Bear Taylor 
RIPPLE SALVO… #662… “The Year the Dream Died”, by Jules Witcover, is a diary of the year that was the turning point for the future of America. Fifty years later we are searching for a way to restore the Great American Dream. Perhaps by “making America great again.” But not unless we put the lessons of 1968 to work in 2018… Humble Host will be including the Witcover best seller as a reference for my daily posts remembering the last year of Operation Rolling Thunder … (the Good Lord willing)…
Good Morning: Day SIX HUNDRED SIXTY-TWO of a remembrance of an air war fought over North Vietnam to reduce the number of lives lost by our troops fighting on the ground in South Vietnam, among other stated national objectives…
29 December 1967…HEAD LINES from The New York Times on a cloudy and windy Friday in New York…
Page 1: “SIHANOUK EASES STAND OPPOSING INCURSIONS INTO CAMBODIA BY U.S.–CITES HOT PURSUIT–SAYS UNITS OF VIETCONG ENTERED CAMBODIA BUT WERE OUSTED”… “Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Cambodian chief of state said today that under certain conditions Cambodian troops would not try to stop United States troops from entering the country in hot pursuit of Vietcong or North Vietnamese forces. The Prince added that he would take such a position only if he was convinced that Vietcong or North Vietnamese troops had entered Cambodia illegally and were in a uninhabited outlying region difficult to control. Prince Sihanouk took that position in reply to questions submitted by the Washington Post. The main point of his reply was made public by the Cambodian Information Service.”… GROUND WAR…Page 1: “Foe Counterattacks on Vietnam’s Coast”...”Vietcong guerrillas counterattacked a force of several battalions of South Vietnamese rangers, infantrymen and militia early today in a fierce battle near Holan, on the South Vietnamese coast 380 miles northeast of Saigon. Government forces said the counterattack was made after the Vietcong had lost 52 men in a series of bitter actions yesterday in which the South Vietnamese were supported by American artillery fire and helicopter gunships. Last night, after continuing fighting through the day, the Vietcong launched a heavy counterattack that listed until 3:30 this morning. South Vietnamese casualties were officially described as light. Heavy fighting was also reported in the same area–northern Quangtri Province–involving a United States Marine battalion and an enemy force of about 500 men. There was some confusion in Saigon this morning over the question whether the marine and South Vietnamese actions might be parts of the same battle, taking place in separate areas of Holan. Fighting broke out as soon as the Marines made a helicopter assault in the morning on the rice-paddy lands. Enemy troops equipped with heavy machine guns and mortars kept the Marines under-fire through the day. The enemy was apparently dug into well-fortified positions in the coastal area.”….
“Earlier in the day the United States command disclosed in Saigon American troop strength in South Vietnam was now 478,000 men, an increase over the week that ended December 16. The new figure–including men of the new 11th Infantry Brigade, which arrived in the country last week. It was also announced that 106 servicemen were killed in combat last week. a week earlier the number of killed in action was 187. THE UNITED STATES COMBAT DEATHS TOLL IN THE WAR IS NOW 15,812. A TOTAL OF 52,665 AMERICAN SERVICEMEN HAVE BEEN WOUNDED IN ACTION…
Page 1: “Protesters Win Sidewalk Rights–State Court Voids City Ban on Obstructions as Vague”... “The Court of Appeals declared unconstitutional today a New York City law that has often been used to break up peaceful protests against the Vietnam war. In a 5-2 decision, the state’s highest court reversed the conviction of …a 20-year old college student who had set up a card table in Queens with a sign that said ‘Stop the War in Vietnam’…”… Page 1: “Senator Dirksen Doubts Johnson Policy Points Toward Peace–Cites Rising War Costs and Casualties–Aggressive Republican Line for 1968 Campaign Seen”… Page 2: “U.S. Deserters From USS Intrepid Leave Moscow for Stockholm, Sweden”… Page 12: “‘In the Heat of the Night’ Voted Best Movie of 1967 by New York Critics, ‘Bonnie and Clyde,’ ‘In Cold Blood,’ and ‘Guess Who is Coming to Dinner,’ also received votes.”…
29 December 1967… President’s Daily Brief… NORTH VIETNAM: Red River Crossings. Photography of 15 December shows three causeway-pontoon bridges in place or under construction across the Red River just north and south of the recently bombed Paul Doumer Bridge. The causeways run out from the banks and are constructed of rock and gravel laid across exposed sand bars. Pontoon sections are added where necessary to complete the crossings. One causeway-pontoon bridge, north of the Doumer bridge, is under construction. Two others, about a mile and half south of the Doumer bridge, are operational. The new Red River crossings are believed capable of supporting a moderate level of truck traffic. The causeways should be serviceable for several months until undermined and washed out when the present seasonally low water in the Red River returns to normal about June. There are twelve other alternative crossing facilities along the Red River, half of them within five miles of the Doumer bridge…. Hanoi Traffic in Hanoi during Christmas Truce: (a source) in Hanoi during the 24-hour Christmas truce observed it with similar high volumes of traffic which have occurred during periods when inclement weather prevented US air activity. (source) observed traffic crossing into Hanoi over what appeared to be two pontoon or boat-borne bridges (apparently the causeway-pontoon bridges referred to in the previous item). The recently bombed Paul Doumer Bridge was in almost complete darkness. Heavy traffic was also observed on highways leading into Hanoi from all directions… HANOI REPORTS ANTIWAR PROTEST IN TEXAS...Quoting Western news sources, the Hanoi broadcast stated that 55 members of the Austin “Committee to End the Vietnam War” held a one-hour Christmas day vigil outside the President’s ranch “to protest against the US war of aggression in Vietnam.”…
