Now may be just the time you need to consider the historical perspective of our latest worst war in Vietnam to decide how to respond to the numbers of bomb droppings in multiple countries initiated at this time in the United States...
I recommend Out of Step as the Best Book Read Regarding the Reality of the Vietnam War and a must-read Suggestion for NOW
What happened there? I began to write to Bill, who was then overseas during the Vietnam War. He was the son of my mother's friend and she'd asked me to write and let him know that he was not forgotten... Since then, I've read a number of books on that war. One of my most memorable reads was The Road From Here to Where You Stay... I'm not sure that it should really be considered in the same genre as the others, but it drew me in to what some may think of as "the romance of war..."
Most of the interactions I've had related to Vietnam books was that not many were willing to really talk about what happened there... And, perhaps, it is by way of my long-time reading of the books by Francis Hamit that I, for the first time, understand all of the confusion that surrounded that period...
I had finished my reading of Out of Step before I accidentally fell recently, and was about to review. But it seemed too much of a coincident that it was right before DJTrump bombed Iran...
Naturally I connected his cavalier words of death and destruction to how Francis has chosen to share with us in the first Book of his Memoir...
Out of Step; A Memoir of the Vietnam War --
Foreword
MULTIPLE INTELLIGENCE FAILURES CAUSED OUR DEFEAT IN VIETNAM
--Francis Hamit
“Our greatest shortcoming in Vietnam is the lack of timely accurate intelligence.”
– A Special Forces officer
“If we see the enemy clearly we will win. If the enemy sees us clearly, we will lose.”- Ho Chi Minh
With that simple statement in 1947, Ho Chi Minh set the rules of engagement that would guide the People’s Republic of Vietnam’s cryptographic services until final victory in 1975. It was all one war for them, in a theatre of operations that included Laos and Cambodia as well as South Vietnam. Lines on a map drawn by others meant nothing to them. Starting with no cryptographic sources but an old manual in French, they built a world-class Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) establishment, in many ways superior to our own. We didn’t know that. We never saw it. They made sure of that. And we walked into a trap of our own making. They were ready. We were not.
At the beginning of the American take-over of the Vietnam War, the U.S. Army was eager, it seemed, for a fresh conflict, but it was not really capable from the standpoint of accurate intelligence. Recently declassified documents reveal that its Military Intelligence establishments were understrength and in severe disarray, forcing them into a game of catch-up that they never did win. This failure ultimately handed victory to the Communists.
The Army had a carefully integrated system of FM (frequency modulated) radios for tactical communication between its units in the field at every level from Army down to eight man infantry squads, all on the same network. In 1965 when the American incursion began, none of these devices had internal or external scramblers to code and decode their signals. The Army Security Agency tried to make up for this deficit by stressing the need for good communications security (COMSEC) in the field, and had units dedicated to intercepting our own traffic in a vain effort to enforce compliance. Its efforts were generally ignored.
Writing in Army Communicator in 2003, David Fiedler, a retired Signals Corps officer who served in Vietnam, wrote, “It was USARV’s official opinion that NVA/VC had no equipment capable of monitoring U.S. tactical nets, nor could they understand English well enough to use the information, and most importantly, that even if the enemy managed to acquire some information from our tactical radio nets, it would do them no good and us no harm. That arrogance was to cost us dearly.”
As one of my company commanders at Fort Devens said “The word “assume” makes an ass out of you and me.” The public face of the VC as “farmers in black pajamas” was their most effective deception. It made us look like we were fighting peasants rather than PAVN, one of the most powerful armies in the world.
The US Army was more concerned with its global mission against the USSR, and to a lesser degree, Red China. That war was fought on multiple fronts. North Vietnam was simply the tip of the spear wielded by the Soviet Union and China in the long Cold War against the United States and its allies. South Vietnam was where that Cold War got hot. But it shrank in importance when compared to the facedown in Europe. That was where the “real war” would be fought.
This I learned first-hand when I reported for duty in Frankfurt, West Germany, in April 1969, fresh from a year in Vietnam. My new First Sergeant directed my attention to the Fulda Gap a few kilometers away and said that was where the Soviet-led invasion would come. Our job was to keep watch and give early warning. So trim that Calvary mustache, get a haircut, and lose that swagger. No one cares you were in a combat zone.
