ROLLING THUNDER REMEMBERED 9 MARCH 1967

RIPPLE SALVO… #369… “In a war like this one, a man’s life is of small account.”... but first…

Good Morning: Day THREE HUNDRED SIXTY-NINE a visit to one of the great battlefields of the last century–the Red River Valley of North Vietnam…

9 MARCH 1967… HEAD LINES and LEADS from The New York Times on a nice Thursday in NYC…

Page 1: “House Ethics Panel Vows Not to Snoop after Hours”..”The House Administration Committee moved today to assume jurisdiction on ethics and assured Representatives that if it got the job it would not snoop into their after hours morals. Omar Burleson, Democrat of Texas, the committee chairman said that ethics ‘a barrel of worms’ difficult to define and regulate. How can you formalize integrity.’ “... Page 1: “U.S. Would Widen Equality of Vote”… “The Federal government asked the Supreme Court to extend the one-man one-vote doctrine to county and city governments throughout the country. Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall: “It is a matter of constitutional principle , logic and sound policy, the principles of Reynolds apply to local governmental bodies whose members who are elected from districts be substantially equal in population.'”… Page 1: “Business Spending in U.S. to Slacken”… Business spending on new plants and equipment was added to the lengthening list of signs of a general slowdown in the economy this year.”… Page 1: “Bombing of North Vietnam Should Stop: Sweden Says”... “…and is ready to assist with peace negotiations. Sweden’s Foreign Minister Torsten Nilsson: ‘World opinion demands with increasing impatience, that the war in Vietnam…be put to an end. Start by stopping the bombing of North Vietnam.’ “… Page 1: “Ivy League Papers Split on Deferment”... “Newspapers from seven of the eight Ivy League colleges split in formal joint statements defining their positions on the questions of draft deferments and reform. In a joint communication issued late Tuesday night the editors of the Brown, Cornell, Pennsylvania and Dartmouth campus newspapers called for preservation of the present system of deferments for undergraduates…Counter communication came from Columbia, Princeton, and Yale urging the abolition of undergraduate deferments. Harvard refused to associate with either position.”…

Page 1: “Schlesinger Charges U.S. Wants No Peace Talks Now”… “Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., an advisor to President Kennedy, said today he had concluded that the Johnson Administration does not want to negotiate now to settle the war in Vietnam. ‘Why else, unless it wishes to avoid negotiation now would the Administration have hardened it terms demanding today from Hanoi what it did not demand a year ago,’ Mr. Schlesinger said. “The time has come to break the hopeless logic which can never find the right moment.’ “...Page 1: “Stand By Kennedy”…”The Vietnam conflict was a sufficient basis for suspension of all student deferments. We now face a difficult time–it is not peacetime, but neither has a national emergency of war been declared.’ Speaking to a meeting of educators in Chicago, Senator Kennedy said, ‘In this situation while 300,000 young men are in Vietnam, serious questions can be raised about the continuation of any deferment policy.’…The President of Brown University, Dr. Ray Heffner said, ‘The college student under this system becomes a member of a privileged class.” “… Page 14: “De Gaulle Sees Freedom at Stake”... “President de Gaulle indicated today that he viewed France’s Sunday runoff election for the National Assembly as a contest between Gaulism and communism–freedom and a dominating element in the government–communism.”…

Page 38: “Chou En-lai At the Helm?” Though still unconfirmed, the Peking that Premier Chou En-lai has at least temporarily taken over the reins of command there is credible enough evidence to support that conclusion. From the beginning of the ‘cultural revolution’ Chou’s speeches have been marked by an emphasis on the need for discipline, for reason rather coercion, and for attention to the needs of production. This pragmatic attitude seemed to have little impact on the Red Guards and revolutionary rebels as they went on with their destructive orgies.   Chou En-lai’s point of view may now be in ascendancy.”

