RIPPLE SALVO… #389… PLATO EXPLAINS WHY WE QUARREL… but first…

Good Morning: Day THREE HUNDRED EIGHTY-NINE of a visit to the archives of the Vietnam War and Operation Rolling Thunder…

29 MARCH 1967… HEAD LINES and LEADS from the Ogden Standard-Examiner on a stormy, chilly Wednesday on the mountain in Ogden…

Page 1: “Hanoi Dampens Peace Hopes; U.S. Pledges Persistence Role…Gains Seen in World Opinion By U.S. Officials…” …”Apparent collapse of another Vietnam peace effort has brought fresh promises from President Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk that they will persist in trying to move the war to the conference table. But Washington officials view the prospects for success are growing constantly more gloomy. At the same time, however, administration leaders reportedly believe the United States is now ahead of Hanoi in the battle for world opinion as a result of Hanoi’s spurning peace proposals from Johnson and U.N. Secretary U Thant…Dean Rusk told a news conference Tuesday: ‘If Hanoi supposes that somehow international opinion will come to their rescue, surely they must know that when they rebuff the United Nations organization…this will not bring them support in other points of the world’…Monday, Johnson said: ‘We regretfully learned from Hanoi that they were informing the world that they were apparently not prepared to accept the Secretary General’s proposal of March 14, a plan that the United States had given positive…definitive…affirmative support…”… For additional State Department communication a telegram from the U.S. mission at the U.N. to Secretary Rusk in Washington concerning the North Vietnamese rejection of Secretary General Thant’s (SYG in the message), is at the following link…

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1964-68v05/d123

Page 1: “Climate of Fear Grips U.S. Johnson Tells Crime Probe”…”President Johnson pictures Americans as living in a ‘climate of fear’ generated by crime in the streets. U.S. crime statistics, he says, ‘are our national disgrace.’ Johnson made the remarks Tuesday night in calling for speedy enactment of his anti-crime legislation, terming it ‘fundamental to the safety of the individual, the security of the home, and the enduring stability of our great society.’…”… Page 1: “Humphrey In Germany For Partnership Talks “... a two-week sweep of Western Europe leaders… Page 1: “Manhunt On In Chicago Kidnapping: more than 100 police and 30 FBI agents are on one of the city’s biggest man hunts in years for the kidnapper of an 8-year old daughter of an unemployed immigrant from Loebel, Kentucky…Carrie Stephens…disappeared Monday night with a man who said he needed help finding his dog…”...Page 1: “Rockets Blast Battered Hulk of Oil Tanker Torrey Canyon”…British jets fired rockets to set her afire again today. Some of the grounded and broken tanker’s oil has reached France.”… (Navy fighter pilots sink a freighter in Rolling Thunder summary below…)…

Page 5: “Aircraft Carrier To Get JFK Name”... “Two days before the May 29th birthday that would have been President John F. Kennedy 50th, an aircraft carrier will be christened in his name at Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Co…The carrier for which the keel was laid 22 October 1964 will be conventionally powered and of the Forrestal class. It’s contract price at the shipyard was $188.5 million.”...(USS John F. Kennedy was the only Navy carrier that never made it to the Gulf of Tonkin… inexplicable!!!) Page 6: “Navy Completes Polaris Sub Fleet”... “A ceremony at New London, Connecticut will be significant in the history of the United States Navy. The submarine, the Will Rogers, will be formally commissioned as retired Admiral Arleigh Burke speaks at the ceremony. The Will Rogers is number 41 of the Polaris class.”…

29 MARCH 1967… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… Associated Press: No coverage of the air war over North Vietnam… “Vietnam: Air Losses” (Hobson) There were no fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 29 March 1967… lousy weather… limited flying… but a few days later on 1 April 1967 a section of VF-92 F-4B Phantom Silver Kings of Carrier Air Wing Nine embarked in USS Enterprise got lucky and found a steel hulled coastal freighter on a coastal reconnaissance mission north of Hon Gai and Cam Pha. The four participants in the event were rewarded with a Navy Commendation Medal with Combat V for putting the enemy freighter  down…Here is the citation for the flight leader LCDR PETE CARROLL…  

The Secretary of the Navy takes pleasure in presenting the Navy Commendation Medal to Lieutenant Commander PETER AUGUST CARROLL for service set forth in the following: CITATION…

“For meritorious achievement in aerial flight as a pilot in combat against the enemy while attached to Fighter Squadron Ninety-Two, embarked in USS Enterprise (CVA(N)-65). On 1 April 1967, Lieutenant Commander CARROLL was the leader in a highly successful two plane armed reconnaissance mission in the vicinity of Hon Gai and Cam Pha, North Vietnam. Lieutenant Commander CARROLL detected a large steel hulled coastal freighter transiting a waterway. Despite a low cloud cover and the heavy anti-aircraft fire from shore batteries and automatic weapon fire from the freighter, he pressed home two accurate and devastating attacks which left the freighter, fully laden with petroleum products, burning and sinking. Lieutenant Commander CARROLL’s skillful airmanship and determined actions in the face of grave personal danger were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service.” 

