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Do you think other people felt as you did towards the war?

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Do you think other people felt as you did towards the war?

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The overwhelming majority. The people who liked it the least were the draftees. I mean, kids today don't understand what it means to be forced into military service. They don't have that frame of reference anymore. To my mind, the
best thing that happened out of Vietnam was the advent of the all-volunteer Army, okay, because that's why there's no large anti-war movement in this country today. You always had anti-war people in this country. Starting
with the Tories,during the American Revolution, and working your way forward, there was always people who didn't like war, okay, but, back in the Vietnam days, when you added in,the draft, now, you could go to any college campus, you send an activist, and you could get yourself an army of students
going, like Kent State, for instance. Then, you had your parents, the parents of all the, potential draftees, I mean, you had an enormous reservoir to work with for anti-war activities out of the Vietnam War because of the draft. Take away the draft and, now, you have parents whose kids
don't have to serve if they don't want to, and the kids in college, their primary concern is their next beer, not the next life. I mean, so,
the anti-war movement, I think, has been toned down significantly, although, I mean, you still have the people. There's no question about it, but, you don't see revolutions on college campuses anymore or people in the streets or
taking over a building, all that business that happened ... during the Vietnam War, because there's no draft. I think that's a good thing.

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Do you remember the first time you
came under enemy fire?

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Do you remember the first time you
came under enemy fire?

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Well, the first, my first mission, one of my first missions, we were
putting in the "Blues," I guess. I'm trying to
remember--I was in the right seat, okay. ... Most helicopters you see in the pictures, the crew chief and the door gunner are sitting in the back of the helicopter with their machine-guns in the back. This particular helicopter, the crew chief and the door gunner had moved the machine-guns to right behind the copilot and the pilot. They were sitting right behind us. Okay, I was on the right,  aircraft commander on the left, the crew chief and the door gunners were right behind us. ... They had their M60s ,machine guns, on a bungee cord, which is like a stretchy cord.For some reason, they had rigged it that way this day, and we were going intothis LZ and I was the new guy--I wasn't flying, I was just sitting there, didn't know what was going on. ... The gunships were firing rockets into theLZ, to prep the LZ, and next thing I know that they said, "We're
going in hot," which meant that the machine gunners would open up.... These guys were firing ... their
machine-guns, but they were right behind us and the hot brass--the ejected rounds coming out of the machine-gun--were banging on my helmet, going down my flight suit.I was scared. I didn't know what [was happening].I don't know how scared I was.I didn't know what the hell was going on at that point. I mean, it was nerve-wracking, but, yes, that was the first time. I was pretty lucky.I mean, I didn'treally.I crashed a couple times, due to the combat situation, not necessarily being shot down. I got caught in weather a lot at night.

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What was your first reaction to being
in Vietnam?

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What was your first reaction to being
in Vietnam?

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It was like a furnace.Walking off an air-conditioned plane into
the [air], it was like walking into a furnace. It was a hundred-and-some-odd degrees. Just what I remember, it was awful hot

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Where did you first land when you
arrived in Vietnam?

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Where did you first land when you
arrived in Vietnam?

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When I came in, the plane landed
at Long Binh, which was there, was a complex--Saigon, Long Binh and BienHoa--and they were all pretty close together. Long Binh is where the replacement company went. The plane landed, as I remember, in Long Binh. Yes, I'm trying to remember, but I'm pretty sure it was Long Binh.

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How were you transported to
Vietnam?

 

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How were you transported to
Vietnam?

 

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I took a commercial flight from
Newark Airport to California--San Francisco, I want to say. Where's the Golden Gate Bridge. Yes, okay, then, went to Travis Air Force Base. ... We didn't fly military. They had contract carriers, airlines that probably don't exist anymore, but they contracted with the government to do this, and so, it was, you know, like a cattle car type of thing, wasn't a military plane, was a civilian jet. ... We flew from Travis Air Force Base to Hawaii, and then, from
Hawaii, I think I went to--I'm not sure if it was Guam. On the way over, I think it maybe was Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, and then, to Vietnam. On
the way back, it was Guam, maybe we flew to Guam, Andersen Air Force Base, and then,
to Hawaii, and then, to San Francisco, back to Travis, and a commercial flight
back to Newark.

