Viet Nam Veterans (VNAM)

[Seminole Red]

The 2014 US Open Pool is now open for business!!!

1. You pick 5 players for the tournament. You can only pick 1 player from the top 5 in the world ranking. The top 5 are Woods, Scott, Stenson, Watson and Kuchar (remember Woods is not playing).

You must also pick a tie breaker total score...even par for the 4 rounds is 280.

2. Teams must be submitted prior to the first group teeing off on Thursday June 12th.

3. Must have fun

4. The winner will be the team with the highest total dollar total at the end of the Tournament.

5. Points will be deducted for spelling mistakes and poor punctuation.

6. All of Fred's decisions are final.

7. No gimmees or mulligans allowed.

8. Void where prohibited.

9. Late entries will be allowed but you can only pick from players that have not teed off.

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=103009235

[softballdaddy]

[iheartweimers]

As a veteran serving with 1/27 Inf, 2d Bde, 25th Inf Div in
1966, and 11th Inf Bde, 23d (Americal) Div, 1968, and US
Army Support Command, Thailand (USASUBTHAI) 1972,
I am missing and honoring the many friends in those units
and them many more I met, taught, or received training
from while stationed at The Infantry School, Ft Benning,
GA. While in The 'Nam, I tried to drink as much warm beer
as I could, or Scotch with my halizone treated paddy water,
but we didn't know that it was the Agent Orange in that
water that would be killing us with cancer 40+ years later.
So I'll be seeing my friends soon, I had many good years
that they didn't. An Infantryman's lament - __________________
\"We have done so much,with so little,for so long,we can do anything with nothing, forever\"

[softballdaddy]

[softballdaddy]

LAWS OF COMBAT
10. If you first don't succeed, call an airstrike
9. If you see a bomb technician running, make sure to keep up with him.
8. Any ship can be a minesweeper . . . once.
7. If at first you don't succeed, bomb disposal is not for you.
6. Never draw fire, it irritates everyone around you
5. Never forget that your weapon is made by the lowest bidder
4. Incoming fire always had the right away.
3. Bring the biggest gun you can handle and lots of ammo.
2. The Calvary doesn't always come to the rescue.
1. If the enemy is within range, so are you.

[softballdaddy]

The cost of this weekends BBQ, ask these guys, they paid for it

[EZ2]

On this weekend ---- Memorial Day specific ----- but, just not only this weekend....I think of my many relatives, friends and fellow Marines who gave all.

I salute you, I love you all and will NEVER FORGET!

[softballdaddy]

I am glad todays men and women are getting better than we did.

http://blog.theveteranssite.com/budweiser-tribute-to-the-troops/?utm_source=faceaff&utm_medium=fenix&utm_campaign=budweiser-tribute-to-the-troops&utm_term=20140414

[Seminole Red]

The 2014 Masters Pool is now open for business!!!

http://investorshub.advfn.com/Golfs-Major-Championships-GMC-2442/

1. You pick 5 players for the tournament. You can only pick 1 player from the top 5 in the world ranking. The top 5 are Woods, Scott, Stenson, Day and Mickelson.

You must also pick a tie breaker total score...even par for the 4 rounds is 288.

2. Teams must be submitted prior to the first group teeing off on Thursday April 10th.

3. Must have fun

4. The winner will be the team with the highest total dollar total at the end of the Tournament.

5. Points will be deducted for spelling mistakes and poor punctuation.

6. All of Fred's decisions are final.

7. No gimmees or mulligans allowed.

8. Void where prohibited.

9. Late entries will be allowed but you can only pick from players that have not teed off.

[HoosierHoagie]

Happy #VietnamVeteransDay!

Today we recognize and thank all Vietnam veterans for their service - honoring those who came back and those who didn't. While many did not get the respect they deserved when they came home, we give it to you now. Welcome Home!

[softballdaddy]

Signal Charlie Adm. Denton

http://news.msn.com/us/jeremiah-denton-vietnam-war-pow-and-senator-dies

[HoosierHoagie]

" It is a SHOCKING AND TRAGIC FACT that today more than 2,490 American servicemen remain unaccounted for from the Vietnam War!!!
Past Administrations of U.S. Presidents and the U.S. Department of Defense HAVE DONE NOTHING TO DEMAND A FULL ACCOUNTING AND RETURN OF U.S.POWs BEING HELD BY COMMUNIST VIETNAM.

The sell-outs in Washington DC have swept issues of our U.S. POWs/MIAs under the geo-political rug in order normalize relations with our former enemy in Hanoi! All but a few have been declared 'presumptively dead by the Department of Defense. Since the war's end in May 1975, the grim roster of POWs-prisoners of war-and MIAs-missing-in action-has been relentlessly whittled to near zero! The U.S. Government often seems more interested in normalizing future relations with Hanoi, THAN IN DEMANDING A FULL ACCOUNTING AND RETURN OF OUR POWs AND MIAs AS CALLED FOR IN THE 1973 PARIS PEACE AGREEMENT!!! "

[softballdaddy]

Band of Brothers character Bill Guarnere passes at 90
Currahee SSGT Guarnere...

[Seminole Red]

2014 Sprint Cup Challenge is ready for signups

WIN IHUB MEMBERSHIPS...SIGN UP NOW...ITS FREE

RULES ARE IN THE IBOX

http://investorshub.advfn.com/A-Sprint-Cup-Challenge-3206/

[Seminole Red]

Merry Christmas Everyone

[excel]

Startup man's walking sticks honor veterans
Published: Tuesday, December 24, 2013, 12:01 a.m.
By Eric Stevick, Herald Writer















