by Mark Berent
**Rank order the results and weigh them against public opinion then throw out or re-file those targets that might cause public unease.
He spent long hours with an Air Force colonel and a Navy captain determining which among the targets were best suited for air attack that would hurt the enemy, but not damage the U.S. image. SEA, meaning Southeast Asia, was the term used to encompass all areas where the war was being fought; Laos and Cambodia as well as Vietnam. The enemy was considered to be all communist forces in SEA whether NVA (North Vietnamese Army), VC (The Viet Cong in South Vietnam supported from the North), or the PL (Pathet Lao communists) in Laos.
Once they arrived at the final list, Whisenand then had to present the results and his recommendations to the SecDef who would add his own ideas before carrying the whole package forward to the president who had his own ideas.
The president would then confer, almost always at a Tuesday luncheon, with the SecDef and other civilian cabinet members and advisors who had their own ideas. The results were sent back with the SecDef to be implemented. Whisenand was in the return chain for information purposes only. He could not protest any decision he felt to be faulty or out of line with sound military precepts.
It all went back to early 1965 when the war in South Vietnam had reached crisis proportions and airpower was selected as an interim answer. The previous CINCPLAN 37-64, a three-phase, 28-day attack against 94 targets in North Vietnam, which the JCS was sure would have effectively stopped communist supplies to the south, was rejected.
Instead, the SecDef and the President decided to gradually bomb northward from the 17th parallel DMZ, the demilitarized zone, toward Hanoi in the hopes the communists would, at some point, realize the pain wasn't worth the gain trying to take over South Vietnam.
The program, code-named Rolling Thunder, set in motion highly limited air strikes. The policy, as stated by the president and as written by his Secretary of Defense, was that the Rolling Thunder air strikes were for three combined and mutually supportive reasons.
** To penalize Ho Chi Minh for supporting aggression in South Vietnam.
** To cut the infiltration of men and materiel into South Vietnam.