Arise! A Latter-Day Poet of the Vietnam War

The war in Vietnam has long been over, but from time to time new writing still appears illuminating the period in a fresh light. So it is with John Buquoi’s just published book of poetry, Snapshots from the Edge of a War.* Although the eloquently and vividly written poems were written one by one, the collection can be read as a single long narrative poem about a large part of America’s war in Vietnam.

The perspective is John’s – as a Vietnam GI, later as a civilian contractor, he bore witness from the fateful year of ‘63 until the end of his extended time in Vietnam in ’70. From the distance of time and much reflection, the poet looks back nearly half a century; his poems have a retrospective antiwar tilt with a hint of the bittersweet.

John was ASA – the Army Security Agency – a semi-clandestine communications outfit, the military arm of the NSA, or National Security Agency, in Washington DC. After a year of intensive study of Vietnamese at a military language school on the California coast, he was shipped out to Vietnam. It was fall of ’63 as a simmering coup in Saigon was coming to a boil.

South Vietnamese generals were plotting against President Diem with sub rosa support from the Kennedy White House. To be on the safe side though, Washington sent in a small team of Vietnamese linguists (lingys) to secretly monitor the generals’ communications to learn what they were up to outside the earshot of the US Embassy. Jeff Sharlet, my brother, was part of the lead group stationed at a remote listening post outside Saigon, the capital, in August. John Buquoi arrived as a replacement in October.

Early in the narrative poem, the poet is out on the town in Saigon with Jeff and other lingys. They were walking toward the Imperial, a French-Vietnamese café when old waiters at l’Imperial/sprint out from the open air café/racing a pursuing billow/of hot shrapnel steel, smoke and fire/from Mr. Charlie’s tossed grenade. ¹ For John it was a violent welcome to the Paris of the Orient from the Viet Cong (VC).

Saigon Street Scene, 1960s

Then came the coup a few weeks later on November 1^st as the lingys tapped into conversations/between the general staff/we listened to the chaos/of the bloody coup d’etat. ² Overnight Diem and his brother, the secret police chief, were out, assassinated, and the generals were in.

The coup over, the linguists returned to their other assignments, but sometimes even those might be interrupted by the more mundane. One day he was on guard duty atop the American school for children of soldiers’ trailing families in Vietnam. Very hot, very bored, John passed the time watching two little Vietnamese ragamuffins spend the afternoon laboriously draining a pond across the road – an arduous job.

The pond finally drained, the kids gathered up a mess/ of tiny gasping fish and crabs/trapped dying on the bottom mud/maybe to take home for dinner/or perhaps to sell at market. Admiring their industry and perseverance, the poet mused, I can’t help myself but wonder/about which side will have the will/to stick it out all the way until/that far off final ‘win’…and why.³

As ’63 came to an end, John again bore witness on Christmas Eve to the ever-present VC. Standing in a bar, he and a friend felt the tremor of a blast. Running out they saw that a massive bomb had devastated a small hotel mainly housing American military advisors. First on the scene before help arrived, the two GIs sprinted toward the destruction.

We made it through the fence/into the Stygian courtyard scene/of burning cars, twisted steel/blasted brick and glass/into a silence beyond death/soundless but for the crackle/of the scattered fires/and the occasional explosion.⁴

A wounded Vietnamese man stumbled from the wreckage, pointing back where his friends were still trapped. John plunged into the choking smoke, found the two bloodied, deafened guys, and just hoping for no second bomb/we crawled out along the floor.⁴ Merry Christmas from Victor Charlie.