STARTUP -- Above the orange glow of a portable heater hangs a shiny didgeridoo.
The long wind instrument of Australian aborigines fits right in at Art King's eclectic workshop where everything, including the wide planks beneath his feet, seems to pay tribute to woodcraft.
Walking sticks, many topped with large carvings, line two walls in this curious room that somehow manages to be cozy in December's cold.
King lives in the hamlet that is Startup, pop. 676 more or less, a community of wide open spaces that's a stark contrast to the state prison in Monroe where he worked for 30 years as a corrections officer.
He's 66 with boyish blue eyes. He wears a straw hat inside his shop and spins yarns as effortlessly as he whittles sticks. His stories zigzag through time, revisiting his childhood on 200 acres in the San Juan Islands where his family made money for the kids' school clothes by hunting rabbits.
He still goes back to the islands to tend a cemetery where generations of his family are buried.
The walking staffs are hewn from cascara, vine maple and diamond willow.
The carvings are gleaned from Goodwill stores, garage sales and wherever else King and his friends happen upon them.
King puts them together with care. He calls these creations dignity sticks. He gives them away to two groups of people he has always respected: the elderly and veterans -- and often elderly veterans.
He once gave one of his walking sticks topped with the carving of a horse to a woman in a wheelchair whose legs had been amputated. She told him she cherished the gift. It took her back to a time in her life when she rode horses.
It was a man living at a local rest home who gave him the idea to give the sticks to veterans. Two of the man's sons were Vietnam War veterans.
"He just asked, 'Would you mind making them one?'" he said. "It was something humbling being able to do that for them."
King, too, had wanted to serve in the military. He didn't qualify.
"I had asthma very bad and they wouldn't take me," he said.
Last summer, King spotted Army Sgt. 1st Class Dave Sivewright running through the Skykomish Valley carrying a large U.S. flag on a staff.
King rolled up behind him and told him he wanted him to give him something. Sivewright later stopped by King's home. He left with a dignity stick.
One thing led to another and King was introduced to Randi Bowman and Christina Nelson, who work for the state Employment Security Office in Monroe. Bowman, who spent more than eight years in the Army, works with disabled veterans.
King gave Bowman a dignity stick topped with a symbol that carries deep meaning in her life.
"It is a wooden combat boot and it is beautiful," she said. "When I was in the Army, I got blisters on my feet all the time. I bought my girls a T-shirt that says, 'My mom wears combat boots.'"
Now, Bowman keeps extra sticks in her office, which she hands out to veterans.
She remembers the reaction of one vet in particular.
"He held onto that stick the whole time we were talking," she said.
Nelson has seen veterans, many who endured hardship upon their return home, reduced to tears when they are given their own walking stick.
"For me, it was a moving experience. It got to me a little bit," said Gerry Gibson, an Army veteran from Sultan who served in Vietnam and received a Purple Heart as well as two Bronze Stars. "Everybody really appreciates it."
Gibson is a member of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Stoehr Glidden Post No. 2554 in Sultan. More than two dozen fellow members received dignity sticks as part of a recent Veteran's Day ceremony.
King has grand hopes for the dignity sticks. Someday he would like to see inmates at the Monroe prison make them. He has known skilled artisans there and figures it can be a small step toward atonement. For years, he assigned them tools and admired their craftsmanship.
"I know for a fact they can do beautiful work," he said.
King said he wants to see the prisoners use their time to do something good, "to let them try to right things a little bit."
It's the same feeling he had as a corrections officer when inmates began what has turned into a massive composting project that keeps them productive and saves taxpayers money.
The prison started with 200 worms dug from the Washington State Reformatory grounds. The last time he checked, there were more than 10 million worms consuming the prison's waste while producing high-quality organic soil. It's King's dream that the soil eventually will be used to grow much of the produce the prison needs to feed the inmates.
These days, King wants to see the staffs in the hands of veterans everywhere. Recently, he bought a cardboard mailing box to send a stick to Si Robertson, a Vietnam War veteran who is part of the Louisiana-based reality TV series "Duck Dynasty."
Nelson, who works with Bowman at the Employment Security Center, said King is motivated by nothing more than kindness and concern for others.
"Everything he does is from the heart," she said. "When I think of Art, I see a generous spirt and he is not looking for anything in return."
Eric Stevick: 425-339-3446; [e-mail].

[softballdaddy]

Dog tags of the more than 58,000 service men and women who died in the Vietnam War hang from the ceiling of the National Vietnam Veterans Art Museum in Chicago on Veterans Day, November 11, 2010. The 10-by-40-foot sculpture, entitled Above and Beyond, was designed by Ned Broderick and Richard Stein.

The tens of thousands of metal dog tags are suspended 24 feet in the air, 1 inch apart, from fine lines that allow them to move and chime with shifting air currents. Museum employees using a kiosk and laser pointer help visitors locate the exact dog tag with the imprinted name of their lost friend or relative.

[softballdaddy]

PEARL HARBOR DAY DECEMBER 7

[softballdaddy]

How about this to get you boiling Jane Fonda on NVA AA mount

[eaglesurvivor]

The worst enemy that Viet Nam Veterans have had to face is elements of our own government and the several corporations, like Monsanto.

This article is a few days old, but it still boils me.
http://therightscoop.com/unbelievable-police-force-vietnam-veterans-to-vacate-vietnam-veterans-memorial/

[EZ2]

He Beat Us in War but Never in Battle

To defeat any adversary, the late North Vietnamese Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap permitted immense casualties and the near total destruction of his country.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304626104579119221395534220.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop

[softballdaddy]

Giap dead

http://news.yahoo.com/vietnam-independence-hero-general-giap-dead-102-173741043.html

[EZ2]

Welcome home boys!!!!

[HoosierHoagie]

Missing Aircrew Returns from Laos
By BigChrisG | Posted October 3, 2013



Sept. 30, 2013

MISSING AIRMEN FROM VIETNAM WAR ACCOUNTED FOR

The Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) announced today that the remains of two U.S. servicemen, missing from the Vietnam War, have been accounted for and will be returned to their families for burial with full military honors.

U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Robert E. Pietsch, 31, of Pittsburgh, Pa., and Maj. Louis F. Guillermin, 25, of West Chester, Pa., will be buried as a group Oct. 16, in a single casket representing the two servicemen at Arlington National Cemetery, near Washington, D.C.
Guillermin’s individual remains will be buried Oct. 5, 2013, in Broomall, Pa.

On April 30, 1968, Guillermin and Pietsch were on an armed-reconnaissance mission when their A-26A Invader aircraft crashed in Savannakhet Province, Laos. Witnesses saw an explosion on the ground and did not see any signs of survivors. Search and rescue efforts were unsuccessful, and Guillermin and Pietsch were listed as Missing in Action.

In 1994, a joint U.S./Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR) team, lead by the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), surveyed the crash site in Savannakhet Province, Laos. The team recovered human remains and evidence, but was unable to fully survey the site due to the presence of dangerous unexploded ordinance.

In 2006, joint U.S./LPDR teams assisted by Explosive Ordnance Disposal personnel cleared the site and gathered additional human remains and evidence such as personal effects and crew-related equipment.

The remains recovered were analyzed by scientists from JPAC and the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory using circumstantial evidence and forensic analysis such as mtDNA comparisons. Portions of the remains were individually identified as Guillermin through an mtDNA match from a hair sample from Guillermin’s medical file. The rest of the remains
recovered were not individually identified, but correspond to both Pietsch and Guillermin.

There are more than 1,640 American service members that are still unaccounted-for from the Vietnam War.

For additional information on the Defense Department’s mission to account for missing Americans, visit the DPMO web site at www.dtic.mil/dpmo or call [phone].


http://ireport.cnn.com/docs/DOC-1044110

[HoosierHoagie]

What a humbling experience EZ...thank you...a little choked up at the moment.

