Here is a story that, for complicated reasons, was killed some years ago

Dennis Rockstroh with Qui Nhon committee officials

Back to the enemy’s lair: warning — long story ahead

Amerasians: San Jose attorney returns to Vietnam in search of America’s lost children

By Dennis Rockstroh

Hanoi, Vietnam, June 1988 — The night air in Hanoi was hot and muggy when the electricity at 202 Restaurant, the diplomatic community’s favorite eatery, suddenly snapped off.
As the neighborhood plunged into darkness, no one stirred, knowing that restaurant owner Vu Van Khai, onetime chief cook at the French embassy, was prepared for such common, temporary unpleasantness as stilled fans and suddenly darkened rooms.
“There they go,” announced Bruce Burns, the attorney from San Jose, California to his dinner companions as Khai’s generators roared to life. The long fluorescent light tubes glowed again, and the green ceiling fans began slowly to slice through the tropical air again, much like those green blades of the Huey gunships in that vicious war so long ago. The rest of Hanoi would suffer a blackout, but not 202 and its packed house of foreigners.
French Ambassador Louis Amigues pushed on his food and resumed conversation with a companion. A film crew from West German television, working on a documentary on Burns, picked up their animated conversation and ordered more beer. A group of diplomats from the Australian Embassy chatted at a table on the other side of the room to the tune of clicking beer bottles.
“French, Americans, West German, Australians — they were all your enemies during the war,” Burns told his guide, Nguyen The Dang, consular for the North American desk of the Foreign Ministry. “Yes,” Dang replied with a puzzled look on his face. “Yes.”
It was Dang’s first dinner at 202 and he was clearly awed by the surroundings. He savored every morsel. The cost of his dinner amounted to about one-third of his monthly salary. But Dang wanted to hear no more of war. His instructions were to help Burns, the Pied Piper of San Jose, a private diplomat in khaki, solve unresolved humanitarian issues between the United States and communist Vietnam. So far Burns had rescued a dozen people from Vietnam — a mother rushed to her dying son’s side in San Jose; a child, now grown, left behind in the confusion of 1975 brought to
her San Jose family; and 10 Amerasians, love children born amid the hatred of war. Burns, who has gained a worldwide reputation — but little money — for his efforts to bring Amerasians to their fathers in America, was in Hanoi plowing new ground. Tonight, he was celebrating some victories. The tenth Amerasian he has rescued and
reunited with a father was in Bangkok, beginning the long journey
to a new life in California. But even more important, Burns has won agreement from the Vietnamese to consider some of the 45 new cases documented in the brown boxes tied with rope that he hauled to Hanoi. Burns had spent two years beginning in 1987 working to pull out the Amerasians, the forgotten generation of Americans left behind in the dust of defeat. Now he wanted to help smooth the flow of reeducation camp prisoners and special medical cases to their families in California. This was the stuff of history. Thirteen
years after the fall of the Saigon’s armed forces and government,
those the U.S. left behind to languish more than a decade in brutal reeducation camps, will be allowed to leave the country.
Generals, ministers, legislators, businessmen, clerics – the old
leadership of the defeated south — will be allowed to follow their
families and the more than one million Vietnamese who left
communist Vietnam to plant new roots in such far-off places as
Washington, D.C., Paris, Frankfurt, London, Santa Ana, Los Angeles
and San Jose.
“This will really change the leadership of the San Jose
Vietnamese community,” Burns told me a number of times. “They’re tough people.” These are the people who stayed at their posts when communist forces swept across South Vietnam to victory 13
years before. Many of them kept fighting for years, striking the
victorious Communists from the old Viet Cong lairs in the mountains
and jungles. When he first learned that the Vietnamese would
consider his political prisoner cases, Burns was excited but
fearful of unknown reactions back home in California. “I don’t
know it this is my biggest victory or the greatest mistake I’ve
ever made,” he said. Officials in Hanoi said both the U.S. and
Vietnam had agreed in principle to release the aging South Vietnamese leaders and allow them to move to the U.S. The details still needed to be worked out. But tonight, as much of grimy, moldy Hanoi struggled through he night in the dim light of kerosene lamps, Burns was still at work under the glare of the bright lights, hoping to shed light on the kind of detail necessary for his specialized work in Vietnam.
Even though he had managed to do it 10 times, Burns wanted to
know the exact steps to get an Amerasian child out of the country.
It was the kind of detail that had eluded him for months. Burns’
two legal assistants, Hung Lu and Que Huong, my wife of 18 years,
questioned Dang in Vietnamese. “Give me a piece of paper,”
Burns asked me. I ripped a page from my notebook and handed it to him. The San Jose attorney, admitted workaholic, a man driven to pluck people from Vietnam, smiled the kind of smile a cat would
have just before lunching on a parakeet. For a lawyer, knowing the
procedure is key to victory. Burns pushed the plates and silverware aside. From what Dang, Hung and Que Huong told him, he drew a flow chart. I plunged a spoon into my baked, stuffed crab and eyed his. Suddenly there was disagreement, and Burns began remaking the chart. He put his head in his arms on the table, looked up at me and said, “This is why no one ever gets out of
this country. You’ve got two people here with graduate degrees,”
motioning to Hung and Que Huong, “And we don’t understand it.”
Burns, who often works through meals and through the night, got
this one solved in half an hour, well before dessert, and proudly
displayed the flow chart showing how an Amerasian first applies for
immigration to the U.S. at the local people’s committee and eventually wins approval from the Ministry for Internal Affairs and Foreign Ministry. “We’ve got 120 years of education at this table and it took us half an hour to figure out the departments involved,” Burns declared as he picked on his French fries and listened to the comfortable hum of Khai’s generator. “Mr. Dang, don’t feel bad. It took us two years to figure out how the U.S. side works. We did this in half an hour.”
***
The road to Burns’ latest triumphs in Hanoi this muggy June night began two weeks earlier in Bangkok as his party of 17 — his staff, three fathers, one mother and a hoard of journalists eager for a trip to Vietnam clamored into town for a round of talks with American and
Vietnamese officials. There was Joseph Crotty of Redding, a retired California Highway Patrol officer, meeting his 18-year-old son, Khuc Thua Si; Wes Anderson of Poulsbo, Washington, to meet his daughter, Nguyen Thi Lang, 16; Verdun Andrus of San Diego meeting his son, Hoang Son, 14, for the first time in 13 years; Nam Small of Westbrook, Maine, whose husband John could not make the trip. She was going to Vietnam hoping to get their son Linh, 16, and take him home to America.
The Bangkok atmosphere was electric. Radio Hanoi had
announced the collapse of the Vietnamese economy. The Socialist
government had run the country into the ground. It had long ago
become a cliche to say that the Vietnamese Communists won the war
and lost the peace. “We have made many mistakes,” a government official told me in Hanoi 10 months earlier. “When we attempt to correct the mistakes, we make new ones. We need friends.” He predicted that proud Hanoi would soon bend to the West’s will in a bid to survive. The people who beat the Americans and the French, Japanese and Chinese before them were good warriors, but they were incompetent administrators. The Vietnamese competent in these matters left Vietnam and live today in far off places like Falls Church, Virginia, Houston Texas, Seattle, Washington, San Francisco and Los Angeles. “Vietnam has become a beggar nation,” said Newsweek’s Ron Moreau, an old friend and veteran Vietnam watcher. From my vantage point on the 10th floor of the New Imperial Hotel, I looked down into the compound of the Vietnamese embassy. High atop its red-tiled roof fluttered the red flag with the big gold star. Even now, long after the war, the flag sent shivers down my spine. My stomach was queasy as I recalled my country’s ignominious defeat by the army that carried that flag victoriously through the streets of Saigon in 1975. As Burns briefed his staff on the day’s work, discussing cases with the Vietnamese and Americans, briefing the parents and the press, I put a long lens on my camera and peered into the compound. Four dark Mercedes’ moved around the Vietnamese compound. Foreign Minister Nguyen Co Thatch was in town mending fences with his Thai counterpart, Siddhi Savetsila. The Bangkok press was in a tizzy. Old enemies were suddenly getting very cozy. History was on the march. The Vietnamese agreed to stem the flow of boat people and even agreed to take some back. More agreements are in the offing, both sides said. Vietnam was pulling in its horns and
holding out its hand, both seeking friends and pleading for help. Just weeks before, Vietnam sent out a plea for rice to make up
for shortages caused by typhoons, drought, insects and
mismanagement. They were pulling soldiers out of Laos and Cambodia and announced the retirement of 90 generals. I turned on my short-wave and listened in. Radio Moscow clicked
its tongue at the collapsing Vietnamese economy and boasted of its
outer space accomplishments in its Vietnamese language broadcasts.
The Voice of America was lecturing the Vietnamese on the
relationship between freedom and a successful economy. The VOA
rubbed it in, telling the Vietnamese of Ronald Reagan’s new, warm
relationship with Moscow, Vietnam’s mentor and chief financial
supporter at $2-$3 million a day. It was into this environment
of change that Bruce Burns entered. The 38-year-old Jesuit-trained
lawyer from Santa Clara University, Boy Scout leader, soccer coach
felt the electricity and knew the Vietnamese were primed to move. But already the feedback from the U.S. troubled him. Burns was
told that one newspaper account of his trip so far pictured him as
an uncaring zealot. One of the three fathers was pictured, mostly
by himself, as a womanizer who used to keep track of his conquests.
More disturbing, an unnamed American diplomat in Bangkok called
Burns an “egomaniac.” “Well, they got the maniac part right,” I told him. He smiled, but the hurt in his eyes lingered on. “I don’t know what people expect. I’m a lawyer. Lawyers are supposed to help people. I’m trying to help people,” he said. But Burns is not your stereotypical lawyer. To the horror of some fellow lawyers, he often – too often — works for free. His two-year Amerasian odyssey has seen him remortgage his home twice, pull back from the brink of foreclosure two times. His Visa card was recalled after his March trip with three fathers. He used it to pay the bills, skyrocketing over his limit. “He’s crazy,” his assistant Hung explained. “This man is
crazy. We tell him he has to charge people money. He makes me
collect fees for his other work in San Jose. They hate me. I go
up to them and say, `You owe Mr. Burns this money.’ and they say,
`Mr. Burns didn’t say anything about money.’ They think he works
for free.” Burns said he plans to change all that and begin charging fees in the future. “He always says that, but he never does it,” Hung said. “What do you want me to do? Tell a father he has to come up with $5,000 or he can’t get his kid out of Vietnam. I won’t do it,”
Burns said as he ambled down Wireless Road in search of some
street food. Burns found some deep-fried bread, bananas and
muddy Thai coffee before heading back to the New Imperial Hotel and gathering his group for a trip to the U.S. Embassy’s office for
immigration from Vietnam. It is called the Orderly Departure Program and has been in operation since 1979 as an alternate to the dangerous flight of Vietnamese by boat. So far, 60,000 people have left Vietnam through the program. But there is a horrible backlog. The U.S. holds more than 650,000 files of eligible people. But under
present U.S. quotas, it will be well through the middle of the next
century before the pipeline is empty. Bruce Beardsley oversees
the Vietnamese immigration program from his office overlooking the
Bangkok skyline. His relationship with Burns has been rocky.
After going over some cases with Burns and his assistants,
Beardsley agreed to talk with journalists accompanying Burns.
Beardsley was dressed in a open collar blue shirt, white slacks and
black shoes. He appeared slightly nervous and spoke cautiously,
occasionally eying the cluster of tape recorders on a coffee
table. His office has the touch of a man whosememories of old
Vietnam are strong. There was the old gold flag with three red
stripes in a corner, a Montagnard crossbow in another. On his desk
was a plaque that read, “Giam Doc,” Vietnamese for “director.”
On the wall was a tourist map of Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnamese,
English and Russian. Beardsley stroked his short beard and
quietly discussed the Amerasian issue. He said he would not talk
about specific cases nor would he discuss Burns. Beardsley
rattled off an endless stream of statistics. Then the
conversation turned to the widespread criticism of the way ODP
works. Fathers seeking their children and Vietnamese immigrants
pleading for departure of their relatives from Vietnam complain of
an uncaring bureaucracy that regularly hangs up on callers and
tells applicants not to write anymore. “The ODP is sort of like
a dog walking on its hind legs,” Beardsley begins, staring off
into monsoon clouds beginning to sweep over the city. He said that
there are no formal relations between the Vietnamese and American
governments. “That it was done at all was sort of amazing. It
could be done but could not be done well.” Now, he said, the
program has been streamlined and expanded and he thinks more people should be leaving Vietnam under the program in future weeks. Beardsley said that some private initiatives, like that of the
Burns mission, have been useful in getting stalled cases moving.
“But some people who have been indulging in these sort of things
are trying to cut special deals either with the Vietnamese or
others and want me to jump through hoops. I’m not very good at
jumping through hoops. But I have jumped through a few.”
Beardsley said that no one knows how many Amerasians are in
Vietnam. The working figure is between 10,000 and 15,000. He said that he hopes to get them and their families out within two years. As Beardsley talked, the sounds of the city wafted into the
room. Drills, jackhammers and the constant roar of traffic were
testimony to a burgeoning economy. The monsoon rains washed over the city as we made our way back to the hotel. Burns was in the cavernous, teak-wood-lined lobby talking with
the three fathers and one mother, Nam Small. These were the four
parents he was bringing to Vietnam for reunions with their children
after more than a decade separation. Then he talked to a reporter
from the Bangkok Post. Just as the interview concluded, that string of dark Mercedes’ swung into the driveway in front. The
Vietnamese foreign minister and his party were having lunch at the
hotel. After the party swept through and sat down to lunch, the
plotting began. Burns decided that they should get Small to
present a bouquet of orchids to Pham Thi Phuc, Thach’s wife, after
lunch and remind her of the Amerasian mission to Vietnam. The
move is pure Burns. High visibility. Quick. To the top. “I
don’t plan these things,” Burns insisted. “They just happen.’
But Burns has done his homework. Letters, dozens of them, and
telegrams have flowed into the offices of the Vietnamese foreign
ministry. He has been on the phone to the Vietnamese mission at the
U.N. “This trip was approved by Thach himself when he was at
the U.N., ” Burns said. There was a flurry of action, a
swishing of bodies as the Thach party, finished with lunch, flowed
through the hotel. Nam stood ready in the lobby that seemed as
big as a football field. “Go,” Burns, the onetime artillery
spotter said as he saw the target. The party stopped. Security
men tensed. Nam handed the flowers to Phuc. Thach leaned over to
hear what she said. “Oh yes, the Small case. I know it,” he
said. Burns has another notch on his brief case. “Maybe it will
help,” he said. “This is what appeals to me. It is the little
guy fighting the system that sort of appeals to me. That’s the
kind of theme I find interesting in movies and books.” “It all started two years ago when this girl walked up to me
and said, `I want to find my daddy.’ I told her, OK, I will find
your daddy. At that time I wasn’t even aware of an Amerasian
issue. Later I read an article in a veteran’s magazine and
realized it was a problem. Burns then was a lawyer with a prestigious law firm, one of the oldest in California. Soon he was spending half his time working on Amerasian cases
