 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii and I've never got quiet. This is a half hour program that explores the Hawaiian connection with the Vietnam War. I'm your host, Vic Kraut. Our guest today is Ken Cupjick. Ken had one of the more obscure but nonetheless critical jobs in Vietnam and that was predicting the weather. A skill more akin to an art as opposed to a science. It is however much unappreciated or underappreciated. The D-Day landing's enormity in the invasion of Europe and the subsequent defeat of Nazi Germany hinged on the weather forecast of a young Royal Air Force group captain meteorologist. More than one operation in history has been upset by mother nature. At least one attempt by the Mongols to invade Japan in the 13th century was interrupted not by an army or navy but by what appears to be a series of typhoons the Japanese called the divine wind. We know it better as kamikaze. Before Ken was commissioned in the United States Air Force he went to Cornell University and received a degree in chemistry. He subsequently earned a degree in meteorology from Penn State. Ken served on General Mo Meyer's staff as weather briefing officer in Saigon. In 1968 he served on the University of Hawaii's meteorology research staff prior to returning to Cornell to obtain a law degree specializing in international affairs. We can spend the rest of the program listing Ken's accomplishments as a lawyer. Suffice us to say Ken has been practicing law in Hawaii since he was licensed and has a catalog of accomplishments in contributing to the body of law pertaining to acquisition, construction, and community development as well as lending his writing talents publications on numerous law related subjects. If you're interested in Ken's career you can visit Hawaii.com HawaiiLawyer.com and get the full details. Aloha and welcome Ken. Aloha, good to be here. Thank you. I noticed your career you started off in chemistry in the sciences. How did you end up as a meteorologist? Well it was a long story but started with Sputnik. Go for it. In 1957 Sputnik went up and we had to beat the Russians and so most of us went off to sciences and math or science or engineering so I went off to college in that area. At the same time we started having some trouble in the south and some sit-ins and the like and as a chemist I thought maybe I wouldn't be able to be a good citizen so I decided I better go to law school at some point and figure out how to work the system understand it and the like so I'd plan to do that but I was in ROTC and I had a four-year commitment to the Air Force and wanted to fly but my eyes got too bad and they sent me to Penn State and I got my meteorology degree and was there a weatherman for the next four years. Was it your career chosen for you or was it one of those things that you had as a choice of maybe five or six different careers? Well I wanted to fly and when they told me I couldn't do that I picked this one that was the only one that came up on my radar. As I said predicting the weather is much more of an art than it is the science especially in Southeast Asia it had to have been a heck of a challenge just to come up with a forecast for the next five minutes never mind predicting what tomorrow's operations are going to face. Can you tell us some of the difficulties you might have had? Well first difficulty was that most of us are trained in temperate meteorology so they sent me to Randtool, Illinois to learn tropical meteorology in November and December so that was that was struggle. Well this is the military we're talking about. The tropics of weather operates a little differently but North Vietnam is even more challenging in that North Vietnam and China were the only two countries at the time who were not on the world meteorological net and so on the weather map where you have all the stations reporting in two blanks there at China and North Vietnam and that's where a lot of the key weather came from. How did you guys overcome that? Well we had covert people in the ground that I could talk to we had constellations that would circle out in the Gulf of Tonkin that I could talk to I could talk to all the pilots in the air at any time and more importantly we also had the first version of satellites that came through so we were able to they only make one pass a day around but you get a cloud picture in the visual spectrum and it would help you a little bit. So you guys basically were responsible for not only providing forecast information for in-country operations but also for the folks over in Thailand who are bombing the north? Right the in-country operations mostly where we had total air control the army of go almost no matter what our weather forecast was except for during Quezon and TEP but over the north we were in a hostile environment we had the NM range and the tropics clouds would go up to 60,000 feet and they had to go from Thailand into Hanoi fly over the range refuel somewhere around those big clouds drop their ordinance and then come back over the range so it was pretty difficult. In those days you had to take evasive action by visual acquiring the Sam's Migs or ACAC so if you didn't have visual flight rules or three miles visibility and 3-8 cloud cover you couldn't see your target. That must have been terribly frustrating not only for you but for the operations people if you couldn't see the target you can't see what you're going to be bombing so I would imagine and your life's in danger and your life's in danger. We set a hundred planes up in a mission and sure and if you didn't have the right environment you'd wasted all that money and probably the lives of some people. Yeah that was I remember we were talking about Jack Broatt and Thud Ridge and going downtown in his books and you mentioned a couple of other books dealing with the operations in the north basically telegraphing where we were coming and when we were coming right and and then piling on top of that