Bear Taylor 
HUMBLE HOST NOTE: rollingthunderremembered for 19 April 1968 (Ripple Salvo #775) was posted PM 19 April …Available on website…
RIPPLE SALVO… #776… CLIP II OF STRAUSS AND HOWE’S “THE FOURTH TURNING“… “It’s all happened before…The reward of the historian is to locate patterns that recur over time and to discover the natural rhythms of social experience.”… One reviewer of the 1997 masterpiece by “soothsayers” William Strauss, who passed in 2007, and Neil Howe, said this: “I put down The Fourth Turning with a mixture of terror and excitement…. If Strauss and Howe are right, they will take their place among the great American prophets.”… Humble Host read the book in 1997 and like David Kaiser of the Boston Globe concluded the forecasts of The Fourth Turning were definitely scary, and now, with twenty years to follow the prophecy, the future IS very scary… but first…
GOOD MORNING: Day SEVEN HUNDRED SEVENTY-SIX of remembering the events and brave souls who fought the air war called Operation Rolling Thunder…
HEAD LINES from the OGDEN STANDARD-EXAMINER on Saturday, 20 April 1968, FIFTY YEARS AGO…
THE WAR: Page 1: “YANK JETS CONTINUE TO HIT TARGETS IN PANHANDLE”… “U.S. warplanes set a 1968 record for the second straight day Friday as they flew 160 missions to blast supply targets in North Vietnam’s southern panhandle. American fliers had set a record for the year Thursday when they flew 145 missions, the l;largest number in nearly four months. The Air Force, Navy and Marine pilots on Friday’s raids said they encountered light ground fire and evaded several antiaircraft missiles fired at them in the coastal area between Vinh and Dong Hoi. They hit bridges, roads, trucks and supply points in the area left open to them under President Johnson’s bombing curtailment order, designed to draw Hanoi into peace talks. The northeast monsoon over North Vietnam is almost over and with the rapidly improving weather, the number of American air strikes is expected to increase unless the President orders further curtailment. Although Friday’s 160 missions set a record for 1968, the number is well below the all-time Vietnam war record of 209 set last August 19 before the monsoon season began. The U.S. Command said the deepest penetration Friday was about 168 miles above the demilitarized zone against a railroad spur near Vinh. This was below the 19th Parallel, a boundary U.S. planes have been observing even through Johnson’s public statements gave the northern limit as the 20th Parallel…No American airplanes were reported down, but in a weekly report the United States Command said 1,070 American warplanes had been lost in combat as of Tuesday–823 over North Vietnam and 247 planes lost in the South. Another 1,002 planes have been announced lost in accidents not involving direct enemy action….The spokesman also announced that 643 helicopters have been shot down, all but nine in South Vietnam, and another 928 choppers have been lost to non-hostile causes…IN GROUND FIGHTING, some of the 100,000 allied troops in Operation Complete Victory–the biggest allied campaign of the war–reported three clashes Friday near Saigon. ‘They said 58 Viet Cong were killed while U.S. losses were five killed and 28 wounded.”... STRIKE AT ROAD: “Along the Northern Frontier, North Vietnamese troops struck at the newly;y reopened overland supply road to Khe Sanh Friday,ambushing a U.S. Marine truck convoy while pinning down leathernecks on a road clearing day. An estimated 135 enemy troops, hiding along Highway 9 about eight miles northeast of the Khe Sanh combat base opened fire simultaneously on the slow-moving 12-truck convoy and road clearing patrol about 200 yards away…the convoy called in artillery and air. When the eight-hour fight was over the enemy dragged their dead and wounded with them. Four Marines wer killed.”
