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.

Still More Characters in Search of Jeff – III

Bill O’Brien, Chicago go-to guy

Bill O’Brien, Chicago, 2006

Bill came to New York for a few days and suggested we meet. I chose a funky place in the East Village. He had been a great pal of my brother, Jeff Sharlet, in the late ‘60s during his time in Chicago. Jeff had arrived there with a big vision and a large mission and soon learned Bill O’Brien was the go-to guy for getting things organized.

An ex-Vietnam GI, my brother strongly opposed the war and was determined to give those fighting it a way to voice their concerns. Bill was one of the key people helping Jeff launch Vietnam GI (VGI), the first GI-edited underground paper designed for the guys stuck in the war.

Bill O’Brien “considered Jeff a brother” and was indispensable to him. Chicago born, Bill knew most of radical Chicago’s major activists as well as officers of the unions and even people in Boss Daley’s machine. A man of many parts, Bill’s political and academic resume was impressive. He’d been invited into University of Chicago’s prestigious honors program though he lacked a high school diploma. Later he transferred to the New School for Social Research in New York and finally took a social science degree at Columbia.

Bill was already into community organizing in his school boy years; Chicago was rife with deserving local causes. Moving on to New York, he demonstrated against the infamous HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee,  and led the initial ’67 protest at Columbia when the university first proposed taking over a Harlem park for a new gym. A year later that protest morphed into the great Columbia student uprising.

Returning home to Chicago, Bill used his political connections for ‘good guy’ causes, one time blocking a hospital expansion that would have taken out a nearby neighborhood. Later he created ‘Radio Free Chicago’, broadcasting from his attic.

In ’68, Bill, Jeff, and Jim Wallihan, another VGI editor, shared a pad on Chicago’s Near North Side. Bill was working in the Office of the Cook County Clerk, but at the end of the day he lent a hand for whatever was needed – a VGI editorial meeting, arranging useful contacts in the city, procuring office equipment, or strategizing the emerging GI movement against the war. When they needed a break, they’d hit Bill’s favorite joint, the jazz bar ‘Get Me High’.

Funds to put the paper out were always tight, so in the fall Bill pulled strings and got Jeff and Jim well-paid jobs in the press rooms of Chicago dailies. But the work was hard, and an ultimately fatal illness that first surfaced in the Vietnam bush started taking its toll on Jeff.

Forty years on, Bill had never forgotten Jeff. When I began this memoir on my brother, he devoted endless time tracking down Jeff’s former Chicago friends, many by then scattered around the country and abroad. When Bill died a few years ago, his many old friends remembered him with a gala memorial evening at the hip Heartland Café, long a haunt of radical Chicago.

Nearly 50 of us were there; many had driven great distances from all over the Midwest while others flew in from San Francisco, Seattle, New York, and even Honolulu to celebrate Bill O’Brien’s memorable life – an unforgettable evening.

Marty Seligman, an evening long ago

A prominent psychologist and author of international acclaim, Professor Martin Seligman is a noted pioneer of the school of Positive Psychology. As a schoolboy though, Marty was a good friend of brother Jeff. They were cadets at a private military school – uniforms, rifles, drill, the whole nine yards. As often happens, after graduation they lost track of each other.

When Marty and I got in touch, he was only aware that Jeff had dropped out of college, gone to military language school, and died several years later of causes unknown. But Marty fondly remembered their school days together, especially an occasion late in their senior year. Both of them had been at the academy for a long time and were restless to move on.

Sitting in a green Ford convertible, as Marty described the moment:

I remember a spring evening, the sky Rembrandt blue,graduation and freedom in sight, looking up and
thinking ‘This is the happiest I’ve ever been’. I thinkJeff thought the same thing, and he may have said so.

A lifetime later at the 50^th Reunion of Jeff and Marty’s class, it was fitting that the two long ago friends shared the Albany Academy’s coveted Distinguished Alumni Award, Jeff the first posthumous recipient in the history of the school.

Looking back on their time together, Marty wrote that he still misses Jeff, “the first of my friends to die.”

         

Karen Grote, the searcher

Karen Grote, Indiana University, 1964

Out of the blue one day, Karen got in contact. She found me through my son Jeff the writer, namesake of my long lost brother of the ‘60s. Brother Jeff had gone to Indiana University (IU), but dropped out and landed in Vietnam. That was before the Pentagon launched Rolling Thunder sent in the Marines. Back in the world, as GIs called coming home, Jeff returned to IU to continue his education.

