In 1967,
Charlie Haughey was drafted into the United States Army and was assigned to work as a photographer, tasked with taking morale-boosting pictures of service members. He shot over 2,000 images, the vast majority of which were never published and languished in boxes and envelopes.
Until now. [more inside]
posted by gkhan
on Mar 25, 2013 -
43 comments
Bill Moyers' scathing 1987 special report on our
secret government.(SLYT)(via)(trigger warning: pictures and video of dead bodies) It includes an in-depth look at the Iran-Contra Affair and much, much more. Note: sound cuts out for a couple of minutes during the intro because of copyrighted song. Sound returns around 3:20.
posted by AElfwine Evenstar
on Mar 23, 2012 -
19 comments
Captured: A Look Back at the Vietnam War on the 35th Anniversary of the Fall of Saigon. (The following photo collection contains some graphic violence and depictions of dead bodies.)
posted by docgonzo
on Apr 21, 2011 -
18 comments
In 1975, desperate to escape Vietnam following the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War, twenty thousand refugees boarded the few remaining ships of the South Vietnamese army and fishing boats. They were escorted by the
USS Kirk, a Knox-class destroyer escort, which led them to the Philippines. This mission,
Operation New Life lives on as one of the largest humanitarian missions in the history of the United States military, but has been largely forgotten by history.
[more inside]
posted by honeybee413
on Nov 24, 2010 -
15 comments
The Sixties Project -
The Sixties Project began as a collective of humanities scholars working together on the Internet to use electronic resources to provide routes of collaboration and make available primary and secondary sources for researchers, students, teachers, writers and librarians interested in the Sixties. [more inside]
posted by IvoShandor
on Oct 23, 2009 -
9 comments
In 1970, while burning captured enemy documents with no military intelligence value, Fred Whitehurst came across a tiny diary. Advised not to burn it by his translator, he kept it and took it with him to America when his tour was over. Thirty five years later,
the diary came back
home.
[more inside]
posted by LenaO
on Jun 25, 2009 -
5 comments
Underfire; images from the Vietnam war. Some photographers never made it out:
Dana Stone,
Henri Huet,
Sean Flynn.
Tim Page is still alive and his photos tell the story of
'Fire in the Jungle".
Several of these almost forgotten legends hung out at
Franki's House at one time or another.
Page, Stone and Flyn were all friends of Michael Herr who wrote about them and the war in
Dispatches which was widely acclaimed and acknowledged by Hunter S. Thompson as
puts the rest of us in the shade.
posted by adamvasco
on Aug 8, 2007 -
14 comments
David Halbertstam dead in tragic car accident. Experienced, eloquent, and always observant (his
dim view of Patrick Ewing being a notable exception), David Halberstam was a journalistic jack-of-all-trades who was probably best known for his stinging indictment of
Vietnam warrior
Robert McNamara,
JFK and
LBJ's secretary of defense, in the classic
The Best and the Brightest. A superior
war correspondent before the era
of
CNN-televised revolutions , Halberstam was also an excellent historian and sports writer. Halberstam's dense but
illuminating
The Fifties is an informative and tightly written study on the
Eisenhower era. And
The Children offers a compelling look at eight young leaders of the Civil Rights Revolution.
Moreover, Halberstam's many writings on
basketball (
The Breaks of the Game,
Playing for Keeps) and baseball (
Summer of '49,
October 1964) rank among the upper
echelon of sports books.
posted by psmealey
on Apr 23, 2007 -
54 comments
The Credibility of Power.
Daryl Press, author of
Calculating Credibility: How Leaders Assess Military Threats, argues that in a crisis, the credibility of threats is primarily determined by the balance of power and the interests of stake; past history is relatively unimportant. As case studies, he examines the decision-making of Hitler and his generals during the crises over Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. "To this day, U.S. leaders ... are loath to reevaluate existing commitments for fear that doing so would signal irresolution. These fears, however, are greatly overblown." An example of US rigidity:
Gideon Rose on the end of the Vietnam War.
posted by russilwvong
on Jan 25, 2007 -
4 comments
Today, George Washington University's
National Security Archive has published online the
most comprehensive collection of memoranda of conversations (memcons) involving Henry Kissinger.
