A Voyage of Discovery – From Bloomington to Saigon

[On this the 4^th anniversary of Searching for Jeff, the present post has been written by my collaborator on this blog, Karen Grote Ferb. Karen knew my brother Jeff well during their university days. In 2013 she and her husband Tom traveled to Vietnam where Karen retraced Jeff’s steps as a Vietnam GI during 1963-64.]

I first met Jeff Sharlet at a house party in early January 1966, a little over a year after he returned to Indiana University (IU) from his tour as a US military advisor in Vietnam.  It was a chance meeting.  One of my house mates had been invited, but did not want to go alone; she begged me to go with her.  I really didn’t want to, but she pleaded so long I finally gave in.  Jeff was there, sitting in a dark corner alone.  I’d seen him once before on campus, standing with a group of guys in front of Ballantine Hall.

I introduced myself, and we began a lengthy conversation in that corner, then got away from the general din to continue talking student style sitting on a pile of winter coats in the bathtub.  We talked about socioeconomics, racism, and the war in Vietnam. The war had been building dramatically since the Tonkin Gulf incident in August ’64 shortly after Jeff had returned stateside – culminating in the launching of a major bombing campaign over North Vietnam followed by the landing of the Marines at Danang in early ‘65. 

Our conversation continued over the next eight months until I left for graduate school, and more and more it turned toward the war, as was happening all over the country.  Why were we fighting in Vietnam was the question many were asking, and how could we stop it.

____________________________________________

Fast forward to the digital age and 2004 when I finally

 learned of Jeff’s tragically early death in ‘69.

____________________________________________

Although Jeff was clear that he had done something in Vietnam he couldn’t bring himself to speak of, he didn’t talk much at all about his experiences there that had soured him on our involvement in the war. At the same time, he had developed an admiration for the Vietnamese people, although not for their oppressive regimes beginning with Diem and his cruel brother Nhu, so he joined the IU chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) during fall of ‘65; I too joined around that time.          

Antiwar protests grew exponentially from the mid-‘60s, not only at home, but abroad, and even in Vietnam itself.  The Buddhist crisis, in particular, had drawn worldwide attention as clergy began to set themselves afire in public places as a protest against the Diem regime.

Jeff at Indiana University, 1965

Fast forward to the digital age and 2004 when I finally learned of Jeff’s tragically early death in ‘69.  I had come across his namesake nephew, at the time beginning his illustrious career as a writer.  At first I thought he was the Jeff I’d known, but a little exploration proved it not so; the namesake was too young and did not resemble his uncle.  The truth was a shock.  Jeff had died of cancer at age 27.  I knew he had an older brother, Bob, so I set out to offer much-belated condolences.

As it happened, Bob, an academic approaching retirement, was determined to give his brother his rightful place in the history of the GI Movement against the Vietnam War by writing a memoir of him.  Jeff too had intended to pursue an academic career. He had begun grad school at the University of Chicago, but dropped out and used his Woodrow Wilson Fellowship funds to create the first GI-led antiwar, underground newspaper. Vietnam GI was aimed at GIs serving in Vietnam as well as on US bases in the States and abroad. 

Contacting Bob at that time was serendipitous because he had little idea of how to reach out and find Jeff’s friends and comrades from his IU days. We determined that, although I’d lost touch with my fellow IU antiwar activists, I could find them for him.

 ___________________________________________________________

I began a voyage of discovery I could not have imagined when I last spoke

with Jeff just a few months before the first issue of Vietnam GI appeared.

____________________________________________________________

Over time I did find many of those people as well as others from Jeff’s high school years, his Army days, and the time he spent in Chicago as an underground editor, which also took him across the country and abroad. Bob eventually interviewed over 150 people who had known Jeff to one degree or another, and I began a voyage of discovery I could not have imagined back in late 1967 when I last spoke with Jeff just a few months before the first issue of Vietnam GI appeared. 

In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have foreseen the depth of knowledge and understanding I would achieve about Vietnam and the war, nor that I would visit Vietnam, now unified, and walk in Jeff’s footsteps, seeing the places he had seen.

