For those people of a certain age - and even for those who aren’t - the somewhat grainy video widely played and replayed recently in the aftermath of an attack on an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman brought back some really bad memories.
You have probably seen it. Black and white, slightly out of focus, images taken by our Navy showing some men on a small boat, apparently doing something to a larger ship, an oil tanker that had been attacked in the Gulf.
Now Donald Trump, our president, said those photos were clear proof that the Iranians had planted a limpet mine on that tanker, one of two that were damaged in a terrorist attack. TheyIranians, he said, used small, fast attack boats to hit the two tankers in the Gulf.
They were taking the mine off because it had not gone off, officials explained. It gets a little muddy, because early reports said at least one of them had been torpedoed. It was, of course, a relatively minor detail.
Or not. Little details can mean a lot when it is a matter of life and death. How many lives? I’ll tell you later.
Meanwhile, you should take note that some of our allies doubt the video really shows what Trump says it shows. Still, the war drums in our country are already beating. After all, the nation has united many times before when there were attacks on our Navy or our merchant ships.
Remember Pearl Harbor? Remember the War of 1812? Do you know why the Marines have proudly fought from the Halls of Montezuma to the Shores of Tripoli?
Iranian swift boats - actually small, fast ships that can carry rockets or torpedoes - are indeed a menace in the Gulf and in the Straight of Hormuz, a narrow choke point where giant tankers carry about 30 percent of the world’s crude oil. Heck, right now you are paying a few cents more for every gallon of gas you buy, because insurance costs on those oil tankers keep going up.
That’s what the Iranian government calls economic warfare against us.
Iran has few friends in the world, and has repeatedly said our continued economic warfare against it would lead to some really bad things. Rumor has it that some Iranian leaders have written a wonderful, beautiful letter to a man named Putin, asking for his support.
Now, officially, the United States likes the people of Iran. We only want its government to go away and be replaced by something different, possibly something more aligned to our foreign policy.
No one has actually said they should bring back the Shah of Iran, who was once one of our strongest allies in the Middle East. He was a prolific buyer of expensive American-made jet fighters, and held the Iranian people under tight control until he was overthrown, leading to….well to what is going on in the Middle East now. It would be hard to bering him back for a lot of reasons, one of the biggest is that he is dead. But, there are always want-to-be candidates to replace him.
So, Where Is This Going?
Now, let’s go back to the 60’s to kind of put all this in perspective. It’s something that most people of that certain age should be familiar with, although some of the details may have faded a bit. Pay attention, because they will become important.
In 1964, I was a callow youth getting out of college and seeking my first real job on a newspaper. It was also the year that President Lyndon Johnson told the world that two United States destroyers - the Maddox and the Turner Joy - had been attacked by fast boats belonging to North Vietnam. The Maddox was actually attacked twice in two days, he said.
In the first attack, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were shot at while trying to get within effective torpedo range of the Maddox, a distance of about 1,000 yards.
It wasn’t much of a battle. The Maddox - which was on a DESOTO mission - fired more than 280 five-inch shells at the North Korean boats and missed with all of them. The North Vietnamese fired six torpedoes at the Maddox and missed with all of them.
Then four F-8 Crusader jets from an American carrier came and fired Zuni rockets, which also all missed. But the Crusaders also had 20 mm cannon, and managed to damage all three of the attacking boats. History records them as T-333, T-336 and T-339, with the T indicating the torpedos they carried.
The second attack President Johnson talked about - which set the war drums beating and led Congress to give him the power to use military force to protect our troops and support our allies in Southeast Asia. Blank check. How big?
* Big blank check. The numbers are a bit fuzzy - the numbers on war casualties always are - but it led to more than 58,000 American military deaths and more than 300,000 wounded.
* Bigger blank check. Add up all the American allies and all the North Vietnamese allies and the casualties on both sides come to between 333,620 and 392,364 deaths and more than 1.3 million wounded.
- Biggest blank check. Add civilians to that list, and the total dead from our Vietnam involvement is estimated at between 1.3 and 4.2 million people.
By the way, there were no deaths of American sailors caused by those attacks on the two ships. If, indeed, there were two attacks.
It took a long time to sort out what really happened that caused Congress to give war-making power to the President and his advisors who were pushing for war.
What’s A DESOTO mission anyway? It’s Important.
So what was the Maddox doing off the coast of Vietnam?
It was running DESOTO mission, an electronic intelligence-gathering operation. And while our nation’s official position was that the ship was not directly involved in any combat activities - which is true - what it was doing was collecting information that was turned over to our South Vietnamese allies so they could attack their North Vietnamese enemies and supporters in their own country.
Navy ships are regularly used for intelligence-gathering missions, and not just by us. The Russians, for example, do it a lot. They were regular observers off the coast of Florida for dozens of missile tests and lunar missions.
Sometimes, that work ends badly. In 1967, Israeli fighters attacked the lightly-armed USS Liberty which was on an intelligence gathering mission off the Gaza Strip during the Six Day War. It was marked with a large American Flag, and Israel was our ally, but that nation did not trust what the United States would do with the information it was gathering.
The result was 34 American sailors killed. Robert McNamara later declared the attack an unfortunate accident by Israeli pilots who somehow didn’t see the American flag on the ship.
Now, let’s round out the story of the second attack on the Maddox and the Turner Joy. It took until 2005 to learn what really happened. A Navy report on the incident was finally declassified, and it explained why there were no casualties from that second attack and no debris. It also answered questions that were first brought up by the U.S. Naval Communications Center in the Philippines.
It Turns Out There Was No Second Attack.
The only thing the North Vietnamese Navy was doing that night was salvaging two boats from the first attack. That little detail didn’t come out for more than 40 years.
But the story and the war powers act it gave the President was enough for Johnson to win his election in 1964, which led to a major increase of American troops in Vietnam - we went from 16,000 advisors in non-combat roles in 1963 to more than half a million troops in 1967.
Johnson won the election, heated up the war and gave birth to a huge anti-war movement that split the country, split up families and turned college students and police into enemies. And, oh yes, after four years of riots in cities and no way out of Vietnam, it gave the next election to a new President, Richard Nixon. You all know how that worked out.
Now President Trump has a grainy video, and a reliable Senate. And an election coming up.
Gee, I wonder how it will all turn out.
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