[EZ2]

Vietnam POW 40th Reunion -

[HoosierHoagie]

[EZ2]

Don't Do It!!!

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91414352

[EZ2]

a HIGH FIVE here!

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91323922

[HoosierHoagie]

John Edward Allen, Tuskegee Airman and Vietnam vet dies at 84. RIP hero!






ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — John Edward Allen, a New Mexico veteran who served as a Tuskegee Airman during World War II and later earned honors for his Air Force service during the Vietnam War, died Tuesday after a long battle with cancer.

NAACP Albuquerque Chapter President Harold Bailey said Allen died from multiple myeloma. He was 84.

A long-time resident of New Mexico after retiring, Allen was drafted into the Army Air Forces right out of high school in Live Oak, Fla., in 1945. At 17, he was assigned to the 332nd Fighter Wing of the Tuskegee Airmen — a group that broke racial barriers in World War II by becoming the first black aviators in the U.S. military.

He did not see combat in World War II, but he later received the Air Force Commendation Medal for assisting in de-arming two dozen 500-pound bombs that were dropped from the wing of a B-52 being prepared for a Vietnam War mission.

In addition, Allen and about 300 original Tuskegee Airmen were awarded a Congressional Gold Medal in 2007.

Upon retiring, the Rio Rancho resident was a sought-after speaker around New Mexico and founded in 2000 a local arm for the General Lloyd W. “Fig” Newton Chapter of the Tuskegee Airmen.

“History speaks for itself,” said Bailey. “He was a role model, not only for African-Americans, but for all Americans in general.”

Despite his accomplishments, Allen’s wife, Willie E. Allen, said her husband rarely talked about them unless he was asked.

“I didn’t even know he was a Tuskegee Airman until after we were married,” she said. “When I found out I started reading all about the Tuskegee Airmen. I was so proud of him.”

His wife said her husband also hardly talked about the racial discrimination he faced in his early days in the military and refused to carry any anger over it.

“That was just not the type of person he was,” Allen said.

Last year, the veteran was a subject of an Albuquerque Journal investigation that reported Allen was a victim of a botched surgery by the Albuquerque VA hospital that resulted in an eye infection. The surgery also resulted in permanent scarring and vision impairment, the newspaper reported.

Family members said a memorial is being planned Aug. 13 at the African American Performing Arts Center.


http://www.marinecorpstimes.com/article/20130801/NEWS/308010019/Tuskegee-Airman-Vietnam-vet-dies-84

[HoosierHoagie]

I know.....my exact thoughts when I was with Robbies Platoon as they were deploying to Iraq...some moments...you never forget.

[EZ2]

They were soooooooooooooo young!!!

[HoosierHoagie]

[HoosierHoagie]

The Boys of '67: Charlie Company's War in Vietnam

Andrew Wiest

When the 160 men of Charlie Company (4th Battalion/47th Infantry/9th ID) were drafted by the US Army in May 1966, they were part of the wave of conscription that would swell the American military to 80,000 combat troops in theater by the height of the war in 1968. In the spring of 1966, the war was still popular and the draftees of Charlie Company saw their service as a rite of passage. But by December 1967, when the company rotated home, only 30 men were not casualties—and they were among the first vets of the war to be spit on and harassed by war protestors as they arrived back the U.S.

In his new book, The Boys of ’67, Andy Wiest, the award-winning author of Vietnam’s Forgotten Army and The Vietnam War 1956-1975, examines the experiences of a company from the only division in the Vietnam era to train and deploy together in similar fashion to WWII’s famous 101st Airborne Division.

Wiest interviewed more than 50 officers and enlisted men who served with Charlie Company, including the surviving platoon leaders and both of the company’s commanders. (One of the platoon leaders, Lt Jack Benedick, lost both of his legs, but went on to become a champion skier.) In addition, he interviewed 15 family members of Charlie Company veterans, including wives, children, parents, and siblings. Wiest also had access to personal papers, collections of letters, a diary, an abundance of newspaper clippings, training notebooks, field manuals, condolence letters, and photographs from before, during, and after the conflict.

As Wiest shows, the fighting that Charlie Company saw in 1967 was nearly as bloody as many of the better publicized battles, including the infamous ‘Ia Drang’ and ‘Hamburger Hill.’ As a result, many of the surviving members of Charlie Company came home with what the military now recognizes as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder—a diagnosis that was not recognized until the late 1970s and was not widely treated until the 1980s. Only recently, after more than 40 years, have many members of Charlie Company achieved any real and sustained relief from their suffering.

[HoosierHoagie]

1973, Vietnam, UH-1 Iroquois arrive to pick up American prisoners of war

[toddao]

The Secret History of the Vietnam War

By Daniel Denvir

http://www.vice.com/read/vietnam-and-the-mere-gook-rule?utm_source=vicefbus
If you thought you knew all there was to know about the Vietnam War, you were wrong. For example: ever heard of the "Mere Gook Rule," a code of conduct the US military came up with in order to make it easier for soldiers to murder Vietnamese civilians without feeling too bad about it? ("It's only a mere gook you're killing!")

Well, few people knew about this bit of history either until author Nick Turse discovered it in secret US military archives, which he used as the primary sources for his new(ish) book, Kill Everything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam. The book is based on Turse's discovery of theretofore secret internal military investigations of US-perpetrated atrocities alongside extensive reporting in Vietnam and among American veterans, and it reminds us that the most significant fact about the Vietnam War is its most overlooked: massive and devastating Vietnamese civilian suffering.

The debate over the US's war in Vietnam continues to hang over this country's most recent and techno-futuristic imperial adventures. Nick's book makes for timely if extraordinarily painful reading, and I sat down with him recently to talk about the ongoing relevance of Vietnam, massacres, and secretly photocopying whole US government archives.
VICE: Your book documents how the American war in Vietnam was a fight systemically waged against the civilian population. How does this account that you documented differ from the Vietnam war as it's popularly remembered in the United States today?
Nick Turse: We have 30,000 books in print on the Vietnam War, and most of them deal with the American experience. They focus on American soldiers, on strategy, tactics, generals, or diplomacy out of Washington and the war managers there. But I didn't see any that really attempted to tell the complete story of what I came to see as the signature aspect of the conflict, which was Vietnamese civilian suffering. Millions of Vietnamese were killed, wounded, or made refugees by deliberate US policies, like the almost unrestrained bombing and artillery shelling across wide swaths of the countryside. That is, deliberate policies dictated at the highest levels of the US military. But any discussion of Vietnamese civilian suffering is condensed down to a couple pages or paragraphs on the massacre at My Lai.