That was my first experience with anti-war rhetoric even within the US Army. The Cold War in Europe created resentment, as we confronted an adversary whose capabilities and intentions remained a mystery even as we gradually encircled them with almost a dozen FLR-9 antenna arrays. These were so large that they were called “elephant cages” and monitored every frequency.
My new unit was HQ USASA Europe, and not really part of the Army. We just wore the uniform. The reality was that we were a military component of the National Security Agency (NSA), an organization more secret and larger by far than the CIA. The Army Security Agency (ASA) was alleged to be drawn from the top ten percent of the Army intellectually, and a minimum GT score of 115 was required. That was to be a cook. For the important operational jobs that required many months of technical and language training, the GT scores tended much higher. It was part of the Army in the sense that everyone went through Basic Combat Training and some of us acquired other military skills such as parachuting. There were tactical units that supported every combat brigade and division. Strategically we had a worldwide network of field stations and other listening posts, and we were in Vietnam even before there was a big war.
The first American soldier killed in Vietnam was one of ours. SP/4 James T. Davis, killed in an ambush that wiped out the nine-man squad of ARVN radio operators he was training in radio direction finding. That was in 1961. Later we would name our big field station at Phu Bai, in the Saigon suburbs, after him. In 1965, after the USA took over the war, there would be a thousand men at Phu Bai (Davis) Station and, at the peak of the war when we had over half a million men in country, five thousand more in tactical units in the field. It became the biggest ASA field station in the world, with almost a hundred operator positions manned 24/7/365. Tactical units had five operator positions each.
This demand on agency resources drained men away from other listening posts, mostly in Europe. It was about 20% of our worldwide strength. Our game was SIGINT: signals intelligence, and our function so vital that we disguised ourselves under the cover designation “Radio Research” and were cautioned to never reveal our true name, under penalty of Court Martial.
How well did this work? Jerry Orlemann, who was a Traffic Analyst at Ben Hoa, relates this story:
“ A friend, when I was awaiting orders in Saigon took me to a bar downtown. Some cute little thing came over to me and plopped herself down in my lap. We began talking – or at least she did – and the first thing out of her mouth was “You new guy. You ASA.” I stuttered and she continued, “Everybody here ASA. This ASA bar.” I stuttered some more and she hit me with: “You must be 98 Charlie (Traffic Analyst). They short 98 Charlie. You go to Bien Hoa. They short 98 Charlie at Bien Hoa.” Three days later I got orders for Bien Hoa.”
Our “loose lips” problem began on arrival at Tan Son Nuit airfield in Saigon where the Sergeants sorting the arriving troops would say things like: “All you ASA guys go to Building ___”. At a time when the Viet Cong offered a 100,000 piaster bounty on our heads (about $5,500.). This was just part of the larger Army’s lack of regard for security.
There was an infamous recruiting poster at that time that said “No ASA in Vietnam” (see illo). This was a trick to deceive men who wanted to avoid service in Vietnam to sign up for a four year enlistment rather than three. It worked, but filled the ASA’s ranks with resentful, rebellious troops with “FTA” and anti-war attitudes. The all-male junior ranks also created a frat house ambience with too much drinking and drug use at many locations. The larger Army was an incubator for drunks then, with alcohol readily available at clubs and base exchanges. This had an impact on “readiness”. It is hard to copy code with a hangover.
Recruiting Sergeants were always on the look-out for high IQ men they could persuade to join ASA despite the four-year enlistment. Some of the schools were almost a year long before you got your first assignment. At Phu Bai, a typical Morse or voice intercept operator was supposed to have 47 weeks of Vietnamese language school, with another eight in the North Vietnamese dialect. Added to that was 16 weeks or more of radio code school to be able to copy 18 five letter code groups or more per minute, plus additional training on the job to learn how to sort out signals from all the crackles, shrill whistles and other artifacts that made up the real world intercept environment.
