Vietnam 67 (4 Viewers)

From the Editor of the New York Times' Vietnam 67 Section:

And All the Ships At Sea

Fifty years ago in July 1967, a rocket was accidentally launched from the deck of the aircraft carrier Forrestal, which was stationed with its battle group off the coast of North Vietnam. The rocket hit a fuel tank, scattering flaming fuel and setting off bombs and other explosions. Within minutes, flames had engulfed a large swath of the flight deck. By the time the fire was under control, 134 sailors were dead and 161 injured, including John McCain, who was hit by shrapnel as he leapt from the cockpit of his burning A-4.

The Forrestal fire is a reminder of the significant, but today largely overlooked, role that the Navy played in the Vietnam War. More than 1.8 million sailors served in Southeast Asia during the war; of those, 1,631 were killed and 4,178 were wounded. The Navy was there at the war’s beginning — the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 — and at its very end in 1975, when American ships received helicopters carrying embassy staff and refugees fleeing the fall of Saigon.

The Navy did everything. Enormous aircraft carriers offshore sent out thousands of bombers and fighters on missions over South and North Vietnam, and into Cambodia and Laos. Destroyers pounded the coast; cruisers, with bigger guns, penetrated far inland. Other, faster ships interdicted smugglers. Amphibious assault ships ferried Marines to landing zones. Search and rescue helicopters saved hundreds of downed airmen.

Maybe the Navy’s most important role was its least glamorous — keeping the entire American operation supplied. As one veteran wrote to me, “If the troops on the ground ate, their foods were brought in by the Navy. If they had tanks, trucks, jeeps or other rolling stock, that was brought in by the Navy. If they fired artillery rounds, dropped bombs or fired M16 rounds, you can trust me that their mothers did not send that stuff in by airmail. All medical supplies came in by ship; many troops came in by ship; pencils, papers, office equipment and about anything else those men in the field had came in by ship and generally, those ships were Navy. They had to have fuel for their vehicles. How in the hell did that get there?”

While the giant aircraft carriers floated far offshore, thousands of sailors aboard hundreds of ships and boats plied South Vietnam’s rivers, carrying supplies, interrupting smugglers and inserting Army and Special Forces units into combat zones, especially in the venous waterways of the Mekong Delta. For four months John Kerry, the future congressman and secretary of state, patrolled those waters in his aluminum-hulled Swift boat.

Despite the hazardous conditions, the so-called brown-water Navy comprised older and less reliable boats, many of them leftovers from Korea or World War II. The boats leaked, and even those in top shape often lacked basic amenities, like water purification systems. Swift boats were basically off-the-shelf vessels originally designed to carry men from the American Gulf Coast to oil rigs. Well armed but poorly armored, River Patrol Boat crews faced annual casualty rates of up to 75 percent.

Though they didn’t know it at the time, those sailors — in both the brown-water and blue-water navies — were also being exposed to Agent Orange. Men working on cargo ships were exposed to it when they loaded and unloaded it from their holds. Dioxin runoff poisoned inland waterways and coastal waters. As a result, thousands of men who never set foot in Vietnam have nevertheless suffered the effects of Agent Orange.

These men have been fighting for years for the government to recognize their claims. In 2002, the Department of Veterans Affairs ruled that to receive benefits for Agent Orange exposure, claimants had to have served on dry land or inland rivers — a remarkably narrow interpretation of “service in the Republic of Vietnam,” the key requirement to receive V.A. Agent Orange coverage. (This year a bipartisan group in Congress introduced the Blue Water Navy Vietnam Veterans Act of 2017 to extend benefits to sailors who served in harbors and coastal waterways.)

But even when sailors qualify, there is often a bias against them — an assumption that because they served on a ship or a boat, they couldn’t possibly have suffered the physical or mental consequences of serving in a war. Evaluators assume that being on the water makes you invincible. Tell that to the men who served on the Forrestal. – Clay Risen
 
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"Against the War at Berkeley", by Mike Roddy, a retired river rafting guide and housing developer.


In the fall of 1967 I enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, partly inspired by the protesters who stopped troop trains passing through Berkeley earlier in the war. I had already lost a high school friend in the battle of Ia Drang Valley in 1965 and was enraged by the incessant lies coming out of Washington. It also became apparent, from studying the history of the region, that we were never going to win that war.

