The Christmas bombings of 1972 and 2005
"These people died silently, complaining to God of a guilt they did not commit."--Zahid Mohammed Rawi
"I know who are responsible. All you are responsible. And you are criminals."--Le Duc Tho
KURTZ" Are my methods unsound?"
WILLARD" I don't see any... method... at all, sir."
The Holiday Season in the United States would not be complete without a surge in airstrikes on a foreign land resulting in mass civilian casualties:
Nixon's Vietnamization plan temporarily quieted domestic critics, but his continued reliance on an expanded air war to provide cover for an American retreat angered U.S. citizens.
...
The conflict
intensified in December 1972, when the Nixon administration unleashed a
series of deadly bombing raids against targets in North Vietnam's
largest cities, Hanoi and Haiphong. These attacks, now known as the
Christmas bombings, brought immediate condemnation from the
international community and forced the Nixon administration to
reconsider its tactics and negotiation strategy.
These were the eleven days of B-52 bombing operations, between December 18 and December 30, 1972, known as Operation Linebacker II or the Christmas Bombings. In Hanoi between 1,318 to 1,600 civilians died:
Operation LINEBACKER II began on December 18, 1972, 3,000 sorties, 11 days, and 40,000 tons of bombs penetrated the most concentrated air defense of the war. President Richard Nixon had turned complete control of the Vietnam war over to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Thomas Moorer on December 14, 1972 with orders "to win this war". As a result of this order Operation LINEBACKER II was executed. Eleven days after the B-52's began this operation, America's involvment in Vietnam was over. Peace talks that had came to a stale mate in October 1972 were resumed on January 8, 1973. Within 30 days after the final bomb was dropped Le Duc Tho and Henry Kissinger reached a final agreement and signed the Paris Peace Accords on January 27, 1973.
It has long been debated whether or not Linebacker II actually coerced North Vietnamese leaders into signing an agreement. Although the December settlement was similar to the one negotiated two months earlier, Hanoi's leaders did not sign that accord. It is impossible to know if they would have done so without the Christmas bombing.
NARRATOR: On December 18, B-52 bombers were over Hanoi and Haiphong.
...
ADMIRAL THOMAS MOORER (Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff): The targets selected in the 1972 Christmas bombing consisted entirely of military targets. For instance, they would consist of warehouses, command and control stations, missile sites, ammunition storage, communications sites, things of that kind. The accusation that we were conducting carpet bombing, of course, is absolutely false. For that matter, had we conducted carpet bombing, I think that there wouldn't be a Hanoi today.
NARRATOR: On December 22, American bombs hit Hanoi's Bach Mai hospital for a second time. Their target may have been a small airfield nearby.
DR. NGUYEN LUAN: Cries and moans filled the dark night. We had to use knives, hammers and shovels to break through the concrete walls in order to get to the victims trapped inside. As a surgeon, I operate on people to save their lives. Now I was using my surgical knife not to save people but to cut apart the corpses in the bomb shelter so we could rescue those still alive.
NARRATOR: The President ordered a one-day bombing halt for Christmas Day. On December 26, the B-52s resumed their missions.
The massive new raids had personally been ordered by President Nixon. His main concern, he said, was not domestic and international criticism, but high B-52 losses. Some of the bombs hit a Hanoi residential district, Khan Thiem. The North Vietnamese believed that the raids were a deliberate act of terror.
NGUYEN THI DUC: The shelter collapsed on me. The next morning, I was taken to the hospital. Only later on did I learn that five members of my family had been killed: my mother, my sister, and her husband, my older brother, my younger brother.
PHUNG THI TIEM: The most heart-breaking sight was in Sonquan alley. A whole family of seven -- husband and wife and five children -- had been killed. The oldest child was 20 and the youngest two. The whole family was wiped out. It was extremely painful to see. The site of their house is still an empty lot. What an outrage! A family of seven completely wiped out.
NARRATOR: The 11-day Christmas bombings were compared to the atomic blast on Hiroshima in World War II. And the tonnage of bombs dropped on the Hanoi-Haiphong area was actually greater, but the targets were more dispersed. The deaths were far fewer. In Hanoi they totalled 1,318.
