A Book Excerpt From Mike Benge
Vietnam? Where and the hell is that? I was just finishing my first year at Oregon State College and living as a fledgling pledge at Delta Chi Fraternity. Pledges such as myself had to follow strict dress code for different days of the week: suits – ties, slacks – sportsContinue Reading
Sometimes the herd is wrong
by Terry Garlock Published on Wed Jan 30, 2019 in The Citizen, a Fayette County GA newspaper. Well into the autumn of my life, I am occasionally reminded the end is not too far over the horizon. Mortality puts thoughts in my head, like “What have I done to leaveContinue Reading
HUMINT: A Continuing Crisis?
Readers note: We will be reproducing a number of articles originally published on Small Wars Journal written by W. R. Baker, an active member of Vietnam Veterans for Factual History. They will be categorized as Small Wars Journal as well as W.R. Baker. This article first appeared here. on, 05/08/2017Continue Reading
The Sad Story of American Abandonment
Readers note: This information was given to me by Bill Laurie, who has a photocopy of the original in his possession. I imagine more than a few Afghans are feeling very similar pain if they are still alive. The following open letter printed in 17 April 1975 Saigon Post, anContinue Reading
The Last Battle of the Vietnam War: Mayaguez Incident by Mike Benge
Two weeks after the fall of Saigon, on May 12, 1975, Khmer Rouge in an American-made PCF Swift gunboat seized the U.S. merchant ship SS Mayaguez and its crew in Cambodian waters. After the U.S. withdrawal from Viet Nam and the abandonment of the three countries of former Indochina, aContinue Reading
The Khmer Rouge: Bayon two faces instead of four – by Mike Benge
The ancient symbolic four-faced sandstone Bayon is thought by some Cambodians to represent simplicity, compassion, equanimity and wisdom, virtues lacking in those involved in the factional struggles of the communists in Cambodia. A symbolic Bayon for the Khmer Rouge would have only two faces, that of the barbaric and amoralContinue Reading
The Making of Apocalypse Now
By Mike Benge, POW, VVFH Founding Member The only similarity between Francis Ford Coppola’s film set-in South-East Asia and Joseph Conrad’s novel “Heart of Darkness” set in Africa is that both had rivers winding through them and both had major characters named Kurtz. And, oh yes, Coppola copied Conrad’s styleContinue Reading
Critique of the Ken Burns Vietnam Program
Panel Remarks Critique of the Ken Burns Vietnam Program Institute of World Politics Washington, DC 22 January 2017 Lewis Sorley From my perspective the Burns production had one objective, to reinforce the standard anti-war narrative that the Vietnam war was unwinnable, illegal, immoral, and ineptly conducted by the allies fromContinue Reading
Mao Zedong’s Travelling Circus
This is a book review authored by VVFH member David Hanna. Land Wars: The Story of China’s Agrarian Revolution, by Brain DeMare; Stanford University Press, 2019 (e-book version), $15.69. Brian DeMare is a cultural historian and teacher of modern Chinese history at Tulane University in New Orleans. In his firstContinue Reading
The Wrong Side Won
By Uwe Siemon-Netto At the height of the Vietnam War, Ralph White tried to join the U.S. Marine Corps but was turned down because of an eye injury he had sustained playing tennis. As the fighting drew to a tumultuous close in April 1975, however, 27-year-old White was inContinue Reading
