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Maps of Southeast Asia in the 1960s When I was at the Air War College in 1979-1980, I wrote a 500-page historical manuscript called Crickets on a Steel Tiger: The Interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail 1966-1968. Although the manuscript was rather pedantically written, I had extensively researched many original documents from that time. The 3 main chapters had more than 100 footnotes each. Upon graduation, I was awarded the Air Force Historical Society's 1980 Award for the best aerospace report of major historical interest. In 1981 or so, the manuscript was moved toward publication, and the graphics department at the Air University put together more than 30 maps I had called for to illustrate the document. When Crickets was submitted to Headquarters USAF for a Security and Policy Review, they balked at the number of classified references. I previously had gotten the entire manuscript declassified, but that paperwork had disappeared at the Air War College. All I got to show for my work was my declassified drafts and a memorable comment from someone at the USAF Office of History. He said something like I had gotten in over my head with some comments on strategy, tactics, force structure, etc., but the manuscript was probably the best thing the Air Force would ever see on the day-to-day life of Forward Air Controllers. Anyway, I made Xerox copies of the maps just so I could keep track of what was supposed to go where. This week I came across those copies and decided to scan 24 of them to include on this cite. I've copied some paragraphs from Crickets to tell you what the maps were to illustrate, so I think this will be an extremely useful section for those of you who want to better understand air operations against the Steel Tiger area of Central Laos up until the bombing halt of North Vietnam on 1 November 1968. The link below takes you to the photo album with the maps. Some are a bit hard to read. I've sized them down to under 300K with some image files about half that size. |