[Dear Reader:
The time is at last at hand to turn full-time to writing the memoir. To
facilitate the writing, the blog will continue to post, but now monthly on the
1st Wednesday of each month beginning August 6th. We will keep you
informed about our progress to publication.]
Duty
in the Philippines (PI) seemed like a playground to my brother Jeff Sharlet, stationed
there in early ’63. It was a bit like being back on a college campus, but instead
of going to classes the GIs worked shifts on classified material. They were
Vietnamese linguists (lingys) in a communications intelligence outfit, the Army
Security Agency (ASA), an adjunct of the NSA, the National Security Agency.
Off-duty, their time was theirs, and Jeff made the most of it as if on
prolonged spring break.
However,
by June he was growing weary of the routine in the PI. You might call it the
rear echelon blues. The action was elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Also the
drenching rains of the monsoon season, which began in May, had a
depressing effect. And the work translating intercepted North Vietnamese
military communications, initially interesting to Jeff, had become predictable
and tedious.
Equally
tiresome was the usual GI social scene of starting out at the Airmen’s Club at
Clark Air Force Base (AFB) with its cheap drinks, then moving on to the
low-life bars of Angeles City – the nearby GI town -- and the occasional trips to
the more upscale watering holes of Manila, the capital. Jeff was becoming jaded
with endless pub crawling.
The
PI scene had become all too familiar to him until the abrupt call to war
suddenly changed everything, as we’ll see in the following excerpts from his
letters home.
2 Jun 63 – back from leave at the 9th ASA, Clark AFB,
the Philippines
I
recently returned from Hong Kong. It’s a great place, sort of an orientalized
San Francisco or an anglicized Chinese city.
Hong Kong harbor
Thanks for the book on Southeast Asia. I
haven’t read it yet, but I have little hope for the future of this region. The
present situation is the fault of the British, French, Dutch, and American
colonialists.
4 Jun 63
Last night I went to town, the night
before I went to town, the night before that I went to town. Tonight I will go to
town, tomorrow night I’ll go to town, the next night I’ll go to town, as a
matter of fact I go to town frequently.
I also sing with the Clark Glee Club
to improve Philippine-American relations.
♫ Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind†
19 Jun 63
Well,
I’ve completed about a third of my tour of duty. My only useful activity is
singing in the Clark Glee Club. We sang on Manila TV on a Jack Paar-type show
last week. Our group is very popular with the American and Filipino
communities.
We sing some songs in Tagalog.* We
sang at the joint US military aid group in Manila for all the generals and
admirals who advise this country on its defenses. They gave us a filet mignon
and lobster dinner.
Last week we sang at an officer’s club
on an American naval base where we got roast beef. I was talking to a Navy
captain’s wife in the bar, and she told me single Navy officers find this a
very boring assignment, as do peons like me.
Nice Asian girls, except in westernized
Japan and Hong Kong, do not go out with Caucasians. It is not socially
acceptable. Therefore, all GIs from lieutenants to privates are relegated to
bar girls.
Right now I’m off the hostess kick and
spending less time in the local GI town. I’m going more often to Manila where
the people are a little more worldly.
♫ Hit the road, Jack
And don’t you come back’
No more, no more††
I never realized how great the little
conveniences of the States were. For instance – toilet seats, sidewalks, paved
streets, air-conditioned buses, trash collectors, clean food, clean people, and
the absence of bugs and dust.
Here when you travel on an intercity
bus, if someone has to go to the bathroom, he yells, the driver stops, people
get off, women squat on one side, men on the other.
At least with the rain, everything’s
no longer brown; the sugar cane and rice shoots are green now. All in all, I
try to make the best of a hurting situation.
Monsoon downpour
30 Jun 63
My
‘whole goal in life’ is not to go into town drinking every night. I have some
good friends here in the unit who are extremely intelligent, mostly guys from the
Army Language School (ALS).
We travel together, have great
intellectual discussions over beers, and do other things. I’m making the best
of it. I do a lot of reading and keep busy all the time.
I think about important problems in the
States and the world. For example, three cops beating a Negro woman in
Birmingham, a fanatic assassinates a Negro leader in Jackson, Mississippi, and
another fanatic in Atlanta slashing a sit-in student. Filipinos ask about these
incidents, and there is little one can say.
23 Jul 63
I
have read most of the books you sent, but I’m still reading the last few. I
just finished ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and I’m now reading ‘The Marxists’ by C Wright
Mills.
Southeast Asia is an amazingly
complicated problem. In my own mind, I haven’t yet come up with a way of
offsetting Chinese Communist influence and keeping these states non-communist.
For instance, Burma has pro-Chinese
Communists and more nationalist Communists; it’s not a cohesive entity in any
sense, politically, ethnically, or geographically. This situation is repeated
in every Southeast Asian state.
19 Aug 63 on leave in Tokyo
This is a very beautiful country, which
is much like the US economically and physically, but very different culturally.
It has been an interesting and educational experience.
Japan in bloom
Then
a week later, a sudden brief, cryptic message home.
27 Aug 63 from the Clark AFB flight line
I’m leaving for Vietnam for some ‘field
work’.
♫ If you miss the train I’m on, you will know
that I am gone
You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles†††
Back
story: Jeff and a small team of Vietnamese lingys were abruptly dispatched from
the PI as the internal political crisis in South Vietnam intensified during
summer ‘63. Relations between the Catholic political elite around President
Diem and the Buddhist clergy had worsened.