Sent up to an outpost near the border with North Vietnam in early ’64, John got a call that two of his good buddies back at Saigon base had been killed – while watching a softball game. The VC had planted a bomb under their section of the bleachers – they told me it was all over in a flash of fire/… they told me all they thought there was to tell, except/they didn’t tell me that 50 years on as I remembered them/I would see them so then time young ….⁵

John was at Phu Bai, ASA’s northernmost listening post where the linguists liaised by radio with South Vietnamese commandos infiltrated across the border. Often as not, the commandos were soon killed or captured by the Communist border troops while watchers just as young as they/listen here, close by, listening/listening, listening, waiting/until their faint transmissions end.⁶

To unwind the stresses of the latest failed black mission, the guys went off to the base club – a hole in the wall with cheap drinks – where they're greeted by Bill, a great gruff, bluff, comic walrus/philosopher, storyteller/our mustached brother holding court with a bottle of whiskey. Jeff, distracted, tired, slouches down/and Bill, in greeting sloshes out/a double Cutty Sark his way/Jeff downs the shot but craves a beer⁶

Already deeply disillusioned with the war, Jeff raged:

this place stinks and this war’s bullshit/

we’re not fucking helping ‘em here/

just makin’ some fat white guys rich/

from people dyin’ on all sides/

’just war’, my ass, there’s no such thing/

not here anyway, least of all.⁶

Hearing the last call for drinks, the gang loaded up and headed out to the base perimeter to continue partying. Peyton joins them, a beat poet/philosopher, weaver of spells/young Kerouac still on the road/the sandbag bunker full of drunks/… until the first dim wash of dawn mists up/pale pinked orange and gold pastels from/over east’s South China Sea, and/beyond those places once called home.⁶ So went many a night at Phu Bai.

In the midst of the nightmare that would soon engulf their daily lives, the poet showed his affection for the Vietnamese. Sitting in a bar with Jeff down the coast in Danang, they encounter a Tom Sawyer kid called ‘Joe’, all/Vietnamese with a huge smile/and sparkling eyes that made you think/you could probably trust this one/even as you checked your wallet.⁷

A bus in Danang

Little Joe, maybe all of eight years old, beaming mischievously among the bar girls, made his pitch:

Hey, G.I. guys! I watch your jeep

 make sure it not get stolen here? …

guys, guys, for sure I watch it cheap

only maybe 10-20 p[iastres]

I guarantee you satisfied

nobody else watch jeep like Joe

and I can tell you about these girls.⁷

John and Jeff laughed, gave him some coins, you couldn’t help but love the kid.⁷

It’s ’65, the war would soon be in full throat, John was back in Saigon. Tracing favorite images from Graham Greene’s famous novel of Vietnam in the ‘50s, the poet found himself on the street where the author’s heroine lived, perhaps even in the same building. Within this perfect corner/at the razor intersection/ of the fiction and the real/ … we relax … with a magical twilight meal/as we try to ignore the war/thunders across the river.⁸

Drawing from his memories of the lively Saigon night scene, the poet records snapshots from the past. A GI in from the field celebrating his first firefight, just seventeen, already killed a man/

          No shit, I stood up and he looked at me

          motherfuckin’ zip maybe ‘bout my age

          and right then, man, it was like Dodge City

          I beat him on the draw Matt Dillon style⁹

But as the Dodge City kid keeps retelling the story, he dissolves to tears, calling his ‘momma’/screaming for Jesus to come take him home.⁹

At another bar was a lovely girl whose name meant ‘Teardrop’ She day- dreamed of childhood days back in her village, swimming in the cool canals/nights listening to the soft rain/by the light of yellow candles/near to comforting kitchen fires/safe from the thunderstorms of war. All dead now except her mother/she works here just to care for her/in this old taxi dancing club/a hostess to Americans.¹⁰

Early spring and the Marines were about to hit the beaches. Like an impending war game, the US was moving its pieces into place. John and a radio operator were dropped on a peak eagle high above the coastal plain/just eastward from bloody Route 19¹¹ – their mission to listen for the enemy’s counter moves to challenge the arrival of the first US combat units.

Exploring their turf, the two GIs found trenches hacked from bedrock/granite defenses all around the hill/hand hewn so deep so long ago.¹¹

From which of Vietnam’s wars from over the decades and even the centuries, they didn’t know. But the silent stone’s message was clear to them,

                   those who hand cut trench terraces

                   from black bedrock had never quit

                   and we knew their heirs, our ‘enemies’,

                   would never give up their father’s land

                   not even to us…Marines or no ¹¹

Just a few days off the hilltop post, the poet finds himself in the cramped cool cocoon/ of a World Airways flight/homeward bound/trying to shake/cold turkey/the adrenaline high/of life and death/in a war zone.¹²

John’s war was over – or was it? As the next post will show, he would soon be back in Nam, but in a different role, one that afforded him even broader vistas of a society being torn asunder by war.

