-Cavet Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> -Cui Bono- from: http://www.prouty.org/ <A HREF="http://www.prouty.org/">The Col. L. Fletcher Prouty Reference Site</ A> ----- Military Experiences Part II: 1945-1961 On Okinawa: The Surrender of Japan, and a 500,000 manpack Re-Routed to Korea and Indochina Prouty: On September 1st, 1945 we left Okinawa after an enormous hurricane and flew north to Tokyo over the storm, which meant we had to fly at about 14,000 feet. We never saw any of the islands as we approached, but our navigator got us directly up there so that we looked down in the clouds and right in the top of the clouds we saw the top of Mt. Fuji. With that as a fix we went down through the clouds into Tokyo Bay. We had no electronic navigation aides, but of course Mt. Fuji was a good fix. We broke out of the clouds at about 1100 feet in heavy rain. There, almost right under us, was the U.S. Navy anchored almost in a big crescent of ships with the battleship Missouri as a centerpiece. September 2nd, the day after we made this first flight into Japan, was the day the Japanese surrendered on the U.S. Navy Battleship Missouri to General MacArthur. We followed a small river to an air base called Atsugi and landed there. We found out after we had landed that, out of about fifty airplanes that had taken off that morning, only three of us had arrived there -- because the weather was severe. It was just the luck we had of seeing that little tip of Fuji that made it possible for us to get in. But it turned the tables on us. Because here we were: we were the second plane -- there was one plane there and shortly after we landed a third plane came. And Atsugi was surrounded by several hundred thousand Japanese. And we thought: we were in a deathly war only a few days before; we'd hit them with atom bombs -- what's our reception going to be? And here we were just in an unarmed transport plane. Our cargo, interestingly enough, was 44 Marines. The other airplanes had equal numbers but, with only three planes we had about 130 Marines. They were going to become the elite guard for MacArthur as he set up his headquarters in Tokyo. So with 140 Marines I don't know how long we could have lasted. But, the Japanese had been told by the Emperor that the war was over. They made no hostile moves. In fact, they came forward and by hand off-loaded our airplane. We had three jeeps on that plane. And by standing on the flatbed of a truck, they lifted the jeep from the plane onto the truck and then lifted the jeep onto the ground. And these were our enemies the week before. It's unbelievable, to think of how wartime emotions can shift immediately. Of course we need to think more of that, because our wartime alliance with the Soviet Union ended in the same way. When the hostile battles against the Germans and the Japanese ended, they became our friends immediately; and the Russians became our enemies. It's a very strange thing. I don't think that historians have dealt properly with the enormous differences that took place -- even before the end of the war (I was going to say at the end of World War II) -- even before the end of World War II. I'd like to recap a few months. The Germans surrendered on May 8th, I believe, 1945. Before their surrender the German foreign minister, Count Lutz Schwerin Von Krosigk made the Iron Curtain speech in Berlin. Not Winston Churchill. A Nazi made that speech. You can read it in the London Times of May 3, 1945. He stated that the Russians were going to lower an Iron Curtain over Eastern Europe. Churchill read that and was impressed by it. He had yet to meet Truman officially. (Truman had just become President after the death of Roosevelt.) He wrote Truman a letter in which he spoke about this Iron Curtain being dropped over Eastern Europe. Truman was fascinated with the letter, invited Churchill (later, 1946 I believe) to come to the States, and it resulted in the famous Iron Curtain speech at Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri. Churchill did not originate the Iron Curtain concept; the Germans did. And the Germans that did were the ones who were in contact with our OSS and who had been led to believe there would be life after war if they allied themselves again with the Americans. Even the Iron Curtain speech had its origins during the war instead of after the war. These are interesting events when you think back to them. I couldn't help but think, as we rolled this airplane on Atsugi air base in front of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese, that here were our enemies -- and immediately they were not. They came over and helped us unload the plane. And they've been our friends ever since. I've lived in Japan for three years since then and never was a victim of any kind of unfriendly act in Japan, under any circumstances, over the years. Incidentally, Atsugi became the Japanese and Far Eastern headquarters for our CIA in later years and is a very active base for that purpose. So a lot of these things that we date September 2, 1945, need to be carefully analyzed for their impact upon events that have happened since then -- the Cold War and all that sort of thing. There was also another important event: on the day we left Okinawa to go to Japan, I noticed that our Navy was loading ships in Naha harbor at Okinawa. When I came back from the flight -- we were living very close to the harbor -- I went down to the harbor and happened