Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Finally, another post!

It's been a long time since I've posted anything in the blog.

I don't really have a lot to say for this entry, but I wanted to just post something.

I should have posted last week for Talk Like a Pirate Day. I should have posted during the eclipse. Oh well, at least I'm posting tonight.

Over the past nine days, PBS has been airing episodes of Ken Burns' The Vietnam War. It's extremely well done, like his other projects. It covers the war from numerous angles, including the viewpoints of the South Vietnamese, North Vietnamese, and Viet Cong. This is a radio blog, so I won't go deeper into describing the documentary. But there have been two noteworthy radio-related bits so far: Ho Chi Minh started the Tet Offensive by broadcasting a poem over Radio Hanoi as a signal for the insurgency to start (FYI, I looked this up and Wikipedia says General Võ Nguyên Giáp read "The Big Victory, The Great Task," so maybe I didn't get this correct or maybe Wikipedia was wrong, I'm not sure). Also during the offensive, in Saigon, the undercover NVA troops and VC guerrillas attempted to overrun a radio station (presumably a local station), but they were fought off while the station just played waltzes and Beatles songs.

Probably most everyone who reads these words either knows about or has heard recordings of Radio First Termer, the Vietnam pirate operated by an AFN broadcaster. I wonder how many other less-conspicuous pirates operated in Vietnam?