I found myself in Saigon’s cavernous Bến Thành Market, in front of which a massive nonviolent Buddhist protest had taken place on August 25, 1963, the very day Jeff arrived in Saigon for the first time. South Vietnamese government troops had opened fire, killing several people, including Quách Thị Trang, a 15-year old student. 

Bến Thành Market Protest and Quách Thị Trang, 1963

The traffic circle was subsequently renamed in her memory and now holds a statue of her in a space shared with a mid-15^th century general, Trần Nguyên Hãn, a great poet, talented politician and strategist under Emperor Lê Lợi, and a hero revered for his role in liberating Vietnam from China’s Ming Dynasty.

Quách Thị Trang & General Han, 2014

No longer there to see were street-side execution posts as well as the trenches which Jeff could not have failed to notice; they surely would have added to soldiers’ anxieties about the dangers that too often erupted.

Trenches in front of Saigon City Hall, mid-‘60s

 

Nor were the famously well-known Buddhist self-immolations the only evidence of a profound cultural conflict and repression in the cities of South Vietnam.  Widely reported, the images of monks engulfed in flames stunned the world, although the root cause was not widely known. 

The Catholic Diem regime had retained a French colonial rule that Buddhism was not a religion, but an association, which severely limited the rights of Buddhists as opposed to those of the Catholic minority. A request to fly Buddhist flags on the occasion of Buddha’s 2,507^th birthday in 1963 had been turned down while the Vatican flag flew on the occasion of the consecration of Diem's older brother as the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Hue.

A protest in the ancient capital of Hue of about 3,000 Buddhists was fired on by government troops.  The regime, attempting to minimize the damage and even pin the blame on its civil war adversary, the Viet Cong, was hotly contested by a huge protest march the next day of more than 10,000 demonstrators.

 

The protests and self-immolations—six in all, including a Buddhist nun—continued throughout the summer of ’63, resulting in several clashes between Buddhists and troops, as well as hunger strikes—over 10,000 participated in Saigon alone—sit-ins, and street fighting between Buddhist and Catholic civilians.  All during the summer the great gong at Saigon’s Xa Loi Pagoda’s tolled, while in Hue the violence had left the main pagoda, Tu Dam, nearly a complete ruin.

Although President Diem had insisted he was pursuing a policy of conciliation, the tragedy in the streets of Saigon in August of ’63 would discredit any notion of it.  Having declared martial law, the president had given the police under his brother Nhu free rein starting that August.

_________________________________________________

Nhu’s police plundered, looted, beat, and brutally murdered 

Buddhists with abandon, killing no fewer than 100 in Hue alone.

___________________________________________________

Nhu’s police plundered, looted, beat, and brutally murdered Buddhists with abandon, killing no fewer than 100 in Hue alone. The overall number murdered or ‘disappeared’ was in the hundreds.  Thousands of Buddhists across the country were arrested and tortured by forces under Nhu, Diem’s brother, who also headed the special forces.  On August 25^th, 6,000 monks, nuns, civilians, and students were arrested followed by many thousands more over the course of the following month. 

A war that had had not yet received much attention back in the States suddenly had many Americans asking questions that before long would result in massive demonstrations against it. The rest of the world began to wonder what our objectives in Vietnam actually were.  In the end, Washington declared, “… it appears that the government of the Republic of Vietnam, has instituted serious repressive measures against the Vietnamese Buddhist leaders…The US deplores repressive actions of this nature.” 

In spite of this, the American media were not quick to pick up on extent of the underlying conflict between Buddhists and the Catholic regime; that is, within the overarching civil war between Communist North and non-Communist South Vietnam, a religious civil war was raging in South Vietnam between Buddhists and Catholics.

Soon after the police attacks against Buddhists and their pagodas, the commander of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) announced military control over Saigon, instituted censorship of the press, and cancelled all commercial flights into the city.  As the US Government began to lose confidence in its client Diem, Jeff and fellow Vietnamese linguists were quickly rushed to Saigon.

