Final Scenes of a Short but Interesting Life

Back to Nam, into the bush …

Sunset over Phu Bai – South Vietnam, 1960s

Post-coup Vietnam was not a happy place. True, Diem, the president, and his notorious brother Nhu, the secret police chief, were gone, but the junta that assumed power couldn’t govern effectively. The generals had few political skills, and by early ’64 they had fallen out among themselves. General Khanh, one of the tougher combat commanders, seized power, and Jeff and his crew of Vietnamese linguists (lingys) were hastened back to Saigon.

However, there was nothing to do this time; Khanh bloodlessly consolidated control within a day. Jeff, with time still to serve, then got sent north to Phu Bai, a remote listening post just below the DMZ. The base was located in South Vietnam’s narrow coastal lowland between the mountains of Laos in the west and the South China Sea to the east.  A chopper flew Jeff and other replacements up. Short on crew, the pilot assigned Jeff to man the door gun, a light machine gun on a 180 degree swivel.

Phu Bai was a fairly primitive base, but perfectly positioned to monitor North Vietnamese military communications across the border. Jeff was billeted in a six-man tent with plank walkways connecting the tents to the heart of the base.  It was blistering hot, and when the monsoon season came, the rains were torrential.

The rest of the place was a series of small wooden structures – HQ, the club, the barber shop installed in a small shack, and a store – except for the air conditioned operational buildings where the Morse code operators, or ‘ditty boppers’, and the lingys worked.

The entire base – not much bigger than a large baseball field – was encircled by barbed wire and defensive bunkers in the event of a Viet Cong (VC) attack. The threat, however, did not seem serious since there was only a single security guard with a sidearm manning the ramshackle front gate.

Jeff’s outfit, called Detachment J, had a two-fold mission in the then-early Vietnam war. They were to intercept and listen to the North Vietnamese Army’s radio messages, as well as maintain radio liaison with South Vietnamese commandos infiltrated across the border into enemy territory.

Off-duty, there wasn’t much for a GI to do in the desolate environment. The little club served cheap drinks to all ranks, and an occasional movie broke the monotony. Boozing was the main preoccupation, as one of Jeff’s buddies who later rendered a familiar scene at the club in a poem:

                   Jeff at the bar has a live one

                   a fool enough to take him on,

                   Phu Bai’s favorite Socrates

                   debating war’s ‘morality’

                   ‘I’m telling you, this war’s bullshit

                   and we’ve got no business here

                   we’re not here to help these people

                   we’re just getting lots of them killed’

…

                   later, last call passed, cutty’s gone

                   so with a case, two, sometimes more

                   st. pauli girl, chilled black label

                   he, Bill, Jeff … continue on out at the wire

                   closer there to the nearby war

                   Jeff recreating his debate,

                   dismissive of his rival’s stance

                   predicting, boy Cassandra like,

                   disastrous outcomes from the war

…

                             the sandbag bunker full of drunks

                   but none too drunk to miss the stars

                   moonless clouds of constellations

                   laced above their no ending war … *

It wasn’t just nightly boozing though; there were other laughs and good times as well. Periodically guys were rounded up to drive 6x6 trucks to Hue, the ancient capital, to pick up supplies. A junior officer in a jeep would lead the convoy, issuing strict instructions that the trucks were to stay together in column.

However, like in a slapstick movie, as the convoy reached the city the drivers would sometimes peel off in various directions. That way the ‘lost’ drivers and helpers could spend part of the day in Hue rather than just loading up and heading straight back up the road to Phu Bai.

On an off-duty day at other times, Jeff and a bunch of guys would drive to a wide sandy beach on the South China Sea for an afternoon of sun and surf. A photo from one of those outings reminds one of a relaxed beach scene on Long Island Sound the morning after a rousing house party at a New England college.

Once in a while Jeff and a buddy would borrow a jeep and drive south to the city of Danang on the coast. They’d put up in a hotel and enjoy a few days of creature comforts sorely missed back at tent city in Phu Bai.

Driving back one time over Đèo Hải Vân (Sea Cloud Pass) high above Danang, the two guys pulled over and took in the magnificent view of the heavily jungled mountains rippling down to a beach at the edge of the sea. Spying a finger of forested land jutting from the shore far below – a shimmering green peninsula – Jeff and his good buddy wistfully talked about opening a casino down there after the war.

It was then still early in the conflict and the war had a long way to go, but the memory lingered.

Hitting the books on the antiwar front …

Pro-war rally, Indiana University, 1966

Vietnam behind him, so he thought, Jeff headed back to college. He took a campus job and hit the books hard that first term of ’64. But even before fall classes began, there had been a skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin between North Vietnamese torpedo boats and an American destroyer. It was an election year, and the incumbent President took full advantage with lethal retaliation, stoking war fever in the land.

