Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2020 i Vietnam

Two years ago, then-Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin decided to add three health conditions to the list of diseases eligible for Agent Orange benefits, but White House officials challenged his authority and impeded enactment, according to internal documents obtained by a veteran through the Freedom of Information Act. Shulkin wanted to add bladder cancer, Parkinson’s-like symptoms and hypothyroidism to the list of diseases eligible for benefits provided to service members exposed to Agent Orange, a toxic herbicide used as a defoliant in Vietnam. Heavily redacted emails and briefings released to former Army Spc. Jeff O’Malley, of Pearland, Texas, show Shulkin made the decision sometime before Oct. 3, 2017—a move that would have meant faster access to disability compensation and health benefits. But the Office of Management and Budget, including Director…

On May 8, 1967, North Vietnamese Army commandos attacked the Marine Corps base at Con Thien, using flamethrowers for the first time in the war. The Marines, forced out of their positions by streams of burning fuel, came under machine gun and mortar fire. Although the attack failed, the Chinese-built Type 74 flamethrowers’ appearance was a harbinger of unpleasant things to come for those on the receiving end. The Type 74 was a license-built copy of the Soviet LPO-50 that entered service in 1953. It had three tanks, each containing a pressure cartridge and about a gallon of special diesel fuel. The tanks were topped by a pressure relief valve and a filling aperture with screw cap. They were mounted in a canvas backpack-style harness. Each tank connected to a…

The last major battle of the Vietnam War was fought at Xuan Loc, only 37 miles east by northeast of Saigon. In April 1975 the town was the eastern anchor of South Vietnam’s final line of defense against the North Vietnamese rush to the capital. That line ran west through Bien Hoa, just north of Saigon, to Tay Ninh, near the Cambodian border. Once it broke, Saigon was doomed—and with it the Republic of Vietnam itself. When the North Vietnamese Army attacked Xuan Loc (pronounced Swan Lock) on April 9, the communists and almost everyone else expected the Army of the Republic of Vietnam’s 18th Division to collapse like a house of cards, as had so many other ARVN units during the NVA’s massive Spring Offensive of 1975. But ARVN…

John D. Howard’s “Going to War in 1965 with the Army You Have” (February 2020) is an excellent treatise on an often-overlooked reality of the Vietnam experience. In my book, Our War, which details the three years in Vietnam of my unit—the 5th Battalion, 46th Infantry Regiment, 198th Light Infantry Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division (Americal)—I note the issues Howard points out in 1965 did not go away. The battalion trained for jungle warfare on the plains of Fort Hood, Texas, in late 1967. The 2nd Armored Division was tasked to ensure we had all our equipment and stripped some of its own units to do it. A number of noncommissioned officers had been to Vietnam for one or two tours and chose retirement rather than going back. When we arrived…

One of the most searing phographs from the Vietnam War is the terrifying image of a badly injured child being rescued by a man in civilian clothes after Viet Cong terrorists bombed the My Canh restaurant in Saigon on June 25, 1965. Symbolic of the war’s innocent civilian casualties, the picture appeared in several newspapers and a military publication, but later was overshadowed by the dramatic photograph of the “Napalm Girl,” a running 9-year-old child who had ripped the clothing off her burning skin after napalm bombs from a South Vietnamese air force plane struck her village on June 8, 1972. That photograph was shown on the front page of The New York Times. The My Canh photo was not in the Times. The graphic My Canh photo was on…

This extensively researched, well-written book was a pleasant surprise. Instead of a dry, boring, statistics-filled diatribe against the “black rifle,” as the M16 has been called because of its color, I discovered a thoroughly documented, fascinating case study of the tragically flawed process of introducing the assault rifle into combat in 1965. Faced with the task of providing U.S. Marines and soldiers with a weapon comparable to the enemy’s Soviet-made AK-47 assault rifle, the Defense Department rushed the still-experimental XM16E1—a small-caliber, high-velocity weapon capable of full-automatic fire—into production and field use in Vietnam when it “wasn’t yet fit for service,” the authors note. Later versions, notably the M16A1 introduced in 1967, corrected many of the flaws, which could have been done earlier because they had been clearly identified by extensive,…

The 54-year-old saga of 81 South Vietnamese soldiers who were killed in the war and denied a resting place came to an end in October 2019 at a peaceful cemetery in California. On Dec. 11, 1965, a U.S. Air Force C-123 Provider transport plane with four American crewmen and 81 South Vietnamese soldiers in an airborne unit was scheduled to fly from Pleiku, a military center and provincial capital in the Central Highlands, to Saigon but was diverted to the coastal city of Tuy Hoa, where a South Korean unit needed reinforcements as it fought Viet Cong troops in the region. The plane, flown by an experienced B-52 bomber pilot, crossed the mountains of the Annamite Range in bad weather and never reached its destination. Communist troops claimed to have…

Alicia Robinson, a 2014 graduate of Garinger High School in Charlotte, North Carolina, never knew Mike Smith, who graduated 50 years before she did. If she had, Robinson would have liked and respected him. “Pinky,” as his friends at Garinger called him, was a tough cookie, a hard worker and well-liked by all who knew him. His closest buddy, Marine Vietnam veteran Don Mullis, said Pinky was walking to his own graduation when Don and his family picked him up on the street and took him to the ceremony. After graduating from Garinger in 1964, Smith enlisted in the Marines and served in Vietnam as a member of B Company, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, 1st Marine Division. In May 1967, he was killed in Quang Nam province in northern South Vietnam.…

Martin Tucker, a photojournalist who was an instructor at the Sawtooth School for Visual Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, had an idea for a class project. To give his students experience in darkroom work (and a history lesson), he had them ask Vietnam veterans for black-and-white negatives they could enlarge. Veterans who responded didn’t have negatives, but they had photographs—4,000 total, often provided with comments. The project grew into an exhibit, “A Thousand Words: Photographs by Vietnam Veterans,” shown at Sawtooth in 2003. The exhibit was taken on the road and then in 2017 given a permanent home at the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. More than 100 photographs for the collection have been presented in a book published in 2019. Tucker is a Navy veteran who served…