Vietnam War Memoirs Point to the Involvement of General Paul D. Harkins in Kennedy's Assassination

     Now that W. Mark Felt, the number two man at the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been revealed to be the secret "deep throat" who brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon, perhaps the time has come for a theory of Kennedy's assassination that jibes with the facts.

   The premise of psephology is that because all communication is theme and variation, hidden reality can be inferred from variations in external, observable data.  This is the same thing as traffic analysis used routinely by the CIA and military, but instead of monitoring phone calls, radio traffic, e-mails or money transfer, we examine the results of secret ballot elections and, in the case of Vietnam, war memoirs.

   Watergate was a coup d'etat, because the normal checks and balances of the constitution were abrogated in the investigation.  The Constitution guarantees that the accused should be able to face his or her accuser and know the nature of his or her crimes; no secret indictments.  By using information developed in a police investigation and then leaking it to the newspapers, W. Mark Felt used proprietary police information to circumvent the normal processes of the criminal justice system. Of course the liberal Democrats, who should have been horrified by this travesty of justice, eagerly participated for partisan political gain.

   So, it is no surprise that Watergate resulted in the first appointed President in modern times, who then brought George H.W. Bush, Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to power.  There is a direct link between Watergate and the extra constitutional stolen election of 2000, which the Democrats, in the person of Al Gore, also condoned by refusing to fight for his own victory all the way through the Electoral College.  Not surprisingly, United States soil was attacked from abroad in the wake of the fraudulent election, just as the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor followed on the heels of Roosevelt's abrogation of Washington's two-term limit.  Dictatorship is interpreted as weakness.

The Warren Commission Was A Fraud

   The assassination of a President is also a coup d'etat.  The Warren Commission was another extra-constitutional device, created to prevent a thorough investigation of the assassination, if not to actively cover it up.  The Warren Commission was designed to be a monolithic entity beyond the normal checks and balances of the Constitution.  The Warren Commission was a Presidential Commission consisting of two members of the House of Representatives: Gerald Ford and Hale Boggs; two members of the Senate: Richard Russell and John Sherman Cooper; former CIA Director Allen Dulles, brother of Eisenhower's Secretary of State John Foster Dulles who had been fired by Kennedy after the Bay of Pigs fiasco; John J. McCloy, the former high commissioner for occupied Germany; and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Earl Warren.

   So all branches of the federal government were represented on the Warren Commission: the Judiciary, the two houses of the legislature; and the secret services. The commission itself was an executive creation.  The Commission was carefully constructed to circumvent the checks and balances of the Constitution by including all the balancing parts in a single entity.   It is no coincidence that one of the members of this commission, Gerald Ford, would become an appointed President in the wake of the Watergate scandal. 

   The Warren Commission was a fraud for another reason beyond its extra-constitutionality.  There was no need for the commission in the first place, certainly not in the immediate aftermath of the assassination.  In 1963, murder was not a federal crime, it was a state crime.  Under procedures then in place on November 22, 1963, the murder of John F. Kennedy should have been investigated by a Texas Court of Inquiry.  The Texas Court of Inquiry consisted of three people: the state Attorney General Waggoner Carr; Robert G. Storey, a past president of the American Bar Association and dean emeritus of Southern Methodist University Law School; and prominent Houston Attorney Leon Jaworski who, as Watergate Special Prosecutor a dozen years later, would be instrumental in making Gerald Ford President of the United States. 

Jaworski was an especially self-serving lawyer.  As an Army prosecutor in World War II, he presided over the largest court-martial of the war, 43 Negros accused of rioting for attacking Italian POW’s at Fort Lawton.  It is a typical tale of Negro justice in America.  Jaworski sought the death penalty for three of the defendants for murder without any direct or circumstantial evidence, merely because it was assumed that the riot had resulted in a POW’s death. In all probability, the murder was committed by a white soldier whose absence from his post was largely responsible for the riot getting out of hand.  Jaworski also withheld vital exculpatory evidence from the defense, which was normal for those days, especially where black defendants were in the hands of white southerners.  This story is told in a book called: On American Soil: How Justice Became a Casualty of World War II by Jack Hamann.  This will cause any objective observer to rethink Watergate.

   This is too much of a coincidence to be believed.  Out of a total of 10 people involved in the extra-legal investigation of President Kennedy's assassination, two would go on to prominence in the removal of Richard Nixon from office a decade later. My theory is a simple one.  Unlike W. Mark Felt, the Kennedy assassins have decided to take their secret to their graves.  After 43 years, it is not only possible to see what happened in the past, but it is now possible to see what is missing.

 

War Memoirs

   Senator John Fitzgerald Kennedy won the 1957 Biography Pulitzer Prize for his partially ghost written book, Profiles in Courage.  Kennedy fully intended to write his memoirs after leaving office.  He wanted to be the final arbiter of how history would view his administration.  Consequently, he made his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, promise never to write his own memoirs as a condition of his appointment.  Rusk promised.  But Kennedy died before he could write his memoirs.

    War memoirs are as old as the human race.  War is a staple of literature.  Starting with Thuycidides Peloponnesian War, Homer's Iliad and even the Bible, war stories are a staple of human history. But Vietnam broke the mold.  While most war stories are of battles won and lost, a bird's eye view of the battlefield, the maneuvering of armies and diplomats written by generals, the Vietnam War was the first war to produce an avalanche of memoirs, not only by generals and diplomats, but also by privates and tank sergeants.