The action started right after I arrived: Stop the Draft Week, in October and again in December, was an effort to disrupt the war at the gigantic Oakland Induction Center by yelling, raising placards and getting chased around by cops waving billy clubs. Different versions of that protest became common in the next few years, as we faced off against the Oakland sheriff’s department (the infamous Blue Meanies), the National Guard and the California Highway Patrol. Campus and City of Berkeley police were much less aggressive.

Later, in 1969, the Berkeley campus was cordoned off by the National Guard, and we were bombed with tear gas from helicopters, so that Gov. Ronald Reagan — who had dodged the draft in World War II — could look tough. My friend Candy and I were attacked by a California Highway Patrol officer, who filled our backsides with birdshot, sending us to the hospital.

There was little self-pity. We knew that our soldiers and the Vietnamese people were enduring far worse than our little tussles in Berkeley. Sometimes the protests would become ideological circuses. One night in late 1967, protesters set up an open mike on the steps of Sproul Hall. Someone hung a North Vietnamese flag above the steps, and various rabble-rousers, mostly non-students, called on the crowd to make common cause with the National Liberation Front — the Vietcong. I got up and spoke out against that madness, and drew a mixed response.

Later that year, I was asked to join a friend at Young Socialist Alliance meetings. To humor her, I attended, but it was obvious that the older-looking Y.S.A. leaders were F.B.I. or C.I.A. plants. They kept repeating tired Communist slogans and had neater long hair. I went to only two meetings, but it was enough for someone to come to where I worked, snap a flashbulb camera in my face and walk away. I was probably on file with the F.B.I. for a while.

We took little pride in those protests as the years passed, because we failed. The war did not end until six years later. In retrospect, even though the police were the aggressors just as often as we were, there was little point in declaring moral high ground. Most of us understood that it wasn’t black and white, that we weren’t superior to the men who submitted to the draft.

Meanwhile, my family was nearly shattered by arguments at the dinner table. My father, John Roddy, was a retired, highly decorated Army colonel who fought in three wars: World War II, the Greek Civil War (as artillery adviser to the Greek Army) and Korea. He liberated death camps in Germany and won two Bronze Stars and a Silver for valor. We had fierce arguments when I came home on holidays. Dad wanted me to do my duty, but a good lottery number in 1969 kept that argument from coming to a head. He was a literate man, and agreed later in the war that it had been a horrible mistake.

Here again, it wasn’t a simple fight, the righteous son against the violent father. In 1959, Dad had stood up to a crew of Strangelove-like officers at the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon, where he was a senior staff officer. Some of them wanted to put field-controlled Nike nuclear missiles on the backs of jeeps — in other words, to give officers in the field the authority to start a nuclear war. It didn’t happen, though Barry Goldwater revived the idea a few years later. Maybe Dad, an articulate and persuasive man, helped effect that outcome.

That struggle influenced his early retirement, out of frustration, in 1963, but his stance at the Pentagon was a greater victory than any of his battles. It certainly dwarfed anything I ever did.

My son Malcolm is a Marine lance corporal. He reminds me of Dad. I’m a pacifist, but could not be prouder of him.​

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Mike Roddy at his graduation from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969.
 
jazzeum said:
"Against the War at Berkeley", by Mike Roddy, a retired river rafting guide and housing developer.


In the fall of 1967 I enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, partly inspired by the protesters who stopped troop trains passing through Berkeley earlier in the war. I had already lost a high school friend in the battle of Ia Drang Valley in 1965 and was enraged by the incessant lies coming out of Washington. It also became apparent, from studying the history of the region, that we were never going to win that war.

The action started right after I arrived: Stop the Draft Week, in October and again in December, was an effort to disrupt the war at the gigantic Oakland Induction Center by yelling, raising placards and getting chased around by cops waving billy clubs. Different versions of that protest became common in the next few years, as we faced off against the Oakland sheriff’s department (the infamous Blue Meanies), the National Guard and the California Highway Patrol. Campus and City of Berkeley police were much less aggressive.

Later, in 1969, the Berkeley campus was cordoned off by the National Guard, and we were bombed with tear gas from helicopters, so that Gov. Ronald Reagan — who had dodged the draft in World War II — could look tough. My friend Candy and I were attacked by a California Highway Patrol officer, who filled our backsides with birdshot, sending us to the hospital.

