Gulf of Tonkin V: Solving the mystery 1

This is the fifth installment of a continuing piece about my dad's experience. For the previous installments, click here to see part I, part II, part III and part IV.

Solving the Mystery (part 1)

In 1987 I located the missing chief sonarman. He is Joseph E. Schaperjahn, then retired and living in Richmond, Virginia. In a telephone conversation, Schaperjahn confirmed that he was the man I spoke with. He also reiterated that he informed his commanding officer during the Tonkin events that there were no torpedoes being fired at the ships, and that the images on the sonar scope were "knuckles" in the water, large subsurface swirls formed by the violent motion of a ship's rudder at high speed which give a sonar return that appears as a solid object. And, most important, he said he was told during the event that ship's command didn't want to hear his negative reports; the same thing was said to him in a debriefing afterward in the Philippines. (That left him, he said, with the uneasy feeling there may have been a kind of script from higher authority played out that night in the Gulf of Tonkin to give the semblance of unprovoked attack.)

I found Chief Schaperjahn thanks to Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale, coauthor with his wife Sybil of their 1984 book In Love and War, which was dramatized on television in 1987. At the time of the Tonkin events, Stockdale was a Commander on the aircraft carrier Oriskany; he flew air defense for the destroyers during the August 4 alleged attack. He was later shot down, held as a POW for nearly eight years, and served as commanding officer of the POWs at Hoa-Lo Prison in Hanoi. (The prison, now destroyed, is better known as the infamous Hanoi Hilton.) For his heroic action there, Stockdale was awarded the Medal of Honor. He is now deceased, but at the time of the TV program, he was retired from naval service and a scholar in residence at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace on the campus of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. As I watched Stockdale’s story unfold, I was struck by his statement about not seeing any torpedo boats that night. Here is how he put it in his book as he described his debriefing after returning to the carrier:

"Did you see any boats?"

"Not a one. No boats, no boat wakes, no ricochets off boats, no boat gunfire, no torpedo wakes”nothing but black sea and American firepower. But for goodness' sake, I must be going crazy. How could all of that commotion have built up out there without something being behind it?"

John White

to be continued...