     One reason for this is that before the 20th century, most of the soldiers in all armies were illiterate.  Only the ruling classes could read and write, so war histories were written by and for them.  War histories were the biographies and autobiographies of the Generals.  This started to change slightly during World War I, when the poems of Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, and the Memoirs of an Infantry Officer by Siegfried Sassoon, shook the very foundations of European civilization by describing trench warfare not as something heroic but as something awful and futile.  Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori was the stock phrase children learned in their Latin classes in school.  Translation: It is sweet (fitting) and proper to die for one's country. 

 

 

Dulce Et Decorum Est

 

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep.  Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod.  All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

 

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And Flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

 

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

 

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a Devil’s sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie : Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

 

 

            “Children ardent for some desperate glory,” a perfect description of every 17-19 year old army recruit stuck in some rural places like Bells, Texas or Detroit Lakes, Minnesota for whom the only way to get out of town is to enlist.

 

It is difficult, if not impossible to overstate the change that World War I wrought in the world.  It created the League of Nations and a ban on the use of poison gas in warfare, as if to make combat humane.  The United States, because it entered the war late, was spared the carnage of the trench warfare that destroyed a generation of French, English and German men.  Whatever the horror of the conflict, it was glossed over in the United States by the idea that it was a war, in President Wilson’s phrase “to make the world safe for democracy.”  Not commonly remembered, is that many colonial troops fought in Europe in World War I: Vietnamese, Africans, Asians, the Irish.  In a certain sense, World War I was just the first battle in a war that continues today in the Middle East and in Iraq.  The seeds of these conflicts were sown almost 100 years ago.  Even today, there are thousands of books in Princeton’s Firestone Library with the following bookplate:

 

Memorial Library

WILLIAM BOULTON DIXON 1915

1st LT. 151st brigade  f.a.

killed in action

near thiaucourt france

october 17th, 1918

 

The Library knows nothing about the life of William Boulton Dixon, only that he was a member of the class of 1915.  After he was killed, his friends donated $20,000 to establish a fund to buy books about foreign relations for the library.  $20,000 was a huge amount of money in 1920, and there are thousands of books in the Princeton Library that have been bought with this fund.

 

World War I produced only a handful of writers.  Owen, Sassoon, and Brooke in England; Americans Ernest Hemingway who drove ambulances during World War I and even a conscientious objector, ee cummings.  In the early 20th century, publishing books was expensive.  Writers had to be good and connected to get into print.

 

World War II

 

World War II was not so different.  The major memoirs were written by generals: Crusade in Europe by Dwight David Eisenhower; The Memoirs of Field Marshall Mongomery; or by profession writers: Here is Your War by Ernie Pyle, U.S. Navy War Photography by Edward Steichen (a professional photographer); Tarawa – The Story of a Battle by Robert Sherrod; Assignment to Catastrophe by Edward Spears; I Saw the Fall of the Phillipines by Carlos Romulo (later president of the Phillipines); Invasion Diary by Richard Tregasis; Kasserine by Charles Whiting; Battle for the Solomons by Ira Wolfer; Stalingrad to Berlin: Defeat in the East by Earl Zienke.  World War II produced history books, not personal memoirs.

 

General George Patton also wrote a memoir, War As I Knew It.  Patton, the great tank commander, was born in 1885 and died in a jeep crash in 1945  His memoir made it into print thanks to the efforts of one of his subordinates, Colonel Paul D. Harkins, who annotated the text for publication.  Clearly written on the title page under War As I Knew It it says, “By General George S. Patton, Annotated by Colonel Paul D. Harkins.

 

 

Korea

 

Of course, there were military engagements between World Wars I & II, the American occupation of Haiti, for example; but Korea was the next major military engagement after World War II.  The Korean War produced almost no books of any kind.  Clay Blair, the military historian wrote a book called, The Forgotten War.  One notable exception was the memoir Hey Mac, Where Ya Been?  Marines in Korea by Henry Berry. Typical of that war are standard military tomes like The Naval Air War in Korea by Richard Hallion.

 

The Korean War was fought by the so-called silent generation.  Having grown up during the Great Depression of the 1930’s, having suffered the deprivations of rationing during World War II, the Korean War soldiers were overlooked while the World War II vets went about the business of starting their long delayed families.  Also patriotism was an unquestioned virtue.  There were a few isolated outbreaks of literary protest, like Thomas McGrath’s Ode for the American Dead in Korea.

 

1.

                       

                                    God love you now, if no one else will ever,

                                    Corpse in the paddy, or dead on a high hill

                                    In the fine and ruinous summer of a war

                                    You never wanted.  All your false flags were

                                    Of bravery and ignorance, like grade school maps:

                                    Colors of countries you would never see –

                                    Until that weekend in eternity

                                    When, laughing, well armed, perfectly ready to kill

                                    The world and your brother, the safe commanders sent

                                    You into your future.  Oh, dead on a hill,

                                    Dead in a paddy, leeched and tumbled to

                                    A tomb of footnotes.  We mourn a changeling: you:

 

2.

 

                                    The bee that spins his metal from the sun,

                                    The shy mole drifting like a miner ghost

                                    Through midnight earth – all happy creatures run

                                    As strict as trains on rails the circuits of

                                    Blind instinct.  Happy in your summer follies,

                                    You mined a culture that was mined for war:

                                    The state to mold you, church to bless, and always

                                    The elders to confirm you in your ignorance.