for free. “I was working 16 hours a day, eight for the firm, eight on
Amerasians. They called me in and said if you want to continue
here and become a partner you have to give this up. “I said I
think I want to leave. There was no hostility with them. I
understood their position. They are in the business of making
money. If you work for a business they have a certain thing they
want you to do. They should’t be painted as bad guys because I
don’t think they did anything wrong. “I didn’t make any money
last year. I didn’t make anything. “I have a wife who works
and she is able to pay the bills at home. “What I hope to do is
to get organized enough to get us incorporated and to try to get
some foundation to pay for some of the expenses and to pay salaries
for some of the people who are doing a lot of things for free.” Later Burns dropped by the Vietnamese embassy next door and
came back with our visas. We were ready to go to Vietnam. The next day, a gleaming white Air France 747 delivered Burns
and his entourage to Ho Chi Minh City’s Tan Son Nhut airport.
The remnants of old U.S. warplanes rusted away near the terminal.
We moved through customs, then some of the parents met their
children for the first time in years. The scene was
emotion-charged as the parents and their children groped at each
other and wept, spilling the sorrow of many years. TV cameramen moved in for close-in shots of the drama. This was a regular part of a
Burns trip. The tearful reunions made good stories, good pictures
and focused on the joy his work brings. Everyone loved these
stories and even the reporters and photographers were caught wiping
tears from their eyes. Outside of Tan Son Nhut, Vietnam was much as I had left it 10 months earlier. Despite all the talk of impending starvation and a collapsed economy, the streets were bristling with motorcycles and bicycles, shops were open and brimming with goods. We moved down the broad boulevard lined with tamarind and flaming jacaranda trees and I felt good to be back. Amid the old French villas were sprinkled people’s committee offices every mile or so, the only overt evidence that the Communists ruled. Before going on to the Cuu Long Hotel on the banks the Saigon River, Burns stopped to see government officials. Over tea and in the wash of a bank of fans, Luu Van Tanh, deputy chief of the Consular Bureau, told us that Vietnam was prepared to move all those Amerasians who wanted to go to the U.S. Their families would accompany them. Like all the other government officials he hammered at the same
theme. “I want to talk ofrumors that the Amerasians are suffering
from prejudice. Our government does not advocate such a
discrimination policy. There is no discrimination. They are
considered Vietnamese children. We don’t deny that some people
have a harsh attitude toward the Amerasian children, but most of
them have been unthinking children. We teach our children not to
discriminate against the Amerasians.” Tanh said that the Vietnamese government wanted to move quickly
on the Amerasian issue because the children are already in their
late teens. “If it is not solved, it will grow,” he explained. “The
Amerasians will grow up and have children of their own.” Over at
the Cuu Long Hotel, the old Majestic, the Vietnamese were quick to
complain of conditions under the Communists. “If they could,
all Vietnamese would leave Vietnam,” said the bartender as he got
me a frosty can of Saigon brand beer. “I’m 69 and they’re making
me retire. I will have no job. I will have nothing.”
“Vietnam kho qua. Vietnam is miserable,” said a cyclo driver who
said his name was Tao. On his hat he wore a “Vietnam veteran”
pin. “I am a veteran. I was an ARVN officer (Army of the
Republic of Vietnam). I spent six years in a reeducation camp and
now I peddle a cyclo. After the reeducation camp I was sent to a
new economic zone. I left and came here.” Tao kept a close eye on me, helped me with my shopping and
delivered purchases to the hotel. “Don’t trust any of the other
cyclo drivers. They are all spies,” Tao whispered. As he
peddled down the familiar streets of Saigon past the old opera
house, down old Le Loi Street and the Ben Thanh market, he
announced to everyone, “This is an American. He is not a Russian.
I have an American.” The older people looked up. Some smiled.
Some held their thumbs up. The younger people only stared. The
stay in Saigon was to be brief, but the Burns team worked all day
and into the night on their 45 cases. The next morning, at 6
a.m., it was time for the long trip by road to Qui Nhon, a coastal
city 600 miles north of Saigon, where Anderson would meet the
family who raised his daughter. Le Hong Nguyen, from the protocol section of the Ho Chi Minh City external relations service, was one of our guides to Qui Nhon. I lived in Qui Nhon three of my five years in Vietnam, working as a teacher during the war. There, 18 years before, I married Que and took her eventually to America. Now I was bringing her home for the first time. “Don’t worry,” said Nguyen, who was a student leader and Viet Cong supporter at Cuong De High School in Qui Nhon during the war. “The war is over. We’re going to be friends.” As we passed over the American-built Bien Hoa Bridge, I spotted the first and last AK-47 I would see on the trip. The assault rifle was the workhorse of Communist forces during the war. It was generally considered superior to the American’s M-16. It dangled quietly from the shoulder of a soldier of the People’s Army of Vietnam leaning against the bridge. He was far too young to have fought in the war. North of the city we passed through rubber plantations. The sight was eerie to me. Twenty-three years ago the first man to fire at me in my life did so in a rubber plantation north of Saigon. I stared deep down the rows of trees and for just a second I thought I saw heads bobbing. Minutes later, we approached the outskirts of Xuan Loc, the
site of the last great battle of the Vietnam War. Here the bravest
and toughest of the South Vietnamese Army stood up to five North
Vietnamese divisions blasting their way down Highway 1 in a
war-ending Blitzkrieg. Here, the commanding general, Le Van Hung, killed himself rather than surrender to North Vietnamese forces. His widow lives in California today. There were few signs of that final battle. Only one building, a house, was unchanged. A
large hole has been blown in the side and the wall was splattered
with machine gun fire. No one lived there now. I remember
the scenes of helicopters chopping through smoke and flames
as the South Vietnamese made a desperate last stand, throwing
everything they had at the enemy. They were grossly outnumbered.
Thousands died in that battle and I could feel their spirits as we
drove by. Then it was on to the beach cities of Phan Thiet, Phan
Rang, Cam Ranh, Nha Trang and Qui Nhon via Vietnam’s picturesque Highway 1. The driver pushed a cassette into the stereo and the voices of the Beach Boys blared. Once again, Vietnam was hearing things like Surfin’ Safari, California Girls and I Get Around. The Vietnamese countryside whizzed by. Boys on water buffaloes, rice paddies, clusters of bamboo hiding small villages. Seaside villages with boats and nets drying in the sun. Seeing all the water
buffalo reminded me of a rarely-mentioned gauge of the viciousness
of the war — more than one million of them died in the war. In my mind there were helicopters again, their blades slapping
the humid air in a continuous whackety-whack. They are carrying
young Americans into battle, the Beach Boys singing in their ears.
In my mind I saw young American men moving on those peaceful
villages, fearful that this was their last day on earth. For more
than 58,000 it was. I hoped no one could see the tears through
my dark glasses. We passed villages of all kinds. Wealthy ones surrounded by rice fields and poor ones surrounded by dry, gray dirt. There were villages of blue and white concrete houses, thatch homes and mud huts, all gauges of the different economic conditions. They had one thing in common — the villages bristled with television
antennas.
Lunch was Coke and sandwiches as we slipped through
the city of Phan Thiet. It is known for its fish sauce factories,
and we could smell the city miles before we got there. We reached Qui Nhon in late evening. There was dust on
everything. It was like a desert town. Most of the people were
still in front of their homes, seeking relief from the heat.
Kerosene lamps cast a dull glow over most of the city, but Du Lich
Hotel, our destination, was lighted with electricity. It is the
old MACV (Military Assistance Command Vietnam) compound. The armed guards, sandbagged bunkers and barbed wire were gone. So was the gunfire, the thud of artillery and bursts of machine gun fire that once characterized Qui Nhon nights. During the war, the allies held the city and the Viet Cong ruled most of the countryside. Now they ran the city, too. In the morning Que and I rose before 5 a.m. Before the trip to visit Anderson’s family in District 6, we wanted to get a look at our old stomping grounds in District 2’s village of Hoa Ninh. We were surprised to find the rest of Qui Nhon was also up — and at the beach.
During the war, the beautiful beaches of Qui Nhon
were just other places to die. That day thousands of people frolicked in the surf. Kids brought inner tubes. People were body
surfing. It could have been Manhattan Beachor Stinson Beach or
Santa Cruz. An hour later, they were all gone. We grabbed a
couple of cyclo cabs and negotiated a ride to the other side of
town. We passed the Girls’ High School, where I used to teach.
There was a giant picture of Ho Chi Minh on the front.
Eventually, we arrived in Hoa Ninh. We got down and slowly, very
slowly moved down the old dusty street where we met two decades ago in wartime Vietnam. There was my house on the right and hers on the left. I had married the girl next door. Within minutes Que
Huong was surrounded by children. There were tears in her eyes.
“It was so sad,” she said. “Here I am in the village I grew
up in — and I don’t know anyone.” But soon the word got around
and down the palm-tree lines roads came old friends. They
screeched as they recognized each other. I stayed long enough to
take some pictures of the reunions. But this was Communist Vietnam and I knew I, the foreigner, had to leave. Even so, hours after I left, security men paid visits to some of the houses. “They
asked what we talked about,” a friend reported later. “I told
them we said, `Hello, how are you.’ Nothing more.” So much for Ho
Chi Minh’s promise of freedom of association. The man was a
scholar. Even now the walls on one side of his home were lined
with books. The other was lined with wood he collected on the hills
to supplement his meager teacher’s salary. He tried to escape
twice. He is now resigned to stay and live in Vietnam. But his
eyes haunted me for the rest of my visit. They had that deep,
saddened look that said, “Why did you leave me here?” Down the
street I visit an old church. Outside it looked as it always did.
Inside, the statues, the altar, the pews — all gone. Later
friends told me that after 1975, the churches were closed for a
year in Qui Nhon. Now they open occasionally. So much for Ho Chi
Minh’s promise of freedom of religion. Before the trip to visit Anderson’sfamily, we stopped by the headquarters of the city’s people’s committee. The committee secretary is Khong Minh Tam and part of his left hand is missing. “A war injury,” the former Viet Cong soldier told me. “Over there when we met the Americans.” He motioned toward the hill near my old house. “I was a soldier and I fought against the French and the Americans,” Tam said. “Now I am an economic engineer.” I looked for a smile and saw none. Throughout our visit, I, the former American soldier, sat next to Tam, the former Viet Cong soldier. I felt a bond and a deep sadness and watched his every move. If we had met two decades before, he probably would have killed me. Or I him. Tam said there were 281
Amerasians in the city of Qui Nhon. He said 199 had applied for
migrations to the land of their fathers. Tam said there were no
food shortages here. “There is a food shortage in the north. We
send food to other regions. We can take care of ourselves,” he
insisted. Later at Anderson’s house the entire neighborhood turned out to greet the big American, but it is out of curiosity more than
anything else. Inside, Anderson held the hands of family members.
He tried to assure them that Lang will be well cared for in America
at home finally with her mother, Du. After the visit, which
attracted well over 100 onlookers, many of them getting their first glimpse at an American, Burns decided to leave for Nha Trang that afternoon rather than waiting until the next day. We spent the night in Nha Trang, one of Vietnam’s principal beach resort cities. There we ran across an Australian arranging for shrimp shipments to Haiphong in the north to help ease the food shortage and a Swede working to develop Vietnam’s tourist and hotel industry. Back on Ho Chi Minh City, Burns and his staff continued to work on cases, gathering documents, meeting people, taking pictures and
making voice recordings for relatives back home. Dozens of
Vietnamese gathered across the street from our hotel. Some watched
out of curiosity. Some watched because it was their job. Others
waited until just the right moment then dashed across the street
with letters for family members in refugee camps or in the U.S. Soon it was time to fly to Hanoi to meet with officials and
assess the trip. One child, Si, would leave with his father, Joe Crotty. Vietnamese officials took the rest to the airport and asked U.S. officials to interview them, one of the last steps before leaving.
The U.S. officials refused, saying they were not on the schedule.
They would have to wait.
In Hanoi, a city badly in need of a paint job, Burns and his
assistants met with officials in the Foreign Ministry. Later
that night we dined with a high official in the Foreign Ministry.
The dinner, in opulent surroundings — high paneled ceiling, velvet
drapes, teak walls, carved rosewood furniture — in the government
guest house behind the old French governor’s house17Yes, said a Vietnamese official, Vietnam was suffering a food shortage but only in some isolated northern provinces. Some 27 people have died from
starvation so far. He did not think there will be more because the
harvest, just in, was bigger than expected. The official said that Vietnam is moving on the Amerasian issue
and all others of interest to the U.S. because it is seeking to end
its economic isolation and move toward resumption of relations, cut
in 1975. Later Deputy Foreign Minister Tran Quang Co met the press on the record in a large hall in the old governor’s house. “We
want to resolve all the issues — Amerasians, MIA/POW, but it is
not easy to solve all at the same time,” Co said. “We are
lacking so many facilities and we need so many things for our
investigation.’’ Co said he expects the U.S. to come up with some money for an Amerasian center in Saigon to process papers and coordinate the airlift to the U.S. The U.S. wants all of the Amerasians and their families out of Vietnam within two years. “It is an American problem,” he said. Co was frail and his hair white. He wore a striped open-collar shirt, khaki pants and loafers. “He is in yuppie uniform,” I thought. “In the end we would like to warm up relations with the U.S. We want normal relations with all nations. “We are willing to cooperate with private American organizations, like that of Mr. Burns, concerning humanitarian issues. We hope to create more good understanding. This is an organization from the American people. The more Americans who realize the realities of Vietnam, the better off we are.” Co sipped Russian mineral water. He sat in a carved wood chair in front of a giant, red lacquer ware
river valley scene. Large air conditioners aided by fans fought
unsuccessfully to make the room comfortable. Co said Vietnam is
willing to take back refugees who have fled the country “on a
case-by-case basis.” “It’s sad for us to acknowledge that the
main cause for their illegal departure is to seek a happier life
abroad,” he said. Co said that the Vietnamese were willing to
move on issues raised by Burns medical emergencies and
immigration of former long-term political prisoners. “These are
people with no advocate,” Burns said. “Neither the U.S. nor the
Vietnamese government are interested in them. I am their advocate.
“Maybe I’m doing this because of the profound feeling I have for
this country after having served here. Maybe it’s because of what
we did here — the bombing, the Agent Orange, then abandoning them.
“The soul of America has a black mark on it and, maybe, I can
help erase part of it.”
Later, at 202 Restaurant, 202 Hue Street, Burns finished his
dessert. As the group was leaving the restaurant, the cyclo
drivers in front had some news. “Your waitress is going to America. She going to marry someone in San Francisco just as soon as her papers are ready,” one said. Burns’ face came alive. He ran back into the restaurant.
“I think I have another client,” he laughed. Que and
Hung threw their hands into the air.
Then they, too, laughed.

