Scenes from a Short but Interesting Life

The formative years …

The Albany Academy, Albany NY

My younger brother, Jeff Sharlet, spent his formative years well up the Hudson River at a venerable old school in New York’s capital. The campus of the Albany Academy with its extensive grounds and playing fields could be found just off Academy Road. Established in the early 1800s, the school boasted a number of graduates later distinguished in American life of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

After the Civil War, the Academy adopted a quasi-military structure, and students, now called cadets, wore uniforms. Classes were small; the faculty, products of elite colleges, were dedicated; and the facilities excellent.

Private school also came with a lively and upscale social life. The Academy boys mixed with girls from the several country day schools of the Capital region. There were proms, balls, and dinner dances as well as gala house parties at the grand homes of the wealthier families.

In a word, the Albany Academy was not a bad place to get one’s education in a pleasant setting while enjoying schoolboy life in the process.

Jeff spent his middle and high school years at the school, flourishing there nearly up to the end. He excelled academically, played two sports creditably well, and performed as an effective member of the Academy’s battalion. By senior year he was appointed an officer in one of the line companies.

Then things began to go awry. Our father, who had provided Jeff a comfortable existence, lived beyond his means and ran his business into the ground. Jeff had his eye set on Dartmouth College, and through junior year his grades and activities strongly indicated he would get in.

However, at the end of football season that fall our father sat him down and broke the news that they’d be unable to afford Dartmouth or, for that matter, the tuition at any private college. Because our parents always made a point of never discussing business in our presence, Jeff was caught completely by surprise.

As a young man with a sports car who wanted for little, Jeff’s bright near-future suddenly darkened. He plunged into an academic tailspin. From Cum Laude  among the top ten of a class of 50, by spring term Jeff had spiraled down to 36^th in class rank, hardly competitive for selective Dartmouth or for any comparable college, even if the funds had been available.

Discouraged by the changed family circumstances, Jeff took no steps to apply to college. He seemed not to care, but the parents prevailed upon him to follow me to grad school. I was headed to a Big Ten research university, and Jeff was coming along as a freshman.

A friend, remembering Jeff from their last days together before the Academy’s commencement ceremony, recalled the two of them sitting in a convertible on a warm June evening ‘under a Rembrandt blue sky’ happy to be putting their formative years behind them.

For me graduate school was a heady experience, but Jeff was lost at that large university of some 30,000 students. Far from home and his friends, all of whom had gone on to the Ivy League back East, Jeff knew no one. He was not a happy trooper.

Jeff dropped out at the end of fall semester, drifting for several months through part-time jobs in the small university town. However, no longer covered by a college deferment, the draft and two years of Army life beckoned. Facing the inevitable, Jeff enlisted for three years with the promise of a year of language study.

Thus began a journey which set him on a trajectory quite different from his peers. The experience and reverberations would shape the rest of Jeff’s short but interesting life. Though serious things lay ahead and Jeff’s personal story would end sadly, there’d also be good times and lighter moments along the way.

                                        

                                           Out to the coast …

Nepenthe’s at Big Sur, California coast

Jeff got through Basic Training at Fort Dix uneventfully. All the marching, drilling, and manual of arms of the Albany Academy years gave him an edge – top sergeant made him a squad leader. That meant a more comfortable billet in the barracks and a few privileges.

He had joined an autonomous intelligence outfit within the Army, and as promised, they sent him to language school for a year of study.  The school was perched on a hill along a particularly beautiful stretch of California coast. Though uniforms were the order of the day during classes, academic life took priority over military life on the base high above Monterey Bay.

There was a lot of free time and just a minimum of duties typically expected of GIs in garrison. After classes and on weekends, the military ‘students’ were off duty and could don their civvies and go where they pleased.

Jeff had a gung ho roommate and got stuck with a starchy Marine NCO as barracks chief. Still, it was great duty only slightly removed from the collegiate ambiance from which Jeff and his classmates had arrived at the school.

There was much to do after hours. Jeff had an old motorcycle, and he and a buddy would ride across the peninsula to the charming village of Carmel-by-the-Sea or roar up the coast highway to San Francisco. Sometimes they’d head off to a race track for a day with the ponies.

By far though, Jeff’s favorite weekend hangout was Nepenthe, a dazzling restaurant built from redwood harvested from the surrounding forest. It was located on a breathtaking strip of coast called Big Sur south of the language school. There Nepenthe extended over a cliff high above the Pacific.

The patios, candle-lit as dusk fell, afforded magnificent views up and down the wild and rocky coast. Food was delicious, but above all Nepenthe was a marvelous place to drink, linger, and talk into the night. It was an easy place to forget one was serving in the armed forces.

Late ’62 Jeff graduated as a Vietnamese linguist, or lingy in the outfit's slang. Originally he’d hoped to go to Europe on the Army’s nickel, but on arrival at the school he’d had been bumped from a Slavic language program, so it was westward ho to Southeast Asia. 

Life in the tropics …

Enjoying good times in the Philippines

Flying with stops in Honolulu and on Guam, Jeff found himself at a vast military airfield in the Philippine Islands (PI), a major US base in the global Cold War. In a far flung corner of the base – far from flight lines where fighters and bombers constantly took off and landed – Jeff worked the graveyard shift in a flood-lit, windowless, heavily guarded building. In effect, he was in the rear area of the low key war underway across the South China Sea in Vietnam.