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*http://www.amazon.com/snapshots-edge-war-John-Buquoi-ebook/dp/B017MR461C

The book is available in e-book, Kindle, and hard copy.

¹  “frag racing,” J Buquoi, snapshots from the edge of a war (2015), 10. Quotes from the poems in the text are indicated in bold blue type.

₂  “oversight,” Ibid, 8.

³ “hangin’ in,” Ibid, 14.

⁴ “hangin’ in,” Ibid, 45.

⁵ “what they told,” Ibid, 16.

⁶ “phu bai nights,” Ibid, 18.

⁷ “joe,” Ibid, 34.

⁸ “maybe,” Ibid, 36.

⁹ “dodge city kid,”Ibid, 40.

¹⁰ “two girls called kieu,” Ibid, 42.

¹¹ “ground truth,”Ibid, 51.

¹² “homecoming,” Ibid,53.

         

         

Scenes from a Short but Interesting Life

The formative years …

The Albany Academy, Albany NY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                        

                                           Out to the coast …

Nepenthe’s at Big Sur, California coast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life in the tropics …

Enjoying good times in the Philippines

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the Paris of the Orient …

A Saigon street scene, 1963

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

High above the heat and dust of the plains

The road to the hill station at Baguio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cuba Dispatches – The View from Moscow

In the fall of ’62, brother Jeff and I were each doing our thing. He was reluctantly learning Vietnamese – he had wanted Russian – at the Army Language School (ALS) in Monterey while I hunkered down in Bloomington feverishly preparing for my PhD exams at Indiana University (IU).

One day in October I was surprised to find the Cold War swirling around me. I had thought that day-to-day reality was behind me when I finished my tour on the front lines of the great East-West conflict in Europe four years earlier. However, the Soviets had secretly begun their build-up in Cuba during late summer. First, ground troops were sent by sea from Leningrad. To avoid detection by US and British aircraft routinely surveilling Soviet shipping out of the eastern Baltic, the troops were kept out of sight below decks by day.

         

Even when the literary-minded infantry commander requested permission to go topside as the ship was passing through the narrow strait off the Danish coast – just to glimpse the legendary castle at Elsinore where Shakespeare’s Hamlet was set – the ship’s captain turned him down. To all intents and purposes, the vessels that NATO overflights observed were just ordinary Soviet freighters routinely carrying cargo to Cuba.

         

Not until early October when Soviet missile launchers had been emplaced in Cuba and the defensive ground force was encamped ashore did the US detect Khrushchev’s near fait accompli. The ominous ’13 days in October’ ensued with National Security Advisor Bundy convening an ad hoc ‘executive committee’ (Ex-Comm) chaired by the President and his brother to cope with the crisis.

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During the crisis, anticipating missile strikes on their bases, the Strategic Air Command dispersed 200 bombers with nuclear loads to civilian airports.

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Meanwhile at normally placid IU, a fellow grad student in Soviet Studies, the left activist George Shriver had done his political work well. Although he had withdrawn from grad school in the spring of ’62, moved to New York, and opted for a career as a Socialist Workers Party (SWP) staffer, George left behind at the university a solidly organized, albeit small SWP affiliate, the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), and its off-shoot, the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC).

         

Coming to the end of my time at IU that fall semester, I was unaware of those small campus activist groups. A typical liberal, left politics were not my thing. My PhD coursework completed, I was intensely studying for the doctoral exams in November.

The exams loomed large in a grad student’s life. If one passed successfully, one was admitted to ‘candidacy’, meaning you moved on to researching and writing a dissertation – in effect, a book-length manuscript – toward attaining a PhD degree and beyond, an academic career.

