“ 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 Mountains of Laos

From the entrance of the squad tent, Jeff could see the mountains of Laos. Brother Jeff Sharlet was in the narrowest, most northern part of South Vietnam serving at an American base near the small ville of Phu Bai in 1964. From where he stood, the South China Sea was to his left; to his right was the rugged Annamite Range as far away as Laos, maybe 50 miles as the crow flies.
 
Jeff was an American ‘military advisor’, one of 16,000 sent mostly by President Kennedy to help South Vietnam (SVN) quell a guerrilla insurgency guided from Communist North Vietnam (NVN).  At that point it wasn’t much of a war, what political scientists called a low-intensity conflict with hard fighting between the SVN Army (ARVN) and the insurgents in the far south in the Mekong Delta as well as occasional hit and run skirmishes in the Central Highlands, but relative quiet around Phu Bai not far below the DMZ and the border with NVN. From Hanoi’s strategic perspective, the action was in the more populous southern part of the country in and around Saigon, the capital.
 
Phu Bai was a very small  outpost relative to regular military bases. Jeff’s outfit was called Detachment J, a subunit of the 3^rd Radio Research Unit (RRU), the euphemism for the intelligence-gathering facility tucked away behind barbed wire at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airport. The 3^rd RRU and Det J were part of the Army Security Agency (ASA), an independent communications intel agency nominally within the Army, but actually under aegis of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Washington. In effect, Phu Bai was NSA’s listening post in closest proximity to NVN.
 
It was an ASA installation, but the base also accommodated a much smaller Marine unit doing much the same thing. ASA intercepted NVN military land communications while the Marines’ beat was the small coastal NVN Navy’s ship to shore and ship to ship communications. Both units were made up of Vietnamese linguists like Jeff, Morse code operators, cryptographers, security guards. and the usual logistical personnel.
 
Marine corporal Dave Reinhardt was in the first Vietnamese class at Army Language School in Monterey CA; he’d been assigned to Phu Bai with the 1^st Composite Radio Company, a unit attached to the 3^rd RRU, the year before Jeff arrived. Phu Bai was not far from the ‘street without joy’, a stretch of highway named by the French who had been frequently ambushed there during the First Indochina War (1946-54).* Dave described the area as peaceful in 1963, with little evidence of the insurgent Viet Cong (VC) – except for road mines. The terrain was mostly flat with little vegetation. Right across from the base was an old French airstrip, the control tower abandoned, but with a long enough runway in good condition for large US military aircraft to land.
 
A year later in ’64, the Pentagon (DOD) began taking a greater interest in remote Phu Bai. Up to that point, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had been responsible for running ‘black ops’, clandestine operations, against NVN, although most of its efforts had ended in failure. Defense Secretary McNamara decided DOD could do a better job and lobbied the White House. In mid-January President Johnson (LBJ) authorized OPLAN 34A, a comprehensive plan described as “a wide variety of sabotage and psychological operations [psy ops] against North Vietnam.”** The centerpiece would be to continue cross-border commando infiltrations, which DOD took over from the CIA on February 1^st.
 
Coincidentally, that was the day after General Khanh carried out a coup against the military junta that had overthrown President Diem several months earlier. As soon as the US got an inkling the coup was underway, Jeff and a contingent of linguists were sent back to Saigon from their home base in the Philippines, but since the coup was quick, bloodless, and successful there was nothing for them to do. However, DOD needed to rapidly strengthen the small ASA detachment at Phu Bai, which would be tasked as communication liaison with SVN commandos infiltrated into NVN as well as for psy ops, so orders were cut for Jeff and a dozen other ASA personnel to report to Det J.
 
Arriving at Phu Bai, Jeff found a ramshackle jumble of low buildings, high antennas, communication vans, large squad tents, a truck park, and construction sites in various stages of completion. The whole assemblage was surrounded by barbed wire with a single gate manned by a couple of ASA security guards armed with .45s. The topography was pretty barren except for a small hill of just under 600’ used for additional antennas. Outside the wire was an old, overgrown Vietnamese cemetery, most likely the graveyard for the nearby ville of about 7,000 inhabitants.

