How many VN vets?
- Thread starter Waterdog
- Start date
Ray VonAsch
New member
Tommy.Gun, We won't tell, cause we don't want THEM to know. You can't play stud with all the cards up. Wasn't this the idea behind the framers thinking on the RKBA ? Ray
Bill Barrett
New member
Cav 70-71 Sgt. E-5
Naval Air.
Cam Rahn Bay, 70-71.
Market Time.
Scary place to fly at night. Unpleasant people we did not know tried to kill us.
Twenty five years later, a gang of our contemporaries who dodged the draft, marched for Ho, and sent others in their place, think they have the right to run the military. I think not. Perhaps, in January, Cohen will reacquire religion and return to the seminary in which he hid until the draft ended in 1971, at which moment he suddenly lost religion. Perhaps Clinton will apologize for marching in Russia against the US. Perhaps Hillary will break-down in tears as she asks Vietnam vets for forgiveness, and denounces the cop killer she so vigorously defended before deciding that such a stance militated against winning political office (And why doesn't Lazio mention this at the next debate?)
The biggest betrayal of my life (so far, anyway) is the country's electing Clinton, twice. What better way to say "f*%k you!" to those who served?
Cam Rahn Bay, 70-71.
Market Time.
Scary place to fly at night. Unpleasant people we did not know tried to kill us.
Twenty five years later, a gang of our contemporaries who dodged the draft, marched for Ho, and sent others in their place, think they have the right to run the military. I think not. Perhaps, in January, Cohen will reacquire religion and return to the seminary in which he hid until the draft ended in 1971, at which moment he suddenly lost religion. Perhaps Clinton will apologize for marching in Russia against the US. Perhaps Hillary will break-down in tears as she asks Vietnam vets for forgiveness, and denounces the cop killer she so vigorously defended before deciding that such a stance militated against winning political office (And why doesn't Lazio mention this at the next debate?)
The biggest betrayal of my life (so far, anyway) is the country's electing Clinton, twice. What better way to say "f*%k you!" to those who served?
Pave Pilot
New member
woodit, I have to disagree a bit:
Jimmy Carter's Draft Dodger Pardon was it.
USAF Long Range Combat Rescue: The Jolly Greens.
------------------
Freedom is never free: get on your feet or get on your knees.
Jimmy Carter's Draft Dodger Pardon was it.
USAF Long Range Combat Rescue: The Jolly Greens.
------------------
Freedom is never free: get on your feet or get on your knees.
'Got hornswaggled (tricked into volunteering) into going to Phan Rang to recover classified equipment from an F-4C crash site in '68. Stoopid. Guess who they got to go everydamntime for the next two and a half years? 'Never was PCS in RVN. Plenty of TDY to Bien Hoa and Phan Rang from Clark and Yokota.
H E R O E S of the VIETNAM Generation
By James Webb
The rapidly disappearing cohort of Americans that endured the Great
Depression and then fought World War II is receiving quite a send-off
from the leading lights of the so-called 60s generation. Tom Brokaw has
published two oral histories of "The Greatest Generation" that feature
ordinary People doing their duty and suggest that such conduct was historically
unique.
Chris Matthews of "Hardball" is fond of writing columns praising the
Navy service of his father while castigating his own baby boomer generation
for its alleged softness and lack of struggle. William Bennett gave a
startlingly condescending speech at the Naval Academy a few years ago
comparing the heroism of the "D-Day Generation" to the drugs-and-sex
nihilism of the "Woodstock Generation." And Steven Spielberg, in promoting his film
"Saving Private Ryan," was careful to justify his portrayals of
soldiers in action based on the supposedly unique nature of World War II.
An irony is at work here. Lest we forget, the World War II generation
now being lionized also brought us the Vietnam War, a conflict which
today's most conspicuous voices by and large opposed, and in which few of
them served. The "best and brightest" of the Vietnam age group once made headlines
by castigating their parents for bringing about the war in which they
would not fight, which has become the war they refuse to remember.
Pundits back then invented a term for this animus: the "generation
gap." Long, plaintive articles and even books were written examining its
manifestations. Campus leaders, who claimed precocious wisdom through
the magical process of reading a few controversial books, urged fellow
baby boomers not to trust anyone over 30. Their elders who had survived the
Depression and fought the largest war in history were looked down upon
as shallow, materialistic, and out of touch.
