Ta Thai Manh, at 15 the youngest member of the Vietnamese Rangers, smokes
a cigarette as he waits for transportation to take him to an aid station
after he was wounded in action in the Cholon section of Saigon
May 6th. The youngster has another distinction besides his age: in March
he was given a medal for helping capture seven Viet Cong.
I can't find any more information after this
one above when he was 15. Be nice to find out he made it another 5
years and was alive and well. (Update: I believe he was killed.)
The fifth big mistake in Vietnam was failure to utilize our most powerful military assets—our overwhelming superiority in Air and Naval Power—early in the conflict. Pacific Area Commander (CinCPAC), Admiral Grant Sharp, believed this was the greatest mistake in the war. This mistake was closely related to and overlapped the fourth big mistake, which was the Johnson-McNamara doctrine of gradualism discussed in part 4 of this series.
On April 20, 1965, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara held a conference in Honolulu to inform General Wheeler, the
Chairman of the JCS and his top commanders in the Pacific of the
Johnson-McNamara strategy to prevent the fall of South Vietnam to the
Communist regime in Hanoi.
Also attending this meeting were Admiral
Sharp; General Westmoreland, Commander of the Military Advisory Command in
Vietnam (MACV); and retired General Maxwell Taylor, the U.S. Ambassador
in Saigon. McNamara brought with him his most influential advisor,
Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, and National Security
Advisor Walt Rostow. This was a mere seven weeks following the
commencement of Operation “Rolling Thunder,” Johnson’s plan to bring
Hanoi to the negotiating table by a gradually escalating campaign of
bombing targets in North Vietnam
.More @ The Tribune
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