South Vietnam Military Postal Rates in 1972

This cover has several aspects that set it apart from typical ARVN training covers of the period.

It was sent by a soldier training at the Thu Duc Infantry School (KBC 4100) in 1972 on a piece of United Nations stationery. He was in the 5th class of 1972 (Khoa 5/72). I am guessing that TBTX is an abbreviation for "Tham Bao Thien Xa" or Recon Unit Sharpshooter. Tell me if you think I am completely off the mark.

Despite the western (or at least American) style lines in the upper left corner for a return address, the sender created a triangle in the lower left corner typical of Vietnamese military correspondence.

The stamp, a coil version of the King Quang Trung stamp (Scott 411a) pays a 6d rate from a military personnel to a civilian address. A Quan Buu machine postmark cancels the stamp.


The sender wanted to make sure the return correspondence was properly addressed, so inside he drew up what the envelope should look like, including the addition of 10d postage.

Based on this cover, postage rates in August 1972 were 6d from military personnel and 10d sent to military personnel. The 10d rate is common, but I don't recall seeing a 6d rate. I need to dig through my covers to see if I have others I have forgotten about. Or of course the sender might have just gotten away with using a cheaper stamp.

Jim G. Lucas - Journalist

A 25-year reporter for Scripps-Howard as a Washington and foreign correspondent, Jim Griffing Lucas won the Pulitzer prize for journalism in 1954. He was selected for Ernie Pyle awards during the Korean War in 1953, and the Vietnam War in 1964. No stranger to adventure, he was a member of Admiral Richard E. Byrd's 1947 Expedition to the South Pole. Mr. Lucas was buried in Oklahoma in 1970 and honored in his hometown of Checotah with the library named in his honor.

This cover was sent from Hanoi on 12 May 1954 by Jim Lucas as a member of the "Camp de Presse". Presumably Lucas was reporting on the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. The French had fallen to Vo Nguyen Giap's forces less than a week before this cover was posted.

The recipient, Clark H. Getts, was a public relations counsel and booking agent.

National Police Training Center

Sent in 1960, this cover contains a love letter from a woman in Khanh Hoi to her boyfriend at the National Police Training Center in Vung Tau.

The Rach Dua training center, under Colonel Nguyen Van Be trained police (Canh Sat Quoc Gia), undercover police and youth member forces.

Garde Nationale Thai Binh

This cover sent in 1952 by a sergeant, "Le Commandant" of the Thai Binh, National Guard ("Garde Nationale") Nord-Vietnam. Thai Binh is located about 20 miles from the Gulf of Tonkin and not far from the Red River, Southeast of Hanoi.

The cover is from a group of covers sent to a language institute in Paris that I picked up at the Washington 2006 show.

 

NVN Military Stamp Wanted on Cover

I am looking for a copy of the brown "invalids on water wheel" North Vietnamese military stamp postally used on cover with a clear cancel. Ideally it will be used around the time the stamp was issued, but anything before April 30, 1975 would be okay. Please contact me if you have one to sell or trade.

Very Early BDQ (Ranger) Cover

The South Vietnamese Ranger organization (Biet Dong Quan) was officially formed in July 1960. The depicted cover is the earliest Biet Dong Quan cover known to me. It was sent on Sept 21st, 1960 to a sergeant on the training staff of the Ranger Training Center (Huan Luyen) in Dong De, Nha Trang.

The Thu Duc registry label and clear postmark make this a nice cover from a philatelic standpoint as well.

Letter from Major in the VNAF

This cover was sent in November, 1974 by Tran Thanh Tung, a Major in the Vietnamese Air Force (VNAF) 3rd Division stationed in Bien Hoa approx 15 miles north of Saigon. The air base was served by KBC 3004.

Bien Hoa was also known as Air Base 23. The number "2" indicated that it was the second air base to be established for military use. The first was in Nha Trang. Bien Hoa became the VNAF logistic support base on 1 Jun 1955. The number "3" indicated the military region.

Typically, the Vietnamese Air Force was referred to as "Khong Quan", but the return address uses the term "Khong Luc."

"V.N.C.H." is Viet Nam Cong Hoa.

"DT" or "dien thoi" is telephone number.

"Hoa Tieu" means pilot - perhaps "Lead Pilot"?

The enclosure is in regards to purchasing a used Fiat from an older gentleman on Pasteur Street in Saigon.