This isn't the book that you initially intended to write. Tell me about the Vietnam War Crimes Working Group and the documents that you found.
I was working on a project on post-traumatic stress disorder among US Vietnam veterans. I would go down to the National Archives and I was trying to find hard data, military documents, to match up to the self-reports that we had from veterans about their experiences during the war. And on one of these trips I hit dead ends at every turn. After two weeks I had nothing to show for my research. I went to an archivist I worked with. I told him I couldn't go back to my boss empty handed. He thought about it for a second. He asked me, "do you think witnessing war crimes could cause post-traumatic stress?' I told him, "excellent hypothesis" and asked what he had.

Within an hour I was going through this box, many boxes actually, these reports of massacres, murders, rape, torture, assault, mutilation. Records put together by this Vietnam War Crimes Working Group impaneled in the Army Chief of Staff's office in the wake of the My Lai massacre, to track any war crimes cases or allegations that bubbled up from the field, to make sure that the Army wasn't caught flat footed again. And whenever it could it tried to tamp down these allegations.
So the War Crimes Working Group was not created to prevent or punish atrocities and war crimes?
That's exactly right. They didn't try and punish wrongdoers. They didn't try and put guidance out in the field. They didn't do anything to prevent war crimes. It operated out of [Chief of Staff] General [William] Westmoreland's office. He had been the supreme commander in Vietnam a couple years before, so he had a vested interest in the war and how it was portrayed. They just tracked things so they could make reports to the Secretary of Defense and to the White House to keep them appraised of possible scandals that were on the horizon.

So this group put together this massive collection of files. And after I found it I wrote my dissertation on these documents, and after I defended my dissertation I went to Vietnam.
Your reporting attempted to match up the atrocities you'd read about in these files with the actual villages where they had allegedly been committed. What did you find?
It was actually a lot easier than I expected to find witnesses and survivors of these particular incidents. Generally because the Vietnamese are so tied to their land, even people who were bombed out of the countryside into the shantytowns and slums and refugee camps, after the war they returned to their home villages, and were living there when I got there. But it really transformed my project, because I went to talk to Vietnamese about this one spasm of violence that I had in the records but what they would talk to me about was ten years of living under bombs and shells and helicopter gunships, and what it took to negotiate every aspect of their lives around the American war.

What I was told in the countryside was beyond my ability to grasp, something that I could have never have gotten from the records. And I would talk to Vietnamese who would tell me about what it was like just to try and eke out an existence in the war zone. About having their home burned down five, six seven times. And then finally giving up rebuilding and starting to live a semi-subterranean life in their bomb shelter. About how they figured out ways to get out of that shelter, to get water or food or relieve themselves. And how their entire lives were just predicated on figuring out a way not to get killed. They would talk about artillery called down on a hamlet, and they would run into the bomb shelter. And stay there. And then this whole calculus would begin where they would try and figure out exactly when the right time to leave that shelter was. You had to wait until the artillery shelling stopped, but you couldn't leave too soon or you were apt to be cut down by a helicopter gunship that was flying overhead. You had to make sure you weren't caught in a crossfire between departing guerrillas and the onrushing Americans. But you couldn't stay down there too long because the Americans were coming, and they would start rolling grenades into the bomb shelters because they saw them as possible enemy bunkers, fighting positions. There all of these decisions to be made, and it wasn't just your life that depended on making it, but maybe your entire family. The whole family could get wiped out if you left a second too early or a second too late.
Your academic advisor suggested that you copy those archives in a hurry before they disappeared?
I couldn't get the documents out of my head, and I went to a couple Vietnam War historians that I knew and tried to interest them in the project. I said, "You really should get down to the National Archives and work on these." And everybody at that time, they were burned out on the War or working on a different project. And one of them suggested that I ought to pursue it. I went to my advisor at Columbia, David Rosner, and I said to him, "Do you think I could write a book and my dissertation at the same time?" I was 200 pages in on another dissertation. He said that I was nuts. If the documents were that important, then I should get down to the National Archives and get the documents.

I was just a grad student at the time, I didn't have the money for this endeavor. I said to him, "I'm going to have to put together a grant proposal and it would be months before I got down there." And he just pulled out his checkbook and wrote me a check on the spot and said, "Go down there and get these documents."

Within 24 hours I was down at the Archives. I went in first thing in the morning and I copied until they threw me out at night. I put every cent that he gave me into copying. I slept in my car in the Archives parking lot and I collected this entire collection.

I always thought he was a little paranoid. I didn't think there was a real need to get all the documents. It turned out that it was a smart move because these documents, sometime after I first published from the files, they were pulled from the Archives' shelves and they haven't been publicly available in the same way since. Now you have to file a Freedom of Information Act request.
Your book describes, I think you call it, "suffering on an almost unimaginable scale." Artillery shelling, bombing, the destruction of villages by infantry, revenge missions, massacres, incredibly sadistic rapes, the gunning down of Vietnamese of farmers and fisherman from helicopter gunships, free fire zones. You cite an estimate of 3.8 million war deaths, the majority Vietnamese civilians. What turned so many young American men into such monsters?
It's a difficult question to answer. I went out and interviewed well over 100 American veterans for this book, and read sworn testimonies of many more. I don't know that I have a satisfactory answer. I talked to one veteran, he talked to me about the war. We were on the phone for several hours. He was very jovial. He had a really infectious laugh.

But he quieted down and said he wanted to tell me a story about a member of his unit. And he talked about how they were going through a village and burning it down, which was standard operating procedure. And in the midst of this, this woman runs up and grabs this GI by the sleeve, and is tugging at him and yelling at him—obviously because her home is being burned down, all her possessions are going up in flames. And she's angry, scared, upset. And he said this GI just pushed her off, and then took his rifle and hit her squarely in the nose with the butt. And he said her face just erupted in blood. She was screaming. And the GI just turned around and walked away laughing. And he paused a second and said, "Do you know that GI was me?" He had such a tough time figuring out how he could have done it. All these years later. At the time he didn't think anything of it, and in the years since, he couldn't help but think of it on a constant basis. And it really haunted him. And I had the same problem trying to match up the man that I was talking to with his 19-year old self.

He told me about how the training that he went through dehumanized the Vietnamese to the point where they didn't think of them as human. They thought of them as—they had a whole bunch of slurs that were used: dinks, slopes, slants, gooks. And he talked about how "I didn't become exactly like a robot but it was like that." You're trained to kill, you chant "Kill, kill kill." It psychologically readies you for this.
There was even a "Mere Gook Rule?"
There was a shorthand in Vietnam: the MGR, or Mere Gook Rule. The idea is that the Vietnamese weren't real people. They were subhumans. Mere gooks who could be abused or even killed at will. And this is something that was inculcated in troops from the earliest days of training. I talked to a lot of veterans who told me that as soon as they arrived at boot camp, they were told you never call them Vietnamese. You call them gooks, dinks, slants, slopes. Anything to take away their humanity. Anything to make it easier to kill them.

