When you think about the Vietnam War, there’s a good chance you picture the Hollywood version, complete with long-captive POWs, gobs of bush fighting, and Christopher Walken playing ultra-violent games of Russian roulette. But just as Russian roulette was known to have been played during the war precisely zero times, many of the things you think you know about Vietnam turn out to be complete bullshit, such as the “fact” that …

#5. The Communists Kept American POWs After the War

Veterans and the New Health Care Law

Week of October 21, 2013

Oklahoma may be unique in that it makes mandatory the honoring of veterans throughout its public school system.

As part of its Celebrate Freedom Week, which coincides with the week of Veterans Day, each public school throughout the state conducts an appropriate Veterans Day Assembly program.  That entails at least one class period devoted to remembering and honoring America’s veterans.

Moreover, schools may choose to have a one-minute moment of silence beginning at 11 a.m. on November 11 or the next appropriate school day.

Click Here for Veterans Day Community Celebrations

A noodle shop’s role in Vietnam War

The Pho Binh noodle cafe in then-Saigon served as a hide-out for the F100 Viet Cong cell that planned and helped carry out Saigon’s part in the January 1968 Tet offensive, a turning point in the war.

By Mark Magnier, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam — For decades now, the Pho Binh noodle cafe, tucked behind a tangle of parked motorcycles on Ly Chinh Thang Street, has served its trademark dish — “peace noodles.”

A survivor of Ho Chi Minh City’s relentless real estate makeover, the seven-table eatery ladles out bowl after steaming bowl of the soup, made with strips of beef and piles of rice noodles, fresh basil and cilantro. Many of the appreciative customers are unaware of the very unpeaceful plot that unfolded long ago in the family rooms upstairs. Continue reading →

The Tet Offensive

Indeed, with U.S. forces still north at Khe Sanh, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive, the large “general offensive” that Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communists had been planning for years. On January 30, 1968, on the Vietnamese new year holiday of Tet, separate Viet Cong and NVA cells attacked twenty-seven different U.S. military installations throughout South Vietnam at the same time.

Fighting was intense, but U.S. forces managed to kill or capture the bulk of the Viet Cong raiders within several weeks. The toughest combat occurred in the city of Hue, which the NVA actually conquered for a few weeks before U.S. troops took it back. Fighting occurred as far south as Saigon, taking over the streets. Amid the chaos, an Associated Press photographer captured South Vietnam’s chief of police, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, executing a Viet Cong captain in the streets of Saigon—a brutal image that shocked the American public and became a symbol of the Vietnam quagmire. Continue reading →

The Cessna L-19/O-1 Bird Dog was the first all-metal fixed-wing aircraft ordered for and by the U.S. Army following the separation of the U.S. Army Air Forces from the Army in 1947, when the service became the U.S. Air Force (USAF). In addition to the U.S. Army and USAF, the Bird Dog served with the Unites States Marine Corps (USMC) and 19 foreign countries.

The Birddog was first built in 1950 by the Cessna Aircraft Company as a military reconnaissance plane. Between 1950 and 1964, 3,398 airframes were built. Originally called the L-19, these planes saw extensive duty during the Korean War from 1950–53, often in the hands of veteran World War II fighter and bomber pilots. The Bird Dog was re-designated the 0-1 in 1962 and was flown in Vietnam until that war ended in 1975. Continue reading →

In case you were wondering what happened to all those fuel tanks we jettisoned from our aircraft in Southeast Asia

Courtesy of Charlie – HooRah