_____________________________________________________

As the US Government began to lose confidence in its client Diem, 

Jeff and fellow Vietnamese linguists were quickly rushed to Saigon.

______________________________________________________

Washington had finally recognized that the Diem regime was behind the attacks and had no intention of reconciliation with the Buddhists, a direct violation of a promise made. President Kennedy was also aware that a group of South Vietnamese generals were planning a coup.

 

The ensuing events in September and early October ‘63, to which Jeff was privy in his position of clandestinely eavesdropping on the ARVN General Staff, led on November 1st to a successful military coup and the execution of Diem and Nhu. 

Coincidentally, a year later in ‘64 – also on August 25 – a group of 10,000 Buddhists attacked and burned to the ground a Catholic village near Danang, after which horrendous bloody clashes erupted between Buddhists and Catholics killing and mutilating each other in the streets.  The violence soon spread to Saigon and other urban centers, creating an atmosphere of anarchy in the entire country.*

Violent clashes between Buddhists and Catholics, August, 1963

Contemporary Vietnam: Now a single unified country under Communist rule, the situation from the early-mid ‘60s has been reversed – the officially atheist Communist government now persecutes Christians, but allows Buddhists to practice their religion, although only a single sect, the Buddhist Church of Vietnam, intended to encompass any and all Buddhist sects firmly under state control.

______________________________________________________

* R J Topmiller, The Lotus Unleashed:  The Buddhist Peace Movement in South Vietnam 1964-1966 (2002), 19

Death in Saigon, Camelot in Disarray

The story began on a steamy day in Foggy Bottom, late August, Washington, ’63, and played out with all the elements of a fictional spy thriller. Thanks to the passage of time and declassification, we can now eavesdrop on the highly secret daily moves within the US government (USG) that led to the coup in Saigon. A year earlier, JFK had installed a taping system, and recently the audio tapes and follow-on memoranda as well as a lengthy, detailed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) history of events have all been made public.

Foggy Bottom was a local name for the State Department complex along the Potomac River. Everyone of importance was out of town, Jack Kennedy (JFK) up on Cape Cod at the family compound, the Secretary of State at the United Nations (UN) in New York, the CIA chief at his California get-away, the Defense Secretary and others out of reach on that end-of-summer weekend.

Three senior diplomats remaining in the capital kept an eye on US-South Vietnam (SVN) policy. Recent news had not been good, and cables from Saigon indicated conditions in SVN were getting much worse. President Diem’s brother Nhu, the de facto secret police chief, had just sent squads of Special Forces and combat police into three major Buddhist pagodas, and over a thousand priests and nuns had been roughed up and arrested. Reportedly, several hundred were killed.

Since spring, the predominantly Catholic government of Diem had been in sharp conflict with the Buddhist religious establishment, which represented the predominantly Buddhist population. It had started on a minor note to which the regime had reacted violently, killing nine unarmed civilians. In reaction, saffron-robed Buddhist monks called bonzes had begun martyring themselves in public squares – gasoline and a match – creating shocking photos on the front pages of the world press and embarrassing the regime’s patron, the United States.

The US, present when SVN was established and Diem installed in the mid-‘50s, by then had much political capital invested. The escalating Buddhist crisis was distracting attention from the government’s flagging fight against Communist North Vietnam’s insurgency, and Washington became concerned. Things weren’t going well with the US client state anyway – endemic corruption and resistance to reforms to engender popular support had become the norm.

On July 4th 1963, the US Embassy in Saigon threw its annual Independence Day party. A number of senior South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) generals, including General Tran Van Don, ran into an ex-comrade in arms, Lou Conein. French by birth, American by citizenship, a long serving hand in the Saigon CIA Station. Conein had first arrived in Vietnam in ‘45 as a WWII OSS* operative, and had fought alongside some of officers now generals in driving the Japanese occupation forces out of Indochina. His old friends invited him to join them for drinks at the nightclub at the Hotel Caravelle where they revealed they were planning a coup against Diem, and asked Conein to find out what Washington’s attitude would be.

