Vietnam 67 (2 Viewers)

jazzeum said:
My Life as a Tunnel Rat -- Attacking underground bunkers was the least of the worries of the author, a sapper with the Royal Australian Engineers.
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Brad mate,
Great article cobber. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim and another Tunnel Rat, John "Jethro" Thomposn at a talk they gave on the tunnels and minelaying at our local RSL (Returned Servicemen's League) last September, Jethro losted a leg and a hand during a mine laying incident but has not lost his sense of humour. It was a great talk with over 75 members attending.
Many thanks for your article. Cheers Howard:salute::
 
Northgate Woods said:
Brad mate,
Great article cobber. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim and another Tunnel Rat, John "Jethro" Thomposn at a talk they gave on the tunnels and minelaying at our local RSL (Returned Servicemen's League) last September, Jethro losted a leg and a hand during a mine laying incident but has not lost his sense of humour. It was a great talk with over 75 members attending.
Many thanks for your article. Cheers Howard:salute::
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My Bn Served in 3 corps and in the area between ben Hoa and the coast,,,In early dec 66 we did an op around Vung tau,,as I avoided flying I was in the convoy along hwy 15 returning to Di An,,,the Austrl. army was securing the roads along with the Korean white Horse,,Nice to have seen you along the road or the fields,
 
Northgate Woods said:
Brad mate,
Great article cobber. I had the pleasure of meeting Jim and another Tunnel Rat, John "Jethro" Thomposn at a talk they gave on the tunnels and minelaying at our local RSL (Returned Servicemen's League) last September, Jethro losted a leg and a hand during a mine laying incident but has not lost his sense of humour. It was a great talk with over 75 members attending.
Many thanks for your article. Cheers Howard:salute::
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Thanks Howard. I knew you’d enjoy reading this article. These men are a different breed, special kinds of people.

Brad
 
Thanks for the link Brad....I wasn't aware that Aussie Engineer Sappers were attached to Infantry units and were required to clear booby traps etc, always assumed the Infantry did it themselves.

For those interested, here's a link to Operation Crimp, where the first North Vietnamese tunnel system was discovered and partly explored: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crimp
 
This might clarify what the current responsibilities are of the Royal Australian Engineers.
The RAE provides combat engineering, construction and other technical support to the Australian Defence Force. Its main roles are to provide mobility and counter mobility capabilities to the Australian Army and its allies. This means enhancing the ability of friendly forces to move while denying movement to enemy forces. In order to provide these capabilities, engineers are required to conduct many tasks including penetrating minefields, locating and disarming booby traps, clearing unexploded ordnance, conducting explosive demolitions, purifying water, surveying, and building and maintaining roads, airfields and bridges. The Corps also performs the majority of the Australian Army's demolition tasks and is trained to fight as infantry if needed.[14]
Regards Sapper.
 
jazzeum said:
What a Combat Medic Still Carries — The War looked easy at first. Then came the buildup to the Tet Offensive and the author found himself trying to save lives in heavy combat day after day.
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When I enlisted I didn't know what I was in for either ,,Plus I carried an assault weapon at 19,,In my Vietnam 67 ,the war never looked easy and my platoon medic,,Drafted ,,silver star etc carried a 45 cal Thompson plus a pistol ,plus all his medic gear,,one of the most heroic men I ever met in my life.,draftees seem to not get the credit they did a few years ago,,as history changes,"the draftee GI joe army that won WW2", now its the unwilling draftees of the past ,Vietnam ,compared to the small number of volunteers these days bearing all the burdens,
 
"The Two Faces of Tony," by George Lartimore, a Vietnam Veteran.

My letter to Ruth Fuller arrived in her mailbox on Feb. 8, 1982. By coincidence, it was exactly 14 years after her son Tony was killed at Khe Sanh, in South Vietnam. “Was surprised to hear from one of Tony’s friends after so many years,” she wrote back. Then, a few lines later, she pressed the pen hard to the paper: “God! I hated that war.”

Tony and I met in Marine Corps training at Camp Pendleton, Calif., in May 1967. We were posted at a dusty outpost on that vast base called Las Pulgas, where we were undergoing further training before shipping out to Vietnam in July. We thought of it as a kind of California summer vacation and, with Vietnam looming, we were glad to get it. Tony was a little older and worldly, a poker player. He had been to college, had belonged to a fraternity and he exuded confidence, which I did not. So my buddy Frank Klemm and I became Tony’s posse. Tony, we also learned, was quick to stand his ground and would not back off from a confrontation.