As a Vietnam GI with a critical MOS, or Military Occupation Specialty, Jeff took note with some concern, but then the President quieted the drums of war as quickly as he had roused them. It would prove to be a false calm.

As he began his second term at Indiana University (IU), Jeff worried about the rising tensions in Vietnam – deadly Viet Cong (VC) terrorism met by heavy US aerial reprisals inevitably followed by renewed hot rhetoric. Having been assigned to an obligatory reserve unit, as an experienced Vietnamese linguist would he be recalled to active duty?

Fortunately Jeff wasn’t, but not long after his reelection, President Johnson (LBJ) set in motion a massive escalation of US involvement against the VC and their sponsors in North Vietnam. At IU, a small band of students began to organize against the war. From those beginnings emerged the new campus chapter of SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society.

Jeff was friendly with the activists, but stood aside from SDS, not convinced that such a loosely structured group of idealistic students could do much to affect the war, a war for which he had brought home a deep aversion. However, a new friend fresh from the ‘free speech’ struggle at Berkeley arrived on campus and persuaded him to lend his ex-GI status to SDS to strengthen its antiwar posture.

Taking on the war was an uphill struggle at IU, a very conservative place. Default sentiment was ‘rally around the flag’ – the country was at war. Adding to the prevailing mood, the university president, Elvis J Stahr, a former high Pentagon official, invited a string of pro-war Washington heavies to speak at IU.

Nonetheless, Jeff and the small band of activists shouldered on – mounting visible and audible demos against the campus visits by Nixon and a brace of gung ho generals. By his senior year, Jeff assumed leadership of the SDS chapter and stepped up the tempo of antiwar protest.

Decades later, a fellow activist remembered him saying at a rally, “This is the second time in my life that I have belonged to an organization run by Elvis J Stahr,” going on to add that he had first served under Secretary of the Army Stahr in the Army in Vietnam.

Then Jeff posed a rhetorical question, “And so why is the man who was Secretary of the Army, who was involved in making war on another country –

a man of the war machine – qualified to become the President of Indiana University, supposedly an institution of higher learning?”

Wrapping up, he concluded:

                   We need self-determination for students to get the

                   education they want and need, and we need self-

                   determination for the countries in the world now

                   oppressed by the US military machine, today

                   especially in Vietnam.**

An outstanding student as well as a major activist, Jeff’s life at IU was not just protest and no play. He and friends were regulars at Nick’s, a pub a block from the IU library. For lighter refreshments, it was off to the Gables, the soda bar and restaurant on Indiana Avenue, or the pizzeria just around the corner.

Sometimes the group gathered for an evening of folk music at one or another off-campus apartment – several of the activists were talented musicians. Then there were the free-swinging parties at the East 2^nd Street house Jeff shared with a few of the guys.

And not least, there were his long relationships with successive girlfriends – with Karin, Karen, and Miki. All in all, good years.

Chicago bound – ready, set, go …

Chicago, “City of Big Shoulders,” cauldron of protest

Jeff headed for grad school. He had won a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and applied to Yale, Chicago, and Michigan. He had in mind an academic career— or did he? Chicago was his choice – not only a top school, but in a  city alive with activism and protest.

As his IU mentor later recalled, in ’67 Jeff was ambivalent about his near future, torn between competing visions. Would it be the rigors of a PhD program or his compelling desire to continue the fight against the war – in fact even upping the ante in the process? He enrolled at University of Chicago for the fall term, but his heart wasn’t in the academic game – at least not then with a war that had to be stopped.

By the end of the term, Jeff had made the choice which would determine his destiny. Dropping out of Chicago, he plunged headlong into the city’s many-sided antiwar scene. Draft resistance, however, wasn’t his thing; neither was the pacifist Quaker group, nor yet more SDS marches and demos – been there, done that.

Instead, Jeff poured all his energies into pursuing the grand vision he’d been nurturing for some time – stopping the war by mobilizing the GIs, the guys with the rifles, against it. Not as difficult as it sounded, for Jeff knew that many fighting men in Nam had doubts about the US mission. Yet other than tete-a-tete in bars and GI coffee houses, they had no way to make their voices heard.

To give expression to those GIs – to give them voice – Jeff used his fellowship funds to create a GI-led, underground antiwar paper. It was to be by and for serving GIs as well as their comrades in other armed services deployed in Southeast Asia. With Jeff at the helm and an editorial board of ex-Vietnam GIs, Marines, and airmen, Vietnam GI (VGI) launched in early ’68.

VGI was an almost instant success with the guys in the trenches, on the ships off-shore, and at the airbases arming the attack choppers and fighter bombers. It resonated as well with many GIs at stateside bases being readied for deployment to Nam.

Letters-to-the-editor praising the paper began streaming in to the Chicago office, with the writers often asking for more copies of VGI to share with buddies. Most of all, the letters revealed the real war behind the sanitized military briefings in Saigon – aptly lampooned as the ‘Five O’clock Follies’.

