Vietnam
To be home ported at Long Beach, the destroyer returned to the United States in June 1964. On 20 August 1965 Mansfield again sailed westward for duty with the 7th Fleet. For the next 6 months she carried out screening and plane guard duties with fast carriers, and provided gunfire support for South Vietnamese, Australian, and American forces fighting in South Vietnam.
In June 1966, Mansfield was once again assigned Yokosuka Naval Base as her homeport, after which her deployment schedule repeatedly took her back to the South China Sea for operations off the coast of Vietnam. Excluding 2 weeks in September with TF 130 as an alternate recovery ship for Gemini XI and 2 weeks in late November as station ship at Hong Kong, she spent the remainder of 1966 off the Vietnamese coast in roles which ranged from blockade patrol in the I Corps area and the interdiction of junk and sampan traffic from the north into South Vietnam, to gunfire support south of Saigon. Adding air‑sea rescue to her services in 1967, she has continued to carry out similar missions in support of Allied operations in Vietnam from 1967 into 1969.
Read more about this topic: USS Mansfield (DD-728)
Famous quotes containing the word vietnam:
“I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.”
—Benjamin Spock (b. 1903)
“Above all, Vietnam was a war that asked everything of a few and nothing of most in America.”
—Myra MacPherson, U.S. author. Long Time Passing: Vietnam and the Haunted Generation, epilogue (1984)
“I told them I’m not going to let Vietnam go the way of China. I told them to go back and tell those generals in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson intends to stand by our word, but by God, I want something for my money. I want ‘em to get off their butts and get out in those jungles and whip hell out of some Communists. And then I want ‘em to leave me alone, because I’ve got some bigger things to do right here at home.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)