The Vietnam Center and Archive would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and to have a safe and happy holiday season and a wonderful new year!

Donald L. Swafford Collection, undated (vas002449)

The Center and Archive will be closed from December 24th-January 1st.

Lai Khe, Vietnam. C Co, 701st Maint company area, Thanksgiving Dinner - November 1968, Philip Varsel Collection (vas047786)

The Vietnam Center and Archive would like to wish everyone a happy and safe Thanksgiving.

The Lubbock PBS station, KTXT, has produced a third show in their Keeping it Local series focused on the Vietnam Center and Archive, this time featuring information about the potential new building that would house the Center and Archive, as well as a new museum.  The show can be viewed online on KTXT’s YouTube channel [http://www.youtube.com/ktxtdt], or by clicking the play icon below.

http://youtu.be/vXGnqtt3Ccc

The staff of the Vietnam Center and Archive would like to take a moment to say Thank You to all veterans, their families, friends, and loved ones for their service.

The first item added to the Virtual Vietnam Archive in 2001, a photograph from the Douglas Pike Collection of a factory under construction in the Bien Hoa Industrial complex northeast of Saigon

The Virtual Vietnam Archive has celebrated a number of milestones this fall, including the addition of our 500,000 item this week.  The Virtual Archive became available to researchers ten years ago this month with just a few thousand items, mostly photographs and documents.  Now the online archive contains over 3.3 million pages of material, including 330,000 documents, 130,000 images, 900 oral history interviews, and thousands of moving images, audio recordings, maps, and more.  In that ten year period, the Virtual Archive has been searched over 10,000,000 times and more than 3 million items have been downloaded.  The 500,000 item, a newspaper article titled “Faint Hope for US Airmen Still Missing in Indochina” from the Garnett Bell Collection, was digitized by student assistant Brooke Boysaw.

Reaching half-a-million items in our digital collections is a great accomplishment for our project that couldn’t have been completed without the over 100 full time staff and part time student employees who have worked on this project since 2001.  Without all of their great contributions, this project would not be the success it has been.

The Virtual Vietnam Archive project continues to digitize new materials, adding about 15,000 new pages each month from a variety of collections, including still images, individual donor’s collections, the CDEC Collection and, starting this month, the Cong Bao.  We look forward to continuing this project for years to come.

Today is the Navy’s 236th birthday!  The Vietnam Center and Archive staff want to wish the Navy and all of its personnel past and present a very happy birthday.  To comemorate this day, we have created a small exhibit of Navy items.  You can view the exhibit by clicking on the link below.

http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/exhibits/navy/navy11.htm

The third Friday in September is National POW/MIA Recognition Day.  Please take a moment today to remember those who are still missing from the Vietnam War and all other wars.

Long time Lubbock resident and friend of the Vietnam Center and Archive General Dudley Faver passed away on Friday.  He was 95.

General Faver was born in Sweetwater, TX (southeast of Lubbock) in 1916.  He joined the US Army Air Corps in March 1941 and served in a variety of posts around the US and the world, mostly as an instructor.  During the Vietnam War, Faver assumed command of the 3500th Pilot Training Wing at Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock.  He was promoted to Brigadier General in 1966, and was transferred to US Air Force Headquarters.  Eventually promoted to Major General, Faver retired from the Air Force in 1973 and returned to Lubbock, where he was a fixture in the community and a great friend to many.

Services are pending with Resthaven Funeral Home in Lubbock.

US Air Force Biography

Lubbock Online

Vietnam Center Advisory Board member Dr. Ron Milam has received a Core Fulbright Scholar Award to teach a history course in Vietnam.  Dr. Milam was an advisor to the ARVN in 1971 and is currently an Associate Professor in History at Texas Tech.  In the spring of 2011, he will travel to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) to teach “America’s Historical Role in International Relations” at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities.  At Texas Tech Dr. Milam teaches classes on US history, the Vietnam War, and military history.  His Vietnam classes are among the most popular offered.  Currently Dr. Milam is accompaning Vietnam Center Director Dr. Steve Maxner and a group of Texas Tech students on a study abroad trip visiting locations in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.  He has previously received the TTU President’s Excellence in Teaching Award and the Distinguished Faculty Award, and was recently named an academic fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Since his arrival at Texas Tech, Dr. Milam has been a great support of the Center and Archive and a fixture at our conferences and events.  While we will miss his presences next spring, we wish him the best with this great opportunity.

More Information:

Dr. Ron Milam Faculty Profile – http://experts.ttu.edu/browse/profile/383

TTU Communications and Marketing News Release – http://today.ttu.edu/2011/06/history-professor-seeks-to-make-an-international-impact/

The Fulbright Program – http://fulbright.state.gov/