Getting the monthly issue out was challenging work. The lead was always Jeff’s interview with a recently returned combat veteran, but first a good source had to be found and be willing to talk about an unpleasant experience. Other stories arrived in the mail, some from the field in Nam, some from the stateside infantry training depots.

Jeff usually added an editorial, and there were also photos, including those the Pentagon hoped would never see light of day; and of course the many ‘Dear Jeff’ letters featured monthly in the ‘Mailbag’.

Everything had to be edited into good readable prose, but prose easily accessible to the average grunt, usually a high school grad. Then came typesetting, proofing, and printing. Printing VGI got harder and harder as the FBI’s Chicago field office persuasively ‘urged’ many area typographers to refuse to print a ‘subversive’ paper.

Finally, there was the monthly distribution ritual. Normally a periodical could be mailed at a low rate as ‘printed matter’. But Chicago postal inspectors were on the lookout for leftist and anti-government material, hence Jeff and his staff had to go the more expensive ‘First Class’ route not subject to postal inspection.

Even so, great numbers of First Class envelopes, especially addressed to military addresses, could not be simply dumped at the post office without arousing suspicion. Volunteers would therefore drive all over the greater Chicago area depositing small numbers of the paper in many corner mailboxes.

All of this this took money for typesetting, printing, and mailing, hence fundraising was a constant of Jeff’s editorship. Getting the paper out was nearly a fulltime activity, so for most of the time for Jeff and senior staff, earning money from a regular job wasn’t a viable option.

It was an intense time, but Chicago was a lively town replete with legions of activists supportive of the GI antiwar cause. Jeff and friends would occasionally get respite from the fever zone with dinners at friends’ apartments, bar hopping to cool music venues, as well as from parties at the place he shared with fellow editors on the city’s North Side.

Still, the tension level remained high with the Feds, the Army’s military intelligence group in Northern Illinois, and the Chicago Red Squad nosing around combined with the chronic problems of scarce funds and deadlines looming.

On the road for Vietnam GI …

The ‘Yard’ at Harvard University, Cambridge MA, 1960s

From his base in Chicago, Jeff covered a lot of ground traveling both at home and abroad on behalf of Vietnam GI (VGI) or as a leader of the GI opposition to the war. By ’68 there was in place a network of GI antiwar coffee houses in the little tank towns outside infantry training bases.

The coffee houses run by antiwar volunteers were havens for GIs less than enthusiastic about the war. Off-duty guys could get a cup of coffee, a piece of pie, and read the irreverent underground press – especially the GI papers, foremost VGI – undisturbed by disapproving non-coms or brass.

Periodically, Jeff traveled the coffee house circuit to rap with GIs and gather their stories for the paper. Some of them were awaiting deployment, while others were just back from the ‘zone’ – the combat zone. During the spring Jeff hung out at ‘Mad Anthony Wayne’s Headquarters’, the coffee house outside the gates of Fort Leonard, MO; in the fall he was at the Oleo Strut, which served the growing number of GI war resisters at Fort Hood, TX.

Another of Jeff’s travel beats were the two coasts, especially the Northeast and the San Francisco Bay Area. That’s where the money was – where the well-to-do antiwar liberals were to be found. Fund-raising was a pressing necessity to keep VGI afloat. Often a wealthy individual would throw a cocktail party with Jeff as guest of honor to talk about his paper and the GI movement as the hat was passed around.

He was also in demand abroad. During the summer it was a trip to Kyoto to counsel the Japanese peace group on how to handle Vietnam deserters being hidden from the Japanese authorities and  US military police. When he served in the Philippines, Jeff had made a leave trip to Japan and liked the country.

Late fall ‘68 Jeff was with a delegation in Stockholm where the Swedish government had given sanctuary to many deserters. Ideally, he would have preferred antiwar GI’s to stay in the ranks and spread the word, but he respected an individual’s decision to bail out of the war.

By far, Jeff’s favorite destination was the Boston area. He was familiar with the town, having visited extended family there during his younger years. Many of his classmates from the Albany Academy had also gone to Harvard, so he was acquainted with Harvard Square and environs as well.

Several of VGI’s most generous financial supporters lived in and around the Square, so it became a frequent stop whenever he hit Boston. Most importantly though, he would visit the Boston Draft Resistance Group (BDRG) and his friends there further along the Charles River embankment in Central Square.

Jeff would give BDRG the templates for the latest issue of VGI, and they in turn would have thousands of additional copies printed. Their cadre of activists would then distribute the paper at military facilities throughout New England. It was a good arrangement.

By late in the year however, a medical problem that Jeff first experienced in Vietnam flared up, and he decided to head home for some doctoring.

