50th Anniversary Issue — October 1, 1995

By Steve Stibbens

A reporter, they taught us in journalism school, is merely a stand-in for all the people who cannot witness an event or get the straight scoop from the big shots.

At PS&S, the seasoned civilian editors never let us forget that we merely represented the thousands of airmen, sailors, soldiers and Marines.

With that necessary humbling, we were truly privileged in our role and responsibility as surrogate for the GIs in Asia. It was surely a dream assignment.

It was not with any sense of bravery or derring-do that I volunteered for any and all assignments, attempting to do anything I figured my adventurous GI readers would give a right arm to try.

The reason was Hardy Barracks, a decrepit old pre-war building in Tokyo's Roppongi district. Cold in winter and suffocating hot in summer. I made it a point to stay gone.

I confess I hid behind duty and responsibility to persuade editors to indulge me in my unforgettable adventure, to wallow in fantasy as proxy for the troops, playing a small role in some wild and woolly moments in history -- with a few good datelines.

INSIDE THE EYE OF TYPHOON RUTH, 1962 -- It was barely dawn when the aging WB-50's four big engines coughed into a dull, powerful roar and the plane leaned into the wind for takeoff at Yokota AB, Japan.

When we breached the "wall clouds'' to penetrate the storm, I braced. But the crew hardly paid attention. Not even a bump as the powerful engines of the WB-50 plowed through the black, swirling clouds.

Suddenly, we were inside the typhoon's huge eye. It was dead calm, and the water 10,000 feet below was still. It was deceptively beautiful as we flew circles inside, dropping instruments by tiny parachutes to read the various pressures.

With our chores done, we exited through the wall clouds and went scouting for storms elsewhere. There was hardly a cloud in the sky as we flew another 12 hours, over the Philppines and Okinawa.

As we headed home to Yokota after 13 hours in the air, a crewman woke me from a deep sleep to tell me we had gone in and out of Typhoon Ruth once more -- without a bump. The most serious problem we had to overcome that day had been the microphone button on the pilot's yoke, stuck in the open position, forcing the sound of his breathing through everyone's headset.

BUCKNER BAY, Okinawa, October, 1962 -- All the ships of the First Amphibious Fleet were huddled in the calm waters off the eastern coast of Okinawa. All the fleet's skippers sat in the ward room of Rear Adm. Francis Blouin's flagship that morning as officers critiqued Exercise Lone Eagle, which had just ended.

The duty communications officer, a tall, slim lieutenant junior grade, entered the room by a back door and walked briskly to the front. He carried the usual clipboard and wore the usual sidearm, a .45. But this time the handle of his pistol revealed it was loaded. His expression was dead serious.

Blouin took the "top secret'' folder, studied the single page inside, and wrinkled his brow.

Then he said:

"Gentlemen, we have just completed a very successful landing exercise here. It looks now like we might have the real McCoy on our hands.

"The secretary of defense has ordered that we set DEFCON 3,'' he added. "DEFCON 3 has been set. All officers report to your ships immediately and prepare to get under way.''

Quickly, the skippers left the wardroom. This was serious business. Pearl Harbor came to mind, as the many ships at anchor here were within bomber range of the Soviet Union.

Heading back to the PS&S Okinawa Bureau at Camp Sukiran, I was unable to enter Kadena AB. Security guards bore loaded weapons.

At the bureau office, we listened to replays of the president's speech over Armed Forces Radio. The teletype chattered endless instructions and restrictions from Press Secretary Pierre Salinger.

PS&S had just published a series of articles from my interview three days earlier with Gen. David M. Shoup, in which I had innocently asked the Marine commandant what would turn out to be sensitive questions about Marine readiness at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

President Kennedy had just announced the blockade of Cuba. The world was holding its breath.

AP BAC, Vietnam, Jan. 2, 1963 -- At 2,000 feet above the rice paddies in an L-19 spotter plane, I saw that the battle was clearly defined. Three downed helicopters -- two sausage-shaped H-21s and a crumpled UH-1B -- lay alongside the paths where ARVN armored personnel carriers had been stopped cold by the intense fire of a guerrilla unit that, for the first time, had stood and fought back against government troops instead of melting into the countryside.

The Battle of Ap Bac has survived in controversy as "the first battle of the American war'' in Vietnam. Many call it a victory for the Viet Cong. Some argue there was no victory -- merely a standoff.

All agree that it was an important milestone in the American involvement in Southeast Asia.

In any event, three American soldiers were killed.

Back in Saigon, Peter Arnett of the Associated Press and David Halberstam of the New York Times persuaded me to change into my Marine uniform to get us past roadblocks and drive us to the battle site in PS&S' little black Ford Falcon.

CA MAU, Vietnam, Oct. 31, 1963 -- Approaching Saigon in the cargo bay of a low-flying C-123, we were about to become eyewitnesses to another bit of world history.

"We can't land at Tan Son Nhut,'' the crew chief shouted.

"Too much anti-aircraft fire!''

Horst Faas, the now-legendary Associated Press photographer who later won two Pulitzer Prizes, was upset. He might miss the biggest story of the time.

We had been choppering around the Mekong Delta's paddies and swamps for several days in a vain attempt to find and rescue three captured Americans being herded toward the dreaded U-Minh Forest.

