Linebacker II: B-52 Crews Nightmare Over North Vietnam

BOOTS ON THE AIR

TET

Nancy Sinatras single

a radio hit in 66

EYEWITNESS ACCOUNT

Black Lions
Chew Up NVA
at An My

FEBRUARY 2016

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MARINE
TANKS
AT HUE
ROCK N ROLL
IN THE BOONIES

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CONTENTS
Lo Manh Hung, just 12 years old,
aims his camera at a scene in
war-torn Saigon on Feb. 18, 1968,
during the Tet Offensive.

Departments
6 Editors
Notebook
Words that
dened Tet

8 Feedback
Readers
comments via
letters, email
and Facebook

12 Today
In the News

38

FEATURES
24

ALL HELL IS BREAKING LOOSE

Alpha Company of the 1st Infantry Divisions Black Lions
Regiment was called into the heat of battle to help a
battalion force under attack during Tet. By Jeff Harvey

32 MONSTERS OF METAL
A jungle is no place for tanks, some said. The jungle
busters showed they belonged there. By Arnold Blumberg

16 Then&Now
18 Voices
Richard Myers,
Air Force pilot,
Joint Chiefs
chairman

20 Homefront
Jan.-Feb. 1966

22 Arsenal
M114A1
Howitzer

38 YOUTH NO OBSTACLE
A 12-year-old Vietnamese boy, Lo Manh Hung, took
pictures that even seasoned war photographers admired.

52

44 NIGHTMARE UP NORTH
A B-52 crew on a bombing run over North Vietnam
during Linebacker II saw a missile headed its way.
There was almost no time to respond. By Paul Novak

52 SOUNDTRACK OF OUR WAR

For many troops, rock n roll and other music provided
the good vibrations that helped them hold onto their
lives in Vietnam. By Doug Bradley and Craig Werner

VIETNAM

58 Media
Digest

64 Offerings
Left at the Wall

COVER: DON MCCULLIN/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES COVER TOP: PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO THIS PAGE TOP: BETTMANN/CORBIS;
ON THE COVER: U.S. MARINES AT THE CITADEL FORTRESS IN HUE, FEBRUARY 1968

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Michael A. Reinstein
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EDITOR IN CHIEF

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PRESIDENT
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER
ASSOCIATE PUBLISHER

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VIETNAM

Vol. 28, No. 5

FEBRUARY 2016

EDITOR

Chuck Springston
Kevin Johnson Art Director
Debra Newbold Managing Editor
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EDITOR'S NOTEBOOK by Chuck Springston

U.S. Marines are
positioned at
the outer wall
of the Citadel, a
historic fortress
in Hue, during
the Tet ghting in
February 1968.

Words That Defined Tet

n the dark early hours of Jan. 31, 1968,

much of South Vietnam was still
celebrating the annual Tet festival,
held on the rst day of the lunar year,
when loud noises and ashing lights lled
the air. These were not the reworks that
traditionally accompanied the celebration.
They were blasts from Communist guns
aimed at more than 150 military bases, big
cities and small towns, as some 84,000
troops from the North Vietnamese Army
and Viet Cong staged nearly simultaneous
attacks throughout the South.
There seemed to be only one way to
describe the chaos of the Tet Offensive. It
was a phrase Captain Jeff Harvey and his
men heard over and over on January 31
and the next day: All hell is breaking loose.
Harvey was commander of Alpha Company,
1st Battalion, in the 28th Black Lions
Infantry Regiment of the 1st Infantry
Division, the Big Red One. He was leading
Alpha on a patrol north of Saigon when
ordered to return to base camp for a new
mission. In a story that begins on pg. 24,
Harvey chronicles the intense battles that

followed as Alpha was airlifted to three

of Tets hot spots.
At the same time, far away in northern
South Vietnam, a Marine corporal was in a
tank unit approaching the city of Hue and
suddenly, as he described it later, all hell
broke loose when a tsunami of enemy re hit
the tanks. American tanks, initially viewed by
some generals as inappropriate for service in
Vietnam, actually became an important part
of the U.S. arsenal, particularly during Tet,
as writer Arnold Blumberg explains in his
overview of tank warfare in Vietnam (pg. 32).
The hellish nature of Tet produced some
of the most powerful pictures of the warthe
work of seasoned photojournalists at their
best, willing to stand in front of danger to
document the erce ghting. Certainly no
place for a kid with a camera. A 12-year-old
boy from Saigon, Lo Manh Hung, disagreed.
He often wiggled his way into just the right
spot for a great photograph. His striking
photos from Tet and other battles are on
display in Youth No Obstacle, pg. 38.
By early March 1968, U.S. and South
Vietnamese forces had largely beaten back the
attackers, but images and the signature phrase
of Tet were burned into the memories of those
who lived through the conagration.
BETTMANN/CORBIS

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FEEDBACK

Water Warriors We Were

Finally, 46 years later we get some recognition. Thank you David
Sears and Vietnam magazine. Water Warriors (December 2015)
we were. I was on Patrol Boat, River 121 in River Division 532 on the
Vinh Te Canal. We took off the radar dome and mounted an M60
machine gun to shoot over the high bank. Risky behavior!
Dane Keller, Pewee Valley, Ky.

WATER
WARRIORS
In the rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta, Navy patrol
boats chased down and destroyed the enemy By David Sears

A
A crew member mans twin
.50-caliber machine guns as one
of the Navys Apocalypse boats
in River Division 53 patrols the
Mekong Delta near My Tho in 1967.

S MONSOON CONDITIONS SWEPT ACROSS

South Vietnam in September 1966, the deluge ooding

the Mekong Delta presented an opportunity to the U.S.
Navy: High waters allowed speedy river patrol boats to
operate in normally unreachable areas while restricting
the Viet Congs mobility and reducing ground cover for
attacks. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Morton E. Toole, commander
of River Division 53, established a 24-hour patrol near
Ngo Hiep Island, 15 miles west of My Tho, a delta town southwest of
Saigon. He hoped to head off the Viet Cong trying to inltrate the Plain
of Reeds south into Kien Hoa province.
Late in the afternoon of October 31, Boatswains Mate 1st Class James E.
Willy Williams, patrol ofcer for Patrol Boat, River 105 and PBR-107,
part of River Section 531 (RS-531), spotted two small sampans motoring
out of the Nam Thon, a branch of the Mekong River. With PBR-107 covering, Williams PBR-105 approached to inspect one craft, only to have its
lone occupant re at his boat and ee into a narrow canal. The 105 and
107 crews opened up with bow- and stern-mounted .50-caliber machine
guns but almost at once were hit by crossre from the second sampan. Its
occupants dove into the water but were killed.
Williams knew his patrol boats couldnt follow the escaping sampan into
the canal, but he spotted a possible shortcut that would enable him to cut off
the sampan at a point where it would have to return to the river.
As he completed the detour, Williams turned at top speed to intercept his
foe in the sampan. But he ran into something else: I looked up and didnt see
nothing but boats and people, Williams said in a 1998 interview. And they
had guns. The Halloween action was just beginning.
As the Mekong River crosses from Cambodia into South Vietnam, it
fans into four additional branchesthe My Tho, Ham Luong, Co Chien
LARRY BURROWS/TIME MAGAZINE/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Credit to the 5th Cav

In Shootout at LZ Albany (December
2015), I was glad to read the credit
you gave to the 5th Cavalry Regiment
in that engagement. About four years
ago I talked with the commander of
Charlie Company in the regiments
1st Battalion. He lost 45 men in his
company during that battle. He said
it still haunts him. I was just a lowly
replacement for Delta Company of the
2-12 Cav, 1st Air Cavalry Division. The
entire division rallied to support the
2-7 Cav with Colonel Hal Moore.

James F. Breen
Blakeslee, Pa.

VIETNAM

and Hau Giang (also known as the Bassac)

which feed the Mekong Delta south of Saigon.
Only one major road coursed the delta, so travel,
commerce and governance depended on ready
access to the regions rivers, canals and streams.
That area was vital to both the South Vietnamese government and the Viet Cong. Vietnamese
navy patrols, supported by American Navy
advisers and aircraft, targeted VC infiltration
of the region via the South China Sea as part of
Operation Market Time, which formally began
in March 1965 and continued through the end
of the war. Additionally, a U.S. Navy fact-nding
report in 1964 had identied the Mekong Delta as
another easily penetrable waterway route. The
report prompted the creation of a token U.S. river
patrol force equipped with converted amphibious
landing craft.
Meanwhile, the Navy began to build a more
substantial river force. It contracted for 120 (later
expanded to 250) patrol boats, designated the
Mark 1, a 31-foot berglass-hulled craft propelled
by two Jacuzzi water-jet pumps.
A later version of the patrol boat, the Mark
2, became known for its appearance in the 1979
movie Apocalypse Now. The boat transported Captain Benjamin L. Willard, Martin Sheens character,
in the hunt for Colonel Walter E. Kurtz, portrayed
by Marlon Brando.
DE CE M BE R 2015

More on
Big Red
One?
In your last
three issues,
you talk about
the Marines and the
1st Cavalry Division. My
husband landed in Vietnam
in July 1965 with the 1st Infantry
Division (Big Red One) and saw action
and lost men. Is there a reason why
they are not in your magazine? As
the wife of a veteran who served in
Vietnam, I would like to know.

Patricia Powell
Brogue, Pa.

Editors note:
The Big Red One has appeared
in past issues and is featured in
this issues coverage of the 1968
Tet Offensive. See pg. 24.
47

Reflections on the Guard at Kent State

The Kent State shootings
(Feedback, October 2015) really
got my attention. The war on
the homefront was so little
understood, even today. I served
in the New York Army National
Guard from 1963 to 1969. I was
actually joining at the local
armory (Syracuse) when the
news came over the radio of
the killing of President John F.
Kennedy in Dallas. In the shock
of it all, the sergeants sent
me home. I had to return on
Monday to be sworn in. Quite a
day! I was 22 years old.
We never had it really bad

like some other cities. There

was some looting in 1966 and
1967. We were mobilized but
never left the National Guard
armory. After Kent State
and even more recent events
(think Baltimore or Ferguson,
Missouri), I asked myself,
could I, would I have shot
a fellow American, given
the rightor wrong
circumstances? Id like to
think not, but that, of course, is
with 50 years of hindsight. Ive
mellowed a bit (I hope).
David F. McLaughlin
San Francisco, Calif.

Videos For
Vietnam Veterans

Hard To Find
Video Titles!

Newer Releases

Marine Tankers In Vietnam, 60 min.

Road Warriors: Truckers Vietnam, 60 min.
American POWs in Vietnam, 60 min.
USMC Camp Reasoner, Hill 510, 3rd MAF, 45 min.
Da Nang Outer Limits: Dog Patch, Danang 500, 60 min.
1st Air Cav. Div. Battle For Ia Drang Valley, 70 min.
25th Inf. Div. Search & Destroy Missions, 45 min.
4th Infantry Division Search & Destroy Missions, 45 min.
11th Armored Cavalry, Black Horse Regiment, 80 min.
Army Engineers In Vietnam, 110 min.
Operation Pegasus: Khe Sanh Rescue 1968, 45 min.
Andersen AFB, Guam 1965-75, 70 min.
9th Inf. Division Search & Destroy Missions, 50 min.
11th Light Infantry Brigade Vietnam, 60 min.
Combat Trackers & Their Dogs 45 min.
Combat Inf. Soldier: Life In Field, 60 min.
Far From Home: Combat Infantry Sights/Sounds, 55 min.
Dogs of the Vietnam War: Scout, Sentry, Patrol, 100 min.
Op. Deckhouse 5, 9th Marines & USS Iwo Jima, 45 min.
23rd Infantry Div. Americal In Vietnam, 80 min.
NVA Easter Offensive Of 1972, 60 min.
Special Forces With Montagnard Training, 100 min.
Special Forces in Vietnam: Early Years, 60 min.

Navy In Vietnam
Small Boat Warfare, 90 minutes
USS Oriskany Fire Off Vietnam 1966, 60 min.
USS Oriskany Off Coast of Vietnam, 40 min.
USS Forrestal 1967 Fire Off Vietnam, 70 min.
USS Forrestal (CV-59) 1950s-60s, 90 min.
USS Enterprise Fire Off Hawaii, 1969, 45 min.
USS Enterprise (CVAN-65) 1960-70, 90 min.
USS America (CVA-66) 1965-68, 60 min.
USS Midway (CVA-41) 1945-70, 60 min.
USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) 1961-79, 75 min.
USS Constellation (CVA-64) 1964-70, 45 min.
USS Independence (CVA-62) 1960s, 90 min.
USS Princeton (CV-37) 1950s-60s, 80 min.
USS Shangri-La (CV-38) 1944-1968, 45 min.
USS Coral Sea (CVA-43) 1965-70, 50 min.
USS Intrepid (CV-11) Off Vietnam, 60 min.
USS Yorktown (CV-10) Vietnam, 45 min.
USS Bon Homme Richard 1950s-60s, 45 min.
USS Franklin D. Roosevelt 1960s, 85 min.
USS Repose & Corpsmen, 60 min.
USS Ticonderoga, 60 min.

Dong Ha Base & $LUHOG 1966-68, 50 min.

Assault on Long Binh Tet 1969, 60 min.
Takhli AB 1964-1970, 110 min.
An Khe, 1965-67, 75 min.
Long Binh 1967-72, 60 min.
Cu Chi 1967-70, 50 min.
Phu Bai 1968-71, 60 min.
SCENES FROM
Bien Hoa AB 1964-69, 80 min.
IN-COUNTRY
Phu Cat AB 1966-68, 70 min.
BASES:
Chu Lai AB 1965-68, 75 min.
Camp Eagle 1971, 35 min.
Tuy Hoa AB 1966-1968, 75 min.
Dong Tam Base 1967-1969, 45 min.
Phan Rang AB 1965-70, 60 min.
Cam Ranh Bay AB 1966-68, 70 min.
Lai Khe, Di An & Phu Loi 1966-1970, 80 min.
Da Nang AB/USMC 1965-1970, 100 min.
Camp Enari (Dragon Mtn) 1968-1969, 30 min.
Ubon & Udorn, Thailand 1966-69, 60 min.
Dau Tieng Base & $LUHOG 1965-70, 45 min.

101st Airborne Div: Search/Destroy Missions, 50 min.

173rd Airborne Div: Search/Destroy Missions, 55 min.
Bangkok, Thailand R&R In The 1960s, 50 min.
National Route 9, A Journey along Route 9 near the DMZ., 60 min.
Rocket City: Attacks On Da Nang AB, 70 min.
1st Aviation Brigade In Vietnam, 60 min.
Op. Pershing, 1st Air Cav., May 1967, 60 min.
Destroyers In The Vietnam War, 65 min.
3rd Brigade 82nd Airborne In Vietnam, 60 min.
5th Special Forces Group Vietnam, 55 min.
African Americans In Vietnam, 60 min.
Op. MacArthur, 4th Inf. Div. in the Battle Of Dak To 1967, 60 min.
1st Air Cavalry, 1965-1967, 60 min.
Southern Man: The Road To Vietnam Training at Forts Jackson,
Campbell, & Gordon in the 1960s, 70 min.

NSA Da Nang, Camp Tien Sha 1966-71, 60 min.

Camp Evans & Op. Delaware 1968, 60 min.

