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Brigadier General Salamone Speaks To Merchant Marine Vets
By Lee Leffler
Published in The Sentinel, Official Newspaper For Orange County NY, November 4, 2005, Volume 27 Number 71, page 17.
The local chapter of the Veterans of the American Merchant Marines welcomed Retired US Army Brigadier General Luciano C. Salamone to their monthly luncheon on October 25 at the Youngest Brother Italian Restaurant in Newburgh (New York). A native of Brooklyn, General Salamone graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1956 and served for 28 years. In the Vietnam conflict, he was an Army Advisor from 1962-1963 in Camau, An Xuyen Province. He was ordered to help counter insurgency by offering training, logistical support and tactical support to a civil guard battalion.
General Salamone showed weapons used by the Viet Cong. The hand-made rifle was not as sophisticated as the American weapons. "Thank God they were not sophisticated," he said. "When they used to shoot at us, they missed us most of the time!" He also brought back a hand-made machete and a Viet Cong flag.
"Many locals were loyal to Ho Chi Minh ("Uncle Ho")--his face and flags were everywhere," said Salamone. When he conducted operations in the province, the villages and the hamlets, there were no young men. The young men were either in the Viet Cong (insurgents) or in the Civil Guard allied with the Americans.
Salamone questioned the loyalty of the Civil Guard members he worked with. "They tried to play both sides. They didn't know when we were going to stay or pull out," he said. And the Americans did pull out, about 10 years later. "I hope it doesn't go on this long in Iraq," said Salamone.
Salamone wrote "after action" reports for his chain of command, and expressed that Ho Chi Minh was primarily a revolutionary nationalist, and secondarily a communist. Ho Chi Minh wanted all foreigners out of Vietnam. "He kicked out the Japanese, the Chinese, the French...now it's the Americans!" he said. In his reports, he wrote that, "Ho Chi Minh was really the popular figure, in both the North and the South--not President [Ngo Dinh] Diem."
These reports went up the line, but "Only God knows what happened to them. Perhaps our military leaders needed to convince our politicians that we had to do something drastic before we lost the war. We left this war too late and lost 58,000 men and women. It's a shame to go look at that [Vietnam Veterans Memorial] wall and see names of my classmates, soldiers in my unit lost in Vietnam, my roommate from West Point. It's just sad. We might have been able to save a lot of them, if only our politicians had pulled us out much earlier," said Salamone.
During the question-and-answer period, some attendees compared the Vietnam War to the war in Iraq. "There are some similarities," said General Salamone. He expressed that the focus of America's military should not be on Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Instead, he said, America should be focused on capturing Osama Bin Laden, who planned an attack on the U.S.A., destroyed the Twin Towers and killed approximately 3,000 people. "This should have been our military priority," he said.
Lee Leffler, "The Newsletter Gal" |
