Damn Yanky Up
Patrick Hughes
I can't find anything on this machine right now. Would you please
post your web page. I would like to remind everyone to Take a Message
to Garcia and don't want to usurp your fine work.
I would especially like to dedicate this one to Sandy and Richard (go
take a look at his web site). I do believe the lad has a gift!
Mary Cranitz
Patrick Hughes wrote:
>
> I can't find anything on this machine right now.
Good on ya mate.
Just about EVERY history book I've seen says that four times as many
bombs as were dropped in ALL of World War Two were dropped on little Vietnam.
Well...they obviously did a poor job of hitting the enemy military (since
the enemy was never defeated).
So were the bombs just hitting empty fields...or what?
Ok...next I'll ask about the artillery...
;-)
(p.s. what's with all those "accidental" civilian deaths)
Bob (RS)
http://home.earthlink.net/~rsears1
its on the left side of the home page.
the direct link is here.
http://www.retroactive.com/artsncrafts/garcia1.html
Bob (RS)
They both earned it IMO.
On Mon, 25 Jun 2001 06:22:35 GMT, Patrick Hughes
<p.at....@worldnet.att.net> wrote:
john stevens
--
john (mesojednik) stevens
osc usn ret
"Bob (RS)" <Damy...@eathlnk.net> wrote
Nigel Brooks
"Mary Cranitz" <ma...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
> Just about EVERY history book I've seen says that four times as many
> bombs as were dropped in ALL of World War Two were dropped on little
Vietnam.
>
> Well...they obviously did a poor job of hitting the enemy military (since
> the enemy was never defeated).
>
> So were the bombs just hitting empty fields...or what?
>
>
> Ok...next I'll ask about the artillery...
Yes Mary those bombs were hitting empty fields.
A brief history of USAF-USDA initiatives in South East Asia.
In June of 1965, the Government of the Republic of Vietnam (South)
approached the United States with a request for agricultural assistance.
Scientists from Texas A&M university had developed a disease resistant
strain of rice and offerered it at no charge to our Vietnamese allies.
This had the potential of resulting in a tenfold increase in grain at
harvest time, and making Vietnam the "rice bowl" of South East Asia.
Due to the fact that Vietnam did not have the equipment capacity to fully
develop their rice paddies. The United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) requested the assistance of the military in developing
alternate methods for cultivation and preparation of the rice fields.
It so happened that the United States Air Force had huge stocks of
ordinance (bombs) left over from WWII and the Korean War. Due to the fact
that the USAF was bringing on line new "smart weapons", these vintage bombs
were to be deactivated and destroyed, a singularily expensive proposition
(If you have ever heard about the bill for cleaning up asbestos you will
understand).
Anyway, a minor official in the Department of Defense was having a few
drinks with a friend from the Department of Agriculture when the discussion
turned to the expense of decommissioning weapons, and how to help a third
world country with no modern agriculture equipment exploit the A&M
discovery.
In a brilliant stroke of reasoning, the two came up with the idea of
employing the vintage bombs as rice field preparation devices. The idea
was proposed to the US and Vietnamese governments and accepted instantly.
There were only winners on both sides - the US taxpayers who avoided the
immense cost of decommissioning, the US military who were able to fullfill
their pilot training with relevant missions, and the Vietnamese who became
self sufficient in rice production - and who today are a net exporter of
rice to their neighbours.
A classic example of military and humanitarian cooperation.
Nigel Brooks
BTW - the artillery was used when bad weather kept the aircraft grounded.
Jerry Fowler
<nbroo...@nospammsn.com> wrote:
Nigel,
Geez this is good-to-know stuff :-), this clears up the confusion
about those arclight missions, operation plowman, what is the
equivalent waterbuff per B52(single moldboard plow)??
Jerry
Bob (RS)
Did you get to see Janes page?
Bob
On Mon, 25 Jun 2001 12:55:10 GMT, "john stevens"
<river...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>nice page
Ted Gittinger
"Jerry Fowler" <jfowlerK...@2fgroup.com> wrote in message
news:h0mejt0eetd4oqvqe...@4ax.com...
> On Mon, 25 Jun 2001 09:25:56 -0500, "Nigel Brooks"
> <nbroo...@nospammsn.com> wrote:
> Nigel,
> Geez this is good-to-know stuff :-), this clears up the confusion
> about those arclight missions, operation plowman, what is the
> equivalent waterbuff per B52(single moldboard plow)??
