The air defense missile sites around Bien Hoa and Tan Son Nhut airport had been thoroughly sabotaged by their loyal crews before they were evacuated, but there was no way of knowing how many handheld SAMs and anti- aircraft guns had fallen into the hands of the rebels. The regiment took off in five four-ship waves, spaced a few minutes apart.
'Looks as if the VNPAF is making a full court press,' General Russ Dewey, commander of the U.S. Pacific Air Forces, observed as the situation display flickered with the latest updates. 'We haven't seen this much activity out of them since, oh, hell, back in '72.'
'There's still no word from the Pentagon,' Admiral Roy Shapiro, the Commander in Chief, Pacific (CINCPAC), replied. 'Not that we could do much right now, even if we got a green light.' You didn't have to see the gold wings above the admiral's chestful of ribbons to tell that he was an aviator. He had flown off carrier decks in the Gulf of Tonkin, out of Subic Bay and Clark Field in the Philippines, out of Andersen AFB on Guam, the Marine base at Kadena on Okinawa, and a dozen other places that were now mostly memories. It was the kind of situation that was every CinC's worst nightmare. Another Major Regional Contingency (MRC) was shaping up, and the nearest airpower that U.S. Pacific Command controlled was exactly two squadrons of 8th TFW F-16s in Korea, two thousand long, long air miles away.
There was still some daylight fading in the western sky as the planes came in from the north low and fast. Because the mission had been laid on in a hurry and the ground crews had humped whatever ordnance was immediately available in the closest bunkers at Gia Lam and Hue, they had been loaded with 250 kg. incendiary and fragmentation bombs.
The slaughter in the streets, thronged with celebrating crowds, was appalling. Months later the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated that over five thousand people had been killed outright and about fifteen thousand seriously burned or injured. No one would ever know for sure — the provisional city government committee reluctantly had to order the dead buried in mass graves for reasons of public health. Some of the fires burned for days, but not as hotly as the wave of rage and revulsion that swept through the normally docile and apolitical Saigonese population. Even worse from the point of view of the world press was what happened to the visitors that made up Vietnam's major cash industry — tourism. Better than two hundred foreigners, mostly businessmen from Europe or Japan, were checked in at the Caravelle Hotel in Saigon. Most of them were eating an early dinner or drinking in the world-famous bar. There were also about a hundred elderly American Vietnam War veterans in the country, invited by the Hanoi government to visit old battlefields and exorcise ancient demons. The original idea behind their visit, in fact, had been to speed along the normalization of U.S.-Vietnamese relations. Unfortunately for them, and for Hanoi, the pilots of four MiG-27 attack fighters had been told that the Caravelle was under rebel control.
It is one of the realities of our time that satellite news networks are the finest intelligence-gathering agencies in the world. Though Hanoi denied conducting the strike, a Sky News TV crew from Britain had it on tape, with the yellow stars clearly visible on the MiGs. The tape was uplinked immediately to the global satellite network.
The first Security Council resolution came up for a vote within hours of the airing of the tape; the pictures from Saigon had shocked even the hardened diplomats of this cynical group.
RESOLUTION 1397
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The motion had been proposed by the ambassador from France, the one-time colonial ruler of the region. It called for a UN-enforced isolation of the South until such time as UN-supervised elections could be conducted. Some speculated that the French proposal was offered in order to soothe old feelings of guilt going back three generations. The other Security Council members barely had time to call in to their various departments and ministries of State to obtain instructions. The surprise came when the vote by the permanent members was taken.
'The United States of America?'
'Yes.'
'The United Kingdom?'
'Affirmative.'
'The Republic of France?'
'
'The Russian Federation?'
'Japan?'
'The People's Republic of China?'
There was a long, tense pause while everyone waited for the simultaneous translation. 'Madame Chairman, China abstains.' In capitals around the world, the great and powerful sucked in their breath.
'How the hell does the UN Security Council expect us to back them up when they won't even tell us what they want ahead of time?' the National Security Advisor raged to the President, the Cabinet, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
'Mitch,' the President said in his best soothing fighter jock voice, 'we have a unique opportunity here with regards to Southeast Asia, and I intend to take full advantage of it.'
'I agree, Mr. President, but what do we use for bases and deployment support? We've gutted our forces in the region and have almost zero influence within the governments that run those places,' the National Security Advisor pointed out correctly. 'And on top of that, we're down to zero carrier battle groups in the Western Pacific, after that little problem with the
A Cypriot supertanker outbound from the Persian Gulf had plowed into the side of the USS