It was on his second academic ‘tour’ in America’s heartland that he met Karen Grote (now Ferb), a very attractive fellow undergrad. She knew him well, both socially and politically, and was willing to share her memories. During Jeff’s college years, I had just begun my career as an academic.  I was elsewhere teaching and doing research, so had known little of my younger brother’s experience at IU.

After Karen filled me in on Jeff’s extensive antiwar activism at the university, she offered to help research the memoir I had started on his short but interesting life. Fortunately, I accepted and we’ve collaborated since to my great benefit.

Aside from short accounts about my brother in several books and periodicals on the Vietnam War period, I soon realized Jeff’s final decade would have to be reconstructed piece by piece through memories of his contemporaries. But locating many of them was not going to be easy – the trail had gone cold after nearly four decades.

A PC keyboard whiz, Karen’s talent was in finding dozens of my brother’s schoolmates, GI buddies, and fellow SDS activists as well as the main people in Chicago who helped Jeff get out his antiwar underground paper directed to the troops fighting the war. He named it Vietnam GI (VGI).

Several of Karen’s notable initial ‘finds’ bear mentioning. Early on, she located Tom Barton, who had worked closely with Jeff as VGI’s East Coast distributor responsible for shipping the paper to GIs in Vietnam. A lifetime left activist, Tom had then recently begun publishing a nightly online anti-Iraq War newsletter, first called GI Special (later, Military Resistance).

In one of his first issues Tom reprinted the most eloquent of the many obits on Jeff, the one from VGI of August ’69. When I rang him up, he told me that he’d conceived his antiwar newsletter as the successor to Jeff’s VGI and saw himself continuing Jeff’s work.

Another remarkable find was Joe Carey, a fellow Vietnam GI whom Jeff had known at Indiana University. A combat photographer, Joe brought back his personal photos of what the war really looked like, pictures which he shared with Jeff for the pages of VGI. However, Joe had not taken the most shocking image – it had been slipped to him by a GI who had witnessed a war crime. Trophy-style, the photo showed several GIs posing with the severed heads of two Viet Cong.

Jeff ran the shot in a spring ’68 issue, and as the first atrocity photo of the war to surface in the public domain, it caused quite a sensation.

Another of Karen’s successes was perhaps her finest coup. A fellow Vietnam GI in the Chicago area who had been on Jeff’s editorial board for VGI seemed to have disappeared without a trace. As we subsequently reconstructed, he had become a Chicago cop, got in trouble with the law himself, served prison time, and, on release, left the city with the intent of getting away from that chapter of his life.

Zeke, as I’ll call him to spare embarrassment, had moved to the West Coast, obtained an unlisted phone number, and hoped to put his past behind him.  That was before the Internet as a valuable search medium. Through great perseverance, Karen had stayed on the trail and eventually ran Zeke to ground.

We knew his wife was an amateur artist, and she happened to be active in art circles. For an upcoming exhibition, she had posted her name and telephone number online. When I rang Zeke, he exploded in anger, “This is an unlisted number! How did you get it?” From your wife, I said. What could he say?

Dave Reinhardt, badlands rancher

Dave Reinhardt, Lehr, North Dakota, 2004

Far from Vietnam of his youth, Dave, proud Marine, is today a rancher in the Dakotas. He never knew Jeff Sharlet, but had preceded him at the same remote post in what might then have been dubbed the badlands of South Vietnam – right up against the border of the Communist North.

Dave Reinhardt joined the Marines in ’59 and was subsequently in the first Vietnamese class at the Army Language School (ALS). Jeff arrived at ALS and bunked in the same Vietnamese barracks a few years later. Dave deployed to Vietnam as a linguist in ’61, with a small Marine radio intelligence unit in Pleiku and Phu Bai. Jeff was based with the Army Security Agency (ASA) detachment at Phu Bai in early ’64.

Because Jeff’s work was highly classified, his letters home were spare. Yet I needed to know about Phu Bai, the place where he had spent much of his Vietnam tour. Luckily Karen, my searcher, turned up Dave Reinhardt on the Internet. Dave served as a fount of information on Phu Bai. Along with describing the physical layout of the base – the barbed wire perimeter, the various antennae, and the ops buildings – Dave also conveyed a sense of the daily routines.

He told me how the Marine intel group worked side by side with ASA, although tasked with different but related missions. The Marines were listening to North Vietnamese (NVN) Navy radio traffic, while the larger ASA unit was tracking NVN Army communications. 

