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The recent PBS ten-episode The Vietnam War, produced and directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and written by Geoffrey Ward, is billed as a critical reexamination of the war in Indochina that claimed more than 58,000 American lives and more than two million Vietnamese lives. It is nothing of the sort. Burns, Novick and Ward do not reexamine any of the conventional liberal perspectives on the war. The shibboleths of the Left are all reinforced. The production of this new series was, objectively, a waste of time and money, for PBS had essentially told the same story in 1983’s...

RIP Glenn. Galveston is a song about a young man drafted to fight in Vietnam. He left his 21 year old girlfriend and thinks of her and Galveston while he worries of dying. "I clean my gun and dream of Galveston". Glenn played briefly for the Beach Boys. From December 1964 through early March 1965, Glen was a touring member of The Beach Boys playing bass and singing Brian Wilson‘s high falsetto harmony part. Brian was in rehab. Glenn could listen to a song once and play it from memory. Also recommended is The William Tell Overture in memory of...

PBS is planning to run a new documentary series this September on the Vietnam War, produced and written by Ken Burns. Burns is a left-wing "historian" and documentary film producer with a history of having his politics shape the narrative of the story he is telling, with a number of resulting inaccuracies. Ken Burns correctly identifies the Vietnam War as being the point at which our society split into two diametrically opposed camps. He is also correct in identifying a need for us to discuss this aspect of our history in a civil and reflective manner. The problem is that...

The guns 'special' rounds were quiet but lacked stopping power Since World War II, America's elite forces have used quiet firearms for missions where it pays to be silent. Sound suppressors—commonly referred known as silencers—remain in service today. What many don't know is that U.S. commandos once carried revolvers with special cartridges designed to muffle gunshots. In the 1960s, the AAI Corporation developed the cartridges for the U.S. Army's and Navy's rifles, pistols and shotguns. The U.S. Army Special Forces and Rangers tested the unique ammunition in Vietnam. While they offered many advantages, AAI's products failed to win any widespread...

In Memory of a Fallen Comrade I write this in memory of one we left behind, MSG William B. Hunt, U.S. Army Special Forces, MIA, November 5, 1966. It is an account of the sacrifice he made to his country, to his comrades, and to the Vietnamese people. In November 1966, SSG Hunt and I served together at Special Forces ODA Camps under Detachment B-32, 5th Special Forces Group, Tay Ninh Province, in the Republic of Vietnam. Hunt was with ODA-322 at Camp Suoi DA, and I was assigned to ODA-323 at Camp Trai Bi. Our camps were about 30...

Troops of Co C, 1st Bat. 20th Inf. Reg. 11 Brig. 23rd ID attacked the Vietnamese village of My-Lai. By the end of the day the village and its population were largely destroyed.

John Kerry doesn’t come late to the betrayal of friends. He has had considerable practice. In 1971, when he was a young lieutenant just back from Vietnam, where he was a decorated skipper of a Swift Boat patrolling the Mekong River, he appeared before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pay his “respects” to the American soldiers, sailors and Marines he fought a war with. Representing all those veterans, he told the senators, he wanted to talk about war crimes he said “were committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”...

Lawrence Manley Colburn, a helicopter gunner in the Vietnam War who helped end the slaughter of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese villagers by U.S. troops at My Lai, has died. He was 67. Lisa Colburn, speaking with The Associated Press on Thursday evening, said her husband of 31 years was diagnosed with cancer in late September and died Tuesday. "It was very quick," she said by phone from her Canton, Georgia, home near Atlanta. "He was a very peaceful man who had a great desire for there to be a peaceful world."

In this 1969 documentary of a seditious meeting of communists with the notorious communist and terrorist Walter T Howard CCCP of New York City, we see Bernie Sanders attending a meeting and a filming of a North Vietnamese communist film that portrays the communist viet cong as freedom fighters and the Americans as torturers and barbarians. This and other films were shown by student radicals and marxists as Americans were being killed by the North Vietnamese army and the VietCong and as Vietnamese civilians were being murdered, tortured, buried alive and extorted by the communists and their gangster protection schemes...

