“ 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

 

The Vietnam Coup Capers

In the beginning I was not the only searcher for my brother Jeff Sharlet – two of his oldest friends from the ‘60s also sought to reconnect with him. Instead, they found my son Jeff, a writer highly visible on the Internet and my brother’s namesake. At the time I was working on a memoir on my Cold War experiences that I envisioned would include a couple of chapters on Brother Jeff – on his time in Vietnam and as a leader of GI protest against the war, so young Jeff referred both old friends to me. The first voice from the past was Ed Smith, an ex-Vietnam GI, who wrote that he was Jeff’s best friend in Vietnam. That got my attention. Over the years since, Ed had taken a degree in Oriental languages, become a published poet, served 15 years in the ministry, and was then working as an insurance agent struggling to rediscover his poetic voice. A great admirer of Vietnamese culture, Ed sent me some lovely poems he had recently written about his Vietnam tour, including one about his passionate love affair with an older Vietnamese woman. His poetry suggested a man entering the age of nostalgia, recalling happier times. In that spirit, Ed came looking for his old friend Jeff decades later.

I had only a general idea of Jeff’s time in Nam during 1963-64; I was in Moscow that year writing a PhD dissertation. Jeff hadn’t talked much about his experience, and I hadn’t asked since I knew the work was classified. Half a dozen years after me, my kid brother had followed in my footsteps into the military. We’d both dropped out of college, and in those days there was a draft, so why not enlist and have some choice. Jeff and I each spent a year at the Army Language School (ALS) and served in a special communications intel outfit, the Army Security Agency (ASA), military arm of the NSA or National Security Agency. There was one big difference; I had studied the Czech language and got a very comfortable posting to Cold War Europe in the ‘50s while Jeff, upon arriving at Monterey on the California coast, had been bumped from Russian into Vietnamese. As fate would have it, that moment shaped the trajectory of his remaining short but interesting life.

Ed Smith, a Harvard dropout, had also joined ASA and preceded Jeff to the Language School where he too had been bumped – out of Chinese into Vietnamese. It was summer ’61 not long after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, and JFK, smarting from defeat, zeroed in on Southeast Asia where he would meet the Soviet global challenge. Sure we needed Russian and Chinese linguists, but building up a cadre of Vietnamese speakers was the priority. Jeff arrived at ALS midway during Ed’s course and the two became close pals, pub crawling through the bars of Monterey and nearby Carmel-by-the-Sea, including Sade’s on Ocean Avenue where my ALS classmates and I had once spent many a pleasant afternoon.

In June ’62, Ed graduated at the top of his class and was sent to Fort Meade in Maryland for eight weeks of specialized training by NSA experts. In September he deployed to Southeast Asia, to the 9th ASA battalion at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippine Islands (PI). Four months later, his Viet course over, Jeff joined Ed at Clark. They worked side-by-side on the night shift, translating North Vietnamese (NVN) military intercepts. Off duty, they partied – in nearby Angeles City; at Baguio, the mountain resort high above the heat of the plains; and in Manila, a train ride to the southeast. Presumably NSA had given Jeff additional training in PI since he worked exclusively with Ed helping the cryptographers, or ‘crypts’, break low-level NVN codes.

Ed Smith (arrow) with Jeff, right

The Coup Missions

As Buddhist opposition to the repressive and incompetent Diem regime mounted during summer ’63, a group of South Vietnamese (SVN) generals discreetly sought US approval for a possible coup against the SVN president. Washington ‘green-lighted’ the plot, and in mid-summer Ed Smith was sent over to Vietnam to reinforce Davis Station, home to ASA’s 3rd Radio Research Unit (RRU), a secure facility at Tan Son Nhut Air Base on the outskirts of Saigon. Several weeks later Jeff and a team of lingy’s, linguists in ASA parlance, followed. NSA briefed the team on a top secret mission. No one in ASA without ‘Need to know’ was privy. The American Embassy had assigned Lucien Conein, a CIA operative, to liaise with the generals plotting the coup, but the White House wanted an additional channel of information on the plotters’ plans.

Realizing that I hadn’t been aware of what Jeff had been involved in, Ed abandoned caution and said, “What the hell, the war’s over; I’ll tell you what we were doing.” The ASA team set up in a remote corner of an Army signal battalion base near a ville called Phu Lam to the west of Saigon. The base handled all military communications for the region, American and Vietnamese. Hooking into the football-field size antennas, the team worked out of communication vans 24/7 surveilling SVN general staff communications. By mid-October ’63, their assignments completed, Ed and Jeff returned to Clark AFB. Two weeks later, the generals pulled off the coup, killing Diem in the process. Since Jeff later became a major opponent of the war, I asked Ed if he’d heard him express any antiwar sentiments. No, he replied, we’d both bought into the prevailing Cold War consensus that the Soviet global threat had to be met, although we’d felt uncomfortable snooping on our allies. Obviously the bigger picture of which they were part was above their pay grade.

President Diem of South Vietnam & General Minh, head of post-coup junta

Back in the Philippines, Ed and Jeff resumed their routine, secret work and the good life of college boys on extended vacation. Then one night late January ’64, they returned from clubbing in Manila to find orders taped to the barracks door – Report to the Clark flight line with gear noon the next day. Another coup was about to occur in Saigon, and a contingent of Viet lingy’s was rushed back to Vietnam. This time the coup went smoothly, power was quickly consolidated, and the ASA team stood down. But 400 miles north at Phu Bai near the ancient capital of Hue, lingy’s were needed to backup highly classified cross-border operations. Ed was ‘short’, his enlistment nearly up, but Jeff had time left, so the military sent them off in different directions – Ed back to Clark to begin his exit from the Army, Jeff up to the North Vietnamese border. But that’s another story.

Epilogue

Returning to the States, Ed briefly attended UC-Berkeley where Jeff, who mustered out several months later, paid him a visit, the last time the two guys saw each other. Nearly 40 years later when Ed found me, he’d had no idea Jeff had died back in ’69. We talked extensively, Ed was an immense help as I began thinking about setting aside my own memoir and focusing on Jeff. Later, I turned to Ed again with additional questions about Vietnam, but couldn’t find him. Emails unanswered, I called his company which said he was no longer there and, somewhat cryptically, provided no further information. Years passed, and then in 2010, a tribute to the late Edward W. Smith III, a well-remembered poet, surfaced on the Internet. Just three months after Ed and I had met, he’d fallen ill and died of a rare complication, the day after Christmas, 2003.