Tanks, bombs and bicycles: how America was humbled

[thedrifter]

Tanks, bombs and bicycles: How America was humbled
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Three decades after the North Vietnamese rolled into Saigon, Colin Smith, who was there for The Observer, recalls the tumultuous last days of the war in south east Asia and the chaos of the evacuation

Sunday April 24, 2005
The Observer

Thirty years ago, I arrived at the flattened gates of what was then the presidential palace in Saigon about 10 minutes after one of the North Vietnamese army's Russian T-54 tanks had gone through them without the formality of lifting the latch. Soldiers of the southern Army of the Republic of Vietnam - always referred to as ARVN - were gathered on the lawns tearing off their uniforms like actors doing a fast costume change. Once they had surrendered their weapons, their captors told them they were free to go.

Separated from their men, five worried-looking officers, one a colonel, were sitting on the raised kerb around the gravelled drive. They looked up at me as I walked by, then down at their feet. Remembering all the little acts of kindness shown to me in previous weeks by ARVN soldiers at various fronts around the besieged capital and the patience they displayed at all our questions, I felt ashamed that I dared not offer them as much as a cigarette. A teenage member of the North Vietnamese army (NVA) waved me back towards the broken gates with his new-looking Kalashnikov rifle and I was glad to go, consoling myself with the thought that probably the last thing the defeated troops needed was acknowledgment from a Westerner.

In the park opposite, more NVA infantry in their dark green uniforms were unloading mortars and heavy machine-guns from the back of long-bonneted old Molotova trucks still decked with the camouflage foliage they had worn throughout their long journey south. Some of the more daring Saigonese rode up on their mopeds to stare at their outsized pith helmets and makeshift rubber sandals, carved, it was said, out of old tractor tyres. For most it was their first close look at these other Vietnamese who, as they always promised, had won against all the odds.

Around the corner at the American embassy, already stripped of most of its furniture and air-conditioners, the last looters were fighting over coffee cups and lightbulbs. Eye-smarting traces of CS gas released by the American marines as they made their escape still lingered in the corridors and stairwells leading to the roof. Until eight that morning their rearguard, armed with the pump-action shotguns they carried for riot control, had held off a pleading Vietnamese crowd.

Some in the crowd had produced what appeared to be valid documents indicating that they had been allotted 'one seat' on the helicopters that were leaving the embassy roof every few minutes. 'I work for the CIA,' whispered one anguished man. 'The communists will kill me.' Suddenly he removed the large gold watch on his left wrist and began waving it at the marines, who looked everywhere but at him.

Occasionally, someone deemed to have produced the right piece of paper or mouthed the right password was pulled over the wall. Westerners were almost invariably offered a helping hand. Sometimes I had caught a quizzical glance in my direction. (Most of the thousand or so TV crews and reporters in Saigon were already on the other side of the wall, but 117 of us, nine British, had decided to stay and see out this last chapter.) Then the helmeted heads disappeared from the parapet. A gas grenade had come over the wall and, judging by the smell of them hours later, at least one had clonked down the stairs before the last evacuation helicopter staggered uncertainly into the air and headed out for the South China Sea and the waiting carriers of the Seventh Fleet.

It was the end of a war that had begun after the atomic bombs of August 1945 assured Tokyo's surrender at the close of the Second World War. In French Indo-China (modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos), an understrength division of the old British Indian Army under Major-General Douglas Gracey had formally accepted the surrender of the Japanese army of occupation, but spared its troops further humiliation by allowing them to keep their arms. They were needed to help Gracey prevent nationalist insurgents - the Viet Minh - from seizing power before France was able to resume its colonial rule.

It would be almost 10 years before the Viet Minh, led by a high-born Marxist called Ho Chi Minh, undermined France's will to continue by inflicting a major defeat at Dien Bien Phu. Out of the wreckage of the French colony emerged the two Vietnams, divided at the country's 17th parallel: the communist north, with Hanoi as its capital; and the republic in the south, run from Saigon by a series of corrupt francophone soldier Presidents.

Vietnam was tailor-made to become one of the Cold War's hot battlefields. The first casualties among the American military advisers attached to the ARVN occurred in 1959. Peasant guerrillas, sponsored by Hanoi and known as the Vietcong, were beginning to make a nuisance of themselves in both the Mekong delta and the Central Highlands, where US special forces, like the French before them, were recruiting indigenous Montagnard tribesmen who appeased a pantheon of spirits with gruesome animal sacrifices.

Most of the 58,000 Americans killed in Vietnam died between 1965 and 1972. This was the Nam that developed its own subculture: the psychedelic war of such films as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, of books like Michael Herr's Dispatches, in which mainly conscript soldiers rarely seem to smoke a straight cigarette. Marijuana fumes scented their dugouts and heroin was supplied by Saigon's Chinese mafia, who would sometimes dispose of troublesome officers with fragmentation grenades. 'Fragging' became part of the Nam lexicon, along with napalm, grunts and choppers.

On becoming US President in 1968, Richard Nixon determined to rid himself of the unpopular legacy of war bequeathed him by his Democratic predecessors John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. His solution was simple: step up the bombing, start to withdraw the demoralised, murderous, often near-mutinous US ground troops and let the South Vietnamese do the fighting on the ground. After an 11-day blitz of Hanoi, the North Vietnamese leadership agreed to return to the stalled peace talks, and on 15 January, 1973, a peace agreement was signed in Paris.

By the time of the fall of Saigon, 'the grunts' of the US infantry (so called because they became so disgruntled) had been home for more than two years. With them had departed the much larger number of rear-echelon units which had kept 543,000 US military in the field at their peak (almost four times the number now in Iraq).

In 1975 there was even an official delegation from the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam - otherwise known as the Vietcong - housed in Camp Davis, a former Marine Corps transit camp at Saigon's Tan Son Nhut airport. They were there as members of the Joint Military Commission set up to administer the Paris agreement by delineating 'zones of control', which had turned the South Vietnamese countryside into a patchwork of heavily armed hamlets flying either the red and blue flag with a yellow star that was the emblem of the Vietcong, or the red and yellow bars of the republic of South Vietnam.

The war had become a series of violations of the ceasefire, and neither side wanted to be caught in the act, so the foreign press was usually kept away. Saigon hotels, once full of press, were half empty, the reporters having migrated to more newsworthy climes. Few of the remaining journalists bothered to attend the communists' weekly press conferences at Camp Davis, where rhetoric, vodka and the Vietnamese spring rolls called cha giac were served by their genial press attaché, Colonel Sinh.

Saigon was safe enough, but shabby. Deprived of the millions of dollars that Uncle Sam's military tourists spent on services ranging from sex to shaving, the city felt like a once popular resort that had somehow slipped out of fashion. In Tu Do Street, unemployed bar girls played endless card games and even pined for the Australians, notorious for their meanness and beating up the clerks and air-conditioning experts of the vast US rear echelon.

There was still a visible US presence of 10,000 or so: the biggest group were contract workers from various aviation companies that kept President Nguyen Van Thieu's air force flying, along with advisers from the Military Assistance Command Vietnam or the Agency for International Development, some of them retired army officers with complicated private lives who were often as devoted to Vietnam as Britain's 'curry colonels' had been to the Raj. The fortress-like, six-storey US embassy still had a huge staff - the CIA alone was said to occupy two entire floors.

Then, with very little warning, the big war came back. It started in the Central Highlands where, three years before, the battlefield debut of Hanoi's T-54s had provoked a terrible display of US air power and brought the last communist offensive to an abrupt halt. This time the crucial towns of Kontum and Pleiku fell within a few days. About 250,000 Vietnamese settlers from the south, many of them government militiamen and their families, began to head for Saigon. It was obvious who was breaking the truce. How long would it be before the B-52s returned?

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[thedrifter]

But nothing happened. Then Hué fell. South Vietnam's most northerly city, 60 miles south of the 17th parallel, had once been the symbol of American resolve. In 1968 US marines and ARVN troops had fought costly street battles to recapture the old imperial capital.

Still nothing happened. Were the Americans at last washing their hands of Vietnam?

The media circus trickled back to Saigon, but was not as welcome as before. 'They are the enemy within,' declared the ARVN newspaper Tien Tuyen, reflecting a justified belief that, without the burden of a free press in the US, President Gerald Ford - who had replaced Nixon after the Watergate scandal - might have persuaded Congress to maintain Saigon's addiction to money and high explosives. 'Soon we will have many interesting times,' announced Colonel Sinh, whose press conferences had become popular again, if only because everyone expected some awful retribution to befall his delegation.

The South Vietnamese republic was shrinking fast. After Hué fell, we flew to Da Nang. A mini-Dunkirk had occurred at the estuary of Hué's Perfume river, though mercifully without any determined attempt to impede flight. Vehicles and artillery had been abandoned and ARVN troops had waded out to a flotilla of small boats and a few landing craft. Some had their families with them, both young and old. Barefoot soldiers came ashore at Da Nang with muddy M-16 rifles under one arm and immaculate small children under the other. 'They don't know what they are running from or how close the enemy is,' complained a bewildered Indian shopkeeper who had been swept up by this tide. 'They just run.' Then Da Nang's resident CIA man, officially its US consul, called a press conference at which he informed us that the North Vietnamese had already cut all roads south from the city and that Da Nang was going to be next. It was difficult to take him seriously - the place was packed with armed troops; all the evacuees from Hué seemed to have brought their rifles with them, and often mortars and heavy machine-guns. But appearances were deceptive. The troops were disorganised, lacked leadership and, above all, pined for American air support.

At the airport, which was beginning to come under occasional rocket fire, Da Nang's more prosperous citizens were fighting to board extra flights to Saigon laid on by an American charter company that once returned homesick GIs to what they usually referred to as 'The World'.

On my flight, almost 200 people were shoehorned into a Boeing 727 designed to carry 125, a squeeze made even tighter by the large electric fans and caged songbirds that were their most popular hand luggage. Many of them were Catholics, often abandoning their homes for the second time in their lives. Twenty years previously, as Vietnam had divided, Catholic bishops had told their flock that the Blessed Virgin had already left a land where God was about to be banished, and that they must follow her south. About 600,000 northern Catholics had done their bidding. Nor was their advice entirely unfounded. Ho Chi Minh's cadres obliged America's Cold War warriors by murdering hundreds of Catholics who chose to stay.

Catholics tended to find their way into the ARVN's better units, such as the parachute battalions stubbornly defending besieged Xuan Loc, a provincial town 50 miles north-east of Saigon along Highway One.

The vanguard of the ARVN relief force was stuck on a slight ridge line about 10 miles away. A forward observation officer was calling in artillery and airstrikes on an enemy by now well dug into the rubber plantations, banana trees and overgrown paddy fields around the village of Hung Loc. Shells from a 155mm battery about three miles behind us exploded in great brown clouds. Blast from the 250lb bombs dropped by the little F-5 fighters tugged at our clothing.

But as the warplanes pulled out of their dives, we heard heavy machine-guns firing back at them, our first indication that their invisible enemy existed. Slow movement towards us through the tall grass on the overgrown paddies caused some weapons to be cocked, but the white blouses and conical straw hats were spotted in time. They turned out to be a mother and her two teenage daughters burdened with everything they could carry, including the inevitable electric fans, in the yokes across their shoulders.

After them came a cyclist, whose erratic progress as he zig-zagged uphill towards us through the bursting shells was watched with bated breath. One of the white smoke markers which every Vietnamese peasant knew were used by American-made artillery dropped 200 yards from him.

'Now lie down, you dumb sonofa*****,' pleaded the Chicago Tribune' s Philip Caputo. Still he came on, apparently oblivious to his imminent extinction. The forward observation officer started yelling into his radio. As the cyclist got closer, we could see that a small boy was sitting on the crossbar steadying two long sticks across the handlebars. Then we realised that he needed the crutches because his right leg had been amputated above the knee.

On the ridge the one-legged cyclist - unable to ride his bike in any normal way - rested with his remaining foot on what appeared to be a sunken roadside kilometre stone as the boy gulped water from a large glass bottle that had somehow survived the journey intact. Their luck held and they had glided downhill for a few minutes before the invisible men of Hung Loc mortared us.

The ARVN troops were almost as well dug in as their counterparts and our only casualty was a French photographer hit in the groin who, two days later, was limping around Saigon waving an X-ray to prove his manhood was intact. But lying in the prone position did give some of us an unexpected opportunity to examine the object that the cyclist had rested his foot on. It was not a kilometre stone. It marked the grave of a Lieutenant Gebelin of the 22nd Colonial Infantry Regiment, shared with four Montagnards who had all fallen at that spot on 22 May, 1948.

The bones of that war were never far below the surface. 'Beaucoup VC' would say ARVN soldiers who hardly knew another word of French, pointing at some innocent-looking greenery down the road. Ragged boys who hung around the Continental Palace Hotel in Saigon selling paperbacks never seemed to be without a copy of Graham Greene's The Quiet American, his novel of America's first stumbling steps to replace Indo-China's tired colonials. Greene thought the Americans had come much too late and that the defeat at Dien Bien Phu in May 1954 marked the end of any hope of further Western rule over south east Asia.

Four million Vietnamese were killed between 1959 and 1975 in what the Vietnamese increasingly regard as a civil war. Most of us who remained in the city whose name had now been changed by the victors from Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City were convinced that we had witnessed a historical watershed that ranked with the fall of Constantinople. Surely 30 April, 1975, would always be remembered as the beginning of the decline of the United States as a great power. The idea that the victor would not get the spoils seemed ludicrous.

Perhaps we should have known better 30 years ago, when the North Vietnamese air force had demanded $100 per head for our short flight out to Laos on an Ilyushin 16 transport plane. The last time I was in Saigon, the hottest place in town was a bar called the B-52.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam War - 30 years later Loved ones grow through grief
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By Rick Farrant
The Journal Gazette

Susan Ducat's husband used to come to her in dreams. She couldn't see him. She just felt his presence, heard his voice.

The love of her life would tell her that his helicopter had been shot down over the jungles of Vietnam, a group of monks had rescued him and he had been carried to a monastery to heal.

"Don't worry about me," Phillip Allen Ducat would tell his wife. "I love it here and I'm just fine."

Perhaps it was just her way of coping, because intellectually Susan knew he couldn't possibly be alive, much less be recuperating at a monastery. There was no question his helicopter had been shot down; witnesses saw burning bodies dropping from the sky and all that was ever found of her husband was a spit-shined boot with the signature parachute cord he used for laces.

But still, she said, his body was never found and "there was all this hope that he might have escaped. It was pretty hard to imagine that he was really gone."

Thirty years it's been since April 30, 1975 - the day the United States plucked 10 Marines from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon and called it quits on a lost war. Thirty-nine years since Phillip Allen Ducat of Fort Wayne went missing on a moonlit night Sept. 25, 1966.

It was a war many people tried to forget, but it radically changed the lives of not only those killed and injured but those who knew the young men who sacrificed their lives. Parents, wives, children, extended family.

In the ensuing years, some of the people close to the roughly 160 men from northeast Indiana killed in Vietnam have also passed on.

But for those still alive - for people like Susan Ducat, for families like the Bunns of Fort Wayne - life remains inalterably changed.

Many still don't understand why the United States went to Vietnam, many still have difficulty resolving their losses and many have this message to impart: No war, they say, is ever a good war.

Susan Ducat is 65 now and living in Pueblo, Colo. She's a mother of two, a grandmother to three and a partner to a man she's been with for more than 30 years.

She's happy more often than not, she says, but every once in a while her mind will wander to the brief life she and Phillip Ducat shared.

It's hard for her to forget because she never changed her last name - out of honor and respect. It's hard for her not to wonder what might have been.

Sometimes she thinks about what her late husband might have said in certain situations. Sometimes she thinks about what he would have been like as an older adult.

"I just never got to watch him grow old and grow up," she says wistfully.

She and Phillip met at North Side High School and became high school sweethearts. He went by Phil and was a grounded, good-looking football player who dreamed of flying. She went by Susie Renforth and was a pretty, gregarious, somewhat flighty young woman who loved going to Phil's games.

Austin Brooks, one of Phillip's best friends at North Side, remembers Phillip and Susan's relationship as a troubled one.

"She was an attractive girl and Phil had an eye for good-looking women," said Brooks, now 66. "But their relationship was a stormy one. There was never any abuse, just lots of bickering back and forth."

Susan doesn't deny there were problems, but both she and Brooks say there was something about their love that kept drawing them together - even after the loss of their child, even after a divorce.

The two began their adult lives after graduating from North Side in 1957, the year Pat Boone released the dreamy ballad "Love Letters in the Sand." Phillip enrolled at Wabash College in Crawfordsville and he and Susan married a year later.

Susan got pregnant, the baby was born prematurely and died, and sometime during Phillip's studies at Wabash - Susan can't precisely remember when - the two divorced.

Susan went off to Seattle to become a flight attendant for United Airlines, but the two kept in touch.

"He helped me write my letters to go to stewardess school, and I took care of him when he was sick," she says. "I think we both just needed to grow up a little bit."

A year and a half after they divorced, they remarried and Phillip decided to forgo acceptance into medical school for a stint in the Marines. The couple was living at a base in Irvine, Calif., when Phillip was summoned to Vietnam in February 1966.

Susan didn't agree with the war, didn't want him to go.

"I wanted to break his leg before he left, but he wouldn't let me," she says.

After he was overseas, though, she did her best to lend support. She sent him care packages. Cases of beer. Sausage sticks. Toilet paper. Green camouflage sheets.

Phillip, a first lieutenant, became a decorated helicopter pilot, winning the Distinguished Flying Cross for a mission on June 11, 1966, when he made four trips into heavily armed enemy territory to evacuate 47 wounded soldiers and seven who had died.

Three months later, Phillip's helicopter was obliterated and Susan's life came apart.

Phillip's death, pieced together from statements by his brother-in-law Phil Ginder of Fort Wayne and from eyewitness accounts, occurred in South Vietnam's Quang Tri Province.

Ginder said Phillip, who'd just turned 27, was due to come home the next day but had volunteered for a medical evacuation mission in place of an ill colleague. Eyewitnesses said friendly fire struck Phil's UH-34, killing Phillip and four comrades.

"It was like cutting a string on a kite and letting it go," Susan says. "My anchor was gone. I just felt thrown to the wind."

She moved to the artsy community of Laguna Beach, Calif., and joined the counter-culture revolution, smoking pot, dropping LSD, meeting acid guru Timothy Leary, making pipes out of Mazanita wood and hooking up with an eccentric proprietor of a "head shop." Susan and the business owner never married but they had two children - beach babies, she calls them - and named them Andro and Kamela.

She stopped reading the newspapers, put anti-war stickers on her car, began immersing herself in Eastern spiritualism and, when her son was about to be born, traveled to Mexico so he wouldn't have a United States birth certificate - so the government couldn't send him off to war.

"I dressed in green stockings and pink dresses - like a flower," she says. "I was half nuts, I think."

In time, she began to recover, made her way in 1977 to Colorado where her parents had a business, met new life partner Michael Flanigan, and found comfort in him, the land and the Paso Fino horses they raised.

She has used a degree in art education and museum studies from the University of Southern Colorado to plan workshops and exhibitions, she volunteers at her grandchildren's elementary school, and last summer she traveled to Vietnam to find a measure of closure.

On one wall of her house, she also has Christmas cards sent from the White House - the kind of cards sent to families of soldiers killed or missing in action.

They are reminders of what was taken from her - and of what other families still go through.

No war, she says, is ever a good war.

"It's hideous," she says. "It's so sad. I feel so sorry for the young men over in Iraq now. They're just children, they're just kids, and they won't get another full view of it until another 30 years - if they survive."

'There's an emptiness'

It is a Sunday afternoon in early April, and this is the first time the Bunn family has gathered to talk about their fallen soldier, Donald Wayne Bunn.

Sitting on couches and chairs are three brothers, two sisters, a mother, a nephew and a soldier's daughter who was only 3 when her father died.

Within minutes of starting their story, there are tears from every corner of brother Jeff Bunn's Fort Wayne living room. Big tears. Silent tears. Thirty-six years of unresolved anguish.

Donald Wayne Bunn was a 21-year-old private in the Marine Corps when he died in 1969, the year Credence Clearwater Revival released the anti-war protest "Fortunate Son."

Bunn was shipped to Vietnam on Valentine's Day. He was killed by missile fire four months later - June 7 - when the enemy overran bunker No. 23 in South Vietnam's Quang Nam Province.

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[thedrifter]

A friend and Marine Corps colleague who was at the bunker would later write that it was a swift death - that Donnie didn't feel much pain.

Donnie's mother, Chris, now 77, shrieked when a Marine major came to her front door on Prairie Grove Drive to announce Donnie's death. Brother Jeff, then 9, was watching "The Flintstones" when he heard his mother's scream. Sister Kathy, then 7, heard it as she played outside with friends three doors down.

It was another cruel blow to the family that had been rocked seven years earlier when Chris' then-35-year-old husband, also named Donald, was left paralyzed from the waist down after a car fell on him when supporting jacks collapsed.

As she had done after her husband's accident, Chris knew she had to project strength for her children, and the children, in turn, worked hard not to show emotion - in deference to their mother and father.

"We were the type of family back in the early '60s, early '70s, we never talked about stuff," says brother Denny, 55, now of Wolcottville. "We just took every day as it was."

"We all got caught up living our lives and trying to survive," says Jeff, 45. "We all dealt with it in our own way."

But on this Sunday in April, the stoic veil they have worn so well for so many years falls quickly. The fact that Chris' husband of 56 years died in 2002 only heightens the grief.

Chris talks about the time 6-year-old Donnie announced that all he wanted in life was to smoke cigars and join the Marines. Later, brother Denny says, Donnie announced that his plans were to own a GTO and join the Marines.

He joined the Marines, Chris says, "he got a GTO, but whether he ever smoked a cigar or not, I don't know."

Such ambitions make it sound as though Donnie was a live-in-the-fast-lane kind of guy, but in many respects he was just the opposite.

Family members talk about how the Elmhurst High graduate was quiet and reserved, except when he was serving as the grand protector for his brothers and sisters.

