Final Scenes of a Short but Interesting Life

Back to Nam, into the bush …

Sunset over Phu Bai – South Vietnam, 1960s

Post-coup Vietnam was not a happy place. True, Diem, the president, and his notorious brother Nhu, the secret police chief, were gone, but the junta that assumed power couldn’t govern effectively. The generals had few political skills, and by early ’64 they had fallen out among themselves. General Khanh, one of the tougher combat commanders, seized power, and Jeff and his crew of Vietnamese linguists (lingys) were hastened back to Saigon.

However, there was nothing to do this time; Khanh bloodlessly consolidated control within a day. Jeff, with time still to serve, then got sent north to Phu Bai, a remote listening post just below the DMZ. The base was located in South Vietnam’s narrow coastal lowland between the mountains of Laos in the west and the South China Sea to the east.  A chopper flew Jeff and other replacements up. Short on crew, the pilot assigned Jeff to man the door gun, a light machine gun on a 180 degree swivel.

Phu Bai was a fairly primitive base, but perfectly positioned to monitor North Vietnamese military communications across the border. Jeff was billeted in a six-man tent with plank walkways connecting the tents to the heart of the base.  It was blistering hot, and when the monsoon season came, the rains were torrential.

The rest of the place was a series of small wooden structures – HQ, the club, the barber shop installed in a small shack, and a store – except for the air conditioned operational buildings where the Morse code operators, or ‘ditty boppers’, and the lingys worked.

The entire base – not much bigger than a large baseball field – was encircled by barbed wire and defensive bunkers in the event of a Viet Cong (VC) attack. The threat, however, did not seem serious since there was only a single security guard with a sidearm manning the ramshackle front gate.

Jeff’s outfit, called Detachment J, had a two-fold mission in the then-early Vietnam war. They were to intercept and listen to the North Vietnamese Army’s radio messages, as well as maintain radio liaison with South Vietnamese commandos infiltrated across the border into enemy territory.

Off-duty, there wasn’t much for a GI to do in the desolate environment. The little club served cheap drinks to all ranks, and an occasional movie broke the monotony. Boozing was the main preoccupation, as one of Jeff’s buddies who later rendered a familiar scene at the club in a poem:

                   Jeff at the bar has a live one

                   a fool enough to take him on,

                   Phu Bai’s favorite Socrates

                   debating war’s ‘morality’

                   ‘I’m telling you, this war’s bullshit

                   and we’ve got no business here

                   we’re not here to help these people

                   we’re just getting lots of them killed’

…

                   later, last call passed, cutty’s gone

                   so with a case, two, sometimes more

                   st. pauli girl, chilled black label

                   he, Bill, Jeff … continue on out at the wire

                   closer there to the nearby war

                   Jeff recreating his debate,

                   dismissive of his rival’s stance

                   predicting, boy Cassandra like,

                   disastrous outcomes from the war

…

                             the sandbag bunker full of drunks

                   but none too drunk to miss the stars

                   moonless clouds of constellations

                   laced above their no ending war … *

It wasn’t just nightly boozing though; there were other laughs and good times as well. Periodically guys were rounded up to drive 6x6 trucks to Hue, the ancient capital, to pick up supplies. A junior officer in a jeep would lead the convoy, issuing strict instructions that the trucks were to stay together in column.

However, like in a slapstick movie, as the convoy reached the city the drivers would sometimes peel off in various directions. That way the ‘lost’ drivers and helpers could spend part of the day in Hue rather than just loading up and heading straight back up the road to Phu Bai.

On an off-duty day at other times, Jeff and a bunch of guys would drive to a wide sandy beach on the South China Sea for an afternoon of sun and surf. A photo from one of those outings reminds one of a relaxed beach scene on Long Island Sound the morning after a rousing house party at a New England college.

Once in a while Jeff and a buddy would borrow a jeep and drive south to the city of Danang on the coast. They’d put up in a hotel and enjoy a few days of creature comforts sorely missed back at tent city in Phu Bai.

Driving back one time over Đèo Hải Vân (Sea Cloud Pass) high above Danang, the two guys pulled over and took in the magnificent view of the heavily jungled mountains rippling down to a beach at the edge of the sea. Spying a finger of forested land jutting from the shore far below – a shimmering green peninsula – Jeff and his good buddy wistfully talked about opening a casino down there after the war.

It was then still early in the conflict and the war had a long way to go, but the memory lingered.