Again, military life in Jeff’s outfit was at a minimum, and when he wasn’t at his classified tasks, life was very good in the PI. The billets were as comfortable as good college dorms. There was an enlisted men’s club where drinks were beyond cheap, and for the endless sunny days of the subtropics, a large outdoor swimming pool.

Evenings Jeff and buddies would often gather in the pubs and cafes of Angeles City, a honky tonk GI town not far from the gates of Clark Airbase. Jeff joined the glee club, which meant invitations to sing at other American bases in the islands, usually followed by excellent dinners. At one point he considered going out for the Clark football team, which would have meant away games all over the US network of bases in Asia.

There were also trains to Manila, the capital, and bus trips up into the cool mountains as well as excursions to white sand and palm-fringed beaches of the South China Sea.

Travel to other cities of Asia was available. On one occasion when Jeff had leave, he flew military transport gratis to exotic Tokyo, while another time he caught the 4x-a year leave-ship to British Hong Kong. Judging by his letters home, he found those two great cities fascinating.

As the saying goes, all good things come to an end, and Jeff was ordered one evening, late summer ’63 to pack his gear and report to the flight line in the morning. He was shipping out to Vietnam.

To the Paris of the Orient …

A Saigon street scene, 1963

It was a deadly serious matter that rushed Jeff and fellow lingys to Tan Son Nhut, the capital’s airport. A coup was in the air. South Vietnam’s president was mismanaging the country and botching the war against the Communist insurgency. The general staff was thoroughly fed up, and President Kennedy (JFK) had lost patience with America’s Southeast Asian client.

With JFK’s secret blessings, behind the scenes the generals had begun plotting a coup. The US ambassador had a liaison with the plotters, but Washington wanted to be sure what it was getting involved in and dispatched Jeff and his team to clandestinely monitor the electronic communications among the conspirators.

The mission was Top Secret lest the South Vietnamese government find out what we were up to. The lingys were billeted in the capital and transported to their operational site in a remote corner of a US base outside Saigon. They worked around the clock. Each day’s ‘product’ – the intercepts – was sent down to their parent outfit in the capital to be closely analyzed.

So sensitive was the operation that the daily product was packed with incendiary explosives to be detonated should there occur any chance of interception by troops loyal to the South Vietnamese president.

Despite this grim routine, Jeff and buddies had unforgettable times in Saigon, then still regarded as the ‘Paris of the Orient’. The American presence was not yet overwhelming, and it was still a lovely city with broad avenues and a French flavor.

The young Vietnamese women wearing the white silk ao dai – long tunics slit down both sides and worn over long pants – seemed universally attractive. Fine European-style hotels served indigenous dishes and continental cuisine. A popular dining place was a floating restaurant moored to a bank of the Saigon River.

Off-duty, Jeff and his pals were fond of pub crawling through the town’s many attractive bars and outdoor cafes. But – as depicted in the film Good Morning, Vietnam – all was not quiet. An insurgency had been underway in the mountains and jungles for several years, and its impact was beginning to be felt in the country’s capital where the American military advisors were concentrated.

The insurgents – called the Viet Cong (VC) – not only conducted hit and run attacks on the South Vietnamese Army in rural areas, but carried out terrorist activities against places where Americans gathered in Saigon.

A VC attack hit a movie theater frequented by US advisers and their dependents, but more often a VC action was no more than two young men on a motor scooter racing down a busy street and rolling a live grenade into an open air bistro.

That happened one evening as Jeff and friends were walking along a major avenue toward one of their favorite Vietnamese-French places. Maybe a hundred feet ahead of them, a couple of VC cowboys sped by and the café exploded. The place was wrecked, but miraculously no one was killed in that incident.

VC terror was such a part of the urban scene in a city at war that GIs had grown accustomed to it. Jeff and the guys glanced at the damage to the cafe, stepped around it, and continued the night’s outing.

A few days later when the café had been repaired, Jeff and the GIs went back to enjoy the good food and pleasant ambiance. Their favorite waiters were decked out in red sneakers instead of the customary sandals. When Jeff asked why, they replied, “To run faster next time.”

After nearly seven weeks on the secret op, Jeff and the initial team were pulled out and flown back to the Philippines. Replacements continued the operation up to the eve of the successful coup on November 1^st..

High above the heat and dust of the plains

The road to the hill station at Baguio

Returning to his duties at the 9^th ASA Field Station in the PI, Jeff resumed the languorous life of the islands. Nearby Angeles City, however, was a come-down after Saigon with its lovely girls in the flowing ao dai, flower vendors along the sidewalks, and, despite VC interruptions – the night life of a romantic Oriental city edged with a frisson of danger.

But the Philippines still had its charms for a young college boy GI with money in his pocket and plenty of downtime. It was back to the sunny beaches, catching the train again to the bright lights of Manila, as well as occasional free-swinging dinner parties with fellow lingys and crypts, or cryptographers. It felt once again like extended spring break.

As relief from the tropical heat of the lowlands, Jeff and friends would make the harrowing bus trip up to the refreshing air of Baguio along narrow, tortuous mountain roads with sheer drops of 1000s of feet. In British India Baguio was the kind of place they called a hill station, high above the dust and heat of the plains far below.

