 Welcome to Think Tech Hawaii and It Never Got Quiet. This is a half hour program that explores the Hawaiian connection with the Vietnam War. I'm your host, Vic Kraft. Our guest today is Tom Sterling. Tom went on active duty with the U.S. Army in 1964 as an intelligence officer. He served several positions while in country, beginning with General Westmoreland's staff at Military Assistance Command Vietnam in Saigon. He then assumed post at division level, traveling the length and breadth of the Central Highlands with the 4th Infantry Division. He had a wide variety of tasks that took in the larger picture of the war from the geopolitical aspects to confronting its results in the field. Tom left active duty and returned to Cornell University to complete his law degree. He did, however, remain in the Army Reserves retiring in 1996. Tom took up law practice in Hawaii in 1970, ultimately specializing in mediation, financial planning and premarital arrangements. He has been listed in the Best Lawyers in America and Hawaii's top lawyers for many years running. Tom belongs to several volunteer organizations, most notably the Vietnam Veteran Leadership Program, Hawaii, where he has been the acting chairman since 1986. Welcome in Aloha, Tom. Welcome. I could go on to accomplishments, but you've captivated me with some of the writings that you have sent me. One in particular, or actually two in particular, was one was called Fixes, the other one was called Snapshots. I'd like to talk about Fixes for just a second. You talk about the changes that are occurring within the personnel. In the intelligence community, I imagine that had quite an effect as far as having some kind of corporate or tribal memory in dealing with the intelligence that was being gathered. Did that affect the quality of the data that was being collected? Oh, sure. By the way, this problem was not germane just to the intelligence community. It's been said that we did not have 14 or 15 years of experience in Vietnam. We had one year of experience 15 times because there was such a turnover of personnel there. Very few of us went over as groups together as a cohesive unit. We were almost all of us replacements, and we would take over a job that somebody else had had and try to pick up the pieces and learn what he had learned, maybe without even talking to him because he may have left before you got there. There was very little opportunities for transition. I think where there were opportunities for transition, it was very helpful. I was faced with a whole bunch of written reports that I knew very little about and had to get up to speed on in a hurry. We had two, and there were new reports coming in every day. It was a mass management exercise among other things and burning and shredding and destroying stuff that we didn't need anymore and trying to isolate stuff that even though it may have been a report from six months or a year ago, may still have some value today. That was a fair amount of what I did. Who prepared these reports? Was this stuff coming from the divisions? It was coming up from lower levels of division, it was coming down from very high level operations. A lot of it in my very closed area was from CIA, NSA, DIA, all of the letter organizations. A lot of it had to do with intercepted message transmission and satellite photography and things that were very close hold, at least the results of it. As well as the product of the divisions, it was called Radio Research Company, actually it was the National Security Agency operating under a cover named it, trying to avoid attention to it. That's a lot of what we did, actually, was try to avoid our attention to ourselves. Kind of reminds me of the saying, what is the meaning of all this significance? Do you have all this information piled in front of you and how do you make heads or tails out of it? Well, that's what intelligence officers are for. They're supposed to cut through the wheat and the chaff and identify what's important, what's not important, identify trends, identify tendencies. In my case, I made it a private project of my own to try to assemble all the information I could about where the same enemy units we were facing had done a year ago during the rainy season, because we were just about to start another rainy season, and I thought, especially because how the rain affects the terrain up there, that it would be good for the 4th Division of Intelligence staff to know what had happened a year ago. I remember you said that you were briefing West Marlin briefly. Well, I was a glorified messenger boy. I was taking a briefcase with very high-level stuff, including personal messages from high-ranking people like the Secretary of Defense and the Chief of Staff of the Army, and some officer in our Specialized Unit had to read it, make sure the margins were correct. There were no typos. As a junior officer, that was me. So I was at risk of having a big head very soon because I was always the first guy in his office every morning for six weeks, not because I was important, of course, but because what I carried was very important. That could be helpful in career advancement, though. Yeah, as long as you didn't screw up, which as far as I know I didn't, with one noticeable exception, one morning I went in his office and I didn't notice that somebody had put a captured AK-47 against the wall, maybe as a trophy for him, and after my chores with him were done I was in such a hurry to get out that I spun out of my chair, went to the door, and kicked over the AK-47 so it was bouncing on the floor with the business end pointing right at him, and I was thinking, oh, God, it's a good thing this wasn't loaded, and I could imagine the headlines in the New York Times the next day. Westmoreland slain gunned down an own office by clumsy lieutenant, so other than that I think it was okay. Are you sure that wasn't the reason why you were sent to division level? I can't be sure of anything, Vic, but it was time for me, that was actually a training portion for me for the first six weeks to learn what the special security detachment did and how they did it so that I could apply those skills to a unit in the field. We had special security detachment had units at all the major headquarters down to division level, and at division level where I was we also supported brigade headquarters and the advisory group at Two Core in Placo city, and we had liaison with special forces intelligence people also. Just thinking, going up into the Highlands, again having this knowledge of what you were looking at from a, as you said, a 30,000 foot level, now you're coming down to a lower altitude and trying to make sense of the data that you're receiving from the field and what you're going to pass on up to McVee at that point. I mean, you're now acting as the sensor in a way. Did you feel that perhaps maybe the information that was being passed to McVee headquarters from