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XXIV Corps Artillery

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            Agent Orange Distribution In Nam  click       

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                                                          Below is a direct copy - paste from Wikipedia  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agent_Orange

Agent Orange is the code name for one of the herbicides and defoliants used by the U.S. military as part of its herbicidal warfare program, Operation Ranch Hand, during the Vietnam War from 1961 to 1971. It was given its name from the color of the orange-striped 55 US gallon (208 litre) barrels in which it was shipped, and was by far the most widely used of the so-called "Rainbow Herbicides".[1] A 50:50 mixture of 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, it was manufactured for the U.S. Department of Defense primarily by Monsanto Corporation and Dow Chemical. The 2,4,5-T used to produce Agent Orange was later discovered to be contaminated with 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzodioxin, an extremely toxic dioxin compound. Vietnam estimates 400,000 people were killed or maimed, and 500,000 children born with birth defects.[2]

During the Vietnam War, between 1962 and 1971, the United States military sprayed nearly 20,000,000 US gallons (75,700,000 l) of chemical herbicides and defoliants in Vietnam, eastern Laos and parts of Cambodia, as part of Operation Ranch Hand.[3][4] The program's goal was to defoliate forested and rural land, depriving guerrillas of cover; another goal was to induce forced draft urbanization, destroying the ability of peasants to support themselves in the countryside, and forcing them to flee to the U.S. dominated cities, thus depriving the guerrillas of their rural support base and food supply.[4][5]

The US began to target food crops in October 1962, primarily using Agent Blue. In 1965, 42 percent of all herbicide spraying was dedicated to food crops.[5] Rural-to-urban migration rates dramatically increased in South Vietnam, as peasants escaped the destruction and famine in the countryside by fleeing to the U.S.-dominated cities. The urban population in South Vietnam nearly tripled: from 2.8 million people in 1958, to 8 million by 1971. The rapid flow of people led to a fast-paced and uncontrolled urbanization; an estimated 1.5 million people were living in Saigon slums.[6]

United States Air Force records show that at least 6,542 spraying missions took place over the course of Operation Ranch Hand.[7] By 1971, 12 percent of the total area of South Vietnam had been sprayed with defoliating chemicals, at an average concentration of 13 times the recommended USDA application rate for domestic use.[8] In South Vietnam alone, an estimated 10 million hectares of agricultural land were ultimately destroyed.[9] In some areas TCDD concentrations in soil and water were hundreds of times greater than the levels considered "safe" by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.[10][11] Overall, more than 20% of South Vietnam's forests were sprayed at least once over a nine year period.[5]

 

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Propaganda Leaflet - War is Hell

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   MISSING     IN    AMERICA    

      M.  I.  A.    "VETERANS "    M.  I.  A.

         To M. I. A. Page

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1) Will Myers                                                                            Will's Pics      My Poems     Bill Cayton's Pic
                                                                                        
  Svc Btry 1/40th                                                                                        
Will's Stories11/18/00
  Oct'68 - Dec '69                                                                          
My Favorite Pics        1         3   4
  Sarge@willpete.com                     9/10/00 B-17 Flight                                                  Memorial Day 2000

    Ft. Sill 2000 - 1/40 Colors click  

IN MEMORIUM      Sam's Pics      P On Jane      ConThien

ojcring.jpgThis site is owned by Will Pete[Next] [Previous] [Random] [List] [Info][Join]

I haven't heard from anyone for 30 years, and have never seen any links to the 1/40th. Hope we can touch base through this page.

Thirty years has gone, seems only a wake up past,    My friends as a boy....., they never asked

What'd you do, do you want to chat,   Like I wasn't there, Like ------------------------------I had passed

Family the same, alone a dream,   To dream alone and alone --------------------------------to scream

Unable to hear..., afraid to see,   But, my mind could feel, ---------------------------- remembering

Thirty years has gone, thirty years has gone,  Only a few,------------------------ have ever known

Fewer now..., as we go on,  "e"memories tell, ------------------------------------------------not so alone

Copyright Will Pete 28 October 2000

The American Veteran has asked so little, yet we seem so far away...


