Arise! A Latter-Day Poet of the Vietnam War

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

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

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

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

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

Saigon Street Scene, 1960s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Already deeply disillusioned with the war, Jeff raged:

this place stinks and this war’s bullshit/

we’re not fucking helping ‘em here/

just makin’ some fat white guys rich/

from people dyin’ on all sides/

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

not here anyway, least of all.⁶

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

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

A bus in Danang

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

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

 make sure it not get stolen here? …

guys, guys, for sure I watch it cheap

only maybe 10-20 p[iastres]

I guarantee you satisfied

nobody else watch jeep like Joe

and I can tell you about these girls.⁷

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

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

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

          No shit, I stood up and he looked at me

          motherfuckin’ zip maybe ‘bout my age

          and right then, man, it was like Dodge City

          I beat him on the draw Matt Dillon style⁹

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

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

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

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

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

                   those who hand cut trench terraces

                   from black bedrock had never quit

                   and we knew their heirs, our ‘enemies’,

                   would never give up their father’s land

                   not even to us…Marines or no ¹¹

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

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

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

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

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

₂  “oversight,” Ibid, 8.

³ “hangin’ in,” Ibid, 14.

⁴ “hangin’ in,” Ibid, 45.

⁵ “what they told,” Ibid, 16.

⁶ “phu bai nights,” Ibid, 18.

⁷ “joe,” Ibid, 34.

⁸ “maybe,” Ibid, 36.

⁹ “dodge city kid,”Ibid, 40.

¹⁰ “two girls called kieu,” Ibid, 42.

¹¹ “ground truth,”Ibid, 51.

¹² “homecoming,” Ibid,53.

         

         

Springtime in Academe – ‘Truth Squad’ Meets Its Match

In the annals of the Vietnam War, the year 1965 has long been remembered as the year of the great escalation. The date of course pales in significance and consequence to 1941, but for those who opposed the war in Vietnam, springtime ’65 will always have a special place in memory.

American involvement in Southeast Asia had begun a decade earlier when the French were still fighting to retain their Indochina colony, but it was limited to military hardware and a few hundred technical advisors. President Kennedy (JFK) set in motion the first escalation in ’61 when he began a 20-fold buildup of US troops in South Vietnam, by then an independent country. South Vietnam was under constant pressure from Communist North Vietnam’s proxy military formation, the Viet Cong (VC), a tough and seasoned guerrilla outfit.

From his predecessor, JFK inherited a contingent of under a thousand military advisors, which he then increased to 16,000 American officers and men advising South Vietnamese Army units fighting the VC. Several years later however, after the VC had made great gains, it was the speed, scale, and composition of President Johnson’s (LBJ) escalation that set 1965 apart as US troop levels soared to 165,000 by year’s end.

In the history of the American antiwar movement, 1965 also became a marker date. Although there was some popular opposition to JFK’s low intensity war, it was minimal, barely achieving media notice. However, LBJ’s dramatic escalation beginning late winter/early spring ’65 was quickly met by a counter-escalation of protest on many college campuses.

LBJ’s dramatic escalation beginning early ’65 was quickly met by a counter-escalation of protest on many college campuses.

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The reciprocal escalation of troops and protesters occurred against a backdrop of continual VC terror attacks on US military personnel billeted in the cities and towns as the countryside was steadily slipping out of Saigon’s control. A particularly deadly VC bombing of a US barracks in February ’65 brought forth a punishing response from LBJ – fighter bombers launched to attack North Vietnam.†

In Washington, the retaliatory air strikes were spun as a spontaneous reply to North Vietnamese aggression in the south, but, as we would later learn when the Pentagon Papers – the secret history of the war – were leaked to the media, the raids had been planned months in advance behind the scenes. The White House had merely been waiting for an appropriate pretext, a sufficient provocation, which the VC provided.

The ensuing attacks on the North were actually dress rehearsals for the secretly planned full-scale escalation set in motion the following month – a systematic bombing campaign code-named ‘Rolling Thunder’ – along with the landing in South Vietnam of the first US combat units. We were at war in Asia.