Those of us who grew up on the other side of the picket line from that
era's counter-culture can't help but feel a little leery of this
sudden gush of appreciation for our elders from the leading lights of the old
counter-culture. Then and now, the national conversation has proceeded
from the dubious assumption that those who came of age during Vietnam
are a unified generation in the same sense as their parents were, and thus
are capable of being spoken for through these fickle elites.
In truth, the "Vietnam generation" is a misnomer. Those who came of
age during that war are permanently divided by different reactions to a
whole range of counter-cultural agendas, and nothing divides them more
deeply than the personal ramifications of the war itself. The sizable portion
of the Vietnam age group who declined to support the counter-cultural agenda,
and especially the men and women who opted to serve in the military during
the Vietnam War, are quite different from their peers who for decades have
claimed to speak for them. In fact, they are much like the World War II
generation itself. For them, Woodstock was a side show, college
protestors were spoiled brats who would have benefitted from having to work a few
jobs in order to pay their tuition, and Vietnam represented not an
intellectual exercise in draft avoidance or protest marches but a battlefield that
was just as brutal as those their fathers faced in World War II and Korea.
Few who served during Vietnam ever complained of a generation gap. The
men who fought World War II were their heroes and role models. They
honored their father's service by emulating it, and largely agreed with their
father's wisdom in attempting to stop Communism's reach in Southeast Asia.
The most accurate poll of their attitudes (Harris, 1980) showed that
91 percent were glad they'd served their country, 74 percent enjoyed
their time in the service, and 89 percent agreed with the statement that
"our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington
would not let them win." And most importantly, the castigation they
received upon returning home was not from the World War II generation, but from
the very elites in their age group who supposedly spoke for them.
Nine million men served in the military during the Vietnam war, three
million of whom went to the Vietnam theater. Contrary to popular
mythology, two-thirds of these were volunteers, and 73 percent of those who died
were volunteers. While some attention has been paid recently to the plight
of our prisoners of war, most of whom were pilots, there has been little
recognition of how brutal the war was for those who fought it on the
ground. Dropped onto the enemy's terrain 12,000 miles away from home,
America's citizen-soldiers performed with a tenacity and quality that
may never be truly understood.
Those who believe the war was fought incompetently on a tactical level
should consider Hanoi's recent admission that 1.4 million of its
soldiers died on the battlefield, compared to 58,000 total U.S. dead. Those who believe
that it was a "dirty little war" where the bombs did all the work
might contemplate that it was the most costly war the U.S. Marine Corps has
ever fought-five times as many dead as World War I, three times as many
dead as in Korea, and more total killed and wounded than in all of
World War II.
Significantly, these sacrifices were being made at a time the United
States was deeply divided over our effort in Vietnam. The baby-boom
generation had cracked apart along class lines as America's young men were making
difficult, life-or-death choices about serving. The better academic
institutions became focal points for vitriolic protest against the war, with few of
their graduates going into the military. Harvard College, which had lost 691
alumni in World War II, lost a total of 12 men in Vietnam from the
classes of 1962 through 1972 combined. Those classes at Princeton lost six, at
MIT two.
·
· The media turned ever-more hostile. And frequently the reward for a
young man's having gone through the trauma of combat was to be greeted by
his peers with studied indifference or outright hostility.
What is a hero? My heroes are the young men who faced the issues of
war and possible death, and then weighed those concerns against
obligations to their country. Citizen-soldiers who interrupted their personal and
professional lives at their most formative stage, in the timeless phrase of the
Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, "not for fame or
reward, not for place or for rank, but in simple obedience to duty, as
they understood it." Who suffered loneliness, disease, and wounds with an
often contagious elan. And who deserve a far better place in history than
that now offered them by the so-called spokesmen of our so-called
generation.
Mr. Brokaw, Mr. Matthews, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Spielberg, meet my Marines.
1969 was an odd year to be in Vietnam. Second only to 1968 in terms of
American casualties, it was the year made famous by Hamburger Hill, as
well as the gut-wrenching Life cover story showing the pictures of 242
Americans who had been killed in one average week of fighting. Back
home, it was the year of Woodstock, and of numerous anti-war rallies
that culminated in the Moratorium march on Washington. The My Lai massacre
hit the papers and was seized upon by the anti-war movement as the
emblematic moment of the war. Lyndon Johnson left Washington in utter
humiliation. Richard Nixon entered the scene, destined for an even worse fate. In
the An Hoa Basin southwest of Danang, the Fifth Marine Regiment was in its
third year of continuous combat operations. Combat is an unpredictable and
inexact environment, but we were well-led. As a rifle platoon and
company commander, I served under a succession of three regimental commanders
who had cut their teeth in World War II, and four different battalion
commanders, three of whom had seen combat in Korea. The company commanders were
typically captains on their second combat tour in Vietnam, or young first
lieutenants like myself who were given companies after many months of "bush time" as
platoon commanders in the Basin's tough and unforgiving environs.