There was little self-pity. We knew that our soldiers and the Vietnamese people were enduring far worse than our little tussles in Berkeley. Sometimes the protests would become ideological circuses. One night in late 1967, protesters set up an open mike on the steps of Sproul Hall. Someone hung a North Vietnamese flag above the steps, and various rabble-rousers, mostly non-students, called on the crowd to make common cause with the National Liberation Front — the Vietcong. I got up and spoke out against that madness, and drew a mixed response.

Later that year, I was asked to join a friend at Young Socialist Alliance meetings. To humor her, I attended, but it was obvious that the older-looking Y.S.A. leaders were F.B.I. or C.I.A. plants. They kept repeating tired Communist slogans and had neater long hair. I went to only two meetings, but it was enough for someone to come to where I worked, snap a flashbulb camera in my face and walk away. I was probably on file with the F.B.I. for a while.

We took little pride in those protests as the years passed, because we failed. The war did not end until six years later. In retrospect, even though the police were the aggressors just as often as we were, there was little point in declaring moral high ground. Most of us understood that it wasn’t black and white, that we weren’t superior to the men who submitted to the draft.

Meanwhile, my family was nearly shattered by arguments at the dinner table. My father, John Roddy, was a retired, highly decorated Army colonel who fought in three wars: World War II, the Greek Civil War (as artillery adviser to the Greek Army) and Korea. He liberated death camps in Germany and won two Bronze Stars and a Silver for valor. We had fierce arguments when I came home on holidays. Dad wanted me to do my duty, but a good lottery number in 1969 kept that argument from coming to a head. He was a literate man, and agreed later in the war that it had been a horrible mistake.

Here again, it wasn’t a simple fight, the righteous son against the violent father. In 1959, Dad had stood up to a crew of Strangelove-like officers at the Joint Chiefs in the Pentagon, where he was a senior staff officer. Some of them wanted to put field-controlled Nike nuclear missiles on the backs of jeeps — in other words, to give officers in the field the authority to start a nuclear war. It didn’t happen, though Barry Goldwater revived the idea a few years later. Maybe Dad, an articulate and persuasive man, helped effect that outcome.

That struggle influenced his early retirement, out of frustration, in 1963, but his stance at the Pentagon was a greater victory than any of his battles. It certainly dwarfed anything I ever did.

My son Malcolm is a Marine lance corporal. He reminds me of Dad. I’m a pacifist, but could not be prouder of him.​

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Mike Roddy at his graduation from the University of California, Berkeley in 1969.
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Guess ill hold down my real reaction to your words,,,Not everyone was drafted and went to Viet,,some of us stood up and volunteered and also didnt duck the military,,I have to admit I despise hearing what a waste the war was as to my 58K fellow soldiers being lost,,I returned In 67 and had no trouble with or from you folks,,only rather short haired conservative looking types and My ex wife,
 
Those are not my words, I just reposted the article. The Times, in their series, are posting articles from a variety of viewpoints.
 
"Busted Bravo", by Michael B. Taft, an iron worker and dairy farmer, who was an infantryman in 1966 and 1967.

I farm in Garfield Township in Jackson County in Wisconsin. I am 72. I am safe, happy, prosperous and grateful for all the blessings life has given me.

Fifty years ago, I was a member of Third Platoon, A Company, First Battalion, Third Marine Regiment. A Company and its platoons were heavily engaged against North Vietnamese forces just northeast of a place called Con Thien. We had been sent there to reinforce another company in another regiment – B Company, Ninth Marine, usually known by the shorthand Bravo 1/9.

Bravo 1/9 was known among Marine grunts as “busted Bravo.” That spring it had been providing perimeter security for the firebase at Con Thien, about two miles from the North Vietnamese border. The size of one of my smaller hayfields, Con Thien had been under constant bombardment, assaults and ambushes from well-positioned artillery and skilled, rested and well-equipped infantry.

By the time we arrived, B Company had been reduced to just 27 men, from an original force of more than 175. In front of our position, many of their dead rotted in the relentless midsummer sun, with the rest of us unable to move forward to retrieve them.

Finally, after days, the fighting subsided and my comrades and I in A Company swept forward to recover the dead Americans of Bravo 1/9. I remember vividly the bodies of those once proud Marines, and they gave testament to our American citizenry at its best.