Nha Trang/Camp McDermott 1965-69, 60 min.
U-Tapao, Thailand 1967-72, 60 min.
Korat AB, Thailand 1965-1970, 70 min.
Tan Son Nhut AB 1965-1968, 60 min.
Camp Carroll & Rock Pile 1967-1970, 30 min.
Nakhon Phanom AB 1966-70, 60 min.
Binh Thuy Naval Base 1968-69, 50 min.

Marines In Vietnam
Marines 1965/ Ops Starlite/Harvest Moon, 90 min.
Marines 1966, Ops Macon/Hastings/Prairie, 70 min.
Marines 1967 with Op Independence, 90 min.
Marines 1968, Op. Baxter Gardens, 80 min.
San Diego Boot Camp 69 & 73, 45 min.
Parris Island Boot Camp 1960s, 45 min.
Marine Staging Battalion, Camp Pendleton, 30 min.
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Con Thien & Op. Buffalo, 60 min.
Battle for Hue City, 45 min.
Marine Aviation: 1st MAW, 90 min.
Siege Khe Sanh & USAF, 45 min.

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101st Airborne A Shau Valley 1969-71, 60 min.

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FEEDBACK

For most of the Vietnam

War,
U.S. planes failed to destroy
a key bridge
at Thanh Hoa. Then came
the smart bomb.

Posted on Facebook

by Don Hollway

I served with the 1st Marine Division, Mike Company,

3rd Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment, as an M60 machine gunner
in 1968-69, and our company was in the jungle a lot. I knew
about Bob Hope being in Vietnam but not a couple [Roy Rogers
and Dale Evans] I had watched on TV back in the 50s with a
chocolate cookie and milk in hand. Both were very kind and
loving; it makes sense they would tour for our warriors.

SLAYING THE

DRAGON

peration Rolling Thunder.

Its very name evoked, no
shoot the missile, and then
doubt intentionally, waves
you guide it.
of U.S. carpet-bombers
Because the pilot had to
obliterating the cities of
steer each missile, he could
World War II Germany
re
only one round at a time.
and Japan. But the tactical
Returning to re again gave
air campaign against
enemy
anti-aircraft artillery another
North Vietnam, beginning
shot. As Smith put it: Rule
in March 1965, required
pinpoint accuracy against
number one is, you never
enemy infrastructure: Communist
go back for a second time
around.
concrete and steel, said
Risner had learned that the
President Lyndon B. Johnson,
hard way on March 22 when
not circled back to check
he
human lives. On April 3
on a gun emplacement he
more than 80 American
thought he had
jet ghters, knocked out,
bombers, tankers and camera
and his plane was hit. Risner
planes attacked one bridge,
was forced to ditch
80 it in the Gulf of Tonkin.
miles south of Hanoi, carrying
(You never get good enough,
enemy troops, supplies, trains
he told
and vehicles over the Ma
Time magazine. A complacent
River, at the village of Thanh
pilot gets killed.) On April
Hoa.
3,
as Risner pulled out of his
Eight-victory Korean War
second run of the day over
ace Lt. Col. Robinson Risner,
Thanh
commanding Republic
Hoa, his Thunderchief took
F-105D Thunderchiefs
a hit. His plane leaking fuel,
of
the
67th
the
Tactical Fighter Squadron
cockpit full of smoke, unable
out of Korat, Thailand, planned
to reach Korat, Risner managed
to nurse the crippled Thud
to
apply almost 100 tons of
high explosive to the bridge.
south across the Demilitarized
Thirty Da Nang. Two
Zone to
F-105s each carried eight
other pilots werent so lucky.
750-pound M117 bombs,
A North American
the largest F-100D Super
then available in theater,
Sabre own by 1st Lt. George
and 16 carried secret weapons:
C. Smith was lost to
a pair anti-aircraft re,
of the new AGM-12 Bullpup
and he went missing in action.
air-to-ground guided missiles.
Captain Herschel S.
The Bullpup packed only
Morgans McDonnell RF-101
a 250-pound charge
Voodoo also was hit but made
it 75
but could apply it precisely
miles southwest of Thanh
on target, even when
Hoa before going down.
red from 12,000 feet. On
Hanoi
Morgan would spend the rest
schedule at 2 p.m. local
of the war as a prisoner.
time on April 3, Risner launched
Thanh
It was all for nothing. Many
his No. 1 missile.
of the free-fall bombs
Hoa
The Bullpup was a guided
had missed the bridge altogether.
missile, but not a
Bridge
Risners third in
self-guided missile. The
Gulf of
command, Captain Bill Meyerholt,
worst part about [the
conrmed that
Tonkin
AGM-12] is you got to stay
his own Bullpup made a direct
with it, said Lieutenant
hit but with no result.
(later Admiral) Leighton
Sheer brute force250 pounds
Snuffy Smith, of attack
of explosive, 750
squadron VA-22 from the
pounds of explosive, 100 tons
carrier USS Coral Sea,
of explosivewasnt
who recalled ring a Bullpup
DMZ
enough to drop the Thanh
at a bridge on his
Hoa Bridge.
rst mission over Vietnam.
The seemingly indestructible
In other words, you
Da Nang
structure was
erected by the Chinese after
the original bridge, built

A Navy F-4B Phantom

of ghter squadron
VF-21, from the carrier
Midway, drops

Mark 82 bombs over

Vietnam in 1965. Its
missions included attacks
on the Dragons
Jaw bridge at Thanh
Hoa.

36

VIETNAM

OCTOBER 2015

Jack L. Rowland

37

Fighter Squadrons
Storied Past
That is an impressive article following the
air campaign over Thanh Hoa (Slaying the
Dragon, October 2015). In regard to the
mention of Republic F-105D Thunderchiefs,
did the 67th Tactical Fighter Squadron out
of Korat, Thailand, have any relation to
the 67th Fighter Squadron of Guadalcanal
fame? On Aug. 22, 1942, Bell P-400
Airacobra ghter-bombers of the squadron
provided air support for the ground units in
the campaign for the island.
George S. Georgiou, Clearwater, Fla.

Editors note:
Roy Rogers and Dale Evans entertain crew members of an
Air Force C-123 Provider during the last leg of their Vietnam
tour. Crew members are, left to right, Airman 2nd Class Cyril
F. Crawly, Staff Sgt. Francis K. Sutek and Technical Sgt. Eddie
Miller, November 1966. PHOTO: U.S. AIR FORCE/NATIONAL ARCHIVES

The 67th Tactical Fighter Squadron in

Vietnam indeed traces its lineage to the
67th Fighter Squadron in the Solomon
Islands in World War II. Today the unit
is again designated the 67th Fighter
Squadron and ies F-15 Eagles.

White Water Red Hot Lead

A Nonfiction Story About Swift Boat Duty
Vietnam 1967 and 1968
Dan Daly, the author was the Officer in Charge of
PCF 76. It begins in Coronado and brings you on board
their patrols out of Da Nang, Chu Lai and Cua Viet.
Operating with other crews, the stories cover blistering
firefights, brutal weather and the comradeship of Swift
Boat duty. Tempered by humor and a touch of romance.

Did our job well and proud of our service

Order your holiday gifts today!

whitewaterredhotlead.com
10

VIETNAM

Send letters and email:

Vietnam Editor
1600 Tysons Blvd.,
Suite 1140
Tysons, VA 22102-4833; or
Vietnam@historynet.com
Become a fan at
facebook.com/VietnamMag

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TODAY

In the News

Nixons Bombing
Contradiction

n 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: Weve 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 Woodwards research for his
new book, The Last of the Presidents Men,
the story of former Nixon aide Alexander
Buttereld, who revealed in the Watergate
hearings that Nixon used a secret taping
system. That revelation precipitated Nixons
resignation on Aug. 9, 1974.
Although Nixon knew that the bombing
campaign wasnt working, he believed it
carried political benets in an election year,
according to Woodward.
Buttereld, now 89, took the Zilch note
and thousands of other documents from the
White House when he left in 1973. He has
said he will turn over the documents to the
appropriate archive.

The CIA has declassied daily intelligence briengs given to Presidents

John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B.
Johnson, including many related to
the Vietnam War. The agency has
posted on its website (www.foia.cia.
gov) about 2,500 of the Presidents
Daily Briefs from 1961 to 1969.
By the fall of 1967 the war had

12

VIETNAM

Richard Nixon confers with

National Security Adviser
Henry Kissinger, around 1972.

become a major part of the briengs

and got its own section: Special Daily
Report on North Vietnam. Some 70
percent of the briengs between
1961 and 1977 contained intelligence
regarding Vietnam.
Researchers have been trying
for more than a decade to get
the briengs released. They led
a lawsuit under the Freedom of
Information Act in 2004, but a court
decision in 2007 denied them the
specic items requested. The court

also ruled, however, that there is no

blanket protection shielding such
documents from public inspection.
Other factors may have inuenced the
CIAs decision, various commentators
have noted, including President
Barack Obamas 2009 memorandum
stressing transparency in government
and fallout from the Edward Snowden
WikiLeaks disclosures.
Documents from the Richard Nixon
and Gerald Ford administrations are
scheduled to be released in 2016.

FREDERIC LEWIS/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES

Remains Identified

Farewell
SYBIL STOCKDALE,
one of the
earliest and most
persuasive
advocates for
prisoners of war
held by North
Vietnam, died in
Coronado, California, at age
90. Her husband was Navy
pilot James Stockdale, who
was shot down over North
Vietnam in September 1965
and taken to the infamous
Hanoi Hilton prison. Sybil
Stockdale became indignant
about the lack of attention
given to the plight of POWs
and in 1968 revolted against
the military Code of Conduct
that urged POW wives to keep
quiet about their husbands
suffering. Her meetings with
the families of other prisoners
led to the formation of the
National League of POW/
MIA Families in 1970, and
she traveled to Paris in 1972
to confront delegates from
North Vietnam. She received
the Navys Distinguished

Public Service Award for work

on behalf of POWs. James
Stockdale died in 2005.
JOHN R. GALVIN,
a four-star general
who did two
tours in Vietnam
as a battalion
commander
and brigade
operations
officer, died Sept. 25, 2015, in
Jonesboro, Georgia. He was
86. A West Point graduate
with a masters degree
in English literature from
Columbia University, Galvin also
contributed to the Pentagon
Papers, the secret history of
the Vietnam War written by
Defense Department staffers.
He later served as Supreme
Allied Commander of NATOs
military forces in Europe, wrote
reports on counterinsurgency
strategy that inuenced Iraq
War General David Petraeus and
was dean of the Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts
University in Massachusetts.

Giant Zoo Planned for Island

ietnams Phu Quoc Island in the Gulf of Thailand, about a

50-minute ight from Ho Chi Minh City, will be the setting for a
new zoo that its developer says will be the second-largest in the world,
according to a report on the website of Asia Pacic Travel.
The island is a nature preserve, and the new venture is being marketed
as a safari zoo with areas representing places such as Africa, India and
Australia. There is no universal denition of zoo size to determine
world rankings, and its unclear what denition is being used for the
Phu Quoc zoo, which will comprise:

1,200 130 1,500

acres

species

animals

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ZUMA PRESS INC/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; AP PHOTO/THOMAS KIENZLE; GARY CAMERON/REUTERS/CORBIS; THE STATE

he remains of
A volley is red
during a burial
three soldiers
service
for the three
killed on May 2, 1970,
soldiers at Arlington
have been repatriated
National Cemetery.
and identied as
Major Dale W. Richardson, 28, of Mount
Sterling, Illinois; Staff Sgt. Bunyan D. Price Jr.,
20, of Monroe, North Carolina; and Sergeant
Rodney L. Griffin, 21, of Mexico, Missouri.
The men were on a helicopter headed to
Fire Support Base Katum in South Vietnam
when bad weather forced the pilot to y into
Cambodian airspace. The copter received
heavy ground re. After an emergency
landing, Richardson, Price and Griffin died in
a reght. Their remains were recovered in
February 2012 and analyzed for identication.

Honoring Dogs of War

fter spending 15 years raising money

for a statue to commemorate the
canines he worked with in Vietnam, former
infantry dog handler Johnny Mayo now has
his monument, a 1,700-pound bronze statue
of a dog handler and German shepherd,
according to the website of the Rockford
Register Star in Oregon, Illinois. The statue
was created by sculptor Renee Bemis of St.
Charles, Illinois, and Art Casting of Illinois
Inc. The memorial, which cost $130,000, will
be installed in Mayos hometown, Columbia,
South Carolina.

Johnny Mayo and

small replica of statue

F E B R U A R Y 2 016

13

TODAY

In the News

Kent State President

Beverly Warren and
Hanoi University
President Nguyen
Dinh Luan.

Kent State, Hanoi University Form

Student Exchange Partnership

orty-ve years after four students were killed by Ohio National

Guardsmen who were called in to deal with disturbances that
accompanied Vietnam War protests, Kent State University has signed
an agreement with Hanoi University for a student exchange program
and other collaboration.
The partnership agreement, signed Sept. 8, 2015, brings full circle
our history, said Kent State President Beverly Warren, in an article
published in the local Record-Courier newspaper. Hanoi University
President Nguyen Dinh Luan said his visit to a campus museum
dedicated to the May 4, 1970, shootings showed him that many
Americans were against the war. Today no one wants war, he said,
adding, We remember the past so we can shape a better future.
Under the agreement, Vietnamese students in Hanoi Universitys
Italian language programs will study at Kent States campus in
Florence, Italy. The two universities said they might also consider
partnerships on the Kent campus.

,
Nobel s War Roots

he 2015 Nobel Prize for Medicine

was awarded to three researchers
for their studies on drugs to treat
parasites, and one of the recipients
was Chinese researcher Tu Youyou,
who began working on an antimalarial
drug in 1967 as a secret military
project after North Vietnam asked
China for help in treating malaria.
She developed the drug from sweet
wormwood, an herb used in traditional
Chinese medicine. The active
compound, artemisinin, was isolated
in 1971 and shown to be effective. The
other Nobel winners were Satoshi
Omura of Japan and Irish-born William
Campbell of the United States for their
work on ringworm treatments.

14

VIETNAM

Climate Change vs.

Coal in Vietnam

t the same time that Vietnam is

experiencing a power-plant boom, the
countrys government says it is committed to
a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.
On Sept. 30, 2015, Vietnam published a
plan to address climate change, making it
one of more than 125 nations to draw up
an environmental plan in advance of the
December 2015 United Nations Climate
Change Conference in Paris.
Vietnams lengthy low-lying coastline makes
the country especially vulnerable to ooding
from rising sea levels, which could ruin much
of the Mekong Deltas rice production. In its
climate-change plan, Vietnam states that it
will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030
to a level at least 8 percentand perhaps 25
percentbelow projections for a business-asusual scenario.
To reach that goal Vietnam will have
to confront the increasing air and water
pollution from new coal-red power plants.
A recent study estimated that 4,300 people
in Vietnam currently die each year from
coal-related exposure, a number that could
rise to 25,000 if all proposed power plants
are completed, reported Thanh Nien News.
Vietnam has 19 coal-burning power
plants, and the total would rise to
53 plants under current
development rates.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: WWW.KENT.EDU; WWW.SUMFOREST.ORG; XINHUA/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

NE
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THEN&NOW

Huu Tiep Lake

A B-52 bomber ying over
Hanoi the night of Dec. 18-19,
1972, the beginning of
Operation Linebacker II, was
hit by an SA-2 surface-to-air
missile and crashed into Huu
Tiep Lake. Two crewmen
were killed. Four were taken
prisoner and released in 1973
when the war ended. Now
tourists come to see a remnant
of the plane in the water.