HENRY KISSINGER: Nixon was of the view that something shocking had to be done. That was not my view at the time, but I didn't disagree with it, and I went along with it and I think Nixon turned out to be right.
NGUYEN CO THACH: After the Christmas bombing, the first day that Le Duc Tho and Kissinger had met in Paris, after shaking hands, Kissinger had told Le Duc Tho that "I am very sorry. I could not prevent the decision of the President in bombing North Vietnam on Christmas day." So Le Duc Tho say that: "I know who are responsible. All you are responsible. And you are criminals."
American Experience: Vietnam Online
Vietnamese Remember Christmas From Hell
25 years ago, President Nixon ordered the biggest aerial blitz of the Vietnam War - a hailstorm of death that devastated Hanoi.
HANOI, Vietnam - Fixed in time, her eyes stare out from a grainy black and white portrait hanging in a memorial in central Hanoi. Her name is unknown, but her memory is linked with the bombing raid on the North Vietnamese capital 25 years ago.
She's one of 1,600 civilian dead remembered this week in Hanoi and throughout this country to mark the anniversary of the 1972 Christmas bombings - President Nixon's last kick at communist North Vietnam.
On Dec. 18, 1972, an armada of American B-52s flew in formation seven miles overhead and unleashed their payloads on Hanoi. The bombings continued for 11 more days.
Stooped low inside a one-person bomb shelter, Nguyen Van Tung listened nightly as explosion after explosion broke his world into a clutter of rubble. Today, he is a volunteer who maintains a small memorial for the victims.
"The United States and Vietnam and our children should look to the future, but let's not forget the past," Tung said.
It was "Operation Linebacker II" - an attack aimed at winning concessions from the communists at peace talks in Paris. The campaign, coming shortly after Nixon had won a landslide election to a second term, was the biggest aerial blitz of the war.
With the fighting long over, Washington and Hanoi have now moved into a new era of friendship. But their troubled past continues to haunt.
"For those who want to forget or who do not want to recall, the candles and incense still lit on thousands of graves and altars will remind us of those 12 days and nights," said Doan Khue, a Communist Party Politburo member and former defense minister.
In Hanoi and the northern port city of Haiphong, the bombing was staggering. More than 1,600 civilians died, 70 U.S. airmen were killed or captured and many Americans were left to wonder what price Nixon was willing to pay for "peace with honor".
For the Vietnamese, it was a hailstorm of death.
"If I could have talked to President Nixon, I would have said 'What were you thinking? How could you do this? You dropped bombs on our heads,'" said 76-year-old Phuong Thi Tiem, who recalls spending days trying to dig trapped survivors out of the rubble.
"All through it we could hear people screaming under collapsed walls and bricks,' she said. "We tried everything to get to them, but by the time we pulled them out they were dead."
Ian Stewart
Associated Press
[?] 1997
Military Confirms Surge in Airstrikes [Operation Steel Curtain. Iraq, December 24, 2005]
U.S. airstrikes in Iraq have surged this fall, jumping to nearly five times the average monthly rate earlier in the year, according to U.S. military figures.
Until the end of August, U.S. warplanes were conducting about 25 strikes a month. The number rose to 62 in September, then to 122 in October and 120 in November.
Several U.S. officers involved in operations in Iraq attributed much of the increase to a series of ground offensives in western Anbar province. Those offensives, conducted by U.S. Marines and Iraqi forces, were aimed at clearing foreign fighters and other insurgents from the Euphrates River Valley and establishing Iraqi control over the Syrian border area.
But Air Force Maj. Gen. Allen G. Peck, deputy commander of the U.S. air operations center in the region, said the higher strike numbers also reflected more aggressive military operations in other parts of Iraq that were undertaken to improve security for last week's national elections.
"I'm hard-pressed to provide a single definitive explanation for the increase," Peck said in a telephone interview.
For most airstrikes in Iraq, U.S. crews have been employing 500-pound, precision-guided bombs rather than the 1,000- or 2,000-pound versions used in past conflicts, Peck said. The smaller bombs are intended to reduce the potential for collateral damage.