to run into a Navy captain who was the harbormaster. Ratcliffe: You came back from the flight on the same day? Prouty: Same day. It was a short flight. Four hours up and four hours back. We couldn't stay; there was no place to stay. In fact, we couldn't even get fuel. We had to carry enough fuel up to get back. That caused us quite a bit of trouble. We lost quite a few planes that way -- they didn't have enough fuel to get back. And we didn't have enough experience with that operation. But we got back that day. The next day I went down to the harbor and met the harbormaster. Okinawa had been absolutely loaded with supplies for the invasion of Japan. It had been planned that 500,000 men would invade Japan and we had stock-piled what we call a "500,000 Manpack." That's enough equipment, medicine, radios, everything, for 500,000 men for a certain fixed period of time. I wish I could tell you, but it's probably a month, or two months, something like that. Ratcliffe: 500,000 men. Prouty: A "500,000 Manpack" of supplies had been stacked up there on Okinawa. Now of course that wasn't all that would go into the invasion, because ships that had been preloaded for the invasion would also come in. But anyway, on Okinawa there was an enormous amount of equipment. And all of a sudden it was being reloaded on trucks, put back on transport ships, and sailing out to sea. The first thing I asked the commander was, "Is this all going back to the United States?" He said, "No. We don't want any of that back. Anything that isn't going to be used is going to be junked." He said, "This is going to Hanoi in Indochina." And he said, "Actually about half is going to Indochina." At that time, that didn't have the same impact on me that it would have today. I've since learned that when it got to Hanoi -- to the harbor of Haiphong -- it was turned over to the representatives of Ho Chi Minh. We gave this equipment to Ho Chi Minh, who was with our own Army, with General Gallagher of the U.S. Army. We were equipping his people so they could help us round up renegade Japanese -- and this would be their way of arming and putting together their original army in North Vietnam. Now this was September 2, 1945. Also on that date, by another coincidence, with the American Army General Gallagher standing beside him and OSS representative Lou Conein there, Ho Chi Minh read the Declaration of Independence of Vietnam. He established the national independence of that country on that same date that the Japanese signed the surrender. It's an historic date, because it marks the beginning of our entry on the ground in Vietnamese affairs, which lasted from 45 until '75. Most historians don't use that 20-year period from '45 to '65, when our Marines finally landed on the shores of Vietnam. They forget that we were there for 20 years before that. We'll say more about that as we go along, but this is an important date. We went into Japan three or four times after that, generally picking up American prisoners of war, who had been very quickly released by the Japanese, and we got them all out of there. In one of those flights, I flew along the coast of Japan and flew right over Hiroshima. Having seen many cities that had been devastated by the war (Tokyo really worse than any of them), Hiroshima was quite an unusual sight. Because you could see that whatever had happened to Hiroshima happened instantly. All of the destruction was in one direction. The wind blew one way. The bomb burst and phum!, the whole city just burst outwards like that. Much of it looked like powder-grey; everything was burned and broken, and steel buildings were bent over. I flew very low over the area and had a good look at it. It was something that we had to learn a lot about. Because a lot of people have no concept really of what this thing called an atom bomb, or hydrogen bomb, can do to a target. And one bomb wiped it out, totally. 1946-1948: Inaugurating the Air Force's ROTC Program at Yale While I was on Okinawa we were continuing this postwar cleanup of our prisoners and people that needed medical care from Japan. After a few months in California, I received orders to transfer me to a training program and then to Yale University to inaugurate the Air Force's ROTC program in 1946. Ratcliffe: This would have been in 1946? Prouty: This was in September, '46. We -- the Air Force had not had ROTC before the war. The Air Corps was part of the Army then and Army ROTC covered Air Force and everything else, so we hadn't had a distinct ROTC. But the decision had been made to establish an Air Force ROTC. So we transferred from San Francisco, where we were living then, to New Haven. I taught there through the scholastic years of '46, '47, and '48. Those were very interesting years in the campuses and very interesting years for the ROTC program. For example: I would have, say, 35 students enrolled in the course and I might have 200 auditing the course. They were very, very interested in the military in those days. They were very interested in what you might call "postwar studies of World War II" by all of us that were teaching. There were three of us with the Air Force ROTC program; we were all veterans of the war and we could speak firsthand. There was a Navy program there and an Army program. So ROTC was a pretty strong course. But the student interest amazed me. I was there when President Bush was a student. I remember William Buckley as the editor of the Yale Daily