On 2 March 1965, 104 United States Air Force and 19 South Vietnamese Air Force aircraft attacked a small military supply depot and the minor naval base at Quang Khe in North Vietnam. This effort marked the inauspicious beginning of the 43-month bombing of North Vietnam known as "Rolling Thunder," one of the most controversial military campaigns in United States history. In the face of denials by senior civilian officials in the Johnson administration, USAF pilots and their military leaders complained of unwarranted restrictions imposed on them by those civilian leaders, not only with respect to target selection but as to strike parameters.1 Simultaneously, downed and captured U.S. pilots were denied prisoner-of-war status by their North Vietnamese captors and for a time were threatened with trial as war criminals for their alleged intentional bombing of the civilian population.
The controversy has1 not abated with the passage of time, and participants have written books with conflicting views of the campaign.2 During the U.S. hostage crisis in Iran, the mercurial government of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini announced its intention to try one of the hostages, Lieutenant Colonel David M. Roeder, USAF, as a "wartime criminal and mercenary spy," owing to his having flown 100 missions in F-105s over North Vietnam during the Rolling Thunder campaign. Although Colonel Roeder’s trial did not occur in part due to Vietnamese failure to provide witnesses and evidence, the recent return by the Hanoi regime of the bodies of three U.S. pilots emphasizes its intention to prolong the agony for the families of the missing in action until some resolution is reached regarding reparations for war damage in North Vietnam. In contrast, Ronald Reagan vowed during his successful presidential campaign that he would never allow the U.S. military to engage in combat under restrictions such as those experienced in fighting the Vietnam War.
The focal point for much of the controversy over both targeting and bombing is that area of international law known as the law of war. Whereas the Johnson administration declined to authorize the attack of certain targets and imposed unprecedented restrictions on U.S. strike forces ostensibly to protect the civilian population of North Vietnam, the North Vietnamese were quick to allege that the United States was engaged in a campaign of indiscriminate bombing in violation of the law of war. Confusion over the state of the law persists. Draft contingency and operations plans I have seen routinely contain unwarranted restrictions apparently derived from the drafter’s experience in Vietnam, misperceived to be based on the law of war. While lecturing at the U.S. military staff colleges, I have noted definite confusion among professional military officers regarding the source of many of the operational restrictions of the Vietnam War. While some of these restrictions may have been the result of law-of-war obligations accepted by the United States, most were not.
