Today is the Army’s 236th birthday!  So happy, happy birthday U.S. Army.  To celebrate the day we have created a small exhibit with Army materials from our collection.  To view the exhibit click on the link below.

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/Army/army11.htm

Part two of the local PBS channel’s “Keeping it Local” series on the Vietnam Center and Archive can now be viewed online at http://www.ktxt.org/productions.asp or by clicking the play icon below. This segment focuses on Kim Phuc, “the girl in the photo” and the second speaker in the Vietnam Center and Archive’s 2011 Guest Lecture Series.

KTXT’s complete interview with Kim Phuc can be viewed on their YouTube page – http://www.youtube.com/ktxtdt

The Vietnam Archive is proud to unveil its new program and online exhibit “Techsans in the Vietnam War.” We created this program to honor Texas Tech grads who served in the Vietnam War. Anyone can nominate a veteran for this program. The requirements are that the honoree graduated from Texas Tech University, before or after their service, and served in Vietnam between 1960–1975. If you nominate someone for this program, please assist us by filling out our Techsans in the Vietnam War Biographical Submission Form (available at the link below) and sending us images. If we have documents or images of an honoree in our collection, we will include them on their page, but the more information that you can provide to us the better. If you participate in this program, please consider donating your original images and documents to the archive, as we would love to be able to preserve materials from our TTU grads.

Once we receive your nomination, biography, and images, we will create a web page honoring or memorializing the Tech grad in our “Techsans in the Vietnam War” online exhibit. Please be aware that we want these pages to be well crafted, which means that we may take some time to put up an honor/memorial page, especially if we receive numerous requests at one time. We also reserve the right to exclude information or images from pages for any reason. If we receive a name with no images or biographical information and we are unable to find any information in our collection, we will add the name to a page in the exhibit that lists Tech grads that served and/or died in Vietnam and they will not have an individual page until we receive more information.

To start this program, we have memorial pages for three Texas Tech grads who were military officers who served and died in Vietnam. Please click on the exhibit link below to see the memorial pages for Lieutenant Lee Roy Herron, 1^st Lieutenant Louis K. Breuer IV and Major Samuel B. Cornelius.

To nominate someone for this program please contact Amy Mondt at vietnamarchive@ttu.edu.

To view the exhibit or find the Techsans in the Vietnam War Submission Form click this link. www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/TTU

For all the men and women who have made the ultimate sacrifice for us and our freedoms, thank you.  Happy Memorial Day from the Vietnam Center and Archive staff.

Vietnam Memorial Wall Ryan Aranda - 1st Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Air Cavalry Division Association Collection

This week the Texas Tech University PBS station, KTXT, broadcast the first of two shows on the Vietnam Center and Archive, part of their “Keeping it Local” series. This segment can be viewed online at http://www.ktxt.org/productions.asp, or by clicking the play icon below.

Part two will air on KTXT next Thursday evening and will feature the recent lecture by Kim Phuc, part of the Vietnam Center and Archive’s 2011 Guest Lecture Series.

May 6 – 12 is Nurses Week; a week dedicated to saying thank you to nurses for all that they do for their patients and communities.  In honor of this week, the Vietnam Center and Archive has developed an online exhibit titled National Nurses Week – Celebrating the Nurses of the Vietnam War.  To see the exhibit please click on the title above or use the link at the bottom of this post.

1st Lieutenant Cheri Hawes, US Army Nurse Corps, at desk for Emergency Room, 91st Evacuation Hospital, Chu Lai, Vietnam

In addition to the exhibit, the VNCA is hosting LeAnn Thieman, the third speaker in our Guest Lecture Series.  Thieman is a nurse with over 30 years of experience who volunteered to help with Operation Babylift in the final days of the Vietnam War.  She is also an author in the popular Chicken Soup series and will speaking at the Lanier Auditorium at the Texas Tech Law School on Thursday May 12th at 7:00.  The lecture is free and open to the public.  For more information about LeAnn or the guest lecture series, please visit the Guest Lecture Series site.

LeAnn Thieman

For all the nurses, thank you for all that you do.

National Nurses Week – Celebrating the Nurses of the Vietnam War

www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/nurses/

Guest Lecture Series

www.vietnam.ttu.edu/events/LectureSeries/2011.htm

Today is the start of Tết, the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration and 2011 is the year of the cat.  To celebrate this great holiday, we have created an online exhibit that is an exploration of the Tết holiday and its customs, history and traditions supplemented with photos and documents from our collection.  If you would like to learn about this unique holiday please click on the link below to see our exhibit.

 http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/tet/ 

Forty-three years ago today the North Vietnamese launched a massive countrywide attack against almost all of the major cities and province capitals in South Vietnam, breaking the truce called for the Tết holiday and forever changing the course of the war.  This countrywide assault became known as the Tet Offensive.  To commemorate this historic event, the staff of the Vietnam Archive have created exhibits detailing the events of the Tet Offensive and three of the offensive’s major battles: Hue – the Imperial City, the Battle of Khe Sanh, and the Battle for Saigon.  In addition to the exhibits, there is a new subject guide to help people locate materials about the Tet Offensive in our collection.  Links to the exhibits and subject guide are below. 

U.S. soldiers move into the alley behind BOQ #3 in Saigon. 31 Jan. 1968 Photo by: SP5 Edgar Price Pictorial A.V. Plt. 69th Sig. Bn

The Tet Offensive

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/Tet68/

Tet Offensive Subject Guide

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/resources/tet

The Vietnam Archive has a collection of over 12,000 Marine Corps records covering after-action reports, command chronologies and other documents for most of the Marine units serving in Vietnam.  These records,shared with the archive by the Marine Corps History Division, are a valuable resource for anyone researching the Marines in the Vietnam War. 

These records have been available in the Virtual Vietnam Archive for many years.  However, many of the records were incorrectly labeled or could only be found in the database using specialized terms.  After extensive database work, the Vietnam Archive archivists have fixed the errors and removed the specialized jargon terms so that the records are much easier to locate. 

In addition to these fixes, the documents themselves are now fully word-searchable.  The Vietnam Archive has undertaken a project to convert all of the over 3 million pages of digitized documents in the Virtual Vietnam Archive into word-searchable PDFs, and the conversion of the Marine Corps documents is now complete. Please note that the quality of the word-search capability is dependent on a number of factors, including the quality of the original.  The worse the condition of the original scan, the lower the accuracy of the word-search function.  To search for words within the PDF’s (in Adobe Reader), simply open the PDF, hold down the Ctrl key and F key and type in your keyword and hit enter.  If the word is in the document, you will be taken to the page where the word is located, and the word will be highlighed with color – a great timesaving device.

As PDFs are converted into the word-searchable format, some users may be required to update to newer versions of their PDF readers.  Versions of Adobe Reader older than Version 6 will not be able to access the modified PDFs, or PDFs newly added to the Virtual Archive.  Adobe Reader can be downloaded free from the Adobe website – http://get.adobe.com/reader/?promoid=BUIGO

If you have not seen the Marine Corps records check out the new and improved version in the Virtual Archive. They are worth a look.

The Summer/Fall issue of the Friends of the Vietnam Center newsletter is available for download on our website.  Articles include information about the Texas Tech student trip to Southeast Asia, a call for papers for our Seventh Triennial Vietnam Symposium, an update on the Graffiti Project, and more.

If you would like to receive a full color printed version of this newsletter in your mailbox, please consider becoming a friend of the Vietnam Center.  Membership information can be found at this link.

Links:

Newsletters: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/friends/newsletters.php

Membership Information: http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/friends/