In the Marine Corps, we knew Tony as Anthony William Handley. But in his hometown of Hot Springs, Ark., he was Tony Fuller. One high school friend recalled a bright, confident, even cocky teenager who “knew what he wanted and knew where he was going,” But Tony had a side that was hard to know. Jody Hart, who dated him during senior year, recalled a terrifying high-speed ride in his old sports car. “Tony had a James Dean quality,” she said.

Mary Jo Rodgers was Tony’s first girlfriend. They were king and queen of their junior high school. Mary Jo’s date to the senior prom, for the Class of 1964, was another Hot Springs boy with a lot of promise: William Jefferson Clinton.

Years later, Tony’s stepfather, Rex Fuller, introduced himself to Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas, at a Hot Springs restaurant. According to Rex, the governor smiled and said, “Tony and I used to chase the same skirts in high school.”

Bill Clinton and Tony Fuller were never close friends. “Tony had his gang from the lake, Bill had his gang from town,” Rex once told me. They would all gather at the Fullers’ house on Lake Hamilton for water-skiing, hot dogs and Cokes and talk about the future. But Bill and Tony did share this: Each had lost his biological father when he was very young. In Tony’s case, he became two people – Tony Fuller at home, Anthony William Handley in Vietnam.

At Camp Butler in Okinawa, as we waited for our assignments, we went to the enlisted men's club to drink beer and listen to the jukebox. Frank and I were still full of boot-camp bravado. We were going to be grunts and we bragged that we could face danger and death and come home heroes.

Tony, for all his daring at home, would hear none of it. He warned us, “Don't do anything stupid, don't volunteer for anything.” This next sounds cliché as I write it but I can still see Tony saying it, sitting directly across from me at a table cluttered with beer bottles: "You know we're not all going to come back.”

“Just a note so you won’t worry,” Tony wrote in a reassuring letter to his parents on Nov. 3, 1967. It was full of news he had heard from college and hometown friends. Then, like an afterthought, there is this: “I got the Purple Heart, but don’t worry.” A scratch, he called it, from shrapnel. Patched up with one stitch and a bandage. Maybe Tony thought he could make it sound like a little boy’s scuffed knee to his mother back home.

At other times his sparse prose revealed fear and anger. On Jan. 3, 1968, one month and five days before he was killed, Tony wrote: “It’s raining and pretty chilly. Preparing to move,” returning to the field, “living in holes covered with sandbags.” Then, “I sent my sea bag and a box home.”

Frank was at Con Thien when he found out about Tony. He picked up a muddy copy of Stars and Stripes that someone had tossed aside on the road and turned first, as we all did, to the page with the list of K.I.A.s.

Tony was a radio operator with the First Battalion, Ninth Marines. His job was to call in artillery and air strikes and medical evacuation helicopters. The battalion (“One-Nine” in Marine shorthand) was known as the Walking Dead decades before a television series borrowed that hard-earned name. One-Nine always seemed to get caught in some of the worst fighting of the war.

At the start of the Tet offensive, in late January 1968, the battalion was choppered in to help defend the besieged Khe Sanh combat base. The first platoon of Alpha Company, One-Nine, was assigned to a tiny hilltop outpost that the North Vietnamese would have to get past in order to attack Khe Sanh. In Marine lore it’s called Hill 64 because 64 Marines defended it.

At 4:15 on the morning of Feb. 8, the Marines on Hill 64 were attacked by a North Vietnamese Army force five times their size. In a brutal fight that lasted hours the Marines finally drove the North Vietnamese off the hill. Twenty-seven Marines were killed, 24 more wounded. Tony was killed by a grenade while manning his radio inside a bunker. He was 21 years old.

I visited Ruth Fuller in Hot Springs last April. Rex died a few years ago, but Ruth is still spry and feisty at 93. There are photographs of Tony, some in his uniform, all around her small, neat house. She still refers to Tony, her only child, in the present tense.