These messages were encoded. That required other sets of specialists to decode them, analyze them and try to convince commanders in the field that the intelligence was real and actionable. Often that was a hard sell. We could not reveal our “sources and methods” – and often what we told them went against their own prejudices and desires. Many of the briefers were young Lieutenants with ROTC or OCS commissions rather than from West Point or another military college. They were not steeped in the traditions so dear to career officers, and viewed with suspicion and disdain by the “ring knockers”. That created a cultural distance and our penchant for secrecy made the product we delivered seem like witchcraft. ASA gave ample warning of the 1968 Tet Offensive but failed to convince General Westmoreland and other top commanders.
We could be fierce about physical security on our own turf. In November 1968 the Airfield Commander at Can Tho decided to surprise us with an unannounced inspection of the mysterious building surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by MPs . It was our operations center. For his trouble he was told by the MP on duty that if he took one more step he would be shot. There was a .45 pointed right at his head. Enraged, he stormed over to our orderly room and berated our company commander for 20 minutes while that worthy continued to sign paperwork. When he drew breath, our C.O. informed him that he’d committed a major security breach. Would he tell MACV or would we? Allegedly he was relieved of duty and his Army career two weeks later, and sent back to the States. As for the MP who’d threatened his life: he was promoted to Sergeant. This was an ASA tradition. Security trumped rank and our MPs everywhere regularly fended off unwelcome inquiries from officers and NCOs from other units. Sometimes at gunpoint.
The company was the 156th Aviation Company (R.R.) . It flew U6A DeHavilland Beavers and was a component of the 224th Aviation Battalion (R.R.). In a way, James T. Davis’s tragic death was the reason these units were created. Radio Direction Finding ( RDF) was one of our basic tasks: find enemy signals and fix their location. As Davis and others using heavy, bulky receivers found, enemy signals were muffled by the terrain and jungles. Putting an intercept operator in a Beaver with dipoles in its wings worked far better. The dipoles were forty feet apart and turned the entire aircraft into a flying antenna. During a four hour mission the operator would find a signal, the pilot would maneuver the aircraft to determine the direction and the co-pilot would mark it on a map. The process would be repeated at least twice so that the intersecting lines revealed the exact location of the enemy transmitter. Sometimes that intelligence was relayed to ground combat units and sometimes just to the Air Force. The resulting B-52 strike would leave an ugly red gash like an open wound in the dark green jungle canopy as it delivered wholesale destruction. This is now considered the most successful signals collection platform of that war.
I knew none of this at the time. I had a TS/C, but no ‘need to know’, and was not permitted to enter that mysterious Operations Building. Neither was our Company Commander. He just, as another of our pilots so elegantly put it, “drove the bus.” It is only recently that many of the details have been declassified and made public.
Intercepting the enemy did not mean that we understood him or his resolve and cunning. American officers working with their South Vietnamese counterparts were frustrated by their lack of urgency. It was part of their culture. Had we understood that, we would have known that the North Vietnamese shared that attitude and were willing to wait us out. The North never accepted the 1954 partition of their country. To them it was all one, and our support for a corrupt and, to them, illegitimate South Vietnam regime, was a temporary problem. Again, it was our own fault. We had no Area Specialists familiar with that part of the world, and our own military intelligence establishment was so thin on the ground that there was an immediate stripping of personnel from other units in CONUS in 1965 to the point that there was no longer a contingency force there to handle new and unexpected threats.
An American might have difficulty thinking a cute little bar girl was an enemy agent, but ASA soldiers were supposed to know better. Conversely, a lot of the first term ASA enlisted were bitter that they’d been deceived and didn’t care. They drank too much and sometimes talked out of school. Most of the bar girls I met were very smart. Some had college degrees and sold their bodies simply to make more money than they could anyplace else. They sold PX goods on the Black Market. Selling or giving bits of information to the Viet Cong was simply another business opportunity. Many were among uncounted and undercounted Viet Cong “part-timers” so scorned by those in command.
This hidden army was why the Tet Offensive almost succeeded. In a way it did succeed, because Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America”, went on his nightly broadcast and declared the war lost. It was the VC that lost. They were almost destroyed entirely. But the PAVN stepped in to replace them and the Chinese and Soviets upped the ante by sending massive economic and logistical support.