The Basin was one of the most heavily contested areas in Vietnam, its
torn, cratered earth offering every sort of wartime possibility. In
the mountains just to the west, not far from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the
North Vietnamese Army operated an infantry division from an area called Base Area 112.
In the valleys of the Basin, main-force Viet Cong battalions whose ranks
were 80 percent North Vietnamese Army regulars moved against the Americans
every day. Local Viet Cong units sniped and harassed. Ridge lines and paddy
dikes were laced with sophisticated booby traps of every size, from a hand
grenade to a 250-pound bomb. The villages sat in the rice paddies and tree lines
like individual fortresses, crisscrossed with trenches and spider holes,
their homes sporting bunkers capable of surviving direct hits from
large-caliber artillery shells. The Viet Cong infrastructure was intricate and
permeating. Except for the old and the very young, villagers who did not side with
the Communists had either been killed or driven out to the government
· controlled enclaves near Danang.
·
· In the rifle companies, we spent the endless months patrolling ridge
lines and villages and mountains, far away from any notion of tents, barbed
wire, hot food, or electricity. Luxuries were limited to what would
fit inside one's pack, which after a few "humps" usually boiled down to
letter-writing material, towel, soap, toothbrush, poncho liner, and a small
transistor radio.
We moved through the boiling heat with 60 pounds of weapons and gear,
causing a typical Marine to drop 20 percent of his body weight while
in the bush. When we stopped we dug chest-deep fighting holes and slit trenches for
toilets. We slept on the ground under makeshift poncho hootches, and
when it rained we usually took our hootches down because wet ponchos shined
under illumination flares, making great targets. Sleep itself was fitful,
never more than an hour or two at a stretch for months at a time as we mixed
daytime patrolling with night-time ambushes, listening posts, foxhole
duty, and radio watches. Ringworm, hookworm, malaria, and dysentery were
common, as was trench foot when the monsoons came. Respite was rotating back
to the mud-filled regimental combat base at An Hoa for four or five days,
where rocket and mortar attacks were frequent and our troops manned
defensive bunkers at night. Which makes it kind of hard to get excited about
tales of Woodstock, or camping at the Vineyard during summer break.
We had been told while in training that Marine officers in the rifle
companies had an 85 percent probability of being killed or wounded,
and the experience of "Dying Delta," as our company was known, bore that
out. Of the officers in the bush when I arrived, our company commander was
wounded, the weapons platoon commander was wounded, the first platoon commander
was killed, the second platoon commander was wounded twice, and I,
commanding the third platoon, was wounded twice. The enlisted troops in the rifle
platoons fared no better. Two of my original three squad leaders were killed,
the third shot in the stomach. My platoon sergeant was severely wounded,
as was my right guide. By the time I left, my platoon I had gone through six
radio operators, five of them casualties.
These figures were hardly unique; in fact, they were typical. Many
other units; for instance, those who fought the hill battles around Khe
Sanh, or were with the famed Walking Dead of the Ninth Marine Regiment, or were
in the battle for Hue City or at Dai Do, had it far worse.
When I remember those days and the very young men who spent them with
me, I am continually amazed, for these were mostly recent civilians barely
out of high school, called up from the cities and the farms to do their
year in Hell and then return. Visions haunt me every day, not of the
nightmares of war but of the steady consistency with which my Marines faced their
responsibilities, and of how uncomplaining most of them were in the face of constant
danger. The salty, battle-hardened 20-year-olds teaching green 19-year-olds
the intricate lessons of that hostile battlefield. The unerring skill of
the young squad leaders as we moved through unfamiliar villages and
weed-choked trails in the black of night. The quick certainty with
which they moved when coming under enemy fire. Their sudden tenderness when a fellow
Marine was wounded and needed help. Their willingness to risk their lives to save
other Marines in peril. To this day it stuns me that their own
countrymen have so completely missed the story of their service, lost
in the bitter confusion of the war itself.