Over the years I had sent Ruth photographs of my sons Evan and Alex, which she brought out during my visit. When they were young their mother took the boys to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and in one picture they are looking at the camera while touching Tony’s name on the black marble.

Frank Klemm’s name is not on the wall although, perhaps, it should be, along with a lot of others. He died after a painful struggle with bone cancer caused by exposure to Agent Orange.

In 1994, Frank and I, along with his oldest son, Justin, met in Washington to visit the memorial. Frank was a courageous and sensitive man and admitted that he had not been to the wall before because the feelings were still too strong. After dinner that night Frank and I went back, just the two of us. It was cold and clear and in the dark we listened to the quiet murmurs of other visitors.

“There’s a thousand Tonys out there,” Frank said, reading Tony’s name with his fingers.​

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Anthony Handley, also known as Tony Fuller, at Camp Pendleton, Calif. in July 1967
 
"Interring Lieutenant Pershing," by Pat Graves, who served in the Army in Fort Meyer, Virginia.

One of the most important duties of the 1st Battalion, 3d Infantry (Reinforced), also known as the Old Guard, is interments in Arlington National Cemetery. It is a necessary duty that we respected. There is little emotional attachment when retired soldiers are interred. However, it is particularly onerous in times of war, and young men and women die. During the Vietnam War, widows were generally young, with young children. We learned to steel themselves against graveside emotions.

On Feb. 17, 1968, during the Tet offensive, Lt. Richard Warren Pershing was killed in Vietnam while an infantry platoon leader in Company A, 1st Battalion, 502d Infantry, 101st Airborne Division. He had been in country only two months. His unit was conducting operations near Quang Tri in I Corps near the Demilitarized Zone.

What was unusual about this 24-year-old was his background. He came from a family with strong traditions of military and public service. A maternal great grandfather was the Wyoming Senator Francis E. Warren, who won the Medal of Honor during the Civil War. Warren’s daughter married a young Army captain, John J. Pershing, destined to earn the sobriquet “Black Jack” and to command the American Expeditionary Force in World War I as General of the Armies. One of their children, and Richard Warren Pershing’s father, Col. Francis Warren Pershing (1909-1980), served as an advisor to Gen. George C. Marshall during World War II and was a stockbroker in the New York firm of Pershing and Company. The family lived on Park Avenue.

Richard Warren Pershing graduated from the best schools, Exeter Academy and Yale College. At Yale he was a member of Skull and Bones. Unlike most children of privilege during the 1960s, he volunteered for service in the Army and as a paratrooper.

I had the honor of being the officer-in-charge of the interment. He was buried in a nondescript section of Arlington National Cemetery, near his grandfather who opted to be buried near soldiers who lost their lives in World War I. My memory of that event is of his father, a tall, dignified man but a tragic figure. He was the sole survivor of a fire in 1915 that killed his mother and three sisters at the Presidio in San Francisco while his father was stationed at Fort Bliss, Tex. Richard Warren Pershing was survived by a brother, Col. John Warren Pershing. He and his brother are buried together sharing reverse sides of the same simple gravestone.​

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The graves of Richard W. Pershing and John W. Pershing
 
"In the Jungle: An Interview with Trung Trung Đỉnh," by Alex Sheal,the co-owner of Vietnam in Focus, a photography tour company based in Hanoi.

“Brother, when do you think we’ll have freedom?” the novelist Trung Trung Đỉnh remembers asking one of the guerrillas he fought alongside for seven years in the jungles of An Khê, central Vietnam.

“When these have completely worn out,” his comrade replied, pointing to the rubber-tire sandals on his feet, the famously indestructible “Ho Chi Minh sandals.” “Only then will we be free!”

It’s one of many war memories Mr. Đỉnh recalls with a smile that lights up the dusty Hanoi street café where we are sitting. Indeed, for all the mayhem, fear and devastation he describes from those years, the “skies packed with planes,” the “normality of death,” you sense that he misses the simplicity of jungle life. It was his youth, after all.

“I still have some pictures of myself taken at that time. I had a ragged beard, but my face shone so bright!” He gently shakes his 69-year-old head in wonder. “The hardest years came afterward,” he admits, “after ’75.”