16

VIETNAM

BOB HENRY/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO;

INSET: FORUM OF THE UNION OF SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, VIETNAM

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VOICES Richard Myers

our-star General Richard Myers

WHAT ARE THE LESSONS OF THE WAR?

became familiar to millions of TV

You have to be broadly prepared for a spectrum

of conicts. We were not prepared for the
Vietnam War. All the plans pointed to a potential
nuclear conict, not a counterinsurgency. To
be really prepared, you have to have the right
equipment with the right training. I dont
think any of the people I knew in the
Air Force would say they were
well-trained for what they were
going to face. Better training
was a big outcome of that war.
And equipment too.

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 ghter pilot and accumulated 4,100
ying hours600 of them on
combat missions in Vietnam.
He led some of the Air Forces
largest commands, including
the U.S. Space Command.

HOW WELL DID WE

LEARN THE LESSONS OF
FIGHTING INSURGENCIES?

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.

BORN
March 1, 1942,
Kansas City, Mo.

WHAT AFFECTED YOU MOST:

THE VIETNAM WAR OR 9/11?
Oh, 9/11 clearly, because it happened at the
Pentagon. I wasnt in the building. I was on
Capitol Hill, but I got right back. The [Joint
Chiefs] chairman was gone, so I was the acting
chairman. It was quickly determined that this
threat of terrorism or violent extremism had
the potential to do great harm to this country.
I saw it and I still see it as an existential threat
to the United States. I dont think we saw
Vietnam like that. At least it would have taken
a lot of dominoes falling to get to that point.

WHAT IS THE LEGACY

OF THE VIETNAM WAR?
The all-volunteer force, which occurred in 1973,
was probably a direct result of our experiences
in the Vietnam War. Another thing that came
out of Vietnam was the Goldwater-Nichols Act
of 1986, in which Congress told the services
to ght in a coordinated and collaborative
way. In Afghanistan and Iraq we were a better
coordinated force. That was a direct result of
not only Vietnam but also all the small little
conicts we got into afterward when it looked
like our services werent coordinating very well.

18

VIETNAM

RESIDENCE
Arlington, Va.

EDUCATION
Bachelor's in
mechanical
engineering,
Kansas State
University;
MBA, Auburn
University

IN VIETNAM
December 1969
to October 1970,
pilot, F-4D
Phantom II
ghter-bomber,
13th Tactical
Fighter
Squadron;
September 1972
to March 1973,
F-4 Wild
Weasel ight
commander,
67th TFS

We were actually having success

in Vietnam toward the end of the war, but we
didnt take advantage of lessons learned when
we prepared ourselves for Iraq. Thats why
General David Petraeus was sent back to [an
Army education center at Fort] Leavenworth
to refresh our counterinsurgency doctrine.
Then he applied it.

WHAT TYPE OF MUSIC FROM THE

VIETNAM ERA DID YOU LISTEN TO?
The Beatles, for sure. I dont know how many
times we played Hey Jude on the jukebox.
There was Creedence Clearwater Revival.
I would hear Led Zeppelin and try to nd it.
When youre in a foreign land, ghting by day,
and you come in to have a drink or a meal, to
be able to listen to something from home is
very comforting.

ARE THERE ANY CLOTHES YOU WORE

IN THE 70S THAT YOU WOULD BE
EMBARRASSED TO WEAR TODAY?
Right after the war, I was in a Las Vegas
department store and getting a nice leisure
suit. It had the bell-bottom pants. I should
have saved it to go to costume parties.
Thats what it would be good for today.

During the Vietnam Wars 50th anniversary, Vietnam is interviewing people whose lives
are intertwined with the war and asking for their reections on that era in American
history. You can read more of this interview at www.historynet.com/Vietnam.

ILLUSTRATION: DAN WILLIAMS

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HOMEFRONT 1966

January February

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 Sinatras song hit No. 1 in
February, and she traveled to Vietnam in
1966 and 67 to perform for the troops.

Both unfair
and tting...
a faded
dream
played in
the mist
and slop,
a transitory
moment
between
footballs
past and
future.

VERNON DAHMERS MURDER

The day before the KKK set re to the
civil rights leaders house in Hattiesburg,
Mississippi, on Jan. 10, a radio program
had announced that Dahmer would
help blacks register to vote by making
his country store one of the few spots
where they could pay their $2 poll tax.

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
Lombardis rst of three
straight championships
(eight total) and
Clevelands Hall of
Fame running back
Jim Browns last game.

SEX AND DRUGS SET THE SCENE

in this bestseller, published in February.
It features three women who meet in
New York in 1945 and live unfullled
lives in the 50s and 60s, shaped by
their similar reliance on pills, or dolls.

BATTLEFRONT 1966

JAN 8-14
The 1st Infantry Divisions 3rd
Brigade, the 173rd Airborne Brigade
and the Royal Australian Regiments
1st Battalion, totaling 8,000 troops,
conduct Operation Crimpthe largest
allied military action thus fara
search-and-destroy mission in the
Iron Triangle north of Saigon. The
operation discovered the Viet Congs
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.

LSD
PARTY
Party protocol was
to drop acid around
6 p.m. to get ready for Acid
Test 5 (out of 19) to begin at 9 at San Franciscos
Fillmore Auditorium on Jan. 8. Partiers tested
the drugs effects in a surreal maze of light
and sound, with music by the Grateful Dead.

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 Vietnams leaders to
negotiate along lines favorable to the
United States and South Vietnam.

FEB 14
The rst Navy Swift boat, ofcially
Patrol Craft Fast, is lost when it
strikes an underwater mine and
sinks in the Gulf of Thailand. Four
of the six crewmen are killed.

FEB 17
BLIZZARD OF 66
From Virginia to Maine,
a late January storm that
began as a noreaster
dumped several feet of
snow in many places.

CLOCKWISE FROM OPPOSITE TOP LEFT: AF ARCHIVE/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; BETTMANN/CORBIS; THINKSTOCK;
WEATHERARCHIVES.ORG;THE ADVERTISING ARCHIVES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; CBW/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The Royal Thai Military Assistance

Group Vietnam is activated, absorbing
the previously deployed Royal Thai Air
Force contingent. Thailands military
eventually numbers 11,570 and suffers
351 killed and 1,358 wounded.

FEB 18&25
In combat actions, Army Specialist
Daniel Fernandez of the 25th Infantry
Division on Feb. 18 and Marine Staff
Sgt. Peter S. Connor of the 3rd Marine
Division on Feb. 25 save their comrades
by covering exploding grenades with
their bodies. Both receive posthumous
Medals of Honor for their heroism.

ARSENAL by Carl O. Schuster

SCREW IT

The gun had an interrupted screw breech with a

slow-cone mechanism that required the loader
to withdraw the block and pad axially before the
breech would unlock and swing open.

KICKBACK

The M114A1 employed a hydropneumatic recoil system that gave a

41- to 58-inch recoil motion in ring.

by Carl O. Schuster

TRAVERSE
TO TARGET

IN THE BAG

Like all interrupted

screw-breech weapons, the
M1114A1 used propellant bags, and
projectiles were loaded separately.
The propellant came in green bags
(charges numbered 1 5) or white
bags (charges numbered 3 7).

The carriage enabled

the howitzer to be
traversed up to 25
degrees (444 mils) to
the right and 24 degrees
(427 mils) to the left.
It could be elevated
to 63 degrees (1,120
mils) and depressed to
-2 degrees (35.6 mils).

The M114A1 155mm Howitzer

n the morning of April 30, 1968, a

patrol from H Company, 4th Marine
Regiment, 3rd Marine Division, encountered North Vietnamese Army troops
entrenched just outside Dong Huan, within
500 meters of South Vietnams Cua Viet River.
The reght quickly escalated as Navy riverine
forces and Marine reinforcements rushed to the
scene. The company commander called in air
and artillery support. Soon, 105mm and 155mm
shells began to rain on the NVA positions.
By late afternoon, Dong Huan was in Marine
hands. That was the opening round of 16 days of
hard ghting before the NVA was driven back
across the Demilitarized Zone, abandoning its
attempt to seize the town of Dong Ha. Artillery
was important in the battles outcome.
The M114A1 howitzer was developed in the
late 1930s and entered production in May 1941
as the M1 howitzer, mounted on an M1 split-rail
carriage. After introduction of the M1A1 carriage with air brakes and a midcarriage ring
pedestal that could be extended by a ratchet,

the howitzer became the M1A1, redesignated

the M114A1 in 1962. First deployed to South
Vietnam three years later, the M114 lled the
gap between the divisions 105mm and the corps
artillerys M110 8-inch howitzer.
Weighing 12,800 pounds, the M114A1 could
be sling-loaded under CH-46, CH-47 or CH-53
transport helicopters.
The M114 was not as accurate as the 8-inch
howitzer, but a well-trained crew and firecontrol team could place its rounds within a
100-meter circle at maximum range. The M114
was nuclear capable, but high-explosive rounds
dominated its re missions in Vietnam; it also
frequently shot white phosphorus and smoke.
More than 10,000 M114s were made before
production ceased in 1953. The howitzer served
with the Army and Marine Corps as well as with
ground forces of most U.S. allies. It began to
give way to the lighter and longer-range M198
after 1978, although it remained in service with
Americas allies and reserve units well into the
21st century.

CREW
11
BORE
155mm
BARREL
LENGTH
10 ft. 2.4 in.
SHELL
WEIGHT
95 lbs.
MAX. MUZZLE
VELOCITY
564 m/sec.
MAX. RANGE
14,600 m
MAX. RATE
OF FIRE
4 rpm/
1-2 rpm
(sustained)

GREGORY PROCH

22

VIETNAM

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The 1st Battalion of the

Big Red Ones Black Lions
in the Tet Offensive
BY JEFF HARVEY

All Hell Is
Breaking
Loose

Flares light up
Da Nang harbor
in northern South
Vietnam, one of
more than 150
places attacked
by the Viet Cong
during the countrys
Tet holiday in 1968.
(PAUL STEPHANUS)

24

VIETNAM

25

s January 1968
drew to a close, it seemed my company, Alpha,
would go the whole month without ring at the
enemy. That was a quiet contrast to the last four
months of 1967, when our battalion1st Battalion, 28th Infantry Regiment (known as the
Black Lions), 1st Infantry Division (the Big Red
One)had frequent contacts with Communist
forces. We were still active in January, conducting
road security operations and base camp security
sweeps, but we just couldnt nd anyone to engage.
Early on January 31, I received a radio transmission that changed everything.
That morning, as commander of Alpha
Company, I was leading my unit on a security
sweep in the rubber plantation south of our base
camp at Quan Loi, about 90 kilometers north of
Saigon. We had gone about 3 or 4 kilometers
when I got a radio call from Major John Taylor,
the operations officer, positioned at the battalion
command post in Quan Loi.
Alpha 6, this is Deant 3, Taylor said. Return
to base camp immediately.
Earlier, around 10 a.m., the battalions executive officer, Major Dannie George, had been
ordered to the divisions 1st Brigade tactical operations center, also at Quan Loi. (The battalion commander, Lt. Col. Frank Cochran, was on
R&R). After the meeting, George called Taylor
and ordered him to get the battalion ready for
immediate movement. He didnt give a reason.
Taylor was simply told, Just hurry, and he

26

VIETNAM

quickly set the battalion in motion.

At the time, the battalions Bravo, Charlie and Delta companies were on
perimeter security assignments. Charlie and Delta companies and the battalion reconnaissance platoon prepared to move, while Bravo stayed at Quan
Loi, where it spread out to cover the battalions portion of the base perimeter.
The 1st Brigade directed the battalion to pick one of its companies for an
independent mission.
I selected Alpha, my best company, Taylor said. He directed Alpha to get
on the road it had just crossed and move with all haste back to the airstrip
at Quan Loi. Taylor dispatched trucks to pick up the Alpha infantrymen and
sent helicopter gunships to protect them. He also ordered the battalion supply staff to grab all the ammunition and C rations they could get their hands
on and take them to the airstrip.
After I got the call from Taylor ordering the hard hump back to base camp,
I directed the rear platoon to become the point platoon. We moved out to the
road and set a rapid pace. Everyone understood the urgency of the orders.
No panic, no questioning, just immediate actions, recalled Lieutenant Ed
Knoll, the leader of Lima Platoon. (All platoons in the 1st Divisions infantry
battalions were designated with alphabet-based call signs rather than with
the usual ordinal numbers.)
Suddenly, a pilot from the team of Huey gunships contacted me. The
gunships would cover us until we were back at base camp. This unusual
level of security increased my already heightened senses and imagination.

GREGORY PROCH

A couple of hours
after a ght at An
My on February 1,
soldiers from Alpha
Company rest at
Phu Loi. From left
are Dusty Williams,
Kirk Falco Sterns,
Denny MacIntire,
Richard Doc Hardy.

Then trucks, escorted by two M113A1 armored

cavalry assault vehicles, came roaring down the
road. We loaded up. I asked what was happening.
The truckers and crews from the two ACAVs only
knew that they were supposed to get us to Quan
Loi airstripand do it fast. At the airstrip, we were met by supply crews who
brought two jeeps with trailers loaded with ammunition and C rations. We
hopped off the trucks, got the ammo and rations and scrambled to get into
position for the Hueys on their way to pick us up.
The assistant operations officer told me we were going to Lai Khe, base
camp for the tactical headquarters of the 1st Infantry Division, a couple of
infantry battalions and other units. All hell is breaking loose, he said. Once
in Lai Khe, I was to report to the 3rd Brigade tactical operations center for
further instructions. Charlie and Delta companies and the battalion recon
platoon were at the runway, also forming up for Hueys going to Lai Khe,
45 kilometers south of Quan Loi, on Highway 13.

I had to nd a way to report to the 3rd Brigade

operations center and noticed a jeep near a small
building. Looking around with 1st Sgt. Leroy
Knight, we found an enlisted man in a bunker near
the jeep and told him we were going to borrow the
vehicle. It was ne by him. He wasnt planning on
leaving the bunker. He gave us directions to the
brigade operations center, in the middle of the
camp. I asked him if he knew what was happening.
His reply: All hell is breaking loose! I informed
my platoon leaders that I was leaving to get our
instructions and ordered them not to move until
they heard from me. I departed in the borrowed
jeep with Knight and one of my radio operators.
When I reported to the brigade operations ofhe flight to Lai Khe paralleled Highway 13. As far north and
cer, I was given a radio frequency to monitor
south as we could see, there was a long convoy of armored
and told to wait. I asked him what was happening
vehicles and their support vehicles. They were part of the 11th
and got what had become the stock answer: All
Armored Cavalry Regiment, which had been operating in the Loc Ninh
hell is breaking loose! The
area, just below the Cambodian border about 125
operations center seemed
kilometers from Saigon. We were all moving toward
chaotic. We returned to AlLai Khe. I assumed the base was under attack. I raphas position at the airstrip
dioed my platoon leaders and directed them to be
The countryside
to await instructions. In my
prepared for anything when we landed.
absence, an unidentified
None of us knew then that the North Vietnamese
was aflame.
major had tried to order the
Army and Viet Cong had launched a major offensive
Artillery flares
company to move out to the
timed to coincide with Vietnams New Years celeperimeter. My lieutenants
bration, the Tet holiday, which began January 30. In
illuminated the
informed him of my directhe early morning of January 31, the NVA and VC
night everywhere. tive to stay put. The major,
struck more than 150 military installations and cifrustrated because no one
vilian areas all across South Vietnam. One of those
would accept his orders, besites was Lai Khe, where the Communists hoped to
came irate and left, threatdistract the 1st Infantry Division, which carried out
ening to have every one of the platoon leaders
operations north and west of Saigon and also guarded the major approaches
relieved. My lieutenants, Kenny Albritton, Roger
to the city, including Highway 13.
Antonelli, Ed Knoll and Rick Nagle, joked about
As we approached Lai Khes airstrip, the helicopter crew chief told me the
the majors threat. One said, What was the major
base camp was under rocket and mortar attack. We landed away from the
going to do? Send us to Nam?
airstrip operations building and an ammo dump, which were being targeted,
By late afternoon, we had not received any inand set up a defensive position off the edge of the strip in some rubber trees.
structions. There were more rocket and mortar
The area around our position seemed to be deserted.

