The War in Vietnam : the view from a Southern community :
Brownsville, Haywood county, Tennessee
Voogt, J.
Citation
Voogt, J. (2005, May 24). The War in Vietnam : the view from a Southern community :
Brownsville, Haywood county, Tennessee. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/9756
Version:
Not Applicable (or Unknown)
License:
Licence agreement concerning inclusion of doctoral thesis in the
Institutional Repository of the University of Leiden
Downloaded from:
https://hdl.handle.net/1887/9756
THE WAR IN VIETNAM
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II. THE VIETNAM VETERANS
The local Vietnam veterans served with all the Armed Forces, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Air Force.
(xlii) TOM SILVIA (white)
On 14 December 1995 I talked to Tom Silvia in his office at Haywood High School in Brownsville, Tennessee. I had first made his acquaintance in 1986 when he taught Mathematics; in 1995 he taught American History and American Government.
VOOGT: I remember when I was here nine years ago your telling me that you were flying in a B-52 in Vietnam.
SILVIA: That is correct. VOOGT: Were you drafted?
SILVIA: No, I enlisted in the Air Force in 1954, I believe.
Four years later, instead of going back to college, to Georgia Tech, Tom Silvia decided to go to Aviation Cadets, which was an officer training program at that time. He did that and went to Navigation School at the same time, as well as going through electronics training. When he got out after two years, he went to B-52s and was stationed in South Dakota. After four years he met his wife and got married. In 1968 his crew volunteered to go bomb Vietnam, “because,” he said, “we did not want to miss the war”. They had been training for war for a very long time and they thought it would be over “pretty quick”.
VOOGT: You still thought that in ‘68.
SILVIA: Well, we could have finished it very quickly if they had let us. The myth is the United States could not win. The reality is we could have killed everyone in North Vietnam and then there would have been no longer any war.
VOOGT: But how? SILVIA: Bombing them.
VOOGT: This is what you were doing.
SILVIA: We were not bombing targets, we were bombing jungle. The target selection was made not by us, but by staff, higher headquarters, etc. And they did not want to bomb North Vietnam, which was the enemy! Instead we bombed South Vietnam.
THE VIEW FROM A SOUTHERN COMMUNITY 247
SILVIA: Higher up, I’m not sure where, but we did most of the bombing in South Vietnam. The enemy was North Vietnam. We would bomb the Ho Chi Minh trail and that was a jungle area with a small trail. And they [the Vietcong] came south two by two, three by three, whatever.
VOOGT: Did you know the Cu Chi tunnels at the time?
SILVIA: We knew there were tunnels and we were not very interested in that. What we were interested in doing was going north and destroying the North Vietnamese.
VOOGT: North of the DMZ?
SILVIA: North of the DMZ. Which we finally got to do over Christmas of 1972, in what we call the 11-day war. It lasted eleven days. We bombed North Vietnam into oblivion.
VOOGT: What did you bomb?
SILVIA: We bombed railroad yards, missile sites, airfields, military targets, and storage points. And when we were done in eleven days, they had nothing left to make war with.
VOOGT: What about the port of Haiphong, did you bomb that? SILVIA: Well, I did not bomb Haiphong, but I believe that other units did bomb it. I bombed Hanoi, railroad routes in Hanoi and I bombed very close to China, about ten miles from China, the border. That was interesting because
-VOOGT: They could have hit you?
SILVIA: Yeah. They could have sent fighters. They did not. They did not get into it. But we made, I think, SAC [Strategic Air Command] made something like 740 plus bombing raids with B-52s into North Vietnam and we lost something in the order of 17 airplanes shot down and another 10 that were damaged so much they could not fly. So our loss rate was something like 3%, which was very very low.
VOOGT: Why did the eleven-day period of bombing stop when it did?
SILVIA: If I have my history correct, the North Vietnamese decided then to go back to the peace table in Paris, and we stopped bombing. And then within a matter of a couple of months or so they turned loose the prisoners that they had in North Vietnam and we picked them up in Hanoi, I believe.
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VOOGT: You would have had a military victory.
SILVIA: We would have had a military victory, in my opinion. That is my opinion.
VOOGT: So, how did you feel about the politicians deciding to go back to the conference table after those eleven days?
SILVIA: Well, there is two sets of emotions actually, because no matter what I am saying about flying up there with impunity, there is always the threat that you could be shot down somehow. So you’re a little worried about that and at the same time we did not especially like the idea of quitting and not destroying them.
The crew of the B-52 felt professional, and basically, what they wanted to do was what they had been trained to do. Tom Silvia was about thirty-seven years old, and while there were some others his age, there were many young people on the plane. The former B-52 navigator felt strongly that they could have achieved a military victory. “Anytime that the U. S. wanted to do it, we could have done it,” he said. What was particularly frustrating was that they were sure they could destroy China or Russia, “and then we were stopped by a country with 17 million people”. He concluded that that was not realistic. And therefore, no matter what anyone said, he was convinced that the United States had the military capability at any time to destroy North Vietnam, to completely destroy their ability to make war. He said: “They could have with sticks and stones, but they would have had nothing else. And we just chose politically not to do that. Those are my feelings.”
On the island of Guam where they were not actually stationed, but on TDY (temporary duty), Tom Silvia together with some other American airmen, lived with his family. It was weird to hear him say that he had rented an apartment there and had his family, wife and two small sons, over for three months, while he flew over Vietnam and would come back, as if it was a nine to five job. “We had a good time that summer,” he said.
