Traffic Route 1A Christmas Truce.
FACs kept hoping to find lines
of trucks like this in the open, but we’d forced them into night operations
with smaller convoys. Actually I
may have seen some of these trucks in the 7-mile + line of trucks I found at
dawn on 24 December 1967 as the North Vietnamese were moving as many trucks as
possible out of Laos to take advantage of the 24-hour truce over North Vietnam
beginning at 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve.
The Christmas 1967 truce was an
abbreviated repetition of the North Vietnamese performance during the TET 1967
bombing halt. This line of trucks
provides ample evidence, once again, of what the tempo of activity would have
been if American airpower were restricted from attacking major areas of North
Vietnam. The Communists regularly
demonstrated that they would take military advantage of any political gains
they could achieve. President
Johnson decided to ignore such evidence when he called for a bombing halt of
most of North Vietnam on 1 November 1968 in an attempt to save the 1968
Presidential Elections for the Democrats.