And they say that despite his desire to join the Marines, he probably wasn't keen on combat. To prove their point, they provide a letter Donnie sent to an aunt shortly before he died.

"So far," Donnie wrote, "I have been in the bush for about a week and haven't fired a shot. I hope I can say that at the end of my tour."

No, family members say, Donnie wasn't a shoot-'em-up Rambo type. Just a young man who believed in serving his country and who departed before some of the Bunns ever got to know him.

Kathy (now Kathy Cook) barely knew her brother. Donnie's now-39-year-old daughter Lisa Sorge can't remember a thing about him. Donnie's 15-year-old nephew Tyler never knew him, but has been praying for Donnie since he was 5.

Brother Larry, 54, talks about how he named his first-born son Donald Wayne and how he and his father had private discussions about Donnie.

Larry's voice catches in the middle of his words and he raises his hands in the air. No more, he's gesturing. No more.

Kathy, 43, now of Ossian, talks about how she frequently visits Donnie's grave at Huntertown Cemetery "to make sure the stone is clean and has flowers, 'cause sometimes I wonder whether he really remembers me."

Her glasses can't hide her loss.

Lisa, married and with three children of her own in Fort Wayne, talks about the letters her father would write to others that would end: "Give Lisa a big hug and kiss from her daddy when you see her, OK?"

Lisa says she tries to err on the side of optimism and figures it's better her father died young because "I don't have the memories to miss."

But there's always a void, she says, tissue in hand, and she has a hard time watching movies that tug on the emotions.

"There are times I get mad at him for not being there," she says. "There are times where it's just a sad thing not being able to share with him. I really think that there are certain parts of your heart that are reserved for certain people and when they're not there, there's an emptiness."

Through all of this spoken sorrow, Chris Bunn - wife, mother, grandmother to 15 - listens intently but never breaks.

"I had to be strong," she explains, "and I still have to be today, 'cause I have to look after myself and protect my kids and grandkids 'cause they're the most important things in my life."

But ask her whether she was ever bitter, ever angry, and she'll say yes. Privately, she was both. About her husband's accident. About her son's death.

No war, she says, is ever a good war."I don't think the Vietnam War should have been," she says. "I don't think this Iraq thing should be. To me, it's wrong. I just think about all these wives and daughters losing their husbands and fathers and it just irritates me."

Hardly a day goes by, she says, that she also doesn't think about her Donnie.

"Something," she says, "always triggers something."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Bond between Marines endures decades later
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JIM KINNEY
The Saratogian
04/24/2005

MALTA -- David Wallingford recently traveled to Massachusetts to attend the funeral of a fellow Marine he'd served with in Vietnam.

'There were guys there that I hadn't seen and that hadn't seen me in 35 years,' Wallingford said. 'After a while, it was just like it was yesterday.'

And, Wallingford said the men who gathered never addressed him as 'Dave' during that day just weeks ago.

'It was always 'Sir' or 'Lt. Wally,' ' he said. 'I have a tremendous amount of respect for those guys because of that.'

Wallingford was a second lieutenant, a forward observer calling in artillery fire and air support during the first part of his tour in Vietnam from October 1968 to October 1969. He was 25 years old.

'I knew that the Marine Corps was the best,' he said. 'I wanted to test myself, to prove that I could be one of them.'

Wallingford's mission was to go out with a company-sized unit of about 150 Marines on search-and-destroy missions. The Marines would have intelligence showing where North Vietnamese regulars were congregating or where they were using infiltration routes and trail systems.

'We were to engage the enemy,' Wallingford said.

The company would get helicoptered to within a one-day hike of the suspected enemy location.

Often they came and went from firebases, or outposts built by dropping huge 'daisy cutter' bombs onto mountaintops.

'They would literally blow the top of a mountain off, then engineers would go in with minimal protection and use bulldozers and build a base,' he said.

Wallingford was wounded during one of these search-and-destroy missions. The terrain was difficult and Marines had to walk single file. Unknowingly, they were nearing a North Vietnamese Army bunker complex and they tripped an ambush.

'There was a firefight that lasted pretty much all day,' Wallingford said. 'All hell broke loose.'

He said the fight went in weaves, ebbs and flows. The North Vietnamese regulars would attack. Marines would drive them back, then counter-attack. Then the North Vietnamese would drive back the Marine counterattack.

Wallingford said the North Vietnamese regulars are not to be confused with the Viet Cong rebels found in South Vietnam.

'They were well trained and well equipped,' Wallingford said. 'As soldiers, I respected them.'

The North Vietnamese had AK-47 and SKS rifles and a few machine guns the Marines could see as night began to fall. After the engagement, Marines found anti-aircraft guns and rocket-propelled grenades in the bunker complex.

The Marines had their M-16s, and one platoon in the company had 60-millimiter mortars and machine guns.

Wallingford's job was to bring heavier American firepower to bear on the fight. And he had to bring it in increasingly closer, down to just 150 feet or so from the American battle lines.

Then he got hit.

'I saw the son of a ***** that shot me,' Wallingford said. 'And I shot him. It's a different kind of experience looking down the barrel of a rifle and seeing someone doing the same back to you.'

He paused when asked if he killed the man: 'I have to think I did.'

Wallingford suffered a wound to his arm.

'It was like being in a dream,' he said. 'I think I was getting a little into shock.'

He was put on one of the last choppers out.

'As a Marine officer, you take care of your men,' he said.

After recovering at hospitals in Vietnam and Japan, Wallingford returned to a different unit, this time commanding two artillery pieces at a firebase. At times, he was able to fire rounds in support of his old unit.

'That was gratifying,' he said.

He still has a little weakness in his arm.

'Over the years, the scars have blended in with the rest of the skin,' he said. 'The psychological effects, that's a different story.'

His friend, the man whose funeral Wallingford recently attended, suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, though it had nothing to do with his death.

'Between calls and e-mails, I'd been in contact with him a few times a week,' Wallingford said. 'He was like a little brother to me and I miss him.'


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Reevaluating the Role of the Dustoff





Vietnam


While it improved the survival rate and confidence level of troops in Vietnam, medevac often distorted the tactical shape of battles.

By Paddy Griffith

Within the general evolution of the art of war, the conflict in Vietnam was notable for several novel and important features that were destined to become irreversible. Among these were such things as the helicopter gunship, the electronic battlefield and even the hush-hush array of satellite-based surveillance assets. All of these are powerful tactical factors that we today seem to take pretty much for granted, to the extent that from our present perspective, a generation later, we may overlook the significance of their original development. We tend to forget that a large number of the key elements of modern warfare were totally new in 1965, and that it was the Vietnam War that first allowed them to be explored and deployed under the stresses of real and mortal combat.


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From the viewpoint of troops on the ground in Vietnam, the innovation that made by far the greatest impact was not directly tactical at all, but actually medical in nature. This was the casualty evacuation helicopter, or "dustoff," which could whisk a wounded man to a well-equipped aid station within minutes, and from there to a base hospital within a few hours. One Vietnam infantry veteran told me: "The troops in my own unit always felt that if we were not killed outright if we were hit, the odds of surviving were in our favor. This added greatly to the confidence factor in any situation."

In historical terms, it represented still another advance in the speed of casualty evacuation and in the treatment of shock, which had significantly improved since the Napoleonic Wars. Until then, unless one was a high-ranking officer, wounded soldiers were not removed from the field until after the battle was over.

In 1792, however, French surgeon Dominique Jean Larrey began to develop horse-drawn, two-wheeled "flying ambulances" for the swift removal of casualties—primarily to prevent their being slaughtered by the enemy—and he soon discovered that the earlier they were treated, the better their chances of recovery. Even after that fundamentally critical innovation, some 44 percent of the soldiers wounded during the American Civil War failed to survive, but by 1918 the British died-of-wounds figure was down to around 8 percent. In World War II it was 4.5 percent for U.S. troops, and in Vietnam it was as low as 2.6 percent.

Each successive improvement in medevac procedures brought a concrete tactical advantage in terms of troop morale, and in Vietnam the process was brought to practically the highest level it could possibly attain. There was also a political advantage for the U.S. government to take unprecedented care of its conscripted soldiers and lavish upon them a degree of medical succor that had been unknown in any previous war. Fewer losses meant more support back home.


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The dustoff, however, did not come cheap. First, it involved a heavy cost in rear-echelon personnel, as well as some long-term cash payouts. More convalescents in the hospital, surviving for longer, meant that more doctors and nurses were needed to look after them, after which more veterans' pensions had to be found. It is a sad fact that the average wounded soldier costs the taxpayer many more dollars than a soldier killed in action, however differently we may rate the psychic or moral costs. Second, the helicopters themselves represented a particularly significant drain on a precious tactical resource.

We must recall that 1965 came only 11 years after the entire French empire had been able to deploy a grand total of only seven helicopters in the Southeast Asia theater. The United States would eventually deploy something like 4,000. But even then the average time available for flying might be only about 10 percent, since as much as 90 percent of any chopper's time had to be devoted to maintenance tasks. Hence, on average, only something like 400 helicopters were reliably available at any moment to cover all the requirements of the U.S. forces in-country, as well as of the ARVN and of the many political and civilian agencies.

If we break this down still further, it is not difficult to understand that only some 70 to 80 helicopters might be available for military use within each corps area. This might translate into only one or two dozen per division. Lifting a single infantry company might normally require some 16 to 20 helicopters, depending on fuel load. Those choppers were supplemented by the necessary accompaniment of gunships, command ships and associated heavy-lift support—or indeed the continuing routine requirement for logistic backup throughout the Army. So by definition, there can rarely have been very many surplus helicopters available for medevac purposes. As Lt. Gen. Harold G. Moore (then the lieutenant colonel commanding the lead battalion) later reported on the start of the November 1965 Ia Drang battle, "my main concern focused on the fact that we would have only sixteen Huey slicks to ferry the battalion into the assault area... .What that meant was that fewer than eighty men—not even one full company—would hit the landing zone in the first wave... ." (In the face of three whole enemy battalions!)

Then again, in December 1969, Lieutenant Michael Lee Lanning experienced a nerve-wracking wait when only three helicopters could be made available to lift his company out of the scene of a bloody battle. "We would have to be extracted in three separate lifts," he recalled. "Turnaround time between each sortie would be about thirty minutes. That meant that before the last group could be picked up, any lingering dinks would have an hour to plan an attack on the remaining eighteen men." All in all, we must conclude that despite the apparently plentiful supply of helicopters available to the U.S. forces in Vietnam, they were still always a relatively rare resource that needed to be managed and husbanded very carefully.

The dustoff suffered from a particular difficulty that has been common to all front-line ambulances throughout history. It was designed to rescue wounded soldiers from as near as possible to the time and place they were wounded—which by definition would add up to an especially dangerous situation. The dustoff had to fly right into the heart of the battle zone and pluck out shocked, suffering, bleeding and badly damaged combatants who might still be under heavy fire. Yet the medical crew also had to make sure that they themselves managed to survive such fire, so that their rescued casualty could be removed safely to an aid station in the rear.

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That made for some urgent personal dilemmas. As one crewman recalled in Moore and Joseph C. Galloway's We Were Soldiers Once…and Young: "The NVA were in the wood line shooting at the helicopter. The medevac pilot kind of froze up on us and was having trouble setting the ship down. We never did come to a complete hover. All aboard had to dive out on the ground from about six feet up in the air. We ran in a crouch."

On some occasions the infantry had particularly bad experiences with dustoff crews. William Shucart reported of the Ia Drang battle: "We were trying to get the medevac ships to come in but they would not. A couple of Huey slicks came down but we were taking fire and the medevacs wouldn't come. When you are taking fire is precisely when you need medevac. I don't know where those guys got their great reputations. I was totally dismayed with the medevac guys. The Huey slick crews were terrific."

Obviously, there was always a serious conflict of interest inherent in the whole business of medevac. On one side, the dustoff crews had to ignore the tactical dangers and go in regardless, and in fact many of them were often among the bravest men to be found anywhere in the military. Yet, on the other hand, they had to carefully calculate their risks and make sure that conditions were relatively safe, or at least safe enough. Otherwise, they would be certain to lose the wounded men they were evacuating as well as their own lives.

Lanning's account of a conversation between him and a pilot was perhaps not atypical: "I held [the wounded and delirious Staff Sgt.] Blyman with one arm and reached for the handset to talk to the medevac pilot with the other. 'Listen,' I said, 'I need a hook and a cable.'

"'What's the situation?' he asked.

"I told him we were receiving sporadic fire, knowing ahead of time what his reaction would be. 'No way,' he answered. 'I can't hover that long under fire.'

"'Listen,' I said again, 'we've got a man hit in the knee. He's gone crazy. I've got to get him out of here now! We'll put down all the supporting fire we can.'

"The pilot must have heard the urgency in my voice, because after a slight pause he said, 'Okay. Pop smoke. Let's give it a try.'"

In that instance, the dustoff chopper did receive some hits. But the extraction was successful and the members of the medevac team were recommended for medals.


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Ellie

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Search for MIAs in Vietnam remains priority
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HANOI, Vietnam - It's been 30 years since the end of the Vietnam War; 40 years since the first American combat troops, one battalion of Marines, landed at Danang in the northern part of South Vietnam.

It's as good a time as any to take a look at where we stand on the search for the 1,399 Americans who are still listed as missing in action in Vietnam, and no better place to do that than here at the offices of Detachment Two of the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC).

The small detachment permanently stationed in the capital of Vietnam is commanded by Army Lt. Col. Lentfort Mitchell of the Special Forces, who worked in Latin America before he was assigned here eight months ago.

Detachment Two maintains contact with the Vietnamese government and helps plan and conduct the searches that take place after the monsoon rains fade each year. The primary work is done between February and mid-December. Equipment for this summer's operations, which will focus on the central-eastern region of what formerly was South Vietnam, already has begun pouring in.

Col. Mitchell's detachment has a file on every one of those still missing. The files are divided into two groups: 667, including 468 individuals lost over the ocean, on whom there are no leads and little or no information; and 732 considered possibles. This includes 500 individuals for whom there are leads or information, however ephemeral.

The search itself is not without peril. There's a simple monument in the front courtyard of Detachment Two. On it are engraved the names of seven Americans from this detachment and nine of their Vietnamese counterparts who were killed in the crash of a Russian-made helicopter four years ago while on an MIA mission.

Once human remains are recovered - often only a few fragments of bone and a tooth or two - there's still much work to be done by the scientists at JPAC's Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii to confirm them first as human, then as Western, not Asian, and then to pursue absolute identification through a match of mitochondrial DNA from a specific family.

Because there's a cap on the number of U.S. government employees based permanently in Vietnam, JPAC, which is headquartered in Honolulu, sends 95 military and civilian employees in to conduct investigations and carry out excavations during the four major field activities each year. They're joined by 20 Vietnamese officials and as many as 600 local Vietnamese workers.

Some will pursue leads that can be as soft as the memory of a Vietnamese woodcutter who recalls seeing the wreckage of a downed plane or helicopter on a remote mountain slope 15 years ago, or as hard as the information provided recently by a metal scavenger who was involved with gathering metal from 17 crash sites in the central part of former South Vietnam.

The search for America's missing has remained a priority for successive U.S. administrations since the war ended. Even in times of tight budgets, this effort has remained immune to cuts in funding although it's not inexpensive: The cost of finding, identifying and returning a single American who disappeared in Vietnam is more than $1 million.

But the extraordinary effort is worth it to the families who've waited and hoped for so long that word would finally come that their son, husband, father or brother has been found and is coming home at last.

It's worth it to those who wear the uniform of their country and believe in a simple creed that we are Americans and we will leave no one behind on the battlefield.

That implicit contract is best expressed in the words of a letter that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to his friend Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at the end of the Civil War:

"I knew wherever I was that you thought of me, and if in trouble you would come for me, if alive."

Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers. Readers may write to him at: Knight Ridder Washington Bureau, 700 12th St. N.W., Suite 1000, Washington, D.C. 20005-3994. His column appears most Fridays in the American News.

Ellie

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30 years later: Are we still warring over Vietnam?
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By Steven Komarow, USA TODAY

The thump-thump of the last helicopter taking off from a rooftop in Saigon marked the end of America's time in Vietnam in April 1975. The U.S. death toll was about 58,000, almost 40 times the number so far in Iraq. In interviews to mark the anniversary, U.S. servicemembers, civilians and South Vietnamese allies tell about their experiences.

Now it's 30 years since South Vietnam fell to Communist forces, and by coincidence, 60 years since the end of World War II. That means the entire Vietnam War took place closer to WWII than to today, a symbolic threshold that puts the Vietnam War firmly in the province of historians. (Graphic: Fall of Saigon)

Even a generation later, controversy over the war has the power to summon passion and bitterness, as evidenced by last year's disputes over Democratic Sen. John Kerry's Vietnam duty and President Bush's time in the National Guard. (Related story: Search for MIAs continues)

In interviews to mark the anniversary, U.S. servicemembers, civilians and South Vietnamese allies tell USA TODAY that the Vietnam experience is the headwaters for attitudes and the template for decisions that flow through society today.

Richard Holbrooke

Holbrooke, 64, a New York investment banker, was United Nations ambassador in the Clinton administration. He began his foreign service career in Vietnam's Mekong Delta before most Americans had heard of war in Vietnam, and later served as an aide at the Paris peace talks aimed at ending it.

"For those of us who were there as young men, it is the originating event of our political and foreign policy education. (Yet) people of course came out of it with diametrically opposed lessons," he says, as evidenced by today's divisions over Iraq.

"I was in Vietnam the day that (President) Ngo Dinh Diem was overthrown and killed. I was 22 years old and a very young foreign service officer. That was Nov. 1, 1963 ... I was trying to (fly) to Saigon to visit my friend Tony Lake (later President Clinton's national security adviser). I called him and he said, 'We're hiding in the closet of our house. The tanks are shooting all around us!' I said, 'I've got to see this. I've never seen a coup before.' "

With flights canceled, Holbrooke drove from the Mekong Delta to Saigon.

"Tanks were everywhere, the girls were putting flowers in the barrels of the guns. Everybody was celebrating. It was very exciting," he says. "What nobody could have known ... is that that would begin (a pattern of) revolving-door governments ... and that we would be dragged deeply in." It's a worry that echoes in Iraq today.

"My roommate in Saigon was John Negroponte (now national intelligence director), and we have talked about this endlessly now for 40 years as friends," he says. "I have this image that 20 years from now the Today show will stage a 50th anniversary debate of the end of the war and they will (roll in) the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the hawks, and they'll start screaming at each other from their wheelchairs."

Catherine Leroy

Photographer Leroy, 60, a French native living in Los Angeles, remembers Vietnam as a magnet pulling her toward her dream.

She was 21 in 1966 when "I went there on a one-way ticket," she says. "I was absolutely obsessed about becoming a photojournalist. My heroes were photojournalists."

She succeeded, covering the war for major publications in the USA and Europe, and her work is the centerpiece for her new book, Under Fire, that matches the best photos and writing on the war. She was there in April 1975 to witness the final Communist victory, then returned two years later. She saw that the spoils of war could be few.

"It was a very bad year," she recalls. "It was a time when there were lots of Russian (Soviet) advisers. The Vietnamese were calling them 'Americans without money.' The Russians would go into the antique shop ... (with) a Russian flag and they would say, 'You give me this ugly porcelain and I'll give you this beautiful Russian flag.' And of course, the Vietnamese had to do it."

Now, she says, "The Vietnamese have moved on, and you have this new generation. And (the war) to them, it's so far away. ... All they want is to have a better life, make money and be like everybody else. Of course, it's OK. Of course."

Nguyen Phong

Phong, 70, was a South Vietnamese diplomat involved in peace talks from 1968 until the end of the war. He returned to Saigon five days before the surrender and was imprisoned. Today, he's a scholar with the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University.

The Vietnamese "still do not understand very well why the calamity of war fell on our heads," he says. "We hoped very much that foreign rule (Vietnam was a French colony) would end, and we would ... have our country back."

Now, he says, "I don't feel that it was a civil war at all. It was a conflict clearly between the so-called free world and the Communist bloc. ... For the first time the United States, a superpower, was forced to deal with a new kind of warfare (where) you don't have any demarcation line between the civilian and the military."

Col. Regina Aune

Col. Aune, 60, an Air Force officer now assigned to Brooks City-Base in San Antonio, was a flight nurse aboard a C-5 cargo jet that would be evacuating orphans from South Vietnam in early April 1975.

Aune, then a 1st lieutenant flying out of Clark Air Base, the Philippines, remembers that when she arrived in Saigon to pick up the children on April 4, there was a sense of desperation as North Vietnamese forces closed in. Her mission was the maiden flight of "Operation Babylift," a humanitarian effort to relocate hundreds of war orphans to the USA. It was to be one of the good things that came out of a divisive and ugly war, she recalls.

But shortly after takeoff, something went horribly wrong. Aune remembers a loud explosion. An investigation later determined that a lock on the cargo doors had failed, leading to a rapid decompression.

"There was a big hole in the back of the plane," Aune says. In a matter of minutes, the aircraft crash-landed near Saigon and broke into pieces.

In all, more than 150 of the 328 aboard were killed. Most who survived - including Aune - were seated in the passenger compartment of the cavernous C-5, located above the cargo bay. The cargo deck was crushed on impact and all but a handful of passengers there were killed.

"I think of this every five years, when there is an anniversary story about Vietnam," says Aune, who broke her back and every bone in her right foot. Aune and others who survived the crash helped to carry 149 children to safety, under the most difficult of circumstances.

The crash did not stop Babylift. By the end of April, more than 1,700 orphans had been flown out of South Vietnam. "We did a lot of good," Aune says.

Chuck Hagel

Hagel, 58, now a U.S. Republican senator from Nebraska, was an infantryman in Vietnam from December 1967 to December 1968.

"We certainly learned a lot from Vietnam," he says. "One of the lessons ... is that it's easy to get into war. But no matter how noble the purpose, (it's) not always easy to get out. You can get yourself into a lot of trouble pretty quick," says Hagel, whose tour included battle during the chaos of the Tet Offensive.

"We should not ever allow that bad experience in Vietnam to paralyze America," he says.

