USS Frank E. Evans DD-754

At around 0300 on 3 June 1969, Frank E. Evans was operating in darkness in the South China Sea between Vietnam and Spratly Island in a formation with ships of the Royal Navy, Royal Australian Navy, and Royal New Zealand Navy. All ships in the formation were running without lights. The Royal Australian Navy aircraft carrier Melbourne was in the process of going to flying stations and radioed Frank E. Evans, then to port of her, to take up station as the rescue destroyer. This required Frank E. Evans to reduce speed and take up station on Melbourne′s port quarter. The commanding officer of Frank E. Evans was asleep in his quarters, having left instructions to be awakened if there were to be any changes in the formation. Neither the officer of the deck nor the junior officer of the deck notified him when the station change was ordered. The bridge crew also did not contact the combat information center to request clarification of the positions and movements of the surrounding ships.

The conning officer on Frank E. Evans misunderstood the formation’s base course and believed Frank E. Evans was to starboard of Melbourne. Frank E. Evans therefore turned to starboard, cutting across Melbourne′s bow twice in the process. Melbourne struck Frank E. Evans at a point about 92 feet (28 m) from her bow on her port side and cut her in two at: 8°59.2′N 110°47.7′E. After the collision, Frank E. Evans′ bow drifted off to the port side of Melbourne and sank in less than five minutes, taking 73 of her crew with it. One body was recovered from the water, making a total of 74 dead. Her stern scraped along the starboard side of Melbourne, and Melbourne′s crew attached lines to it. It remained afloat. Around 60 to 100 men were rescued from the water.

The three Sage brothers of Niobrara, NE, were among the men lost: Gary, 22; Gregory, 21; and Kelly, 19. “It was their wish that they serve together,” Linda Sage, wife of Gregory Sage, reflected. “That’s the way they wanted it and that’s the way we accepted it.” A fourth Nebraskan was also lost when the USS Evans went down. His name was Garry Bradbury Hodgson, he was from Beatrice, NE and he was the second oldest of the lost at 32.

Battle of Ben Het

By early 1969, there were 12 Special Forces advisers and three companies of Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) numbering 400 men in total, with two M42A1 Duster self-propelled anti-aircraft guns and an artillery battery of M107 self-propelled guns. To counter a buildup of PAVN forces in the area, a unit of the 1st Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment, equipped with four M48 Patton tanks was sent to reinforce the camp. Three of the four tanks took up dug-in positions on a hill facing west towards Cambodia, while the last tank occupied a firing position in the main camp overlooking the resupply route.

Throughout February the PAVN attacked the camp by fire. The shelling decreased at the beginning of March, but at 21:00 on 3 March the PAVN shelling began again and men of the 1/69th Armor heard the sound of tank engines coming from the west. A PT-76 of the PAVN 16th Company, 4th Battalion, 202nd Armored Regiment detonated an antitank mine 1,100 meters to the southwest of the base, which alerted the camp and lit up the other PT-76s attacking the base. Flares were sent up, exposing the attacking tanks, but by sighting in on muzzle flashes, one PT-76 scored a direct hit on the turret of an M-48, killing two crewmen and wounding the other two. Another M-48, using the same technique, destroyed a PT-76 with their second shot. At daybreak, the battlefield revealed the wreckage of two PT-76s and one BTR-50 armored personnel carrier but no PAVN dead. Intelligence later revealed that the main object of the attack was to destroy the M107 guns.

Hamburger Hill

Hamburger Hill was the scene of an intense and controversial 10 day battle during the Vietnam War. Known to military planners as Hill 937 (a reference to its height in meters), the solitary peak is located in the dense jungles of the A Shau Valley of Vietnam, about a mile from the border with Laos.
An estimated 630 North Vietnamese were killed. U.S. casualties were listed as 72 killed and 372 wounded.
The Vietnamese referred to the hill as Dong Ap Bia (or Ap Bia Mountain, “the mountain of the crouching beast”). Though the hill had no real tactical significance, taking the hill was part of Operation Apache Snow, a U.S. military sweep of the A Shau Valley. The purpose of the operation was to cut off North Vietnamese infiltration from Laos and enemy threats to the cities of Hue and Da Nang.

Hanoi Hilton

During the Vietnam War, the first U.S. prisoner to be sent to Hoa Lo was Lieutenant, Junior Grade Everett Alvarez Jr., who was shot down on August 5, 1964. From the beginning, U.S. POWs endured miserable conditions, including poor food and unsanitary conditions. The prison complex was sarcastically nicknamed the “Hanoi Hilton” by the American POWs, in reference to the well-known Hilton Hotel chain. There is some disagreement among the first group of POWs who coined the name but F8D pilot Bob Shumaker was the first to write it down, carving “Welcome to the Hanoi Hilton” on the handle of a pail to greet the arrival of Air Force Lieutenant Robert Peel.

Regarding treatment at Hoa Lo and other prisons, Communists countered by stating that prisoners were treated well and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. During 1969, they broadcast a series of coerced statements from American prisoners that purported to support this notion. The North Vietnamese would also maintain that their prisons were no worse than prisons for POWs and political prisoners in South Vietnam, such as the one on Con Son Island. Mistreatment of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese prisoners and South Vietnamese dissidents in South Vietnam’s prisons was indeed frequent, as was North Vietnamese treatment of South Vietnamese prisoners and their own dissidents.

Operation Bold Mariner

Marine operation on Batangan Peninsula southeast of Chu Lai. (12 Jan-7 Feb).

On 12 January the Marines conducted a feint against Mộ Đức District approximately 20 km south of the operation area.