Construction at Phu Bai base, 1964

 
The nondescript buildings housed the communications and intercept equipment as well as the work areas for the lingys, crypts, and ditty boppers, as the ASA guys called their specialties. Most of them were billeted in the large tents set on wooden platforms with space for eight cots with mosquito netting and footlockers. Wooden walkways linked the tents to other parts of the base. Given the heat, humidity, and flying insects of Southeast Asia, at night the side flaps were usually up and mosquito nets down. Jeff and his bunkmates posted a sign out front reading:

CANVAS CASTLE MOTEL – 3

·         Air conditioning

·         Wall to wall plan

·         Scenic view

·         Floor show nightly

NO VACANCY

 

Amenities were minimal. There was an enlisted men’s club with cheap booze and a jukebox; a small PX, or military store that sold liquor, beer, and toothpaste; a one-chair barber shop in a wooden hut, a tent with some workout equipment; and the mail room. The touchdown of the C-123 Caribou mail plane was a daily event. Less welcome were the nearby ARVN heavy artillery unit firing randomly and thunderously day & night and the constant hum of powerful diesel generators powering the base’s equipment—both of which took some getting used to, as Jeff wrote home.

The classified work required attention, but otherwise formal military duties were at a minimum. Given the steamy climate, the standard uniform would barely qualify as military-informal. Occasionally the men were trucked outside the compound to a rifle range to practice firing their carbines. When someone asked why the truck bed was covered with sandbags, the answer was, ‘road mines’. Otherwise, no ammo was handed out, probably as a safety measure, since few if any ASA troopers had weapons experience.

Jeff worked alongside a congenial group of young college guys like himself—Ralph Adams, John Buquoi, Bill Jernigan, Peyton Bryan among others. Ralph Adams was the best linguist and served as the base commander’s (CO) interpreter for administrative business with local Vietnamese. Later Ralph would make a career with the NSA, rising to executive director before retirement.

 

Ralph Adams off duty talking to a Vietnamese boy

As the CO’s aide, Ralph had use of a jeep he’d occasionally loan to Jeff and his buddies. Off duty they’d don civvies and roam the countryside – north to nearby Hue on the coast, south over the picturesque Hai Van (Sea Cloud) Pass to Danang, and occasional afternoons at white sand beaches on the South China Sea.

By late May ’64, Jeff finished his Vietnam tour and headed back to the States, to ‘the world’ as GIs would later say. Not long afterward, a major event in what became the American war in Vietnam occurred. A US destroyer on an electronic surveillance mission in the Gulf of Tonkin cruised close to the NVN coast well within the 12-mile international waters limit, drawing the attention of NVN torpedo boats. A brief sea skirmish occurred.

The destroyer escaped unscathed thanks to warnings from the Phu Bai Marines who intercepted the attackers’ communications, but a furor ensued in Washington. On the basis of bad information and worse advice, LBJ used the incident as a pretext to launch a heretofore secret air strike against NVN. Planes from the carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation carried out 64 attacks on NVN naval facilities ashore. Far more consequential, LBJ used the patriotic fervor whipped up by ‘Operation Pierce Arrow’ to push through an almost unanimous Congress a loosely worded resolution that he, and later President Nixon, would use to provide political cover for our subsequent long involvement in Vietnam’s civil war.

Security began to tighten at the ASA base after the Tonkin crisis. Everyone pulled night guard duty once or twice a week using parachute flares that cast spooky shadows to illuminate the area. The man assigned to guard the sandbagged radio direction finder outside the perimeter at the air strip was given a couple of grenades and the reassuring company of a guard dog in addition to his weapon and ammo. One of the GIs, noting all the on-base construction and the new runway being added across the road, figured something was afoot.  He was right.

