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berto wrote: Sun Nov 27, 2022 1:45 pm On This Day

27 November, 1965

The "March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam", organized by the "Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy" (SANE), attracted a crowd of almost 35,000 demonstrators who picketed the White House, then moved on toward the Washington Monument. It was the largest public protest against U.S. involvement in Vietnam up to that time. The leaders of SANE were concerned about the public perception of the antiwar movement, so they asked that protesters only carry signs with "authorized slogans", and not to demand immediate withdrawal, nor to burn the American flag.

In an act which it said was being done as a "response to the friendly sentiments of the American people against the war in South Vietnam", the VC released U.S. Army Sergeant George E. Smith and Specialist E-5 Claude E. McClure, who had both been captured on 24 November 1963. Vietnam Communist Party official Le Duc Tho escorted Smith and McClure across the border from North Vietnam into Cambodia, freeing both men after two years as prisoners of war. Smith and McClure would travel across neutral Cambodia on their own and would address a press conference in Phnom Penh on 30 November, praising their captors and American antiwar protesters, and criticizing the war effort. On 27 December the U.S. military announced that Smith and McClure would face court martial for aiding the enemy.

PAVN forces attacked the ARVN 7th Regiment, 5th Division in the Michelin Rubber Plantation killing most of the Regiment and five U.S. advisers.