                                    No scholar put your thinking cap on nor

                                    Warned that in dead seas fishes died in schools

                                    Before inventing legs to walk the land.

                                    The rulers stuck a tennis racket in your hand,

                                    An Ark against the flood.  In time of change

                                    Courage is not enough: the blind mole dies,

                                    And you on your hill, who did not know the rules.

 

3.

 

                                    Wet in the windy counties of the dawn

                                    The lone crow skirls his draggled passage home:

                                    And God ( whose sparrows fall aslant his gaze,

                                    Like grace or confetti ) blinks and he is gone,

                                    And you are gone.  Your scarecrow valor grows

                                    And rusts like early lilac while the rose

                                    Blooms in Dakota and the stock exchange

                                    Flowers.  Roses, rents, all things conspire

                                    To crown your death with wreaths of living fire.

                                    And the public mourners come: the politic tear

                                    Is cast in the Forum.  But, in another year,

                                    We will mourn you, whose fossil courage fills

                                    The limestone histories: brave: ignorant: amazed:

                                    Dead in the rice paddies, dead on the nameless hills.

 

 

Vietnam

 

The first books about the Vietnam War were public relations pro-war books.  The Green Berets by Robin Moore and Outpost of Freedom by Captain Roger H. C. Donlon as told to Warren Rogers with a Foreward by Robert F. Kennedy published in 1965.  Almost immediately returning veterans started writing their own books like Winning Hearts and Minds a book of war poems by Vietnam Veterans collected by Basil T. Paquet and Larry Rottmann, self-published by the First Casualty Press, the name taken from the old adage, In war, truth is the first casualty. 

 

Winning Hearts and Minds opens with the picture of a sign reading: “if you kill for pleasure – you’re a sadist….if you kill for money – you’re a mercenary…if you kill for both – you’re a RANGER!!”

 

                                    They Do Not Go Gentle

 

                                    The half-dead comatose

                                    Paw the air like cats do when they dream,

                                    They perform isometrics tirelessly.

                                    They flail the air with a vengeance

                                    You know they cannot have.

                                    After all, their multiplication tables,

                                    Memories of momma, and half their id

                                    Lies in some shell hole

                                    Or plop! splatter!  on your jungle boots.

                                    It must be some atavistic angst

                                    Of their muscle and bones,

                                    Some ancient ritual of their sea water self,

                                    Some blood stream monsoon,

                                    Some sinew storm that makes

                                    Their bodies rage on tastelessly

                                    Without their shattered brains.

 

-          Basil T. Paquet

 

Clearly, the Vietnam War looked to be devoid of heroics.               

 

Bernard B. Fall – The Grandfather of Vietnam Memoirs

 

Even before the American buildup in Vietnam in 1965, Bernard B. Fall was writing books about the war in Vietnam.  Fall, who was born in France in 1926, was a resistance fighter who found his father murdered in a ditch when he was 16.  After emigrating to the United States, he started traveling, at his own expense, to Vietnam.  The books he wrote were mostly about the French -Vietnamese War from 1945-1954.  He wrote Viet Minh Regime, Government and Administration in the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in 1954;  Political Development of Vietnam, VJ Day to the Geneva Cease Fire in 1955:; Vietnam Witness, 1960;  Street Without Joy, 1961; The Two Vietnams; 1963, revised in 1965 and 1967; Hell In A Very Small Place – The Siege of Dien Bien Phu;  Anatomy of a Crisis, Laos 1960-1961, plus posthumously Last Reflections On A War.

 

Fall was killed in February, 1967, while on patrol with U.S. Marines on The Street Without Joy.  Fall’s writings, mostly in The New York Review of Books, fueled the Vietnam skeptics in the early years of the American Vietnam buildup. Although Fall’s works were read by many Vietnam bound officers, his observations were discounted for two reasons.  Americans in the 1960’s thought of the French as poor fighters and cowards.  Many French troops were, in fact, colonials from North Africa and other Francophone nations.  Although the United States actually financed the French war in Indochina, and American military intervention was actually contemplated to save the French at Dien Bien Phu by dropping bombs, or even an atomic bomb; the United States was more confident that it could prevail where France had failed by the greater use of technology:: helicopters, B-52 bombers and, of course, the brave American fighters who saved France twice, in World Wars I & II.  

 

For any career United States Army officer, especially one who had fought in France in World War II, the Vietnam War was far from an unknown quantity.  So, General Paul D. Harkins, when he was made commander of American forces in Vietnam, was not stepping into an unknown situation.  He certainly knew the history of French involvement and must have been familiar with the strategy and tactics of the enemy.

 

Writer Soldiers’ Memoirs

 

If Bernard Fall was the most prolific older writer on Vietnam, W. D. Ehrhart and Tim O’Brien were the most prolific combat veteran authors.  W. D. Ehrhart wrote: To Those Who Have Gone Home Tired, Vietnam Perkasie, Carrying the Darkness, and Unaccustomed Mercy.  Tim O’Brien wrote: If I Die In A Combat Zone,  Going After Cacciato and The Things They Carried.  Ehrhart and O’Brien are writers who also happened to be combat veterans.  If I Die In A Combat Zone,  To Those Who Have Gone Home Tired, and The Things They Carried are truly great books.  Many of the others are very, very good. 