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The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is a 3 acres (12,000 m2)
national memorial in Washington, D.C. It honors U.S. service members of the
U.S. armed forces who fought in the Vietnam War, service members who died in
service in Vietnam/South East Asia, and those service members who were
unaccounted for (Missing In Action) during the War. The memorial is managed by
the National Park Service under its National Mall and Memorial Parks group.

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The Fall of Saigon was the capture of Saigon, the capital of
South Vietnam, by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation
Front of South Vietnam (also known as the Việt Cộng) on April 30, 1975. The
event marked the end of the Vietnam War and the start of a transition period
leading to the formal reunification of Vietnam into a socialist republic,
governed by the Communist Party of Vietnam.

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The War Powers Act of 1941, also known as the First War Powers Act, was an American emergency law that increased Federal power during World War II. The act was signed by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and put into law on December 18, 1941, less than two weeks after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

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On April 30, 1970, President Richard M. Nixon appeared on national television to announce the invasion of Cambodia by the United States and the need to draft 150,000 more soldiers for an expansion of the Vietnam War effort. This provoked massive protests on campuses throughout the country. At Kent State University in Ohio, protesters launched a demonstration that included setting fire to the ROTC building, prompting the governor of Ohio to dispatch 900 National Guardsmen to the campus.

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The Credibility Gap was a satirical comedy team comprising
Harry Shearer, Richard Beebe, David L. Lander and Michael McKean. Lew Irwin,
John Gilliland, Thom Beck, and Len Chandler also performed in their early days.
They emerged in the late 1960s doing comedic commentary on the news for the Los
Angeles AM rock radio station KRLA 1110, and proceeded to develop more
elaborate and ambitious satirical routines on the "underground"
station KPPC-FM, Pasadena, California.

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Upon taking office in 1969, U.S. President Richard Nixon (1913-94) introduced a new strategy called Vietnamization that was aimed at ending American involvement in the Vietnam War (1954-75) by transferring all military responsibilities to South Vietnam. The increasingly unpopular war had created deep divisions in American society. Nixon believed his Vietnamization strategy, which involved building up South Vietnam’s military strength in order to facilitate a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops, would prepare the South Vietnamese to take responsibility for their own defense against a Communist takeover and allow the U.S. to leave the conflict with its honor intact.

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Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger-LaKera Moore

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Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger-LaKera Moore

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Richard M. Nixon and Henry A. Kissinger's accounts of the Vietnam War were self-serving, incomplete, and obfuscatory. In addition, their legal and administrative steps delayed the release of relevant documentary evidence about their policies, strategies, and motives.In The Vietnam War Files , I have tried to show through selected excerpts of audio tapes and paper documents that the trail of evidence contradicts many of the claims Nixon and others made during and after his presidency about his Vietnam-War policies and related strategies. In some cases as with the secret nuclear alert of October 1969, Nixon's emphasis upon the madman theory, his and Kissinger's adoption of the decent-interval solution by 1971.

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to the United States Constitution prohibits the states and
the federal government from using age as a reason for denying citizens of the
United States who are at least eighteen years old the right to vote. The drive
to lower the voting age from 21 to 18 grew across the country during the 1960s,
driven in large part by the broader student activism movement protesting the
Vietnam War.

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On January 31, 1968, some 70,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces launched the Tet Offensive (named for the lunar new year holiday called Tet), a coordinated series of fierce attacks on more than 100 cities and towns in South Vietnam. General Vo Nguyen Giap, leader of the Communist People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), planned the offensive in an attempt both to foment rebellion among the South Vietnamese population and encourage the United States to scale back its support of the Saigon regime.