Stateside, the universities were quick to react to LBJ’s move. It was springtime in academe for what would gradually become a nationwide antiwar movement. First out of the gate was the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, one of the more liberal and free-spirited campuses in the country.

Stateside, the universities were quick to react to LBJ’s move. It was springtime in academe for what would gradually become a nationwide antiwar movement.

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On March 23, ‘65 Michigan faculty and students organized the first ‘teach-in’, an all-night gathering at which professors reviewed Vietnam’s history and the conflict between north and south and led discussions on the major issues with the hundreds of students who turned out. The idea of the teach-in caught on quickly as some 20 other universities followed suit the next week. ††

Meanwhile, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), a New Left organization founded in ’62 at Michigan, led the way, rapidly signing up many new campus chapters and hundreds of new members. With its ranks growing, SDS coordinated a major challenge to LBJ’s war policy, staging a 25,000-strong march on Washington on April 17^th. The lines of the emerging divide on the homefront between the government and the New Left were now clearly drawn.

I was then a young academic, a first-year Political Science prof at the University of Missouri (Mizzou) where a teach-in was also held. A relatively conservative campus, our event was sedate by comparison with Michigan’s. I was a co-organizer, but my motive was to support the war, not oppose it.

My younger brother Jeff Sharlet, an ex-Vietnam GI then back at Indiana University (IU), was on the other side of the issue. Later, after the Tet Offensive of ’68, I came around to Jeff’s view.

We held the Mizzou teach-in at a 500 seat auditorium. The place was packed with students and faculty, the overflow sitting in the aisles and standing at the back. I was joined on the pro-war side by a senior American historian. Our opponents, junior faculty like me, were both specialists in South Asia.

They argued against the war based on their extensive knowledge of Southeast Asia, the previous fate of the French colonialists, and the idea that Vietnamese nationalism was the essential driving force in what they considered a civil war.

As a JFK liberal internationalist, I placed the Vietnam conflict in the context of the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. I argued that North Vietnam’s campaign against the South was being facilitated by indispensable Soviet military materiel and was a challenge to the US policy of ‘containing’ the USSR within its imperial frontiers.

I did not dismiss Vietnamese nationalism, but insisted that Communist ideology was the major factor; hence, for me the conflict was a Soviet proxy war using North Vietnam and, in the South, its surrogate, the VC.

Teach-in, University of Missouri, 1965 – author at far right pondering

Both sides to the debate received supportive applause from the audience, but when a straw vote was taken at the end, the pro-war position had prevailed.

While I doubt that Washington took note of Mizzou, historical accounts tell us that LBJ was upset and offended that the learned community was leading the burgeoning protest against his policy.

Shortly after the antiwar left carried its opposition to the streets of the nation’s capital, the administration began marshalling its forces against the growing tumult at some of the nation’s foremost institutions of higher learning.

Meanwhile, since February’s retaliatory air attacks, the State Department (USDS) had been getting telephone calls hourly from citizens asking for an explanation of the sudden escalation that followed. In addition, by April of ’65 USDS had received over 20,000 letters of inquiry about the war. As a presidential advisor commented, the administration clearly wasn’t doing its “propaganda job right.”*

On April 25^th, Secretary of State Rusk commented briefly in an aside in a speech on an unrelated subject that he found much of the criticism he had heard against the war ‘nonsense’ and expressed surprise at the ‘gullibility’ of the academics leading the charge. The following day USDS began planning to counter the protests by ‘explaining’ the war policy to academe.

A Washington speaking team was dispatched to visit five universities in the Midwest. Leading the group, officially called the ‘Inter-Departmental Speaking Team on Vietnam Policy’, but soon dubbed the ‘truth squad’, was Thomas Conlon, a mid-level Foreign Service officer.

Conlon, an experienced 40-year old diplomat, was well qualified to lead the group, having served at the US Embassy in Saigon for two years. He’d even learned Vietnamese in the process and was an articulate and forceful public speaker as well. A ‘hawk’ on ‘containing’ Communism, Conlon strongly supported drawing the line in Southeast Asia.