They were told by their superiors that all Vietnamese were likely the enemy. That children might carry grenades, women were probably the wives or girlfriends of guerillas, and they were probably making booby traps.

And even if there were rules of engagement on paper, or little cards handed out saying to treat the Vietnamese properly, the message that they were really given was that it was a lot safer to shoot first because no one was going to ask questions later.
How did high-level policies connect down to village level atrocities?
The Vietnam War was fought using an attrition strategy. This wasn't a war like World War I, where you had two armies facing off across a well defined battlefield. It's a guerrilla struggle, where the Vietnamese revolutionaries are radically outgunned. So they're not going to stand toe to toe with the Americans. And the Americans aren't trying to take territory or capture an enemy capital.

They were searching for some metric, some measure to show that they were winning a war. They settled on the attrition strategy which was used during the second half of the Korean War, and the main measure was body count. You would kill your way to victory by piling up Vietnamese bodies, and the Americans were always chasing this crossover point when they would be killing more Vietnamese guerrillas than the enemy could put into the field. And the idea was that at that moment, the enemy would give up the fight.

Because they would view the war as a rational effort the way the Pentagon did: this was a ledger sheet. And once the debits outweighed the credits, then they would end the war. They didn't think the way the Vietnamese did, that this was a revolutionary struggle. The Vietnamese saw it as a continuation of their anti-colonial fight against the French.

The troops in the field, they were pressed for bodies. Their commanders were leaning on them heavily. You were told to produce Vietnamese bodies, and if you didn't you were going to stay out in the field longer. They learned pretty quickly that the command wasn't discerning about what bodies were turned in, that just about any Vietnamese bodies would do. This pushed American troops toward at least calling in all Vietnamese who were filled as enemies, and also to the killing of detainees and prisoners and civilians, and calling them in as enemy dead.

This coupled with the much higher level of strategic thinking like the use of "free fire zones," which was basically a legal fiction that the US came up with to open wide swaths of the countryside to unrestrained bombing and artillery shelling. This caused tremendous amounts of death and destruction in the country side. And it opened it up to all this heavy firepower and made it inevitable that large numbers of civilians would be killed or wounded.
You write about particular commanders, like Lieutenant General Julian Ewell, who oversaw atrocities.
Ewell was one of the most notorious commanders who served in Vietnam. He was body count obsessed in a military world where body count was king. Even in the military he was known as the Butcher of the Delta.

What Ewell did was unleash heavy fire power across the Mekong Delta, which was the rice bowl of Vietnam and the most densely populated area. He opened the countryside to unrestrained artillery fire, bombing, and pushed his troops hard. His subordinates, the colonels under his command, were constantly badgered about body count. He demanded it, and if you didn't produce body count you were going to be sacked, and somebody else would be brought in until he got it.

Ewell's signature operation was code-named Speedy Express. It began in December 1968 and ran until the end of May 1969. Ewell's troops reported almost 11,000 enemy dead, but they only recovered less than 750 weapons. This great disparity was somehow ignored, as it often was across the country, by reporters in Vietnam. But a couple of years after Speedy Express ended, a stringer at Newsweek got wind of the story. Alex Shimkin. He felt that something extremely bloody had gone on in the Delta, and he amassed some evidence and brought it to his bureau chief Kevin Buckley. They came up with an estimate of 5,000 civilians killed during the operation.

Their report was heavily truncated by Newsweek, and the story never got out in the fullest way that it could have. What they didn't know is there had been a whistleblower in the military who had let the high command know exactly what was going on in the Delta. And what they also didn't know was that the military conducted their own investigation, because they were afraid that the Speedy Express story that Newsweek had would blow up and become as big or bigger than the My Lai massacre story. I found this in the National Archives. It had been buried for decades. But the military's own estimate showed that Newsweek probably underestimated the toll there, total. The military estimated as many as 7,000 of the dead were civilians. So 7,000 of 11,000. Just a devastating conclusion that no one knew about for decades.
Was Ewell ultimately punished since the military did indeed find that these atrocities had taken place?
No, far from it. After Speedy Express, Ewell was hailed as a hero. This was seen as a major victory. He was promoted to something called II Field Force Vietnam, the largest combat command in the world at the time. And from there he was promoted to become the military attache to the Paris peace talks. This was probably the least peaceful man in the military and the one least suited for the peace talks sent because what he'd done in Vietnam was considered such a success.

Ewell's crimes were understood and known by Westmoreland and other top officials. And instead of any effort to discipline or reign him him he was promoted?
That's exactly right. Westmoreland had received a letter at the end of Speedy Express from a soldier who had served within the division, and seen what had gone on firsthand. And he just set this letter aside. And this whistleblower wrote other letters to other top commanders, and eventually the military looked like they were going to conduct a full investigation, or at least begin one. They set about tracking down the whistleblower, and that's where the trail kind of ends. You could see that they identified him, they were going to make efforts to speak to him, and then shortly thereafter the investigation was killed. Subsequent investigations into Speedy Express were all suppressed, none of them ever made public. It was all disappeared.

What Newsweek had was the stuff of Pulitzers or Congressional investigations.
Why did editors suppress it?
They kept pushing back on it. I've read the cable traffic between Newsweek and Buckley, and they objected to him linking My Lai and Speedy Express together. They said they felt the Army and the White House had been through so much with the My Lai scandal, they didn't think it was fair to put them through that type of thing again.

Poor babies.
Exactly. So what had been a 5,000-word article, a really devastating piece of reporting, was truncated down to something around 1,800 words. And Julian Ewell's name wasn't even in the piece.

You write about many failures of journalism during and after the war. Seymour Hersh nearly couldn't even find a publisher for his My Lai investigation.
Yeah, Hersh took this story to Look magazine, Life magazine, a whole bunch of publications. Nobody was interested. Some of these publications had even heard about it previously from the whistleblower who got the entire My Lai investigation started, Ron Ridenhour. Hersh finally had to take it it to Dispatch News Service, which was a brand new, fledgling anti-war news service. They were able to distribute it into the mainstream, but really second tier newspapers. And it was only after it became public, and some photos of My Lai were published, only then did the story really start to gain steam.

