On Friday, April 21, Mr. Wilfred Billey, a member of the
Navajo Code Talkers Association addressed the general membership assembled at
its monthly meeting. He was introduced by Chapter President, Lieutenant Colonel
Alfonso E. Garcia, AUS (Ret). Mr. Billey served his country during WWII
(1943-45) in the Pacific Theater of Operations as a radio operator.
After receiving honor discharge, he attained bachelors and
masters degrees and entered the field of education. He taught high school,
served as a guidance counselor, principal and administrator. Most of his career
was spend at Central Consolidated School system retiring in 1990.
Mr. Billey explained the origin of the Code Talker
operations. The Japanese had been very successful of decoding American secret
communications. A gentleman by the name of Phillip Johnson, who as a child lived
on the Arizona side of the Navajo Reservation and learned the language came up
with the idea of using the Navajo language to augment military code systems. He
took his idea all the way to the Commandant of the Marine Corps who gave the
approval to experiment. Twenty nine young Navajo men were recruited to help
Johnson develop his idea, 400 Navajo words became a secret document for
communicating. It was successful in training exercises and 68 more Navajo young
men were recruited to serve as radio operators after becoming proficient in the
use of the Navajo Code. He used transparencies to show the audience how the code
worked. Mr. Billey then gave the audience examples of where and how the code was
used. He stated that a total of 97 Navajos, himself included, served in the
famous 1st and 2nd Marine Divisions. Only three of the
Code Talkers did not come back home.
At the end of his presentation, Mr. Billey allowed the
audience to ask questions. This proved to be a very interesting segment of the
evening activities. LtCol Joe Ziems, USAF (Ret) commented that he sure enjoyed
hearing about the exploits of the Code Talkers with the Marines in the Pacific.
Major Terry Fredericks, USMC (Ret), who fought with the Marines in the Pacific
was familiar with many of the areas Mr. Billey discussed.
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25th Anniversary of the End
of the Vietnam Conflict
by Bruce A. Black
This experience was recorded by Rear Admiral Bruce Black, USNR-R (then
Captain Black) while on active duty at the Office of Naval Intelligence, with
the U.S. Navy in Washington, D.C. in late December 1989.
All those years I had dreaded the day I would see the Vietnam Memorial. I
know myself, and I knew it would hurt. That tears would come was a forgone
conclusion.
On previous trips to Washington I had always found a way to avoid going to
what seemed to be the saddest of places. To me it was a reminder, somehow, of a
national failure. I felt as if I personally represented a divided nation - a
county that failed to fully back the men and women who went, fought, and died in
Vietnam. To me it was a pain in the depth of my soul I didn’t wish to visit.
I’d worked late at the Pentagon on that bitterly cold 1989 Christmas eve.
On my way back to the hotel, I took a wrong turn out of the parking lot and near
midnight found myself on the 14th street bridge headed into Washington. All of a
sudden, there I was in sight of the Lincoln Memorial and driving near the
Vietnam Memorial. I also found myself suddenly drawn to it.
I didn’t want to visit the ghosts I knew would be there, but a most
compelling feeling of obligation somehow griped me. I parked the car and began a
short lonely walk over to the wall. The only sound was the soft crush of frozen
snow when I walked up to the three statues. No one else was there and all alone,
I stared into the bronze faces - into the souls of the three soldiers. In some
incomprehensible way, they were my father, my brothers, my sons and
daughters....the anticipated tears didn’t come.
Then I went over to the reality of that terrible, granite wall. My God - how
awesome! I hadn’t realized it started so small. Just one or two names on the
low beginning stones...and it grew into the ground like the casualty lists and
body bags had grown. I walked into the earth and back into the past. The list of
sorrow just grew and grew and grew...I was awed. Tens, then hundreds, then
thousands, then the tens of thousands of names reached out from the cold black
stone and touched me in a way nothing else ever will. Still the tears did not
come.
I stopped near the center of the monument. Along the base was an occasional
snow covered Christmas present, or card, or some frozen flowers left by those
who the names on the wall had loved, and had so unwilling left behind. God! The
horrendous loss...the awful price paid by so many in a fight for a cause they
believed in. Had all this all been in vain? ... Yet still the tears didn’t
come. Tears of loss wouldn’t come that night.