News. In fact, I wrote for him several times. Many of the other people of that era now have become rather prominent people in the United States. When you start a course like that, you have no antecedent. We didn't even have offices. Our offices at first were in a corridor. You don't have books, you don't have textbooks. You don't have the lesson guides. So we were authorized by the Air Force to teach certain subjects. They gave us a list of including Aeronautics (obviously), Meteorology, Comptrollership (which the Air Force was very strong in -- it was a new subject in the military in those days), Personnel, and Logistics. The obvious. I taught a very interesting course called "The Evolution of Warfare" that went way back to throwing stones and using clubs and on up to jet planes and atom bombs. That's the course where the crowd of students used to come to. 1949-1950: Writing the First USAF ROTC text book on Aeronautics and a Major Portion of Rockets and Guided Missiles After three years of that work I was asked to transfer to New York City and write textbooks, because we had to get textbooks onto the campuses. I wrote the first textbook for the Air Force on the subject of Aeronautics, and I wrote a major portion of another textbook on the subject of Munitions that was the text on Rockets and Guided Missiles regarding this entirely new area that was coming in after World War II -- rockets and missiles. It was a very interesting task to be asked to do because we had very little reference material on the subject. My orders authorized me to visit anyone, anywhere in the United States (like at a factory or a university or any other place) that knew anything about rockets and missiles in order to write the book. So I visited Werner Von Braun, Walter Dornberger, the German experts from Pennemunde, and the other big names in the rocket business because there was no one else to see. Ratcliffe: What was your impression of someone like Von Braun? -- personal impression? Prouty: A remarkable individual. In those days he seemed absolutely dedicated to rocketry. That was everything for him -- rockets. He told me about building a rocket that would go to the moon -- which, of course, he did. I don't think we can say that anyone else had as dominant a part in sending a rocket to the moon as he did. But even in those days he would tell me how he was going to do it. And I know, from my inexperienced view of things, that I used to wonder how he meant to do it -- because he said he would fire a rocket to the moon, and then it would orbit the moon, and then another rocket would drop down to the moon -- a lander. Well, it's exactly what they did. But I used to think back at that -- in fact, I wrote about it. I had to write about how this was going to work. I would have a little trouble visualizing what this man could plan. He was an absolutely dedicated genius. I had no way (or reason) to discuss any of his politics. I didn't even think about that, I was so busy picking up ideas from him. I remember another thing: I asked him about the benefits of the propulsion systems, whether solid propellants or liquid propellants were preferred. As far as he was concerned, liquid propellant was the only way. His argument for that was, first of all, there is much more specific impulse -- much more rocket power -- in the liquid-propellant chemicals (the fuels) than there is in solid-propellant chemicals. I thought of that when we lost the "Challenger" shuttle rocket off Florida, because the trouble was with the solid-propellant component. I still believe they should not be using the solid propellant for that kind of flight. They use them for smaller ones but not for that kind of flight, because the liquid propellant system is much better. I don't know whether you recall or not, but the rockets that went to the moon, the Apollo ship -- those were all liquid propellants designed by Von Braun. All the Soviet flights are with liquid propellant. On subjects like that you couldn't have talked to a more competent, more able man than Von Braun. That was the impression I had. For his years, he was a very youngish man -- vigorous, young. Of course, his English was heavily coated with a German accent but I could understand what he said. On the other hand, Dr. Dornberger, who had been Von Braun's mentor at Pennemunde. Ratcliffe: -- and his military superior, Prouty: Yes, his superior -- was a completely different person. You had to draw him out a little to get him to talk. He was more the manager, he was more the operator. And he was working for a private corporation then -- the Bell Aircraft Company in Buffalo. He was a very impressive individual. For the purposes of my book, I had no reason to talk with him at much length. I saw right away that he was just going to talk about administrative things and I didn't need that. I wanted to write about the technical side. So I don't have a very distinct impression of him, as I do of Von Braun. They were both interesting and they were both, you might say, removed from Germany under this program of bringing German scientists and specialists -- and they're probably two of the most famous that were brought out. I didn't realize -- that was 1949 -- that in 1955 I would be in the Pentagon, and responsible for scheduling many of those "Deep Water", covert flights out of Germany. But we'll talk about that when we get to it. 1950-1951: A New Air Defense Command After I completed these textbooks and some