Many More Nurses Were Killed in Vietnam
A letter to the editor in the December 2008 issue referred to Dr. Christiane Granger, a French doctor who died in Vietnam during the period of American involvement. I served in the intelligence section of 2-19th Artillery of the 1st Cavalry division and had access to all of the information going through 1st Brigade. In reality, Dr. Granger will be just the tip of the iceberg. In the book We Came to Help, authors Monika Schwinn and Bernhard Diehl talk about the nurses George Bartsh, Marie-Luise Kerber and Hendrika Kortmann from the Aid Service of Malta, who were captured in April 1969. All three died in captivity. There were at least four other foreign medical personnel in the same area of operations that I covered during my 1966-67 tour in Vietnam who were killed.There were doctors and nurses in Vietnam from, at least, Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, United States through the Society of Friends, and other religious or public service organizations. I would expect the deaths of foreign nurses and doctors to top 50.

Glenn Sheathelm
Muskegon, Mich.

How Confusion Found Its Way Onto the Map
The letter to the editor in your August 2008 issue by Daniel R. Arant, concerning the map names related to those in the What Really Happened in Pinkville article of April 2008, reminded me of an old problem we had in Vietnam.

In January 1966, I was tasked to create an intelligence unit for the MACV J2, Maj. Gen. Joseph A. McChristian. As the unit added capabilities, we had to have the coordinates of every map from 1/10,000 to 1/250,000 so that overlays would exactly match the maps in the hands of the staff and in the field.

I remember the number of maps totaled over 700 and, at that time, we did not have all of them covering Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Eastern Thailand and Burma (Myanmar) and South China. An order for all of the maps was sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency, but we needed them now, so I started scouring all of the allied intelligence activities in and out of country in Southeast Asia for the missing maps. Most of the maps I found were produced by the French military, and some by local governments in each country. When all of the maps arrived from DIA, I compared them to our non-U.S. maps to confirm the coordinates matched. As I was doing this, I saw that most if not all of the names of the small towns, villages, hamlets, mountain names, etc., were different than on the U.S.-produced maps! What was going on here?

The new governments, which took over after the French, had and were creating new names for almost every location and natural feature, and continued to create new names throughout the war. There were a few exceptions, but the French kept the original names on their maps—and, more important, so did our enemy.

When an enemy-produced document was captured and there was a plan to attack a village by name and not a coordinate with it, most new intelligence analysts could not use the document because the exact location was unknown to them! For those who were in-country and the region for many years (six years for me), they learned of the differences and recorded the names used by the enemy, so that every piece of intelligence was included in their reports/operations. But for the newbies, a document with an unknown name was tossed to the side.

There were many, many, many “little” things most Americans never learned about Vietnam and the region in their one-year tour. It was very frustrating to see each experienced man, who was just becoming very valuable to the war effort, complete his one-year tour and leave, to be replaced with another newbie. One “little” example was when a newbie thought “FNU” in the family name part of an enemy unit commander name was a Vietnamese name, when it meant Family Name Unknown! And you should have seen a newbie’s face upon first seeing a person’s or location’s name recorded by using the Vietnamese telegraphic code!

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to