Posted on 11/13/2015 8:23:41 PM PST by Brad from Tennessee
A FEW weeks ago, an archivist at The New York Times discovered a small trove of photographs I’d taken 50 years ago while covering the first major clash of the Vietnam War between the American and North Vietnamese Armies. Though I had written about the battle for The Times, and later in my book “A Bright Shining Lie,†I’d completely forgotten about the photographs. Seeing them brought back a cascade of memories of one of my most extraordinary days as a young war correspondent. From Our Advertisers
It was Nov. 15, 1965, in the valley of the Ia Drang in the wild mountains of the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. That spring, the Saigon government had begun collapsing under the combined blows of the Vietcong guerrillas and the regular North Vietnamese Army units infiltrating down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos. To save his Vietnamese protégés, President Lyndon B. Johnson had launched what became the big American War in Vietnam. The combined military might of the United States — the infantry of the Army and the Marines, the warplanes of the Air Force and the Navy’s carrier fleets — was arriving as fast as it could be assembled.
That evening, I telephoned The Times’s Saigon bureau to let them know what I would be writing. Charlie Mohr, the other reporter in the bureau and my boss, told me to head back up to Pleiku, the principal town and major air base in the Highlands, right away. The “Air Cav,†as the Army’s newest division was called, was apparently in a hell of a fight with N.V.A. units near there. . .
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I remember the day President Reagan said, “Those who fought in Vietnam participated in a noble cause”. That gave me a sense of peace I didn’t have before then.
It’s still hard to remember the ones who had it a lot worse than me (I was a Huey driver). I bless those grunts every time I think of them, the ones I carried around.
As for the politicians, it’s fun to read about LBJ’s decline & death after leaving office, which proved that karma is indeed a most vengeful b!tch.
Welcome home, everybody, and let us always salute out fallen brave.
CNN ? Hell, everyone of us knew ISIS could do this.
You are welcome. Y our story reminds me of something I hadn’t thought about for years. The first reunion I went to was Gamewardens. Their speaker on Saturday night was Elmo Zumwalt and he made essentially the same points. I like the line about Americans without money.
Uh, no. The US flew almost 700 sorties in support of the French at Dien Bien Phu, but as Ike had already disavowed any intent to get involved, the operation was done covertly. Two US pilots lost their lives.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Dien_Bien_Phu#American_participation
Ho Chi Minh, his general Giap, and all the rest of his fellow commies were responsible for what happened at Dien Bien Phu. Until Giap opened up on the French positions with superior firepower from higher ground, no one in France or the US had any idea about Viet Minh capability. The French had picked the location in order to cut Viet Minh supply lines.
After WWII, the French had insisted on the return of all of their prewar colonial territory, and DeGaulle took a hard line against the countries that had just liberated France, refusing to join NATO, etc. The US didn’t give a crap about Indochina, it only wanted to keep France in the fold.
Total waste of time that was, too, since the result of French mistakes at Dien Bien Phu was to see the hung over French public turn 93% against trying to hang on to Indochina, and the fever pitch against the US and UK get even worse. It’s still a factor in French elections, even among the best-of-the-worst politicians and political parties.
During WWII, Joe Stilwell suggested supporting Mao instead of CKS, an attitude probably influenced by the rocky relationship between Stilwell and CKS, and the great public relations the Maoists had when they received him as a visitor. He didn’t want the US to switch sides, merely support both in their fight against the Japanese. CKS also ran and supplied the Vietnamese resistance to the Japanese occupation.
Truman refuse to give US support for Ho Chi Minh’s takeover. That’ll learn Ho.
“The US didn’t give a crap about Indochina, it only wanted to keep France in the fold.”
That would explain the 60K dead over the next years as we fought there. There is no doubt we pushed the French to fight that war; while they wanted Indochina, they had no interest in fighting to keep it.
The “US pilots” weren’t in the US military; one was so fat he couldn’t get the stick all the way back to take off (his body was recovered in the last ten years).
No, but nice try — the policy of the US changed; the US policy in the 1950s was devolution of the old colonial empires, but France was believed to be critical to European security. Apparently to you fat guys are neither pilots nor American.
Why weren’t we providing air support a few years later in their war in Algeria? We wanted them to fight the Indochina War, paid & supplied them to do it, then left them to lose it.
The French had done a good job of destroying much of the Viet Minh. What ultimately saved Ho and Giap was Chinese involvement in Dien Bien Phu. Of course, the American decision not to use airstrikes against the combined Chinese-Viet Minh force was critical.
The US did use airstrikes, so, no.
Hal Moore wrote the book, We Were Soldiers Once...And Young, the basis for the Mel Gibson movie, We Were Soldiers. I couldn’t watch it without sobbing.
Still doesn’t answer the question of how effective they were. The Chinese decision to move troops into the Dien Bien Phu era saved Giap’s behind.
No one asked about effectiveness — you simply repeated the already-refuted LIE that the US didn’t support Dien Bien Phu with bombing.
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