Since the end of the Vietnam War, General William C. Westmoreland has been criticized for approving the construction of large U.S. military bases throughout South Vietnam. Critics, who included the highly decorated Colonel David Hackworth, argued that the bases were unnecessarily large, provided too many amenities to soldiers, exposed the Americans stationed on the bases to enemy fire, reduced the combat effectiveness of U.S. units by providing soldiers an all-too luxurious life in the rear, and increased the overall cost of the war without any discernible benefits. Hackworth once described the 9th Infantry Division base at Dong Tam as “Four hundred acres of sitting ducks.” [Hackworth, Steel My Soldiers, Photo Caption] But critics, such as Hackworth, failed to acknowledge the multiple political, economic, and military reasons Westmoreland favored large bases. Continue Reading »
Tagged 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), An Khe, Ca Mau Peninsula, Camp Holloway, Chu Lai, Cu Chi, Danang Airbase, Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), Dien Bien Phu, Dong Tam, Lai Khe, My Tho River, National Route 1, People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), Phu Bai, Robert S. McNamara, Search and Destroy, South Vietnam, U Minh Forest, Viet Cong, William C. Westmoreland
Robert Strange McNamara was born on June 9, 1916, in San Francisco, California, to Robert James McNamara and Clara Nell Strange McNamara. Yes, his middle name, as he so often told others, was in fact “Strange,” which was his mother’s maiden name. In 1933, at the height of the Great Depression, McNamara graduated from Piedmont High School in Piedmont, California. From there he went on to study economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he graduated with honors in 1937. Following his undergraduate studies, he pursued, and completed, an M.B.A. at the Harvard Business School. He was an exceptional student. One of his professors, Edmund Learned, remembered the young McNamara, “…I almost got the feeling he was ingesting these systems [as part of his studies in systems analysis] as if he’d somehow known them all before, in another consciousness….” [Hendrickson, Living Dead, 86]. Continue Reading »
For four days in mid-November 1965, the skytroopers of the 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) grappled with the soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) in the elephant grass and jungle growing below the heights of the Chu Pong Massif in western Pleiku Province. The Battle of the Ia Drang Valley [Ia is pronounced “Yah” and means “river” in one of the Montagnard languages of the Central Highlands] marked a milestone in the Vietnam War. For the first time in the conflict, main-force units of the PAVN fought against battalion-sized formations of the U.S. Army. Continue Reading »
Tagged 1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile), Body Count, Chu Pong Massif, General Andrew J. Goodpaster, Ia Drang, Lt. Col. Hal Moore, Lt. Col. Hu An, LZ Albany, LZ X-Ray, Morley Safer, People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), Richard T. Knowles, Robert S. McNamara, South Vietnam, UH-1D Huey, William C. Westmoreland
“…you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the falling domino principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences…So, the possible consequences of the loss [of Indochina] are just incalculable to the free world.” President Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 7, 1954, in a statement to the press
In its most basic articulation, the Domino Theory postulated that the fall of one pro-Western nation to communism would lead to the rapid communist subjugation of adjoining Western-bloc nations. Every president from Truman to Nixon, either believed in the Domino Theory or recognized its usefulness as a tool in garnering domestic support for U.S. involvement abroad. The theory’s proponents did not believe it applicable to every region of the world. However, it was considered most pertinent to the East-West confrontation in Indochina. Continue Reading »
Tagged Cambodia, Charles S. Reed, Cochin China, David Brinkley, Domino Theory, Dwight D. Eisenhower, First Indochina War, Indochina, John Foster Dulles, Laos, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Malayan Peninsula, Mekong Delta, Mekong River, Phnom Penh, Robert S. McNamara, South China Sea, Viet Minh, Vietnam