The only break in the daily routine from the night shift in the windowless building and days of beer and bar girls was a tragic one, the assassination of JFK in Dallas. Profound shock was felt by Jeff and his buddies so far from home at a terrible moment in the life of the nation.

By early ’64, Jeff had had it with military life. He’d been in the forces for two and a half years with just six months to go, and was thinking ‘short’ – shorthand for combat GIs counting the days until they were out of harm’s way.

Jeff’s most urgent concerns became getting his driver’s license renewed back in the States, arranging to return to college, and generally transitioning back to civilian ways.

But then political conditions in Saigon became unstable, the post-coup junta proved inept, and rumors of another upheaval were rife. Once more on short notice, Jeff found himself transferred to Vietnam, but this time in different circumstances, absent the creature comforts and good times of his first tour.

As we shall see in the next posting, he was about to come face to face with the realities of the smoldering, low intensity war in the bush.

Still More Characters in Search of Jeff – III

Bill O’Brien, Chicago go-to guy

Bill O’Brien, Chicago, 2006

Bill came to New York for a few days and suggested we meet. I chose a funky place in the East Village. He had been a great pal of my brother, Jeff Sharlet, in the late ‘60s during his time in Chicago. Jeff had arrived there with a big vision and a large mission and soon learned Bill O’Brien was the go-to guy for getting things organized.

An ex-Vietnam GI, my brother strongly opposed the war and was determined to give those fighting it a way to voice their concerns. Bill was one of the key people helping Jeff launch Vietnam GI (VGI), the first GI-edited underground paper designed for the guys stuck in the war.

Bill O’Brien “considered Jeff a brother” and was indispensable to him. Chicago born, Bill knew most of radical Chicago’s major activists as well as officers of the unions and even people in Boss Daley’s machine. A man of many parts, Bill’s political and academic resume was impressive. He’d been invited into University of Chicago’s prestigious honors program though he lacked a high school diploma. Later he transferred to the New School for Social Research in New York and finally took a social science degree at Columbia.

Bill was already into community organizing in his school boy years; Chicago was rife with deserving local causes. Moving on to New York, he demonstrated against the infamous HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee,  and led the initial ’67 protest at Columbia when the university first proposed taking over a Harlem park for a new gym. A year later that protest morphed into the great Columbia student uprising.

Returning home to Chicago, Bill used his political connections for ‘good guy’ causes, one time blocking a hospital expansion that would have taken out a nearby neighborhood. Later he created ‘Radio Free Chicago’, broadcasting from his attic.

In ’68, Bill, Jeff, and Jim Wallihan, another VGI editor, shared a pad on Chicago’s Near North Side. Bill was working in the Office of the Cook County Clerk, but at the end of the day he lent a hand for whatever was needed – a VGI editorial meeting, arranging useful contacts in the city, procuring office equipment, or strategizing the emerging GI movement against the war. When they needed a break, they’d hit Bill’s favorite joint, the jazz bar ‘Get Me High’.

Funds to put the paper out were always tight, so in the fall Bill pulled strings and got Jeff and Jim well-paid jobs in the press rooms of Chicago dailies. But the work was hard, and an ultimately fatal illness that first surfaced in the Vietnam bush started taking its toll on Jeff.

Forty years on, Bill had never forgotten Jeff. When I began this memoir on my brother, he devoted endless time tracking down Jeff’s former Chicago friends, many by then scattered around the country and abroad. When Bill died a few years ago, his many old friends remembered him with a gala memorial evening at the hip Heartland Café, long a haunt of radical Chicago.

Nearly 50 of us were there; many had driven great distances from all over the Midwest while others flew in from San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and even Honolulu to celebrate Bill O’Brien’s memorable life – an unforgettable evening.

Marty Seligman, an evening long ago

A prominent psychologist and author of international acclaim, Professor Martin Seligman is a noted pioneer of the school of Positive Psychology. As a schoolboy though, Marty was a good friend of brother Jeff. They were cadets at a private military school – uniforms, rifles, drill, the whole nine yards. As often happens, after graduation they lost track of each other.

When Marty and I got in touch, he was only aware that Jeff had dropped out of college, gone to military language school, and died several years later of causes unknown. But Marty fondly remembered their school days together, especially an occasion late in their senior year. Both of them had been at the academy for a long time and were restless to move on.

Sitting in a green Ford convertible, as Marty described the moment:

I remember a spring evening, the sky Rembrandt blue,graduation and freedom in sight, looking up and
thinking ‘This is the happiest I’ve ever been’. I thinkJeff thought the same thing, and he may have said so.

A lifetime later at the 50^th Reunion of Jeff and Marty’s class, it was fitting that the two long ago friends shared the Albany Academy’s coveted Distinguished Alumni Award, Jeff the first posthumous recipient in the history of the school.

Looking back on their time together, Marty wrote that he still misses Jeff, “the first of my friends to die.”

         

Karen Grote, the searcher

Karen Grote, Indiana University, 1964

Out of the blue one day, Karen got in contact. She found me through my son Jeff the writer, namesake of my long lost brother of the ‘60s. Brother Jeff had gone to Indiana University (IU), but dropped out and landed in Vietnam. That was before the Pentagon launched Rolling Thunder sent in the Marines. Back in the world, as GIs called coming home, Jeff returned to IU to continue his education.