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The movement against U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War began small–among peace activists and leftist intellectuals on college campuses–but gained national prominence in 1965, after the United States began bombing North Vietnam in earnest. Anti-war marches and other protests. In August 1964, North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, and President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the retaliatory bombing of military targets in North Vietnam. And by the time U.S. planes began regular bombings of North Vietnam in February 1965, some critics had begun to question the government’s assertion that it was fighting a democratic war to liberate the South Vietnamese people from Communist aggression.

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The Pentagon Papers,
officially titled United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study
Prepared by the Department of Defense, is a United States Department of
Defense history of the United States' political-military involvement in Vietnam
from 1945 to 1967. The papers were discovered and released by Daniel Ellsberg,
and first brought to the attention of the public on the front page of The
New York Times in 1971. A 1996 article in The New York Times said
that the Pentagon Papers had demonstrated, among other things, that the Johnson
Administration "systematically lied, not only to the public but also to
Congress.” More specifically, the papers revealed that the U.S. had
secretly enlarged the scale of the Vietnam War with the bombings of nearby Cambodia
and Laos, coastal raids on North Vietnam, and Marine Corps attacks, none of
which were reported in the mainstream media.

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The horrors of war entered the living rooms of Americans for the first time during the Vietnam War. For almost a decade in between school, work, and dinners, the American public could watch villages being destroyed, Vietnamese children burning to death, and American body bags being sent home. Though
initial coverage generally supported U.S involvement in the war, television news dramatically changed its frame of the war after the Tet Offensive. Images of the
U.S led massacre at My Lai dominated the television, yet the daily atrocities committed by North Vietnam and the Viet Cong rarely made the evening news.

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During the Vietnam War, about two-third of American troops were volunteered, the rest were selected for military service through the drafts. In the beginning of the war, the names of all American men in draft-age were collected by the Selective Service.Most of U.S. soldiers drafted during the Vietnam War were men from poor and working-class families. The least political power sections were mistreated. As a matter of fact, American forces in Vietnam included twenty-five percent poor, fifty-five percent working-class, twenty percent middle-class men, but very few came from upper-classes families. Many soldiers came from rural towns and farming communities.

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n. Students for a Democratic Society-Tewodros Asefa

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n. Students for a Democratic Society-Tewodros Asefa

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was a student
activist movement in the United States that was one of the main representations
of the New Left. The organization developed and expanded rapidly in the
mid-1960s before dissolving at its last convention in 1969.

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Agent Orange was a powerful mixture of chemical defoliants used by U.S. military forces during the Vietnam War to eliminate forest cover for North Vietnamese and Viet Cong troops, as well as crops that might be used to feed them. The U.S. program of defoliation, codenamed Operation Ranch Hand, sprayed more than 19 million gallons of herbicides over 4.5 million acres of land in Vietnam from 1961 to 1972. Agent Orange, which contained the chemical dioxin, was the most commonly used of the herbicide mixtures, and the most effective.

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On August 2, 1964, gunboats of North Vietnam allegedly fired on ships of the
United States Navy stationed in the Gulf of
Tonkin. They had been sailing 10 miles off the coast of North Vietnam in
support of the South Vietnamese navy.

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It also known in
Vietnam as the "Trường Sơn trail", was a logistical system that ran
from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) to the Republic of
Vietnam (South Vietnam) through the neighboring kingdoms of Laos and Cambodia.
The system provided support, in the form of manpower and materiel, to the National
Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (called the Vietcong or
"VC" by its opponents) and the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), or
North Vietnamese Army, during the Vietnam War.

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Guerrilla force that, with the support of the North Vietnamese Army, fought against South Vietnam (late 1950s–1975) and the United States (early 1960s–1973). The name is said to have first been used by South Vietnamese Pres. Ngo Dinh Diem to belittle the rebels.

