Day of infamy vietnam12/14/2023 It wasn't so much what I was seeing on TV, it was a memory of the Vietnamese people I had come to know. I sat there alone with tears rolling down my face. I left work in April of 1975, went to my friend Lonnie Wheeler's house, turned on his black-and-white TV and saw South Vietnamese streaming down the roads as the communist forces advanced behind them. Who knew Gerald Ford and Barack Obama would have so much in common? The last living American soldiers and Marines made it out, but a lot of Vietnamese did not because we abandoned them, just as we have in more recent wars. Maybe so, but many individual South Vietnamese didn't. Today, I talk to people who say it hasn't been a disaster, that Vietnam is doing all right without us. Walter Cronkite saw it differently and came home and announced the war was a stalemate. He notes that American forces won every battle during Tet of 1968, when the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese Army launched a massive offensive throughout the country. "Our government mismanaged what should have been a victory into a defeat," Browning said.ĭavis blames the media, too, for giving an inaccurate picture that turned many Americans against the war and the people who fought it. If South Vietnam fell to the communists, Cambodia and Laos would follow and, ultimately, Thailand, or so the Cold War domino theory went. We shouldn't have gone in the first place if we had no intention of doing everything necessary to win, he said.ĭavis said he thinks Washington believed the war was necessary to stop the first domino from falling. "I'll always honor those who went and fought and didn't come back," Browning said, "or gave up limbs or part of their minds." Browning is also retired, but still works hard as a Glynn County commissioner and with veterans groups. He and I talked at Bamboo Garden, a restaurant owned by a nice Vietnamese couple.ĭavis spent 30 years on the same job and retired. He stayed in the Army three years and then got out. As soon as I turned 18, I got orders," he said. "They wouldn't send a 17-year-old to Vietnam. "I hate to see that helicopter land on that building," he said.ĭavis said he had a tough family life and had quit school and joined the Army at 17. Cambodia was hard, Davis said, but he had worse days around Pleiku and Dak To.ĭavis said he hadn't watched the PBS documentary that aired this week on Saigon's final days including footage of that last chopper landing on the embassy roof. Richard Graham, who was wounded on Charlie Ridge around Christmas.ĭavis was with the troops that President Richard Nixon ordered into Cambodia in 1970 to strike the communist sanctuaries and supply bases. Unlike Davis and Browning, I didn't see any of my comrades die. Davis was a spec 4 with the 4th Division out of Fort Hood. I was there later as a buck sergeant with Alpha Co., 3/21 Infantry Regiment of 23rd's 196th Light Infantry Brigade. The ruthless North Vietnamese communists backed up those fears mostly by working thousands to death.īrowning was an infantry sergeant in Vietnam with the 11th Brigade of the 23rd Infantry Division, better known as the Americal. had evacuated as many South Vietnamese as possible fearing they faced death or hard labor. What a waste."Īpril 30, 1975, was when the last Americans were airlifted from the embassy in Saigon, and the city fell to the North Vietnamese Army. Here's another one for you April 30, 1975.Īsked how he felt about the day, Mike Browning said, "What a waste, really. | "December 7, 1941," President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said, "a date which will live in infamy.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |