James Stockdale Interview (page: 7 / 9) Medal of Honor	Print Interview

You led three principal actions on the Tonkin Gulf.

James Stockdale: Yes. This is kind of a long story but here's the way that was handled by L.B. Johnson. William Bundy was Secretary of State for the Far East, and in May of that year he drafted a congressional resolution -- if you've got enough congressmen to go along with it -- what he wanted to see come out of Congress when it came time to settle with erratic raids by the enemy that were illegal, unconstitutional.

I had hardly gotten back from the Connie when I was back on the Taiko and we were having Sunday afternoon sleepy day flight operations that consisted of really training your new and weak pilots. We would go down and we would shoot rockets.

This was an easy day. There were probably about 15 airplanes that were going out to shoot rockets at a towed spar that the ship would be towing. They were A-4s and F-8s.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. After we had been out there just a few minutes and maybe made two runs a piece, I got the word to shift to strike control. That means you're going to get sent somewhere and everybody switches that button on the machine. And the voice on the ship said that the Maddox is being chased by four PT boats at 300 plus miles north of here so clean up and get up there and help them out. What had happened was, that morning on the ship they had had kind of a strange announcement before they got everybody in the ready rooms and told them you should know that there's a certain type of counter to the North Vietnamese seagoing traffic. It's a single Destroyer. It was the Maddox, a single ship that was going up the coast. In doing that, he was involving himself necessarily with another American effort that was sort of off the books. Big PT boats made in Norway, bought by the United States, supposedly being manned only by South Vietnamese. But, a lot of high ranking officers doubted that in my company because of the need for them. They would go on regular runs, leaving at dusk out of Da Nang. They could make about 45 knots. They would go up and they would have target areas that they would shellac in the middle of the night and then they would head back down. The sun would just be rising as they coasted into their dock.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. It so happened that before the destroyer got up there, they had even accelerated this program to not having navy guns but army rifles, not great big ones, but big enough to be supported by this ship. In some cases they were skippered by Norwegian merchant seamen. Anyway, they caused a lot of damage and they really raised hell with these army rifles at night. When this fellow came in with the Maddox, the North Vietnamese were really griped at him. They knew he didn't do it, I suppose, but they were really seething. It was an island off shore, maybe a half mile off shore, An May they called it, and it's probably about the size of Coronado, maybe a little bigger. The Maddox had an instrument which sounds pretty good -- all you could hear on the radio was the gibberish of the Vietnamese calling this and that, this and that -- brought into existence, and I didn't know it at that time, a device which he could throw a switch and it instantly translated all that into English. The Maddox heard by that means that the North Vietnamese were calling in PT boats to get even with him the next morning.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. When we first sighted those people, we could see that the boats were almost up there to torpedo him. We were descending, and we saw three PT boats with a torpedo under each wing. So six torpedoes hit the water less than a half a block behind this destroyer but they all went bananas. They didn't steer. I said to myself, "So much for Southeast Asian electronics." So the Maddox cut it; he was getting the hell out of there and he said, "Your mission now is to sink and destroy these three PT boats." We were almost out of fuel, but we learned a lot in those few minutes. I learned how to damage a PT boat. You don't want big rockets from altitude going after them. You want to get way down, right on the water's edge, go right up next to them and just give them 40 millimeter machine gun bullets and cut the whole thing up the side. We had one dead in the water and both of the others were spewing oil by the time we had to get out of there and fly back. I had to call planes in to refuel us about half way and we did that and we landed about dark. We'd left about 1:00 o'clock. But, that was the first step.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. So everybody around the Washington powerhouse tables said, "Well, looks like we've got a good option here. We can declare war now because they've violated common international law." And then next morning LBJ had a meeting in his office and he said, "Gentlemen, I've been thinking this over and I think that I'm not going to execute the Tonkin Gulf Resolution at this time because this could have been the result of a hare-brained local area commander." And then people he'd also talked to, and even out of the newspapers -- I got this -- he said, "You know, I'm running for President for a second term against Barry Goldwater and if I do something that seems rash to the Americans they will say, 'What the hell is the difference between Barry Goldwater and L.B. Johnson?'" Of course that was in his head, but all these powerful military commanders deluged the office immediately with instant telegraphs saying, "What in the hell are we doing? We've been working for two years to set this up and now that it's time to pull the handle and you lose your guts."

Did you feel that, too?

James Stockdale: Oh, yeah. I'm a player in this. A willing player, but not an instigator.

James Stockdale Interview, Page: 1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9