Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2016 i Vietnam

Four-star General Richard Myers became familiar to millions of TV viewers as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the initial phase of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It was the culmination of a military career that began in 1965 when he joined the Air Force as an ROTC graduate. Myers became a fighter pilot and accumulated 4,100 flying hours—600 of them on combat missions in Vietnam. He led some of the Air Force’s largest commands, including the U.S. Space Command. Myers was vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and became chairman the next month. He retired in October 2005. WHAT AFFECTED YOU MOST: THE VIETNAM WAR OR 9/11? Oh, 9/11 clearly, because it happened at the Pentagon. I…

About 600 U.S. tanks were used in Vietnam. The primary tank through much of the war was the M48A3 Patton medium tank, one of several M48 designs since the first one in 1952. The M48s were introduced in February 1963. About 330 to 350 of them went to Vietnam, including tanks from the 3rd Marine Tank Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, that came ashore with the first ground forces in March 1965. About 160 Pattons were destroyed or severely damaged, mostly by mines. After the U.S. military began withdrawing in 1969, it gave 190 Pattons to the South Vietnamese army. The second most widely used U.S. tank was the M551 Sheridan armored reconnaissance/airborne assault vehicle, introduced in 1967. Sent to Vietnam in January 1969 as replacements for the Patton fleet, the…

“The feel of Vietnam, the vibe, was like nothing I’d ever experienced,” says Doug Bradley, co-author with Craig Werner of We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War. “It seemed as if our music—the rock ’n’ roll sounds that we brought with us on our records and albums and cassettes, in our fingers, on our lips and in our heads—was colliding with the brutality of war and ricocheting off the Vietnamese landscape.” Nowhere was that more apparent than at Long Binh Post, the largest Army encampment in the world at that time. Army veteran Frank Gutierrez, who spent most of four years in South Vietnam between 1967 and 1970, traced his memories of the song “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” to the replacement…

“HOLY TITANIC!”... “HOLY SAFARI,” Batman (Adam West) sidekick Robin (Burt Ward) would exclaim on Batman, an ABC TV series that debuted Jan. 12. BOOTS ARE MADE FOR WALKIN’ Nancy Sinatra’s song hit No. 1 in February, and she traveled to Vietnam in 1966 and ’67 to perform for the troops. “Both unfair and fitting... a faded dream played in the mist and slop, a transitory moment between football’s past and future.” — Author Dave Maraniss, on the last NFL Championship game before the Super Bowl era. The Green Bay Packers defeated the Cleveland Browns 23-12 on Jan. 2, in a sloppy mix of snow, sleet and rain. This was legendary Green Bay coach Vince Lombardi’s first of three straight championships (eight total) and Cleveland’s Hall of Fame running back Jim…

Lo Manh Hung was photographing the 1968 Tet Offensive for the Associated Press when he was just 12 years old. By then, he had already been helping his father, a freelance news photographer, for more than two years. Hung eventually left Vietnam and ran his own photo shop in San Francisco, where he met former AP photographer Horst Faas in 1998, according to the San Francisco Examiner. “They paid me $10 a picture,” Hung told Faas. “It could support my whole family for one month.” A selection of Hung’s photos follows.…

Photographs are often one of the best ways to understand what a war was really like, and some recently published books are loaded with pictures that provide fascinating views of the Vietnam War. Here is a sampling. The American Experience in Vietnam: Reflections on an Era, from the editors of Boston Publishing Company, Zenith Press, 2015, $40 This is a must-have commemorative volume that presents material from The Vietnam Experience, a classic illustrated history of the Vietnam War now anthologized for the 50th anniversary of the conflict. The 25-volume Vietnam Experience, published between 1981 and 1988, offered historical perspectives on the war from some of the best rising authors on the conflict. The American Experience in Vietnam: Reflections on an Era is the official successor to the Pulitzer Prize–nominated set. It…

In a 1972 CBS interview President Richard Nixon, with his re-election campaign looming, claimed that bombing runs over North Vietnam had been “very, very effective.” But a recently uncovered Nixon note, written to his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, on Jan. 3, 1972, the day after the interview, shows what he really thought: “We’ve had 10 years of total control of the air over Laos and V.Nam. The result = Zilch. There is something wrong with the strategy or the Air Force.” The note surfaced in Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward’s research for his new book, The Last of the President’s Men, the story of former Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield, who revealed in the Watergate hearings that Nixon used a secret taping system. That revelation precipitated Nixon’s resignation on Aug.…

JAN 8-14 The 1st Infantry Division’s 3rd Brigade, the 173rd Airborne Brigade and the Royal Australian Regiment’s 1st Battalion, totaling 8,000 troops, conduct Operation Crimp—the largest allied military action thus far—a search-and-destroy mission in the “Iron Triangle” north of Saigon. The operation discovered the Viet Cong’s 120-mile Cu Chi tunnel complex. JAN 22 The Air Force completes Operation Blue Light, the largest airlift of troops and equipment into a combat zone to that date. The operation, which began Dec. 27, 1965, transported 4,600 tons of equipment and over 3,000 troops from Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii to Pleiku, South Vietnam. JAN 31 Operation Rolling Thunder, the U.S. bombing campaign over North Vietnam, resumes after a 37-day pause, ordered by President Lyndon B. Johnson, fails to compel North Vietnam’s leaders…

Truly it was “one of the most awesome armadas ever assembled,” as Major Bill Stocker, in command of the lead B-52, later described it. The roar could be heard and vibrations felt 10 miles away when our 78 giant bombers went to full throttle on all eight turbojet engines, one after the other, over 2 1/2 hours, and took off from Andersen Air Force Base in Guam. Thousands of observers cheered the spectacular sight—the complex choreography of the largest launch of B-52s ever undertaken. The 26 three-ship cells of aircraft moved from 5 miles of walled-in, fortified parking areas and taxiways into position on the runway. The spectators included the crew of a Russian trawler off the coast of Guam. Forty-two additional U.S. bombers left later from the U-Tapao airfield…