Here’s the Redwood City story

Basically, a Soviet submarine sank somewhere near Hawaii in very deep water in the 70s. The CIA got the job of hauling it up for the code books and nuclear weapons. Oh, and the submarine. While they were pulling it up, it fell apart. The CIA established a base at Redwood City’s port to handle whatever was pulled up. At one point they had to work picking up pieces of rotting meat, standins for the remains of Soviet sailers. Other Soviet sailors were buried at sea. The ceremonies were taped and later handed over to Soviet authorities.

More at http://redwoodcity-woodside.patch.com/groups/politics-and-elections/p/its-the-scrap-heap-for-redwood-citys-mystery-war-ships

More secrets from the archives

I was looking for some more information on the old CIA base in Redwood City when, OMG, I learned that crusty, secretive cousin USAF Col. Ward Rockstroh was listed as a CIA source for a book. He always said he was a genealogist and did prepare an impressive family history back to the 1700s. See http://cryptome.org/cia-2619.htm

San Jose secret — until now

From the archives
City of San Jose was planned in secret — in smoke-filled back rooms
Millions, perhaps billions, were made by a select few as California’s first city grew into the largest city in the San Francisco Bay Area in an octopus-like spurt during the 50’s and 60’s
The names at the end of this story, pulled from the San Jose library archives, will tell you all you need to know about this race for absolute power, ill-planned growth and vast wealth
When I was a young reporter in 1973, I noticed something strange about San Jose.
When I arrived, fresh from Southern California and Vietnam journalism adventures, there were numerous reports in the news about a moratorium of construction in one of America’s fastest-growing cities.
Of course, as a curious reporter and new to this territory, I wondered what this was all about.
When I was assigned to cover the city of Cupertino on the west side of San Jose, I learned that the city – and others — were formed as San Jose was expanding aggressively and was looking to make Cupertino part of San Jose.
Reporters are trained to look for anomalies because when things seem out of order, there is usually a story behind it.
I wanted to tell the story. The editors – now long gone — did not. Now the story can be told (sorry – couldn’t help myself).

One thing I noticed was that San Jose streets often change names abruptly and do not continue on as the same street — a small but curious item.

Also, I noticed that San Jose had approved construction on top of a landslide on the east side of town. Not only that but San Jose was building on known earthquake rupture zones. Today they are still doing it

In those days, 40 years ago, the only “market” in Evergreen, my part of town, was a 7-Eleven on the corner of a Aborn and San Felipe roads. What was strange about this was there was no sidewalk or no curb and gutter, instead only an asphalt berm. It was owned by a top city official.

When I had a chance, I gathered information on these anomalies. I continued to collect information over the years and from time to time would approach an editor about the story.
.
But I could not tell the story. On all occasions I was rebuffed and one editor just laughed at me.

There was a reason for all of this I learned later and that is the subject of this report.
While I was still working on this, I learned that a student at San Jose State University was working on the same information. His name was Mitchell Mandich and his thesis was entitled “The growth and development of San Jose, California – social, political, and economic considerations.”

Mr. Mandich’s thesis runs more than 200 pages and reveals what happened to make this city’s growth beyond its ability to provide some basic services one of the oddest in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This is what the introduction to his 1975 thesis says:
“Santa Clara Valley, once one of the most beautiful valleys in the world, now lies beneath concrete, asphalt, and smog. A dominant sprawling metropolis covers much of the valley floor, and the beauty that initially attracted migrants to the area no longer exists. Dominant economic forces in the public and private sector pushed the Valley toward development and the pervasiveness of these interests exert strong, and perhaps nonnegotiable pressures for development. However the policies and practices of the San Jose city government also did much to ensure the destruction of the natural environment. At the onset of the spectacular growth during the 1950s, municipal government embraced the belief that growth was beneficial to the community.”
Much can be said on this subject.
But the telling details can be told in the membership of the so called “Book of the Month Club.”  Its members:
Steve Dorsa: Operated major gravel business
Ray Blackmore: San Jose Chief of Police
Roy M. Butcher: electric utilities contractor (also on planning commission)
Arch McDonald: Savings and Loan
William Elbert: pipeline construction president
Dan Caputo: Land Developer (also on planning commission)
Leo Piazza: owner paving company
Patrick Regan: paving company executive
Bo Raisch: paving company owner
Al Raisch: paving company owner
Leo Ruth: civil engineer and zoning consultant
Jack Going: Owner of Ruth and Going, civil engineers
Earl Freitas: Bank of America
George Siegfried: subdivider
George Myren: Title company
Paul Potts: Title company
George Honore: President of San Jose Steel
Clifford Swenson: road and building contractor
Charles Quinn: Realtor and developer
Victor J. Lo Bue: speculator, developer and subdeveloper
Al Ruffo: Zoning attorney, city councilman
Howard Campen: county planning
Anthony P. Hamann, city manager
And (drum roll, please) Joe Ridder, publisher San Jose Mercury-News
(Source: Mayfair, 1/25/64)

Blast from the past

MISSION REALLY IS A COOL FIND

By Dennis Rockstroh

NOW THAT I am almost recovered from last week’s heatstroke — and I hope you are, too — it is apropos to tell you about a cool place I found to hide when the sun starts to buckle the roads.
Please note on this second day of summer that fellow columnist Jan Null reports that heat is the No. 1 weather killer ahead of flooding, lightning, tornadoes, cold and hurricanes.

So, this is a matter of life and death.

Last week, when the thermometer started to creep above the 100-degree mark, I happened to be on a field trip looking into the planned earthquake retrofitting of this cool building complex — the old Mission San Jose.

Earlier I had noted how cool it was inside so I returned with a thermometer.

My findings in early afternoon:

The temperature on the porch of the convento, or former padres’ quarters — now the museum — was 100 degrees.

Just inside the adobe walls, which are three to five feet thick, my thermometer — after about 15 minutes — dipped into the 70-degree range.

Inside there is no air conditioning, not even a fan.

I wandered around the relics of the past waiting for the thermometer to get used to its various locations.

In the old padres’ room, the temperature was 78 degrees.

Same for the other 12 rooms in the museum where visitors can learn about the pre-mission Ohlone, Indian life at the mission, the Rancho era and the history of the mission’s restoration.

Then I moved across the square to the restored adobe church, which I was told is an even cooler place.

I sat for about half an hour right in front of Robert Livermore’s tomb in the back of the church: 77 degrees.

Then I moved closer to the altar, keeping my thermometer cupped in my hands hoping that God didn’t mind my profane use of his place.

This is not easy because as I slowly approached the reredos, I could see the painting of Christ and the statues of St. Joseph and Mary — all staring at me.

I took a quick look at the thermometer: 76 degrees.

”Wow!” I exclaimed to myself. ”What a cool place.”

Then I glanced at the cute faces of the six angels just above the altar.

I moved closer so I could see their secret told to me by the Vietnamese artist who had helped restore the art in the mission church.

My eyes started at the left and moved to the right across the pink facesand brown and blond hair.

Then I smiled to myself and wanted to turn and tell the woman kneeling in the first pew, ”See the angel on the far right? He has black hair and a golden face?”

But she was deep in prayer.

I didn’t say anything even though I hoped she knew.

She looked to be of Asian descent.

I stood there in front of the altar staring at the Asian angel.

I thought of the day back in 1984 at the Carmel Mission workshop when artist Nguyen Van Huu showed me his secret.

”That’s me,” he said, pointing to the golden cherub.

Huu and curator Richard Menn explained that in the tradition of Michelangelo, Raphael, Renoir and Picasso, Huu had literally put himself into his work.

”It’s something I can leave for my children and grandchildren,” he said.

Huu told me that right about now, ”at the turn of the century,” he planned to visit the church with his kids and grandkids in tow, march them right up to the front of the church, point out the angel and tell them, ”That’s me.”

Now that is cool.

By Dennis Rockstroh

So long. This is my last column for the San Jose Mercury News and another dozen dailies in the San Francisco Bay Area.

It’s been a long time since 1973 when I walked into the Mercury News newsroom after reporting from places like Vietnam, Okinawa, Barstow, Thousand Oaks, Beverly Hills and Santa Paula.

One of the assistant editors asked the city editor, “What should we do with him?”

So I wrote my first obit.

From obits, they sent me to cover Cupertino, mental health, and then later Alameda County. In 1990 I was convinced to write a three-dot column for the Alameda County edition. A three-dotter is a bunch of small, newsy items connected by three dots that look like this … When I mumbled to my wife that I was going to be doing a daily three-dotter, she shot me a puzzled look and asked, “You have three daughters?” To her relief, I explained what a three-dotter was.