 

O’Brien and Ehrhart faced a problem common to all aspiring writers of their generation.  What to do about Vietnam?  Anyone who read For Whom The Bells Toll, or Red Badge of Courage in middle or high school knew that war makes great material for writers.  But what if one thinks the war is wrong?  Is it worth fighting just to get material for a book?  On the other hand, young men want to be part of the crowd.  Even writers are brave and patriotic.  O’Brien and Ehrhart come from that tradition of writer-soldiers: Owen, Booke, Sassoon, and Hemingway.  

 

Every war produces books by writers who are also soldiers, some great books, but the number of these books is usually small.  Soldiers who fought in World War II or Korea did not feel the need to write books because they felt their story was told by the professionals.  They understood the strategy and their role in the fighting.  They did not see the combat of their individual units as central to the conflict.  A soldier participated in D-Day or the Battle of the Bulge or the retreat from Chosin.

 

Soldier Writers’ Memoirs

 

Vietnam was a civil war.  American soldiers could not tell friend from enemy.  There did not seem to be a military strategy and there were no front lines.  Many soldiers felt that people back home did not understand the war or them and so they felt compelled to tell their story.  These books were not by writers who became soldiers, but by soldiers who became writers merely to tell their stories.

 

Usually, they wrote only one heartfelt book, some confessional.  The lack of a meaningful overall military strategy meant that the war was reduced to their immediate combat experiences:  their unit, their village, their sector, their paddy.  Each of these personal memoirs is like a dab of paint on an impressionist painting.  Close up, it is just a seemingly isolated blur, but standing back, taken together, these books paint a clear picture of the Vietnam War.  The reason they got into print was because of the changing economics of publishing.  Everyone had an electric typewriter, printing costs were falling, and mass literacy created a market.  Finally, the enlisted soldier was going to have his say.

 

Service for the Dead by Robert Anderson is a beautifully written, powerful story of a teacher who gave up his deferment to fight in Vietnam.  Nam by Mark Baker was one of the first soldier memoirs.  Charles R. Anderson wrote Vietnam, The Other War and a less impressive sequel The Grunts. Gordon Baxter chimed in with 13/13 Vietnam: Search and Destroy.

 

David Bowman, a soldier from Missouri, published The Vietnam Experience, a glossy, coffee table book with photographs and text about the war.  Matthew Brennan wrote a brilliant Brennan’s War – Vietnam 1965 – 1969 and a less personal sequel Headhunters, 1st Squad, 9th Cav. 65 – 71.  Rice Paddy Grunt by John M. G. Brown is a great, archetypical description of Vietnam combat at the bottom, just what the title says. The Soldier’s Story – (Xa Long Tan) by Terry Burstall;  and Lima 6 by R.D. Camp, for which he enlisted the help of Eric Hammel.

 

Philip Caputo’s A Rumor of War was one of the earliest and most shocking soldier memoirs, a precursor of the veteran led anti-war movement to follow.  Reflections of a Wolfhound in County by Ronald Carmell; and Vietnam Blues by John Benjamin Carr are American versions of French books like Parachute en Indochine by Guy de Chezal. 

 

Semper Fidelis by Johnnie M. Clark is another of the brilliant views from the bottom, followed by a less successful Guns Up.  Michael Clodfelter’s Mad Minutes and Vietnam Months is another great book which, like the title, perfectly captures the tension between the boredom of being in the military and the terror of combat.  A Long Time From Home by Michael Costello, Remains – Stories of Vietnam by William Craper, Pigman Vietnam 1968 – 1969, the story of a machine gunner, by James Crum,  The Killing Zone by Frederick Downs, and I Protest, Khe Sanh, a book of photographs by the famous photographer David Douglas Duncan.   

 

During World War II, Duncan was a Marine Lieutenant.  He photographed Marine Corps aviation operations throughout the Pacific, fought with the famed Fijian guerrillas behind enemy lines on Bougainville, filmed Marine fighter-bomber attacks against Japanese pillboxes on Okinawa (shooting pictures from inside a plexiglass-nosed capsule under the wing of a P-38 fighter plane).  Duncan made the first landing on the Japanese mainland and photographed surrender ceremonies aboard the U.S.S. Missouri in Tokyo Bay.  During his 1967-1968 trips to Viet-Nam, Duncan joined the Marines in their bunkers at Con Thien, and on the DMZ, while the North Vietnamese tried to dislodge them with artillery fire.  Later, Duncan was with other Marines in their besieged Khe Sanh outpost.  In Self Portrait USA a book Duncan did on the Republican and Democratic national conventions in1968, he has 14 pages of photographs, pages 172- 185, of the wards of the Great Lakes Naval Hospital which, at the time he was there, held 1,263 Marines and paratroopers who were either amputees or in traction.   These photographs are love letters and a rare commodity, pictures of the inside of military hospitals during wartime.  Only a fellow Marine could have gotten close enough to take them.

