“A Typical Child of the Middle Class”

When my younger brother Jeff died the summer of ‘69 at the ungodly young age of 27, I vowed to write a memoir of his short but interesting life. He had been a Vietnam GI well before the war became front page news. He came home and helped create the GI antiwar movement. What occurred in the interim was a compelling story. 

Though there were seven years between us and I was away for much of his growing up, I thought I knew Jeff pretty well. What I didn’t know about him I figured I could fill in from the small archive of letters and documents he left behind.

Jeff age 10, summer camp, Adirondack Mts, 1952

It seems I was under an illusion – it turned out I really didn’t know my kid brother that well. He had grown up, experienced things I had no idea of, and generally, unbeknownst to me, had carved out an important niche in the history of his time – the ‘60s. But much of that I learned only decades later.

However, before tackling a memoir my first order of brotherly duty was to try to get Jeff his ’15 minutes’ of fame – an obit in the New York Times. Returning from the funeral, I shut myself in my study for several days going through his papers to piece together an outline of the final decade of his life.

I had hoped an extended resume would serve as notes for an obituary. I knew getting him a Times obit was a long shot, but I intended giving it a helluva try. I didn’t know anyone at the paper except, by reputation, a senior writer and editor. I was then a young academic – a specialist on the Soviet Union – and Harrison Salisbury of the Times was a well-known author who’d been on the Moscow beat.

There was little chance he had heard of me – I hadn’t yet published that much – but invoking our common interest, I sent him my notes on Jeff, hoping he might use his good offices to recommend an obit, even a short one. Alas, I heard nothing from the Times until more than a week later when a short note from Mr Salisbury arrived.

He had found Jeff’s brief life interesting and worthy of special notice and had passed the material on to the Times’ obituary editor, but unfortunately it was too late. The paper then had a rule – no obits older than three days, and in my grief I had taken nearly a week to assemble Jeff’s timeline.

It’s not that Jeff’s death was unnoted – there were several obits in his hometown papers in upstate New York and many death notices in the underground antiwar press throughout the country, but he would not make it into the Times, so I filed away the notes for another day.

Many years later I finally began researching a memoir on my brother, a project of discovery both exhilarating and humbling. Learning about Jeff took me back to that sad week following his death, June ‘69. I dug out the notes I had originally written for the Times nearly a half century ago.

Rereading them, I was surprised at how much about Jeff I had been able to glean from his papers, but I was also taken aback at the important pieces of his life I’d been then unaware of. In ‘searching’ for Jeff over the past several years, my research assistant Karen Grote Ferb – herself a close friend of Jeff’s long ago – and I drew on the memories of his countless contemporaries in both war and antiwar, and have since filled in most of the gaps.

That left me wondering about how much a memoir begun in the summer of ’69 would have missed of Jeff’s journey. Before the age of the Internet, I could not have located the majority of our interlocutors. Cast your mind back to that era of typewriters, snail mail, expensive long distance phone calls, and city phone books as sources.

By the time of his death, Jeff’s GI buddies had returned stateside and scattered to the four corners of the country while many of his college SDS co-activists had graduated and gone hither and yon in pursuit of careers. And at that time in the late ‘60s, Jeff’s comrades in the GI antiwar movement – mostly people on the left – were still in the thick of battle, often living semi-underground, and occasionally operating under pseudonyms to escape FBI surveillance.

For the New York Times back in ’69, I had introduced Jeff as “a typical child of the middle class” and briefly summarized his Vietnam experience:

          He learned Vietnamese at the Army Language School

          in Monterey, California and later worked as an interpreter

          and translator in Saigon and in Phu Bai, an outpost north

          of Hue. [President] Diem was overthrown at the time Jeff was             

          working in Saigon, and he had left the country just a few months

          before the Gulf of Tonkin incident [in ‘64].

Indeed, Jeff was trained as a Vietnamese linguist, and he had finished his Vietnam tour not long before Tonkin – a major turning point in the slow burning war – but as Karen and I subsequently found out, dramatic things happened between those two moments of his life.

I had missed the fact that Jeff had spent his first eight months overseas at a secret facility in the Philippines translating North Vietnamese military intercepts – until late one evening when he and several fellow linguists were ordered to ship out to Vietnam on short notice.

  

The 'Elephant Cage', giant antenna array at the secret facility where Jeff worked  in the Philippines, 1963

President Kennedy had given a covert ‘green light’ to a group of South Vietnamese generals plotting the overthrow of the inept and ineffective Diem, President of South Vietnam, and his brother Nhu, the much despised commander of private armies and secret police.

