Ho Chi Minh trail past and present, hundreds of present day photos of the Ho Chi Minh Trail | Laos GPS Map

Thanks,,
A little piece of history,,
I'll share will guys that walked that road..

great piece of history alot of good photos

I always wondered about the drop tanks - and how often they get dropped and where they end up.

Wow what a story about the history about the war "when the war is over" and the stuff left behind. This sounds like a movie to me?

it still looks like a very scary place with all of that ordnance laying around

They are still finding stuff like that all over Russia and Eastern Europe and Finland.

for that matter it isn't unusual to still be finding leftover ordnance in most of Europe from the world wars

Everybody involved in keeping troops in Afghanistan should be required to view those photos. And then given a dope slap for not learning history, or having the hubris to think they are any different or smarter than past decision makers.

Good trip back in time, was my time as I graduated in 1969, and a little while later @ Ft. Jackson S.C. tank hill, many memories.
A little background music
Simon and Garfunkel - The Sound Of Silence (bombing run)/The Vietnam War - YouTube

I lived in an area of Washington DC called Spring Valley, and ordinance was found pretty regularly, every few years.

Chemical ordinance was found there also, which is kind of scary.

We bombed the trail day and night for several years. Lost a lot of aircraft and a lot of people. Very few of our guys ever came home from Laos. So when you see those names on the flight card, those guys were probably dead soon after that.
The only airman that I personally knew who returned from a Laotian shoot down was captured by the North Vietnamese regulars who were guarding the trail. He got shot down near Chepone. They took him to Hanoi and later he came home.
So when I say 'been shot at and missed, been crapped on and hit' some of the shots were fired on the trail.

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

Such a long time ago..... a place I do not care to set foot on again.

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A closed mouth gathers no foot

A friend of mine had somewhat of a different perspective. He was a gunner on an AC130 Hercules, and it was always at night. Their 40mm Bofors and 20mm cannons made the landscape there a bit more dangerous for folks in the area.

My old boss who I mentioned metal detected Civil War sites did it a lot around DC. The US buckle that he wore came from there.

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NRA LIFE MEMBER

It's nice to see real people living among the old relics from the war, especially in the open sunshine. To me it was a dark, foreboding place where we knew the enemy was creeping up on us and we were shooting at ghosts, just every once in a while happening to hit something important. Not enough to stem the tide.