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ANNALS OF VIETNAM

Welcome to the Annals of Vietnam, a collection of articles, reviews, and images dealing with America's misadventures south and north of the 17th parallel. I have a particular interest in the early years, because that's when I was there as a reporter for the lefty magazine, The Nation, which was so financially strapped that it would publish dispatches even from a Republican like me.

No, that wasn't the AR-15 in Vietnam

Several years ago, the former commander of the Special Forces camp at Boun Beng in the Highlands of Vietnam wrote a lengthy article about what went wrong with the adoption of the M-16, a military version of Colt's AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that in the 1960s was being marketed to US law enforcement agencies. Oddly, I never linked to it, so I doubt that many people ever came across it. That was a terrible oversight, which I now remedy: please have a look at No, that wasn't an AR-15! by Captain Crews McCullogh, 1931-2021.

Early model M-16 with duck-bill flash suppressor, 20-round magazine, triangular front hand-grip, and no forward assist lever. It was this model apparently that was supplied to Special Forces in 1964, probably by the CIA. It certainly looks like the weapon carried by the Boun Beng Green Berets that I met in the team that followed Capt. McCullogh's, except that they invariably taped a second magazine upside-down to the first, the quicker to reload.

Blue skies! -- Daniel Ford. You can send humanitarian aid to Ukraine through Razom (a tax-exempt US-based charity). Or support its military through the National Bank of Ukraine.

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Early days in South Vietnam:

Remembering the quagmire:

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