26th - 27th Dec 2022
I took a trip up to the old 'DMZ', about 50 miles north of Hue. It was the demilitarised zone established roughly along the 17ยบ N 'Parallel' after the Geneva Conventions in 1954 following the humiliating French debacle at Dien Bien Phu and their subsequent withdrawal. It divided North and South Vietnam as two seperate states; Communist North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh and with his very able military strategist General Vo Nguyen Giap and South Vietnam under a rather corrupt and incompetent Government headed by President Ngo Dinh Diem (assassinated during a coup in 1963 and replaced by another rather useless American 'puppet').
The Americans, with a paranoid fear of the spreading communism in the Far East (the Domino Theory), supported the South. In 1964, using the Gulf of Tonkin incident, when a US warship was 'supposedly' attacked by a North Vietnamese torpedo boat, as an excuse, they (Nixon and Kissinger etc.) got the Senate to agree to send US troops into South Vietnam to support the South's army; The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). The North had a big army, The Peoples' Army of Vietnam, but lets just call it for simplicity the North Vietnam Army (NVA) who had seen off the French. They also had, throughout Vietnam, a determined guerrilla force, the Viet Cong (VC). They were well supported politically, financially and logistically by China and Russia. The North were determined to re-unite the whole country, and the Americans were determined to stop them.
So that brief potted history leads us to the start of the Vietnam War in 1964. I choose to call it 'The Great American Fuck-up'. Many books and films have described what followed. The real fighting started in 1967.
Left: A sketch map of our itinerary covering about 40 x 40 miles.
We passed the Catholic church at Long Hung which is derelict but still shows the scars of battle with many bullet holes. Then on to the town of Quang Tri which was the site of much fighting, and casualties after being taken and retaken by successive US/ARVN and NVA battles. There is a memorial park there to commemorate the dead (right).
There is a small museum which displays various artefacts from the war. Such as (right) this NVA outfit.
The DMZ buffer zone was 5 miles wide north/south, similar to that between North and South Korea, and a road, route 9, was the main supply route used by the US forces to resupply their many 'fire-bases' and HQs along the southern side of the zone. We passed an extraordinary high and precipitous 'hill' called 'Rockpile'. This was again taken and retaken in various US/NVA battles. This war seemed all about taking command of hills. Often fruitlessly!
Right: An old dilapidated C130 'Hercules' still sits there.
Left: As well as an old Huey helicopter....so many were deployed in this war and were the 'workhorses' for deploying troops, and subsequently rescuing them!
Right: This one didn't quite make it.
Left: Plus a trusty Chinook helicopter.
Right: There are still the remains of the trench system which surrounded the base. As with the French at Dien Bien Phu, the VNA/VC took hills surrounding the area and regularly bombarded the base with artillery. The inhabitants spent most of their time sheltering underground.
The museum here displays much weaponry deployed by both the Americans and the VNA/VC. Left: I'm not sure, forgotten, what this particular 'fowling piece' is. I expect my reliable and well-informed research team at OMPITA will be able to identify it. (They have. Copy to follow.) Below!
Right: A VC or VNA soldier with his trusty bicycle, probably on the Ho Chi Minh trail. This trail, or in fact many hidden trails, were used by the VNA to resupply themselves and the VC in the south. They passed close to the base here and also went into Laos. The Americans spent much time and a colossal, inordinate, amount of bombs (HE, napalm and the dreadful defoliant dioxin....Agent Orange, but that is another story in itself) to disrupt this 'trail'. Their efforts were futile. The North Vietnamese simply bypassed areas which had been defoliated or attacked. The US forces spent much of their time in this war chasing their tail
Left: I don't know what these 'bullets' are, but someone has carelessly left them lying around.
The NVA and VC launched all-out attacks throughout the whole country, the Tet offensive, in January 1968. The US army and ARVN largely regained control, but with many casualties on both sides (see my Hue blog...Hue was devastated). The base at Khe Sahn was remorselessly bombarded from hills surrounding it, previously US fire-bases which the VNA had overrun. The Yanks were on the back foot. All of this was reminiscient of Dien Bien Phu! The order was then given by Gen Westmoreland who commanded the US forces, to abandon Khe Sahn. Right: Marines running to a plane to get out.
The next year another nonsense occurred at a hill, Hill 937, a high ridge on the Dong Ap Bia mountain near the Laos border which the NVA occupied and gave good observation over the area. After much intense B52 bombing and a ten day battle the US military took the hill. The place was scattered with human remains and thus became known, by the Press, as 'Hamburger Hill'. Many casualties on both sides. After another ten days the US Commanding General, by now Gen Abrams, then gave the order to evacuate this position because it served no real purpose! What were they thinking!
Left: The thoughts of the US Air Force Chief of Staff in 1965. What a disillusioned prick.
Right: An interesting photo of a US plane having been shot down by a 'friendly' US artillery shell. No survivors, obviously.
The more one reads and learns about the US involvement in Vietnam (and many excellent books have been published) the more one becomes worried about the sanity of the politicians and military strategists who planned all this. If you have a large country of 80 million people (at the time) of whom about 90% hated you, and were zealously, with high morale, defending their independence, and you send in thousands of mostly conscripted, often demoralised (fragging? remember that?) troops with no empathy or understanding of the locals, to beat the shit out of them, what can you expect? Defeat, of course. The French discovered this. The Americans obviously learnt nothing from the French experience. Pathetic really! I suspect the same will happen to the Russians in Ukraine, as it did to the Russians and the US/UK involvement in Afghanistan.
OK, I'm getting a bt carried away and only half-way through my tour. Much more to follow, but I have an important engagement with the charming Cuban ladies at the Caravelle, so must dash.
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