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)
“Come Vitus, are we men, or are we children? Of what use are all these melodramatic gestures? You say your soul was killed, and that you have been dead all these years. And what of me? Did we not both die here in Marmaros fifteen years ago? Are we any the less victims of the war than those whose bodies were torn asunder? Are we not both the living dead?”
—Peter Ruric, and Edgar G. Ulmer. Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff)
“A clergyman, again, can hardly ever allow himself to look facts fairly in the face. It is his profession to support one side; it is impossible, therefore, for him to make an unbiased examination of the other.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“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)