In limited cases, the 100-pound Hellfire missile is used. "It won't knock down a house, but it can be effective in taking out a car," Peck said.
With the Pentagon preparing to reduce the level of U.S. ground forces in Iraq next year, some defense experts have speculated that U.S. airpower will be used more intensively to support operations by Iraq's fledgling security forces and protect U.S. advisers embedded with them. Indeed, American commanders have said that U.S. air forces in the region will not be drawn down as quickly as ground forces.
Bradley Graham
The Washington Post
Dec24.2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/23/AR2005122301473.html
U.S. Airstrikes Take Toll on Civilians
Eyewitnesses Cite Scores Killed in Marine Offensive in Western Iraq
RAMADI, Iraq -U.S. Marine airstrikes targeting insurgents sheltering in Iraqi residential neighborhoods are killing civilians as well as guerrillas along the Euphrates River in far western Iraq, according to Iraqi townspeople and officials and the U.S. military.
Just how many civilians have been killed is strongly disputed by the Marines and, some critics say, too little investigated. But townspeople, tribal leaders, medical workers and accounts from witnesses at the sites of clashes, at hospitals and at graveyards indicated that scores of noncombatants were killed last month in fighting, including airstrikes, in the opening stages of a 17-day U.S.-Iraqi offensive in Anbar province.
"These people died silently, complaining to God of a guilt they did not commit," Zahid Mohammed Rawi, a physician, said in the town of Husaybah. Rawi said that roughly one week into Operation Steel Curtain, which began on Nov. 5, medical workers had recorded 97 civilians killed. At least 38 insurgents were also killed in the offensive's early days, Rawi said.
In a Husaybah school converted to a makeshift hospital, Rawi, four other doctors and a nurse treated wounded Iraqis in the opening days of the offensive, examining bloodied children as anxious fathers soothed them and held them down.
"I dare any organization, committee or the American Army to deny these numbers," Rawi said.
U.S. Marines in Anbar say they take pains to spare innocent lives and almost invariably question civilian accounts from the battleground communities. They say that townspeople who either support the insurgents or are intimidated by them are manipulating the number of noncombatant deaths for propaganda -- a charge that some Iraqis acknowledge is true of some residents and medical workers in Anbar province.
"I wholeheartedly believe the vast majority of civilians are killed by the insurgency," particularly by improvised bombs, said Col. Michael Denning, the top air officer for the 2nd Marine Division, which is leading the fight against insurgents in Anbar province.
In an interview at a Marine base at Ramadi, Anbar's provincial capital, Denning acknowledged that a city was "a very, very difficult place to fight." He said, however, that "insurgents will kill civilians and try to blame it on us."
But some military analysts say the U.S. military must do more to track the civilian toll from its airstrikes. Sarah Sewall, deputy assistant secretary of defense from 1993 to 1996 and now program director for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, said the military's resistance to acknowledging and analyzing so-called collateral damage remained one of the most serious failures of the U.S. air and ground war in Iraq.
"It's almost impossible to fight a war in which engagements occur in urban areas [and] to avoid civilian casualties," Sewall, whose center is a branch of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government that focuses on issues such as genocide, failed states and military intervention, said in a telephone interview.
"In a conflict like Iraq, where civilian perceptions are as important as the number of weapons caches destroyed, assessing the civilian harm must become a part of the battle damage assessment process if you're going to fight a smart war," she said.
The number of airstrikes carried out each month by U.S. aircraft rose almost fivefold this year, from roughly 25 in January to 120 in November, according to a tally provided by the military. Accounts by residents, officials and witnesses in Anbar and the Marines themselves make clear that Iraqi civilians are frequently caught in the attacks.
On Nov. 7, the third day of the offensive, witnesses watched from the roof of a public building in Husaybah as U.S. warplanes struck homes in the town's Kamaliyat neighborhood. After fires ignited by the fighting had died down, witnesses observed residents removing the bodies of what neighbors said was a family -- mother, father, 14-year-old girl, 11-year-old boy and 5-year-old boy -- from the rubble of one house.
Survivors said insurgents had been firing mortars from yards in the neighborhood just before the airstrikes. Residents pleaded with the guerrillas to leave for fear of drawing attacks on the families, they said, but were told by the fighters that they had no other space from which to attack.