Hitting the books on the antiwar front …

Pro-war rally, Indiana University, 1966

Vietnam behind him, so he thought, Jeff headed back to college. He took a campus job and hit the books hard that first term of ’64. But even before fall classes began, there had been a skirmish in the Gulf of Tonkin between North Vietnamese torpedo boats and an American destroyer. It was an election year, and the incumbent President took full advantage with lethal retaliation, stoking war fever in the land.

As a Vietnam GI with a critical MOS, or Military Occupation Specialty, Jeff took note with some concern, but then the President quieted the drums of war as quickly as he had roused them. It would prove to be a false calm.

As he began his second term at Indiana University (IU), Jeff worried about the rising tensions in Vietnam – deadly Viet Cong (VC) terrorism met by heavy US aerial reprisals inevitably followed by renewed hot rhetoric. Having been assigned to an obligatory reserve unit, as an experienced Vietnamese linguist would he be recalled to active duty?

Fortunately Jeff wasn’t, but not long after his reelection, President Johnson (LBJ) set in motion a massive escalation of US involvement against the VC and their sponsors in North Vietnam. At IU, a small band of students began to organize against the war. From those beginnings emerged the new campus chapter of SDS, or Students for a Democratic Society.

Jeff was friendly with the activists, but stood aside from SDS, not convinced that such a loosely structured group of idealistic students could do much to affect the war, a war for which he had brought home a deep aversion. However, a new friend fresh from the ‘free speech’ struggle at Berkeley arrived on campus and persuaded him to lend his ex-GI status to SDS to strengthen its antiwar posture.

Taking on the war was an uphill struggle at IU, a very conservative place. Default sentiment was ‘rally around the flag’ – the country was at war. Adding to the prevailing mood, the university president, Elvis J Stahr, a former high Pentagon official, invited a string of pro-war Washington heavies to speak at IU.

Nonetheless, Jeff and the small band of activists shouldered on – mounting visible and audible demos against the campus visits by Nixon and a brace of gung ho generals. By his senior year, Jeff assumed leadership of the SDS chapter and stepped up the tempo of antiwar protest.

Decades later, a fellow activist remembered him saying at a rally, “This is the second time in my life that I have belonged to an organization run by Elvis J Stahr,” going on to add that he had first served under Secretary of the Army Stahr in the Army in Vietnam.

Then Jeff posed a rhetorical question, “And so why is the man who was Secretary of the Army, who was involved in making war on another country –

a man of the war machine – qualified to become the President of Indiana University, supposedly an institution of higher learning?”

Wrapping up, he concluded:

                   We need self-determination for students to get the

                   education they want and need, and we need self-

                   determination for the countries in the world now

                   oppressed by the US military machine, today

                   especially in Vietnam.**

An outstanding student as well as a major activist, Jeff’s life at IU was not just protest and no play. He and friends were regulars at Nick’s, a pub a block from the IU library. For lighter refreshments, it was off to the Gables, the soda bar and restaurant on Indiana Avenue, or the pizzeria just around the corner.

Sometimes the group gathered for an evening of folk music at one or another off-campus apartment – several of the activists were talented musicians. Then there were the free-swinging parties at the East 2^nd Street house Jeff shared with a few of the guys.

And not least, there were his long relationships with successive girlfriends – with Karin, Karen, and Miki. All in all, good years.

Chicago bound – ready, set, go …

Chicago, “City of Big Shoulders,” cauldron of protest

Jeff headed for grad school. He had won a Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship and applied to Yale, Chicago, and Michigan. He had in mind an academic career— or did he? Chicago was his choice – not only a top school, but in a  city alive with activism and protest.

As his IU mentor later recalled, in ’67 Jeff was ambivalent about his near future, torn between competing visions. Would it be the rigors of a PhD program or his compelling desire to continue the fight against the war – in fact even upping the ante in the process? He enrolled at University of Chicago for the fall term, but his heart wasn’t in the academic game – at least not then with a war that had to be stopped.

By the end of the term, Jeff had made the choice which would determine his destiny. Dropping out of Chicago, he plunged headlong into the city’s many-sided antiwar scene. Draft resistance, however, wasn’t his thing; neither was the pacifist Quaker group, nor yet more SDS marches and demos – been there, done that.

Instead, Jeff poured all his energies into pursuing the grand vision he’d been nurturing for some time – stopping the war by mobilizing the GIs, the guys with the rifles, against it. Not as difficult as it sounded, for Jeff knew that many fighting men in Nam had doubts about the US mission. Yet other than tete-a-tete in bars and GI coffee houses, they had no way to make their voices heard.