COURTESY JEFF HARVEY

F E B R U A R Y 2 016

27

Squad leader Spc. 4

Bill Lines, left, and
Sgt. 1st Class Leo
Williams take a break
on February 2 after
Alpha Companys
afternoon sweep
through An My to
clear the village.

explosions near the ammo dump area, and a lot of

choppers were coming and going. I kept checking
with 3rd Brigade. Nothing. It was getting dark when
I nally received a directive: Get to the airstrip operations building for pickup. We were needed at Di
An, base camp for the 1st Infantry Divisions main
headquarters, about 10 kilometers northeast of Saigon. As we were moving to the pickup area, there
was another rocket and mortar attack.
The rounds were moving in our direction, remembered Spc. 4 Glen Pittman, a section leader
in Oscar Platoon (mortars). A couple of my new
soldiers started to panic. I got them settled down.
A loaded Huey gunship parked on the strip
suffered a direct hit just as a flight of 20 or so
choppers took off. The Huey started to burn, and
its ammo began cooking off, so I positioned Alpha
well away from the gunship. It was now dark, but
the burning chopper was providing illumination.
We saw Hueys coming in. We popped a smoke
grenade, and they moved up to us. We hopped
aboard, and off we went.
It was the rst time anyone in Alpha had own
at night. The ight was spectacular, though a little eerie. We picked up over the trees and could
see Highway 13 again. Headlights and taillights
showed the 11th Armored Cavalry convoy still
moving south. The countryside was aame. Red
tracers (friendly forces) and green tracers (NVA/
VC) streaked across the sky. The convoy was ring as it moved, its ngers of red tracers reaching
out from the road. Artillery ares illuminated the
night everywhere, along with ashes of artillery,
rocket and mortar re. Helicopter gunships and
the Air Forces Lockheed AC-130 and Douglas
AC-47 aircraft, equipped with Vulcan cannons and
miniguns, kept ring as they circled targets below,
creating red cones of light down to the targets.
We saw a fantastic light show, remembered
Spc. 4 Norm Meier, a rieman in Lima Platoon. But
it was a dangerous one. One artillery shell burst
about 200 yards away, on a level with our choppers,
which immediately ew to a higher altitude.
We landed at Di An about 8 p.m. and were met

28

VIETNAM

by Captain Steve Wolfgram, assistant headquarters operations officer for

2nd Brigade. He took us to some buildings near the airstrip and lled us
in. Wolfgram said U.S. troops were under fire throughout the southern
part of the 1st Divisions area and in Saigon. Alpha Company would be the
divisions reaction force, deployed wherever there was a hole to plug or a
unit that needed assistance. I felt proud and frightened at the same time.
Alpha passed the night without any calls for help. In the lull, someone
tuned a transistor radio to American Forces Vietnam Network in Saigon,
Meier remembered. Finally we got some info about what was happening:
All hell is breaking loose all over.

arlier in the day, when the battalion had been forming up on the
Quan Loi airstrip at the start of the operation, the 1st Brigade
commander, Colonel George Buck Newman, made Taylor the
commander of a battalion task force ordered to secure an aireld at Phu
Loi, a base camp southeast of Lai Khe and northeast of Saigon. Task Force
Taylor had a brief stop at Lai Khe, then Charlie and Delta companies and
the recon platoon continued on to Phu Loi.
Phu Loi was a huge base camp. With just two companies and the recon
platoon, Taylor said, the best we could do was set up roving patrols around
the aireld and protective revetments, thus protecting aircraft from VC sap-

COURTESY JEFF HARVEY

On the eve of
the An My battle,
Major John Taylors
battalion was
strengthened with
armored M42
Dusters, similar
to this one on
an unidentied
operation in the
Central Highlands.

pers [commandos], and be a reaction force if any

ground attack hit the base.
On the evening of January 31, Taylor heard reports of large enemy movements around the hamlet of An My, about 2 kilometers off the northwest
from artillery, mortars and rocket-propelled
end of Phu Lois airstrip. During the night, Charlie and Delta companies and
grenades, accompanied by firing from the
the battalion recon platoon were bolstered with repower from the 1st DiACAVs and automatic weapons.
visions B Troop, 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment, which consisted of
The general finished his briefing and said,
ACAVs, a tank platoon and a platoon of M42 Dusters, armored vehicles with
sounding like a John Wayne character, We
a turret that housed two 40mm anti-aircraft guns. The battalion had become
must kill them so they will not live to fight ana combined-arms task force of about 300 men.
other day. Lieutenants Knoll and Albritton burst
At daylight on February 1, Taylor sent his men across open elds to the
out laughing. He stared at them and then at me
An My area to check out the reports of enemy activity. The task force came
with a shocked look on his face. I said, General,
under heavy re as it neared An My. There were more NVA than the battalion
theyre just a little nervous. He put his hand on
had seen since early December 1967 at Bu Dop, a big battle about 2 kilometers
my shoulder and said, I understand.
from Cambodia and an NVA sanctuary. It was estimated that Taylors force
Hueys landed us in a eld behind Task Force
was facing about 1,500 enemy troops.
Taylor. We received re on the way down, and it
Taylor asked for more troopsAlpha troops specically. I wanted a comcontinued as we moved to the right of the battle
pany that was tested, he said. I requested infantry and armor-type ammo,
and took positions behind a low berm that borwhich was in short supply on an aviation base. The assistant division comdered An My. The plan called for the task force to
mander, Brig. Gen. Emil Eschenburg, quickly approved both requests.
move forward in an abreast
While waiting for reinforcements, the troops at
formation and assault
An My continued ghting with what they had. At one
enemy forces in the village.
point all of the men in one Duster crew were wounded.
Alpha was assigned to the
Men from either Charlie or Delta, I cant remember,
I saw a dark
formations right ank.
jumped on the Duster and took over its operation for
shape come up
While waiting to move,
the rest of the fight, Taylor said. The Duster plawe
received small-arms
toon leader was so impressed by their prociency he
out of the ground
re from the far end of the
wanted to keep them. This was the rst time that any
with a rifle, so I
berm on our right. I radioed
of my soldiers had seen a Duster. They quickly gured
out how to operate it while under re.
fired a short burst. the information to Taylor
and recommended that
At Di An, Alpha Companys radio operator was
Alpha keep its right side
monitoring the battalion network. We could hear
tied to the berm, stopping
Taylors transmissions and knew the battalion was in
any enemy anking efforts to get behind the task
a big battle just outside the Phu Loi camp. Several Alpha soldiers were sitforce. Taylor agreed. Alphas armor support crews
ting, listening. Drew Bozek, a specialist 4 rieman in Lima Platoon, said he
had not arrived when we were given the signal to
had never heard anyone on the radio as calm and controlled as Major Taylor
move out, but they were headed in our direction as
with all hell breaking loose. Expecting to be called in soon to help Taylor,
we went over the berm, so I popped smoke, which
Alpha Company saddled up. The order to move to the airstrip came quickly.
showed them our location as we advanced.
While we were in ight to Phu Loi, Taylor quickly explained his situaCrossing the berm, we were giving and receiving
tion. After we landed, while the rest of the company stayed on the Hueys,
heavy re. I saw a medic treating a November PlaI took my platoon leaders with me for a brieng by General Eschenburg.
toon soldier. There were NVA bodies and weapons
Over the generals shoulder, about 2 kilometers away across a at eld and
scattered around the battleeld. The whole area
along a tree line bordering An My, we saw the battle. There were explosions

VAN009314, WILLIAM BRUCE BARTOW COLLECTION, THE VIETNAM CENTER AND ARCHIVE, TEXAS TECH UNIVERSITY

F E B R U A R Y 2 016

29

was a target-rich environment, rieman Bozek

said. There seemed to be NVA everywhere in front
of us. I saw Spc. 4 Frank Ward, a Lima rieman,
jump into a trench. He found some live NVA in the
trench and started shooting and jumping around.
He jumped back out of the trench. As we passed
the trench we saw a bunch of dead NVA in it.
We slowly progressed forward. The armor
platoon leader radioed to say that the smoke
had died out and he needed another marker. I got
my company radio operator, Specialist Dillard
Massengale, and moved back toward the berm to
throw another smoke grenade. Massengale saw
one of the NVA bodies move. At the same time,
I noticed a large Chinese-made Claymore mine
had been set up near the moving body, aimed in
our direction. Massengale grabbed my M16 and
made sure that the NVA soldier would not move
again. I knocked the mine face down and yanked
out the electrical wire.
We threw the requested smoke. The armor
came over the berm. Our support was an M48A3
Patton tank, a Duster and three ACAVs. I quickly
briefed the platoon leader, who was on one of the
cavalry assault vehicles. He moved the tank and
Duster into position between Lima and November
platoons. The ACAVs were between November
and Mike platoons on our right. The armored vehicles put out a lot of re. But they also drew a lot
of re. I was astounded to see the crews just sitting
on top of the vehicles behind thin-looking armor
plates, ring their weapons as rapidly as possible.
Lieutenant Albritton, November Platoons
leader, climbed on the tank to direct its re. He
was crouched beside the turret gesturing to the
tank commander. I saw him and motioned him
to get down. As he started to jump off the tank,
he was hit. Richard Doc Hardy, Alphas senior
medic, was on him as he hit the ground. The lieutenant had a bad-looking chest wound. He was
evacuated by helicopter with other wounded.
A Lima Platoon rieman, Spc. 4 Dusty Williams, said that as he advanced into An Mys
small village, he had seen the tank with Albritton come up close on his right. I saw movement
behind a tree about 20 meters ahead of us, then
saw the lieutenant take a round, Williams recalled. While others were attending to him, I
focused on the tree. I saw a dark shape come up
out of the ground with a rie, so I red a short
burst. The gure went down. I kept watch as we
moved forward. I saw a spider hole with a black

30

VIETNAM

pajama-clad body half out. I notched one for the lieutenant.

Major Taylor ordered the task force to break contact and return to Phu
Loi because the combined-arms force was also the base camps defense
force. The plan was for artillery and gunships to pound the An My area all
night, and the task force would go back in the next morning, February 2,
to clear the village. We started to withdraw at 5:35 p.m., picking up enemy
documents, ammo and weapons as we went.

e received word that night that Albritton had died. He later

received the Silver Star Medal for his actions that day.
American losses during the February 1 battle at An My
totaled one killed and 19 wounded in the 1st Battalion, 28th Infantry; four
killed and 13 wounded in the 1st Squadron, 4th Cavalry; and four wounded
in the Duster platoon. Additionally, one ACAV was destroyed.
BETTMANN/CORBIS

A bomb explodes
near a group of
Marines in Hue, one
of the northernmost
targets of the 1968
Tet Offensive.

There were 65 conrmed enemy dead. The captured weapons included

ve AK-47s, one rocket-propelled grenade launcher and three rounds, one
heavy machine gun on wheels with ammo, mortar rounds, one light machine
gun, a K-50, one U.S. carbine and medical supplies. One heavy machine gun
on wheels and a large Claymore mine were destroyed.
Shortly after daybreak on February 2, we had begun forming up for the
move back to An My when General Eschenburg arrived and presented Silver
Star medals to two deserving soldiers, Alphas Spc. 4 Frank Ward and Deltas
Sgt. 1st Class Ryan.
By 10 a.m., the task force began sweeping through An My. We met much
lighter resistance than the day before. But just hours after receiving his
medal, Ryan was killed. The sweep was completed by late afternoon. The
task force of three companies, the recon platoon, Cavalry Troop B and a
Duster platoon had successfully fought two NVA regiments during the
two days at An My.
The 1st Battalion of the Black Lions continued to engage in firefights

through the month, including another heavy battle with a NVA regiment in the Thu Duc area just
outside of Di An on February 20. We didnt return
to our base camp at Quan Loi until March 1.
Jeff Harvey, a retired Army lieutenant colonel,
was commanding officer of Alpha Company
from October 1967 to March 1968. Harvey wrote
this article with assistance from John Taylor,
a retired lieutenant colonel who commanded
Alpha Company from June to July 1967 and
was operations officer of the 1st Battalion,
28th Infantry, August 1967 to June 1968.
The recollections of other soldiers were taken
from oral histories compiled by the battalions
Alpha and Headquarters companies.
F E B R U A R Y 2 016

31

At rst dismissed as useless in

guerrilla warfare, tanks proved
to be real heavy hitters
BY ARNOLD BLUMBERG

Monsters
of Metal
T

he rst sight that greeted the newly arrived Marine tank crews
from Da Nang was hardly reassuring. It was Feb. 2, 1968, when
Captain Conwill Case Caseys Alpha Company, 1st Tank Battalion, attached to the 1st Marine Division disembarked from its
landing boats at the Navy ramp near the southwest corner of the
Citadel, a centuries-old walled fortress on the north bank of the Perfume
River in Vietnams former imperial capital, the city of Hue.
When Alphas 2nd Platoon reached the south bank of the river, the Marines were shocked to see the burned-out hulk of an M48A3 Patton tank near
the boat ramp, its charred turret lying several yards away, the crew nowhere
to be found. This metal monster had been part of a four-tank detail headed
for Hue, where it would be transported by water to join the 3rd Marine Division, deploying to the northernmost part of South Vietnam. On the way to
Hue, the detachment had been ordered on January 31 to support a Marine
Corps rie company going to the city to assess the situation there after an
assault by the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army during the Communists Tet Offensive, a series of simultaneous attacks on cities and military
bases throughout South Vietnam.
We got to the outskirts of Hue City, and all hell broke loose, remembered
Corporal Karl Fleischmann, who was in the four-tank detachment. As the
force attempted to barrel through a built-up area of the city, the tanks were
hit by a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and recoilless rie re, and the

32

VIETNAM

AP PHOT0

Marines use
an M67A2
amethrower
tank to ush
suspected Viet
Cong troops out
of the brush at
an unidentied
location.

F E B R U A R Y 2 016

33

infantrymen riding on them were swept off the

decks by machine gun re.
By midafternoon, the Pattons from 3rd Tank
Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, with the surviving infantry, took positions at the Hue compound
of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam,
the organization that commanded all U.S. combat forces in South Vietnam. The command tank
of Lt. Col. Karl Frontenot was soon knocked out
when an enemy round entered through an opening in the turret, igniting the 90mm shells stored
there and sending the turret ying through the air.
Casey assumed command of all armored units
in Hue and contacted the headquarters of the
1st Marine Divisions Task Force X-Ray, which
oversaw operations in the area. Casey reported
that he had available for action six Patton tanks
and two M67A2 amethrower tanks (nicknamed
Zippos, after the lighter), as well as a tank retriever, a vehicle that could tow a damaged tank.
Caseys company would conduct a critical and
brutal battle against 14 VC and NVA battalions
with only two of his three ve-tank platoons, two
of his three amethrower tanks, the one retriever
and the orphans of the four-tank detachment.
His efforts would be hampered by the usual
use (or misuse) of tank crews in Vietnam, where
armor often spent more time providing security
for cities than supporting troops in the field.