PAVN, since “Uncle Ho’s” simple statement in 1947 quoted above, constantly sought to improve and build its cryptological services, recruiting young men and women. Very serious these young people were, filled with the fervor of a perpetual revolution fueled by propaganda and patriotism. Hundreds were recruited every year and there were over 3,200 of them by the time of the American incursion in 1965. Still not enough to handle the explosion of traffic that came with that. Unlike their American counterparts they were there for the long haul. Very few in ASA volunteered to go to Vietnam. (I was one.) There were better assignments many other places. But we hardly experienced the harsh conditions that the PAVN “crypties” endured. They also accompanied combat units in the field, and handled their communications as well as intercepting ours. And while we experienced some combat loses, theirs were epic. Dying Crypties blown up in an artillery strike or B-52 raid made heroic efforts to conceal or burn their code books and other cryptologic material before they died.
The Viet Cong had an excellent intelligence system, especially where combat was offered to them. It allowed them to evade large main force units, and ambush and destroy smaller ones.
Those in the field who knew the people and the culture were sometimes accused of having “gone native”. The Special Forces, rescued by President Kennedy from disbandment, were derided as “snake eaters” and considered a career dead end to be avoided by those aspiring to flag rank. Their true masters were the CIA paramilitary agents who ran the Phoenix Program, USAID and CORDS. “Hearts and minds” seemed overly sentimental to commanders who had spent their own youth in World War Two and the Korean Conflict, a war so brutal that everyone wanted to forget it.
Top commanders and staff never grasped the reality of our determined enemy. Our own culture got in the way. Racial stereotypes were a major hindrance. At that time there were so few Vietnamese living in the USA that none appeared in the John Wayne war propaganda film, “The Green Berets.” The extras in that film who played Viet Cong were actually ASA enlisted men of Asian heritage from Hawaii. They performed a similar role at the Tactical Training Center at Fort Devens, Mass. This was a well-intentioned but flawed effort to train ASA soldiers in advanced infantry techniques needed in tactical units in Vietnam, and also how to resist enemy interrogations under torture. There was a simulated “Vietnam Village” on the course, but it was a Disneyland version of the real thing.
The US Army, even all those years after President Truman decreed racial equality, was filled with Jim Crow racists who viewed the Viet Cong as a peasant army of farmers in black pajamas who could not match us technologically. And so it appeared. It was not until 1969 that an enemy SIGINT unit was captured and revealed the presence of a PAVN/VC SIGINT force of about 5,500 with sophisticated equipment.
An ASA radio repairman who was sometimes tasked to examine captured enemy equipment remembers: “In the beginning it was exactly the kind of kit radio I built in high school but very well soldered, then it was Japanese ship to shore radios mixed with some German and Swedish gear, and finally Chinese and Russian military radios as good as our own...and, of course, they had many of those, some captured in battle and some diverted from our own stores.”
David Fiedler confirms this. US Army radios captured in battle or simply purchased from our South Vietnamese allies and other sources were a mainstay of PAVN/VC SIGINT. And they were geniuses in antenna engineering, contriving some that extended the range of their equipment far beyond our own.
On the Human Intelligence (HUMINT) side of the war, the one-year tour was also a major stumbling block. That was simply not enough time for a new Order of Battle (OB) specialist to attain the needed mastery. OB is the “who, what, and where” of intelligence analysis. It requires intellectual rigor and a set of specific skills. Despite its importance, it was a neglected stepchild in an organization where men signed up to be counterintelligence agents and field interrogators. Book smarts were not street smarts without the proper training. There was an erroneous assumption that men with advanced education would somehow magically be able to produce useable OB product as they trained “on the job” (OJT). A detachment with 27 Lieutenants and seven enlisted men with graduate degrees proved this to be a false assumption. They all had to be retrained. OB was a needed but unloved skill set before that war.
A lot of the raw intelligence for OB was also collected by HUMINT. Patrolling and reconnaissance were a primary means, if the enemy could be found. But many patrols became “a walk in the woods” with no contact, as the enemy used his own SIGINT to find and avoid us. If there was an engagement, then prisoner interrogations were a primary source; however, since few Americans spoke Vietnamese themselves, translators provided by the host nation were required – an imperfect method to attain accurate intelligence because it was vulnerable to enemy infiltration. The situation was compounded in the tribal areas where the language was a Montagnard, Hmong, or Nung dialect.
