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.

“A Typical Child of the Middle Class”

When my younger brother Jeff died the summer of ‘69 at the ungodly young age of 27, I vowed to write a memoir of his short but interesting life. He had been a Vietnam GI well before the war became front page news. He came home and helped create the GI antiwar movement. What occurred in the interim was a compelling story. 

Though there were seven years between us and I was away for much of his growing up, I thought I knew Jeff pretty well. What I didn’t know about him I figured I could fill in from the small archive of letters and documents he left behind.

Jeff age 10, summer camp, Adirondack Mts, 1952

It seems I was under an illusion – it turned out I really didn’t know my kid brother that well. He had grown up, experienced things I had no idea of, and generally, unbeknownst to me, had carved out an important niche in the history of his time – the ‘60s. But much of that I learned only decades later.

However, before tackling a memoir my first order of brotherly duty was to try to get Jeff his ’15 minutes’ of fame – an obit in the New York Times. Returning from the funeral, I shut myself in my study for several days going through his papers to piece together an outline of the final decade of his life.

I had hoped an extended resume would serve as notes for an obituary. I knew getting him a Times obit was a long shot, but I intended giving it a helluva try. I didn’t know anyone at the paper except, by reputation, a senior writer and editor. I was then a young academic – a specialist on the Soviet Union – and Harrison Salisbury of the Times was a well-known author who’d been on the Moscow beat.

There was little chance he had heard of me – I hadn’t yet published that much – but invoking our common interest, I sent him my notes on Jeff, hoping he might use his good offices to recommend an obit, even a short one. Alas, I heard nothing from the Times until more than a week later when a short note from Mr Salisbury arrived.

He had found Jeff’s brief life interesting and worthy of special notice and had passed the material on to the Times’ obituary editor, but unfortunately it was too late. The paper then had a rule – no obits older than three days, and in my grief I had taken nearly a week to assemble Jeff’s timeline.

It’s not that Jeff’s death was unnoted – there were several obits in his hometown papers in upstate New York and many death notices in the underground antiwar press throughout the country, but he would not make it into the Times, so I filed away the notes for another day.

Many years later I finally began researching a memoir on my brother, a project of discovery both exhilarating and humbling. Learning about Jeff took me back to that sad week following his death, June ‘69. I dug out the notes I had originally written for the Times nearly a half century ago.

Rereading them, I was surprised at how much about Jeff I had been able to glean from his papers, but I was also taken aback at the important pieces of his life I’d been then unaware of. In ‘searching’ for Jeff over the past several years, my research assistant Karen Grote Ferb – herself a close friend of Jeff’s long ago – and I drew on the memories of his countless contemporaries in both war and antiwar, and have since filled in most of the gaps.

That left me wondering about how much a memoir begun in the summer of ’69 would have missed of Jeff’s journey. Before the age of the Internet, I could not have located the majority of our interlocutors. Cast your mind back to that era of typewriters, snail mail, expensive long distance phone calls, and city phone books as sources.

By the time of his death, Jeff’s GI buddies had returned stateside and scattered to the four corners of the country while many of his college SDS co-activists had graduated and gone hither and yon in pursuit of careers. And at that time in the late ‘60s, Jeff’s comrades in the GI antiwar movement – mostly people on the left – were still in the thick of battle, often living semi-underground, and occasionally operating under pseudonyms to escape FBI surveillance.

For the New York Times back in ’69, I had introduced Jeff as “a typical child of the middle class” and briefly summarized his Vietnam experience:

          He learned Vietnamese at the Army Language School

          in Monterey, California and later worked as an interpreter

          and translator in Saigon and in Phu Bai, an outpost north

          of Hue. [President] Diem was overthrown at the time Jeff was             

          working in Saigon, and he had left the country just a few months

          before the Gulf of Tonkin incident [in ‘64].

Indeed, Jeff was trained as a Vietnamese linguist, and he had finished his Vietnam tour not long before Tonkin – a major turning point in the slow burning war – but as Karen and I subsequently found out, dramatic things happened between those two moments of his life.

I had missed the fact that Jeff had spent his first eight months overseas at a secret facility in the Philippines translating North Vietnamese military intercepts – until late one evening when he and several fellow linguists were ordered to ship out to Vietnam on short notice.

