A Voyage of Discovery – From Bloomington to Saigon

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

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

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

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

____________________________________________

Fast forward to the digital age and 2004 when I finally

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

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

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

Jeff at Indiana University, 1965

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bến Thành Market Protest and Quách Thị Trang, 1963

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

Quách Thị Trang & General Han, 2014

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

_________________________________________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jeff and fellow Vietnamese linguists were quickly rushed to Saigon.

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

 

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

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

Violent clashes between Buddhists and Catholics, August, 1963

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

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

Rear Echelon Blues – Then Came War

[Dear Reader:  The time is at last at hand to turn full-time to writing the memoir. To facilitate the writing, the blog will continue to post, but now monthly on the 1st Wednesday of each month beginning August 6th.  We will keep you informed about our progress to publication.]

         

Duty in the Philippines (PI) seemed like a playground to my brother Jeff Sharlet, stationed there in early ’63. It was a bit like being back on a college campus, but instead of going to classes the GIs worked shifts on classified material. They were Vietnamese linguists (lingys) in a communications intelligence outfit, the Army Security Agency (ASA), an adjunct of the NSA, the National Security Agency. Off-duty, their time was theirs, and Jeff made the most of it as if on prolonged spring break.

However, by June he was growing weary of the routine in the PI. You might call it the rear echelon blues. The action was elsewhere in Southeast Asia. Also the drenching rains of the monsoon season, which began in May,   had a depressing effect. And the work translating intercepted North Vietnamese military communications, initially interesting to Jeff, had become predictable and tedious.

Equally tiresome was the usual GI social scene of starting out at the Airmen’s Club at Clark Air Force Base (AFB) with its cheap drinks, then moving on to the low-life bars of Angeles City – the nearby GI town -- and the occasional trips to the more upscale watering holes of Manila, the capital. Jeff was becoming jaded with endless pub crawling.

The PI scene had become all too familiar to him until the abrupt call to war suddenly changed everything, as we’ll see in the following excerpts from his letters home.

2 Jun 63 – back from leave at the 9^th ASA, Clark AFB, the Philippines

          I recently returned from Hong Kong. It’s a great place, sort of an orientalized San Francisco or an anglicized Chinese city.

Hong Kong harbor

Thanks for the book on Southeast Asia. I haven’t read it yet, but I have little hope for the future of this region. The present situation is the fault of the British, French, Dutch, and American colonialists.

4 Jun 63

Last night I went to town, the night before I went to town, the night before that I went to town. Tonight I will go to town, tomorrow night I’ll go to town, the next night I’ll go to town, as a matter of fact I go to town frequently.

          I also sing with the Clark Glee Club to improve Philippine-American relations.

♫ Just an old sweet song

Keeps Georgia on my mind†

19 Jun 63

          Well, I’ve completed about a third of my tour of duty. My only useful activity is singing in the Clark Glee Club. We sang on Manila TV on a Jack Paar-type show last week. Our group is very popular with the American and Filipino communities.

          We sing some songs in Tagalog.* We sang at the joint US military aid group in Manila for all the generals and admirals who advise this country on its defenses. They gave us a filet mignon and lobster dinner.

          Last week we sang at an officer’s club on an American naval base where we got roast beef. I was talking to a Navy captain’s wife in the bar, and she told me single Navy officers find this a very boring assignment, as do peons like me.

          Nice Asian girls, except in westernized Japan and Hong Kong, do not go out with Caucasians. It is not socially acceptable. Therefore, all GIs from lieutenants to privates are relegated to bar girls.

Right now I’m off the hostess kick and spending less time in the local GI town. I’m going more often to Manila where the people are a little more worldly.

♫ Hit the road, Jack

And don’t you come back’

No more, no more††

          I never realized how great the little conveniences of the States were. For instance – toilet seats, sidewalks, paved streets, air-conditioned buses, trash collectors, clean food, clean people, and the absence of bugs and dust.

          Here when you travel on an intercity bus, if someone has to go to the bathroom, he yells, the driver stops, people get off, women squat on one side, men on the other.

          At least with the rain, everything’s no longer brown; the sugar cane and rice shoots are green now. All in all, I try to make the best of a hurting situation.

Monsoon downpour

30 Jun 63

          My ‘whole goal in life’ is not to go into town drinking every night. I have some good friends here in the unit who are extremely intelligent, mostly guys from the Army Language School (ALS).

We travel together, have great intellectual discussions over beers, and do other things. I’m making the best of it. I do a lot of reading and keep busy all the time.

