Lavelle's Private War

No tradition is more sacred and vital to the U.S.--or any democracy --than the supremacy of civilian authority over the military. Limited wars such as Korea and Viet Nam put unusual strain on the bonds of the tradition. In Korea, it cost General Douglas MacArthur his command; in Viet Nam, it led General William Westmoreland to liken his job to fighting with one hand tied behind his back. But until General John Lavelle, Viet Nam had produced no outright defiance of presidential strictures on the conduct of the war.

In August 1971, Lavelle took command of all U.S. Air Force units in the Viet Nam conflict. Nervous, not very personable, he nonetheless was respected for his tenacious concern for the welfare of his men. When he arrived, the North Vietnamese were well along within their borders on the massive buildup for last April's all-out offensive. Lavelle's air reconnaissance crews provided a regular flow of reports and photographs chronicling its progress. A veteran Air Force "tiger" who flew 76 combat missions in World War II, Lavelle, 55, decided he could not sit idly by while Hanoi continued to assemble its war machine. So he made the extraordinary decision to take matters into his own hands.

Defying the directives laid down by the White House on bombing North Viet Nam, time and again over a period of four months from November to March, he secretly sent his planes (mostly F-4 Phantoms) north to hit unauthorized targets. To cover his actions, the official reports of the missions were falsified all along the line to describe them as "protective reaction" strikes. In Pentagon jargon, that means a pilot has let loose on a target because that target, usually a missile battery, has fired or was preparing to fire on his plane. During Lavelle's tenure, only such enemy action made bombing in North Viet Nam permissible.

Troubled. Washington might never have learned of Lavelle's raids had not an Air Force sergeant in Viet Nam involved in falsifying the reports become troubled when his immediate commanding officer quipped that even the President did not know what the fighter-bombers were doing. The sergeant wrote Iowa Senator Harold Hughes "to inform you of what is happening and to find out if this falsification of classified documents is legal and proper." Hughes suspected not, and had a copy of the letter hand-carried to Air Force Chief of Staff General John Ryan on March 8. Within 24 hours Ryan had the Air Force's inspector general, Lieut. General Louis L. Wilson Jr., on a plane to Saigon.

He found Lavelle was indeed exceeding his command authority. Wilson specifically pinpointed 147 sorties into North Viet Nam by Lavelle's planes in violation of the war's Rules of Engagement. The bombings had been reported as protective reaction strikes when, in fact, there had been no enemy firings, and Lavelle was choosing his own targets. There may well have been many more than the 147 the inspector general identified: during the four months in question, Lavelle's planes reported 1,300 protective reaction strikes.

Lavelle was ordered home. Given the battered image of the military, Ryan hoped that the matter could be kept within the Pentagon. He offered Lavelle two options: 1) another assignment and the loss of two stars, or 2) retirement with a reduction to the three-star rank of lieutenant general. Lavelle wisely chose the latter. He retired on April 7 with a pension of $2,250 a month.

But four-star generals commanding the nation's air war are scarcely allowed just to fade away, and the House Armed Services Committee appointed a special subcommittee to investigate Lavelle's retirement. Last week Lavelle and Ryan appeared before the congressional committee. Relaxed and unrepentant, Lavelle blandly acknowledged that he had made what he termed "a very liberal interpretation" of the Rules of Engagement in ordering his pilots to hit north. Would he do it over again? a committee member asked. "Absolutely," the general replied. "The strikes were specifically directed at air-defense targets, where the buildup had increased in preparation for the invasion."

Was General Creighton Abrams, commander of all U.S. forces in Viet Nam, aware of the missions? "I believe General Abrams knew what I was doing," Lavelle told the Congressmen. He added, however, that he was "positive"

Abrams did not know that the strike reports were being falsified.

Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin urged the Air Force to court-martial Lavelle, who, though now a civilian, can legally be returned to stand military trial. Proxmire rightly termed Lavelle's shoot-from-the-hip action a violation of "the principles of civilian control over the military." Then there was the haunting possibility that Lavelle's raids might have contributed to the mysterious breakdown of Kissinger's secret peace negotiations in Paris last November--the very month Lavelle began his extracurricular activity with strikes at three North Vietnamese airfields. Beyond that is yet a fresh puzzlement in the often baffling conduct of the war: how one man could get away with such grave and potentially disastrous cowboyism for four months without his superiors in Viet Nam or the Pentagon knowing it.

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