ARMED FORCES: The Lavelle Case

• Share

Rules have been our way of life out there. If I or any other commander picks and chooses among the rules, it will unravel in a way that you will never be able to control. A lot of these rules looked silly to many of the men. In a military, in a purely military sense, they appear silly, but they must be—if you are going to hold it together—they must be followed.

So testified General Creighton Abrams last week before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which was examining behind closed doors the campaign against Hanoi carried on for a time by Air Force General John D. Lavelle. Last spring Lavelle was recalled from his command of all Air Force activity in Southeast Asia and demoted for conducting 28 raids against North Vietnamese airfields and radar sites between November 1971 and March 1972. The raids were in clear violation of the White House rules then in force on bombing North Viet Nam, and came at a period when the Administration was engaged in delicate peace negotiations with Hanoi.

Agony. Abrams, who is now awaiting confirmation as Army Chief of Staff, was then commander of U.S. forces in Viet Nam. His small dissertation on following orders revealed anew the agony and ambiguity faced by the professional soldier of the long Viet Nam War, in which, as General William Westmoreland once complained, so often the U.S. commander has had to fight with one hand tied behind his back.

On his own, Lavelle loosed that hand, and the details of how he did it began to emerge in the hearings and the partially censored text of them that was released. The sum of the testimony seemed to exonerate Abrams or any higher officers of complicity in Lavelle's misdeeds; it also illuminated the baffling technology of the war and provided a classic case study of a bureaucracy warped to serve a devious purpose. To understand Lavelle's case, it is necessary first to understand the regulations governing the air war that he inherited when he arrived in Saigon to take command of the Seventh Air Force in August of last year.

Those regulations had first been devised by the Johnson Administration at the time of the bombing halt, and were carried forward and amended by President Nixon. Reconnaissance overflights of North Viet Nam would continue, and armed escort fighter-bombers would accompany the unarmed photographic craft simply for protection. The rules of self-defense were that the planes could not open fire or drop their bombs unless they were 1) fired on by anti-aircraft emplacements, 2) engaged by MIG fighters in the air or 3) threatened by surface-to-air (SAM) missiles. Pilots could readily tell when they were in danger from SAMs because an indicator on their control panel would automatically light up when a SAM'S tracking radar locked onto their planes. Any of these three conditions entitled pilots to take "protective reaction" and loose their ordnance against the enemy.