“Because I could not stop for Death …”

Veterans Administration Hospital, Miami FL, 1960s

Home for Jeff was the Miami area where his parents lived. Exploratory surgery in early ‘69 detected cancer. It had spread, the odds were not good. Back at his alma mater, Indiana University, a friend arriving at a party of Jeff’s old college pals brought the news – the room went silent.

Despite his dire prospects, Jeff soldiered on, withstanding heavy doses of chemotherapy along with uncomfortable rounds of radiation. He fought hard, and by early spring the disease was in remission. The VA Hospital granted him a furlough.

In relays, friends and comrades from Chicago and Boston made the long drive down to Florida to spend time with Jeff. All of them would sit around drinking wine, listening to music, and laughing – there was lots of laughter about the many good times together.

♫Some will come, some will go

                                    We shall surely pass …

                                    We are but a moment’s sunlight

                                    Fading on the grass†

Through the underground papers and the growing antiwar press inspired by Vietnam GI’s (VGI) success, news of Jeff’s illness flashed across the country and abroad. Dozens of cards and notes began arriving from myriad people in the antiwar struggle – everyone from Bernardine Dohrn, a national SDS leader, to individual GIs who only knew Jeff through his editorship of VGI.

Unfortunately the remission came to an end, and he had to return to the hospital for more chemo, more radiation, and IV’s, always the IV’s. But all was to no avail as he rapidly declined. In great despair one afternoon during late spring, Jeff attempted suicide, but failed. The end was near.

A few weeks later he slipped away – his heart stopped – he was gone. Death at an early age, he was only 27. He was widely mourned wherever an underground paper carrying his death notice was read. At the last SDS convention, a minute of silence in memory of Jeff was observed by the nearly 2000 gathered.

In an uncanny foreshadowing of what would become his destiny, many years later a friend recalled Jeff once telling him of his plans for Vietnam GI:

          He told me that this was what he wanted to do

          at this time in his life. And he thought this would

          be the most important thing he had ever done

          in life.***

Of the many obits, the most eloquent one began:

                 Many good men never came back from Nam. Some

          came back disabled in mind. Jeff Sharlet came back

          a pretty together cat – and he came back angry.

               Jeff started VGI and for almost two years poured

          his life into it in an endless succession of 18-hour

          days, trying to organize men to fight for their own

          rights.

As Emily Dickinson, the poet of Amherst, wrote, Because I could not stop for Death/ He kindly stopped for me.

*J Buquoi, “phu bai nights,” Snapshots from the Edge of a War. e-book         forthcoming via Amazon, 2015.

**D Kaplan, “Reminiscences of Jeff’s March 1967 Peroration,” August 2011.

***D Kaplan, “Last Conversation with Jeff,” August 2011.

† https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4fWN6VvgKQ

         

         

         

A Minute of Silence

The tumultuous ‘60s ended with a bang – the implosion of SDS, the Students for a Democratic Society. As the Vietnam War revved up in far off Southeast Asia, SDS became the core of what morphed into a vast movement against the war.

Many memoirs have been written on the decade, but a fairly recent one may be the best.* Author John Maher bore witness to the evolution and subsequent decline of the Vietnam antiwar movement. And along the way he had known the major players on both sides of the split that rendered SDS asunder in ’69.

Born in ’38, John Maher fell between me and my younger brother in age. During our younger years it appears John and I had been doing some of the same things, although in reality we were ships passing in the night. Later it was very different between John and my brother Jeff Sharlet, a leader of GI protest against the war; not only did they move in sync along near similar trajectories, but they became good friends as well.

John Maher and I both went to college in the Boston area during the late ‘50s – he to Harvard, I to Brandeis. There our headings began to diverge since he was already tacking left as I sailed a middle course – a standard liberal.

John Maher during his university years

Paradoxically, despite our different political vectors, John was associated with the junior Harvard professor Zbigniew Brzezinski, destined to become an establishment foreign policy specialist with whom I coincidentally worked in the ‘70s; simultaneously at Brandeis I was studying with the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, soon to become guru to the New Left.

Though we never crossed paths, Maher and I shared some common experiences. We had both hung out at Club 47, the folk café just off Harvard Square where each of us got to know the fetching young Joan Baez as her brilliant career was taking off.

Joan Baez, Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA, 1962

Upon graduating from Harvard, Maher and a few friends traveled to the Soviet Union as tourists. A few years later I spent a year at Moscow University researching my PhD dissertation. Not long after, in the mid-‘60s, both of us happened to land in Washington as consultants – he with the War on Poverty, I on the Soviet-American arms control negotiations.

As the war in Vietnam began to heat up, our paths sharply divided. I became an academic preoccupied with Soviet politics & law as John moved into the maelstrom of emerging antiwar activism.

He soon acquired an impressive New Left resume, coming into contact with Noam Chomsky of MIT; Marty Peretz, publisher of the New Republic; I. F. Stone, premier critic of Washington from the left, as well as serving as a principal organizer of ‘Vietnam Summer’ – a series of antiwar protests across the peace movement.