  

The 'Elephant Cage', giant antenna array at the secret facility where Jeff worked  in the Philippines, 1963

President Kennedy had given a covert ‘green light’ to a group of South Vietnamese generals plotting the overthrow of the inept and ineffective Diem, President of South Vietnam, and his brother Nhu, the much despised commander of private armies and secret police.

Jeff and the team were hurriedly flown to Saigon to take part in a US undercover operation in support of the coup. Billeted near the Saigon airport, they performed their highly classified, politically sensitive duties in a remote, off limits corner of a US base near the village of Phu Lam.

         

In fact, I was wrong in the resume; Jeff was not in Saigon when the coup went off. Their assignment completed, he and his detachment had gone back to the Philippines two weeks earlier. However, less than two months later as another coup against the new president was in the offing, Jeff and the linguists were rushed back to Saigon.

         

Since the second coup went off quickly and bloodlessly, Jeff was reassigned to Phu Bai, a small US listening post just below the North Vietnamese border. There he and others maintained radio contact with South Vietnamese commandos being infiltrated into the north. Both of Jeff’s clandestine missions – in Phu Lam and at Phu Bai – remained highly classified, and he had never spoken or written about them.

         

I was also in the dark in ’69 when I wrote Harrison Salisbury at the Times that Jeff came back from Vietnam, finished college, and won a coveted Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship, which he took to the University of Chicago for graduate school. I hadn’t known that upon withdrawing from grad school to launch his soon-to-be famous GI antiwar paper, Vietnam GI, Jeff had financed it with his fellowship funds – for a prospective academic, a step unheard of then or now.

         

Elsewhere in the resume under the heading, Other radical activities, I  simply listed that Jeff “Attended a conference of Japanese peace groups against the Vietnam War in Kyoto, Japan, August, 1968,” an event that turned out to have a rather dramatic back story.

         

Dave Dellinger, chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (the MOBE), thus, the titular head of the US antiwar movement, had asked Jeff to join a delegation of leading American antiwar activists headed for Budapest to meet with representatives of the National Liberation Front, the underground political arm of the Communist insurgency in South Vietnam.

         

Jeff reluctantly had to decline; he had worked under the aegis of the National Security Agency in Vietnam and was still subject to restrictions on travel behind the Iron Curtain. Instead, Dellinger sent him to Japan under the guise of serving as a speaker at an international peace conference, but actually for a very different and delicate purpose.

         

The Japanese peace movement, Beheiren, encouraged US military personnel to desert the Vietnam War and was secretly hiding some 20 deserters. However, the young GIs had become restless and ill-disciplined and hard for the peace activists to cope with.

Beheiren requested the American movement to send someone knowledgeable about GI protest to counsel them on what to do. Jeff, as an ex-GI and authoritative leader of the GI movement, was the ideal candidate.

         

Suffice it to say, in my initial attempt to reconstruct Jeff’s life there were other gaps and missing parts that Karen and I eventually closed and filled in,  including perhaps the two greatest omissions.

         

I had failed to convey any sense of Jeff as a person. As my younger sibling by many years, I assumed that an older brother’s perceptions would not have been of interest to the historical record I was trying for at the Times.

         

In the ultimate illusion, as I was to repeatedly discover with each new interview of Jeff’s contemporaries, I really didn’t know the brother who had gone off to war and returned to achieve his destiny as an antiwar leader. When I asked a half a dozen of his closest friends for a single word to describe Jeff, each without hesitation independently replied with ‘charisma’.

         

I was astonished. That was an aspect of Jeff that hadn’t been apparent to me or our parents when we occasionally got together in his last years. A very nice guy, well-spoken, and mature, but I had never thought of my kid brother as a charismatic leader. I was of course pleased to learn this of him.

Jeff back at Indiana University, 1965

Jeff had other personal qualities that I had also missed. In Karen’s words, “his sense of humor and joie de vivre on the one hand and his dark side on the other; his drive, his passion, his vision, his charisma, his foibles.”

         

Finally, the biggest surprise of all has been that Jeff had come back from Vietnam a troubled soul with a secret about his involvement that he could never bring himself to speak of, and eventually carried to the grave.

No, he didn’t kill anyone – neither enemy combatant nor innocent civilian; he was in an intelligence agency, not a combat unit – but once in an anguished voice he had said to Karen, “If you knew what I did in Vietnam, you’d hate me.” That was as much as he would say despite her repeated denials and assurances.