From the three-dotter, the column grew into a regular, and sometimes irregular, news column with a sometimes whimsical touch. I wrote about the things that popped into my head such as a list of the 10 best places Osama bin Laden could be hiding locally. Some readers learned for the first time about the Berkeley volcano crater. The column ran three or four times a week until the late 1990s when the editors decided it would run two times a week and my territory was expanded to cover Santa Cruz County. Then, in 2003, I was assigned the Action Line column which ran seven days a week.

So there had to be a favorite column, right? There was.

One day, my editor walked over and asked, “Whatever happened to the Carol Doda sign?” That famous or infamous sign of the legendary beauty hung larger than life in front of the Condor Club in San Francisco’s North Beach. Most noteworthy were the two blinking red lights on her chest. So I headed for San Francisco’s striptease neighborhood and carefully began my investigation.

It turned out that the sign had been removed in two parts. A man from Sausalito bought the blinking top part. But Carol Doda’s bottom was missing. I called her up and told her what I was doing. “I can’t find your bottom,” I informed her. And she replied without hesitation, “Well honey, I’ve been working out.”

So I’m done here, 70 years old and time to fade away.

 

I retired from the Mercury News today

I hope to add to this blog in the months ahead

Check out this website, New Saigon — San Jose, California

http://newsaigonsanjose.blogspot.com/

Secrets of the Vietnam War: Blast from the past

This is the 1976 San Jose Mercury News series on untold stories of the Vietnam War. It won the “Best Series” award from the Peninsula Press Club

By Dennis Rockstroh

America’s secret foreign policy in Vietnam – carried out by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA on orders from the National Security Council – was no secret in the inner circles of Vietnamese intelligence, well-placed sources in the former government of Vietnam have told The Mercury.

Pieces of a top secret puzzle, gathered through hundreds of interviews with Vietnamese refugee policy-makers and policy-implementers reveal the most complete picture to date of the clandestine and often dramatic operations undertaken by Americans and Vietnamese during the 30-year war in Indochina.

Information turned up during the long investigation is substantiated by government documents and the memoirs of President Lyndon B. Johnson, General William C. Westmoreland and others who were instrumental in drawing up the policy that culminated in the nation’s most disastrous foreign adventure in its 200 years of history.

Confidential sources provided key information that was then checked against the public record.

Interviews combined with documentary evidence reconfirm earlier findings that the Vietnam War was planned and implemented step-by-step by five administrations and principally directed by the Central Intelligence Agency. Once secret documents, referred to as the “Pentagon Papers” and “McNamara Papers,” have shown the U.S. government, during the war, systematically deceived the American people as the secret strategy unfolded. Deception is war’s key weapon.

[top of page missing]
…servicemen still listed as missing in action (MIA) were not pilots, as commonly believed, but actually members of commando units operating behind enemy lines.

American cryptologists intercepted and broke codes of both friends and enemies in Vietnam during the war, the CIA operated military units and a massive spy organization using the U.S. aid program as a cover and the CIA directed secret wars in North Vietnam and neighboring countries.

The investigation also confirmed earlier stories in The Mercury which said many of the Vietnamese refugees evacuated from Saigon last year were intimately involved with espionage, terrorist and sabotage activities sponsored by the CIA and other U.S. intelligence organizations.

The investigation has uncovered a number of the best-kept secrets of the war, and only now that the war is over can the story be told.

Since 1950 American and Vietnamese military teams, under the direction of the CIA and later a joint CIA-military group, were “inserted” behind enemy lines and across international boundaries to conduct intelligence-gathering missions as well as activities designed to create chaos behind enemy lines. Later, some of these missions were designed to provoke the North Vietnamese into taking military action so the United States could use those “attacks” as an excuse for escalation, a number of sources said.

Many of these teams, operating under the direction of the CIA or under operation 34A, a joint command plan, disappeared without a trace.

[top of page missing]
Figures published by the New York Times last year listed 450 MIAs lost in North Vietnam, 550 MIAs in Laos, 168 in Cambodia as well as 875 MIAs in South Vietnam. Of that number, 850 men are still listed as missing.

In addition to the American teams, South Vietnamese commando squads regularly dropped into the North to kidnap military and civilian mid-level officials for interrogation in South Vietnam, sources who went on those missions told The Mercury.

This investigation showed that the operations into North Vietnam and the other countries is only the tip of the top secret iceberg that began to melt when the Americans began pulling out of Saigon thousands of intelligence officers and operatives as part of the refugee evacuation last April.

The Mercury interviewed American Special Forces commandos, U.S. Navy Seals, Vietnamese military, political and intelligence leaders and other Vietnamese refugees over a 10-month period beginning with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975.

During the course of the investigation, The Mercury learned:

• American and Vietnamese intelligence teams eavesdropped on communications to and from the headquarters of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (Viet Cong) using hidden transmitters, wire taps or electronic means or all at Camp Davis on Tan Son Nhut Airbase following the signing of the Paris Peace Accords in 1973.

• The historical North Vietnamese attacks on the American destroyers, the Maddox and the C. Turner Joy were provoked by both the American ships and South Vietnamese PT boats as part of an elaborate CIA plan to spark a wider war.

• The Americans in Vietnam intercepted incoming and outgoing messages and diplomatic communication of the South Vietnamese government and, most likely, the allies helping to fight the war in Vietnam.

• The U.S. intelligence community conducted electronic bugging of communications in North and South Vietnam using ships of the 7th Fleet, U.S. Air Force aircraft and the CIA-run Air America as well as ground listening stations.

• South Vietnamese political and military intelligence teams operated in Japan, India, Hong Kong, France and Indochina collecting information and occasionally “neutralizing” (assassinating or blackmailing) targeted businessmen, politicians or even Communist officials.

• Vietnamese commandos operated a two-man submarine in North Vietnamese waterways blowing up bridges, military installations and occasionally engaging in some psychological warfare tricks.

• More than 45 of the generals who ran Vietnam in the wake of the 1963 coup and assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem are among the 141,000 Vietnamese refugees in the United States.

Next: Raids behind enemy lines

A U.S. Navy chopper, painted in camouflage green and brown, zipped low over the South China Sea in the Gulf of Tonkin close on the heels of a warm squall.

Ten kilometers off the North Vietnamese coast, six U.S. Navy Seals, nautical commandos, dropped one by one into the water. The frogmen regrouped on the surface and began the long swim toward their target.

Near the coastline they dove to the bottom of the shallow waters, and then, under the cover of darkness and rain, inched out of the water onto the sandy beaches.

At the same time, ships of the 7th Fleet began laying down a heavy barrage five kilometers up the coast as a diversion while jet fighters of the 7th Air Force prowled the skies seeking targets of opportunity.

The U.S. Navy Seal team was in North Vietnam on a top-secret mission covered by one of the most impressive combat armadas in the history of man at war. America’s secret war was a war of finesse and restraint.

The same night a silver Air America C-46 transport plane bearing no markings lumbered in from Laos at high altitude.

On the ground in the thick rainforest only the animals of the jungle could hear the soft whine of the airplane’s engines.

Eight parachutes mushroomed one by one under the plane as it turned to head back to the secret base in Thailand, headquarters for the CIA war in Southeast Asia.

That night two American commando teams – combinations of civilians and military men – had been “inserted” into North Vietnam. The “inserted” scenes were repeated thousands of times during the long war. At any one time as many as 7,500 men were either on missions or “available,” sources told The Mercury.

The secret American war was fought by the men of the U.S. Special Forces, U.S. Army Rangers, U.S. Navy Seals and the CIA. It was part of Operation 34A, called Oplan 34-A by General William C. Westmoreland, the American commander. Westmoreland later established another group to work on the overall coordination of Oplan 34-A. that group was called the Special Observation Group (SOG). It was made up of American military, civilian and CAS – Controlled American Source – (CIA) representatives. Every action into the North had to be approved in advance by the Secretary of Defense, Secretary of State and the President (the National Security Council).

Americans rarely heard the secret operation code words for intelligence missions. “Leaping Lena,” “Eagle’s Nest,” “Praise Fire,” and “Gamma Delta” were common terms in the White House of Lyndon Johnson.

With soft music playing in the background, a supervisor of 12 years of clandestine raids into the North sipped brandy on San Jose’s West Side and discussed his missions with a reporter.

“We ran a lot of missions into the North,” he said. “We pulled off terrorist raids, assassination missions; we cleared mines off beaches and blew up bridges. One time we helped clear some ships out of Haiphong Harbor,” he recalled. He noted that the ships had been sunk there earlier to tie up shipping lanes.

He said he once moved and armed a nuclear weapon somewhere in the Pacific as President Johnson toured the war zone.

“Most of it is still classified. I’ve been told to keep my mouth shut,” he said. His roommate had tipped off the reporter, and before the interview, the former commando talked with military officials at the Presidio in San Francisco. They advised him to say nothing.

He sipped on the brandy and twisted his torn body, the result of his last mission in the North. He talked about his continuing bouts with drinking and how he just about had it licked.

“I was lucky to get out. A lot of guys never did,” he said.

“A lot of things I did would make (Lt. William) Calley (commander of the My Lai massacre) seem like a pussycat, but it was done under orders,” he said. He didn’t appear to be boasting.

“I think the American people should know what we did,” he said, showing in his facial expressions the pain veterans of the unpopular conflict often feel.

“I’m very super-patriotic. A lot of things I didn’t enjoy, but I did them. Someone had to do it, and I was trained in it,” he said.

“It was dirty work,” his roommate interjected. That pained look crept back over the crippled vet’s face.

“Sometimes we’d just sit on a hill for weeks and record troop movements like the Special Forces A teams on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Sometimes we had to kill. I once saw a young girl shot down because she was running ammunition to the enemy. It wasn’t an easy job. Someone had to do it,” he said.

The Special Forces A teams were also part of Operation 34A. Their casualties out of South Vietnam were listed as “classified” in the books at 5th Special Forces headquarters in Nha Trang. It was standard practice at Green Beret headquarters to list the location of the death of a “member” by geographic location and grid coordinates, but only if the death occurred in the South. An authoritative source estimated 10 per cent or as many as 25 per cent of member casualties were listed as classified.

A commander of unconventional warfare operations sat in his sparsely-furnished Santa Clara Valley home and discussed the war in his homeland.

“We operated unconventional warfare teams in North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Hong Kong, India, Japan and Paris,” the Vietnamese refugee said. He once held a high rank in the military and was intimately involved in clandestine operations.

“We worked independent of American units, but sometimes we ran joint missions in North Vietnam,” he said.

“We blew up military installations, gathered information and conducted psychological warfare,” he said.

“We’d blow up bridges and occasionally send small model boats down the rivers with South Vietnamese flags flying on them. The enemy would try to shoot them out of the water, when they hit the boats, they would explode scattering hundreds of leaflets asking them to help us. It was one of the few funny things we did,” he said.

One prime source of intelligence were prisoners the raiders would spirit to the south for interrogation.

“Often we would convince them to join us as agents. Then we would send them back on a diversionary raid into the North while we worked the main target,” he said.

“It was all very secret. Maybe someday we can tell the story.”

It was a reoccurring theme, but over a 10-month period The Mercury was able to piece together many loose ends of some of the untold tales of the Vietnam War.

Both American and Vietnamese sources agreed that many of the special operation teams inserted on secret missions into the North disappeared without a trace and make up a large part of the MIAs the United States is seeking to find.

“I think most of them are dead,” the Vietnamese commander said. Their missions were very dangerous.”

Next: How the Americans spied on their enemies and their friends.

Camp Davis, home of the Vietnamese Communists at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhut Airbase as a result of agreements reached in the 1973 Paris Peace Accords, was bugged by American intelligence, informed sources have told The Mercury.

Prior to the move-in of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, the political arm of the South Vietnamese Communists, Camp Davis, also known as Davis Station, was the headquarters of a super-secret U.S. Army political and military intelligence unit that specialized in breaking codes. The outfit used electronic surveillance to keep tabs on Communist military units in North and South Vietnam and political and government communications of the Saigon and Hanoi governments.

The techniques used were those learned from British intelligence during World War II when the English broke the German code and thereby were informed of all enemy moves in advance.

The American spy unit, called the 3rd Radio Research Unit – later reorganized as the 309th Radio Research Group – conducted a top secret operation code-named “Gamma Delta.” That operation was so sensitive even the code word was listed as top secret. That operation was also known as “host intercept” among insiders and was established to listen in on all messages dispatched and received by the government of South Vietnam.

Sources among the Vietnamese intelligence community, evacuated by the Americans in April, 1975, said they believe the U.S. government employed the same techniques to spy on allied communications in Saigon.

The Tan Son Nhut spy outfit’s work was so sensitive that even mechanics in the motor pool and the kitchen’s cooks, all U.S. military, had to be cleared for top secret and cryptographic material.