 

And one of those Marines was Rick Eilert whose For Self and Country is an incredibly moving, wonderfully written, story of a young man’s decision to go to war and the luck, strength and fortitude required to recover from life altering injuries to his legs.  Charles V. Engelbrecht’s The Guns Fell Silent and the War Began is another book in this category.  Books like Thumbs Up by Ron Flesch, a fictionalized account of his Vietnam experience, are uniformly less believable and more poorly written than the non-fiction accounts.  The failure of fictional accounts to measure up to the actual events is explained by Pope John Paul II in his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope.  When asked by a reporter why priests never talk about Hell anymore the Pontiff declared,  That is because what is actually going on in the world today is so much worse than anything we can imagine. Redwood Delta by Ron Flesch; Visions of Nam, Volumes I, II, & III, poems by Harvey Fletcher; Date With Death by Leslie Ford; Nurses in Vietnam, The Forgotten Vets by Dan Freedman & Jacqueline Rhoads; Line Doggie, Foot Soldier Vietnam by Charles Gadd, Brothers: Black Soldiers In The Nam by Stanley Goff & Robert Sandler, Thirteen Months by K. W. Gorsky, Jr., Dispatches by Michael Herr, The Khe SanhVet Newsletter edited by Ernie Husted, 101st Airborne Division – Vietnam – 1st Year Yearbook, Vietnam ’68, Jack’s Journal by Jack W. Jaunal, are testimony to the breadth and doggedness of the veteran’s desire and need to tell the Vietnam story.

 

And A Hard Rain Fell by John Ketwig is one of greatest and most moving books.  Ketwig did not go to college, he was just a young man trying to be a musician when he was drafted.  He was a truck mechanic who cleaned the blood out of the cabs after attacks and ended up driving into Cambodia.  He blames the absence fathers and “teachers who never taught us that there was anything more important than getting the next first down” for the personal disaster of the Vietnam veterans.  Vietnam – The Other Side of Glory by William R. Kimball and the classic Born On The Fourth of July by Ron Kovic, who became wheelchair bound as a result of his service,  The Only War We Had by Michael Lee Lanning followed by the more historical sequel Inside Force Recon – Recon Marines in Vietnam by Michael Lee Lanning and Ray Stubbe; American Eagle by Larry Lee from the Navaho Indian perspective; In The Combat Zone by Kathryn Marshall, an oral history of women in Vietnam, Chickenhawk by Robert Mason, another brilliant memoir, this time from the helicopter pilot’s perspective; Platoon Leader by James McDonough, We Were Soldiers Once, And Young by Harold Moore and Joseph Galloway, Rows of Corn by Herb Moore describes Marine Training circa 1963 by someone who did not go to Vietnam, just for a little contrast of how combat affects attitude.

 

Timefighter – A Marine in Vietnam by Gary Murtha, The Boy Who Picked the Bullets Up by Charles Nelson is a great book, the Vietnam War told from a gay hospital corpsman’s perspective.  The dirty little secret of the military, gay people have served with distinction in all branches in all wars.  The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, is the Vietnam War as seen from the North Vietnamese enlisted man’s perspective,  These Good Men – Friendships Forged from War by Michael Norman, Green Knight, Red Mourning by Richard E. Ogden, another great, heartbreaking book by a man whose reading disability and stepfather’s encouragement landed him in the Marines in Vietnam,  G.I. Diary by David Parks, one of the few black written memoirs.  Parks is the son of the famous photographer, Gordon Parks.  Once Upon a Distant War by William Prochnau and a book that is an absolutely must read Fortunate Son by Lewis B. Fuller, Jr.  Fuller, the son of legendary Marine Corps Commandant Chesty Puller, wanted nothing more than to be an English teacher.  He even scalded himself at the age of nine, but did not damage himself enough to be exempt from military service.  Dad, the Marine Corps Commandant, was not to be denied.   Lewis entered the Marines and was mortally wounded in Vietnam.  Had he been anyone other than Chesty Puller’s son, he would have been left to die, but he was saved, although he never walked again.  After attending law school and with a nice job at the Pentagon, a wife and family, Puller had his fair share of drinking and marital problems.  He wrote this really great  book before finally killing himself a few years after its publication.  An equally tragic life and death awaited the son of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, Jr.  In the early 1960’s, sons were routinely forced to pursue the careers of their father’s choosing.

 

Mekong by James R. Reeves is a novel about Navy SEALS, Mourning Glory – The Making of a Marine by David Regan, The Walking Dead by Craig Roberts and Charles Sasser,  Not To Reason Why – A Vietnam Journal by Bernard Rustad, Everything We Had and To Bear Any Burden by Al Santoli, To Heal A Nation by Jan Scruggs & Joel Swerdlow, POW – Two Years With the Viet Cong by George E. Smith, a great book by a soldier held captive by the Viet Cong for two years early in the war.  Released as part of a peace token, the South Vietnamese and Americans concluded they could continue to fight on to victory.

 

Welcome To Vietnam, Macho Man by Ernie Spencer, a book about Vietnam and especially the siege of Khe Sanh by a Marine who was really there.  A Doctor’s Vietnam Diary by John F. Stahler, M.D., a great book; Faces I Tried To Forget by John Steer; Once A Hero, by Howard Swindle, a true story of one man’s journey from Vietnam to Leavenworth;  Dress Gray by Lucian K. Truscott IV, a book about West Point by a member of family of distinguished soldiers;

 

Home Before Morning by Lynda Van Deventer, the searing story of a happy go lucky girl who becomes a nurse and ends up in Vietnam.  This book, by one of the few women vets, will tear you up. Charlie’s Paradise 67-68 by Mike Vitel,  Civilian POW – Terror and Torture in South Vietnam by Winnie Wagaman and Norman Bookens, the story of a civilian employee of the state department held prisoner by the Viet Cong for five years; Fields of Fire by James Webb, a novel by an Annapolis graduate who fought in Vietnam and went on to become Secretary of the Navy and a United States Senator from Virginia.  One of the best, if not the best, novel by another member of a distinguished military family.