Thats the reason I never could get my other ve tanks, my 3rd Platoon, up
there, Casey lamented after the ght at Hue. Instead of being fully mobile
and ready to move into combat wherever it occurred, they were hung up on
bridges around Da Nang, he said.
Casey described perfectly the problem with the American doctrine for the
use of tanks during the Vietnam War: It was never uniform or fully developed.

t the beginning of U.S. ground combat in South Vietnam, most senior

armor officers considered the war an infantry and Special Forces
ght; they saw no place for armored units in the conict. The commander of American forces in South Vietnam from 1964 to mid-1968, General William C. Westmoreland, was skeptical of armors usefulness and its
ability to operate in Vietnam. Westmoreland, who did not have practical
experience with tank units and had not studied armored warfare theory,
said in a July 1965 message to Army Chief of Staff General Harold K. Johnson that except for a few coastal areas, most notably in the I Corps area
[South Vietnams northern provinces], Vietnam is no place for either tank
or mechanized infantry units.
Even though the Armys top brass were not convinced of a tank units value
in Vietnam, tanks did come ashore with the rst U.S. ground combat forces,
units of the 3rd Marine Division, in March 1965. Staff Sgt. John Downey, in
3rd Platoon, B Company, 3rd Marine Tank Battalion, drove his M48 off a
landing craft onto Red Beach at Da Nang, South Vietnams second-largest
city, on March 9. His unit was one of several tank platoons assigned to protect
the huge American airbase there. In early July the battalion, under Lt. Col.
States R. Jones Jr., set up its headquarters at Da Nang.
Marine tank units participated in the rst major engagement that included
armored troops, Operation Starlight, southeast of Da Nang in mid-August
1965. After two days of bitter ghting, about 700 Viet Cong had been killed,
68 by Marine tankers. American tank guns had also destroyed dozens of
enemy fortications.
The rst Army tanks to appear in Vietnam came with the 1st Squadron, 4th
Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Infantry Division. The division, whose units arrived

An M551 Sheridan
tank, in foreground,
is positioned
alongside other
11th Armored
Cavalry vehicles
near Cambodia
in March 1970.

34

COURTESY JOHN POINDEXTER; OPPOSITE: TIM PAGE/CORBIS

between July and October 1965, had asked Army

officials to also attach a regular tank battalion to
its force, but the request was denied. The Korean
War showed that armored vehicles were vulnerable
A tank crew
to mines, Army leaders argued. They also believed
from the 5th
Infantry Division
the presence of tanks, historically associated with
(Mechanized)
mass armored assaults, would create a psychologcrosses Ben Hai
ical atmosphere of conventional combat while the
River, south of
Army was trying to convince the troops that they
Con Thien in 1968.
were ghting a guerrilla war that called for small
units and an emphasis on men over machines.
The 1st Infantry Divisions cavalry squadron was allowed to retain its
tanks, and tanks also served in other cavalry squadrons, but the Military
Assistance Command, Vietnam, restricted their use with the dictum of
no tanks in the jungle. The squadrons Pattons were removed from the
line cavalry troops and kept on base. It took six months to nally convince
Westmoreland and MACV that tanks could contribute to the squadrons
combat operations.
By the end of 1965, when the 25th Infantry Division was being deployed to
Vietnam, its commander, Maj. Gen. Fredrick C. Weyand, overcame MACV
resistance and brought with him the divisions tank battalion, a mechanized
infantry battalion and an armored cavalry squadron.
Three Army tank battalions would serve South Vietnam: the 1st Battalion, 69th Armored Regiment, 25th Infantry Division; the 2nd Battalion, 34th
Armored, 4th Infantry Division; and the 1st Battalion, 77th Armored, 5th
Infantry Division (Mechanized), all equipped with Pattons.
The stubborn opposition to the use of tanks in Vietnam stemmed in part
from the impression that they would have problems with the countrys
weather and terrain. But Army studies in 1967 found that tanks in South
Vietnam generally could travel across 60 percent of the countrys terrain in
the dry season and 45 percent when the monsoon rains fell. And Vietnam
isnt all jungle. Tanks could run across the open plains. Operating a tank in
Vietnam was never easy, but the ingenuity of the crews and an enormous
amount of hard labor made it possible.

y 1967 U.S tank forces in South Vietnam had taken on myriad tactical missions that included convoy escort, land and road clearing,
plowing through heavy vegetation as jungle busters, base security,
search-and-destroy operations, assisting infantry reaction forces that
reinforced units under attack, providing re support to supplement eld
artillery and guarding bridgesa risky business that kept tanks immobile
for long periods and made them easy targets. As the war progressed tanks
also were used to x the enemy in place while infantry troops arriving by
helicopter carried out the main battleeld maneuvers.
Even though armor theory held that tank units should not be broken up and
deployed piecemeal, that principle was widely violated in Vietnam, primarily
because once the effectiveness of tanks was recognized, every command
from companies to divisionswanted them. Since there were few tank units
in-country, the available units had to be divvied up. For example, the 4th Infantry Divisions 2nd Battalion, 34th Armored, which arrived in September
1966, was promptly split, its three tank companies sent to widely separated
areas. The battalion never fought as a unit during its entire service in Vietnam.
The great dispersion of the tank units, often far from their immediate

Americas tank force

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
rst 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 rst
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 eet, the rst Sheridans were
issued to the 3rd Squadron, 4th Cavalry
Regiment, 25th Infantry Division, and
the 1st Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry
Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division. By the
end of the war, the tanks were in nearly
every armored cavalry squadron. The
Sheridan was used primarily to provide
extra repower for infantry units.
The M551 received high marks for its
mobility. It did not get stuck in the mud
or throw its tracks as often as the M48
did. But the Sheridan was too light to be
a jungle buster like the Patton, which
would cut through dense vegetation.
Sheridans experienced heavy losses
from mines and anti-armor weapons.
The Pattons could be damaged by mines
but were rarely destroyed by them.
Rocket-propelled grenades were more
likely to destroy a Sheridan because the
propellant charges in the tanks shells
often fell off the warhead and dropped to
the oor, where a spark from an enemy
weapon could ignite the propellant and
set re to the vehicle.
About 270 Sheridans were shipped
to Vietnam and about 200 were lost to
enemy re and mines.

F E B R U A R Y 2 016

35

M48A3
Patton

M551
Sheridan

CREW

CREW

WEIGHT

WEIGHT

WIDTH

WIDTH

LENGTH

LENGTH

HEIGHT

HEIGHT

SPEED

SPEED

RANGE

RANGE

FUEL CAPACITY

FUEL CAPACITY

ENGINE

ENGINE

4 (driver,
commander,
gunner, loader)
52 tons
12 ft.

28 ft.
10 ft.

30 mph
160 miles
335 gal.

Continental
AVD-1790-A
12-cylinder diesel
engine, with
General Motors
CD-850-6A
transmission

15.2 tons
9 ft. 1 in.

20 ft. 7 in.
7 ft. 6 in.
43 mph
348 miles
335 gal.

General Motors
6V53T
6-cylinder,
turbocharged
diesel engine

ARMAMENT

CANNON
90mm M41

CANNON
152mm ried
M81E1 gun/
missile launcher

MACHINE GUNS
.50-cal. on turret;
.30-cal. on bow

MACHINE GUNS
.50-cal. on turret;
.30-cal. on bow

ARMAMENT

36

4 (driver,
commander,
gunner, loader)

VIETNAM

headquarters, put enormous strain on a logistical support system that lacked

spare parts, fuel and the personnel to repair vehicles or replace crews. In one
extreme case, a tank battalion near Saigon was responsible for servicing one
of its companies that had been sent more than 675 miles away.
The greatest threats to American armor were ambushes and mines. When
coming under attack, tanks responded with instantaneous and heavy return re.
They were instructed to herringbonealternate vehicles aiming left and right
to direct more effective re on the ambushers, while providing some protection
for light-skinned vehicles, such as trucks and armored personnel carriers, that
sought shelter between the tanks. To head off ambushes and mine laying, tanks
were sent out on thunder runs, fast nighttime drives down a road while all of a
tanks repower was unleashed at suspected ambush or mined sites.
Those tactics inicted grave losses on the enemy, but the U.S. tanks also
suffered. They were frequently taken out of action by mines and RPGs. Although many measures to defeat these weapons were tried, no adequate
means was ever found, said Donn A. Starry, who commanded the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment in Vietnam as a colonel and later became a fourstar general and head of the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command.
Studies of tank losses found that mines caused three-quarters of all tank
damage and losses. Most mines were discovered and cleared by tanks running over them, a solution their crews viewed as less than ideal.

anks played a vital role in defeating Communist attacks in the Tet Offensive. Rapid movement was imperative in the early stages of the
enemy attack, Starry noted. The armored forces were the rst ground
forces to reach the battleeld in almost every major engagement, such as
the ghts at Tan Son Nhut and Bien Hoa airbases.
No one knew that better than tank company commander Casey, whose
tankers fought in the streets of Hue. By February 4, just two days after they
arrived, his tanks were not only protecting the MACV compound and the
Navy boat ramp used for arriving supplies and reinforcements but also fending off enemy attacks on both ends of the Tuy Long Bridge, a critical link in
the resupply route for the beleaguered Americans ghting inside Hue. The
tank crews on the bridge red ries and tossed grenades into the water under
the span whenever anything suspicious appeared.
Caseys tanks also were used to clear the streets, as long as infantrymen accompanied them. Tank machine guns were aimed down the streets, their re
seriously impeding the enemys attempts to move between blocks of buildings.
Some tanks were used as battering rams to mouse hole passageways into
buildings so the infantry could enter them. Others extracted foot soldiers from
ambush sites and provided re supportusually using high-explosive ammunitionto eliminate snipers and enemy strongpoints in sturdy masonry buildings.
The tanks attracted intense re from every enemy weapon in the vicinity,
which put the infantry working with them in a very dangerous position. But
the enemys concentration on tanks also meant that less re was directed at
other grunts moving through urban areas.
The Patton tanks bore the brunt of the battle in Hue. They got some
backup from the M50A1 Ontos 106mm recoilless rie carriers, which had
little armor protection. Caseys two ame tanks were deployed to guard the
American communication lines. Using the Zippos in their regular role as an
attack weapon was difficult because the propellant they used had to be loaded
by hand at Hue: the mixer (the machine that combined the ingredients to

make the liquid the tanks red) and transfer unit

were not with the tank company during the battle.
But a Zippo did re once, according to one tanker,
burning down a whole city block.
While the tanks took a toll on the Communist
ghters, they were often under re themselves.
Incessant hits from rocket-propelled grenades
sounded like gravel on a tin roof, said Lt. Col.
Ernie Cheatham, commanding officer of the
2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine
Division. Every one of those 11 tanks had at least
one penetration into the turret and numerous hits
all up and down the tank, from both sides.
None of Caseys tanks was disabled, but shards
from hot metal inicted brutal wounds on the tank
crews. Only 11 of the 55 Alpha Company crewmen
who entered Hue were still in action after six
weeks of ghting, the highest tank crew casualty
rate during the entire war. Four were killed, the rest
wounded and evacuated. Replacement crews were
own in or landed at the boat ramp. On February 10,
ve more of Caseys tanks arrived in the city.
By February 22, Caseys tanks and fresh Marine
infantry began to clear the southeast wall of the Citadel, the last bastion held by the NVA in Hue, which
nally fell to the Americans on February 25. After
Hue was secured, the 1st Tank Battalion, with some
infantry from the South Vietnamese army, cleared
out the area between the city and the sea, the only
supply route into Hue since the main road south
to Phu Bai was closed because of enemy activity
and mines. Alpha Company was ambushed in the
operation and had to retreat along a single narrow
road. Soon after, it was withdrawn to rest and ret.
In 1969 U.S. forces began withdrawing from
South Vietnam. General Creighton Abrams, who
was in command of all American ground forces in
Vietnam at the time and had won fame as a tank
battalion commander in World War II, ordered
that the armored units be taken out last because
they buy us more time. As Starry noted, The
armor units, specially excluded from the buildup
until late 1966, would anchor the withdrawal of
American combat units from Vietnam. The last
tank formation, the 1st Battalion, 77th Armored,
left the country in August 1971. +

The 11th
Armored Cavalry
Regiments
Sheridan tanks
move through
the jungle near
Loc Ninh in 1969.

Arnold Blumberg, an attorney in Baltimore,

served in the Army Reserve, 1968-74, ending
his term as a staff sergeant in a maintenance
company. He writes on military topics for
history publications.

BETTMANN/CORBIS

F E B R U A R Y 2 016

37

Youth No
Obstacle

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 Hungs photos follows.
Above: In 1968 Lo Manh Hung said his biggest problem
was convincing police that he really was a working
photographer. Right: On Oct. 16, 1972, Lo Hung captured
the smoke and rubble from an airstrike on the village of
Xom Suoi, about 20 miles north of Saigon along Route 15.

38

VIETNAM

TOP LEFT: BETTMANN/CORBIS; ALL OTHERS: AP PHOTO/LO HUNG

On July 22, 1972, Hung photographed an M41 tank

providing cover for South Vietnamese government
troops pulling back to a bunker line during ghting
along Route 1 south of Quang Tri. For three days,
North Vietnamese troops had been trying to cut off
the road, vital to supplying troops in Quang Tri.

Smoke and ame

rise from a North
Vietnamese Army
T-34/85 tank
knocked out during
the enemys predawn
attack near Quang Tri
on July 7, 1972.

40

VIETNAM

TKTKTKKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKKTKTKTKTK

A South Vietnamese
soldier holds a
captured Soviet-built
SA-7 Strela surfaceto-air guided missile
in Cai Lay in the
Mekong Delta on
Aug. 6, 1972.

Hung and his photographer father, Lo Vinh, rose every

day at 5 a.m. to capture ofcial events in Saigon or
images of the war. Here, a South Vietnamese soldier
runs to an M42 Duster, an armored vehicle with
two 40mm cannons, as the crew res on suspected
North Vietnamese Army positions along Route 1 near
Quang Tri on July 22, 1972.

42

VIETNAM

TKTKTKKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKKTKTKTKTK

Top: South Vietnamese rangers move through

besieged An Loc, 60 miles north of Saigon,
on June 15, 1972. Bottom: During attempts to
recapture a village 20 miles north of Saigon on
Oct. 15, 1972, a South Vietnamese soldier res
a recoilless rie at North Vietnamese Army
positions along Highway 13.

Just seconds before a B-52 is scheduled

to release its bombs on Hanoi, the crew
nds itself in the bulls-eye of a missile
BY PAUL NOVAK

Nightmare
Up North

North Vietnams
SA-2 surface-toair missiles were
a deadly threat
to U.S. bombers
in Linebacker II.
A SAM is being
readied for ring
in this 1966 photo
from the Hanoi
Vietnamese News
Agency.

