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[Institution’s Name]
Essay on The Son Tay Raid
On the night of 20–21 November 1970, President Richard Nixon took an aggressive move on the North Vietnamese by expressing his apprehension for the well-being of United State’s prisoners of war or POW. He announced the famous raid on the Son Tay Camp for POW. Although the raid failed to rescue any prisoners of war, as the enemy had already moved the prisoners to another location, the Son Tay raid helps to provide a model of a special joint army’s well-planned and brilliantly executed operation. In recent times Son Tay raid is complete contrast to the grim effort by soldiers to free hostages in wars today. The raid still stands as a model of exceptional organization, and training, and unity of efforts. Moreover, it also gives POWs hope.
Although, Pentagon, in Washington had only limited information regarding the POWs' personal physical conditions, however, it was a common knowledge to all that the prisoners of war were being kept under the most primitive and atrocious conditions. The prisoners were subjected to the most merciless torture daily. Moreover, it had become impossible for prisoners to survive and maintain their sanity in a solitary confinement and on the inadequate food given to them.
The Pentagon had assigned a special and devoted team to locate and keep an eye on all the POW compounds using a recurrent aerial reconnaissance. Approximately, twenty-three miles in west of Hanoi, on the Song Con River was a prison called Son Tay, which was held under Pentagon’s surveillance for a while. The officials reporting to Washington believed that the prison had at least fifty and perhaps to the extent that 100 prisoners of war were stationed in the Son Tay’s remote camp. The analysts in Pentagon concentrated their efforts on the prospects that the American prisoners of war might be safely "extracted" from the Son Tay camp with the help of particularly trained armed force soldiers of both the Army and Air Force’s rescue specialists.....