He was variously accompanied by an official of the Agency for International Development (AID) and one or the other of two assigned senior Army officers – all with Vietnam experience as well. The rep from AID was Earle Young, a specialist in rural development who had served both in Laos and South Vietnam.

Earle Young, USAID, 1981

Young’s field experience was extensive. While working in South Vietnam, he had witnessed Saigon losing ground in the countryside. One of his postings was in Long An province abutting the capital region, which, on the cusp of LBJ’s escalation, was increasingly falling under VC control. One village, a mere 12 miles from Saigon, was so completely under VC sway that the government flag could not be flown there.

The Washington civilians were backed up by two colonels who had served as advisors to the South Vietnamese Army in its counter-insurgency campaign against the VC. In effect, it was a well-informed truth squad that landed in America’s heartland, confidently expecting to set the record straight on US involvement in Vietnam and quiet the spreading campus unrest.

The truth squad landed in America’s heartland confidently expecting to set the record straight on Vietnam and quiet the spreading campus unrest.

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Their first stop on May 4^th – during the weeks following the early March landing at Danang when Marine combat reinforcements were pouring in as a result of LBJ's ongoing buildup – was at the University of Iowa where the truth squad received its baptism by fire. The Iowa Socialist League organized a raucous evening reception before a hooting and jeering crowd of 200 students and faculty.

The government team argued the US was responding to Communist aggression from North Vietnam, a claim that flew in the face of the Iowa critics’ belief that we had intervened in a Vietnamese civil war. That first experience became a rude awakening for Washington’s experts, who had anticipated being heard by a typically tranquil and polite academic forum.

Braving shouts and provocative statements, Conlon soldiered on, replying to questions about why Vietnam was important to US national security with standard Cold War rhetoric; to wit, if we let North Vietnamese aggression go unanswered, it could lead to world war.

Toward the end of the evening at Iowa, Conlon began to lose his cool, agreeing with a questioner that it was a “crummy war,” but “the only war” we’ve got.** Predictably, the place erupted in hoots of derision.

The truth squad moved on to Drake University in Des Moines where they found some respite from the battle zone. The Drake audience was mildly critical but respectful, and the team was able to get its points across without incident. Traveling north, the next stop was University of Wisconsin at Madison, and it was back into the cauldron of antiwar protest.

Well before the Vietnam War heated up, Wisconsin-Madison was primed to play a role in opposition. Back in the ‘50s, the campus had a small but critical group of professors on the left led by Hans Gerth, an émigré German Marxist in Sociology, and William Appleman Williams, a Marxist historian. They were the cynosures of a graduate student Marxist study group that published a journal on left politics.

A week after Michigan’s teach-in, reacting to LBJ’s Vietnam escalation, Wisconsin activists mounted their own massive teach-in attended by 5,000 students and faculty with television coverage by CBS. A month later, Conlon and company were unknowingly heading into a buzz saw in Madison.

The truth squad had been invited to Wisconsin by the campus ‘Committee to Support the People of South Vietnam’, but on arrival at the evening’s venue with 650 people awaiting, it was also met – ‘confronted’ would be more apt – by the ‘Committee to End the War in Vietnam’ (CEWV), a 200-strong umbrella group drawing on SDS and other campus left groups.  

Although there were empty seats in the room, the CEWV activists wearing black armbands insisted on standing along the walls and greeting the team’s pronouncements with a cacophony of hisses and heckling.

I happened to arrive at Wisconsin as a visiting professor a few weeks later   and found the campus still abuzz over the ever rising American troop levels and expanding bombing runs over North Vietnam. From my office window on the campus green, I saw occasional rallies and periodic marches up the hill to the Administration Building.

A police-student confrontation, the Wisconsin green a few years later

Though no doubt the majority population of a large Midwestern university was mostly mainstream politically, the campus left in Madison was highly visible, well beyond its numbers.

Battered but not cowed, Conlon and colleagues went across the state to the university’s Milwaukee campus for a relatively quiet evening of Q & A on the war, and then headed south.

At Indiana University the military officers held informal afternoon meetings with small groups of interested students and professors. A former IU grad student critical of the war told me that the colonels responded to queries about the fighting in rural areas forthrightly and with candor, earning the respect of those present.

