Kill Without Mercy, Die Unlamented

After you read it please read Richard Manning's commentary on the bloodthirsty careerist mentality as it manifested itself in Vietnam.  He wrote his observations just as the bombing began.  There is a chilling prescience in his words.

Then read Col. James Robert "Cotton" Hildreth's heart-wrenching true story that our propagandists masquerading as journalists would not dare tell you.

BELGRADE, April 18  - Serb television on Sunday revealed extracts of what it called a taped conversation of a NATO pilot being ordered to attack a civilian convoy in Kosovo last week despite seeing only cars and tractors.

It said the conversation, between the pilot ("Charlie Bravo") and an AWACS early warning aircraft ("Mother"), was from a transcript of the tape to be published on Monday by the Belgrade daily Vecernje Novosti.

RTS did not play the tape nor did it say how or where the newspaper had obtained the recording. NATO was unable to offer any new information on Sunday about what it has said was a mistaken attack on a refugee convoy in Kosovo on April 14. Serbia says at least 64 people were killed in the attack.

The extract covered the crucial moment when the pilot identifed the convoy, having dropped below cloud cover to 3,000 feet. Asked by the AWACS if there were any tanks in the convoy, the pilot said he could see only cars and tractors. The conversation then proceeded as follows:

"Charlie Bravo to Mother. What should I destroy? Tractors? Ordinary cars?  Repeat, I do not see any tanks. Request additional instructions."

"Mother to Charlie Bravo. This is a military target, a completely legitimate military target. Destroy the target, repeat, destroy the target"

"Charlie Bravo to Mother. Understand. Roger. Launching." 

....a most timely, honestly eloquent article hopefully - possibly, with a few - giving pause to our citizens about how they should consider the Kosovo kind of police actions; and what necessarily follows, when our 'heroic' military pilots, and other officers and men, from Vietnam to Kosovo, unquestioningly obey orders to carry out bombing operations in predominantly civilian areas.

We keep seeming to forget the lame excuses we heard at Nuremberg and Tokyo, when we hung military and civilian moral cowards who committed crimes against civilians by excused themselves as only being 'order followers' or 'nationalists' or religious 'demi-god followers'.

It is from my personal knowledge of village targets in the II Corps area where I worked, very like the one described herein, that makes me, still today, wonder how it was that so very, very few of our pilots even questioned, never mind refused, to bomb the many similar targets we hit in both North and South Vietnam (not counting the slaughter in Laos); AND that the enemy we created in Vietnam, from 1947 onwards, were able to refrain from executing the US pilots they shot down over the North who had so often bombed civilian locations, targets often not very different than the one herein described.

Take my word for it, the infamous My Lai was not an on the ground aberration (just ask our Korean lackeys, who were specially infamous for this, actually liking, the totaling game, leaving no evidence behind), to say the least.

AND the number of 'My Lais' perpetrated from the air, as with this herein described village, was thousands of times, not hundreds, repeated. That's how evil our Indochina record tonnage of bombs was to the people on the ground who never saw their killers faces..

I can tell you from personal experience that the fighter pilot who wrote this article was a major exception; most of them never had the moral courage to disobey orders. They preferred another notch on their gun belt and promotion reports.

We'd best remember his story when proudly listening to the roar of our military juggernaut, wherever we allow it to be sent - from Panama to Grenada to Kuwait to Iraq to Sudan to Afghanistan to Kosovo; and to whatever is the next civilian city Eisenhower's Military Industrial Complex send our career pilots and ships : all those men, as this author quite correctly and eloquently points out, who can murder without having to look into the eyes of their victims.

Until our country faces up this technocratic, career protecting habit of our CIA and Military blindly obeying the corporations macro managing our 'National Security' profit psychosis, the American ethos will continue to deteriorate, the commonweal will further rot out from the greedy Enemy Within.

richard manning

        I was sixteen when I went into the Merchant Marines.  I served sixteen months as a Ship's Radio Officer.  When I became eighteen, I joined the Army and served a hitch as an enlisted man, then got out of service.  I was called back into service when the Korean War started.  I went into the Air Force in 1952 and became a fighter pilot, and it was my career for the next thirty years.

        For the next ten years, I served as a flight commander in several fighter squadrons, flying the F-84, F-86, F-100 and F-105.  This was the most exciting, rewarding, and enjoyable ten years of my life.  During the hottest period of the Cold War we developed and exercised world-wide deployment for our fighter aircraft, using aerial refueling, and responded to numerous military threats with a show of force in such places as the Taiwan Straits and Lebanon in the Middle East.

        I was assigned to Fighter Requirements in the Pentagon when the military buildup in Vietnam began, and I volunteered to go.  I think we all wanted to go.  It was what we had trained to do since we took the oath.  When my request was approved, I called my friend, Dudley Foster, in Rated Officer Assignments in Personnel and told him I had been released from my Pentagon tour and wanted an F-105 assignment to Southeast Asia.  He told me that since I had not flown F-105 in three years I would have to retrain in the F-105 and that I would have to wait five or six months for a school slot. This was in 1966, and I didn't think the war would last that long.