A
Buddhist monk publicly burned himself to death in protest against the regime. The
shock waves were felt throughout the country and beyond as the horrific news
photo went around the world.
When
a second Buddhist self-immolation occurred soon after, the South Vietnamese
military elite cautiously inquired of the American Embassy what the US attitude
might be toward a coup.
The
war against the Viet Cong was not going well, and by then President Kennedy
(JFK) had lost patience with Diem’s resistance to the reforms needed for
winning ‘hearts & minds’ in the villages.
In
late August, JFK cabled his new ambassador to ‘green light’ the South
Vietnamese generals. The conspirators immediately began secretly planning an
anti-Diem coup.
Anxious
to keep abreast of the clandestine developments in Saigon, the White House
relied on reporting from its military and intelligence sources in the Embassy
as well as the special team of ASA specialists flown in from Clark.
Jeff
and his fellow lingys had been quickly assembled with full field gear and sent
off posthaste to Vietnam. They were installed in a remote corner of a base
outside Saigon where they worked around the clock covertly tapping all the
coup-planners’ voice communications.
As
to the ‘big picture’ of why they were eavesdropping on allies, the plans afoot
were well above the ASA team’s pay grade and ‘Need to Know’. However, daily
arrangements for the transfer of their translated intercepts to a nearby air
base to be flown out to NSA-Washington, gave the team a pretty good idea of how
serious the matter was.
Each
day’s intelligence product was packed in ammo cans rigged with thermite
grenades, then transported by jeep under armed guard. ASA’s security guards
were under orders to pull the grenade pins and run like hell if there was any
danger the material might be compromised and the clandestine US operation
exposed to the South Vietnamese government.
15 Oct 63 ASA monitoring base at Phu Lam
Jeff
wrote me from Saigon that he and the special ASA group were pulling out and
returning to the Philippines.
During
the rush deployment from the PI, Jeff had forgotten to leave a forwarding
address at the Clark mailroom, and while he was in Vietnam on that first tour
he never wrote home.
Of
course he couldn’t write about the secret operation – not even fellow ASA troops
in the area with high security clearances were entitled to know – but off-duty Jeff
did do other things that could be put in a letter. He was especially taken with
Saigon, then called the Paris of the Orient.
Saigon flower
stall, 1963
Meanwhile,
our Mother wrote him at Clark AFB, but her letter came back marked ‘UNKNOWN’.
Understandably upset, she called their local Congressman who advised a letter
to the Army’s Adjutant General.
She
wrote the general at the Pentagon that very day, “Dear Sir: I will appreciate
your advising me by return mail exactly where my son is.” Unaware of the
distress he had caused our parents, Jeff casually resumed corresponding from
the PI.
29 Oct 63 – back at 9th ASA, Clark AFB
I’m
now back in the PI after 49 days in Vietnam. Don’t believe what Madame Nhu** is saying in
the States. The fact remains that South Vietnam is a complete dictatorship and
the Buddhists are persecuted.
The rainy season has ended, but heat
and humidity linger. Hopefully we’ll have cooler weather soon. This climate
breeds lethargy.
♫ We’re having a heat wave,
A tropical heat wave††††
My driver’s license was supposed to be
renewed by September 30th, and I didn’t do it. I was in Vietnam at
the time, in the jungle. I’ll write to Motor Vehicles and tell them I was
fighting a war and to please excuse this oversight.
On
1 Nov ‘63 the South Vietnamese generals carried out their successful coup
during which the president and his brother, the notorious secret police chief
Nhu, were assassinated. General Minh, leader of the junta, became the new head
of state, beginning a long period of political instability in Saigon.
General Minh,
new head of state, 1963
Meanwhile,
on the lighter side of history, our Mother’s insistent inquiry as to Jeff’s
whereabouts had worked its way down the chain of command from Washington to
Saigon and back to the 9th ASA at Clark – much to his embarrassment:
5 Nov 63
I
know you must have been worried when your letter was returned to you,
especially after reading about the coup in Saigon (by the way it’s the best
thing that's happened in Vietnam in a decade; now the people are very happy).
I neglected to write to tell you I had
returned to the PI, but I wish you hadn’t contacted your Congressman. It caused
a lot of trouble for the field station commander, my company commander (CO),
and me.
I’m writing this letter because I have
received a direct order from my CO to write one tonight. He even wants
to see me put it in the mail.
Please be more discreet in the future.
The Army and I (although at opposite ends of the philosophical totem pole), do
not relish embarrassments and inconveniences like this.
22 Nov 63
In the middle of the night we heard of the
President’s assassination. No words can describe the gloom that hangs over this
place. It’s as if a little bit of everyone suddenly died. It was more than a
shock – much more than a shock.
20 Dec 63
I
think the States are going to hell under the strain of the ‘Cold War’. As for
me, I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to agitate in my society to better
it, or retire from the struggle completely to hide in some environment like the
academic community.
Vietnam
is a little quieter these days. Happy Holidays.
The turbulent year ’63 came to a
subdued end, but then just several weeks later in early ‘64 another coup took
place in Saigon, and Jeff was soon on his way back to Vietnam – back to war – a
story for another time.
*Tagalog,
along with English, one of the two official languages of the Philippines.
**Diem’s
sister-in-law, then on a speaking tour in the US promoting the regime.
