US Marine Corps in Vietnam

You will be accessing what is probably the most complete set of records on the US Marine Corps in Vietnam. As of right now, I am still building and repairing the pages you will be using, but I believe they are about 95% complete. What you will find here are the records that were digitized by the Gray Research Center at the Marine Corps University at Quantico Virginia, hosted and offered free of charge by Texas Tech Universities Virtual Vietnam Archive.

The scanning was undertaken probably close to 8-10 years ago, and therefore were scanned as bitmap .tif files (pixels either black or white), which in some cases with lighter original documents, caused parts of some documents to be completely unreadable. As of now these are the best copies available online. I have found at least two locations other than TTU on the internet that are charging monthly fees to access these very same documents. If you look at their finding aid, it is the same as the one used by TTU. They (NOT TTU, but the other sites) appear to have acquired the CD's from the Gray Research center, and are charging you to access them.

The reason for developing this set of pages, is that there seems to be no direct link between the titles in the finding aid and the search results at the TTU website. I started this project so this valuable resource would be a bit more user friendly, by making the documents available by unit, not some cryptic search routine. Through this set of web pages, you will have access to over 1,000,000 (yes, that is 1 million not a typing error!) pages served in 12,000+ documents stored at the Texas Tech Virtual Vietnam Archive.

Using the archives

When you access the pages presented on this site, you are actually downloading them from TTU's Virtual Vietnam Archive. They have asked me to make a few changes in my links, so when you select a document, you will be initially taken to the TTU site, where the document title you selected will be displayed in their search results page. Simply select the PDF file and it will open. Use your back button on your browser to back to previous page from the search results page.

If you are going to download any of these documents it is very important that you use the 'Save As' choice, and type an appropriate name, otherwise you will simply get a document with a large number for a name!

These links are being updated, so if TTU moves the original documnets to a different server, the links will still be valid. There will be differences in how document dates appear, and not all pages have been edited to give them a consistent look yet. Throughout the links the document description 'Command Chronology' is used very freely, and some documents may not match the title directly. So far with the exception of a couple unit pages, the document description is taken directly from the name in the finding aid. The order of the unit links are taken directly from the finding aid based on original CD's.

For anyone wishing to truly find out what the Marines of Vietnam experienced, and accomplished, you will find truly endless days of reading. In time I hope to add maps, (also from the Virutal Vietnam Archive) that have been converted to GeoPDF format. This will allow the reader to access these maps, and read the coordinates referenced in the documents as the curser moves across the PDF file. - Happy reading - Ray Backstrom - MSgt USMC (Retired)

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