Jeff and the team were hurriedly flown to Saigon to take part in a US undercover operation in support of the coup. Billeted near the Saigon airport, they performed their highly classified, politically sensitive duties in a remote, off limits corner of a US base near the village of Phu Lam.

         

In fact, I was wrong in the resume; Jeff was not in Saigon when the coup went off. Their assignment completed, he and his detachment had gone back to the Philippines two weeks earlier. However, less than two months later as another coup against the new president was in the offing, Jeff and the linguists were rushed back to Saigon.

         

Since the second coup went off quickly and bloodlessly, Jeff was reassigned to Phu Bai, a small US listening post just below the North Vietnamese border. There he and others maintained radio contact with South Vietnamese commandos being infiltrated into the north. Both of Jeff’s clandestine missions – in Phu Lam and at Phu Bai – remained highly classified, and he had never spoken or written about them.

         

I was also in the dark in ’69 when I wrote Harrison Salisbury at the Times that Jeff came back from Vietnam, finished college, and won a coveted Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, which he took to the University of Chicago for graduate school. I hadn’t known that upon withdrawing from grad school to launch his soon-to-be famous GI antiwar paper, Vietnam GI, Jeff had financed it with his fellowship funds – for a prospective academic, a step unheard of then or now.

         

Elsewhere in the resume under the heading, Other radical activities, I  simply listed that Jeff “Attended a conference of Japanese peace groups against the Vietnam War in Kyoto, Japan, August, 1968,” an event that turned out to have a rather dramatic back story.

         

Dave Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the MOBE), thus, the titular head of the US antiwar movement, had asked Jeff to join a delegation of leading American antiwar activists headed for Budapest to meet with representatives of the National Liberation Front, the underground political arm of the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam.

         

Jeff reluctantly had to decline; he had worked under the aegis of the National Security Agency in Vietnam and was still subject to restrictions on travel behind the Iron Curtain. Instead, Dellinger sent him to Japan under the guise of serving as a speaker at an international peace conference, but actually for a very different and delicate purpose.

         

The Japanese peace movement, Beheiren, encouraged US military personnel to desert the Vietnam War and was secretly hiding some 20 deserters. However, the young GIs had become restless and ill-disciplined and hard for the peace activists to cope with.

Beheiren requested the American movement to send someone knowledgeable about GI protest to counsel them on what to do. Jeff, as an ex-GI and authoritative leader of the GI movement, was the ideal candidate.

         

Suffice it to say, in my initial attempt to reconstruct Jeff’s life there were other gaps and missing parts that Karen and I eventually closed and filled in,  including perhaps the two greatest omissions.

         

I had failed to convey any sense of Jeff as a person. As my younger sibling by many years, I assumed that an older brother’s perceptions would not have been of interest to the historical record I was trying for at the Times.

         

In the ultimate illusion, as I was to repeatedly discover with each new interview of Jeff’s contemporaries, I really didn’t know the brother who had gone off to war and returned to achieve his destiny as an antiwar leader. When I asked a half a dozen of his closest friends for a single word to describe Jeff, each without hesitation independently replied with ‘charisma’.

         

I was astonished. That was an aspect of Jeff that hadn’t been apparent to me or our parents when we occasionally got together in his last years. A very nice guy, well-spoken, and mature, but I had never thought of my kid brother as a charismatic leader. I was of course pleased to learn this of him.

Jeff back at Indiana University, 1965

Jeff had other personal qualities that I had also missed. In Karen’s words, “his sense of humor and joie de vivre on the one hand and his dark side on the other; his drive, his passion, his vision, his charisma, his foibles.”

         

Finally, the biggest surprise of all has been that Jeff had come back from Vietnam a troubled soul with a secret about his involvement that he could never bring himself to speak of, and eventually carried to the grave.

No, he didn’t kill anyone – neither enemy combatant nor innocent civilian; he was in an intelligence agency, not a combat unit – but once in an anguished voice he had said to Karen, “If you knew what I did in Vietnam, you’d hate me.” That was as much as he would say despite her repeated denials and assurances.

Karen and I queried his numerous friends, asking if Jeff had ever spoken of his troubling secret, but to no avail. Admittedly memories grow dim after so many years, but that was the kind of thing someone wasn’t likely to have forgotten. The best we’ve been able to come up has been an unverifiable ‘maybe’ and a couple of hypotheticals.