My first Section Chief, when I was a NIC (below)


1 - 1) Sgt. Don Kelly                                                       Don's Pics
 Svc Btry 1/40th                                                                                        
 '68 -  '69 

 


REST IN PEACE DON  9/8/2018

2) Don DeLano                                 Don's Pics                      VETS DON'T FORGET - I went back last year and

                                                                                                       helped recover Dave Lemcke's remains from Vietnam.

                                                                                                                        He's no longer MIA. 

 

                                                                                                     SSG Albert Corioso  B Btry (1968) I just found out served

                                                                                                            a second tour in 1971 and died at the young age of 43 that

                                                                                                            year.  SSG Corioso served in WWII, the Korean War and

                                                                                                                              Vietnam.     Thanks.

                                                                                                            LINKS:  http://rochesterhomepage.net/fulltext/?nxd_id=278307 MUST SEE VIDEO

                                                                                                                            http://www.pownetwork.org/bios/l/l370.htm

                                                                  "It could have been any one of us!"                  

                                                        Couvi                  

Bravo Battery - FO Team #3
2/67 - 5/69

Barzilla@portcity.com

DHCB,CaLu,Rockpile,Gio Linh, Alfa-One (1st ARVN), 3/5 Cav.

With LT's Murden,Sweet,McDonough, Turnbull,Thomas,Anson,Morales, etc. Murden and Sweet KIA along with RTO's Carl Dingus, Brent Jonesclick, and Dave Lemcke.

star.gif (1954 bytes)    I just discovered that Dave Lemcke, who was killed in a bunker fire on Alfa-1 in 1968 is still carried as "Missing-
killed, body not recovered" This is disgraceful, as they spend thousands of dollars sifting for even a tooth fragment of the
missing AF pilots. I wrote a letter to a fellow named Lemcke from Dave's hometown in NY state, telling him I could still
pinpoint the location of that incident within 15 yards after all these years. What happened was, as the bunker burned, the
sand within it kept burying the bodies of Lemcke, Jones and a Marine whose name I don't remember. It was a hellish sight......
..........Can you think of anything we can do about this? I have pictures of landmarks, such as a church from the OP and I know how the bunkers were oriented......... think it's time that Dave "came home" though. This really bothers me a lot. 

Ode to NVA Ghost
Why must you keep, Interrupting my sleep?

The man that took your ears, Is dead now thirty years.

Don't you talk to him in hell?  Or won't he tell?

Why won't you listen to me?   

Are you just hard of hearing?


3) In Memoriam Donn Sweet - Bravo Btry 1/40                               


4) Dennis Coble     "REST IN PEACE"

Viet Nam finally won. On December 21st at 8:50pm the most honorable decent man I will ever know had to leave my life. His injuries in Viet Nam caused  his death. I think he is the only vet on the Radar page at your site. He was only 54 years old and I buried him on our 35th wedding anniversary. I know we are strangers to you but it seems there is an intangible bond among veterans and I felt the need to share my loss with you. Thank you for giving him a chance to look for his friends. The reunion is a nice idea. I wish he could be there.

Sue Coble

1/40th Service Battery Radar Det.
Dec.67-Nov.68

DC92147@cs.com



5) JOE WALSH                                                                              Joe's Pics
A BTRY 1ST BN 40TH ARTY APO 96269
1965 - 1967

BLUMAX@NAC.NET

Good to hear from you Will, have pictures, but no scanner yet. Joe.


6)  Lynden T. Couvillion                                       Couvi's Pics    It's The Soldier    Why Soldiers Reenlist
SVC Btry 1/40 Arty
April 69-Nov 69

Couvi@wichitaonline.net
                                                                                                        1/40 - 8 inch

Great site. Couvi                             If you haven't cried enough today...


