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As always, Caveat Lector.
Om
K
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<A HREF="aol://5863:126/alt.conspiracy:511314">A bomber pilot speaks out about
Vietnam</A>
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Subject: A bomber pilot speaks out about Vietnam
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (The UnaPoet)
Date: Tue, Mar 30, 1999 8:15 PM
Message-id: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
An Unacceptable Target
Told by James Robert "Cotton" Hildreth
One particular mission is as vivid in my memory now as the day it
happened. I was leading a flight of two A-1s on an armed
reconnaissance mission, but shortly after take-off we were diverted to
a target on the coast of I Corps (northern quarter of South Vietnam.)
On arriving in the target area, we contacted the FAC (forward air
controller) who pointed out the target. It was a huge village of three
or four hundred houses, probably twelve to fifteen hundred people. It
was between the main north-south highway and the ocean, a pretty,
clean village. I asked the FAC why the village was a target.
The FAC said, "That is a Vietcong village."
I said, "How do you know its a Vietcong village?"
He said, "Well we saw three Vietcong run in there."
Across the road from the village was a rice paddy.
He said, "We saw them run out of the rice paddy when we flew over, and
they ran into the village."
I said, "And you want us to wipe out this whole village to get three
Vietcong?" How do you know they were Vietcong? Were they armed?"
He said, "They had on black pajamas."
All of the farmers working in the fields had on black pajamas. That
was their dress. And they carried tools like rakes and hoes.
He said, "They were armed."
I said, "How do you know they weren't carrying rakes and hoes?"
He said, "Don't argue with me. I've got the provincial governor in the
back seat, and he says that is a Vietcong village."
I said, "Well, I'll go down and look around and see if I can draw any
fire."
So we went down and flew over real low and slow. There were children
in the courtyard, smiling and waving at us. This village had obviously
been there for years, and it had never been touched. I pulled back up;
and I said, "Okay, what are your instructions?"
He said, "The wind is blowing off-shore; so put your napalm down on
that first row of houses, and the wind will carry the fire across the
entire village."
So I said, ""Fine."
I pulled around and told my wingman to come in from one side and I
would attack from the other. We would start our attack from opposite
corners. I was coming in toward the corner hut. I looked up at the
other end, and he had moved over the road and dropped his napalm on
the road. As I approached my release point, a woman with a tiny baby
strapped on her back, holding the hand of a small child three or four
years old, came running from the hut. I pulled my aircraft over and
dropped the napalm in a ditch beside the highway.
The FAC screamed and raised holy hell because he had this governor in
the aircraft with him. He said, "You know I'm going to report you for
this!"
I said, "You don't have to. I'll be on the ground before you are, and
I'll report myself."
When we landed, my wingman walked over to my aircraft and said, "Sir,
I have three small grandchildren, and I could never have faced them
again if I had followed those orders." He said he didn't want to fly
any more combat missions. Later, I had him transferred to a unit with
an airborne command and control mission.
I went into Squadron Operations and called the Command Center at
Seventh air Force and talked to the director, a brigadier general I
had served with several years before. I told him what happened.
He said, "Damn, Cotton, don't you know what's going on? That village
didn't pay their taxes. That lieutenant colonel, a provincial
commander, is teaching them a lesson."
On returning from an interdiction mission several days later, we flew
over the target area. The village had been totally destroyed. Nothing
but a large, black, burned area remained. I'm sure when the FAC got a
fast-mover (high-performance jet) on the target and destroyed the
village the report read: Target 100 percent destroyed, body-count 1200
KBA (killed by air) confirmed.
I'm a grandfather now, and I can't watch my grandchildren at play or
carry them in my arms without thinking of that village in Vietnam.