However, it was while working with the Boston Draft Resistance Group (BDRG), the most effective anti-draft outfit in the country, that John first met Jeff, editor of Vietnam GI (VGI). The foremost underground GI antiwar paper, VGI was published out of Chicago, but Jeff periodically traveled east to raise funds for the paper among wealthy left liberals in Boston and New York. Abby Rockefeller, into whose extended family John Maher had married, was a generous contributor.

BDRG activist distributing Vietnam GI, Boston Army Center, 1968

BDRG had linked up with VGI, printing several thousand additional copies of each issue for passing around at military installations throughout New England. The anti-draft activists took every opportunity to hand out VGI to GIs as well as civilians in the induction process. Speaking of his personal role in the BDRG-VGI connection, John wrote:

                   I helped raise money for the paper and distributed

                   it around the Boston area. When the work was

                   done, Jeff and I loved to sit around and drink beer

                   and talk politics. We became close friends.**

Later in ’68, an illness Jeff first experienced in Vietnam back in ’64, caught up with him and he flew to our parents’ place in Florida for medical help. The diagnosis was dire; though Jeff still had hope, he was to have only a few months more to live.

Jeff’s last photo – with his parents and sister-in-law Nancy,

Coral Gables, FL, March 1969

♫Yes, how many ears must one man have

Before he can hear people cry?

Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows

That too many people have died?

The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind

The answer is blowin' in the wind.†

Meanwhile, SDS was veering toward destruction. Sharp factional conflict had been growing within the organization during the past few years and by late spring ’69 had gotten much worse. On one side was the national SDS leadership group styling itself as the ‘Revolutionary Youth Movement’ (RYM). Opposed to RYM was a strong, well-disciplined faction that identified with the Maoist Progressive Labor Party (PL). Essentially an internal power struggle, it was fought out under the guise of conflicting political theologies.

The two groups’ implacable differences came to a dramatic climax at what was to become the last SDS national convention, a gathering of nearly 2,000 delegates in Chicago, mid-June ’69. In just a few days of wild proceedings, the organization split irrevocably, with RYM, calling itself Weatherman, soon after turning to violence and going underground.

John Maher was in the convention hall and initially hoped SDS might weather the storm and survive intact, but it was not to be. At the opening session there was a moment of unity, albeit extremely brief, as all the factions united in grief for Jeff who had died two days earlier. As John remembered the scene:

                             The chair asked us to rise for a

                             minute of silence in memory of

                             my friend Jeff Sharlet, editor of

        Vietnam GI.***

*John Maher, Learning from the Sixties: Memoir of an Organizer (2011)

**Ibid, 159.

***Ibid, 198-99.

† https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFvkhzkS4bw

Recovering the Past – Memorable Encounters

I’ve been on the trail of my brother’s lost past for a long time. Along the way I’ve encountered many memorable people who were part of his story. Brother Jeff Sharlet distinguished himself early, but died young. As the Vietnam War faded from public memory and with it the antiwar movement, Jeff’s accomplishments in the struggle were forgotten.

He was an ex-Vietnam GI who became a founding leader of GI opposition to the war. His pioneering underground paper, Vietnam GI, caught on quickly and was read around the world wherever American troops were stationed, most importantly in Vietnam.

In the early ‘70s, Jeff’s contribution was generously recognized in several articles and books, but the overall significance of GI protest in contributing to the end of the Vietnam War soon slipped into oblivion. Quite a number of books and memoirs subsequently published were primarily about the ‘civilian’ antiwar movement. Most of the authors had been activists who somehow forgot, or chose to ignore, the GIs who took on the war and ultimately made the difference.

Antiwar GI leaders languished along with Jeff in historical obscurity for over a quarter of a century until the dramatic appearance of the first full-length documentary on resistance in the ranks. Late spring 2005 I got a call telling me that the film, Sir! No Sir!, the suppressed story of the GI Movement to end the war in Vietnam, would be premiered at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It was the director, David Zeiger, calling to say that Sir! No Sir! was dedicated to brother Jeff.

Around that time I had begun ‘searching’ for Jeff – to find and reconstruct the shards of his life and put his story between the covers of a book. It’s been a lengthy quest, but I’m now close enough that the time has come to note some of the memorable encounters I’ve had along the way.

‘Encounter’ is my word of choice meant to encompass those whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting in person along with many others I’ve met through Minerva’s gift to searchers, the Internet, and even a couple of historical figures of the times whose lives I ‘encountered’ only posthumously.

It was also about the time that I came upon an unusual social networking theory called ‘six degrees of separation’, the idea that everyone is just six or fewer steps away by way of introduction from any other person in the world.  I first stumbled on this curiosity in connection with my own life while seeking my brother’s story. Bear with me while I relate how it worked.

