TOAW 4 Campaign for South Viet Nam

[kutaycosar]

I enthusiasticlly reccomend "Campaign for South Vietnam" as a really good scenario. It's realistic. I like that. You feel the artillery has too much moxie and I feel like the AC-130E/H modeled in the game doesn't have nearly enough moxie. I used to fly on those every other night up and down the Ho Chi Minh trail. which reminds me of a war story you've never heard.

When I first arrived at Ubon, Thailand in Aug. 1970 I was assigned to the "Tan Son Nhut turnaround". TSN was a major airport in downtown Saigon, South Vietnam and the "TSN turnaround" meant taking off from Ubon just about dusk and following the Mekong river southeast to Pakse, Laos which upon arrival it's dark. Then straight east to Saigon and go into an racetrack orbit over the airport until about 03:00. Then you land at Bien Hoa, another major base near Saigon, to refuel, rearm, and get some breakfast. The midnight meal is served from midnight to just after 04:00 as I recall. Then we reload the bird and go into that orbit until just before dawn and head back to Ubon. We crewmembers in the back of the plane didn't have anything to do so we mostly lay down next to the guns and dozed off. We kept one ear open for anything important. Suddenly we heard in the earphones the IO yell: "Strella at four o'clock brake right, brake right." Someone on the ground in Chulon, a surburb of Saigon, at about 02:00 in the morning, shot a Strella missile at us. At first I though I'd stand up but then hearing a bang I sank down to my knees behind the 40 mm gun for protection and the right scanner pulled the lanyard for the flare pistol and the missile started guiding on the flare instead of us. The flare pistol going off was the bang I heard. The IO was alert and teamwork saved the day. This was in early September, 1970 and they definately had SA-2's then. I believe that's what they are called.

That was an unexpected answer, sir While I'm looking for a game that would give bit of the atmosphere of that period, you lived through it. Politics aside, it must have been something truly extraordinary to be a part of that war.

[larryfulkerson]

I had no feelings about politics or "history" at all until after coming home and going through the way the Vietnam vets were treated by American society. Rejected by our pears, set apart from normal norms and practices we felt terrible and it was a depressing period in our history. Eventually things changed but it wasn't until 2022 that someone, my sister in this case, that someone thanked me for my service. I though at the time, to myself, that it was too fucking little too fucking late but I didn't say so outloud.

Overall I'd say the war was a time when we got lost in our abilities and capabilities, what we could do, and gave that our priority. Vietnam was actually a civil war but we weren't treating it that way. We were treating it like an open secret genocide attempt against the people of North Vietnam. North Vietnamese civilians counted for very little, were were not considered in our bombing calculus, if they were considered at all. We bombed them with a considerable amount of counterfeit money and caused an inflation rate that destroyed their economy for several years. I'm surprised we never bombed them with biological weapons. It WAS considered I promise you.

But the ground troops were considering their immediate situation and never gave "history" a thought. It was a situation of survival for the Marines. I think our Marines were killing the North Vietnamese wholesale every day. The ARVN was shelling the DMZ daily to interdict the flow of infiltration. And our aircraft had a total local aerial supremacy and therefore were largely unstoppable.

But Nixon had a plan to pull the Americans out of the war and America eventually turned our back on the South Vietnamese and gave them over to the enemy deliberately. We pulled out and the South Vietnamese paid the price. We were to do the same thing to the Afganistan people some years later.

I'll never forgive Biden for doing that.

[Zovs]

Eventually things changed but it wasn't until 2022 that someone, my sister in this case, that someone thanked me for my service. I though at the time, to myself, that it was too fucking little too fucking late but I didn't say so outloud.

Larry,

That is not entirely true, and while you and I have never met in the flesh, back in 2019 I sent you this email while you and I were playing PAW.



Your buddy and Vet Brother in Arms!

[larryfulkerson]

I stand corrected. Thank you very much for pointing that out to me. My memory isn't what it used to be. I would repeat my finest comeback here but I can't remember it.