Free Republic

John Kerry invoked his Vietnam War service to push back against an Israeli cabinet member who criticized his recent comments on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. During a security conference in Munich last weekend, Kerry suggested that if his Israeli-Palestinian peace effort fails, there could be serious consequences for Israel. “For Israel there is an increasing delegitimizing campaign that has been building up,” Kerry said, without condemning the effort. “People are very sensitive to it. There are talks of boycotts and other kinds of things.” In response, Israel’s economy minister Naftali Bennett harshly criticized Kerry’s failure to speak out against the...

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said Wednesday that he was unfazed by criticism in Israel over his peace efforts, saying that he was “threatened by real bullets” so words do not intimidate him. In an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper, Kerry was asked to respond to the Israeli ministers who criticized him earlier in the week after he threatened Israel with boycotts if peace talks with the Palestinian Authority (PA) fail. […] Referring to his service in Vietnam, he added, “And, you know, words—I have to tell you, my friend, I’ve been, attacked before by people using real bullets,...

The submarine, named HQ-183 Ho Chi Minh City, was built at Admiralty Verfi Shipyard in St. Petersburg. Due to harsh weather conditions in St. Petersburg, the naval diesel-electric submarine was loaded on to the Dutch heavy lift ship at Kaliningrad’s Yantar shipyard instead of Admiralty Verfi. The loading was supported by two tug boats and a canoe. The Dutch ship is now travelling to the Baltic Sea and then to Vietnam. It is scheduled to dock at Cam Ranh Port in one and a half months. Vietnam and Russia signed a document verifying the result of the vessel’s technical tests...

January 24, 2014 Obama Spending $2.7 Mil to Broadcast Communist Propaganda to Vietnam Daniel Greenfield You would think that once we were out of Vietnam, we could stop spending money on Vietnam. You would also think that the Department of Health and Human Services would have better places to spend millions of dollars especially considering the shape Medicare is in. The Department of Health and Human Services is spending $2,797,979 on a study that brings television to more than a dozen remote villages in Vietnam to study its impact on their culture and reproductive behavior.“In cooperation with the Vietnam government,...

Perhaps one of the unfortunate byproducts of the lumping together of English and History under the rubric “Humanities” is that English professors start to think of themselves as historians. When they try to be, they prove that they are not. At the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting in Chicago, Katharina Motyl from Germany’s Free University claimed that women and children were also at Abu Ghraib as inmates. Excusing Abu Ghraib’s infamy “would give a lie to the Bush administration” that these Middle Eastern wars were to free both women and children from repressive regimes, she argued. Abu Ghraib has long...

THE battle-hardened Australian jihadis coming home from Syria's civil war are not the first cohort of returning Middle Eastern freelance fighters to stump policymakers in Canberra. The war in Oman's Dhofar region that raged between 1962 and 1976 lured dozens of the nation's most seasoned Vietnam-era soldiers and airmen, who opted to keep fighting Marxist guerillas rather than readjust to civilian life. ..... Vietnam War hero Keith Payne still recalls publicly lashing the Whitlam government's soft stance on communism in April 1975 before leaving for Dhofar, where he served as an Omani captain for nine months. Payne now admits he...

Today is the day the Syfy channel has it's annual Twilight Zone marathon. I just watched the 1963 episode "In Praise Of Pip", which has the Vietnam war as its background. I got to thinking of those times (I was 13 then) and the fact that I knew several guys of draft age that got MARRIED pretty much to get out of going over there because they weren't taking married men then. I can't remember anyone who thought that getting married to avoid the draft was a particularly bad idea back then. Weird huh?

One of the big Obama administration trade initiatives going on right now is negotiations with eleven countries in the Pacific region, called the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). What exactly is being talked about in these trade talks? Is it really about free trade? Based on standard media coverage of the issue, it’s not easy to discern.  Here’s an example from the Washington Post.In the print version of the piece, the title notes that the U.S. is seeking “to shape global trading rules”; and the sub-title says that the goal of the talks is “a freer flow of world commerce.”...

U.S. Army Bell UH-1D Iroquois, commonly known as Hueys, airlift members of the 2nd Battalion, 14th Infantry Regiment from the Filhol Rubber Plantation area to a new staging area during Operation Wahiawa, a search and destroy mission conducted by the 25th Infantry Division, northeast of Cu Chi, South Vietnam. May 1966.U.S. Army archive photo.

As Christmas 1970 approached, 43 American prisoners of war in a large holding cell at the North Vietnamese camp known as the Hanoi Hilton sought to hold a brief church service. Their guards stopped them, and so the seeds of rebellion were planted. The Hoa Lo prison, a 19th-century structure built by the French in central Hanoi, was christened the Hanoi Hilton by American prisoners during the Vietnam War. A few days later, Lt. Cmdr. Edwin A. Shuman III, a downed Navy pilot, orchestrated the resistance, knowing he would be the first to face the consequences: a beating in a...

