Vietnam Airstrikes: 14 through 16 November, 1965

Background

Data downloaded from data.mil and data.world. It covers US military airstrikes over a 3 day period during the Vietnam War - 14 - 16 November, 1965. I picked these dates to coincide with the battle for LZ XRay. I deleted several hundred observations out of the roughly 2500 because no lat/long data was available. Most of those observations were actually recce missions. The marker labels/popups consist of the following:

• Mission ID number

• Branch of Service e.g. USAF, USN

• Aircraft Type e.g. F4, A1

• Target type e.g. Troops, Depot

• Time on target

• Weapon type if specified, otherwise coded as NA

Raw data is available on github (use RCurl to load into a dataframe): https://raw.githubusercontent.com/datameister66/Vietnam/master/vietnam_nov_65.csv

library(leaflet)

## Warning: package 'leaflet' was built under R version 3.3.3

library(dplyr)

## 
## Attaching package: 'dplyr'

## The following objects are masked from 'package:stats':
## 
##     filter, lag

## The following objects are masked from 'package:base':
## 
##     intersect, setdiff, setequal, union

# setwd("C:/Users/Cory/Desktop/nam")
df = read.csv("vietnam_nov_65.csv")

dim(df)

## [1] 2252   39

names(df)

##  [1] "THOR_DATA_VIET_ID"    "MILSERVICE"           "MSNDATE"             
##  [4] "SOURCEID"             "SOURCERECORD"         "AIRCRAFT"            
##  [7] "TAKEOFFLOCATION"      "LAT"                  "LONG"                
## [10] "TGTTYPE"              "NUMWEAPONSDELIVERED"  "TIMEONTARGET"        
## [13] "WEAPONTYPE"           "WEAPONTYPEWEIGHT"     "AIRCRAFT_ORIGINAL"   
## [16] "AIRCRAFT_ROOT"        "FLTHOURS"             "MFUNC"               
## [19] "MFUNC_DESC"           "MISSIONID"            "NUMOFACFT"           
## [22] "OPERATIONSUPPORTED"   "PERIODOFDAY"          "UNIT"                
## [25] "TGTCLOUDCOVER"        "TGTCONTROL"           "TGTCOUNTRY"          
## [28] "TGTORIGCOORDS"        "TGTORIGCOORDSFORMAT"  "TGTWEATHER"          
## [31] "ADDITIONALINFO"       "GEOZONE"              "ID"                  
## [34] "MFUNC_DESC_CLASS"     "NUMWEAPONSJETTISONED" "NUMWEAPONSRETURNED"  
## [37] "TIMEOFFTARGET"        "Year"                 "popup"

# If the same mission conducts multiple attacks on the same # lat/long, it generates a separate observation. Therefore, I have # chosen to dedupe on mission id number (MISSIONID)
df <- distinct(df, MISSIONID, .keep_all = T)
dim(df)

## [1] 609  39

# US Air Force = blue
# US Marine Corps = dark red
# US Navy = light green
df$color <- ifelse(df$MILSERVICE == "USAF", "blue", ifelse(
  df$MILSERVICE == "USMC", "darkred", "lightgreen"
))

icons <- awesomeIcons(
  icon = "air",
  iconColor = "black",
  library = "glyphicon",
  markerColor = df$color # Branch of Service
  #text = df$MISSIONID 
)

leaflet(df) %>% 
  addProviderTiles("Esri.WorldImagery", group = "Image") %>%
  addProviderTiles("Stamen.Terrain", group = "Terrain") %>%
  
  addLayersControl(
    baseGroups = c("Image", "Terrain"),
    overlayGroups = df$MSNDATE,
    options = layersControlOptions(collapsed = FALSE))  %>%
  
  addAwesomeMarkers(icon = icons,
             label = ~ df$popup, 
             popup = ~ df$popup,
             group = paste(df$MSNDATE))

## Assuming 'LONG' and 'LAT' are longitude and latitude, respectively

LZ XRay

This photo shows the area where the Battle of LZ Xray took place, southwest of Pleiku.

LZ XRay