"Special" Correspondence / A Letter from Admiral Stockdale
S P E C I A L C O R R E S P O N D E N C E A Letter from Admiral Stockdale Dear Mr. Tyrrell, Thank you for your letter of January 19, and your agreeable comments about my appearance with Diane...
...She was a peach, and it was a pleasure to be led in such a relaxed manner through a brief discussion of my experiences as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, and to chat with her about the academic course I'm teaching at Stanford...
...By the time our tactical raids crept up to Hanoi in 1966, every civilian in the city had undergone months and months of instruction in civil defense...
...Once in a while, prisoners on the far side of the compound, looking south, identified a particularly brilliant torch among the array of bursting antiaircraft shells and surface-to-air missiles...
...there are also likely to be a few casualties, particularly at the antiaircraft batteries, and one or two ambulances might be heard en route...
...Our North Vietnamese captors seemed contemptuous of our government's sheepishness...
...Meanwhile, the other 99.99 percent of us can chop chop by the numbers back to our work stations...
...In Hanoi in those years of tactical bombings, there were few surprises...
...Bloomington could cope, too, with prior instruction like this...
...By nightfall an almost carnival atmosphere could be sensed...
...By then there are a few fires and the trucks wheel past...
...THOMAS MORE INSTITUTE OF LIBERAL ARTS...
...the name of the game in war is to break the enemy's will...
...In Hanoi, this stoppage brought about no change in the brutality with which we prisoners were treated...
...The Americans were constrained by self-imposed rules that were public knowledge on the streets of North Vietnam's capital city...
...Diane Sawyer was not part of that 7:45 segment on January 27...
...The scenario goes like this," the party-cadre's man might well have explained to the people on his block: "The air-raid siren wails in mid-morning, you run and get in your hole, the planes roll in, there is a lot of noise, a bridge is bombed, the 'all clear' is sounded...
...Everything seemed programmed...
...Our college program is based on the Humanities as discerned in the great books of Western civilization and as seen through the eyes of the Christian humanist...
...In late 1971 in Hanoi we began to hear air raid sirens again, and a new generation of prisoners started to trickle in to join us...
...For many of us, our very worst tortures occurred during that Johnson-initiated hiatus of bombing...
...This was a new reality for Hanoi...
...He reminded viewers that January 27 was the tenth anniversary of the signing of the Vietnam Peace Accords...
...At first we (in the very center of Hanoi in Hoa Lo prison) thought it was a regular tactical raid of the sort that came in every few nights...
...Though landing thousands of yards away, they shook the ground under us and plaster fell from all the ceilings...
...There are enough falsehoods in that paragraph alone to justify a demand for equal time...
...Let's hear it for President Nixon...
...the raids broke the will of the North Vietnamese as did nothing else in that war...
...The number of civilian casualties has yet to be released...
...Moreover, North Vietnam persisted, and still persists, in the validity of their figures...
...and the number of total casualties (some lesser part of which were undoubtedly civilians) was publicly released by the North Vietnamese government and printed in the New York Times within a week after the last bomb was dropped on December 29...
...Thus went life in Hanoi throughout the latter half of 1966, all of 1967, and through March of 1968∔until President Johnson halted the bombing...
...Those eleven days of bombing at the end of 1972 are a subject I could discuss on CBS morning news with real credentials...
...So it went, hour after hour, night after night, with frequent tactical raids in the daytime...
...civilian targets were never deliberately hit (and far fewer were accidentally hit than in any bombing of a large industrial complex since the invention of the airplane...
...Tyrrell, Thank you for your letter of January 19, and your agreeable comments about my appearance with Diane Sawyer on CBS morning news on January 13...
...Now airpower's greatest utility is its shock effect, its ability to create fear and panic, particularly among the uninitiated and undisciplined...
...Some of the prisoners did detect higher level explosions early in the bombardment, but it wasn't until these explosions were still being heard 20 minutes later that the cheers started to go up all over the cell blocks of that downtown prison...
...Clever American prisoners with a good ear for lyrics could identify the targets hit that day from their mention in songs sung that night...
...went the cry from cell block to cell block, all around the courtyard...
...But did you catch that same show at the same time exactly two weeks later...
...If I learned nothing else during eight years in wartime Hanoi, it was that Clausewitz is as right today as he was during the Napoleonic Wars...
...Our wonderful America was here to deliver a message, not a self-conscious stammer of apology...
...These were big explosions∔and the bombs kept coming...
...City life can seemingly go on forever under mere tactical bombings if the population is well indoctrinated...
...The bombs were hitting out where they usually hit∔in the railroad yards, power plant, and airfield areas...
...But a totally contrasting atmosphere swept the city about an hour after dark on that December 18 night in 1972...
...Off and on for about a year, we had the tactical raid situation we had known five and six years before...
...And the truth is that not one bomb was dropped on Christmas...
...Songfests went off as scheduled in the guards' quarters and in the city parks...
...I was an eyewitness...
...And that's all there is to it until afternoon when it will all start and end within fifteen minutes just like it did in the morning...
...These facts have been in the public domain for years, yet they have been ignored again and again and again...
...The casualty number was extremely low ∔1,318 killed∔no more than a scant percentage of the casualty numbers common for European and Japanese cities bombed with comparable tonnage during World War II...
...Patriotic music was soon blaring from the speakers at every corner, while our interrogators strutted about the prison yards defiantly...
...So let me make a few points you won't normally hear on CBS...
...THE GREAT UNIVERSITIES provided the ground for the important political leaders, philosophers, theologians, scientists, lawyers, poets, and religious of the past...
...and then (on December 18, 1972) came the Christmas bombing of civilian targets . . . which had nothing to do with ending the war...
...Though the guards of the prisons feigned wide-eyed hostility during the few minutes of the raid, the street sounds were back to normal right after the "all clear" siren...
...rather for about five minutes the screen was filled with old Vietnam war scenes narrated off camera by Bill McLaughlin...
...The days of Mickey Mouse were over...
...Guards, normally enraged by loud talk, guards who normally thrust their bayonetted rifles through the bars and screamed at us if we had the temerity to shout, could only be seen silently cowering in the lee of the prison walls, their faces ashen in the light reflected from the fiery skies above...
...And the bombers kept coming, and we kept cheering...
Vol. 16 • June 1983 • No. 6
