In contrast to most Vietnam veterans, I was a REMF in Vietnam. My tour of duty with the CIA was in the background compared to most of you. I skulked about avoiding contact, training others to do our will, managing their efforts, and collecting military and political intelligence on who was doing what to whom.

I had a series of a couple dozen unfortunate encounters with the enemy, unplanned on my part, and never was involved in what you would rate as a winning engagement. I worked with the provincial police in the nine northern provinces of what used to be South Vietnam setting up hamlet informant programs, training police how to process and analyze intelligence information gleaned from informant reports, and training squad-size operations to carry the war to Charlie's turf. The police ranks were so thoroughly infiltrated by VC that all our operations were telegraphed ahead and well-placed ambushes awaited us routinely.

Additionally, once we trained a squad, the province chief would transfer them to his headquarters as part of his palace guard. There were seven coups d'etat in 1964 and 1965 in South Vietnam. Each time one went down, the new general to emerge as warlord appointed new province chiefs loyal to himself in each of the 43 provinces of South Vietnam.

The whole house of cards fell as far as governing South Vietnam was concerned with each of these coups. Each new province chief would appoint new district chiefs as well as new province and district police chiefs. The province chiefs were obsessed with playing the "general-watching" game assiduously and paid no attention to VC operations in their midst. Instead they were busy making huge "tribute" payments to the top three generals of the month to hang onto their lucrative jobs when the next coup went down. Funds, by the way, came from CIA bankrolls and US-AID construction funding.

Some province chiefs produced for us a host of bogus informant reports designed to eliminate people their family members owed money to or to settle long-standing blood feuds in their families. Others were heavily involved with selling US arms and ammunition to the VC at exorbitant prices. Still others were involved in smuggling raw opium out of Laos using Air America aircraft. A few were involved in padding their province payrolls with non-existent informants or operatives, collecting their pay and using Air America aircraft to fly the cash to Bangkok, where they deposited it in mutual funds at the Merrill Lynch office there.

While all of this was going on behind the scenes, the VC juggernaut continued unopposed. Hanoi's 325^th Infantry Division entered the central highlands in mid-1964 and kicked ARVN's ass right back into the provincial capitals. They owned the rural areas completely. ARVN would collect solid intelligence on the location of, say, the 33^rd Regiment of the 325th Division and would mount a major multi-battalion sweep sixty or eighty miles south of the known location.

In those days, an ARVN Division Commander would get sacked if he took too many casualties, so they simply avoided contact. The generals in Saigon were focused on holding onto their turf. The armor commander wouldn't send his tanks out to blunt the VC's overrunning of a district capital or a Special Forces camp for fear a coup would go down while he was in the field with his tanks, and his tanks would be called on to capture Saigon's airport, radio station, and presidential palace. The air force commander wouldn't scramble his A1-H's out to support a besieged province or district capital because a coup might go down, and the new general might want the tanks bombed and strafed as they moved on Saigon.

By January 1965, the CIA estimated that the VC would topple the South Vietnamese military government by June. I, personally, agreed with that estimate based upon what I was seeing in the provinces. The only thing that turned the tide and delayed this 1965 victory until 1975 was the deployment of you guys in IIIMAF to Danang and the 173^rd Airborne Brigade to the Saigon area.

In those days my loyalties were stretched nine ways from Sunday because as an intelligence officer I knew just a little too much. Westy and Ambassador Taylor we nicknamed "Ostrich-One" and "Ostrich-Two." Any US Army provincial advisor who told the truth in his weekly and monthly progress reports was relieved and sent home under a cloud of suspicion about his loyalty, so most complied and played the "Country Team" game of rosy reporting. This, of course, was massive, command-wide self-delusion of the worst kind. Westy fired his Marine one-star J-2 Intelligence aide, who told it like it was in his reports to the Pentagon, in the summer of 1964 and replaced him with an Army one-start J-2, who hewed to the MACV line. "And, the beat goes on . . . "

Note: This section was extracted from side-notes and off-the-record conversations with the Village Elder himself. I think it helps paint a more balanced picture of reality..... don't you think?
- by The Editor's Assistant -

Send me back, I'm ready!

I had a lovely villa at 69 Truong Minh Giang in the diplomatic quarter of town, my wife and three kids (4th born after Nam) accompanied me. CIA gave my wife $5K to "decorate" the villa any way she liked, so that kept her and a gaggle of other wives busy for a month shopping Saigon's boutiques and furniture makers.

The three story limestone villa was enclosed by 10 foot concrete walls, had a manicured Japanese garden in front yard, screened porches, servants quarters in rear and behind that a handball court. The joint had five bedrooms, each with a limestone sundeck to walk out onto in the morning for coffee. Bathroom had a sink, bidet, toilet, and a sunken bathtub with inset lounging shelves specially designed by the French who built it for intercourse. One was male superior; the other female superior. The roof was a party platform with wet bar, carved columnar railings, bathroom, tiki torch holders, potted palms.

I know all you jarheads who beat the bush and elephant grass need to hear this description of the decadent lifestyle of the CIA, who paid the rent on the place. But, ya know, it was tough duty, and somebody had to do it, so I volunteered as any red-blooded American boy would do.

Before February '65, mine was a commuter's war, where I'd fly out of Tan son Nhut at 0530 on Monday mornings and make my weekly rounds of nine provinces, ending up drinking beer at Casey's Air America bar and grille at Danang for a commuter flight back to Saigon on Friday nights.

Then it was a round of CIA parties all weekend with time in the pool at Cercle Sportif, the tennis courts, the Happy Hour. Dinner on top of the Rex Hotel with a skyline view of Saigon or on the breezeway at the Hotel Continental. Breakfast Sunday's at the Hotel Majestic along the Saigon River after Mass at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in center city.

"The Company" had a fleet of six 29-foot sailboats docked at the Cercle Nautique along the river for sign out, so often we'd take a Sunday afternoon sail down to Vung Tao (known in those days as Cap St. Jacques).

For a change, they are all very pleasant, fond memories.

---

On Being Asian

You might be Asian if:

you can hunker down, with ass on heels, and have a conversation with someone for at least as long as it takes to smoke a cigarette.

your belt goes around your waist 1.5 times

you walk around in shoes that are untied

your ancestors invented two sticks to pick up one grain of rice and one stick to carry two buckets of shit

you diet by eating half a duck's head

you can clean and gut a fish without a knife

you shave a pigs' head for wedding ceremonies

you have never had a formed stool

you drown daughters instead of puppies

you believe gin-seng gives you a hard-on

ginseng actually gives you a hard-on

you only eat black dogs in the winter

Mental Exercises for the Soul

Every thought is made up of two factors, knowledge and feeling. A thought consists of a piece of knowledge with a charge of feeling, and it is the feeling alone that gives power to the thought. No matter how important or magnificent the knowledge content may be, if there is no feeling attached to it nothing will happen. On the other hand, no matter how unimportant or insignificant the knowledge content may be, if there is a large charge of feeling something will happen.

It makes no difference whether the knowledge content is correct or not as long as you believe it to be correct. Remember that it is what we really believe that matters. A report about something may be quite untrue, but if you believe it, it has the same effect upon you as if it were true; and that effect will depend upon the quantity of feeling attached to it.

When we understand this law we see the importance of accepting the truth with joy in every phase of our experience.

The Village Elder