Mr. Đỉnh is the author of many novels and plays, but it’s his first novel, “Lạc Rừng,” or “Lost in the Jungle,” that we’ve come to discuss. The book was recently reprinted for the 19th time, and many in Vietnam consider it a classic of “The American War,” although it has never reached an international audience like “The Sorrow of War,” a novel by his friend and “bạn rượu,” or drinking buddy, Bao Ninh.

He remembers his childhood fondly. “1949 to 1959 were the greatest years of my life, when I was still back in the countryside,” he says. “In my memory it was an idyllic time. We spent the days fishing, catching cicadas, watching our buffalo. I was a naughty kid, stealing fruit and fish from the neighbors.” Mr. Đỉnh is a native of Vĩnh Bảo, Haiphong, even today a rural backwater where a foreign face would draw curious stares.

Most of his relatives died in the war: a brother-in-law killed in the first American bombing of the north; brothers who sacrificed themselves both before and after he himself joined up. He lists the many family members he lost almost mechanically.

“Lost in the Jungle” tells the story of Binh, a North Vietnamese Army regular who becomes separated from his regiment in the mountains of central Vietnam, and is saved and then initiated by a band of tribal Bahnar guerrillas fighting the Americans. Binh lives with and fights alongside the Bahnar for many years, learning their language and assimilating their culture, while taking cover from helicopter gunships and setting booby traps for the enemy. But the title reflects unease about “going native.” Mr. Đỉnh points to his head, “He’s lost in here.”

“How much of the story is true?” I ask him. Like the hero of “Lost in the Jungle,” Mr. Đỉnh fought shoulder-to-shoulder with the Bahnar from 1968 to the end of the war.

“It’s a work of imagination, based on truth,” he explains. “It was the first novel I wrote after the war, and the memories were still fresh. Some of the stories I tell in the book are very close to what happened.”

As the morning unfolds, Mr. Đỉnh shares many anecdotes from his own years in the jungle. There’s a boar hunt; tales of stealing rations and weapons from the Americans stationed nearby; and another of hoisting an old parachute like a flag on the tallest tree in the forest and watching from afar as American jets unloaded bombs on it. “Just to tease them, you see?” Mr. Đỉnh explains.

All of these stories, slightly fictionalized, feature in the novel.

The characters sprang from life too. There’s an ancient Bahnar man, called “Old Phoi” in the novel, who in Mr. Đỉnh’s telling appeared impervious to missiles, bombs and bullets, escaping certain death several times. And of course Bin, the fiercest of the Bahnar warriors, and Binh’s guardian, shadow and guide.
We ask him about the character of Kohler, an American captive enlisted as a farmhand and menial laborer by the Bahnar in the novel. Was he real?

Mr. Đỉnh explains that, while he never met any personally, some American soldiers were captured and imprisoned “for various purposes.” Normally, however, such P.O.W.s would be transferred to Hanoi. The inspiration for docile, nervous Kohler came from an American veteran Mr. Đỉnh met after the war, on one of the many exchange programs organized by the two countries.

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Unlike “The Sorrow of War,” in which the conflict affects every part of the story, destroying the lives of its characters, in Mr. Đỉnh’s novel it functions more as a background to the action. Apart from several skirmishes with American troops, and the occasional buzz of reconnaissance planes overhead, the plot focuses on Binh’s immersion in the culture of the Bahnar, his bonds with the group, and the challenges of jungle survival. In fact, the forest, for all its dangers, protects Binh and his comrades from the war, especially giving them cover from the Americans in their helicopters and planes. As Mr. Đỉnh writes, “Sometimes jungles are so quiet that even war can’t rouse them.”

However, while the action in “Lost in the Jungle” tends to be on the light side, Mr. Đỉnh describes his own years of war as ones of near-constant fear and violence. “I joined up at 17 years old, and hadn’t really wanted to fight. But suddenly I was surrounded by bombing and people dying all around me,” he says.

On the way to the frontline, he caught malaria, and was laid up in a field hospital at the DMZ for a short time. There he met a staff sergeant from Gia Lai who recruited him to fight with the guerrillas in the south.

“An Khê at that time was the most dangerous place in Vietnam,” Mr. Đỉnh says. “Not only did we face the Americans, but also the Australians, and toughest of all, the South Koreans, who were the most experienced and ruthless soldiers in the jungle. Each day would bring at least two or three battles. Death was a very normal thing. The years ’68 to ’69 were the worst, with nonstop American bombing. Sometimes, when the planes finally left, you’d find yourself trapped in the roots of enormous trees that the bombs had upturned.”

