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I enlisted in the Navy on September 11, 1969, at the height of the Vietnam War. As part of the SEAL’s Underwater Demolition Team, I spent time off the coast of Hanoi waiting with a Marine division for a Normandy-type invasion that never happened. Altogether I served seventeen months overseas, never questioning how we ended up in Vietnam to begin with.

Today, I know different. It was a sham from the get-go, trumped up by the military industrial complex. If President Kennedy had lived, we’d have started withdrawing troops by late 1963 and had all our servicemen out of there by the end of 1965. The idea that JFK was responsible for having escalated the war is simply bogus. It’s obvious his plans were to pull us out, but he’d said behind the scenes he had to wait until after the next election to do it.

When the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) official file from those years was declassified in 1997, it contained a memorandum concerning the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF in the document) conference on May 6, 1963, held at CINCPAC headquarters in Camp Smith, Hawaii. Let’s start with key excerpts from that one, and a follow-up memo from late October (less than a month before JFK was assassinated) that clearly show we were starting to get out of Vietnam and leave matters in the hands of the South Vietnamese, where they belonged. Unfortunately, this is again a case of misleading the people for years, by keeping the true thoughts of John F. Kennedy out of the public realm.

10

FLAWED INTELLIGENCE

What Really Happened at the Gulf of Tonkin

The official line was that, in August 1964, the North Vietnamese twice attacked U.S. ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. That was the incident that led to Congress passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and President Johnson’s dramatic buildup of our forces. As it turns out, according to top secret documents finally released by the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2005, the second attack never happened. Somebody involved in SIGINT (Signals Intelligence) skewed the data to make it look that way.

Some 58,000 of my generation were killed in the Vietnam War, and no telling how many Vietnamese, probably over a million but who knows? Again, all based upon fraudulence. How can our government have any credibility whatsoever when it’s always caught in these major lies?

An article in Naval History, a magazine published by the U.S. Naval Institute, first revealed the story in 1999 of Operation Plan 34A, a highly classified program of covert attacks against North Vietnam, including the raids on two offshore islands that forced their one (and only) retaliation against the USS Maddox.

As far back as 1972, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was pushing the NSA to release what its files contained on the Gulf of Tonkin. They stonewalled, even as late as 2004 when a FOIA request pushed for it. According to the New York Times, high-level officials at the NSA were “fearful that [declassification] might prompt uncomfortable comparisons with the flawed intelligence used to justify the war in Iraq.” Oh really?

11

AGENT ORANGE?

U.S. Capabilities in Chemical and Biological Warfare

It’s hard to imagine today’s Congress holding this kind of hearing in anything but a closed-door top-secret session. But there seemed to be a lot more openness in our government as the sixties came to a close. I founda the transcript of this House Subcommittee to be a real eye-opener. Not only the transcript of this House Subcommittee to be a real eye-opener. Not only in terms of the R&D going on at the time—and I realize this was during the Cold War with the Russians—but of how “innocently” we were using herbicides in Vietnam. You won’t see Agent Orange mentioned, but clearly that’s what they’re talking about. The other part that blew my mind was how acceptable it was to dump “obsolete chemical agents” into the ocean.

It’s just appalling to know that we have this capability to use as we so desire. Is it truly survive-at-any-cost, where we have no moral high ground on anything? Maybe so. Because, as