 

Song of Napalm by Bruce Weigl;  David’s Story – A Casualty of Vietnam written by Victor Westfall, David’s father, who never got over the loss of his son; Touched With Fire, The Future of theVietnam Generation by John Wheeler; REMF Diary by David A. Willson.  Combat soldiers called those in the military bureaucracy rear echelon mother fuckers (REMF).  This is a great book. Tank Sergeant by Ralph Zumbro is the war memoir of a tank driver.  A heavy equipment operator in civilian life, Zumbro shows that those big dump trucks on the highways are not trucks, they’re tanks, and the 18 wheelers are railroad cars.  Remember that when driving.  Finally, My Father, My Son by Elmo Zumwalt, Jr. and Elmo III.  Zumwalt was the chief of Naval Operations during Vietnam.  His son was a sailor on the rivers of Vietnam, valiantly diving into the Agent Orange polluted waters, he got cancer and died in his early 40’s. 

 

This is not even a comprehensive list of combat soldier memoirs, just the tip of the iceberg.  And the grunts were not the only ones who have been writing.  The diplomats have been hard at work trying to understand and explain the Vietnam War.

 

Diplomat Memoirs

 

Vietnam, A Diplomatic Tragedy by Victor Bator.  Planning A Tragedy – The Americanization of the Vietnam War by Larry Berman.  Anatomy of Error by Henry Brandon. The Lost Crusade by Chester Cooper. To Move A Nation by Roger Hilsman, The Right Hand of Power by U. Alexis Johnson, The Secret Search for Peace in Vietnam by David Kraslow and Stewart Loosy, a great book for showing what a president does.  Kraslow and Loosy, two low level functionaries in the state department, spend more than 200 pages describing a series of peace feelers in which they were involved.  In Lyndon Johnson’s Vantage Point he treats this feeler, along with four others that the Kraslow and Loosy knew nothing about, in one paragraph. The Storm Has Many Eyes by Henry Cabot Lodge, the ambassador during the coup against Deim, wrote this crucially important book that has been largely ignored.  It was barely mentioned by The New York Times upon publication. . Mission In Torment by John Mecklin, the embassy press officer during the coup against Diem, From Trust to Tragedy – Diem & Kennedy by Frederick Nolting, the American Ambassador to Vietnam who was replaced by Lodge just before the coup which toppled Diem. 

 

In the end, Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote As I Saw It, a memoir.  The reason he broke his promise to Kennedy not to write a book is because his son, who had served in the Marines in Vietnam, came home from Alaska and camped on his doorstep until his father agreed to tell his side of the story. 

 

 

Newsmen and Historian Memoirs

 

The New Face of War by Malcolm Brown.  The Furtive War by Wilfred Burchette.  The Fall of Saigon by David Butler.  Vietnam – A Political History by Joseph Buttinger.  Vietnam, The Secret War  by Kevin Generous, The Perfect War by James William Gibson, Charlie Company, What Vietnam Did To Us by Peter Goldman and Tony Fuller was written by two Newsweek Magazine reporters who were asked to do a cover story on Vietnam Veterans.  In the course of their investigation, they found enough material for this excellent book about the war and its aftermath. The Making of a Quagmire by David Halberstam, Tragic Mountains – War in Laos 1942 – 1992 by Jane Hamilton – Merrill, Ambush Valley and Khe Sanh, Siege in the Clouds by Eric Hammel, The Struggle for Indochina by Ellen J. Hammer, My Lai 4 by Seymour Hersh, Our Vietnam Nightmare by Marguerite Higgins, The Devil and John Foster Dulles by Townsend Hoopes, Vietnam – A History by Stanley Karnow, Payback by Joe Klein, Vietnam, A Reporter’s War by Hugh Lunn, The Tunnels of Cu Chi by Mangold and Penycate, The Vietnamese and their Revolution by John McAlister and Paul Mus, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred McCoy,  JFK and Vietnam by John M. Newman, Into Laos, The Battle for Hue, Tet 1968, and Death Valley – Summer Offensive in I Corps by Keith William Nolan,  Tet! – The Turning Point In the VietnamWar by Don Oberdorfer,  Page after Page by Tim Page, a British photographer’s memoir, Kennedy’s Quest for Victory (1961-1963) by Thomas Paterson, The Hidden History of the Vietnam War by John Prados,  Kennedy and Vietnam by William J. Rust, Flashbacks – On Returning to Vietnam by Morley Safer, Hamburger Hill – The Brutal Battle for Dong Ap Bia Mountain May 11-20, 1969 by Samuel Saffiri, Behind the Lines – Hanoi by Harrison E. Salisbury, War and the Ivory Tower – Algeria and Vietnam by David L. Schalk, The Real War by Jonathan Schell, Bitter Heritage – The Vietnam War and the American Dream by Arthur Schleshinger, Jr., The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam by Franz,Schurmann, Peter Scott and Reginald Zelnik (published in 1966), A Bright Shining Lie by Neil Sheehan.  Sheehan spent 16 years writing this classic best seller, a history of the American involvement in Vietnam as told through the life of Colonel John Paul Vann. Wings For the Valiant by Robert W. Sisk, Looking Away – Hollywood and Vietnam, by Julian Smith, The Vietnam Experience by Time-Life Books; Why Vietnam? By Frank N. Trager, a 1966 history of the French War and Diem Regime that concludes by being supportive of the war.  Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War by Brian Van De Mark; A Piece of My Heart – 26 Women Vets by Keith Walker;

 