It was on his second academic ‘tour’ in America’s heartland that he met Karen Grote (now Ferb), a very attractive fellow undergrad. She knew him well, both socially and politically, and was willing to share her memories. During Jeff’s college years, I had just begun my career as an academic.  I was elsewhere teaching and doing research, so had known little of my younger brother’s experience at IU.

After Karen filled me in on Jeff’s extensive antiwar activism at the university, she offered to help research the memoir I had started on his short but interesting life. Fortunately, I accepted and we’ve collaborated since to my great benefit.

Aside from short accounts about my brother in several books and periodicals on the Vietnam War period, I soon realized Jeff’s final decade would have to be reconstructed piece by piece through memories of his contemporaries. But locating many of them was not going to be easy – the trail had gone cold after nearly four decades.

A PC keyboard whiz, Karen’s talent was in finding dozens of my brother’s schoolmates, GI buddies, and fellow SDS activists as well as the main people in Chicago who helped Jeff get out his antiwar underground paper directed to the troops fighting the war. He named it Vietnam GI (VGI).

Several of Karen’s notable initial ‘finds’ bear mentioning. Early on, she located Tom Barton, who had worked closely with Jeff as VGI’s East Coast distributor responsible for shipping the paper to GIs in Vietnam. A lifetime left activist, Tom had then recently begun publishing a nightly online anti-Iraq War newsletter, first called GI Special (later, Military Resistance).

In one of his first issues Tom reprinted the most eloquent of the many obits on Jeff, the one from VGI of August ’69. When I rang him up, he told me that he’d conceived his antiwar newsletter as the successor to Jeff’s VGI and saw himself continuing Jeff’s work.

Another remarkable find was Joe Carey, a fellow Vietnam GI whom Jeff had known at Indiana University. A combat photographer, Joe brought back his personal photos of what the war really looked like, pictures which he shared with Jeff for the pages of VGI. However, Joe had not taken the most shocking image – it had been slipped to him by a GI who had witnessed a war crime. Trophy-style, the photo showed several GIs posing with the severed heads of two Viet Cong.

Jeff ran the shot in a spring ’68 issue, and as the first atrocity photo of the war to surface in the public domain, it caused quite a sensation.

Another of Karen’s successes was perhaps her finest coup. A fellow Vietnam GI in the Chicago area who had been on Jeff’s editorial board for VGI seemed to have disappeared without a trace. As we subsequently reconstructed, he had become a Chicago cop, got in trouble with the law himself, served prison time, and, on release, left the city with the intent of getting away from that chapter of his life.

Zeke, as I’ll call him to spare embarrassment, had moved to the West Coast, obtained an unlisted phone number, and hoped to put his past behind him.  That was before the Internet as a valuable search medium. Through great perseverance, Karen had stayed on the trail and eventually ran Zeke to ground.

We knew his wife was an amateur artist, and she happened to be active in art circles. For an upcoming exhibition, she had posted her name and telephone number online. When I rang Zeke, he exploded in anger, “This is an unlisted number! How did you get it?” From your wife, I said. What could he say?

Dave Reinhardt, badlands rancher

Dave Reinhardt, Lehr, North Dakota, 2004

Far from Vietnam of his youth, Dave, proud Marine, is today a rancher in the Dakotas. He never knew Jeff Sharlet, but had preceded him at the same remote post in what might then have been dubbed the badlands of South Vietnam – right up against the border of the Communist North.

Dave Reinhardt joined the Marines in ’59 and was subsequently in the first Vietnamese class at the Army Language School (ALS). Jeff arrived at ALS and bunked in the same Vietnamese barracks a few years later. Dave deployed to Vietnam as a linguist in ’61, with a small Marine radio intelligence unit in Pleiku and Phu Bai. Jeff was based with the Army Security Agency (ASA) detachment at Phu Bai in early ’64.

Because Jeff’s work was highly classified, his letters home were spare. Yet I needed to know about Phu Bai, the place where he had spent much of his Vietnam tour. Luckily Karen, my searcher, turned up Dave Reinhardt on the Internet. Dave served as a fount of information on Phu Bai. Along with describing the physical layout of the base – the barbed wire perimeter, the various antennae, and the ops buildings – Dave also conveyed a sense of the daily routines.

He told me how the Marine intel group worked side by side with ASA, although tasked with different but related missions. The Marines were listening to North Vietnamese (NVN) Navy radio traffic, while the larger ASA unit was tracking NVN Army communications. 

However, the differences between the military culture of the Marine radio intercept contingent and its ASA counterpart were stark. All the Marines, regardless of specialized skills, had undergone several months’ of  combat infantry training and were all qualified riflemen. They were a very shipshape crew. In contrast, ASA was a laidback outfit, military in only the broadest meaning of the term.

In spite of the great heat and humidity at Phu Bai, the Marines wore their olive green field uniforms, while many of the ASA guys went about their jobs shirtless in boxer shorts and flip flops. Similarly, the Marines had rifles, M-14’s with ammo, while the unit Jeff would join was given only low caliber carbines and no ammo.

As Dave said, that was probably a good policy since ASA troops had little weapons training, and someone could have gotten hurt. One time the Army colonel commanding both units, a veteran of WWII and Korea, summoned Lance Corporal Reinhardt and asked him to drill the ASA troops, try to whip them into shape. While the ASA Morse Code operators and the linguists did their work well, Dave concluded that trying to turn them into soldiers was a lost cause.

