Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2021 i Vietnam

On Oct. 26, 1965, I walked into the offices of Draft Board No. 40 in Dayton, Ohio, and volunteered for the draft, which meant that someone else would not be drafted. I was 19 and lived just outside of Dayton in the village of Farmersville. After U.S. Army basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky, I went to Fort Bliss, Texas, and Fort Ord, California, for advanced individual training. My first assignment was New York City’s Armed Forces Examination and Entrance Station at 39 Whitehall St. in Manhattan. Six months later, I was sent to an examination and entrance station in Cincinnati. In both places there were daily anti-war protests. After seeing so many American men and women entering the military, I volunteered to extend the two-year commitment required of a…

Tom Collins will never forget Jan. 19, 1968. The Army military police officer was standing guard onboard a cargo ship in the middle of Qui Nhon harbor in central South Vietnam. His watch was nearly over, and he was waiting to be relieved. Collins stood by the railing and checked out an approaching boat to make sure it wasn’t an enemy craft. He saw that it was an American water taxi and comrades from the 127th Military Police Company were clustered onboard. Then something unusual caught Collins’ eye. On the boat, amid all the olive drab uniforms and dark green helmets marked “MP,” stood a civilian dressed in a madras shirt and white jeans. He had red hair that looked familiar. “Chickie?” Collins thought, and shook his head in disbelief.…

Courage Under Fire: The 101st Airborne’s Hidden Battle at Tam Ky By Ed Sherwood Casemate, 2021 Appalled by the loss of American life on “Hamburger Hill,” a remote mountain near the Laotian border in northern South Vietnam, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts took the floor of the U.S. Senate in May 1969 to condemn the 101st Airborne Division’s bloody 10-day battle. Kennedy was apparently unaware that elements of the 101st, nicknamed the “Screaming Eagles,” were already embroiled in another costly—and now nearly forgotten—battle 100 miles south near Tam Ky, the capital of Quang Tin province. The fierce fight there and the pivotal role of the division’s 1st Battalion, 501st Infantry Regiment, are the subject of retired Army Lt. Col. Ed Sherwood’s new book, Courage Under Fire: The 101st Airborne’s Hidden…

In his youth, Lawrence Joel faced many challenges beyond the color of his skin. Born on Feb. 22, 1928, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he spent his early years in poverty. The Great Depression took such a toll on Joel’s family that his parents separated six years later. Joel was raised by foster parents. After graduating from high school in 1945, Joel joined the Merchant Marine. He enlisted in the Army a year later and went to jump school. Joel spent most of his tour in postwar Italy. Following his discharge he hoped to become a beautician but found his opportunities limited and returned to the Army in 1953. According to Time magazine, which interviewed Joel for a 1967 article on Blacks serving in Vietnam, he “was convinced that you ‘couldn’t…

The effects of chemical defoliants used during the Vietnam War are still being felt among Southeast Asians, who have recently been struggling to raise awareness of related adverse health effects among local populations. U.S. forces dropped an estimated 18 million gallons of Agent Orange—containing TCDD, one of the most toxic chemicals ever produced—on Vietnam during the 1960s and ’70s. A lawsuit by a 79-year-old French-Vietnamese woman, Tran To Nga, against 14 makers of Agent Orange was rejected by a French court this May. Tran, a former Viet Cong member, says she suffers diseases related to Agent Orange after being sprayed with the poisonous herbicide in the mid-1960s. The lawsuit, filed in 2014, sought to hold companies accountable for harming the environment and Vietnamese people. A French court declined to hear…

The remains of an Air Force lieutenant shot down over Laos on Jan. 17, 1967, were interred in his home state of Wyoming on July 21, 2021. First Lt. Alva Ray Krogman, known as Ray, was born in Worland on April 12, 1941. He became an Eagle Scout, was president of his senior class in high school and earned an All State Honorable Mention as a football player. His mother described him in an interview as a “very ambitious” young man who “wanted to be a leader.” Krogman graduated from the U.S. Air Force Academy in 1964. After assignments in the United States, he was sent to Southeast Asia as a “forward air controller” flying a Cessna O-1F Bird Dog, a small propeller-driven plane. Forward air controllers were spotter pilots…

At noon on March 30, 1972, North Vietnam opened its spring offensive with a massive artillery barrage against South Vietnamese positions just south of the Demilitarized Zone separating the two countries. Outgunned and out-ranged in artillery, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam saw its weapons quickly silenced. By that evening, virtually every ARVN fire support base within 20 miles of the border was surrounded and fighting for survival. South Vietnamese units trying to move came under fire as nightfall and cloud coverage limited the use of air power. The 11,000 artillery rounds and several thousand rockets fired that day were a clear demonstration that the North Vietnamese Army had improved and expanded its artillery arm. The 122 mm D-74, a towed gun that entered Soviet service in 1955, was…

In accounts of the November 1967 battle of Dak To, one of the largest and longest battles of the Vietnam War, the center of attention is often the elite 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne) of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, assigned prior to the battle to the 4th Infantry Division. Seemingly forgotten is the fight waged by the division’s “leg” (non-airborne infantry), engineer and artillery units. That’s a sore spot for some veterans who were at Dak To. “The 173rd were good soldiers and they did their fair share; they certainly did no more than the many other ‘non-elites’ did, like the 4th Division grunts, the artillery and others,” said Steve Stark, an artillery liaison specialist assigned to the 6th Battalion, 29th Field Artillery Regiment, 1st Brigade, at Dak To, in an…

In June 1967, Robert Komer, a former top aide to President Lyndon B. Johnson, was in Vietnam to initiate a CIA-inspired plan to round up Viet Cong leaders in an operation that became known as the Phoenix Program—one of the most misunderstood aspects of the war. Komer worked for Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, as director of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program, or CORDS—a “pacification” effort to gain the support of the South Vietnamese population through civic improvements, enhanced security and aggressive action to neutralize (kill, capture or persuade to defect) Viet Cong agents who ran shadow communist governments in thousands of hamlets and towns. The task was difficult. Most underground agents, formally the Viet Cong Infrastructure, possessed government identity papers (real or forged), used aliases and did…

Most war stories are about soldiers and battles. Rarely do we examine war through the unique bond between a man and his weapon—in this case the M60 machine gun. I was drafted on Nov. 10, 1965, and assigned to the 4th Infantry Division. I traveled to Fort Lewis, Washington, and trained there for 10 months before deploying to Vietnam as specialist 4. At Fort Lewis, every recruit learned to operate various weapons. To my surprise, I qualified as an expert with the M60 machine gun, nicknamed “the pig” because of the size, weight and sound of the weapon. At that time, an infantry company consisted of about 150 men. Each company had eight M60s. The machine gun was also mounted in the UH-1 Huey helicopter and other Army aircraft. It…

Specialists in intelligence gathering are as old as organized warfare and “know thy enemy” remains a fundamental need of any armed force. The Vietnam War, with its unforgiving operating environment, was a crucible in which both sides developed specially trained scouting units and every branch of the U.S. military fielded its own. On June 19, 1957, the Marine Corps organized force reconnaissance, or Force Recon, battalions out of World War II’s Amphibious Reconnaissance Battalion, a parallel to the Navy’s Underwater Demolition Teams that evolved into the SEAL (sea, air, land) teams. Entering service in Vietnam as the 3rd Force Reconnaissance Company in September 1965, Marine long-range patrols came in three primary forms. A combat patrol, operating within range of friendly artillery, consisted of a team leader, a grenadier, a hospital…