To give expression to those GIs – to give them voice – Jeff used his fellowship funds to create a GI-led, underground antiwar paper. It was to be by and for serving GIs as well as their comrades in other armed services deployed in Southeast Asia. With Jeff at the helm and an editorial board of ex-Vietnam GIs, Marines, and airmen, Vietnam GI (VGI) launched in early ’68.

VGI was an almost instant success with the guys in the trenches, on the ships off-shore, and at the airbases arming the attack choppers and fighter bombers. It resonated as well with many GIs at stateside bases being readied for deployment to Nam.

Letters-to-the-editor praising the paper began streaming in to the Chicago office, with the writers often asking for more copies of VGI to share with buddies. Most of all, the letters revealed the real war behind the sanitized military briefings in Saigon – aptly lampooned as the ‘Five O’clock Follies’.

Getting the monthly issue out was challenging work. The lead was always Jeff’s interview with a recently returned combat veteran, but first a good source had to be found and be willing to talk about an unpleasant experience. Other stories arrived in the mail, some from the field in Nam, some from the stateside infantry training depots.

Jeff usually added an editorial, and there were also photos, including those the Pentagon hoped would never see light of day; and of course the many ‘Dear Jeff’ letters featured monthly in the ‘Mailbag’.

Everything had to be edited into good readable prose, but prose easily accessible to the average grunt, usually a high school grad. Then came typesetting, proofing, and printing. Printing VGI got harder and harder as the FBI’s Chicago field office persuasively ‘urged’ many area typographers to refuse to print a ‘subversive’ paper.

Finally, there was the monthly distribution ritual. Normally a periodical could be mailed at a low rate as ‘printed matter’. But Chicago postal inspectors were on the lookout for leftist and anti-government material, hence Jeff and his staff had to go the more expensive ‘First Class’ route not subject to postal inspection.

Even so, great numbers of First Class envelopes, especially addressed to military addresses, could not be simply dumped at the post office without arousing suspicion. Volunteers would therefore drive all over the greater Chicago area depositing small numbers of the paper in many corner mailboxes.

All of this this took money for typesetting, printing, and mailing, hence fundraising was a constant of Jeff’s editorship. Getting the paper out was nearly a fulltime activity, so for most of the time for Jeff and senior staff, earning money from a regular job wasn’t a viable option.

It was an intense time, but Chicago was a lively town replete with legions of activists supportive of the GI antiwar cause. Jeff and friends would occasionally get respite from the fever zone with dinners at friends’ apartments, bar hopping to cool music venues, as well as from parties at the place he shared with fellow editors on the city’s North Side.

Still, the tension level remained high with the Feds, the Army’s military intelligence group in Northern Illinois, and the Chicago Red Squad nosing around combined with the chronic problems of scarce funds and deadlines looming.

On the road for Vietnam GI …

The ‘Yard’ at Harvard University, Cambridge MA, 1960s

From his base in Chicago, Jeff covered a lot of ground traveling both at home and abroad on behalf of Vietnam GI (VGI) or as a leader of the GI opposition to the war. By ’68 there was in place a network of GI antiwar coffee houses in the little tank towns outside infantry training bases.

The coffee houses run by antiwar volunteers were havens for GIs less than enthusiastic about the war. Off-duty guys could get a cup of coffee, a piece of pie, and read the irreverent underground press – especially the GI papers, foremost VGI – undisturbed by disapproving non-coms or brass.

Periodically, Jeff traveled the coffee house circuit to rap with GIs and gather their stories for the paper. Some of them were awaiting deployment, while others were just back from the ‘zone’ – the combat zone. During the spring Jeff hung out at ‘Mad Anthony Wayne’s Headquarters’, the coffee house outside the gates of Fort Leonard, MO; in the fall he was at the Oleo Strut, which served the growing number of GI war resisters at Fort Hood, TX.

Another of Jeff’s travel beats were the two coasts, especially the Northeast and the San Francisco Bay Area. That’s where the money was – where the well-to-do antiwar liberals were to be found. Fund-raising was a pressing necessity to keep VGI afloat. Often a wealthy individual would throw a cocktail party with Jeff as guest of honor to talk about his paper and the GI movement as the hat was passed around.

He was also in demand abroad. During the summer it was a trip to Kyoto to counsel the Japanese peace group on how to handle Vietnam deserters being hidden from the Japanese authorities and  US military police. When he served in the Philippines, Jeff had made a leave trip to Japan and liked the country.

