The Mission I propose an online digital archive to capture and preserve history of the air war over Southeast Asia from 1961 to 1975. The generation of flyers who fought over the skies of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand possess many artifacts from their war. As the Vietnam generation ages, these artifacts and the stories of the warriors, missions, and machines may soon be lost to history. Artifacts that may be of interest may include:

  • Photos–of people, planes, targets–especially pre- and post- strike photos
  • Maps–mission maps used in the cockpits by the crews may indicate the planning detail available to crews at the time, that defensive threats anticipated at the time
  • Audio–many crews flew combat missions with small cassette recorders spliced into their intercom system. The recordings were used to reconstruct missions for debriefing purposes. The stress, confusion, and rapid pace of air combat is captured on these tapes.
  • Video–gun camera film of bomb runs or air-to-air engagements were limited to short film strips, but could be of great use if available and able for digitization
  • Other Resources–kneeboard cards, intelligence briefings, medal citations tied to missions might add depth to the project
  • Personal narratives–the glue that will pull these artifacts together, explain, and add context.

Combat aircrew from Southeast Asia are the most important audience because they are the ones with the artifacts stuffed under the bed or on the top shelf of the spare bedroom closet. The good news is that there are several very active fraternal organizations with magazines and websites that can provide a means to get the word out. Key associations include:  

  • The Red River Fighter Pilots Association (the River Rats–an associaltion of combat aircrews founded during the Vietnam War) http://www.river-rats.org/  The River Rats have the added luxury of a list-serve E-mail update. 
  • Vietnam POWs (NAMPOWS) http://www.nampows.org/
  • Association of Old Crows (Electronic warfare officer association)
    https://www.myaoc.org/eweb/StartPage.aspx
  • The Order of Daedalians is a fraternal order of military pilots stretching back to the First World War http://www.daedalians.org/index.htm

A wider audience would expand to those interested in learning more about the air war over Vietnam, including family members, younger generations of air warriors, enthusiasts, historians and amateur historians. Dissemination could be accomplished through links from military history websites, the Air Force Association, Naval Institute, and Association of the US Army, and the Marine Corps Gazette.   Why Digital? The idea to “go digital” started from the Vietnam-era cockpit audio cassette. The cockpit audio is a potentially great historical resource that can mesh nicely with the web. These recordings are important because they capture intercom and radio transmissions over the course of a mission. Tapes were used by aircrews to reconstruct their missions with intelligence experts, urgent radio calls calling out enemy Migs, dodging SAMs, trying to reach shot down crews have the potential to provide a window on air combat over Vietnam. Many Vietnam era pilots are likely to still have tapes in their war memorabilia, and this generation may be interested in passing this glimpse into air combat of their era on to other generations. If we wait, the tape players may become harder and harder to find, and the context and explanations behind the tapes will be lost with this generation. On a positive note, with software accompanying most sound cards today, digital audio is fairly easy to capture.   Building around the audio element, there are many artifacts from combat flying that may be of interest. Combat maps used in battle lend themselves to digitization and sharing. Maps can explain what the terrain was like, how the crews navigated, how far they had to fly to get to their targets, where the defenses were, how severe the defenses were, and where the targets were–providing an element of rich detail.  Vietnam-era combat had limited use of gun-camera footage, several types of combat aircraft were equipped with small movie cameras designed to film bomb runs or when air-to-air weapons were fired. These 16mm films, although of limited field of view (small field of view, often through the aircraft bombsite) has potential to add detail.  

Additional mission materials and artifacts: maps, kneeboard cards, and citations can add valuable details to history of a combat mission. Maps may present a problem to digitize, requiring large format scanners or a stitch program. The other downside of large maps is the large file size. None of these problems are insurmountable.   Narratives are the necessary fill-in. Personal narratives are desired to provide the context and meaning to historical artifacts. What Else is Out There?There are a few scattered elements of air combat artifacts on the web. Here’s a rundown of several prominent elements: §         http://www.acig.org/ Air Combat Information Group (ACIG) ACIG has a robust discussion forum on the state of air combat today and the history of Air Combat. Discussion threads in ACIG’s forum cover almost any topic under the sun on aircraft, tactics, and air battles around the world. Although the discussion forums are a great slource of info, it’s mostly commentary from secondary sources

§         There are five combat missions recorded on Wikisource. Wikisource is a Wikimedia project to build a free, wiki library of source texts, along with translations into any language and other supporting materials. It is located at Wikisource.org.

