Vietnam War Essay

The Vietnam War is known to be one of America’s toughest wars, starting in November of 1955 and ending with the “Fall of Saigon” in March of 1975. In 1973 all American combatant troops had departed Vietnam due to a peace treaty which only left a couple thousand Americans for humanitarian aid with only a handful of Marines for their protection. The North Vietnamese knew that with American military forces withdrawn, taking over South Vietnam would no longer be a challenge. As the North Vietnamese Army started migrating south the remaining Americans relied on the U.S. Government to develop a plan to safely extract the remaining personnel without involving U.S. combatant forces.

This plan turned out to become the largest helicopter evacuation

Ambassador Martin was the field commander for any evacuation to take place in Vietnam and had the final decision to evacuate; the Ford administration stressed their concerns to Ambassador Martin about an urgent evacuation. The Pentagon wanted to evacuate as fast as possible but did not want to cause panic amongst the South Vietnamese people, knowing that panic could cause the South Vietnamese people to turn on the remaining American people. They developed a plan to evacuate all but about one thousand two hundred fifty Americans. The remaining one thousand two hundred fifty Americans could be evacuated in a single day’s helicopter airlift, to be known as Operation Talon Vice.

The week of April 18th reporters from Newsweek magazine published Operation Talon Vice almost in its entirety. This publication compromised the operation creating little time to come up with an entirely different plan. The operation was renamed, Operation Frequent Wind. The concept of the operation was primarily the same but locations, call signs, and code words were changed so that the Vietnamese would not know the actions of the Americans and would not be able to interfere with the

This is done to cover the most probable courses of action and contingencies for each of those operations. With this planning in most any situation our military forces can react and carry out the mission with little to no disruption.

In the “Fall of Saigon” vital lessons were learned by American forces during operations in any foreign country. America learned that it is always important to have more than one option to be implemented when evading any situation that is not completely under American authority. America also learned that the very people that they intend to help can turn into one of the largest obstacles and hinder the safety of our own personnel.

Operation Frequent Wind’s tactics have been carried forward to today’s battles and can be seen in operations as current as Operation Spartan Shield. Although we have better technology now, the more simple methods have sometimes proven more reliable. One noticeable change that has come from most every operation in American history is the disciple in Operation Security (OPSEC), by limiting what the media has access to they are less likely to jeopardize the mission and cost innocent lives to be