Military Officer Memoirs

 

Trung Ta Bac Si by Lt. Colonel Wesly Grimes Byerly.  The Advisor by John L. Cook. Infantry inVietnam by Lt. Colonel Albert Garland.  About Face by David Hackworth, Inner Circles – How America Changed the World by Alexander Haig, Johnny’s Song, and other poems by Captain Steven Mason, is probably the best single poem to emerge from the Vietnam War which was read at the dedication of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C., The Twenty-Five Year War by General Bruce Palmer, Jr. Why Vietnam? By Archimedes Patti, Thunderbolt – Creighton Abrams by Lewis Sorley, the closest thing to an autobiography of Abrams, who was dying of cancer while serving as Commander in Vietnam and passed away soon after the end of his tour.  On Strategy by Harry Summers, Jr.  The Uncertain Trumpet and Swords and Plowshares by General Maxwell D. Taylor, who served as Kennedy’s Chief of Staff and military advisor;  Our Endless War – Inside Vietnam by Tran Van Don; Strange War, Strange Strategy by Lewis Walt; A Soldier Reports by William C. Westmoreland;

 

 

Elected and Appointed Official Memoirs

 

Counsel To the President by Clark Clifford.  Two United States Senators also wrote books about Vietnam.  J. William Fulbright of Arkansas wrote The Arrogance of Power and Vance Hartke of Indiana wrote The American Crisis in Vietnam. , In Retrospect and The Essence of Security by Robert McNamara, the Secretary of Defense during the buildup in Vietnam,

 

 

.Paul Harkins’ Memoir

 

What does this list of books prove?  It proves that if everyone from Presidents, Senators, Diplomats, Military Officers and combat veterans have been writing books about Vietnam, it is strange indeed that the commanding General in Vietnam during the most controversial event of the Vietnam War, the overthrow and murder of President Diem and his brother-in-law Nhu, the head of the secret police, has written nothing.

 

Well, you say, that doesn’t prove anything.  Why should Harkins write a book?  The answer is because he already had and he came from a family of writers.  His father was a newspaper reporter.  His brother was a novelist. He annotated George Patton’s memoirs after his death.  Paul Harkins himself collaborated with his brother Philip to write The Army Officer’s Guide, a how-to book for young officers.  Published in 1951, reflecting the lessons learned from World War II just in time for Korea, this 545 page book was published by McGraw-Hill with a Foreward by Major General Maxwell D. Taylor, Deputy Chief of Staff.  Clearly, Harkins took his soldiering seriously, or else he would not have presumed to write a textbook on soldiering.  So the fact that Harkins left no record of his time as commander in Vietnam is strange indeed, especially seeing as so many other people have spent decades of time, effort and money to get their stories, no matter how seemingly insignificant to others, into print.

 

In 1969, however, he published a book called When The Third Cracked Europe: The Story of Patton’s Incredible Army.  Harkins did not die until 1984, yet he never wrote an article, gave an interview nor wrote a book about his time as the first General of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam.  Why?  Maybe because he could not tell the truth about his role in the coup against Diem and the assassination in Dallas.  Unlike W. Mark Felt, who could wait 30 years and then confess to leaking information to the press that removed a president from office, admitting to conspiracy to commit murder, even if justified, even if the victim was part of the plot, is a far, far different kettle of fish.

 

Kennedy’s Conundrum and the Internal Debate Over Diem

 

In the fall of 1963, Kennedy faced a serious political problem.  The first Catholic ever to be elected president, the United States was fighting an anti-communist war in Vietnam where Nho Dinh Diem, the President, was a Catholic in a majority Buddhist country.  In May, religious riots had broken out with Buddhist priests burning themselves to death in protest.

 

Kennedy was caught between a rock and a hard place.  He couldn’t abandon South Vietnam or Barry Goldwater, the prospective Republican candidate would brand him soft on Communism.  On the other hand, fighting a war in support of what was essentially a Catholic dictatorship in South Vietnam had little appeal.

 

Consequently, the wheels were set into motion late in the summer, when everyone was on vacation, to help dissident officers (non-Catholics, of course) overthrow President Diem.  Also, it is important to remember that the decisions that Kennedy made that led to the coup were made right after his newborn son, Patrick Bouvier Kennedy, died at the age of 2 days.  Kennedy was depressed, naturally, and probably was not thinking too clearly.  He should have taken a vacation on the Cape, not tried to deal with his most difficult political and foreign policy question by himself.  Nevertheless, politics reigned supreme in the Kennedy Administration, and the president plunged ahead.  Wars frequently have accidental causes, usually unanticipated consequences flowing from deliberate acts.

 

 The administration was sharply divided over this course of action, with the military, especially, opposed.  Diem was our ally and overthrowing a head of state is an act of war.  Overthrowing a friend, furthermore, would make other nations far more reluctant to accept American help if it ever came out that the United States was involved.  This is why Kennedy had to be removed from office after Diem’s overthrow.  Kennedy could not resign, because that would have been an admission of American involvement in Diem’s overthrow.  Tran Van Don protests too much in his book that the coup that removed Diem was entirely a Vietnamese affair.  It became important to reassure allies that overthrowing our friends was not the policy of the United States, it was the policy of the Kennedy Administration, and if anyone ever tries to do something like that again, he or she will meet a fate similar to Kennedy’s.