In Memory of a Fallen Comrade I write this in memory of one we left behind, MSG William B. Hunt, U.S. Army Special Forces, MIA, November 5, 1966. It is an account of the sacrifice he made to his country, to his comrades, and to the Vietnamese people. In November 1966, SSG Hunt and I served together at Special Forces ODA Camps under Detachment B-32, 5th Special Forces Group, Tay Ninh Province, in the Republic of Vietnam. Hunt was with ODA-322 at Camp Suoi DA, and I was assigned to ODA-323 at Camp Trai Bi. Our camps were about 30...

Memorials to veterans in a Los Angeles neighborhood and a town in Kentucky, as well as a Civil War veterans cemetery in Virginia, were damaged as the nation prepares to mark Memorial Day, officials said. A Vietnam War memorial in the Venice area of Los Angeles has been extensively defaced by graffiti. The vandalism occurred sometime during the past week, KCAL/KCBS-TV reported. The homespun memorial painted on a block-long wall on Pacific Avenue lists the names of American service members missing in action or otherwise unaccounted for in Southeast Asia. News of the vandalism came as another veterans-related memorial was...

VENICE (CBSLA.com) — Vandals defaced a memorial to Vietnam war veterans in Venice – an awful sight on this Memorial Day weekend. Stewart Oscars welled up as he looked at the vandalized mural located on Pacific Avenue near Sunset Court. It was covered in graffiti from end to end. “This knocked me out. So sickening. Just sadness…think of all these people. They’re gone,” Oscars said. “I remember the Vietnam war and how friends went to war, and bodies came back. Somehow, it has to be taught that this is not a good idea. This is actually stupid.” The memorial was...

More than four decades after the fall of Saigon, Washington is still holding on to various classified details about its fight in Southeast Asia. Among the Pentagon media arm’s still-secret records are photos and video of updated World War II-era bombers the U.S. Air Force sent to hit Laos. In May 1966, pilots and crews from the 603rd Air Commando Squadron brought eight B-26K Invaders from their base in Louisiana to Nakhon Phanom Air Base in Thailand. Desperate to stem the flow of troops and supplies flowing down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam, the flying branch had...

In a move that is raising concerns among some Vietnam War veterans, President Obama will discuss selling more U.S. arms to Hanoi during his visit to Vietnam that began Sunday night. Top White House advisers said Mr. Obama hasn’t made a decision whether to lift the partial U.S. embargo on sending military equipment to Vietnam, where more than 58,200 U.S. soldiers were killed before the fall of Saigon in 1975. But the administration sees advantages in easing the embargo, both as a warning to expansionist China and as leverage to compel the communist regime in Hanoi to improve its record...

John Kerry, our Secretary of State, has been talked about by three former Obama Secretaries of Defense who have expressed grave concerns about the lack of respect displayed by both Kerry and Obama for members of the American military. And Kerry has expressed contempt for American men at arms on more than one occasion. During his run for President, it was Kerry who said young people needed to go to college or remain stupid and go into the military. Such are the views of the self-described “winter soldier;” the treacherous soldier that attempted to throw his brothers in arms under...

There’s a VA facility near my home and I pass by it about three times each week on the long runs I use to keep my body from stagnating as I grow older and achier. Seeing our American flag waving from a tall pole near the entrance to the veterans’ complex always puts a little bounce in my step. So I’m chugging by it last week wearing a sweat-stained PT shirt emblazoned with a replica of the Vietnam Service ribbon when a guy limping toward the entrance and leaning on a cane spots me. He smiles, waves and points to...

I'm hours late on this post, but better late than never. For National Vietnam Veterans Day A great episode from the CBS News Vietnam Series with Walter Cronkite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTcLw8l9rQQ

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Remains of Illinois soldier, missing since 1969, coming home By Len Wells Evansville Courier & Press, Ind. (Tribune News Service) Published: January 9, 2016 ALBION, Ill. The remains of an airman listed as "missing in action" during the Vietnam War have been recovered. Officials with the U.S. Department of Defense confirmed the remains of Pfc. Kenneth Leroy Cunningham of Ellery, Illinois. He had been missing since Oct. 3, 1969. He was 21 at the time. Cunningham's remains will be flown back to the United States later this month, arriving at the airport in Louisville, Kentucky on Jan 19. His remains...