of the lesson-guide material and all that we needed, the Korean War broke out in June of 1950. My military base at the time (although I was working in New York) was at the Mitchel Field on Long Island, in the headquarters of the Air Force's Continental Air Command. A decision had been made to create a new Air Defense Command. And for reasons that aren't clear to me, I was one of five officers selected to go to Colorado Springs and initiate that new command. It was a very interesting situation, because we were developing radars that could cover the North American continent, and that gave us the capability to track any oncoming aircraft and, later on, missiles. We had developed interceptor fighter aircraft that were capable of handling any bombers that might come in. So we visualized the creation of an adequate defense system at that time -- 1950. As rocket and missile technology came in, things haven't changed appreciably and, effectively, today we do not have an air defense system. We talk about it; but we don't have one. But we thought we could build a good one in those days. I stayed with the Air Defense Command -- I was Director of Personnel Planning for this command of 77,000 people. We were the first ones, in our office, to use computers in such a thing as personnel records, all that management of records. It was a very interesting time. We hadn't had computers. Everything was done with typewriters and paper and pencil. And we were able to keep the records of 77,000 people up to date in real-time on computers. Of course, they were the old-style computers. I remember the biggest problem we had was getting rid of the excess heat generated by all these computers. But they did a good job. And we learned how to use them. Ratcliffe: This was for 77,000 government Air Force personnel? Prouty: Air Force military people. We handled all their records. Actually it became a very important system because we could order full-size units to Korea, to the Korean War, without any trouble at all -- because we had all the data right there in the computer. It had never been done before. Immediately, of course, it spread throughout the entire military system. But I believe we had the first office that did that. Ratcliffe: And that was in Colorado Springs. Prouty: Colorado Springs, in 1950-51. Then at the end of '51, I was sent to several nuclear schools. A lot of us in the military had absolutely no idea about handling nuclear weapons, the effect of nuclear weapons, what they were, and all that sort of thing. There was no intention to make us nuclear physicists. What they were trying to do was teach us something about the weapons. The military was going through a very difficult period at that time, because only a few military people knew the technology of the enormous devastation power of the atom bomb. Hydrogen bombs came a little later. It was difficult, tactically, to work that into a military plan because: you get your forces lined up as we did in Germany, and start moving them, and you get hit by nuclear weapons and your forces are all knocked to pieces. Plus the fact that there is this residual radioactivity which is even worse than the explosion. So I went to three different nuclear schools. And was very glad I did, because I learned early in the business to have enormous respect for their power and what they could do, and really, what they could not do. I'm still convinced that what they cannot do is be used in warfare -- not used successfully. They can be used for what you might call in warfare "mass suicide", world suicide. But not for victory in a war. That's why they weren't used in Korea and in Vietnam. We didn't think of it that way in those days, but that's what happened. >From those schools I was then sent to the Air Command and Staff School at Montgomery, Alabama. This was a six-month course -- and it was a very interesting course. Because I had been writing for the ROTC textbooks, I was asked to do some writing there. I wrote the first statement of Air Power and its effectiveness for the new Air Force. It was just a four-page paper but it was reproduced in hundreds of thousands of copies so people could get an idea what this new nuclear-age air power was all about. It interested me an awful lot, and I think it interested everybody in the Air Force. 1952-1954: Managing Tokyo International Airport And Heavy-Transport Flying Prouty: That was in the spring of '52. I received orders from the Air Command Staff School to go to Korea. This was at the height of the Korean War. I left my family in Montgomery, and when I arrived in Tokyo, as I stepped off the plane, a colonel was there at the foot of the stairs and asked if I was Colonel Prouty. I said yes, and he said, "Your orders have been changed. You're going to stay at this base." That was the Haneda, Tokyo International Airport. The plane I had arrived on was going through to Korea. They had to find my baggage and unload it. I went in to see the commanding officer of the base and he said: "Because of your background experience" (primarily, the experience I had as "Chief Pilot" at Cairo in the Air Transport Command), "We've just had a man have a heart attack who was managing Tokyo International Airport." This was the period of the occupation of Japan, so almost any major activity was actually run by Americans with Japanese in backup positions. Before too long I was the Military Manager of Tokyo International Airport, the third busiest