01 February 2010
 
Bullet Proof

 
Something quite ordinary happened in the wake of the great mobilizations required to ensure victory over the Kaiser and the Fuhrer and the Commissars, and a sad compromise in Korea and a defeat in Vietnam.
 
Dick Nixon told us that “everything we knew about Vietnam was wrong,” except for the end of it. My pal Jake served in Saigon in the waning days, and then as a promising young officer in the Intelligence Plot of the Chief of Naval Operations.
 
It was all over but the shouting as spring came to Washington in 1975. The ground troops and the POWs- at least the ones in the hands of the DRV- were home and no longer news. Along with others who knew the ground, the last offensive was in progress, and the troops of the South were fleeing in disarray.
 
Jake was a Lieutenant then, the finest rank it is possible for an officer to have. Lieutenants are bullet-proof. They can get out of the service, as most did in the days of the Draft, or they are permitted to make minor mistakes of enthusiasm.
 
Sometimes they are permitted more. The Admiral and Dr. Dave were sitting on the couch last night. We were talking about the notion of responsibility. The Navy prides itself on pinning it on whoever is in command. “Chester Nimitz got a court-marshal for grounding USS Decatur (Destroyer #5) in China,” said the Doc. “It didn’t hurt his career, but of course he was only an Ensign and the charts of those waters in 1907 lacked detail.”
 
“Ensigns are bullet-proof,” I said from the safety of my brown chair.
 
We went back and forth about who usually got hung for really serious screw-ups, and the results were inconclusive. Some of the biggest mistakes are never punished, or even acknowledged.
 
In that light, we had a cheery dinner and talked about things that have no place in this narrative, though they happened around the same time. Better said, they were things that Rex was concerned with, and the magnitude of the effort spent upon them was lavish enough that it might have prolonged the war in Asia a few weeks longer.
 
That was the power of America at the Zenith. She was able to do massive things in many places simultaneously. We talked about the President’s Budget, too, the one with the big deficit and casual shrug contained in the budget lines that say we are not going back to the Moon any time soon, and perhaps will not be able to afford the heavy lift vehicles to get things on orbit any more.
 
This is a bleaker future than the one we knew in 1975, though it has a certain grim commonality. In that year, Commander Tom, a company man by that time in his career and future DNI, stood in the back of the briefing room and allowed the Lieutenant to tell Admiral Holloway, the Chief, that the North was going to overrun the defenses around Saigon, and that the war was going to end on terms favorable to the enemy.
 
Jake told me one time about the delicate process of moving the truth forward. They tried it out on some Congresional staff that seemed interested. Legendary DNI Bobbie Ray Inman and his leadership team wanted to work into the denouement of the conflict with accuracy and truth, but a certain delicacy.
 
Admiral Holloway had rows of ribbons that went from his left pocket up almost over his shoulder. He had first gone to war with the Vietnamese a decade before. As the 7th Fleet Commander, he had personally led the cruiser-destroyer gunfire strike against Hai Phong, and unleashed massive carrier air strikes against Hanoi as part of the LINEBACKER II joint air effort that led to the (temporary) cease-fire in 1973.
 
“It’s over?” said the Admiral, trying to process the information. Jake nodded. The other flag officers leaned forward in surprise that someone had said the truth so bluntly.
 
“Yessir,” responded Jake. “It’s over.”
 
Sometimes it is good to be a Lieutenant.
 
So, 1975 passed and life went on. No one paid except those who went to war, and of course the ones who loved them. Of the men who served in Rex’s intelligence program, one was lost, but presumed dead. That was Jack Graf, a crusty LDO who should have known that no one is bullet-proof.
 
Lieutenants Ken Tapscott, Al Hollowell and R.O. Williams were killed in the line of duty. Sometimes it is not good to be a Lieutenant.
 
The national leadership of the United States was naturally a little gun-shy about military operations for several years. I wandered into the service about eighteen months after Jake’s brief, and despite, or perhaps because of the failed rescue attempt in Iran, the government stayed that way right through the adventure in Grenada.
 
We were honest enough to talk about the lessons of Vietnam inside the military. The Army literally shredded itself at Carlisle Barracks and Ft Leavenworth analyzing doctrine.
 
The guys who stayed on active duty after the war found that their time spent in-country was considered in a generally positive manner, though somewhat off the main beam of the Navy mission, which was blue-water operations against the Soviet threat.
 
I still wince at the painful decade inside the military after the Wall came down. Every meeting was about what capability we would have to eliminate in order to recapitalize the force. It was a precursor to what we are about to start doing now, though we still have two major combat operations in progress.
 
It was not until 9/11 that we suddenly realized that we were no longer protected by the vast oceans here in the homeland. We were not bullet-proof at all.
 
The time the NILOs spent in the field suddenly seemed to have astonishing relevance. By then, the last of the guys who had served were gone. Naval intelligence suddenly had to learn a lot of lessons that had already been paid for by Jack, Ken, Al and R.O. the hard way.
 
So after 2001, with the sudden relevance of support to special operations on the ground, and a certain bellicosity in the air, it seemed that things were not over after all.
 
Not then, and not now.
 
I should not have been surprised when my phone rang at the Phone Company in the spring of 2006. It was tenty-six years since Saigon fell, and eleven since my last time in the city. A voice I had not heard for twenty years asked for a little help on a matter he considered to be of some interest to the Community.

(The Waterfront at Cat Lo, Republic of Vietnam, 1970)

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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