Latinos from New York, New Mexico and the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. Native Americans from Wisconsin, Wyoming and the plains of Oklahoma. African-Americans from Alabama, South Los Angeles and the flats of Cleveland. Japanese-Americans from Hawaii, Seattle and the endless fertility of the Central Valley. European-Americans from Iowa, Kentucky and the industrial North. The flower of American youth, blown away, dead and wasted.

Over the years, as I milked the cows, tilled the fields, raised my family and enjoyed the fruits of a long life, I often think of those dead men I saw at Con Thien. In the words of another Midwestern farm boy turned lawyer, in deed and spirit, they gave “their last full measure of devotion.”

Such devotion was constantly tested, then met, under the overpowering firepower, experience and dedication of their opponents. Hopelessly outnumbered, confined to static defense, the Marines charged with holding the firebases like Con Thien and the whole of the area that was part of and below the Demilitarized Zone, were there because of perverse decisions made far away. Decisions informed by racial arrogance, tactical ignorance and, tragically, as always, domestic political arrogance.

The exhausted, overextended Marines were there at the insistence of Gen. William Westmoreland of the Army and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who wanted a static line along the length of the DMZ. More experienced Marine generals like Victor Krulak and Lewis Walt argued fruitlessly for concentrating on the populous coastal areas, leaving the jungle hinterlands to whoever wanted to be there. From private to general, Marines knew full well what they and their comrades were up against.

But there would never be enough Marines to prevent the North Vietnamese from having the initiative from the South China Sea to Laos. Their combat skills were honed at Dien Bien Phu, and well before. Con Thien was the whole senseless tragedy of Vietnam reduced to a small plot of cursed land, a place where nothing grew and only death held sway.​

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Marines near Con Thien, 1967
 
"Coming Home", by Eric DeWeese, a retired station manager in Los Angeles.

Returning from Vietnam was a relief. I had been lucky. Arriving in 1970, I didn’t have to hump the bush on infantry patrols. Instead, I did six-hour shifts in a bunker at Long Binh that had to be manned 24/7. Two guys to a bunker, we took turns staying awake on the midnight shift, as we all had day jobs.

Mine was to go 25 miles to Tan Son Nhut airport next to Saigon to pick up congressmen and generals who had come from the States to find out why the war was going so poorly. Along the way, I had to get them through Vietnamese customs. The Vietnamese customs agents laughed. Their bigwigs never bothered with customs.

Back home, I learned to be careful about saying where I had been. To say the war was not popular is an understatement. There was no “thank you for your service.” To some, Vietnam vets were all baby killers. One girl berated me for allowing myself to be drafted. Finally, exasperated, I pointed out that, as a woman, she didn’t have to face the choice of getting drafted, going to jail or fleeing to Canada.

Attempting to talk about the experience was difficult. Even with friends, I got cold stares when I told a story full of black humor about a hated general’s dog that bit lower-ranking officers with impunity. Eventually, one of the men shot it – claiming it hadn’t given the password when it returned through the perimeter after relieving itself.

For a time, I settled on the Christmas Eve story. At midnight on Dec. 24, 1970, those of us in perimeter bunkers shot off all the red and green flares to celebrate. The brass told us we had used up $35,000 worth of flares and to knock it off. A week later, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, we did it again.
This story generated blank stares and the occasional question, “Did you fight or anything?”

A blind date finally convinced me to shut up.

I met the young woman at a bar and grill in Baton Rouge. La. We ordered, then did the usual blind date business. She told me where she grew up, where she went to school, and about her job. My turn.
I told her I had grown up in a small town in Illinois, Taylorville. I went to a small college on a legacy scholarship. Became a Vista volunteer in East Texas, living in a poor, rural community in a house that had been used to store hay the year before, a house that came equipped with a three-sided outhouse, one side being an old screen door. Then I got drafted. And, after I got out, I moved to Chicago.

"Drafted," she interrupted me.

"Yes."

"Army?"

"Yes."

"Vietnam?"

"Yes."

Then, I rattled on about moving to Chicago, my friend Gil giving me a place to stay.

While I talked, she got up. She grabbed her purse and said she had to use the restroom. She walked past the restroom and out the front door. I never saw her again.