A second unit, called the 7th Radio Research Unit, positioned in the nearby strategic compound of the joint command headquarters of the Vietnamese armed forces, spied on the Camp Davis unit to insure its super-secret operation contained no leaks.

This “plumber’s unit” was located in a part of the compound known as White Birch, authoritative sources told The Mercury. Part of its function was to teach the South Vietnamese the fine art of interception and code-breaking.

Both the 3rd Radio Research Unit and the 7th Radio Research Unit were in Vietnam in a “sub-rosa” or cover status. Their operations were so secret, the U.S. Army history on the Vietnam War, recently released in 22 volumes, mentions only the 309th and does not discuss the functions of the code-breaking units.

Sources told The Mercury the two military groups were part of the worldwide network of the U.S. Army Security Agency’s special operations command.

The Army Security Agency operates electronic listening posts covering virtually all areas of the world, informed sources told The Mercury. The code-breakers work for the National Security Agency and cooperate with the similar Navy and Air Force units, the CIA, the FBI and U.S. Army intelligence. The reports sometimes bypassed the American commanding generals and ambassadors in the scene in Vietnam and moved directly to NSA headquarters outside Washington, D.C. or to the situation room in the White House, professional intelligence sources said.

Its Top Secret DINAR classification, one of the highest and most sensitive of classified information, was slapped on a CIA report of the Bay of Tonkin incident that sparked the Vietnam War. A number of top-secret operations accidentally tangled in the Tonkin Gulf.

A number of sources agreed the agency was one of the most important spy organizations and dealt cards in the political and military games of intrigue-filled Saigon.

The Tan Son Nhut eavesdropping group, staffed by perhaps 300 technicians, played a major role in providing information on key historical incidents that led to the beginning of the combat role for Americans in 1965.

Authoritative sources said U.S. Marines, on special assignment at Trai Bac (Northern Base) Station on the northern front at Phu Bai intercepted and taped the radio exchange between Vietnamese naval commanders on the North Vietnam shore and small North Vietnamese PT boats hunting down South Vietnamese raiders who were hitting the port cities one after another. Those PT boats were eventually provoked into attacking the U.S. destroyers C. Turner Joy and Maddox on spy missions inside North Vietnamese territorial waters.

After that interception, President Lyndon B. Johnson dispatched a full Marine battalion to defend the Phu Bai Station after its own recent patrols became jittery and accidentally shot and killed a South Vietnamese sentry.

The commander of the South Vietnamese operations said his men were provoking the North Vietnamese by hitting their shore positions up and down the coastline while the American ship probed both North Vietnamese radar defenses and communications in the area.

A memorandum from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to President Johnson in May 1964, three months before the Tonkin incident, outlined the administration “scenario” to force the North Vietnamese into a larger war which, American planners hoped, would bring the North to its knees.

The code-breaking units played key roles in determining North Vietnam’s responses to the American plan.

The Tonkin “attacks” led to the passage of a pre-resolution which became known as the Tonkin Resolution. It was shepherded through the Congress by former Arkansas Sen. William Fulbright and became the de facto declaration of war that marked the beginning of the combat role that eventually took more than 58,000 American lives. At the time, 163 Americans had died in Vietnam.

The radio research units, sources told The Mercury, not only snooped electronically on communication of governments, but also helped pinpoint key communications with the American and Vietnamese commando teams operation in North Vietnam and other neighboring countries.

When the Paris Peace Accords set up the tri-party military commission that was supposed to establish the Council of Reconciliation and Concord, which was to unify the South through elections, it also provided for a Saigon headquarters for the Communists.

Davis Station was chosen, but the connection between the site’s former occupants and the new tenants was generally lost on Saigon watchers who did not know the nature of the 3rd Radio Research Unit.

It was not until the fall of Saigon and “Operation Talonvise,” which brought a large number of intelligence officers out as refugees that the real story could be pieced together.

It is the nature of intelligence that it has to be carefully pieced together because spies are given information only on a “need-to-know” basis and there is probably no single person who knows the entire story.

Some former intelligence officers refused to discuss Vietnam operations, but some felt they now owe history a full recount of what happened behind the scenes.

One former intelligence chief said he wants the American people to know that “many very brave men died behind the lines trying to wear down the enemy.”

When asked point-blank if the Americans bugged Camp Davis and the Viet Cong, one key Vietnamese general positioned high in the Ministry of Defense, and now living in California, gave a one-word response.

“Sure,” he said.

Next: U.S. aid – cover for the CIA.

[Note: Sidebar for Part III]

Perhaps the most revealing document released as part of the “Pentagon Papers,” a top secret “encyclopedic and objective” study on the United States involvement in Vietnam was “scenario” for action that led to the Tonkin incident, the escalated bombing and the beginning of a combat role for Americans.

The study, entitled “United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967” was ordered by then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident that led to the active combat role for U.S. servicemen took place in August, 1964.

Three months earlier, on May 23, 1964, McNamara told the President in a memorandum that the following “scenario” was planned. The “D” followed by a number indicates the days until the massive bombing of North Vietnam would begin.

“1. Stall off any conference on Vietnam until D-Day.

“2. Intermediary (Canadian?) tell North Vietnam in general terms that U.S. does not want to destroy the North Vietnam regime (and indeed is willing ‘to provide a carrot’) but is determined to protect South Vietnam from North Vietnam.

“3. (D-30) Presidential speech in general terms launching Joint Resolution.

“4. (D-20) Obtain Joint Resolution approving past actions and authorizing whatever is necessary with respect to Vietnam…

“5. (D-16) Direct [Commander in Chief, Pacific] to take all prepositioning and logistic actions that can be taken ‘quietly’ for the D-Day forces…

“6. (D-15) Get [General Nguyen] Khanh’s agreement to start overt South Vietnamese air attacks against targets in the North and inform him of U.S. guarantee to protect South Vietnam in the event of North Vietnamese and/or Chinese retaliation.

“7. (D-14) Consult with Thailand and the Philippines to get permission for U.S. deployments; and consult with them plus U.K., Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan, asking for their open political support…

“8. (D-13) Release an expanded “Jordan Report,” [White Paper on Aggression from the North] including recent photography and evidence of the communications nets, giving full documentation of North Vietnamese supply and direction of Viet Cong.

“9. (D-12) Direct CINCPAC to begin moving forces and making specific plans on the assumption that strikes will be made on D-Day.

“10. (D-10) Khanh makes speech demanding that North Vietnam stop aggression, threatening unspecified military action if he does not.

“11. (D-3) Discussions with Allies not covered in item 7 above.

“12. (D-3) President informs U.S. public (and therefore North Vietnam) that action may come, referring to Khanh speech…

“13. (D-1) Khanh announces that all efforts have failed and that attacks are imminent…

“14. (D-Day) Remove U.S. dependents [from South Vietnam].

“15. (D-Day) Launch first strikes…

“16. (D-Day) Call for conference on Vietnam…”

Saigon, for many years, was the spy center of East Asia as the major powers played their historical game of chess over the Indochinese real estate.

And for the past 10 months many of the central figures in the Saigon world of espionage have been living in the United States building new lives as refugees.

In San Jose alone, a number of Vietnamese officials high in the ranks of the intelligence world work far from the intrigues of a Saigon that is no more. Many do not like to talk about their work in Vietnam fearing reprisals from the U.S. government which allows them to stay here on parole visas that could be lifted at any time. However, many of the refugees have agreed to talk off the record and the story they tell could fill books.

Newsmen, spies, counter-spies, double- spies, spies who watched spies, businessmen and adventurers commonly gathered at Saigon’s venerable Continental Palace Hotel – whose last owner lives in downtown San Jose – to sit on the raised veranda, sip on a gin and tonic and watch the world pass by in the sweltering heat of Saigon.

Information swapping on the “Continental Shelf” was a regular pastime, and both Time and Newsweek magazines maintained their bureau headquarters at the hotel. Offices of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press were a hand grenade throw away.

The daily military briefings, called the “five o’clock follies,” were held across the square and the often-hostile questions and equally hostile answers were relayed live via shortwave back to the Pentagon.

Down the street, at the government press center, transcripts of daily briefings in Washington were rushed to the Saigon press corps via teletype and U.S. network television news was played on a big screen in the auditorium.

The hotel, however, was the key information-gathering point and rumor and fact often mixed like the gin and the tonic.

A popular subject was the secret raids behind enemy lines, but military officials refused to discuss them.

For more than a quarter of a century teams of Americans and Vietnamese poured into the North gathering information and engaging in psychological warfare, sabotage and espionage; but Saigon was where the real action was.

One of Saigon’s residents was William Colby, a veteran CIA agent. He was assigned to Vietnam with the rank of ambassador to run the Pacification Program that operated hand-in-hand with the U.S. aid program and CIA operations. It was a well-kept secret over the years that Colby was actually a CIA agent in charge of an immense network of information-gatherers working under cover of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the American Embassy, the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) and a number of lesser organizations.

Colby, who until recently operated the worldwide operations of the CIA, masterminded the CIA clandestine operations in Indochina. From 1959 to 1962 he was the CIA’s station chief in Saigon. In 1962 he became head of the Far East Division of the CIA’s Clandestine Services. He directed commando raids in North Vietnam, Laos and neighboring countries. He had, at his command, units of American, Vietnamese and mercenary military units.

It was Colby who was the architect of the Counter Terror Program in Vietnam. The operation was established in 1965 with Colby running it from Washington. Adverse publicity of the name necessitated a change to Provisional Revolutionary Units (PRU), then Phoenix. In 1967 Colby’s office designed the Phoenix Program which, Colby told Congress in 1971, assassinated 20,587 Vietnamese in Phoenix’s first two and a half years. He was named to head the Pacification Program in 1968.

USAID operated in the 44 provinces of Vietnam in a number of ways under a number of names. It directed all Vietnamese police actions through “public safety advisors,” and a number of the “advisors” were recruits from Valley police departments, including a sunny “sharpshooter.” It provided aid in agriculture, education, medicine and collected information. It was called CORDS (for Civil Operations for Rural Development Support), USOM (for United States Overseas Mission) and USAID.

A USAID senior advisor headed each province and gave orders to the Vietnamese province chiefs. USAID advisors kept tabs on education, economic and political developments in the provinces, and his information was fed into banks of computers in Saigon. USAID was in fact an action arm of the CIA and employed CIA liaison officers as “advisors.”

The team of USAID advisors and their contract agencies provided a constant stream of information back to Saigon’s mammoth six-story headquarters on Le Van Duyet Street, but for special assignments the U.S. Embassy dispatched “political reporters” who were light cover CIA agents.

When journalists moved through the provinces in search of stories, it was not uncommon to find a “political reporter” tagging along when a journalist was working on a story that touched a CIA nerve.

Such a program was the dreaded Phoenix Program. In April last year Operation Talonvise swung into operation to evacuate Phoenix and other “embassy” (CIA) employees when Saigon was surrounded by North Vietnamese divisions.

The operation ran smoothly for a couple of days until the North Vietnamese put a stop to it with a devastating artillery barrage that tore up Tan Son Nhut’s giant runways.

After that, it was every man for himself, and other refugees joined the stream of humanity that poured into the South China Sea and made it to ships of the 7th Fleet on station for the last time on Vietnam.

On April 30, 1975 Gen. Duong Van Minh (Big Minh) surrendered the South Vietnamese government to the Communists. Saigon became Ho Chi Minh City and there was a Third World celebration at San Jose’s Williams Park.

It is impossible to say how successful Operation Talonvise really was. Its goal was to lift out 14,000 agents and their families, most of who didn’t know what their fathers did. At 10 members to a family, some 140,000 refugees were expected.

Operation Talonvise was supposed to bring out agents of all kinds, especially those associated with Phoenix. That program was designed to “neutralize” the Viet Cong “infrastructure” through assassination and terror. It was an eye-for-an-eye and a tooth-for-a-tooth operation.

The Phoenix Program ran hand-in-hand with the Pacification Program which was supposed to win the “hearts and minds” of the people and the Open Arms operation worked to convince the enemy to change sides.

That last program provided the Viet Cong with an easy method for placing their agents in the South Vietnamese government and alongside American servicemen as “Kit Carson” scouts.

But Phoenix eventually backfired. Saigon newspapers said the program put too much emphasis on terror and created a backlash of revulsion and fear among the Vietnamese people.

Corrupt Vietnamese officials used the assassination and terror program to solicit funds from targets in return for not fingering them as members of the Viet Cong “infrastructure.”

Many of the sophisticated intelligence programs enjoyed limited success because of the American habit of using the native population for such chores as washing uniforms, cleaning barracks, building defenses, shining shoes and working in PXs and offices. The possibilities for placement of a Viet Cong agent on an American base were endless.

