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 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
"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
"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
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