There is a coda to the story. Thirty years later, I was watching the Super Bowl. A commercial by Budweiser showed a group of G.I.s in uniform walking across an airport waiting room. Spontaneously, people stood and applauded. I almost fell off my chair.​

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Troops of the Third Batallion, 60th Infantry, 9th Division, 2nd Brigade arrive in the United States after being withdrawn from Vietnam in 1969
 
Jazzeum,I found the last three installments "Coming Home", "Busted Bravo" and the Australian involvement especially interesting.On the whole,I would tend to agree with Lee Kuan Yew's assessment,but would just add this comment of my own.We were told that we were fighting in Vietnam to stop the spread of Communism in this region,but afterwards that we had lost and it had all been in vain when the North Vietnamese over-ran the South in in 1975.But I would pose this question-where is Communism today?Didn't it die with a sick old man in Cuba not so long ago?Maybe,just maybe we were more successful than we were given credit for.Keep up these posts.Well done that man.
 
Thanks Tony. I found the Coming Home recollection particularly fascinating. It's good to see times have changed.
 
"Kinship in a Cemetery," by Dot Coltrane.


It was one of those nagging impulses, elusive and persistent, that comes unbidden and takes up residence in a person’s head. This one — the urge to do “something patriotic” for Memorial Day — had been there all day. Perhaps it was the guest column I’d read in the morning newspaper titled “Remembering the ‘Regular Guys,’” written by a local social studies teacher whose high school buddy died in Vietnam just a year after they graduated. Or maybe it was a residual effect of watching the series “Vietnam: A Television History” on public television a few days earlier. Whatever the reason, this particular holiday weekend’s summer-launching cookouts, pool parties and festivals just didn’t get it. Something was missing.

So that the afternoon, on what was bound to be one of Atlanta’s dwindling allotment of cool days, my husband, Al, and I — empty-nesters with memories of several wars — found ourselves walking among rows of small white markers in Marietta, Ga.’s National Cemetery.

Here’s the scene: It’s quiet, the rows of graves seem endless. On tall flagpoles punched into the green hillsides, dozens of large American flags ripple in a light breeze, with smaller versions of Old Glory placed carefully at each burial site. Not many people are around, just a few families and a couple of television crews doing the obligatory live remotes for the evening news. The markers bear names of Union soldiers who died in the Civil War, along with contemporaries of my father, who fought in World War I. Men who perished at Pearl Harbor on that grim December morning in 1941 and veterans of the Korean War are buried here. And ever so many servicemen who died in the jungles of Vietnam.

Back in 1968, when I was a young bride waiting for the love of my life to return from that confusing conflict in Southeast Asia, I wrote an essay titled “For a Year, It’s Your War.” If I were to update that article now, I would change the title to “It’s Always Your War.” Because I have learned, in the decades since my husband returned to me, stepping off a plane in Seattle to jeers of “baby killer” by war protesters, that Vietnam is etched into our lives just as permanently as the nearly 60,000 names carved into that long, black wall in our nation’s capital. Like it or not, the disastrous endeavor that most people would rather forget is part of us, one of the most significant segments of our shared experience, and it will never go away.

Like the young man to whom the guest columnist paid tribute, my husband went to Vietnam because he was convinced it was his duty to serve our country. After all, America’s leaders surely had not sent all those soldiers in World Wars I and II off to war for nothing, had they? And now this new enemy, Communism, we were told, was posing a terrible threat to our freedom.

Believing those premises, and with his friendly draft board in hot pursuit, my new husband enlisted in the Army Corps of Engineers. Following 18 months of stateside duty, he left for Vietnam. As a 25-year-old second lieutenant, he was one of the older men in his unit. Many of his friends in the construction battalion to which he was assigned in Nha Trang were between 19 and 22 years old. Some had wives and children back home. None of them wanted to be there.

In retrospect, fleeing to Canada seems like it was a really sensible alternative.

It was strange, watching the television series, to realize how much history I had forgotten. Or did I even know, much less understand, the long and complicated self-destructive series of events that led to America’s involvement in Indochina? Until the television screen rekindled them recently, I honestly had no clear recollections of the C.I.A.-approved assassination of South Vietnam’s President Ngo Dinh Diem, or of the glamour-tinged American tour by his sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, who was trying to rally support for the doomed regime.

