Posting photos of the Vietnam War
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A female demonstrator offers a flower to military police on guard at the Pentagon during an anti-Vietnam demonstration
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CPT Antonio Mavroudis, 327th Infantry, 101st Airborne Brigade looks for enemy targets from an observation post on a mountain top. The company was participating in Operation “Wheeler” in the Tam Ky area. CPT Mavroudis was killed in action 28 October 1967.
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Here is one of the strangest true programs of the entire war, and for years it was one of the most secret. The United States military tried to defeat North Vietnam with rain. On purpose. For five years.
It was called Operation Popeye, and inside the unit that ran it the men used an actual slogan: make mud, not war. The idea sounds like science fiction, but the science was real. Seed the clouds over the Ho Chi Minh Trail with silver iodide and lead iodide, and you can squeeze extra rain out of them. Do it constantly, all through the monsoon season, and you can stretch that season out by an extra month or more.
Why bother? Because the Ho Chi Minh Trail was a dirt road network through the mountains of Laos and Cambodia, and dirt roads die in the rain. The goal was to soften the road surfaces into muck, trigger landslides across the passes, wash out the river crossings, and keep the whole soggy mess unusable for weeks longer than nature intended. Bog down the trucks, and you choke the supplies heading south.
From 1967 to 1972, out of a base in Thailand, a weather reconnaissance squadron flew two seeding missions a day, every rainy season, in C-130s and F-4 Phantoms. To the outside world they were just weather planes gathering data. In reality they were trying to weaponize the sky.
Here is the part that turned it into a scandal. It was so secret that the Secretary of Defense, Melvin Laird, flatly told Congress that no such weather weapon program even existed, while it was actively running. It reportedly had backing from Henry Kissinger and the CIA and went around the normal chain of command. Then the columnist Jack Anderson caught wind of it in 1971, the Pentagon Papers mentioned it, and in 1972 the New York Times blew it wide open.
The fallout was permanent. The public was disturbed by the idea of the government secretly messing with the weather as an act of war, and Congress was furious about being lied to. It led directly to an international treaty, signed in the seventies, that bans using environmental modification, weather included, as a weapon of war. So the lasting legacy of Operation Popeye is not a single washed out road in Laos. It is that making rain to kill your enemy is now against international law, because America actually tried it.
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Ralph Dias was hit by snipers three separate times, crawling the whole way, refusing to stop until he had knocked out the machine gun that was killing his friends. He threw the grenade that destroyed it in the same instant a bullet killed him. He was nineteen.
He came from tiny Shelocta, in the hills of Indiana County, Pennsylvania, a Portuguese American kid who did not even finish high school. He went two years at Elderton Joint High and then, in October 1967, walked into a recruiting station in Pittsburgh and joined the Marines. He trained at Parris Island and Camp Lejeune and Camp Pendleton, and in April 1969 he shipped to Vietnam as a rifleman with Company D, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines, part of the 1st Marine Division. That put him in exactly the country I have been writing about today, the Que Son Mountains and the valleys of Quang Nam Province southwest of Da Nang.
On November 12, 1969, Dias was part of a reaction force sent to help a pinned down Marine platoon. When his own group got pinned too, he could see both units taking casualties, and he could see where it was coming from. One enemy machine gun in a bunker was doing most of the killing. So he decided, on his own, to go take it out.
He charged across open ground toward the bunker and a sniper hit him almost immediately. He dragged himself behind a rock. Then he got up and went again, and got hit a second time. Now he could not even walk, so he crawled, fifteen meters, over open ground, toward the gun. He threw several grenades and none of them did the job. He was out of range and out of strength, but not out of will.
So he moved into the open one last time. A third sniper round hit him. And as he was going down, mortally wounded, he threw one final grenade, and this one landed true and destroyed the machine gun position that had been tearing his fellow Marines apart.
He died right there. His stubborn, impossible refusal to quit saved the men he had come to help. President Nixon signed his Medal of Honor citation. They buried him at Oakdale Cemetery in Leetonia, Ohio, and cut his name into the Wall on panel 16 West, line 63. A stretch of state route back in Ohio carries his name now. A high school dropout from the Pennsylvania hills who, in the last ninety seconds of his life, crawled through three sniper hits to finish a job nobody ordered him to do.
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Here is one of the most bitter facts of the whole war, and it was quietly true on September 24, 1968. The Marines had abandoned Khe Sanh. They blew up the base they had bled for months to hold, and walked away.
Everyone remembers the siege of Khe Sanh in early 1968, seventy seven days of a Marine garrison surrounded and pounded while the whole world watched, with President Johnson himself obsessing over whether it would become an American Dien Bien Phu. They held. The base did not fall. It became a symbol of Marine toughness.
Then, just a few months later, the Americans simply left. Under a new overall commander, General Abrams, the strategy changed. Instead of chaining Marines to fixed bases along the DMZ where enemy artillery could hammer them, the plan was to go mobile, to hunt the enemy instead of sitting still and absorbing shells. Khe Sanh no longer fit. So during Operation Scotland II, in the summer of 1968, the Marines stripped the base of anything useful and demolished the rest. On July 5 it was officially closed.