The later models of the B-52 carried 108 500-pounders, if memory serves. If
we equate each bomb with creating one half-acre paddy, that comes to 216
water-boo days per aircraft.
ted
Chas Hurst
Ted Gittinger <TGITT...@austin.rr.com> wrote in message
news:LHOZ6.93311$tb6.23...@typhoon.austin.rr.com...
Ted Gittinger
"Chas Hurst" <rose...@early.com> wrote in message
news:1OPZ6.2002$n6.8...@nntp3.onemain.com...
> Is that why they are nick-named Buffs?
Chas, as you know damned well, BUF stood for Big Ugly F.... I forget.
ted
Yeff
> "Chas Hurst" <rose...@early.com> wrote in message
> news:1OPZ6.2002$n6.8...@nntp3.onemain.com...
> > Is that why they are nick-named Buffs?
>
> Chas, as you know damned well, BUF stood for Big Ugly F.... I forget.
Surprisingly, the B-1 has gotten a nickname that's
almost as good as BUFF (or BUF to the purist).
Seems a reporter was calling in a story about America's
newest bomber and the person taking the copy spelled
out its nomenclature. That simple error made it into
print and now everyone (pilots included) calls the B-1
the BONE (B-One).
-Jeff B.
yeff at erols dot com
Chas Hurst
style couffure they sported.
But I like the credit given to arty for our agricultural contributions.
Yeff <ye...@spamcop.net> wrote in message
news:9h8s5o$lb6$2...@bob.news.rcn.net...
CuchiD...@webtv.net
(since the enemy was never defeated).
The Russians were giving them advance warning enabling them to clear the
area. Eventually they ran to Cambodia.We followed. Otherwise,they
were pissing and shitting themselves and going insane,according to
someone who was "there". Read carefully,you might actually learn
something.
Truong Nhu Tang was a French-educated lawyer, who while living and
working in South Vietnam, devoted himself to the cause of the Viet Cong.
After the Communist victory, Tang was horrified by the repression of the
new regime and left Vietnam for France. A Viet Cong Memoir (1985) is
Tang's account of his fight against the Americans. In the following
excerpt, Tang describes what it was like to be caught in a U.S.
bombardment.
From a kilometer away, the sonic roar of the B-52 explosions tore
eardrums, leaving many of the jungle dwellers permanently deaf. From a
kilometer, the shock waves knocked their victims senseless. Any hit
within a half kilometer would collapse the walls of an unreinforced
bunker, burying alive the people cowering inside. Seen up close, the
bomb craters were gigantic – thirty feet across and nearly as deep. In
the rainy seasons they would fill up with water and often saw service as
duck or fishponds, playing their role in the guerillas' never-ending
quest to broaden their diet. But they were treacherous then too. For as
the swamps and lowland areas flooded under half a foot of standing
water, the craters would become invisible. Not infrequently some
surprised guerilla, wading along what he had taken to be a familiar
route, was suddenly swallowed up.
It was something of a miracle that from 1968 through 1970 the attacks,
though they caused significant casualties generally, did not kill a
single one of the military or civilian leaders in the headquarters
complexes. This luck, though, had a lot to do with accurate advance
warning of the raids, which allowed us to move out of the way or take
refuge in our bunkers before the bombs began to rain down. B-52s flying
out of Okinawa and Guam would be picked up by Soviet intelligence
trawlers plying the South China Sea. The planes' headings and air speed
would be computed and relayed to COSVN headquarters (Communist
headquarter in South Vietnam), which would then order NLF (National
Liberation Front) or Northern elements in the anticipated target zones
to move away perpendicularly to the attack trajectory. Flights
originating from the Thai bases were monitored both on radar and
visually by our intelligence nets there and the information similarly
relayed.
Often the warnings would give us time to grab some rice and escape by
foot or bike down one of the emergency routes. Hours later we would
return to find, as happened on several occasions, that there was nothing
left. It was as if an enormous scythe had swept through the jungle,
felling the giant teak and go trees like grass in it's way, shredding
them into billions of scattered splinters. On these occasions. – when
the B-5s had found their mark – the complex would be utterly
destroyed: food, clothes, supplies, documents, everything. It was not
just that things were destroyed; in some awesome way they had ceased to
exist. You would come back to where your lean-to and bunker had been,
your home, and there would simply be nothing there, just an
unrecognizable landscape gouged by immense craters.
