Bear Taylor 
RIPPLE SALVO…#48… MY COUNTRY …but first…
Good Morning: Day FORTY-EIGHT of a look back at Operation Rolling Thunder…”the air war”…
19 APRIL 1966 (NYT)… ON THE HOMEFRONT… Bright Tuesday morning in New York… The Foreign Aid Bill is lead item as the State Department seeks big bucks and Senator William Fulbright holds out for better accountability: “U.S. Secretary of State Defends Aid Bill Against Senator’s Attack.” Bill’s price tag $3.4 billion… Page 1; “Bill Russell Named Boston Celtics Coach,” and becomes the first Negro to lead a major professional team. He replaces Red Auerbach and as a player/coach gets a raise to $125K…Page 1 jumped to 3: “Missile Sites Afire U.S. Attackers Say,” and smoke rising from the site to 3,000-feet. The Flight Leader Captain Glenn Farnsworth of Homestead, Florida was interviewed by the press in Saigon. While the SAM site was being engaged, three flights of Air Force jets struck a bridge on the main rail line north of Hanoi… also, two aircraft lost, a Navy A-1H lost at sea and an Air Force F-4 went down at sea off Dong Hoi… Page 6: “FBI Said to be Investigating Student Group Opposed to War.” Students For Democratic Society,” a four year old organization, has doubled in size in a year and has been active on several college campuses including Wesleyan and Yale. National membership now put at 5,000 and chapters between 175 to 200. FBI is investigating 175 types of violations including “possible infiltration of SDS by Communists.” The SDSers are counseling and giving advice to college students on how to be conscientious objectors to avoid the draft..
Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield’s speech on the Senate floor (days earlier) was carried verbatim on page 8, including these clips: “During the past year our armed forces by their sacrifices, gave a new lease on life to the non-communist military and political structure of South Vietnam. But let us not delude ourselves that new lease on life runs only as long as United States support continues, and in the present circumstance, continues to grow… It is not in Europe but in Asia and the United States where the pain of war is felt. It is in Asia where the implications of this war are most grim. It is in Asia where other nations are immediately threatened by its spread. It is in short, in Asia where the peace must be made and kept. It may well be, therefore, that it is in Asia where peace must now be–directly and vigorously–sought.”
19 APRIL 1966… ROLLING THUNDER… “A costly day for both the Air Force and Navy…” The Air Force lost an F-105D from the 333TFS, Takhli, piloted by 1LT LEE ARON ADAMS on a strafing attack on trucks near Van Loc, 40 miles north of the DMZ. The aircraft was either struck by automatic weapon fire in the strafing pass and crashed with no ejection or 1LT Lee flew into the ground. In either case he was Killed in Action and rests in peace… CAPTAIN JOSEPH ORVILLE BROWN, and an unidentified crewman, of Detachment 3 of the 505TACG, NKP, flying an o-1F were Killed in Action near the Mugia Pass when their aircraft was hit by ground fire and was seen to enter a steep dive into the ground. CAPTAIN BROWN’s body was recovered and identified in 1995 and he was buried in Arlington on 19 April 1999, seventeen years ago today… I have no information on the unidentified crewman (Vietnamese?)… The third loss of the day was an A-1E from the 602ACS out of Nha Trang piloted by CAPTAIN RICHARD JOSEPH ROBBINS. He was part of a flight escorting the rescue helicopter to the scene of the O-1F downed near Mugia. While orbiting the crash site he was hit and attempted to fly the aircraft to the Gulf of Tonkin. He crashed near the border of Laos and North Vietnam and was Killed in Action. His body was recovered in 1995 and returned to the United States for burial. The same day, USS Ticonderoga lost two F-8s, but both pilots ejected over the Gulf and were rescued…LT RON BALL was piloting a VFP63 Photo Crusader near Haiphong on a photo recce mission and was hit by AAA. He flew the aircraft 15 miles to sea before the engine seized and he ejected to be rescued by a helicopter from USS Yorktown… COMMANDER R.A. MOHRPARDI of VF-51 was flying an F-8E fighter escort for a strike group attacking a bridge north of Thanh Hoa and was hit by AAA. He flew the aircraft for more than 100 miles, but exhausted his fuel and had to eject to be rescued by Navy helicopter to fly again another day… CAPTAIN ORVILLE BROWN, CAPTAIN RICHARD ROBBINS and 1LT LEE ADAMS (and an unidentified o-1 crewman) perished in the line of duty fifty years ago today… Lest we forget…
RIPPLE SALVO… DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY… In those days of the early 50s, when we were young, every one of my peer understood our obligation to do something for our country for all she has done for us (thanks JFK). We were the children of World War II and Korea. And as we left high school we registered for the draft. Or enlisted. We all knew that service in the military was a given. The only questions were: which service, when, and where??? All of us were influenced by the culture and the times of our youth. For me, that included a couple of media productions that sealed the deal…Fly Navy. “The Bridges of Toko-Ri” and the “Victory at Sea” TV series were the final touches on my dream of flying that had been planted many years before and defined by the heroics of Navy and Air Corps/Force fighter pilots in World War II. Ten to fifteen years later it was me and my cohorts turn to put on the shield, take up the sword and fight for our country. Duty, honor country. Does that sound phony? Not in the 1950s and 60s. Not ever? The Silent Generation really believed CSA General JEB Stuart when he said: “A man who loves his country will not hesitate for a second to volunteer for combat and fight for his country.”