9 March 1967… The President’s Daily Brief (TS sanitized) VIETNAM: Some unusually good movie and still films have been acquired as an unexpected dividend from Operation Junction City. The best of these pictures show General Nguyen Chi Thanh–a member of Ho Chi Minh’s Politburo and Hanoi’s number one man in the South–and two other North Vietnamese Generals inspecting Viet Cong installations in South Vietnam. This is by far the most publicly exploitable evidence yet that these people are in fact operating inside the South. The Saigon embassy is planning to make full use of the opportunity.

9 MARCH 1967…OPERATION ROLLING THUNDER... New York Times (10 Mar reporting 9 Mar ops) Page 20: “In North Vietnam”… “American pilots flew 90 missions involving two or more planes against targets across the country while naval gunners continued to bombard the coast. The Nay reported destruction of a surface-to-air missile on the cost south of Thanh Hoa. Pilots reported that radar at two other sites, one north of Thanh Hoa and the south of Haiphong had also been struck…”…. “Vietnam: Air Losses” (Hobson)… Three fixed wing aircraft lost in Southeast Asia on 9 March 1967…

(1) COMMANDER CHARLES LANCASTER PUTNAM and LTJG F.S. PRENDERGAST were flying an RA-5C of the RVAH-13 Bats embarked in USS Kitty Hawk on a coastal photo reconnaissance run north of Thanh Hoa with an F-4 escort. While on a high-speed low altitude — 350-feet — the aircraft was hit by automatic weapons fire and burst into flames. Both aviators ejected and came down about 200 yards off the beach. COMMANDER PUTNAM was observed down and immobile on the beach. Heavy enemy fire precluded further rescue attempts… COMMANDER PUTNAM was Killed in Action fifty years ago, glory gained, duty done… His remains were returned to the United States in 1988…Read the Task Force Omega report on Commander Putnam. 

The capture and rescue of Frank Prendergast is one of legend. According to Captain Irv Williams, USN (ret.):

“I was in CAG-11 with Frank. He was an RA-5C RAN backseater from VAH-13 on board Kitty Hawk during our 66-67 cruise. His pilot was the squadron CO, CDR Charlie Putnam. They were shot down on 9March 1967 off the coast north of Thanh Hoa. Charlie landed on beach and was last seen running with the NVA in hot pursuit (we on the ship assumed he was captured, but he was never in our system. Remains returned in 1988). Frank landed about 200 yards offshore in shallow, waist-depp water. Two North Vietnamese came out and captured him. They took his standard issue .38 revolver but did not go through his survival vest—in which Frank was carrying a .25 automatic. They gave him the hands up signal and started to force him toward the beach. However, every time the F-4 escort made a low pass, one guard would duck under the water and the other would kind of duck and take his eyes off Frank. Frank saw the rescue helo inbound and decided it was now or never. One the next pass he pulled out the .25 automatic and shot the first guard between the eyes—as the second one surfaced he knocked him silly, took his AK-47 and threw it away from them (he told me he didn’t know why he didn’t shoot the second guard!). Frank then got up on a sandbar and started running toward the chopper. The guard recovered his weapon, was in hot pursuit about 100 yards behind, and began to shoot. Frank stopped and held up his hands as if surrendering. The guard stopped shooting at which time Frank fired at him, and then began to run again. The same thing happened a second time before the Navy CSAR helicopter Loose Foot arrived, turned broadside and machine-gunned the guard in pursuit. Frank was rescued and returned to Kitty Hawk.” Tragically, Frank Prendergast passed away suddenly on Friday 16 January 1998, from a heart attack. He was only 55 years-old.

