Filmmaker Steven Spielberg is 80 years old today.

At a news conference, President Richard Nixon said that the
Vietnam War is coming to a “conclusion as a result of the
plan that we have instituted.”

Nixon had announced at a conference in Midway in June that
the United States would be following a new program he termed “Vietnamization.”

The first Medal of Honor awarded to a U.S. serviceman for
action in Vietnam was presented to Capt. Roger Donlon
of Saugerties, New York, for his heroic action earlier in
the year.

Captain Donlon and his Special Forces team were manning
Camp Nam Dong, a mountain outpost near the borders of
Laos and North Vietnam.

He was wounded three more times, but he continued fighting,
manning a mortar, throwing grenades at the enemy, and
refusing medical attention.

President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded Captain Roger
Donlon the Medal of Honor.

 
CARLATA BRADLEY

A Russian nuclear submarine sank to the bottom of the Barents
Sea on August 12, 2000; all 118 crew members are later found
dead. The exact cause of the disaster remains unknown.

Kursk left port on August 10 to take part in war games with the
Russian military. Russian ships, planes and submarines met
up in the Barents Sea, which is above the Arctic Circle, to
practice military maneuvers.

A battalion of the U.S. 9th Infantry Division left Saigon in the
initial withdrawal of U.S. troops. The 814 soldiers were the
first of 25,000 troops that were withdrawn in the first stage
of the U.S. disengagement from the Vietnam War.

There would be 14 more increments in the withdrawal, but
the last U.S. troops did not leave until after the Paris Peace
Accords were signed in January 1973.