In Saigon, we had skipped out on another of those exasperating "coup watches'' after "Radio Catinat,'' the grapevine, buzzed rumors of imminent revolt against the South Vietnamese government of President Ngo Dinh Diem. We were careful to stay near radios, and it paid off when we got word of "something going on'' in Saigon.

So we were flying back, our C-123 flying low to avoid a band of storm clouds. Faas looked out the porthole for a moment and told the crew chief, "Okay, we jump.'' He turned to me and repeated, ``We jump.'' "Okay,'' I said. ``You jump, I jump.'' But there were no parachutes on board. Diverted to Cap St. Jacques (Vung Tau), we waited -- engines off -- on the tarmac through the agonizing hours untl dawn. As the sun came up in the South China Sea, we were in the air, aboard an Army Caribou approaching Tan Son Nhut Airport.

The PS&S Ford Falcon got us to town in time to join the rebel Vietnamese Marines storming through the presidential palace. Diem and his notorious brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, had escaped through secret tunnels.

They were later found and slain by the coup-makers.

SAIGON, Nov. 1, 1963 -- "Viet Victory Near'' screamed the five-column front-page headline in Pacific Stars and Stripes. The unfortunate headline introduced a roundup story assessing the state of affairs in Vietnam, where nearly 15,000 U.S. advisers attempted to train an army to deal with Communist insurgents.

In separate interviews, Gen. Paul D. Harkins, commander, Military Assistance Command-Vietnam (MAC-V), and Maj. Gen. Charles J. Timmes, commander, Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG), had spoken in unison.

Barring unforeseen circumstances or political turmoil, they said, the war against the Viet Cong could be finished by "the end of the next dry season,'' just nine months away.

Asked about the Vietnamese army's feuding Buddhist and Catholic soldiers, both generals said the ARVN troops were "loyal to their government.''

Copies of Pacific Stars and Stripes arrived just as the coup was starting.

"Go talk with my G-1,'' Harkins had said at the end of his interview. "We're sending 1,000 soldiers home by Christmas.''

And they did.

But when President Kennedy read the PS&S story, which had been picked up by the wire services, he fired off a rocket to Harkins, sternly reminding him of an agreement that they would not forecast the "light at the end of the tunnel.''

Three weeks later, Kennedy was dead.

It was the beginning of a new era of escalation in South Vietnam.

CAVITE, The Philippines, 1962 -- Generalissimio Don Amilio Aguinaldo watched as we signed his guest log -- a thick bookkeeping ledger that held such names as Dwight D. Eisenhower, Douglas A. MacArthur and Harry S. Truman.

Aguinaldo, who led his army against the Americans at the turn of the century in a war for independence and hence was called "`the George Washington of the Philippines,'' had been his country's first president.

Navy Journalist Paul Brinkley-Rogers, assigned to Stripes' Philippines bureau, shared my fascination as we spent the day with the 84-year-old soldier reminiscing about the birth of his nation. (The British-born Rogers went on to become an American citizen and correspondent for Newsweek in Vietnam and Cambodia. He is now an editor at the Arizona Republic in Phoenix.)

Aguinaldo's old, unpainted wooden house in Cavite was like a national museum. We stood with him on the second-floor balcony, overlooking Cavite's main street, where he had waved his country's first flag and proclaimed independence.

He told us how he was tricked into captivity when he agreed to a cease-fire meeting with the U.S. Army's Col. John Funston, which ended the war.

BA DONG, Vietnam, October, 1963 -- A Viet Cong flag was already flying from the center of this small coastal hamlet near the southern tip of Vietnam. Hordes of villagers warmed through the waist-high weeds as our UH-1 helicopters descended at twilight to rescue villagers being overrun by VC.

On my Huey alone, we hauled in 23 men, women and children before we had to leave. I never learned the fate of those we left behind.

B'DRAU, Vietnam, December, 1963 -- This time, we were the guerrillas on this 60-mile, 10-day mountain patrol with three U.S. Special Forces men and 85 montagnards of the Koho tribe.

It was cross-country all the way through bamboo forests, up and down mountain streams to lay ambushes along the Ho Chi Minh Trails around Hill 1181.

NUMAZU, Japan, 1963 -- Ten days in the water with a school of 12-foot hammerhead sharks as a trainee at the 5th Air Force Sea Survival School.

BENEATH TOKYO BAY, 1963 -- Practicing submarine rescue aboard the U.S. Navy submarine rescue vessel USS Coucal, skippered by Commander Steinke, inventor of the Steinke Hood, which allows escape from boats as deep as 400 feet.

WAKE ISLAND, 1963 -- It was a Space Age stagecoach stop. Every day for a week, we went along as KB-50s refueled the first trans-Pacific flights of F-105s headed west.

On takeoff, we watched for a shark we called ``Mag-check Charlie'' known to race to the far end of the runway when an aircraft's run-up sounded bad.

The tiny island, barely three miles from tip to horseshoe tip, still held gun emplacements with American helmets, soggy mattresses, rusty old coast artillery pieces --just as they had been left in the early days of 1942.

PAPEETE, Tahiti, 1963 --With NASA communicators, a weather specialist and two C-130 loads of long-range para-rescue teams, we waited for Air Force Col. Gordon (Gordo) Cooper's launch into his 22 space orbits aboard Mercury 9.

The shot was delayed, and we were forced to spend three awful weeks on this remote island.