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Updated Sunday 15 May, 2011 12:18 PM |
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This Day in Alternate History Blog
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Hanoi Horror
Before any passengers can disembark, however, a powerful bomb explodes, igniting the aircraft's engines and incinerating the plane in an explosion whose resultant fireball is visible for miles. It will latter be determined by forensic examiners that the bomb had employed military-grade explosive, giving rise to a variety of conspiracy theories spanning the political spectrum. Those theories are not quashed by the immediate attempt by Al Qaeda to take responsibility for the attack, because several other terrorist groups, including Islamic Jihad and Indonesia's Tamil Tigers, will also boast of being behind it. Only in 2018 will it be learned that a previously unknown radical South Vietnamese group had planned and carried out the bombing with the intent of derailing normalization of U.S.-Vietnamese relations. The group, it will be learned, had the aid of revanchist U.S. military personnel, who provided the explosives and some technical assistance but who were told the target would be a Chinese plane rather than an American one and that the objective was to destabilize the Hanoi regime by provoking a military confrontation with Beijing. The duplicitous scheme works, prompting President John McCain to sever all
ties with Hanoi, setting relations between the U.S. and Vietnam back essentially
to where they had been at war's end. Even after the true identity of the bombers
is revealed, it will be years before another American passenger plane lands in
Vietnam.
Author's Notes
Eric Lipps Guest Historian on Today in Alternate History, a Daily Updating Blog of Important Events In History That Never Occurred Today. Imagine what would be, if history had occurred a bit differently. Who says it didn't, somewhere? These fictional news items explore that possibility. Possibilities such as America becoming a Marxist superpower, aliens influencing human history in the 18th century and Teddy Roosevelt winning his 3rd term as president abound in this interesting fictional blog.
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In
2010 on this day a U.S. passenger airliner lands in Vietnam, at Hanoi's
International Airport. It is the first such landing since the fall of Saigon in
1975 ended in the Vietnam War.