Smith: 50 years later, Fred Ptucha still battles over Vietnam

Fifty years ago Sunday, the U.S. government girded for direct hostilities against what was then the communist Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or North Vietnam.

And, aboard a destroyer in the South China Sea, a young Naval Intelligence officer named Fred Ptucha wrestled with his guilt for keeping his mouth shut.

Now 71 and an outspoken Santa Rosa peace-justice advocate and retired stockbroker, Ptucha feels it’s time to publicly apologize for not having blown the whistle when secret military documents made it clear to him that his country was about to wage war under false pretenses.

At the start of that August 50 years ago, America was only covertly involved in the war between North and South Vietnam. Then word reached President Lyndon Johnson of two attacks in three days by North Vietnamese forces on U.S. ships in international waters within the Gulf of Tonkin.

Johnson denounced the attacks as unprovoked. Quickly, the U.S. Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution authorizing the President to take “all necessary measures” to repel attacks by North Vietnam “and to prevent further aggression.” Soon, America’s full-scale war in Vietnam was on.

Many researchers long ago concluded that the alleged second attack on the destroyers Maddox and C. Turner Joy did not even happen, and that the first attack was far from unprovoked.

Ptucha said he lives with the remorse of not having gone public with the truth he gleaned from the secret communications he read while aboard the destroyer Joseph Strauss.

He said the documents revealed the fired-upon destroyer Maddox was not on routine patrol off North Vietnam but was performing electronic surveillance and was on alert to intervene if necessary on behalf of clandestine attack boats launched by the CIA. Ptucha said the primary target of the North Vietnamese torpedo boats that struck in the Gulf of Tonkin early in August of 1964 was not the Maddox, but the commando boats it was defending.

In time, numerous accounts would agree that the incident that drew the U.S. into a war that would claim 58,000 Americans and as many as a million Vietnamese was not at all an act of unprovoked aggression by North Vietnam. Ptucha struggles with whether things might have been different had he risked the fallout of speaking up about his country’s provocations.

He said, “I will carry that guilt probably until the day I die.”

ANALY RANKS: Metropolitan Sebastopol’s 106-year-old public high starts the new academic year with a bounce in its step.

Analy High has learned it placed high, quite high, in the “America’s Top High Schools” ranking by Newsweek/The Daily Beast.

The home of the Tigers placed No. 221 in the list of 1,000 public schools praised by the magazine for how well they prepare students for college. Analy has made the list several times, leaping this year from its 2013 ranking of No. 709.

Only 19 of California’s public high school placed higher than Analy. And the rankings of some impressive schools in Carmel, Palo Alto, Carlsbad and Costa Mesa are lower.

Onward, Analy.

TIMELY JOLT: I’d heard of this sort of thing happening in an earthquake, a minor silver lining to the terror, casualties and destruction. Then Linda Beatie of Petaluma confirmed it.

She slept through the temblor of a week ago. “I didn’t feel it at all,” she said, “and was even a little disappointed to have missed what everyone was talking about.”

But as she began her day that Sunday, she became aware of a sound she hadn’t heard for years. It was the ticking of the old grandfather clock in the dining room of her westside home .

She’d bought it at an antiques store on Clement Street in San Francisco in the late Sixties,. She can’t even remember what year its hands froze at 2:20 and it stopped ticking and chiming.

“The last clock-repair person who was here said it couldn’t be fixed without drilling into the back,” Beatie said.

Today her heart goes out to Napa and it warms each time the old clock chimes.

Chris Smith is at 521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.