Equally often, however, we were not so fortunate and had time only to
take cover as best we could. The first few times I experienced a B-52
attack it seemed, as I strained to press myself into the bunker floor,
that I had been caught in the Apocalypse. The terror was complete. One
lost control of bodily functions as the mind screamed incomprehensible
orders to get out. On one occasion a Soviet delegation was visiting our
ministry when a particularly short-notice warning came through. When it
was over, no one had been hurt, but the entire delegation had sustained
considerable damage to its dignity – uncontrollable trembling and wet
pants the all-too-obvious outward signs of inner convulsions. The
visitors could have spared themselves their feelings of embarrassment;
each of their hosts was a veteran of the same symptoms.
It was a tribute to the Soviet surveillance techniques that we were
caught aboveground so infrequently during the years of the deluge. One
of these occasions, though, almost put an end to all our endeavors.
Taken by surprise by the sudden earthshaking shocks, I began running
along a trench toward my bunker opening when a huge concussion lifted me
off the ground and propelled me through the doorway toward which I was
heading. Some of my Alliance colleagues were knocked off their feet and
rolled around the ground like rag dolls. One old friend, Truong Cao
Phuoc, who was working in the foreign relations division, had jumped
into a shelter that collapsed on him, somehow leaving him alive with his
head protruding from the ground. We extricated him, shoveling the dirt
out handful by handful, carefully removing the supporting timbers that
were crisscrossed in the earth around him. Truong had been trapped in
one of the old U-shaped shelters, which became graves for so many. Later
we learned to reinforce these dugouts with an A-frame of timbers that
kept the walls from falling in. Reinforced in this manner, they could
withstand B-52 bomb blasts as close as a hundred meters.
Sooner or later, though, the shock of the bombardments wore off, giving
way to a sense of abject fatalism. The veterans would no longer scrabble
at the bunker floors convulsed with fear. Instead people just resigned
themselves – fully prepared to "go and sit in the ancestors' corner."
The B-52s somehow put life in order. Many of those who survived the
attacks found that afterward they were capable of viewing life from a
more serene and philosophical perspective. It was a lesson that remained
with me, as it did with many others, and helped me compose myself for
death on more than one future occasion.
But even the most philosophical of fatalists were worn to the breaking
point after several years of dodging and burrowing away from the rain of
high explosives. During the most intense periods we came under attack
every day for weeks running. At these times we would cook our rice as
soon as we got out of our hammocks, kneading it into glutinous balls and
ducking into the bunkers to be ready for what we knew was coming.
Occasionally, we would be on the move for days at a time, stopping only
to prepare food, eating as we walked. At night we would sling our
hammocks between two trees wherever we found ourselves, collapsing into
an exhausted but restless sleep, still half-awake to the inevitable
explosions.
Pursued relentlessly by such demons, some of the guerillas suffered
nervous breakdowns and were packed off for hospital stays; others had to
be sent home. There were cases too of fighters rallying to the Saigon
government, unable to cope with the demands of life in the jungle. Times
came when nobody was able to manage, and units would seek a hopeful
refuge across the border in Cambodia.
Source: A Historical Reader: The Vietnam War, 2000, Nextext (McDougal
Littell), Evanston, Illinois
"The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion."
--Edmund Burke
Bill Clarke
> almost as good as BUFF (or BUF to the purist).
>
> Seems a reporter was calling in a story about America's
> newest bomber and the person taking the copy spelled
> out its nomenclature. That simple error made it into
> print and now everyone (pilots included) calls the B-1
> the BONE (B-One).
>
> -Jeff B.
> yeff at erols dot com
What a pity that these young pilots came up in the politically correct
military and probably don't know that fine old Jody call;
I'm on the BONE,
My pants are tight,
My balls are swinging from left to right,
Sound off,
Bill Clarke, who learned that one at A&M.
F Troop, 17th Cav
Jerry Fowler
<TGITT...@austin.rr.com> wrote:
G'morn'n ted,
Ynow, this could have been waaay ahead of it time, with the right
explosives one could till and fertilize in one pass, right in there
with the new 'minimum tillage' farming.
'tis good to see you here in fine form!
Jerry
Ted Gittinger
"Bill Clarke" <cla...@livingston.net> wrote in message
news:tjgsvjj...@corp.supernews.com...
WEre you marching to Sbisa or Duncan?
ted
>
>
>
>
Bill Clarke
news:rnb_6.100506$tb6.24...@typhoon.austin.rr.com...
>
> WEre you marching to Sbisa or Duncan?