Karen and I queried his numerous friends, asking if Jeff had ever spoken of his troubling secret, but to no avail. Admittedly memories grow dim after so many years, but that was the kind of thing someone wasn’t likely to have forgotten. The best we’ve been able to come up has been an unverifiable ‘maybe’ and a couple of hypotheticals.

         

One person thought she remembered Jeff relating a painful memory of an interrogation, but we found no one else who had ever heard even a hint about it.  In a hypothetical guess, a fellow ex-GI linguist who had served with an airborne unit involved in unintended collateral damage (civilian deaths), believed Jeff may have done the same thing with the Marines on long range patrols, but we’ve been unable to unearth any firm evidence.

         

A more recent speculation has been that Jeff may have been dispatched from Phu Bai to nearby Hue a few times to sit in on harsh South Vietnamese Army interrogations of Viet Cong prisoners to pick up any information of interest to his unit. Witnessing such brutal interrogations would not have been something easily forgotten, but as I shall say in the memoir, it seems we’ll never know.

         

Jeff never got his 15 minutes in the Times, but his niche in the history of the Vietnam antiwar movement is now secure with both a book and an award-winning documentary dedicated to him, a page in a mainstream American history text about his editorship of Vietnam GI, and a literary prize established in his name among other recognitions and honors.

More Characters in Search of Jeff – II

Bernella Satterfield, fiddler on the left

 Bernella & David Satterfield, San Francisco Bay Area, 1962

            Bernella and David Satterfield hailed from very different places, but music was their bond. A ‘red diaper’ kid, Bernella came from a family of socialists and anarchists – even an aunt in the Communist Party. Bernella went off to UC-Berkeley.

David, an all-American boy, grew up in tiny Stoney Lonesome, deep in southern Indiana. He headed to Dartmouth in staid New England where he captained football and studied literature. The two connected in Greenwich Village as folk music, their mutual love, was coming of age at now iconic music venues. They hung out with young Bob Dylan and other folkies of the day.

Arriving at deeply conservative, politically quiet Indiana University (IU) in the early ‘60s, the Satterfields helped found a Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) chapter. They continued making music, David the guitarist, Bernella on the fiddle – folk, blues, bluegrass, country.

The war in Vietnam was escalating, and their living room just off campus became the hangout for Marxist rap sessions as well as planning for emerging antiwar protest at IU. Bernella later wrote of their fellow SDS co-founders:

            Most of us were 'outsider' types – we were

            beatniks, grad students, often older than

            the typical IU undergrad, and some of us

            were from different parts of the country or

            the world.  We were the weirdos, the

            bohemian fringe, the vanguard. 

           

My brother Jeff Sharlet, an ex-Vietnam GI, was part of the group. Bernella described him as less a Marxist, more a strategic realist and tactical pragmatist – he well understood Bloomington was not St Petersburg on the eve of the Russian Revolution.

Later however, when Weatherman seized control of national SDS and turned to violence, Bernella, saying she “didn’t sign up for this,” took off for the coast where she resumed music full time. For the next two decades she toured the country and beyond with various bands, making music and writing songs.

            Moving later to Tennessee, Bernella, now Nell Levin, again took up political activism, becoming a prominent statewide activist. Ever the musician though, her new Shelby Bottom String Band recently issued its first CD, East Nashville Rag.

Ed Smith III, soldier-poet-minister-salesman

Ed Smith reciting his poetry, 2003

            Born to missionary parents in war-torn China by the light of a lantern under Japanese bombing, Ed Smith was raised in America. Twenty years later, he returned to the Orient, a Vietnamese linguist (lingy in army-speak) in a semi-secret outfit. Ed was the first of Jeff’s friends I encountered for this memoir.

            Ed and Jeff met at military language school and then shipped out to the Philippines (PI) where they awaited the call to war just across the South China Sea. Both had dropped out of university – Ed had gone to Harvard – so for them life in the tropics was akin to an extended college break with weekend sojourns to the capital a train ride away, a high mountain retreat above the heat of the plains, or beautiful white sandy beaches beneath swaying coconut trees.

            In late summer ’63 on very short notice, Jeff, Ed, and several fellow lingys received orders to pack their gear and report to the flight line for assignment to Saigon. A coup was brewing with the White House’s covert blessing. Still, Washington wanted to make sure it knew the generals’ moves.

            The lingys were brought in to tap the conspirators’ phones in a top secret operation. Two months later, after the coup took place, the lingys were reassigned, Jeff up to Phu Bai near the DMZ. Later, back in civilian life, Ed and Jeff kept in touch for a while before losing contact.

