26 FLYPAST March 2018
KILLERS
VIETNAM MiGs
Above
An assortment of MiG-
21s. The fourth – a MiG-
21MF – is in dark green
camoufl age with no
tactical number.Right
‘Red 4023’ an early
MiG-21PF that arrived in
Vietnam in late 1965 from
the Soviet Union.O
utside of a small circle of
people in Vietnam, the
emotions and thoughts of
North Vietnamese pilots and
groundcrew who experienced the
Christmas bombings of 1972 –
America’s Linebacker II campaign- have never been revealed.
A series of contemporaneous
accounts have been collated,
especially the diaries of Le Thanh
Chon. Many of these do not
distinguish between the individual
or the group and all events were
recorded as a collective experience, so
the words ‘we’ or ‘I’ mean the same
thing. In the West this would be
unthinkable in most circumstances
but the culture of the people has to be
taken into account when the histories
of this period are read.
Surrender not an option
On December 18, 1972 comrade
Le Duc Tho, a special government
envoy, returned from negotiations