         

One person thought she remembered Jeff relating a painful memory of an interrogation, but we found no one else who had ever heard even a hint about it.  In a hypothetical guess, a fellow ex-GI linguist who had served with an airborne unit involved in unintended collateral damage (civilian deaths), believed Jeff may have done the same thing with the Marines on long range patrols, but we’ve been unable to unearth any firm evidence.

         

A more recent speculation has been that Jeff may have been dispatched from Phu Bai to nearby Hue a few times to sit in on harsh South Vietnamese Army interrogations of Viet Cong prisoners to pick up any information of interest to his unit. Witnessing such brutal interrogations would not have been something easily forgotten, but as I shall say in the memoir, it seems we’ll never know.

         

Jeff never got his 15 minutes in the Times, but his niche in the history of the Vietnam antiwar movement is now secure with both a book and an award-winning documentary dedicated to him, a page in a mainstream American history text about his editorship of Vietnam GI, and a literary prize established in his name among other recognitions and honors.

Marching to Different Drummers*

 [Dear Reader:  The time is at last at hand to turn full-time to writing the memoir. To facilitate the writing, the blog continues to post, but now monthly on the 1st Wednesday of each month.  We will keep you informed about our progress to publication.]

Two generations of Sharlets, Bob and Jeff, recently participated in a remote interview with long-time activist Thorne Dreyer of The Rag Blog and Rag Radio, cutting edge alternative media out of Austin TX.  The long time reader is no doubt aware that Bob, the well-known scholar of Russian constitutional law, is the older brother of the subject of this blog, the late Jeff Sharlet, 1960’s ex-Vietnam GI, activist, and underground press founder and editor; and that the other Jeff in the interview is his son, the best-selling author and namesake.

The interview covers a wide range of topics, many of which have appeared in more detail in this blog, but here, for the first time on air, father and son speak candidly, not only about the remarkable man who was one’s brother and the other’s uncle, but also about their own career trajectories and thoughts about the memoir in progress for which this blog is a precursor. The interview has been preserved as a podcast here: 

https://archive.org/details/RagRadio2014-06-27-JeffSharletRobertSharlet

                                                                 “A more congenial man I never knew”

L to R: Bob Sharlet; Jeff, his late brother; and Jeff, his son

During the interview you will hear Bob recount his path from aspiring writer at Wesleyan University in the ‘50s to the army, where he was posted to the Army Language School (ALS, now the Defense Language Institute). At ALS he was taught Czech, and then stationed in Germany from where he toured Europe before returning to college, and becoming a political scientist schooled in the rigors of his field. 

His brother Jeff, expecting to follow in his footsteps, was diverted onto a very different path at ALS – the Army Security Agency (ASA) anticipated an imminent need for Vietnamese linguists.  Jeff’s experience in Vietnam and the subsequent buildup of American forces there would turn him into an antiwar activist once he was back in school in the States.

For a time, he and his brother Bob were at odds over the Vietnam War politically, each influenced by his personal angle of vision – Bob as an academic Soviet specialist focused on the Cold War, Jeff as an ex-Vietnam GI activist.

After his brother Jeff died at a young age in ’69, Bob promised himself he would give his brother’s short but accomplished career as a founder of the GI Movement**  its place in the history of the antiwar movement. Upon his retirement from academe, Bob at last had the opportunity to finally fulfill that commitment.

With invaluable assistance from Karen Ferb, a good friend of his brother’s from long ago, he set out to make contact with Jeff’s GI buddies, fellow college antiwar activists, VGI staffers from his Chicago days, and friends, all of whose memories of Jeff he assiduously collected. Bob also began studying memoirs to learn how they are made as well as to help him slip the bonds of analytical social scientific writing.  It was not an easy task.

Along the way his son Jeff blossomed into a writer of national reputation known for his research skills and for turning out notable creative nonfiction that eventually landed him in his current professorship at Dartmouth. 

Jeff the son had grown up in a writerly family where Jeff the brother acquired “mythic status” from Bob’s recounting of his brother’s activism as the founder-editor of the influential underground paper, Vietnam GI (VGI).

VGI was the first antiwar paper to be written by ex-Vietnam GIs for the troops. Jeff the namesake remembers first stumbling upon issues of the paper as a boy and seeing the uncle he never knew peering out of his own obituary and later memorialized in verse.

He knew and loved the men

Who write the letters home

And when he came home

He gave them something to believe in.

…

Not long ago he said:

“We felt a newspaper

Was the best way to begin…

To talk to the enlisted men

The guys on the bottom

Help bridge the gap between

The movement and the people.”