However, the truth squad’s full-dress appearance in Bloomington that evening turned out differently. National press coverage on the uproar at Iowa and Wisconsin had preceded the team, and the large auditorium was full – a mix of supporters of the war, a sizable minority of opponents – liberals, the New Left, and even a few Old Left – and the largest group, people curious to hear both sides of the issue. 

Brother Jeff, who had returned to college from Vietnam the previous fall, was no doubt in the audience and well informed on the conflict. He had returned from ‘Nam highly critical of the war, but at that point in time was mainly preoccupied with getting back into the academic groove.

However, from his IU letters of the previous several months, I knew Jeff was worried about the possibility of the war flaring up and, as a Vietnamese linguist, being recalled to duty – a prospect he didn’t relish.

Although battle-scarred, Conlon led off with a strong, assertive line on Washington policy in his opening remarks to the IU audience; during the Q & A that followed, the critical minority dominated the floor, firing off challenging questions and often greeting the government’s responses with vocal disbelief.

In the audience that evening was Bernard Morris, who had only recently left a career at the State Department to join the IU faculty. Addressing a question to Conlon, Professor Morris became incensed with the answer, responding “I never thought I’d see the day when my government would lie to me.”†††

“I never thought I’d see the day when my government would lie to me.”

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At their final destination, the University of Illinois on May 11^th, the truth squad got more rough sledding from many in the hall who had followed the team’s rocky reception elsewhere. They flew back to Washington, Conlon unfazed by the Midwest reception, but the others no doubt relieved to be off the firing line.

In the end, what was the outcome of the first of what would become numerous confrontations over the war between the government and its critics, initially a very small minority which would eventually become legion? To read Thomas Conlon’s subsequent published account of the truth squad’s spring ’65 tour, one might come away with the impression that his team had successfully taught the students ‘the facts of life about Vietnam’.

He believed that the truth squad had rescued the universities from those who had fallen prey to ‘communist propaganda’. Of course he was referring to the ‘extremist’ professors he had encountered  –  often, as he pointed out, in fields like psychology, the sciences, and literature, hence not qualified by training and therefore lacking in expertise on Vietnam.

On the other hand, tapping back into activist circles at Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, and elsewhere, one hears the cheers of victory, ‘we have met the enemy and he is ours’. The klaxon had been sounded – rise up in protest against the war.

As for the canard about the need for expertise to understand Vietnam – a notion popular in Washington foreign policy circles – one of the country’s foremost critics of the war, Noam Chomsky of MIT, shot that one down a year later. As he wrote, “There is no body of significant theory or … relevant information, beyond the comprehension of the layman, which makes policy [on the war] immune from criticism.”***

In reality, the New York Times correspondent covering the truth squad’s tour, called its running battles with its foes a draw. Both sides came away with something. The government succeeded in reinforcing the “views of supporters” of  its Vietnam policy while the campus activists, with their critical positions “strengthened” by the clashes, emerged energized for the encounters to come.****

*Quoted in T Wells, The War Within: America’s Battle over Vietnam (1994), 29.

**D Janson of the New York Times, who reported on the truth squad in the Midwest, quoted in The Militant (June 14, 1965).

***N Chomsky, “The Responsibility of Intellectuals” (1966) in American Power and the New Mandarins (1967), 335.

****D Janson writing in The Nation (May 24, 1965).

†  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2013/08/saigon-was-no-rear-area.html

††  http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2012/12/antiwarriors-mobilize-brothers-divergent.html

††† http://jeffsharletandvietnamgi.blogspot.com/2011/06/maverick-mentor.html

"Saigon Was No Rear Area"

It was early evening in I Corps (eye core), northernmost of the four tactical zones where US military advisors could be found in South Vietnam (SVN) in 1964. It was the first weeks of spring and already dark enough that Jeff Sharlet, my brother, and a GI buddy with him in the jeep had to turn on the headlights. They were headed back from Hue on the coast of the South China Sea to their base near the small ville of Phu Bai.