Near the town of Qaim one day last month, a man who identified himself only as Abdul Aziz said a separate U.S. airstrike killed his grown daughter, Aesha. Four armed men were also found in the rubble of her house, he said.
"I don't blame the Americans. I blame Zarqawi and his group, who were using my daughter's house as a shelter," said Abdul Aziz, referring to Abu Musab Zarqawi, leader of the foreign-dominated group al Qaeda in Iraq.
Abdul Aziz spoke beside his daughter's newly dug grave, in a cemetery established for the 80 to 90 civilians who Anbar officials said were killed in the first weeks of the offensive. Several dozen new graves were evident, and residents said more than 40 victims of the fighting were to be buried that day alone. Witnesses saw only 11, all wrapped in blankets for burial. Residents said two of the 11 were women.
Abdul Aziz's grandsons ascribed blame for their mother's death more pointedly. "She was killed in the bombing by the Americans," said Ali, 9, the oldest of three brothers.
Operation Steel Curtain is representative of a series of offensives in western Anbar that began in late April. Brig. Gen. James L. Williams of the 2nd Marine Division described them as a town-by-town campaign to drive out insurgents and establish a permanent Iraqi army presence in the heavily Sunni Arab region. Iraqi and foreign insurgents use the Euphrates River communities for bases and for logistics support to funnel money, recruits and ordnance from Anbar and neighboring Syria to fighters planning attacks elsewhere in Iraq.
Steel Curtain involved 2,500 U.S. Marines, soldiers and sailors and about 1,000 soldiers of the U.S.-trained Iraqi army, including newly established units of locally recruited scouts commissioned mainly for their knowledge of the area, the Marines said. As the Iraqi and U.S. forces moved through Husaybah, Karabilah and other towns, Marines said, they encountered scores of mines and insurgent-rigged bombs made from artillery shells or other ordnance. Ten Marines and 139 insurgents died in the offensive, the Marines said. They gave no totals for known civilian deaths.
Statements issued by the U.S. military during the offensive reported at least two incidents that were described as airstrikes unwittingly conducted on buildings where civilians were later found to have been present.
On Nov. 8, a man in Husaybah led U.S. and Iraqi forces to a house destroyed by U.S. airstrikes the previous day, Marines said. Searching the rubble, Iraqi troops and U.S. Marines found two wounded civilians -- a young girl and a man -- and recovered five bodies.
The Marines were told that fighters loyal to Zarqawi had forced their way into the house, killed two of the people inside and locked the rest of the family on a lower floor before using the building to attack Iraqi and U.S. forces clearing the neighborhood.
"The soldiers and Marines had no knowledge of the civilians being held hostage in the home at the time of the attack," Marines said in a statement. It could not be determined if that airstrike was the same as the one described by witnesses who watched removal of the dead family.
On Nov. 15, U.S.-led forces called in an airstrike after coming under small-arms fire from a building in the hamlet of New Ubaydi. Two men ran from the building waving white flags after the airstrike, followed by 15 male and female civilians, a U.S. Marine statement said.
Marines described other instances of insurgents hiding among civilians in Anbar, including occasions when they dressed as women and tried to pass unnoticed among townspeople fleeing the battles. Residents, local officials and emergency workers said insurgents often sheltered among civilians in urban neighborhoods.
Arkan Isawi, an elder in Husaybah, said he and four other tribal leaders gathered to assess the damage while the operation was still underway and identified at least 80 dead, including women and children. "I personally pulled out a family of three children and parents," he said.
An exact count, however, was impossible, he said. "Anyone who gives you a number is lying, because the city was a mess, and people buried bodies in backyards and parking lots," with other bodies still under rubble, Isawi said.
Townspeople, medical workers and officials often exaggerate death tolls, either for effect or under orders from insurgents. However, accounts from other officials and residents are borne out at least partially by direct observation of bodies and other evidence.
The accounts of U.S. Marines and Iraqi civilians of airstrikes often diverge sharply.