By this date in late September, the great fortress of Khe Sanh was a wrecked, empty scar on the plateau, and North Vietnamese troops were being spotted picking through the site. Men who had watched friends die defending that ground could be forgiven for asking what exactly it had all been for.
One footnote almost nobody knows. Among the Marine officers fighting in this same operation, leading a rifle platoon through these hills, was a young lieutenant named Robert Mueller. Decades later he would run the FBI. In 1968 he was just another platoon commander in Quang Tri, earning a Bronze Star for valor and a Purple Heart in the kind of fighting that never made headlines.
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This F-4 Phantom II from Marine Aircraft Group 13, as well as A-4 Skyhawks (Marine Aircraft Group 12), operated from Chu Lai to support ground operations with 500 pound bombs and napalm.
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Since September 24 has no marquee battle, here is a story that always stops people cold. The man who would one day run the FBI for twelve years, and later investigate a sitting president, spent 1968 and 1969 as a Marine rifle platoon commander getting shot at in the jungles of Vietnam.
Robert Mueller did not have to go. He came from a well off family, went to Princeton, and could have found a hundred ways out, the way plenty of men of his background did. Instead, after a college lacrosse teammate was killed in Vietnam, he tried to enlist in the Marines. A knee injury got him rejected at first. He had surgery, rehabbed it, and applied again until they took him.
He led a rifle platoon in the same brutal fighting across Quang Tri Province that this fall of 1968 was all about. In one action his unit was ambushed and pinned down, and Mueller moved under enemy fire to reach a wounded Marine and get him to safety, then kept directing his platoon even after being hit in the leg himself. He earned the Bronze Star with a V for valor, a Purple Heart, and the Navy Commendation Medal.
People who worked with him decades later, in the Justice Department and the FBI, always described the same thing. A ramrod straight, unshakably disciplined man who never talked about himself. Almost none of them knew that the quiet director in the corner office had once carried wounded Marines out of a firefight in the elephant grass.
He is one of thousands of examples of something worth remembering. The men who fought that war did not stay frozen as soldiers. They came home and became teachers, cops, mechanics, congressmen, and in his case, the head of the FBI. The war was a chapter, often a buried one, in lives that went on to shape the country in ways nobody standing in those jungles could have guessed.
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An Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) interpreter questions villagers during a search and destroy mission conducted 18 miles southwest of Da Nang during Operation Wallowa, which began in October, 1967.
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Michael Crescenz was nineteen years old and had been in Vietnam for about two months when he grabbed a machine gun off the ground and went up a hill alone into four enemy bunkers. He is the only man from the entire city of Philadelphia to earn the Medal of Honor in that war.
He was a Philly kid through and through. Born in January 1949, raised in the West Oak Lane neighborhood, he went to St. Athanasius School and then Cardinal Dougherty High, one of six brothers in a big Catholic family. He was tall and athletic and, by every account, an ordinary, likable guy who was not looking to be a hero. He enlisted in the Army in February 1968. He shipped out to Vietnam that September, and here is a detail that tells you everything about that family. The same month Michael arrived in the war, his older brother Charles, a Marine, was coming home from it, thirteen months done. One Crescenz brother out the door as the other walked in.
Michael went to Company A of the 4th Battalion, 31st Infantry, part of the 196th Brigade in the Americal Division. On November 20, 1968, his company was pushing through the Hiep Duc Valley, in the same brutal Que Son country that swallowed so many American units, when they walked into a large, well dug in North Vietnamese force. The opening burst killed both point men and pinned the whole lead squad flat. The advance just stopped cold.
Crescenz did not wait for orders. He left cover, picked up a nearby machine gun, and charged straight up the slope, about a hundred meters, toward the enemy bunkers. He knocked out the first one and killed the two men inside. Then the second, two more dead. Then a third bunker, two more. He was clearing a path up that hill single handedly, one machine gun against a fortified line, so his friends could move.
Then a fourth bunker, hidden and camouflaged, opened up. He could have gone to ground. Instead he turned and went straight at it too. He got within about five meters of it, close enough to almost reach out and touch it, when the machine gun inside cut him down. He was killed right there on the slope.
His one man assault broke the position open and let his company maneuver and win the fight. President Nixon gave the Medal of Honor to his family in April 1970. At his parents' wish he was first buried near home outside Philadelphia, and after they passed, in 2008, he was moved to Arlington to lie among the others.
Philadelphia never forgot him. The city's VA medical center now carries his name. There is an eight foot bronze statue of him at the Philadelphia Vietnam Veterans Memorial. And his name is cut into the black granite of the Wall in Washington, on panel 38 West, line 16. A nineteen year old who had been in the country for two months, who ran up a hill so the rest of his squad could come home.
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On September 23, 1967, American armor and infantry were sweeping the rubber plantations of Tay Ninh Province, right up against the Cambodian border, trying to stop an enemy who could always run somewhere they were not allowed to follow. The operation was called Diamond Head.
