At a news conference in 1969, President Richard Nixon said 
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.”

Under the provisions of this program, South Vietnamese forces
would be built up so they could assume more responsibility
for the war. As the South Vietnamese forces became more
capable, U.S. forces would be withdrawn from combat and
returned to the United States.

Near the end of a weeklong national salute to Americans who
served in the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial 
was dedicated in Washington, D.C. after a march to its site
by thousands of veterans of the conflict.

CARLATA BRADLEY

Before Wheel of Fortune, Pat Sajak
served as a disc jockey during the
Vietnam War in Vietnam on the
Armed Forces Radio.

TV game show host Patrick Leonard
Sajak is 78 today.

CARALATA BRADLEY

Cecil Blount DeMille (August 12, 1881 – January 21, 1959)

DeMille is acknowledged as a founding father of American
cinema and the most commercially successful producer-
director in film history.

"Let Valor Not Fail" by Dan Nance, Battle of Hamburger
Hill, 1969. 

Hamburger Hill was the scene of an intense and controversial
battle during the Vietnam War. Known to military planners as
Hill 937 (a reference to its height in meters), the solitary peak
is located in the dense jungles of the A Shau Valley of Vietnam,
about a mile from the border with Laos.

The Vietnamese referred to the hill as Dong Ap Bia (or Ap Bia
Mountain, “the mountain of the crouching beast”). Though the
hill had no real tactical significance, taking the hill was part of
Operation Apache Snow, a U.S. military sweep of the A Shau
Valley. The purpose of the operation was to cut off North
Vietnamese infiltration from Laos and enemy threats to the
cities of Hue and Da Nang.