re: #343 avanti

OK, here’s one that I witnessed, that I’ll call embarrassing to morale at least. One of the missions of my cruiser was hunting and sinking “WABLIK’s (water born logistics crafts). As a 20 something sailor, I pictured NVA troops in small armed, gray patrol boats patrolling off the N Vietnam coast.
We’d pick them out on radar and sink them from a few miles out with our 3 inch guns. One day we picked up a survivor in the water, a kid maybe 10 years old and took him to sick bay. He was so frightened he actually crapped on the examining table.
The rest of his family had been found by the sharks and were left in the water. The kid was put in a rubber raft near the coast so he could make land fall. We were asked to not report the nature of the wooden boats we were attacking, nor anything about the survivor.
Later in the cruise, we actaully approached a WABLIK with just machine guns at the ready and found a old lady and her kid with their baskets of fish, and after inspection, they were left alone.
I know some percentage of those small boats were moving arms to the south, but the realization that we’d probably sunk dozens of simple fishing boats was a downer to our morale, and the command did not want that info sent home in letters.

Embarrassing yes, but not an atrocity. That having been said, that situation was very badly handled, I agree. Newport News should have been supported by a number of smaller craft to enable search of suspect ships, rather than a shoot-first policy.