I think about important problems in the States and the world. For example, three cops beating a Negro woman in Birmingham, a fanatic assassinates a Negro leader in Jackson, Mississippi, and another fanatic in Atlanta slashing a sit-in student. Filipinos ask about these incidents, and there is little one can say.

23 Jul 63

          I have read most of the books you sent, but I’m still reading the last few. I just finished ‘Dr. Zhivago’ and I’m now reading ‘The Marxists’ by C Wright Mills.

          Southeast Asia is an amazingly complicated problem. In my own mind, I haven’t yet come up with a way of offsetting Chinese Communist influence and keeping these states non-communist.

For instance, Burma has pro-Chinese Communists and more nationalist Communists; it’s not a cohesive entity in any sense, politically, ethnically, or geographically. This situation is repeated in every Southeast Asian state.

19 Aug 63 on leave in Tokyo

This is a very beautiful country, which is much like the US economically and physically, but very different culturally. It has been an interesting and educational experience.

 Japan in bloom

Then a week later, a sudden brief, cryptic message home.

27 Aug 63 from the Clark AFB flight line 

I’m leaving for Vietnam for some ‘field work’.

♫ If you miss the train I’m on, you will know that I am gone

You can hear the whistle blow a hundred miles†††

Back story: Jeff and a small team of Vietnamese lingys were abruptly dispatched from the PI as the internal political crisis in South Vietnam intensified during summer ‘63. Relations between the Catholic political elite around President Diem and the Buddhist clergy had worsened.

A Buddhist monk publicly burned himself to death in protest against the regime. The shock waves were felt throughout the country and beyond as the horrific news photo went around the world.

When a second Buddhist self-immolation occurred soon after, the South Vietnamese military elite cautiously inquired of the American Embassy what the US attitude might be toward a coup.

The war against the Viet Cong was not going well, and by then President Kennedy (JFK) had lost patience with Diem’s resistance to the reforms needed for winning ‘hearts & minds’ in the villages.

In late August, JFK cabled his new ambassador to ‘green light’ the South Vietnamese generals. The conspirators immediately began secretly planning an anti-Diem coup.  

Anxious to keep abreast of the clandestine developments in Saigon, the White House relied on reporting from its military and intelligence sources in the Embassy as well as the special team of ASA specialists flown in from Clark.

Jeff and his fellow lingys had been quickly assembled with full field gear and sent off posthaste to Vietnam. They were installed in a remote corner of a base outside Saigon where they worked around the clock covertly tapping all the coup-planners’ voice communications.

As to the ‘big picture’ of why they were eavesdropping on allies, the plans afoot were well above the ASA team’s pay grade and ‘Need to Know’. However, daily arrangements for the transfer of their translated intercepts to a nearby air base to be flown out to NSA-Washington, gave the team a pretty good idea of how serious the matter was.

Each day’s intelligence product was packed in ammo cans rigged with thermite grenades, then transported by jeep under armed guard. ASA’s security guards were under orders to pull the grenade pins and run like hell if there was any danger the material might be compromised and the clandestine US operation exposed to the South Vietnamese government.

15 Oct 63 ASA monitoring base at Phu Lam

          Jeff wrote me from Saigon that he and the special ASA group were pulling out and returning to the Philippines.

During the rush deployment from the PI, Jeff had forgotten to leave a forwarding address at the Clark mailroom, and while he was in Vietnam on that first tour he never wrote home.

Of course he couldn’t write about the secret operation – not even fellow ASA troops in the area with high security clearances were entitled to know – but off-duty Jeff did do other things that could be put in a letter. He was especially taken with Saigon, then called the Paris of the Orient.

 Saigon flower stall, 1963

Meanwhile, our Mother wrote him at Clark AFB, but her letter came back marked ‘UNKNOWN’. Understandably upset, she called their local Congressman who advised a letter to the Army’s Adjutant General.

She wrote the general at the Pentagon that very day, “Dear Sir: I will appreciate your advising me by return mail exactly where my son is.” Unaware of the distress he had caused our parents, Jeff casually resumed corresponding from the PI.

29 Oct 63 – back at 9^th ASA, Clark AFB

          I’m now back in the PI after 49 days in Vietnam. Don’t believe what Madame Nhu** is saying in the States. The fact remains that South Vietnam is a complete dictatorship and the Buddhists are persecuted.

          The rainy season has ended, but heat and humidity linger. Hopefully we’ll have cooler weather soon. This climate breeds lethargy.