Late fall ‘68 Jeff was with a delegation in Stockholm where the Swedish government had given sanctuary to many deserters. Ideally, he would have preferred antiwar GI’s to stay in the ranks and spread the word, but he respected an individual’s decision to bail out of the war.

By far, Jeff’s favorite destination was the Boston area. He was familiar with the town, having visited extended family there during his younger years. Many of his classmates from the Albany Academy had also gone to Harvard, so he was acquainted with Harvard Square and environs as well.

Several of VGI’s most generous financial supporters lived in and around the Square, so it became a frequent stop whenever he hit Boston. Most importantly though, he would visit the Boston Draft Resistance Group (BDRG) and his friends there further along the Charles River embankment in Central Square.

Jeff would give BDRG the templates for the latest issue of VGI, and they in turn would have thousands of additional copies printed. Their cadre of activists would then distribute the paper at military facilities throughout New England. It was a good arrangement.

By late in the year however, a medical problem that Jeff first experienced in Vietnam flared up, and he decided to head home for some doctoring.

“Because I could not stop for Death …”

Veterans Administration Hospital, Miami FL, 1960s

Home for Jeff was the Miami area where his parents lived. Exploratory surgery in early ‘69 detected cancer. It had spread, the odds were not good. Back at his alma mater, Indiana University, a friend arriving at a party of Jeff’s old college pals brought the news – the room went silent.

Despite his dire prospects, Jeff soldiered on, withstanding heavy doses of chemotherapy along with uncomfortable rounds of radiation. He fought hard, and by early spring the disease was in remission. The VA Hospital granted him a furlough.

In relays, friends and comrades from Chicago and Boston made the long drive down to Florida to spend time with Jeff. All of them would sit around drinking wine, listening to music, and laughing – there was lots of laughter about the many good times together.

♫Some will come, some will go

                                    We shall surely pass …

                                    We are but a moment’s sunlight

                                    Fading on the grass†

Through the underground papers and the growing antiwar press inspired by Vietnam GI’s (VGI) success, news of Jeff’s illness flashed across the country and abroad. Dozens of cards and notes began arriving from myriad people in the antiwar struggle – everyone from Bernardine Dohrn, a national SDS leader, to individual GIs who only knew Jeff through his editorship of VGI.

Unfortunately the remission came to an end, and he had to return to the hospital for more chemo, more radiation, and IV’s, always the IV’s. But all was to no avail as he rapidly declined. In great despair one afternoon during late spring, Jeff attempted suicide, but failed. The end was near.

A few weeks later he slipped away – his heart stopped – he was gone. Death at an early age, he was only 27. He was widely mourned wherever an underground paper carrying his death notice was read. At the last SDS convention, a minute of silence in memory of Jeff was observed by the nearly 2000 gathered.

In an uncanny foreshadowing of what would become his destiny, many years later a friend recalled Jeff once telling him of his plans for Vietnam GI:

          He told me that this was what he wanted to do

          at this time in his life. And he thought this would

          be the most important thing he had ever done

          in life.***

Of the many obits, the most eloquent one began:

                 Many good men never came back from Nam. Some

          came back disabled in mind. Jeff Sharlet came back

          a pretty together cat – and he came back angry.

               Jeff started VGI and for almost two years poured

          his life into it in an endless succession of 18-hour

          days, trying to organize men to fight for their own

          rights.

As Emily Dickinson, the poet of Amherst, wrote, Because I could not stop for Death/ He kindly stopped for me.

*J Buquoi, “phu bai nights,” Snapshots from the Edge of a War. e-book         forthcoming via Amazon, 2015.

**D Kaplan, “Reminiscences of Jeff’s March 1967 Peroration,” August 2011.

***D Kaplan, “Last Conversation with Jeff,” August 2011.

† https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4fWN6VvgKQ

         

         

         

“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.

Eight More Characters in Search of Jeff

Paulann Sheets, one time revolutionary

Taking a break on the Mediterranean coast, Paulann Sheets, 1966

          
          Paulann Sheets, nee Hosler, and I first met in an arty town in the Hudson valley north of New York. She was staying at the Morning Glory B+B on Upper Tinker run by an attractive Chinese woman with freckles named Pansy.

          Once an all-American girl, then a student revolutionary, now a counselor of the law with leftward bent, Paulann knew my brother Jeff Sharlet at Indiana University (IU) some 40 years back. She was of good memory.

          Paulann’s life has been an interesting journey. Entering IU as a freshman in ’59, a politically conservative young woman – a Goldwater Republican – within a short time she was an ardent Marxist.

