Vietnam 67 (2 Viewers)

I like the first person accounts as they give you a sense of what it was like for people who fought there or were affected by the War but I also appreciate the perspective of people who write about the War.

The New York Times is looking for accounts from people who fought in or was otherwise involved in the War so if anyone has one please write to vietnam67@nytimes.com
 
jazzeum said:
The Myth of the Spitting Anti War Protestor — Nobody spat on returning Veterans so why does the story persist?
Click to expand...

Probably because they were the first returning veterans from a foreign war that were not given an appreciative reception, apocryphal stories like the veteran being spit on are lent credence by other veterans and their families. It is only in the last 20 years that Vietnam Veterans are given the respect and gratitude they deserve by the American public. I saw a car with a bumper sticker saying "Vietnam: I served there. If you weren't there, shut up." I suspect this reflects the frustration of many Vietnam Veterans.
 
I saw a car with a bumper sticker saying "Vietnam: I served there. If you weren't there, shut up." I suspect this reflects the frustration of many Vietnam Veterans.[/QUOTE]

Knowing a Vietnam combat vet and the many people who lived through that era, but have not experienced war, it is worlds apart. We, who have not experienced war, will never understand what its like. Never. Like I said previously, the History Channel was interviewing a 90+old WWI vet, who said he still had nightmares about the war. The History Channel asked when did you have your latest nightmare? He replied, "last night". BTW Brad, still loving your Vietnam articles. Thanks.
 
The following was the first article in the Vietnam 67 series and was written by Karl Marlantes, a Marine, who had a prominent role in the Ken Burns Lynn Novick series and who has written two highly regarded books on the War, "What It Is Like To Go To War" and "Matterhorn," considered one of the great novels of the Vietnam War.

Vietnam: The War That Killed Trust -- The legacy of the War still shapes America even if most of us are too young to remember it.
 
The Moral Case for Draft Resistance -- Many protestors risked jail not to avoid serving in Vietnam, but to dissent against what they believed was an unjust war.

The author of the article has written a book about draft resistance during the Vietnam War.
 
Note: the title of the articles and the captions I add are not mine but come from the Vietnam 67 page.
 
"Vietnam Was a Lark," by Joel Blackwell, who served in the Air Force during Vietnam, was a newspaper writer and editor, and later worked as a trainer and writer on grass-roots lobbying.

When I got off the plane in Albany, Ga., in late September 1967, wearing my Air Force uniform for the last time, my mother hugged me so hard I could barely breathe. She wouldn’t turn loose. Only now can I see that having come through World War II, she had already known many men who did not return from war.

I, on the other hand, had, and have, fond memories of Vietnam. It was a lark. Like the vast majority of the men sent to Vietnam, I served in a noncombat role: In my case, I flew 120 missions on aging EC-47s, the two-engine workhorse you see in all the old movies. I was shot at only once that I know of; that bullet went through our plane and out the roof a few feet from where I sat staring at a screen full of electronic blips of Morse code, radio signals from the Vietcong.

The missions lasted up to seven hours, sometimes during the day, sometimes at night. The greatest danger was probably catching a cold, since we started off sweaty and hot and rose to the cold of 10,000 feet. We used direction-finding equipment to locate Vietcong transmitters, usually flying at an altitude that was out of danger. Once my crew and I had to put on parachutes and get ready to bail out because of a faltering engine, but we ended up landing safely.

In fact, the most peril I ever felt was finding my way back to our barracks while drunk. We always had plenty of beer and liquor, way too much in fact. Nha Trang, where I was stationed, was said to be a rest-and-recreation destination for both Vietcong and American personnel. Beautiful beaches, hotels, restaurants and shops. I got a pair of custom-made black-and-cordovan saddle oxford shoes for about $30.

When we weren’t on duty, we were relaxing – and partying. With all the bar crawling, Vietnam was sort of an extension of my college days, with enough danger to make it exciting. I still have a vivid memory of the tall, blond Australian woman dancing, completely naked, on the top floor of the large hotel in Nha Trang in front of 200 drinking, shouting, stomping, sweating soldiers. I always wondered how much she got paid.

