Another War, Another Time

Hearing about the two Air Force planes shot down today got me remembering.

When I remember, lots of times, I read one of my memoirs.

This is a snippet from Saigon 1967.

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I had noticed that Time Magazine (I had my Time subscription delivered to me in Saigon, albeit a version with very thin paper compared to the domestic magazine) had much deeper discussions of many of our targets.  And Time’s discussion of the conduct and results of many of the missions with which I was familiar was much more in-depth, interesting and insightful than the information I could glean from classified sources.  At first this irritated me.  Why were my classified sources so boring, irrelevant, wrong and, basically, useless?  Why couldn’t we do a better job?  Why couldn’t we do a competent job of gathering and disseminating intelligence?  Time magazine could; why couldn’t we?

Then an idea occurred to me.  Why not use Time as my source wherever possible for my briefings?  Who would know?  I read the classified stuff.  Nobody would know that I was only using the classified stuff as a fact checker where that was possible against what Time had to say.  Where the facts were absent and Time had information so much the better.  There was no way to question me.

My briefings, which had been up to that point encounters my audience bore up under as a professional duty requirement, quickly became lively well-attended events.  I suddenly gained the reputation of being a young officer on the rise.  And, best of all, I was assimilating and purveying information that was actually interesting enough to keep everybody, even me, awake and paying attention.  But I had already made the career decision not to let anybody, or anything make me really care.

That was probably a good thing.

On the strength of my vastly improved briefing skill, I was chosen to replace a departing lieutenant whose primary function had been to brief every morning the brigadier general who was commander of the entire 7AF HQ intelligence function. The subject of these briefings was everything that had happened overnight. The problem with that, in addition to an aversion I had toward generals, was that the information available for preparing them was only our useless, boring, inaccurate classified information.  Time magazine was weekly.  Its information was a week old, not overnight.  So I was back in the soup.

The difference this time was that the general really thought he was winning the “war effort” and wanted to know “what” and “why” and “who” and a bunch of other interrogatives about every subject.  That information was either not readily available or was totally unavailable.  Without Time Magazine I was dead meat.  As a result, my answers very quickly transmitted the impression, which was fact, that I didn’t give a shit and, in any event the interrogatives were so trivial as to be ridiculous. 

I was quickly replaced with someone who gave a shit.