To say that those deaths were overshadowed by President John Kennedy’s assassination three weeks later, at least in my personal past, is the ultimate understatement. To this day, I can tell you precisely when and where I heard the mind-numbing news from Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. I can describe in great detail the robotic movements of my circle of friends as we huddled together, hurt and bewildered, in the days that followed, even to the Thanksgiving meal we halfheartedly consumed in our rented duplex that year. Who were these Diem and Nhu guys, anyway?

Along with a lot of other fortunate individuals of our generation, we weathered Vietnam and “got on with our lives,” but that afternoon in the cemetery, I realized all over again that it is a war whose legacy keeps coming back to haunt us.

As we were leaving, an S.U.V. swung into a parking space just up the hill from our car. A young man got out the driver’s door, accompanied by a young woman about his age. Both wore cut-off shorts and T-shirts and seemed in a hurry. I assumed she was his wife or girlfriend, but she could have been a sister. Then I noticed the two red roses in his hand.

The two wandered among the graves for a while, obviously searching for a particular marker. As I watched this attractive pair in such a seemingly unlikely place for two young adults on a holiday weekend, it occurred to me that, in all likelihood, Vietnam was their war, too. It made sense: They were young, maybe close in age to our grown son and daughter who, through the grace of God — or maybe sheer luck — grew up with a healthy father who had survived his 12-month tour of duty in that faraway country and returned home to lead a productive life.

Now, many years later, we felt a kinship with the two strangers in the cemetery. Like us, they had been drawn to a hallowed place on Memorial Day to remember those who made the supreme sacrifice, to be reminded that “freedom is not free.” But their pilgrimage was different — it was for a specific person, someone with a face and a name, someone they perhaps had never had a chance to know.

In those few moments, I realized anew that no matter how reluctant my generation’s “ownership” of the Vietnam War might be, or how different our choices might have been if we had known then what we know now, it is our war. A young man carrying two red roses toward a grave in a military cemetery on Memorial Day reminded me.​

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Golden Gate National Cemetery, San Bruno, California.
 
"A West African Vietnam Story," by Jonathan Berger who served with the Peace Corps between 1967 and 1969.

I did not go to Vietnam; instead, I sought alternative service as a Peace Corps volunteer in Upper Volta — today known as Burkina Faso — in West Africa. Here amid the sun, the red blowing dust, the hot searing winds, loneliness, sickness and violent lightning, I learned the local language, Moré, spoken by millions of people in the region. I smelled the wood smoke, the pungent peanut sauce and the creek water. I saw the fire leaping to the night sky from burning fields. I supervised construction of water and wells, and sold potatoes grown from irrigated plots.

At the end of my first year of work, I strolled the fields of the village where I lived, Sapagha, with its chief, Sapag Naba. The rains had started. Though it was a bit warm, there were dark black clouds above; the sun behind them fell in sharp rays to the earth, and green had come up all over. Folks worked the land with small short-handled hoes called daba, made from carved tree limbs and fitted with blades tapped out by tinsmiths from old car bumpers and forged in small furnaces. As we walked, we chatted as acquaintances might when one is a longtime resident and the other is obviously out of place and recently arrived.

Sapag Naba asked me, “Foe manda bwen Koupela bii?” — “What is a kid like you doing in a place like this?”

“Sin ka waa Koupela ti tuuk bulsay mam nii eeye soldassay,” I replied. “If I did not come to Koupela to dig wells, I would be a soldier.”

“Zaaba zii bugo?” he asked. “Where is the fighting?”

“Foe ka mii ziga yay” — “You don’t know the place.”

“Bii toegis mam!” — “Tell me!”

“Moré ka tara goma yay,” I replied. “Moré has no word for it.” I went on: “Yam teka ya Ouagadougou bala” — “Your view is only up to the house of the Moe Naba in Ouagadougou,” the national capital.

But Sapag Naba persisted. “Dites moi en francais!” he said. “Tell me in French!”

“Indochine,” I said.

“Kyettan zabadamay?” he asked, knowingly. “Is there still fighting there?”

“Foe mii bay?” I said, a bit taken aback. “You know there?”

He gestured toward his hut. “Waya n geesa mam teedo” — “Come see my stuff.”

I followed him inside, where he showed me photos of himself in a French uniform. He was holding a submachine gun. Stunned, I could barely utter a reply. Conscripted into the French Army along with men from the villages Koupela and Puitega, he had crossed Africa to Djibouti, where they boarded a ship for Vietnam.