The political use of programs and the immense amounts of money USAID or CORDS pumped into Vietnam to run the programs provided the ingredients for one of the most often criticized vices of Vietnamese officialdom – corruption.

The Phoenix Program was used to eliminate political enemies, and fund-skimming by the Vietnamese was overlooked by American officials as “that’s the way it is.”

The politicization of the war in Vietnam at all levels led to corruption and a weakening of the ordinary citizen soldier’s will to fight, a number of refugees told The Mercury.

“In the end, we lost the war because it was a political war in the provinces and the international scene. We never had real military discipline and in the end it just fell apart,” said one former general now living in the Bay Area.

Next: The Vietnamese generals in exile.

From November, 1963 and the assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, the generals ran Vietnam.

Today, most of them are in exile trying to piece together shattered lives as refugees. The rest, according to a report from Sen. George McGovern who toured Hanoi and Saigon in January, have either been put to death or are working on farms in the Vietnamese countryside.

During a 10-month investigation, The Mercury has been able to pinpoint 45 of the more than 80 generals on the rolls at the end of the war.

The list includes one full general, 13 lieutenant generals, 11 major generals and 18 brigadier generals. Naval general-grade officers or admirals are included in that list.

When the VIPs arrived in the United States, they were initially segregated from the other refugees, but on the job today across the nation few people realize the man pumping gas at a California service station or serving a hot meal in a Virginia restaurant or selling insurance in Santa Clara is a former general trying to make it in a new land and a new role.

Some Vietnamese generals reportedly are not working at simple jobs because they have maintained sizeable “savings.”

Vietnamese generals come in all sizes, with varied talents and varied feelings about the war in Vietnam. Some were top combat generals, some were cruel warlords and some were corrupt, ineffective parasites who were loyal to politically strong friends. Some, even today, remain in hiding.

One thing the generals have in common – they’ve fallen a long way and, most likely, they will never again achieve the prominence they once enjoyed as field commanders in one of the best-supplied wars in history.

“We had everything we could have wanted to fight the war,” said Lt. Ge. Hoang Xuan Lam in his bare, flea-market furnished downtown San Jose apartment.

“We had air support, artillery support, guns, tanks, everything,” the former three-star general said.

The generous support from their American allies proved to be too much of a temptation to some generals and corruption was widespread.

“Corruption was a perennial problem,” wrote General William C. Westmoreland in his recently-published book, “A Soldier Reports.” “Partly because under the old mandarin systems, it had become a way of life,” he said.

“It had been long established that a legitimate portion of an official’s emolument was a cut of the funds and material that passed through his hands,” the American commanding general of American forces in Vietnam said.

“If a man rose to authorities and then failed to use his position, say, to get his old father’s tin roof repaired, the people saw him as cruel and inconsiderate. On the other hand, there clearly had to be limits if government leaders were to gain the trust and confidence of the people,” Westmoreland said.

Gen. Lam commanded the northern front for six years. He once led Vietnam’s crack First Division, the unit that played a key role in recapturing the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive of 1968.

Today Lam works for an insurance company in Santa Clara and plays tennis on weekends with two former general friends from San Francisco.

“We lost the war because we did not live up to the Paris Peace Accords (of 1973),” Lam said. “I was a neutralist. When the agreements were signed, I was ready to put down my weapons and begin to work for peace,” he said.

Lam, after some serious defeats on the Northern Front, was transferred to Saigon where he became assistant to prime minister. He was in Saigon when the cease fire went into effect.

In Saigon, it became apparent that President (Nguyen Van) Thieu was not going to follow the accords. “We were forcing the Communists to continue the fight, and we lost,” he said.

Lam pushed hard for the resignation of Thieu, he said, but it was not until the end that the generals announced that Thieu had to go.

“But it was already too late, and I left on a ship,” he said.

The list of generals reads like a who’s who of the Vietnam War. Some of the generals accumulated great wealth, like generals Cao Van Vien, in Washington, D.C. and Dang Van Quang, in Canada.

There are those who are publicity shy, like chief of the national police Nguyen Khac Binh and his Saigon commander, Trang Si Tan. The two were partially responsible for keeping thousands of political prisoners and running the Vietnamese police state.

The joint chiefs of staff, former generals Chung Tan Cang, navy; Vo Dinh, air force; and Dong Van Khuyen, army, are on American soil.

Other generals here include electronic intelligence chief Phan Huu Nhon, the last I Corps commander, Ngo Quang Truong, military academy commanding generals Lam Quang Tho of Daly City and his brother, Lam Quang Thi of San Francisco.

Down in Monterey are Bui Dinh Dan, former chief of manpower and Huynh Van Lac, commander of the Quang Trung training center.

Other army generals in the United States, according to the other generals, are Nguyen Van Manh, Nguyen Van Tuan, Du Quoc Dong, Nguyen Van Thinh, Phan Dinh Niem, Le Quang Luong, Le Nguyen Khang, Dao Duy An, Le Ngoc Tien, Tran Dinh Tho, Tran Van Trung, Vo Vanh Canh and Ton That Dinh.

Vnamese admirals among the refugees are Diep Quang Thuy, Ho Van Ky Thoai, Nguyen Thanh Chau, Nguyen Huu Chi, Le Trung Hieu and Vu Hong Dao.

Air Force generals include Nguyen Cao Ky, once the nation’s prime minister and later vice president, Tran Van Minh, Nguyen Van Lanh, Dang Dinh Linh, Huynh Ba Tinh, Nguyen Van Luong and Phan Phung Tien, commander of the 5th Air Force Division. His main claim to fame was his bombing of the presidential palace of President Diem in 1960.

The former commanding general of the corps of engineers, Nguyen Van Chuc, who runs a garage in the country town of Loomis in Placer County, said most of the generals are doing well.

“Only a few dedicated former field commanders are poorer (than the rest) and are meeting some difficulties readjusting,” Chuc said.

One of those “poorer” commanders who, he claims, was too busy fighting the war to gather a private fortune is San Jose’s Gen. Lam, but he said he has no regrets.

“I did my job well. I did the best I could. It was not I who lost the war,” Lam said.

-30-

Yankees go home; then come back

Yesteryear, in Mexican California, the headlines of the day might have read: ”Governor orders illegals out of the country.”

The illegals were Yankees, Americans, citizens of the United States of America.

It’s history.

There is an annual reenactment of this page in history at San Juan Bautista and Fremont Peak, north of Salinas. In 1846 there was a showdown between the northern governor of Mexican California and a band of rowdy Americans led by John C. Fremont.

In essence, General Jose Castro, governor of Northern California, ordered the 60 Americans, mostly rambunctious mountain men, to get out of the country, head back to the United States, then east of the Rockies.

It was a step Castro ”had every right to take, as they had not bothered to secure passports,” wrote Ray Allen Billington in his history, ‘The Far Western Frontier: 1830-1860.”

Castro probably was not aware that Fremont and his men were on a secret mission for U.S. President James K. Polk to provoke war – an American revolution against Mexico.

The first American trails to California were blazed by Jedediah Smith in 1826 and Joseph Walker in 1833. Organized parties of immigrants from the United States began crossing the Sierra Nevada into Mexican territory in 1841. Some had permission. Some did not.

But one group drew the ire of the province governor. In an act of provocation, Fremont raised the U.S. flag on the slopes of Gavilan Peak, today known as Fremont Peak.

”It was the most provocative, anti-Mexican thing that could have been done,” said Rick Morales, a park ranger and expert on local history at San Juan Bautista.

Soon after this, California-Americans at Sonoma revolted against Mexican rule. They set up the Bear Flag – or California – Republic. Their revolt blended with the American cause in the Mexican War.

That war resulted in an American victory, establishment of the Rio Grande as the boundary and cession of California and New Mexico to the United States. California was conquered by U.S. forces commanded by Gen. Stephen Watts Kearny.

Mexican territory, from Texas to the Pacific Ocean, became U.S. territory in exchange for $15 million in a forced treaty.

The re-enactment at San Juan Bautista State Historical Park starts when Castro receives word that Fremont and his company of explorers have entered the Monterey Bay area and are encamped on the slopes of Gavilan Peak.

Castro issues a proclamation ordering Fremont and his people to get out of the country.

In the proclamation, Castro asks for help from the local people: ”In the name of our native country, I invite you to place yourselves under my immediate orders at headquarters where we will prepare to lance the ulcer which would destroy our liberties and independence . . .”

Castro was able to raise a force of about 200.

Then the re-enactment shifts to Fremont Peak, where the American intruders had set up a makeshift fort. Castro’s men deliver the governor’s edict to Fremont.

Soon after that historic confrontation, the wind blew down the American flag, and Fremont told his men that it was a bad omen. They left.

But a couple months later, the United States and Mexico were at war.

The rest is history.

The Niles Canyon Ghost

OK. OK. There are plenty of ghosts in the old town of Niles and its picturesque canyon on the southeastern side of San Francisco Bay. The John McCain lookalike, Charlie Chaplin, lived and worked there circa 1915. As did Broncho Billy and casts of hundreds forgotten faces. Joaquin Murrieta?

But I mean THE real Niles ghost. The most famous one.

The Niles Canyon Ghost the best known of the local ghosts, but in the 1950s, Alameda County sheriff’s deputies on at least two occasions nabbed youngsters hiding in the bushes with white sheets over their heads. According to old newspaper clips, the sheriff picked up one Clarence Chivers, 19, on Feb. 26, 1950, on suspicion of impersonating a ghost.

When I talked to her, his mom, Bea Chivers, was still chuckling over her son’s youthful prank.

”I thought they buried that story,” she declared.

Young Chivers, now a senior citizen was a truck driver and lived in Newark.

Two years after the Chivers incident, the newspaper clips reported, deputies arrested a 22-year-old for the same reason. They reported there were 20 to 30 kids hiding along Niles Canyon that same day.

The story of the “Lady in White” is still told today.

The old newspaper clippings, which are missing some details, said that on Feb. 26, 1938, a young woman was killed in an automobile accident. She died while returning from a formal ball. Since then, on rainy Feb. 26ths, she flags down motorists at night. She gets in the back seat and gives as her destination an address in San Francisco. When they get to the toll gate on the Dumbarton Bridge, they look in the back seat. The woman is not there. Curious, they drive to the address in San Francisco, where they find a sad-faced old woman who tells them that her daughter was killed some years earlier driving through Niles Canyon.

As the visitors leave the house, they catch a glimpse of a picture of the woman’s daughter on the fireplace mantel. It is the young woman who flagged them down. . . .

Mad cows, or were they just angry?

Mad cows.

They are a source of concern when they enter the food supply.

But, I am sorry to say (not really), there hasn’t been a hotter topic for humor since Joe the Plumber, so you can imagine my delight when I realized that there could be a lot of mad cows out in Livermore.

But, maybe not the ones you’re thinking.

Let me explain.

Cows and cowboys are part of the San Francisco Bay Area culture what with one of the longest ranges anywhere in the hills from San Pablo Bay to Hollister. And, from time to time, the cutting horse association meets at the Livermore Rodeo. The job of the cutting horse is to cut a cow from the herd for things such as doctoring, weaning, branding or eating.

Sometimes ”cutting” makes a cow mad.

Well, how would you feel if you were sitting down munching on your breakfast and a bunch of horse riders showed up, cut you off from your family, tied you with rope and put a hot iron on your butt?

You’d be teed off, angry, irritated, incensed, irate, enraged, furious, possibly choleric.

And mad.

Out there under the Livermore sun the cattle barons, cowboys and cowgirls were quick to point out this mad is not the mad in the ”mad cow disease” controversy swirling about Canada, Europe and the United Kingdom. Folks there have been in a near panic because the cow disease – bovine spongiform encephalopathy – apparently can spread to humans in the form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a very rare degenerative brain disorder.

‘We don’t have the disease here,” said Ron Davis, a rancher from Southern California. ”I inoculate my cattle against brain disease.”

”I never heard of mad cow disease until now,” he said, sitting on a fence overlooking one of the three corrals at the Livermore Rodeo. ”I’ve been buying cows for three years and never heard of a mad cow. It sounds something like rabies.”

Jason Clark, a cowboy from Placerville, said cows get mad (the good mad) for all kinds of reasons.

”They’ll be mad in about an hour after sitting in that sun,” he said.

A mad cow, he explained, ”does not respect you or your horse. They’ll just run all over you.”

Rich Figoni, a rancher from Red Bluff, said you can tell when a cow gets mad.

”Its tail goes up. It will bump into you or go under your horse,” he said.

This could cost a cutting horse competitor points and money.

Riders have 2 1/2 minutes to cut cows out of a herd of a dozen steers. They are judged on their skill and form.

A lot of money is at steak . . . I mean . . . stake.

REBECCA Davis, sister of Ron, said she has won $100,000 during the last two years on the cutting horse circuit.