But those who fought there are mindful that "war is full of unintended consequences. War is a very uncertain process. The only constant of war is that there's a tremendous amount of suffering. "If we can keep this all in a certain balance and perspective as we work ... then we would have gained from that experience."

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James Miles

Miles, 57, of Sioux Falls, S.D., is a chief warrant officer 4serving with the 42nd Infantry Division in Iraq since last August. He flew helicopters in Vietnam for a year starting in February 1969. He e-mailed from Iraq.

"You really can't help but compare your enemies when you get the opportunity to face more than one," he says. "The Vietnamese were much more dedicated and resilient than my current foe. They were all committed to one goal, whereas our current adversary lacks organization and true commitment. While we do see a few (enemies) who would be willing to give their life for their cause, 99% of the citizens over here really want us here and help in any way they can. They can actually see that we are really here to help them, whereas the Vietnamese never did see that."

Most of the soldiers he serves with now have no memory of his first war.

"I really don't get many questions from others over here about Vietnam. In the few conversations I have had with others, I still get the feeling that that is one situation the U.S. Army would just as soon forget about."

Quang X. Pham

Pham, a Southern California businessman, was 10 when South Vietnam collapsed around him. He, his mother and four sisters were evacuated to the USA, but his father was imprisoned for 12½ years. Pham joined the U.S. Marines and piloted helicopters in the 1991 Persian Gulf War and in Somalia.

He remembers the kindness of strangers. "I didn't know that outside of the (refugee) camp public sentiment was divided on what to do with the refugees."

Now 40, he's trying to mobilize America's Vietnamese community. Pham has published a memoir, A Sense of Duty, that pleads with America to recognize the efforts of the South Vietnamese soldiers, including his father, a fighter pilot.

"There's no South Vietnamese (military) voice in writing, the movies or anything," he says. "Go ask the South Vietnamese how they felt about being abandoned by the United States. Go ask the South Vietnamese how they feel about being in a prison camps for 15 years.

"It took 20 years for American vets of the Vietnam War to get their due. So I think for the Vietnamese it takes a little longer," he says.

"Just acknowledge that 250,000 of them died in the war, like the 58,000 Americans who died. We're not just rice farmers in the background of Hollywood movies."

Ron Serafinowicz

Serafinowicz, 56, flew Army attack helicopters in Vietnam from June 1970 to June 1971 as a Chief Warrant Officer. Now a National Guardsman, he's been in Iraq since January with the aviation brigade headquarters of the 42nd Infantry Division.

"America is stronger from the experience" of Vietnam, he says. "That was proven in the Gulf War, the way things were done to assure a rapid victory."

Now, he says, "being in a combat zone again makes you feel the same way as you felt 35 years ago, and it revives the memories of things you did back then. You remember little details and the missions you flew ... the present situation in Iraq is a lot like the Vietnam War was. There are no front lines. Anyone can be your enemy. You can't roam the countryside without a lot of firepower with you. You can't have a rapid victory because the process of rebuilding Iraq is going to be slow and there are many trying to stop it."

John Miska

The war was winding down when Miska, 51, of Greene County, Va., had a low draft lottery number and enlisted in 1973. "I spoke to my Uncle Joe, who was in the Army in Guadalcanal and Okinawa. He said, 'You'll get an experience in the military that you won't get anywhere else.' "

Because he enlisted for four years instead of waiting for the draft, he was able to choose a job that kept him off the front lines. "And when I was in the Army, it was totally different than a guy who served '67 to '69. It was a different Army. There was not the esprit de corps and all. When we were leaving basic training, they told us not to travel in military uniforms."

He's resolved that returning soldiers will never be mistreated again, and he has plenty of opportunity. Miska how runs a non-profit organization called Adopt a Soldier that collects and distributes clothing and other goods to wounded soldiers returning from Iraq. He visits them in the hospital and sometimes goes to their funerals if they don't make it.

"When I'm with these kids, talking with them, having a beer with them, holding their hands, burying them ... I'm 19 again," he says.

Contributing: Dave Moniz


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Correspondent recalls final days before end of Vietnam War <br />
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By George Lewis <br />
Correspondent <br />
NBC News <br />
April 29, 2005...

[thedrifter]

30 years later, Vietnam vets remember fall of Saigon <br />
<br />
BY KIRSTEN SCHARNBERG <br />
<br />
Chicago Tribune <br />
<br />
<br />
SAN DIEGO - (KRT) - Outside the window of the general's conference room, a new class of young...

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Only 11 Marines, including Valdez, remained by 3 a.m. on April 30. They climbed to the roof of the embassy, locking the doors to each floor behind them, with no means to call for help.

Four hours later, many of the men assumed they would either be killed by the communist troops surrounding the city or by the frenzied crowds that by then had broken through the embassy's gate and were breaking their way through each locked door between the floor and the roof.

"I thought, `This is where it ends. This is what it feels like to be cornered,'" Valdez says today.

But, then, off in the distance, Valdez spotted that final helicopter. One by one, he got his young Marines on board and then climbed in himself.

As the helicopter flew off, bound for a U.S. Navy carrier offshore, Valdez barely looked back at the embassy. Today, as a man nearing 70, he recognizes the drama of that moment and wishes he had appreciated what he was witnessing.

"If I had known the historical significance of that moment, I would have taken notes to document it," he said.

Broussard, who says he still "deals with the memories every day," wrote one of the more dramatic accounts of that final day in Saigon.

On April 29, after the airport was heavily bombed in the attack that killed Judge and McMahon, Ambassador Martin demanded to go there to assess the damage and see if an evacuation using fixed-wing aircraft, which had been the longstanding plan, was still possible.

Broussard, assigned to the ambassador's personal security detail, led the trip.

"It was an absolute mess," he says today. "We knew immediately when we saw the airfield that the fixed-wing operation was done. We knew we couldn't get out any more Vietnamese. Now we could only get out a few people at a time on small helicopters that could land at the embassy."

At the embassy, Broussard saw images he has never been able to shake: a mother throwing her child over the tall outside wall in the hope that the Marines inside would fly him to a better life in the United States, a family who had worked for years for the embassy who made it to the gate, their bags packed, only to be told their flight was no longer going.

Soon the ambassador got a "flash top secret" notice from the president: Evacuate everyone still in Saigon immediately.

Martin said before he could do that he had to go to his residence several blocks away to destroy confidential documents. The crowds, Broussard told the ambassador, would kill them if they left out the gates.

So, using a secret passageway between the U.S. Embassy and the adjacent French Embassy, the ambassador sneaked out with Broussard and Staff Sgt. Jim Daisy. The three made it to the residence, burned the materials and made it back to the French Embassy even as gunfire raged in the streets around them.

Daisy remained one of Broussard's friends long after they evacuated with the ambassador on one of the last helicopters out of Saigon. The two saw each other at an association reunion several years ago where many men saw one another and relived for the first time those final events.

Not long after, Daisy committed suicide.

One of the principal missions of the Fall of Saigon Association revolves around the memories of Judge and McMahon, whose bodies were not recovered for nearly a year after the chaos of the exit.

The association has helped establish memorial parks in the hometowns of each man and each year gives high school students from those local high schools college scholarships in McMahon and Judge's name.

It lobbied to get the two fallen Marines, who had never gotten posthumous medals, Purple Hearts, which were awarded on April 30, 2000, the 25th anniversary of the evacuation of Saigon.

All these years later, Broussard weeps the hardest when he talks of these young men.

"I should have been killed, not Judge or McMahon. They were so young, new and innocent," Broussard said.

Today Broussard goes every chance he can to Camp Pendleton north of San Diego. Marines there have been through some of the diciest days of Iraq - hand-to-hand combat in Najaf, the battle for control of always-restive Fallujah.

Over the past two years, he said he has informally counseled hundreds of them.

"I just approach them and tell them a little about my experience and the way it has stayed with me all these years," he said. "And they start to open up pretty quickly."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

An inspiration and a lesson
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In our opinion
The Anniston Star
04-30-2005

Today, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, we pause to recall the lives lost and the immense sacrifices made during the Vietnam War. And we pause to remind ourselves of the ongoing struggles in Iraq.

This week, New York Times writer Michael Moss told of the brave exploits of one company of Marines serving for six months in a treacherous part of Iraq. (The Star's Insight section this Sunday will reprint his account on Page 1E.)

Company E, based in Pendleton, Calif., is part of a battalion that has a storied history. The Magnificent Bastards, as they are affectionately known, are famous for their fighting spirit and resourcefulness during trying times.

The six months of 2004 Company E spent trying to quell the insurgency in Ramadi certainly qualifies as a trying time. The company's casualty rate is the highest in Iraq. One-third of its 185 soldiers were either killed or wounded.

The Marines in Moss' account tell of being lethally short on armor, manpower and even accurate maps. One Pentagon observer who studied conditions for Marines in Iraq says, "It was pitiful. Everything was just slapped on armor, just homemade, not armor that was given to us through the normal logistical system."

Still, these brave Marines soldiered on, engaging in 26 firefights and defending against almost 100 mortar attacks.

Capt. Kelly D. Royer commanded Company E during its time in Ramadi. Speaking of the sacrifices of his Marines, he said, "I'm thinking we have our most precious resource engaged in combat, and certainly the wealth of our nation can provide young, selfless men with what they need to accomplish their mission. That's an erudite way of putting it. I have a much more guttural response that I won't give you."

We can just imagine some of the colorful language this captain might use in describing the careless treatment of "our most precious resource."

We would no more blame him for feeling abandoned by America's civilian leadership than we would troops in Vietnam who felt the same way 30 years ago.

While the exploits in Iraq of Company E are famous among the armed services, we should remember those Marines are not alone. Thousands of other GIs in Iraq face the same tough odds with inadequate armor and short supplies. We are inspired by the bravery, by their service to the United States. They are owed our respect and our gratitude.

All the while, the military's civilian leadership, including the Defense Department and the White House PR agents, have done their best to play down flaws and shortcomings in their Iraq plans. That is both a shame and sad proof that there are still lessons to be learned from Vietnam.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Marine can't shake haunting memory of his last mission
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By Alex Fryer
Seattle Times staff reporter

On this day three decades ago, Earl Burks was a 21-year-old Marine crew chief in a helicopter flying over Saigon, a "balcony seat," he said, to the chaos of the Vietnam War's last hours.

Although his chopper wasn't the last to evacuate the U.S. Embassy, Burks claims it was the last to leave South Vietnam. And he marked the occasion that day with a simple gesture.

As the Vietnamese coastline receded, Burks looked out his CH-46 Sea Knight, raised his hand, and waved goodbye to the 58,000 American dead and missing.

"Somebody should have said a prayer or something. All I did was wave," said Burks, 50, now a Tacoma longshoreman. "It was just a thing I had to do. It was for all the ma's and pa's. Nobody could wave that much."

Burks grows anxious each April, thinking about his Vietnam experiences. Others in his unit are proud of what they accomplished that day. Some don't think about it at all.

For the men involved in Operation Frequent Wind, the evacuation of Saigon ranges from a war story worth telling to a source of guilt to simply something to forget.

In that sense, the last day of April 1975 was much like the rest of the Vietnam War for thousands of combat veterans.

When Burks joined the Marines in 1972, Vietnam already seemed like ancient history.

As a boy, he had watched the fighting on the news. A year after he enlisted, the last American combat soldier left Vietnam. Nobody thought the Marines would go back in.

But when the South Vietnamese Army began to crumble in the spring of 1975, the Navy assembled five carrier battle groups near Saigon.

In late April 1975, U.S. planes evacuated 40,000 Americans and South Vietnamese refugees until mortars and rocket fire closed Tan Son Nhut airbase between April 28 and 29.

To rescue the last Americans at the U.S. Embassy, the military turned to helicopters, and initiated Operation Frequent Wind. It began with a command to the pilots aboard the carrier U.S.S. Hancock: "Gentlemen, start your engines." More than 80 helicopters took part.

On April 29, two pilots went missing after their Sea Knight crashed into the sea, but the mission was considered a huge success, as nearly 7,000 refugees and military personnel were removed to safety.

Braving rifle fire and mortar shots, the last 11 Marines were evacuated at 7:58 a.m. April 30.

Burks said his chopper was airborne when his crew heard over the radio that everyone was out of the embassy.

His aircraft was then ordered to search for the two missing Sea Knight pilots before returning to the carrier, Burks said.

Although they never found the men, Burks remembers seeing thousands of refugee boats fleeing the communists. And he realized then this may be the last combat mission of the war.

In his diary, Burks wrote:

"From deep inside me, I knew the only thing that I could do for my country and the souls that we were leaving behind and their families was to wave goodbye ... we are the most powerful country in the world and all I can do is wave goodbye."

After he left the Marines, Burks became a stand-up comic, touring the country and earning mentions in Rolling Stone and People magazines.

But he never forgot about Vietnam. He said he suffers from guilt, thinking about those who didn't make it, particularly the two dead pilots he searched for.

"I remember it like it was yesterday," he said. "Every April gets kind of weird."

Across the country, another helicopter vet remembers that day, too.

Chris Woods of Havelock, N.C., was crew chief on the helicopter credited with evacuating the last Marines from the embassy roof.

As the aircraft took off, "I remember having a conscious thought: 'This could be a historic moment,' " Woods said. "And then I didn't think about it for years."

In the 1990s, Woods, 53, began researching the mission and attending Marine reunions, sometimes pointing out that his chopper rightfully earned the distinction of being the last to leave the embassy.

"As the older we get, we're aware of our 15 minutes of fame," he said. "Like Earl Burks, this is my 15 minutes."

But for some helicopter crew members, there was neither fame nor shame in flying the last missions of the Vietnam War.

In an e-mail to Burks, a former comrade wrote: "It is amazing to me that you still are so interested in the Saigon thing. To me it was just what we needed to do at the time, and doesn't require any recognition beyond that."

Burks agreed that his participation in Operation Frequent Wind was "no big badge of honor."

But that day 30 years ago left him with an ache that hasn't diminished much over time.

"All I could do was wave. That's the thing that haunts me."

Alex Fryer: 206-464-8124 or afryer@seattletimes.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam anniversary stirs memories
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Saturday, April 30, 2005
The Journal Star

PEORIA - Bruce Thiemann remembers watching the last American helicopter leave what was known as Saigon 30 years ago today, marking a dramatic end to the Vietnam War.

He was sitting in a Carbondale bar, watching the news as the images flashed across the screen. He had served in Vietnam, spending a year with the 1st Air Calvary Regiment. He carries the emotion from that day with him now.

"I remember thinking, 'This isn't a good way to end a war.' We left all those good people who had helped us in limbo," the Peoria attorney said Friday afternoon.

The days leading up to April 30, 1975, were chaotic. For a week, frightened Saigon residents who had sided with the Americans were fanatically trying to escape the advancing North Vietnamese army. Many swarmed to the U.S. Embassy, where they gathered outside in hopes of getting a coveted seat to freedom.

For hours on April 30, helicopters landed on the embassy roof and took thousands to awaiting U.S. Navy ships. The crowd became more desperate and began to climb over the outer gates of the embassy, as the last copter left with nearly a dozen U.S. Marines.

"It was a black eye, and one of the saddest chapters in American history," said Thiemann, who was a door gunner of a UH-1 "Slick" helicopter from 1969 to 1970. "Before that, we had never left an ally like that to be overrun."

Hal Fritz of Peoria served from 1968 to April 1969 and was wounded twice in combat in Vietnam, earning a Purple Heart with Oak Leaf Cluster to go along with the Medal of Honor, a Silver Star and numerous other commendations.

He remembers watching the fall while stationed in Germany with the 11th Armored Calvary Regiment, the same unit he served with in Vietnam. For him, the end meant the United States had not been able to help the South Vietnamese achieve a lasting peace.

"We failed at our promise to help the Vietnamese people establish freedom in their country, and I wonder if we didn't do more harm than good," he said. "Those that were associated with the U.S. were slaughtered by the North Vietnamese."

Larry Evans, who flew Medevac, or "dust-off," missions from 1972 to 1973, just returned from a year tour in Iraq. He, too, remembers where he was when Saigon, now called Ho Chi Minh City, fell.

"I was in San Francisco in the airport," Evans said. "It was a very lousy feeling, horrible. I had a lot of friends who were killed there, and I saved a lot of lives, too.

"All that work - and that goes back to the 1950s - was all over now," he said. "The people we had supported lost."

Fritz says he can see some parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, namely that it is politicians, not the troops on the ground, who dictate what happens when.

"It's not the old veterans, but it's the young soldiers who face the fusillade of fire and died," Fritz said. "It's a terrible cost, but it's going to remain the cost that we have to pay if we are going to help a nation for being free, whether it succeeds or fails.

"There are going to be casualties, and it is going to be young men and women who are going to have to face the fire and bayonets of the enemy," he said.

Both Evans and Thiemann dropped out of college and enlisted. They say they are proud of their service and what they accomplished there.

Theimann points to those Vietnamese who made it to the United States and credits the military for giving those fortunate few a taste of America.

Evans says he doesn't dwell or live in the past, but notes the military remains the strong and effective force it was 30 years ago.

None of the men say they are going to do anything special today. Thiemann's hunting for morel mushrooms. But the memories of Vietnam and the image of those helicopters remain strong.

"It means as much to me now as it did then," Evans said.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Changed by war, veterans carry on
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By Sandra Tolliver
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Saturday, April 30, 2005

They are husbands, fathers, sons and brothers.

They often are businessmen, pondering retirement or already retired.

They live and work in communities with no outward display of their past as young servicemen in Vietnam.

Thirty years ago today, the war that shaped their lives ended with a televised Air America helicopter pushoff from the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Vietnam veterans aren't likely to mark the anniversary.

"It's complicated, like most things," said psychologist Dave McPeak of his memories and those of the veterans he sees at the Department of Veterans Affairs Vet Center in Green Tree.

"The thing about this anniversary, it's not much for us," McPeak said. "I was home for seven years when this happened. It was no big deal to me because it was an inevitability."

McPeak, 57, of Baldwin Township, was a 20-year-old Marine corporal when he left Vietnam in July 1968. "War makes you different," he said. "You're changed forever."

"I think the experience shaped everybody's lives in many ways," said Fred Sargent, CEO of Sargent Electric in the Strip District, who enlisted at 24 and served as a platoon leader in the Army's 11th Armored Cavalry from 1968 until he was shot in an ambush in 1969.

"There's a case to be made that capitalism is what it is today in no small part because of the war," said Sargent, 60, a Silver Star recipient.

An estimated 2.7 million Americans served in uniform in Vietnam from 1964 to 1975, including 370,400 Pennsylvanians. More than 58,000 Americans were killed in Vietnam, and 304,000 were wounded. Pennsylvania ranked fourth in the nation with 3,142 casualties.

Many troops went overseas to fight a cause they believed in and returned, unpopular, to a public hostile to them and the war. Still, 91 percent of Vietnam veterans are glad they served, and 74 percent would do so again, according to Veterans Affairs surveys.

Studies show 85 percent of Vietnam veterans made successful transitions to civilian life. They have a lower unemployment rate than non-vets of the same age groups.

Mike Hepler, 56, of Richland, said his service as a staff sergeant in the Army's 1st Cavalry gave him maturity to deal with challenges throughout life. Hepler still has a bullet in his neck as a painful reminder of his year in Vietnam, but he doesn't dwell on it. His war experience made him a better person, he said.

"The experiences you gain in combat, a lot of those are transferable to civilian life," said Hepler, director of the Boys & Girls Club of Western Pennsylvania, who has five medals: a Purple Heart, a Silver Star, two Bronze Stars and a Vietnamese Cross of Galantry. "There's certain people you know you can depend on to help you through situations. I never look back; that's one thing you learn."

Many of the vets are committed to helping others, in part because of their war experiences.

"Most of us really went over there wanting to help," said Dan Pultz, 63, of the North Side, a Marine captain in Vietnam from December 1966 to February 1968. In 1973, after returning to Pittsburgh, he started the technology company NetTec Services that today employs 20 people.

Pultz is among a dozen Vietnam veterans involved in a local group, Friends of Da Nang. They have raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to build seven schools and a medical clinic in Vietnam. Their current goal is to raise $196,000 to buy prosthetic devices for the 1,300 children in Da Nang who have lost limbs from disease and accidents.

"It's certainly an extension of caring about Vietnam and the Vietnamese people," Pultz said. "Initially that care was acted out by being in the Marine Corps and trying to have a free South Vietnam. When it didn't work out that way, that desire to help never ended."

Tony Accamando, of Eighty Four, Washington County, formed Friends of Da Nang with his friend, George D'Angelo, of Bethel Park, after the two returned to Vietnam in 1997, curious to see how the country had changed.

"I just wanted to see the country at peace," he said. "The Vietnamese love Americans, which is pretty hard to understand because of all the conflict. But that's all behind them."

Accamando and others in the group have since returned three times to dedicate structures they helped to build.

"We are commemorating reconciliation almost on a daily basis," said Accamando, 61, a retired vice president of Adelphia cable who left Vietnam in January 1968 as a first lieutenant in the Army.

D'Angelo, 61, who also served overseas in 1967-68, retired as an Air Force colonel after nearly 20 years in the military. He later worked for the United Nations in New York, and for a time owned a health food store. Today, he said, "everything I do is dedicated toward international peace."

"People have to work for (peace), otherwise it won't come about," D'Angelo said. "When I went to Vietnam, I thought it was the right thing. I went in before the big introspection. I might have looked at it differently had I been (there) four years later. I look at it differently now."

Dr. Ed Kelly, of Mt. Lebanon, who retired this week from his South Hills orthopedic practice, grapples with his war memories. A Navy lieutenant, Kelly treated casualties in a MASH unit with the Marines' 3rd Medical Battalion for 13 months after he arrived in Vietnam in July 1968.

"I still have very vivid memories," said Kelly, who is glad that he returned to Vietnam last year with D'Angelo and Accamando. He acknowledges he still hasn't conclusively dealt with the massive loss of young lives he witnessed while overseas.

"I consider myself over it, but I still read (about Vietnam)," he said. "It's still a big part of me."

Many Vietnam veterans are pleased to see the applause troops today receive upon their return from Iraq. Of all the bumper stickers spawned by today's war, Accamando likes his the best: "Home of the free because of the brave."