 

General Don, coup plotters’ contact with Conein for US Embassy

Conein reported back to them that the US was non-committal, but would not stand in the way – what the conspirators hoped to hear. Planning began, then on August 21st the raid on the pagodas occurred, and Nhu falsely implicated the generals. They were furious, it was the final straw.

The next day, they sent word to the American Embassy asking the USG for a signal. It was the very day the new ambassador, Henry Cabot Lodge, arrived. He’d been briefed earlier and was disposed toward regime change. He cabled State for instructions and ordered Conein to liaise with the cabal. In addition, a team of Army Security Agency (ASA) linguists (lingys), including brother Jeff Sharlet, were quickly flown into Saigon from Clark Air Base in the Philippines (PI). Set up at an out of the way base, their classified mission was to tap into the conspirators’ communications.† 

Lodge’s urgent cable reached Washington that humid Saturday morning, instantly setting in motion a flurry of activity. Since spring the President himself and most of his senior advisers had become disenchanted with Diem’s leadership, especially his brother’s actions. It had become clear that the war against the insurgents would not be won without a regime change.

The ambassador needed immediate guidance, so the key officer, Assistant Secretary of State for the Far East Hilsman, and his superior, the Deputy Secretary of State, began urgently drafting strong, unambiguous instructions for regime change in Saigon – at the very least, the removal of Nhu.

Protocol required that the communication be approved by the Under Secretary of State who was in town, but at the golf course. With the cable in hand, the draftsmen rushed out to Burning Tree Golf Course where they caught up with Secretary Ball at the ninth hole. Ball insisted on calling JFK at his Hyannisport retreat. The President suggested circulating the draft for more approvals.

By Saturday evening, Rusk had been reached at the UN, as well as the acting chiefs at the Pentagon and CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Shortly after 9 PM, JFK’s White House Vietnam adviser telephoned him at the Cape and secured final approval. At 9:36 PM, the cable that would irreversibly transform America’s commitment in Southeast Asia went off.

Marked ‘Top Secret’ and ‘Eyes Only – Ambassador Lodge’, the text was as direct as diplomatic language permitted. The ambassador was to see Diem forthwith to say that the USG could no longer tolerate Nhu, but if Lodge’s efforts were to no avail, then, in the delicate phrasing of high diplomacy, “we must face the possibility that Diem himself cannot be preserved.” The key generals were to be told that if Diem proved obdurate about his brother, then the USG is “prepared to accept the obvious implication that we can no longer support Diem” himself. The ambassador was assured that Washington would back him “to the hilt.” As history has recorded, a ‘green light’ had been given.

Ambassador Lodge and President Diem

On Monday, August 26th, with all the foreign policy principals back in town, there was alarm that the cable had been too strong, even incendiary. The President’s advisers were divided – McNamara at the Pentagon, McCone of CIA, and General Taylor of the Chiefs all felt that Hilsman, Harriman, and Ball had gone too far. Concerned over the divide among his inner circle, JFK quickly convened the National Security Council.

At that first of many meetings, the President served as moderator, generally questioning rather than expressing his views. However, at the outset when several inner circle people proposed withdrawing the cable, JFK rejected that course of action.

Despite the concern over the tone of the cable, Hilsman led off the initial session, expressing the broad consensus that Nhu had to go. He added that the two key generals who had sent word to Lodge told their US contacts “you have got to make up your mind.” From where the generals stood, things had reached a critical point, and the USG could no longer sit on the fence. JFK called another meeting for Tuesday and asked that Ambassador Nolting, the outgoing Saigon envoy be present. McNamara suggested designating the policy group an Executive Committee or ExComm.

As the ExComm went through a series of meetings that last week of August, no clear agreement on what to do about the situation in Saigon had been reached, and the President was beset by indecision.

On August 28th, domestic politics momentarily intruded on the ExComm deliberations. That was the day of the great march on Washington, 250,000 strong, culminating in Martin Luther King’s (MLK) iconic ‘I Have a Dream’ speech at the Lincoln Memorial.  JFK broke off a late afternoon session to receive MLK and a delegation from the historic event.