My service started that summer in 1964, when I called my draft board in Albany to see if I had enough time to get enrolled in college and get a deferment. I was driving a truck for Sears, trying to earn enough money to get back in school, and thought maybe I had another six months before my number came up. But the people there told me if I didn’t get in school by September I’d probably be drafted, so I decided I might as well enlist, and at least stay out of the trenches.

The Air Force recruiter told the best lies about how service would improve my life, so I signed up to wear blue. It was a good choice. Basic training was fun: running, marching, shooting, taking aptitude tests. In movies you always see the Ph.D.s getting assigned to be cooks, but my experience was different. The smartest guys got to go to language school and the next smartest got to learn Morse code, which the North Vietnamese and Chinese still used.

I became part of what was called the United States Air Force Security Service. Our job was to intercept radio communications from the other side, like pilots talking and radar stations tracking our planes as they flew just outside international borders. At the time it was all hush-hush. You would read once in a while about the Russians shooting down one of our unarmed reconnaissance planes. Most of us were not flying, but stationed in one of the many listening posts that circled the Communist nations from Alaska to Taiwan to Pakistan, Italy and England.

My first assignment was in Okinawa, listening to the Chinese, and I stayed there 15 months. The stint was supposed to be two years, but the call went out for volunteers to learn some new technology that would require flying over Vietnam to locate radio transmitters. It sounded exciting, going to war, getting to fly, getting extra flight pay ($50 a month). I also calculated that because of a quirk in Air Force regulations, I might just be able to get out of the service before my four-year commitment was up.
It was more enjoyable than I expected. I got some training with parachutes, although we never actually jumped from a plane. Survival school taught us how to stay awake for 24 hours while being sprayed with cold water like a prisoner of war, how to run through a forest being chased by “enemy,” how to make a bed in the jungle … it was way better than the Boy Scouts.

Then in September 1966 I landed in Nha Trang. At first we had no planes, so we enlisted men were assigned to whatever hard labor needed doing. For a while we built foundations for buildings out of huge mahogany timbers from the Philippines. These logs could sit in the sand without rotting, we were told. All I knew for sure was that we had extra-heavy hammers and hardened nails because the wood was so dense. I still get an ache in my arm just thinking about it.

Another duty was sorting through pallets of beer that were stored out in a vast field because more beer was coming in than could be helicoptered out to the troops. Our job was to squeeze the cans to see if they were rusted through – this was before aluminum – and throw out the punctured ones.

We figured out pretty quickly that no one was counting, and we brought a pickup truck into which we loaded unrusted cans of beer for our own use. We would then dump crushed ice onto the load so it was crispy cold by the time we got off work.

We lived in barracks near the airport made mostly of louvered asbestos to allow ventilation – it was a simpler time. We each had a metal locker and two-man bunk beds covered with mosquito nets. Next door was a shower that had hot water, most of the time. A couple of local women swept up and picked up the beer cans, of which there were plenty. One night the Vietcong got through the perimeter and blew up some helicopters not far from our barracks, but we were all passed out and didn’t know until the next day.

After our planes arrived from the States, we were issued .38-caliber revolvers to wear when we flew. It felt cool – we were all John Wayne. I never got to shoot one, though.

We did lose one plane that was carrying guys I had worked with. My mission took off knowing a plane was missing. When we got back a guy drove a truck to pick us up from the tarmac and his face was drained of blood, white as a sheet. “They found them,” he said, “all dead.”

But for the most part, I was isolated from the horror. My gamble paid off and I got out of the Air Force 10 months earlier than I’d signed up for. I went to college, helped by the G.I. Bill, married, graduated, worked for newspapers and seldom thought about Vietnam. I was lucky, but I was far from the only one.​

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Joel Blackwell in 1966.
 
"A Nurse in the Highlands," by Joan K. Boyd, who served as a nurse advisor with the U.S. Agency for International Development in Pleiku, Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. She is writing her memoirs about her time at the Pleiku Provincial Hospital.

In 1967 and ’68 I was living in a house in Pleiku, Vietnam, in the remote Central Highlands. The war was at its peak. There was a night when the battle came close to home. Helicopters circled overhead with their red tracer bullets in the sky, and the noise of rockets, mortars and rotor blades was deafening. My two housemates and I were awake all night – and scared!

I was 28 years old and worked as a nurse adviser in the Pleiku Provincial Hospital, taking care of the civilian population – mostly Montagnard tribal people and Vietnamese peasants. The patients had serious war wounds, burns and tropical diseases such as bubonic plague, malaria and cholera. The hospital was poorly maintained and poorly equipped, and had no running water. We were challenged beyond belief.

