COMBAT STORIES FROM Vietnam

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Showing : Vietnam Videos

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  Sar Phouthasack +12 Total Videos

  Royal Lao Army, Special Guerrilla Unit (SGU)

  The Paris Peace Accords brought immediate changes to the war in Laos. All of the CIA backed Special Guerrilla Units were absorbed into the Royal Lao Army. Sar Phouthasack was sent to Vientiane where he started another secret assignment monitoring enemy radio transmissions.

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  Alex Ortolano - Army +7 Total Videos

  57 Medical Detachment

  Alex Ortolano flew as part of a helicopter medical evacuation team known as Dust Off, which he gives a little introduction to. Of all the medical evacuation units, Dust Off came in contact with the most casualties during its missions.

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  Bill Ryan - Army +5 Total Videos

  4th Infantry Division

  During his time serving in Vietnam the first time, Bill Ryan had plenty of up close encounters with the Vietnamese enemy and some civilians. At this point, Ryan's ears were used to hearing the sound of gunfire in the distance when not being directly part of it.

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  Jesse Groves - Army +6 Total Videos

  2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Division

  Mail call was a really big deal to Jesse Groves. There was very little contact with the outside world in the jungles of Vietnam. He was vaguely aware of the anti-war movement, but a man getting shot at has no time to ponder such things.

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  Paul Koshewa - Air Force +6 Total Videos

  700th Airlift Squadron

  After his 75 missions in the Korean War, Koshewa got to go back to Atlanta and took up a teaching job from there. However, his service was far from over considering the Vietnam War had started going on. He was tasked with flight missions that took off from the states and made pit stops in Vietnam, Bermuda, Europe and the Pacific. All the while, he was still teaching at the local high school. Every so often a mission would take longer than expected and he would have to call out of his job for several days. During this time, there was a terrible plane accident that worried his family sick, but luckily Koshewa wasn't on that flight. (This interview made possible with the support of RICHARD SPEARS.)

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  George Ferkes - Air Force +12 Total Videos

  20th Tactical Air Support Squadron

  He was married and in graduate school but when his deferment no longer protected him from the draft, George Ferkes enlisted in the Air Force and learned to fly. He was assigned as a forward air controller and began training for Vietnam.

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  Mike Paque - Army +13 Total Videos

  4th Infantry Division

  He was drafted, but with a college degree, he was eligible for Officer Candidate School. Mike Paque went through basic training and advanced infantry training, then it was off to Fort Benning for OCS. It was tough, maybe tougher than what was coming.

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  Ray Fairman - Marines +10 Total Videos

  Marine Fighter Attack Squadron 314 (VMFA-314)

  Many years after his experiences in Vietnam, Fairman still has fond memories about the men he commanded, and is still commended by other veterans for his selfless actions to this day. Here he recalls some sentimental memories he has of those times.

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  John Parker - Army +9 Total Videos

  B Company, 4th Aviation Battalion, 4th Infantry Division

  A very memorable mission for Parker was the time he had to help save a total of 10 Air Force men from a dangerous North Vietnamese attack. They were trapped in a hole in Cambodian territory, and it was up to him to fly over and pull them out. He had to try multiple methods in order to keep the NVA's heads down during the rescue.

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  Fred Behrens - Army +10 Total Videos

  Multiple Units

  After the intense and costly battle at Fire Base Ripcord, Huey pilot Fred Behrens was thinking he may not survive the tour. He was transferred to a different unit where he flew a smaller helicopter, the Loach, which he liked. The unit was dysfunctional, however, and he managed to make another move to Eagle Dust Off, a medical evacuation unit.

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  Jack Swickard - Army +12 Total Videos

  118th Assault Helicopter Company

  During helicopter flight training, Jack Swickard's first instructor pilot really had it in for him, writing him up with pink slips for no reason. After he went through a check ride with another instructor, he was able to fix the situation.

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  Robert Wolfe - Air Force +8 Total Videos

  23rd Tactical Air Support Squadron (TASS)

  Forward air controllers are responsible for making sure the fighters making the air strike don't get shot down. You have to know the location and direction of enemy ground fire to give the pilot a safe approach and exit. Bob Wolfe is proud to say, not one of his fighters was ever shot down.

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  Jim Smith - Army +9 Total Videos

  Multiple Units

  Huey pilot Jim Smith landed in a lot of defoliated areas in Vietnam and he saw a lot of aircraft spraying Agent Orange, but he didn't think anything of it. Decades later, he developed diabetes and it may have been related to that exposure.

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  Kevin Hathaway - Army +11 Total Videos

  173rd Assault Helicopter Company

  After a while, door gunner Kevin Hathaway got in a groove and the helicopter assaults became routine. He recalls one troop insertion which required the troops to jump as the chopper hovered over water. He knew the water was deep and he tried in vain to warn a very short soldier.

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  Lee Ellis - Air Force +23 Total Videos

  390th Tactical Fighter Squadron, 366th Tactical Fighter Wing

  While fighting in Vietnam, Lee Ellis had to deal with the loss of his best friend Tom. There were some soldiers whose loved ones had been notified that they had been killed in action, only for them to come home months later. He discusses the events leading up to the day he was shot down (Part 1 of 3).