A Nixon supporter in the 1960 presidential campaign, by ’62 Paulann had become a committed Trotskyist. The FBI field office took note, enlisting 11 confidential informants at IU to keep track of her activities. Initially a rah-rah sorority girl, she became a key player in the two most salient events on the left in the history of the university at that time.

Paulann joined the tiny campus chapter of the Young Socialist Alliance (YSA), junior affiliate of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party. IU YSA in turn founded a local branch of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee (FPCC) in support of Castro’s Cuban Revolution.

As the Cuban Missile Crisis heated up in ‘62, YSA and FPCC supported Cuba. When President Kennedy (JFK) blockaded the island to stop Russian missile-carrying freighters, Paulann and comrades announced a protest march against US policy.

Gathering on the steps of the campus auditorium to begin their march, the small band of brothers was stunned to see a sea of angry, shouting students lining their route. Facing the dozen demonstrators were well over a thousand counter-protestors.

The situation was dangerous so the guys decided to defer the protest, but Paulann and Polly Smith, the only women in the group, disagreed and declared their intention to march. With little choice, the young men joined them, and they set off brandishing their colorful signs – Paulann’s, ‘a fierce JFK head on a huge eagle with its talons sunk into the small island of Cuba’.

Within minutes, ugly catcalls began, punches were thrown, and the provocative signs ripped up by enraged young ‘patriots’. Miraculously, the protestors made it to the library and escaped the raging mob.

Several months later the group invited a YSA national officer to speak on campus. Although his remarks were fairly moderate – ‘a sedate, academic affair’ in Paulann’s words – the politically motivated county prosecutor saw it differently.

Partly as payback for their ‘un-American’ pro-Cuban march, he indicted the YSA leaders under Indiana’s anti-communism statute for attempting to overthrow the Government of the United States.

Paulann organized the defense of the ‘Bloomington 3’ (B-3), whose lives would be disrupted for the next two years. She led the ‘Committee to Aid the Bloomington Students’, or CABS, which involved her taking a leave of absence, traveling extensively to publicize the case and raise defense funds. Thanks to her leadership, a prominent radical lawyer joined the case and soon brought to an end the trumped up charges.

Back from the Vietnam War, Jeff returned to IU as the B-3 case was winding down. Paulann well remembered him for his charisma as chair of the campus SDS group. I noted that several others had also referred to Jeff’s charisma. Paulann’s comment—‘How could anyone have missed it’.

Spooks at the rifle range

Specialist-3 John Buquoi (haloed),rifle range, outside Saigon, 1963

 Looks like a picture of regular GIs, doesn’t it? The time late ’63, the place South Vietnam, specifically an Army rifle range. The guy haloed in the middle is John Buquoi, a great friend of brother Jeff.

John and Jeff were soldiers, although in name only, part of the Army Security Agency (ASA)—an autonomous intelligence outfit. ASA’s priorities did not include good marksmanship. The agency prioritized a very different set of skills—training young men, usually college boys, as linguists, cryptographers, and intelligence analysts—a far cry from combat, the heart of the warrior profession.

I too had served in ASA, but in the ‘50s. The setup however was the same John and Jeff experienced—eight weeks of minimal military training before we were sent off for up to a year to acquire specialized skills.

Since John and Jeff looked like regular GIs—ASA was the military arm of the National Security Agency (NSA) in Washington—their superiors occasionally paid lip service to the soldierly calling with a little close-order drill or a tune-up trip to the rifle range.

John Buquoi followed Jeff at the Army Language School where they met. Completing his Vietnamese language course, he was dispatched to Saigon. Jeff met him on arrival and gave John a kind of social introduction to Vietnam, a tour of Saigon’s great bars and cafés.

Taxiing into town, they set off on a whirlwind pub crawl starting at the Papillon and ending many hours later at the Happy Bar. Along the way, they dined at the Peacock where 60 piasters (50 US cents back then) bought them a steak (probably water buffalo), fries, salad, and a Vietnamese beer to wash it down.

On another night out, they were approaching one of Jeff’s favorite places—French style, Vietnamese run—and were stunned by an explosion at the café just ahead on the street.

Two Viet Cong (VC) ‘cowboys’ had sped by on a motor scooter and rolled a grenade into the place. Injuries were fortunately very minor. The guys peeked in and walked on. VC street bombings were not infrequent in the South Vietnamese capital.

Later both John and Jeff were assigned to Phu Bai in the far north of the country. Occasionally they borrowed a jeep and drove down Highway 1 for a weekend in Danang on the coast, staying at a hotel.