Some Special Forces soldiers had close relationships with these tribes, who hated the South Vietnamese and their Northern cousins equally. Sometimes “going native” was sound strategy. Political loyalty flowed directly to us. But a Special Forces A Detachment was only 12 men, and only one dealt with Intelligence. Over his one-year tour, he would work with the local Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) and develop sources and networks in his area of operations. Because they were close to the people, the A teams and CIDG were the most productive sources of HUMINT. All of that knowledge was lost when he rotated to his next assignment, because his replacement had to start from scratch.
Military Intelligence also suffered through several reorganizations in the early 1960s to bring its administrative procedures in line with those of the larger Army. It finally became a separate branch with its own insignia, but the tradecraft developed by the old Counterintelligence Corps that preceded it in World War Two and Korea was lost. Adding to the irony was the fact that ASA had its own separate counter-intelligence agents. The ones in the Regular Army did not have the necessary Top Secret/ Crypto security clearances.
Returning to Jerry Orlemann’s encounter with that Saigon bar girl, it is hard to imagine that anyone actually discussed personnel shortages at Bien Hoa with her. That would have been a Court Martial offense with heavy jail time. So how did she know? Very possibly she was part of an enemy intelligence unit that acquired the information through document theft or their own SIGINT.
The larger Army was, however, full of men who talked too much. Usually in Plain Language with little regard for proper security procedures, with improvised call signs and unit designations. PAVN also had this problem at first but used re-education and refresher courses to correct it. COMSEC (communications security) became a way of life in those units.
It was not part of the American Army’s culture: ASA was also tasked with communications security and provided tactical units with carefully devised codes and radio procedures to foil enemy tactical SIGINT. Generally these were ignored, starting with the officers at the top of the chain of command. Fiedler reports that this cultural blindness was pervasive among field grade (Major and above) and General officers up to and including Creighton Abrams, and that unit Signals officers (S6/G6) were “cowed” into going along. Most were Lieutenants with very little experience and training.
Again, the false view of the enemy held by most American military personnel worked against us. The VC operators liked and had a full understanding of American popular culture. This made it easy for them to immediately understand made-up amateur code words used by lazy officers and NCOs leading combat units in the field. Sometimes battle plans were easily detected with tragic results. Commanders got their men killed and wounded in ambushes simply by refusing to take the time to send their orders in the proper format and codes. Call signs and radio frequencies were supposed to be changed at regular intervals to foil enemy listeners. Almost no unit, ASA included, did this. It was too confusing.
When it came to transmitting “in the clear”, older generation West Pointers were among the worst offenders, sometimes identifying themselves by name over voice transmissions in the heat of battle. The higher the rank the bigger the bubble that isolated them from the realities in the field.
The VC operators also became proficient at “spoofing”. This was tactical deception. Some of their operators would sign onto our networks and try to deceive our operators into revealing information by pretending to be another unit on that network. They could then deceive us into doing something inimical to our plans. There were authentication procedures, of course, but the VC/PAVN operators spoke excellent English or might even imitate an Australian or Mexican accent to add a little theatre to their spoof.
The big field station at Phu Bai worked on strategic intelligence, some of it political as well as military. Tactical collection was handled by Direct Support Units (DSUs) attached to every combat organization we deployed in Vietnam. Detachments and Companies with a constantly changing roster because of the one-year tour were always short-handed. The heavy workload and unfilled operator seats produced long hours and high stress. Non-operational slots were filled by school washouts like myself who could type. We became OJT clerks. When that failed, men were levied from the Regular Army where commanders viewed us as a dumping ground for their problem children.
The one-year tour meant that just as someone got good at his job, he was gone. Because Army personnel policies had everyone in slots, there was no overlap so that the replacement could be briefed or trained. Because our tactical units moved with the commands they were assigned to, and the Army, not ASA, controlled personnel and pay records, promotions and other rewards often disappeared; another source of enlisted discontent.