My nurse colleague Noreen Gilroy had short, dark hair and a winning smile. We worked under the auspices of the United States Agency for International Development, and in collaboration with American military physicians and corpsmen. Part of counterinsurgency strategy is to win the “hearts and minds” of the people. We did not really think much about this political objective, but simply wanted to help sick people in a war-torn country with a paucity of resources. Our tour was 18 months.

I worked on the surgery ward with two Montagnard nurses and a corpsman, Willie Brown, who had a voice like the great Johnny Mathis. The surgery ward was mud-stained on the exterior and darkened within by soot from wood fires. The patients lay on rusty old iron bed frames covered with straw mats with their families in attendance. All we had for light at night was one bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. I learned great respect for the people who were victims of the war and suffered incredible pain and loss. Among the courageous and stoic patients I observed were children who stepped on land mines. We had no medications for pain relief.

One memorable patient was a 6-year-old Vietnamese boy who was very thin and pale. Third-degree burns covered the whole of his back. Every morning I removed the gauze dressings from his burns and saw countless maggots, their bodies writhing and swollen from feeding on dead and infected tissue – but his wound was clean. I learned then that maggots are the most effective means of wound debridement, and new ones appeared daily and magically on this child’s back.

I grew very fond of this adorable little guy, and we developed a special bond. He trusted me to take him to the coastal city of Nha Trang, where the American Army hospital had excellent plastic surgeons. When I took this boy to the ward where he would stay while recovering from skin grafts, the G.I.s were immediately all around him, shaking his hand and using Vietnamese words they had learned. The boy would not want for affection and attention. I was thrilled for this kid! When I picked him up a few weeks later he looked like a different boy, with pink cheeks, big smile and a healthy weight gain.

Our home in Pleiku was a modest white stucco house with faded green shutters and without any vestige of landscaping. Noreen and I shared the house with Richard Kriegle, a U.S.A.I.D. liaison officer with good looks, grayish dark hair and a great sense of humor. The house was sparsely furnished, but it had a large dining table and a fireplace. A cherished possession was a tape player, and sometimes the rockets and mortars we heard in the distance were accompanied by Brahms and Beethoven in our home.

At our dinner table were people from the embassy in Saigon, reporters, and Vietnamese and American Army officers. We talked about the Vietnam War and little else. We talked about the loss of life in nearby battles at Dak To. From the doctors at the Army 71st Evacuation Hospital we learned of overwhelming numbers of wounded coming from the field and many troops arriving at the hospital in body bags. It was heartbreaking. The deaths of soldiers and civilians on all sides seemed pointless then, just as it does now.

Vietnamese Army officers told of their never-ending tours of duty, and of their worries about their families, who followed them from post to post. No one talked about victory or winning the war. The stalemate of the war seemed very real to us.

And then there were occasions when officers from a nearby American compound came over for a glass of wine and respite from their military duties, and we sat before the fire listening to Beatles songs: “Yesterday,” “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

Such were the incongruities of war.​

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Joan Boyd in the Cental Highlands in 1967.
 
If any reader of this thread has an upcoming Vietnam-related event you'd like to publicize, please see below:

"Do you have an upcoming Vietnam-related event you’d like us to mention? Drop us an email at vietnam67@nytimes.com."
 
The March on the Pentagon: An Oral History - Fifty years ago, tens of thousands of people gathered in Washington to protest the Vietnam War. Here are some of their stories.

This is a special section that features recollections of people who were there: demonstrators, soldiers, reporters and people inside the Pentagon.

The actual march was on October 21, 1967.
 
The Face of Agent Orange, by Jacob Cohn, a master's candidate at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a former peace fellow with the Advocacy Project.

I first came face to face with the toxic herbicide Agent Orange the day I met Mai Kien. One of Agent Orange’s many victims, Kien lives with his mother in a remote village in north-central Vietnam. Most Vietnamese men Kien’s age — he’s 33 — would have long since gone off on their own and started families. But Kien is severely mentally ill (he “cannot control his mind,” his mother says) and prone to violent episodes, and so he has been confined at home for 20 years, ever since he started hurting himself and others during his outbursts.