♫ We’re having a heat wave,

A tropical heat wave††††

         

My driver’s license was supposed to be renewed by September 30^th, and I didn’t do it. I was in Vietnam at the time, in the jungle. I’ll write to Motor Vehicles and tell them I was fighting a war and to please excuse this oversight.

On 1 Nov ‘63 the South Vietnamese generals carried out their successful coup during which the president and his brother, the notorious secret police chief Nhu, were assassinated. General Minh, leader of the junta, became the new head of state, beginning a long period of political instability in Saigon.

General Minh, new head of state, 1963

Meanwhile, on the lighter side of history, our Mother’s insistent inquiry as to Jeff’s whereabouts had worked its way down the chain of command from Washington to Saigon and back to the 9^th ASA at Clark – much to his embarrassment:

5 Nov 63

          I know you must have been worried when your letter was returned to you, especially after reading about the coup in Saigon (by the way it’s the best thing that's happened in Vietnam in a decade; now the people are very happy).

          I neglected to write to tell you I had returned to the PI, but I wish you hadn’t contacted your Congressman. It caused a lot of trouble for the field station commander, my company commander (CO), and me.

I’m writing this letter because I have received a direct order from my CO to write one tonight. He even wants to see me put it in the mail.

          Please be more discreet in the future. The Army and I (although at opposite ends of the philosophical totem pole), do not relish embarrassments and inconveniences like this.

22 Nov 63

          In the middle of the night we heard of the President’s assassination. No words can describe the gloom that hangs over this place. It’s as if a little bit of everyone suddenly died. It was more than a shock – much more than a shock.

20 Dec 63

          I think the States are going to hell under the strain of the ‘Cold War’. As for me, I haven’t yet decided whether I’m going to agitate in my society to better it, or retire from the struggle completely to hide in some environment like the academic community.

          Vietnam is a little quieter these days. Happy Holidays.

          The turbulent year ’63 came to a subdued end, but then just several weeks later in early ‘64 another coup took place in Saigon, and Jeff was soon on his way back to Vietnam – back to war – a story for another time.    

*Tagalog, along with English, one of the two official languages of the Philippines.

**Diem’s sister-in-law, then on a speaking tour in the US promoting the regime.

†       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZceOIAh1i0&feature=kp

††     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKvhxapM5zo&feature=kp

†††   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=stwt_ew6Bac

†††† https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57qy7MCzLXA

Celebration of Defeat?

When did the Vietnam War start? Of course we mean the ‘American war’ in Vietnam. Everyone knows when the French Vietnam War began – in 1945 when the forces of defeated France returned to Indochina, denied the Vietnamese independence, and attempted to resume control of their colonies.  The date of America’s ill-fated involvement in that faraway land, however, is more ambiguous.

Dating America’s major wars has rarely been difficult or controversial. Absent or present a constitutional declaration of war, the trigger events have been beyond dispute – the Battle of Lexington and Concord triggered the Revolutionary War; Fort Sumter, the Civil War; and Pearl Harbor, America’s World War II; while North Korea’s crossing the 38th parallel brought the US into the Korean War.

Why should we care what year our Vietnam began? Mercifully, it’s long over. For those who caught the Vietnam Memorial ceremony in Washington this past Memorial Day, the issue must have been somewhat puzzling. President Obama chose the occasion to solemnly declare the 50^th anniversary of the Vietnam War. At the same time, he announced the launch of an official Vietnam War Commemoration that is to last 13 years, until 2025. Where did all this come from? Well, the Congress, presumably in a bipartisan spirit, mandated the Secretary of Defense to plan a commemoration back in 2006, and the Pentagon brought forth a preliminary plan in ’10. Why then wait two years for the launch, what’s the significance of 2012?

The President chose to couple the opening of the commemoration with a significant anniversary, the 50^th of the war, but counting back from this year would mean the Vietnam War started in 1962. A strange choice, as we shall see. First of all, US involvement in the fate of Vietnam goes back much further, moving forward in time in what might be called mini and maxi escalatory steps. It began in 1950 when President Truman sent military aid to the French struggling against the Viet Minh, a national communist insurgency in Indochina, and established the MAAG-I (Military Advisory Assistance Group-Indochina).

If one had been on the other side fighting the French colonialists for Vietnamese independence, US aid would most likely have been felt to be an unfriendly act. Of course, Truman was acting in the context of the then-intense early Cold War, assisting a US ally, France, against an adversary being armed by our enemy, the Soviet Union. Still, imagine if the French had chosen to lend military support to the Redcoats trying to suppress the American colonial rebellion instead of coming to our assistance in our long revolutionary war to gain independence. We would have surely regarded that as a hostile act, an act of war.

