(Ongoing Vietnam Legacy Project. Details at July 4 post.)
November 30, 1970, The Saigon Post
November 30, 1970, The Saigon Post
SAIGON NOTES:The Commando Raid in N. Vietnam
by
Daniel Cameron
Bold, yes. Imaginative, yes. A propoganda coup that may eventually aid the
POW's indirectly. In motivation, even noble. The volunteers, heroic. But
successful in the stated task? Let's stop the kidding.
The abortive rescue mission demonstrates how strongly the US feels about
the POWs and Hanoi's exploitation of them.
Unfortunately, it also demonstrates an open secret: the US military in
Vietnam has no intelligence system adequate for such a delicate operation. A sad
thing about all this is that such an operation has to succeed the first time.
The enemy won't give you a second chance to surprise him in the same way. Does
anyone doubt that he will now make it virtually impossible to rescue the
surviving POWs in another such raid? Kidding each other won't change this fact.
Neither will it change the fact that the US military's intelligence was bush
league.
We see no equivalent of the German air commandos who sprung loose Mussolini
himself from Allied captivity in Northern Italy. Or the tiny Israeli team that
tracked down Eichmann in Argentina and whisked him all the way back to Tel
Aviv.
All we see is people congratulating each other for an aborted mission.
Brave men were landed in N. Vietnam and found nobody home. In Vietnam the US
military, it seems, is best suited for expensive meat-grinding, H & I fire
and saturation bombing. In football terms it produces a maximum of blistering,
hulking tackles, a minimum of artful quarterbacks and deft half-backs. It may
snow the Washington civilians, but we don't propose to be snowed.
ps The American-distributed Vietnam Round-up and Vietnam Press Review will
be excused from reprinting this commentary.
AROUND THE TOWN
Strange rains? Folks are wondering why the beginning of the dry season has
been so wet....TITO V. CARBALLO has settled in Phnom Penh with his wife BLANCA,
for the Phillipine News Service. TITO has been with the Saigon Post for two
years....An American who retired from the US Army after more than 20 years
service is living in Saigon with his wife and children and working for a
US-Government operated contractor. Yet MACV refuses to give him Commissary
privileges, he says. He claims that USAID employees get these privileges with
no sweat....LOLITA re-appeared at the Vinh Loi cinema recently. James Mason
plays the poetic middle-aged Humping Humbert who does a cross-country station
wagon tour with glorious fair-haired nymphette played by Sue Lyon. In the movie
she's about 16. In NABOKOV'S original novel she was 13....Remarkably the
non-political Association of Foreign Correspondents in Vietnam has decided to
involve itself in the accreditation case of DON LUCE who is firmly established
in many minds here as a political personality....What is ARTHUR DOMMEN smoking
up there in Vientiane? More on this later...Chinese own the TOKYO restaurant on
Le Loi. but the food is Japanese-style and reasonably priced....Somebody has
spread reports that we're wedding HENNY SCHOUTE the air-borne blonde. Nothing to
it. We are not jump-qualified.
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