However, the differences between the military culture of the Marine radio intercept contingent and its ASA counterpart were stark. All the Marines, regardless of specialized skills, had undergone several months’ of  combat infantry training and were all qualified riflemen. They were a very shipshape crew. In contrast, ASA was a laidback outfit, military in only the broadest meaning of the term.

In spite of the great heat and humidity at Phu Bai, the Marines wore their olive green field uniforms, while many of the ASA guys went about their jobs shirtless in boxer shorts and flip flops. Similarly, the Marines had rifles, M-14’s with ammo, while the unit Jeff would join was given only low caliber carbines and no ammo.

As Dave said, that was probably a good policy since ASA troops had little weapons training, and someone could have gotten hurt. One time the Army colonel commanding both units, a veteran of WWII and Korea, summoned Lance Corporal Reinhardt and asked him to drill the ASA troops, try to whip them into shape. While the ASA Morse Code operators and the linguists did their work well, Dave concluded that trying to turn them into soldiers was a lost cause.

After his Marine enlistment, Dave returned to Vietnam on the CIA payroll. With his language skill and military training, he was in effect a civilian combatant for the next several years.

Later, back in civilian life, he struggled with undiagnosed PTSD. When the Pentagon eventually acknowledged his condition and gave him back compensation, Dave bought the ranch in North Dakota where he raises a variety of animals and takes in, cares for, and puts to pasture injured, abused, and neglected horses otherwise destined for the glue factory.

Robin Hunter, Marxist guru

Robin Hunter, antiwar rally, Indianapolis, 1967

Born outside London during WWII, educated in Canada, Robin came to the States to take a PhD in Political Philosophy. He chose Indiana University (IU), arriving on campus in the early-mid ‘60s where he became a co-organizer of the IU chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). In its earliest incarnation, Robin later wrote of IU SDS,

we were seen as not just political, but as part of every-thing groovy and anti-establishment: folk music,radical, ‘concerned’, politics, dope, sex, bohemianstyle, cool, and hip.

He became the Marxist guru of the new group, leading theoretical discussions in Bernella and David Satterfield’s living room a stone’s throw from the campus gates. In spring ’65 when the fledgling group went to Washington for the first big New Left anti-Vietnam War demo, Robin was there.

Brother Jeff Sharlet joined SDS a few months later, and he and Robin became good friends and close collaborators. In early ’67 when Jeff headed the chapter, Robin helped draft his speech to the activist community, ‘The Role of the New Left on Campus: The State of the Student’.

That spring, Robin attended a rally in the state capital where Jeff addressed the assembled audience, and then back on campus the two of them worked together to ensure the election of Guy Loftman as student body president, the first New Left activist to win the post.

However, Robin Hunter’s most lasting contribution to the Indiana scene was to serve as its diarist. In the English political-literary tradition of Samuel Pepys, the great diarist of the 17^th century; and later Harold Nicolson, a heralded chronicler of the 20^th century, Hunter recorded in fluent prose a decade of the IU New Left’s main actions.

Robin has been well remembered even by a major adversary, a leading campus conservative who became a national leader of the pro-war New Right. A few years ago, Robert Turner spoke of Robin Hunter as “the most able of the anti-Vietnam activists I encountered at Indiana.”

Terry Whitmore – Marine hero to deserter

Lance Corporal Terry Whitmore, Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam, 1967

         

A poor boy from the Upper South, Terry enlisted in the Marines and was sent to Vietnam. He and brother Jeff never met there, but would later cross paths in Scandinavia. Whitmore was a good Marine for whom the US mission in Southeast Asia went unquestioned. However, as a fire team leader in a company-size sweep of a suspect village, he found himself in a moral quandary.

The company CO had lost a brother to the war and was bent on revenge. When a single shot came from the village, he ordered it leveled. That meant tossing grenades into family shelters, burning huts, killing adults, and rounding up children.

The Marines followed orders, but when the vengeful captain ordered the youngsters to be ‘wasted’, Terry and other Marines were taken aback. Not likely the kids were Viet Cong, but nonetheless a Marine mowed them down. The CO noticed one hut still standing and told Lance Corporal Whitmore to take it out with a rifle grenade.

Orders were orders, Terry fired, the grenade hit the hut but didn’t detonate.