Unbelievably the Berlin wall had come down the month before and it finally
began to dawn on me, as I stood in the present world that they had not lived to
know, that world Communism was really falling apart. Their sacrifices, like
those who fought the Korean War before them, were the essence of that
destruction of Communism and the basis of a far more beautiful and promising
future for me and mine.
Like victories of just conflicts in the past, where ultimate triumphs were
preceded by the bitter loss of crucial battles, the deaths in Vietnam and that
bitter war lost by lack of will at home was a necessary step in a much, much
bigger issue...the ultimate victory of a free world over the tyranny of world
Communism. It was finally becoming apparent that Christmas!
All of a sudden I was warm in that frozen place, and I felt a deep sense of
gratitude. I wanted somehow to let them know they had not died in vain. But a
voice inside told me that God had already let them know that. All of those names
on the wall, and tens of thousands of others who had gone, sacrificed, and had
come home maimed in mind or body had held the front line for freedom and for the
dignity of humanity -- when it was indeed most sorely tested. In their deaths
and their country’s first political defeat in war, they none-the-less moved
all the world irreversibly toward freedom.
They must have known, just like their loved ones knew then, that on that
Christmas Communism was actually falling apart. The principals of democracy, and
the right of individual personal freedom that they fought to help bring to a
besieged people, -- and which they had paid so dearly for -- was in fact being
won, not just in Southeast Asia but all around the world.
What a Christmas present they had given to their fellow countrymen...to those
who backed them, and even those who did not...indeed to all of humanity! They
helped give the whole world freedom from the numbing despotism of Communism. It
had just taken awhile to get there.
If you have not been to the memorial, have no hesitation to do so. In a very
real way it is not just a monument to those who died in the conflict, but in the
bigger sense, it’s a memorial to that larger and more important war fought ...
and won ... against an international conspiracy of oppressive evil.
After 28 years the Berlin wall had come down that Christmas. It’s no longer
there and no longer a symbol of fear, hate and oppression. In time, it may even
be forgotten. But the sacrifices represented by that black wall in the earth
will endure in the hearts of mankind for as long as history is recorded by free
women and men. That will not be forgotten.
I felt I had the greatest personal honor that Christmas eve to whispered
silently to those ghosts of the past...You didn’t lose, you won, and your
country finally knows it and understands it......you won.....and most
importantly the World won with you. I have the greatest respect for those who
wear the Vietnam and Korean Service Medals. God bless them all.
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The Rift Between WWII and Vietnam Era Veterans
(Part 2)
Now, what about the perception of those who fought them? Let's begin with
World War II.
Here you have a generation that, except for a few exceptions, has had a very
hard road. Born largely in the decade following World War I, they were barely
old enough to begin those golden years of 10 to 13 or so years old when the
Stock Market Crash of 1929 heralded the decade of the Great Depression. So,
instead of enjoying a period of unobstructed happiness as teenagers, this
generation endured uncertainty, and in many cases hunger and privation. Many of
them saw their families' possessions and property foreclosed.
1933 was an important year for this generation. Franklin Roosevelt was
inaugurated as President of the United States, and his Administration began the
initiation of the immediate policies and programs necessary to stop our
country's economic downturn that became known as the New Deal.
In the same year, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, and began to
secretly re-arm that country. Even though America maintained an official policy
of neutrality and non-interventionism during the Thirties, it was quite clear to
all but the most oblivious of my parents' generation that fascism was on the
rise both in Europe and in the Far East. Not many of them were under any
illusions about the future, and I'm sure that most of them had a certain degree
of fatalism as they faced it.
When the call to arms did come for this generation, in December of 1941, the
great majority of them, as we have seen in our comparison of the two wars, went,
if not willingly, then with a sense of purpose and conscience as they saw their
duty.