Tay Ninh sat next to one of the great frustrations of the whole war. Just across the border was a chunk of Cambodia called the Angel's Wing, a supposedly neutral sanctuary where the North Vietnamese stockpiled supplies and staged their forces. American intelligence knew a two battalion attack was being prepared over there, aimed at Tay Ninh city, and Diamond Head was the 25th Infantry Division's attempt to break it up before it could land.
The problem was the border itself. The Americans would sweep between the Vam Co Dong River and Cambodia, make contact, and watch the enemy slip back across a line they were forbidden to cross. Looming over the whole area was Black Virgin Mountain, a strange lone peak rising straight out of the flat plain, with an American outpost on top and the enemy controlling the slopes below. It was a perfect little symbol of the war, holding the summit while never really owning the ground underneath.
In late September, tanks from the 34th Armor rolled in to guard the Tay Ninh base while the other battalions combed the Michelin Rubber Plantation, an old French estate that had become a favorite enemy hiding spot, and claimed seventy five enemy killed along with several supply caches. By the time Diamond Head ended in October it had cost 35 Americans and killed 136 of the enemy. The big cross-border attack it was meant to stop never quite came, but the sanctuary that launched such things stayed right where it was, untouchable, for years to come.
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On September 23, 1968, in the coastal province of Binh Thuan, a single American battalion was quietly doing the kind of work that was supposed to win the war and almost never got any credit. This was Operation McLain.
McLain was a security and pacification operation run by the 3rd Battalion, 506th Infantry of the 101st Airborne, working alongside the South Vietnamese 44th Regiment around the town of Phan Thiet. It ran for over a year. The whole point was not big dramatic battles, it was rebuilding rural security after the Tet Offensive had wrecked it, when the government had pulled back into the towns and left the countryside to the Viet Cong.
The interesting thing about McLain is that it was a preview of Vietnamization, the whole strategy of handing the war back to the South Vietnamese. The Americans deliberately worked in the background, training a local reconnaissance squad, running combined patrols, and pushing the South Vietnamese to go on the offensive instead of sitting still. When a new, competent South Vietnamese colonel named Nguyen Ba Thinh took over the 44th Regiment and got aggressive, it actually started working. In July his troops, backed by American companies and gunships, drove the Viet Cong out of a bunker complex in a two day fight.
By the time McLain wrapped at the end of January 1969, the tally was over a thousand enemy dead against sixty nine Americans killed. It was not a glamorous operation and you have never heard of it, but it was arguably closer to the actual formula for success in that war than any of the big sweeps. Get the locals to fight for their own villages, and stay long enough for it to stick.
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John Levitow was bleeding from forty wounds when he threw his own body onto a burning flare that was about to blow his aircraft and everyone on it out of the sky. He weighed about 145 pounds and he was twenty three years old.
He was born in November 1945 in Hartford, Connecticut, into a Jewish family. He first thought about joining the Navy, then changed his mind and went into the Air Force in 1966. He did not start out as anything glamorous. His first job was in civil engineering, and only later did he cross train into the loadmaster field, the enlisted man who rides in back and handles the cargo and the gear. In July 1968 he was sent to Vietnam with the 3rd Special Operations Squadron, flying aboard the AC-47 Spooky gunship, the same slow, deadly old transport packed with miniguns that prowled over battlefields at night.
On February 24, 1969, Levitow was not even supposed to be on that plane. He was filling in for the regular loadmaster on a gunship called Spooky 71 over Long Binh. His job that night was to set the timers on the big magnesium flares, powerful enough to light up a battlefield, and hand them to the gunner to drop out the cargo door. A flare like that burns at around four thousand degrees.
Then a North Vietnamese mortar round hit the wing. The blast tore a hole two feet across and punched more than three thousand holes through the fuselage. Everyone in the back was thrown down and torn up by shrapnel. Levitow took over forty wounds in his back and legs. And in the chaos he saw the thing that would kill them all. An armed flare, its fuse already lit and smoking, was rolling loose across the floor among the ammunition cans that held nineteen thousand rounds of live ammo.
He could not grab it. It kept rolling, and he was slipping in blood, and the plane was pitched over at a hard angle. So he did the only thing left. He threw himself on top of it, pulled the burning flare against his own body, and dragged himself and it toward the open cargo door, leaving a smear of blood the whole way. He shoved it out into the night a second before it ignited fully.
The flare went off clear of the aircraft. The crew lived. All of them. The pilot got the shredded plane home.
Levitow recovered and actually went back to fly more missions. In May 1970 President Nixon put the Medal of Honor around his neck, and he became the first enlisted airman in Air Force history to receive it. He carried that honor quietly for the rest of his life and spent years helping other veterans.
He died of cancer in 2000, at fifty five, and was buried at Arlington. The Air Force gave his name to its most important enlisted award, the Levitow Award, handed to the top graduate of Airman Leadership School. So every year, the best young airmen in the entire force learn the name of the skinny loadmaster who hugged a four thousand degree flare to his chest so that eight other men could go home.
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