The two GIs were on a narrow deserted road flanked with scrub growth when their lights picked up something in the roadbed directly ahead. Jeff hit the brakes; they got out with carbines at the ready and cautiously approached. At that point in the Vietnam War, there wasn’t much Viet Cong (VC) activity in that part of the country – most of the attacks were far to the south in IV Corps, the Mekong Delta, below the capital, Saigon – but occasional incidents were not unknown.

As they got closer, they saw that it was a Vietnamese peasant woman curled up on the road, probably from the nearby tiny hamlet of Huong Thuy just north of Phu Bai, but was it a trap – did she have a concealed weapon or was she dead, a grenade under her body rigged to explode if she was moved? Happily neither – the old woman was just sleeping soundly on the road still warm from the day’s sun, no doubt a more comfortable berth than the bramble to the left and right. False alarm.

That, of course, was the ‘bush’ in Vietnam where groups of American ‘advisors’ to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) – as they were then called – were scattered up and down the countryside, relatively isolated in a sea of Vietnamese, friendlies and unfriendlies. One might reasonably assume that Saigon, the HQ of the US military effort to help SVN cope with a guerrilla war directed from Communist North Vietnam (NVN) – was a relatively safe area. Alas, not so.      

During the previous year, Jeff had been based in the Saigon area from late summer into the fall. The concentration of Americans there – enjoying the pleasures of the city called the ‘Paris of the Orient’ – instead proved a magnet for persistent and well-coordinated terrorist attacks by VC cadres who were indistinguishable from other Saigonians.

A Saigon street scene, 1961

Once in office in early ’61, President Kennedy (JFK) had begun a build-up of the small US military commitment in SVN inherited from outgoing Dwight Eisenhower. In effect, during the next 1000 days in the White House until his assassination in late ’63, JFK had significantly escalated the sleepy, low-key internal war between ‘our guys’ in the South and the Communists in the North of the divided country. At that stage of what became the long war in Vietnam, the NVN carried out their campaign to overthrow the government of SVN through their proxy, the shadowy National Liberation Front (NLF) and its tough fighting arm, the VC.

♫They said you're pretty safe when the troops deploy

But don't turn your back on your house boy

When they ring the gong, watch out for the Viet-Cong†

In response to JFK’s moves during 1961-62, the underground VC units of the capital responded at first with numerous incidents of terror against the Vietnamese population of Saigon – the implied message being that the regime of President Diem couldn’t effectively fulfill the basic function of government, i.e., the protection of its citizens. However, as the numbers of US military personnel multiplied three-fold in the next two years, the VC began directing carefully planned attacks against venues in the city where Americans – both military personnel and the growing host of civilian contractors and dependents – gathered for diversions.

By the end of ’63, the toll of dead and wounded Americans in Saigon had registered in Washington, provoking discussions of possible retaliatory bombing attacks against the North. The NLF took note and in early ’64 directed its VC cadres to zero in on Americans in Saigon. The new policy of urban terrorism bore two implicit messages – the US should realize how vulnerable their people were in the capital if they decided to strike NVN, and high profile attacks against Americans should have a demonstration effect on their South Vietnamese ‘clients’, to wit the US cannot protect you.

In ’64-’65 the frequency and intensity of VC targeting of US billets and recreational facilities had increased five-fold from ’61. Years later, the atmosphere of bombs going off on the streets of Saigon was cinematically depicted in Robin Williams’ Good Morning Vietnam (1987). On the ground back in the ‘60s, Jeff and his GI pals, all Vietnamese linguists (lingys) attached to a communications intelligence outfit outside the city in ’63, were caught up in the rising tide of VC violence aimed at Americans as can be seen in the following account by a fellow GI of an eventful evening on the town with Jeff and three other lingys:

We were walking down Tu Do Street [the main drag],

headed for the Impérial, a little French open-air bar – a

corner bar – classic French, tile floor, zinc top bar,

uncomfortable stools, bistro menu, maybe a dozen tiny

tables open to the street on two sides, ancient Vietnamese

waiters in khakis, white shirts and flip-flops, no girls – the

 perfect venue for a Pernod or Pastis on a warm night.