"War is never pleasant," Accamando said. "I know some people say war is not the answer, but sometimes it is. We held off communism for 10 years, and in that particular setting it was very much alive.

"Who knows where the world would be if we had not stood our ground."

Sandra Tolliver can be reached at stolliver@tribweb.com or (412) 320-7840.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

War through the eyes of a child
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By Jason Foster
The Herald, Rock Hill, SC
April 30, 2005

Her country was in chaos. This was obvious even to a 6-year-old.

It was April 1975, and the war that ravaged Vietnam for a decade was coming to an end. There was really no winner.

Today, the world commemorates the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and the end of American involvement in the war.

Teresa Hoang of Rock Hill witnessed the turmoil as her family sought refuge from the death and destruction.

On April 30, 1975, North Vietnam forces rolled into the former U.S.-backed capital of South Vietnam, crashing tanks through the gates of the Presidential Palace and broadcasting the surrender of President Duong Van Minh Minh over national radio. By that time, the war had already claimed the lives of more than 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese. The average age of U.S. servicemen was 19, but servicemen as young as 17 died in the conflict.

"All I knew was that my parents told me we had to run for shelter, because it wasn't safe in the village where we lived," recalls Hoang, now 36.

Her family lived in the coastal village of Binh Tuy, about 90 miles southeast of Saigon. For about a week leading up to the fall of the capital, Hoang said, Vietnamese citizens sensed the enormity of the situation.

"Everybody knew it was coming," she said.

That's about when pandemonium set in. Villagers had to decide whether to stay in their homes and risk injury or death, or leave everything behind.

"Kind of like running from a hurricane," is how Hoang remembers it.

Her father, a fisherman, decided to move the family to what he thought would be a safer place. But there weren't any safer places.

As the war reached its climax, Hoang saw things children shouldn't. Shootings. Explosions. Sheer terror.

"I saw some pretty scary stuff," she said. "It was chaos."

As Saigon fell, a rear guard of 11 U.S. Marines -- their escape covered by tear gas and smoke grenades -- jumped aboard a U.S. helicopter and were the last American troops to leave Vietnam. The last two Americans killed on Vietnamese territory were Marine Cpls. Charles McMahon Jr., 21, of Woburn, Mass., and Darwin Judge, 19, of Marshalltown, Iowa, who died in a three-hour rocket and artillery attack on Tan Son Nhat Air Base. A massive airlift by U.S. Marines and Air Force helicopters transported more than 1,000 American civilians and about 7,000 South Vietnamese refugees out of Saigon during an 18-hour span, according to PBS.org.

Hoang's family didn't leave Vietnam immediately. After U.S. forces pulled out, the family returned to its village. It would be three years before they made their escape. But it wasn't without fear or risk.

The ruling communists wouldn't allow anyone to leave the country.

"Anybody who left the country, they would consider that violating the law," Hoang said.

She once saw a group that was caught trying to leave. The communists brought them back to a village and made everyone watch as they were executed.

"They said, 'This is what you get if you leave the country,'" Hoang said.

A short time later, her family made their escape anyway. One day, her father the fisherman went out to sea and arranged for another boat to secretly bring the family out to meet him. Hoang remembers hiding on the boat and being afraid.

Eventually, they arrived safely at a refugee camp in Malaysia, where they lived for nine months before being sponsored to come to the United States by a church in Minnesota. From there, the family eventually made its way to Mississippi, and Hoang moved to South Carolina in 1988.

She works in the engineering department of a Fort Mill company that makes bearings for cars, tractors and other vehicles.

Military records show that 896 South Carolinians died in the conflict. There were 32 military personnel from York County who died, with 14 of those coming from Rock Hill. The war dead from Chester and Lancaster each numbered eight. The U.S. military still lists more than 1,800 Americans as missing in action from the war.

Hoang has only memories of her childhood in Vietnam. Having left everything behind in 1978, Hoang doesn't even have childhood photos.

In the 27 years since leaving her homeland, Hoang hasn't returned. But she wants to, as soon as she saves enough money.

But she'll never forget her roots. She still feels a part of the culture and wants to educate others about it.

To that end, she leads a program at St. Anne Catholic Church to teach the Vietnamese language and culture to children.

"One of my dreams is to preserve this culture," she said. "I love my country."

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vista man last U.S. soldier to escape fall of Saigon
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By: TERI FIGUEROA - Staff Writer

His were the last American boots to leave the ground that day, the last pair of military feet to scramble aboard the last American helicopter out of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

And as the mechanical bird finally headed out of war-ravaged Vietnam, John Valdez looked down at the place he had just left, the U.S. embassy at Saigon. Some people were looting the building. Others just sat, talking. A few raised their heads to watch the American military fly away.

Some 58,000 Americans and thousands more Vietnamese had died down there, on the land his feet had last touched. The toll of more than a decade of fighting had reached from the jungles of Vietnam to the living rooms and funeral homes of America, sparking an anti-war movement and dividing the nation.

Valdez, then a 37-year-old master sergeant in the Marines and a guard at the embassy in Saigon, had a number of friends die on that ground, including the last two Americans killed in the war.

And, 30 years ago today, as North Vietnamese tanks rolled toward what was then Saigon, Valdez knew it was all over.

Today, the 67-year-old Valdez lives in Vista, in the same home he bought three years after leaving Saigon, which is now Ho Chi Minh City.

He's retired now, after a 30-year career in the Marines. He takes classes at MiraCosta and Palomar colleges. Passing him on the street or in the grocery store, many would never know his role that fateful day 30 years ago.

Pressing the embassy

A week before the city fell to the North Vietnamese, Valdez ordered the 52 Marines under his command to move out of their quarters in the city and into the embassy in downtown Saigon. They slept on cots.

Within days, Valdez said, South Vietnamese people desperate for help, desperate to get out of the country before they were overrun by the army from the north, flocked to the gates of the American embassy.

"It was crowds and confusion," remembered Valdez. The people at the gates weren't dangerous. But they were desperate.

Soon, the crowd was crushing into the gates of the walled embassy. Infantry Marines, brought in to help, took to the top of the wall to hold them off. Children were lifted to the top of the throng as parents begged the troops to take the little ones, to get them on a flight out.

"The kids were getting crushed," Valdez recalls. "They are handing kids over to you and you know you can't take them. It was a real tear-jerker."

Only the "at-risk" Vietnamese, those who had helped the Americans, could come over the wall. Valdez said he lifted eight or 10 of them over.

Meanwhile, at Tan Son Nhut air base six miles away, Americans and selected South Vietnamese people were flying out of the country.

Valdez sent about 20 Marines to help. In the early morning hours of April 29, 1975, in the darkness, two of them died.

Cpl. Charles McMahon Jr. and Lance Cpl. Darwin Judge were the last two American military deaths in Vietnam from enemy fire.

Judge had arrived at the embassy about six weeks earlier; McMahon had been there only a week.

Valdez sent them to the air base, figuring it to be the safest spot for rookies.

Random rocket launches by the North Vietnamese killed the two Marines with a hit to the closest Marine post to the main gate at Tan Son Nhut. A direct hit.

The shelling at the air base made airplane evacuations no longer an option. The operation shifted to the sprawling embassy compound.

American helicopters were landing at the embassy, the smaller ones on the roof, the larger ones in the courtyard. Waves of choppers. Hovering, loading. Thousands boarded and flew off to waiting American ships.

"I don't think we were scared," Valdez said. "Your blood is pumping, you are excited."

It was just before dawn on April 30, 1975, when Valdez got the word from his superior officer: That's it. No more people. Leave.

The Marines at the gates and at the walls formed three groups into sort of a semicircle, faced the crowd, and inched back toward the embassy. The goal: button up the building, get to the roof, hop into a helicopter.

They backed up 400 yards. The first line of Marines slipped inside the embassy doors. The second went in. By the time the third group of Marines were backing up, the crowds became clued in.

"They started flooding the gates," Valdez remembers. "We had to push them and shove them so we could close the (embassy) doors."

The Marines who made up the third semicircle, including Valdez, fought off the clawing hands of the people who had jumped the embassy walls and dashed to the doors.

Push. Shove. Slam. They shut the door. Thump. The troops banged down the wooden bar designed to barricade the doors. Clang. Down they dropped the metal gate inside.

Some of the Marines then sped to the elevators to lock them up, freeze them on the sixth floor. Other Marines clambered up the stairs to the top of the six-story building. Valdez took the steps, he and his buddies stopping to slam shut and lock the metal grill gates that stood on every other floor in the stairwells.

There they were. On the roof, 150 or so Marines.

Soon, Valdez heard a crash below and peeked over the edge. Desperate South Vietnamese had rammed a firetruck through the doors of the embassy's lobby.

Somehow, the panicked crowd had clawed its way up the stairwell and entered the incinerator room on the top floor. The last room to the roof.

Valdez said 30, maybe 40 Vietnamese could be seen through the door's small window. He stationed an armed guard at the roof door. No one tried to enter.

In waves of 20 or so, the Marines hopped into the helicopters as they came. The South Vietnamese in the incinerator room must have heard them, Valdez said.

Finally, just 11 men remained on the roof top.

And then, nothing.

Long, anxious minutes followed, the 11 men peering into the sky for puffs, tell-tale smoke from a helicopter coming to whisk them away.

Until then, the choppers had come back and forth from the American ships pretty constantly, every half hour or so, hovering, landing in the embassy courtyard or on the rooftop, filling with evacuees.

But now, near silence. Half an hour passed. Then another. And another.

"We were getting pretty itchy," Valdez said. "We went into our own thoughts. It was quiet, except for the cowboy shooting."

Cowboy shooting was the random shots fired into the air by South Vietnamese on the ground.

Valdez never doubted the chopper was coming. But what went through his mind, what thoughts came as he awaited rescue?

"My sweet butt getting the heck out of there," Valdez said.

He thought of the horrors of being captured by the enemy. He thought of McMahon, of Judge. He could see the shelling at the airstrip again, and worried that the rockets might get turned in the direction of the embassy.

"We were sitting ducks up there," Valdez said.

Then they saw it. Puffs in the distance, drawing closer. The rescue helicopter.

Valdez told the Marine guarding the roof door to make three or four passes by the door while everyone else hopped on board. Then, he told the Marine, run and jump on.

Valdez made sure everyone was on, then he scrambled aboard.

The ramp to the helicopter was still open as they lifted off. Someone told the Marines to get rid of their smoke grenades before leaving. But one of the Marines had pulled the pin before tossing his ---- a bad move. The churning blades sucked the smoke into the chopper, blinding the pilot.

The helicopter had to land on the roof. Within seconds, the smoke cleared, and the bird lifted off. It was 7:53 a.m.

On the way to the ship, the USS Okinawa, the gas light came on. But soon, the crew chugged the chopper onto the ship.

After 70 hours, Valdez finally slept.

Today, 30 years later, Valdez heads the association of Marine security guards who were at the embassy those final two days, some with him on the roof that last day.

By Valdez's count, 84 Marines qualify for membership in the association. Two of them ---- Judge and McMahon ---- died in Vietnam. In the years that followed, 10 others, including two who were on that final flight out, have passed away.

The Fall of Saigon Marine Association is meeting in Quantico, Va., this weekend to mark the 30th anniversary of the evacuation.

Valdez said about 50 of the association's members will attend the reunion.

"This," Valdez said, "is the very first time that we are going to get together since the evacuation."

Contact staff writer Teri Figueroa at (760) 740-3517 or tfigueroa@nctimes.com.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Veterans, refugees have mixed feelings
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By Emil Guillermo
Record Staff Writer
Published Saturday, April 30, 2005

Mai To got his wife and three children out.

But Kha Le and his family didn't. Not by April 30, 1975, the day South Vietnam surrendered to North Vietnam, ending the conflict that divided two nations.

The surrender marked the end of a conflict that dated back to 1954, one that claimed more than 58,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.

For the more than 8,000 Vietnamese and Vietnamese Americans now in Stockton, the feelings surrounding April 30 are mixed. Many in the younger generation show only passing interest in history, while an older generation struggles with the memories.

"After 30 years, I don't feel anything like before when I was young," said Mai To, 74, who climbed the ranks from a combat grunt to colonel in the South Vietnamese Armed Forces.

He was angry and scared back then. He saw the North's invasion in 1975 as a fight to the death.

"We knew if we don't fight, we'd get killed anyway," he said in his north Stockton home, where he sat next to a life-sized Buddha made of dark rosewood. "We're in the army, and have ideals. We don't want to give in to communism."

There will be no celebration of the fall of Saigon, renamed Ho Chi Minh City, at Stockton's Karl Ross Post 16, said Tino Adame, the Vietnam veteran who commands the American Legion post.

"The 30th is for the Vietnamese, not the vets," he said.

Adame, now 58, enlisted in the Marines in 1966. He was 19 years old. Stationed for two years in Quang-Tri province, he returned home to demonstrations in 1968. Thirty years ago, all he felt was anger.

"For the government to just pull out was a slap in the face to a lot of veterans," Adame said. "Why go in there and spend money, waste a lot of people's lives, just to pull out?

"Today is really about the refugee," he added. "I'd rather not think about it."

Though a refugee, To's evacuation was relatively easy.

On April 27, 1975, he got his wife and three young children on a transport plane from Saigon to America. On April 29, To left Vietnam on the last military ship. An estimated 150,000 refugees left by that date, according to Vietnamese American Heritage Foundation in Texas.

The To family was reunited 45 days later at Camp Pendleton in California. The fighter in To still regrets the end.

"Of course, anybody leaving his country has regrets," he said. "But we have no choice."

After leaving Camp Pendleton, the family moved to Roseville, then Stockton in 1981. All became naturalized U.S. citizens by 1992. To retired after 16 years working for San Joaquin County. He says his successful children are his wealth. His youngest son, Brian, lives and works as an engineer in Stockton.

Brian To, 40, remembers his flight to freedom as a normal one. He was 9 years old.

"We just boarded a military flight," he said. "They said we were going on a trip."

He doesn't celebrate the day. But he has an understanding of what that trip meant to his life.

"I see now I was very fortunate," he said. "We were able to get out of harm's way. ... There was no hardship. No danger."

The road to freedom was harder for restaurant owner Kha Le and his family.

On the March 1975 day they were ready to leave Vietnam, their home came under attack.

"We had rockets all day," Tina Le said. "The plane can't take off. We're stuck."

Kha, who worked at the U.S. airport loading jets with napalm bombs, was arrested and spent two months in a re-education camp. After his release, he plotted the family's escape.

For two years, Kha Le repeatedly took his family to the beach so they would know how to swim. In 1977, the family escaped to China on a 16-foot bamboo boat. Ten adults and 13 children huddled together on the boat, knees to their chests. They were part of a second wave of 150,000 refugees who left by boat before1978.

"I prayed so much," Tina Le, now 58, said.

"To Buddha, to God," Kha Le, 63, said.

The 12-day trip put them on the high seas for the first six days. They were lost and encountered a storm. Then the boat hit something big.

"It was two whales," Tina Le said. "They were on both sides of the boat."

The whales escorted the boat to China. Eventually the family made it to Hong Kong, immigrating to San Francisco in late 1977. They were among the lucky ones. According to U.S. estimates, about 700,000 Vietnamese escapees perished at sea between 1978-1982.

Kelly Le, one of the Le's six kids, doesn't remember the whales. Then 8, she was seasick or sleeping the whole time, she said.

"I remember being surrounded by water," said Kelly Le, now 37 and a U.S. citizen who lives in Sacramento.

As a child, she had flashbacks, she said.

"Sometimes when I think of scary things like that, I just want to forget," she said. But she hasn't lost an appreciation for her mom and dad. "I try to imagine just being them. There's no way. They had guts. The whole family could have been lost at sea."

She went back to Vietnam for a visit in 2000.

"I felt like a foreigner," she said.

Today there are more than 1.2 million Vietnamese Americans, according to the California Department of Finance.

Officials with the Vietnamese Heritage Foundation said the creation of a free Vietnamese-American community and the accomplishments of professionals such as Kelly Le and Brian To and their children are the most positive outcomes of April 30, 1975.

It's what the foundation hopes will help people move forward and not dwell on the past.

Mai To, the former colonel who became a U.S. citizen in 1991, stared at a bamboo etching in his living room, a symbol of his former home in war-torn Vietnam.

"I'm an American now," To said. "More or less."

To reach Emil Guillermo, phone (209) 546-8294 or e-mail eguiller@recordnet.com">eguiller@recordnet.com

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam: The lost generation
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By Henry Fredrick and Danielle Drolet
The Taunton Gazette
04/30/2005


Who could forget the image of a desperate South Vietnamese man being knocked off the last of the American choppers as the Viet Cong smashed through the fallen city and headed toward the American embassy with the world's most powerful nation reeling from political scandal at home finally bailing out.


It was a war in a far away place few Americans understood or wanted.


From the turbulent 1960s with the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the demonstrations on college campuses and even public schools, like the one at the Taunton High School in May 1970, would lead to bloodshed on American soil at Kent State University. Later a disgraced Richard Nixon would be forced out amid Watergate impeachment carried live on television in the afternoon and newsman Walter Cronkite's body counts at night.


And then as the last of the 58,000 Americans to lose their lives as the choppers loaded American personnel and terrified Vietnamese lucky to board, the fall of Saigon became the final chapter in American history where losing a war remains hard to swallow 30 years later.


It's been 34 years since Taunton resident Dennis Proulx, 55, a former Army reservist, left Vietnam, while servicemen were coming home in body bags.


He said the 30th anniversary of the fall of Saigon just gives him more of a reason to remember and honor those lives that were lost.


"Most veterans will tell you to remember those who died and were wounded," he said.


Proulx, stationed in the Central highlands of Vietnam from February 1970 to April 1971, and his unit lived among an indigenous group of original settlers - Montagnards.


"I remember the little boys from the villages who would get us corn," he said.


The tribal peoples, Proulx said are still being persecuted, today by the communist government.


When he came back home, he said it was like entering into another battle.


"We had many enemies when we came back home," he said. "We had a lot of enemies while we were there; the Vietcong, at home and in our minds."


Many veterans like Proulx feel like they are part of the Vietnam era's lost generation - to this day finding it hard to be a part of something many Americans did not support.


"Lots of us went there as individuals - when we got back the World War II guys criticized us, saying you guys didn't win," he said.


Proulx, who is married, returned to his job at Reed & Barton as a master scheduler, where he still works today.


Though he and many of his friends who survived the war didn't receive a hero's welcome, Proulx said he is pleased American troops in Iraq are recipients of heroism and patriotism.


The Vietnam War and the Fall of Saigon, Proulx said were "big lessons" to the American people and the ways in which they treat the young me and women who risked their lives overseas for their country.


"I'm just glad that they don't take it out on the soldiers who come back from Iraq," he said.


Dighton resident Ron Naro cried when he heard the news of the Fall of Saigon.


"88,000 men for nothing," Naro said.


Naro was sent to a demilitarized zone 13 miles away from North Vietnam in 1964. He spent 18 months there as a U.S. Navy Seabee assigned to the Marines.


"I had never even heard of Vietnam," he said of the time, then just 19 years old.


Naro said he signed up because his parents couldn't afford him to go to college.


"You'd go to bed at night wondering if you'd see the morning and wake up in the morning wondering if you'd go to bed at night... It was hell. We're used to formal combat, not guerrilla warfare," Naro said.


When Naro came back home in 1968 he said, it didn't seem like the home he had left.


"The protesters were very hard to come back too," he said. "They didn't brief us before we came back about what was going on. We didn't know there were people against us back at home."


A welcome greeting turned into a chaotic scene. Protest signs read "Baby killer" as others threw garbage at them, when they got off their plane.


"We all couldn't wait to get out of our uniforms," he said. "You'd get mobbed if you were out there wearing a uniform."


Two days after his returned, he said the air strip they rebuilt in Vietnam was blown up.


"I felt lucky that I'd come home," he said.


A few decades later, Naro said he is still troubled by the war.


"I still get flashbacks and nightmares," he said.


After suffering a heart attack in recent years, Naro said he has gained much support from his wife of 15 years, Barbara, and his 11-year-old son, Nicholas. He also has two children from a previous marriage who live in New Jersey.


Before being forced to retire on disability, he was CEO of a collection agency in Boston and joined the VFW in 1998.


Naro said it was a very saddening experience when he brought his son to see a piece of The Healing Wall, of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial went it was in Dartmouth.


"When they dedicated that wall... it just tears me up," he said.


Naro said his son made rubbings of the soldiers he knew.


"I got emotional," Naro said. "[Nicholas] didn't understand. I told him daddy got hurt, but he's okay now."


Naro's favorite song while in Vietnam: The Animals' "We gotta get out of this place."


Ellie

[thedrifter]

'NAM: WHAT WE WON

By THOMAS H. LIPSCOMB

April 30, 2005 -- THE spectacular fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, 30 years ago, had Americans glued to their television sets. Millions watched as long lines snaked up stairs at the American Embassy waiting to be rescued by the U.S. military.
It had been barely 10 years since the first U.S. Marine combat troops arrived in Vietnam at Danang. That decade had been punctuated by premature proclamations of victory, promises of "light at the end of the tunnel" and a Tet offensive that effectively destroyed the Viet Cong, but remained a potent Communist propaganda coup in Western media.

"Vietnamization" finally removed almost all America combat troops from Vietnam more than a year before the fall of Saigon. But by then many Americans felt so whip lashed by media accounts of a war they didn't understand they accepted the fall of Saigon as the final humiliating proof of an American defeat.

As the years passed, a collection of myths accrued that today are regarded by many as historical fact. It is time to reexamine them.

There may be good reason to do so since Edward Kennedy, John Kerry and others repeatedly warn there is an imminent danger that America's attempt to liberate Iraq may become "another Vietnam."

As "everyone knows" today, Vietnam was a war in which the lives of Americans drafted from the lower classes, disproportionately black and Hispanic, were wasted in a failed American intervention in what was basically a civil war between Vietnamese.

Except, as a former Secretary of the Navy who served in Vietnam as a Marine officer, James Webb, has pointed out, 67 percent of those who served and 73 percent of those who died in Vietnam were volunteers, not draftees. And blacks "comprised 13.1 percent of the serving age group, 12.6 percent of the military and 12.2 percent of the casualties."

