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In 1966, well into the Vietnam War and three years into Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, Charles Graham Boyd took his eighty-eighth mission into Hanoi to search and destroy anti-aircraft missiles. It was during this mission that Boyd was shot down by Vietnamese artillery and landed in the unfortunate location of an enemy rice paddy. He […]
The United States Intelligence Community was, infamously, heavily involved in the Cold War. The tensions between the United States and the USSR dominated world affairs between 1945–1991, periodically erupting into “hot” conflicts beyond the two powers’ borders. Perhaps the most destructive of these conflicts was the Vietnam War, which extended from 1955–1975. In Vietnam, the […]
How do you reconcile the goals of the U.S. military, USAID development workers and State Department diplomats in the midst of an active conflict? USAID Officer George Laudato faced that dilemma in a particularly challenging way when U.S. military officials shared plans to defoliate a village in Vietnam where USAID had been working for over […]
For a young lieutenant to challenge the number two man in the Department of Defense over Vietnam policy in 1969 took guts. The ensuring argument pitted R. James Woolsey, still in his 20s and later to become Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, against Paul Nitze, Deputy Secretary of Defense and pillar of the U.S. […]
In 1961, United States forces in Vietnam began to use chemical herbicides and defoliants on South Vietnamese crops, bushes, and trees in order to deprive the Vietcong of both food and cover for ambushes. Code-named Operation Ranch Hand, the campaign used a variety of herbicides but the most commonly used, and most effective, was Agent […]
For U.S. Foreign Service Officers during the Vietnam War, an assignment to South Vietnam was unlike any other. For some, it was seen as a death sentence. For others, it was a chance to make a real, immediate difference in the world. For Ambassador Kenneth Quinn, it was very nearly both of those things. After […]
The Fall of Saigon is perhaps one of the most infamous moments of the Vietnam War. Following the fall of other large cities to the North Vietnamese Army, the U.S government launched covert operations to evacuate Americans and Vietnamese civilians from the country. These evacuations would become some of the most famous in history. In […]
About one month before Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States officially entered World War II, tensions were already rising between Japanese officials and U.S. Foreign Service Officers serving in Asia. Japan continued its mission of global expansion, hoping to become a more respectable world power, while the United States issued economic sanctions and […]
The First Gulf War. The Persian Gulf War. Desert Storm and Desert Shield. All of these titles and operation names are associated with the same war, the first major U.S. military action since the Vietnam War. During the 1980s, while at war with Iran, the Iraqi government borrowed heavily from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to […]
“Winning hearts and minds” is at the very core of diplomacy. Sometimes that takes place in an embassy or a foreign ministry. Very rarely does it take place in the jungle and on the frontline of a warzone. But that is exactly where Kenneth Quinn found himself as a first-tour Foreign Service Officer in South […]