For me then, nothing had higher priority in October ’62 – not even the hair-raising confrontation between the United States and the USSR over little Cuba just 90 miles off-shore. Likewise, the unfolding Cuban Missile Crisis made barely a ripple in the routine at ALS on the California coast. Jeff and his fellow GI students continued to attend language classes six hours a day while the Kennedy (JFK) Administration was quietly building up its assets for the low-key but escalating war in Vietnam.

Meanwhile off the Florida coast, tensions were rising. Soviet anti-aircraft missiles brought down an American U-2 over Cuba while another US spy plane, actually on a high altitude weather mission, accidently strayed into Soviet airspace, a provocation even at the best of times. Soviet MiGs scrambled, US fighters rose to meet them, and the errant U-2 pilot barely escaped, not to mention that an aerial dogfight was avoided.

Serious people in the States feared the possibility of full-scale armed conflict between the superpowers, one that could rapidly escalate into nuclear war. They weren’t far off the mark as we subsequently learned. In the Ex-Comm meetings in the White House, shielded from public view, the generals were strongly pushing JFK to attack Cuba and take out the Soviet missile batteries soon expected to be ready to threaten American cities and military installations.

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The protestors – Fair Play for Cuba stalwarts – were trying to march down a 

broad avenue amidst several thousand shouting and cursing fellow students.

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Anticipating missile strikes on Strategic Air Command (SAC) bases, the Pentagon dispersed 200 bombers loaded with nuclear bombs to civilian airports from Portland to Philadelphia. In turn, the Army mobilized a quarter of a million troops for an invasion of Cuba – my parents living in Miami told me the roads south to the sea were clogged with military vehicles. Even inexperienced, first-year student nurses in training at hospitals across the country were put on alert for casualties from a nuclear attack.

Naturally I was deeply concerned – who wouldn’t be – and I had to make a very fundamental decision. Time was short before my PhD exams, but so was the nuclear fuse lit between the superpowers. With WWIII waiting in the wings, should I hang it up – forget about studying day and night and have a final fling before everything came to an end – or should I push on. I voted for a future.

As the missile crisis deepened, I was walking across campus to the library one afternoon to collect more books and saw a clutch of people – perhaps eight in number – carrying signs critical of the President’s naval blockade of Cuba. American warships were on station to prevent Soviet freighters from delivering the missiles, the final step in the dangerous contretemps underway. The protestors – FPCC stalwarts – were trying to march down one of IU’s broad avenues amidst a huge crowd of several thousand shouting and cursing fellow students.†

Occasionally a hostile student would dash out of the crowd, snatch a protester’s sign, and tear it up to stormy cheers. Farther along the march route,

another onlooker ran out, threw a punch, and a brief scuffle ensued – the marcher slugged was trying to shield the two women at the center of the group.

Throughout the ordeal, campus security and the city cops stood by impassively as the FPCC folks struggled on, advocating at that moment as the nation was rallying around the flag probably the most unpopular position imaginable. As I walked on, I thought, ‘God, those people are brave’.

Fortunately for the world, cool heads prevailed in the Kremlin and at the White House, and the crisis came to a peaceful resolution. We all breathed a sigh of relief. It might have been otherwise if JFK had not fended off General Curtis LeMay and other hawks on the Ex-Comm pushing for a preemptive air and land attacks on Cuba.

After the USSR collapsed in ’91, it was revealed in Moscow that the Soviet combat brigade in Cuba had been equipped with tactical nuclear weapons, and the commander was authorized to use them if American forces came ashore.

Castro was furious the Soviets had backed off and pulled their missile batteries, leaving revolutionary Cuba high and dry. He was well aware of the CIA’s attempts to assassinate him and assumed the ‘imperialist’ United States would not stop at taking him out, but would launch another invasion of the island.

At IU, but for a few bruises, IU’s pro-Cuba contingent survived its ordeal to protest another day. Jeff finished at the language school and shipped out to Vietnam, and I passed my PhD exams and headed for Moscow late summer ‘63 for a year of dissertation research for my doctorate.

I had been selected for the official US-Soviet graduate student exchange designed to encourage better mutual understanding to help avoid war. The idea was that each side’s young scholars would get an up-close experience in their respective societies. I was assigned to the law school at Moscow University. It was to be a remarkable year.

