On 04 Sep 2004 00:42:19 GMT, (BUFDRVR) wrote:

Ed Rasimus wrote:

In late November, the agreement had not been signed
by the North and they walked out of Paris.

Ed, that is a misleading description of events. When the NVN walked out in
November, they had nothing to sign. Kissenger had recently submitted changes to
the October agreement, but even if NVN found them acceptable it would have been
weeks before a final signing. Bottom line; NVN walked out because we were
changing an already agreed upon accord AND (more importantly) the anti-war
movement in congress was threatening to give them much more than the Paris
Peace Accord.

You fail to add one important link to the events: There was an
election on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November. And,
you also fail to acknowledge my qualification that causative
relationships in issues like this are not simple.

You can speculate, I was a participant, and the POWs were on-scene
observers.

You and I have been over this before Ed, but I don't believe participation in
history makes someone an expert in anything other then your own part in that
event. In this discusion, aircrew perspective doesn't provide much.

I'm not going to descend to the level of others who discount anyone
who wasn't there. That's why I added reference to Eschmann, Clodfelter
and Michel as well. When we take on-scene observers (the POWs who were
interacting with the NVN military on a daily basis and had seen
considerable shifts in attitudes, goals, and political positions in
the camp leadership in response to events), participants (lots of them
who had been through multiple tours), senior military leaders who were
in-the-loop on classified and back-channel traffic, and the historians
you should be able to get a much better interpretation of events than
simple archivist reviewer historians (and many with a political ax to
grind.)

I can find a direct causative relationship between getting
the crap kicked out of them for eleven days and crying "uncle", then
signing and in very short order releasing the guys.

Without a doubt, however LBII would have lasted until the dollars ran out if
congress had returned and voted to suspend funding for the war. The bombing
and, as equally important, the silence from congress convinced NVN to return to
Paris and sign *the original October agreeement*.

And, the "silence from Congress" can very clearly be linked to the '68
election and the need to wrap things up without political campaign
positions interfering.

To suggest that LBII would have gone on until the budget tightened is
to be unaware of the initial alerting order for the campaign which
said "three days" of maximum effort. That doesn't sound like an
open-ended campaign to me.


Ed Rasimus
Fighter Pilot (USAF-Ret)
"When Thunder Rolled"
"Phantom Flights, Bangkok Nights"
Both from Smithsonian Books
***www.thunderchief.org