 

MLK (l) leading a delegation to meet with JFK (r), August 28, 1963

Although JFK was deeply skeptical about its likelihood of success, he decided at the next day’s ExComm on one more attempt to get Diem to oust Nhu. If it failed, the ambassador was to learn of the generals’ plans, but without committing the USG. Ruefully, JFK observed that America was “hip-deep in mud in Vietnam” and if he let the country go “down the drain,” Congress would be madder than hell.

JFK remained distressed that his closest advisers disagreed, not only in Washington, but at the Saigon embassy where Lodge was an enthusiastic coup proponent while the general commanding the military advisors, essentially a career staff officer an old cavalry officer with no knowledge of guerrilla warfare, was doubtful and the CIA station chief less than keen. However, as the leading authority on the secret history of the Vietnam War has concluded: “In effect the President rejected an immediate coup, but accepted that one would eventually take place.”**

By the end of that hectic week in August, JFK directed a cable be sent leaving the initial green light signal on the table, but expressing his second thoughts. No doubt divining Washington’s hesitation and ambivalence, the generals, who were risking their lives and feared possible betrayal either by one of their own or even the Embassy, abruptly suspended planning for a near-term coup. The diplomatic reason given – they didn’t feel ready.

The pressure was off at the embassy, but Jeff and the ASA team continued their covert assignment on a 24/7 basis, recording and translating the intercepted communications of the target generals, and no doubt highlighting key words that turned up. Their ‘product’, destined for the National Security Agency, was so politically sensitive that it was rigged to explode should the guards be stopped enroute to the airport for the flight to Washington by South Vietnamese police or military personnel.

Decades later Jeff’s buddy, the late Ed Smith††, told me that at the time they had no idea why they were listening in on US allies. Despite their top secret and cryptographic security clearances, the ‘big picture’ was well above their pay grade. Jeff and the intercept team did not have ‘Need to Know’, a concept I understood well from my own ASA experience in Cold War Europe where  the translator working next to me and I were not permitted to discuss our respective work – compartmentalization was the name of the game.

September arrived, and nothing had changed in Saigon. The bumbling Diem remained blissfully unaware of the real state of affairs in the country, having long encouraged overly optimistic reports. Even his brother Nhu privately referred to the regime as ‘mandarin’ and ‘feudal’. Washington’s dilemma was that while the war was unwinnable with Diem in power, they foresaw political instability and a lost cause in the long run without him.

Meanwhile, Saigon was awash in rumors; an observer commented that the “city seemed as taut as a piano wire.”***  The senior conspirator of the summer plotters, General Minh, known as ‘Big Minh’, asked the CIA contacts to keep the lines of communication open, so Conein, under orders from the ambassador, listened and reported through channels.

Lodge himself remained committed, but like JFK in Washington, he presided over a divided house. By all reliable accounts, things were not going well in South Vietnam, but his CIA chief, Jocko Richardson, tended to minimize the political crisis while his military adviser, General Harkins, written off by history as a “compelling mediocrity,”**** kept unrealistically insisting the war was going well. To reduce the dissonance, the ambassador engineered Richardson’s recall to Washington while JFK, anxious to gain more clarity, dispatched General Taylor and State’s Walt Rostow to Saigon on a fact-finding mission.



JFK,  Gen Taylor, and Sec McNamara conferring, September 24,1963

Then in early October, the USG learned the Saigon generals had resumed coup-planning. All indications were that they were in earnest. General Don, now liaison for the plotters, ran into Agent Conein and invited him to his office to learn the latest developments. Don passed on that Big Minh wanted to meet with Conein; they met for an hour, and Minh expressly asked Washington’s stance on a coup. He stressed that they were not seeking assistance, just assurance that the USG would recognize the post-coup government.

That promise came back quickly from JFK who directed the Embassy not to encourage a coup, but not to discourage one either. Essentially it was a repetition of the ambiguous signal of August, but satisfactory to the generals. They just wanted to be sure as they proceeded that the Americans would not betray them to Diem and Nhu.

