The Vietnam War by Ken Burns

Trade

Trade

Well-known Member
Anybody else been watching this? I have. So I can find out what actually was going on over there. I got to Vietnam on August 20th 1970 as an E-2 with six months in the Air Force and one stripe on my sleeve. I didn't get my second stripe until the first of October. Then I was an E-3 REMF medic at the 483rd USAF Hospital at Cam Rahn Bay Airbase. Here's a picture of my ass at work, and a picture of where I worked. Believe me, someone as low on the food chain as I was were not given a clue as to what was going on beyond our own little workspace.

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Interesting. I shipped to Vietnam Sept.13, 1970, arrived at Cam Ranh Bay. Spent about a week there. I should have brought more money to spend at a little bar there.

Who knew that you needed money in a combat zone? I was had just turned 19. :shrug:

In the area I was(Army) everywhere smelled like pee. I guess the latrines weren't clearly marked....maybe it was just the mess hall I smelled.

I stayed in a kind of open air barracks...maybe it was just a big tent mounted on a steel frame, I don't recall.

For bedding they gave me a mattress cover. That was wonderful, but there were nor mattresses to put it on.

The beds had old steel springs, I had to decide whether to sleep on the mattress cover to cushion the springs,

or sleep under the mattress cover to keep the mosquitoes from eating every bit of flesh off my bones.

I loved my stay at Cam Rahn Bay, but I'm glad I didn't have to come back through there on the way back home.

Instead, I took a medevac flight from Tan Son Nhut to Da Nang, then spent several days at Clark Air Base in the PI.
 
I've watched the first episode. I was young enough that the draft ended while I was in high school, thus never had to face going over.
I have always wanted to know more about the war over there, and this documentary should help. I also found in the library, a companion book for the documentary and I think it will help. Tons of photos and text from the series. Great resource.
 

I caught a bit of it last month I think it was. Didn't know it was re-airing, so will look for it.

I turned 18 right before the draft ended, so I went to enlist. I failed the physical due to my lumbar spine not being fused; spina-bifida, they said. But our family physician said that was bull-crap. There was a small area where two vertebrae hadn't fused quite correctly, but he said the neural tube was well developed and it wasn't spina-bifida. I tried the other recruiting offices but no branch of the military would take me. I remember being really bummed about that for quite a while. I was really hoping for the navy.

My older brother served in the air force, but was never sent to Nam. He went to the Philippines and Okinawa. My best friend served in Viet-Nam and was killed. I'd say maybe 6 guys I knew served in Nam, and all came back alive except my buddy, Dan.
 
I don't think I could handle watching it. My Husband got drafted 5 months before our wedding. Thankfully he didn't go to Viet Nam , but many of our friends did and sadly some did not come back home. I've forgotten a lot of things over the years ,but I remember almost everything from those days.
 
It's very well done but I feel numb after each episode. I was a kid during most of that time so knew about the war of course but didn't know many of the specifics that this show points out.
 
I was in the military from '63 to '67. I am on episode 8 out of 10 . The things I missed then was understanding the conflict, the Vietnamese customs, the lying of our officials & the belief that we were invincible.
 
older relatives served in many of the previous wars and Vietnam was to be mine, how absurd an idea..
enlisted national guard 1965 while still in school
enlisted navy 1966
tonkin gulf sar '66'67'68
reenlisted 1970
incountry Vietnam sept 6 1970 mekong delta riverine forces(brown water navy)
guam 1973-75 300000 refugees after Vietnam
why were we there? good question and the answer will be different depending on who you ask?
to prevent the spread of communism is the most common,, and that really worked huh?
to show the soviet union we meant business, again that showed em huh?
to preserve our way of life and the country from foreign enemy action, I dont remember us being attacked in any manner.
_______________ fill in you own opinion

one last thing I would like to put here.... we did not LOSE the war. there was never a declaration of war,it was mearly a localized domestic conflict in which we participated, and after training and arming the locals to defend themselves our task was done and we left. I LOST nothing, I obeyed my orders and did as I was told.. anyone lost anything than blame the higher ups. A lot of good people died there but then many have died over the years in other wars.
PBS should do a documentary on the stupidity of past wars!!!!

oh ya and matrix this is also a political thingy so go ahead and lock it!!!!!
 
Having only watched the first episode, (rest on my DVR), I felt so sad knowing that so many of our troops (and others) died, simply because we didn't understand what we were getting into over there. The arrogance, the fear of communism, our alliance with France and trying to prop up their colonial aspirations, it all led to some many lives being lost. What a tragedy.
 
tnthomas said:
Interesting. I shipped to Vietnam Sept.13, 1970, arrived at Cam Ranh Bay. Spent about a week there. I should have brought more money to spend at a little bar there.
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Interesting. You and I were there at the same time. I take it you were in the Army?

We had it pretty good in the Air Force. This is a picture of the "Hooch" I lived in. Four of us Dudes to a hooch. Mattresses, Box Springs, Refrigerator in the front room and cheap maid service from the local women. That was for low level dudes like me. E-3, e-4, E-5. If you were an E-6 or up you only had two to a hooch. Life as an Air Force REMF was a whole lot different than it was for the grunts out in the bush.