I've been scanning old slides and thought some freepers might find a few interesting. #1 WWII era wooden gunboat we used. Twin 6-71 diesel engines.(Thank God. At least the Navy had the sense to stay away from gasoline power.) 18 Knot max speed. Unless it had a forward-throw mortar and then maybe it had a 14knot top speed. The mortar wasn't worth the trouble. One twin .50 mount armament, plus an M-79 (my favorite) and some M-16s and a shotgun. Nothing but the best for our boys! The .50s aren't installed because this particular shot was taken after a refit....

Sec. of State John Kerry spoke Sunday about losing his faith in God while a soldier in the Vietnam War, then returning to his Catholic faith after an "epiphany" that suffering is part of God's plan. After the Vietnam War shook his faith, correspondent Martha Raddatz asked on ABC's "This Week," "how did you get that back?"

Junk Science: Our secretary of state can't stop talking about the climate change threat. Allow us to cite some recent headlines that should encourage him to rethink his position. When John Kerry and other alarmists talk about climate change, he means man-made global warming. Climate change is a meaningless description because the climate is always changing, always has, always will. The alarmists moved on from "global warming" to "climate change" because it was obvious that not only was the world not getting hotter, winter kept arriving with intense cold and mountains of snow. How could they sell the oppressive swelter...

On Nov. 29, 1970, 43 U.S. servicemen gathered in the Hoa Lo prison compound, often called the “Hanoi Hilton,” and performed an act of retaliation— a church service. Nine days earlier, after a failed attempt by U.S. Special Forces to liberate the prisoners, the North Vietnamese captors had removed them from their cells and incarcerated them in a single holding area. For several men, it was the first face-to-face encounter with friends they had made through tap-code communication. The first Sunday after they were removed from their cells, they attempted to hold a church service but were threatened with severe...

John Kerry first set foot in Vietnam 44 years ago, a young U.S. Navy officer fighting in a war that would come to profoundly influence his political career and foreign policy thinking. He returned again Saturday, this time as America’s top diplomat, offering security assurances and working to promote democratic and economic reforms in the communist country. In his 14th trip to the Southeast Asian nation since the war’s end, the U.S. secretary of state was trying to bolster the remarkable rapprochement that he had encouraged and helped to engineer as a senator in the 1990s. …

40 Years after a Purple Heart in Vietnam a Veteran Hikes on the Appalachian Trail - YouTube Mark Parish·Published on Dec 13, 2013 A wounded Veterans odyssey 40 years after receiving the Purple Heart in the Vietnam war. Vietnam war Veteran Mark Parish hikes the Appalachian Trail for rehabilitation from delayed stress syndrome. Through this video you willlearn how Mark earned his Purple Heart, learn about his experiences in Vietnam, see some beautiful scenery from the Appalachian Trail and see Marks ending journey to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington DC.

The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command and Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory have identified the remains of an airman who went missing during the Vietnam War. Air Force Col. Francis McGouldrick Jr., of New Haven, Conn., is to be buried Friday with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery on the 45th anniversary of his loss, according to a Pentagon statement Monday.

When Vice President Lyndon Johnson returned to Capitol Hill after his first White House meeting with the new team assembled by President John F. Kennedy, he rushed to talk with his mentor, House Speaker Sam Rayburn. LBJ told his fellow Texan how impressed he was with Kennedy’s “best and brightest.” He was especially taken with Defense Sec. Robert Strange McNamara, the ex-CEO of Ford Motor Company. Lyndon described that “feller with the sta-comb in his hair” as being the brightest of the brightest. The bald-headed Texas politico, Rayburn, narrowed his eyes and looked at Johnson over his glass of Bourbon...

The number of U.S. battlefield fatalities exceeded the rate at which troop strength surged in 2009 and 2010, prompting national security analysts to assert that coinciding stricter rules of engagement led to more deaths. A connection between the sharp increase in American deaths and restrictive rules of engagement is difficult to confirm. More deaths surely stemmed from ramped-up counterterrorism raids and the Taliban’s response with more homemade bombs, the No. 1 killer of NATO forces in Afghanistan. But it is clear that the rules of engagement, which restrain troops from firing in order to spare civilian casualties, cut back on...

Looking to increase defence cooperation with India, Vietnam Communist party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong also requested New Delhi for conversion training for Vietnamese pilots to fly Sukhoi-30 aircrafts. Vietnam formally requested India to supply the Indo-Russian BrahMos cruise missiles at a meeting in New Delhi, informed sources told RIR. The request was made when Vietnam Communist party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong visited the Indian capital, the sources said, adding that the Southeast Asian country was looking at enhancing security cooperation with India. Informal negotiations had been going between the countries for the joint Indo-Russian missiles that are being...