Ho Chi Minh: The Price of Freedom

Very recommendable! Why was he a communist?

However, the documentary is e.g. silent about how much Communist China or the Soviet Union supported him.

(6) Ho Chi Minh: The Price of Freedom | Historical Documentary | Lucasfilm - YouTube

Kissinger's Devastating Secret Bombing of Cambodia

This seems to be a very biased representation of history as is typical for PBS!

“Napalm Girl” Kim Phuc, from the iconic Vietnam War photo, on pain and forgiveness

Very recommendable! Love and faith can heal all wounds!

With her baby

Vietnam War photographer on his iconic 'Napalm Girl' image

Very recommendable! See also my other blog post nearby on the victim.

She is like my daughter the photographer said!

Vietnam War “Napalm Girl” pursuing peace in the world

Very recommendable! Blessed are the peacemakers!

The Vietnam War and Taiwan’s Hidden Role in this war: 50 Years On

Very recommendable! Who knew that Taiwan was militarily involved in the Vietnam War.

Ho Chi Minh: The Price of Communism

Very recommendable with some reservations! He committed massacres against  Vietnamese people. He was a communist dictator.

Unfortunately, this video does not say anything about whether and how the former Soviet Union or China supported the Vietnamese communists.

Desperate despots like Putin & Assad use chemical weapons - they will do ANYTHING to try to win

Very recommendable & concerning! 

Richard Nixon: Did The Actions of Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark Prolong The Vietnam War?

Food for thought!

Prager University: Lyndon B. Johnson and the Vietnam War

Very recommendable! LBJ certainly was a very controversial U.S. President!

Prager University: Why Did America Fight the Vietnam War?

Very recommendable! With Victor Davis Hanson.

Crater detection from commercial satellite imagery to estimate unexploded ordnance in Cambodian agricultural land

Latest AI research helps to save life and limb in very difficult circumstances!

Full credit for this story goes to Deeplearning.ai The Batch by Andrew Ng

Crater detection from commercial satellite imagery to estimate unexploded ordnance in Cambodian agricultural land: Unexploded ordnance (UXO) pose a significant threat to post-conflict communities, and current efforts to locate bombs rely on time-intensive and dangerous in-person enumeration. Very high resolution (VHR) sub-meter satellite images may offer a low-cost and high-efficiency approach to automatically detect craters and estimate UXO density. Machine-learning methods from the meteor crater literature are ill-suited to find bomb craters, which are smaller than meteor craters and have high appearance variation, particularly in spectral reflectance and shape, due to the complex terrain environment. A two-stage learning-based framework is created to address these challenges. First, a simple and loose statistical classifier based on histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) and spectral information is used for a first pass of crater recognition. In a second stage, a patch-dependent novel spatial feature is developed through dynamic mean-shift segmentation and SIFT descriptors. We apply the model to a multispectral WorldView-2 image of a Cambodian village, which was heavily bombed during the Vietnam War. The proposed method increased true bomb crater detection by over 160 percent. Comparative anal

My Lai Massacre Revisited

Posted: 4/23/2015

Trigger

Just watched “AMERICAN EXPERIENCE/ My Lai” for the first time. Here is the Wikipedia entry for this 1.5 hour long documentary.

Remarks

1. To suspect that My Lai village was a stronghold of Vietcong at the time was apparently  an U.S. intelligence disaster. Further, on that day there was apparently no or little counterfire.
2. This is surely a dark chapter of U.S. military history. Nothing was done to stop the ongoing massacre although reports of it came in early over radio. The attempted cover up in the aftermath by higher ups was and remains despicable.
3. Thank God, several courageous U.S. soldiers tried to halt the massacre or to save innocent, unarmed Vietnamese such as Hugh Clowers Thompson, Jr and his helicopter crew (Glenn Andreotta and Lawrence Colburn). Finally, in 1998 at least several of them received a Soldier’s Medal (u.S. Army's highest award for bravery not involving direct contact with the enemy) for their heroic efforts.
4. Twenty-six officers and enlisted soldiers, including William Calley and Ernest Medina, were charged with criminal offenses, but all were either acquitted or pardoned.
5. The documentary shows the bizarre reaction (the “Free Calley” movement) of the public in response to the prosecution of William Calley. “Nixon got 260,000 letters and 75,000 telegrams, most opposing the verdict.”
   “Many in America were outraged by Calley's sentence. Georgia's governor, Jimmy Carter, instituted American Fighting Man's Day and asked Georgians to drive for a week with their lights on. The Arkansas, Kansas, Texas, New Jersey, and South Carolina legislatures requested clemency for Calley.[12] Alabama's governor, George Wallace, visited Calley in the stockade and requested that President Nixon pardon him.” (source)
6. It still remains an incomprehensible disgrace that none of the U.S. military war criminals was ever sentenced except for one.
7. Why U.S. President Richard M. Nixon basically pardoned the only convicted war criminal, i.e. William Calley should be seen as another, awful disgrace! “Under mounting pressure from the public, President Richard Nixon intervened on April 1, 1971, and ordered Lieutenant Calley released from the army stockade and placed under house arrest. Calley's sentence was reduced the following August, and reduced again in April of 1974 when he returned to the stockade. When he was released on parole on November 9, 1974, ...” (source, source2)