        I asked, "Well, what aircraft do you have that I can go over in now?"  And added, "I don't care what it is.  I'm ready to go."

        He said, "I just had a cancellation in an A-1 assignment."

        I didn't know what an A-1 was.  He told me it was a conventional Navy attack aircraft that the Marines used in the Korean War for close-air support.  The Marines were converting their attack units to A-4s and giving the A-1s to the Air Force to use for Air Commando missions, principally close-air support, search and rescue, and covert mission he couldn't talk about.  It was really not what I had in mind, but I wanted to go so badly I took the assignment.

        I arrived at Pleiku in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam as Commander of the First Air Commando Squadron in March, 1967, and ended my tour a year later during the Tet Offensive.

        How do I feel about the war in Vietnam?

        I have mixed feelings, mostly bad.  From the onset of the buildup in Vietnam, it was clear that there was no military solution to the conflict.  We should never have become so extensively involved.  The volume of ordnance we expended over an area about the size of California was more than the total ordnance expended in all the previous armed conflicts in the history of our country, and it had no appreciable effect on the outcome in Southeast Asia.  The total of all the targets destroyed was not worth the life of one of my pilots, and I lost eight of them in ten months and twelve of my twenty-two assigned aircraft.

        It was difficult to show the bean-counters and political warriors in Washington positive military results for all our casualties and materiel losses.  So the American military leadership in South Vietnam determined that bodies destroyed was a good gauge.  BODY-COUNT became the measure of a ground commander's success.  It should not then have been surprising that this policy led to the civilian massacre at the village of Mylai.

        The vast majority of the A-1 missions were in Laos: flying armed reconnaissance of North Vietnamese infiltration routes into South Vietnam, search and rescue missions for downed air crews, and covert support for special ground forces operations.

        Our aircraft was very slow and heavily armed.  I mention this because all of my previous experience had been in high-performance jet fighters where the pilot never really sees the people who die in the target he destroys.  In the A-1 you actually see the people shooting at you, and, at the time, feel the satisfaction of knowing you've killed someone who was trying to kill you.

        One particular mission is as vivid in my memory now as the day it happened.  I was leading a flight of two A-1s on an armed reconnaissance mission, but shortly after take-off we were diverted to a target on the coast of I Corps (northern quarter of South Vietnam.)  On arriving in the target area, we contacted the FAC (forward air controller) who pointed out the target.  It was a huge village of three or four hundred houses, probably twelve to fifteen hundred people.  It was between the main north-south highway and the ocean, a pretty, clean village.  I asked the FAC why the village was a target.

        The FAC said, "That is a Vietcong village."

        I said, "How do you know its a Vietcong village?"

        He said, "Well we saw three Vietcong run in there."                  Across the road from the village was a rice paddy.

        He said, "We saw them run out of the rice paddy when we flew over, and they ran into the village."

        I said, "And you want us to wipe out this whole village to get three Vietcong?"  How do you know they were Vietcong?  Were they armed?"

        He said, "They had on black pajamas."

        All of the farmers working in the fields had on black pajamas.  That was their dress.  And they carried tools like rakes and hoes.

        He said, "They were armed."

        I said, "How do you know they weren't carrying rakes and hoes?"

        He said, "Don't argue with me.  I've got the provincial governor in the back seat, and he says that is a Vietcong village."

        I said, "Well, I'll go down and look around and see if I can draw any fire."

        So we went down and flew over real low and slow.  There were children in the courtyard, smiling and waving at us.  This village had obviously been there for years, and it had never been touched.  I pulled back up; and I said, "Okay, what are your instructions?"

        He said, "The wind is blowing off-shore; so put your napalm down on that first row of houses, and the wind will carry the fire across the entire village."

        So I said, ""Fine."

        I pulled around and told my wingman to come in from one side and I would attack from the other.  We would start our attack from opposite corners.  I was coming in toward the corner hut.  I looked up at the other end, and he had moved over the road and dropped his napalm on the road.  As I approached my release point, a woman with a tiny baby strapped on her back, holding the hand of a small child three or four years old, came running from the hut.  I pulled my aircraft over and dropped the napalm in a ditch beside the highway.

        The FAC screamed and raised holy hell because he had this governor in the aircraft with him.  He said, "You know I'm going to report you for this!"

        I said, "You don't have to.  I'll be on the ground before you are, and I'll report myself."

        When we landed, my wingman walked over to my aircraft and said, "Sir, I have three small grandchildren, and I could never have faced them again if I had followed those orders."  He said he didn't want to fly any more combat missions.  Later, I had him transferred to a unit with an airborne command and control mission.

        I went into Squadron Operations and called the Command Center at Seventh air Force and talked to the director, a brigadier general I had served with several years before.  I told him what happened.

        He said, "Damn, Cotton, don't you know what's going on?  That village didn't pay their taxes.  That lieutenant colonel, a provincial commander, is teaching them a lesson."

        On returning from an interdiction mission several days later, we flew over the target area.  The village had been totally destroyed.  Nothing but a large, black, burned area remained.  I'm sure when the FAC got a fast-mover (high-performance jet) on the target and destroyed the village the report read: Target 100 percent destroyed, body-count 1200 KBA (killed by air) confirmed.