Veterans...Get the hell in here now!

raratt

raratt

Well-Known Member
We had a snow day on Guam. The base commander used to have a tape recorder when he went on his run and his secretary would write down the "discrepancies" on little white pieces of paper then send them down to each building. Our flight chief had a handful off them one day and he got to one asking what the "cylindrical object was by our side door" It was a concrete door stop. He threw the rest in the air and called a snow day, so we went home.
 
BarnBuster

BarnBuster

Virtually Unknown Member
Today in Military History:

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Master Sgt. Chester Ovnand (left) and Maj. Dale Buis (right) •July 8, 1959: Ovnand and Buis were killed during an ambush on a U.S. compound in Bien Hoa, Vietnam, marking the first American casualties of the Vietnam war​
Article as it appeared in ASSOCIATED PRESS | July 8, 2009 at 8:39 am
"It was July 8, 1959 and Stanley Karnow, Time magazine’s chief correspondent in Asia, was on his first trip to Saigon when he heard about an attack at an Army base about 20 miles north of the city.

Six northern Vietnamese had attacked the Army’s residential compound in the town of Bien Hoa, killing two American men while they watched a movie on a home projector. Karnow wrote three paragraphs about it for Time.

“It was a minor incident in a faraway place,” said Karnow, who reported from southeast Asia from 1959 to the early 1970s. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that these two guys would be the first in a memorial to 50,000-some others.”

Today, those guys — U.S. Army Maj. Dale Buis and Master Sgt. Chester Ovnand — were remembered on the anniversary of their deaths during a special ceremony near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. An armed services color guard marched and a bugler played “Taps” on a hill overlooking the memorial wall, where Buis’ name is listed first, followed by Ovnand’s, in panel 1E, Row 1, at the wall’s apex.

“Today we are here to reflect and honor the individuals who paid the supreme sacrifice for our country,” said Jan Scruggs, president and founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, a nonprofit authorized by Congress in 1980 to build the memorial.

Scruggs said the group began organizing today’s ceremony just three weeks ago. “We thought it would be a really good idea to remind people of this first tragedy among many deaths that followed from the Vietnam War,” he said, adding that he hoped people would pause to remember servicemen and women killed in combat, as well as those at war now.

More than 58,000 Americans and some 1.5 million Vietnamese were killed during the Vietnam War.

According to Karnow’s 1959 Time article, Ovnand, of Texas, had just mailed a letter to his wife and Buis, who was from California, was showing off pictures of his three sons. They were two of eight men who lived at the compound, and among the six who took a break in the mess hall that July 8 to watch “The Tattered Dress,” starring Jeanne Crain.

The soldiers were sprayed with bullets by “terrorists” when Ovnand turned on the lights to change the home projector’s first reel, Karnow wrote.

Ovnand was just a month away from finishing up his yearlong tour of duty, according to Nathaniel Ward IV of San Diego, a retired Army captain whose father was chief of staff of the U.S. Army Military Assistance Advisory Group in Vietnam. Ward was 17 at the time of the Bien Hoa attack and remembers his father changing into his fatigues to rush to the outpost that had been ambushed.

Ward and others said little is known about Ovnand, except that he was married when he died at 44.

Buis was originally from Nebraska, but was living in California before he went to Vietnam. He was a 1942 graduate of Wentworth Military Academy in Lexington, Mo., and is one of 13 Wentworth graduates listed at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

Buis arrived in Vietnam just two days before he was killed at 37, leaving behind a wife and three young sons. Ward, who in the mid-1980s tried to locate relatives of Ovnand and Buis, said only one of Buis’ sons is alive today and lives in San Diego.

Today, a wreath of daises, lilies and irises was laid at the memorial wall under the year 1959, where Buis and Ovnand’s names appear. Mementos propped against the wall included a plaque commemorating the 50th anniversary of their deaths, a red Wentworth Military Academy flag and a copy of a story in the Pacific Stars and Stripes, with the banner headline: “2 Americans Killed by Saigon Terrorist.”

“They became a part of history,” Ward said of the fallen soldiers, “when they never intended to.”
 
BarnBuster

BarnBuster

Virtually Unknown Member
Today in Military History:
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An ammunition ship explodes while being loaded in Port Chicago, California, killing 320 people on July 17, 1944. The United States’ World War II military campaign in the Pacific was in full swing at the time. Poor procedures and lack of training led to the disaster.

Port Chicago, about 30 miles north of San Francisco, was developed into a munitions facility when the Naval Ammunition Depot at Mare Island, California, could not fully supply the war effort. By the summer of 1944, expansion of the Port Chicago facility allowed for loading two ships at once around the clock. The Navy units assigned to the dangerous loading operations were generally segregated African American units. For the most part, these men had not been trained in handling munitions. Additionally, safety standards were forgotten in the rush to keep up frenetic loading schedules.

On the evening of July 17, the SS Quinault Victory and SS E.A. Bryan, two merchant ships, were being loaded. The holds were being packed with 4,600 tons of explosives—bombs, depth charges and ammunition. Another 400 tons of explosives were nearby on rail cars. Approximately 320 workers were on or near the pier when, at 10:18 p.m., a series of massive explosions over several seconds destroyed everything and everyone in the vicinity. The blasts were felt as far away as Nevada and the resulting damage extended as far as San Francisco. Every building in Port Chicago was damaged and people were literally knocked off their feet. Smoke and fire extended nearly two miles into the air. The pilot of a plane flying at 9,000 feet in the area claimed that metal chunks from the explosion flew past him.

Nearly two-thirds of the people killed at Port Chicago were African American enlisted men in the Navy—15 percent of all African Americans killed during World War II. The surviving men in these units, who helped put out the fires and saw the horrors firsthand, were quickly reassigned to Mare Island. Less than a month later, when ordered to load more munitions, but still having received no training, 258 African American sailors refused to carry out the orders. Two hundred and eight of them were then sentenced to bad conduct discharges and pay forfeiture. The remaining 50 men were put on trial for general court martial. They were sentenced to between eight and 15 years of hard labor, though two years later all were given clemency. A 1994 review of the trials revealed race played a large factor in the harsh sentences. In December 1999, President Clinton pardoned Freddie Meeks, one of only three of the 50 convicted sailors known to be alive at the time.

The Port Chicago disaster eventually led to the implementation of far safer procedures for loading ammunition. In addition, greater emphasis was put on proper training in explosives handling and the munitions themselves were altered for greater safety. There is now a national memorial to the victims at the site.
 
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