the the very the vagaries of weather. Well the missions were to get in two missions a day we had a bomb at 8 a.m. and at 4 p.m. because the planes had to go from Thailand to Hanoi back to Thailand back to Hanoi and back so you can only get two missions in a day and if they we didn't show up at 8 they knew we're coming at noon and there'll only be one mission so the rest of the day they could operate without. Well how convenient. The Navy was a little different this was the Air Force Navy's out in the Gulf and I guess they could fly at different times the Air Force where I was provided the weather to the Air Force and to the Army. Well I think the Air Force probably had a little longer distance to go because considering Yankee Station was a whole lot closer to Hanoi and Haifeng and coming out of Toc Lea or Karat or wherever. We used to we divided the north in the six we're calling route packages and three of them were for them I think we're Air Force and two of them were Navy and they had Haifeng and one part of Hanoi and we had the rest of the western part where Dien Bien Phu was and the southern part North Vietnam and I did the go now go forecast for the missions over the north. How stable were those forecasts not not reflection on your ability but I mean did mother nature cooperate most of the time? Well one time I told them that it'd be clear in 15 miles visibility and they got there and there's a typhoon. For a pilot that's the difference day and night yeah for the meteorologist it was a difference in 15 miles on the forecast. That's true. The typhoons would suck the moisture into them and there's usually a clear air mass right in front and so for two three days we'd been bombing in that clear air mass. We thought it was going to move into Hainan Island and it moved 15 miles to the west unfortunately it was on our route so that's why it was that was not so much fun. You were telling me earlier about having to scrub some of the missions based on whether you as you said a hundred aircrafts up in the air and they've got to be refueled and again if they're going in country and if you're scrubbing the mission and then they have to go back what do they do? Well we didn't have the full say on whether to hit the target or not. Washington D.C. played a big role in the decision making. We had our frag teams would set the targets together and I briefed the decision maker the general two hours before and they'd make a decision to go and sometimes when we're in route refueled or perhaps over the gulf Washington would call and scrub the mission so the pilots would have to drop their ordnance in the gulf and fly back home their lives at stake and the like. This didn't sit well with the military people in Vietnam and the generals and the colonels and the command post were complaining up one side and down the other about Washington not understanding our mission and then some years later when I got to law school we had Nicholas Katzenbach who was one of the people at the other end of the line had been Johnson's attorney general came up to a cocktail party that we had at our law review and so I explained to him my story and his response was those darn generals they didn't know what was going on out there. My point on this story is that not that one side was right and the other was wrong we had a significant communication problem between the field and home and I observed that because I sat in the command post of MacV and Seventh Air Force for the year that I was there and I saw most of the decisions were made and we'd used to brief the senators and the congressmen that they'd come down on the climatology and other things and I'd be there for the body count briefing and the other things but it was quite apparent to me my mouse in the room or the fly on the wall that we had a significant communication gap. I wonder if that has been resolved in the intervening years. I don't want to know. You didn't get the opportunity to travel much throughout country did you? I was not allowed to leave the Saigon area because I had a special intelligence clearance and therefore I was not cleared to travel anywhere else. Part of that had to do with the type of information I was receiving in order to make my forecast. At the time you were there we were receiving an awful lot of information about terrorist activity that was going on in Saigon in fact other large metropolitan areas within the South. Did you happen to experience any or see any? Well a couple things one I felt for the first 10 months I was there I was safer in Saigon than I was in New York City. My previous posting was on Eastern Long Island at Suffolk County Air Force Base and it was the city safe you know we used to go to the city all the time but I thought it was safer in Saigon. The last two months offensive hit and changed everything nothing was safe at that point. One example of safety there was a golf course Saigon Country Club and they had crabgrass grains on it because you couldn't grow the grass low enough it would burn out in that heat on it and the bunkers were real bunkers they were manned with machine guns and sandbags they were regular they were the sandbag I were the bunkers for the golf course but they were banned and during that period of time and during Tet the biggest some of the biggest battles were fought on the golf course as the insurgents came through and there were quite a few people killed where we were playing golf on it. Hopefully you weren't playing golf at the same time that they were running their operation. Well the night before was when they celebrated Tet and it's time to chase the spirits away a lot of fireworks from time it was dark till after midnight it was as light as day just from little fireworks going off and so it was something like I've never seen we have new years and other things we celebrate here but it's quite small change compared to the constant roar through the whole time and the light that was put off just by the little