Ike, President Eisenhower, continued our involvement in Vietnam even after the Viet Minh decisively defeated the French in ’54, and the great powers at Geneva split the newly independent country into two parts divided roughly at the 17^th parallel. North Vietnam was supported by the USSR, while South Vietnam became a client state of the US. Under the Geneva Agreements, Ike sent several hundred US military advisors to help the South build an army. When the guerrilla insurgency from the North began against the regime in the South in the late ‘50s, US advisers accompanied South Vietnamese units in the field in what was in effect a Vietnamese civil war.

Advisors were armed although under orders not to participate in combat, but it was dangerous duty, and the first US advisors were killed in hostile action with insurgents in 1959. By the end of his second term in ‘60, Ike found ways around the Geneva limits, and the US had nearly 900 military personnel on the ground in the Republic of Vietnam, as the South was formally known.

A decade of US arms and men in the middle of a small war in a distant country – could that be regarded as the genesis of America’s Vietnam War? To be fair to the President, he did say in his Memorial Day address that we must measure our initial involvement by a ‘major operation’. So let’s for the moment hold in abeyance Washington’s choice of 1962 and consider alternate years that could have been construed as the beginning of the Vietnam War.

Even if we consider individual years of the first half of the ‘60s, we’re still looking at a war we slid into. Or to use the more apt metaphor, we gradually slipped into a quagmire. Nevertheless, let’s consider other candidates from which to start the count toward a 50^th anniversary, working backward. Why not the year 1965 when the first Marine combat units went ashore at Danang and ‘Rolling Thunder’, the systematic bombing campaign of the North, commenced. In the popular mind that has long been considered our biggest escalatory step, the first introduction of US combat troops and the commencement of what became known as Lyndon Johnson’s war.

1965 – Marines hitting the beach in South Vietnam

We know from the leaked Pentagon Papers that the Johnson Administration had previously undertaken secret contingency planning for full-scale US involvement in the ongoing civil war in Vietnam. As the planning documents revealed, what would be needed was a trigger event, a pretext to justify the escalation, especially since President Johnson (LBJ) had won election in ’64 on a policy of dovish restraint. In February ’65, the enemy obliged by attacking the US barracks at Pleiku and a nearby helicopter base, killing nine Americans and seriously wounding 76.

National Security Adviser McGeorge Bundy happened to be in-country and rushed to the scene. Seeing the carnage, he telephoned the White House recommending Pleiku as the pretext. Operation ‘Flaming Dart’ was quickly set in motion with 49 fighter-bombers launched from two aircraft carriers in the South China Sea hitting military targets in North Vietnam. Billed as retaliation, the operation was in fact a rehearsal for Rolling Thunder the following month.  1965 certainly made a good war-start year as the United States carried out extensive large scale offensive operations for the first time.

Another possibility for Pentagon planners preoccupied with an anniversary date would have been 1964, a year of major covert and overt operations against the North. That was the year my brother Jeff Sharlet was sent back into Vietnam from his base in the Philippines. Assigned to Phu Bai, the Army Security Agency’s (ASA) most forward base just below the 17^th parallel, Jeff and fellow Vietnamese linguists were involved throughout the spring in the highly classified OPLAN 34A. The US was secretly training South Vietnamese commandos for infiltration across the border, with ASA guys keeping in touch with them by radio. The fact that the op was obviously penetrated and most of the infiltrators quickly captured or killed didn’t make it any less war-like. To Jeff, it certainly felt like he was in a war.†

But 1964’s main claim as the start of the war was the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August, a live-fire, very public event as it turned out. A US destroyer also operating under OPLAN 34A, sailing in international waters off the coast of North Vietnam, was attacked by enemy PT boats. The attackers were driven off, but LBJ, under the misapprehension that a second attack had followed against another destroyer, ordered an air strike. Planes from the carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation attacked coastal vessels and struck shore facilities in the North.

1964 - Carrier operations, South China Sea

Even though the strike was advertised as a one-off affair, how many fighter-bomber sorties does it take to constitute a major op? Far more significant, however, was Congress’s war-fevered near-unanimous passage of the vaguely worded Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, a document that LBJ and then President Nixon used as cover to conduct the war for the next eight years.

