Good Morning... Day FIFTEEN of our look back to Operation Rolling Thunder …Fifty Years ago…
15 MARCH 1966 (NYT)… A partly cloudy, cool, high of 50, Tuesday in New York…Page 1 carried the news that the Gemini 8 flight had to be postponed one day due to a fuel leak in the capsule. The three day flight would include a rendezvous and a walk in space… The big news was: polling results. Under the headline: “Public Backs Negotiations With Viet Cong, Poll Says,” Wallace Turner wrote that a Stanford University study determined that: 60% of the American public “… would favor fighting a major was with hundreds of thousands of casualties to the alternative to withdrawing American troops from Vietnam.”…On page 6 writer Tom Wicker, reported from Washington that 88% of Americans would back direct negotiations with the Viet Cong and 61% approved the handling of the war. However, 54% disapproved of continuing the war if it meant the death of several hundred American soldiers every week. 42% favored a withdrawal rather than continuing the President’s limited war policy… The President met with the Governor of Puerto Rico and Governor Edmund Brown of California…The Senate approved a resolution endorsing the selection of Utah to host the 1972 Winter Olympics…On Wall Street the Dow tumbled on a wide front with declines 5 to one over gains, down 10.86 to 917.09…the streets are quiet…
15 MARCH 1966… ROLLING THUNDER… An O-1E of the 22nd TASS operating out of Khe Sanh in the area of Tchepone in Laos. The Bird Dog FAC, CAPTAIN DAVID HUGH HOLMES, USAF, spotted a large concentration of North Vietnamese troops in a truck park protected by six gun emplacements. A second FAC entered the area and spotted CAPTAIN HOLMES’ down aircraft with the pilot slumped in the cockpit. A subsequent Army Mohawk reported CAPTAIN HOLMES was not in the downed aircraft and he has never been accounted for. He is carried as Killed in Action…Further North, a section of Air Force F-4Cs conducting a road recce mission in the area of Dien Bien Phu commenced an attack on a pair of trucks. The wingman was seen to fly into the ground either as a consequence of enemy automatic weapon fire, which was active in the area, or target fixation. CAPTAIN MARTIN ARNOLD SCOTT and LTCOL PETER JOSEPH STEWART were killed in action.
RIPPLE SALVO… Opinion …. GUNS AND BUTTER… Prancing unicorns populate the world. They are called liberals and progressives and they live in dizzyland responding forever to the sound of a real world avoidance warning tone. They seek Utopia. Realists have the same dreams, but they recognize that “…a man has to know his limitations,” as Clint would say, and that the same applies to great nations. In 1966 the United States and President Lyndon Johnson did not heed those limitations and attempted to grasp more than could be reached. Waging war on a distant horizon while birthing “The Great Society” proved to be the beginning of the “great unraveling” of the American Dream that we are living with today. As this three year recall of the Rolling Thunder experience unfolds, history will validate this thesis. Core to my argument is the real world axiom that bears the title “Guns and Butter.” The relationship of one to the other is usually graphed to show that an increase in expenditures for Guns, representing a nation’s military spending, can only occur at the expense of Butter, representing other national expenditures, and that an increase in spending for Butter can only occur at the expense of Guns. The conclusion: the allocation of a nation’s scarce resources is a matter of priorities and difficult choices that have consequences. That’s my opinion, what ‘s yours…?
This discourse is a vital part of remembering Rolling Thunder because scarce resources, in the form of blood, spirit, unity and treasure, were expended in pursuing a war, including the bombing campaign Rolling Thunder, that adhered to a “strategy for defeat.”
Lest we forget, Bear Taylor
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