Like every military unit throughout history we had occasional
laggards, cowards, and complainers. But in the aggregate, these Marines were the
finest people I have ever been around. It has been my privilege to
keep up with many of them over the years since we all came home. One finds in them
very little bitterness about the war in which they fought. The most common
regret, almost to a man, is that they were not able to do more for each other
and for the people they came to help.
It would be redundant to say that I would trust my life to these men.
Because I already have, in more ways than I can ever recount. I am
alive today because of their quiet, unaffected heroism. Such valor epitomizes the
conduct of Americans at war from the first days of our existence. That the
boomer elites can canonize this sort of conduct in our fathers generation
while ignoring it in our own is more than simple oversight. It is a
conscious, continuing travesty.
Former Secretary of the Navy James Webb was awarded the Navy Cross,
Silver Star, and Bronze Star medals for heroism as a Marine in
Vietnam. His Novels include The Emperor's General and Fields of Fire
By James Webb
The rapidly disappearing cohort of Americans that endured the Great
Depression and then fought World War II is receiving quite a send-off
from the leading lights of the so-called 60s generation. Tom Brokaw has
published two oral histories of "The Greatest Generation" that feature
ordinary People doing their duty and suggest that such conduct was historically
unique.
Chris Matthews of "Hardball" is fond of writing columns praising the
Navy service of his father while castigating his own baby boomer generation
for its alleged softness and lack of struggle. William Bennett gave a
startlingly condescending speech at the Naval Academy a few years ago
comparing the heroism of the "D-Day Generation" to the drugs-and-sex
nihilism of the "Woodstock Generation." And Steven Spielberg, in promoting his film
"Saving Private Ryan," was careful to justify his portrayals of
soldiers in action based on the supposedly unique nature of World War II.
An irony is at work here. Lest we forget, the World War II generation
now being lionized also brought us the Vietnam War, a conflict which
today's most conspicuous voices by and large opposed, and in which few of
them served. The "best and brightest" of the Vietnam age group once made headlines
by castigating their parents for bringing about the war in which they
would not fight, which has become the war they refuse to remember.
Pundits back then invented a term for this animus: the "generation
gap." Long, plaintive articles and even books were written examining its
manifestations. Campus leaders, who claimed precocious wisdom through
the magical process of reading a few controversial books, urged fellow
baby boomers not to trust anyone over 30. Their elders who had survived the
Depression and fought the largest war in history were looked down upon
as shallow, materialistic, and out of touch.
Those of us who grew up on the other side of the picket line from that
era's counter-culture can't help but feel a little leery of this
sudden gush of appreciation for our elders from the leading lights of the old
counter-culture. Then and now, the national conversation has proceeded
from the dubious assumption that those who came of age during Vietnam
are a unified generation in the same sense as their parents were, and thus
are capable of being spoken for through these fickle elites.
In truth, the "Vietnam generation" is a misnomer. Those who came of
age during that war are permanently divided by different reactions to a
whole range of counter-cultural agendas, and nothing divides them more
deeply than the personal ramifications of the war itself. The sizable portion
of the Vietnam age group who declined to support the counter-cultural agenda,
and especially the men and women who opted to serve in the military during
the Vietnam War, are quite different from their peers who for decades have
claimed to speak for them. In fact, they are much like the World War II
generation itself. For them, Woodstock was a side show, college
protestors were spoiled brats who would have benefitted from having to work a few
jobs in order to pay their tuition, and Vietnam represented not an
intellectual exercise in draft avoidance or protest marches but a battlefield that
was just as brutal as those their fathers faced in World War II and Korea.
Few who served during Vietnam ever complained of a generation gap. The
men who fought World War II were their heroes and role models. They
honored their father's service by emulating it, and largely agreed with their
father's wisdom in attempting to stop Communism's reach in Southeast Asia.
The most accurate poll of their attitudes (Harris, 1980) showed that
91 percent were glad they'd served their country, 74 percent enjoyed
their time in the service, and 89 percent agreed with the statement that
"our troops were asked to fight in a war which our political leaders in Washington
would not let them win." And most importantly, the castigation they
received upon returning home was not from the World War II generation, but from
the very elites in their age group who supposedly spoke for them.
Nine million men served in the military during the Vietnam war, three
million of whom went to the Vietnam theater. Contrary to popular
mythology, two-thirds of these were volunteers, and 73 percent of those who died
were volunteers. While some attention has been paid recently to the plight
of our prisoners of war, most of whom were pilots, there has been little
recognition of how brutal the war was for those who fought it on the
ground. Dropped onto the enemy's terrain 12,000 miles away from home,
America's citizen-soldiers performed with a tenacity and quality that
may never be truly understood.