The "civil war between Vietnamese" is a misrepresentation of the Geneva Agreement of 1954. Among other things, it negotiated the removal of the French colonial power and separated North and South Vietnam at the 17th parallel, pending a popular election to be held in 1956 to determine a single government for them both. Neither South Vietnam nor the United States were signatories to the treaty. The majority of the population remained in the Communist North, even after more than a million fled to South Vietnam.

In anticipation of the election, The New York Times in 1955 stated "we must not be trapped into a fictitious legalism that can condemn 10,000,000 potentially free persons into slavery." And Sen. John Kennedy regarded the election as "obviously stacked and subverted in advance."

When the vote didn't take place, the Vietnam War began with the late-'50s return of Communist cadres to what had become South Vietnam. The "National Liberation Front" — better known as the Viet Cong — was sent to create an insurgency against the Diem government. The NLF was not an independent political movement of South Vietnamese. Said an editor of the official North Vietnamese People's Daily, "It was set up by our Communist Party."

So this was no civil war. North Vietnam began and supported a campaign of Viet Cong subversion of its sovereign southern neighbor, and after the destruction of the Viet Cong at Tet in 1968 intervened directly with its own military.

But, after 9 million men and women had served in the U.S. armed forces and more than 60,000 American soldiers died, South Vietnam still ended up as part of the North Vietnamese totalitarian state. So what could it have been but U.S. defeat?

John Foster Dulles, Eisenhower's Secretary of State, so mocked to this day for his "domino theory," gave a perfectly logical answer to that question years before American forces had even begun a role in Vietnam.

Prior to the Geneva Agreement in 1954, Dulles was asked if the new Southeast Asia Treaty Organization was designed to solve the Indochina problem after the French evacuation or the problems of Asia? Dulles replied: "The purpose . . . is to save Southeast Asia, to save all of Southeast Asia if it can be saved; if not to save essential parts of it . . . then the 'domino theory,' so-called, ceases to apply."

The object of U.S. action in South Vietnam was to stabilize Asia in general and Southeast Asia in particular. At the time, Asia was anything but stable. The former British colonies Malaysia and Singapore were under siege by Communist guerillas. The No. 2 political party in India was the growing Communist party, and Pakistan and India were still at one another's throats. Taiwan expected an assault from Red China at any moment. And China itself was suffering from Mao's "Great Leap Forward" industrialization that led to a famine that killed more than 30 million.

Indonesia under Sukarno was headed toward a "year of living dangerously" showdown with a large Communist insurgency led by overseas Chinese. The Philippines continued to have a problem with its Communist Huk rebellion. And the Korean War had ended less than a year before Dulles's statement.

Dulles wanted to save "essential parts" of Asia. America understood at the outset that it was unlikely to save all of it. And America succeeded brilliantly, both for its own interests and Asia's. It may have lost Vietnam and been unable to stop the Communist takeover that led to the death of a quarter of Cambodians in the "killing fields." But the dominos did not fall.

Only four years later, in 1979, American trade with Asia had surpassed trade with Europe. And now, 30 years later, the new "Asian tigers" have standards of living and booming economies that would astonish an old Asia hand like Dulles.

Asian prosperity is the wonder of the 21st century and particularly valuable to U.S. trade at a time when the stagnant European Union is becoming an increasing problem. And in this brilliant company of Asian states, full partners in the global economy, the People's Republic of Vietnam remains mired in irrelevancy.

America may have lost a tactical intervention in Vietnam, but the strategic consequences of that intervention were part of one of the most masterful exercises in foreign policy in modern history.

The Middle East and the United States should be so lucky as to have Iraq turn out to be "another Vietnam."

Thomas H. Lipscomb served as N.Y.chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Leadership Program.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Papers reveal U.S. intelligence on Vietnam

By KATHERINE SHRADER
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

WASHINGTON -- A 1967 memo on Vietnam, delivered to then-President Johnson in a sealed envelope, eerily foretold what happened in Saigon nearly eight years later.

"There could be a spectacle of panic flight from the country ... and Communist terror and vengeance," said the CIA memo.

The scenario was laid out in one of 174 intelligence documents released by the government Friday, a day before the 30th anniversary of Saigon's fall.

The documents spanning from 1948 to 1975 show where the spy community got it right - and wrong - on Vietnam.

"Implications of an unfavorable outcome in Vietnam," the 1967 memo was entitled.

But even that worst-case scenario envisioned a better outcome than what actually occurred. It assumed a negotiated settlement that favored the North, and called a possible political and military collapse an "entirely implausible hypothesis."

The 1967 memo also bluntly stated what some historians have viewed as one of the central lessons of Vietnam, which still echoes today: that such a loss would demonstrate that the United States "cannot crush a revolutionary movement which is sufficiently large, dedicated, competent, and well-supported."

"In a narrow sense," it added, "this means more simply that the structure of U.S. military power is ill-suited to cope with guerrilla warfare waged by a determined, resourceful, and politically astute opponent."

In an introduction to the compilation of documents, Lloyd Gardner, a Rutgers University history professor, said the intelligence papers lay out the "convictions and doubts of the intelligence community" as they changed over time.

"They are often ahead of the curve and occasionally lag behind the pace of events," said Gardner, a specialist on the Vietnam War.

The documents were released by the National Intelligence Council, the government's leading analysts who coordinate the judgments of the various intelligence agencies and provide them to policy-makers.

They come on the eve of the 30th anniversary of the April 30, 1975, fall of Saigon to communist troops, ending the Vietnam War. All but a small number of Americans were evacuated a few days earlier, along with U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin.

In one estimate from April 1963, intelligence analysts saw "some promise" for political stability. But weeks after the estimate argued that "communist progress has been blunted," Buddhist monks were protesting on street corners, in some cases setting themselves on fire. Americans watched from their television sets in horror.

The "political situation was literally set afire," Gardner wrote.

Only in the fine print of the 1963 document were doubts raised about the South Vietnamese government's ability to turn military success into security.

"Some areas of Viet Cong control, such as the Mekong delta, will be very difficult to pacify, decisive campaigns have yet to be fought, and no quick and easy end to the war is in sight," the assessment said.

Later, in July 1969, an assessment said that U.S. analysts believed "Hanoi has the capability to pursue this military course through 1970 at levels approximating those of the past 12 months." The war actually lasted another five years.

In the collection's final installment, dated March 1975, U.S. intelligence analysts said even if the ongoing North Vietnamese attack were blocked, the South Vietnamese government would find itself in control of very little.

The estimate "foresaw final defeat by early 1976, a prediction still too generous as it turned out," Gardner wrote.

---

Associated Press writers Matt Kelley, Mike Feinsilber and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.

---

On the Net: http://cia.gov/nic/NIC-foia-vietnam.html

Ellie

[thedrifter]

30 Years After War's End, U.S., Vietnam Focusing on Mutual Interests


By Donna Miles
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, April 29, 2005 – Thirty years ago tomorrow, the last U.S. helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, South Vietnam, marking the official end of the Vietnam War.

The decade-long conflict left 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese dead, and for the next two decades, relations between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam remained at an impasse.

But 30 years after the war's end, the two countries have reached an unprecedented level of cooperation, U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Michael Marine told participants at the March 17 Texas Tech 5th Triennial Vietnam Symposium in Lubbock, Texas.

This cooperation extends to security, trade and investment, health, education and culture.

Marine delivered his assessment two weeks before the frigate USS Gary arrived in Ho Chi Minh City for a five-day port call, the third Navy ship to visit Vietnam since the war's end.

The visit marked the 10th anniversary of the normalization of diplomatic relations between the two countries and a warming of military relations between the former foes.

"Now we must put aside the past, and I think we should look forward to the future," Vietnamese Col. Bui Van Nga told the Associated Press during the frigate's visit.

Marine said the United States and Vietnam are putting their differences aside to find common ground in a wide range of issues, including counterterrorism and regional stability.

"Vietnam and the United States stand together in opposition to the global scourge of terrorism," Marine said, noting that Vietnam has become an active participant in regional counterterrorism efforts.

Vietnam also shares U.S. opposition to the development and spread of weapons of mass destruction, he said.

As a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors, Vietnam has publicly called on North Korea to honor its commitment to give up its nuclear-weapons program. "This is of no small significance considering the traditionally close ties between Hanoi and Pyongyang," Marine said.

"Both countries (the United States and Vietnam) desire peace in the Asia-Pacific region and believe that there can be no economic growth and prosperity without a stable security environment," he said. The two countries also share a mutual interest in seeing that strong regional institutions address security challenges, such as international crime, drugs and environmental threats, he said.

A bilateral agreement signed by the two countries last year lends American expertise to Vietnamese law enforcement agents working to stem the flow of drugs into and through Vietnam, Marine said.

"We are hopeful that by building bridges this way, we will be able in the future to expand our cooperation to include more direct cooperative efforts to shut down drug traffickers and other criminal organizations," he said.

But as the two countries look toward a more cooperative future, Marine said, they're helping heal old wounds by working together to find answers to the fate of missing servicemembers in Vietnam, including 1,800 from the United States.

"As we mark the 30th anniversary of the end of the war, we must not forget those on both sides who made the ultimate sacrifice during the terrible conflict," he said. "The best way to do this is to remain steadfast in our efforts to achieve the fullest possible accounting of our missing personnel from the Indochina conflict."

Cooperation in this endeavor enabled the United States and Vietnam to move relations forward on other fronts and remain a top priority, he said.

Marine said he regularly urges the Vietnamese government to maintain its cooperation and to take concrete steps to allow full access to all archival records, renewed joint activities in the Central Highlands, and a concerted effort to conduct underwater activities.

"Right now, there are teams spread out across Vietnam conducting investigations and recovery activities," he said. He referred to five recovery teams, two research and investigative teams, and an investigation team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command that deployed to Vietnam in early March.

The Defense Department announced the most recent success in this effort April 12. Two Army officers missing from the Vietnam War since 1971, Col. Sheldon Burnett and Warrant Officer 3 Randolph Ard, were positively identified and their remains were returned to their families for burial.

Four former North Vietnamese soldiers were instrumental in identifying the site where the two officers' OH-58A Kiowa helicopter went down near the Laos border, defense officials said.

"I want to thank the dedicated men and women -- both American and Vietnamese -- who work so hard to find answers for the loved ones of these soldiers," Marine said of the overall POW/MIA recovery initiative.

As these efforts advance, Marine acknowledged, areas remain in which the United States and Vietnam still don't see eye-to-eye, including Vietnam's human rights record. He vowed that the United States would continue pushing Vietnam to improve on progress slowly being made.

But these differences aside, Marine said, the two countries have come a long way since the fall of Saigon 30 years ago and the reestablishment of diplomatic relations just a decade ago.

"When one considers how far apart the United States and Vietnam once were, how implacably against each other we were -- and it wasn't that long ago -- I believe it's a testament to the efforts in both countries to build bridges, foster communication, and create an atmosphere of trust and understanding," he said. "I can assure you that these efforts will continue."


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Young Marine guarded chaotic rooftop
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By M.S. Enkoji -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 am PDT Saturday, April 30, 2005

Marine Lance Cpl. Ken Crouse had often climbed to the roofs of the American Embassy compound to catch a breeze gliding by.

Now, six floors up, on the roof of the tallest building in Saigon, Crouse easily spotted incoming explosions flaring in the night at Tan Son Nhut air base. The United States had started evacuating American civilians and South Vietnamese refugees there.

"It was like a big fireball hitting, and I felt a sense of doom, my gosh, someone has been hurt," Crouse said.

Within minutes, a radio message confirmed the worst: two Marines in Crouse's guard detail, temporarily assigned to the air base, were dead. They were the last American soldiers to die in Vietnam.

At 19, the Woodland High School graduate already had served in Okinawa, but less than three months into his posting at the embassy in Saigon, he realized this would end differently, with nauseating haste.

By the time North Vietnamese forces surrounded Saigon and peppered the air with gunfire, the 43 Marine guards had abandoned their quarters several blocks from the embassy compound. Days blurred into nights as they worked a frenzied 24-hour schedule to strip the embassy.

"I lived on caffeine and hot chocolate," Crouse said.

Routinely assigned to the embassy's main gate, he was ordered to a room filled with file cabinets. "We were told to load the files on a pushcart, push it up to the roof and turn the stuff into powder," he said.

The names of South Vietnamese who had worked for the United States were in the files.

A giant shredding machine on the roof pulverized the files into paper ash blown into 55-gallon drums. When those were filled, the soldiers were told to let it blow off the roof.

As he worked, he couldn't hear or see beyond the block walls topped with concertina wire enclosing the compound. By now, thousands of Vietnamese clamored outside, arms outstretched toward the surest ride to freedom.

Once the bombing destroyed the airstrip for evacuations, the sky was lined with helicopters. Wave after wave touched down, first at the air base, then at the embassy - smaller CH-46s on rooftops; bigger CH-53s on the ground.

As the hours ticked down, Crouse channeled the stream of evacuees - Americans, French, South Vietnamese military families - into orderly huddles of up to three dozen on a rooftop of the compound, nudging them forward when the choppers touched down. For eight hours, as the panic-stricken milieu pressed around the compound, Crouse focused on those people.

Sometime in the early hours of April 30, the order came: Evacuate U.S. personnel only. The ambassador was gone. The only Americans left were Marines.

Crouse and his fellow Marines "buttoned down" the compound, barricaded entries, rolled down steel doors as they made their way to the roof for the last time. A full water truck crashed through into the compound, and Vietnamese flooded in. Marines dropped tear gas down stairwells behind them.

Crouse said he knew the intruders weren't the enemy, but he had orders: End the flow of refugees.

On the roof, the few dozen Marines waited. No more roar and whine from chopper blades.

"Part of the thing of being a young Marine is you really believe in your heart that everything will be fine," he said. "The entire Seventh Fleet was just off the coast a few miles. I was totally confident everything was going to be OK, we weren't going to be captured. We weren't going to be left behind."

The helicopters did come.

When it was his turn to lift off, Crouse - unshowered and sleepless for at least two days - looked down on a city under siege. Daybreak streaked the sky.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam veteran recalls service after long, cold war
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By JASMINE RANGEL
jrangel@lakecityreporter.com

Today marks 30 years.

On this day in 1975, the last 10 Marines were evacuated from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, ending the Vietnam War.

Fort White resident Bill Capwell remembers the day the war ended, but the memory now is bittersweet.

"It seemed to fall so fast when we were fighting for so long," he said.

Capwell served in Vietnam, along with several million other Americans. His memories from serving with the Marines are difficult to think about and still fresh in his mind.

In 1967, Capwell graduated high school in Rhode Island and enlisted. Following boot camp and infantry training, he was shipped out in October.

Being so young, Capwell said he was scared, because he didn't quite know what to expect. But the Marines "made a man out of me," Capwell said, and the brotherhood in the service was tight.

But after serving for nine months, he stepped on a mine.

Capwell then came back home, where Americans with anti-war attitudes were not always kind.

"It wasn't a nice time to be in the service," he said.

He was stationed for some time at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, but protesters were harsh there as well, and Capwell later began to use alcohol and other substances to combat difficult memories.

After three or four months, when it became too overwhelming, Capwell volunteered to go back.

"It seemed more normal over there than here," he said.

For his second tour of duty, Capwell was sent near the area in Vietnam where he had served before. This time, it seemed easier, because he was walking trails he had seen before and visiting villages for the second time.

During this time, the Tet Offensive, a major guerilla warfare campaign by North Vietnamese soldiers, had begun and the regular rules of warfare had changed.

Night was the worst.

This was when the Viet Cong like to be on the move, Capwell said, and, sometimes, when they would attack.

With the bad memories though, come some good. Community projects in Vietnamese villages were conducted, and these are recollections Capwell said helped balance the negative.

"It wasn't all combat, all the time," he said.

Capwell came back to the United States in 1970 and soon began a family. By the end of the war, in 1975, he had been married for three years. Capwell said his Vietnam experience aided the crumbling of his marriage, now over for 23 years.

"A lot of times I took the war home with me," he said.

Capwell has a daughter who serves in the Air Force in North Dakota, but he said he doesn't have much of a relationship with her.

The healing process began when Capwell began receiving treatment through Veterans Affairs. He has been treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and said Lake City's VA hospital has given him the best care.

"Lake City is about the best. This VA calls home and checks on you," he said. Capwell has called Columbia County home for eight years now and continues to receive treatment at the VA. He lives on 22 acres near Fort White, in what he calls "God's Country."

Being able to open up about his time in Vietnam was not an easy process for Capwell. Through counseling at the VA, he said it's gotten better, but loud noises still make him nervous and going to Memorial Day rallies are still hard to do.

"There are a lot of memories with the guys who didn't come back," Capwell said. "I have a lot of mixed emotions this time of year, with Memorial Day coming up."

The war in Iraq has been tough for Capwell to watch on television. He hopes soldiers serving now fare better than his comrades in Vietnam.

"I would like to see them come home safe," he said. "I hope democracy in the Middle East is achieved so they don't have the feeling they fought for nothing, because a lot of us in Vietnam had that feeling."

With time, Capwell believes things get better, as does talking about the bad memories.

"It took a long time for me to be proud to be a vet," Capwell said.

It's been 30 years, but Vietnam isn't over.

"The war is with me every day," Capwell said.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam Preps for War Anniversary
Saturday, April 30, 2005

HO CHI MINH CITY, Vietnam — Workers hung red national flags and set out blue Pepsi machines Friday ahead of celebrations for the 30th anniversary of the Vietnam War's (search) end, but the prime minister warned against letting memories of victory overshadow the country's economic problems.

In Hanoi, Premier Phan Van Khai (search) cautioned against complacency at a ceremony presided over by a giant golden bust of founding father Ho Chi Minh (search) and included costumed dancers who re-enacted the war on stage, miming the downing of U.S. warplanes and weeping over fallen comrades.

"Our people's victory in the resistance against the Americans for national salvation is forever written in our nation's history as one of the most glorious pages," Khai told politicians and generals from Vietnam's communist regime and foreign dignitaries, including U.S. Ambassador Michael W. Marine.

But, Khai added, the Vietnamese face many challenges and must "avoid self-satisfaction, and realize the weaknesses and challenges posed to us."

"The economy has not developed to match up with potential, is weak in efficiency and competition," he said. "Compared with countries in the region, we are still behind and have not been able to narrow the gap on economic development and technology. The danger of lagging further remains a major challenge."

An increasingly free enterprise economy has benefited people in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, but prosperity hasn't reached many others, particularly in rural areas. Worst off are the remote highlands of central and northern Vietnam where villagers eke out bare livings, with little access to health care or education.

Khai also spoke about reconciliation. "We advocate friendly cooperation to strengthen relations with countries that took part in the Vietnam War," he said.

"With our humanitarian spirit, we want to close the past and look to the future as regards those people who were in the other camp, whether they are in the country or abroad," he said. He referred to Vietnamese who fought for the former South Vietnam before the fall of its capital — Saigon, later renamed Ho Chi Minh City — on April 30, 1975.

The country's main celebration was set for Saturday on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City, which swarmed with workers all week putting up celebratory billboards, hanging Vietnam's red national flag with yellow star and building stages for performances. On Friday, workers hooked up soda machines along the route for Saturday's parade.

Authorities also began releasing prisoners across the country in a mass amnesty declared for the celebrations. Earlier in the week, officials said they would free a total of 7,820 inmates, including 16 political and religious dissidents who had been jailed for crimes against national security or causing social disorder.

Friday's ceremony in Hanoi focused on reminding Vietnamese of the sacrifices made in a decades-long struggle first against a colonial French regime and then U.S.-backed South Vietnam.

Among those at Ba Dinh Hall, home of the National Assembly, were Communist Party chief Nong Duc Manh, President Tran Duc Luong and the legendary Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap, who led communist forces during the long war.

During the decade of U.S. involvement, the war killed some 58,000 Americans and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese.

But the atmosphere three decades later is mostly festive. Memories of the war and its aftermath are little more than anecdotes in history books for the majority of the country's population that was born since communist tanks rolled into Saigon on a hot April day.

"I was born after the war so I only know it as part of history. But it was very important. It was the reunification of the country. It's a moment we can be proud of," said Ngo Thi Binh, 23, a student whose streaked hair is a hallmark of the postwar generation.

That sentiment was echoed by a worker helping with the last-minute touches along Le Duan Boulevard, where Saturday's main parade would pass the former Presidential Palace of South Vietnam.

"I was born the year the country was liberated," Tran Minh Thu Huong, 30, said as he put up posters. "I'm proud of the city, proud of Saigon."


Ellie

[thedrifter]

30 years after South Vietnam fell
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Published in the Home News Tribune 04/30/05
By RICK MALWITZ
STAFF WRITER

EAST BRUNSWICK - Jan Avery Elkins would never know he had a son. He would never know how his death in Vietnam would ruin his family. He would never know how the war turned out, how 30 years ago the United States would abandon Saigon, with American personnel and a few fortunate Vietnamese scrambling to the top of the American embassy to be airlifted to safety.

Jay Elkins, Jan's younger brother, has seen those familiar photos taken April 30, 1975.

But that date is not as significant as Oct. 26, 1968, the day Jan was killed in Vietnam.

"His death had a ripple effect that never really healed," said Jay Elkins, one of three surviving brothers. "We stopped functioning as a family after his death."

Elkins' parents never recovered from the shock. His mother, Joyce Elkins, died in

1980 at the age of 60. "She refused to take care of herself. She gave up on life after my brother died," said Jay Elkins.

Two months after his mother died, his father Julius died. Julius was raised an Orthodox Jew and could not cope with the loss of his firstborn son, according to Jay Elkins, who said he and his two surviving brothers are not particularly close today. He traces the fracturing of the family to his oldest brother's death.

When Elkins was killed in Vietnam his wife Steffanie was pregnant with their only child. Five months after her husband died she gave birth to Jan Avery Elkins II. She did not remarry, and would spend much of her adult life helping care for her father, who lived the last 17 years of his life with Lou Gehrig's disease.