Equal partners in the event were three LTJGs (THUENTE, SHOEMAKER and McCLENNY) following Pete Carroll’s lead…  NCM “Green Weenies” with a “V” all around…     oohrah…

RIPPLE SALVO… #389… QUARREL: “a ground for dispute; a verbal clash; conflict…” ENMITY: “Ill will; especially mutual hatred.” In 1967 our nation began to come apart. A great debate became a quarrel. Fifty years later we are still quarreling and tearing each other and our country to shreds. Enmity and anger invaded the dialogue of the late 1960s and have erupted in spades in 2017. What would Plato say?… A Plato lesson: “Socrates and Euthyphro.”

Socrates: And what sort of difference creates enmity and anger? Suppose, for example, that you and I, my good friend, differ about a number; do differences of this sort make us enemies and set  us at variance with one another? Do we not go at once to arithmetic, and put an end to them by a sum?

Euthyphro: True.

Socrates: Or suppose that we differ about magnitudes, do we not quickly end the difference by measuring?

Euthyphro: Very true.

Socrates: And we end a controversy about heavy and light by resorting to a weighing machine?

Euthphyro: To be sure.

Socrates: But what differences are there which cannot be thus decided, and which therefore make us angry and set us at enmity with each other? I dare say the answer does not occur to you at the moment, and therefore I will suggest that these enmities arise when the matters of difference are the just and the unjust, good and evil, honourable and dishonourable. Are not these points about which men differ, and about which when we are unable satisfactorily to decide our differences, you and I and all of us quarrel, when we do quarrel?

Euthphyro: Yes, Socrates, the nature of the differences about which we quarrel is such as you describe. 

JUST: “having a basis or conforming to a fact or reason; reasonable; morally right.

GOOD: “of a favorable character or tendency.” EVIL : “wicked; causing or threatening harm; pernicious.”

HONOR: “high respect; esteem.” HONORABLE: “bringing of worthy of honor.”

These were the points about which Americans argued in 1967 and are the points that dominate our lives in 2017. Enmity thrived when the demonstrators hit the streets with “make love not war” signs, Martin Luther King preached that America was immoral, Rolling Thunder pilots were baby killers, and the Pentagon got painted as the “evil palace.” They read the facts and reasoned that the war was evil and unjust. On the other hand, our country was supporting a nation that was pursuing self-determination and fighting aggression from a communist neighbor. It was a just and honorable war, said our President and Congress. Enmity: ill will and hatred consumed our nation. Today in America one side sees a need to redistribute the wealth from those who have too much to those who have too little. The other side sees this as unjust, unfair and intolerable. Enmity.

Fifty years later our Dis-United States is at it again. Sides have been chosen and each side sees the facts and reason in their favor and claims to be just, good and honorable while the other side is unjust, wicked and dishonorable. 

Plato was good at framing the problem but offered no canned solution to resolving matters of difference when it came to just and unjust, good and evil, and honorable and dishonorable, which is where we are today. Result: flaming enmity. Failure to find and make compromises to resolve our differences will have tragic consequences.  Plato came up short, and so have I, in how to limit or eliminate our nation-wide quarreling.

A rascal named Rodney King from the past sounded an appropriate plea in the midst of the Los Angeles-Watts riots that followed the acquittal of the cops who put 33 baton blows on him. King said on a television interview: “I just want to say–you know–can we all just get along? Can we? Can, we get along? Can we stop making it horrible for older people and the kids?…. And uh, I mean just please, we can, we can get along here. We all can get along–we just gotta, we gotta. I mean we’re all stuck here for a while, let’s, you know let’s try to work it out, let’s try to beat it, you know, let’s try to work it out.”…  Over the years the quote has become: “Can’t we all just get along?”

From Plato to Rodney King in one blog…..   oohrah….     

CAG’s QUOTES for 29 March: FROST: “Every mistake in war is excusable except inactivity and refusal to run risks.”… PATTON: “The fear of having their guts explored with cold steel in the hands of battle maddened men has won many a fight.”…

Lest we forget…      Bear