T
I

ruly 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 sightthe 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, fortied 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 in Thailand. We
were all headed for Hanoi and the port city of
Haiphong. The trawlers crew radioed Hanoi and
gave the North Vietnamese hours of advance notice that the BUFFs (Big Ugly Fat Fellows) were
on their way. The date was Dec. 26, 1972. All 120
Boeing B-52s plus dozens of Air Force, Navy and
Marine support aircraft would reach their targets
and drop thousands of tons of ordnance over a
15-minute period.
Some of us would not return.
I was an Air Force captain and the navigator of a six-man crew from Westover Air Force
Base in Massachusetts that included aircraft
commander Captain Richard Dick Purinton,
co-pilot Captain Malcolm Mac McNeill, radar

navigator and bombardier Lt. Col. Jean Beaudoin, electronic warfare officer Major Bob Dickens and tail gunner Master Sgt. Calvin Creasser.
We were one of the lucky teams that made it
over the fence, safely out of enemy territory after
hitting our target. The December 26 ight, part of
Operation Linebacker II, which began December
18, was our second mission over the enemys capital city and our third in North Vietnam.

MOST HEAVILY DEFENDED CITY

In 1972 Hanoi was considered the most heavily
defended city in the world, protected by layers
of air defense and the sheer massed quantity of
Soviet-made supersonic surface-to-air missiles
and MiG fighter aircraft. In previous air campaigns over North VietnamRolling Thunder in

U.S. AIR FORCE

AP WIRE PHOTO BY CABLE FROM WARSAW, POLAND

B-52 crews at Andersen

Air Force Base in Guam are
briefed for their Linebacker II
bombing runs over Hanoi in
late December 1972.

45

B-52 bombers
are lined up row
upon row at
Andersen. More
than 200 B-52s
participated in
bomb runs during
the 11 days of
Linebacker II in
December 1972.

the mid-1960s and Linebacker I in mid-1972the U.S. military command

had not allowed B-52s to attack Hanois air defenses.
The North Vietnamese used early-warning radar with a range of about
170 miles to spot incoming B-52s. The located target was handed off to
re-control radar that directed the SAMs and at about 40 miles provided
more rened data on the position, altitude and speed of the arriving aircraft.
Soviet-built MiG-17s, 19s and the technologically advanced 21s, strong competition for American ghters, were launched against the bombers to pace
them and report altitude and speed to the SAM operators.
B-52s confronted the SAM threat with electronic countermeasures, such
as jammers that created an electronic cloud over enemy radar and thus
covered the aircrafts specic location. Flying in three-ship cells maximized
this effect, hiding all three aircraft.
As the lead navigator, or Nav, of our three-ship formation, I had to get
those aircraft to the target within 30 seconds of our scheduled drop time in
a coordinated attack with the 117 lumbering giants in the other cells.
We were coasting into Qui Nhon, South Vietnam, after a ve-hour leg from
Andersen and an air-to-air refueling over the Philippines, when I called out to
Purinton, Pilot, Nav, right to 3-4-0, giving our intended heading in compass
degrees. The only sound in the aircraft was the comforting roar of the engines.
It was also my job to advise the crew of action pointsentering the threat
zone, the initial point of the bomb run and the time to target: Crew, Nav,
were 25 minutes south of the Gulf of Tonkin, about one hour to the target.
Those updates ensured that the items on the bomb-run checklists would
be completed. Each crew member performed critical tasks at designated
points along the ight route. Missing one of these in hostile territory could
prove fatal.
I was stationed on the windowless lower deck along with Beaudoin, a
gray-haired Frenchman. As our radar navigatorRadar or just RN during
ightBeaudoin had to direct the rendezvous with the Boeing KC-135 airto-air refueling tanker, prepare the bombing system, locate the precise aiming point for our target and release our 54,000 pounds of ordnance.

TROUBLE OVER THE GULF

46

VIETNAM

Linebacker II
by the Numbers
U.S. AIR FORCE

Pilot, Nav, weve got a problem down here. My navigation position counters, which showed our latitude and longitude, had failed. The counters were
continually updated by the radar navigator, who gets latitude and longitude
gures by locating a known radar return on the ground and placing a set of
electronic crosshairs on it, much like an arcade video game.
Nav, Pilot, whats your plan? Purinton asked.
We have the radar. Well go range and bearing since I cant use the counters. This meant I would have to manually identify ground returns from my
5-inch radarscope. Then I would plot their range and bearing from the aircraft on my chart in order to initiate turns and call action points.
You want No. 2 to take over navigation for the cell? was the pilots logical
question. I wanted to remain as the lead navigator. I was trained to work without the counters and knew I could. We were 10 minutes from hostile territory.
No problem. I can get us to the target, I replied. We were entering unfamiliar territory, and I realized it would be a challenge to identify radar
returns. Many of the ground landmarks were built of wood, which does not
reect radar. This was, in fact, a big problem.
Rog, copy, was the pilots only response. He understood the situation and
trusted us to get the job done. For the rst time, a knot formed in my stomach.

729 34 15,237
tons

B-52
sorties
own

different
targets
attacked

explosive
ordnance
dropped

1,600 500 372

military
structures
demolished

railroad
interdictions
demolished

pieces of
rolling stock
demolished

80% 25% 884

electrical
capability
eliminated

petroleum
reserves
eliminated

SAM missiles
launched
at B-52s

15
B-52s shot down
(26 men rescued,
33 KIA, 33 POW)

47

A B-52D ies
over Vietnam in
October 1966.

Boeing
B-52D
CREW

WINGSPAN

185

ft.

LENGTH

156 ft. 7 in.

HEIGHT

48

ft. 4in.

WEIGHT

185,000 lbs.
MAX. LOAD

88,000 lbs.
MAX. SPEED

551 knots
638 mph
MAX. ALTITUDE

46,200 ft.
MAX. RANGE

8,338 miles
ARMAMENT

.50-cal.
machine guns

BOMBLOAD

84

500-lb. bombs
in bomb bay

24 bombs
under wings
48

Crew, Nav, were over water and into the Gulf

of Tonkin. This rst warning of hostile territory
alerted everyone to keep a sharp eye as we made
our way toward the coast of North Vietnam.

THREAT AREA
Pilot, Nav, left to 2-9-0. Crew, seven minutes to
next turn. Were 60 miles from the coast. Seventeen minutes to target.
I instructed electronic warfare officer Dickens
to watch for SAMs, even though I knew he was
already focused on that activity: EW, Nav, threat
area at the turn.
Crew, EW, I have launch on two: 1 oclock
and 9 oclock. No uplink. An uplink meant
the North Vietnamese ground radar was sending
guidance signals to the missile. No uplink was
good news for us. That meant it would be easier
to dodge the two missiles.
Pilot, Nav, right to 3-5-5. Crew, 20 miles from
coast-in. RN lets get the checklists done.
We were 70 miles from Hanoi. Ive got a SAM!
Purinton called.
EW has uplink.

SAMs suddenly came at us like an angry

swarm of bees. We were told later that more
than 200 of them were red at the seven waves
of B-52s that night. Our bombers couldnt run
from them. We cruised at 450 mph; the SAM at
2,400 mph.
But no one panicked. When we realized we
hadnt been hit, we instantly went back to work
and got ready to unleash total destruction on the
Van Dien vehicle depot, 18 miles south of Hanoi.
Crew, guns, called tail gunner Creasser, who
sat 140 feet behind the rest of us. I have aircraft
at 7 oclock, tracking.
The tail gunner, manning four .50-caliber
machine guns, each with 600 rounds of ammunition, used radar to track and target hostile aircraft. But the plane Creasser spotted this time
turned out to be a friendly escort, a McDonnell
Douglas F-4 Phantom II.
Our small tables on the lower deck were covered with maps, navigation plotters, checklists,
stopwatches and a variety of other navigation
equipment. Amid the mess, the radar navigator
and I methodically kept the aircraft on time and

on course for the bomb run to Hanoi.

RN, Nav, conrm that return is Thai Binh, a city about 70 miles from Hanoi.
Beaudoin set the radar range at 100 miles, and Hanoi popped up at our
11 oclock position, right where it should be. I stared at it for a moment wondering what was in store for us, certain that I didnt want to know the answer.
Youre right, Nav. Its Thai Binh.
Pilot, Nav, left to 3-2-0. Crew, seven minutes to target. Radar, bomb run
checklist.
The interphone chatter crescendoed as we neared the target. The co-pilot,
gunner and pilot called out SAM launches and clock positions. The electronic
warfare officer confirmed SAM reports and told us whether missiles had
locked on to us. Beaudoin and I reported navigation points, times to target and
the action points that alerted other crew members to the tasks they needed
to perform. It was the organized chaos verbalized by a B-52 combat crew at
war. Each crew member knew what needed to be done and accomplished it.
One might think fear would lurk about or even dominate the thoughts of a
combat ight crew facing possible death or capture and torture. But it didnt.
Perhaps the training, the necessity of getting a job done or the frenetic activity pushed such thoughts aside. I dont really know. I honestly dont remember feeling afraid. And in talking later with other crew members, I learned
that fear had no home on that aircraft.

In six minutes our three-ship cell of B-52s was scheduled to unload 162,000
pounds of explosives on the vehicle depot, rendering it unusable to the North
Vietnamese. To reach the target, we had to go through wall-to-wall SAMs
every step of the way, as one crew member said.
We started the bomb run with our three aircraft arranged in an offset triangle, separated by 1 mile of distance and 500 feet of altitude. The formation
was crucial to obtain that jamming effect on enemy radar, which enhanced
our chances of survival.
The radar navigator placed the electronic crosshairs on our aiming point
for the target.
Nav, conrm aim point, Beaudoin said.
I studied my radarscope for 10 seconds and
replied, Rog, thats it.
Pilot, RN, center the PDI. The pilot direction
indicator was a steering needle on Purintons instrument panel tied into the bomb system. When
the indicator was centered, the aircraft was aimed
directly at the target.
Beaudoin and I worked our way through the
checklist for releasing the bombs. The arming
sequence did not start until a wire was automatically pulled from each bomb as it left the racks.
Dickens interrupted: Crew, EW, multiple
SAM launch, 12 oclock.
Pilots searching, co-pilot McNeill announced. Then Bingo, have what looks like two,
no, three, coming up from our 12 oclock.
Uplink! replied the electronic warfare officer.
EW, co-pilot, two tracking across.
U.S. AIR FORCE

U.S. AIR FORCE

BOMB RUN

The two missiles were moving across the pilots line of sight and going away from us. The bad
news was the third missile.
Third one still has uplink.
Damn, comin straight at us, McNeill yelled
the bone-chilling words.
Crew, starting combat turns, Purinton said.
He put the aircraft into a series of steep banked
turns left and right, a tactic meant to break the
missiles lock on our aircraft. The turns also diminished the effectiveness of our electronic countermeasures, but the decision, with a missile headed
straight for us, was easy for the pilot to make.
EW dispensing chaff, Dickens said, referring
to aluminum foillike material ejected to fool the
enemy radar and divert the missile.
In the midst of this, the radar navigator and I
nished our checklist and concentrated solely on
the target, just 90 seconds away.
Ill need it straight and level at 30 seconds to
go, Pilot.
This was essential so the bombing gyro would
stabilize before the weapons were released. Without stability, the bombs could be tossed anywhere.
Rog, was all Purinton had time to say. I could
hear the strain in his voice. Maneuvering the
steep turns was like driving a loaded cement
truck with no power steering, no automatic transmission and no brakes.
Lost uplink, called the electronic warfare officer, his voice at a lower pitch. The missile missed
us and wandered upward.

Illustrating
the dangers
B-52s faced in
Linebacker II,
a SAM explodes
near a McDonnell
RF-101 Voodoo
jet over North
Vietnam.

F E B R U A R Y 2 016

49

3 Major Air Campaigns

OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER
MARCH 2, 1965-OCT. 31, 1968
The rst bombing campaign was instituted
to cut supply lines to Communist troops
in South Vietnam and later expanded to
target infrastructure in North Vietnam
such as power plants, ammunition sites
and airelds. Certain areasincluding
much of Hanoi and Haiphongwere
off-limits to minimize civilian casualties.
U.S. officials hoped the bombing would
bring North Vietnam to the negotiating
table, but the enemy repaired much of the
damage and continued to ght.

OPERATION LINEBACKER
MAY 10-OCT. 23, 1972
U.S. bomb runs resumed after the
Communists Easter Offensive on March
30, 1972. The goals were familiar: slow the
ow of supplies to enemy ghters in the
South and encourage peace negotiations.
This time the U.S. arsenal included laserguided smart bombs that increased the
destruction. The bombing stopped when
North Vietnam showed more interest in
serious negotiations.

OPERATION LINEBACKER II
DEC. 18-29, 1972
After peace talks broke down in December
1972 because of North Vietnamese
demands, the United States launched a
massive bombing operation that relied
primarily on B-52 strikes and focused on
targets around Hanoi and Haiphong. North
Vietnam resumed negotiations, a peace
agreement was signed in Paris on
Jan. 27, 1973, and 591 prisoners of war
began returning on February 12.

50

Pilot, 60 seconds to target, straight and level, center the PDI, the radar
navigator calmly requested.
Rog, straight and level, PDI centered.
Crew, Nav, 30 seconds to target.
I counted down. Twenty seconds to target, speaking rather calmly,
I thought.
SAM launch dead ahead, called the electronic warfare officer.
Searching, one of the pilots said to no one in particular.
Bingo, have it. Looks like it could hit us right between the eyes.
A SAM traveling at 2,400 mph would take about 10 more seconds to reach
the aircraft. At bombs away, it would hit the aircraft.
This time we couldnt execute combat turns to get out of the way. Our
aircraft was a sitting duck.
Ten seconds. Bomb doors open.
We didnt open the doors earlier because that would have created a bigger

Bombs dropped
from a B-52 fall
on North Vietnam
in March 1968.

CO RENTMEESTER/TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

me to the right, and the ejection seat shoulder straps burned into my skin
through the ight suit.
Where was it? The bailout light? Where was it? Oh yeah, look up, Paul. My
mind was doing things my body couldnt comprehend. All in the ash of an
instant. Nav bails out rst. How can we get this far and then get blown out of
the sky? Ejection D ring, nd it, nd it, gotta nd itthere. Keep your elbows in.
Brace your back. All galloping through my mind.
Not us. Why us? Stay with me, God. Tighten your seatbelt. Already did that.
A voice. Theres a voice. Foggy. Not making sense. A voice.
An explosion. A brilliant ash. The airplane vibrated and rocked from side
to side. The SAM detonated far enough away that there was no damage.
Crew, Pilot, keep your eyes open. Were not out of it yet.
What did the voice mean, keep my eyes open? How could I if I was dead?
Nav, Pilot, heading?
HeadingHeadingNavyeahthats memust not be deadHeading
Crew, Radar, bomb doors closed.
What seemed like minutes of agony ashed by so quickly that no one noticed my slight hesitation responding.
Left 2-6-0, I heard myself say.
Everybody OK? Purinton polled the crew and got a positive response.
We may have avoided the SAM because of the pilots extreme hard turn,
but we also surmised that the missile missed us because it never achieved
uplink. If it had, the electronic warfare officer would have detected the signals. The SAM must have been launched visually, without radar guidance
from the ground, as a desperation salvo.

radar target for SAMs.