There are many representations of the men who served in the generation that
defeated the Axis powers in World War II; perhaps one of the most endearing is
that of "Willie and Joe", the two scruffy, slouching, seasoned combat
infantrymen portrayed in Bill Mauldin's cartoons in the "Stars and
Stripes", the newspaper read by almost everyone in the armed services at
the time. Or perhaps it was the spirit of "GI Joe"; the Everyman who
soldiered on every front, as found in any one of the excellent dispatches
written from the combat fronts by Ernie Pyle, the beloved newspaper
correspondent who met his own death on the tiny island of Ie Shima in 1945. For
many at home, it was embodied in the distinctive voices of Edward R. Murrow,
William Shirer, Bob Trout, and Walter Cronkite, as they filed their radio
dispatches from around the world, reporting on the generation of the
"Little Guy", the average American G.I., who confronted and defeated
the myth of the Nazi Superman and the fanaticism of the spirit of Bushido and
emperor-worship that drove the soldiers of the Japanese Empire.
These men and women came home from the greatest war of all time in 1945, and
picked up their lives again. Robbed of the innocence and opportunity that would
have been theirs in a time of piece, they had grown up far beyond their years,
and the vast majority of them had no greater desire than to get jobs, marry,
settle down, and raise families. Many of them went into business, believing they
could shed their wartime experiences as easily as they folded up their old ODs
and put them in mothballs. But as Sloan Wilson's landmark book of the early
1950s (later a superb motion picture, starring Gregory Peck) "The Man in
the Gray Flannel Suit" showed, it was not going to be that easy. That film
had many messages; one of the most impressive to me was that simply meeting the
stresses of everyday life in a modern world, day in, year out, requires a quiet
degree of heroism for many that is every bit as impressive as that of a man
faced with the immediate choices and fears of combat.
The GI Bill enabled many of the returning men and women veterans to obtain
college educations at America's finest universities, and as they passed through
the postwar Forties, the sound of new babies crying in unprecedented numbers
heralded the largest birth spurt in our nation's history to that time. It was
the beginning of the "Baby Boom", and what was in process was the
production of the generation that would confront, fight, or protest the Vietnam
War.
In the summer of 1950, Americans were in combat again, this time in Korea.
Many of the World War II veterans were called back to active service, and many
of them were killed or wounded in Korea, which turned out to be a very hot war
in a very cold place. Korea was a precursor to Vietnam, in that it was the first
war that America had never decisively won. And the absolute shock and surprise
when millions of Chinese soldiers swarmed unexpectedly into North Korea in the
winter of 1950 had deep policy ramifications later, when American Presidents
contemplated widening the war in Vietnam.
One evening in May, 1954 at West Point, my father, then an Army captain, told
us at dinner that the New York Times had reported the surrender of the French
garrison that day, at a place called Dien-bien-phu. I remember two things about
my father's statement. The first was that he actually pronounced "Dien-bien-phu"
properly (my father had been in OSS during World War II, and nothing he ever did
surprised me). The second was that he predicted that America would wind up
involved in Indochina somehow, someday.
It's strange to me that historians and the media of late seem to look back at
the Fifties as a time of gentle lassitude, when America was gripped in the
peaceful, consumer-goods-oriented, bringing-up-the-basic-family eight years of
the Eisenhower Administration; a sort of celestially imposed "job well
done" reward period, in which everything was just fine, while the
generation that had survived a major depression and a global war got busy,
raising their kids to have absolutely everything they had never been able to
enjoy themselves. Well, that's partly true, but there were a few unpleasantries.
There was, for example, The Bomb. The lives of all of us born in that postwar
baby boom have been overshadowed by The Bomb.
Since my father was a career Army officer; my life as an Army Brat meant that
we moved to some new and strange place about once every two to three years. And
during the Fifties, the threat of global nuclear war was always just around
every corner. I never believed that business about building fallout shelters for
survival; I always thought that if the bombers and the missiles ever did fly, it
would be the end of the world as we knew it. I'm sure that beneath their studied
self-assurance, my parents knew it, too. So to me, the sound of the Cold War
will always be the sound of the Alert Horn that was at every army and air base.
If you've never heard it, you won't understand what I mean; suffice to say that
if you have heard it, you'll never forget it.
But through it all, the generation of World War II raised their kids, and
gave them everything they wanted, if it was within their power. After all, that
was the American way of life, wasn't it? Yes, it was. Until the Sixties.