Another candidate-year for those more cynically inclined would have been 1963, the year President Diem of South Vietnam was overthrown and assassinated. The coup plotters were South Vietnamese generals, but they had asked for and been given a ‘green light’ by Washington since Diem was considered a corrupt and ineffective war leader. A CIA man known personally to the plotters served as the generals’ liaison to the US Embassy,† while Jeff and a small ASA team had been quietly brought into the country to play a clandestine support role. †

Being complicit in taking out the head of state of a sovereign country certainly constituted a very hostile act, perhaps an act of war. Would backing a coup by military forces be considered a ‘major operation’? Either way as post-coup South Vietnam soon descended into political infighting among the generals, thus adversely affecting the war effort, the United States, in a manner of speaking, acquired ‘ownership’ of the war in that fateful year of 1963.

Finally, for those looking at the broad sweep of history, an argument could be made that our war in faraway Vietnam began with President John F Kennedy (JFK) during his first year in office, 1961. The Cold War with the Soviet Union was raging, and in his memorable Inaugural Address JFK had thrown down the gauntlet to our powerful adversary on the other side of the world. But then JFK was saddled a few months later with the Bay of Pigs fiasco on the shores of revolutionary Cuba, a military and political disaster for the young president.

That wasn’t the end of his freshman year difficulties. In June, JFK met Khrushchev and afterward candidly told a journalist he had been bested in debate with the tough, experienced Soviet leader. The Soviets had taken the measure of the new President and judged him weak. That same summer they set in motion a major crisis over West Berlin, culminating in the erection of the Berlin Wall, a humiliating setback for JFK and the West.

The battered young President, looking for a way to recover his prestige, paid a visit that fall to the Special Forces training camp at Fort Bragg. Conferring his presidential blessing upon the group, which specialized in irregular warfare, counterinsurgency in the parlance of the day, JFK granted them the right to officially wear their distinctive headgear, a green beret. In the Green Berets, he foresaw a force to contest Khrushchev’s backing of so-called ‘Wars of National Liberation’ in Third World countries like Vietnam.

Green Beret M/Sgt Donald Duncan



Acutely aware that he had to take dramatic action to restore his credibility as a leader, JFK looked around the globe for a place he could demonstrate his toughness and concluded “Vietnam looks like the place.”* He significantly stepped up the US presence in South Vietnam. From his predecessor he had inherited a small advisory group that had been providing military advice to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) in their fight with the elusive North Vietnamese-inspired guerrilla insurgency. The enemy force, called the Liberation Army of Vietnam was soon pejoratively dubbed the Viet Cong or VC, a name that gained in respect as the guerrillas demonstrated their combat skills and courage.

The VC operated by stealth in the mountains and jungles of the interior, striking suddenly and lethally, and just as quickly withdrawing before superior counterforce could be brought to bear. Kennedy decided to meet them on their own terms, and by the end of his first year he had nearly quadrupled the US advisory force in South Vietnam to over 3,000 men, including many Green Beret teams, as well as squadrons of helicopters for tactical mobility and fighter-bombers manned by US pilots. 

Since the Pentagon was casting about for a precise year from which to date the war for a 50^th anniversary, why not have called 1961 the beginning of the American war in Vietnam, Kennedy’s war? That would have meant launching the 13-year Vietnam War Commemoration in 2011, but that decision would have ignored the presidential election cycle, not a good idea from the White House point of view. Aside from the axiom that it’s always a good for an incumbent seeking re-election to issue positive announcements in an election year, was there anything else possibly to be gained by instead declaring 2012 the anniversary of US involvement and the beginning of the commemoration?

In the short term, yes, according to a cable news pundit. Apparently, the President did not do well with veterans in the ’08 election, and two states that may be in contention as swing states, Virginia and North Carolina, are both heavy in veterans. Taking a longer view though, might there be a downside to ignoring other very plausible years for the war’s inception and instead positing 1962? Judge for yourself. In his Memorial Day speech at the Wall on Memorial Day, President Obama expressly referred to a major American operation in January ’62. He was alluding to the disastrous Battle of Ap Bac, not far from the capital Saigon, which commenced a few days after New Year’s.

Ap Bac is an odd point of departure for a long term celebration. The outcome was a major victory for the Viet Cong despite being outnumbered 10:1, heavy ARVN casualties, and, although the advisors were only in a combat support role, significant US losses – nearly a dozen Americans killed or wounded, five choppers shot down, and the rest riddled with VC bullets. An omen of what was to come?

Starting the commemoration in 2012 based on a major setback in 1962 and then concluding it in 2025, 13 years later on the 50^th anniversary of the 1975 fall of Saigon as the last Americans scrambled to escape, makes for a symmetry of defeat quite appropriate for our ill-fated venture, but an unusual way of honoring veterans of the war.

*D Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (1972), 77

†

http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/03/searches-spectacular-shortfalls-asa.html

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

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