I always thought it was very telling that at the time the My Lai massacre took place there were somewhere between 500 and 700 reporters in Vietnam. But when it was reported in the US, it was just a major victory over enemy forces: 128 enemies killed at a cost of no US lives. There was only a handful of weapons collected, but nobody thought to ask any questions. Basically the military press releases were just copied and put into the newspapers. It took a reporter back in the US to finally break the story.
My Lai has become the single atrocity through which the bad of the war is remembered. How did that happen, and what does that do to the way we think about Vietnam?
It really gives a false impression of the war. Most histories just distill down all discussion of Vietnamese civilian death and civilian suffering to the My Lai massacre. Two things were atypical about it: one, 500 civilians killed over a four hour period is an anomaly. But My Lai was also an anomaly because it was the one war crime that was completely and thoroughly investigated. Even the other investigations that I had in the files, nothing is the scope of My Lai. It came to stand in for a lot of what was going on in Vietnam. And after that, when other atrocity stories would come to light, a lot of editors felt that it was old hat. We've heard about My Lai. We know about that. The war was wrapping up and people weren't interested in revisiting this.

In histories of the war, academics and scholars haven't wanted to draw on what existed during the war, a fairly substantial anti-war literature that talked about atrocities. Most of this was written off as propaganda, and I think what seemed safe to talk about was My Lai. And because Americans generally focus on the American side of the war, it made it easy to do.
This seems like such a profound and outrageous failure on the part of both reporters and academics. You write, it went from being considered "propaganda and leftist kookery" one day to "yawnworthy common knowledge" the next.
I think that was really the case. There was only a brief window of opportunity, maybe one year in 1971, when it seemed that the issue of war crimes and the issue of Vietnamese suffering was gaining some traction. The military was having a tough time keeping a lid on it as it had done for years before. But with the war wrapping up, Vietnam started to migrate off the front pages. It was no longer leading the nightly news. The press seemed to be moving on and a lot of people wanted the war to go away. And of course the military had wanted this to go away to and took active steps to suppress the story whenever it could.

You write that civilian support for the National Liberation Front made such civilians legitimate targets as far as the US was concerned.
A lot of the places I talk about in the book, they were what the US called "hardcore revolutionary areas" because of strong nationalist revolutionary support. They and their allies in Saigon were never able to win over the population in that countryside. The governments that had ruled these areas for years, that represented the people, that provided the services: this was the revolutionary government. They were inextricably tied to the population. So they're unable to win them over, and they really couldn't break that bond. All the US really had was firepower. They tried to drive the people out of the countryside, to drive them into refugee camps. When people would get driven into refugee camps, most didn't have adequate housing, there wasn't potable water, there wasn't sufficient food. And they would filter back to the countryside. It was easier to take your chance even amidst the firepower and free fire zones than to try to eke out a living in one of these camps.

There was this explicit campaign to break the ties binding Vietnamese people to their land, to drive them into cities. You quote a 1968 Foreign Affairs article by Samuel Huntington arguing that this, "forced urbanization and modernization" was a good thing.
This was seen as the one means to break Vietnamese support for the guerillas, to physically move the Vietnamese population. But the Vietnamese were so tied to their land, tied to their rice fields. This is where their ancestors were buried. And it's very important to Vietnamese to venerate their ancestors. So people were very reluctant to move. The only thing they had at their disposal was destructive force.

You write about the US troops widespread dismembering of Vietnamese corpses. Why did this become such a common practice?
There are a lot of factors at play. Body count, and the way to prove the body count was to bring in an ear. This was a practice in some units. There were incentives tied to body count, winning R&R at a beach resort in country or extra beer, medals, badges.

In other cases, troops had this belief that Vietnamese spirituality said that if the corpse wasn't intact, they wouldn't be able to move into the afterlife. A lot of Americans would call it "Buddha heaven." So they had this belief that dismembering Vietnamese would be a form of psychological warfare. They would leave a "death card," either an ace of spades playing card or a specially made up, like a business card, with the unit's name on it and generally some sort of grim motto attached.

There was also an active trade in body parts in Vietnam. Ears were worn on necklaces, one ear or maybe even a whole chain of ears. Some guys wore these to show their combat prowess. Others would collect these ears and sell them to people who wanted to project this image. In one unit they were cutting off the heads of enemies, and anyone who presented it to the commander got an extra beer ration. In one case, a sergeant had cut off a head and he boiled the flesh of it, and then traded the skull for a radio.
Rape was also a weapon of war and an enormous number of vietnamese women, including children, were forced into prostitution.
They were forced into catering to the US war machine one way or another, and one of the prime ways was prostitution. A lot of girls who were sent to it, their villages had been destroyed and they were forced into the cities. And this was a way to provide for their families. The Americans had lots of money to spend and these were young guys, 18, 19, 20 years old.

So it was this flourishing sex trade and then out in the countryside there was what seems to be a tremendous amount of rape and sexual assault.

What I found was extremely disturbing. I recount a few cases where the sexual violence is really shocking. A lot of times I found myself, I felt I didn't have the language to describe exactly what I found in the cases, because rape or even gang rape didn't seem to convey the level of sexual sadism. These are extremely violent gang rapes, or raping women with inanimate objects like bottles or even rifles.
You write about an archipelago of American and South Vietnamese prisons that practiced not only torture but also placed prisoners in "tiger cages," small, submerged, windowless stone cells where they were shackled to the floor. Guards would throw lime powder onto prisoners as punishment.
The most infamous were at a prison island called Con Son. There were men and women who were imprisoned for sometimes years on end without ever being charged, let alone tried. And these were people who spoke out against the government or spoke up for peace. They were sent to Con Son as political prisoners and chained in these very tiny cells that had been built by the French in the 19th century. There had been for years rumors about what had gone on at Con Son, and it was only in the 1970s a US aid worker turned activist was able to sneak a couple of American congressmen in to get a first-hand look at these tremendously deplorable conditions.

When some tiger cage prisoners were released, a Time magazine report said 'you can't really call them men anymore. They're more like shapes.' They talk about them scuttling on the floor like crabs. If you watch the video of it, that's really the case. It happened to women too. Lower-limb paralysis from being chained so long in stress positions. They can no longer stand and they had to crawl in a very unnatural way.
And the US was fully aware of this?
There were US advisors inside the entire prison system. Con Son was the most infamous, but there were around 500 South Vietnamese detention centers around the country, mostly set up by the Americans, paid for by the Americans. The US also operated its own detention system on bases, where there were military intelligence units that held prisoners for varying lengths of time before they sent them on to joint American and South Vietnamese facilities, and most of them ended up in strictly South Vietnamese facilities.

And torture and summary execution were common in US-run facilities as well.
The anecdotal reports, and the few comprehensive investigations, show that torture was widespread. Things like electrical torture, water torture, what we now call waterboarding. And routine beatings.

