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Vietnamese surrender leaflets


Blu1989
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Hey everyone. I posted about these a while ago but they are just so unique that I thought they would be a good bring back to show. My dad picked these up when he was out on various patrols with the 7th Marine Regiment in Vietnam and would stuff them in his pocket. He amassed quite a few different ones but these ones were in the best shape to display and photograph. They have a lot of different imagery from the helicopters shooting at a village to various ARVN units posed with equipment to even an ARVN and VC defector practically hugging each other. I know there are a ton of different variants of these out there and many survived but some of these I haven't found duplicate images of anywhere, Anyway I hope you guys like them as much as I do.

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Thanks for sharing your father's bringback leaflets. I enjoyed looking at these. I think I have several in my paper goods folders but I don't recall seeing these before.

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Very Cool! Thanks for posting them. I suspect not at high survivability of these, likely made a substitute for toilet paper.

BKW

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Those are nice examples; especially since your father actually picked them up firsthand. There is a photo of them being packed for dropping in the book "The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia 1961-1973" which was written by Carl Berger for the Office of Air Force History.

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I served with Company A, 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, 525th MI Group in Vietnam 1969-1970. After 6 months of security duty I was assigned to the Combined Document Exploitation Center (CDEC) not far from the Tan Son Nhut Airbase. We would receive tons of captured VC/NVA paperwork from units in the field for translation and analysis. This type of material was common for us to see. I brought home a few as souvenirs, but have often wondered what happened to the hundreds of boxes of papers we stored after translation and processing. I suspect most of them were burned, but I do not know by whom. My "office" was the final copy division. We would receive the document along with its translation, and my job, as the ranking NCO and only enlisted guy in the office with college English behind me, was to proofread the translation, make grammatical corrections and write a cover sheet briefly explaining what was in the document. Our translators were all South Vietnamese girls (ages 19 to 30) who did a very good job for us. I had 2 girls working for me (one of whom we always suspected of being VC but that was never proven) who did the retyping after I made the needed corrections. The other girl, "Jo Jo," was even better at the English language than me, and she always had fun with me when she found something I had missed. Once processed, we would send translation copies back to the unit that sent the material to us to let them know what they had found, and on up the chain of command (525th to CICV then MACV) for any further action needed. Our information at the time was that many of these leaflets did produce some good results. The imagery was important on them as many VC recruits could not read (hard-core VC and NVA paid little attention to them). Thanks for posting them. They brought back some good memories for me. MHJ

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I served with Company A, 519th Military Intelligence Battalion, 525th MI Group in Vietnam 1969-1970. After 6 months of security duty I was assigned to the Combined Document Exploitation Center (CDEC) not far from the Tan Son Nhut Airbase. We would receive tons of captured VC/NVA paperwork from units in the field for translation and analysis. This type of material was common for us to see. I brought home a few as souvenirs, but have often wondered what happened to the hundreds of boxes of papers we stored after translation and processing. I suspect most of them were burned, but I do not know by whom. My "office" was the final copy division. We would receive the document along with its translation, and my job, as the ranking NCO and only enlisted guy in the office with college English behind me, was to proofread the translation, make grammatical corrections and write a cover sheet briefly explaining what was in the document. Our translators were all South Vietnamese girls (ages 19 to 30) who did a very good job for us. I had 2 girls working for me (one of whom we always suspected of being VC but that was never proven) who did the retyping after I made the needed corrections. The other girl, "Jo Jo," was even better at the English language than me, and she always had fun with me when she found something I had missed. Once processed, we would send translation copies back to the unit that sent the material to us to let them know what they had found, and on up the chain of command (525th to CICV then MACV) for any further action needed. Our information at the time was that many of these leaflets did produce some good results. The imagery was important on them as many VC recruits could not read (hard-core VC and NVA paid little attention to them). Thanks for posting them. They brought back some good memories for me. MHJ

 

 

I keep a "soft goods" binder in my Vietnam collection, and in that binder I have newspapers, propaganda documents from both sides, and so on. I have several 1968 Tet related propaganda documents from the Central Committee of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam along with their original translations which I am sure were done by units such as yours. The original translations are quite fragile and luckily there is also another translation with each. Unfortunately these were brought back by an unnamed "intelligence officer" so the attribution isn't specific enough for this forum, but I have met several other officers who did keep pretty significant personal collections of this material.

 

 

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I keep a "soft goods" binder in my Vietnam collection, and in that binder I have newspapers, propaganda documents from both sides, and so on. I have several 1968 Tet related propaganda documents from the Central Committee of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam along with their original translations which I am sure were done by units such as yours. The original translations are quite fragile and luckily there is also another translation with each. Unfortunately these were brought back by an unnamed "intelligence officer" so the attribution isn't specific enough for this forum, but I have met several other officers who did keep pretty significant personal collections of this material.

 

 

The1968 Tet Offensive is what put me in the Army. I was a sophomore in college, and watching the nightly news all summer that year showing the pounding our people were taking made me feel like I needed to do something to lend a hand in some way (not a popular thing to do back in those days). I talked to a local recruiter who told me that since I was reasonably fluent in German and was interested in Intelligence work I would be sent to Germany after basic training and AIT, followed by the "sign here" command. My Intel AIT training was taken at Fort Holabird, Maryland. All the courses were directed at Vietnam, so it was no surprise to me when my orders came down for service in SVN. Upon assignment to CDEC I was interviewed by the colonel commanding. I will never forget the dismay on his face when I told him my language background was German and not the Vietnamese he had been promised. That was the Army back then. I recently donated all of my Tet related material along with most of my other Vietnam souvenirs to our local museum. My sons said the stuff would be appreciated there by more people for a longer period than if I passed it to them, and they could take their kids and grandkids to see the material long after I was gone. Oh, I should mention that I did eventually get to Germany, but it took an awful lot of paperwork (Uncle Sam wanted me in Fort Polk for some reason). I spent the last 18 months of my enlistment in Heidelberg. Great times! MHJ

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  • 3 weeks later...

I know just about all of those leaflets. They are all ours, and from fairly early in the war.

Thank you for the insight Herb. I've been trying to find out how early these really are but with so many different variations and designs that were made it has been a challenge. Do you know about how early in the war these were made? My dad picked them up randomly during his tour in 1967 so I guess they would date earlier than that?

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