I will never forget the shock of seeing a grown man chained in a concrete enclosure, wearing only a ragged shirt, shouting incoherently. Letting him loose would endanger the rest of the family, I was told, and there seems to be no prospect of his condition ever improving. Unless his mother can somehow save enough money for costly treatment in the provincial capital, it’s possible Kien will remain in chains until he dies.

I was born in 1991, and like most young Americans, I had always thought of the Vietnam War as an event mostly relegated to history class and pop culture. But Kien, and many others like him, do not have that luxury. For them, a war that ended before they were born has defined them, destroying any chance at a normal life.

I had come to Vietnam through the Advocacy Project, a Washington-based nonprofit group that sends graduate students to volunteer abroad. I was assigned to work this summer with a Vietnamese nonprofit organization, the Association for Empowerment of Persons With Disabilities, which supports Agent Orange victims and their families.

From 1961 to 1971, Agent Orange was used by the American military to defoliate jungle areas used as cover by the Vietcong. The herbicide contains dioxin, a highly toxic compound that kills plants; it eventually became clear that dioxin is extremely harmful to humans as well.

About 20 million gallons of Agent Orange were sprayed on Vietnam. Many of those exposed – both Americans and Vietnamese – went on to suffer ill effects linked to dioxin, including cancer and neurological disorders. Those effects can be passed down to their offspring. The Red Cross estimates that Agent Orange has harmed about three million Vietnamese, including at least 150,000 children born with birth defects in the years after the United States stopped using it.

Kien’s father was one of the many North Vietnamese soldiers exposed to Agent Orange, and he experienced memory loss and other ailments as a result. His first two children were born healthy, but Kien and his two younger brothers exhibited mental and neurological problems at an early age. None were able to go to school. Their mother, Mai Thi Loi, has cared for all three by herself since her husband’s death in 1989. She works a small plot of land, and she can’t afford the medical care her children so desperately need.

Her story follows a familiar pattern. All 17 of the Agent Orange victims I met were cared for by relatives, and that burden often falls on women, many of whose husbands have died from illnesses caused by Agent Orange.

Since the 1980s, American veterans exposed to Agent Orange have fought a legal battle to get compensation from the United States government. Although second-generation victims are still seeking recognition, the Department of Veterans Affairs does list a number of diseases among veterans as being caused by dioxin and eligible for compensation. But the United States has never admitted that dioxin has also caused these effects among Vietnamese, and Vietnamese victims groups’ pursuit of legal remedies has been unsuccessful.

There has been some cause for hope since 2007, when Congress began appropriating funds for disability support in areas affected by Agent Orange — but these programs are open to any person with a disability, and the fact that some of these disabilities are a direct result of our government’s actions has never been acknowledged. Perhaps the official silence is because the United States does not want to accept liability for Agent Orange’s legacy. Or perhaps as with so much about the Vietnam War, it’s simpler than that — a basic reluctance to come to terms with what we did.

As I met teenagers unable to walk or feed themselves and adults with the mental and physical capacity of small children, I noticed that nobody mentioned the United States’ role in their trauma, or expressed any resentment of me as an American. But I was always aware that my own country was responsible for what I was seeing. I believe every American should know these victims’ stories and acknowledge the continuing effects of our war in Vietnam. Anyone who loves his or her country should have the courage to face the truth when it does something wrong.

Americans obviously can’t change the past, or undo the damage inflicted by Agent Orange. But the least we can do is recognize and help those harmed by its use.​

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Ngyuyen Thi Thuy Lieu kisses and hugs her daughter Ngyuyen Thi Trang Ngan at their home in Danang, Vietnam. Ngyuyen Thi Thuy Lieu, who grew up next to the U.S. military base inside Denang airbase, has given birth to two children with physical and mental disabilities.
 
"A Flip of a Coin,"by Ira Cooperman. Retired after 35 years as a development officer for non-profit organizations, Ira Cooperman now teaches courses to adults on the Vietnam War and national security issues at Temple University in Philadelphia.

In Vietnam I served with a 26-year-old Brooklyn native and Columbia graduate named Vincent A. Chiarello. We were both Air Force intelligence officers, assigned to Detachment 1 of the 7th Air Force/13th Air Force, based in Udorn, a town in northeast Thailand about 30 miles south of the Laotian border.

