RIPPLE SALVO… #784… SYNDICATED COLUMNIST JOSEPH ALSOP WAS PUT TO TEARS ATTENDING AN ARMY AWARDS CEREMONY AT LANDING ZONE BALDY. Then he wrote a column titled: “ALL RACES REPRESENTED IN AWARDING OF VIET MEDALS.” And he asks: “WHO ARE THE AMERICANS?”… but first…
GOOD MORNING: Day SEVEN HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR of a 1,000-day reflection and remembrance of a few pages of American history….
28 APRIL 1968… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… Ogden Standard-Examiner… Page 1: “Despite reports of the Communists taking advantage of the limited U.S. air raids, Saigon headquarters said all of 96 missions flown against North Vietnam Friday hit panhandle targets south of the 19th parallel. The air war communique reported the loss of a U.S. F4 Phantom jet, the 828th American plane to fall over the North since attacks began on 1 August 1964. The report said the Phantom went down ‘from cause unknown’ and that both pilots are missing in action.”….PRESIDENT’S DAILY BRIEF (27 Apr 68). “Hanoi Keeping an ‘Indications’ Book” : Hanoi has published a catalog of ‘war crimes’ committed by the US pilots since the limitation of the bombing. This North Vietnamese “War Crimes Commission” published the list yesterday claiming that the US had signficantly increased the pace of bombing in the four southern provinces of North Vietnam as military response to the “general offensive and general uprising” of the South Vietnam people…a running account of the number of air attacks was given for each of the four provinces, and each example was illustrated by lists of schools, hospitals, and churches destroyed and civilians killed. The last list included two claims of bombing north of the 20th Prallel…The War Crimes Commission is also keeping a book on the level of artillery fire across the DMZ into the Vinh Linh Zone…
“Vietnam: Air Losses” (Chris Hobson) There were four fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 28 April 1968…
(1) LTCOL WILLIAM RICHARD COOK and MAJOR JOSEPH CHESTER BORS were flying an RF-4C of the 16th TRS and 466th TRW out of Tan Son Nhut failed to return from a reconnaissance mission and was thought to have gone down 10 miles west of the Marine base at Chu Lai… Another report gives a location of the downed F-4 as 20 miles west-southwest of Chu Lai… As a consequence, LTCOL COOK and MAJOR BORS remain where they fell fifty years ago. They rest in peace left behind, awaiting recovery and return…
(2) LTCOL JOHN STEWART FINLAY and 1LT WESLEY I. RUMBLE were flying an F-4D of the 389th TFS and 366th TFW out of Danang on a strike mission in Route Pack I and were downed by 85mm antiaircraft fire while attacking a ferry about 7 miles north of the demilitarized zone. They ejected and were immediately captured. 1LT RUMBLE was seriously injured and the North Vietnamese released him from captivity as a POW after 13 months. LCOL FINLAY was imprisoned until the POW Homecoming release in March 1973…
(3) LCDR DUKE E. HERNANDEZ and LTJG DAVID J. LORTSCHER were flying an F-4B of the VF-21 Freelancers embarked in USS Ranger on a strike on the Ben Thuy storage caves across the river south of Vinh. They were hit by 85mm antiaircraft fire on the recovery from a dive bomb run and immediately turned seaward. they were able to get about 15 miles from the beach before having to eject. They were rescued to fly and fight again by the SAR destroyer… Chris Hobson points out that DAVID LORTSCHER would make history with a fourth ejection from a F-4 Phantom while on exchange duty with the Royal Navy on 15 October 1973….
(4) CAPTAIN JAMES F. LANG was flying an O-2A of the 20th TASS and 504th TASG out of Danang on a night reconnaissance mission west of Hue when downed by ground fire… He died in the crash and his body was recovered by the SAR. He is remembered on this day fifty years after his last flight…
RIPPLE SALVO… #784… COLUMNIST JOSEPH ALSOP’S DAWNING MOMENT AT LANDING ZONE BALDY… He went to war to get the facts and the creds required to sustain his outstanding reputation as a writer and dispenser of editorial comment… His report from the front is a good read… I quote…
ALL U.S. RACES REPRESENTED IN AWARDING OF VIET MEDALS…
“LANDING ZONE BALDY, Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam — By some standards, perhaps the scene was sadly banal. In a dusty clearing, on the flank of this craggy LZ, the formation was as smart as wartime ever permits. The honor guard’s uniforms showed the scars of combat, though they had done the best refubishing they could, and the guard commander’s hand was messily bandaged, for he had lost most of a finger waving on his men in the Tet fighting near Da Nang.
