....had a pair.
I've studied military history for over 50 years so this isn't supposed to be a greater geopolitical discussion on the Vietnam War, although I wouldn't shy from that sort of the discussion but I doubt it would be tolerated. So, this is more about one particular little event that I had never heard of before this story caught my eye when looking something else up the other day. One reason its probably fairly unknown is the greater context of April 1972, a massive ground offensive by the NVA was going on in South Vietnam. A surprise, minor attack by a couple of North Vietnamese MiGs against two old WWII U.S. Navy ships (although probably upgraded by 1972) probably only made a minor headline somewhere in American newspapers or TV news.
The MiG-17s used weren't exactly new but I suspect that Mig-19s and MiGs-21s couldn't be spared for such an attack experiment as they were fighting American aircraft over the North.
The NVA spring offensive was a "near thing" for the South Vietnamese government and military, only overwhelming American air power saved them that year. That effort wasn't repeated three years later and the South was defeated in six weeks between mid-March 1975 and April 30th when NVA tanks rolled into the South Vietnam presidential palace.
An ironic twist of all this in 2024 is that most Vietnamese alive weren't born yet in 1975 and only know of the war through what their grandparents or maybe some of their parents tell them. I had a colleague that was part of a global forest change research project and spent some time in the Central Highlands of Vietnam circa 2015. In some of the most rural villages the team he was part of visited, he was one the first European-ancestry person, especially with sandy blond hair, that many of the villagers had met. His hair color was of much interest by the kids and teenagers of that area.
My colleague had a couple of Vietnamese researchers over the next year, one guy was my age so was an elementary age school kid in 1972 but the other one was born probably in the late '80s or early '90s. The guy my age was a bit more reserved but the younger one greatly enjoyed when we took them over to a nearby farm that I knew the owner and younger guy got to climb up the steps into a larger tractor and combine. Nothing that size is involved in Vietnamese rice paddy grain production. So it goes...
https://getpocket.com/explore/item/...warships?utm_source=firefox-newtab-en-ushttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Offensive