As a young man I knew Joan Baez who was to become the famous singer-songwriter. In the late ‘50s, I was living in Harvard Square across the river from Boston when she was beginning her career. She often performed at Club 47 on Mt Auburn Street, a coffee house a few blocks from Harvard run by friends of mine. I hung out at ‘47’ and got to know Joan casually.

At the time I was going to college and driving a cab, a Boston Checker. To take some liberty with Harry Chapin’s song, Joan soon “took off to find the footlights”, and me, I was “flying in my taxi.”*

Life moved on, and, like countless others, I listened to Joan’s music over the years, my brief encounter with America’s great chanteuse a pleasant but distant memory. Some 15 years later, after I’d begun my academic career and the Vietnam War had ended, I found myself invited to be on national public television (PBS). I went to New York, made my way to the studio, and was shown to the Green Room to await show time.

There I recognized Telford Taylor, the former US prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. We were to be on the show together that evening. I introduced myself, and we talked a bit. I wasn’t thinking, here I am talking to the man who brought the Nazi war criminals to justice or even about our upcoming on-air discussion.

Instead, a news item several years back sprang to mind. Professor Taylor had accompanied Joan Baez to Hanoi on a peace mission, and almost immediately on arrival they found themselves hunkering down in a bomb shelter. The US Air Force had just launched its so-called Christmas raids, the deadly carpet-bombing campaign against the North Vietnamese capital, December ’72.

Joan Baez and Telford Taylor enroute to Hanoi, 1972

That was, of course, a tenuous connection to my youthful encounter with Joan, but several decades farther on a closer link would emerge. In searching for brother Jeff, I was trying to locate GIs who served with him in Vietnam. I had names, one of which was Peyton Bryan, but no addresses.

Then another GI pal of Jeff’s gave me a crucial tip – after the war, Peyton had married Joan Baez’s older sister. Happily, a book on the Baez sisters had just been published, and there was Peyton in the Index. He and Pauline were living in  Carmel Highlands, a stone’s throw from Joan in Carmel-by-the-Sea on the California coast.

The six degrees theory came into play again while I was researching two especially prominent public figures relevant to the memoir. The two men were well-known in the history of the Vietnam War. Both were deceased, and though each was amply discussed in the war literature, I was able to gain further unusual insight into their public lives through similar personal interconnections.

One was Lucien Conein†, a legendary CIA agent in Vietnam; the other was Bernard Fall, the great chronicler of France’s defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese. Both of them were linked indirectly to Jeff’s experience in Vietnam.

Conein had been a daring OSS operative in Occupied France near the end of WWII and then had been redeployed to French Indochina to help drive the Japanese out. That was the beginning of his long relationship with Vietnam that lasted to the late ‘60s.

During 1963-64 when Jeff was there, Conein was in Saigon serving as covert US liaison to the South Vietnamese generals planning the coup against President Diem. Jeff, a Vietnamese linguist, was also part of our secret involvement in the coup, so I was on the lookout to learn as much as I could about Conein as the key player.

Sufficient information was available in published histories of the coup, but it was through two friends of mine who knew Conein personally that I gained the most insight – in effect, two degrees of separation. One was a former student who lived next door to Conein in an upscale Washington suburb until his death; the other was a college roommate who had served in Vietnam with the CIA.

My former roommate happened to witness the evening in Saigon a very drunk Conein raised so much hell in a hotel bar that the following day his superior sent him into Agency exile, shipping him out to one of the most remote small outposts in South Vietnam. Conein promptly dubbed the obscure place his ‘Phu Elba’ – he’d been assigned to Phu Bai, exactly where Jeff had been posted three years earlier.

Jeff’s posting at Phu Bai was also why I became interested in Bernard Fall. One of his noted books, Street without Joy, had been set on a stretch of highway not far from Jeff’s base in ‘53 where a French armor unit was wiped out in a well-laid ambush by Ho Chi Minh’s Vietminh. Ironically, years later in ’67 during the American war, Bernard Fall, who was embedded with a Marine patrol, was killed by a mine explosion in the same locale.

Although not absolutely essential to my project, I wanted to know more about the distinguished historian, and, lo, two direct sources turned up. One was a colleague, godfather to my children, who, while taking courses on Southeast Asia at Cornell in the ‘50s, had been in a seminar taught by Bernard Fall. The other source was an ex-Vietnam Marine I came across who had known the historian well in Vietnam and remained a friend of his family since then.

Most of my encounters, however, have been with many good people I’ve been in touch with who have kept Jeff in memory. I’ve found these individuals all over the United States and as far afield as London, Paris, Munich, Athens, the Austrian Alps, Sydney, Thailand, and Chile.

Over time I’ve traveled far and wide to meet and directly interview those who remembered Jeff best – to Chicago, San Francisco, San Diego, New York, Washington, Indianapolis, Bloomington, Woodstock, and elsewhere.

