14 January 2010
Semper Fi
Lieutenant Baldomero Lopez, USMC, scales the seawall at Inchon’s Red Beach. Minutes later, he was killed when smothering a live grenade with his body. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. John Guenther landed with the Division reserve.Seven days before the main attack, a joint Central Intelligence Agency–military intelligence reconnaissance operation, codenamed "Trudy Jackson," placed a team led by Navy LT Eugene Clark on Yonghung-do, an island in the mouth of the harbor. From there, they relayed critical intelligence back to U.S. forces afloat.
John Guenther’s funeral is today. It is supposed to warm up. The snow is still piled in concrete cones from the great dump nearly a month ago, and it has not been above freezing for more than a second or two since.
The service is just after noon; they move things along over at the old Chapel at Arlington, so I think we will be at graveside down in the sprawling grounds of the old Custis-Lee Estate not long after, certainly by 1400 local time.
There is a reception to follow, at the Army-Navy Country Club. It will be a celebration of John’s life, and I was proud to be a coworker, or at least considered myself as such when John was the senior civilian in Marine Intelligence, and we provided entirely inadequate resources from the Budget Staff I managed to help him accomplish his mission.
In the end, the money is what Washington is about, and John was very good at the game. He took the long view on things in his retirement; he had just completed a history of the Marine Corps before his death, and I helped to edit an article he wrote lat year about his time on the ground in Korea, having landed at Inchon and walked, as an enlisted Marine, across the Frozen Chosen.
John is widely known as the Father of Marine Intelligence, and there are two components to that. First, he understood how to follow the money, and ensure that his Marines got some. The other was his persistence. Of the many accomplishments in his life, one that will probably not be remembered today is the fact that John sat in more U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB) meetings than anyone else alive.
The Marines have always been the step-children of the national military structure, and accordingly have always relies on a pugnacious approach to the Navy Department, not to mention the adversary military departments of the Army and Air Force.
In concept, the Joint Chiefs were intended only to include as regular members the two, then three military services. The Marines were to be invited only matters “of interest to the Corps.”
Well guess what? Everything is of interest to the United States Marine Corps, and after grumbling, the rest of the military went along.
John applied the same principle to the USIB. Even if the topic of the meeting was review of a National Intelligence Estimate of Soviet Steel production, John was there.
John’s passing was a personal event to a lot of people in this town, but it was with dignity and peace. The challenge in losing friends and family in this town who are entitled to Full Military Honors and the last trip to Arlington is that there are only so many of the 3rd Infantry Division to go around, and there are several weeks that must pass before the ceremony can be accommodated.
I was signing up for an insurance policy at Murphy’s funeral parlor the other day- there have been so many deaths of late that I feel compelled to make the arrangements myself- when the Director of Advance Planning sighed in exasperation.
“If only they would open up Arlington on Saturdays for interments, we could close the backlog.”
I looked up from the triplicate forms I was signing to finalize the details of my journey to the same place. For the record, I have no intention on being put into that stupid wall they are building overlooking Route 110 by the Pentagon.
“And take away the Soldier’s weekend?” I growled. “The Old Guard is in the rotation for Iraq and Afghanistan. They deserve weekends when they get home.”
The Director seemed chastised by my emotion, but I understand his concern.
Rex’s family is dealing with the delay now. Today we finish John’s journey.
His road in military intelligence was longer than Rex’s, though it did not start until 1948. He stayed on active duty for thirty years, and was around for all the frantic activity that went with Rex’s time as DNI, and later as the senior budget weenie in OSD.
John had the good sense to get out of town in 1974, after language and tradecraft training, and report as Joint Operations Officer/Naval Representative to the Military Liaison Mission to the Group of Soviet Forces Germany in East Germany.
He was lucky. He got a chance to miss the budget melt-down that followed the loss of Vietnam and the earthquakes of the Church and Pike Committees on intelligence misconduct. The aftershocks went on in Washington until the year I joined the Navy in 1977.
The Potsdam Mission was about as loony as things got in the Cold War. An artifact of the division of the former Reich, like Berlin itself, the little team of Americans were able to drive around East Germany collecting what intelligence they could against the main enemy, with the Red Army on their heels the whole time.
That was a lot more fun than what Rex had to do. This is about following the money, and I had a long talk with my pal Mac about it at the bar at Willow the other night.
If you want to step out for popcorn now, I wouldn’t blame you. When you come back I will still be spewing acronyms about policy and budget authority. I don’t think Rex would mind, since despite the criticality of being able to fight for resources, most operational intelligence people hate budget crap.
I know I did, but then I wound up having to run part of it. It was painful, but useful in later life, and on the upside, there is scandal, public humiliation of senior pulbic officials, the pall of a lost war, and the search for someone to blame. So from a story-telling perspective things are looking up, even if it must have been painful for a man of honor like Rex.
I got a nice note from his Executive Assistant in those later days, and Bill’s description of the Admiral’s conduct and demeanor in those trying times is in the highest traditions of the naval service.
Enough. There is no alternative but to get down and dirty on the most important things that Rex left behind. The fact that they are almost incomprehensible to anyone not in the game is not going to stop me.
Stand back. Re-living the years 1973 through 1976 is not going to be pleasant for either of us.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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