Page 1: “TWISTER SWEEPS TOWN CLAIMS 13 LIVES IN ARKANSAS–MORE VICTIMS SOUGHT–At Least 270 Injured”… “Greenwood Arkansas, a tornado devastated this western Arkansas town Friday and killed at 13 persons.”…Page 1: “SENATE CUTS MILLIONS IN DEFENSE”… “The Senate, which voted earlier this year to trim federal spending by $6 billion, has extended its economy drive to include the administration’s massive defense budget. But the $660-million reduction voted Friday by a heavy 45 to 12 majority still left the military authorization at a total of $211.3 billion.”… Page 1: “DR. KING’S KILLER’S IDENTITY CLARIFIED BY FBI”… “The FBI has pinpointed an ex-convict, high school dropout and Army reject as the phantom fugitive Eric Starvo Galt, target of a massive manhunt, in the slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The FBI said Friday a ‘systematic and exhaustive search’ through its fingerprint files revealed Galt and 45-year old James Earl Ray–drifter, loner, avid dancer and prison escapee–as the same man.”… Page 1: “THANT FLIES TO PARIS EN ROUTE TO TEHRAN”… “…has no comment on the prospects of selection of a site for the Vietnam peace talks.”… Page 1: “KENNEDY CONDEMNS NEGRO VIOLENCE”… “Robert f. Kennedy, who see campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has been aimed largely at minority groups, has denounced Negro violence and said it ‘must and will be met with the full force of the law. In a speech in San Francisco, Kennedy said he understood what makes a Negro slum-dweller ‘turn to violence but insisted it solves nothing. The result of Negro violence, he said,’is not a better life for black people, it is a devastated America.’ “
20 APRIL 1968…THE PRESIDENT’S DAILY BRIEF (CIA TS/S-I)… VIETNAM: Signs are increasing that the Communists are using current military lull to prepare for a new round of offensive actions One source says that the aim of a planned new “general offensive against towns and cities” will be to enhance the Communist bargaining position during expected peace talks. Neither forecasts a “second general attack’ if US–North Vietnamese talks are “not successful.” …SOUTH KOREA: Leading Seoul newspapers are enthusiastically hailing the Honolulu communique as a reaffirmation of US commitments in Asia…. NORTH VIETNAM: Hanoi promptly rejected the US offer of ten new sites for preliminary talks. The authoritative Foreign Ministry statement yesterday repeated the demand that the U.S. choose Phnom Penh of Warsaw.
20 APRIL 1968…OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER… OGDEN STANDARD-EXAMINER (See Head Lines Above, full coverage of air war) …”Vietnam: Air Losses” (Chris Hobson) there were no fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 20 April 1968…
SUMMARY OF ROLLING THUNDER LOSSES (KIA/POW/MIA) ON 20 APRIL for all four years of the air war with North Vietnam…
1965… None.
1966… COMMANDER JOHN ABBOTT, Commanding VA-113 embarked in USS Enterprise was flying an A-4C and leading a strike on the highway bridge over the Song Ca at Vinh Son, the training academy for AAA gunners, located about 25 miles northwest of Vinh. Opposition was intense and COMMANDER ABBOTT was hit and went down as he attempted to make the Gulf. He was able to eject and was captured. He died in captivity and his remains were returned to the United States in March 1973 and positively identified for burial in April 1974… He is remembered by the Stingers on this 52nd anniversary of his last flight…
1967… None.
1968… None.
RIPPLE SALVO… #776… CLIP II ( READ CLIP I at Rolling Thunder Remembered for 19 April 1968) THE FOURTH TURNING by William Strauss and Neil Howe, Page 2-3: I quote…
“IT’S ALL HAPPENED BEFORE”…
“The reward of the historian is to locate patterns that recur over time and to discover the natural rhythms of social experience.” In fact, at the core of modern history lies this remarkable pattern. Over the past five centuries, Anglo-American society has entered a new era-a new turning–every two decades or so. At the start of each turning, people change how they feel about themselves, the culture, the nation, and the future. Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history’s seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:
*The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
*The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
*The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
*The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.
“Each turning comes with its own identification mood. Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise. In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that’s what happened.
“The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, no one predicted that America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural divide that would separate anything thought or said after from anything thought or said before. But that’s what happened.