Quelle ambiance! …

We were walking toward the bar five abreast, a short

block away, maybe 50-75 yards, when a grenade was

thrown from a motorbike into our intended destination.

It was, for all of us, a strange experience – our first sense

of the explosion was seeing waiters from the bar running

into the street followed, in slow motion, by a flash of light

and a huge horizontal column of a billowing dirty gray

cloud of smoke that appeared to be chasing the waiters –

only then came the sound of the explosion itself which

caused us to momentarily duck our heads before running

toward the explosion – a foolish impulse, but ….*

The bar was in shambles with overturned tables, broken glass, and waiters’ flip-flops scattered about. Happily their favorite waiters were unharmed, and there were no serious injuries. The following night the five guys made Bar Imperial their first stop of the evening and found all the waiters wearing brand new tennis shoes, the better to run with, they told the GIs.

Bar Impérial, Saigon, 1960s

The NLF’s new terror policy had gone into immediate effect in early ’64. On February 9^th, the VC hit the sports stadium where two US service teams were playing a softball game before bleachers filled with cheering American military and civilians: 2 dead, 42 wounded. Exactly a week later on Sunday, a VC team in a well-coordinated attack bombed a packed movie theater exclusively used by Americans watching a Hollywood film. The first VC shot and killed the lone US military policeman (MP) on guard out front, followed by his accomplice rushing into the theater to plant a 25-pound bomb with a 15-second fuse: 3 killed, 32 wounded.

Lest the reader think this was an improvised operation, US forces later captured the 13-page VC document on the meticulous planning and post-attack evaluation for the theater bombing. The document noted with satisfaction that local Vietnamese residents had come by the next day to see the wreckage and were heard to say, “Once they [the VC] have succeeded in attacking this objective, they will easily succeed elsewhere.”**

♫Searching for the Viet Cong in vain.

They left a note that they had gone.

They had to get down to Saigon††

Near the end of ’64, on Christmas Eve, the VC pulled off another high profile strike designed to reinforce their ‘message’, to wit, that Americans in Saigon were vulnerable, hence the Vietnamese population should not count on them for protection. By then Jeff had completed his tour and was back in the States, but a couple of lingy buddies happened to be nearby and witnessed the carnage after a few minutes earlier a 200-pound bomb blew out the back of the 6-story Brink Hotel – quarters for US officers –  and obliterated the small buildings behind it. Dashing to the site, the two GIs instinctively rushed into the dense black smoke and, at personal risk, rescued three stunned and dazed Vietnamese employees of US armed forces radio housed in the building.

Aftermath of the Brink bombing, Christmas Eve, 1964

Again, it was later learned how carefully the VC commanders had planned the attack on the Brink. Observing that South Vietnamese officers freely mingled with Americans at the hotel, the VC assault team acquired ARVN uniforms on the black market, studied the officers’ mannerisms, their speaking style, and even how they smoked – and were thus able to infiltrate the building with their deadly cargo.

Meanwhile standing on the street as Vietnamese police and fire fighters responded, the two lingys could see “the floors buckled upward, re-bar and all, from the blast and ground floor walls now skeletal.”*** It was evident that anyone above the explosion would certainly be dead and, indeed, two were, plus 107 wounded.

Afterward, one of the GIs got cleaned up, changed his blackened uniform, and continued out on the town to celebrate Christmas Eve as initially intended. Therein lies the story of how Americans grew accustomed to VC violence as part of the Saigon landscape in the midst of war, but more on this further on.

The new year of 1965 – the fateful date of President Johnson’s major escalation of the US commitment to the Vietnam War – was another deadly period for American citizens in and about the capital of SVN. Responding to the first sustained US bombing attacks on NVN, dubbed ‘Rolling Thunder’, the VC hit the US embassy killing and wounding Americans, but far more Vietnamese who worked at the compound; in all, the attack left 23 dead and 183 wounded.

Wrecked interior of US Embassy, Saigon, March 1965

 However by far the most spectacular attack of the VC Saigon campaign took place in June ’65 – by which time Rolling Thunder had been backed up by the first waves of US combat troops who had already begun to engage the highly mobile and elusive VC battalions in the boonies. The site of the dramatic assault was the My Canh, a glamorous and popular floating restaurant aboard a boat tethered to a dock on the Saigon River mainly frequented by Americans and wealthy Vietnamese.