            Forty years on, unaware that Jeff was long gone (d. ’69), Ed searched the Internet for his old pal. Instead, he found me.  I was glad to hear from him – I knew few of my brother’s friends, least of all the GIs he served with.

            Returning stateside, Ed had studied Oriental languages; become a published poet; and then, following in his father’s footsteps, took up the ministry for some years. When I met him, he had moved on to the corporate world – as an agent for a large insurance company.

            When we talked, I sensed Ed was restless – he was trying to regain his poetic voice as he waxed nostalgic for his adventurous youth. A few months later when I dropped him a line with further queries about Vietnam, there was no reply. Nor did he answer his phone. Finally I rang Ed’s office, but learned only that he was no longer with the company, had left no forwarding address.

            Years later, my research assistant, Karen Ferb, finally resolved the mystery. Less than three months after Ed had first contacted me, he had taken ill with the flu and died suddenly of a rare complication the day after Christmas, 2003.

       

Fred Halstead, presidential candidate

Halstead for President, '68 election, official portrait & campaign button

            An immense man at 6’6”, 350 lbs, one couldn’t miss Fred Halstead on the campaign trail. As presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in the ’68 election – a quixotic pursuit for a Trotskyist – he traveled the country and even took his campaign abroad.

            Fred had cut his teeth politically in the southern Civil Rights movement during the ‘50s. A garment-cutter by trade, he became a lifelong member of SWP. As able writer and effective public speaker, Fred was one of SWP’s most skilled political operatives.  His greatest impact was in the Vietnam antiwar movement.

            The parties of the left routinely ran candidates for public office. Harboring no illusions of winning public office, the left regarded elections as a chance to reach a wider audience with their political message.

In ’68, Halstead ran for the presidency on the SWP line. Since the Vietnam War was an issue between the two major candidates,  he used his campaign to project the party’s opposition to the war.

            Halstead’s campaign took him to Japan to speak at an international peace conference. There he met Jeff who, as a GI antiwar leader, had also been brought in as a speaker. Acknowledging that the two of them didn’t share the same ideological outlook, Halstead was nevertheless impressed with Jeff and his role in the GI antiwar movement. Writing about GI opposition to the war, he said of Jeff:

                      An important development was the growth

                      of antiwar GI newspapers. The first of

                      these were published by civilians and 

                      aimed at GIs. The most influential in the

                      early period was Vietnam GI, published

                      in Chicago by Vietnam veteran Jeff

                      Sharlet, who managed to accumulate a

                      mailing list of thousands of GIs in 

                      Vietnam itself.

                      

Joe Carey, combat photographer

Sp4 Joe Carey, near Cu Chi, South Vietnam, 1967

            On patrol with the Wolfhounds, an infantry outfit out of Cu Chi, Joe Carey was handed a shocking film – a grinning GI holding two Viet Cong (VC) heads near their decapitated bodies, he and his buddies posing like great white hunters. As a combat photographer, he had witnessed and photographed many rough scenes, but nothing like this.

            Joe’s job was to get publicity shots of the Wolfhounds in action for the 25^th Division magazine back at base as well as for distribution to other military and civilian publications. Knowing that his edgier shots would never pass muster for publication, Joe filed them away in his personal portfolio on the war.

            Some combat GIs carried small cameras in their backpacks and one of them had photographed the grisly scene – the beheaded enemy bodies. Seeing Joe arrive with cameras slung around his neck, the GI wordlessly slipped him the roll of film.

Joe and Jeff had been acquainted at Indiana University. After graduating, Jeff had moved to Chicago where he launched Vietnam GI (VGI), his antiwar paper. Finishing his Nam tour, Joe also found himself in Chicago, heard what Jeff was doing, and passed along the headless photo.

It was the first atrocity photo to surface; Jeff ran it in VGI, and it was picked up and reprinted elsewhere in the country and abroad, causing the Pentagon considerable embarrassment.

             Joe had brought his own revealing photos home as well – the ones too hot for publication in the 25^th Division’s Tropic Lightning News. He shared them with Jeff, who printed several in subsequent issues of VGI.

            In spring ’68 the French Left contacted the American antiwar movement requesting an antiwar ex-GI be sent over to speak at a rally; Jeff was tapped. But too busy getting his paper out, he sent Joe Carey to Paris along with blow-ups of his photos showing what the war really looked like.  Narrating the shots for his French audience, Joe was a big hit and much in demand by other Parisian anti-Vietnam War groups.

