Category Archives: Viet Nam

I Ask You

Google translations, especially of Vietnamese, can be weird.

This one for Hoi Anh Hoi Em, a beautiful duet by Đặng Thế Luân & Băng Tâm, seems to have acquired a few unintended words. But who knows? The meaning comes through. More or less. The music is worth the struggle with the words.

I asked him how much love or hate brings grief,
Russian team when they are separated each other passionately loved,
together for a day on the way back,
Road to the joys of love in his mind melting

He asked me why I had fun when life also sad,
infantry fire are also divided many people as we live separated,
elderly parents and children to find the bullets,
night night sweet wife and her mother lived in the flat

Oh what is pleasing to each other when mother earth still live happy
do not fire the blood, the moon is not fading off to sleep late
European morning fire on high.

Children in the capital a love him and wait,
I’m in remote border lobe injury on helpless children are living,
Lord God for the rain on the sunny dry fire
two children to love like flowers bloom in the right season

The album is here.

Reprise: VN vet understatement

“I’ve passed the memorial in D.C. but never visited. More often I pass the one in NYC, but there too I avoid it.  It’s my way of remembering I guess.”

–Anonymous

Yay Us Day

My four years of Army service in the late 60s, including a year in Vietnam. My late father’s flying in World War II and his Air Force career thereafter, and Mr. Boy’s late maternal grandfather who flew in Vietnam in a Navy career.

My nephew’s current service as a pilot-rated Navy officer. A Mississippi cousin-by-marriage who recently left the Army. My late great uncle from Dallas whose Navy unit landed on Omaha Beach on the first day, and his nephew who was there on the second day with the Army.

Another late great uncle from Mississippi who drove Army ammunition trucks in World War I, and a cousin who served in the Spanish-American war, though his unit never left its training camp in Houston.

Before that there was family who fought for the Confederacy, in the Mexican War, the Texas Revolution, the War of 1812, and in the American Revolution: Thomas Farrar, a lieutenant colonel in the South Carolina “line” of the Continental Army, and Claudius Pegues, Jr., a captain in the South Carolina militia, who died young from a combat wound.

Veterans all.

UPDATE:  Mr. B.’s 5th grade teacher had a nice idea today for homework: let the kids practice their writing skills by writing thank-you letters to veterans. He’s not sure where they will be sent. He’ll find that out tomorrow.

The Benning School for Boys

Seems like only yesterday…

Actually it was at noon on June 3, 1968, which is roughly 15,147 yesterdays. The magic day and time I graduated from the Benning School for Boys.

Sounds like a reform school for “troubled” youth. In a way, it was. Considering that it was a one-way track that led straight to the infantry in Viet Nam.

UPDATE:  Whoa. The school is on Facebook. Who knew? Even the 101st ABD claims it. Apparently the name was first given in World War II and applied to all combat training at Benning, not just OCS. News to me.

Viet Nam, 1969

Dick+Stanley+in+VietnamThis was somewhere in the foothills of the Annamese Cordillera southwest of Da Nang, late August or September. When I was using lace-up zippers in my boots but before, it seems to be, I started adding my dog tags to them for surer body identification. Note the bipod on the M-14 at left.

Our war dead

These are the men of 60th Company, OC 504-68, who were killed in Vietnam. We graduates of that 1968 class of Infantry Officers Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia, commemorate them each Memorial Day weekend.

One graduate:  1LT Jacob Lee Kinser.

Two Tactical Officers:  CPT Reese Michael Patrick and 1LT Daniel Lynn Neiswender.

Four drop-outs:  CPL Sherry Joe Hadley, SP4 Reese Currenti Elia Jr., CPL Robert Chase, and SP4 Jeffrey Sanders Tigner.

Another Vietnam wannabe unmasked

This one is a politician. The attorney general of Connecticut, no less. And a Democrat, of course. No surprise, either way. They always seem to be politicians (when they’re not academics, so many of whom dodged the draft in the 60s and 70s). What gripes me about them is they lie about us and their lies perpetuate myths, or as I had a character in a short story put it, “the lies that everyone knows are true.” Because of these weenies.

Via Instapundit

UPDATE:  Looks like this clown will walk away from it. A prosecutor who has prosecuted many a liar for lying. Irony.  Course it helps that the liberal media is covering for him. No surprise. He is a Democrat, after all. One of their own.