 

Washington now became uneasy relying on Conein as its sole conduit to the conspirators. More a man of action than reflection, he wasn’t the ideal person to convey and negotiate USG positions. For the generals, however, there was no question of any other liaison – they knew Conein well and trusted him. So he remained Washington’s ‘man in the middle’. To throw off any possible surveillance by Nhu’s people, Conein and Don would meet seemingly by chance in nightclubs, at the airport, and even at the dentist they coincidentally shared, or use cut-outs, intermediaries, since both men were well-known around Saigon.

Conversely, from their side the generals wanted to be certain Conein was speaking with authority. An unobtrusive meeting was arranged at the airport between General Don and Ambassador Lodge as the ambassador awaited a flight. Don asked him in French for whom Conein spoke. Lodge replied unequivocally, “Il parle pour moi. Il me représente." (He speaks for me. He is my representative.)

Unexpectedly a ‘monkey wrench’ was thrown into the works when Harkins, a protégé of General Taylor, who opposed a coup, on his own initiative told General Don to cease and desist the plotting. Alarmed that the Americans had changed their collective position, the generals sought clarification. Conein told Don that the general had been out of line, and the ambassador, although an old Boston friend of Harkins, quickly set him straight. Meanwhile covering all bets back in Washington, the CIA director assured JFK that if the coup went awry, the Agency would disavow Conein as a rogue agent.

 

By mid-October, Jeff, Ed Smith, Fred Baumann, and their team finished their stint and headed back to the PI, but the surveillance mission continued with another group of lingys sent out from Clark Air Base. Meanwhile, Conein was instructed to ask Big Minh and the generals for their operational plans so the USG could evaluate the odds of success, but the plotters dithered and promised only to give the embassy 48-hour advance warning. Back in Washington, confidence in the outcome waxed and waned as the ExComm constantly reviewed the order of battle of rebel and loyalist forces.

The President, already quite uneasy, was getting mixed messages from his people. Ambassador Lodge came on strong while General Harkins via a backchannel was feeding Taylor dissent. Near the end of October, JFK signaled Lodge to slow things down, but the ambassador cabled back it was too late. The US was implicated, and at that point events in Saigon were beyond its influence.

 

On November 1st 1963, the conspirators’ promise of two days’ warning dissolved into four hours when they summoned Conein. Arranging for a Green Beret team to guard his family should the coup fail, Conein rushed off with a radio and his sidearm to coup headquarters from where he radioed the embassy a stream of reports for the next 18 hours.

 

The generals had planned well; loyalist forces were neutralized, but Diem and Nhu remained at large. Finally promised safe passage out of the country, the brothers surrendered, but soon after were assassinated by a special unit loyal to General Minh.

 

The unexpected news of the killings shocked official Washington. It was front page news around the world – I read about it in Izvestiia in Moscow†††. When the President received the news, he turned ashen, jumped up, and rushed out of the room. His close adviser, Arthur Schlesinger, later said he had never seen JFK so distraught since the Bay of Pigs fiasco in ’61.

 

Whatever his intentions for Vietnam might have been, JFK was too shrewd not to instantly grasp that the United States was complicit in the death of a head of state, and, absent a successor to ensure political stability, America would be stuck in Vietnam.

 

Camelot, the aura of style, grace, and, above all, effectiveness in the world at large, was in disarray. Then a mere three weeks later with the assassination of the young president, the Camelot on the Potomac passed into history as a brief moment of unbridled optimism, the romance of great power, and, yes, unchecked hubris.

________________________________________________

 

*The Office of Strategic Services or OSS was the United States’ clandestine military arm during WWII, and precursor of the CIA established in 1947.