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l. Operation Rolling Thunder-Tewodros Asefa

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l. Operation Rolling Thunder-Tewodros Asefa

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was the title of
a gradual and sustained US 2nd Air Division (later Seventh Air Force), US Navy,
and Republic of Vietnam Air Force (VNAF) aerial bombardment campaign conducted
against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) from 2 March 1965
until 2 November 1968, during the Vietnam War.

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k. Tonkin Gulf Resolution/The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution-Tewodros Asefa

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k. Tonkin Gulf Resolution/The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution-Tewodros Asefa

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On an amendment offered by
Senator Robert Dole (R-Kansas) to the Foreign Military Sales Act, the Senate
votes 81 to 10 to repeal the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. In August 1964, after
North Vietnamese torpedo boats attacked U.S. destroyers (in what became known
as the Tonkin Gulf incident), President Johnson asked Congress for a resolution
authorizing the president "to take all necessary measures" to defend
Southeast Asia. Subsequently, Congress passed Public Law 88-408, which became
known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, giving the president the power to take
whatever actions he deemed necessary, including "the use of armed
force." The resolution passed 82 to 2 in the Senate, where Wayne K. Morse
(D-Oregon) and Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) were the only dissenting votes; the
bill passed unanimously in the House of Representatives. President Johnson signed
it into law on August 10. It became the legal basis for every presidential
action taken by the Johnson administration during its conduct of the war.

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The first president of South Vietnam. In the wake of the French withdrawal from Indochina as a result of the 1954 Geneva Accords.he joined the U.S.-backed government, making himself president in 1955. He imprisoned and murdered hundreds of Buddhists, causing the U.S. to remove its support. Diem's assassination in 1963 left Vietnam vulnerable to the Communist threat from the north, eventually resulting in civil war.

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Was the decisive engagement in the first Indochina War (1946–54). After French forces occupied the Dien Bien Phu valley in late 1953, Viet Minh commander Vo Nguyen Giap amassed troops and placed heavy artillery in caves of the mountains overlooking the French camp. Boosted by Chinese aid, Giap mounted assaults on the opposition’s strong points beginning in March 1954, eliminating use of the French airfield.

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(June 9, 1916 –
July 6, 2009), he was an American business executive and the eighth Secretary
of Defense, serving from 1961 to 1968 under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon
B. Johnson, during which time he played a large role in escalating the United
States involvement in the Vietnam War.

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organization that led the struggle for Vietnamese independence from French rule. The Viet Minh was formed in China in May 1941 by Ho Chi Minh. Although led primarily by Communists, the Viet Minh operated as a national front organization open to persons of various political persuasions.

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First emerged as an outspoken voice for Vietnamese independence while living as a young man in France during World War I. Inspired by the Bolshevik Revolution, he joined the Communist Party and traveled to the Soviet Union. He helped found the Indochinese Communist Party in 1930 and the League for the Independence of Vietnam, or Viet Minh, in 1941.

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The war divided the country into two different sections. The sections were the people who wanted war and the ones who didn't. The ones who wanted war were known as the "Hawks." The ones who didn't want war were known as the "Doves." The hawks believed that due to the agression of North Vietnamese it forced us into the war.
They thought that the United States should do what ever is necessary to win. Doves think that the problem in Vietnam is a civil war. They thought that the United States had no right to be in their conflicts. They also believed that the money that was spent there that it would be much better invested in America for certain programs.

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Prominent from the 1950s to the 1980s, that speculated that if one state in a region came under the influence of communism.

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Tewodros Asefa

Seek and
Destroy, or even simply S&D,
refers to a military strategy that became a large component of the Malayan
Emergency and the Vietnam War. The idea was to insert ground forces into
hostile territory, search out the enemy, destroy them, and
withdraw immediately afterward. The strategy was the result of a new
technology, the helicopter, which resulted in a new form of warfare, the
fielding of air cavalry, and was thought to be ideally suited to counter-guerrilla
jungle warfare.