RIPPLE SALVO… #430… GETTING IN: EASY… GETTING OUT: APPARENTLY IMPOSSIBLE… but first…
Good Morning: Day FOUR HUNDRED THIRTY of a review of the 1000-day air war called Rolling Thunder…
9 May 1967… HEAD LINES and leads from The New York Times on a dark and cloudy Tuesday in NYC…
Page 1: “Marines Beat Off Northern Troops Near Buffer Zone”... “American Marines beat back an assault by more than a thousand North Vietnamese troops yesterday in savage fighting two miles south of the demilitarized zone. Forty-four Marines were killed and 121 Marines were wounded in the battle for a base camp on a hill at Conthien. When the main attack was repulsed after a three-hour battle, 197 North Vietnamese dead were counted.”... Page 1: “Vote In Greece Is Pledged On Constitutional Change”... “Interior Minister Stylianos Patakos announced today that constitutional amendments would be drafted and submitted to the people in a referendum. He declined to predict when this would happen. Once the amendments are approved, elections will be held.”…
9 MAY 1967 Page 1: “Senator Robert Kennedy Charges Welfare Has Failed the Poor”... “and called yesterday for a ‘virtual revolution’ in the nation’s efforts to help the poor, which he described as ‘a system of handouts, a second-rate set of social services, which damages and demeans the recipient.‘ If the system is not changed, he warned, ‘the results could be the ripping asunder of the already this fabric of American life.’ In a sweeping indictment of a range of institutions set up ‘in our generosity,’ the Senator said that they had destroyed ‘any semblance of human dignity’ and made the following charges:
*’We have created a welfare system which aids only a fourth of those who are poor, which forces men to leave their families so that public assistance can be obtained which has created a dependence on their fellow citizens which is degrading and distasteful to giver and receiver alike.’
*’We have built vast, impersonal high-rise public housing projects–ghettos within ghettos–isolated from the outside world, with little sense of what would become of those we have housed there.’
*’We have provided health services in huge unpleasant municipal hospitals–through emergency rooms and out-patient clinics where people wait for hours to see a doctor they have never seen before and are unlikely to see ever again.’
“Kennedy was speaking in New York City before two days of hearings by a Senate sub-committee headed by Senator Joseph Clark. This is one in a series of such hearings to consider changes to the renewal of the Economic Opportunities Act.”
Page 1: “President Is Firm On Poverty Drive”... “President Johnson replied to critics today that, ‘No, we are not backing away from our commitment to fight poverty, nor will we so long as I have anything to say about it. Responding to complaints such as those of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that the war in Vietnam had produced retreats from domestic social programs, the President cited the yearly increases in spending for the poor and other signs of ‘the face of progress’ … ‘We have just begun,‘ he told 450 women volunteers in the anti-poverty program at a White House reception. ‘We cannot logically oppose the effects of poverty and efforts to relieve them. We cannot abhor the disease and fight the cure–not if we want a healthy nation–and poverty is curable.’ “…
Page 3: “Queen Will Knight Chichester in June For Global Voyage”… “Sir Francis Chichester, the doughty 65-year old Briton, who is nearing the end of his single-handed sailing voyage around the world, will be knighted by Queen Elizabeth II at Greenwich next month…same sword that knighted Sir Francis Drake 400 years ago. Chichester is near the Azores and expected to complete his 28,500-mile circumnavigation of the globe by the end of May.”… Page 15: “Display of POWs Protested By U.S.”…”a flagrant violation of the Geneva Convention by North Vietnam by parading three captured American Air Force pilots throughout the streets of Hanoi.” (Leo Thorsness, Bob Abbott and Joe Abbott)... Page 21: “Clay Indicted For Refusing Draft; Could Get Jail Term of Five Years”... “A Federal Grand jury indicted Cassius Clay for refusing to be drafted into the armed services. When asked how he pleaded, he said,’Not guilty.’ Defense based the plea on ground of being a Black Muslim minister.”…
9 MAY 1967… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER–THE AIR WAR– New York Times (10 May reporting 9 May ops)… Page 18: “MIG Bases Attacked: United States pilots put a North Vietnamese MIG airfield out of operation yesterday for the first time in the war. The attack occurred 20 miles west of Hanoi at Hoalac where Air Force fighter-bombers blasted huge craters in the runway. Nine flights of planes, F-105 Thunderchiefs based in Thailand, bombarded the airfield damaging taxiways and parking areas as well as the runway. The attack was the fifth since April 24. ‘From the damage estimates available to us today, the airfield is not operable at this time,’ an Air Force spokesman said. One F-105 was shot down over North Vietnam but had not been participating in the attack at Hoalac. The pilot (Capt MK McCuistion-POW) whose plane was the 535th lost over North Vietnam, was listed a MIA.” (bear#72RPIIbridge#73xuanduongbarracks)…
“Vietnam: Air Losses” (Hobson) There was one fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 9 May 1967…
(1) An F-4C of the 433rd TFS and 8th TFW blew the left main tire on takeoff at Ubon and swerved off the runway.
RIPPLE SALVO… #430… The American experience–history lesson–in Vietnam led to the rewrite of the guiding principles for the commitment of our armed forces to conflicts, large and small, where our national interests are deemed at stake. A paramount principle on that short list of five or six, is: “Don’t go in unless you have a way out– an exit plan.”
Humble Host finds this paragraph from Thomas Powers’ “Vietnam: The Home Front,” an appropriate statement of the dilemma our nation created by “going in without a plan for getting out.” Powers paints a realistic picture of America in the Spring-Summer of 1967–fifty years ago… I quote… (pg. 196)
“For all the bitter arguments over the war, it remained strangely distant, a far-away struggle on the periphery of American life. Business boomed. Few families had lost sons, and there was no rationing. The killing all took place on television, between the commercials, and the government insisted there was money enough for both guns and butter. Even after President Johnson finally asked Congress for a 10-per cent tax surcharge, the first request for new sources of money directly linked to Vietnam, the fighting itself remained remote. Specialists in a number of fields, especially economists worried about inflation, budget deficits, and the international strength of the dollar, knew that the true price of the war was a great deal higher that officially admitted, and that it would inevitably reveal itself. For the most part, however, the war had been conducted with apparent impunity. Calling a halt to the war in August, 1967, when Johnson made his appeal for a tax surcharge, would have exacted a more immediate price in national humiliation, in wrecked careers, in lingering recriminations about a ‘stab in the back.‘ The average American, and even the average senator or representative, instinctively felt that the cost of abruptly ending the war was far greater than the cost of continuing it.”
National humiliation. Wrecked careers. Lingering recriminations. And perhaps the greatest obstacle to withdrawal– all the lives lost in vain. For these reasons and countless others, our nation must adhere to the lesson, now principle, “Don’t go in unless you have a way out–an exit plan.”
Afghanistan: We went in 2001. We are still there in 2017 (17th year) and requests for more troops are pending. Troop fatalities so far: 2,396.
Iraq: We went in 2003. We are still there in 2017 (14th year). Troop fatalities so far: 4,519
What are the exit plans?
CAG’s QUOTES for 9 May: PATRICK HENRY:”We are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of Nature has placed in our power….The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave.”… PATTON: “I am convinced that more emphasis should be placed on history.”… me, too!!!
Lest we forget… Bear