A Hero In Action

True heroes are rare!

Following is an excerpt taken from the Wikipedia entry on Lawrence Coburn (emphasis added):

“Movement from the ditch indicated to Thompson that there were still people alive in there. Thompson landed his helicopter and dismounted. David Mitchell a sergeant and squad leader in 1st Platoon, C Company, walked over to him. When asked by Thompson whether any help could be provided to the people in the ditch, the sergeant replied that the only way to help them was to put them out of their misery. Second Lieutenant William Calley (1st Platoon Leader, C Company) then came up, and the two had the following conversation:[3]

Thompson: What's going on here, Lieutenant?

Calley: This is my business.

Thompson: What is this? Who are these people?

Calley: Just following orders.

Thompson: Orders? Whose orders?

Calley: Just following...

Thompson: But, these are human beings, unarmed civilians, sir.

Calley: Look Thompson, this is my show. I'm in charge here. It ain't your concern.

Thompson: Yeah, great job.

Calley: You better get back in that chopper and mind your own business.

Thompson: You ain't heard the last of this!

Thompson took off again, and Andreotta reported that Mitchell was now executing the people in the ditch. Furious, Thompson flew over the northeast corner of the village and spotted a group of about ten civilians, including children, running toward a homemade bomb shelter. Pursuing them were soldiers from the 2nd Platoon, C Company. Realizing that the soldiers intended to murder the Vietnamese, Thompson landed his aircraft between them and the villagers. Thompson turned to Colburn and Andreotta and told them that if the Americans began shooting at the villagers or him, they should fire their M60 machine guns at the Americans: "Y'all cover me! If these bastards open up on me or these people, you open up on them. Promise me!":[4] Colburn (whose M60 faced 2nd Platoon) replied, "You got it boss, consider it done." He turned his weapon to face the American soldiers and exchanged stares with them, but privately was uncertain if he could actually fire on his fellow countrymen. Thompson then dismounted to confront the 2nd Platoon's leader, Stephen Brooks. Thompson told him he wanted help getting the peasants out of the bunker:[5]

Thompson: Hey listen, hold your fire. I'm going to try to get these people out of this bunker. Just hold your men here.

Brooks: Yeah, we can help you get 'em out of that bunker – with a hand grenade!

Thompson: Just hold your men here. I think I can do better than that.”

“Thompson made an official report of the killings and was interviewed by Colonel Oran Henderson, the commander of the 11th Infantry Brigade (the parent organization of the 20th Infantry). Concerned, senior American Division officers cancelled similar planned operations by Task Force Barker against other villages (My Lai 5, My Lai 1, etc.) in Quang Ngai Province, possibly preventing the additional massacre of further hundreds, if not thousands, of Vietnamese civilians.” (source)

“Thompson was condemned and ostracized by many individuals in the United States military and government, as well as the public, for his role in the investigations and trials concerning the Mỹ Lai Massacre. As a direct result of what he experienced, Thompson suffered from posttraumatic stress disorder, alcoholism, divorce, and severe nightmare disorder. Despite the adversity he faced, he remained in the United States Army until November 1st, 1983” (source)

Were There Other Massacres?

Probably yes, but probably only a few massacres occurred between the beginning of heavy U.S. military involvement in 1960 to the end in 1975. When you Google for massacres in vietnam war you come up with one other massacre described e.g. here.

Thus, the U.S. military with respect to massacres is probably more maligned in the global public opinion than is justified.

A German Journalist From Vietnam On The Vietnam War

Trigger

Recently (9/27/2013), I came across this article published in the Weekly Standard titled “The Lost Cause/A reporter remembers the agony of South Vietnam” about a German journalist, i.e. Uwe Siemon-Netto, covering the Vietnam War on the ground. A German journalist? I was immediately intrigued.

