Regarding Washington, no matter how cynical I get, I can”t keep up. I watched President Obama”s modest announcement of his heroism in leading the SEALs to kill bin Laden, followed by the slobbering adulation of the media for him. It was pure horse manure but it solved a 43-year-mystery for me. I made three tours to Vietnam, the last two as Talos missile officer aboard USS Long Beach. Our station was within sight of Haiphong (Hanoi”s) Harbor. Our mission was to control our air strikes and shoot down enemies.
Tactically, Talos was the Navy”s big boomer. We could shoot down airplanes all across Vietnam and into Cambodia. My men were great. We had the best hit record in the world. The first morning we arrived on station, we could have decimated the Vietnamese air force. Just one problem: I needed a “weapons release” to fire.
Unfortunately my trigger finger, as well as air strikes and targets, was controlled by President Johnson from the White House. Month after month I sat with missiles loaded and ready, my hand inches from the firing key with perfect targets on my screen. Those targets were enemy fighters our planes had to contend with as they dodged enemy missiles and sought politically correct bombing targets assigned by Washington.
Eventually Nixon relieved Johnson. The war was decentralized and my missiles were released for firing. Then on May 3, 1968, young Lt. Ridgel fired the first shipboard missile ever launched against an enemy aircraft in the history of the world, destroying the target. That was soon followed by others. The enemy air force had something new to worry about, but, sadly, it was too late to affect the war.
Running a war from the White House, Johnson, in his ignorant arrogance, got 58,300 Americans killed and filled the “Hanoi Hilton” with our pilots. We knew his decisions were politically driven but his failure to release Talos to fire was a mystery.
Forty-three years later, as I watched Obama and his advisors supposedly guiding the SEAL activities, I realized why Johnson never gave me a weapons release to destroy enemy airplanes. He probably never knew that Talos even existed. Of all the people in the chain from me to Johnson, the President was the most ignorant of our capabilities. But he was calling the shots.
Obama is playing the same ignorant, arrogant game as Johnson. It was no gutsy decision to send in the SEALs. After months of knowing bin Laden”s location and with the SEAL team poised and ready, he insanely slept on it for 16 hours. He was no doubt wringing his hands and calculating the effect on his career. During those 16 hours an information leak could have wrecked the mission and gotten SEALs killed. But, after all his dallying, he had to send in the SEALs; bin Laden”s escape would have gotten him impeached.
Whatever his faults, Bush knew to make broad decisions as Commander-in-Chief and leave tactics to people who knew what they were doing. Obama does not and his tactical experience exactly equals that of my 2-year-old grandson, Jack: None.
Randy Ridgel
Kelseyville