EW dispensing chaff.
Missile still tracking visually, McNeill said.
Crew, prepare for bailout, Purinton announced, as calmly as a bus driver announces
the next street.
At bombs away, Im gonna bend the fuselage
put the aircraft into an almost impossibly steep
turn.
Five seconds, from the radar navigator.
Holy Mother someone pleaded. (Maybe it
was me.I dont remember.)
Bombs away, Beaudoin said.
The aircraft shuddered as all the weapons departed simultaneously. The severe turn yanked

LATEROVER THE FENCE

Crew, Nav, out of the threat area, I announced. We could nally relax.
The pilot made his call to the airborne mission commander: Over the
fence with three.
As we turned south, the aircraft was silent. No interphone chatter, no
activity. It was as if we had entered a different dimensionpeaceful and
quiet. The adrenaline left my body, and I sagged in my ejection seat. It was
then that it all hit me: what we did, the danger and the magnitude of it. We
were all drained.
At our debrieng we learned that two B-52s had been shot down. Two
friends of mine werent coming back. I had played golf with one of them 36
hours earlier. That made it personal. Before, it was a missiona dangerous
onebut it was a thing, a possibility, not the death of a golng buddy you just
had a pitcher of beer and a pizza with at the officers club.
Dick Purinton and I glanced at each other but never spoke of it. We
couldnt do that. There were more missions to y. Guys, lets hit the roach
coach and get a couple chili dogs, he offered. Ill buy.
So we didand he didand everything was back to normal, at least until
we launched again for Hanoi.
Four months after the Christmas bombings, Purinton was diagnosed with
leukemia at his ight physical. He died in June 1974a true hero. The mans
skill ying this nations frontline strategic bomber saved my life. +
Paul Novak, a decorated former B-52 navigator who teaches creative
writing at an adult extension of Arizona State University in Phoenix,
wrote about B-52 crews in his anthology, Into Hostile Skies.
F E B R U A R Y 2 016

51

The channels that brought music to the

troops: live musicians, tape decks and
radio stations, official and underground
BY DOUG BRADLEY AND CRAIG WERNER

Soundtrack
of OurWar
The feel of Vietnam, the vibe, was like nothing Id 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 musicthe rock n roll
sounds that we brought with us on our records and albums and cassettes, in our
ngers, on our lips and in our headswas 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 station at Long Binh. Theres 300 or 400 or
500 guys in one place, he said, all brand new, and
we dont know what our destiny is, and were listening to this music, and the song ts. Weve got to get
out of this place, if its the last thing we ever do.
In this excerpt from We Gotta Get Out of This
Place, Bradley and Werner show the importance of
music to U.S. troops. It was a way to connect with
each other and the world back home. Music also
helped them cope with the complexities of the war
they had been sent to ght.
he sounds of popular American
music reached almost every
corner of Vietnam through
radio waves that carried both
sanctioned and underground
stations; cassettes, eight tracks
and reel-to-reel tape decks in

hooches; bands, many of them Filipino or Korean,

strumming out Creedence Clearwater Revival
and Wilson Pickett covers in the enlisted mens
clubs; and stages where USO shows and a few
big-name stars entertained war-weary troops.
But while many veterans say there was music
everywhere in Vietnam, they dont always
bother to state the obvious exception. For combat
soldiers in the field, the soundtrack consisted
mostly of silence.
Tom Helgeson, who spent much of his 1967-68
tour doing night patrols with the 23rd Infantry
Division (Americal) in and around the notorious
Pinkville, where the My Lai and My Khe massacres took place, observed: When you went out on
patrol, you really relied on your hearing. Most of
what you heard was bad news, a twig snapping
at night meant there was someone around. Even
during the day, when you heard an explosion, you
knew it meant someone had stepped on a mine.
Steve Piotrowski, a radio-telephone operator with the 173rd Airborne Infantry Brigade in
1969-70 who spent most of his tour in the eld,
concurred: Funny, music is a big part of the experience, but most of the time there was no music.

Excerpted from
We Gotta Get Out
of This Place: The
Soundtrack of the
Vietnam War, by
Doug Bradley and
Craig Werner
(University of
Massachusetts
Press, 2015).

The Animals,
a British pop group,
released We Gotta
Get Out of This
Place in 1965, a
song that summed
up the feelings
of many troops
in Vietnam
and continued
to reverberate
in their lives
during struggles
back home.

PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

We just did not let people operate radios while we were in the bush, at least
not in any place that was at all dangerous. You might hear some music on
a resupply day if someone on the helicopter crew had a radio or a tape, but
mostly it had to wait till you got back to the rear.
Almost everyone listened to the officially sanctioned Armed Forces
Vietnam Network radio, though opinions differed on the quality of it.
Many GIs remember AFVN primarily as a purveyor of musical pabulum.
By the later stages of the war, however, as hip militarism gained force,
AFVN was playing at least some of the rebellious rock and soul songs that
had begun to dominate the soundtrack back home. Late night on AFVN
was reserved for progressive rock played by stoned-sounding DJs, just like
FM stations back in the world, said George Gersaba Jr., of the 1st Cavalry
Division (Airmobile). Those low-voiced disc jockeys played everything
from Roger Daltry to Procol Harum.
Like all military communications networks, AFVNs primary mission
was to build morale and cheer on the war effort. Music, especially familiar
stateside songs, was a good way to do that, said Les Howard Jacoby, a DJ
from January to December 1970. At times Vietnam DJs found themselves
at the center of a battle between a command determined to maintain traditional military decorum and a growing number of GIs who identied with
the rebellious and often explicitly antiwar music.
The connection between music and morale was particularly clear to the
young women who signed up for the American Red Cross Supplemental Recreation Activities Overseas program, better known as the Donut Dollies, who
often served as DJs. Our job was to lift the guys spirits, said Jeanne Christie,
who was stationed with the Army at Nha Trang, the Marines at Da Nang and
the Air Force at Phan Rang during her tour from January 1967 to February
1968. Christie enjoyed using the huge tape center in Da Nang, which gave her
access to an unusually wide range of music. I would spend hours and hours
and hours at night copying music. I copied jazz and classical. The music that
really got me was the Going Home segment from Antonin Dvoraks Symphony
No. 9 From the New World. Whenever we put that on in the center, all the
noise would stop. It was just this very powerful moment of reality.
During the four months beginning in July 1969 that Donut Dollie Nancy
Warner contributed to the programming at KLIK, an AFVN station at Lai
Khe, she avoided songs or dedications that might put the DJs and their shows
at risk. Once a week at KLIK, they had the Red Cross girls come in and do
a live dedication show, said Warner, who later worked at the AFVN station in Da Nang. So all week long when we were out at rebases, we would
collect dedications from guys in the eld. A lot of them were songs to their
girlfriends back home. They knew what time the show was on and theyd
tape it and send it home.
Warner, who later worked at the AFVN station in Da Nang, remembered,
We couldnt play two Beatles songs, specically, Happiness Is a Warm
Gun and Why Dont We Do It in the Road?
But even when radio guidelines forbade playing songs like War and
Ruby Dont Take Your Love to Town, the troops still heard them through
the ubiquity of tapes, records and live bands.

54

VIETNAM

B.B. KING: EYEBROWZ/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO; ALL OTHERS: CBW/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Radio DJ Hanoi Hannah,

Trinh Thi Nhon, in 1995,
with a picture of her
during the Vietnam War.
DEREK HUDSON/GETTY IMAGES

A
B

s the war crept on, enterprising GIs would rig tape recorders, microphones and even record players to their field
radio systems and conduct unauthorized broadcasts on
so-called alternative stations. One of the minor mysteries
of the pirate radio scene was how the counterfeit DJs got
almost immediate access to new sounds from stateside.
Roger Steffens shed light on the practice. Steffens, who
trained at the Armys radio and television school before being sent to Vietnam, was assigned to the militarys psychological operations, or PsyOps,
which distributed American propaganda to enemy troops. Because his assignment gave him a high-level security clearance, Steffens was in a position
to receive what amounted to contraband musical deliveries from the West
Coast. My friend Jerry Burns in San Francisco would tape from 8 in the
morning to 4 in the afternoon and send me these tapes from KSAN, which
was the rst free-form FM station. Hed stick the tapes in the overnight and
within 36 hours wed have them in Saigoninterviews with the Grateful
Dead, new music. I was making cassettes for guys to take out to the eld. I
must have made 1,000 cassettes those 26 months I was in yard.
Most of the makeshift networks were ephemeral, some jury-rigged for a
single night. Sometimes, late at night, thered be radio frequencies no one
was using, said Piotrowski, the 173rd Airborne radio operator. Some guy
would get bored and send out some music, someone else would pick it up and
relay it, and so on. One evening Piotrowski was participating in a radio relay
when someone cut in angrily. He said, This is a military station, I can have
you busted. He was really pissed off. After a minute, a voice comes over the
airwaves, Where am I, Major? And right away, other guys in the relay join in,
Where am I, Major? Where am I? Come and get me. There was absolutely
no way he knew where anyone was.
Among the innovators and pirates, none stood out more than Dave Rabbit, the radio name of C. David DeLay Jr., the guiding spirit of the notorious
Radio First Termer broadcasts, which aired for a mere three weeks in January 1971. Rabbit and his sidekicks, Peter Sadler and a female announcer
who used the name Nguyen, streamed drug-related songs to hooches,
bunkers, compounds, hospitals, offices and tents across South Vietnam. It
was spooky, recalled George Moriarty, an information specialist at Army
headquarters in Long Binh from November 1970 to November 1971. Dave
Rabbit would always be playing The Pusher by Steppenwolf and warning
us about bad drugs and nefarious drug peddlers. We all listenedbecause
this guy was telling it like it was, playing our music, probably getting stoned
himselfand infuriating the brass.
For more than 40 years Dave Rabbit remained a cipher, his true identity
unknown. Finally, in 2006, DeLay went public and gave his version of the
story. He had been assigned to Phan Rang Air Base during his second tour,
and one day his roommate told him the base was going to start a radio show
that would override Saigons AFVN for three hours a day. The roommate
asked DeLay to be his studio engineer.
They decided on the name Radio First Termer. It was a crazy setup, DeLay
recalled. We had a couple of TEAC reel-to-reel decks, an amplier, a monitor

speaker, a portable cassette player, a turntable, a

telephone and a few cords and wires that hooked
everything together. However, the neatest thing
was this little switch. When 8 p.m. rolled around
we ipped the switch, which put our signal out over
the radio relay station that overlooked Phan Rang.
Radio First Termer, broadcasting from a
brothel where Sadler knew the madam, hit the
Saigon airwaves on Jan. 1, 1971, beginning with
an announcement patched into AFVNs frequency: Vietnam, in just 30 seconds your radio
experience will change forever. Turn your radios
to 69 megahertz on your FM dial. If you dont, we
are going to re-up you for another tour of Vietnam. After the announcement, AFVN returned
to their regular crap, and at 8 p.m., 2000 hours,
Radio First Termer was born, DeLay said.
As the threat of being discovered increased, 21
days and 63 programing hours later Radio First
Termer was laid to rest. Taking one of the famous
radio lines spoken by Edward R. Murrow and
changing it just a bit, Rabbits last words were,
Good night, Vietnam, and good luck.
The same message, issued in a very different
tone, echoed in the broadcasts of Hanoi Hannah,
who could be heard on Radio Hanoi in most areas
of South Vietnam, especially at night. Several vets
said they listened to Hannah for laughs, late at
night over a few beers. But they also were puzzled
about how she knew what she knew, often broad-

Lead singer and drummer

Dianne Cameron toured
Vietnam in 1967 with the
Pretty Kittens, an all-girl band.
DIANNE M. CAMERON COLLECTION

the gut. And she also had some idea of the popular culture of black Americans.
Just the mention of a singer like Ray Charles or B.B. King sort of legitimized
her voice. You felt a momentary hesitation. It stopped you in your tracks.

W
B
casting Viet Cong offensives and announcing the
names and hometowns of dead American soldiers.
Hanoi Hannah was the only source of music
for prisoners of war in North Vietnamese camps,
and they expressed a deep ambivalence toward
her. North Vietnamese propaganda radio played
some memorable songs from the 60s, said Phil
Butler, a pilot who was imprisoned at the infamous
Hanoi Hilton. He listened to Buffy Sainte-Maries
Universal Soldier, Bob Dylans With God on Our
Side, Country Joes I-Feel-Like-Im-Fixin-ToDie Rag and Frank Sinatras The House That
I Live In. Butler noted that the purpose was to
lower our morale and make us homesick.
Another former POW, Ray Voden, shot down
over Hanoi in April 1965, observed that the North
Vietnamese strategy often backred. One time
they played Downtown by Petula Clark, he said,
and everyone started dancing and yelling for an
hourjust went wild. Another one that gave us a
hoot was Dont Fence Me In by Ella Fitzgerald.
Hanoi Hannah frequently aimed her words specically at African-American GIs and the racism
they faced. It was as if she were talking directly to
you, said Yusef Komunyakaa, a black soldier from
Bogalusa, Louisiana, whose book of poems Dien
Cai Dau is one of the unquestioned masterpieces
of Vietnam literature. Shed say things like Soul
Brothers, what you dying for? It was like a knife in

56

VIETNAM

hile radio was an omnipresent part of the Vietnam

experience for American troops, it was often the live
music played by their comrades that tugged hardest
at their hearts or tickled their funny bones.
Sometimes Special Services had auditions where
soldiers could show what they can do, and they can
put you on temporary duty, going around and playing,
said Kimo Williams, who had established himself as a guitarist and singer in
Hawaii before enlisting in the Army. We auditioned, and in October and in
November we had 30 days of temp duty. We called ourselves the Soul Coordinators. We played officers clubs, hospitals, rebases. Wed get in helicopters
and play rebases in Da Nang. One gig was in the middle of a courtyard in the
hospital in Saigon, just blasted, they were in their beds listening to us play
that was pretty special. (See Kimo Williams: Are You Experienced, by Rick
Fredericksen, Vietnam, April 2014.)
A handful of well-known American musical acts performed in Vietnam,
including Rebel Rouser Duane Eddy; the Surfaris, who reported that they
were asked to play their hit Wipe Out a half-dozen times or more at each
show; Motown artist Edwin Starr, best known for his antiwar anthem War
(What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!); James Brown; Nancy Sinatra;
and Johnny Cash.
Cash, who spent several weeks singing for troops in 1968, was ambivalent
about the politics surrounding the war but not about the need to support
the men ghting it. The following year Cash released Singing in Vietnam
Talkin Blues and Man in Black, which included the lines, I wear the black
in mourning for the lives that could have been / Each week we lose a hundred ne young men. Cash admitted in his autobiography, Ring of Fire: My
thoughts about Vietnam really had to do with our boys over there. I knew they
didnt want to be there, which is why I went over myself. Pretty soon June,
Carl Perkins and I were doing seven and eight shows a day, sometimes for
only 10 people in a hospital ward.
Some American musicians saw Vietnam as an opportunity to cash in on
the large captive audience. The Pretty Kittens, a four-girl group assembled
by a stateside manager to capitalize on the combination of rock n roll and
sex appeal, wore miniskirts and white boots to entertain the half-million
GIs that were in Vietnam, said their singer-guitarist, Bobbi Jo Petit.
The Pretty Kittens arrived in Vietnam in September 1967 with a grueling
schedule. We didnt get paid, lamented Petit. Wed y up in C-130s to Da
Nang, do a show and then chopper down to Marble Mountain or someplace
like that for an afternoon show, and then back to Da Nang for the night. Wed
set up on the back of atbeds, I mean wherever. We were in the middle of nowhere, choppers ying through. After I got over the scariness of it, you know,
the weight of what was really going on, it got to be where life was at for me.
The understandable reluctance of touring musical acts to perform in

TKTKTKKTKTKTKTKTKTKTKKTKTKTKTK

Backstory:
Get Out of
This Place
More than any other song, We
Gotta Get Out of This Place
was the glue that held the
improvised communities of
troops together in Vietnam
and its still bringing veterans
together. We Gotta Get Out
of This Place was our We Shall
Overcome, observed Bobbie
Keith, an Armed Forces Radio
DJ in Vietnam from 1967 to
1969 and famous for being the
Weathergirl. We listened and
danced to the tune in a state
of heightened awareness that
many of us might not make it
back out.
In some ways, We Gotta
Get Out of This Place was an
unlikely anthem. The song was
written for the blue-eyed soul
duo the Righteous Brothers,
recalled Cynthia Weil, who
wrote the lyrics for Barry
Manns music. Although they
were white, they sounded so
black that we thought of it as
a ghetto anthem, she said. I
was in a sociological, changethe-world-with-songs period in
my young life, so the lyric came
from that sensibility.
The songwriting duo cut
a demo with Mann singing
both the lead and background
parts. They gave copies to
the Redbird record labels
manager, Alan Klein, and its
owner, George Goldner, who
was so enthusiastic about the
song that he persuaded Mann
to release it under his own
name rather than send it to the
Righteous Brothers.
Later Weil received a call
from Klein congratulating her
and Mann on having a big
hit in England and she didnt
know what he was talking
about. It turned out that Klein
had passed the demo on to
the Animals producer, Mickie
Most, and the group cut the
record without informing the
writers. When we heard the
record, I was really upset, Weil
admitted. Theyd made it their
own stylistically, which was ne,
but they changed or left out
sections of the lyric. It killed
Barrys record release.