On Oct. 16, for instance, a U.S. F-15 pilot caught a group of Ramadi-area insurgents planting explosives in a blast crater on a road used by U.S. forces, Denning said. The F-15 dropped a bomb on the group, and analysis of video footage shot by the plane showed only what appeared to be grown men where the bomb struck, Denning said. After the airstrike, he said, roadside bombs in the area "shut down to almost nothing.
"That was a good strike, and we got some people who were killing a lot of people," Denning said.
Capt. Jeffrey S. Pool, a spokesman for the 2nd Marines, said it was not possible that children were killed in that strike unless they were outside the range of the F-15's camera.
Residents, however, said the strike killed civilians as well as insurgents, including 18 children. Afterward, at a traditional communal funeral, black banners bore the names of the dead, and grieving parents gave names, ages and detailed descriptions of the children they said had been killed, witnesses said. The bodies of three children and a woman lay unclaimed outside a hospital after the day's fighting.
American commanders insist they do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties, but overall, Denning said, "I think it would be very difficult to prosecute this insurgency" without airstrikes.
The precision-guided munitions used in all airstrikes in Anbar "have miss rates smaller than the size of this table," Denning said in the bare-bones cafeteria of one of several Marine bases around Ramadi. He said that officers at Ramadi and at the Marines' "lessons learned" center in Quantico coordinate each attack using the best intelligence available. "I have to sell it to about two or three different chains of command: 'What are you doing to make sure there are no civilian casualties?' " Denning said.
Sewall, the former Pentagon official, also said air power often is the best means for taking out a target more cleanly than ground forces could. But, she said, U.S. forces don't do enough after the airstrikes to figure out whether each one succeeded in hitting the intended targets while sparing civilians.
Marine officers said their lessons-learned center at Quantico did not try to assess civilian casualties from attacks. At the Pentagon, routine bomb-damage assessments rely heavily on the examination of aerial photos and satellite images, which Sewall said were "good for seeing if a building was hit, but not as good for determining who was inside."
"I have enormous respect for the extent to which U.S. air power has become discriminate," Sewall said. "But when you're using force in an urban area or using force in an area with limited intelligence," and facing an enemy actively "exploiting distinctions between combatants and noncombatants, air power becomes challenging no matter how discriminate it is.
"When it comes to the extent to which they are minimizing civilian harm, the question becomes: How do you know?" Sewall said.
Ellen Knickmeyer
The Washington Post
Dec24.2005
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/23/AR2005122301471_pf.html
also see:
UP IN THE AIR by Seymour Hersh
WILLARD "Here, take the radio. If I don't get back by 2200 hours,
you call in the airstrike."
CHEF "Airstrike ?"
WILLARD "The code is Almighty, coordinates 090264712.. It's
all in here."
...
CHEF "Hello Almighty, Almighty, this is PBR Street Gang -
radio check, over."
I suppose Francis Ford Coppola's mention of PBR could also be interpreted as being a reference to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, which would be highly appropriate for George W. Bush and his Street Gang.
David Lynch also uses the PBR reference for another American Psycho--Frank Booth from Blue Velvet:
FRANK (to Jeffrey)"What kinda beer do you like?"
JEFFREY (just says it) "Heineken."
FRANK "FUCK THAT SHIT. PABST BLUE RIBBON!!!"
Frank, of course, is played by Dennis Hopper. Hopper's photojournalist character is who Willard meets soon after this Almighty scene. A little homage to Apocalypse Now by Lynch perhaps ?
(Georg Wilhelm) Pabst was also a famous German Expressionist film director, whose most notable work was Pandora's Box (1929) starring the extraordinary Louise Brooks.
The Legend of Prometheus and Pandora's Box
RADIO "Street Gang, this is Almighty, standing by, over."
...
RADIO "PBR Street Gang, this is Almighty, over...
This is Almighty, standing by, over.
This is Almighty, how do you copy, over..."
RADIO"PBR Street Gang this is Almighty, over.."
Willard switches off the radio. The journey back home starts...
...
THE END
...
[Loop back to the very beginning of the script...]
WILLARD (v.o.)"Saigon, shit. I'm still only in Saigon."
http://corky.net/scripts/apocalypseNow.html
"The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past."--William Faulkner
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