USMC:NAM

NAM: The longest war in American History, the 10,000 day war..... America's biggest military involvement in SE-Asia after WWII & the Korean War against the communist insurgency in Vietnam. Immediately after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu & subsequent withdrawal, US military advisers had begun to arrived in Vietnam from the early 50s to the eventual deployment of combat troops in the 60s to the final fall of Saigon to the communists in 1975. My earliest memory of the war was the news footage that dominated the nightly news during my childhood days; favorite Vietnam War paperbacks: 'The Five Fingers', 'The 13th Valley', 'Fields of Fire', 'The Short Timers' etc. i read in school. And of course some of the greatest war movies ever made: the surreal & sometimes funny 'Apocalypse Now' & 'Full Metal Jacket' & the brutal hard-hitting 'Platoon' to name a few. The Vietnam War was also a proving ground for some of the modern military tactics/equipment we see today: trial & introduction of the M16, Huey helicopters & air cav/air assault tactics, the M113 APC & mechanized infantry assault etc. On the 1/6 front, DML had released a series of 1/6 NAM figures in it's early days with HT & TS revisiting the genre in recent years. The theme for my bash is a Nam USMC gunner during the battle of Khe Sanh i completed in 2008 which incidentally is also the 40th anniversary of the NVA's siege on Khe Sanh firebase in 1968.