>
> ted
Sbisa, where every meal was a banquet the fish year. Duncan the other 3
years.
Damn that was a long time ago but I can still remember some of those ass
chewings.
Bill Clarke
F Troop, 17th Cav
Ted Gittinger
Shoot the bullneck, please.
ted>
>
>
Bill Clarke
Would you like some afterbirth or baby-shit to go with that T-Bone?
Wonder what they call it now in the politically correct age?
_______
about
Ted Gittinger
I have plumb forgot most of the A&M chow hall language. But carrots =
"sunshine," spinach = "Popeye," eggs = "cackle,"potatoes = "spuds" (what
else?), salt and pepper = "sand and." "Afterbirth" was ketchup and "baby
shit" was mustard.
Oh, yes, "cush" was dessert, and no "fish" got cush without earning it. One
way to earn it was to tell a funny story that so revolted the other seven at
the table that you were given dessert as sort of a merit badge.
I heard stories at chow that still curdle my blood to think about.
Sweete William, b/c me if all this puzzles you about my checkered career.
Warm regards,
ted
who is re-heating Chinese for dinner tonight.
>
>
>
Bill Clarke
news:GvK_6.1061$Hj7.34...@news.sisna.com...
>
> Placenta, or mirconium, or the t-bone damn LT which one you
> talking about
>
>
I sure ain't talking about no T-bones cause they wasn't any T-bones served
in those 2 mess halls. But there was a lot of good bull served there.
The Air Force cadets set on one side and we on the other so you can imagine
the rolls (deal fight) and insults thrown like future hand frags from one
side to the other. The whole Army side would stand and deliver the old,
"Propeller butt propeller butt crunch crunch crunch. Air crapper Air
crapper here's your lunch". And then we'd shoot'um the bird.
And the now politically incorrect yell the week before the Rice-A&M football
game, "What comes out of a Chinaman's ass-Rice Rice Rice".
Lord I was such an innocent child way back then.
Bill Clarke
you need a few Tiger Dicks".
And then your fish buddies would ask for permission to have a Tiger Dick
also so you wouldn't be alone. We bonded like the men of F Troop and I
found my best life long friends there.
If you tell me of your checkered past will you then have to kill me. <G>
Bill Clarke
F Troop, 17th Cav
Ted Gittinger <TGITT...@austin.rr.com> wrote in message
news:HYN_6.99876$lq1.25...@typhoon.austin.rr.com...
Ted Gittinger
>
> And the now politically incorrect yell the week before the Rice-A&M
football
> game, "What comes out of a Chinaman's ass-Rice Rice Rice".
>
> Lord I was such an innocent child way back then.
>
> Bill Clarke
> F Troop, 17th Cav
In the fifties it was still called "Rice Institute," and I believe it was
all male in those days. Still, a very prim and proper place, by some
accounts. The Aggie yell--Aggies don't cheer; they yell--at the Rice game
went like this:
"Rooty toot toot;
Rooty toot toot;
We are the boys from the Institute.
We don't smoke, and we don't chew,
And we don't go with the girls that
do."
ted
>
>
>
Charles G. White
> In the fifties it was still called "Rice Institute . . .
> The Aggie yell--Aggies don't cheer . .
The 50's and 60's were the good old days. And I might add that the Aggies
in showing their respect to the "tu" (University of Texas) Longhorns sang
something about
"Saw 'varsties' horns off -
"Saw 'varsties' horns off -
" - - - - -SHORT"
Bill Clarke, do you guys still sing that tribute?
Bill Clarke
not stand the Rice Band, a band well know for it's irrelevance and
outrageous antics.
One of her crowning moments was the day some Aggie cadets roughed up the
Rice Band after a particularly insulting half time performance. Get some
momma!
The old girl was a better Aggie than I ever was and it is a pity she didn't
get to attend the school. She would have gone far.
She missed very few Rice-A&M football games from the mid fifties when her
baby brother attended A&M up until she became too weak to make the trip.
Bill Clarke
F Troop, 17th Cav
Ted Gittinger <TGITT...@austin.rr.com> wrote in message
news:kCr%6.105777$lq1.28...@typhoon.austin.rr.com...
Bill Clarke
And we stole that steer my freshman year but the world was already getting a
little tight assed by then. They called out the Texas Rangers! They got
their steer back needless to say. Quickly!
Bill Clarke
F Troop, 17th Cav
Charles G. White <whit...@amaonline.com> wrote in message
news:gTs%6.20771$D92....@newsfeed.slurp.net...