RIPPLE SALVO… #477… SAD BUT TRUE… and 50 years later? More of the same…

Good Morning: Day FOUR HUNDRED SEVENTY-SEVEN of a one thousand day history lesson…

25 JUNE 1967… HEAD LINES from The New York Times on a partly cloudy and showery Sunday in NYC…

Page 1: “Johnson Prepares For Second Round of Kosygin Talks–Glassboro Parley Expected to Focus on Specifics in Mideast and Vietnam–Days Rest at Ranch–President Pays first Visit to Grandchild and Relaxes After a 25-Hour Day–Western Envoys Briefed by Rusk–He Tells Diplomats Here of Summit Talks–Mansfield Sees Hope for Results–Kosygin Goes Sightseeing at Niagara Falls–Premier Takes a Boat Ride...Says he likes wind and mist while accompanied by his daughter and a party of fifty.”

Page 20: “Israelis Say Captured Documents Show Egyptians Planned to Strike First”... “Israeli sources have made available documents that they day are captured operations orders of the United Arab Republic. the operations orders indicated the Egyptian Air Force planned from May 17 to bomb Israel airfields and the Port of Elath and intended to use napalm bombs in the attack. OpOrders indicated that Israel beat Egypt to the punch by a narrow margin of time.”… Page 15: “The  World’s Homeless: The Problem of Refugees is Increasing–International Rescue Committee Hailed”... “The hundreds of thousands of displaced persons as the result of recent fighting in the Middle East have given new meaning to the terming of our times as the ‘Century of the Homeless Man.’ The United States Committee for Refugees International estimates the worlds homeless in 1964 at 8-million and by 1966 it had reached 11,250,000.”…

Page 17: “Soviet Navy Leaves the Mediterranean”… Page 18: “Syria Lists Dead in War at 145 Dead and 1600 Wounded”... Page 1: “U.S. to Send India More Food Relief–Total aid for ’67 to 5.1 Million Tons of Grain”... “James Meredith Marching Again in Mississippi”… “…was wounded last summer by a shotgun blast. ‘I want to show Mississippi Negroes that ear can be eliminated.’ “…Page 1: “U.S. Safety Drive for Cars and Roads Spreading Abroad”...Page 2: Japan Seeks Return of Two Island Groups”... “Japan has opened a determined campaign to regain the Bonin and Volcano Islands, two small Western Pacific groups left under United States jurisdiction by the 1951 peace treaty. Hopes for an early return of Okinawa to Japanese rule have been virtually abandoned.”…

Page 3: “Landowners Win in Vietnam Vote”... “The traditional wielders of local power in Vietnam will continue to wield it as a result of elections for Hamlet Chiefs over the last two months…Of the 4,476 hamlets in which elections were held, the winners by occupation were farmers, 2,263; former hamlet and village officials, 1,676; businessmen, 284; and former civil servants 247…The good show of the landowners had been expected…2.3 million of 2.9 million registered voters went to the polls.”… Page 3: “Boredom In Saigon A Key G.I. Problem”... “A United States Army psychiatrist says boredom and loneliness are troubling many servicemen in Saigon. ‘Most people seem to have dubbed their consumption of alcohol because there is nothing else to do…A big part of this is loneliness. What does someone do at night in Saigon? They go out and eat and afterward they go to a bar or go back to their room. It is bound to affect people.’ “…

Page 1: “76 Americans Die in Enemy Ambush on Vietnam Ridge– 40 G.I.s Wounded as Enemy Fires Mortars At Airfield Northwest of Saigon”… “Seventy-six American paratroopers were killed and 25 wounded in an ambush on a heavily wooded ridge in the Central Highlands Thursday. During the ambush North Vietnamese attackers cut off two platoons totaling about 80 men from a reinforced company of the 173rd Airborne Brigade. These bore the brunt of the onslaught. The ambush occurred in Kontum Province 280 miles northwest of Saigon and about 19 miles from the Cambodian border. The reinforced company of about 150 men pulled out of its night defense perimeter and began a sweep along the northwest slopes of the ridgeline about two miles south-southwest of Dak To…A North Vietnamese battalion suddenly opened up from all sides with machine guns, carbines, recoilless rifles and hand grenades. Reinforcements were cutoff…fighting was at such close range that air support was not possible. The average of 1 KIA per 6 WIA ratio was 1/3 in this engagement, part of Operation Greeley. ‘We are trying to find and destroy the enemy.’...This was the third time in a week the North Vietnamese have surprised and inflicted heavy losses on American troops. The 1st Infantry suffered 31 killed and 113 wounded in  fight 40 miles north of Saigon and in a fight in the Mekong Delta 26 were killed and 113 wounded.”…

25 JUNE 1967…OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… New York Times (26 June reporting 25 June ops)…Page 8: “American pilots flew 120 missions against targets in North Vietnam yesterday concentrating on the southern part of the country near Donghoi and Vinh, and Thanh Hoa on the coast 90 miles Southeast of Hanoi. No aircraft were lost  and no opposition from enemy planes was reported.”…

“Vietnam: Air Losses” (Chris Hobson) There were no fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia for the second day in a row… oohrah

RIPPLE SALVO… #477… Humble Host requests your indulgence for the following commentary.