            Long after Jeff was gone, Joe became a noted American chef. As Chef Joseph, he ran an acclaimed culinary school and wrote two cookbooks. He is now a novelist. As for the postwar fate of that shocking headless photo Jeff ran in VGI? – it hangs today in the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon.

 Lynn Wilson, keeper of a ‘safe house’

Lynn Wilson on a walk near Seattle, 2010

            Chicago in the late ‘60s was a city of tumult where the Red Squad roamed – undercover cops tailing and harassing activists of all persuasions. UC-Berkeley may have been the cynosure of campus antiwar activism, but Chicago was the big stage, an epicenter of protest in all its colors and hues.

            Jeff set up shop in Chicago and began publishing Vietnam GI. The choice of locale was fortuitous since he needed not only editorial help, but myriad other hands to get the paper out. When the print run of many thousands of copies of the monthly issue was ready to stuff and mail, local lefties came forward with willing hands.

            Not everyone made the mailing parties though. Lynn Wilson and her ex- helped Jeff in another way. They lived in a comfortable apartment not far from his place. VGI didn’t have an office as such – it would have been too easy a target for the Red Squad and their minions. Instead, the paper’s editorial operations moved like a floating crap game around Chicago’s Near North Side where Jeff shared a pad with two of his editors.

            Fund raising to support VGI and putting the paper out kept Jeff under relentless pressure. To give him an occasional breather, Lynn and her ex- offered their place as a kind of ‘safe house’. When she first mentioned the phrase, I was thinking hideout, but Lynn meant a retreat, a place of temporary respite from the fever zone of antiwar activism. Jeff had an open invitation.

            He would walk to Lynn’s place “after dark, having followed a circuitous route” to ensure he wasn’t followed. He was off-duty, no one knew where he was. Lynn set a nice table, and Jeff often arrived for dinner. Other times, he’d come later, and the three of them would just hang out, play music, and drink wine.

            Jeff talked about Vietnam – not his secret work of course, just the social scene – Saigon’s fine restaurants, his fondness for the Vietnamese, and how he liked their food. Lynn remembered he loved to laugh, his wonderful smile.

            A year later, Jeff lay dying of an illness that first hit him in the bush in Vietnam.  To spend a weekend with him, Lynn, her ex-, and Jeff’s roommate Bill O’Brien, drove her VW Bug day and night straight through to Miami.  Just as before, the good friends hung out, drank wine, and listened to music. Jeff was still optimistic, but he didn’t make it.     

           

Gordon Livingston, ‘an embarrassment to command’

Major Gordon Livingston, Bien Hoa, South Vietnam, 1968

            In the ‘50s, Gordon Livingston and my kid brother were schoolmates at a private military school. Jeff was just a freshman in one of the line companies when Gordon Livingston, a senior, was an officer of the cadet battalion.

            Gordon and Jeff later ended up in Vietnam, and both returned to the States disillusioned about the war. Each of them took on the military – Jeff as an ex-GI, Gordon as a senior officer in a combat unit. Jeff now has a posthumous niche in the history of the antiwar movement, but Gordon – today a noted psychiatrist and author – is undeservedly a nearly forgotten footnote in the literature.

            Gordon was no ordinary soldier; he had gone off to West Point and was destined for a brilliant military career. Qualifying as an Airborne Ranger, he commanded an 82^nd Airborne unit, was certified as a pilot, and, not least, Gordon was Regimental Surgeon in a crack outfit in Vietnam. As a soldier-physician, he even earned a combat medal for valor.

            However, as an officer endowed with high moral conscience, he became increasingly disturbed with what he was witnessing in the 11^th Armored Cavalry (‘Blackhorse’), and grew progressively disenchanted with the US mission in Vietnam. Knowing that he was running afoul of command, he carried out an audacious protest before the entire in-country military establishment.

            The occasion was Easter Sunday ’69, the change of command ceremony for Colonel George S Patton III on completing his successful tour as CO of the 11^th ACR. The audience included the commander of all US forces in Vietnam and 20 generals.

In what an angry fellow officer referred to as a blasphemous rendering of the Bible, Major Livingston wrote a highly irreverent ‘Blackhorse Prayer’, surreptitiously mimeographed it, and handed out copies to the assembled officers.

