Vietnam War Support and Operations
The year 1964 brought the ship still closer to actual "hot war" operations. From 16 July to 2 August 1964, Whippoorwill joined a barrier patrol established in the South China Sea off the coast of South Vietnam to assist the South Vietnamese Navy in preventing water-borne infiltrators and logistics from North Vietnam from reaching the Viet Cong rebels in the south. During that phase of American involvement, the United States Navy's role remained essentially passive in nature. While American ships such as Whippoorwill stopped no craft themselves, they vectored South Vietnamese ships in on suspicious contacts.
Though the barrier patrols were dissolved on 2 August, and Whippoorwill resumed her familiar training schedule, events occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin that same day which increased American involvement in the Vietnam War and eventually brought Whippoorwill into intimate association with the war over the next six years. After nine months of normal U.S. 7th Fleet operations, the minesweeper returned to Vietnamese waters on 18 April 1965 as one of the American ships assigned to "Operation Market Time". That operation consisted of continuous patrols along South Vietnamese coasts in an effort to interdict the increasing volume of arms and supplies being smuggled from the north into South Vietnam in support of Viet Cong guerrillas.
Read more about this topic: USS Whippoorwill (AMS-207)
Famous quotes containing the words vietnam war, vietnam, war, support and/or operations:
“No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.”
—Richard M. Nixon (b. 1913)
“I was proud of the youths who opposed the war in Vietnam because they were my babies.”
—Benjamin Spock (b. 1903)
“The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees. ... Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain ...”
—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)
“She isn’t harassed. She’s busy, and it’s glamorous to be busy. Indeed, the image of the on- the-go working mother is very like the glamorous image of the busy top executive. The scarcity of the working mother’s time seems like the scarcity of the top executive’s time.... The analogy between the busy working mother and the busy top executive obscures the wage gap between them at work, and their different amounts of backstage support at home.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)
“There is a patent office at the seat of government of the universe, whose managers are as much interested in the dispersion of seeds as anybody at Washington can be, and their operations are infinitely more extensive and regular.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)