What's Up With Ft. Lewis?

[rob]

good thing to have when some dipshits have blasted a giant hole in your side

 

the USS Cole was an inside job. RON PAUL!!!!

[sobo]

@Mtguide-

You're welcome.

 

Sobo, I think I may have been confused by what I heard some years back, about the Aug. 4 incident, which the NSA said never happened. Again, thanks for the full info.

Possibly you were. August 2, 1964 is the actual GoT incident wherein four PRVN sailors were killed and six injured. The August 4, 1964 "incident" was likely the result of overzealous radar operators... Both events were embellished by the NSA and the Johnson Administration and used as a pretext to escalate the Vietnam conflict into a full-scale war.

[sobo]

come on now, mtguide - this here is the internets - you can't admit a mistake here!!!

Some people have the intellectual capacity to admit a mistake and move on. Class matters...

[JosephH]

The events early that August were clearly used as a pretext no differently than WMDs in Iraq and the extended consequences equally unnecessary. I'm not sure the PRVN crews were any more experienced or better than our gun crews at the time. Somewhere I have the only photos ever taken of a PRVN attack during the raid on Haiphong Harbor. We and the Robison had finished our run and had turned back out to sea, but you could see the PRVN's getting closer to the Newport News and Rowan in a strange, lurching staccato visual with each successive flash of 5 and 8 inch guns. Then, by an odd miracle of actual on target shooting by the Rowan (the NN couldn't shoot that low and close) and some form of air support (probably A4's) the PRVN's simply disappeared much to everyone's relief.

 

As I understand it the whole naval op into Haiphong was a diversion while the harbor was mined from the air behind us. Ironically the only ship destroyed by those MK36 mines was the USS Warrington some time later. We were out on the fantail getting high and the Warrington was about a 1/3 of a mile off our stern when suddenly it was enveloped in two enormous walls of water. A pair of connected MK36's had gone off on either side of her. Much to our amazement she was still there when the walls of water collapsed, and seemingly unharmed. The reality was about every metal-to-metal weld on the boat had come undone and she got towed back to Subic Bay and scrapped.

 

[edit: so much for my memory - the Warrington was done in by other mines a month before the raid. Not sure where those mines would have drifted from given we were operating further south at that time and none of the 'harbors' along the coast would have really warranted bothering. All in all it was quite the show regardless.]