2 Heroes Call for Further Air Assaults

Two of the nation’s most highly decorated military pilots said Friday that the U.S.-led coalition in the Persian Gulf should continue its aerial assault against Iraq before mounting a land war, despite a recent air attack that reportedly killed hundreds of Iraqi civilians.

“We shouldn’t panic at the adverse effect of charges of bombing civilians and rush into the land campaign before we’ve exhausted all the advantages we can reap from bombing alone,” said James Stockdale, 67, a Medal of Honor recipient, former POW in North Vietnam and retired Navy vice admiral. “We’ve got to turn a deaf ear to that.”

George Day, 65--also a Medal of Honor winner, former Vietnam War POW and a retired Air Force colonel--called the civilian casualties “a terribly unfortunate fallout . . . but I don’t think it’s useful for any Americans to be killed running a ground assault against the Iraqis if it can be done by air. And so far it looks like it’s being done by air very well.”

The men spoke to The Times on Friday evening at King’s Crown Gallery in Tustin, where both were promoting books dealing with their POW experiences.

Day, who is the most highly decorated U.S. soldier since Gen. Douglas MacArthur, said Iraqi President Saddam Hussein’s forces should be completely debilitated within a week by the allied air campaign.

“In five or six days he’ll have nothing useful to fight with,” he said. “We ought to bomb him back to the Stone Age before we assert the (ground) troops.”

“So far, so good,” said Stockdale, a Navy pilot who led the first bomb attack on North Vietnam in 1964. “Maybe we can win the whole war through the air.”

Both men also said the allied POWs being held in Iraq have obviously been tortured. Stockdale spent more than seven years in Hoa Lo Prison--also known as “the Hanoi Hilton”--as the Navy’s highest-ranking officer. Day was moved from prison to prison in North Vietnam before his eventual release in 1973.

“I was convinced that they’d been through a torture process of the sort I’d been through many times” in North Vietnam, Stockdale said.

“It was obvious that they’d been beaten and intimidated and were being forced to make statements,” Day said.

If Hussein puts the POWs at risk at strategic military sites, “we have to try him and hang him as a war criminal,” Day said.