(Motor Vessel M/V Mayaguez at anchor after being seized in May, 1975, by the Khmer Rouge maritime forces. Photo USAF).
I was going to wrap up a brief commemoration of the end of the conflict that defined the mid-point of the American Century with an account of the Speech the Congressman made me give to the Chairman of the People’s Council of Ho Chi Minh City, an earnest smiling man named Pham Chanh Truc, in our visit on the avvicersary of the fall of Saigon in 1995.
It is a fun story, if you like awkward moments, but I realized in the exhange of notes yesterday that the story wasn’t really over. Loose ends, sort of like the single artillery shell that was fired from shore to land a hundred yards astern of the 7th Fleet flagship, USS Oklahoma City (CG-5). The shell was not intended to harm the flagship, but rather to extend the middle finger of peace that marked the last shot of the war.
But things were not over. There were a few loose ends that had to be raveled up. My pal Joe was in the Pentagon at the time, and he recalled the post-script to the conflict that cost millions of Vietnamese people their lives and livelihood, and the deaths of 58,000 young Americans. And defined the attitudes of my generation of young men subject to the draft, pro and con.
Joe was attempting to depict the new reality in the Western Pacific to the Navy’s leadership. He wrote: “Mayaguez was seized on Sunday night Washington Time. The Sunday night before I was in CNO IP putting the brief together the brief when I found a Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) report saying a German-owned merchant ship in the Gulf Thailand was threatened by unidentified pirates, but eluded them.”
I have to walk the cat back on the account for the previous week. Joe had planned on using the tid-bit in the Out-of-Area worldwide maritime portion of the previous Monday morning brief to the Chief of Naval Operations and his key staff, which was also packaged as the top-level intelligence update transmitted to ships and stations world-wide.
Since the FBIS report was open-source and unverified by National Technical Means or corroborating HUMINT, the item was deleted.
On Monday night, the watch team at the Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Center at Makalapa Crater in Hawaii picked up the item and transmitted it in the daily Situation Report. The item was included in the CNO notes, but not formally presented in the Tuesday morning briefing.
Wednesday there is an report from Fort Meade about a merchant ship in the same general area of the German incident being attacked, but this time the reporting indicates the unidentified “pirates” are firing on the merchant ship. Again, the merchant escaped unharmed.
M/V Mayaguez was seized Sunday night, and the predicable “intelligence failure” is trotted out to absolve the operators from being asleep at the switch. There is a hunt for a scapegoat, which my pal dodged, and eventually collapsed on the Hydrographer of the Navy was issued a public letter of reprimand for failing to issue a NOTAM- “Notice to Mariners.”
The Mayaguez incident is covered nicely by our pal Mike Bohn, who transitioned from Naval Intelligence (and the White House Situation Room) to full-time journalism. His new book is titled “Presidents in Crisis,” and it is a good read.
And it certainly was a crisis. The Mayaguez incident, occupied the footnote to the Vietnam War, and it was deadly. The response to the seizure of the merchant ship was the last official battle of the war in South East Asia, Another couple pals were there to have ring-side seats for it. We will revisit it all in the week of May 12th, when the action went down.
But remember: coincident with the collapse of South Vietnam, the Khmer Rouge had seized the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. The U.S.-backed Khmer Republic was overthrown, and the bloody reign of terror was just beginning. That is one of the legacies of the abdication of responsibility of the Americans. But we would pay a price for it anyway.
(Members of Company D, 1st Battalion, 4th Marines board the Mayaguez. Gas masks were worn because the ship was bombed with tear-gas canisters by USAF helicopters. Photo DoD).
In the rescue attempt to free the thirty-nine civilians who crewed the Mayaguez, eighteen Marines, Sailors and Airmen died. Fifty more were wounded. Twenty-three more USAF personnel died in a support force helicopter crash in Thailand due to mechanical failure. Three Marines, inadvertently left behind on Ko Tang Island in darkness and confusion, were executed and buried there within a few days by the Khmer Rouge.
The Cambodians released the crew and the ship, and might have even without the decisive response by President Ford. I will let Mike Bohn speak to that, but the accounts by my pals on USS Coral Sea (CV-43) are pretty amazing.
We will come back to that when the time is right. But 40 years ago this month, the American War in Southeast Asia was over.
For a while, anyway.
Copyright 2015 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303