“The men to receive decorations had been given a bit of help with their spit and polish, so they looked almost lke peacetime soldiers–though the deeds for which they got their Silver Stars and Bronze Star were high acts of warlike valor and sacrifice.
ALL THE STRAINS
“Here, one noticed all the strains of our America were gloriously represented–Irish and Yankee, Jewish and Puerto Rican, German and Central European and Negro, last-listed, but by no means last in act and presence. The officer reading the citations was an exceptionlly impressive, very young Negro lieutenant who is making the Army a career.
“The Stars and Stripes drifted gently in the bright air in the iron grip of an even younger Negro draftee who rather resembled Cassius Clay, powerful, ramrod-erect, proud of his silken and symbolic burden. And at the head of the list of Silver Stars, along with Capt. Francis C. Brennan (“heroic actions”) and one or two others, was 1st. Sgt. Hubert B. Ramier (“heroic actions and personal example”), a giant Negro veteran who had led his platoon with such incomparable dash that he and his few men overrn a whole hornet’s nest of enemy-filled bunkers..\
“The unit being decorated was the 1st Battalion of the 6th Infantry Regiment, which descends directly, albeit by many transformations, from a new raised regiment of the War of 1812 that the British admiringly named ‘The Regulars.’ So the unit colors, alongside the Stars and Stripes, were heavy with battle-honors from old times.
“Canada, Chippewa and Landy’s lane, the Bad AX River, where they fought the Black Hawk Indians, Vera Cruz, Churubusco and Chapultepec, Manassas, Antietam, Chancellorsville, and Gettysburg, Santiago de Cuba and Panay in the Philippines, Alsace-Lorraine, Saint Mihiel and the cruel Meuse-Argonne, a long list from the Second Great War, from Algeria via bitter Anzio to the Po Valley where the Wehrmacht broke at last in Italy–all were there except Korea, which the regiment somehow missed.
EYES MISTED
“Now the 1st and the 6th was receiving yet another honor for its brilliant deeds in Vietnam. As the unit-citation was read in the standard flat military voice, the breeze grew stronger, the pennons fluttered out and one could read the battle names embroidered on half a dozen of them. That vividly reminded of the long American past, thus simultaneoously face-to-face with youthful patriotism and brave endurance and our country’s strange accomplishment, an old man’s eyes perhaps ludicrously misted.
“This was over soon, however, with the concluding address by the Americal Division commander, Maj. Gen. Samuel Koster, a tough an able leader in the field but not exactly a Churchillian orator. Or was it really over, after all? For as the helicopter lifted off again, one found oneself almost desperately asking, for the hundreth time, the question that Vietnam somehow always raises. Who are the Americans?…
“In the war, the question presents itself in novel guise, that may have some importance for Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. For the contrast this time is not the usual one, between the fat, forgetful comfort of the home front and the hardiness and bravery of the men in the field. That customary contrast is there, too, of course, but now there is another.
HAPPY DERISION
“On the one hand are the large group of the senator’s supporters, whom someone flatteringly (or was it unflatteringly?) described as ‘chicly New Leftish,’ who greet reports that their own country has been successful on the battlefield with happy derision and almost seem eager for an American defeat in war. On the other hand are the people of every American strain, who stood proudly beneath the colors on LZ Baldy, serving their nation in war in the old American way.
“In this way, Sen. Kennedy has his own credentials as, God knows, both his older brothers did. Yet here in Vietnam, among the men of General William Westmoreland’s very much vaster academy, so different in all ways from Berkeley (and Columbia), the conclusion is unavoidable that Sen. Kennedy cannot afford to forget this question: Who are the Americans?…
RTR Quote for 28 April: DD EISENHOWER: “Always try to associate yourself with and learn as much as you can from those who know more than you do, who do better than you, who see more clearly than you.”
Lest we forget… Bear