August 18, 1969, fifty-five years ago today, I was supposed to be at the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York with my buddies. But instead on that sultry mid-summer morning, I was in Brooklyn, where I took my first military steps on the way to Vietnam. Read More
Early on March 16, 1968, the massacre of hundreds of innocent women, elderly men and children by US soldiers in the tiny hamlet of My Lai took its place as the Vietnam War’s most enduring badge of depravity, and the hapless Americal Division’s most unholy ghost.Read More
This time of year folks will say to me, and to countless thousands of other military veterans: “Thank you for your service.” I hear it in person, by email, text, through social media. It happens every November on Veterans Day, March 29, on Vietnam Veteran’s Day.Read More
54 years ago this day, the heartlessness of the Vietnam War came home to America: four dead, eight wounded at Kent State University in Ohio. More domestic violence would follow. The war against the war raged in a divided nation. Is it 1970 all over again?Read More
Imagine strolling past the Boston home of Paul Revere, and not having a clue. Not likely, right? But in Ho Chi Minh City, revolutionary history is unseen and unheeded every day at an unassuming noodle shop that is the site of a Vietnam War story extraordinaire IRead More
Fifty years ago, the Christmastime night sky over North Vietnam was not an idealized, star-studded obsidian wonderland. Beginning on December 18, 1972, American B-52 aircraft delivered holiday death and destruction to Hanoi in one of the most intensive and lethal bombing campaigns of the Vietnam War. Read More
Forty-seven years ago, on the last day of April,1975, the Vietnam War finally ended when the North Vietnamese Army overwhelmed Saigon. It was the day that Tran Van Kim, then a fierce young Special Forces Colonel, made the hardest decision ever for himself and his family.Read More
Sgt. Randy Sanders was trim, fair-haired, well tanned and never shut up once. That’s how I remember my seatmate on the “Freedom Bird” flight home from Vietnam on June 4, 1971. He seemed happier than a fat kid in a candy store. He was leaving theRead More
It was finally spring in South Vietnam. On March 28, 1971, the morning’s sticky warmth, which had replaced cold monsoon rains, felt reassuring on my stroll from the mess hall to the Americal Division Public Information Office. My thoughts were only of a letter to NatalieRead More
The Zodiac calendar says the Year Of The Ox/Buffalo has arrived. But in Vietnam, despite the Tet Lunar New Year, the page has not turned and the Year Of COVID-19 stubbornly persists. The country is now battling hard against one of the virus’s most troublesome outbreaks. Read More
