Category Archives: Viet Nam

Reunion 2007

OC504-68.jpg

 The posts on the email group are starting to dribble in from this year’s third reunion in Washington, D.C. Most people left the hotel this morning to fly home, some as far as the West Coast. So the posts won’t pick up until this afternoon or even after sundown. "Was interesting," one earlybird and first-timer writes, "to dust off the memory banks and actually recognize faces from 39 years ago. Probably talked more to non-third platoon members yesterday then in all of OCS." Reunions in ’03 and ’05 were like that, too. Sorry I missed this one. Have to stay healthy and make the one in ’09.

Swiftboating

Big Bill says he won’t let Hillary be "swiftboated" because those kinds of attacks won’t go unanswered. Pretty funny. Everytime I hear a Dem use that word, I’m reminded of what a liar John Kerry is. He didn’t answer back, if you want to put it that way, because his Swiftboat attackers were telling the truth. He was a fraud and he knew it.

Benediction

Soldier, rest, thy warfare o’er, 
Dream of fighting fields no more.
Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking,   
Morn of toil, nor night of waking.

Sir Walter Scott

Our war dead

These are the men of 60th Company, Infantry Officer’s Candidate School, at Fort Benning, Georgia, a class dubbed 504-68, who were killed in Vietnam, and whom we 110 graduates (all but one of whom also served in Vietnam) remember on Memorial Day: 
 
One graduate:   1LT Jacob Lee Kinser
 
Two tactical officers: CPT Reese Michael Patrick
                              1LT Daniel Lynn Neiswender
 
Two drop-outs: CPL Sherry Joe Hadley    
                      SP4 Reese Currenti Elia, Jr.
 
UPDATE:  Two more drop-outs, inadvertently left out, but since confirmed:
 
                       CPL Robert Chase
                       SP4 Jeffrey Sanders Tigner

Courting defeat

The Dems, it seems, truly want another Vietnam defeat in Iraq, now that they’ve attached departure dates to the refunding of the campaign. Presumably Bush will veto, and the Dems haven’t the votes to override. Some conservatives think this will energize the Republican base, but I wonder. The Dems could keep this up until the military runs out of money.

Pultizer prize winning author (and old neighbor in another part of town) Lawrence Wright ("The Looming Tower") says democratization of the Middle East may be our only hope to defeat al Q and its religious zealots and wannabees. But that it won’t be pretty, and that leaving Iraq too soon could convulse the region. But with House Speaker Pelosi skipping two meetings with the commanding general in Iraq, and Senate Majority Leader Reid saying the war is lost, it looks like the Dems either disagree or don’t care.

UPDATE  Crazy Politico points out that a veto isn’t all Bush can do. He can find other ways to pay for the war: "Bill Clinton couldn’t get the GOP controlled Congress to pass what he wanted for funding for Kosovo, so he signed executive orders halting certain defense contract work, and shifting the money to fund troops."

Bonjour Viet Nam

I just wanted to get a link up for the site for this haunting favorite of mine. If you don’t understand French, here are the lyrics in English and something on the singer, Pham Quynh Anh, and the composer-lyricist, Marc Lavoine.

Soldier heroes, afterall.

Neal Sheehan’s "Bright Shining Lie" began by asserting that the Vietnam war was "a war without heroes." He meant the soldiers. His journalists were the heroes. Yet there were many soldier heroes and one has been finally recognized.

"President Bush [has] awarded a Medal of Honor — the nation’s highest military medal — to 74-year-old Bruce Crandall."

Some Vietnam veterans like Sheehan’s book, feel it justified and have recommended it to non-veteran friends as the definitive truth. I’m not among them. A longer look at Crandall, a heroic Huey pilot in the American war in Viet Nam. Milton Olive, who was from my father’s Mississippi hometown, also was a hero.

UPDATE  Why most newspapers ran Crandall’s story as a round-up item. Risky times we live in.