The Voice for Kitsap County’s Veterans, Active-Duty Personnel,
and their Families
Veterans Life
KitsapVeteransLife.com
April 2015
INSIDE: THE WAR AS VETERANS REMEMBER IT | TRIBUTES TO THOSE WHO SERVED
40 years later The U.S. left Saigon on April 30, 1975, and President Ford declared an end to the Vietnam Era a week later. What the war was about, and why we can be proud of our mission there By THOM STODDERT
A
For Veterans Life
typical high school history book will, at best, have only two paragraphs on the Vietnam War, though its history and South Vietnam’s loss to a cruel regime took more than 20 years. Those two paragraphs will focus on the social unrest and nothing really about the war — why 58,000 Americans died and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese drowned at sea; why there was a massive wave of immigration to this country; and how the war resulted, indirectly, in a safer Europe. Today, there is little known or understood about that conflict. There is also much distortion of what did happen. In 1954, Vietnam won its freedom from France, under which it had been a colony. Subsequent peace negotiations allowed the Vietnamese people to choose to live in the Communist-controlled north, governed from Hanoi; or in the democratic state in the south, governed from Saigon. Millions moved south of the 17th parallel after witnessing the brutality of the communist forces
D.R. Howe of Glencoe, Minnesota treats the wounds of Private First Class D.A. Crum of New Brighton, Pennsylvania, “H” Company, 2nd Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, during Operation Hue City, 1968. Allied casualties numbered 668 dead and 3,707 wounded. Communist forces lost an estimated 2,400 to 8,000, but 5,000 civilians were killed — 2,800 of them executed by the PAVN and Viet Cong, according to the South Vietnamese governNational Archives and Records Administration ment — and the battle marked a turning point in American political support for the war. against their own people. In 1965, American troops were deployed formally to South Vietnam, to support the South Vietnam government’s efforts
against a rising communist insurgency, which was trying to take control of a people wishing to remain self determinant. Till that time, it was a guerrilla war.
Then, in 1968, all pretenses from the North Vietnamese government were lost. It was no longer a guerrilla uprising or a civil war, as the American press tried to
A COMMEMORATIVE EDITION PRODUCED BY SOUND PUBLISHING
paint it, but a full-blown conflict between the North Vietnamese Army (NVA), supported by the See THE WAR, Page 3