            In swift reaction, a court-martial was contemplated, but the idea was shelved as much too awkward – after all, the miscreant was a West Pointer as well as a physician. Instead, the Regimental Surgeon was deemed ‘an embarrassment to command’, shipped home, and allowed to resign his commission.

            Gordon Livingston went on to a brilliant career of a different kind – in medicine and letters – but his ‘prayer’, a wicked satire on a terrible war should not be forgotten:

                             God, our heavenly Father, hear our prayer.

                             We acknowledge our shortcomings and

                              ask thy help in being better soldiers for

                              thee.  Grant us, O Lord, those things we

                              need to do our work more effectively.  

                              Give us this day a gun that will fire 10,000

                              rounds a second, a napalm that will burn

                              for a week.  Help us to bring death and

                              destruction wherever we go, for we do it in

                              thy name and therefore it is meet and just.

                              We thank thee for this war, mindful that,

                               while it is not best of all wars, it is better

                               than no war at all. ...In all things, O God,

                               assist us, for we do our noble work in the

                               knowledge that only with thy help can we

                               avoid the catastrophe of peace, which

                               threatens us ever.  All of which we ask in

                               the name of thy son, George Patton.  Amen.

Elvis Stahr, the man whose luck ran out

Dean Rusk being heckled, Elvis Stahr glowering, Indiana University, 1967

            Buried in Arlington Cemetery with full military honors, from childhood on Elvis Stahr had been a winner in life. A prodigy, he went to university at age 16, attained the highest average in the school’s history, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, was decorated for valor in WWII, served as Secretary of the Army, and methodically climbed the ladder of academic leadership – until he slipped.

With his impressive winning streak, Elvis probably thought why not reach for the pinnacle of academe – in due time, perhaps an Ivy League presidency. His relentless ascent took him to top positions at several universities until he made it to the presidency of a major research institution, Indiana University (IU) – and that’s where his luck finally ran out.

Elvis Stahr arrived at IU just as the war in Vietnam was heating up and the first shouts of student protest could be heard on that politically dormant campus. In his opening address, he said all the right things and initially handled dissent calmly and with forbearance.

But with each new campus protest, President Stahr, a classic liberal, grew more uncomfortable with radical activism. Complicating the situation, his Washington connections enabled him to attract major national figures to IU – all of them pro-war.

It was a march of the titans – Richard Nixon; General Maxwell Taylor; General Hershey of the draft (who, in terms of student reaction, was probably the straw that broke the camel’s back); and Secretary of State Rusk, the ultimate bête noire of the antiwar protestors.

            By the time Nixon, Taylor, and Hershey had come and been met with noisy but peaceful, albeit small demonstrations, Elvis had lost patience with the student minority who were roiling the campus waters, disturbing his presidency. In the fall of ’66 in a talk to incoming freshmen, the president criticized an upcoming New Left demonstration, invoking the bogey of a threat to ‘basic freedoms’ at IU.

Several months later in his annual address to the faculty, Elvis let loose a harsh broadside against the campus New Left. Using intemperate language normally not heard at a university, least of all from its president, Stahr bluntly questioned the motives of the New Left at IU, peppering his remarks with such inflammatory terms as ‘dogma’, ‘deceit’, ‘propaganda’, ‘conspiracy’, and ‘puppets’.

            Jeff had just assumed the leadership of the IU SDS, and he and fellow activists were not about to let Stahr’s remarks go unanswered. Initially, Jeff addressed a polite open letter to the president, asking him to either substantiate his allegations or retract them.

Although Jeff quoted back to him the offensive remarks, Stahr declined to retract. Speaking as SDS president, Jeff responded with a counter-address, ‘The Role of the New Left on Campus’, a reasoned defense of the rise of student protest at universities across the nation. Published verbatim in IU’s alternative paper and issued as a small booklet, Jeff’s well-crafted rebuttal of Stahr’s “enemies of freedom” diatribe gained wide attention on and off campus.

Elvis Stahr staggered on at for another year at IU before throwing in the towel. After a relatively short tenure, he claimed he was ‘retiring’, citing “presidential fatigue”, but from his bitter exit interview, it was clear he had fled the university in some disarray.  Stahr’s race to the top had come to an end in a setback at IU, his long winning streak broken.

Nonetheless, quick on his feet, Elvis Stahr landed at the Audubon Society where he enjoyed a successful tenure, but it wasn’t the same. He’d been shunted off the main line of academe to a quiet siding more suited to his comfort zone.