Since I wanted to be politically correct, I asked Davis if I should refer to her as a ”cowgirl” because, for example, titles such as chairman have been broadened to include choices like chairwoman, chairperson or, simply, the chair. Following that pattern, a cowgirl could be a cowwoman, a cowperson or, simply, a cow.

The 20-something Davis had that you-gotta-be-kidding look on her face. But she was quick to make a choice.

”I am a cowgirl,” she declared.

Blast from the past: reporting from Vietnam

Far Eastern Economic Review

Reference: Vol. 73, No. 33, 14 Aug 1971, 20

The Faces of Peace

Dennis Rockstroh|Qui Nhon

BINH Dinh province is the keystone of South Vietnam’s central provinces — which remain the political and economic hub of the country. It is the richest, the most populated and the most sought after. Its name — which means pacified in Vietnamese — is misleading: it has seen some of the bitterest fighting of the war. NLF (National Liberation Front) troops are as strong as ever here. Vietnamese authorities place their number at 10-15,000, bolstered by an estimated 5,000 troops of the third division of the North Vietnamese army. They also believe the Communists can rely on some 300,000 of Binh Dinh’s population of nearly a million for support.

National highway 19 extending west from the coast cuts the province in half and is the vital artery feeding An Khe, Pleiku, Phu Bon and a number of other potentially powerful economic centres in the central highlands. “Without that road open we are dead,” Nguyen Van Nhan, chairman of the Binh Dinh province council, declares. “And you can rest assured we will keep it open.” But this may not be so easy as it has been in the last six years. South Korean troops are slowly withdrawing their forces from the province; the American 173rd airborne brigade has orders to minimise casualties and the 22nd South Vietnamese army division, based outside the capital city of Qui Nhon, has only three regiments on hand to protect population centres.

With communist strength up and “free world” strength down, the much vaunted American South Vietnamese pacification programme is in trouble and the failure of the long struggle to the “win hearts and minds” of the population is becoming evident. Most province officials are willing to admit partial failure — but insist there has also been success, though they can offer few proofs. “In 1965 if you went 10 kilometres out of the city of Qui Nhon you were dead,” Nhan says. “Today you can travel in any direction as far as you want — but don’t get caught on the road after dark.”

The officials say most government services and development projects are continuing and improving. Vietcong-initiated terrorist incidents continue, but serious military engagements have decreased. “It depends a lot on your standard for security,” one officer explained. “If you rate security the way we do — by the number of incidents–then you would have to rate Hanoi an ‘A’ (secure) hamlet.” The number of communists in an area seemingly matters less than the level of activity they keep up.

America’s effort in Binh Dinh province began in earnest in September 1965 when General William Westmoreland, then leading US military operations in Vietnam, ordered the first airborne cavalry division to Qui Nhon and An Khe. He then ordered a brigade of the 101st airborne division to clear the An Khe area and highway 19 linking An Khe with the port city of Qui Nhon. A battalion of marines began to secure Qui Nhon port, then under development and eventually to become the main logistical supply point for central Vietnam.

Meanwhile South Vietnamese and American units, later aided by the Korean Tiger division, began to “clear” the area of insurgent forces. Since Binh Dinh province was, with Phu Yen on the south and Quang Ngai on the north, a Vietcong stronghold, clearing operations became more difficult as the area to be pacified increased.

The allies were fighting in the heartland of historical resistance. The only effective way to clear it of insurgents was to wipe out the entire population. Political and military planners chose the next best thing: they cleared the population out of the most intensely hostile areas. The result was a massive movement of refugees into the cities — above all Qui Nhon. The government was ill-equipped to handle the flow, and slum-like refugee camps sprung up all around the city. Some fugitives, like those from southern Phu My. district, had been terrorised by the Vietcong because they were Catholics and inclined to be anti-communist. They moved to the refugee camps voluntarily. Many others did not.

The presence of the newly arrived American and Korean soldiers took care of one immediate problem, employment for the refugees. They cleaned the soldiers’ floors, washed their clothes, cooked their food and served other needs. It was an ironic situation — refugees waiting on soldiers who, for many, had driven them from their ancestral homes. The arrangement has lasted, from economic necessity, until now.

But half the Americans have gone home. They have left behind buildings which scavengers have picked apart for the valuable wood. Some complexes cannot be turned over to the Vietnamese army as barracks because the buildings are in danger of collapsing. The Qui Nhon air base is virtually abandoned except for the US medical evacuation hospital. Military flights have been diverted to nearby Phu Cat air base and only an occasional Air Vietnam or Air America craft lands on the once busy airstrip.

The American pullout was speeded up by demonstrations earlier in the year which “ironically . . . resulted in better relations between the Vietnamese and American communities in Qui Nhon,” according to Eldon Ewing, chief of the community development division for CORDS (Civil Operations for Rural Development Support).

Ewing feels the massive military presence here and the largely hostile population caused problems which the American community, especially the military leadership, ignored for years. It was often said American drivers on the streets of Qui Nhon and on highway 19 caused more casualties than the war. “There was never really any convoy control,” Ewing admits. American drivers speeded unchecked on the roads, tossed things at the Vietnamese and in many cases caused needless death. The combination of reckless US drivers and careless Vietnamese pedestrians heightened the toll of injuries and deaths and brought relations to breaking point.

But the accelerated American pullout entails some new problems. Some 5,000 Vietnamese workers at American bases have lost their jobs, and redundancies are bound to increase. Those still in work face shorter hours and smaller wages. American advisers wish the refugees would return to the countryside. The government is offering financial and material assistance under the return-to-the-villages programme. “But there are few takers,” Ewing says. “It’s still too insecure – especially for Catholic refugees.” Some Vietnamese have been misusing the programme. “Some people take the allowance and building material, build a shack out in the countryside and hurry back for more. They just see the programme as a way to make a little money,” Ewing adds.

The core of the problem is the continuing hostility to the government in the countryside, despite land reforms and better amenities. As one US official put it: “There is really no difference between the farmers of 1965 and those here today. They would support the Vietcong before any Saigon government with its American tint.”

But there are encouraging signs in Qui Nhon. While Indian merchants, bargirls and prostitutes are short of business the ordinary Vietnamese is not really suffering. Many bars have been converted into summer classrooms. There is no starvation in the province, and construction is evident throughout the city. The chief causes for optimism are the plans Japanese businessmen have for Binh Dinh’s great natural resources. Japanese engineers have surveyed the An Khe area in the hills 36 miles northwest of Qui Nhon. Construction has begun on a hydroelectric power plant capable of generating 160,000 kilowatts and irrigating 50,000 hectares of land. It will provide power for a proposed industrial centre clustered around the port of Qui Nhon.

In addition, the Japanese are talking about the timber potential, grazing land for thousands of head of beef cattle, and a Toyota plant at An Khe, which is already a Japanese “sister city”. The An Khe district chief went to Japan in June to discuss postwar plans for his area. The Vietnamese government has approved a loan for construction of a textile plant in Qui Nhon which will employ 400 people. Setting up this and other plants should take up, jobwise, most of the slack left by the American withdrawal. But these few steps do not spell a glowing future for Binh Dinh. The overriding requirement for any kind of serious industrial development is a peaceful environment. Binh Dinh is in reality still a contested province and all the power of the Americans, Saigonese and Japanese combined will not alleviate the problems of war.

One factor which strongly favours the Japanese attempt to build up Binh Dinh and thereby capture a rich market for machinery and spare parts is their ability to get on well with all factions in the Vietnamese struggle. “Whoever wins here will probably invite the Japanese to help out in the development,” an American official says. “In that respect, the province has a bright future. The real problem is solving the shooting war aspect of it all, and that isn’t even in sight.”

But the Japanese have encountered trouble with Vietnamese development elsewhere. Just off the coast of Vietnam are some of the richest untapped fishing waters in Asia. Japanese interests have offered to help outfit a fishing fleet, enabling the Vietnamese to take advantage of a source of potentially almost unlimited wealth. But nobody is interested. “The Japanese plan would require the fishermen to stay out overnight and this they refuse to do,” one government official said. “In addition, the fishermen are afraid that with the increasing number of fish, prices in the market would tumble .”

The biggest fear in Saigon recently has been the spectre of another North Vietnamese attempt to split Vietnam in half. It was this fear that originally spurred American involvement in the province. “Route 19 is the likely spot to do it,” one Saigon observer said. “It is vital to the logistical and economic maintenance of much of the highlands.” An estimated 65,000 North Vietnamese soldiers in the northern provinces outnumber South Vietnamese forces there — a fact whose significance may become painfully apparent when all the American troops have departed. In Van Canh, a remote district, there are ominous signs of stalemate. The only industry in the area is charcoal-production, which American officials say is controlled by the Vietcong. Van Canh Used to be a Vietcong-controlled area — which so embarrassed province officials that they made it a part of Tuy Phuoc district and thereby eliminated a “Vietcong district”.

The paper change meant little. The Koreans brought temporary security to the area but they have already begun withdrawing. A single dirt road runs through the district and every bridge on it has been blown up at frequent intervals. Along the railway tracks lie the rusting hulks of demolished trains. Large shrines dot the road commemorating the deaths of dozens of villagers killed when their bus hit roadmines. At the end of the road, the government has offices and maintains a show of control but villagers point out that hills on three sides are inhabited by the Vietcong. American and Vietnamese officials agree the hills are full of the enemy in unknown strength.

Yet nothing is done to root them out – perhaps because not much can be done. Binh Dinh has never been successfully controlled by anyone — French, Saigonese or American. Control is no longer the American objective. “Our primary trust . . . is to bolster the territorial forces,” an American official admits. The territorial forces are essentially the militia — farmers by day, soldiers by night , like the Vietcong they oppose — who constitute one of the untold stories of the war in Binh Dinh. As in any civil war, families have been split, with father and son or brothers on opposing sides. “Here in Binh Dinh this has become a blood war, a war between families, and that will be the hardest thing to cure,” Ewing says. Others disagree, holding that once the war is over the hatred generated by years of fratricidal war will diminish.

But on one point everybody agrees: Binh Dinh province, with peace, could have a very rosy future. The fish, timber and rice, combined with an industrial base, could bring new prosperity there — if Binh Dinh lives up to its name.

Carol Doda’s bottom

In her heyday, Carol Doda was big.

Bigger than Jane Russell, Marie McDonald, Raquel Welch and even Diana Dors.

For two decades, Doda’s likeness, with two red, blinking lights for nipples, beckoned big-eyed customers to the naughty Condor Club at Columbus and Broadway. It was there that topless dancing was born on June 19, 1964, and bottomless on Sept. 3, 1969.

Doda was big because she stood 20 feet tall on the North Beach sign, probably the most famous in San Francisco history.

Whatever happened to the sign?

A two-week investigation revealed that:

— I don’t know.

— Not entirely, anyway.

— Neither does Carol Doda.

I found Doda’s top part: head, shoulders, flashing red lights, 44D upper torso.

But her bottom is missing.

”I’ve been working out,” Doda explained.

Seriously, she said, ”What difference does it make?”

History, I told her. We owe an explanation to history.

After all, the sign was offered to the Smithsonian (they declined) and there’s a bronze historical marker near the spot stating:

”The Condor

”Where it all began

”The birthplace of the world’s first

”Topless and bottomless entertainment . . .”

The top half of Carol Doda is framed inside the new Condor, which has innocuously reincarnated itself into a neon-emblazoned sports bar with satellite TV. It’s a type of place that young urbanite tourists are drawn to, with espresso and lattes. The windows slide open for a good view of the other tourists outside.

In the back is a museum, the walls are filled with newspaper stories chronicling the rise and fall of topless dancing.

”Look up if you want to see Carol,” explained the barkeeper.

There on the wall is the top of the sign. Next to it is a part of Doda’s old dressing room. Securely attached to the ceiling is the killer piano. Doda used to open her show by slowly riding down on it, and in the wee hours of one morning, it killed an assistant manager while he was making love to one of the dancers.

The new Condor says a lot about that section of North Beach once known for its exotic dancers and bawdy life. It was the lineal descendant of the old Barbary Coast.

It ain’t the same.

Yuppification has set in. Where once 28 strip joints made the place jump, only five remain. And most of them feature videos or booths.

The strip’s neighbors – Little Italy, Chinatown and the Financial District – have moved in replacing the raunchy glare of the strip joints with upscale jazz cabarets, lunch spots and bookstores.

Old-timers on the street attribute the downfall of the nudie joints to the World Series (Loma Prieta) earthquake in 1989. Before the quake, about 25,000 cars a day flowed into the bustling area via the Embarcadero Freeway. Now it’s gone, and so are about half the cars, said Patrick Roe, manager of the hungry i.

”It really killed us,” Roe said. ”Business is OK. It’s good for us, but it’s not like what it used to be.”

Doda blames the area’s downfall on the owners’ unwillingness to change their acts. She left the Condor in 1985. The sign came down in 1991. ”The guy who owned it just let it go down the drain,” she said.