For many years afterward, he says, the war haunted him. “I’d hear a wall fan start up and jump, thinking it was a helicopter, have nightmares about the loudspeaker voices from propaganda planes over the jungle.” In the period after 1975, he tells me he “aged heavily,” no doubt suffering from what we’d now call PTSD.

He began to write “Lost in the Jungle” in 1980. “As a child I’d been a great daydreamer,” he says. “I remember reading Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, about a fisherman lost in the ocean, and thinking, ‘One day, I’ll write an even better story than this!’ During the war, of course, there was no time to write anything. I just took notes mainly, for tactical purposes. But I think that dream about writing a book like ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ stayed with me.” “Lost in the Jungle” took him 10 years to write, and five different drafts, but went on to win several awards, and it launched Mr. Đỉnh’s career as a writer.

I ask if he had read any war fiction by American soldier-authors, such as Karl Marlantes and Tim O’Brien.
“Some,” he says vaguely, “but not much.” The reality is that, even today, few such works are available in Vietnamese, making it difficult for a non-English-speaker like Mr. Đỉnh. He has read foreign classics of the genre, and argues that no one has topped Erich Maria Remarque. “He best captured the atmosphere of war.”

But what of “The Vietnam War,” Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s acclaimed documentary, which has a Vietnamese-subtitled version, and featured his great friend Bao Ninh?

He has seen a few episodes, he says. “Interesting,” he admits, “and mostly correct. But I found some of the choices for interviewees strange. They went for diversity rather than expertise. It was impossible to explore the most important points in depth. Everything Bao Ninh said was right, but some of the others, I wondered how well-qualified they were to speak.”

I ask him what he makes of America’s ongoing fascination with the war. While American artists and writers continue to create new work on the topic, the Vietnamese (in Vietnam at least) have produced relatively little since the 1990s. Likewise, American visitors to Vietnam are often astonished by locals’ willingness to forgive and move on. Would today’s Vietnamese simply rather forget about the experience?

“No,” he replies bluntly. “It’s just that, for Vietnamese, the feelings and memories are so heavy. It’s not easy to share.” And as for the youth, even his own son, studying in London at the moment, they don’t want to hear war stories, he says. “If the young aren’t interested in the war, it’s fine,” he waves a hand dismissively. “Let them live.”

Far from melancholy, though, Mr. Đỉnh seems to have enjoyed this wander into the past. He tells some funny stories about motivational meetings with the revolutionary cadres back in An Khê. They would set a blackboard up against a tree and go through the dialectic. “Are we on the way up or down?” they once asked the group rhetorically.

“Down,” Mr. Đỉnh replied, matter-of-factly.

“You can’t say that!” came the reprimand. “We’re on the way up, we’re going to win!”

“I just say down because the way is easier,” he explains.

“I didn’t really want to go to war,” Mr. Đỉnh says, as our cafe starts to clear out for lunchtime, “but in April 1968, every able-bodied young person had to sign up. And all the time I fought, I never thought of victory.” He quotes the poet Nguyễn Duy, “Phe nào thắng thì nhân dân đều bại” – “Whichever side wins, the people lose.”

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Trung Trung Đỉnh
 
When Walter Cronkite Pronounced the War a 'Stalemate' -- The nation's most trusted news anchor had not been critical of the War but a visit to Hue during the Tet Offensive changed his mind.

The author of the piece is Mark Bowden, who has recently written Hue 68. His piece begins with the words "One of the most enduring myths of the Vietnam War is that it was lost by hostile press coverage" and ends with the sentence "I'll take Cronkite's legacy over Westmoreland's any day."
 
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jazzeum said:
When Walter Cronkite Pronounced the War a 'Stalemate' -- The nation's most trusted news anchor had not been critical of the War but a visit to Hue during the Tet Offensive changed his mind.

The author of the piece is Mark Bowden, who has recently written Hue 68. His piece begins with the words "One of the most enduring myths of the Vietnam War is that it was lost by hostile press coverage" and ends with the sentence "I'll take Cronkite's legacy over Westmoreland's any day."
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If I said what I thought of who ever Bowden is id be banished,,
 
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