Word: patroling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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With the new equipment-whatever it was-Maddox took up patrol, with orders never to venture closer than eight miles to the North Vietnamese mainland, or closer than four miles to any Northern islands. How close she did go, in fact, has not been disclosed. McNamara maintains that Hanoi never officially announced its claim to a twelve-mile boundary until Sept. 1, 1964, so that, as far as the U.S. was concerned, Maddox was always within international waters...
Shortly before Maddox arrived on station, South Vietnamese patrol boats (the night of July 30-31) shelled the Northern islands of Hon Me and Hon Nieu, staging points for Northern infiltration to the South. Did Maddox help the Southerners by diverting Northern attention from the attack? McNamara says no, but he acknowledges that the U.S. was aware that the islands would be bombarded...
...damaged by F-8 Crusader jets, called in from the U.S. aircraft carrier Ticonderoga. Maddox suffered minimal damage. The Pentagon has pictures of the action, and no one questions this part of the story. The destroyer Turner Joy, a 2,850-tonner, was sent to reinforce Maddox, and the patrol-now known grandiloquently as Task Group 72.1-went on as before...
...metal runway. Then they dart into bunkers, knowing that the planes usually attract "incoming." The Marines just sit and wait to be attacked, primarily because seeking out the enemy could cost more lives and casualty-consciousness has been drummed into every commander. The fact that they do not patrol means that Khe Sanh's original purpose-to interdict enemy infiltration-has been abandoned. As the tension builds, Marines manning the misty perimeter, their eyes wet with straining, sometimes begin to imagine phantom attackers coming through the gathering dusk...
...Koreans are far from defenseless. Their 600,000 man army--according to American propaganda, one of Asia's best--is nearly twice the size of their Northern enemy's. And though Korea depends on U.S. industry for weapons and some supplies, this hardly explains why two U.S. divisions patrol one third the length of the 38th parallel armistice line. The need for greater flexibility in our allied bonds is the clearest lesson of the Vietnamese mess. Vance's mission, however, ties an ostentatious knot in an unnecessarily tight U.S. commitment...