Viet Minh Commem Covers on eBay

Covers from the First Meeting of the Vietnam General Assembly in 1946 are being offered on eBay by a French seller (click here). The interesting thing to me is that he has a stack of these things.

Also offered are unaddressed covers with the Viet Minh cathedral stamps affixed and canceled, as well covers with the 1953 Telecommunications Festival stamps with red cachet (Richard Aspnes lists the cachet in both red and blue on his Commemorative Markings CD). Again, small stacks of these covers are shown, but only a single set seems to be offered.

I'm not planning on bidding, but I contacted the seller out of curiosity to see whether he accepts PayPal and ships to the United States. His reply, "Hello, bonjour. I don't accept paypal, but you can pay me with dollars and shit off paper in envelope - merci. BRUNO."

If you've been looking to pick up examples of these covers, the opening bid price is right (9 euros) although dealing with the seller might be interesting. Let me know how it goes.

Fake Postmarks on NVN Millitary Covers

Be alert to bogus postmarks on North Vietnamese military covers. This post illustrates two examples with different levels of sophistication.

I obtained these covers at different times from a trading partner in Hanoi, whom I don't think realized that these were bogus. We exchanged want lists and acquired items for each other. I am convinced that these and other covers were custom made for me from a faker in North Vietnam.

In other words, my trading partner asked a stamp dealer for a particular stamp on cover and was told to check back in a couple of weeks at which point, lo and behold, the seller had come up with the stamp on cover. These particular stamps are not at all easy to locate used on cover, however they are readily available in mint condition. The seller could remove the stamp from a genuine cover or create one from scratch.

The first cover is a simple fake featuring the orange military stamp depicting a soldier with outstretched rifle. It is meant to be an adversity envelope made from a piece of notebook paper due to the lack of paper during the war. In reality, the paper is clean and nice smelling(!) so definitely not genuine. More obvious is the cancel, which looks to be hand drawn with a pen. It is not quite round and you can see the individual pen strokes.
The second cover is "better" in that the faker went to the trouble of soaking the original stamp and postmark off the cover. Unfortunately, he got a bit zealous with the water, leaving water stains and smearing the ink in the address. But we've all seen Vietnamese military covers in much worse condition, so this is not an immediate tip off.

The benefit of this approach is the faker has genuine postmarks on the reverse to lend credence to the cover

The postmarks on the front of the cover were then applied, again apparently drawn with a pen. At least the forger knew enough to make these an earlier date from the receiving marks on the back. But how many NVN military covers apply an additional cancel to the decorative cachet?


I have a dozen or so examples of fake covers like these, so let me know if you are interested in seeing more (and yes, my trading partner provided enough genuine material to make it worthwhile maintaining the relationship).

Some of the fakes have hand-stamped postmarks making them more difficult to identify, and some appear to have been made by another person with a different "style", but all have the same pleasant smell (Vietnamese military covers don't smell nice!) and all have a random splash of something on them that glows brightly under black light that leads me to conclude that they all came from the same source.

Vietnamese Recon Unit Cover

Here is a cover sent in April 1966 from a member of a Vietnamese Recon company (dai doi tham Bao) operating from KBC 3338. Based on the enclosed letter, the sender is writing to a girl in Saigon whose address he got from a buddy in his unit. This is his first attempt to befriend her.

"Tien tuyen" in the upper right corner is a term used to indicate the sender is in the front line, and "hau phuong"means in the rear or city, so "tien tuyen goi hau phuong" literally means "front line to the rear."

Thanks to Vinh Nguyen for the translation.

Korean Forces in Vietnam

I am planning on writing an article on military mail from Republic of Korea (ROK) forces operating in Vietnam. My goal is to provide a basic reference for identifying this material, showing how to determine the military unit, approximate usage date and that a cover originated in Vietnam.

I have reached out to the members of the Korea Philately Society for assistance and have gleaned some information from several web sites and publications, including Allied Participation in Vietnam, published by the Department of the Army.

If you have information on this topic, please contact me.

Click here to view the ROK military covers on my web site.

River Assault Group to Phu Quoc Prison

River Assault Group 23 (GD23XP in Vietnamese) was stationed in Vinh Long province in the delta. The cover was sent from patrol boat 1533, according to the letter's contents.

The cover received a nice Hai Quan Viet-Nam (Vietnamese Navy) military mail hand stamp on sending from KBC 3323.

The cover was also hand stamped with a military police insignia, depicting crossed pistols over a star. The recipient was a military policeman from Company D7 on Phu Quoc Island, served by KBC 4286.