>From "Salute to Veterans," Mary Lewis Deans, Editor (Flatrock Books,
15 Goose Creek, Rocky Mount, North Carolina 27804), pp. 63-71
Salute to Veterans 1996: Oral histories from veterans and their
relatives, gathered by the Nash County Cultural Center's Oral History
Project
Ralph McGehee, former CIA analyst in Vietnam:
http://come.to/CIABASE
"Essentially the CIA stopped all accurate info on Vietnam while
conducting a propaganda campaign to keep us in this war that was
unwinnable. If we are to avoid further "Vietnams"
we need a good, reliable, trustworthy intelligence service."
"In my experience, the CIA pulled the United States into the Vietnam
War and kept it there with false intelligence and propaganda. The CIA
rejected all reality about the war in its intelligence while
constructing and maintaining a Gobbel's-like Big Lie."
"The CIA is not now nor has ever been a central intelligence agency.
It is the covert action arm of the president's foreign policy
advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign
governments while reporting "Intelligence" justifying those
activities. It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as
soviet nuclear weapon capability, to support presidential policy.
Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility,
and the American people are the primary target audience of its lies."
Ralph McGehee, CIABASE Home Page
Richard Manning
http://www.angelfire.com/ny2/richardmanning/
As a former NYC teacher (P/T), Youth Board Gang Worker and Police
Dep't Detective (Special Frauds Bureau) who went to Vietnam in 1967 as
a Plans and Operations Officer with the CIA : I confirm what Hackworth
says is the absolute truth concerning the wholehearted selfishness of
our 'leadership', BOTH military and civilian. The exceptions were,
like Hackworth, those few, most rare, men who had the moral courage to
put honest loyalty to America and humane values for the slaughtered
Vietnamese BEFORE their personal whims, vices, crimes AND careers.
Vietnam was unusual, for it was a most SENSUAL, and SEXY, war for the
upper-echelon leadership; not just the average high tech violence done
to so many another yellow-skinned (or brown or black) inferiors in our
history.
Most of the above leadership in Vietnam were - besides being moral
cowards - also physical cowards who never had to defend themselves or
their men with a weapon facing our 'enemy'. This double cowardice is
the 'why?' behind their support of a techno war; one using twice the
total WW-II tonnage of bombs against a 3rd World country - an agrarian
country with almost no industry and few viable military targets; and
none to speak of after 1968.
Due to this, Hackworth's comments should be understood as even more
strongly applicable to the US Navy and US Air Force - push-button jet
jockeys dropping everything from napalm, cluster bombs, white
phosphorus, chemicals and high explosives on an almost exclusively
civilian population. Returning afterwards to their hot showers, clean
white sheets and Playboy R & R machismo hobbies. Hackworth may have
been an officer but he was something much more than a grunt with
shoulder insignia, for in facing the enemy on the ground he learned
the truth, and then had the wholly GREATER moral courage it takes to
step out of line and tell it to the people he really served - the US
public. It takes that kind of hero to go around his disloyal military
brass and his dishonest Presidents.
Least we forget, let's not leave out the CIA : for it was their Col.
Lansdale and his illegal and totally immoral coterie of little boys
playing top secret spooky games who actually started the war
beginning in 1954. We must remember, it was the CIA, using mostly
detached military personell, who invaded and attacked the Vietnamese,
both North and South. Neither the so-called 'north'
Vietnamese nor the old Viet Minh in the 'south' ever did anything
against America or any American until they had been tortured and
assassinated to the tune of over 200,000 dead and wounded (by
1960), mostly civilians with the wrong sympathies.
So there were only a very few, like Hackworth, McGehee and I
(presuming to put myself in their good company), who had the awareness
and balls to go against the Pentagon's and The Company's
lies and cover ups and murder and torture while we were in-country.
Richard Manning
Ass't Operations Officer, Phan Thiet; Plans Officer, Nha Trang; Op &
Plans Officer, Ba Ngoi (Cam Ranh)
Common Sense Almanac
http://come.to/commonsense
The First Church of Common Sense
http://come.to/tfcocs
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Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
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