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  Henry Newinn - Army +5 Total Videos

  MACV-SOG

  Originally from North Vietnam, Henry Newinn grew up near Ho Chi Minh City. At the start of the greater Vietnam conflict, Newinn and his family fled to the south to escape communist regime. Eventually, the French pulled out of the fight and the United States came to aid the people left behind. When Newinn got involved in the war effort, his first job was reconnaissance patrol near the Cambodia and Vietnam border.

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  Edwina Morrison - Army +3 Total Videos

  30th Engineer Battalion

  After her enlistment was over, Edwina Morrison returned to college, where she really wanted to be the whole time. After collecting two degrees, she became a clinical social worker and eventually founded her own firm where she was able to help people; her real purpose in life.

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  Mike McCormick - Army +8 Total Videos

  Multiple Units

  If you were smart, you could avoid the booby traps, but what you couldn't avoid were the questionable tactics. Mike McCormick wanted to know why they were going back to the same piece of land over and over, taking casualties and then leaving. The brash young lieutenant got no real answer.

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  Thomas Gipson - Army +10 Total Videos

  4th Aviation Battalion, 4th Infantry Division

  The load limit on a Huey is not something to be ignored. Thomas Gipson was piloting the last aircraft on a mission to extract a ground unit. He had never carried more than eight passengers but somebody screwed up. There were thirteen men left.

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  Tom Pemberton - Army +10 Total Videos

  4th Transportation Command

  Transportation officer Tom Pemberton's first job in Vietnam was at Tan Son Nhut Air Base taking care of cargo. Later, the Army inherited responsibility for the Saigon port from the Navy and he moved to that location. During the offloading of tanks from a ship, a crew member forgot some basic safety, with expensive results.

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  Nat Robb - Army +9 Total Videos

  Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV)

  Nat Robb got to know the efficiency of different weapon systems when he called in fire support to the South Vietnamese unit he was advising. He would work his way through various types of artillery until he got to what worked every time, big bombs from the air.

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  Ron Schuh - Air Force +12 Total Videos

  13th Tactical Fighter Squadron

  It started in the bar at Udorn. A group of pilots listened to a CIA operative describe a problem the Hmong army was having in Laos, mainly too many North Vietnamese troops. They came up with a plan to hit their camp with wave after wave of cluster bombs.

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  Jack LeCroy - Navy +3 Total Videos

  USS Cone (DD-866)

  Gunner's mate Jack LeCroy returned from his Vietnam tour without encountering any protests. The only one he'd ever seen was during a port visit in Japan. He finds some parallels between the jungle warfare of the ground troops in Vietnam and the suburban warfare today's combatants must face.

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  LTG (Ret) Robert T. Clark - Army +15 Total Videos

  2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry (Airmobile), 1st Cavalry Division

  Bob Clark's first contact with the enemy in Vietnam was memorable. His platoon found a bunker complex they'd been looking for and soon a firefight began. When it was over, a search for intel in the pockets of the dead revealed a photograph of the family of an NVA soldier. That provoked a little soul searching.

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  Tony Nadal - Army +16 Total Videos

  7th Special Forces Group

  The plane that took Tony Nadal to Vietnam was old and slow but the men on it were not. He was part of a Special Forces team that aimed to organize tribal people in the border area into civilian defense groups. It was in rough terrain in the central highlands where he made his way to the camp at Nam Dong.

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  Jim Smith - Army +9 Total Videos

  Multiple Units

  Jim Smith tried not to make close friends with anyone in Vietnam. You never know when they might get killed. He flew missions for MACV, the advisory group which had a lot of special forces assigned to it. These men had to be trained on triple canopy extractions, a tricky business.

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  Carl Scheidegg - Air Force +12 Total Videos

  35th Tactical Fighter Squadron

  "Three MiGs...left...ten o'clock...slightly high." Anytime you saw any potential opposition in the air, you told the rest of the flight and that's just what F-4 pilot Carl Scheidegg did. It went well until the cockpit recording was played back for his buddies.

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  Jim Smith - Army +9 Total Videos

  Multiple Units

  The campus of Western Kentucky University was practically a home for Jim Smith through high school and college. He loved ROTC and the Pershing Rifles and when it came time for a commission, he chose reserve because he could go to flight school sooner. He was sent to helicopter training because pilots were desperately needed in Vietnam.

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  Jim Littig - Army +14 Total Videos

  505th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division

  There were a lot of hairy firefights for Jim Littig in Vietnam. There was one in particular where the enemy had their old Soviet machine guns going in a hail of fire. After regrouping, his unit prepared a defense line at their fire base that included everyone from the rear, cooks and all.

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  Paul Curs - Air Force +15 Total Videos

  20th Tactical Air Support Squadron

  For Vietnam veteran Paul Curs, his experiences and stories are shared in the memory of his VMI classmate John William Kennedy, who did not make it back from that war.