Waterboarding, of course, has been at the center of the controversy over the treatment of War on Terror detainees today. Are there other parallels in your book? Does the US wage war differently than it did in Vietnam?
I've studied today's wars fairly closely, and I have to say that I don't think that the scale of killing of civilians by US forces is anything near the scale of the carnage in Vietnam. I think specifically the ways that artillery and airpower are used are radically different. That said, civilians still die on a regular basis in our war zones, be it Iraq or Afghanistan. Many of them due to violence set off by America's invasions and occupations and the resulting civil strife. Then of course others have been killed directly from US bombing, from helicopter gunships, troops on the ground. And still more have been wounded and still more made refugees. And I think that even despite the best efforts of the United Nations and some other NGOs, we still don't have good numbers on the civilian toll. And I'm afraid that if history is any guide it might be decades before someone is able to really put together the real stories of these wars, let alone the semi-covert campaigns in places like Pakistan and Yemen. So while I don't think it's as bad as it was in Vietnam, I think it remains to be seen exactly what the toll of these wars has been.


This interview has been edited and condensed.

[softballdaddy]

From my old squadrons page



Once you are in the fight, it is way too late to wonder if this is a good idea.


It is a fact that helicopter tail rotors are instinctively drawn toward trees, stumps, rocks, etc. While it may be possible to ward off this natural event some of the time, it cannot, despite the best efforts of the crew, always be prevented. It's just what they do.

NEVER get into a fight without more ammunition than the other guy.

The engine RPM and the rotor RPM must BOTH be kept in the GREEN. Failure to heed this commandment can affect the morale of the crew.

Cover your Buddy, so he can be around to cover for you.


Decisions made by someone above you in the chain-of-command will seldom be in your best interest.

The terms Protective Armor and Helicopter are mutually exclusive.


Sometimes, being good and lucky still is not enough.


"Chicken Plates" are not something you order in a restaurant.

If everything is as clear as a bell, and everything is going exactly as planned, you're about to be surprised.

Loud, sudden noises in a helicopter WILL get your undivided attention.


The BSR (Bang Stare Red) Theory states that the louder the sudden bang in the helicopter, the quicker your eyes will be drawn to the gauges. The longer you stare at the gauges the less time it takes them to move from green to red.


No matter what you do, the bullet with your name on it will get you. So, too, can the ones addressed "To Whom It May Concern".


If the rear echelon troops are really happy, the front line troops probably do not have what they need.


If you are wearing body armor, they will probably miss that part.


Happiness is a belt-fed weapon.


Having all your body parts intact and functioning at the end of the day beats the alternative.


If you are allergic to lead, it is best to avoid a war zone.


It is a bad thing to run out of airspeed, altitude, and ideas all at the same time.


Hot garrison chow is better than hot C-rations which, in turn, are better than cold C-rations, which are better than no food at all. All of these, however, are preferable to cold rice balls, even if they do have the little pieces of fish in them.


Everybody's a hero ... on the ground ... in the club ... after the fourth drink.


A free fire zone has nothing to do with economics.


The further you fly into the mountains, the louder the strange engine noises become.

Medals are OK, but having your body and all your friends in one piece at the end of the day is better.


Being shot hurts.


Thus the term 'SHIT!' can also be used to denote a situation where high Pucker Factor is being encountered.


Thousands of Vietnam Veterans earned medals for bravery every day. A few were even awarded.

Running out of pedal, fore or aft cyclic, or collective are all bad ideas. Any combination of these can be deadly.


There is only one rule in war: When you win, you get to make up the rules.


C-4 can make a dull day fun.


There is no such thing as a fair fight-only ones where you win or lose.


If you win the battle you are entitled to the spoils. If you lose you don't care.


Nobody cares what you did yesterday or what you are going to do tomorrow. What is important is what you are doing-NOW-to solve our problem.


Always make sure someone has a P-38. Uh, that's a can opener for those of you who aren't military.


Prayer may not help . . . but it can't hurt.

Flying is better than walking. Walking is better than running. Running is better than crawling. All of these, however, are better than extraction by a Med-Evac, even if it is, technically, a form of flying.

If everyone does not come home, none of the rest of us can ever fully come home either.


Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR.


A grunt is the true reason for the existence of the helicopter. Every helicopter flying in Vietnam had one real purpose: To help the grunt. It is unfortunate that many helicopters never had the opportunity to fulfill their one true mission in life, simply because someone forgot this fact.

If you have not been there and done that . . . you probably will not understand most of these.

[EZ2]

New edition of book being released on our bird ---- can't wait to get my signed copy!

Congrats to author Chris Monier (France)....and,

a shout out to all my squadron brothers ~~~~ Semper fi !!

[EZ2]

R.I.P. old warrior!

[NYBob]

May he Rest In Peace --- Van T. Barfoot died at the age of 92 on 2 March 2013.

May he Rest In Peace.

Van T. Barfoot died at the age of 92 on 2 March 2013.

Remember the guy who wouldn't take the flag pole down on his
Virginia property a while back?

You might remember the news story several months ago about a
crotchety old man in Virginia who defied his local Homeowners
Association, and refused to take down the flag pole on his property
along with the large American flag he flew on it.

Now we learn who that old man was.

On June 15, 1919, Van T. Barfoot was born in Edinburg , Texas . That
probably didn't make news back then.

But twenty-five years later, on May 23, 1944, near Carano , Italy ,
that same Van T. Barfoot, who had in 1940 enlisted in the U.S.
Army, set out alone to flank German machine gun positions from
which gunfire was raining down on his fellow soldiers.

His advance took him through a minefield but having done so, he
proceeded to single-handedly take out three enemy machine gun
positions, returning with 17 prisoners of war.

http://nesaranews.blogspot.ca/2013/07/may-he-rest-in-peace-van-t-barfoot-died.html

That probably didn't make much news either, given the scope of the
war, but it did earn Van T. Barfoot, who retired as a Colonel after
also serving in Korea and Vietnam , a well deserved Congressional
Medal of Honor.
God Bless

[EZ2]

Curtis Tarr

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/fortwayne/obituary.aspx?n=curtis-tarr&pid=165543008#fbLoggedOut

Pam Tarr says her father wanted to eliminate an exemption for college students and make the draft more equitable. He instituted a lottery system based on birthdays that were picked on national television.

[EZ2]

USMC 21 Gun Salute And Taps At The Vietnam Memorial 1990

[HoosierHoagie]

Let's not forget the women.....

The Vietnam Women's Memorial - Washington, D.C.

[HoosierHoagie]

Sent chills EZ...thanks...because Dad was a career Army Officer we lost a few close friends in Vietnam and had some close calls....dad being one of the close calls....only the trajectory of a bullet saved him....Dad had a bullet graze his cheek....left a neat scar though..

I will NEVER forget those lost in Vietnam....or any war.
VERY interesting Stats EZ.

[EZ2]

Subject: The Vietnam Wall


The Wall

A little history most people will never know.
Interesting Veterans Statistics off the Vietnam Memorial Wall

There are 58,267 names now listed on that polished black wall, including those added in 2010.