29 December 1967… OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER…New York Times…Page 1: “In the air war over the North, United States pilots struck lines of communications and storage areas in the panhandle region, the southern part of North Vietnam. Cloudy weather, however, hampered an assessment of the damage.”… “Vietnam: Air Losses” (Chris Hobson) There were two fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 29 December 1967…
(1) LT J.F. DOWD and LTJG GARTH K. FLINT were flying an F-4B of the VF-161 Chargers embarked in USS CORAL SEA on a weather recce along the coast northeast of Haiphong near Cam Pha when hit by ground fire from one of the many small islands off the coast. Smoke filled the cockpit, the canopy was jettisoned to clear the smoke, but conditions in the cockpits worsened and the two aviators were forced to eject about ten miles southeast of Cam Pha. They were rescued by a Navy helicopter to fly and fight again…
(2) CAPTAIN CARLOS RAFAEL CRUZ, CAPTAIN WILLIAM JOSEPH POTTER and A1C PAUL LEONARD FOSTER were flying an A-26A Invader of the 609th ACS and 56th ACW out of Nakon Phanom on a night armed recce in Steel Tiger and sighted a convoy of ten trucks 35 miles northwest of Khe Sanh. They made three successful attacks, including a napalm run. On their fourth attack they were hit by the active 37mm fire in the target area and were all killed in action in the ensuing crash. Their remains were recovered and identified and they rest in peace in America on this day fifty years after their valiant final flight…
RIPPLE SALVO… #662… Here is some of what David Halberstam had to say about 1968 and The Year the Dream Died in the Foreword to the book…..
“It was one those extraordinary benchmark years; it seemed to signify that the country, under the ferocious pressure of rapid technological change (most particularly, the nightly delivery of televised news into each home), the growing pain of an unwinnable war in a distant Asian society, plus bitter, increasingly explosive racial division, was on the verge of a national nervous breakdown. The year had begun with the stunning North Vietnamese assault upon American Forces in Vietnam at the time of Tet, an assault that robbed an already embattled administration of its little surviving credibility and the validity of its pronouncements that victory was just around the corner. It speeded up immediately with two challenges to the sitting president by two members of his own party, Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, challenges that put in play a children’s army of student dissenters, and that turned the Democratic primaries into a de facto referendum on the war. If in the past American political divisions had been primarily based on region and class and ethnicity, a new ingredient had now been added, profound generational differences, not just region by region, but remarkably and often quite painfully, house by house. Those who had suffered through the Depression and fought World War II and who tended to accept the word of existing leadership were on one side, their children, raised in a more affluent and more iconoclastic age, were on the other.
“Nineteen sixty-eight was the year in which politics seemed to begin with violent events in a small country 12,000 miles away, to go into the street at home, finally to reach the conventions themselves. It was a yer marked by two shattering assassinations, the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. In that year, lone sometimes had a sense that violence begat violence. all kinds of different forces were at work: the year marked a collision of the politics of old, for better and for worse, with the politics of the new, for better and for worse. It came a little more that a decade into the full era of politics by television, the entire nation sitting at home watching the news in its living rooms on a medium that seemed to need and demanded ever more action, for television news loved action, because action provided film. Nothing had done more to expedite the jarring domestic political events or 1968 than the jarring nightly reports from Vietnam, what the writer Michael Arlen eventually called The Living Room War. In a way the events of 1968 reflect the culmination of an age; the dissenters kept going into the street, until at the central moment of the political year, the Democratic convention in Chicago, the most important events were outside the convention hall in the streets rather than inside on the podium.
“No one captured the politics of that year at the time better than Jules Witcover, one of the best and most careful political writers. In The Year the Dream Died he has set down with great skill and precision the political events that reflected a year in which the nation itself seemed on the edge of unraveling. To read this book is to be brought back to the frenetic, moving, painful, bittersweet time.”…
Humble Host predicts remarkable coincidents in the events of 1968 and 2018… Time will tell…watch these spaces for exciting developments as we continue to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Vietnam war and Operation Rolling Thunder…
RTR Quote for 29 December: CALVIN COOLIDGE, May 1930 Cosmopolitan Magazine: “I should like to be known as a former president who tried to mind his own business.”…
Lest we forget…. Bear
