WMUK: The Western Activist, a 1960s-era student newspaper published at WMU, is now online. “In the 1960s, students at Western Michigan University published an anti-war, countercultural newspaper. Now the Western Activist, as it was known, has been digitized. The paper covered the Black Panther movement and protests against the Vietnam War among many other topics.”
Christian Science Monitor: It took decades: Now there’s a photo for each name on Vietnam wall. “Volunteers have now tracked down at least one photo for every one of the more than 58,000 U.S. military service members who died in the Vietnam War – for an online Wall of Faces project that took more than two decades to complete.”
Fold3: New POW/MIA Records Added!. “The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) is an agency within the United States Department of Defense. Their mission is to recover the remains of military personnel who are listed as prisoners of war or missing in action from past conflicts. We’ve added a new collection of indexed records for the estimated 82,000 American military and civilian personnel still missing in action. The index covers multiple conflicts including WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Cold War, and more recent conflicts including Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
EurekAlert: Study uses AI to estimate unexploded bombs from Vietnam War. “Researchers have used artificial intelligence to detect Vietnam War-era bomb craters in Cambodia from satellite images – with the hope that it can help find unexploded bombs. The new method increased true bomb crater detection by more than 160 percent over standard methods.”
I haven’t gotten to do one of these in a while, so I’m excited! Flickr Blog: Welcome the US Navy Bureau of Medicine to the Flickr Commons!. “Items in this collection include albums and historical photographs of World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, as well as naval hospitals, including hospital ships, around the world. The collection also includes modern images of the Navy Medicine corps work to ensure the health and well-being of all beneficiaries.”
WFMJ: Pennsylvania completes Vietnam War Memorial database. “All 3,150 photos of Pennsylvania heroes who died in the Vietnam war have been found and added to the digital Wall of Faces Memorial page. This includes 38 photos of those from Mercer County. The digital Wall of Faces is a database of every American whose name appears on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington D.C.”
Texas Tech Today: Vietnam Center & Archive Oral Histories Will Soon Be More Accessible. “Thanks to a $95,740 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the Vietnam Center & Archive (VNCA) will now be able to transcribe, edit and publish online its entire backlogged collection of oral history interviews conducted by the VNCA Oral History Project, which includes a diverse array of Vietnam veterans and their family members.”
UVA Today: After Court Case, UVA Students’ Tool Could Help Veterans Get Key Benefits. “How can families – and the VA officials assessing their claims – prove that a particular ship was in the Agent Orange exposure zone, defined by the legislation as within 12 nautical miles of a boundary off the coast of Vietnam Currently, that process involves looking through handwritten deck logs or other archived documents to prove eligibility. It’s a time-consuming process for veterans, their families and the VA. That’s where Brian Harris, Jackson Sutherland, Alexi Himarios and Matthew Jacobs come in. They knew there had to be a better way.”
The State Archives of North Carolina has put up a new photo album on Flickr. It’s called Ernest W. Payne Vietnam War Images and it’s over 300 images covering 1967 and 1968. Be sure to click on the “show more” link on the front page with the description of the album, as it’ll give you a full biography of Staff Sergeant Payne, supply officer and Bronze Star recipient.
Director of National Intelligence: Intelligence Community Releases Newly Declassified Tet Offensive Documents. “On January 4, 2018, in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive, Director of National Intelligence Daniel R. Coats directed intelligence agencies to review their holdings for historical material of current interest relating to the IC’s role in the Tet Offensive. Today the Intelligence Community has published the first installment of the newly declassified documents relating to the Tet Offensive, highlighting material from the Central Intelligence Agency and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.”
South Bend Tribune: Notre Dame hosts first military anti-war movement conference. “The University of Notre Dame wrapped up the first major conference nationally that specifically examined the opposition of war by members of the military during the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The three-day conference brought together academics and activists to discuss veteran and military members’ opposition to U.S. interventions abroad, and the implications of their actions, while also kicking off a photo exhibit and heralding the launch of a new online project that archives anti-war newspapers printed by members of the military during the Vietnam War.” I could not find a link to the new online collection, but I did find it via a Google search.
State Archives of North Carolina: New Siler City Veteran’s Vietnam War Collection Available. “The Grover M. Johnson Jr. Papers is composed of correspondence, photographs, 35mm and 126 Format color slides, and miscellaneous materials, documenting the U.S. Army service of Grover M. Johnson Jr. of Siler City, N.C., during the Vietnam War from November 1966 to October 1968. He served for several months in the 569th General Supply Company at the U.S. Army’s Camp Davies, just outside of Saigon, Republic of Vietnam. For most of his overseas service during the war, Johnson Jr. served on Okinawa in the Headquarters Company at Headquarters, U.S. Army Ryukyu Islands (USARYIS).”
New York Times: In Her Own Words, Photographing the Vietnam War. “Ms. [Catherine] Leroy wrote over 100 letters home during her three years in Vietnam, one almost every 10 days, and they show how she was processing her experiences and navigating professional challenges. They are candid and revealing, attesting to her resiliency, exposing insecurities, and showing her in moments of triumph, despair, optimism or courage….Now a selection of those letters are featured on a new website, accompanied by some of her archive and details from her life.”
VietnamNet: Students design war hero burial database. “The students spent three months seeking information for the database and designing the website, according to Truong Van An, deputy secretary of Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union at the HCM City University of Social Sciences and Humanities. Through the search function, visitors only need to type the full name of the martyr or heroic mother buried in the cemetery. The site will then reveal the martyrs’ birth year, birthplace, day of sacrifice, burial position in the cemetery, and their site of fighting in the war.”
Decades of film taken by the US Marines is going to be digitized and preserved by the University of South Carolina. “The Marine Corps is sending the rare stockpile of films to specialists in South Carolina. Some of the images have been in storage for 70 years and offer viewers a gritty ‘you-were-there’ view of military life. Most films were not even seen by the combat photographers who shot them with hand-held cameras from the late 1930s through World War II, Korea and Vietnam.”
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