It was a two-part VC op – first a grenade was tossed into the restaurant during the dinner hour, predictably causing consternation. Then, as dazed and wounded diners rushed to shore over the boat’s gangplank, an electronically controlled Claymore anti-personnel mine (which fires metal balls 110 yards in a wide killing arc), planted in the riverbank, was remotely detonated causing mass casualties: 32 killed, 42 wounded.

Assisting victims at My Canh floating restaurant, June 1965

A US sailor helping rescue people, shocked to see blood everywhere and so many body parts, subsequently commented, “Saigon was no rear area. It was a very dangerous place.” But should we conclude that the large American community in Saigon was cowed and intimidated by the rash of well-aimed, lethal VC terror attacks in the city – no, according to a good friend of Jeff’s who was there for a number of years, first as a GI and then as a civilian contractor. He and everyone he knew had a personal story of a near miss, and certainly on those occasions emotions swirled, but fear was not one of them.

On the contrary, he told me, a backdrop of violence was a part of the fabric of daily life in the city, a feature of the urban scene in a country being torn apart by a raging war. Young American GIs either based in Saigon or there on furlough, accepted the explosions as a condition of life in a wartime capital and did not allow the bombs and grenades to change their routines or divert them from the city’s pleasures.

One could chalk it up to the conviction of invincibility among the young – it won’t happen to me – or perhaps recall similar reactions among many civilians who survived WWII London and Berlin. Both cities were savagely and relentlessly attacked by vast fleets of bombers, but life went on amidst the death and destruction and, in fact, a little defiantly in both wartime capitals. Sure, English and German children alike were sent to the countryside for safety and Berliners and Londoners of course took to the bomb shelters during air raids, but during intervals people shopped, ate meals, made love, and much else of the routines that define 'the human condition' even in times of crisis.

Back in Saigon during the war, a terrorist incident a few years later perhaps best illustrates the response to routine violence as part of the texture of everyday life. A couple of American civilians lived down the block from a Filipino aid mission – housed in a building protectively wrapped in anti-grenade fencing with a small guard post in front. There were a couple of small openings through which the sentry could fire if attacked.

Waiting for a taxi one evening, the Americans saw a speeding motorcycle with a Vietnamese teenager on the back go flying by the Filipino building as the passenger tried unsuccessfully to hurl a grenade through the firing slit of the guard post. It bounced off the fencing harmlessly and exploded in the street as the guard opened fire on the fleeing cycle.

Coincidentally, a week later to the day and hour, the Americans were again at the cab stand and witnessed an identical failed attack. Again the duo escaped unscathed. Word got around among Americans in the neighborhood, and every Tuesday at 7 PM they’d gather on a protected portico to watch the same scene repeat itself – for six straight weeks until on the seventh try, the guard finally managed to take down the teenage cao bồi, cowboys, ending the weekly entertainment.

By ’66 US security had greatly increased in capital, and by then local VC priorities were changing as their units increasingly faced large, well-armed US combat forces on search & destroy missions in the Saigon region. Although VC urban terrorism had taken a significant toll in life and limb, its intended psychological impact on Americans who served or worked in Saigon fell far short of VC expectations.

Saigon remained a dangerous posting throughout the Vietnam War, but of course the danger there paled in comparison to the extraordinary hazards and the appalling loss of life on both sides of the conflict elsewhere in war ravaged Vietnam.

Links to music videos

†  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_2hlKqRTPg

††  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTyqoV1d2Ys

*Personal communication (8/1/13) from a Vietnam GI buddy and good personal friend of my late brother Jeff Sharlet – to whom I am greatly indebted for his help on the memoir project.

**Quoted in A Study of the Use of Terror by the Viet Cong (prepared by the Military Assistance Command, Nha Trang, South Vietnam, May 1966), 36. Declassified 5/1/78.

***Personal communication of 8/1/13 from Jeff Sharlet’s GI buddy and good friend.