“The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagan’s mid-1980s Morning in America and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade, eight or ten years from now (1997). Amid the glitz of the early Reagan years, no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of national drift and institutional decay. But that’s where we are.
“Have major national mood shifts like this ever before happened? Yes–many times. Have Americans ever before experienced anything like the current attitude of Unraveling? Yes–many times, over the centuries.
“People in their eighties can remember an earlier mood that was much like today’s. They can recall the years between Armistice Day (1918) and the Great Crash of 1929. Euphoria over a global military triumph was painfully short-lived. Earlier optimism about a progressive future gave way to a jazz-age nihilism and a pervasive cynicism about high ideals. Bosses swaggered in immigrant ghettos, the KKK in the South, the mafia in the industrial heartland and defenders of Americanism in myriad Middletowns. Unions atrophied, government weakened, third-parties were the rage and a dynamic marketplace ushered in new consumer technologies (autos, radios, phones, jukeboxes, vending machines) that made life feel newly complicate and frenetic. The risky pleasures of a ‘lost’ young generation shocked middle-aged decency crusader–many of them ‘tired radicals’ who were then moralizing against the detritus of the ‘mauve decade’ of their youth (the 1890s). Opinions polarized around no-compromise cultural issues like drugs, family, and ‘decency.’ Meanwhile, parents strove to protect a scout like new generation of children (who aged into today’s senior citizens). Back then, the details were different, but the underlying mood resemble what Americans feel today (1997). Listen to Walter Lippman, writing during World War I:
“We are unsettled to the very roots of our being. There isn’t human relation, whether parent or child, husband and wife, worker and employer, that doesn’t move in a strange situation. We are not used to a complicated civilization, we don’t know how to behave when personal contact and eternal authority have disappeared. There are no precedents to guide us, no wisdom that was not meant for a simpler age.” “... …
“During each (of four Third Turnings in American history described by the authors), Americans felt well-rooted in their personal values but newly hostile toward the corruptions of civic life. Unifying institutions, which had seemed secure for decades, now felt ephemeral. Those who had once trusted the nation with lives were growing old and dying. To the new crop of young adults, the nation hardly mattered. The whole res publica seemed on the verge of disintegration.
“As it turned out, they were.
“The 1760s were followed by the American Revolution, the 1950s by Civil War, the 1920s by the Great Depression and World War II. All these unraveling eras were followed by bone-jarring Crises so monumental that by their end, American society emerged in a wholly new forms. Each time, the change came without scant warning. As late as 1773, November 1959, and October 1929, the American people had no idea how close it was. The sudden sparks (The Boston Tea Party, John Brown’s raid and execution, Black Tuesday) transformed the public mood, swiftly and permanently. Over the next two decades or so, society convulsed. Emergencies required massive sacrifices from a citizenry that responded by putting community ahead of self. Leaders lead and people trusted them. As a new social contract was created, people overcame challenges once thought insurmountable–and used the Crisis to elevate themselves and their nation to a higher plane of civilization: In the 1790s, they triumphantly created the modern world’s first democratic republic. In the late 1860s, wounded but reunited, they forged a genuine nation extending new guarantees of liberty and equality. In the late 1940s, they constructed the most Promethean superpower ever seen. ‘The Fourth Turning is history’s great discontinuity. It ends one epoch and begins another.”
Strauss and Howe wrote this in 1997: “History is seasonal, and winter is coming. Like nature’s winter, the saecular winter can come early or late. A Fourth Turning can be long and difficult, brief but severe, or (perhaps) mild. But, like winter, it cannot be averted. It must come in its turn.” Fellow Americans, twenty years has passed–winter is here… tomorrow: Clip III … The Strauss & Howe summary of “what the rhythms of modern history warn about America’s future.”…
RTR quote for 20 April: EPICURUS, Diogenes Laertius: “No means of predicting the future really exists, and if it did, we must regard what happens according to it as nothing to us.”
Lest we forget… Bear