7) Robert Lee Smith                                Jane Fonda email
1/40th 108th Bravo
Feb.69 to Nov.69
cooz65@hotmail.com

http://www.

Came in country at LZSally Hung around the DMZ (Con Thien) More later when I know who you are! Thanks for having this web page. Self Propelled 105's.


8) Tim Welsh
HHB 1/40th FA
1974-1976

timothyone@bellsouth.net

Please write if you were with 1/40th in 1974-76.  I would love to hear from all. Do you recall the truck wreck involving commo vault operator?  He was a freind to many.


9) Robert D. Hickey  U.S. 
HQ Battery 13E20 FDC
March/66 March/67
pamh@mcn.net


                                                               Your email address is no longer valid we'd like a new one

1st BN 40th Arty activated in Ft. Sill 1966 - Shipped out to Viet Nam Sept. 23, 1966 - Landed at Danang - Convoyed to Dong Ha. - HQ Btry located in cemetary. ALL FOR ONE-ONE FOR ALL Reunion???


10) Robert N. Backman  (Bob/Bobby)
Headquarters Battery  1/40
Sept. '66 - Sept. '67
bnback@yahoo.com
                             

For all those that surveyed Highway 9 . . . 


11) Tom Nathe
Battery C, 1st Bn, 40th Arty
May 1966 - April 1967
tgnathe@qwest.net             

Was forward observer on ground and in air.


12) Mike Bateman         "REST IN PEACE"   OBIT       
HHB
April, 66-Sept.,67
b4282@bellsouth.net                                                 Presidential Unit Citation      Mike's Pics

Puked over the side of the USNS LeRoy Eltinge when we left Oakland, CA until we made the landing at DaNang. Most everyone called me Batman


13) Jerome Hoff
Btry C, 1st Bn40th Arty FDC
5/66-3/67
ritjer@gwtc.net

I served in the unit when it was formed at Ft Sill to go to Viet Nam. I was at Dong Ha for the start. I was transferred to a unit that just arrived in the Central Highlands in March.


14) Al Sandau
Alpha Battery, 1/40th, FDC
August '67-August '68
asandau@mystic.bhsu.edu






15) Merle E. Butler
Service Btry / Moter Pool
1966-1967
MEBUTLER300@YAHOO.COM

Went over to Viet Nam from Fort Sill. Came pack in Sept. 1967.


16) In Memoriam Rick Harbot - C Btry 1/40                        

Will: Perhaps you or one of your members can help this woman -:

star.gif (1954 bytes)star.gif (1954 bytes)         SISTER IN NEED OF INFO          star.gif (1954 bytes)star.gif (1954 bytes)

Emily Harbot Hedengren emilyhedengren@aol.com  new email 7-29-02Altamonte Springs, Florida, USA I am searching for anyone who knew my brother Frederic Richard Harbot. He was killed in Quang Tri, South Vietnam. He was in C Btry, 1st Battilion, 40th Arty. He was in the Army and he drove a track. He went by the name of Rick. At least he did at home. He was killed April 28, 1969. If you knew him please e mail. I miss my brother so much. Each year he is gone, it gets harder and harder. I was 14 when he was killed and he was only 21. It's just not fair. Thursday, July 01, 1999 

Dan Fisher
29th FA Regiment
ziggy2@global2000.net


17)  Michael Taggart                                                                                              Mike's Pics
C Btry  maintenance
74-76
COONHILLMIKE@aol.com
                                  

also know as TIGGER

THANKS WILL FOR THIS SITE,1/40TH IS BACK IN ACTION,  SON IS THERE 101st AIRBORNE,  I AM PROUD OF YOU SON.COME HOME SAFE ALL OF YOU.    WATCH YOU BACK!YOUR FAMILY IS WITH YOU.