The Mann-Weil song, written

as a ghetto anthem, caught
the ear of the Animals Eric
Burdon, far left.
PICTORIAL PRESS LTD/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

Eric Burdon, the lead

singer and guiding spirit of
the Animals, remembered
encountering the song in a
stack of demos submitted to
his agent. Most of them were
just Oh be my baby, he said.
But when we heard We Gotta
Get Out of This Place, we really
identied with it. It t with our
working-class ethic. For us, it
was a symbol of wanting to get
out of Newcastle.
When the Animals made
their rst visit to America
in 1965, Burdon said, The
Beatles warned us what our
management would tell us:
Dont mention the war. So we
had a stock answer. We told
reporters we were against war,
period.
It wasnt until an encounter in
a bookstore near Fort Benning,
Georgia, that Burdon became
aware of Vietnam veterans
feelings about the song. These
three Green Berets came up to
me, the then long-haired singer
recalled. Im saying, Uh-oh,
these guys are going to rip my
head off. But they told me how
the war was all a lost cause.
They were actually thanking me
for what I was saying.
The veterans responses
became a central part of
Burdons sense of the song.
These amazing stories just
keep coming, he said. There
have been hundreds of people
who have come up to me and
said something like, Your song
saved my life.
Like Burdon, Weil receives
tons of letters every year from
grateful veterans. I cant express
how much this kind of feedback
means to us, she said. To know
that you have strengthened
and comforted others through
your work is the most satisfying
feeling in the world.
D.B. and C.W.

or near combat zones opened opportunities for

in-country GI-musicians to do the entertaining.
Priscilla Mosby was working as a stenographer
in Long Binh when she heard about tryouts for a
show that would go out and entertain the troops
and build the morale.
After signing a disclaimer because I was a
female and I wasnt supposed to be out of Long
Binh, Mosby spent eight months in late 1971 and
early 1972 in the band Phase 3 playing rebases
from the Mekong Delta to the Demilitarized Zone
separating North and South Vietnam.
The story of Phase 3 came to a tragic conclusion at Bien Thuy in the Mekong Delta. Mosby
had gone into the nearby town of Bien Sam Son
to do some shopping and heard that we were
getting hit, she said. I took refuge in a restaurant and stayed there until my instincts told me
to move. When I came out, I saw a couple of guys
that I knew who were Navy SEALs, and I went
with them. So, I got back to the base, and someone
tells me that the bunker has been hit. My guys
the barracks they were inwere totally demolished. My entire band had been killed.
Like countless others in the war, Mosby expressed her grief through gallows humor: I remembered something that one of the guys told me,
and we laughed about it. He said, If I ever croak,
make sure they dont cremate me because I dont
want to burn twice because I know Im going to
hell. I thought about it and started laughing.
Someone said to me, Its not a laughing matter. But
thats the only way that I knew how to handle it.
Laughter, while an antidote to the grim reality
of the Vietnam War experienced by people like
Mosby, would become a rare commodity back
home in America. There wasnt anything funny
about the treatment encountered by many returning Vietnam veterans. More than ever, they would
hold on to music in their struggle to survive. +
Doug Bradley, a Vietnam veteran, teaches a
course on the war with Craig Werner, professor
of Afro-American studies at the University
of WisconsinMadison and author of Higher
Ground: Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin,
Curtis Mayeld, and the Rise and Fall of
American Soul.
F E B R U A R Y 2 016

57

MEDIA DIGEST

APPS, COMPUTERS
AND STREAMS

Books Focus on
Photos of the War
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: Reections 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 conict. 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 conict.
The American Experience in
Vietnam: Reections on an
Era is the official successor to
the Pulitzer Prizenominated
set. It combines some of the
best writing about the war
in recent years with neverbefore-published photos. The
new content includes social,
cultural and military analysis;
a view of post-1980s Vietnam;
and the echoes of the Vietnam
War in discussions of U.S. involvement in the
Persian Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if
you own the original, The American
Experience in Vietnam is a necessary
addition for anyone interested in the story
and photosof the war.

58

VIETNAM

Name That Vietnam War Thing,

by Military Quiz Games, new version free
on Google Play, last updated March 2015
An educational quiz game featuring
about 500 Vietnam War images, a
searchable gallery, difficulty levels
and informational links for each item.
Includes people, tanks, guns, helicopters, aircraft, navy ships,
ranks and medals. Youll be surprised at what you know.

Snakes, Rain and the Tet

Offensive: War Stories
with Photos, by William
Ingalls, 2014, $90
William Ingalls gives a monthby-month account of his year in
Vietnam as a combat engineer
with a camera by his side. The
book includes more than 275
color photos, culled from over 500 slides,
and 50 letters home, interspersed with
commentary and humor.
Viet Nam: An Inner View,
1000 Yard Stare, The Photobook,
by Marc C. Waszkiewicz, with Crista
Dougherty, Inner View Productions, 2015, $55
During combat tours, Marc Waszkiewicz
took thousands of photographs, capturing
moments of beauty, drudgery, hilarity and
horror. He also wrote hundreds of letters
and shot hours of home-movie footage.
The photobook is part of a
project that includes a lm, a
memoir and an album of music
(Warspeak: The Soundtrack,
$13). Waszkiewicz hopes his
journey, as told through his
photographs, will inspire other
veterans to share their stories
with friends and loved ones.

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My Lai Massacre: A Case

of Failed Leadership

his book recounting the Vietnam

Wars most shameful episode
involving U.S. troops is a difficult
read for any American, particularly those
of us who served in Vietnam. As the books
preface explains: On 16 March 1968, in the
course of a search-and-destroy mission in
a village suspected of harboring crack Viet
Cong troops, an American infantry officer
ordered others to round up, and joined some
of them in butchering, unarmed civilians.
Hundreds of dead when not a shot was red
against the American troops. On that day,
Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry
Regiment, part of a battalion-size task force
from 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division
(Americal), descended upon Son My villages

60

VIETNAM

The Vietnam
War on Trial:
The My Lai
Massacre and
the Court-Martial
of Lieutenant
Calley, by Michal R.
Belknap, University
Press of Kansas, 2013

cluster of hamlets, including My Lai, in Quang

Ngai province to engage the 48th VC Local
Force Battalion thought to be hiding there.
The Viet Cong had already left, but the area
was still occupied by several hundred civilians,
mostly women, children and old men. Charlie
Companys commander, Captain Ernest
Medina, sent his 1st Platoon, commanded
by 2nd Lt. William L. Calley Jr., on a sweep
through the hamlets with Medinas orders
Calley later claimedto make sure there was
no one left alive in My Lai. The result was an
hourslong murderous rampage in which U.S.
soldiers slaughtered at least 347 unarmed
civilians (Vietnamese sources say 504). Only
one of Calleys men was wounded; that soldier
admitted shooting himself in the foot so he
could be evacuated and escape the sickening,
one-sided carnage.
Based on primary sourcescourt

documents, official depositions and records

and many books and articles, law professor
and legal historian Michal Belknap presents
in stomach-churning, horric detail what
happens when leaders fail the troops they
are entrusted to lead and the people they are
charged to defend. The leadership failures
in Charlie Company were compounded by
Americal Division senior commanders who,
in Belknaps words, engaged in a cover-up
almost as shocking as the carnage itself.
Senior division leaders, including 11th Brigade
commander Colonel Oran K. Henderson
and division commander Maj. Gen. Samuel
W. Koster were alerted to the murders by
helicopter pilot Warrant Officer Hugh C.
Thompson Jr., who had angrily confronted
Calley during the killings (Calley retorted,
It aint your concern) and then personally
rescued nearly 20 civilians. Division leaders,

A woman adjusts
her blouse after
a sexual assault,
just before she
and those with
her are killed
at My Lai in
March 1968.

however, actively covered up or turned a blind

eye to the obvious massacre.
Although the My Lai Massacre took place
on President Lyndon B. Johnsons watch, the
cover-up delayed any high-level response
for over a year. Senior Army leaders learned
about the massacre and ordered investigations
during Richard Nixons administration. The
crime did not become public knowledge until
autumn 1969. Eventually Calley, Medina and
24 others were charged with murder and other
criminal offenses. Only Calley, on March 29,
1971, was found guilty of premeditated
murder of at least 22 individuals. He was
sentenced on March 31 to life in prison at
hard labor. The others were either acquitted
(notably Medina) or had their charges
dismissed (Henderson, for example). For his
role in the cover-up, Koster was reduced in
rank to brigadier general and stripped of his

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STATEMENT OF OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENT AND CIRCULATION (required by Act of

August 12, 1970: Section 3685, Title 39, United States Code). 1. Vietnam 2. (ISSN: 10462902) 3. Filing date: 10/1/2015. 4. Issue frequency: Bi-monthly. 5. Number of issues published annually: 6. 6. The annual subscription price is $39.95. 7. Complete mailing address
of known ofce of publication: World History Group, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA
20176-6500. Contact person: Kolin Rankin. 8. Complete mailing address of headquarters
or general business ofce of publisher: World History Group, 19300 Promenade Drive,
Leesburg, VA 20176-6500. 9. Full names and complete mailing addresses of publisher,
editor, and managing editor. Publisher, Michael A. Reinstein, World History Group, 19300
Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176-6500, Editor, Chuck Springston, World History Group,
19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176-6501, Managing Editor, Debra Newbold,
World History Group, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176-6502. 10. Owner: World
History Group, 19300 Promenade Drive, Leesburg, VA 20176-6500. 11. Known bondholders,
mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding 1 percent or more of total amount of
bonds, mortgages or other securities: None. 12. Tax status: Has Not Changed During Preceding 12 Months. 13. Publisher title: Vietnam. 14. Issue date for circulation data below: October
2015. 15. The extent and nature of circulation: A. Total number of copies printed (Net press
run). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 47,151. Actual
number of copies of single issue published nearest to ling date: 40,033. B. Paid circulation.
1. Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each issue during the
preceding 12 months: 25,781. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to
ling date: 24,491. 2. Mailed in-county paid subscriptions. Average number of copies each
issue during the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published
nearest to ling date: 0. 3. Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors and counter
sales. Average number of copies each issue during the preceding 12 months: 4,723. Actual
number of copies of single issue published nearest to ling date: 4,208. 4. Paid distribution
through other classes mailed through the USPS. Average number of copies each issue during
the preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to
ling date: 0. C. Total paid distribution. Average number of copies each issue during preceding
12 months: 30,504. Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to ling date:
28,699. D. Free or nominal rate distribution (by mail and outside mail). 1. Free or nominal
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issue published nearest to ling date: 29,405. G. Copies not Distributed. Average number of
copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 10,944. Actual number of copies of single
issue published nearest to ling date: 10,628. H. Total (sum of 15f and 15g). Average number
of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 47,151. Actual number of copies of single
issue published nearest to ling: 40,033. I. Percent paid. Average percent of copies paid for
the preceding 12 months: 84.2%. Actual percent of copies paid for the preceding 12 months:
97.6%. 16. Electronic Copy Circulation: A. Paid Electronic Copies. Average number of copies
each issue during preceding 12 months: 0. Actual number of copies of single issue published
nearest to ling date: 0. B. Total Paid Print Copies (Line 15c) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line
16a). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 30,504. Actual
number of copies of single issue published nearest to ling date: 28,699. C. Total Print Distribution (Line 15f) + Paid Electronic Copies (Line 16a). Average number of copies each issue
during preceding 12 months: 36,207. Actual number of copies of single issue published
nearest to ling date: 29,405. D. Percent Paid (Both Print & Electronic Copies) (16b divided
by 16c x 100). Average number of copies each issue during preceding 12 months: 84.2%.
Actual number of copies of single issue published nearest to ling date: 97.6%. I certify
that 50% of all distributed copies (electronic and print) are paid above nominal price: Yes.
17. Publication of statement of ownership will be printed in the February 2016 issue of the
publication. 18. Signature and title of editor, publisher, business manager, or owner: Karen
G. Johnson, Business Director. I certify that all information furnished on this form is true and
complete. I understand that anyone who furnishes false or misleading information on this
form or who omits material or information requested on the form may be subject to criminal
sanction and civil actions.

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Distinguished Service Medal.

Surprisingly, people who opposed
the war and those who supported
it were united in sympathy for
Calley after his four-month trial and
conviction. Many harsh critics of the
war considered him a convenient
scapegoat and believed more senior
officials should be held accountable.
The wars supporters felt Calley was
being singled out for prosecution.
In that atmosphere, Nixon ordered
Calley to serve house arrest
instead of prison connement
for nearly the entire time of the
lengthy appeals process that
eventually resulted in the cashiered
lieutenants release in 1974.
Belknaps account of the massacre,
cover-up and Calleys court-martial
is thorough and readable. But the
authors conclusion that the Calley
court-martial was a trial of the
army that fought the Vietnam War
and ultimately of the war itself is
unconvincing and patently unfair.
His attempt to taint the service of
more than 2 million U.S. military
personnel who served in Vietnam
with the stain of My Lai does them
an egregious injustice and neglects
an absolutely vital point: When U.S.
Army officials nally discovered
that something horrible and illegal
had happened, they investigated,
brought charges and conducted
courts-martial. The author misses
or chooses to ignore a dening
distinction regarding how the
opposing sides prosecuted the war:
For U.S. forces, the My Lai massacre
was a terrible aberration caused by
unconscionable leadership failures;
while for the Communists, their
widespread, systematic killing of
civilians was a North Vietnamese
government-sanctioned tactic.
Jerry Morelock
F E B R U A R Y 2 016

63

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Left at the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial
64

VIETNAM

PHOTO BY JENNIFER E. BERRY/VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL COLLECTION, VIVE 33263

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