Those who believe the war was fought incompetently on a tactical level
should consider Hanoi's recent admission that 1.4 million of its
soldiers died on the battlefield, compared to 58,000 total U.S. dead. Those who believe
that it was a "dirty little war" where the bombs did all the work
might contemplate that it was the most costly war the U.S. Marine Corps has
ever fought-five times as many dead as World War I, three times as many
dead as in Korea, and more total killed and wounded than in all of
World War II.
Significantly, these sacrifices were being made at a time the United
States was deeply divided over our effort in Vietnam. The baby-boom
generation had cracked apart along class lines as America's young men were making
difficult, life-or-death choices about serving. The better academic
institutions became focal points for vitriolic protest against the war, with few of
their graduates going into the military. Harvard College, which had lost 691
alumni in World War II, lost a total of 12 men in Vietnam from the
classes of 1962 through 1972 combined. Those classes at Princeton lost six, at
MIT two.
·
· The media turned ever-more hostile. And frequently the reward for a
young man's having gone through the trauma of combat was to be greeted by
his peers with studied indifference or outright hostility.
What is a hero? My heroes are the young men who faced the issues of
war and possible death, and then weighed those concerns against
obligations to their country. Citizen-soldiers who interrupted their personal and
professional lives at their most formative stage, in the timeless phrase of the
Confederate Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, "not for fame or
reward, not for place or for rank, but in simple obedience to duty, as
they understood it." Who suffered loneliness, disease, and wounds with an
often contagious elan. And who deserve a far better place in history than
that now offered them by the so-called spokesmen of our so-called
generation.
Mr. Brokaw, Mr. Matthews, Mr. Bennett, Mr. Spielberg, meet my Marines.
1969 was an odd year to be in Vietnam. Second only to 1968 in terms of
American casualties, it was the year made famous by Hamburger Hill, as
well as the gut-wrenching Life cover story showing the pictures of 242
Americans who had been killed in one average week of fighting. Back
home, it was the year of Woodstock, and of numerous anti-war rallies
that culminated in the Moratorium march on Washington. The My Lai massacre
hit the papers and was seized upon by the anti-war movement as the
emblematic moment of the war. Lyndon Johnson left Washington in utter
humiliation. Richard Nixon entered the scene, destined for an even worse fate. In
the An Hoa Basin southwest of Danang, the Fifth Marine Regiment was in its
third year of continuous combat operations. Combat is an unpredictable and
inexact environment, but we were well-led. As a rifle platoon and
company commander, I served under a succession of three regimental commanders
who had cut their teeth in World War II, and four different battalion
commanders, three of whom had seen combat in Korea. The company commanders were
typically captains on their second combat tour in Vietnam, or young first
lieutenants like myself who were given companies after many months of "bush time" as
platoon commanders in the Basin's tough and unforgiving environs.
The Basin was one of the most heavily contested areas in Vietnam, its
torn, cratered earth offering every sort of wartime possibility. In
the mountains just to the west, not far from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the
North Vietnamese Army operated an infantry division from an area called Base Area 112.
In the valleys of the Basin, main-force Viet Cong battalions whose ranks
were 80 percent North Vietnamese Army regulars moved against the Americans
every day. Local Viet Cong units sniped and harassed. Ridge lines and paddy
dikes were laced with sophisticated booby traps of every size, from a hand
grenade to a 250-pound bomb. The villages sat in the rice paddies and tree lines
like individual fortresses, crisscrossed with trenches and spider holes,
their homes sporting bunkers capable of surviving direct hits from
large-caliber artillery shells. The Viet Cong infrastructure was intricate and
permeating. Except for the old and the very young, villagers who did not side with
the Communists had either been killed or driven out to the government
· controlled enclaves near Danang.
·
· In the rifle companies, we spent the endless months patrolling ridge
lines and villages and mountains, far away from any notion of tents, barbed
wire, hot food, or electricity. Luxuries were limited to what would
fit inside one's pack, which after a few "humps" usually boiled down to
letter-writing material, towel, soap, toothbrush, poncho liner, and a small
transistor radio.