After his Marine enlistment, Dave returned to Vietnam on the CIA payroll. With his language skill and military training, he was in effect a civilian combatant for the next several years.

Later, back in civilian life, he struggled with undiagnosed PTSD. When the Pentagon eventually acknowledged his condition and gave him back compensation, Dave bought the ranch in North Dakota where he raises a variety of animals and takes in, cares for, and puts to pasture injured, abused, and neglected horses otherwise destined for the glue factory.

Robin Hunter, Marxist guru

Robin Hunter, antiwar rally, Indianapolis, 1967

Born outside London during WWII, educated in Canada, Robin came to the States to take a PhD in Political Philosophy. He chose Indiana University (IU), arriving on campus in the early-mid ‘60s where he became a co-organizer of the IU chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In its earliest incarnation, Robin later wrote of IU SDS,

we were seen as not just political, but as part of every-thing groovy and anti-establishment: folk music,radical, ‘concerned’, politics, dope, sex, bohemianstyle, cool, and hip.

He became the Marxist guru of the new group, leading theoretical discussions in Bernella and David Satterfield’s living room a stone’s throw from the campus gates. In spring ’65 when the fledgling group went to Washington for the first big New Left anti-Vietnam War demo, Robin was there.

Brother Jeff Sharlet joined SDS a few months later, and he and Robin became good friends and close collaborators. In early ’67 when Jeff headed the chapter, Robin helped draft his speech to the activist community, ‘The Role of the New Left on Campus: The State of the Student’.

That spring, Robin attended a rally in the state capital where Jeff addressed the assembled audience, and then back on campus the two of them worked together to ensure the election of Guy Loftman as student body president, the first New Left activist to win the post.

However, Robin Hunter’s most lasting contribution to the Indiana scene was to serve as its diarist. In the English political-literary tradition of Samuel Pepys, the great diarist of the 17^th century; and later Harold Nicolson, a heralded chronicler of the 20^th century, Hunter recorded in fluent prose a decade of the IU New Left’s main actions.

Robin has been well remembered even by a major adversary, a leading campus conservative who became a national leader of the pro-war New Right. A few years ago, Robert Turner spoke of Robin Hunter as “the most able of the anti-Vietnam activists I encountered at Indiana.”

Terry Whitmore – Marine hero to deserter

Lance Corporal Terry Whitmore, Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam, 1967

         

A poor boy from the Upper South, Terry enlisted in the Marines and was sent to Vietnam. He and brother Jeff never met there, but would later cross paths in Scandinavia. Whitmore was a good Marine for whom the US mission in Southeast Asia went unquestioned. However, as a fire team leader in a company-size sweep of a suspect village, he found himself in a moral quandary.

The company CO had lost a brother to the war and was bent on revenge. When a single shot came from the village, he ordered it leveled. That meant tossing grenades into family shelters, burning huts, killing adults, and rounding up children.

The Marines followed orders, but when the vengeful captain ordered the youngsters to be ‘wasted’, Terry and other Marines were taken aback. Not likely the kids were Viet Cong, but nonetheless a Marine mowed them down. The CO noticed one hut still standing and told Lance Corporal Whitmore to take it out with a rifle grenade.

Orders were orders, Terry fired, the grenade hit the hut but didn’t detonate.

A mother and child stuck their heads out the door -- Terry, seeing the captain looking elsewhere, silently motioned to them to run for their lives, to get away. He turned to walk back to the unit when a loud explosion went off. Out of curiosity the little boy had picked up the unexploded but live grenade. Terry felt remorse, but remained silent.

Later in his tour, Terry distinguished himself in battle, saving the platoon leader and his radioman, both wounded and pinned down under enemy fire. But in the melee, Terry himself was severely wounded by a mortar round and medevacked out of the line. He was convalescing at the Navy hospital in Cam Ranh Bay when President Johnson (LBJ) made a lightning visit to the facility. LBJ took the opportunity to personally award medals to wounded Marines recommended for bravery, including Corporal Whitmore.

Subsequently, Terry was transferred to a major US military hospital in Japan. After some months he was well enough for out-patient treatment and allowed to go out on the town. Then the day came when the docs cleared him to return to his combat unit. By now Terry was developing misgivings about the war, but duty called.

Twice his plane back to Vietnam was canceled due to weather, and he had to return to barracks. His growing doubts about the war then came to the fore. Try as he might, Terry couldn’t think of any justification for Uncle Sam “to be wiping out the Vietnamese people [or] one good reason for me to help Sam in his dirty work.”

Lance Corporal Whitmore had finally had enough – he deserted, as had others, and was sheltered by the Japanese left, moving the American deserters from safe house to safe house to evade the US Military Police. Eventually the Japanese activists found it hard to keep the deserters safely hidden, and arranged to spirit them out of the country.

Terry and several others were clandestinely transported to northern Japan. They boarded a Japanese fishing boat whose skipper rendezvoused with a Soviet coast guard vessel that took the Americans aboard. After a whirlwind tour of the USSR during which the Soviets exploited them for propaganda, the US Vietnam deserters were flown to the West and sanctuary. Stepping down at the Stockholm airport, Terry Whitmore began his long exile.

