MEMOIRS OF A SOVIET ANTI-AIRCRAFT GUNNER
It's been more than 30 years since the guns went silent in Vietnam. The intervention launched by the United States under the slogan of fighting "communist aggression" in Asia ended in complete failure for them. Across the ocean, a lot of memoirs of participants in the Vietnam War were published, and films by outstanding American directors told about it. The changes experienced by our country in the 1980s and 1990s made it possible to remove the "taboo" over one aspect of the history of this war - the participation of Soviet soldiers in the air defense of Vietnam. Today we offer our readers the memoirs of Guards senior sergeant of the Reserve Nikolai Nikolaevich Kolesnik, who was in Vietnam from July 1965 to March 1966, was a platoon commander in the Vietnamese People's Army (VNA).
In February 1965, a Soviet government delegation headed by Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR A. N. Kosygin visited Hanoi and signed an intergovernmental agreement on military assistance to Vietnam. And in early March, our 3rd division of the 236th Guards Kirov-Putilov Anti-aircraft Missile Regiment withdrew from its permanent position near the village of Korostovo, Krasnogorsk district and marched to Dmitrov district to perform training tasks: radar tracking of real targets, imitation of missile launches, protection of anti-aircraft missile systems C-75.
The division was assigned a battery of 57 mm anti-aircraft guns (the same ones that were also in service with the anti-aircraft gunners of the Vietnamese People's Army) to practice the techniques of covering the SAMs with anti-aircraft guns. Of course, we guessed that we were not mastering anti-aircraft guns by chance - the Vietnam War forced us to look for new methods of combat and effective protection of air defense systems from enemy air strikes.
At the end of the exercise, the division commander-a front-line soldier, Guards Major Ivan Konstantinovich Proskurnin-together with our s ...
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