Military Operations/Strategy/Background Photos


 

Cao Lanh (1963)

These voices of fear and helplessness introduced me to the plight of Vietnam’s rural families when in the spring of 1962 I visited the Mekong Delta province of Kien Phong, abutting the Cambodian border southwest of Saigon.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 39)

Delta Heliborne (1963)

The first American helicopter unit started moving into the Mekong Delta on April 9, 1962, and I went to visit it soon afterward. I was eager to cover the first contact between these newcomers and the delta’s population.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 57)

Bien Hoa (1965)

Arriving in Bien Hoa, I was appalled to learn of the ferocity of the fighting that had occurred there. One U.S. veteran officer living on the gigantic base recounted, “This is the worst battlefield I have ever seen – and this is my second war.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 53)

Military Operations (1965)

U.S. combat units brought with them tremendous technologies of firepower and air-power that increased the level of violence and destruction in the South. I found the cumulative impact and magnitude of allied artillery shellings and air bombardments hard to report to readers because they occurred in so many different places over sporadic stretches of time, and no official announcements about them were made.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 152)

Military Camp (1965)

The marines had transformed swampland, weeds, debris, and six structures into a city of tents, wooden frame toilets, a flimsy canvas shower hall, their own water purifying system, a fuel field, a seventy-five-kilowatt electric plant, and a thousand foot, all weather runway, equipped with portable lights. “This is just a typical marine operation,” [Colonel] Carey said offhandedly.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 58-59)

Tan Son Nhut (1965)

Tan Son Nhut, just about the world’s busiest and best-defended airport and site of the headquarters of Westmoreland’s command, was subjected to pitched battles, mortar fire, sniper siege, and guerilla raids. Communists donning government soldiers’ fatigues attacked the South Vietnamese High Command.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 191)

Plei Me (1965)

“In my opinion, the Air Force has saved this camp…air strikes outstanding.” These are the words of the Plei Me Special Forces outpost commander, Captain Harold M. Moore. His camp has been under attack by a multi-battalion sized Viet Cong Force since 7:00 P.M., 19 Oct. It all started with a 20 to 40 man VC probe of the outpost’s defenses. Since then it has blossomed into a major battle in which air power has played a role of tremendous importance.
SSgt Stewart Diamond

Military Press Release, Bev Keever Collection (Packet 66)

Damages (1965)

“It was becoming necessary to destroy the town to save it,” the major [Peter Arnett] was quoted as saying. Returning to Saigon, Arnett focused his copy on that memorable quote, which, he recounted, “leaped out as a comment on the essential dilemma of the Tet Offensive. The authorities had not only to defeat the attackers, but protect the civilian population.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 197)

Navy Photos (1965)

Hamlet residents along a river in Ba Xuyen and Chuong Thien Provinces were increasingly reluctant to travel the waterways after U.S. Navy boats began patrolling the area, one American in the field learned in 1966, thanks to U.S. polling of Vietnamese nationwide.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 55)

Amphibious Operation (1965)

Eight days after my article was published in New York, the Pentagon, also recognizing that guided missiles could not protect the Danang airbase from guerrilla attacks, ordered 2,000 men of a U.S. Marine amphibious brigade to swarm ashore near Danang.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 144)

Military Vehicles (1965)

Now Americans were calling it the “War of the Prairies.” The advisor told me that more Communist units, better equipped and led, were infiltrating, with command posts in the rear using telephones to their frontline troops. Most units were composed of teenaged northerners, like the private I had reported on eight months earlier but the Pentagon had denied. “These are regular units using regular inafntry tactics,” the advisor summed up. “We aren’t fighting guerrillas anymore.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 142)

B-52 Raid (1965)

After a B-52 raid troops would have to wait thirty minutes before the dust settled enough for [Capt. Gerald L. Harington] to assess the bomb damage in the target area. “If you’ve seeen the World War II pictures of London and Berlin,” he said, “a B-52 gives you the same impression, except they’re not in the cities.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 219)

Aerial Photos (1965)

By launching its destructive bombing campaign against North Vietnam, the United States was trying to rescue South Vietnam. But the U.S. combat units and increased firepower were no substitute for a legitimate, stable government worthy of popular support within the United States and South Vietnam.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 145)

County Fair (1966)

With the new employment of ground and air forces, the U.S. role went through gradual metamorphosis. At the end of 1965 America was in a war it barely realized it had entered. The cold war had gone hot in the jungles of the Indochinese peninsula.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 276)

DaNang Harbor (1966)

The United States Navy’s largest single overseas shore command is headquartered in Da Nang, second largest city in the Republic of Vietnam. Its official title is U.S. Naval Support Activity, Da Nang.
Beverly Deepe Keever

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 127)

Thanh Hoa Bombings (1966)

Three days later Johnson ordered a much more deadly punishment. Sustained air attacks steadily intensified against North Vietnam. More than reprisals or retaliation, these air strikes were justified as a response to aggression from the North, but, as the Pentagon Papers point out, they were launched “as gradually and imperceptibly as possible.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 142)

Operation Mastiff (1966)

Giant craters dotted the dense jungle when I joined ten thousand Australian, U.S., and South Vietnamese troops on Operation Mastiff in Feruary 1966. Enduring ninety-plus-degree heat that produced a sweaty lather on us, we were scouring the hundred-suare-mile jungled stronghold and a French rubber plantation known as Ho Bo Woods, which one GI dubbed the “Dogpatch of the Viet Cong.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 152)