We moved through the boiling heat with 60 pounds of weapons and gear,
causing a typical Marine to drop 20 percent of his body weight while
in the bush. When we stopped we dug chest-deep fighting holes and slit trenches for
toilets. We slept on the ground under makeshift poncho hootches, and
when it rained we usually took our hootches down because wet ponchos shined
under illumination flares, making great targets. Sleep itself was fitful,
never more than an hour or two at a stretch for months at a time as we mixed
daytime patrolling with night-time ambushes, listening posts, foxhole
duty, and radio watches. Ringworm, hookworm, malaria, and dysentery were
common, as was trench foot when the monsoons came. Respite was rotating back
to the mud-filled regimental combat base at An Hoa for four or five days,
where rocket and mortar attacks were frequent and our troops manned
defensive bunkers at night. Which makes it kind of hard to get excited about
tales of Woodstock, or camping at the Vineyard during summer break.
We had been told while in training that Marine officers in the rifle
companies had an 85 percent probability of being killed or wounded,
and the experience of "Dying Delta," as our company was known, bore that
out. Of the officers in the bush when I arrived, our company commander was
wounded, the weapons platoon commander was wounded, the first platoon commander
was killed, the second platoon commander was wounded twice, and I,
commanding the third platoon, was wounded twice. The enlisted troops in the rifle
platoons fared no better. Two of my original three squad leaders were killed,
the third shot in the stomach. My platoon sergeant was severely wounded,
as was my right guide. By the time I left, my platoon I had gone through six
radio operators, five of them casualties.
These figures were hardly unique; in fact, they were typical. Many
other units; for instance, those who fought the hill battles around Khe
Sanh, or were with the famed Walking Dead of the Ninth Marine Regiment, or were
in the battle for Hue City or at Dai Do, had it far worse.
When I remember those days and the very young men who spent them with
me, I am continually amazed, for these were mostly recent civilians barely
out of high school, called up from the cities and the farms to do their
year in Hell and then return. Visions haunt me every day, not of the
nightmares of war but of the steady consistency with which my Marines faced their
responsibilities, and of how uncomplaining most of them were in the face of constant
danger. The salty, battle-hardened 20-year-olds teaching green 19-year-olds
the intricate lessons of that hostile battlefield. The unerring skill of
the young squad leaders as we moved through unfamiliar villages and
weed-choked trails in the black of night. The quick certainty with
which they moved when coming under enemy fire. Their sudden tenderness when a fellow
Marine was wounded and needed help. Their willingness to risk their lives to save
other Marines in peril. To this day it stuns me that their own
countrymen have so completely missed the story of their service, lost
in the bitter confusion of the war itself.
Like every military unit throughout history we had occasional
laggards, cowards, and complainers. But in the aggregate, these Marines were the
finest people I have ever been around. It has been my privilege to
keep up with many of them over the years since we all came home. One finds in them
very little bitterness about the war in which they fought. The most common
regret, almost to a man, is that they were not able to do more for each other
and for the people they came to help.
It would be redundant to say that I would trust my life to these men.
Because I already have, in more ways than I can ever recount. I am
alive today because of their quiet, unaffected heroism. Such valor epitomizes the
conduct of Americans at war from the first days of our existence. That the
boomer elites can canonize this sort of conduct in our fathers generation
while ignoring it in our own is more than simple oversight. It is a
conscious, continuing travesty.
Former Secretary of the Navy James Webb was awarded the Navy Cross,
Silver Star, and Bronze Star medals for heroism as a Marine in
Vietnam. His Novels include The Emperor's General and Fields of Fire
USS Constellation CVA 64. 1963-64.
P3As 1964-1968.
GOD bless all that lost thier lives, and those that were wounded physically and mentally.
Let it be a lesson, that if a war comes WIN it. 58,000 lives were lost for nothing.
------------------
"Defiance"
And yet...it moves
(Galileo Galilie)
"Spay or Nuter your Socialist Pets"
P3As 1964-1968.
GOD bless all that lost thier lives, and those that were wounded physically and mentally.
Let it be a lesson, that if a war comes WIN it. 58,000 lives were lost for nothing.
------------------
"Defiance"
And yet...it moves
(Galileo Galilie)
"Spay or Nuter your Socialist Pets"
Mike Spight
New member
RVN, Jan 1970-71, US Navy, River Assault Divisions 153 and 152.
Now they're called Special Boat Squadrons...back then we were just River Rats.
Mike
Now they're called Special Boat Squadrons...back then we were just River Rats.
Mike