**J Prados, Kennedy Considered Supporting Coup in South Vietnam, August 1963, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 302 (2009), 15. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB302/index.htm

***R Phillips, Why Vietnam Matters (2008), 200.

****D Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972), 183.

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

†† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/05/vietnam-coup-capers.html
 

††† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/10/surveilling-and-surveilled.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

               

 

“ The Times They Are a’Changin’”

It was the 25^th of August, 1963, and the times were certainly changing for Jeff Sharlet and his fellow linguists (lingys) stationed at placid Clark Air Base in the Philippines. Their task – to intercept and translate COMINT, communications intelligence, from Communist North Vietnam for analysis.  Over in South Vietnam, rebellious generals were planning a coup against the regime of President Diem, and the lingys received sudden orders to a secret base, Phu Lam, near Saigon. 
 
Chances are these men did not have a good idea of what was going on back in the United States.  On the 28^th  a massive protest demanding civil and economic rights for Blacks was held in Washington DC; reported attendance was as high as 250,000, making it one of the largest political marches in the history of the United States.

 

At the Reflecting Pool, Washington, DC:

March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963

 

The leaders of the sponsoring groups spoke passionately for justice and freedom  for all.  Most memorable was Reverend Martin Luther King’s (MLK) “I Have a Dream” speech in which he foresaw a time when

…this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

Negro (then the term for Black) celebrities were present, including Marian Anderson, who led off the official program with the National Anthem; Mahalia Jackson, who exhorted MLK to “tell them about the dream, Martin!”; and Harry Belafonte, who, during the '50s in the US, popularized  the Calypso sounds of the Caribbean as well as a large body of traditional and ethnic music.  Many of Belafonte’s songs, such as the Bahamian lullaby All My Trials, no doubt resonated through the protestors’ minds as they listened to words of action and hope:

♫I’ve got a little book with pages three

And every page spells liberty.

All my trials, Lord, soon be over.†

Also there that day were two young singer-songwriters, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, icons of the social protest movement and its wildly popular music. By the time Jeff and his buddies returned to the States in the summer of ’64, the first Civil Rights Act had passed, thanks in part to the great march on Washington at which the two singers performed a moving duet of Dylan’s When the Ship Comes In:

 

♫And the ship's wise men

Will remind you once again

That the whole wide world is watchin'.†

 

Joan Baez in concert, Central Park, New York City

 

When the Ship Comes In was followed by an accusatory homage to civil rights leader Medgar Evers, who had recently been murdered in Mississippi by a white supremacist:

 

♫The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid

 And the marshals and cops get the same

 But the poor white man's used in the hands of them all like a tool…

 He's only a pawn in their game.†

 

The folk music segment closed with an emotional ensemble performance of a traditional tune with new lyrics by activist Alice Wine later featured in the PBS documentary of the same name, Keep Your Eyes On the Prize:

 

♫Freedom's name is mighty sweet

 And one day soon we are gonna meet

 Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on†

 

Jeff and his cohort may have seen the iconic photo of the momentous march on the front page of Stars and Stripes, the military newspaper that carried coverage from the Washington  event.  But they probably hadn’t seen the huge protest coming since most of them came from the north and the coasts, and hadn’t been exposed to Southern racism.  The situation in the South was eerily similar to the plight of the oppressed Buddhists in South Vietnam who were immolating themselves in the streets that same summer. 

 

Finishing up at Phu Lam in mid-October and returning to Clark Air Base, the young GIs resumed their COMINT work and went back to off-duty time in the bars of Angeles City and at the Manila racetrack along with occasional treks to the sea as well as the mountain retreat at Baguio.

 

Jeff’s pal and fellow GI Keith Willis has reminisced about the bar scene, how he wowed the B-girls with his dancing. †† Some of the dances he’d have been showing the girls were mentioned in a popular song, Land of a Thousand Dances: the Pony, the Chicken, the Mashed Potato, the Watusi, the Twist, the Slop, and the Bop among them.