" MY SON IS HOME FROM IRAQ "


18)  Doug Jones                                                    Doug's Pics
Svc Btry, 1/40th, Dong Ha
Sep 67 - Apr 69
jonesr99@hotmail.com

personnel clerk, orders clerk, R&R clerk. I remember Lt. Sweet. Roger T. McLendon, Dave Schwartz, you out there?

People I remember well:

Bob Affholter, Bill Hawthorne, John Housea, Randy Hedrick, Willie Judkins, Rick Kruzel,
Roger T. McLendon,  Peter J. Neptune, Ken Prentice, Paul Reinhart, Dave Schwartz,
Carl Henley,  Henry Wannamacher,  Jim West,  Larry White


19)  Louis A Savarino                                  PLEASE UPDATE YOUR EMAIL Sarge@willpete.com
1st Bn 40th Arty Svc Btry (c sec I think)
Jan 1968-Jul 1968                                                                               contact Tom Hanan  thanan@twcny.rr.com
KrysnLouie1@Juno.com

We are trying to look up old friends and arn't real great with the internet yet, this is our first attempt, anyone that remembers me please contact my e-mail address.


20)  MICHAEL  HUXTA                                  Mike's Gulf War    Pics1       Pics 2
A/40TH F.A. (MLRS)                        
NOV. 1989 TO NOV. 1991                                                                                   
  A Soldier Died Today
MCHUXTA@ELAGROUP.COM                                                                           

    MLRS Specs

RASBEERY, THE NAME SOUNDS FAMILIAR CAN'T PLACE THE FACE. I WAS WITH A/40 FA (MLRS) FROM NOV. '89 TO NOV.91 WENT TO THE GULF ,PART OF 3RD ARMORED DIVISION. ANY OTHER A/40TH VETS OUT THERE FROM 3RD A.D.?  ANY PROBLEMS FROM NERVE AGENTS FROM KAMISEYIA AMMO DEPOT (IRAQ)EXPLOSIONS?       CONTACT ME


 

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Will Myers Svc Btry 1/40 Arty 68-69 Dong Ha  Sarge@willpete.com

 


 

 

sasm.gif (1212 bytes)   nam.jpg (1871 bytes)   wwII.gif (3213 bytes)
Dong Ha Combat Base, Quang Tri Province, I Corps

Southwest Asia     ***        World War II

Dong Ha Combat Base Map

´You sleep well in your bed at night only because a few rough men are willing to do violent things on your behalf´ 

George Orwell paraphrase


  Free  Defenders of the DMZ Screen saver  (click) Rev.11/2003 No Commercial Use - Personal Use Only


  

TAPS 21GUN SALUTE

Forever or a day I lost a friend yesterday,  Didn't have time to stop and pray 

Or even say "Rest In Peace",  I wonder, will it ever cease?

Yesterday is gone and tomorrow is here, The morning sun brings a little cheer

But thinking of my friend who lies at rest, I can't help wonder, which is best

To watch a friend die who once stood tall, Or to have never had a friend at all.

However lonely it my be, without a friend for company 

At least again I will never say, Lost a friend yesterday

But old man time marches on, And soon we tire of being alone

So, natural optimists that we are,  Always reaching for the unreachable star

We let our heart control our mind,  And very soon ourselves we find

Trying again and glad to say,  I made a friend yesterday.

Written by Bill Blair (Osias) Tarrance USMC KIA 22 Feb 1969 Tn VFW News Magazine

 