He was a quiet, vital guy

Who thought before he spoke,

…

Courage from his courage

Example of his deeds,

For Jeff is dead…

                                                    ~ Lincoln Bergman in ‘Seeds of Revolution’

Bob and his son talked often about the memoir with Bob eventually inviting Jeff to collaborate on the book.  After all, Jeff was a successful writer and would have much to impart to what he called his father’s “towering work of historical investigative journalism.”  He should know – his own achievements include the important investigative works The Family and C Street, both of which address the fundamentalist threat to democracy in America and elsewhere.

For the C Street book, he traveled at great risk to Uganda to expose the influence of American fundamentalists and politicians on the so-called Ugandan “kill the gays” legislation. He later went to Russia to report on the virulent homophobic movement there – both journeys a kind of reprise of his uncle’s travels to Sweden and Japan as well as to the GI coffee houses across America on behalf of beleaguered American servicemen – many of them hounded by the military for their opposition to the Vietnam War.

_______________________________________________________________

*This post has been written by Karen Grote Ferb, Bob’s collaborator on the blog.

**For more information about the GI Movement, underground press, and GI coffee houses, see http://www.sirnosir.com/ , an award-winning documentary film covering those subjects dedicated to GI activist Jeff Sharlet.

Rear Echelon Blues – Then Came War

[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 9^th 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 9^th 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 30^th, 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 9^th 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.

†       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZceOIAh1i0&feature=kp

††     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKvhxapM5zo&feature=kp

†††   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stwt_ew6Bac

†††† https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57qy7MCzLXA

Sojourn on the South China Sea

Jeff Sharlet hoped to be shipped to Europe, but landed on the shores of the South China Sea. He had enlisted in the Army Security Agency (ASA), a semi-secret communications intelligence outfit, the military arm of the National Security Agency in Washington. ASA sent Jeff to the Army Language School (ALS) in sunny California.

By late ’62 he’d completed the 47-week Vietnamese course, received Top Secret and Cryptographic clearances, and was soon dispatched to the 9^th ASA Field Station at Clark Air Force Base (AFB) in the Philippine Islands (PI).

Life in the islands – a quiet backwater of the global Cold War – was relatively pleasant for ASA personnel. Across the South China Sea a low intensity civil conflict was underway in Vietnam, and the Pentagon was gradually stockpiling Vietnamese linguists (lingys for short). ASA was temporarily parking most of them in the Philippines out of harm’s way.

With so many interpreter/translators on hand, the workload at the 9^th ASA was not heavy, and the troops enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle. But for the war looming in Vietnam, one might call it an extended spring break in the South Pacific.

For the young college-boy lingys, it was something of an adventure. While they bided their time waiting for the call to war, daily life in the tropics resembled scenes from From Here to Eternity without the romance – a sprawling military base, a nearby GI town, palm trees swaying in the breeze. 

Excerpts from Jeff’s letters home trace his carefree time as a GI in the PI during the early months of ’63.

13 Jan 63 – from Honolulu enroute to the Far East

Hawaii is beautiful and warm. I’m on a Super-Constellation. It will take 30 hours to get to the Philippines. The South Pacific looks enchanting.

29 Jan 63 – at 9^th ASA Field Station, Clark AFB, PI

This base is like a little piece of America. It has everything. We live in a fairly new billet in three-man rooms. Outside walls, and inside walls as well, are louvered for ventilation. We have houseboys at $2.50 a month to make beds and shine shoes as well as clean rooms, the billet, and its grounds.

Jeff (r) & Fred Baumann outside barracks, Clark AFB, 1963

The pool is across the street, tennis courts are nearby, and the enlisted men’s open mess, called the Coconut Grove, is next door.

The pool across the street

You hear music everywhere on base. It’s from Armed Forces Radio (AFR), which we get on our transistors, and you can also hear it through speakers in the clubs and the rec areas.

It’s a strange combination of Country Western and Rock ‘n Roll, everything from ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’ and ‘Oklahoma Hills’ to Little Richard’s ‘Good Golly, Miss Molly’ and lots of Ray Charles.

♫ I’m an old road-hog/I drove a big truck

Shot the pinball machine, but it brought me bad luck†

The work is interesting, informative, and not too hard. I work the mid-shift from Midnight to 7:00 AM. The place where we work, called Operations (Ops for short), is a windowless, concrete building in a heavily-guarded, barbed wire enclosure in the middle of an enormous field.