airport in the world. However, not as busy as Cairo was during the war -- it was not all that much of a surprise. But it was a very interesting period and I enjoyed working with the Japanese, who were planning to take over the field as soon as our occupation ended. I got to know many of them in those days and worked with a lot of them who eventually formed Japanese Air Lines (JAL) and some of the others, manufacturers that were in the business. All that time I was flying. I'd kept up my active heavy-transport flying. This brought me into the Philippines -- Manila; into Saigon, Bangkok, New Delhi, India, and even back to Saudi Arabia. I arrived in Saudi Arabia exactly 10 years to the date (in the month) that I had gone there with General C.R. Smith when I went to visit the people from California Standard Oil, when we painted our airplane and went into Saudi Arabia back in 1943. And -- an interesting little note -- I arrived in Saudi Arabia and here it was built up like a modern state, with all this oil money and all the oil people. What a difference it was. When I was there in 1943, it was absolutely barren. I got out of the airplane, got cleared with all the paperwork (from bringing our plane and passengers in there), and went quickly to a telephone, and opened the telephone book. I looked for the name of the man we met when we landed on the beach that day (or on the sand that day in 1943) when General Smith got out of the plane and shook his hand. His name was Floyd Oligher. He was a long-time engineering employee of California Standard Oil and one of the founders of Aramco. Aramco is the most profitable corporation ever made by man. I found his name and just for the fun of it, dialed his telephone number. Some man at his house answered the phone and said, "Mr. Oligher is very busy right now." It was in the evening. He was having a big party at his house, an official party. And he said, "But may I ask your name?" I said, "I'm Colonel Prouty." I said, "I visited Mr. Oligher here in Dhahran in October, 1943." The man said, "Just a minute please Colonel." And in no time I hear, "Prouty, what are you doing?" He remembered me of course, and we had quite a reunion there. But now, I couldn't believe what had happened to the sands of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia in 10 years. Out of Tokyo we ran a regularly scheduled heavy-transport run from Tokyo to Okinawa to the Philippines to Saigon to Bangkok to Calcutta, New Delhi, to Karachi and then to Dhahran. It was called the Embassy Run. We served the embassies back and forth through South Asia. Again, as I learned later, a certain amount of that activity had to do with the CIA. So you see, once again, we're in this little fringe area of work that goes on all the time, beginning with the OSS and the OPC and the CIA and the rest of it. In 1953, probably about May or June, the commander of the heavy-transport squadron at Tokyo was being rotated back to the States and they asked me to transfer from managing the airport to being commander of the squadron. We had turned the airport over to the Japanese; they now were operating the field. I became squadron commander, responsible for flights every day to Korea (mostly for the evacuation of the sick and wounded), flights every day to Hawaii, some to San Francisco, and flights two or three times a week to Manila and Saigon and that sort of thing. We were running a major service over more than one-half of the Earth. I also continued the Embassy Run that went all the way to Saudi Arabia. Ratcliffe: When was that, in 1953? Prouty: That was in about -- oh, let's say about June of '53. I stayed in that job until December of '54. It was very interesting in that period because, although none of us out there realized it, we were gradually stepping up American influence in Indochina. One of the first things we realized was that a lot of C-119 heavy transport planes (we used to call them "flying boxcars") were operating under an airline we knew as CAT, Civil Air Transport Airline, with American pilots. They were delivering supplies to the French, who were deeply involved in fighting Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh forces and especially in trying to extricate the French army out of Dien Bien Phu. The first American airplane and crew shot down in Indochina was shot down trying to supply Dien Bien Phu at that time, in 1954. Other flights that we were operating from Manila served the logistics needs back and forth between Manila and Saigon for the Saigon Military Mission (which we'll talk about later). I met then-Colonel Lansdale (and Bohannan and many of his people who were connected with that). And in that long five-and-a-half-hour flight between Manila and Saigon we spent many an hour talking about his activities in support of the election of President Magsaysay and the planned activities of his organization in Vietnam -- which at that time was just beginning. The White House approval for that took place in early 1954, when we were still flying that run regularly. Some of these practical, everyday working experiences in the Far East played a strong role in my work later in the Pentagon between 1955 and 1963. The rest of the transport flying was rather pedestrian. We had a very busy time, we all were doing quite a lot of flying in that period. 