Revealed in the collection is the fact that "Kissinger quietly acknowledged to China in 1972 that Washington could accept a communist takeover of South Vietnam if that evolved after a withdrawal of U.S. troops - even as the war to drive back the Communists dragged on with mounting deaths....[He] told Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai: 'If we can live with a communist government in China, we ought to be able to accept it in Indochina.' ...[His] comments appear to lend credence to the '
decent interval' theory posed by some historians who said the United States was prepared to see Communists take over Saigon, as long as that happened long enough after a U.S. troop departure to save face."
posted by ericb
on May 26, 2006 -
38 comments
"We wired the Ho Chi Minh Trail like a drugstore pinball machine and plugged into it every night." From 1965 to 1975, telemetry from thousands of microphones hidden in remote Vietnam jungles were fed to a massive data processing center in Thailand, where an
IBM System/360 [wiki] mapped real-time Vietcong movements to display terminals. The
details of Project Igloo White remained compartmentalized and highly classified until only several years ago.
posted by rolypolyman
on May 22, 2006 -
33 comments
"I am
Colonel Tom C. McKenney, You must know how to reach
Bobby Garwood. I directed an official mission to assassinate him behind enemy lines, because I believed what
they told me. Would you tell him that I will crawl on my hands and knees to beg his forgiveness?"
posted by drakepool
on May 30, 2005 -
22 comments
I can't find any major news outlets mentioning that
today is the 35th anniversary of the Kent State killings, when national guardsmen troops fired a fusillade of live bullets at unarmed students protesting the invasion of Cambodia. Not everyone has forgotten. A new
documentary, "Fire in the Heartland: A History of Dissent at Kent State University 1960-1980" was screened on campus today.
posted by tizzie
on May 4, 2005 -
23 comments
"We are here to hand over to you the power in order to avoid bloodshed." Today is the
thirtieth anniversary of the
Fall of
Saigon.
A
secret plan to end the war. After the rewarding the Vietnam war's
technocratic architect with the
Presidency of the World Bank, after the twin failures of President Nixon's
"madman plan", to scare the
Soviet Union into concessions over Vietnam out of fear of Nixon's insanity, and of
"Vietnamization", turning over
responsibility for the war to
the South Vietnamese, the North nevertheless
won the war.
Disposable helicopters.
Operation Frequent Wind, the
chaotic evacuation of the
American Embassy, brought to
a close fifteen
years of
American hubris. Karl Marx, who got little else right, observed "History repeats itself, the first as
tragedy, then as
farce."
posted by orthogonality
on Apr 30, 2005 -
50 comments
How Kerry Earned His Decorations For all the loud mouths who shout out that Kerry is a traitor, a guy who did not earn his medals, read this and then compare your medals with his! Did he turn against the war? Sure. Many soldiers did too. The nation also turned against the war and, finally, some responsible for getting us into the war admitted their mistake. "Kerry is one of the Senate's most decorated veterans — though he has far fewer medals than friend John McCain — and his record is impressive for an officer who spent just 10 months in Vietnam. Each of the medals below came with a matching ribbon. Kerry wore his ribbons when he testified before a Senate committee in 1971; the next day, joining hundreds of other vets, he lobbed them at the Capitol. "
posted by Postroad
on May 4, 2004 -
77 comments
Dead Men Walking Thomas Lipscome urges us to think about 4th generation warfare, the nature of the battle, and the potential dangers well beyond the idea of nations such as Afghanistan and Iraq. From the article:
"Terrorists become extraordinarily resourceful playing weak hands against the strong and rich. So do revolutionaries. And it is time to realize bin Laden is both" This article is short yet wide-ranging, neatly bringing together the Balkans, Clinton, the Media, and 4G warfare.
via follow me here
posted by cell divide
on Nov 28, 2001 -
3 comments
Sen. Bob Kerrey tells a personal Vietnam horror story
And the NYT has posted an advance copy of its Sunday Magazine story to avoid being scooped, which is a first, I believe.
[via
<http://www.nytimes.com>] Kerrey, as a lieutenant in Vietnam helped kill a village of Vietnamese women and children in 1969. How many more skeletons in the closets of the current leaders of America? And will this spur the actual beginning of American critical reflection on Vietnam, or will it blow over in a few weeks like when MacNamara's autobiographical confession came out a few years ago?
posted by rschram
on Apr 25, 2001 -
32 comments