Another time driving over the high mountain pass enroute, they turned on to a side road. Down below poking into the South China Sea was a small verdant peninsula. The two young GIs mused, wouldn’t it be a great place to set up a gambling casino after the war.

That was early ’64, and of course neither could foresee the war would go on for many years.  

John later told me that some of their buddies became Vietophiles while others were Vietophobes, but Jeff was neither. He was a realist, skeptical about the US mission in Vietnam, and critical of the emerging war.

Fred Gardner, antiwar impresario

Fred Gardner in recent times

           Fred Gardner never got the credit he deserved for the rise of the GI movement against the Vietnam War. Trained as an Army reservist, he remembered the sleazy GI town near the base with its grungy bars and dives. With that and his growing opposition to the war in mind, Fred came up with the idea of setting up coffee houses for GIs near major base camps as alternative hangouts.

They’d be pleasant places where a GI could get away from the military milieu – to drink coffee, listen to some music, and, especially, peruse the small but growing number of underground antiwar papers, notable among them brother Jeff’s Vietnam GI.

Start-up capital was needed, so Fred turned to the New Left antiwar movement for help. He got a cold shoulder—the New Left at the time was hostile to GIs, saying they were ‘no better than cops’. Like Jeff, Fred knew differently—there were many GIs with doubts about the war.

With $10,000 of money he raised, he and two friends opened the first GI coffee house near Fort Jackson, SC. In a play on the WWII USO canteens offering troops sandwiches and a little entertainment, they called their place the ‘UFO’. It soon attracted hundreds of off-duty GIs. 

More such venues followed, the next one outside Fort Leonard Wood, MO; then another near the gates of Fort Hood, TX – the lively Oleo Strut. The Army took notice and, in collusion with local authorities, orchestrated a harassment campaign against the new GI gathering places.

Nonetheless, Fred’s idea took off and new GI coffee houses began springing up at bases all over the country. With few exceptions, harassment was the norm, and in some instances anonymous violence— in Idaho the Covered Wagon was firebombed one night, while a grenade was tossed into the coffee house near Fort Dix, NJ.

Fred has had an extensive career as a writer and editor. Starting with the Harvard Crimson, he wrote for the critical magazine of the day, Ramparts; served as an editor at Scientific American; and frequently contributed to other publications.

In 1971, he published a widely read, still definitive book, The Unlawful Concert: An Account of the Presidio Mutiny Case, an account of a major event in antiwar history. Fred dedicated his book to Jeff:

Jeff Sharlet, founder of

Vietnam GI,

dead at 27

Once upon a time in Indianapolis

 (Life is what happens while you’re making other plans, as the saying goes.  That is precisely what happened to Karen Grote Ferb on July 23, 1966.  Here’s the story she related to me.)

Soldiers and Sailors Monument, Indianapolis, IN

In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson (LBJ) made a Midwestern swing for the off-year congressional elections that included Indianapolis (Indy) IN in the heartland.

My old friend Jeff Sharlet was spending the summer there working on the railroad, and I often went up from Indiana University (IU) in Bloomington to spend weekends with him; one of those weekends LBJ spoke at Indy’s downtown Monument Circle. 

The IU New Left planned to welcome the president with a peaceful antiwar protest. I went up to Indy to join them the night before.  Jeff, disappointed that he had to work that sultry Saturday, dropped me off at the rally point early. 

I joined a handful of protesters, parade permit in hand and antiwar signs at the ready.  That’s as close as we got to protesting.  In short order, cops arrived and told us to move. Showing our permit, we refused. Then they returned with Chief Jones, a good-sized man wearing a tan trench coat, a brown fedora, and an annoyed expression.

Unbeknownst to the IU activists, the feds and local law enforcement had worked together to preempt the protest. License numbers of their cars had been relayed ahead, and the Indy police arrested them on arrival.

Each time the paddy wagon filled up, the group was transported to a sheriff’s bus out of sight of the crowd, the press, and especially the president’s podium. LBJ finished speaking and left for a businessmen’s luncheon where he ironically declared, “We will abide civil protest” as the would-be protesters were carted off to jail. 

Chief Jones thought the roundup of the protesters with their “lousy signs” was a good idea, but the Indiana Civil Liberties Union (ICLU) immediately protested: 

It is incredible that responsible public officials would utilize the power of their position in such a flagrant suppression of the efforts of the citizens to exercise their fundamental right of freedom of expression. 