It was an incredibly powerful watershed era for the United States: so many
books and films have been made about it that it seems that the entire decade was
swathed in psychedelic lights, and gyrating bodies, with an overlay of rock
music and the sweet smell of burning hemp, while everyone just loved each other
to death. But that wasn't the way it was for everyone. For the generation that
had fought World War II (and many of them entering their forties at the time,
contemplating impending middle age), the start of the Sixties was much like the
Fifties.
Dwight Eisenhower was succeeded by a much younger man, an ex PT boat skipper
named John Kennedy, who brought a sense of elegance and style, a dynamism, wit,
and charm, to the Presidency, that the nation welcomed. I know, because I was in
high school through the few years of Camelot, and Kennedy's exhortation to
"ask not what your country can do for you", caused many of us to
evaluate careers in one sort of national service or another. One of my best
friends in high school chose the Peace Corps. I chose the Army.
A lot of things were happening in 1963. On the other side of the world, in
Vietnam, U.S. Army advisors, mostly Special Forces, an elite unit with an
unusual and unorthodox hat called a green beret, were assisting the South
Vietnamese military in what at the time was termed "pacification". The
war in Vietnam was a small-scale, guerrilla war, being handled by an unorthodox
branch of the Army, so not much to pay attention to there.
The war wasn't going to our satisfaction, however, and American policy makers
identified the president of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, as the primary
problem. As the result of a coup engineered by senior officers of the Vietnamese
military, approved by John Kennedy, and backed by the American command in
Vietnam, Diem and his brother Ngo Dinh Nhu were assassinated. It was the late
summer of 1963. If we had ever been able to claim any innocence or altruism in
our engagement in Vietnam, those days were over. And it turned out, that late
summer, to be later than we thought. November was just ahead.
I believe the killing of John Kennedy that November was the watershed point
in post-World War II American cultural history. From that incredible moment
onwards, I don't think anything has really been able to shock us. The Vietnam
War, Watergate, the incredible excesses of our current crop of politicians,
nothing after John Kennedy's death has really been that much of a shock. And we
lost something far more important in 1963 than our president. Something
fundamental to our national psyche was destroyed that November afternoon; I
think we're still looking for the pieces.
During the four years of my cadetship, the war in Vietnam went from a side
show to a powerful engine, going full blast, and pulling into it thousands and
thousands of young men, who, given the chance, would just as soon have been
"back on the block', chasing girls, going to school and doing all those
things that young men do.
So now we come at last to my generation. There are a number of points I'd
like to make about those of my generation who served in Vietnam. I'd also like
to debunk some of the enduring mythology that been hung on those of us who
served in Vietnam.
In the next issue we’ll continue with Part 3, The Myths of the Vietnam
Conflict.
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The progress that our chapter is making is truly awe
inspiring to me. I have heard good remarks from several of you and appreciate
your suggestions and advise as to how we can improve the chapter image and
standing in the TROA community as well as in our area. First of all, we must
keep in mind the goals and objectives we have set for our developing
organization.
We continue to improve the general chapter meeting programs.
The meeting where Major David Stock, Farmington High School JROTC Sponsor, spoke
to us provided the source for one of objectives. We are well into supporting
JROTC endeavors in the area. Mr. Wilfred Billey, Navajo Code Talker, spoke at
our April gathering and thus provided an example of how we fulfill our other
goal, to honor and encourage national patriotism. Those of you that missed Mr.
Billey's presentation missed an outstanding program. Our next meeting, May 19,
will feature a Vietnam Medal of Honor recipient, I encourage every member and
spouse to attend and bring a prospective member.
Our goal to increase our membership to 50 members by the end
of the summer is still in sight. Recently we signed up two more members. We well
come Don Ice and Quincy Cornelius, we welcome them to our ranks and we'll
properly welcome them at our next meeting.
By the way, our Chapter Newsletter has received an award for
excellence from TROA but we do not have the official paperwork on it he. Thanks
and congratulations to Steve White and those of you who have contributed to
making it a success.
This next meeting will be our last meeting before taking a
three month vacation from meetings but we will have our traditional summer
picnic. The June Newsletter will contain information on the picnic.
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