JAMES email me Will@willpete.com  click link


Howitzers at the DMZ

Viet Nam Art click  art by Eric Nevatie    Pointman  click


My Heart's Content

Thirty years of one man's truth are up for reconsideration

by Pat Conroy

The true things always ambush me on the road and take me by surprise when I am drifting down the light of placid days, careless about flanks and rearguard actions. I was not looking for a true thing to come upon me in the state of New Jersey. Nothing has ever happened to me in New Jersey. But come it did, and it came to stay.       In the past four years I have been interviewing my teammates on the 1966-67 basketball team at the Citadel for a book I'm writing. For the most part, this has been like buying back a part of my past that I had mislaid or shut out of my life. At first I thought I was writing about being young and frisky and able to run up and down a court all day long, but lately I realized I came to this book because I needed to come to grips with being middle-aged and having ripened into a gray-haired man you could not trust to handle the ball on a fast break.      When I visited my old teammate Al Kroboth's house in New Jersey, I spent the first hours quizzing him about his memories of games and practices and the screams of coaches that had echoed in field houses more than 30 years before. Al had been a splendid forward-center for the Citadel; at 6 feet 5 inches and carrying 220 pounds, he played with indefatigable energy and enthusiasm. For most of his senior year, he led the nation in field-goal percentage, with UCLA center Lew Alcindor hot on his trail. Al was a battler and a brawler and a scrapper from the day he first stepped in as a Green Weenie as a sophomore to the day he graduated. After we talked basketball, we came to a subject I dreaded to bring up with Al, but which lay between us and would not lie still.       "Al, you know I was a draft dodger and antiwar demonstrator."       "That's what I heard, Conroy," Al said. "I have nothing against what you did, but I did what I thought was right."       "Tell me about Vietnam, big Al. Tell me what happened to you," I said.       On his seventh mission as a navigator in an A-6 for Major Leonard Robertson, Al was getting ready to deliver their payload when the fighter-bomber was hit by enemy fire. Though Al has no memory of it, he punched out somewhere in the middle of the ill-fated dive and lost consciousness. He doesn't know if he was unconscious for six hours or six days, nor does he know what happened to Major Robertson (whose name is engraved on the Wall in Washington and on the MIA bracelet Al wears). When Al awoke, he couldn't move. A Viet Cong soldier held an AK-47 to his head. His back and his neck were broken, and he had shattered his left scapula in the fall. When he was well enough to get to his feet (he still can't recall how much time had passed), two armed Viet Cong led Al from the jungles of South Vietnam to a prison in Hanoi. The journey took three months. Al Kroboth walked barefooted through the most impassable terrain in Vietnam, and he did it sometimes in the dead of night. He bathed when it rained, and he slept in bomb craters with his two Viet Cong captors. As they moved farther north, infections began to erupt on his body, and his legs were covered with leeches picked up while crossing the rice paddies.       At the very time of Al's walk, I had a small role in organizing the only antiwar demonstration ever held in Beaufort, South Carolina, the home of Parris Island and the Marine Corps Air Station. In a Marine Corps town at that time, it was difficult to come up with a quorum of people who had even minor disagreements about the Vietnam War. But my small group managed to attract a crowd of about 150 to Beaufort's waterfront. With my mother and my wife on either side of me, we listened to the featured speaker, Dr. Howard Levy, suggest to the very few young enlisted Marines present that if they get sent to Vietnam, here's how they can help end this war:       Roll a grenade under your officer's bunk when he's asleep in his tent. It's called fragging and is becoming more and more popular with the ground troops who know this war is bullshit. I was enraged by the suggestion. At that very moment my father, a Marine officer, was asleep in Vietnam. But in 1972, at the age of 27, I thought I was serving America's interests by pointing out what massive flaws and miscalculations and corruptions had led her to conduct a ground war in Southeast Asia.       In the meantime, Al and his captors had finally arrived in the North, and the Viet Cong traded him to North Vietnamese soldiers for the final leg of the trip to Hanoi. Many times when they stopped to rest for the night, the local villagers tried to kill him. His captors wired his hands behind his back at night, so he trained himself to sleep in the center of huts when the villagers began sticking knives and bayonets into the thin walls. Following the U.S. air raids, old women would come into the huts to excrete on him and yank out hunks of his hair. After the nightmare journey of his walk north, Al was relieved when his guards finally delivered him to the POW camp in Hanoi and the cell door locked behind him.        