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Party time! Grillin steaks that "Fell off a truck"
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tnthomas said:
My bad, I was focusing more on sharing experiences, I flat overlooked the aspect of this being about a PBS documentary.

I don't mind watching documentaries about Vietnam, it's the Hollywood movies I don't care for.
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Please do share experiences. This documentary is stirring up a lot of memories for me and I intend to share some of them. I would also love to hear some from other Vietnam Vets.

I found some pictures of some of the guys I served with.

This is Carl Reinhart. Good Guy. From New Jersey. I used to call him Jersey Joe Reinhart.

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And Baker. Can't remember his first name. He was from North Carolina. He had a really hot wife. It was kind of a running joke between he and I. I was always asking him to show me her picture. He could put away the brewskis too. He had the record for our squadron of 20 beers in one night. I tried to break it, but I passed out somewhere in the teens.

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Here's Titus with his damned monkey that he got when he went on his in country R&R.

He had it for about a week. The monkey peed all over the hooch and Titus's hooch mates gave him an ultimatum. Either the monkey goes or he goes. So he got rid of the monkey. I'm not sure how. Probably just let it go out by the perimeter.

And here's a little stray Mutt that we all kind of adopted for our Squadron mascot.


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This is Ralph Minden down at the beach standing in front of an old bunker I think from WW2.

Ralph was the only one of us medics in the whole squadron that had a weapon. An Army guy that was on the ward Ralph was working on was about to be medevaced back to the world. He had smuggled his sidearm into the hospital with him. However, when he found out his was a "million dollar wound" and he was going home he was afraid that if they found the gun on him it would mess that up. So he slipped it to Ralph. It was one of those good old school .45 auto's and it had one magazine with seven rounds in it. God I envyed Ralph having that pistol.
 
Trade said:
Please do share experiences. This documentary is stirring up a lot of memories for me and I intend to share some of them. I would also love to hear some from other Vietnam Vets.
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You guys ought to start your own section for Viet Nam Veterans, open to all members to read, though, I would hope.

After my physical I was classified unfit for service during the Viet Nam the war, but my son served with the SeaBees in Iraq and Afghanistan. He retired from the Navy a Chief Petty Officer just last year. I got a call from him around the middle of his boot camp experience - I missed the call but he left a message that it was the worst mistake he ever made. He was choking back tears. It took over a week to finally get a hold of him, and he said, "It's ok, Dad. It was just a really bad few days. I want to stay in and finish this." He stayed in for 25 years.
 
I like that idea Cap'n, maybe an admin could suggest the best section to set up such a thread. Diaries, or...?

If we did such a thread, I would like to have veterans of all wars/conflict feel free to post their stories and pictures as well. Maybe a new sub-forum,....?
 
tnthomas said:
Well, until we get a thread going for Vietnam experiences, here's a video on Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam :
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Cool. Thanks for posting that. Even though that was mostly on the Army side I still recognize some of it.

On the road to the beach.


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And at the beach.

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And I'm not sure where I took this from.

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I just started watching this excellent Ken Burns film via Amazon Prime. I was intrigued because I was in Korea1953 when it was rumoured that our wing of F 86 Sabre Jets was going to French Indo China (Viet Nam) to aid French forces that were being badly defeated by the Viet Minh. The wing wisely never went to aid the French and shortly thereafter Dien Bien Phu ended the days of FRENCH COLONIALISM. were over.The Vietnamese hated us for our support of the French and had previously admired us because of our INDEPENDENCE, which they wanted for themselves.We never learned anything from the French and the WHOLE VIETNAM WAR was a disaster and a huge mistake.

WILL WE EVER LEARN?
 
Another one of the beach.


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This was our squadron area for the medics. Nice digs compared to what the grunts had. And we still got the same $65 extra bucks a month combat pay that they did. Pretty unfair.




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The Red Cross took some of the patients in the Hospital out for a cruise on the bay. And of sourse some of us medics got to go along. I took this from from the boat on the bay looking back on a little village on the shore.

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And some more that I took on the cruise.

These were all originally slides I think I took with Kodachrome. I had an Ashai Pentax Spotmatic that I bought over there.

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Lon said:
I just started watching this excellent Ken Burns film via Amazon Prime. I was intrigued because I was in Korea1953 when it was rumoured that our wing of F 86 Sabre Jets was going to French Indo China (Viet Nam) to aid French forces that were being badly defeated by the Viet Minh. The wing wisely never went to aid the French and shortly thereafter Dien Bien Phu ended the days of FRENCH COLONIALISM. were over.The Vietnamese hated us for our support of the French and had previously admired us because of our INDEPENDENCE, which they wanted for themselves.We never learned anything from the French and the WHOLE VIETNAM WAR was a disaster and a huge mistake.

WILL WE EVER LEARN?
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What's really disgusting is that they have obtained tapes of conversations between Johnson and McNamara and also ones between Nixon and Kissinger, and they'll play these, and then play excerpts from what both Johnson and Nixon where telling the public and you can plainly see that they were both lying their asses off when they talked to the public about the war.
 


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