Hist - HanoiH 07

George Hart, Boston, remembers Hanoi Hannah's broadcasts that mentioned specific GI's by name and said their girlfriends were sleeping with someone else back home. A few days later he remembers the soldiers named got Dear John letters from home confirming what Hannah had said."

Just as most vets remember a specific Radio Hanoi broadcast above all others, I do too. But it wasn't by Hanoi Hannah. It was broadcast by her male counterpart, Nguyen Van Tung, who sounded like an actor Peter Lorre, the popular villain of the Hollywood screen. It was also the first Hanoi Radio broadcast I ever heard, four week after arriving in Vietnam. It was recorded late one night in An Lac, a US Special Forces Camp in the Central Highlands. I still have the tape twenty-five years.

"You are new here and we don't expect you to believe us when we tell you just how bad it is. But just a sample of what you can expect was written up by a bona fide American correspondent for the New York Times on June 20th about some fighting less than fifty miles from Saigon. Zone D is all they said it was. It is a flat, scary jungle, thick with scrub trees and tall grass...hot and wet with intermittent rain and strong tropical dragon flies and Viet Cong sniper bullets." (Nguyen Van Tun, Radio Hanoi, 30 June 1965)

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Comments by George Hart