By dark we’d all been released. A small crowd of supporters awaited us outside the jail. Jeff was there, quietly outraged.  He intuitively understood how frightened I’d been and how anxious I was about the pending court case. 

That Sunday’s New York Times gave the story brief coverage in the back pages, saying the president had vigorously defended his Vietnam War policy before a crowd of several thousand at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Indianapolis.

As for the thwarted protesters, the report included a statement by a sheriff’s deputy that we might be kept overnight and charged with breaking up a public meeting.  Only one arrestee was named, IU Professor James Dinsmoor, charged with interfering with the police.

When I came to trial, the initial charge of Disorderly Conduct had morphed into Resisting Arrest. The arresting officer falsely testified I had struck him with my sign. I was nonplussed and felt little satisfaction with my eventual verdict of not guilty. 

Dan Kaplan, to create a better world

Dan Kaplan, SDS chair (carrying books), leading a demo, Indiana University, 1967

A teenage stalwart, Dan has done it all – civil rights activism, SDS leader, Trotskyist journeyman, antiwar organizer, college professor, and longtime union activist.

At a New Left reunion in 2013, Dan, conceding that their side hadn’t been winning the battle for fundamental social change, said he still remained committed to engaging in the struggle ‘to create a better world’.

Dan knew Jeff at their alma mater, Indiana University (IU), succeeding him as president of the campus SDS chapter. Dan remembered him well.

They first met at an SDS meeting. Both were following the discussion with interest when someone remarked that since Jeff was an ex-Vietnam GI, he should be asked his opinion on the matter.

Dan, a freshman, recalled being amazed that the activist next to him had been in the war. Turning to Jeff, he asked, ‘Are you really a Vietnam veteran?’‘Yes, I am’, Jeff said, ‘but this is where I really belong.’

Later that year, Jeff as SDS leader gave a speech at a rally Dan has always remembered, a demo outside the residence of the university president. Jeff opened, saying ‘This is the second time in my life that I’ve belonged to an organization run by Elvis Stahr’.

He explained that he had served in Vietnam under Stahr as Secretary of the Army, and was now again under his aegis as President of IU. Rhetorically, Jeff asked why a man of the ‘war machine’ was qualified to be president of an institution of higher learning, then answered that in various ways the American university system served the military-industrial complex, hence senior personnel of the two organizations had become interchangeable.

Jeff went on to grad school at University of Chicago with a prestigious national fellowship. Dan’s memory of their last encounter had an elegiac tone.

Jeff told Dan he had decided to drop out of Chicago, instead using his fellowship funds to launch a much needed GI antiwar paper, Vietnam GI.  Dan expressed surprise that Jeff was throwing away a coveted fellowship at a distinguished university. Jeff replied– and presciently, given his short but interesting life:

He told me that this was what he wanted to do at this time in his
life.  And that he thought this would be the most important thing he had ever done. 

Anti-hero of GI protest

Grave marker, Pvt James Richard 'Rusty' Bunch, 1949-1968

High above San Francisco Bay sat a nondescript white stone building, the Army stockade at the Presidio of San Francisco. The majority of the prisoners there were maladjusted soldiers serving short-term sentences, mostly for AWOL  (absent without leave).

In the fall of ’68, conditions at the stockade were seriously wanting – it was badly over-crowded with insufficient sanitation facilities and sometimes short rations. Many of the GI prisoners were a disorderly bunch–some had gone AWOL during their first days and weeks in the Army, others multiple times.

A number of them came from unstable homes, were poorly educated, and generally unable to adapt to military life. Mental illness was not uncommon among the prisoners, some of whom repeatedly attempted suicide.

Among this odd lot, one young prisoner stood out as truly bizarre. From his arrival at the stockade barracks, it was apparent to all that Private James Richard ‘Rusty’ Bunch was a very strange bird. He often conducted two-way conversations with himself; fantasized about space ships; believed he had been reincarnated; and claimed he could walk through walls.

He was clearly suicidal, asking a bunk mate the best way to do it–slashing wrists, drinking a toxic fluid, or trying to escape while under guard. The guards had standing orders to shoot fleeing prisoners. Rusty chose to run, and died of a shotgun blast.

The next day 27 prisoners protested his death and prison conditions generally with a sit-down. Refusing an order to disperse, they were arrested. The 27 were charged not with ‘Willful disobedience to orders’ entailing a light sentence, but the extreme charge of ‘Mutiny’ calling for death or life imprisonment.

None of the offenders had expressed any interest in the war–Vietnam was not their issue, stockade conditions were – but the Army prosecutor construed their actions as antiwar and anti-military. The alleged ringleaders were court-martialed first and got 14 and 15 year sentences.