(2) An O-1E Bird Dog of the 21st TASS and 504th TASG out of Nha Trang crashed due to pilot error. Two in the crew survived to fly and fight again…

(3) MAJOR IVEL DOAN FREEMAN, MAJOR LEROY PRESTON BOHRER, CAPTAIN ROGER PAUL RICHARDSON, TSGT RAYMOND FRANCIS LEFTWICH, SSGT PRENTICE FAY BRENTON, A1C CHARLES DWAYNE LAND and A1C DANIEL CORTEZ REESE were flying an RC-47P of the 361st TRS and 460th TRW out of Nha Trang on an RDF (radio direction finding) mission in the Central Highlands and failed to return to base. The crash site was found on 11 March and there were no survivors. It was determined that the aircraft had been shot down by small arms fire and thereafter the RC-47s were operated above a minimum altitude of 2000-feet. KILLED IN ACTION: MAJOR FREEMAN, MAJOR BOHRER, CAPTAIN RICHARDSON, SSGT BRENTON, TSGT LEFTWICH, AIRMAN LAND, and AIRMAN REESE. They rest in peace and are remembered on this day fifty years after their final mission… Killed in Action…

RIPPLE SALVO… #369… “KILLED IN ACTION“…  is the title of a little book by Gregory Coco that records the last moments of one hundred Union soldiers who gave the “last full measure” at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in July 1863. My great-great-grandfather Isaiah T. Enders was in the Pennsylvania Militia unit that was called to cleanup the battlefield after the armies moved on. He spent July and August 1863 amid the dead and dying soldiers who were unable to move on. So Coco’s books recounting the days, combat and the aftermath of Gettysburg is of special interest to me.  But my war was Vietnam and ROLLING THUNDER and my purpose in creating this journal –my motivation– was difficult for me to nail down, until I re-read this piece from Coco’s “Killed in Action.”  He introduced his explanation for his motivation to write his “small book” thusly…

Coco wrote:

“In a war like this one, a man’s life is of small account.” The words are appropriate enough…those of General Daniel E. Sickles as he lay dazed and bleeding on a surgeon’s crude operating table near a place called Gettysburg, so many long years ago. He instinctively knew that oft-times an individual in battle, as in life, could make a difference. But Sickles was also consciously aware that, in reality, a battlefield is an intrinsic region where one man’s mortal being is indeed, nearly worthless. War is like a great monstrous threshing machine; it does not keep score; it does not pick and choose; it does not show preference. It merely crushes and maims and destroys, with no rhyme or reason, until its bloody, sickening work is done. My inherent belief in the truth of what Sickles uttered on that Thursday, July 2, 1863, it then the primary motivation for this small book.”

“A soldier, W.J. Patterson, formerly of the 62nd Pennsylvania Infantry, said it best when he noted in a speech given at Gettysburg in 1889:

‘Have the dead been mentioned except in numbers? Have the cripples been referred to except in the aggregate? Yet it was the rank and file that stood the shock of battle and that gave blow for blow. It was the columns of soldiers that charged the enemy or stood like a rock against fierce assaults.’

“Patterson was correct of course, except he left out the general, field and line officers who died too, bravely beside and among the men they commanded.”

Gregory Coco spent most of his adult life researching and recording the stories of the men who lived and died on the battlefield at Gettysburg. He was not satisfied with a name on a muster sheet or casualty list. He wanted to “find something more than that.” He wanted “a witness to death, a view into the suffering and pain; much more than a passing notice of ‘killed in action.’ ” Coco wanted to make the fallen more human. He wanted to record history. What he found was that such biographical and eyewitness details and data were to be found for only a few hundred warriors and witnesses out of the tens of thousands who were there. As a result, the good of those thousands, and their role in history, died with them–lost for all time.

rollingthunderremembered.com is a comparable endeavor. This is an open website with an opportunity for every warrior who was on the battlefield of North Vietnam to record for posterity the eyewitness details and testimonials that will make the fallen warriors “more human.” Humble Host encourages readers to become writers and take this opportunity to make some contributions to the permanent records of the our war… 

CAG’s QUOTES for 9 March: Mac Arthur: “Surprise is the most vital element for success in war.”… PATTON: “If the fate of the only successful general in war depends on the statement of a discredited writer like Drew Pearson, we are in a bad fix.”

Lest we forget…      Bear