At one point, Phu Bai would pull new operators back to the big field station for additional training and replace them with operators who’d gained mastery. Then the better-trained operators would switch back to their original assignments. This greatly improved tactical collection, but much of that was designated “special intelligence” and could only be sent by SIGINT channels, sometimes as far away as NSA’s Fort Meade headquarters, to be analyzed and scrubbed before being relayed to the military unit the DSU was assigned to. Usually too late to be useable.
A secret Australian SIGINT unit, 547 Signal Troop, was deployed with the Australian forces and subordinated to ASA and NSA as a DSU. It had a very confused Chain of Command above it and often violated NSA protocols by delivering tactical intelligence directly to the consumers. These included not just several American units but an Australian SAS (special forces) unit assigned with them. There were just 35 men in this unit, of “all ranks”. They had eight intercept positions and are considered by their American peers to have performed exceptionally well. They, too, were hampered by a lack of trained linguists. Excessive secrecy sometimes was a barrier: there were few at the tactical level cleared for their reports, who even knew of their existence. Finally, in 1968, they received permission to make direct briefings. They were in Vietnam for five and a half years.
Our collection efforts always produced far more traffic than could be analyzed in the field. The excess would be sent to higher headquarters, usually by couriers transporting locked 80 pound mail bags full of raw intercepts. (I was one of these.) The time lag made it useless for tactical purposes. So the DSU was caught between the Army and the NSA constantly. It got worse when a commander at Phu Bai started taking replacements meant for DSUs to fill his own empty slots. This brought one DSU to the edge of collapse as operators rotated out of their one-year tours and were not replaced.
The fact that everyone in ASA had enlisted rather than being drafted partially saved the situation. There was a sense of doing important work, of being special. But the pay was low and the ceremonial nature of Army traditions an unwelcome intrusion in a combat zone. We had no morning formations and training was ad hoc and secondary to the mission. We had real jobs. After that first four years, most of us moved on, back to civilian life, unlike the PAVN and VC operators who had no other place to go and gained more experience as the war continued. They were totally committed to their cause, while our resolve was weakened by the anti-war virus of popular culture. It was present in every song, every film, every television show, the message that ours was a losing cause, and in the end the sheer weight of that disapproval would burden those who served there for decades, even to the present day.
Sources:
1.) Essential Matters: A History of the Cryptologic Branch of the People’s Army of Vietnam 1945 -1975. Translated and edited by David W. Gaddy, Center for Cryptologic History, NSA, 1994.
2.) “Working Against The Tide” COMSEC monitoring and analysis. NSA cryptologic history series published in 1970 and 1978 as a Top Secret/Crypto UMBRA NOFORN document. Now declassified and available online.
3.) “A Critical Analysis Of US Army Intelligence Organizations and Concepts 1965-1969.” Another TS/C UMBRA NOFORN document recently declassified and available online.
4.) “American Cryptology During The Cold War 1945-1989; Book II Consolidation Wins 1960-1972 by Thomas R. Johnson, formerly a TOP SECRET UMBRA NOFORN document, now declassified and available online.
5.) Unlikely Warriors, The Army Security Agency’s Secret War in Vietnam. by Lonnie M, Long and Gary Blackburn, iUniverse 2013, available on Amazon,com. Both authors served in SIGINT units in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. Considered the best non-classified source.
6.) My Detachment by Tracy Kidder. Random House 2005, Memoir by a former MI officer who commanded a very small COMSEC unit in Vietnam. (Full disclosure. He was a classmate of mine at the Iowa Writers Workshop but it was not until the book was published that I knew he’d even been in the US Army or Vietnam.)
7.) Military Studies: The Role of Military Intelligence by Joseph A. MacChristian, MG retired, Department of the Army 1973.
8.) Vietnam Studies: U.S. Army Special Forces 1961-1971 by Colonel Francis J, Kelly, Department of the Army, 1973.
9.) 547 Signal Troop and the Army Security Agency by Phillip Rutherford, PhD, an unpublished paper by a former member of the 547th,
10.) Project Touchdown: How we paid the price for a lack of communications security in Vietnam by David Fiedler, article in Army Communicator, Spring 2003.
11.) Various Facebook posts on ASA and SIGINT veteran groups. Jerry Orlemann quote used by permission.
12.) Author’s personal recollections.
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