26 December 2009
Ramping Up
(USS Arizona, Below, Before the Memorial)
My sons are leaving for the island of their birth this morning, starting from Dulles and O’Hare, respectively. They intend to poke around the places they knew only as little boys, and I envy them the gentle breezes.
It is bone cold here in Michigan after a Christmas thaw, and the longest night of the year, near abouts, and all the ice and snow is between me and Virginia.
That is where we left Rex in 1964. More properly, in the NW corner of the District, working NSA issues and earning his spurs as the Deputy Chief of Staff for Ops and Plans at the Naval Security group. The conflict in Vietnam was heating up through his time there, and the full resources of the Department of Defense were being funneled into increasing the quantity and quality of intelligence available to support the US forces that had been introduced in-country in 1965.
The Marines had waded ashore at Da Nang that summer, with the general idea that regular US forces would take on the Viet Cong proxies of the North Vietnamese directly, and settle the matter once and for all.
A myriad of technical marvels was deployed to support the war effort. Unattended ground sensors placed in the jungle to check the vibrations of moving vehicles and machines; infrared sensors to penetrate the triple canopy vegetation. Low light sensors to light the night, which belonged to the Cong, and dozens of more conventional airborne and satellite imagery collectors.
My pal Mac was the Pacific Fleet Intelligence Officer from 1962 to 1966, so he saw the whole ramp-up to the ground war. As the senior intelligence officer to the Navy type Commander, he had direct responsibility for the Fleet Intelligence Center- FICPAC- which had labored on the surreal campus of Ford Island until MilCon funds were available to construct the great gray monolith at Makalapa Crater, near the headquarters.
Mac had first arrived at Pearl in February of 1942, and the superstructure of the mortally wounded Arizona still towered above her grave there at the end of Battleship Row. In his next incarnation at the Pacific Fleet, Mac supervised the intelligence center as the engine for production to support the burgeoning war.
Mac moved on the year the Marines went ashore, and just before Rex arrived on the staff to become the Current Intelligence Officer, the very month the 9th Marines reinforced the main body.
Working hours for the staff were around the clock, of course, but to accommodate the war the usual schedule was modified to have a “half day” on Wednesdays and another half added on Saturdays. Of course that was a fiction, but the tradition continued long after that war was done, and we had all moved on to other things.
Jim Hartz was working in the FIC when Rex was there, arriving the morning after the Pueblo was grabbed in 1968, with a full-blown ground war. History is messy, of course, and the SIGINT collection ships operated by the Navy in the service of NSA were the targets of outrages elsewhere in the world.
The Isrealis had shot up and torpedoed the USS Liberty the year before, the time of the 6-day war in a “mistaken identity” nine-hour multiple source attack, that included strafing survivors in the water. The North Koreans, for reasons best known to themselves, had boarded the USS Puelbo and taken the crew hostage.
FICPAC turned to, diverting attention from the ground war in Vietnam to turn up the heat on the Korean Problem. Jim described some of the things that happened immediately. A Box Car mission was flown over North Korea, and they worked around the clock to use the imagery to build quick-response target graphics to update ancient U-2 and Mild Wind photography.
Rex took the fruits of the research to update the current intelligence picture in case the Fleet was directed to intervene in Korea. Jim was assigned to work a special cell project with photo technicians on temporary duty from the west coast carriers that were not on the line in the South China Sea and augmented by Marines.
He worked the project with an indomitable Mustang officer whose life- and death- would haunt Rex to the end of his days.
The name of that man was Jack Graf, and he had already been to The Show, and seen the elephant. He was more than prepared to go back, too, and that is where the story goes from here.
My boys will feel the gentle breezes of Honolulu later today, just as Jack and Rex did. But this story is about to transition from paradise to something else, in Saigon and the Third Coastal Zone in Vietnam.
Copyright 2009 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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