Steffanie wonders what affect the war would have had on her husband, had he come home. "Would he have been the same husband I knew? What would the war have done to his mind? I'll never know."

In 1985, when the township named Elkins Road in Jan's honor, Jay talked of this in an interview in The Daily Home News of New Brunswick. "He was one of the thousands of unfortunate recruits who were to die in an unpopular war," he said.

"The effects on families are common in every war. But they seem even more tragic in an unpopular war," Jay Elkins said last week.

He recalled his father's reaction to the scenes of Americans fleeing Saigon 30 years ago this weekend. "He was glad America finally had a way out of an unproductive war. He wasn't happy to see how they were leaving, but he was glad no more Americans would be dying."

Steffanie Elkins, a history buff, is angry that the United States did not learn from the French failures in Vietnam in the early 1950s. "The French suckered us into fighting their war," she said last week, from her home near Pittsburgh.

Jan Avery Elkins II, now 35, says of the war that claimed the father he never knew, "All these people died and we gave out all this money and then one day it all stopped. It seems like it was all for nothing."

Jan Avery Elkins graduated from East Brunswick High School in 1965. "He was the finest student I had in 40 years," said Stephen Michaud, who retired from the English department in 2000. "You hate to use cliches when you're talking about a human, but he was one of those kids you don't ever forget."

After attending the University of Miami for one year, Elkins left, intending to transfer. But by leaving school he lost his student deferment, and rather then be exposed to the draft he joined the Marines.

He did well enough in boot camp to be assigned duty in Washington. One night he ventured into Betty's Place, where he met Steffanie Blanning, an employee of the Food and Drug Administration.

Steffanie, who has a wonderful sense of humor, remembers it as, "The kind of place if ever they turned on the lights you'd want to leave."

Two months later they eloped to North Carolina, and were married by a minister named Rev. Daniel Boone.

Elkins called his home that night, asking his mother if she wanted to say hello to his wife. The reaction at home: Wife? What wife?

Steffanie, four months pregnant when her husband left for Vietnam, went to live with her parents in Pittsburgh. Elkins did not want his wife to remain alone Washington, during a period of turmoil that included war protests, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy and urban unrest.

Lance Cpl. Jan Avery Elkins, arrived in Vietnam Sept. 2, 1968, serving with Charlie Company in the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, 1st Marines Division. In an undated letter home to his father he recalled how his unit had just reported 99 confirmed enemy deaths. He lamented, "I never killed a man before, and it's terrible how easy it is."

In a letter to his brother he told how a buddy died while on patrol. "It was kind of cryptic. It was like he was predicting his death," said Jay.

At home there were no such thoughts. "For some reason we all thought he would come home alive," Jay recalled.

On Oct. 26, 1968 Jan Elkins was killed.

Two marines came to Steffanie's door in Pittsburgh, telling her the news. Steffanie, known to the Elkins' family as Stevie, called Julius Elkins at his office in New York.

Jay Elkins, then 18, was attending American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. He reasoned that his father was too distraught to call. Instead he sent a special delivery letter.

Elkins' father wrote: "Just as I started this letter to you on a pleasant possible note I received the phone call I have been dreading all these weeks with a sense of foreboding that kept me distressed. Yes, Son, Jan is no longer with us. Killed in action Oct. 26 in Vietnam. Stevie just called me completely broken up and I must wind my way home and tell your mother. God help her! I do know however, what it is doing to me and I cannot find the words thru the tears. Our family is one less. Lovingly, Dad."

The explanation of the death, according to Elkins' son, "was short on details." It was thought he perhaps stepped on a land mine.

Three years ago Elkins' son discovered a Web site, www.thevirtualwall.org. On it are the names posted of the war casualties, with links allowing for communication. Elkins' son put his dad's picture on the site, looking for persons who knew his dad.

About a year later he received an e-mail from a man in California named Greg Welch, telling how he was the medic who treated Elkins. He asked Elkins' son to call him. "It took me about a week before I could make that call," he recalled from his home in Western Pennsylvania.

Following his call to Welch, Elkins' son sent an e-mail to Jay, telling what he learned:

"It was an early morning patrol. The platoon was walking along a road way. (Welch) said railroad tracks were once there but were removed sometime before he got there. The tracks and the ties were gone leaving just a dirt path. There was a tree line on one side of the road with a rice paddy beyond. On the other side there was a dike and then an open rice paddy. Dad was on point in front walking along the tree line. This is where he tripped the boobie trap that killed him."

Welch also told him that his father had a mustache, and hair longer than what he expected on a Marine.

In a story published on the Web site Welch explained, "I do know that (Elkins) was aware that his chances of being injured or killed were high, but he did his job without complaining. This is something that I felt his son needed to know."

Elkins would be one of 58,153 Americans killed in Vietnam, including five from East Brunswick. The story of his death was reported in a short obituary in The Daily Home News of New Brunswick, four paragraphs long.

In a letter to Elkins' father, following news of Jan's death, Michaud, his former teacher, cited Elkins' fondness for the poet Dylan Thomas. "I often think of Thomas' phrase "thunderclapping eyes,' to describe Chip," using Elkins' nickname.

The funeral for Elkins was held in Pittsburgh. Jay Elkins recalls that seven of his brother's Marine buddies were there, and asked to talk with him alone. They walked through a neighborhood and talked for about 40 minutes.

They were aware that Jay was one of three surviving boys in the Elkins' family, and they wanted to impress on him how none should feel compelled to join the military, since the odds of survival were troubling.

Jay Elkins recalled: "They said my family had given enough. Then they said something strange. "There are seven of us. A year from now no more than four of us will be alive.' They were all going back to Vietnam. And sure enough, only four came home."


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam: Legends of the fall
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By PETER ROPER
THE PUEBLO CHIEFTAIN

Vietnam.

Few words provoke so many painful images and memories for Americans as Vietnam - a 14-year-long war that cost the lives of 58,000 American men and women, wounded and maimed hundreds of thousands more and divided America into "hawks" and "doves," "the silent majority" and "peaceniks."

From 1961 until April 30, 1975, America helped and often propped up the Republic of South Vietnam in its war against Viet Cong guerrillas and the North Vietnamese Army. There were savage battles with names that were seared into the American consciousness - My Lai, Quang Tri, Tet, Khe Sanh, Hue, An Loc - and new phrases that defined the war, such as "body count," the "Ho Chi Minh Trail" and "search-and-destroy."


As U.S. casualties climbed, especially after 1968, the American public's willingness to keep fighting in Vietnam steadily weakened. President Richard Nixon steadily pulled U.S. troops out of Vietnam in 1972, saying it was time for South Vietnam to carry the full brunt of the war. When a peace agreement was reached in early 1973 that left Vietnam divided, not many observers thought the cease-fire would last very long once U.S. forces were out of the country.

Unfortunately for America's South Vietnamese allies, those predictions came true with bewildering speed in the spring of 1975. NVA and Viet Cong forces attacked in numerous places across the south. In just weeks, the communist invaders had control of two-thirds of South Vietnam and thousands of refugees and Army of the Republic of Vietnam soldiers were fleeing into Saigon.

By the last week of April, NVA troops ringed the city and President Gerald Ford had put in motion an emergency force of aircraft carriers to evacuate the last Americans and their Vietnamese colleagues from the city. Rockets sporadically exploded around the city as thousands of Vietnamese converged on the American embassy, hoping to bribe or plead their way aboard one of the aircraft flying out of Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base every few minutes.

It was a time of panic and resolve, of sadness at the loss of a war and grief at the allies left behind to cope with a relentless enemy.

On April 30, it was all over at noon when NVA tanks crashed through the gates of the Presidential Palace in Saigon, which was quickly renamed Ho Chi Minh City. The last helicopter of U.S. Marines had lifted off the embassy roof about 5 a.m. that morning, leaving an empty, looted building and a dazed population behind.

The Pueblo Chieftain asked local Puebloans who were there for the final days of South Vietnam to recall their memories of the end. Their stories can be found on Page .

One was a South Vietnamese police chief who expected to be shot by the new communist government. One was an American contractor who was begged by a South Vietnamese shopkeeper to take his young son to America. A third was a Navy aircraft mechanic who served as a door gunner on the Marine helicopters landing at the Saigon embassy.

And the last was a legal secretary at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines who was ordered to listen and transcribe all the radio traffic between the chopper pilots and air controllers as they shuttled to and from Saigon and the Navy task force offshore. She was told the White House wanted a full report of the evacuation.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

'Nam never goes away
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BRUCE WILSON
The Sunday Mail
01may05

BY THE end of April the Army of the Republic of Vietnam had fought its last great fight, a brave but losing enterprise at the provincial capital of Xuan Loc.

From the time the final offensive started only weeks before, it had become clear that after almost 40 years of continual war of one kind or another, the spirit had gone from the army of the South. Many of its generals no longer attended the battles. The corrupt president, Nguyen Van Thieu, was loading his getaway plane with gold while urging his army never to surrender.

Each day our journey to the frontline was shorter and shorter so that it became possible to go down, say, Route 15, absorb a little fighting, talk to some proper soldiers, return to Saigon, write and file your story and then go to lunch at one of the dozen or so French or Corsican-owned restaurants that stayed open to the end.

Panicky evacuations started with the northern city of Da Nang and then leapfrogged down the coast.

The veteran associate of Ho Chi Minh, northern commander General Vo Nguyen Giap, who had defeated the French in 1956, could scarcely believe what was happening as his divisions outstripped their supply lines.

One morning we drove down to Saigon's Newport bridge, and there was the enemy right across the river. Tan Son Nhut, once the world's busiest airport, was bombed by aircraft captured from South Vietnam's air force. Soon artillery shells were falling on Saigon's outskirts and 122mm rockets detonating in central Saigon markets. On the night of April 28 you could hear the artillery bombarding the airport, effectively closing it to fixed-wing aircraft. Saigon was trapped.

The chaos of April 29, 1975, one of the most miserable days in modern American history, has been well documented, and pig-headed US ambassador Graham Martin must be blamed for it.

The final embassy absurdity - the signal to prepare to evacuate was supposed to be Bing Crosby singing I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas on armed forces' radio - had been quietly shelved. It was word-of-mouth, and the word soon spread.

Then I made a decision I knew I'd probably regret forever, and decided to leave rather than stay. And so I never saw that first North Vietnamese tank crash through the gates of the presidential palace; although, had I stayed, I would never have seen the amazing scenes in the South China Sea, as million-dollar helicopters were manhandled and hurled into the ocean as fast as fleeing South Vietnamese officers could land them on the decks of the Seventh Fleet.

Saigon still had tragedies to give us, though. One of the buses taking us to Tan Son Nhut ran over and killed a little girl. At the airport lay the bodies of two Marines, probably the last US casualties.

I went over to the passenger terminal where, unbelievably, I bought a beer from the old Chinese man who had the bar open. From there I watched the communists' artillery strikes march across the airport, one-by-one taking out the fighter planes parked in their bunkers.

All around us on that trip had been chaos in one form or another. The US embassy drivers were half mad with fatigue, anger and fear, and it seemed anything might happen. Later, of course, it did when the embassy was mobbed by Vietnamese who were frantic with terror.

Who could blame them? For most of their lives they had been told horror stories about the communists, and now the ogres were at the gates.

In fact, it was poor little Cambodia, almost unnoticed in all this, that was taken over by a force of such evil that, in relation to population, it made Hitler seem like a philanthropist.

By comparison, South Vietnam escaped very lightly at the hands of its invaders, but it was still no place to be if you needed to be reconstructed. There were executions and a program of mass re-education that involved methods beyond inflicting hardship. It had been, after all, a long, long war and passions were deep.

At sea on April 30, aboard one of the ships in the largest flotilla the US commissioned in the entire course of that war, we heard of the surrender of the Government of South Vietnam.

Defeat, and it was a spectacular defeat, was handled with the same can-do attitude that marks the US armed forces.

As we all set sail for the friendly shores of the Philippines, more than 50,000 US, 500 Australian and somewhere between one and two million Vietnamese lay dead behind us, buried in a war that today seems of almost total long-term inconsequence so far as South-East Asia is concerned.

Most of all, though, the result of the war in Vietnam was very, very dangerous for America.

A small, insignificant, poor nation through immense sacrifice and generations of bravery sent the No. 1-seeded power off into the South China Sea, to throw its super hardware overboard. Back home, it left a nation still twitching about it all.

'Nam does not go away.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Timeline of Vietnam
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1945 - Ho Chi Mihn announces Vietnam's independence from France.

1954 - French forces leave Vietnam, country split into north and south at the 17th parallel.

1959 - Supplies and troops from North Vietnam begin to infiltrate the south.

1961 - President John F. Kennedy increases support for South Vietnam, including more than 3,000 military advisers.

1964 - USS Maddox reported destroyer attacked. Retaliation against North Vietnam ordered by President Lyndon Johnson. American jets bomb two naval bases and destroy a major oil facility. Two U.S. planes downed in the attack.

April 1965 - More than 60,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam.

1966 - By end of year, 385,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam, plus an additional 60,000 sailors stationed offshore Viet Cong troops estimated at more than 280,000.

1968 - Tet Offensive begins. Viet Cong attack more than 100 cities and towns; 37,000 Viet Cong and 2,500 Americans killed.

1969 - By April, U.S. combat deaths over 33,600. In June, President Richard Nixon announces 25,000 U.S. troops will be withdrawn.

1972 - About 133,000 U.S. troops remain in South Vietnam. In past two years, 2/3 have been withdrawn.

1973 - On Jan. 27, a cease fire agreement is reached. The last American combat soldiers leave South Vietnam in March, but military advisers and Marines protecting U.S. installations remain. Over three million Americans served in the war, about 58,000 were killed, 150,000 were seriously wounded and more than 1,000 were missing in action.

April 29, 1975 - U.S. Marine and Air Force helicopters, flying from carriers off-shore, begin a massive airlift. In 18 hours more than 1,000 American civilians and almost 7,000 South Vietnamese refugees are flown out of Saigon.

April 30, 1975 - The last few Marines guarding the U.S. Embassy leave and hours later, Viet Cong tanks roll into Saigon.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Those who've lost their way since defending ours <br />
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <br />
By Jack Komperda Daily Herald Staff Writer <br />
2 hours, 10 minutes...

[thedrifter]

The last ones to leave

By Kirsten Scharnberg Tribune national correspondent
Sat Apr 30, 9:40 AM ET



Outside the window of the general's conference room, a new class of young Marines is going through training exercises--shouting, marching, dropping to do 20 when the drill instructor sees fit. Inside, two retired Marines can hear the racket but are distracted by the past, by a painful episode of military history that none of these recruits was even alive to witness.

One of the men is John Valdez, 67, a career Marine whose life for three decades has been defined by one overarching distinction: On April 30, 1975, he was the last man to climb on board the last helicopter out of Saigon, an act that marked the end of America's official military presence in Vietnam, though combat had been turned over to the South Vietnamese two years earlier.

The other man, Colin Broussard, 54, is one of the Marines who were assigned to the personal security detail of Graham Martin, the last U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam. On that final day in Saigon, Broussard risked his life to keep the ambassador safe in a bizarre mad dash out of the city that involved a secret tunnel, a pact with the French and direct orders from the president of the United States.

Valdez and Broussard saw and did things on that historic day that haunt them still:

They left behind loyal Vietnamese employees they feel certain were killed by the communists shortly after the hurried U.S. evacuation.

They left behind the bodies of two fallen comrades, an act of unspeakable regret because there is nothing a Marine holds more dear than the vow to never leave killed or wounded Marines on the battlefield.

And, maybe worst of all, they left behind an advancing enemy they believed the United States could have defeated if only political forces had not influenced things.

"It was horrific to watch," Valdez said. "We came damn close to becoming the new American Alamo, and we would have been the guys to die defending it."

Valdez and Broussard, Californians and founding members of the Fall of Saigon Marine Association, remain close friends. But as they sit side by side inside the conference room at Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego on a recent spring morning, it is clear how differently the events of April 30, 1975, affected them.

Broussard, who retired as a master sergeant, cannot make it through the telling of his story without weeping, taking long breaks, holding his face in his hands and whispering again and again, "What is wrong with me? What is wrong with me?"

Valdez, who retired as a master gunnery sergeant, has no trouble talking about that day or the decisions he made as the top enlisted man on the ground that put people in battle positions where they eventually would die.

In those final 24 hours before the United States abandoned its 25-year effort to stem the spread of communism in Vietnam, 52 Marines remained to guard the soon-to-be-overrun U.S. Embassy and the Defense Attache Office near the Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon. How close they came to not making it out alive has become a story for the history books, for the military documentarians, even for the Broadway musical "Miss Saigon."

But these men's stories are not confined to that one day. The story of the Vietnam War--its battles and its conclusion-- continues, in men like Valdez and Broussard. Their mixed feelings over the conflict mirror a nation still so divided that Vietnam became an issue in a tight presidential race last year. Their struggles to recover from combat mirror the struggle so many troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are experiencing today.

"If you talked to all of us who remained on that day, everyone's reactions would run the gamut. Some guys are great. Some are messes. Some have killed themselves because they couldn't get over what happened there," said Valdez, ever the direct talker after more than 30 years in the Marines. "People could probably learn something from us, using us as a case study."

Reunion at memorial

Many of the Marines from that final day, including Broussard and Valdez, planned to reunite again this weekend. They planned to gather in front of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington on Saturday to award a Purple Heart to a comrade wounded on that last day but never honored.

"The guys from that day really have slipped through the cracks," Valdez said. "None of the paperwork made it out so if they were wounded in those final weeks, the [Pentagon] doesn't have proof of it."

continued................

[thedrifter]

Tourists who see Valdez, Broussard and their buddies at the memorial will almost certainly realize they are veterans of the war. But few will know the role these graying men played the day they made...

[thedrifter]

Miramar veteran of HMH-463 remembers bitter end in Vietnam
Submitted by: MCAS Miramar
Story Identification #: 2005427183849
Story by Cpl. Paul Leicht



MARINE CORPS AIR STATION MIRAMAR, Calif. (April 11, 2005) -- The month of April marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of Vietnam to communist forces and the evacuation of the American embassy in Saigon. For one of Miramar's own, this bitter ending remains a significant personal experience occasionally overlooked in Marine Corps lore.

The tragic year was 1975. Many Americans and Vietnamese, now disillusioned and bereft of the idealistic dreams of democracy, knew the war against communist aggression in Southeast Asia was already lost.

"Most of us had already been to Vietnam more than once," said retired Sgt. Maj. Michael G. Zacker, a San Diego native who now works as a volunteer at Miramar's Flying Leatherneck Historical Foundation and Aviation Museum. "My squadron, (Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron) 463 was stationed in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, at the time with our CH-53Ds that had returned from Vietnam a few years before."

Sitting in Hawaii, they did not expect to receive orders. Zacker and the rest of HMH-463 had recently served off the coast of Vietnam during Operation End Sweep to help clear out mines near Haiphong. However, one Friday morning, Zacker and his Marines came in to work and were told that they would be leaving to participate in the evacuations of Vietnam.

"We went aboard the USS Hancock that had a whole carrier air wing of fixed-wing strike aircraft," recalled Zacker, who served as an avionics Marine, crew chief and gunner with HMH-463. "The Hancock had A-4s and F-4 Phantoms on board, and we had to load our 53s, which definitely congested things. We sailed across the Pacific to Subic Bay in the Philippines, where all the fixed-wing aircraft were flown off the ship and stayed during the evacuations. This essentially turned the aircraft carrier into an LPH amphibious assault ship. We also picked up a search and rescue detachment, plus some CH-46s from Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 164, and off we went to Vietnam."

The USS Hancock then sailed for the southern tip of Vietnam and the western coast of Cambodia.

For a few days the ship cruised around before Zacker and his fellow Marines were told they were going to participate in the evacuation of Phnom Penh, code-named Operation Eagle Pull.

"There were still U.S. advisors in there, in addition to the embassy staff and other folks from U.S. aid and government organizations, although the Cambodian government had collapsed," said Zacker. "Our evacuation took place on a soccer pitch with what looked like condominiums along the side. It was an ideal landing zone. The flight was long as we had internal, fiberglass box fuel tanks. I think it was 300 gallons of fuel each that allowed us to extend our range. With the four-man crew and these range extension tanks there wasn't a whole lot of room left for troops."

The first squadron had dropped off a ground security force - not a company, but a few platoons - which set up a perimeter to keep the communists at bay while a second squadron came in to load up with evacuees.

"I think that was HMH-462," recalled then Gunnery Sgt. Michael G. Zacker. "Then our squadron, HMH-463, flew in empty, other than the crew, with the mission to pull out the ground security force."

They were about half finished with the troops closing in on the backs of the aircraft - there were about four in the zone at the time - when all of a sudden mortar rounds started crunching in from the housing complex.

"Chunks were falling all around us," said Zacker. "The grunts - God bless 'em - stopped coming aboard and ran back out like they were going to go after the guys launching the mortars. They only had small arms - the biggest thing they had were M-60 machineguns - and they were going to engage them. So we yelled 'No dammit, get back. We gotta get out of here!', and eventually we got them turned around except for the combat camera guy that we had with us."

The Marine combat photographer was Gunnery Sgt. Donnie Shearer, assigned to HMH-463. He had flown on Zacker's aircraft and was one of his buddies. Shearer would later receive the Military News Photographer Award for the year for his 'End of an Era' coverage of the evacuations.

"He was actually on the ground taking pictures of the grunts getting on the aircraft when we lifted off," remembered Zacker. "More mortars came in, and here's Donnie taking photos. I looked down and saw him and told the pilot 'you're not going to believe this, but we have to get back down to get him.' So we went back, picked him up. The pilot later told him that if it weren't for (Zacker) he might have been left behind."

Later, with many evacuees aboard, the Hancock left for Singapore to offload the passengers. Just as the Sailors and Marines had barely stepped off deck for a liberty call, the Hancock raced back to the coast of Vietnam.

The Marines and Sailors on the Hancock were told that the code name for the evacuation of Saigon would be Operation Frequent Wind. The warning order given over the ship's intercom system was "Deep Purple."