 

 

Spec-3 Keith Willis on a rare ASA field exercise, Philippine Islands,‘63

 

The Twist and the Mashed Potato were especially popular, and the later film, Dirty Dancing, actually set in ’63, incorporated many hits of the day, including the wildly popular Do You Love Me (Now That I Can Dance):

 

♫I can mash-potato (I can mash-potato)

And I can do the twist (I can do the twist)

Well now tell me baby (tell me baby)

Mmm, do you like it like this (do you like it like this)†

 

Stars and Stripes had been reporting on the uncertainties surrounding the Diem regime  back in August when the initial coup plotting fizzled, but within a short time, the generals were back at it in earnest.  The eavesdropping linguists may not have been surprised when they heard news of the coup in November, but the assassinations of Diem and his brother Nhu were a shock followed by the even bigger shock merely three weeks later, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas.  We know from Jeff’s letters home how sad and stunned he and others at Clark felt.

 

But life went on.  On one of his December ‘Club Clark’ shows, radio host Airman Jim Gleason played a tune fondly remembered by Keith Willis, Sugar Shack; Keith said the bar girls ‘employed’ by the GIs were their ‘sugar shacks’:

 

♫There's a crazy little shack beyond the tracks

And ev'rybody calls it the sugar shack

Well, it's just a coffeehouse and it's made out of wood

Expresso coffee tastes mighty good

That's not the reason why I've got to get back

To that sugar shack, whoa baby

To that sugar shack.†

 

One of Keith’s doo wop favorites was also on the playlist that night:

 

♫I remember the nights we dated,

Always acting sophisticated,

Talking about high society,

Then she tried to make a fool out of me.

They call her Donna, Donna the Prima Donna…†

 

New Year’s ‘64.   In mid-January a covert operations plan for infiltrating North Vietnam was launched, OPLAN 34A.  At the end of the month, General Khanh seized power, in another of what became a long series of coups – from General Minh who had unseated Diem.  Countering the guerrilla war being directed from the North was not going well as a US classified study concluded "South Vietnam has, at best, an even chance of withstanding the insurgency menace during the next few weeks or months." At best. 

 

In mid-February Jeff and his buddies were ordered up to a small bleak base, Trai Bac Station, Phu Bai, near the DMZ, the demilitarized zone, to work from there carrying out so-called ‘black ops’ against North Vietnam. Depending on the season, the men lived in gritty dust or in lashing rain and mud; in either case, they sweltered.

 

Meanwhile back in the States, folk and protest music favored another GI linguist, John Buquoi, was increasingly popular.  Buffy Sainte-Marie’s scorching, hard-hitting debut album included her song, Universal Soldier, about individual responsibility for war and not blindly following orders, thus presaging the GI Movement against the Vietnam War.

 

♫ And he's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France

He's fighting for the USA

And he's fighting for the Russians and he's fighting for Japan

And he thinks we'll put an end to war this way†

 

Phil Ochs, a master of satire, wrote Talking Vietnam Blues in ’64.  Had he not later committed suicide, he might have achieved the stature of Bob Dylan:

 

♫He [Diem] said: "meet my sister, Madame Nhu

The sweetheart of Dien Bien Phu"

 He said: "Meet my brothers, meet my aunts

 With the government that doesn't take a chance.

 Families that slay together, stay together."†

 

Even artists known for their feel-good songs began to pick up the protest pen.  One was Sam Cooke, who, like Dylan, Baez, and Ochs, saw that the times were indeed a’changin in his A Change Is Gonna Come:

 

♫Oh there been times that I thought I couldn't last for long

But now I think I'm able to carry on

It's been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will†

 

Jeff returned stateside in June ‘64, shortly before the Gulf of Tonkin Crisis.  But that’s another story.

† Links to music videos

All My Trials, traditional: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iLiwycXQoA

When the Ship Comes In, Only a Pawn in Their Game, and Keep Your Eyes On the Prize:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLwHnNybADo

Do You Love Me:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x43vK0k6A2I

Sugar Shack:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DW8ecqu0Iw&feature=related

Donna the Prima Donna:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igGVFZNCbZI

Universal Soldier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYEsFQ_gt7c

Talking Vietnam Blues:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5JOfkQRuBY

A Change is Gonna Come:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fGjmQiVTeBc

†† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/08/music-to-wait-for-war-by.html