Squadrons of attack aircraft, mostly F-4 jets, were stationed at Udorn, whose mission was to fly over Laos and bomb targets in North Vietnam. Among our other duties, Vince and I took turns briefing pilots, describing enemy targets and the route to them, as well as reviewing how our airmen could evade capture should they be shot down over Vietnam or Laos. With the help of other units, we also were involved in attempting to locate and rescue downed airmen.

And so it was unusual, to say the least, for our boss, Col. John Bridge, our unit's director of intelligence, to approach both of us one hot July day in 1966 to ask if either of us would be interested in flying on a different kind of mission, an "intel" mission in a specially equipped C-47, which would be flying over the so-called Ho Chi Minh Trail.

Running largely along the spine of Laos, this trail was a major thoroughfare through the jungle, down which the North Vietnamese transported men and material to their forces in South Vietnam. The Central Intelligence Agency, which was responsible for operations in Laos, had men clandestinely stationed along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, calling in air strikes whenever they noticed large enemy movements along its route, which was all but invisible from the air. The unarmed C-47 aircraft, codenamed "Dogpatch," had the mission of flying over this enemy route and contacting the American and Thai agents who were working for the C.I.A.

As briefing officers who spent much of our time behind a desk, each of us was eager to fly on a mission, to see some "action." The problem was, the plane's seven-man crew and electronic intel specialists had room for only one more person — and both of us volunteered. The colonel suggested we flip a coin, a Thai baht. Vince won the toss, and the next day I accompanied him to the flight line and the plane.

It was the last time I saw him. A couple of hours later, "Dogpatch" was shot out of the sky by a North Vietnamese MiG-21 with the loss of all eight men on board. At the time, it was the largest single air loss of the war. The only evidence we had then was an intercepted message from the aircraft commander yelling into his microphone, "MiGs! MiGs! MiGs!" It must have seem to him that there were several enemy aircraft rather than just one firing at him.

Rescue aircraft were immediately dispatched to what was supposed to have been Dogpatch's flight path, but no evidence of the C-47 was found. The jungle swallowed the plane and its contents. It wasn't until June 1988, 22 years later, that some remains and effects of the eight airmen were uncovered in an area near the border of Laos and what had been North Vietnam. Among them were parts of my Air Force partner, Vincent Chiarello, who had been promoted in absentia to lieutenant colonel.

Today Vince's name, as well as the seven other men on that plane, can be found on Panel 9 East of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Another tragedy of the Vietnam War, he is buried in an historic cemetery in Newtown, Penn.​

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Ira Cooperman's Armed Forces identification card, 1966.
 
Upcoming events, courtesy of the Times:

Graham Shelby will perform his one-man show “The Man on TV,” about his father, a Vietnam veteran, at the Kentucky Center in Louisville, Ky., on Oct. 27 at 8 pm.

On Oct. 28, the Rikkyo Research Center for Cooperative Civil Societies at Rikkyo University in Tokyo will hold a panel discussion on war resistance and the Vietnam conflict from 1:30 pm to 5 pm.

Authors Le Ke Son and Charles R. Bailey will discuss their new book, “From Enemies to Partners: Vietnam, the U.S. and Agent Orange,” at The Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University from 12 pm to 1:30 pm on Oct. 31. The event will be held at 1957 E St., NW, Room 505.

The 187th Assault Helicopter Company will hold its next reunion in Las Vegas from Nov. 8 to Nov. 12.

Bev Parsons, a playwright and student at Goucher College in Baltimore, is writing a documentary play about siblings of Vietnam vets. She invites people to share their stories with her at bp@beverlyparsons.com.
 
Your Favorite Books on Vietnam.

Among readers’ favorites are

The Best and the Brightest - David Halberstam
Matterhorn - Karl Marlantes
The Cat From Hue - John Laurence
The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien
A Bright Shining Lie - Neil Sheehan
Annam - Christopher Bataille
Dispatches - Michael Herr
Dereliction of Duty - H.R. McMaster
They Marched Into Sunlight - David Maraniss
This Eternity - Richard Wilks Taylor
 
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If you live in Northern California, the Veterans View Art Exhibit will run from Nov. 3 through Nov. 18 at the Veterans Gallery, Room 101, Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness Ave, San Francisco, Calif.
 
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