It was there in the Swedish capital in late fall ’68 that Terry and Jeff crossed paths. Jeff was in town with a delegation of American antiwar clergy and laity to offer support to the deserter community – Jeff the sole ex-Vietnam GI in the group, representing the burgeoning Vietnam GI movement against the war.

Door gunner distributor

Door gunner over the Mekong Delta, South Vietnam, 1968

Terry DeMott went to Nam as a grunt, humping a rifle in the bush, but later transferred to the division’s aviation wing, finishing his tour as a helicopter door gunner.

Early on, returning from a patrol, he remembered coming upon a copy of Vietnam GI (VGI) in his squad tent, avidly reading it front to back, and immediately clipping the free subscription coupon to send off to Chicago.

He added a note that if they could spare extra copies, he’d pass them around. Thus, Terry became part of Jeff’s network of nearly 200 sub rosa VGI military ‘distributors’ in units up and down South Vietnam.

Carrying copies in his backpack, Terry would pass them to guys in his squad who’d share with the other squads.  Once VGI made the rounds of the platoon, the copies would be handed off to other units. Later Terry similarly circulated the paper in the aviation wing. Thus the multiplier effect as a handful of copies was read by dozens of GIs.

While Terry was careful to keep the antiwar paper out of sight of the brass, he told me he wasn’t too worried about getting caught, saying in so many words, What could they do, send me to Vietnam? 

Nancy Goodlin Sharlet, secret writer

Nancy Sharlet and Jeff the namesake, The Cloisters, New York City, 1974

Nancy died way too early, but at least, unlike her brother-in-law Jeff, she made it into her 40s. Unbeknownst to anyone who knew her, she had been writing for years. After her death, a trove of myriad unpublished writings was discovered in the drawers and cupboards of Nancy’s house.

When our son Jeff, my brother’s namesake, later came of age, he wrote a memoir of his mother by drawing on her many journals, short story fragments, character portraits, and word sketches of people she knew as well as things going on around her. Young Jeff dubbed her a ‘secret writer’.

One piece Jeff found among her papers was a brief but beautifully written, poetic evocation of his Uncle Jeff’s last days.  It was, in effect, Nancy’s obit for brother Jeff.

A few lines illuminate Jeff’s fleeting passage through our lives:


       He had that ancient look of a Persian or an Assyrian
      He had a gift for friendship
      His mind was facile, theoretical
      His experience was valuable

And Nancy’s final image – as we walked the grounds of the VA medical center, Jeff’s hospital robe, caught by the wind, “billowed like an Arab’s caftan.”

         

Good Wars, 'Bad' War - Three Who Spoke Out

A small historic boy’s school upriver on the Hudson has long sent its graduates to fight America’s big wars. My brother Jeff Sharlet and I both graduated from the Albany Academy (AA or Academy), and each of us in turn had gone off to the country’s 20^th century wars, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The Academy was founded in 1813 as a private college preparatory school. At the time, Albany, the bustling capital of New York State with over 10,000 residents, was the 10^th largest city in the United States, settled in the early 17^th century under Holland’s House of Orange-Nassau as the frontier trading posts Forts Orange and Nassau. By the early 19^th century, Dutch could still be heard spoken in the streets of Albany, so renamed under the English.

The newly established Academy offered a classical secondary education, including Math, Physics (then called Natural Philosophy), Greek, Latin, Belles Lettres, and Natural History. In the school’s 200-year history, it has boasted among its graduates a number of American notables, including Herman Melville of Moby Dick fame; Joseph Henry, a pioneer of the telegraph and adviser to President Lincoln; and, in the 20^th century, William Rose Benet,   winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

Albany Academy celebrated its 200^th anniversary, May 2013 

From the Academy’s inception well past the mid-20^th century, the names of the oldest Dutch landowning families of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, called ‘patroons’ – among them the Van Rensselaers, the Ten Eycks, the Pruyns – were to be found on the school’s rosters. Beginning at the turn of the 20^th century, Governor Theodore Roosevelt and, over the decades, other New York governors as well, sent their sons and grandsons to the Academy. In my day, Governor Dewey’s youngest son John and I were in the Class of 1953 – just another classmate except that John had a bodyguard.

The academy grew in the first half of the 19^th century; its graduates prospered, many becoming men of means and influence in the region. With the outbreak of the War of Secession, a very large number of Academy men volunteered for the New York State regiments being raised for the Union forces. Many would fall on storied battlefields, including quite a few officers, junior and senior.

Many of the regimental officers and men had graduated from the Academy in the years before the Civil War, had gone off to college, and were often practicing law or holding public office in Albany, the capital, and its neighboring towns. Of the several who fought with uncommon courage and died heroically in 1864, General Lewis Benedict, AA ’34, a member of the New York State legislature, had first worked closely with the governor getting the state on a war footing until he led the 73^rd NY in the Siege of Yorktown of 1862.

Appointed commander of the 162^nd NY on the Louisiana front, Benedict was killed in a charge which successfully stopped the surging Confederates, a victory credited with saving the Union Army in the southwest. General Benedict’s body was brought back to Albany and buried with the highest honors.