Gene Ainsworth, manager of the North Beach News, an adult book store, attributed the drop in business to a temporary switch in taste.

”It’s like you get tired of your wife and you leave her,” he explained. ”Then, after a few years, you realize what a prize she was and you get back together.”

Ainsworth said customers are starting to come back. ”They really do like sex after all,” he said.

As far as Doda’s bottom goes, though, its whereabouts remains a mystery to me and to the folks on the street.

This much I know: According to columnist Herb Caen, in 1993, the bottom half of the sign was auctioned to a man named Paul Gunther. He paid $3,700.

And that’s the bottom line.

This town’s a Locke

As a town, Locke is tiny, but as a monument to the achievements of California’s Chinese pioneers, it is huge.

Locke, the only rural Chinese town in America, sits on the banks of the Sacramento River, 60 miles east of San Francisco.

There are 51 wooden buildings in the 10-acre ramshackle town with homes, a main street with sagging balconies, a general store, two restaurants and dogs sleeping on musty wood sidewalks.

Now zoom upward high into the crisp blue sky and linger where the clouds are.

Look down with me on the sprawling Sacramento and San Joaquin River delta.

See the more than 1,000 miles of levees and waterways and the 738,000 acres of rich farmland planted in pears, almonds, asparagus and alfalfa, to name a few of the crops?

The Chinese built what you see.

They got it started.

They reclaimed the land that was once all meandering rivers and marsh. Then they planted the crops and, for years, made up the bulk of the farming and harvest crews.

They are among the founders of California’s agricultural industry, the most prosperous in America.

For two decades toward the end of the 19th century, 3,000 to 4,000 Chinese workers, laboring in conditions that no one else would, sometimes waist-deep in mud, set the foundations for reclaiming the delta marshes.

They cut tule peat into the building blocks and hauled them on their backs up the growing levees, fighting mosquitoes and malaria all the while.

Between 1860 and 1880, they reclaimed 88,000 acres before machines took over to finish the job.

“The work they did is still there,” said Darwin Kan, 51, grandson of Lee Bing, the “godfather” of Locke and one of its founders. “All they have done is built it larger, but the base, built by the Chinese, is still holding up.”

In her PBS documentary on the Chinese pioneers of the 19th century, Berkeley filmmaker Loni Ding said that between 1860 and 1890, Chinese workers were primarily responsible for the development of California’s agriculture.

In 1870, she said, three-fourths of California’s agricultural workers were Chinese.

Despite all their hard work, the Chinese were not allowed to own land. That law was on the books until the middle of the 20th century.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Chinatowns grew all over Northern California.

Locke was born when the Chinese part of nearby Walnut Grove burned down in 1915.

Walnut Grove’s Chinatown was an uneasy grouping of two peoples — those from Sze Yap in China and those from nearby Zhongshan, not far from Macao.

People from different villages and different provinces back home in China usually were more competitors than friends.

Since relations were not good between the two groups, the folks from Zhongshan decided to establish their own town just up the road on the property of the George Locke family.

By 1920, Locke, originally named Lockeport, was what you see today, except that it was brand new and bright and shiny.

About 350 people lived there.

Today the population is about 85, mostly non-Chinese.

Locke became a full-service town with homes and businesses including restaurants, bakeries, herb shops, markets, shoe shop, candy store, clothing store, theater, gambling houses and brothels. There was even a Chinese school.

Locke was an island of Chinese culture where the folks from Zhongshan could live the way they wanted.

Bing Fai Chow gives this perspective in the book “Bitter Melon: Inside America’s Last Rural Chinese Town”: “In the past, the whites would attack you with stones when you walked through some of the towns. We never dared to walk on the street alone then — except in Locke. This was our place.”

Historian Sucheng Chan, in “Bitter Melon,” wrote, “Locke is the most visible monument to the extraordinary efforts made by the Chinese to develop agriculture in California.”

Over the years, Locke’s children grew up and moved away. Only a handful of Chinese remain today.

In 1970 Locke was placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

There have been unsuccessful attempts to make Locke a state park or develop it as a Chinese theme park and marina.

Ping Kan Lee, 83, a 1941 graduate of the University of California-Berkeley in economics, the unofficial mayor of Locke and son of founder Lee Bing, said he would like the town saved for future generations as a living museum.

“It should be a memorial to what the Chinese did for this area,” he said.

Visitors still flock to Locke, especially on weekends, Lee said. It even has its own Web site, http://www.locketown.com.

Many visitors come away with the same question, he said.

“What the heck is a town like this doing here?”

Great Scot

From 1995:

JUST about every other summer weekend, 11-year-old Alison Dunshire of Pleasanton puts on a man’s skirt before she goes out to play.

It’s a cultural thing.
Alison is a bagpipe player. Her skirt is a traditional kilt, normally worn by Scottish men.

In the summer, the Dunshire family jumps in the family RV and heads out for a vacation with stops at local Scottish contests.

The family are members of the Scottish Buchanan clan and have celebrated their ancestry as long as Alison can remember.

It used to be that Alison’s father, Bob, a Silicon Valley executive, played the bagpipes at the regular gatherings of Scots across the country, while Alison, younger sister Elizabeth and mother Diana danced. But a year ago, Alison switched from dancing to bagpipe playing, becoming the youngest competing female bagpiper in Northern California. In 11 competitions this year, she has won four awards and, in one contest, tied for first in her division.

Alison’s next performances are Labor Day weekend at the Alameda County Fairgrounds during the 130th annual Scottish Gathering and Games. The games were moved to Pleasanton last year after 32 years in Santa Rosa. The crowds grew so large the sponsoring Caledonian Club of San Francisco moved them permanently to Pleasanton.

ALISON HAS been practicing the bagpipes at home with nary a complaint from the neighbors. She likes the wailing music, particularly ”College of Piping, Summerside P.E.I.”

”It’s really fun to play,” Alison said. ”It’s sort of complicated but not so complicated that I can’t play it. It’s fun and you can dance to it.”

Alison, an accomplished pianist, model student and cultural star, looks at competition as a way to improve.

”I do the whole thing for fun. I did the dance thing for fun. (After playing the bagpipes,) the judges give you a critique. It’s like an extra lesson,” she said.

Alison is well known at school for her dancing and bagpipe-playing. She often performs at assemblies.

”Most of my friends have pretty much grown up with me. They know it’s going to happen,” she said.

She was unable to say just what kind of music her friends listen to. At home, her music of choice is bagpipes.

”I like the music,” Alison said. ”I listen to bagpipes most of the time because I want to hear good bagpipes.”

She’s practicing almost every day for the big games.

Last year, an estimated 60,000 people jammed into the Alameda County Fairgrounds to eat bangers, shepherd’s pie and shortbread, buy family crests, listen to bagpipes and watch great Scots toss cabers, hammers and stones.

At the games, you can even buy a kilt.

The kilts – short, pleated skirts that are suitable for climbing the rough hills of Scotland, were worn by Highlanders because they were poor and that’s all the material they could afford. The more-affluent Lowlanders wore trousers.

IN THE old days, the clans gathered and athletes squared off in sporting competitions. Bagpipers and Highland dancers added color and interest to the gatherings.

Originally, only men competed. In recent years, more women have joined in, even competing in the men’s contests of strength and endurance. There are now categories for women.

Women regularly wear kilts, but, in the minds of some people, kilts are still a male thing.

Earlier this year, when Alison was playing the bagpipes in competition in Southern California, she was reminded of this.

”I walked into the ladies room and a woman said, ‘Excuse me, this is the ladies room.’ ”

Vietnamese-American power struggle

Some of the hotheads in San Jose’s Vietnamese community are poised to recall its first (and probably last for a while) elected city council member over the naming of one of many Vietnamese shopping districts in the city, home to more Vietnamese than any other city outside Vietnam. A large number of the Vietnamese wanted the area named Little Saigon. Madison Nguyen, after hearing protests from other ethnic groups, suggested calling it the Vietnamese Business District. The city council went along triggering a bizarre and lengthy protest that included a hunger strike. Eventually the council caved in and approved the Little Saigon name. Now Nguyen faces a recall election. Over a name? Nope. It’s over power. There are still remnants of power in San Jose left over from old Saigon. This is only the most recent and most obvious exercise of that waning power that often plays hardball. In 1990, at the request of several young Vietnamese, I addressed this Old Guard problem at a Stanford University conference. Here’s what I said:

Happy Columbus Day?

I’d bet that Rick Reboca of Fremont didn’t celebrate Columbus Day today. Again.
”We Indians don’t believe in Columbus Day,” the member of the Pomo tribe told me a few years ago when I asked him how he celebrated the holiday. “This Christopher Columbus, he didn’t discover America. There were people on the shore when he set foot on land.”
Leonard Valles, who said he has Shawnee blood, agreed: “Yeah, it’s been downhill ever since.  There went the neighborhood.” Both were barbers at Rick’s Sundale Barber Shop on Stevenson Boulevard.
Reboca’s and Valles’ descendants lived here before Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Ever since then, people like Reboca and Valles have been called Indians even though they claim no relationship or connection whatsoever with the people of India.
It’s like some guy looking for Milpitas, finding Fremont instead, and calling the people here “Milpitians.” As the newspapers keep telling us, Americans are not good at geography. Neither was Columbus.
”Columbus was lost,” said Reboca, one of about 200,000 “Indians” living in the state. The last census showed that there are more than 60 tribes in the Bay Area alone. None of them are from India as far as we know.
When Columbus set foot in what was to become the Americas, the Pomo people lived between today’s San Jose and Oregon.
”They came here a long time before that,” Reboca said. “I think they came from Asia over the Bering Straits. You know, a lot of Indians look Asian.”
Like many of California’s ancient people, Reboca keeps in touch with his roots, traveling back to his home reservation, Robinson Rancheria near Clear Lake, whenever he can.
The Pomos today live mostly in Northern California north of San Francisco and south of Humboldt County.
In the 18th century, the Pomos were laborers for Russian settlers. Some settlers married Pomo women and took them home to Russia. The local tie with Russia stays alive in the Pomo language that contains several Russian words.
Reboca said he left the reservation when he was 18 and went to San Francisco, where the Bureau of Indian Affairs paid his tuition to barber college. After graduation, he  opened his barber shop in Fremont.
Some day, the 41-year-old Reboca said, he plans to give up cutting hair and head back into Indian country.
”I’m going to go up there to relax and, maybe, help my father-in-law with his cattle,” he said. “But mostly, I think I’ll just fish and hunt.”
Footnote: Happy Columbus Day, everyone. And maybe old Chris got it right after all. Some years ago, the Los Angeles Times reported that ancient bones found on an island off the California coast revealed that the woman’s ancestors came from as far away as South Asia — where India is today.

Many old Saigon generals settled in San Jose

San Jose, CA 1987 — They no longer call the shots, but they still wish they could, those former generals and admirals of the defeated Republic of Vietnam. They meet regularly in the San Jose area to secretly map the political future of the Vietnamese, both here and in the homeland. Their meetings are private, and they prefer that they stay that way.

“We don’t look for publicity,” said Do Kien Nhieu, once a brigadier general, now a mail room supervisor in a Bay Area city hall. “Even the Vietnamese press does not write about us. No one in this office knows who I am.”Today a dozen of the generals live in the San Jose area selling insurance, investing in real estate and working at such diverse jobs as electronics technician, social worker and catering-truck driver. They live almost anonymously in two worlds, making a living in one and working behind the scenes to influence the future in the second.The defeated warriors in exile, once leaders of one of the best-equipped military forces in history, meet to discuss their future roles in two areas a world apart: Vietnam and California’s Republican Party.Nhieu was a general in the South Vietnamese army and the last mayor of Saigon, a post he held from 1968 until his escape on one of the last flights from the U.S. Embassy in 1975. Shortly after Nhieu left, Saigon ceased to exist when the victorious communists renamed it Ho Chi Minh City.For 12 years in Vietnam, from the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 to the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, the generals ran South Vietnam. Sixty-seven generals and admirals escaped from Communist Vietnam. A dozen did not get away. Their fate is uncertain.

How San Jose, California became the New Saigon

I left Old Saigon in October 1971 after spending a total of five years in South Vietnam, first as a soldier, then a teacher and later, a correspondent for the Far Eastern Economic Review.

Two years later, in 1973, I came to San Jose where I went to work as a reporter for the San Jose Mercury. There were only a handful of Vietnamese students and expatriates in the Valley at the time. I thought I had left Vietnam behind forever. But Vietnam was about to follow me to San Jose.
Two years after I arrived in San Jose, old Saigon died. It passed into history soon after the North Vietnamese conquest of the south on April 30, 1975 when the communists renamed Saigon Ho Chi Minh City.

Little did I know that in the years to follow a New Saigon would grow all around me.