The handwritten note at the bottom of the envelope, “thu 0 nguoi nhan xin hoan lai kbc 3323," means “unknown recipient, return to sender”. The MP insignia handstamp was probably applied as part of the return routing.

USARPACINTS

USARPACINTS stands for United States Army Pacific Intelligence School, which was located in Okinawa and serviced by APO 331. Below are two covers, one sent to a Vietnamese Lieutenant training at the school, the other from a Vietnamese Lieutenant to Saigon.



Below are two citations that comprise the extent of the information I have been able to locate online about the school.

One unique feature of the Pacific theater was the existence of the U.S. Army Intelligence School, Pacific. Unlike other Army intelligence training facilities overseas, the Pacific intelligence school, set up on Okinawa in 1958, trained foreigners, not Americans. The students from seven different countries bordering the Pacific basin took courses in combat intelligence and counterintelligence techniques until the reversion of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty brought operations to a halt in 1975.
http://www.army.mil/CMH/books/Lineage/mi/ch8.htm

More tantalizing are the following excerpts that school was linked to "Project X" and potentially the Phoenix program.

Until the early 1980s, the U.S. military ran an intelligence training program in Latin America and elsewhere using manuals that taught foreign officers to offer bounties for captured or killed insurgents, spy on nonviolent political opponents, kidnap rebels' family members and blackmail unwanted informants, according to recently declassified Army and Defense Department documents.

The manuals, known as Project X, were written by U.S. Army experts starting in 1965 for use by the U.S.-funded Joint Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program. Portrayed by the Army as instructional materials to help friendly governments fight Cuban- and Soviet-inspired rebels in Latin America, the manuals were "in fact a guide for the conduct of clandestine operations" against domestic political adversaries including peaceful ones, according to a panel of Army experts that later reviewed some of the material.

Army officials were unable to provide details about the intelligence assistance program, such as the date it ended or the countries where it operated. It's also impossible to tell how the use of the training manuals may have influenced the actions of foreign militaries.

The intelligence assistance program was first used in 1965 to train Vietnamese and other foreign nationals at the then-U.S. Army Pacific Intelligence School on Okinawa, Japan, and also operated in Iran in the late 1970s, according to the records.

"This school is in an excellent position to meet requests for intelligence training submitted by" military advisers and attaches in "the Pacific and Southeast Asia area," a 1965 informational brochure on the program states.

One counterintelligence official told Army officials in 1991 that she believed the program might be linked to the Phoenix program, a U.S. military and CIA undertaking that resulted in the assassinations of thousands of South Vietnamese suspected of disloyalty. Some of the Project X materials appeared to be the same as the Phoenix lessons, and the Army intelligence school was teaching a course on the Phoenix program at the same time that the Project X manuals were being written, she noted.

During the mid-1970s, after the intelligence school moved to Fort Huachuca, Ariz., the school "began exporting, on request, Project X material to MAAGs, MILGROUPS, defense attaches, and other U.S. military agencies participating in the U.S. advisory-training effort in friendly foreign countries," according to a short history of the program prepared in 1991.

The program's history is difficult to trace in part because Defense Department intelligence oversight officials, after seeing what the manuals contained in 1991, ordered that the original documentation be destroyed. The ostensible reason was so the materials could never be used again.
http://www.soaw.org/new/newswire_detail.php?id=996

SMA Baby Formula Flyer with Quan Buu Postmark

Here is an unusual item - a promotional flyer for baby formula from the "SMA" company. It was sent to Doctor Mai Le Hiep at the Cong Hoa hospital in 1965. This was the largest military hospital in Saigon, the other military hospital in the city was the operated by the Navy along the Saigon River.

The military hospital had its own KBC number (I'll try and find it), but the sender apparently didn't know the number so it was addressed directly to the hospital and placed in the civilian mail on April 3rd. A meter paid 0.80d postage. The cover was transfered to the military post office for delivery and received the military "Quan Buu" postmark on April 5th.

ARVN Photo Postcard

The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) issued a number of different postcards for use by troops. Many had civilian scenes, such as women buying fruit at a market on the picture side. The reverse typically had a military insignia or printed KBC number.

This postcard has a distinctly military theme with text reading, "Practice well, study well to build strong armed forces." It was sent from KBC 4918, the military boot camp in Nha Trang. According to the contents, the sender was drafted on 22 May 1965, at age 30. He received a stipend for the difference in pay between his regular job as his duty as a Private in the Army.