My interlocutors have been a diverse group. All without exception ended up in so-called ‘good guy’ professions – no oil lobbyists or ad execs penning  jingles. Aside from the military guys, the former civilian antiwar activists include academics, authors, artists, musicians, translators, international humanitarian workers, a few lawyers, a couple of film makers, several union activists, a rancher, and even a former professional football player.

Apropos the Vietnam War part of Jeff’s story, the military personnel were also a varied group. Most of the GIs were linguists, but there were also communications, transportation, and medical personnel as well as several infantrymen and a helicopter door gunner. Two were officers, both West Point graduates.

One of the Marines had been a member of Force Recon, a unit that infiltrated North Vietnam to carry out targeted assassinations, but perhaps the most unusual individual was Jeff’s fellow GI linguist who, upon completing his Vietnam tour, chose to remain in-country and for a time became a Buddhist monk.

Except for Jeff’s prep school classmates, most of the civilians were left activists, although of various persuasions – Trotskyists of sundry affiliations, including the Socialist Workers Party and the International Socialists; Progressive Labor; the Communist Party; Yippies; and a few members of the Workers World Party as well as the Lyndon LaRouche group.

A number of the people I encountered along the way had noteworthy pasts. They included a co-founder of Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW); some GI deserters; a former Assistant Attorney General of New York State; ‘soldiers’ of the SLA, the violent Symbionese Liberation Army; and several one-time prison inmates who had done time for draft resistance, burglary, or drugs.  

Some of the activists had played leading or significant supporting roles in momentous events of the ‘60s – notably the case of the Bloomington (IN) Three, the ‘64 Berkeley Free Speech Movement, and the Columbia University uprising of ’68.

One of Jeff’s friends, a Japanese-American, had been interned as an infant during WWII; another made a rare escape from a Mexican prison; and one man, a charismatic draft resistance leader, tragically took his own life. Quite a few have been lifelong supporters of the Cuban Revolution, some of whom had gone there to cut cane with the Venceremos Brigades beginning in ‘69.

A number of the individuals who have been of great help have led unusual or adventurous lives including Joe,¹ combat photographer of the war’s underside; Gordon, a major who confronted the generals;² and Jim, the former Yippie who took on the Pentagon.³

There’s also Tom, the career activist-organizer;⁴ Bill, who had been the ‘go-to’ guy in radical Chicago;⁵ and Bernella, the activist-musician.⁶ And no longer with us, there was Bernie, the maverick professor;⁷ Max, organizer of GI resistance in Europe;⁸ and Gary, the antiwar comet who briefly streaked across the ‘60s’ skies.⁹

My very first encounter on the memoir project from Jeff’s college days was with Karen Grote Ferb, who had known Jeff way back when they were undergrads at Indiana University (IU). She told me about Jeff’s ‘political’ life at IU, of which I’d been largely unaware. Within our family, he had rarely mentioned his radical activism – our parents would not have understood.

At IU, Karen, along with Jeff, was involved on campus with Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Early on, SDS’s mission was urban and local, ERAP or the Economic Research and Development Project. Karen was sorry to see it shunted aside as the war in Vietnam heated up and national SDS refocused on antiwar protest, but threw herself into the fray with energy and enthusiasm.

When IU New Left activists went up to the state capital, Indianapolis, to join a demonstration protesting President Johnson’s weekend appearance, the Secret Service arranged with the city cops to preempt them. Karen was the first one arrested and in Monday’s paper became the poster girl for the incident. ††

Taking her degree in ’66, Karen went on to grad school. First day on campus she asked a bearded student where to find the left. He replied, “You just found it,” but her activism there was short-lived. Soon married, her husband, a fellow grad student, was drafted, and Karen, after a brief stint as a welfare caseworker in New York, became a trailing military wife.

Following Tom through the Army’s training network – Forts McClellan (AK), Benning (GA), and Hamilton (NY) – on the side Karen did her best to seed doubts about the war among young GIs destined for battle in Vietnam.

When Tom was released from the forces, the couple intended to resume their PhD study at Penn State. No problem for Tom, but by then they’d had their first child, and Karen was blocked by academic discrimination of the day – no mothers permitted in the graduate programs.

  Karen and her kids camping, New Hampshire, 1974

Tom and Karen went to work for Abt Associates, an international development outfit based in Cambridge MA working mostly under federal contract, whose mission was and still is to improve the quality of life and economic well-being of people around the world.  

Specializing in the evaluation of the Head Start and Magnet school programs that had been created in the mid-‘60s, among other federal programs,  Karen traveled extensively under Abt’s auspices – New York, Washington, San Francisco, and also Appalachia, south Florida, the Great Lakes region, and the Southeast as well as the Northwest.