They had fought in the north. The country was beautiful, he said. Lush, bountiful, but, he said, “Mam yaa neda keemay” — “I saw people die.”

Michel Bodin, the author of “African Soldiers in Indochina,” estimates that 60,340 soldiers from Upper Volta, Chad, Senegal, Dahomey and other French colonies in Africa served in the Far East, of which approximately 5,800 were killed and 3,800 wounded. According to Bodin, the French Army said that as soldiers, they were “très bon.”

Unknowingly, in my self-imposed journey to escape service in Vietnam, I had landed amid the largest contingent of Voltaique soldiers who had served in Indochina. I was surrounded by an earlier generation of Vietnam veterans. Even 50 years later, I can’t think of a more stunning example of the reach and perversity of war.​
 
All of the first person accounts that I post I obtain from the semi monthly email I receive from the Vietnam 67 Newsletter. Some of the accounts are better than the articles I post as there's nothing better than people's recollections.

If you have a story you'd like to tell, the Vietnam 67 people want to hear from you. Their email is vietnam67@nytimes.com
 
Why Vietnam Was Unwinnable - Revisionist historians argue that we could have won the war but the media and politicid got in the way. The answer is not that easy.

The author of the piece is a historian at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh and the author of “Losing Binh Dinh: The Failure of Pacification and Vietnamization, 1969-1971.” He worked for the Department of Defense and Army staff’s War Plans Division from 1995 to 2005.
 
Reading Vietnam - A comparison of Michael Herr's "Dispatches" and Phillip Caputo's "A Rumor of War."

This particular article is what are reader's favorite books on Vietnam, which are discussed in the article's comment section. If I have time, I will make a list and post it here.
 
"The Ghost on the Tape," by Rod Stengel, a first lieutenant in Vietnam who later became a television programming executive.

During the last half of my tour in Vietnam, in 1968, I served as the executive officer of the 409th Radio Research Detachment, also known as the Army Security Agency. Our unit was attached to the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment based in Xuan Loc, northeast of Saigon, and led by Col. George Patton III. Unlike most fighting units in the area, the regiment did not have a fixed area of operation. War planners in Saigon frequently moved it around to take advantage of its firepower and speed, and my radio detachment traveled wherever they went. We had our own armored cavalry assault vehicles, which were modified for communications operations.

The 409th had two missions. First, our linguists, analysts and intercept operators tried to locate enemy positions through their radio communications. Second, radio research units monitored our own communications between and among field and headquarters units, to make sure they were secure.

In my experience, infantry and cavalry field commanders highly valued our work locating the enemy. Simply identifying the location of a Viet Cong unit was guaranteed to produce targeted artillery fire. In some cases — for example, whenever we intercepted intelligence about the plans or operations dictated by the enemy high command — a wave of B-52 strikes would follow.

As for reports about our own failures to ensure communications discipline, our work was often less warmly received. Understandably, in the heat of battle and the fog of war, mistakes were made. Call signs were not utilized. Pre-designated codes were forgotten. Locations, names and unit designations were transmitted in the clear, available for radio interceptors on the other side to hear.

One way we tried to drive home the importance of communications security was through training. Every month as new troopers arrived in the country, they were subjected to field orientation classes on a variety of subjects. I led a 30-minute class on communications security for these men.

Most of it was common sense. Without a doubt, the most effective lesson came in the form a tape recording of an actual incident. It started with what appeared to be the radio communications of an American unit that had suffered casualties and was calling for a helicopter to evacuate the wounded. Within minutes, an American helicopter arrived. The radio operator calmly guided the “dustoff” into a makeshift pickup zone. No call signs were used. Then came an explosion. Then silence.

There was silence in the class as well. I explained that the radio operator was actually a Viet Cong who spoke perfect, unaccented English. His distress call had been a trap. The helicopter and crew were lost.
After almost every class, troopers crowded around and asked to hear the tape, again and again. Over time the story took on new dimensions. That English-speaking Viet Cong had actually lived in the United States. In fact, I said, he had attended U.C.L.A.

