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Ridge Was Slated as Veep
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David Vest:
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October
1, 2001
Tom Ridge in Vietnam
Tarnished Star
By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander
Cockburn
The new director of the Office of Homeland
Security, Tom "T-Bone" Ridge, has been widely hailed
as a hero of the Vietnam War. But there's something screwy about
Ridge's Bronze Star.
Ridge was drafted in 1968 while
he was in his second year as a student at Dickinson University
School of Law. He passed up officer training school because it
would have meant an extra year of service. Ridge arrived in Vietnam
(where he gained the T-Bone moniker) in November 1969, and joined
Bravo Company, First Battalion, 20th Infantry Brigade, Americal
Division. He was quickly promoted to staff sergeant by a captain
named Boyd Harris, who later nominated Ridge for a Silver Star.
Members of Ridge's battalion have suggested that Harris, a West
Point man with political ambitions, made his promotions based
on class status and education.
"I became a buck sergeant
with my own squad in the first platoon", a man who served
under Ridge in Vietnam wrote to a veterans'
webpage last year when Ridge was under consideration as a
vice-presidential candidate. "The last several months I
participated in the Pacification program along the Red Ball.
My squad then consisted of four other US soldiers and up to ten
ARVN. What a waste. I was not impressed with Ridge either. He
was the squad leader of my squad before I became a sergeant.
The pathetic SOB would have caused all of us to get killed if
we hadn't taken care of him. I was glad when he no longer led
us".
Ridge was stationed in a coastal
village in South Vietnam where his company was involved in what
his office delicately refers to as the Army's "pacification"
campaign. Pacification was the CIA's reader-friendly word for
its extermination of civilian opposition to the US war machine
in South Vietnam. Another alias for pacification was the Phoenix
Program. It routinely involved sweeps through hamlets to make
mass arrests, brutal interrogations, the destruction of villages,
napalming of rice fields and wide-spread assassination.
Like Bob Kerrey, Ridge won
his Bronze Star for an operation that seems to have been little
more than outright murder by ambush which was almost immediately
sanitized as an act of heroism. Ridge's own account has made
the operation seem like a firefight between US troops and regulars
of the North Vietnamese Army.
But in fact it appears that
on March 30, 1970 Ridge and his squad sneaked up on a group of
Vietnamese who were having lunch under a tree near the hamlet
of Vinh Lac 4 and opened fire on them. The subsequent
incident report claimed that one 25-30 year old man wearing
"a blue uniform" was killed. They recovered a rifle,
a grenade, US Army ammo pouch and "15 bushels of potatoes
and a small amount of rice". The report says the lethal
shots were fired from the unlikely distance of "500 meters".
Ridge was later credited with
firing the shot that killed the young man, an action that led
Harris to belatedly put him up for the Bronze Star. "I'm
not 100 percent sure who fired the shot", said Ridge. "I
have a pretty good idea. I think it was (me).''
But Ridge's radio man doesn't
think that Ridge was the triggerman. In fact, he doesn't even
remember finding a body. "I don't remember T. Ridge getting
a KIA", the radio
man wrote to a website maintained by veterans of Ridge's
battalion. "I could be wrong and wouldn't want to swear
to it because it was 30 years ago. I do not remember finding
any bodies that day. 500 meters is a long distance".
Several things undermine the
contention that these were NVA regulars. But the text of the
citation also gives away the true nature of the ambush. "Sgt.
Ridge moved forward and began placing accurate bursts of rifle
fire on the insurgents, eliminating one and forcing the remainder
of the hostile elements to take evasive action", his medal
citation says.
The troops of the North Vietnamese
Army weren't insurgents. Insurgents is the term the CIA and the
Pentagon applied to the National Liberation Front (aka Viet Cong)
and South Vietnamese civilians. The choice of the word "eliminating",
as a euphemism for killing, is also a giveaway. "'Eliminating'
is pure Phoenix speak", says Doug Valentine, author of The
Phoenix Program, the definitive work on the CIA's bloody operations
in Vietnam.
So, a veteran of the CIA-run
terror program in Vietnam, which left upwards of 30,000 dead
civilians, now steps into the top counter-terrorism job here
on the domestic front, with the distinct prospect, as CounterPunch
has reported (see our recent story) of replacing vice president
Dick Cheney. CP
Read
Douglas Valentine's story, Homeland Insecurity, which details how
this new department is likely to operate.
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