“He arrived in Vietnam in 1965 … [his] last trip to Vietnam was in 1972”

Summary & Comment

Salient quotes from the article (emphasis added):

1. “Unlike some American reporters who seldom ventured anywhere outside Saigon, Siemon-Netto ranged far and wide across South Vietnam, dipping in on remote Special Forces bases and brave South Vietnamese Army units who were cutting down from trees the corpses of village elders and their children (including babies) who had been strung up, tortured, and murdered by Communist forces.”
2. “He describes weeping Marines coming across hundreds of women and children murdered by the Vietcong on their way to enjoy the holiday. Then, slowly, the full horror of the Tet atrocity emerging when it became clear that the Vietcong had targeted at least 3,000 South Vietnamese civilians on written execution lists even before the offensive started. When this fastidious German reporter came upon a mass grave of victims, he was astonished to find an American television crew standing around with idle cameras. The crew refused to shoot the scene because, they said, they didn’t want to film “anti-Communist propaganda.”
3. “Because he loved the Vietnamese so much, Siemon-Netto became deeply angry that the murderous brutality of the Communist side was never fully reported by American or other Western reporters. Vo Nguyen Giap, the North Vietnamese commander, supervised a military campaign that deliberately terrorized civilians, understanding that, in Giap’s own words, “the enemy does not possess the psychological and political means to fight a long, drawn-out war.””
4. “There is also a touching scene in which he meets an American machine-gunner who was desolate with grief and contrition because the black-clad figures he had earlier gunned down had turned out to be children. But Siemon-Netto makes it clear that the chasm between Vietcong and American murders was galactic in size: The Communists carefully planned violence against civilians, whereas the Americans punished anyone they could prove had committed such acts.”

Germans are sometimes famous or infamous for saying the truth regardless of who is hurt. German directness!

State Secretary John Kerry you should read this book by that German author!

German Participation In The Vietnam War

Trigger

Recently, I came across this article in the Weekly Standard titled “The Lost Cause/A reporter remembers the agony of South Vietnam” about a German journalist covering the Vietnam War on the ground. A German journalist? I was immediately intrigued.

German Hospital Ship Helgoland

I have never heard of it. Must be the government run public education that I received. I quote from the article: “He also writes admiringly of the German doctors and nurses who courageously staffed the West German hospital ship Helgoland, in the face of relentless Vietcong attempts to destroy it, far up north near Da Nang.”. Unfortunately, the article does not say more about this German hospital ship.

After a bit of research I came up with these websites:

http://military-intelligence.wikispaces.com/Helgoland

http://www.dw.de/german-hospital-ship-saved-thousands-during-vietnam-war/a-17012714

The latter article is published by the Deutsche Welle, the German government radio station like Radio Free Europe etc. or according to the About on their website: “Germany's international broadcaster”.

Quotes from these two articles (emphasis added):

1. “the German hospital ship "Helgoland," where civilians from both sides were treated. For many Vietnamese, it was the last resort. ”
2. “In a rush, the German Red Cross had converted the boat into a hospital ship, as ordered by the German government. … there were ten doctors and 30 nurses on board from the German Red Cross. Some 150 beds and three operating rooms were set up along the boat's 92 meters (300 feet). There was even a proper laboratory.”
3. “The "Helgoland" reached the South Vietnamese capital Saigon in September 1966, protected by mine-detection ships. But the doctors and nurses were not prepared for the horrors that were awaiting them. When the first wounded civilians were brought on board, the German medics were shocked. "We just cried," one nurse said. The final harbor for the "Helgoland" in Vietnam was the city of Da Nang, close to the war. Only civilians were treated on board, no soldiers. Since the boat was under protection of the Geneva Conventions, it was considered strictly neutral. … The floating hospital was the most modern clinic in all of Vietnam. …  Word got around quickly that the German ship spelled salvation for the ill and wounded. The Vietnamese called the "Helgoland" the "white ship of hope." The crew helped everyone, no matter which side they may have been on. "We never asked where they came from," the chief physician aboard the "Helgoland" recalled. On top of that, treatment on the boat came for free. For the doctors and nurses, working with the many civilian patients was a big challenge physically and mentally. They amputated limbs day and night from children, women and men, whose legs were torn to shreds by mines, who were wounded by gunshots or who had bad Napalm burns on their bodies. At night, the "Helgoland" left its harbor for the safer open sea. Surgeries still continued.”
4. “The "Helgoland mission ended in 1971, when a hospital on land took over the tasks. Until then, the boat's staff treated more than 11,000 people. And they keep helping. Today, former crew members run an association to support Vietnamese children.”

History Is Full Of Surprises

Hope this story will be told more often in Germany! My gratitude goes out to these doctors and nurses!