Fatal Error

VIET NAM WAR

On two successive nights last June, U.S. F-4 Phantom jets scrambled to intercept what they took to be North Vietnamese helicopters, spotted for the first time crossing the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Viet Nam. The sightings were made by U.S. counter-mortar radar teams atop the hills overlooking the South China Sea. Their radar screens showed blips moving low and slowly, as invading helicopters might if hugging the waves for concealment. Once aloft, the Phantoms soon had moving blips on their own radar screens and unleashed Sparrow rockets at the targets. An eager South Vietnamese officer reported that 13 Communist helicopters had been destroyed.

On the same nights, a number of allied ships reported being attacked by enemy aircraft. That, too, had never happened in the war. Seven miles offshore near the DMZ, three shells narrowly missed the U.S.S Boston. A 50-ft. patrol boat was sunk, taking five of her U.S. crew down with her. The Australian destroyer H.M.A.S. Hobart was hit by three rockets that killed two of her sailors.

Last week a U.S. board of investigation confirmed the tragic error that had been suspected ever since two survivors of the patrol boat had said that they had been attacked by a U.S. plane and the fragments of rockets that hit the Hobart had turned out to be Sparrow parts. What the spotters and pilots had taken for helicopters on their radar was, said the board, the allied ships. The pilots, of course, never saw their actual targets. The Sparrows are guided by radar and computers.

A covey of North Vietnamese helicopters might have triggered the whole chain of disastrous events and escaped before the Phantoms were airborne. But the board said that no evidence has been produced of enemy helicopter action near the DMZ. For the future, the U.S. command in Saigon promised that "action has been taken to provide improved coordination and control" of allied forces to prevent any repetition of June's deadly miscalculations.

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