RIPPLE SALVO #67… POW PREP… but first…
Good Morning: Day SIXTY-SIX of a marathon review of Operation Rolling Thunder…1965-1968
4 MAY 1966 (NYT)… ON THE HOMEFRONT… A fair and cool day in New York City…Page 1: “U.S. Fires on Site Inside Cambodia”… A government official disclosed the action, reporting that the action was taken to halt a heavy automatic weapon and mortar barrage coming across the border requiring U.S. Army artillery return fire. “Meanwhile, according to the Associated Press, the Defense Department said that 11 flyers had been killed over Laos in the last two years in operations cloaked in secrecy.” The attack on Cambodia was the first such action to be acknowledge and the issue of hot pursuit has been refueled, both by air and by land… Page 2; “House Panel Defies Johnson on Military Budget”…The HASC added $931 million for procurement to the Presidents $19.9 billion procurement budget. “Mr. Johnson and his economic advisors have warned that the administration might have to ask the congress for a tax increase this year, should the trend toward increased spending continue.”…. same page: “Mendel Rivers To Add Funds of $258M To Build 2 Nuclear Frigates'”…The Chairman of the HASC said that the committee was united in the decision that “this country will have a nuclear Navy,” The Secretary of Defense remains reluctant to support the idea but agreed on the need for two conventionally powered frigates… Page 3: “USSR and China Fued”…The PRC declares that the Soviet is holding back on delivery of military aid to North Vietnam and that Moscow is delivering “deplorably meager aid consisting of outmoded weapons.” The article concluded that there is building tension in the extended dispute… Page 4: “A Navy A-4E Shot down Near Vinh”… good chute but there was no pickup and the pilot is listed as MIA. The Navy flew 27 missions and encountered light opposition while striking railroad cars, barges, bridges, and radar sites in the southern panhandle…The downed A-4E was the 227th lost aircraft in the air war… Page 4: “President Opens Economic Review”…The President mustered his Labor Management Panel for talks on the administrations economic stabilization policies seeking answers to the basic question of ‘how to continue our unparalleled prosperity and maintain a stable and healthy economy.”… Page 22: A large picture of a new pilot rescue technique involving dropping a balloon kit to a downed pilot and then rescuing the pilot by C-130 snatching the balloon attached to the pilot and reeling the pilot into the read cargo area of the aircraft. In the test a “cargo plane snatched three men from the desert by cable today in daring tests of a new technology for rescuing down pilots or astronauts. The snatch is a 6-7 G force on the pilot. The tests were conducted at Edwards Air Force Base under the supervision of Colonel Allison Brooks, Commander of Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Services…
Page 26: Henry Ford II speaking at the Convention of National Association of Purchasing Agents in Detroit said; “The economic and technical triumphs of the past few years have not solved as many problems as we thought we would. In fact, the triumphs have brought us problems we did not foresee. What really counts when we measure local progress is not the ingenuity or technology or the growth of national product, but the quality of our society and our individual selves. The basic measures of human achievement are such things as human satisfaction and fulfillment and the growth of harmony, good will and respect among men.”
Editorial Page: By C.L. Sulzberger, “Foreign Affairs Another Enemy Within”… “Perhaps the most obstinate enemy in South Vietnam is not the Viet Cong, but inflation and the 60% increase in money supply. As is always the case this economic distortion wipes out the salaried classes including government workers and teachers. Yet it is precisely that increasingly embittered elite whose support we seek to win the war.”
4 MAY 1966… ROLLING THUNDER OPS… Nothing of note…
RIPPLE SALVO… POW PREP SCHOOL… On 4 May 1966 Our government announced that Ambassador-at-Large Averill Harriman was being dispatched to Geneva to start negotiations for the trading of Prisoners of War. It was labeled a “new effort for the exchange of prisoners in Vietnam.” On that date North Vietnam was holding 227 POWs. And on that date I was on the schedule for my POW PREP SCHOOL, the Survival, Escape, Resistance and Evasion (SERE) school located at Naval Air Station, San Diego. Some of the training was conducted at the Naval Air Station, but it was the evasion and resistance training at Warner Springs in the hills east of San Diego where the real learning took place. For any further details on what that training consisted of you will have to seek another source. I recommend Stephen R. Gray’s “Rampant Raider: An A-4 Skyhawk Pilot in Vietnam”… It is a great book from the U.S. Naval Institute Press. Gray’s detail of his experience at Warner Springs is the best I have seen.
But I do not talk about the subject anymore. In 1968 I submitted an essay that I planned on making chapter one of my novel about the war to the Famous Writer’s Course as one of many homework assignments I knocked out between Rolling Thunder missions on my second cruise on Enterprise. The 2500 word yarn got an A- from the instructor and he encouraged me to clean it up and submit it to a slick magazine for some cash. I smoothed it up, but was smart enough to know that a LCDR in the U.S. Navy, who hoped for promotion someday, needed to seek security clearance of anything being submitted for publication, so I did. In a month or so, the request came back denied with an additional comment I tattooed on the back of my writing hand. “If LCDR Taylor persists in his effort to have this short story published, appropriate courts martial action will be taken in accordance with…etc.” Specific security violations were identified as the use of the term “ROLLING THUNDER,” which was still considered a classified identifier, even though it was regularly used in the American press, including Time and Newsweek. And I was forbidden to mention the fact that Navy pilots and aircrew were being exposed to evasion and resistance training. Needless to say, I ate my essay and shelved any idea about challenging the limits of Naval Security.
So if you want to know about SERE training I am a blank. However, I agree wholeheartedly with the final two sentences of Stephen Gray’s 12-page 2007 recollection of his SERE experience. “Years later, after the release of the American POWs at the end of American involvement in the Vietnam War (12 February 1973), many of them said that they had relied heavily on things learned during their POW compound training at E&E school. I felt that the only thing I got out of the POW training was a deep desire to never be captured.”
Ditto for me. The training convinced me that my survival as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese would be a function of my faith in myself and my God, and that his will would be done. In addition, as of 4 May 1966 I knew that as a prospective POW, Ambassador-at-Large Averill Harriman was my –and all POWs–new best friend.
Lest we forget… Bear ………. –30– ……….