I found a paragraph in in Stanley Karnow’s “Vietnam: A History,” that helps explain why my cohort, the Silent Generation,” went to war, and fought the war, with full vigor and dedication to the task. “My country, right or wrong, my country.” Karnow:
“In many ways, the American troops sent to Vietnam were no less (motivated and) ideological than their North Vietnamese and Vietcong adversaries. Exhorted by Kennedy and Johnson to join the crusade to halt the spread of Communism, they firmly believed in the sanctity of their cause. Also, their fathers had fought in World War II, and they felt it was their generation’s turn to do their duty. They knew the United States had never been defeated in a war, and their impulses were stimulated and dramatized by the exploits of movie and television heroes–a factor that emerges repeatedly in their personal recollections. William Ehrhart, a former marine sergeant, emphasized the influence on him of what he called the ‘John Wayne syndrome,’ and another veteran, Dale Reich, imagined himself to be ‘a soldier like John Wayne, a dashing GI who feared nothing and either emerges with the medals and the girl, or died heroically.’ In ‘Born on the Fourth of July,’ an account of his service, Ron Kovic recalled his decision to enlist in the marines after two recruiters had strongly addressed his senior high school class: ‘As I shook their hands and stared up in their eyes, I couldn’t help but feel that I was shaking hands with John Wayne or Audie Murphy.'”
Karnow cites a 1980 Veteran’s Administration poll of Vietnam troops concerning their feeling after they came home…
(1) Looking back, were you glad you went to Vietnam?…72% Yes
(2) Did you enjoy your tour there?…74% Yes
(3) Would you go again?… 66% Yes
(4) In addition, 82% said “…they had been sent into a conflict that political leaders in Washington would not let them win…”
My answers to all three questions ?…Yes, Yes, and Yes… As for #4… I am in the 18% who would disagree with that conclusion. Just as success has many mothers, so does defeat. Sun Tzu, the teacher, advises… “The acme of skill is to win without fighting.” I believe we started losing the day we chose to enter the fight with men and arms on the side of a nation that was as hopelessly divided and disorganized as South Vietnam was in 1962-64. Our country is notorious for believing that democracy is the answer for all nations. Somehow, somewhere, somebody created a paramount “national value” for our country that insists that it is the destiny of the United States to “spread and defend democracy” throughout the world. That is an impossible dream. It is the wishful thinking of the prancing unicorns among us– the idealists, progressives, neo-conservatives, and dreamers. That was the case in Vietnam in the 1950s when we went where we had little chance of achieving our political and military objectives. We went in without having: clear objectives; the power, position and RESOLVE to get the job done; and a realistic exit strategy. Fifty years later our nation is still leaping before looking and continues to ignore the teacher, Sun Tzu AND our own lessons learned, or not, from bitter experience– South Vietnam 1962-75. “To win without fighting” remains an elusive alternative cardinal rule to the century old axiom that it is our national responsibility and destiny to expend ourselves proving that a democratic republic is the epitome of government form. Our quest to make the world safe for democracy, self-determination and individual freedom has proven to be a path of self-destruction.
Stuart was right– no man should cringe from fighting for his country. His country. Duty, honor, country. My cohort understood this and we did our duty, and we did it well. For what purpose? Fifty-eight thousand brave warriors expended in a good cause?
Lest we forget…. Bear ………………………… –30– ……………………….