The names are arranged in the order in which they were taken from us by date and within each date the names are alphabetized. It is hard to believe it is 36 years since the last casualties.

The first known casualty was Richard B. Fitzgibbon, of North Weymouth , Mass. Listed by the U.S. Department of




Defense as having been killed on June 8, 1956. His name is listed on the Wall with that of his son, Marine Corps




Lance Cpl. Richard B. Fitzgibbon III, who was killed on Sept. 7, 1965.

There are three sets of fathers and sons on the Wall.

39,996 on the Wall were just 22 or younger.

8,283 were just 19 years old.

The largest age group, 33,103 were 18 years old.
12 soldiers on the Wall were 17 years old.

5 soldiers on the Wall were 16 years old.

One soldier, PFC Dan Bullock was 15 years old.

997 soldiers were killed on their first day in Vietnam ..

1,448 soldiers were killed on their last day in Vietnam ..

31 sets of brothers are on the Wall.

31 sets of parents lost two of their sons.

54 soldiers attended Thomas Edison High School in Philadelphia .



8 Women are on the Wall. Nursing the wounded.

244 soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War; 153 of them are on the Wall.

Beallsville, Ohio with a population of 475 lost 6 of her sons.


West Virginia had the highest casualty rate per capita in the nation. There are 711 West Virginians on the Wall.

The Marines of Morenci - They led some of the scrappiest high school football and basketball teams th at the little Arizona copper town of Morenci (pop. 5,058) had ever known and cheered. They enjoyed roaring beer busts. In quieter moments, they rode horses along the Coronado Trail, stalked deer in the Apache National Forest. And in the patriotic camaraderie typical of Morenci's mining families, the nine graduates of Morenci High enlisted as a group in the Marine Corps. Their service began on Independence Day, 1966. Only 3 returned home.

The Buddies of Midvale - LeRoy Tafoya, Jimmy Martinez, Tom Gonzales were all boyhood friends and lived on three consecutive streets in Midvale, Utah on Fifth, Sixth and Seventh avenues. They lived only a few yards apart. They played ball at the adjacent sandlot ball field. And they all went to Vietnam. In a span of 16 dark days in late 1967, all three would be killed. LeRoy was killed on Wednesday, Nov. 22, the fourth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Jimmy died less than 24 hours later on Thanksgiving Day. Tom was shot dead assaulting the enemy on Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.

The most casualty deaths for a single day was on January 31, 1968 ~ 245 deaths.

The most casualty deaths for a single month was May 1968 - 2,415 casualties were incurred.

For most Americans who read this they will only see the numbers that the Vietnam War created To those of us who survived the war, and to the families of those who did not, we see the faces, we feel the pain that these numbers created. We are, until we too pass away, haunted with these numbers, because they were our friends, fathers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters. There are no noble wars, just noble warriors.


Please pass this on to those who served during this time, and others who also Care.


I've also sent this to those I KNOW do care very much, and I thank you for caring as you do.

[EZ2]

We will never forget!!

http://www.legacy.com/memorial-sites/veterans/

[profiteer11]

Is everyone here aware of ALL 4 VERSES of the Star Spangled Banner?

One verse just doesn't do it justice!


The Star Spangled Banner Lyrics
By Francis Scott Key 1814


Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.
Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
'Tis the star-spangled banner! Oh long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion,
A home and a country should leave us no more!
Their blood has washed out their foul footsteps' pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave:
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

Oh! thus be it ever, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved home and the war's desolation!
Blest with victory and peace, may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto: "In God is our trust."
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

[Seminole Red]

Welcome to the first playing of the "fifth" major...the 2013 Players Championship!!!

Same rules apply and the money WILL count in our overall totals:

1. You pick 5 players for the tournament. You can only pick 1 player from the top 5 in the world ranking. The top 5 are Woods, McIlroy, Scott, Rose and Donald.

You must also pick a tie breaker total score...even par for the 4 rounds is 288.

2. Teams must be submitted prior to the first group teeing off. Tournament begins May 9th.

3. Must have fun

4. The winner will be the team with the highest total dollar total at the end of the Tournament.

5. Points will be deducted for spelling mistakes and poor punctuation.

6. All of Fred's decisions are final.

7. No gimmees or mulligans allowed.

8. Void where prohibited.

9. Late entries will be allowed but you can only pick from players that have not teed off.

10. "The Watney Rule" - Your user name does NOT count as a player on your team.

[EZ2]

By mid-October 1965, VMF(AW)-235 was alerted to anticipate deployment to Vietnam. The capabilities of the squadron's F8Es made it a logical choice for deployment. It spent the balance of the year in preparation for the overseas move, and was completed with the "Death Angels'" arrival at Danang.


VMF(AW)-235 arrive in Vietnam on 1 February 1966 and had pilots in the air flying their first combat sortie less that 24 hours later and had flown 603 sorties by the end of the first month. The squadron's working components smoothed out by March and the pilots established a new monthly operational record of 806 sorties and 1,027.8 flight hours. Keeping busy, the Angels flew 696 sorties in April, 663 in May and 678 in June. On 10 June the squadron set a new record of 41 sorties in a 24-hour period.


During the latter part of April, VMF(AW)-235 was assigned the task of defending the Danang Air Base when the other squadrons were withdrawn during the Vietnamese political/military crisis. Ingenuity and creativity by squadron maintenance personnel effectively protected the parked aircraft on the airstrip, making it feasible for the squadron to remain there where they could best make use of their 20-millimeter cannon in air-to-ground support.


The squadron's missions on its first tour in Vietnam can be divided into five categories: (1) Flying escort and cover for combat and logistical support helicopters; (2) Providing close air support for Marine infantry units in the field; (3) Providing armed escort for Marine convoys traveling Vietnam roads; (4) Providing fighter escort for Marine aerial refueling aircraft; (5) Day/night all-weather bombing under control of a Marine air support radar team.


The only land-based F8E Crusader-equipped squadron in Vietnam in 1966, the squadron hammered the North Vietnamese heavily, flying over 6,000 sorties and encompassing over 7,000 flying hours in support of 22 special operations.

http://www.vmf235.com/VMF-235/History.html

[bagwa-john]

I was stationed here (Johnston Island) when they were a destruction depot for Orange, Nerve gas and tear gas. Time frame 73-74. The first thing you were issued off the plane was a gas mask. I went here when my orders to Nam were redlined. The Orange was stored in leaky 50 gallon barrels on the far end of the island. I don't have any idea how many hundreds of barrels were in that storage area. The good news is as this website shows, it is a bird sanctuary now.
http://home.earthlink.net/~markinthepacific/index.html

It was a year of quiet time I apparently needed to make transition into adult hood. I turned 21 there. I would have been working Crypto maintenance at a comm center had I gone to Nam.