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Two Obituaries
Two obituaries in the news recently, reminded me that the Vietnam War is slowly slipping out of our national conscience and consciousness. The Vietnam War is an historical event of such vast importance that we ignore it, and remain ignorant of it, at our peril. Let me try to jog a few memories and prick a few consciences.
Last week the death of James Bond Stockdale was announced. Stockdale was the man who ran with Ross Perot in 1992. He was famous for being a POW in North Vietnam during the war and was awarded the Medal of Honor. He was a career pilot in the Navy and was an excellent flier. (He was named James Bond, long before Ian Fleming created the fictional secret agent with the same name.)
Few people know that he was an eyewitness to an event that was alleged to have occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964.
Early in August of 1964 an American destroyer, the Maddox, painted in battle camouflage, was conducting a DeSoto patrol off the coast of North Vietnam, inside their territorial waters. It was on an electronic warfare mission tracking radar installations. This ship, the Maddox, was attacked by a North Vietnamese PT boat group. The Maddox sped away after sinking some of the attacking craft and calling for air support. James Bond Stockdale was one of the pilots that responded and he reported seeing “enemy” boats on fire and the Maddox steaming away. He fired on one of the “enemy” boats and flew back to his carrier. The attack on the Maddox did take place. McNamara and Johnson knew why it was attacked and that it was our actions that provoked it.
Two days later another ship joined the Maddox, the Turner Joy. The two of them were a small flotilla off the coast of North Vietnam. On a “dark and stormy night” radar and sonar “detected” enemy craft closing in on them. The same radar and sonar then reported torpedoes being fired. As the ships fired at the phantoms on their electronic screens, air support was requested and out came James Bond Stockdale. He flew low over the American ships and reported seeing no enemy boats. He fired flares and still saw nothing, except the American ships firing their guns. He followed the ships for a few hours and seeing no enemy, he returned to his carrier. He was debriefed and reported that the crews had given a false report. There was no enemy attack on the Maddox and the Turner Joy that night.
He went to sleep only to be awakened for a mission to bomb North Vietnam in “retaliation for the attack on our ships.” Stockdale was a disciplined soldier and did his duty, but he knew there was no attack. When he was captured and became a POW, he knew there was no attack. When he was released from North Vietnam, he knew there was no attack. He did not tell the world what he knew about the Tonkin Gulf incident, until he wrote his memoirs.
James Bond Stockdale, a U.S. Navy pilot, who flew over the Maddox at the time of the first incident, and over the Maddox and the Turner Joy during the second alleged incident, finally gave his honest description of what he saw in his book (co-written with his wife, Sybil), In Love and War (New York: Harper and Row, 1984) (Revised Edition, Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1990), Chapter 1. pp. 19 - 25.
Stockdale was an authentic hero. He served his country, according to his sense of duty, honor and country. He was honest and that probably explains why he was not promoted to the highest echelons of the U.S. Navy.
He died last week and not one obituary that I came across discussed his role in the Gulf of Tonkin incidents of 1964. Freedom of the press belongs to one who owns one, as A.J. Liebling once said.
For the younger readers, allow me to point out that the phony “attacks” on our ships were used to get a resolution out of Congress authorizing LBJ to do whatever was necessary to defend our puppet state in South Vietnam, called the “Republic of Vietnam.” The lies told about Tonkin Gulf in 1964 were the pretext for a war that cost 58, 000 American lives, and who knows how many millions of Asian lives.
The other obituary was that of General William C. Westmoreland, the commander of all American military forces in Vietnam from 1964 to 1968. Westmoreland had a great name for an officer charged with expanding American imperialism into the Pacific and on into Asia. “. . . to the West more land!. . .”
Westmoreland was a professional soldier and therefore a professional killer. His strategy to win the war in Vietnam, a land where 80% of the people supported Ho Chi Minh, nationalism and communism in roughly that order, was called attrition.
Translation, he proposed to find the enemy and kill him. Search and Destroy was the name of the mission. People who argued for winning hearts and minds were pushed aside and the tough guys, “the best and the brightest,” drew up the plans and executed them. General William C. Westmoreland had a plan and LBJ had found his man. McNamara signed on and the USA went to war against the people and the land of Vietnam.
Four years later, the plan was shown to be bogus, when across South Vietnam attacks by supposedly dead guerrillas exploded across the country. This was the “Tet Offensive” of 1968. The guerrillas attacked the American embassy and entered inside its walls. Westmoreland continued to claim that we were winning, but Walter Cronkite told the American people we were nowhere near winning. The American people trusted Cronkite the newsman more that they did the general. When Westmoreland asked LBJ for even more troops, he was called home and promoted to Chief of Staff of the Army. He was never named, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.
Westmoreland should be remembered as a dishonest, political soldier. He told his bosses what they wanted to hear. He was part of the Maxwell Taylor school of soldiering that the Kennedy brothers admired so much. They wanted to hear that counter - insurgency warfare,”the Green Berets,”could be made to work. Skeptics were kicked out of Camelot.
JFK gave the orders to create a helicopter air mobile division. LBJ just followed along listening to the Kennedy advisers telling him what JFK would have done. And thus the political path was paved for the rise of Westmoreland and the attrition policy. The popular novels of Ian Fleming and his secret agent, 007, “licensed to kill,” were endorsed by JFK and they came to epitomize the American plan for “saving” Vietnam, by killing off its citizenry.
When people talk about the “restraint” we used in Vietnam, they reveal that they are either fools or knaves. There was no restraint. The only weapon not used was the atomic bomb and poison gas. Westmoreland created the idea of a free fire zone. In such a designated area, you could presume anyone living there was an enemy and therefore, kill them. Mortars, artillery, tanks, napalm, minefields, rifles, machine guns, hand grenades, helicopter gun ships, gatling guns, night vision weapons, smart bombs, dumb bombs were all authorized for use against the people of Vietnam. Vietnam, also became a place to test new weapons for maiming and killing. Destroying the village was necessary, in order to save it.
Why? Because the people were the enemy, the guerrillas lived among the people, just as the fish live in the sea. If you can’t find the fish, then drain the sea! Brilliant idea. But insane, and completely immoral. It is a strategy that the Ku Klux Klan and the NAZI SS would have endorsed and did endorse. General Westmoreland made it his central strategy. Hence, body counts, computers to track death and destruction, etc.
Westmoreland is dead. But his name is still synonymous with American imperial design. We are the last great empire with the same old battle cry of manifest destiny that took us to war with native-Americans, Mexicans, Hawaiians, Filipinos, Koreans, the Vietnamese and now the people of Iraq. The battle cry is still “west, more land!