On the Virginia front, Colonel John Wilson, who had left the Albany Academy in 1854 due to the death of his father, also fell in ’64, leading the 43^rd NY in the Battle of the Wilderness; while Major Charles Elisha Pruyn, AA ’56, mentioned in dispatches for valor at the Battle of Fair Oaks before Richmond, was killed in action in June of that year commanding the 118^th NY in the assault on Petersburg.

Major Pruyn, 118^th NY – Albany Academy, Class of 1856 

Of all the Academy men and boys who gave their lives defending the Union, perhaps the saddest account was the very brief story of William Cady, a recent graduate of the school, who upon hearing news of the Southern attack on Fort Sumter in April 1861 – the first engagement of the Civil War – rushed to volunteer for the Union. Always somewhat frail, William’s parents were opposed at first, but he was so full of patriotic fervor that they relented. The relevant dates tell his story:

April ’61 – Cady enlists in Albany

May ’61 – Assigned Co F, 3^rd NY
June 10, ’61 – Wounded in action
June 14, ’61 – Died, age 19

The North soon realized how ill equipped it was to prosecute a major war. Much public discussion ensued on the need for a better prepared citizenry. The Albany Academy responded by adding elementary military training – drill and the manual of arms – to its curriculum in 1861. A decade later the student body was reconstituted as a battalion organized into several companies.

Uniforms were introduced – a day uniform of grey trousers and shirt and black shoes and tie, and a parade uniform of white ducks, West Point style jackets, field caps for the ranks, and high plumed headgear along with sword for the officers. The Battalion would show off its marching proficiency annually by parading through Albany on Decoration Day, later renamed Memorial Day, and after 1918, on what used to be called Armistice Day. Early on, a drum line marching behind the Cadet Major helped the ranks keep step.

In 1917 when the United States entered WWI, hundreds of later generation Academy boys rallied around the flag and marched off to war in France. All are memorialized on a large bronze panel at the school, including several descendants of James Fenimore Cooper and former President Theodore Roosevelt’s sons, one of whom later became a general and won the Medal of Honor in WWII. Stars mark the names of Academy graduates who didn’t return.

The Albany Academy’s contribution to WWII has been best remembered by the late Andy Rooney, AA ’38, the popular nationally known journalist. He had served as a combat correspondent covering the 8^th Air Force over Europe. In his war memoir many years later, Andy fondly and eloquently memorialized some of his Academy classmates who didn’t make it back – Charley Wood, the class poet, who died in the Normandy invasion; Bob O’Connor, shot down over France; and his close friend and fellow football co-captain, Obed ‘Obie’ Slingerland, one of the school’s greatest athletes.

Lt Obed ‘Obie’ Slingerland, Guadalcanal, South Pacific 

In his weekly piece on CBS’s 60 Minutes and then in his memoir, Andy Rooney told the story of Obie, a Navy carrier pilot who died in a crash in June ‘45 during the invasion of Okinawa. Sadly, ever so sadly, he recounted:

                   I have awakened in the middle of the night

                   a thousand times and thought about the life

                   I’ve had – am having – that Obie never got

                   to have.* 

By the time I arrived at the doors of the Albany Academy, the Second World War was rapidly receding in memory, being displaced by the growing, tense ‘Cold War’ with the Soviet Union. In those days all males were subject to the Draft, short for the call to arms by the Selective Service System. College boys were deferred, but once out of school, summons to duty soon followed. 

Most of my classmates served in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, the six who became doctors upon completion of medical school. Another member of AA ’53, an Air Force pilot, flew the U-2 for the CIA. I too was a Cold War soldier as part of an intelligence outfit based in West Germany, having been trained in one of the Soviet bloc languages as an interpreter/translator.

Then came America’s involvement in a far corner of the world called Southeast Asia – in Vietnam’s civil war. It would not be long before it was evident that this would not be one of the country’s good wars enjoying nearly universal support. Well before it came to an end, Vietnam would be widely considered a bad war, a very bad war.

By ’65, when the US went into Vietnam in a big way with bomb runs and boots on the ground, all but the three of my Academy classmates who became career officers had done their duty and moved on to their respective career paths. However, over 90 cadets from the classes following ours, well into the late ‘60s, got caught up in the Vietnam era military – although a number of them were fortunate to do their tours in other sectors of America’s worldwide network of bases.

Going on to college, most of the Academy boys who were part of the Vietnam War came out of the Reserve Officer Training Corps programs (ROTC) with commissions, while several graduated from the service academies. At first in the ‘50s, it was a trickle, but then in the ‘60s as the war intensified, a flood of Academy graduates went into the forces.  Of those who had been sophomores when I graduated in ‘53, two went off to the war, one of whom eventually made admiral. In ’56, Gordon Livingston, Cadet Executive Captain, went on to the US Military Academy (USMA), also known as West Point, and later Vietnam.

From the Class of ’58, more were drawn into the services, including Cadet Captain Co B William Cross, who followed the same path to the USMA and Vietnam. Another was his fellow AA cadet officer, Keith Willis, a good friend of my brother, who served with Jeff in the Philippines and Vietnam.

Beginning with Jeff’s Class of ’60, the number of Academy boys called to duty during the Vietnam War rose rapidly. Ten that year, including Jeff, who had also held officer rank at the school; 16 the next year; and then, in the subsequent four years through the end of ’65, another 40 put on the uniform.

