Dear Editor,
It was the fall of 1964 and in October I heard a speech by Ronald Reagan called “a time for choosing”. He said it was not about left or right, but about up or down. I had just turned 21 a few months earlier and had reached voting age, the speech was in support of Barry Goldwater for president.
I had completed the process of obtaining an absentee ballot for the November election. I voted for Goldwater because I remember communicating with him via ham radio on Morris Code when I was in high school in 1960 and that he planned to send the B 52s north over Hanoi as soon as he was elected. I also remember two prominent Republicans by the names of Rockefeller and Romney who would not support him. The Democrats told us he planned to use nuclear weapons which was not true. Interestingly when the B 52s were sent north under Nixon in December of 1972, the war was over in a couple of months.
I arrived at Cam Ranh Bay in February of 1969 flying the F4 phantom jet. The Vietnamese ladies who cleaned our quarters were refugees from the north. Most of their families had owned small parcels of land, and the men of their families had been executed, and they were sent south as refugees. Many of them were eager to learn English. We were able to obtain books such as first graders used and most of us remember reading how the dog Spot could run, etc.! Many times after we returned from flying over the north these little ladies would ask us if we were able to kill Ho Chi Min. Even then we would tell them we would have to send the B52s north.
I belong to a group on the internet who had flown the same aircraft that I had flown. All of us are retired, a number of whom are retired airline pilots. I do not think that even one of them is a Democrat now. I heard that there was a Vietnamese gentleman whose parents were refugees from Vietnam who was running for congress. I also heard he was a conservative Republican. As Reagan said it was not right or left but up or down. The question is have we gone too far down?
Dr. W. David Herbert
Billings