I never found out whether the story was true; all I had was that tape. I didn’t even know if the tape itself was real. The two sergeants running the program claimed the incident happened “somewhere up North.” Higher-ups in the radio research department vouched for it, but couldn’t provide details. As for me, I like to think that tape saved many American lives.​

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A Platoon commander from the United States 1st Marine Division using a radio during operations in Vietnam.
 
"Special Friends," by Cara Beames, a psychologist in Minneapolis.

In July of 1966, when I was 17, I went on two dates with an 18-year-old named Larry, who would soon be deployed to Vietnam as a Marine. We’d each had serious relationships with others – as serious as young love can be. But during those two evenings we poured our hearts out to one another. Once he left for Vietnam, we started a correspondence that left me with 47 letters, which I have only recently had the courage to read again.

Immersing myself in Larry’s letters now, I relive the experience of being a senior in high school trying to survive a year filled with too much responsibility, sorrow, loneliness and despair as my father announced he was leaving my mother for another woman. I tried to dissociate from the emotional pain by doing what I had always done: getting over-involved in activities at school and falling in and out of love with guys I dated. I shudder to think of how I expressed my troubles to Larry, as though they were overwhelming, while Larry sat in a bunker, on a hill, in a jungle.

He kept trying to make me feel better, but as he reassured me with praise for how “perfect” I was, I only felt worse. I could see that he was falling in love with a girl that didn’t really exist. Larry seemed to think I was a virginal saint and he was lucky to have a chance with me. He talked about seeing me in September and wanting “thousands of dates” with me when he got home. He described how guys write their girlfriend’s name in the camouflage covers on their helmets and he hoped I didn’t mind that he wrote mine. I felt honored – but also wished I felt like I deserved it.

Larry’s early letters described his pride in being a Marine and being able to serve his country. But he also wrote about never having killed anyone before, and not being able to imagine it. Sometimes he’d reveal his fear of not coming home, and other times he was feeling optimistic and talked about his plans for when he did.

Over time the tone of his letters changed. He said he was sorry that it wasn’t just Viet Cong being killed, but also women and children. As Larry was getting into increasingly dangerous situations with buddies dying beside him, his thoughts about his service took a turn. He wrote about being in a senseless war and just wanting to get out of it alive. He described things I could not begin to fathom, so I tried not to as I watched his disillusionment grow.

Larry was also becoming disillusioned about our relationship, sensing it might never be more than “special friends.” He had talked about how much he’d idolized me in high school and how fortunate he’d be if I’d be his girl. Even though I’d never led him to believe we were a couple, Larry wrote on the back of a photo he sent that he would always think of me as his. I figured that like so many others in combat situations, Larry needed a distraction from his daily life. A pretty girl back home who loved and was missing him was something to keep his mind off killing and being killed.

late May, near my graduation, someone wrote to Larry and told him I was dating a Vietnam vet whom Larry knew and that I’d been doing some drinking. It was true, but nothing serious in either case. Still, Larry’s last two letters were very different from the earlier ones. He wrote that he was disappointed in me and wanted me to quit that behavior before it changed me. He added that whoever was buying me the alcohol should have his face smashed in. The other guy and I had already broken up by the time I got Larry’s letters. But it was too late.

I wish I had my letter in response to his. I know I felt devastated that he was hurting over my fall from grace. He’d even written that now I wouldn’t “see him in September.” I didn’t want to break his heart. I wanted to be the girl he thought I was. I wanted to see him in September.

Larry was a member of the 1st Battalion, 9th Marines, Bravo Company, referred to as “The Walking Dead.” He died on July 2, 1967, during the infamous and horrendous Operation Buffalo engagement near Con Thien firebase, in which 159 Marines were killed and 845 wounded. He’d written me about other operations he’d been involved in, but he never named them or gave many details. When I read online reports about his last one, I felt ill.

All I remember about Larry’s funeral is coming out of the church in a state of disbelief, though a friend recently told me she remembers me sobbing through the service. I also remember numbly checking the mail for many weeks hoping somehow there would be a letter from Larry written prior to his death saying we were okay.

Reading his letters these 50 years later has been heart wrenching. I was not able to be there for him when he wanted me most. I know that being his girlfriend would not have kept him from dying. But if I could have been more present, more aware of what he was going through, maybe he would have died knowing there was a girl back home for him.​

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Larry on the far right on R & R in Vietnam

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Larry on patrol in Vietnam
 
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