Her most exotic destination was Alaska. From Anchorage she flew south in a Twin Otter, the pilots following the fjords along the Kenai Peninsula, described by Karen as “a place of stark and desolate beauty.” On the ground, she was driven by heavy truck over rough dirt roads to reach the evaluation sites.  

Later Karen, Tom, and their children became skilled ocean sailors, docking their boat in the Caribbean, and, by air, adventurous global travelers as well. Karen continues her lifelong work toward greater social inclusiveness as a civic leader in her local community, which most recently honored her as a ‘Woman of the Year’.

The family sailboat, Sazerac, British Virgin Islands, 1990

Since early in the new century when Karen first contacted me, I’ve been the fortunate beneficiary of her exceptional skills as researcher and editor in retracing Jeff’s short but interesting life, both for this blog and the forthcoming memoir.

My encounters on the trail of my brother’s life continued – most recently with Charlie Fisher, one of Jeff’s erstwhile comrades from the ‘60s. Actually, with Charlie it was a re-encounter since I had located him several years ago via the Internet. Subsequently, he and I met in San Francisco, but the announcement of his latest book has given me the chance to learn much more about his rich and adventurous life.

Chicago born, Charlie received his education from Kindergarten through a Master’s degree at the University of Chicago, reading the renowned ‘Great Books’ curriculum along the way. Off to Berkeley for a PhD in 1960, Charlie was part of the civil rights activism, the Free Speech Movement in ’64, and anti-Vietnam War protest then rife in the Bay Area.

Moving on, he enjoyed a long academic career as a sociologist at Brandeis University just outside of Boston teaching a broad array of courses across several disciplines. A polymath, Charlie taught the familiar Sociology curriculum – Social Movements, Community Organizing, and Sociology of Science – but also further afield, History of Science, Ethnography, and the Social Psychology of Consciousness.

Having joined the Brandeis faculty in the midst of the Vietnam War, Charlie plunged into antiwar activism in the Greater Boston area. Most notably, he became an activist in the Boston Draft Resistance Group (BDRG), the most effective organization of its kind in the country.

It was from Charlie I learned that Jeff had sent the masters for each issue of Vietnam GI to BDRG, which would then print up another 5,000 copies and extend distribution to military facilities throughout New England.†††

As Charlie relates in the author’s bio for his new book, the first of two major turning points in his life occurred in ’69 when he canoed from the Canadian Northwest on the Coppermine River to the Arctic Ocean. During this epic adventure, Charlie became hooked on nature.

                             Charlie Fisher, Buddhist, naturalist, scholar

The other seminal moment was in ’77 when he made the decision to take up meditation. Charlie soon became a committed practitioner and serious scholar of Buddhism, incorporating the themes of the natural world and the practice of meditation into several of his courses. He began a lifelong study of the interconnection between the two.

Charlie’s commitment to Buddhism took him to remote corners of India as well as the American Southwest and other centers of meditation, while his engagement with nature involved a tree count in former British Honduras, now Belize; participation in a plant census; avid bird-watching; and summers spent in the coastal mountains of Northwest British Columbia.

Retiring from Brandeis, Charlie moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in ’97. No longer responsible for academic duties, he was able to devote full-time to the research and writing for two planned books on his education writ large. His first book, a study of the origins of human discontent, Dismantling Discontent: Buddha’s Way through Darwin’s World appeared in 2007.

His latest book, the companion study Meditation in the Wild (2013), continues his intensive inquiry into the historical and philosophical origins of the relationship between human consciousness and the natural world. The noted author Wade Davis, National Geographic Explorer in Residence, has called the book:

An astonishing fusion of interpretation and inspiration distilled over a lifetime of study of both natural history and the Buddhist dharma.**

 

Charlie is by no means at the end of his personal and learned quest, but l am pleased to have this chance to express my gratitude to him as well as to my colleague Karen Ferb.  Thanks also go to the many others referenced here and, though unmentioned due to space – to a legion of others.

Remarkable people one and all, I’m grateful for their memories in my journey to rediscover Jeff’s past and reconstruct his life in the GI antiwar movement of long ago.

____________________________________________________________ 

*Harry Chapin, Taxi, 1972 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5dwksSbD34&feature=kp

**Wade Davis, Foreword, Meditation in the Wild (2013), 2.

† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/conein-lawrence-of-vietnam.html

†† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/preemptive-arrest-karens-day-in-court.html

††† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/04/distributing-vietnam-gi.html

¹ http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/07/mission-to-paris.html

² http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/05/other-academy-boy.html

³ http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2014/02/man-in-red-devil-suit-lives-of-new-left.html

⁴  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/12/unsung-hero-of-gi-resistance.html

⁵  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-tale-of-two-friends-in-city-of-big.html

⁶  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/12/heartland-radicals.html

⁷  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/maverick-mentor.html

⁸  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/02/jeff-and-max.html

⁹  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/green-beret-antiwarrior.html