When I wake up in the afternoon, I do errands, read in bed, or go to the pool. I generally go to Happy Hour at the Airmen’s Club from 4:30 to 5:30  afternoons. All drinks are only 10 cents, normally 20 cents, while weeds run 95 cents a carton. I either stay there for a while or go into town with a buddy.

The town called Angeles City is right outside the base. It’s like something out of Susie Wong’s world, just like those Far Eastern army towns you read about in war novels. All the joints have American names.

A GI joint, Angeles City, PI, 1963

It’s one huge collection of bars, whores, beds, Jeepney taxi drivers, horse and buggy conveyances, and the most poverty stricken people I’ve ever seen. The girls are mostly young.

Thus far when I think of this country, the R&R song ‘Babycakes’ (Ooooh, baby, oooh), the dance ‘Mashed Potatoes’, strong San Miguel beer, as well as comments in the bars like ‘Hey Joe, you buy me a ladies beer’ – come to mind as representative of the PI.

♫ Hey Mama, don’t you treat me wrong

Come and love your daddy all night long††

15 Feb 63

The Filipinos and the bar girls don’t need any information. The first night I went to town, all the girls asked me if I was ‘9^th ASA’. I’m trying to organize the girls into an entertainment union so they can get a guaranteed wage for hustling drinks.

Jeff (2d on l) & buddies, Angeles City, 1963

         

Manila, the capital, is 65 miles away. I just got back from there. It’s just like any large city in the States, a total imitation of the US with gangs, the PTA, an American Legion, and a Chamber of Commerce. English is the common language, and just about everyone speaks it. The University of the Philippines even has sororities.

I like it here, but I don’t know why.

24 Mar 63

I have a chance to get a hop to New Delhi next month, but I’m going to pass it up for a while. They have space available on planes to India once a week and to Saigon, Bangkok, Taiwan, and Japan every day. They also have a ship, which goes to Hong Kong 4 times a year, expressly for guys going on leave.

I might go out for football because they go on game trips to Japan, Korea, and Okinawa. This station has a good team. They almost beat the Far Eastern champions last year.

11 Apr 63

Some friends and I took a train to a place called Dagupan, a few hours from here. Just beyond the city is a beautiful white sandy beach on the South China Sea where we rented a hut for a couple of days, took in some sun and surf, and drank a lot of beer.

♫ Where the deep blue pearly waters

Wash upon white silver sands

We watched the sun set in the evening

In a far and distant land†††

I cut it too close getting back from town last night and almost missed the shuttle to Ops for mid-shift. If a guy’s had one too many in Angeles, the flood lighting around the Ops building for night security definitely has a sobering effect.

28 Apr 63

The PI is quite different from any other environment I have ever seen. This country is a cross between the 20^th and 19^th century. Even in Manila, a large (pop. 2 million), Westernized, and extremely dirty city, one will see horse-drawn carts on the streets with old WWII jeeps used as taxis and private vehicles.

Manila Bay

About 85% if the people are extremely poor, ill-fed, ill-clothed, and unhealthy. Begging for money or cigarettes is very common here.

A strong national police force secures the peace. In the expensive commercial sections of Manila, there’s a cop on duty every hundred yards. There are guards on all the trains. Most cops carry submachine guns or shotguns.

It’s starting to get very hot now with the rainy season approaching soon.

17 May 63

Some of us took a bus to Baguio, a mountain resort about 120 miles north of Clark AFB. It’s about 5000 feet up in the clouds and nice relief from the heat of the plains.

♫  I’m gonna climb that mountain

Walk up there among the clouds††††

         

On the way up – before the steep ascents – we passed many poor farmers and their water buffalo. The trip was one of the most beautiful as well as the most dangerous bus rides I’ll probably ever take.

Perilous Baguio road, 1963

         

In the Philippines, Jeff availed himself of the Army’s recruiting slogan ‘Fun, Travel, and Adventure’ or FTA,* but the bloom was beginning to fade. The weather in the South Pacific – rising temps and drenching monsoons – was a damper, but he was also finding the repetitive classified work less challenging, while the allure of an endless party life had begun to pall.

As will be apparent in the next post, it was war just over the horizon that would dramatically change Jeff’s experience in the military.

____________________________________________________________ 

*With the later rise of GI anti-Vietnam War protest in which Jeff was a principal player, the Army’s slogan FTA became ‘Fuck the Army’.

Links to music videos:

†       

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIbK9LWKO5g

††      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjSaHcBcI4I&index=3&list=RDfgfYSLNddGo

†††     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrErJRCovSw&list=RDGrErJRCovSw&index=1

††††

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0JsYKHTJlg