Jeff Sharlet, No. 25 (circled), Albany Academy Varsity Football 

Of the many AA graduates who found themselves in the ranks during the long Vietnam War, at least three who went to Vietnam came back disillusioned with the US mission in Southeast Asia – Major Gordon Livingston, AA ’56; Capt Bill Cross, AA’58; and Sgt Jeff Sharlet, AA ’60. Patriots all like their forbears and contemporaries who went to war, for all three disillusionment with the cause led to critical stances on the war.

Gordon and Bill had both received appointments to West Point. Gordon, a regimental surgeon, served with the 11^th Armored Cavalry in Bien Hoa during 1968-69. Bill, an infantry officer, was military advisor to a unit of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in the Mekong Delta in 1964-65.

Distressed by what he was witnessing in his gung ho unit – rough interrogation of severely wounded enemy prisoners and cavalier attitudes toward the lives and fortunes of South Vietnamese civilians – Major Livingston took on his commanding officer by writing and printing up an irreverent ‘prayer’ mocking the military ethos of his unit, and distributing it to a gaggle of generals at a change of command ceremony.†

Major Livingston, Bien Hoa, Vietnam, 1968 

Needless to say, his superiors were extremely displeased with their regimental surgeon. He had shocked them by boldly expressing his dissent, at least implicitly, in a front line unit in the midst of the combat zone. What to do with the maverick major? After some months, the Pentagon made the prudent decision not to proceed with prosecution under military law against a top West Point graduate and exemplary soldier-doctor who had been decorated for bravery.

Gordon Livingston was permitted to resign his commission and return to civilian life. He published his unusual Vietnam story, including his ‘Blackhorse Prayer’, in a national magazine and actively pursued his criticism of the conduct of the US mission in Vietnam. Subsequently Gordon has gone on to a distinguished career as a psychiatrist and author of remarkably inspirational bestselling self-help books based on his professional experience.

Gordon’s AA and USMA schoolmate, Bill Cross, even while tactically advising ARVN troops in battle, was becoming disillusioned with the US effort in Vietnam. Like Gordon, who had learned about Vietnamese history and culture before deploying, Bill studied the language for three months before shipping out and was also exceptionally well prepared for his field assignment.

Cadet Capt William Cross, Albany Academy ‘58 

After a year working with ARVN armored troops in a number of engagements with the enemy, Bill, obviously highly regarded by his superiors, was posted to West Point and promoted to captain. In his new assignment as a Professor of Military Psychology and Leadership, his disillusionment continued.

This was especially the case after the public exposure of the My Lai Massacre in ’69 when Bill and faculty colleagues sought to explore the atrocity in detail and draw lessons from it in the leadership course. The idea, however, was scotched by Bill’s military-academic superiors. Since then, of course, we’ve become aware that the egregious misconduct of Lt Calley’s platoon was not a one-off incident in a misbegotten war.

After a decade in uniform and upon completion of his West Point tour as a major, Bill chose to leave the Army, although, like Gordon Livingston, he too had intended to pursue a military career. Bill went on to earn a PhD in Psychology and become a college professor. Counseling veterans on the side, Bill has also become a noted contemporary antiwar activist.

In 1991, Bill Cross founded the Veterans for Peace chapter in Syracuse NY, and, a little over a decade later when the Iraq War broke out, he co-founded ‘West Point Graduates against the War’, subsequently renamed ‘Service Academy Graduates against the War’.

The final member of the AA trio who took issue with the Vietnam War was my brother. By now Jeff Sharlet’s story is fairly well known to readers of this blog, Searching for Jeff, so I’ll just add that he had preceded both of his schoolmates to Vietnam, serving there at bases near little villes called Phu Lam and Phu Bai during the early, low profile phase of the war, 1963-64. As a Vietnamese linguist, Jeff had unusual access to the culture and society of South Vietnam.

Like Gordon Livingston and Bill Cross after him, Jeff too had disillusioning experiences in Vietnam. He came back determined to do something about stopping the conflict. Jeff’s assessment was that only the troops themselves – the grunts in harm’s way, the guys actually fighting the war – could stop it.

To that end, in 1968 he founded the underground antiwar paper, Vietnam GI (VGI), which quickly became widely known and sought after wherever American troops were stationed – in the field in ‘Nam, at stateside camps awaiting deployment, and on US bases in Europe and Asia.

Although VGI ran for only 15 issues over 18 months, judging by the feedback in letters from GIs, Marines, sailors, and airmen – not to mention the reaction of the FBI as well as military commanders into whose hands a copy fell††– the paper had a major impact. 

VGI helped stimulate the emergence of the GI movement against the war by raising and focusing the consciousness of troops on the vital issues of the war affecting their lives.

Decades later in 2010, the Albany Academy honored Jeff posthumously for his antiwar work, conferring upon him its Distinguished Alumnus Award. Although Jeff didn’t live to see the war’s end, he had done his part, and the guys themselves, particularly the enlisted men in the front line and rear units, aboard the ships, and even on the planes did the rest.**

† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/05/other-academy-boy.html 

†† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/07/subversion-by-newspaper.html 

*Andy Rooney, My War (1995), 101-02.

** For active military dissent against the Vietnam War in all branches of service including aboard planes flying over North Vietnam and among sailors on four aircraft carriers, see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-ostertag/death-of-an-american-hero_b_155430.html