My arrival at Moscow Law School in September ’63 was preceded by Castro’s state visit to the USSR that spring. Khrushchev wanted to make amends to the unhappy Cuban leader for the Soviets’ abrupt retreat from Cuba. Castro had agreed to go to Moscow to discuss a very generous Soviet aid package as a kind of reparations. The trip was organized around the May Day celebrations, the second most important holiday in the Soviet calendar.

It was the most elaborate welcome ever extended to a foreign head of state. A red carpet was laid out from Lenin’s Tomb to Swan Lake. Castro reviewed the gala May Day parade in Red Square from atop Lenin’s Mausoleum along with the Soviet leadership – a rare honor for a foreign leader.

Castro & Khrushchev, May Day parade, 1963

Soviet crowds were ecstatic over the charismatic Cuban leader, a genuine revolutionary hero. In the late ‘50s American media had lionized the guerrillas for their daring forays against the Batista regime, so one can easily imagine the exuberant Soviet press adulation that preceded Castro.

For Khrushchev, the visit was of the utmost significance as it helped repair the damage to his image with his comrades after the humiliating withdrawal from the Caribbean. It also shored up his flagging leadership position in the international communist movement – for the time being.

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Soviet crowds were ecstatic over Castro, a genuine revolutionary hero.

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Fidel understood the great leverage he had and extracted a huge political, economic, and military aid package. On the symbolic side of the state visit, the USSR heaped honors and laurels on him, including an honorary Doctorate of Laws from what would shortly become my Soviet alma mater, Moscow University (MGU). The degree was conferred in the Great Hall at MGU’s Lenin Hills campus high above the River Moskva. The citation noted Castro’s contribution to the “application of the Marxist-Leninist doctrine to State and Law.”

In his acceptance remarks before the throng of students, including my soon-to-be fellow law students, Fidel told them that his first big mistake in life was to study law in a capitalist society with its main emphasis on commercial, property, and real estate law, “laws of a society doomed to disappear.” He assured his audience to rousing cheers that Marxism-Leninism would guide the solutions to all of Cuba’s constitutional, legal, and institutional questions.

Castro went on to tour the length and breadth of that vast country from Murmansk near the Arctic Circle to ancient Samarkand in the Soviet Central Asian desert. At every stop he was enthusiastically feted by the local establishment and the general public. After more than 40 days, he returned triumphantly to Havana.

Castro and Soviet sailors in Leningrad, 1963

I arrived in Moscow for my research year in early September. The university was still on summer break so I had time to look around. I made a point of going to several Soviet movies – nothing remarkable, ordinary fare – primarily to ‘tune up’ my Russian language ear. The only one I recall was a WWII drama which, given the country’s staggering losses of 27 million dead, was in ’63 still well within living memory of nearly all.

The scenario followed a predictable plot line – first the Soviet forces suffered serious reverses, but then regrouped and through great heroism exacted a terrible toll on the enemy. What surprised me though was that all around me in the theater older men were weeping.

A few weeks later I was no longer the only occupant on my floor of the dorm – the law students had come back for fall semester. Most had been working in Kazakhstan, one of the Soviet Union’s Central Asian republics, performing their pro bono ‘social duty’ helping bring in the harvest. Moscow Law School soon came alive, and it was time for me to present myself to my Soviet advisor.

The law school was near the city center, lodged in a time-worn 18^th century building not far from the Kremlin. It was a rather ornate structure and must have been at one time the grand residence of a wealthy merchant.

At the appointed hour, I climbed the stairs to the Jurisprudence Department on the second floor. The door stood open, and I entered the cavernous room with elaborately ornamented flourishes along the high ceiling, décor I’d never before seen in an academic office.

My advisor, Dr Professor A I Denisov, a nationally known jurist, chaired the department and had assembled his faculty to welcome the American visitor. For me, a rookie in Russia, it was somewhat daunting as they all rose to greet me with customary handshakes. Andrei Ivanovich introduced me to each colleague, several of whose names I recognized from having read their books.