§         This article is a great example of what’s possible. This is a possible model for my proposal. Why not go with Wikipedia? Focus. Wikipedia may be all things to all people, a focused site with a more narrow mission has an advantage in drawing the right contributors. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Wild_Weasel_mission_5_November_1967

§         F-16 net: This is a site that tracks F-16 news, provides a forum, and interesting F-16 facts. It’s a great resource, fairly open through a user forum area, but dates mainly after the Vietnam era. http://www.f-16.net/“Closed” systems: There are many sites with primary resources on air combat. Some are professionally produced sites, the vast majority are individual enthusiast run sites dedicated to covering one particular type of aircraft or unit. There is value in the resources they provide, but the key limitation of these sites is that they are closed to wider contributions because they are run by webmasters with limited time, reach, or mission/interest.§         History Channel “Dogfight Series”: The History channel has a few online resources supporting its Dogfight series, but resources are very thin without potential to grow or user  http://www.history.com/minisite.do?content_type=Minisite_Video_Clips&content_type_id=52092&display_order=4&mini_id=51833 

§         Craig Baker’s F-105 site http://www.burrusspta.org/thud.html A great site with audio and video devoted to F-105 action in
Vietnam.

§         Unit web  sites. There are many amateur historian-created unit web sites. These can be of great interest, but limited in scope due to the small unit focus. Example: http://www.174ahc.org/ 

 Why this idea fits a need–there aren’t any sites that fill the following niche:

  • Open-ended and collaborative
  • Intended to collect primary sources
  • Focused on air combat

Mediawiki appears to be the most popular wiki engine as indicated by this graph of possible wiki engines: http://www.google.com/trends?q=TWiki%2C+MoinMoin%2C+PmWiki%2C+MediaWiki%2C+DokuWiki&ctab=0&geo=all&date=allOne approach is that there’s safety in numbers, and with a lot of mediawikis around, the possibility of more familiarity among potential contributors is a strong selling point. . Here is a table of features; Mediawiki seems to have many favorable attributes although there are quite a few that will take some research to understand. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_wiki_software Making the Idea a Reality 

Phase I: Feasibility of support The first phase is to find an organization willing to sponsor the project. Sponsorship can include server space, monetary support to purchase server space, and IT expertise to help build and support the project. The organizations listed in section 1, “the mission are a strong bet for support. The River Rats are the first and strongest bet for some support. They have a strong base of supporters and contributors, their sub-organization “the Air Warrior Courage Foundation seems like a strong bet for support of the project as we’re looking to preserve stories and primary source materials indicating courage in aerial warfare. Because the River Rats are a volunteer organization (and everyone has real jobs), monetary support seems most likely, but I will be on my own for the technology unless I get lucky and find another member of the organization that has time and expertise.  Phase 2: Selecting the software engine Downloading and trying a few of the front-running software engines seems to be the best approach. There’s a steep learning curve to negotiate here, but it seems that the best method is learning by doing when dealing with new software. I’d like to find a software engine that allows a template to be applied. Standard fields can provide a common basis for entries. Minimum fields are:

  • Date of
    Mission
  • Type aircraft
  • Positin in formation (lead/wingman/soo)
  • Other aircraft in the mission
  • Unit (squadron/Wing)
  • Location of action (geo-tag)
  • Takeoff base/landing base
  • Mission type
  • Narrative/description of the mission
  • Resources (cockpit video/audio/photos/maps/mission materials/other primary resources)

To attract contributors the wiki will have to have a few user-friendly attributes including:

  • Provide information or a service to digitize audio tapes and other mission materials
  • Allow for easy upload
  • Tie related artifacts together by mission, location, and time

Phase 3: taking the leap Building the engine, and template need to be followed by a few “seeder entries” to prime the pump. The game plan here will be to use contacts through the River Rats and other professional contacts (Pentagon, AF Association, etc) to populate a few missions in order to create an example for follow up entries. These initial entries will be collaborative between me and the contributor to get them looking right because follow on work will be participant driven.  

Phase 4: publicizing Once up and running with a few examples, publicizing the effort needs to follow. The invitation to see and contribute will initially focus on the core group of potential contributors (
Vietnam combat aircrew). These individuals are likely to be best able to contribute for the following reasons: most are retirement age and beyond (time available). Most will be tech-savvy (former combat crews accustomed to dealing with technical gear), many will want to share stories (“hanger-flying” among pilots is a time-honored tradition).  Phase 5: Sustain Once up and running, as contributors piling on, there’s the question of who will carry the  workload, how much time will be available, and what types of unanticipated conflicts/problems will crop up. Expanding server space and bandwidth are likely problem areas if the wiki succeeds; especially because audio, video, and graphics are likely to be large file sizes and demand lots of server space.