"For a few days we heard nothing but 'Deep Purple' at like 2 a.m.," recalled Zacker. "We heard 'Deep Purple,' and we all rolled out of the rack to work on the aircraft. My job was to grab two .50 caliber machineguns, six cans of ammo and flares, and get the aircraft armed and ready to go. Other Marines were busy doing their jobs. We had to have 100 percent preparedness for all the aircraft we had despite difficulties with parts, etc., so we were ready to launch. Later during the day it became painfully obvious that we were not going, and they stood us down. So we had to unload and de-arm all the aircraft, which wasn't easy since the armory was located all the way down on the bottom of the ship!"


Finally on April 29, 1975, "Deep Purple" was sounded for the last time and Operation Frequent Wind began.

"At 1:30 p.m. that day I was in the lead aircraft, YH-02, of three Marine CH-53Ds that launched and went over to the USS Midway, where we landed and topped off fuel," said Zacker. "I had a huge battle-axe with me that I had used during a Halloween scare house back in Hawaii. As we launched from the Midway, I held the battle-axe aloft out the crew door and over the noise of what by then were 12 CH-53s on the deck-nine Air Force HH-53s had joined up with us, and you could still hear the roars of 'Yeah!' from everyone on deck. It was awesome."

Zacker said the Marine CH-53s led the flight of Air Force 53s because they did not know how to fly combat evacuations the way the Marines did. He and his fellow Marines had maps with locations of various friendly units below who were not totally overrun, such as the (Army Republic of Vietnam) Marines, in the event that they were shot down.

Dodging North Vietnamese Army surface-to-air missiles, Marine helicopter squadrons put their flying skills to the test as they flew in and out of Saigon.

"We were going in at 5,000 feet which was our approach altitude, through the Mekong Delta and over Saigon," said Zacker whose squadron flew the first CH-53Ds in Vietnam nine years before. "Then we did a 'death spiral' down into the LZ to reduce the opportunity to be acquired by enemy guns. By the time we made our third trip in, night fell. Flying 70 miles, without night vision gear, over the water and then over unknown terrain was pretty challenging."

Central Intelligence Agency operatives assembled evacuees and their carry-on bags into 30-man sticks for the loads HMH-463 picked up in the Defense Attaché Office compound.

"That was a standard load for our CH-46s, which were not used because they were not efficient," Zacker said. "Our 53s were picking up 60 (evacuees). On our second load we took on three sticks since we had no problem with 60, so then we had 90 aboard. On the third flight we still had room on the ramp, and so we waved the CIA guy to have him send another stick. With a six-man crew and about 120 passengers we left the DAO compound just east of Saigon for the Hancock at sea."

The Marines of HMH-463 actually had very few Americans aboard, according to Zacker. Most were Vietnamese who were American dependents or had been working for the U.S. government, supporting operations in Vietnam in different capacities, as well as Vietnamese military.
Flying for 20 hours straight - with sandwiches, water and 'no-doze' pills from Navy corpsmen to help them stay awake - Zacker and the rest of HMH-463 accomplished their mission to help evacuate the last vestige of American military forces and supporters from Vietnam. The largest helicopter evacuation, amidst a panic-stricken exodus of South Vietnamese, was history.

"With the fall of Saigon, communist forces had taken all the major cities in Vietnam, and we knew it was totally over," Zacker reflected.

"On our very first load, to look into the belly of the aircraft, and look into the eyes of all these Vietnamese who had supported the U.S., and our efforts to give them the freedom that they desired, to watch them look out the aircraft as we lifted out of there over their capital city Saigon, and see their country slip away knowing they would never return - that hit me real hard. I knew right then that it wasn't because we the Marines let them down, it was because people in our government had caved in to the anti-war movement."


http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/image1.nsf/Lookup/2005427184233/$file/Shearer-filming-evacuat_low.jpg

Marine combat photographer Gunnery Sgt. Donnie Shearer films evacuees from Saigon during Operation Frequent Wind in April 1975. Shearer would later receive the Military News Photographer Award for the year for his "End of an Era" coverage of the evacuations. Photo by: courtesy of Donnie Shearer


http://www.usmc.mil/marinelink/image1.nsf/Lookup/2005427184433/$file/OFW001_lowres.jpg


A crew with Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 463 stands in front of "YH-12" on the deck of the USS Hancock during operations Eagle Pull (the evacuation of Phnom Phen, Cambodia) and Frequent Wind (the evacuation of Saigon). Standing left to right: Maj. J. R. Howell, pilot; Cpl. R. L. Bartlett, crew/chief; and 1stLt C. L. Stonecypher, co-pilot. Sitting left to right: Cpl. D. R. Levin, 1st mech. and Sgt R. D. Brookins, gunner.
Photo by: Courtesy of R D Brookins


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam War Ended 30 Years Ago Saturday

The Vietnam War ended 30 years ago Saturday when the last helicopter lifted off the roof of the U.S. Embassy In Saigon, carrying ten U.S. Marines to an aircraft carrier positioned off just off the Vietnamese coast.

The decade-long war left 58,000 and an estimated 3 million Vietnamese dead.

"That was probably the hardest day of my presidency for me,” then President Gerald Ford told Newsweek Magazine in 1999.

“I think we made a very heroic effort and did the best we could under the worst of circumstances. I look upon it as the sadness of a retreat that I'll never forget, Ford said."

Thirty years after the end of the divisive conflict, however, the U.S. and Vietnam have reached what U.S. Ambassador to Vietnam Michael Marine calls an unprecedented level of cooperation that extends to security, trade, investment, health education and culture.

The two countries are also working together, Marine said, to determine the fate of service members who are still missing, including 1,800 Americans.

"When one considers how far apart the United States and Vietnam once were, how implacably against each other we were -- and it wasn't that long ago -- I believe it's a testament to the efforts in both countries to build bridges, foster communication, and create an atmosphere of trust and understanding," Marine said.

For Veterans History Project From The Library Of Congress
http://www.loc.gov/vets/

For Fall Of Saigon Marine Association Web Site
http://www.fallofsaigon.org/

For More On The Vietnam War From The History Place
http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/vietnam/

For Vietnam Memorial Wall Web Site
http://thewall-usa.com/

For U.S. Embassy Hanoi Web Site
http://hanoi.usembassy.gov/

Ellie

[thedrifter]

In 'Nam, bigotry was order of the day <br />
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- <br />
Les Payne <br />
May 1, 2005 <br />
<br />
'Where would you like to be assigned?&quot; <br />
<br />
It was a...

[thedrifter]

Thirty years ago: A lonely homecoming .... 'We Never Said Thanks' Now
it will be said with a Party in Branson, Missouri




'We Never Said Thanks'
At one event to mark the anniversary of the fall of Saigon, Vietnam vets are getting the recognition many feel is long overdue.
Thirty years ago: A lonely homecoming

By T. Trent Gegax
Newsweek
Updated: 11:33 a.m. ET April 30, 2005

April 29 - Homecomings are bittersweet for U.S. troops serving in Iraq. But for Vietnam vets, watching their young counterparts return from America’s most recent war can be a bitter reminder of what they missed out on when they came home. Instead of applause and tears, many saw jeers and bile. No events, no parades.


It was 30 years ago this week that the last Americans were airlifted out of Saigon, ending U.S. involvement in the war. To commemorate the anniversary—and perhaps spur revision of the war’s history—Ross Perot, the former presidential hopeful, is helping to throw a $15 million homecoming celebration this summer, complete with the bands that rocked the troops in Southeast Asia for the USO.

“These men were never properly recognized and thanked when they came home,” Perot, a 1953 Annapolis grad and a longtime supporter of POW/MIA causes, told NEWSWEEK. “I love what we're doing now [for the Iraq war vets], properly thanking them in the airport and homecomings. But here we’ve got a huge number of men who fought a huge, ugly war [in Vietnam] and we never said thanks. It's about time we do.”

The plans are ambitious. Organizers say nearly 20,000 vets have registered so far. They hope for between 50,000 and 100,000 Vietnam vets in Branson, Mo., June 13-19 for “Operation Homecoming USA,” billed as “the homecoming you never received.” The name is a reference to Operation Homecoming, the last repatriation of American POWs, in 1973. Most of the musicians who played in Vietnam—the Doobie Brothers, the Beach Boys, Credence Clearwater Revisited (CCR sans John Fogerty), Tony Orlando—will be there. So will actress Ann-Margret and Adrian Cronauer, the radio DJ immortalized in the film “Good Morning Vietnam.”

In addition, active-duty troops in Baghdad will thank Vietnam vets via a live video feed. Perot even put a call in to Bud Selig, the commissioner Major League Baseball, who agreed to have ball clubs honor Vietnam vets during all the games played the week of Operation Homecoming. (Announcers will ask the vets to stand during the seventh-inning stretch.) Retired Army general Hugh Shelton is also pitching in, and corporations like UPS and American Airlines are helping Perot foot the bill. The Pentagon says it’s working with organizers to find a way to participate.

The Branson homecoming week won't be the first time people have reassessed the Vietnam War, but it does point to the raising profile of a counterintuitive way of looking at that tumultuous period. Some vets assert that the U.S. military was not really defeated in Vietnam: no significant battle was lost, they claim. The revisionist history got a boost from the efforts of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) in last year’s election. Their vigorous—if not 100 percent accurate—criticism of John Kerry brought out dormant pride from many conservative Vietnam vets; likewise, Kerry toured the country with his former Vietnam War boatmates.

This week, a spinoff group from the Swifties, the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation, launched to take the positive message of the Vietnam experience to high schools and colleges. “We weren’t Genghis Khan,” says retired Navy Cmdr. Paul Galanti, who spearheads the group. He says that the $26 million raised by SBVT demonstrates the increasing self-confidence among Vietnam vets who want to defend their honor. (Galanti and other Swifties insist that their motive to defeat Kerry was about Vietnam and not about partisan politics.) “We want to not so much rewrite history as much as write the right history,” Galanti says. “It wasn’t a dishonorable war. We’re making sure its history isn’t the gospel according to Jane Fonda.”

The homecoming event's speeches will be laced with pride in the veterans' service to their country. The message: the war’s defeatism is a concoction of the media and cowardly politicians. From the stage, they will talk about how 91 percent of Vietnam vets say they’re glad they served—and 74 percent would do it again even knowing the outcome. They’ll talk about the postwar successes of Vietnam vets. Their average income exceeds that of nonveterans of the same age by 18 percent, thanks in part to a higher degree of education among troops—79 percent had a high-school diploma—than people who did not serve. (Their statistics come from a variety of government agencies.) “The idea is to set the myth straight,” said Jim Amos, a vet and organizer who built Mailboxes Etc. into a billion-dollar company. “We weren’t addicted to drugs, and there were no more atrocities than you see in Iraq right now. Yet when I came home I was spit upon by a crowds yelling obscenities.”

It’s not difficult to find Vietnam vets who aren’t so optimistic about this kind of event. Bill Belding, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, applauds Perot’s effort. But at the same time, he hopes that more serious attention (read: money) will be paid to Vietnam vets’ issues. His group, among other things, helps veterans with posttraumatic-stress disorder. “It’s hard to imagine 100,000 guys whooping it up in Branson,” says Belding, a Navy SEAL for three tours of duty in Vietnam. “Those wounds are pretty deep with a lot of those guys.” But perhaps the party in Missouri can at least take away some of those vets’ bitterness.
© 2005 Newsweek, Inc.

Hollis Stanford
Springfield, Missouri
"Contemplate the mangled bodies of your countrymen, and then say, 'What should be the reward of such sacrifices?' Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship, and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animating contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen!" --Samuel Adams


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam War Web site debuts
SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE
April 30, 2005

The tragedy, turmoil and tears of the Vietnam War continue to roil 30 years after helicopters evacuated the last Americans off the embassy roof during the fall of Saigon.

Marking that day, April 30, 1975, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) invites those involved in the war or directly affected by it to post their war experiences in an interactive online journal.

The site - http://www.VietnamViews.org - launches today. The veterans organization says it will be "a dynamic online history for soldiers, families, friends and others to share their stories from the war."

"We're expecting that a lot of veterans will share poignant stories from their Vietnam experiences at this distance - 30 years," said Bill Belding.

A Navy SEAL in Vietnam who worked as an attorney in San Diego after the war, Belding is president of the Washington-based VVAF, an international humanitarian organization that addresses the causes, conduct and consequences of war through advocacy programs for victims of conflict around the world.

"We want not only to learn how American soldiers view the war, but also to provide a forum for Vietnamese to connect with that experience. We will be building a kind of oral history using the modern technology of the Internet."

On the Web site, where contributors may also post photographs, the stories will be organized by time and place and in other ways for easy access, according to the organization.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Remembering Vietnam 30 Years Later
International Herald Tribune
May 2, 2005

The first deployment of American combat forces in Vietnam was made here on the beach on March 8, 1965, as the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade splashed ashore in what was South Vietnam's second city, to be greeted by kids selling ice cream. French tourists now sip cold drinks at a luxury hotel near the spot.

The Leathernecks were ostensibly here to defend the giant Danang airbase, but American forces never really did get a grip on the area. If they had, how was it that the Vietcong, in this war without mercy, were running a field hospital under their very noses? Coming back to China Beach now, before the 30th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War on Saturday, the futility of the whole struggle seems obvious, the ruinous loss of life pointless. Nowhere is this more so than at the Marble Mountain, five craggy outcrops towering near the South China Sea, just south of Danang.

Inside the biggest cavern, soaring upward and lit in daylight by a ragged hole through which rays of sunlight slant you might be in Chartres cathedral a large Buddha reposes. A plaque on the wall celebrates the fact that a Vietcong military hospital was situated here, and that an adjacent women's anti-aircraft detachment shot down 17 aircraft, probably helicopters.

At the time, there were American military facilities, a helicopter base, motor pools and bars full of "boom-boom girls" in scruffy villages decorated with flattened beer cans. As villagers tell it now, it seems the Vietnamese respectfully advised the Americans that the caves were sacred to their religion, and it would be polite if soldiers stayed away.

I spent my first year in Vietnam reporting out of Danang in "Eye" Corps, verbal shorthand for South Vietnam's first military region in the war-intense northern fourth of the country. It was from the Danang press center that we fanned out to cover the demilitarized zone, or DMZ, dividing the then two Vietnams. In historical times, this whole area belonged to the now lost Kingdom of Champa, a Hindu- Buddhist civilization the Vietnamese overran. The Danang press center, where we filed, slept, drank cheap booze and ate big steaks, stood opposite the Cham museum, which is now Danang's top foreign tourist draw no wonder, the sculptures rival those of Angkor. But the press center, on the Han River, has disappeared, journalism being an ephemeral trade. Champa's greatest temples were at My Son, which was safely tucked away in valleys, and the Vietcong hid there too. Elsewhere in "Eye," during the ill-conceived 1970 thrust against the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos, the South Vietnamese troops were driven back, and I saw American helicopters fly in with fleeing South Vietnamese soldiers grimly swaying from the skids. Some lost their grip and plummeted into the jungle below. The South Vietnamese dead were set out in long lines. Indicating them, one U.S captain said: "They're doing a great job we're proud of them." To me, they just represented life's tenuousness.

I recall, as a new and nervous correspondent, being offered a berth on a helicopter to go into the DMZ to see an arms cache an American patrol had found. As we corkscrewed down toward a lunar landscape, the unit popped purple smoke. I thought, "Christ, the North Vietnamese must see that, too." Sure enough, as soon as we jumped to the ground, the first artillery fire hit, and the chopper took off behind us. I ran through brush and jumped in a foxhole on top of the company's radio operator. As I looked up at the blue sky, contemplating mortality, I heard wounded American marines calling out "Mom," "Mom," "I've been hit." There was a muffled shout beneath me in the foxhole. It was the radio operator. He made a call and in minutes, the jets screamed in, bombing the North Vietnamese "arty" unit. A chopper came in to collect the dead in bodybags, and us four correspondents.

Danang, "liberated" without a shot being fired after scenes of mayhem involving fleeing South Vietnamese troops at the end of March 1975, has been rebuilt. With 1.2 million people, it's rather bland now.

At the Ben Hai River, which formerly divided Vietnam, there's a memorial to the journalists, whatever their nationality, who died covering the war. It is in the form of a bodhi tree the sacred tree under which the Buddha meditated and it was planted by the British war photographer Tim Page, who was himself wounded several times.

But the river floods in the wet season, and the waters threaten the tree. It's symbolic, in a way, of the impermanence of life. That's what the 80 or so former Vietnam War journalists may be thinking Sunday when they gather in Ho Chi Minh City at a memorial service for fallen comrades, and for all the other dead of the Vietnam War.

**

James Pringle covered the Vietnam War for Reuters for three years.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Operation Frequent Wind
. . . as told by Chris Woods,
Crew Chief of Swift 2-2.



"Gentlemen, start your engines." The laconic command copied from the Indianapolis 500 auto races, echoed from the 1MC, the public-address system of the U.S.S. Hancock. Moments later, the Commanding Officer of Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 463, LtCol. Herbert Fix, lifted his CH-53A Sea Stallion off the deck of the aging carrier. When the other seven choppers in his squadron had left the deck, they fluttered off in a tight formation through blustery winds and dark, ominous rain clouds that hovered over the South China Sea. Operation "Frequent Wind," the emergency evacuation of the last Americans in Saigon was under way.

The rescue operation had been delayed as long as possible-too long, in the view of many Pentagon officials. In recent weeks 44 U.S. Navel vessels, 6,000 Marines, 120 Air Force combat and tanker planes and 150 Navy planes had been moved into the area. Nevertheless, Secretary of State, Henry Kissenger and the U.S. ambassador in Saigon, Graham Martin, argued that the final withdrawal of the American community would probably set off a wave of panic in Saigon and hasten the fall of the South Vietnamese government.

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During the preceding eight days, U.S. planes had evacuated almost 40,000 American and South Vietnamese refugees from Tan Son Nhut airbase near Saigon. By last week, the airlift was growing increasingly dangerous. Artillery shells and rockets closed Tan Son Nhut airport Monday morning, April 28, 1975. The next day, an U.S. C-130 transport was hit by a rocket on the runway and burst into flames as the crew escaped. A short time later, two Marine Corporals, Cpl. N. McMahon of Massachusetts and LCpl. D. Judge of Iowa, guarding the US defense attaché’s compound at Tan Son Nhut, were killed by Communist artillery.

News of the destruction of the C-130 and the Marines’ deaths reached President Ford during a meeting with his energy and economic advisers. He scribbled a note to the deputy director of the National Security Council, LtGen. Brent Scowcroft: "We’d better have a NSC meeting at 7."

Plainly, evacuation by commercial flights, by military airplanes or by sea was no longer feasible. The security advisers discussed whether conditions might permit a resumption of the military airlift. If not, they would have to go a fourth option, the riskiest of all: evacuation by Marine helicopters. Scarcely two hours after the meeting ended with no decision, Ford learned that two C-130s attempting to land at Tan Son Nhut had been waved off; the airport was blocked by thousands of panicky South Vietnamese, by then all of Ford’s advisers, including Martin agreed that it had to be "Option Four." At 10:45 p.m., the President ordered Operation Frequent Wind to begin.

Kessinger telephoned Ford to report that a fleet of 81 helicopters was about to embark on its mission, then, at 1:08 a.m. Tuesday, he called again with the news that the evacuation had begun. In Saigon, the center of activity for much of the day was the landing at Tan Son Nhut airport, a tennis court near the defense attaché’s compound. Landing two at a time, the helicopters unloaded their squads of Marines- 860 in all, who reinforced the 125 Marines already on the scene- and quickly picked up evacuees.

As the operation continued, many helicopters came under fire. Most evacuees sat in cold panic as their choppers took off. "For the next three minutes as we gained altitude," reported TIME Correspondent William Stewart, "we held our breaths." We knew the Communists had been using heat-seeking missiles, and we were prepared to be shot out of the sky. As I turned around to see who was aboard, Buu Vien, the South Vietnamese Interior Minister, smiled and gave a thumbs-up signal. "Forty minutes later we were aboard the U.S.S. Denver, a landing-platform dock, and safe."

By nightfall, the mission had been completed at Tan Son Nhut, but the evacuation of the embassy was still to be accomplished. Sheets of rain were pelting the city, and visibility had dropped to barely a mile. Some choppers had to rely on flares fired by Marines within the embassy compound to find landing zones; others homed in on flashlights.

Through Tuesday night, the Vietnamese crowd grew uglier, hundreds tried to scale the ten-foot wall, despite the barbed wire strung on top of it. Marines had to use tear gas and rifle butts to hold back the surging mob. Some screamed, some pleaded to be taken along. Floor by floor, the Marines withdrew toward the roof of the embassy with looters right behind them. Abandoned offices were transformed into junkyards of smashed typewriters and ransacked file cabinets. Even the bronze plaque with the names of the five American servicemen who died in the embassy during the 1968 Tet offensive was torn from the lobby wall. Marines hurled tear-gas grenade into the elevator shaft; at time the air was so thick with tear gas that the helicopter crews on the roof were effected.

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A HMH-463 crew stands before YH-12 on the deck of the USS Hancock sometime during operations Eagle Pull (the evacuation of Phnom Phen, Cambodia) and Frequent Wind (the evacuation of Saigon). Standing left to right are: Major J. R. Howell, pilot; Cpl R. L. Bartlett, crew/chief; and 1Lt C. L. Stonecypher, co-pilot. Sitting left to right are Cpl D. R. Levin, 1st mech. and Sgt R. D. Brookins, gunner. - photo courtesy of R D Brookins

By that time, tempers were frayed in Washington as well as in Saigon. Martin had drawn up a list of 500 Vietnamese to be evacuated; he refused to leave until all were safely gone. His delay prompted one Administration official to quip, "Martin got all 600 of his 500 Vietnamese out." Finally, at 5:00 p.m., Washington time- it was 5:00 a.m., in Saigon- Kessinger told the president that Martin was closing down the embassy and destroying its communications equipment. Minutes later, Lady Ace 09 landed on the embassy helo pad and Ambassador Martin boarded the helicopter as Major James Kean urged the CH-46 pilot Captain Berry, to please be sure someone comes for them. After lift off, Captain Berry broadcast the message; "Lade Ace Zero Nine, Tiger-Tiger-Tiger."

