Searches - Prologue

Thought to myself, what more is there to learn about Jeff? After all he was my brother, I had boxes of his letters and papers, his posthumous archive. But one summer afternoon several years ago I was researching an aspect of my own Cold War America memoir – something about US government experiments with mind-bending drugs on unwitting subjects -- when I first heard from Ed Smith.

Ed was an ex-Vietnam GI looking for his former buddy Jeff. They’d lost touch in the late ‘60s. He’d found my son Jeff on the Internet, thinking he was his old pal. I replied politely, telling Ed about my memoir project, including the two chapters on Brother Jeff. Ed suggested we talk so I called. Told me about himself, also Army Security Agency (ASA) and a fellow Vietnamese lingy – Army-speak for linguist -- who had served with Jeff, said he was his best friend. Curiosity aroused, I asked for details and in a flash it struck me I didn’t know my brother as well as I thought.

It was late August ’63, the Kennedy Administration had ‘green lighted’ coup planning against ineffective President Diem. In the Philippines where the lingys were held in reserve, Jeff, Ed and six others were alerted during the night, told to get ready to ship out. Flown up to Saigon, installed in a dark corner at a base to the northwest. Ed said it was very secret stuff, but what the hell, time’s past I’ll tell you. Mission was to surveil communications of South Vietnamese generals planning the coup, White House wanted to be sure they knew what was happening. Ed told me other tales about Jeff’s covert work, more than enough to convince me I had a lot to learn.

A month or so later out of the blue, Karen Grote Ferb found me. An old girlfriend of Jeff’s from college days, she too was looking for him, wondering where he landed. They’d been together at Indiana University after Jeff returned from Vietnam. She had more surprising stories to tell. I’d been dimly aware of Jeff’s interest in the New Left at IU – I’d seen documents in his boxes although his letters were silent, but had no idea of the depth of his SDS involvement. Listening to Karen, I grasped that Indiana had been the link between Jeff’s Vietnam experience and his later radical leadership of the GI protest movement.

Karen LeMoine Grote IU '66 and Ed Smith (left) & Jeff, Philippines, '63

Complacency gone, I realized if I was to get my brother’s story, I’d have to find people who knew him as a young man. Both Ed and Karen gave me names, the search was on. It was my great good luck that Karen offered to help. GI buddies, SDS activists, Vietnam GI comrades, they were out there somewhere. We’d find someone who in turn would lead us to others, but decades since the ‘60s clues would sometimes lead up blind alleys. Inevitably our efforts produced many ‘hits’ but some bizarre ‘misses’ as well.

About the Writer - Bob Sharlet

Bob in Tribute to Brother Jeff, 2010

For decades I labored in the groves of academe. The Soviet Union and then Russia were my beat. Fascinating journey, lived in Moscow, conferenced all over Europe, wrote a great deal about it all. Though limited expertise, always interested in Vietnam. Taught the war for many years at Union College, a kind of memorial to Brother Jeff. How did my books prepare me for doing a memoir on Jeff? Not at all, that was social science, law no less. Well at least I was a skilled researcher, right? Wrong. Studying Soviet law meant reading treatises, monographs, and occasionally talking with jurists on trips back to Russia. Those conversations, welcome reader, didn’t resemble anything you’re familiar with. No personal questions allowed, just law and jurisprudence, and even then no attribution by name.

Sure there was information about Jeff in print out there, not a great deal, mostly about his endgame --editorship of Vietnam GI. But what were his hopes and dreams as he finished school, what about his Vietnam tour, SDS days at Indiana, grad school in Chicago? How did he create and sustain VGI?

I soon realized I’d have to talk to people who knew him, lots of them since no single individual knew Jeff’s whole story. That meant ‘interviewing’, something I’d not done much of in the past. It was like an archeological dig except through words, collecting shards of memory to reassemble into tales of Jeff. Often a seemingly insignificant detail became a key piece in the mosaic. Needless to say, I made rookie mistakes in early interviews.

As the story of my brother’s short but interesting life emerged, I began thinking how to write it up, how to make a book out of it, to give Jeff his niche in the history of the Vietnam antiwar movement. A glance at my academic resume told me there were no role models there. During college years, I wanted to be a writer, but ended up a political scientist. Now was the time to again try my hand as a story teller.

I started reading memoirs to see how it was done. Calvin Trillin’s 'Remembering Denny' made a big impression. Like Denny, there were two Jeff’s, the younger brother I remembered, then Jeff the soldier, radical, GI activist others knew. Another model I found promising was Hilary Masters’ 'Last Stands: Notes from Memory' about growing up with his older father, the poet Edgar Lee Masters. Even more striking were the memories of his grandfather, beginning with the tale of his burial at Arlington as the last of the frontier cavalrymen – “His eyes were … cornflower blue … his hands were steady.” And of course, one of the first memoirs on Vietnam and for me still the finest, Phillip Caputo’s 'A Rumor of War'.

Then one day the problem got solved. My brother’s namesake, my son Jeff, a non-fiction writer joined the project as co-author. With a best seller to his credit, I now felt assured my brother’s story would not just be told, but written with literary merit as well.

But I’m getting ahead of myself, interviewing Jeff’s contemporaries was one thing, but finding them 40 odd years later another; hence “Searching for Jeff,” selected stories of how Karen Grote Ferb, my estimable assistant, and I reconstructed Jeff’s story and his times piece by piece.