firecrackers all through a city of three million people the next night when I went home I lived a mile off base that a bicycle went to and from the base we had been warned that there's something was going to happen but no one thought too much about it and the explosion started middle of the night and I said out there and there's more fireworks out there and then they kept going and getting louder and we turned on Armed Forces Radio and they said stay in place don't try to come in they had come through the perimeter at Tansenute they were firing in the streets throughout on it in sort of two days it was trapped there at our villa we started going up on the roof to watch the gunship shoot buildings two blocks away and things like that and then the shrapnel started going over the roof so it was time to hide under our beds it's myself and one other guy there were six of us GIs that rented this villa then two of us were there the rest were on base at the time and so we had one old M1 rifle between us and we hit under our bed until two days later they told us it was safe to come in and so we walked up the mile to the base and the MP battalion I think was the only thing there at the beginning and how they brought in the big red one and I looked at them and they were about 17 year old and they looked more scared than I was I didn't get off for two more weeks slept on the floor in the command post and they finally said it was safe to get off we'll get back to you in a minute on that Ken I'd like to hear some more about Ted but first let's have some messages and we'll be right back this is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness I'm Helen Dora Hayden the host of voice of the veteran seen here live every Thursday afternoon at 1 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii as a fellow veteran and veterans advocate with over 23 years experience serving veterans active duty and family members I hope to educate everyone on benefits and accessibility services by inviting professionals in the field to appear on the show in addition I hope to plan on inviting guest veterans to talk about their concerns and possibly offer solutions as we navigate and work together through issues we can all benefit please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the voice of the veteran aloha aloha I'm Marcia Joyner inviting you to navigate the journey spend the time with us as we look through and discover all of the ins and outs of this journey through life we're on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. and I would love to have you with us come navigate the journey okay aloha we're talking with Ken Cutcheck about his experiences in Vietnam particularly we were just talking about Ted you've got a couple more stories about Ted you said mentioned something about your first day back of work after oh no first day I got off base Ted hit was stuck off for two days got in had a sleep on the floor for 10 days till they cleared out things the people had come through the perimeter we put about 400 bodies in a common grave near the end of the runway towns people come out and put flowers on their graves so you didn't feel like you were real comfortable they finally let us go off and I went to my place which is a mile off base and that night 100 rounds of rocket fire came into Thompson so we ran up to the roof again with a flat top roof in our building and a big fire going on they they had hit the BOQ and a chapel and they were burning up I'm taking pictures and pictures and pictures I finally noticed I had taken 40 shots on a 24-shot roll and I was so scared I guess I had ripped the sprocket holes on the first one and all of them were taken on the same frame but the worst part about the the rocket attack was that they hit the PX and got the beer supply and the shaving cream oh dear so they were shaving cream all over the place and the beer supply was hit and so everybody was fighting mad I think it was mad but there was another time when I got back in after that they issued me an M16 and a 38 revolver I had had a half hour of pistol training at summer camp in the summer of 62 at Langley Air Force Base and I've never been given any instruction on an M16 and I would go back and forth on a bicycle so I'd be pedaling around with my M16 strapped on and my pistol on my hip and one time when I was going along the primitive road I could hear them and my first thing I did was I jump off and grab my camera fortunately it hit the building across the road and from that point I decided to hit the ground when you're young and dumb and you do things like that and I'm glad to be home that's funny you mentioned young and dumb because in our group we were talking about the difference in age you mentioned the 17 year olds the difference between a 17 and 18 year old and a 21 year old or a 25 year old is like you're a million years old when you're and you're looking at that 21 year old until they've been there about six months and they look like they're 80 yeah that's about it you get over very quickly yeah but you can imagine how old we were because we were in our 20s yeah I was 24 and 25 when I was there yeah I don't know it's you did some time at the University of Hawaii in the meteorology department was that after your active duty time or I was immediately after I processed out on my return my wife from here we were going to spend about six months long on the beach till law school began and I took her down to alamona court played tennis hit a drop shot she went down didn't get up so we had to get a knee operation for her oh dear and the day before the airport covered it we didn't have any insurance so I had to go to work and so I knew these fellas up at UH because they'd come through Saigon we're doing a study on forecast methods for Southeast Asia and because I had operational experience I went up and knocked on the door and said hey you got room for me on this team and they said sure and so I spent the