Saturday, June 30, 2012

Anniversary 1966

My room-mate, Bill Ricks and I were gone to Tokyo for a three day break in combat flying. We'd been on the seven-day-a-week schedule since arriving at Korat the first week of May. It was the 29th and 30th of June when we picked up a newspaper in the Tokyo Hilton lobby. This was the news of the day:

The targeting had gotten a whole lot more serious. The thunder was rolling to the edges of Hanoi and the rest of the summer was going to be very intense. 

6 comments:

drjim said...

Was this Rolling Thunder 1 or 2?

Ed Rasimus said...

There is only one Rolling Thunder campaign. It had stops and starts under LBJ, but it was only one. In 1972 there was Linebacker and Linebacker II.

drjim said...

Thanks, Ed.
About an hour after I posted this I was reading a book, and it referenced Linebacker I & II, and I knew I'd stuck foot-in-mouth.

FlyingBarrister said...

If the US had been talking with China, warning Russia, mining and closing the port of Haiphong, and continually bombing the north, things could have been much different.

Chris Manno said...

This is one of the best sections of "When Thunder Rolled."

I'm waiting for the movie, although Tom Cruise is kind of preoccupied at the moment.

Murphy's Law said...

@ Chris: Tom Cruise is not man enough for the role...unless maybe you wanted to cast him as Robert McNamara.