Port au Prince is in ruins this morning, which is a bit of an oxymoron. But the tragedy is real, and the misery is great. Even the Presidential palace crumbled, and that structure had lasted since General Smedley Butler’s Marines had the place built nearly a century ago.
 
I remember the last time I saw the place, whizzing by in a Haitian government car. There is a vitality about the part of Hispaniola shaped like a lobster claw that was quite remarkable, even with the abject poverty.
 
We need to do something, again. I thought about that as I walked toward the Metro.
 
I had to be at the Pentagon early, and the building was buzzing with activity; I go there once a week to attend a meeting through the miracle of secure video-teleconferencing with some very interesting people scattered in little vaults around the world. Some of them are in grand places and some are in trailers.
 
It has been so damned cold here for so many weeks that I decided to drive over to Pentagon City and park at the shopping mall and take the Metro one stop north so I could stay where it was warm, rather than take the trek across the outer parking lots, through the tunnel under I-395 and the stroll in the bitter cold across South Parking to get to the massive building.
 
To get to the secure facility, one then has to scale the mighty steps up to the second floor, head down the 3rd Corridor, descend to ground level to cross Ground Zero and hit the 8th Corridor and proceed all the way out of the E-Ring.
 
The first time I went, I automatically turned right on the E-Ring corridor, but everything that used to be there is gone; the J-2 spaces, the National Military Joint Intelligence Center, and the analytic offices that supported it.
 
If your feet take you to the old place, you will find only a blank passageway, a few Air Force staff codes, and a glass door to the D Ring.
 
Eerie.
 
If you come via the Metro, you get off at the stop just below the new Visitor’s Center. They have walled up the old escalator bay that once took your direct to the concourse. It cost a lot to enhance security, not that the measures taken would have provided any more protection against airliners.
 
Going to the meeting I walked past the offices of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I used to go there a lot when Colin Powell was the Chairman, and the rich wood paneling in that corridor is quite a contrast to the new antiseptic walls and passages that are the hallmark of the newly-rehabilitated old structure.
 
It is pretty cool, and I take a little pride in the system, for which I was a foot-soldier back twenty years ago, in a time of declining budgets.
 
The worldwide communications network was one of the brain-children of Ted’s fertile mind, that and the legendary Russ of the electronic hobby shop at the US Atlantic Command.
 
To see the flower of that system deployed now as the de facto command and control communications system gratifies my professional mind, since it meant a lot of money allocated in times of stress.
 
All the meetings in those days were about money, or the lack of it. The quote from Churchill resonated. There had to be a way to think our way out of things, and one of the ways forward appeared to be a worldwide secure data and video link.
 
I was lucky to have stumbled into the money game in Washington at an interesting juncture in America’s history. We had just completed the Gulf War, or rather, America’s first Gulf War, since the one between our erstwhile alley Iraq and adversary Islamic Republic of Iran had just dragged on for nearly eight years.
 
I settled into my chair, waiting for the disparate stations to check in on the network. My mind drifted over time, since at the zenith of Rex’s career as the DNI and later as
 
A lot of memories, and it is likewise a real trek to get to (and inside of) the grand old structure what with the security since 9/11. The memories did not stop coming. The Navy Bureau of Personnel used to be in the Annex up on the hill, where Rex and Millie Doyle and a lot of the rest of us worked.
 
There is still a significant Navy and Marine presence in the building, and a Navy Credit Union and a uniform store. I needed to get a regulation shirt for a friend. While any non-button down white shirt would do, the real thing has epaulets for the shoulder tabs, and the funeral home wants to do things right.
 
So I stopped up there and bought one for him.
 
I trudged back out into the cold. BuPers moved to Tennessee more than a decade ago. Something about strategic dispersal of resources, or saving the old Navy airfield where my Dad marched around in World War II, waiting for flight training.
 
The situation today is a lot like it was when the Cold War ended, and I joined the budget wars. The Congress then was howling for the Peace Divident, and after the intoxication of the war over Kuwait, it was time to start taking the big machine apart.
 
That is exactly how Rex spent the last years of his active duty.
 
In February 1973, the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) was formally reinstituted with Rex becoming Bud Zumwalt’s Director of Naval Intelligence. VADM Fritz Harlfinger was headed for retirement after four decades in uniform. Rex had the support of the CNO and the bitter staff struggle over an independent intelligence office was over, for the moment.
 
Rex had nineteen months as the real DNI, until September of 1974. It was going to be a wild ride down the rapids, since the dry dates don’t convey the immediacy of what was going on around the office on the C-Ring of the fifth floor in the Pentagon.
 
Two weeks before the triumph of the staff war, President announced that an agreement with the North Vietnamese had been reached that would “end the war and bring peace with honor.”
 
Under the terms of the Paris Peace Accords, the Americans agreed to immediately halt all military activities and withdraw all remaining military personnel within two months. Vietnam was forthwith considered to be “one country with two governments.”
 
Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced the end of the Draft, the news of which filled me with great joy, since I was going to graduate from college that summer. On the same day- the 27th of January, 1973, the last American combat death in the former Republic of Vietnam occurred.
 
For the record, it was Lt. Col. William B. Nolde, USA. RIP.

The month of February brought a new set of challenges for Rex. “Operation Homecoming” began with the release of 591 American POWs from Hanoi. Naval Intelligence officers were assigned to help with the delicate matter of debriefing the former prisoners, the memories of which linger today with those who participated.
 
The last American troops were gone by the end of March. During 15 years of military involvement, over two million Americans served in Vietnam. Half a million saw actual combat and almost 58,000 died.
 
On April Fool’s day, 1973, the last known American POW was released by Viet Cong cadre in the Mekong Delta. His name was Robert White, and he attracted the attention of a passing helicopter waving the rags that had been a shirt.
 
There were a lot of thing that needed to be cleaned up. The work began that month, even as top Nixon aides H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman announced their resignation as a product of the on-going Watergate investigation.
 
The Congress was restive, and was going after the Executive Branch in a big way. I will never forget Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina and his faux-folksy and scathing treatment of the president’s men. We all watched the hearings that Spring. It was electrifying.
 
Rx was probably surprised to see some of the information that was coming across his desk. One of the interesting things about Captain Robert White, the last POW, was that he had been shot down while piloting an OV-1 Mohawk in November of 1969.
 
In the back-seat was a naval officer named Jack Graf.
 
Jack did not come home. I think Rex made a note of it, not that there appeared to much that could be done about it then. Maybe things would become clearer in time. There was not a great deal anyone could do about it now.

Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!