As we learned much later from the leaked Pentagon Papers, LBJ was secretly laying the groundwork for a planned escalation of US involvement. A usable justification arrived just over six months later in February ’65 at Pleiku in the Central Highlands. The VC carried out a devastating attack on US military advisors’ barracks, so the President commenced a systematic bombing campaign, Rolling Thunder, against NVN and sent in the first combat units. As National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy subsequently explained, “Pleikus are like streetcars;” in effect, it was a convenient vehicle for the planned escalation.***

A Marine battalion (bttn) was assigned to defend Danang airbase; another was sent north to provide security for the top secret operations at Phu Bai. Because ASA guys had minimal military training, the unit commander strengthened the bunker network, added more wire to the base perimeter, and stepped up weapons practice to include light machine guns and bazookas.

As the war increased in intensity with hundreds of thousands of American troops in-country, the heretofore distant base at Phu Bai was no longer a backwater immune from armed clashes and casualties. By the late ‘60s, Phu Bai personnel had increased from a few hundred in Jeff’s day to several thousand to become the largest ASA unit world-wide. By then, the Agency no longer had the place to itself.

With VC bttns and North Vietnamese Army regulars maneuvering in the operational area that the US Saigon command called I Corps, the 1^st Marine Division took up residence followed by the Army’s elite 101^st Airborne (ABN). Phu Bai and its environs became a vast military camp, home to tens of thousands of combat troops and their command headquarters. The once largely empty terrain had become quite congested with barracks and facilities for large fighting formations.

 

Phu Bai in the late ‘60s: Marine Hq and an Address board for 101^st ABN units

In ’69, Phu Bai, an otherwise obscure dot on military maps, acquired sudden visibility in the world press and the halls of Congress (publicity unwanted by the principals involved, as it turned out). In early May, General Zais, CO of the 101^st ABN, ordered elements of the division with Marine support to assault and take an enemy-held peak with in the Annamite Range abutting Vietnam’s border with Laos. Their assignment – to attack and destroy, or ‘attrit’ in the parlance of the US mission in Vietnam, the opposition.

As not infrequently happened, US intelligence underestimated the NVA’s strength, so the force sent to do battle was inadequate. Although the elevation was just over 3000’, it was a steep climb through bamboo thickets, waist-high elephant grass, and triple canopy jungle. The opening attack went badly; friendly fire killed two paratroopers and wounded 35, the first of five such incidents in the course of the battle. Subsequent assaults went little better against a battle-hardened NVA regiment firing downhill from well concealed, heavily fortified bunkers, trench lines, and fighting holes.

US air power was not effective in the visually impenetrable terrain, and the 101^st began taking significant casualties. In fact, the enemy was so disdainful of air attack that their cooking fires were openly visible. In spite of mounting losses and an incredibly challenging battlefield complicated by weather and mud, command kept sending the survivors back up the hill for 10 days of brutal fighting when the summit was finally reached. After a massive bombardment by 150,000 pounds of napalm, 20,000 artillery shells, and 1,000,000 pounds of bombs, all they found was a small rear guard, the main force off to fight another day. Finding a piece of cardboard, a GI scrawled on it in large letters ‘Hamburger Hill’ and attached it to what remained of a tree. Another paratrooper added the words, “Was it worth it?”

In the midst of the fighting, a US wire reporter interviewed commanders as well as bloodied troops, many of whom were enraged at the high death toll, and wrote a scathing article, calling the engagement a ‘meatgrinder’. The public was shocked, and members of Congress led by Senator Ted Kennedy attacked the operation using words like ‘savagery’, ‘senseless slaughter’, and ‘madness’. General Zais and other senior commanders received sharp criticism. Back in barracks at Phu Bai, the hat was reportedly being passed to raise a $10,000 bounty for taking out the general.

In the long American war of attrition, holding ground was never a tactical objective, so US troops left the mountain, which the NVA predictably reoccupied soon after.  As a kind of epitaph, a Vietnam veteran and military historian has written that the Battle of Hamburger Hill became “an enduring symbol of the overall futility of America’s war in Vietnam.”****

*B Fall, Street Without Joy (1961)

**J Prados, Keepers of the Keys: A History of the National Security Council from Truman to Bush (1991), 201

***D Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest, (1972, 1973), 646

****J H Willbanks, “Hell on Hamburger Hill,” Vietnam (June, 2009), 24