It was at the camp that Al began to die. He threw up every meal he ate and before long was misidentified as the oldest American soldier in the prison because his appearance was so gaunt and skeletal. But the extraordinary camaraderie among fellow prisoners that sprang up in all the POW camps caught fire in Al, and did so in time to save his life.       When I was demonstrating in America against Nixon and the Christmas bombings in Hanoi, Al and his fellow prisoners were holding hands under the full fury of those bombings, singing "God Bless America." It was those bombs that convinced Hanoi they would do well to release the American POWs, including my college teammate. When he told me about theC-141 landing in Hanoi to pick up the prisoners, Al said he felt no emotion, none at all, until he saw the giant American flag painted on the plane's tail. I stopped writing as Al wept over the memory of that flag on that plane, on that morning, during that time in the life of America.        It was that same long night, after listening to Al's story, that I began to make judgments about how I had conducted myself during the Vietnam War. In the darkness of the sleeping Kroboth household, lying in the third-floor guest bedroom, I began to assess my role as a citizen in the '60s, when my country called my name and I shot her the bird. Unlike the stupid boys who wrapped themselves in Viet Cong flags and burned the American one, I knew how to demonstrate against the war without flirting with treason or astonishingly bad taste. I had come directly from the warrior culture of this country and I knew how to act.         But in the 25 years that have passed since South Vietnam fell, I have immersed myself in the study of totalitarianism during the unspeakable century we just left behind. I have questioned survivors of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, talked to Italians who told me tales of the Nazi occupation, French partisans who had counted German tanks in the forests of Normandy, and officers who survived the Bataan Death March. I quiz journalists returning from wars in Bosnia, the Sudan, the Congo, Angola, Indonesia, Guatemala, San Salvador, Chile, Northern Ireland, Algeria.        As I lay sleepless, I realized I'd done all this research to better understand my country. I now revere words like democracy, freedom, the right to vote, and the grandeur of the extraordinary vision of the founding fathers. Do I see America's flaws? Of course. But I now can honor her basic, incorruptible virtues, the ones that let me walk the streets screaming my ass off that my country had no idea what it was doing in South Vietnam.         My country let me scream to my heart's content-the same country that produced both Al Kroboth and me.         Now, at this moment in New Jersey, I come to a conclusion about my actions as a young man when Vietnam was a dirty word to me. I wish I'd led a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. I would like to think I would have trained my troops well and that the Viet Cong would have had their hands full if they entered a firefight with us. From the day of my birth, I was programmed to enter the Marine Corps. I was the son of a Marine fighter pilot, and I had grown up on Marine bases where I had watched the men of the Corps perform simulated war games in the forests of my childhood. That a novelist and poet bloomed darkly in the house of Santini strikes me as a remarkable irony. My mother and father had raised me to be an Al Kroboth, and during the Vietnam era they watched in horror as I metamorphosed into another breed of fanatic entirely.         I understand now that I should have protested the war after my return from Vietnam, after I had done my duty for my country. I have come to a conclusion about my country that I knew then in my bones but lacked the courage to act on: America is good enough to die for even when she is wrong.       I looked for some conclusion, a summation of this trip to my teammate's house. I wanted to come to the single right thing, a true thing that I may not like but that I could live with. After hearing Al Kroboth's story of his walk across Vietnam and his brutal imprisonment in the North, I found myself passing harrowing, remorseless judgment on myself. I had not turned out to be the man I had once envisioned myself to be. I thought I would be the kind of man that America could point to and say, "There. That's the guy. That's the one who got it right. The whole package. The one I can depend on." It had never once occurred to me that I would find myself in the position I did on that night in Al Kroboth's house in Roselle, New Jersey: an American coward spending the night with an American hero.

Pat Conroy's novels include The Prince of Tides, The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline, and Beach Music. He lives on Fripp Island, South Carolina. This essay is from his forthcoming book, My Losing Season.

Special thanks to Charles Stephenson 2/94 who forwarded this excellent essay

Download MS Word .DOC of this essay


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