So, What Was the Vietnam War About?

First things first today; I share this link to a very powerful Memorial Day video I urge you to watch. It is fitting for the following post.

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In this Prager U. video Victor Davis Hansen - a war historian - gives us a brief overview of all the issues regarding this war.

It is significant for me because I was a part of it. I never set foot in the country; the closest I ever got to Vietnam was 35,000 feet above the Mekong Delta as a military hop was approaching Thailand. I was an Air Force enlistee who got trained at technical school to conduct maintenance on jet aircraft with multiple engines. When I got assigned to my permanent duty station in east Sacramento in 1972, I became a team member of the 320th Operational Maintenance Squadron in the Strategic Air Command and began my O.J.T. - on the job training - on B-52 G/H bombers.

After one year at Mather A.F.B. my entire squadron received temporary duty (TDY) orders for a six month assignment at Andersen A.F.B. on the island of Guam; a U.S. Trust Territory. There were so many personnel there at once that "tent cities" - the heavy canvas type that get very hot inside unless the side flaps are tied open - as part of Operation Archlight, had to be set up on almost every available grass area where there wasn't a building already.

My duties on the flight line involved conducting pre/post-flight inspections of the bombers who were going in sorties (group missions) of about a dozen 1,500 miles due west over the Philippine Islands to North Vietnam to drop 500 lb. bombs on Hanoi whenever the representatives of N.V. walked away from the Paris peace-talk table during negotiations.

Once the first TDY was expired, we got a 30 day leave - during the Christmas season - to go home state-side before being sent back to Guam for a second TDY. This second time I was assigned to the parachute packing team for the B-52s and later to the refueling team after having a service connected disability incident where I lost one of my fingers from a falling piece of equipment off of a B-1 stand while on the flight line.

The most frustrating thing for me was learning several years later that the North Vietnamese General was reported to have stated that, had the bombing of Hanoi had gone one more week longer than it had, the N.V. government would have totally surrendered to the U.S. due to the devastating effect it had on their city and people of Hanoi.