Everyone was cordial, but it was still little overwhelming since the huge windows overlooking the street below were open – AC not an option – and noise rising from passing buses and trolleys sometimes drowned out the chair’s deep hoarse voice. Finally, an ice-breaker of sorts as I was introduced to a junior docent about my age.

He asked where I lived in the States. Told him my parents lived in south Florida, at which he lit up with a big smile and said, “I’ll be flying over there in a few days.” He was bound for Havana for the academic year to lecture at the law school through simultaneous translation on Soviet administrative law.

The docent was part of the vanguard of the big Soviet aid package negotiated by Castro during his spring visit – one of a number of law profs being dispatched to Cuba, effectively to transmit the Soviet legal model. Coincidentally, a generation earlier when East Europe fell behind the Iron Curtain, Professor Denisov, as a young scholar, had performed the same function in Communist Bulgaria as the new regime there struggled to put a Soviet-style system in place.

As had been the case in Communist East Europe earlier, by the late ‘60s most of the textbooks used in the Cuban law schools were verbatim translations of Soviet texts into Spanish.

I soon settled into a routine in Moscow – research at the Lenin Library, classes at the law school, and occasional forays into the impressive world of Soviet high culture, music, ballet, and theater. One evening that fall I was at the Bolshoi Theater with a group of fellow American exchange students. We had gone to see the Russian opera Boris Godunov. As foreign visitors in the USSR, we were privileged to have excellent orchestra seats at nominal cost.

Bolshoi Theater, Moscow

We arrived early and waited for the curtain, which was delayed a few minutes. I had noticed that the theater’s first three rows were empty and cordoned off by ushers. Finally, some 75 Cuban Army officers trooped in and filled the seats as honored guests of the evening. They doubtlessly didn’t know Russian, so what they might have thought of that melodramatic opera – a dark tale of royal intrigue in the 17^th century Kremlin – we’ll never know.

During intermission in the lobby, the officers kept to themselves. Just as the US trained allied Latin American military personnel in our higher command schools, the Bolshoi’s guests were also part of the Soviet aid program to revolutionary Cuba. They were in Moscow for advanced tactical training in Soviet Army schools.

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North Vietnamese students posted a large sign in our dorm lounge gleefully  welcoming Kennedy’s death; Russian students tore it down in a fury. _________________________________________________________

During my Moscow sojourn, I became aware of Cuba for the last time in late ’63. I was in my room in the Lenin Hills dorms when the terrible news arrived that JFK had been assassinated in Dallas just an hour earlier on the other side of the world.††

There were just a few Americans in the dorm, and we were desperate for information. From what we could glean from special Soviet news announcements interspersed with funereal music, Voice of America shortwave broadcasts, and phone calls to the embassy, the assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, had a possible Cuban connection. He was married to a young Soviet woman and had lived for a time in the USSR. Once back in the States, he identified himself with the Fair Play for Cuba Committee.

My Russian dorm mates greatly admired Castro and were quite upset at the suggestion that Cuba might be involved in the death of the President. Paradoxically, they also thought well of JFK even though he was the chief adversary of their country.

Sub rosa they appreciated JFK’s youth and vigor as a leader. Unspoken, but well understood, was an implicit comparison with their own sluggish, geriatric leadership. When North Vietnamese students from the floor below posted a large Russian-language sign in our dorm lounge that gleefully welcomed Kennedy’s death, the Russian students tore it down in a fury.

Two days later, when Jack Ruby shot Oswald before the cameras of the world, the Soviet public was shocked and dismayed by our gun-crazy culture, and nothing further was heard of a Cuban link. For me, dissertation research beckoned, and Cuba fell off my radar screen.

I returned to the States the following summer, and several months later Khrushchev’s comrades ousted him in a bloodless coup. The bill of particulars against him included a number of his policies dubbed ‘harebrained schemes’, among which the USSR’s Cuban debacle loomed large.

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† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/12/for-better-world-lives-of-new-left-iv_18.html

†† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/11/moscow-thanksgiving-63.html