As many as 130 South Vietnamese planes and helicopter, including F-5 fighter-bombers, transports and attack planes, were reported meanwhile to have reached the US run Utapao airbase in Thailand with about 2,000 soldiers and civilians; already some 1,000 Cambodian refugees were crowed into tents there. Alarmed, the Thai government announced that the refugees had to leave within 30 days and that it would return the planes to "the next government in South Vietnam." Defense Secretary James Schlesinger firmly advised Bangkok that it should do no such thing; under aid agreements, the equipment cannot be transferred to a new government but must revert to U.S. possession.

By the end of the week, another seven or so South Vietnamese helicopters had landed or tried to land on the U.S. naval vessels. One South Vietnamese pilot set his chopper down on top of another whose blades were still turning. Others ditched their craft and had to be fished out of the water. An American search-and-rescue from the U.S.S. Hancock crashed at sea, and two of its crewmembers, Captain William C. Nystul and First Lieutenant Michael J. Shea were listed and missing, possible the last American fatalities of the war. The Crew Chief, Cpl. Steve Wills and the left gunner were rescued by another CH-46, Swift 0-7, during a zero visibility, night water landing to pick up the two wounded Marines.

"The last days of the evacuation were very hairy indeed," Ford confesses afterward. "We were never sure whether we were going to have trouble with the mobs." As Ford noted, the whole operation had gone better "than we had any right to expect." According to the Defense Department, 1,373 Americans and 5,680 South Vietnamese- many more that the US had originally intended- had been removed. Another 32,000 desperate Vietnamese had managed to make their way by sampan, raft and rowboat to the US ships offshore, bringing to about 70,000 the number evacuated through the week.

For the next three hours the Marines wait, and grow more concerned as they discover no one responds to their radio signals. Finally, after they have resigned that they will not be rescued, and have voted to make an Alamo-like stand, the Marines hear the familiar sound of rotor blades slapping the humid air, a CH-46 Sea Knight, and two AH-1G Cobra escorts come in to view.

Dodging small arms fire and using riot control agents against people attempting to force their way to the rooftop, Major Kean and his 10 Marines boarded a HMM-164 CH-46 helicopter, Swift 2-2. After closing the ramp, Swift 2-2 (piloted by Captains Holden and Cook, and crewed by Sergeant Stan Hughes, left machine gunner and Sergeant Chris Woods, Crew Chief and right gunner) lifted into a hover and the pilots were overcome by CS gas had to set back down on the embassy helo pad. Regaining their composure, Captain Holden lifted the helo and departed the embassy rooftop. The last American helicopter to leave South Vietnam, Caption Holden radioed the last official message from Saigon: Swift 2-2 airborne with 11 passengers, ground security force onboard. Clearing antennas and church steeples, Swift 2-2 picked up the Saigon River and descended to tree top level and followed the river out to the awaiting American Forces. During the flight along the river, Sergeant Woods sighted approximately eight communist tanks, parked side-by-side, waiting until the eighth hour to enter the city. Checking his watch, Major Kean noted that it was two minutes until eight, only 23 hours since the NCOIC of Marine Security Guard, Manila, had called him to relay a message from his wife in Hong Kong that she was pregnant. Only 32 minutes later on that unforgettable day, 30 April 1975, the 11 Marines exited Swift 2-2 onto the deck of the U.S.S. Okinawa.

Disembarking, many on board the Okinawa, the consensus was why so much time had elapsed between the arrival of the Ambassador’s flight and Swift -2-2, well over two hours. Had someone forgotten these Marines were still at the Embassy? The answer is no. The intention was to remove the Ambassador while some security still remained at the Embassy, and then have other helicopters pick up the remaining Marines, but it appears that when Captain Berry’s aircraft transmitted "Tiger is out," those helicopters still flying, including Captain Walters who was orbiting the Embassy at the time the Ambassador left, thought the mission was complete. This particular transmission had been the preplanned code to indicate when the Ambassador was on board a helicopter outbound to the task force. Having waited so long for his departure, this transmission caused some to conclude that he had departed as part of the last group to leave the Embassy. Captain Berry late explained that radio message " ‘Tiger-Tiger-Tiger’ was the call to be made when the Ambassador was on board and on his was out of Saigon. It had absolutely nothing to do with the cessation of the operation. We had originally planned to bring the Ambassador out on the afternoon of the 29th."

continued..............

[thedrifter]

At this juncture, thinking the mission complete and the Ambassador safe, Captain Walters headed back to the USS Okinawa. Subsequent to his landing at approximately 0700, the command realized that Captain Walters did not have the remaining Marines on board. Due to a misunderstanding and miscommunication, they were still at the Embassy. General Carey immediately recycled the HMM-164 CH-46 "Swift 2-2", but by this time due to the ships’ offshore movement, the time required to reach the Embassy exceeded 40 minutes. With two hours of fuel on board, the CH-46 did not have any room for error. Swift 2-2 landed on the USS Okinawa with two "LOW FUEL" lights, or 20 minutes of fuel remaining.

To the Marines waiting in Saigon, attempts by the South Vietnamese to reach the rooftop kept them busy and as a consequence, they did not notice the extended gap between the flights. Major Kean later stated that he and his Marine did not become alarmed because they knew that another CH-46 would arrive. "We never had a doubt that our fellow Marines would return and pick us up. They had been doing it all night long."

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This was a term paper I did in August 1996. I have made every attempt to state the facts to the best of my knowledge having dusted the cobwebs from my memory.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam: The Fog of War or the Smoke of Propaganda?
Carlton Sherwood
Tuesday, May 3, 2005
Thirty years ago, Americans were transfixed by the chaotic images flickering across their TV screens. Hordes of frantic South Vietnamese men, women and children desperately clinging to the U.S. Embassy fence in Saigon, pleading for escape. Chinook helicopters teetering precariously on the Embassy roof, evacuating the last Americans even as North Vietnamese Communist Army tanks rolled into the outskirts of the city. Huey gunships, the very symbol of American combat power in Vietnam, commandeered by fleeing South Vietnamese Army pilots, either ditched into the sea or pushed overboard from the decks of crowded American aircraft carriers.

If the film footage wasn't compelling enough to make the point, all three television networks, the only sources of broadcast news in the last days of April 1975, made certain their audience got the message. This undignified, ignominious retreat, they reported, marked the end of the Vietnam War, a shameful chapter in U.S. military history, "the first war America lost."

Even today, that same theme is echoed by one of those network news anchors, CBS's Walter Cronkite. "We knew we had lost in Vietnam before we saw that final day," he said in a recent interview marking the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. "It taught the military a very important lesson that I think it has begun to forget in some ways, that it could not fight an unpopular war. We were clearly not omnipotent. We shouldn't be arrogant about our power and the use of our power."
You could almost hear Cronkite's familiar sign-off, "And that's the way it is."

But was it, really? Did the U.S. military lose the Vietnam War? If not, who was responsible? And what about the Cronkite's remark: "It taught the military a very important lesson that I think it has begun to forget in some ways, that it could not fight an unpopular war." Unpopular with whom, the dominant leftist media?

Perhaps a more important question: Is it the fog of war or the dense smoke of over three decades of political, anti-military propaganda that continues to confuse and divide Americans about the true history of Vietnam?

Certainly, Vietnam is used routinely today to accuse the U.S. military in Iraq and to question America's Global War on Terrorism. But is that rhetoric based on fact or on so much 1960s anti-war revisionist bunkum, more the stuff of Hollywood fantasies than the real, documented history of those who served in Vietnam?

Now, thanks to a distinguished group of Vietnam combat veterans, the American public is beginning to hear different, far more factual answers to those questions and many others. This time, they will get it straight from those who know Vietnam best, former POWs, American pilots held in North Vietnam prison camps for years, in places like the infamous "Hanoi Hilton," where they were brutally tortured, beaten, starved and sometimes murdered by their Communists captors.

Earlier this year, the former POWs created the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation (VVLF), a non-profit educational organization designed, in part, to "separate truth from fiction, to expose the myths about Vietnam and those who perpetrate them and, to do so, factually and accurately."

The chairman of the VVLF is Col. George E. "Bud" Day, a Medal of Honor recipient and Air Force pilot who was held prisoner by the North Vietnamese Communists for six years. Other VVLF Board Directors include POWs Col. Kenneth Cordier, CMDR. Paul Galanti and Marine pilot James Warner. Mary Jane McManus, the wife of former POW Kevin McManus, is also on the board, along with Army combat veterans Robert A. McMahon and Wallace Nunn, who also serves as Chairman of the Medal of Honor Foundation.

Last week, the VVLF launched its new Web site, www.vietnamlegacy.org, which contains full bios of each Board member and several links to other informational Web pages and references for scholarly works on Vietnam history.

If the names of Col. Day and others on the VVLF Board seem familiar, they should be. Last year, they were among the handful of Vietnam combat veterans who publicly denounced Sen. John Kerry for his post-Vietnam activities, for his "slander and betrayal of all those who served in Vietnam."


First in Swift Boat TV ads and later in the documentary "Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal," the VVLF Board members excoriated Kerry for his 1971 testimony before the U.S. Senate, where he accused the POWs and other Vietnam combat veterans of genocide, deliberately "murdering" and "torturing" hundreds of thousands of innocent Vietnamese civilians.

At the time of Kerry's Senate testimony, all of the VVLF POWs were still being held in North Vietnam prison camps under constant threat of execution as "war criminals." In "Stolen Honor" they vividly recall the reaction of their Communist captors to Kerry's accusations and the demoralizing effects of propaganda by such anti-war activists as Jane Fonda.

"Stolen Honor" was scheduled for airing in early October 2004 on 62 Sinclair Broadcast network stations. However, the Kerry Campaign, the Democratic National Committee, 18 U.S. Democrat senators and several "Old Media" national news organizations launched an all-out, concerted effort to have the documentary censored from the airwaves and banned from being shown even in privately owned theaters.

Eventually, however, "Stolen Honor" was seen by millions of Americans in the closing days of the election, when it was made available for free on the Web site www.stolenhonor.com.

Editor's Note: NewsMax also paid for the film to be shown the weekend before the election on the PAX-TV network and on numerous local stations across the nation, including ABC, CBS and NBC affiliates.

Frustrated by the political Left's determination to silence them and concerned about the public's lack of understanding about Vietnam history and those who fought in that war (most Americans alive today were not born before 1972), the POWs hope to provide a counter-balance to the propaganda that still permeates the media and public education today.

For example, contrary to the assertions of Cronkite and others in the mainstream press, the American military had nothing to do with the fall of Saigon, much less losing the war. The last American combat unit left Vietnam in August 1972, nearly three years before the 1975 Communist invasion. The U.S. military remained undefeated in battle throughout the Vietnam War.

Instead, it was Congress – more specifically, the nearly 2-to-1 Democrat majority in the Senate (61 to 37) and the House (291 to 144) in 1975 – that voted to cut off all military funding to the Saigon government that was directly responsible for the defeat of South Vietnam.

Congressional Democrats literally abandoned our South Vietnamese allies and it was they, not the U.S. military, who were responsible for the carnage that followed, the slaughter, imprisonment and forced "re-education" of millions of innocent civilians throughout Southeast Asia by an avenging North Vietnamese Army.

There's another little-known fact.

Several months after the last U.S. ground combat forces left Vietnam in 1972, the North Vietnamese Communists and the Viet Cong signed the Paris Peace Accords, promising, among other things, to cease all hostilities and to NOT invade South Vietnam, much less conquer it, as they did in 1975.

Then and now, 30 years later, rarely is there ever a mention of this diplomatic treachery. Broken treaties, even ones for which the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded, apparently aren't worthy of mention in the evening news, certainly not in history textbooks, at least not when it comes to Vietnam.

As for the popularity of the war, among Walter Cronkite's friends and colleagues in the "Old Media" and the anti-war community, the war became "unpopular" in 1968, immediately after Democrat President Johnson announced he would not seek a second term and Republican Richard Nixon, who vowed to "bring peace with honor" to Vietnam, was elected.

For his efforts to withdraw American troops, eliminating the draft in the process, Nixon was rewarded with a landslide re-election victory in 1972 (521 to 17 electoral votes), burying his liberal Democrat opponent, Sen. George McGovern, who advocated a "cut and run" policy, a complete and immediate withdrawal from Vietnam.

If the only accurate polls are those taken in the voting booth, Nixon's lopsided re-election victory (46 million to 28 million votes) clearly demonstrated that an overwhelming majority of Americans still supported the war in Vietnam at least through 1972, probably much longer.

Media polls taken prior to the November 1972 election somehow missed tens of millions of Americans who supported the Nixon administration's war policies – the so-called "Silent Majority" – much as last year's media exit polls apparently failed to count a majority of Americans who had just voted to re-elect President Bush.

Those are but a few Vietnam myths spawned by political propagandists and the mainstream media, ones the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation hopes to dispel.

While protecting and preserving the "honor and reputations" of those who served in Vietnam is paramount for the VVLF, their "mission" today is to prevent an inaccurate history of Vietnam to erode U.S. national security. They do not want history to repeat itself, provide "terrorists" a political victory in the halls of Congress or on the streets of America that they could not possibly achieve on the battlefield, much like the Communists did in Vietnam three decades ago.

Nor do they believe that the media, academics and show business entertainers should be allowed to go unchallenged when they regurgitate enemy propaganda and advocate the wholesale defeat of the U.S., as John Kerry, Jane Fonda and numerous other Leftists did while Americans were still fighting and dying on Vietnam battlefields and in Communist prison camps.

"The false history of Vietnam has been used to endanger and demoralize our troops in combat, undermine the public's confidence in U.S. foreign policy and weaken our national security," Foundation chairman Col. Day said. "Radical leftists such as Sen. Kerry and Jane Fonda lied about the war 35 years ago and are lying about it today. The goal of the VVLF is to continue the work of countering more than three decades of misinformation and propaganda, and set the record straight."



Carlton Sherwood is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, a thrice-wounded, decorated Marine Vietnam combat veteran and producer of the documentary "Stolen Honor."


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam myths, 30 years later
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By EARL TILFORD
The Citizen News

Thirty years ago Friday, April 29, a North Vietnamese tank crashed through the walls of Saigon's Presidential Palace to raise a Viet Cong flag over Ho Chi Minh City, ending the 20-year Republic of Vietnam and America's longest war. This anniversary passed largely unnoticed.

I teach a course on the Vietnam War at a Christian liberal arts college in Western Pennsylvania.

Friday's lecture, "From Saigon to Baghdad," discussed how the American military recovered from Vietnam to build the kind of forces for the Persian Gulf War retired General Norman Schwarzkopf characterized as "just damn good."

For today's students, the Vietnam War is as remote as the Spanish Civil War was for undergraduates of the 1960s. So what might today's students hear about the Vietnam War?

In too many college and university courses on Vietnam, students will be taught America's involvement resulted from neo-imperialism driven by a corrupt capitalist system.

Many (not all) professors will maintain that a cruel technology was unleashed on a peaceful and peace-loving people and that millions of Vietnamese, Khmers, and Lao died due to craven policies compelled by U.S. industrialists and a warmongering Pentagon.

They will be taught that Agent Orange defoliants ruined the ecology of southern Vietnam, devastating forests and poisoning the earth; that a generation of American soldiers and millions of innocent Vietnamese died (or soon will) as a result.

Students may hear that draftees bore the burden of the war and African-Americans died in disproportionate numbers.

Their professors may contend that, at best, President John F. Kennedy's noble aspiration "to bear any burden" was subverted after his assassination by a military-industrial complex that expanded the war to suit their own ends.

These are among the myths propounded by lefty professors intent on pushing their "America as behemoth" weltanschauung. False assumptions result in false conclusions.

Communism, not the United States, caused the deaths of an estimated 100 million innocents from collectivization and the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and post-World War II period to the communist takeover of China in 1949 to the Khmer killing fields of post-Vietnam war Cambodia to the death camps in North Korea today.

If one considers the Indochina conflict as a theater in the 45-year-long Cold War, fighting there bought time for other Southeast Asian nations to bolster their economies and democratic political systems.

The defeat of U.S. policies in Indochina in 1975 was, at worst, a battle lost in the Cold War the West eventually won, resulting in freedom for Eastern Europe and an end to the Soviet Union.

The global spread of freedom since the Cold War makes the deaths of 58,000 Americans much more meaningful than depicting them as victims of neo-imperialist polices.

Other myths, like those associated with the use of Agent Orange, need to be exposed. During Operation Ranch Hand from February 1962 until mid-1971, the U.S. Air Force conducted defoliation missions over South Vietnam and parts of the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos.

While defoliants devastated mangroves in the swamps of the Mekong Delta, their effect on hardwoods in the Central Highlands was minimal. Agent Orange did no long-term damage to the ecology of southern Vietnam or southeastern Laos.

Furthermore, the Air Force closely monitors the health of aging Ranch Hand crews. These airmen, who were literally drenched in Agent Orange while flying their missions, have not encountered physical problems significantly different from men their age never exposed to chemical defoliants.

Compare the numbers of French soldiers killed during the French Indochina War in ambushes along roadways and waterways with the smaller number of Americans who perished in roadside or waterway ambushes. Even if defoliants had deleterious long-term health effects, dying in late middle age beats dying at 19.

More myths concern who fought and who died. Soldiers and Marines comprised 88 percent of combat deaths with 90 percent of those deaths occurring among enlisted men, mostly in the grades of E3 and E4.

Of the 31,000 Army combat deaths, less than 15,000 were draftees.

Virtually all the 13,000 Marine, 1,400 Navy, and 1,000 Air Force personnel killed in Vietnam were volunteers.

Certainly the draft drove many to volunteer, but the fact is volunteers, not draftees, died in far greater numbers.

Perhaps the most pernicious part of this myth is that African-Americans died in disproportionate numbers.

Truth is, blacks accounted for 12 percent of combat deaths while draft-eligible black males comprised 13.5 percent of the available manpower cohort.

Claims that our soldiers engaged in "atrocities reminiscent of Genghis Khan" do the greatest disservice to men and women who served nobly in a just cause.

We were neither victims nor victimizers. Rather, we fought for the Enlightenment ideal that people everywhere deserve to live in freedom and dignity.

>Dr. Earl H. Tilford is a professor of history at Grove City (Penn.) College and a fellow with The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. He has authored three books on the Vietnam War and co-edited a book on Operation Desert Storm. Contact him at ehtilford@gcc.edu.


Ellie

[thedrifter]

Vietnam-era 'Ponderous Polly' featured in air show
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May 08, 2005
Corey Friedman
New Bern Sun Journal

CHERRY POINT - In 1968, it supplied Marines with fresh food and potable water during the Siege of Khe Sanh. In 1975, it dodged enemy gunfire as it raced across the Vietnam-Thailand border.

On Saturday, it sat idle on the Cherry Point Air Show grounds as curious visitors roamed its stout fuselage.

"Ponderous Polly," a Fairchild C-123K Provider used extensively in Vietnam, attracted plenty of attention as part of the vintage airplane display at the 2005 Air Show.

Owner and pilot John Curran, a retired U.S. Army captain, said the C-123s were a precursor to the more prevalent C-130 aircraft, and their primary use was to access short runways in remote locations.

"It is a short takeoff and landing aircraft designed to get in and out of unimproved airstrips or hastily constructed jungle strips," explained Curran, a River Bend resident who owns the aircraft with his wife, Sandra, through New Bern-based Northeast Aviation Group.

Curran said only about 300 of the airplanes were manufactured and just five C-123s in working order remain in the United States today.

Curran's plane shuttled supplies to U.S. troops and provided Vietnamese citizens with humanitarian aid gifts of rice and pigs during its many Vietnam war missions.

"This particular airplane was also the last C-123 to make it out of Vietnam into Thailand in 1975," he said. "There are lots of bullet holes in this thing. There are patches all over the place, mostly on the bottom."

Since the C-130 was the favored aircraft, Curran explained, C-123s were flown into some of the most dangerous missions.

They called in the C-123s right after the first C-130 landed and got mortared," he said. "They didn't want to lose any C-130s, so they brought in 123s."

Old bruisers like "Ponderous Polly" evoke nostalgia in some aviators who long for the raspy rumble of a strong engine.

"There's no jet whine on this thing," Curran said. "Each one of these engines has got 18 cylinders and the sound of those 36 cylinders firing is just music to most people's ears."

With a 110-foot wingspan and a capacity of 70 passengers in addition to its regular three-man crew, the C-123 is too large for most hangars. When Curran purchased the airplane in 1998, it had been exposed to the elements for 13 years and needed some renovations.

"This airplane was derelict in the desert when I got it in 1998. It had been there since '85," Curran said. "As you might imagine, it took a little work to get it airworthy again, and when we did get it airworthy in June of '98, we flew it 2,000 miles to Schenectady, N.Y., where it has been based up until this past November."

Curran paid just $1 for his C-123, but even routine maintenance on such an aircraft requires a substantial investment.

"Ponderous Polly" burns 200 gallons of fuel and eight gallons of oil per hour, he explained. The craft's cavernous fuel tank holds 2,600 gallons, and with jet fuel currently averaging $3.50 per gallon, that makes for a $9,000 fill-up.

The retired Army special forces officer and corporate pilot credits the air show community with keeping his plane - and dozens of other vintage aircraft - in the sky.

Shows such as the 2005 Cherry Point Air Show pay airplane owners an appearance fee and reimburse them for the cost of oil and fuel, enabling the owners to tour the air show circuit.

"If it wasn't for the air show community, these airplanes wouldn't even exist anymore," he said. "(This plane) would be in a museum someplace just sitting if there weren't air shows. We bring the museum to the people."


Ellie

[thedrifter]

The 'Last Patrol' comes home <br />
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By RICHARD SISK <br />
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU <br />
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WASHINGTON - The &quot;Last Patrol&quot; of Marine &quot;Recon Team Breaker&quot; that began in the mountain jungles of Vietnam...

[thedrifter]

Missing Vietnam Servicemen to Be Buried <br />
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By FREDERIC J. FROMMER <br />
Associated Press Writer <br />
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<br />
WASHINGTON (AP) -- On May 9, 1967, Sigmund and Agnes Tycz of...