“And former CNO, an F8 pilot…” should read “And former CNO Admiral Thomas Hayward, an F8 pilot…”

“…the Crusader’s cockpit design would it made…” should read “…the Crusader’s cockpit design would have made…”

Apologies for the flubs.

Captain Herrick’s comments have been ripped from their context, as he emphasized in at least one message that an attack had taken place and later thanked Turner Joy’s skipper for “saving my ass out there.”

The ability of then-Commander Stockdale to see anything was in serious question. He came within a hairs breadth of blowing our fantail off when he almost launched either a Sidewinder or Zuni at us, in part because he refused to accept shipboard air control. Subsequent nighttime aircraft-vs-PT exercises with Nasty boats out of Danang revealed that pilots frequently couldn’t see the PT’s even when they were vectored directly on top of them by shipboard air control. And former CNO, an F8 pilot himself, has said that the Crusader’s cockpit design would it made it difficult at best for Stockdale to have seen anything on that moonless, occasionally squally night.

NSA historian Robert Hanyok’s analysis is flawed, in part because he accepted the erroneous agency assessment of 3 September 1964 that 4 August was characterized by the virtual “absence of North Vietnamese tracking”–an assessment which ignores the fact that we had substantial ECM acquisitions of North Vietnamese radar directed at us, in some cases from one or more Swatow patrol boats that day.

One of the problems with the accounts which have polluted the history books, including the Moise book which is held up as the “standard reference,” is that they’ve either ignored, given short shrift to, or distorted eyewitness evidence. In some instances, the authors flat-out don’t know what they’re talking about.

If you’re interested in a more detailed analysis of the problems the “reference” histories present, I’ve posted one at my website (http://jimtranr.com), with links to html or pdf versions.