At 07:00 on 13 January the Marines landed on the peninsula meeting negligible resistance. Once ashore the Marines linked up with Task Force Cooksey and then pushed east forcing the VC towards the sea. While encounters with the VC were minimal, the Marines encountered extensive networks of mines, booby-traps and fortifications. On 19 January 2/26 Marines captured 56 Vietnamese of military age. Under interrogation they were found to be members of the C-95th Sapper Company. The Marines evacuated numerous civilians for screening, eventually totaling some 11,900 people.

On 24 January 2/26 Marines returned to their amphibious assault ships.
Following the conclusion of the assault phase, Operation Russell Beach continued with Marine combined action teams, the 46th Infantry Regiment and the ARVN 6th Regiment operating to cleanse the peninsula of VC/People’s Army of Vietnam forces.

Operation MENU

Operation MENU was a code name for the secret bombing campaign by the United States performed in eastern Cambodia and Laos. Operation Menu was a covert United States Strategic Air Command (SAC) tactical bombing campaign. The bombings lasted from March of 1969 to May of 1970 and targeted military bases of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), along with Viet Cong forces. The United States began bombing rural areas of Cambodia in 1965 under president Lyndon Johnson. Nixon then allowed the technique of carpet bombing, which is a large aerial bombing done in a progressive manner to cause damage in every part of a selected area of land. The attacks did not prevent further North Vietnamese advances.

Operation PHOENIX

The Phoenix Program (Vietnamese: Chiến dịch Phụng Hoàng) was designed and initially coordinated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Vietnam War, involving the American, Australian, and South Vietnamese militaries. In 1969, CIA responsibility was phased out, and the program was put under the authority of the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS).

The program, which lasted from 1967 to 1972, was designed to identify and destroy the Viet Cong (VC) via infiltration, torture, capture, counter-terrorism, interrogation, and assassination. The CIA described it as “a set of programs that sought to attack and destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong.” The Phoenix Program was premised on the idea that North Vietnamese infiltration had required local support within noncombat civilian populations, which were referred to as the “VC infrastructure” and “political branch” that had purportedly coordinated the insurgency.

Joseph Robert Kerrey (Bob Kerrey)

Born: 1943 Lincoln, NE (USA)

Vietnam Veteran, Navy SEAL officer, Kerrey was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for combat in which he was severely wounded. He was Governor of Nebraska 1983-1987, United States Senator from Nebraska, 1989-2001. From 2001 to 2010, Kerrey was President of the New School in New York.

Kerrey earned a reputation as an incisive critic of political clichés and obfuscation. As Governor, he had the Nebraska National Guard park a tank on railroad tracks at the state border when the federal government failed to notify him of a rail shipment of nuclear waste. He was a very successful, though at the end of his tenure a controversial leader of the New School in New York City. He left New School after 94% of the faculty recorded a ‘vote of no confidence’ in him.

March on Washington

While hundreds of thousands of demonstrators converged on Washington in November 1969 to show their growing disdain for America’s involvement in Vietnam, Sgt. Grant Coates was bunkered in the Commerce Department with his fellow soldiers, peeking out windows to catch glimpses at the activity outside.

Coates was a squad leader with the 6th Armored Cavalry Regiment out of Fort Meade, Md., one of the units assigned to riot duty during the weekend of Nov. 15, 1969, when about 500,000 people gathered in the capitol for what’s believed to be the largest antiwar protest in U.S. history, called the Moratorium March.
The weekend of the march, Coates was one of the only service members on riot duty who had served in Vietnam.

Moon Landing

On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong (1930-2012) and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin (1930-) became the first humans ever to land on the moon. About six-and-a-half hours later, Armstrong became the first person to walk on the moon. As he took his first step, Armstrong famously said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” The Apollo 11 mission occurred eight years after President John F. Kennedy (1917-1963) announced a national goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s.

Ronald L. Coker

Ronald L. Coker, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for heroism in Vietnam in March 1969, was born 9 August 1947, in Alliance, Nebraska. He attended District 78 Rural Elementary School in Alliance, Alliance High School, and Denver Colorado Automotive School.

PFC Coker lost his life in Vietnam while attempting to save a wounded marine in his unit. During the rescue, Coker was also wounded by small arms fire and several grenades. He succumbed to his wounds after he had drug his comrade to safety.

Vietnamization

Vietnamization was a strategy that aimed to reduce American involvement in the Vietnam War by transferring all military responsibilities to South Vietnam. The increasingly unpopular war had created deep rifts in American society. President Nixon believed his Vietnamization strategy, which involved building up South Vietnam’s armed forces and withdrawing U.S. troops, would prepare the South Vietnamese to act in their own defense against a North Vietnamese takeover and allow the United States to leave Vietnam with its honor intact. But the Vietnamization process was deeply flawed from the beginning.

In his final report before leaving office that month, Melvin Laird the creator of the Vietnamization strategy, declared the process completed: “As a consequence of the success of the military aspects of Vietnamization, the South Vietnamese people today, in my view, are fully capable of providing for their own in-country security against the North Vietnamese.”

However, later events proved that the Laird’s confidence was completely unfounded, as South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese communist forces in 1975.

Woodstock Music Festival

The Woodstock Music Festival began on August 15, 1969, as half a million people waited on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York, for the three-day music festival to start. Billed as “An Aquarian Experience: 3 Days of Peace and Music,” the epic event would later be known simply as Woodstock and become synonymous with the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Woodstock was a success, but the massive concert didn’t come off without a hitch: Last-minute venue changes, bad weather and the hordes of attendees caused major headaches. Still, despite—or because of—a lot of sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and rain, Woodstock was a peaceful celebration and earned its hallowed place in pop culture history.