next six months developing forecast methods for Southeast Asia and this is the time I think we may have discovered for the first time that our cone of storms were really hurricanes because as I said satellites were coming in we had nimbus which was would make our pass once a day or so and or every so many hours and we put all these pictures together and we counted 12 of these storms from Mexico over to Southeast Asia they were all kind of interconnected and a couple years ago here you might have seen the paper with three of those storms connected on a light but if you go this is the least traveled part of the globe 10 degrees north of the equator roughly people travel north and south and ships through it but hardly anybody would go east west where the weather moves and so we found that these things existed and every so often one would spin north and they'd come by Hawaii or go into the Philippines or if they didn't spin north they'd head into Saigon at the end of their track on it so that was one of the things we discovered while I was there we also found that it was storms like these that would suck all the moisture down or the dry air down out of Siberia and clear out the Red River and the Black River Valley so that's good bombing time for Hanoi which was the purpose of the study in some way benefits in on one way but learning how to better kill other people I guess well it's the whole data is who uses it and how they want to use it I imagine again dealing with the folks in Thailand and giving them forecasts did you have any interface with the Navy at all none the Navy ran their aeronautics or aerologists they don't have meteorologists they have aerologists but they ran their thing totally separate maybe at some level up at Scott Air Force Base and alike they communicated but in my four years we never had anything to do with the Navy talk about inter-service rivalry the shift from science to law how did that you mentioned something about you wanted to practice law and you're waiting for the Cornell time frame getting there you had this desire to do things or help people I guess I wanted to understand why our system seemed to be having so much trouble which early 60s and so I figured I needed to understand that and learning a law degree was the best way to do that and become an active citizen I got to law school and I discovered that you can't write a law that I can't interpret more in one way which led me to believe that what I know about our system and I think I know a fair amount now it's as good or better than anybody's around the only difference is who's administering the system because the executive gets the first shot at interpreting the law and if you want to call the executive on it you got to go to court and we do have an independent judiciary but it takes time sometimes two to five years to resolve that issue and not everybody can afford it so the 80 percent of the time whoever's in the executive branch gets the chance to interpret the law to do pretty much what they want so that's what I learned at law school and I was no longer so idealistic on it but it's we because of the laws we do have and the Bill of Rights and other things I think we still have the best system that I've studied and you know my degree was with some emphasis in international affairs so no or fact that we have an independent judiciary puts us a little bit different than most other places and what makes it independent to a large degree is the lifetime appointments of the judges that they can't for the most part be caught under someone's thumb they may be beholden to someone before they get there but once they get into a federal judgeship they're not beholden to anybody except for impeachment and there's perhaps been one or two of those and over 200 years of the United States well I think of you're talking about beholden to anybody I recall so many of the chief justices as many of the other associate justices who were nominated by a president thinking that that particular judge was going to go in and follow their philosophy and do a complete 180 on them so first of those was probably not maybe not the first the first time wherever Hugo Black senator from I think was Georgia or Alabama goes on the court and becomes perhaps one of the most liberal justices there ever was at the time and then there's of course just a suitor who became known as the stealth justice because they had thought he was going to rule one way and he turned out that he start ruling different ways from what they expected have any advice for returning veterans today given your experience or giving certain circumstances I'd get an education it gives you more options I was trustee at mid pacific institute for about 21 years and we learned that the kids going out of high school weren't trained the way the employers needed them they were trained that based on a system developed in industrial age where everything was locked up and you do a production line and they do one thing for the rest of their life today our kids are between six and 12 different jobs by the time they pass on and our returning veterans have lost some time in grade best thing they can do is upgrade themselves and get an education perhaps an education that allows them to be more flexible to be able to collaborate and solve problems hands-on work no matter what the industry changes and the job changes you'll have some ability to try to change with it and always have a place so that's my take is get an education well thank you Ken I appreciate that and hopefully some of our veterans will take your advice we would love to have some feedback if you would like to be on our program or if you have some comments please send us an email at 808 vietnam vets at gmail.com I would like to thank the staff here at think tech Hawaii for all their support and assistance surely without them this program would not be possible please come back again next week for another issue of it never got quiet mahala