 

It is important to remember that in those days, coups could be gentlemanly affairs.  When the CIA overthrew the legally elected government of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, Mossadegh retired to Paris.  King Farouk fled Egypt when Nasser took power.  Kennedy may have been under the impression that Diem would just be removed from office.  When Kennedy heard that Diem and Nhu had been murdered, he blanched and left the room.

 

Preposterous as it seems, Kennedy may even have understood the impossibile situation the coup put him in better than anyone.  He was the one who insisted that the bubble top be removed in Dallas, over the objections of the Secret Service.  Kennedy may even have been part of the plot.  He may have been one of the first friendly fire or fragging casualties of the Vietnam War, preposterous as that may seem.  Anyway, a brain surgeon needs to explain how a person, shot in the head from behind, can have part of their brain come out in the direction from which the bullet came.  Jackie Kennedy was climbing on the trunk of the limousine to retrieve part of Jack’s head.

 

Lodge’s Memoir, The Storm Has Many Eyes

 

In Kennedy’s Ambassador to Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge’s book, he freely admits having secret communications with Kennedy, leaving Harkins out of the loop.  Lodge never says what the communications were, but stoutly defends Kennedy’s right, as commander-in-chief, to leave Harkins in the dark.

 

In Mecklin’s book, he quotes Diem as saying, “I know a coup is coming, I just can’t figure out from where.”  Perhaps Kennedy used Harkins to deceive Diem to enable the coup to succeed.  If that was the case, Harkins would have been humiliated and his effectiveness as an officer ended. Kennedy, Harkins and Lodge were all from Massachusetts, which means that politics had its fingerprints all over the Vietnam problem. Furthermore, Harkins was a recess appointment, obviating the necessity of Senate confirmation where questions might have been raised as to the propriety of appointing a general with tank command experience to a guerilla war where the enemy had no tanks.   Kennedy wanted people in Vietnam who he thought he could control politically.

 

This back channel theory is given indirect confirmation by the actions of Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger during the waning days of the Nixon Administration over Watergate.  He said he sent out a message to all commanders telling them not to accept orders “outside of the normal chain of command.”  The purported fear was that Nixon might use the military in some way to stay in power.  Nevertheless, the mere mention of this possibility is indirect proof that presidents in the past might have issued direct orders to commanders outside the normal military chain of command.

 

 Harkins, a firm backer of Diem, probably also clearly saw the consequences of the coup, that it would now have to become an American War.

 

.The Timing of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution

 

Lyndon Johnson carried the Gulf of Tonkin resolutions around in his pocket for months before finally submitting them to Congress.  He did so in August, 1964, days before he was nominated for president for his own term.  The Gulf of Tonkin attacks are universally recognized as a causus belli, an excuse for the Vietnam War, just as the allegation of the weapons of mass destruction turned out to be the excuse, not the reason for the Invasion of Iraq.  If the attacks occurred at all, they were minor responses to clear American provocations.

 

Lyndon Johnson passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolutions when he did clearly to put the responsibility for the Vietnam War in Kennedy’s lap, during the time he considered himself the caretaker president.  If he hadn’t felt that way, he never would have stepped down in 1968.

 

Lee Harvey Oswald and Paul D. Harkins

 

The Warren Commission’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of President Kennedy is believable, but makes no sense given the inconsistencies and omissions in the investigation and its aftermath; the idea that General Paul D. Harkins was instrumental in the assassination is unbelievable, but makes sense given the revelations of the past 45 years about the Vietnam War and its origins.

 

An indirect confirmation of this theory can be found in H. R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty, Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies that Led to Vietnam. McMaster, a 1984 graduate of West Point, holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  As an Army officer, he had access to the files of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and wrote this book about its role in the decision to fight in Vietnam.  McMaster clearly documents the horrifying fact that Kennedy’s appointees in the Johnson Administration (McNamara, Rusk, and Bundy) the major players in foreign policy decision making, knew that the United States would not be able to win in Vietnam, but judged that it would be better to lose after committing troops and making a fight than just pulling out in 1965.  Why?  Because the United States felt it had to honor the commitments made by Kennedy to the anti-Diem coup plotters.  Similarly, assassinating Kennedy communicated to our allies that the United States does not condone turning its back on its friends.  This is the use of force for political purposes.

 

McNamara, Rusk and Bundy saw the use of military force as a means of communicating our resolve to North Vietnam and that the United States was “true to its word.”  The American Vietnam War aims were bizarre and even insane from a traditional war fighting perspective.  But if the involvement in Vietnam was to show the Anti-Diem coup plotters that America was sticking to its commitments, no matter how futile, even while demonstrating to the rest of the United States’ allies that abandoning a friendly head of state is not United States policy, then the policy makes perfect sense.  If  Johnson, McNamara, Rusk and Bundy knew the war was lost before it began, then the restrictions on the military to make sure it did not escalate into a nuclear World War III with China and/or Russia were eminently reasonable, even noble.

 

The epigraph in Closely Watched Trains, one of the first films to emerge from the Prague Spring in 1967 is: “A Hero is Someone Who Dies for No Reason, While Most People Live for No Reason.” America flushed its soldiers and Vietnamese lives down the toilet to make political statements.  Unfortunately, accidents can usually be found at the beginning of armed conflict, which is why they are so difficult to prevent or understand.  Menachem Begin, the Prime Minister of Israel, once said, “Anyone who doesn’t believe in miracles isn’t a realist.”  That’s just another way of saying that accidents do happen and I guess that’s where the tragic quality of life comes from.  

 

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