The Vietnam war was fought both in Southeast Asia and in the continental United States. These contests, one in the jungles and skies of Vietnam, the other in the streets, hearts and minds of Americans at home, were inseparable. The Vietnam war was a war of attrition and a battle of wills — resolve. Ho Chi Minh’s consistent position was: “we can outlast you,” and his barometer for the battle of wills was the nightly news from America. And what he saw, the whole world saw, was the steady erosion of support for the war by the American public. I believe the summer of 1967 was the last opportunity to “spot weld” the crack in American resolve, and regain the unity and level of resolve required to sustain a war of attrition 10,000 miles from our shores.

When the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., the champion and leader of the civil rights movement in America, put on a second hat to lead the anti-war movement in April 1967, the question of American will-to-win a war in Vietnam was decided. Support for the war dwindled away. Unfortunately, American leadership was unable and unwilling to say “uncle.” As a consequence, fifty-thousand more American troops would die over the next six years while our Presidents sought a way to “save face.”

But, you say, “Taylor, all that was fifty years ago. You are beating a dead horse. Get over it.” To which I answer:

Rarely does a lesson from the past–history– have more applicability to current events than our Vietnam war to our current wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Our failure to “spot weld” and change course in Vietnam in the summer of 1967 was a moment in history we are about to repeat. In which case, the consequences will be the same. Our President and generals in civvies as well as uniforms are adding troops and pressing on in lost cause–nobody ever won in Afghanistan–at a time when our nation requires priority attention to the state-of-the-union here at home. It was a “guns or butter ” issue in 1967 and it is a “guns or butter” issue in 2017.

On Saturday, 25 June 1967 the nephew of Roy Wilkins, the Executive director of the NAACP, Roger W. Wilkins as head of the Government Race Relations Agency gave a speech that was broadcast to the world via Voice of America that warned that there was a likelihood that America was about to host a summer of riots because the Negroes of America’s ghettos are “desperately unhappy.”

Roger Wilkins: “Many Americans believe we have come into a very unhappy period in race relations. I don’t see anything on the horizon within the next few weeks or so that is going to change the course of the summer… I am a firm believer in the view that the riots are not the real problem. The real threat to American life is our inattention to the really depressed and anguished conditions of the minority group people who live in the ghettos of the country, whether they are Puerto Rican or Chinese or Mexican-Americans. These are the conditions that cause the riots. There are an awful lot of things that this American society ought to be doing in the inner city in the summertime, whether you have problems or riots or not. We are just beginning. Just beginning.

“It is still true that most Negroes don’t like policemen and most policemen don’t like Negroes. That situation probably has not improved, but there are more people worried about it today. More people are beginning to understand the very complex new role of the American policeman in an urban society…they are nameless, faceless white authority that ghetto people see every day.

“There has never been another nation in the history of the world that has made the progress that we have made so far–this is to take a people who is easily distinguishable from the majority by a variety of very clear characteristics as the Negro, take them out of bondage and, through their efforts and society’s, move them toward equality as far as American Negroes have moved in 100 years. We have an awful long way to go but it is one of the most remarkable stories in history.”

In the summer of 1967 our President made a decision to continue to limit the war so he could continue to pursue “The Great Society.” In seeking both we achieved neither. Fifty years later our President is faced with unprecedented divisions in the country since our civil war. Abroad multiple “national security” involvements are draining extremely scarce resources pursuing strategies of defeat, certainly not victory, and objectives beyond our reach. Without a reordering of national priorities the very survival of our nation is at risk. The lessons of Vietnam apply.

Thank you for your indulgence…I welcome your comments…

RTR QUOTE for June 25: Editor, Houston Chronicle, 3 April 2017: “After 15 years in Iraq with little end in sight, the White House is expanding our military footprint into Syria and Yemen (and adding 8,400 more troops in Afghanistan). Like Vietnam, we have to wonder what, exactly, we’re fighting for and what our nation is sacrificing to gain it.”… 

Lest we forget….     Bear