The heavy sentences for a peaceful protest immediately ignited press and public reaction in the San Francisco Bay area. Jeff’s Vietnam GI got on the story as outrage spread quickly throughout the broad antiwar community.

The Presidio case soon took on national dimensions, reaching the halls of Congress. The Pentagon hastily reduced the sentences, but it was too late; and GI protest, heretofore buried in the back pages, became national news.

No matter that not one of the Presidio 27 was protesting the war; in the public mind the late Pvt Rusty Bunch went from a tragic figure to an unintended martyr to the GI cause, or, as a GI antiwar activist later put it.

The Presidio 27 was the best thing that ever happened to the GI movement – it put us on the front page.

Dave Komatsu, keeper of memories

Header for Dave Komatsu's obituary for Jeff, Vietnam GI, 1969

Perhaps no one knew Jeff in his last years as well as Dave Komatsu of Chicago. Jeff harbored a big vision of how to stop the war; Dave helped him realize it. The two first met through a mutual friend in New York, summer, ’67. The rest is antiwar history.

Dave, an exceptionally bright and insightful individual, skeptical of all certainties, had long been a left activist. He led a breakaway faction of the American Socialist Party that became the Young People’s Socialist League (YPSL).

Dave and Kit, his wife, set up a newspaper for YPSL, American Socialist, a briskly written, well-edited tabloid Jeff happened to read and admire.

Returning from the Vietnam War, Jeff planned to organize GIs to oppose the war from within the military, a formidable undertaking. Dave suggested an interim step, a newsletter or bulletin reflecting GI opinion.

Thus was born Jeff’s antiwar underground paper, Vietnam GI (VGI), which soon became a platform for raising GI political consciousness and encouraging self-organizing against the war. An instant success from the initial issue, VGI ultimately inspired dozens of antiwar papers created by serving GIs.

Jeff’s aim was to mobilize GIs to bring the war to a halt, but unfortunately his time was cut short. An illness he first experienced in the Vietnam bush resurfaced and took his life.
 Dave had known my brother much better than I. For me Jeff was a much younger sibling, while Dave remembered him as a man he greatly admired. He compared Jeff’s tightly wound power and self-containment to Steve McQueen's racing car driver in the film Le Mans.

 Many obits on Jeff appeared in the underground press, but Dave’s, in a posthumous edition of Vietnam GI, was the most eloquent, the most poetic, as reflected in the opening and closing lines:

 Many good men never came back from Nam. Some came back disabled in mind. Jeff Sharlet came back a pretty together cat – and he came back angry. Jeff started VGI and, for almost two years poured his life into it, in an endless succession of 18-hour days, trying to organize men to fight for their rights.

                                          …

[At the end] he said he had many new ideas
for our fight, but was just too exhausted to talk about them.

Tran Van Don, coup-maker

Major General Tran Van Don, South Vietnam, 1963

The Vietnam War was not going well in ’63; the Viet Cong controlled much of the rural countryside. South Vietnam’s President Diem was a generally benign but inept leader. There was much dissatisfaction among the populace as well as the elites.

Minority Catholics, Diem and his brother Nhu, the secret police chief, ordered a violent assault on the Buddhist clergy. For the army generals, mostly Buddhists, who long felt that both the war and the country itself were being badly mismanaged, that was the last straw.

General Don was delegated to find out what the US would think of a coup. He contacted an old friend, a CIA officer at the embassy. The US was secretly supportive – Washington was fed up with Diem’s ineffective leadership.

Born in France of Vietnamese parents, educated in Paris before WWII, Tran Van Don had been a senior officer in the South Vietnamese Army since the establishment of the republic in the mid-‘50s. He held the trust of both the general staff and the presidential palace.

Late summer/early fall ‘63, Don and Lucien Conein (US liaison to the plotters) maintained surreptitious contact. Although Jeff never met Conein, he and fellow Vietnamese linguists were part of his operation. From a secret location outside the capital, they clandestinely monitored the generals’ communications as backup to Conein’s meetings with General Don.

The day before the planned coup, Don tried again to persuade Diem to change his policies asking, ‘Can you make some changes to your domestic policy by reopening the pagodas, freeing the monks and nuns, and bringing about a more flexible government?’

       His plea was to no avail, the president replied, ‘No, there is nothing to do … the situation is fine.’ The next day the generals carried out the coup. Diem and Nhu were executed. General Don was distressed; they were supposed to have been sent into exile.