A mother and child stuck their heads out the door -- Terry, seeing the captain looking elsewhere, silently motioned to them to run for their lives, to get away. He turned to walk back to the unit when a loud explosion went off. Out of curiosity the little boy had picked up the unexploded but live grenade. Terry felt remorse, but remained silent.

Later in his tour, Terry distinguished himself in battle, saving the platoon leader and his radioman, both wounded and pinned down under enemy fire. But in the melee, Terry himself was severely wounded by a mortar round and medevacked out of the line. He was convalescing at the Navy hospital in Cam Ranh Bay when President Johnson (LBJ) made a lightning visit to the facility. LBJ took the opportunity to personally award medals to wounded Marines recommended for bravery, including Corporal Whitmore.

Subsequently, Terry was transferred to a major US military hospital in Japan. After some months he was well enough for out-patient treatment and allowed to go out on the town. Then the day came when the docs cleared him to return to his combat unit. By now Terry was developing misgivings about the war, but duty called.

Twice his plane back to Vietnam was canceled due to weather, and he had to return to barracks. His growing doubts about the war then came to the fore. Try as he might, Terry couldn’t think of any justification for Uncle Sam “to be wiping out the Vietnamese people [or] one good reason for me to help Sam in his dirty work.”

Lance Corporal Whitmore had finally had enough – he deserted, as had others, and was sheltered by the Japanese left, moving the American deserters from safe house to safe house to evade the US Military Police. Eventually the Japanese activists found it hard to keep the deserters safely hidden, and arranged to spirit them out of the country.

Terry and several others were clandestinely transported to northern Japan. They boarded a Japanese fishing boat whose skipper rendezvoused with a Soviet coast guard vessel that took the Americans aboard. After a whirlwind tour of the USSR during which the Soviets exploited them for propaganda, the US Vietnam deserters were flown to the West and sanctuary. Stepping down at the Stockholm airport, Terry Whitmore began his long exile.

It was there in the Swedish capital in late fall ’68 that Terry and Jeff crossed paths. Jeff was in town with a delegation of American antiwar clergy and laity to offer support to the deserter community – Jeff the sole ex-Vietnam GI in the group, representing the burgeoning Vietnam GI movement against the war.

Door gunner distributor

Door gunner over the Mekong Delta, South Vietnam, 1968

Terry DeMott went to Nam as a grunt, humping a rifle in the bush, but later transferred to the division’s aviation wing, finishing his tour as a helicopter door gunner.

Early on, returning from a patrol, he remembered coming upon a copy of Vietnam GI (VGI) in his squad tent, avidly reading it front to back, and immediately clipping the free subscription coupon to send off to Chicago.

He added a note that if they could spare extra copies, he’d pass them around. Thus, Terry became part of Jeff’s network of nearly 200 sub rosa VGI military ‘distributors’ in units up and down South Vietnam.

Carrying copies in his backpack, Terry would pass them to guys in his squad who’d share with the other squads.  Once VGI made the rounds of the platoon, the copies would be handed off to other units. Later Terry similarly circulated the paper in the aviation wing. Thus the multiplier effect as a handful of copies was read by dozens of GIs.

While Terry was careful to keep the antiwar paper out of sight of the brass, he told me he wasn’t too worried about getting caught, saying in so many words, What could they do, send me to Vietnam? 

Nancy Goodlin Sharlet, secret writer

Nancy Sharlet and Jeff the namesake, The Cloisters, New York City, 1974

Nancy died way too early, but at least, unlike her brother-in-law Jeff, she made it into her 40s. Unbeknownst to anyone who knew her, she had been writing for years. After her death, a trove of myriad unpublished writings was discovered in the drawers and cupboards of Nancy’s house.

When our son Jeff, my brother’s namesake, later came of age, he wrote a memoir of his mother by drawing on her many journals, short story fragments, character portraits, and word sketches of people she knew as well as things going on around her. Young Jeff dubbed her a ‘secret writer’.

One piece Jeff found among her papers was a brief but beautifully written, poetic evocation of his Uncle Jeff’s last days.  It was, in effect, Nancy’s obit for brother Jeff.

A few lines illuminate Jeff’s fleeting passage through our lives:


       He had that ancient look of a Persian or an Assyrian
      He had a gift for friendship
      His mind was facile, theoretical
      His experience was valuable

And Nancy’s final image – as we walked the grounds of the VA medical center, Jeff’s hospital robe, caught by the wind, “billowed like an Arab’s caftan.”