Mike, with respect to you and given your approach to this thread being rather as one would expect from Moorer's legal team rather than someone attempting to find the truth you have hitherto got off lightly IMHO.
FWIW I have attempted to read the preview link and using three browsers (IE. Safari, Firefox) I continue to get 'No Preview Available' so must make do with the three pages you posted.
Yep, I get no preview available.For the benefit of the others here, go to Google Books, Perilous options: special operations as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy By Lucien S. Vandenbroucke (url on my computer - it goes to Page 200 - use "Previous Page" on the right of Page 200 to get to pages 65-67).
So... from the attached pages we learn...
and Moorer:According to Secretary Laird's military assistant, Brigadier General Robert Pursely, DIA told Laird and him before the operation that, "the chance that prisoners were still in he camp was, at best, 10 or 15 percent.
In post #4 to this thread I said the following:"I argued more strongly than all the others that we should go in and conduct the rescue mission ... We had some doubts the POWs were there, but the forces were poised to go and there was some possibility the POWs were still there."
Laird/Pursely were told there was a 10-15 percent chance the POWs were still there while according to Train, he and Moorer knew the camp was empty. Yet despite this the raid went ahead.Having been involved in some raid activity myself it is the waiting that gets to you. You want to get it done and over with. Son Tay had a specific weather/moon phase window of opportunity which limited possible action to a few days in each month. They wanted to go in October but were scheduled for November. The prospect of another delay was not what the commanders (and probably the troops) wanted.
Moorer was in a position to pull the emergency brake on a train that gathering a momentum of its own and he failed to do so and allowed himself to be swept all in the 'group-think'. As the top man in the military he failed. He failed to say:
"STOP... we are planning to do what on an empty camp 23 miles from Hanoi?"
This comment on Vanderbroucke? Because he doesn't produce what you wanted you got to put the boot into him too? Very Sad.Vandenbroucke was a State Dept. guy who generally took a negative view of special ops because of what he believed to be their negative impact on US foreign policy.
Regards
Mike
It saddens me more than I can say that it is the behaviour of men at the top of the military (as in the example of the Son Tay Raid) that opens the door for the demand for civilian oversight and micromanagement of military operations.
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