Aircraft Photos (1967)

For the six years from the Americanization of the war in 1965 through 1970, the U.S., South Vietnamese, and allied forces would expend 12.22 million tons of explosives. During one month alone in Vietnam, when the U.S. expenditure of munitions peaked in 1970, the 128,000 tons of air and ground explosives equated to the explosive force of 8.5 Hiroshima-size A-bombs
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 154)

Navy (1967)

The United States and South Vietnamese Navies have established a formidable “defensive blockade” around the 1200-mile shoreline of South Vietnam in an attampt to counter Communist infiltration by sea. Operating under the code name of “Operation Market Time,” the outer rim of this “defensive blockade” includes more than a half dozen of the DER radar picket escort destroyers “filled with very exotic radar.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Bev Keever Collection, Packet 127)

Soldiers (1967)

But the U.S. combat units and increased firepower were no substitute for a legitimate, stable government worthy of popular support within the United States and South Vietnam. Americanizing the war in the South occurred just twelve days after the Saigon government’s strongman, Gen. Nguyen Khanh, had been exilied from his own country
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 145)

Aerial Photographs (1967)

I saw that the U.S. bombing of North Vietnam did little to stave off political turmoil or attract enough attention to raise the morale of Saigonese.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 134)

Air and Sea (1968)

After my Bien Hoa trip I assessed that allied bombing, rocketing, and shelling of province towns and cities created a highly explosive political backlash so significant that it risked offsetting the short-term military advantages gained by killing numerous Communist forces.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 196)

Aerial Photos (1968)

For the six years from the Americanization of the war in 1965 through 1970, the U.S., South Vietnamese, and allied forces woud expend 12.22 million tons of explosives. During one month alone in Vietnam, when the U.S. expenditure of munitions peaked in 1970, the 128,000 tons of air and ground explosives equated to the explosive force of 8.5 Hiroshima-size A-bombs, without the resulting long-lived radioactivity.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 154)

Taylor (Undated)

Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, a French-speaking retired genral, recognized this xenophobia, however, when he argued unsuccessfully in February 1965 against introduing U.S. Marine combat units into Vietnam, prophesying that the United States – like France – would fail. “The ‘white-faced’ soldier cannot be assimilated by the population,” Taylor warned. “He cannot distinguish between friendly and unfriendly Vietnamese.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 29)

Gulf of Tonkin (Undated)

I later was able to describe these kinds of covert opearations in connection with Tonkin Gulf incidents that catapulted the United States into a massive air war against North Vietnam and a buildup of its troop strength in the South.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 11)

Aircraft Carrier (Undated)

Morale remained high, with many Vietnamese repeating with a singsong lilt: “The more Americans keep coming, the deeper the grave.” U.S. bombing was galvanizing the North Vietnamese like the stealth attack on Pearl Harbor had the United States in World War II.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 145)

Danang, USAF (Undated)

The marines’ mission “to secure enclaves in the northern region of Vietnam” included the strategic Danang airbase and the six hundred square miles surrounding it, inhabited by 411,000 people. The marines’ area was included in the five northernmost provinces in South Vietnam, and area of about ten thousand square miles, where about 2.5 million people lived.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 154-155)

Vietnamese Soldiers (Undated)

Politically, the South Vietnamese armed forces manifested a glaring contradiction of the war – they had helped to reconquer the city and then proceeded to damage it further by looting. Their troops had in effect nullified their prime political mission – to reestablish law and order – and instead simply added to the anarchy and destruction.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 202)

Saigon (Undated)

 

Saigon is beginning to be a capital without a country. It is beginning to suffer visibly from strangulation in slow-motion – but it is not yet being starved to death. “The Viet Cong are putting the squeeze on Saigon,” one Vietnamese intellectual who had once served with the Communists explained. “But they won’t go to the breaking point to starve Saigon–until they are ready to seize power. and that is several years away.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 98)

Navy (Undated)

The U. S. Navy’s official interest in the Vietnam area dates back 15 years, when the United States and France signed an agreement to provide military assistance to Indochina. The miliitarty Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) Indochina was created to carry out this agreement, and the first Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP), later renamed Military Assistance Program (MAP), was initiated.
Unknown

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 127)

US Air Force (Undated)

At first, the bombing of North Vietnam was a policy of tit-for-tat — if you destroy our installations, we’ll destroy yours. But it soon gave way to general retaliation, and then to regular and continual bombing. In the beginning, the policy was officially proclaimed an inducement to the north to negotiate. High ranking American officials said hopefully: “We’ll be at the conference table by September.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 274)

Ca Mau (Undated)

The demise of Diem’s Strategic Hamlet Program meant U.S. officials needed a new label to define their efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people. The Americans adopted the term pacification, despite warnings that the French had used it to describe their domineering colonial and military approach to the villagers.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 51)

Dalat Military Graduation (Undated)

“They (Khanh and Khiem) both became cadets in the French Military Academy in Dalat, a mountain resort city north of Saigon. Of the 17 members in that class, only 11 graduate-and those eleven are among the most important field commanders and administrators now in the Khanh government.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 32)

Dogs (Undated)

“When it comes to the sentry dogs at Bien Hoa air base, there isn’t one there that leads a dogs life. It could almost be said that they lead the life of a human. They get fed a wholesome diet, have dry, clean pens, are exercised daily, get regular medical checkups, and work eight days on with one day off.”
United States Air Force News Release

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 36)

Miscellaneous Photos

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