1955: Attending the Armed Forces Staff College At the end of 1954 I was selected to attend the school run by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called the Armed Forces Staff College. That's in Norfolk, Virginia, at the Norfolk Navy Base. It's a six-month school -- an excellent, excellent military course. I happened to be there for the first half of 1955. One part of the curriculum is quite outstanding for that period. One of the courses the school gave was to set up a NATO-type combat operation. They would divide the school into two forces: one would be Red and one would be Blue. And obviously, the Reds were the communists. So they were the ones that were attacking the West. They were the ones that began -- or initiated the attack. Those of us in the Blue forces would defend against the attack. It would be the hypothetical NATO confrontation through Europe. In the assignment of forces -- very interesting how the school did that -- they assigned each student a role -- like a commanding general, like Patton, like Bradley, like Montgomery -- and you're in charge of what goes on through the area, as though you were a regular top general in the command. It's very, very good experience. And the school staff had quite a lot of experience in running these courses -- each class -- that's twice a year. But in '55, for the first time, they assigned a student commander of nuclear forces. This was new. They gave the Soviet army nuclear capability. So it was the first time that two large forces (NATO and Warsaw Pact) would confront each other, potentially, with nuclear weapons. I was made the Commander of the Nuclear Force on the Blue team -- and had no -- I'll admit it frankly -- I had no idea what you would do with nuclear weapons in that kind of a war. But I figured: if they can hit as hard as I know they can hit, then, when I see the Soviets breaking through here or breaking through there, I'm going to hit them with everything we've got and wipe them out. Whether we could use the territory afterwards or not, that was someone else's business -- the other general's job. I took care of that one. The way this plan broke loose is rather interesting. The Red forces attacked through the Balkans, and into Turkey, and made very fast gains into Turkey -- because they surprised the Blue forces in the main part of Europe, where they thought the main attack would be. And they made this flank run through Turkey and the Balkans, down into Greece. Within about three days, the Red forces had taken Greece, had about half of Turkey, and were obviously heading for the Middle East and the oil and the routes to the world through the Middle East. It was a clever maneuver. Those of us on the Blue team had no idea that it would happen this way, so we didn't have enough forces on hand in Greece and Turkey to stop them. So I presented the idea for a nuclear counter-attack. What I had done was, I measured how many miles were on the Soviet front -- in that area. I divided it up into a certain number of nuclear weapons. And I decided that, if I set these nuclear weapons down like fenceposts along a fence, I'd completely stop them. So I asked for the permission to drop nuclear weapons that way. There was no way they could refuse me, so they gave the OK. So we dropped them. And when we saw what happened -- of course on paper, but -- when we saw what happened, I went to the chief umpire of the war game, a "Three-star" Vice Admiral, and I said, "Admiral, the war is over." He said, "On what grounds?" I said, "We have wiped out all of these forces. We have destroyed all of their routes. We have destroyed all of their communications and their supplies with atomic bombs in a line from the Bosphorus to the Black Sea. The entire territory is radioactive, so nobody can go through there. The war is over." It just shocked the whole group -- because, they knew that too. They knew that nuclear weapons had that capability. It took them about a day; and after that day they called off the rest of the exercise. It was supposed to run for a month. And this happened -- we did it about the fourth day. This is very important -- because I don't know of any other time when our military have actually confronted on the ground, on military maps, the force structures that would be used for such a defensive action, and then the impact of what nuclear weapons could do. One of the reasons I declared the war to be over was because I would have used my other nuclear weapons against any other outbreak exactly in the same way. And they agreed; they agreed the war was over. But what they really agreed to, what we spent the rest of the month talking about as a review of that, was: "What are we going to do in war plans?" How on earth are we going to fight a war? We had fought the Korean War to a standstill -- no nuclear weapons. When General MacArthur had tried to cross the Yalu River into China he had been stopped for procedural reasons, but mainly because our administration thought that the response against his attack would be nuclear. So we didn't do it. The Vietnam War had not heated up at that time -- the Vietnam War was underway but it was all covert. This was just a school exercise, but done seriously and with many senior officers there. We had probably as many as twelve admirals and generals who were the umpires of the whole thing. I know from my point of view, it was a very convincing activity. --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance�not soap-boxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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