the other units was, did it have the quality that it needed to have to make good decisions? Hard to tell. It was, there was pressure, well you're talking about I think more the operational communications than the intelligence communications. There was always pressure on those in the field to send good news up the line to the higher ups and people are human, they try to put a good face on it where they could. The officers I admire most were the ones who didn't try to do that, they tried to tell it the way it was. Westmoreland himself was not above trying to make things look better than they really were. I think it has been said that we had probably killed the entire population of Southeast Asia several times over with the amount of ordnance that we dropped on the place. Well, a lot of, yeah, we just don't know. I mean, the whole idea of body count was not the way to manage the war. We didn't know nearly enough about the culture of that country as we should have a problem repeated in Iraq and Afghanistan. Correct. Yeah. And it's, there are some who speak the language who know the culture but not nearly enough of us were. I didn't. I spoke a little French but that didn't help much in my relationship with the Vietnamese. Makes you kind of wonder in terms of objectives, you're looking at the first-hand results of what we're doing there and receiving this information from the field and the higher ups trying to make decisions as to where we're going to go next. And yet there is this political pressure to do something and the idea was we were supposed to be there to prevent the North from taking over the South. It was of course supposedly us against the communists but I think at a personal level it got a little more than that. We don't look at it that way today. It was very personal which gets us into the next essay that you did which was snapshots and I'll go into that with you after we have our break because I think it's a very poignant essay. But I'm thinking of the quality of the information that made these decisions and how much of that was just overshadowed by the political decisions. Did you see that a lot or? Well the political decisions, I saw some of the high level communications about it. There were suggestions that we should take the war into Cambodia and Laos long before we actually did and the high level was absolutely no and from a tactical point of view it would have made sense to have these cross border operations. I mean there were a number of low level not supposed to know about it cross border operations but to go there in force would have been a good tactical move but I'd leave it to smarter people than me to figure out whether it was a good strategic move. If you want to think real, real strategically one of the best things that happened in the Vietnam war is that we did not get into another war with China or the Soviet Union. We came close and if we had pushed it who knows what would have happened. I am to this day very sad that we were not able to achieve what we wanted to do in Vietnam. I feel like a lot of others do that maybe we could have been better somehow but I don't know if we could have sustained a win in Vietnam. I just don't know and I don't think anybody knows the way we were able to in Korea after that war. We'll take a break here for a minute and hear some messages and we'll be right back with Tom Sterling. Hello everyone I'm DeSoto Brown the co-host of Human Humane Architecture which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host Martin Despeng we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live but other aspects of our life not only here in Hawaii but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. But I have a story and I don't know where to start. I feel alone in a crowd. I can't sleep. I feel overwhelmed. I don't even know who I am anymore. I still have nightmares. I can't live like this anymore. I'm really not so good but are you ready to listen? Thank you for joining us. We were talking about some of the essays that our guest Tom Sterling has written. The other more poignant essays, snapshots deals with a more serious and personal struggle I'd like to read from that essay. It had been raining earlier. Random puddles littered the fire base. Soon to be replenished by the dark clouds off to the west. The rainy season had come to the central Highlands. I'd been with the 4th Infantry Division in the Highlands for several months and had made scores of helicopter flights around its area of operation. The sounds were now so commonplace as to be hardly noticeable. I thought I'd heard all the variations. But a new sound suddenly registered, different, off the scale. I could swear I actually felt it before I heard it. A deep rumble, urgent, demanding. I looked for the source but I didn't see it. The approaching noise seemed louder than necessary. The Huey that soon appeared came in faster than any I had ever seen. The pilot was really driving the bird, foot to the floor. He banked it hard, his rotor's almost perpendicular to the ground, then straightened out, flared like a cowboy on a horse, and eased down into some open space, engines still roaring. A few men ran toward it, but what I noticed more were those who weren't. They were briskly but unexcitedly getting ready for tasks at hand. I found myself moving toward the roaring helicopter. I knew instinctively what its cargo was. I felt I had to do something, but I didn't know what. The memories of what followed didn't return until about 19 years later. Never completely out of mind, just unfocused, hidden, put away in the attic. Then one day the unexpectedly came tumbling out. July 4th, 1986 was an exceptionally bright, warm summer day. I was alone in a cottage in Honolulu, drinking coffee and watching today on NBC. Bryant Gumbel and Jane Polly were broadcasting from an outside location, somewhere looking out on New York Harbor, chatting amably about the rededication of the recently restored Statue of Liberty. The harbor was full of anchored warships and parade of tall sailing ships from many nations. After a station break, they cut to Willard Scott, who was standing by at the Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C. The U.S. Marine Corps silent drill team was performing an impossibly precise manual of arms with shining rifles, fairly bursting with pride and professionalism. I watched with rapt approval, marveling at their skill, and savoring the surge of patriotic feelings. But then I began to notice a counter surge and unexpected emotional cross-current. There was something about watching these parading young warriors that was bothering me. Something felt dimly wrong here as if had forgotten the real reason why such young men are put in uniform and given weapons, not for parades. That's not it. My stomach was going tight on me, maybe it was the coffee, and some long-stored stuff was starting to stir in my attic. I went to the bathroom, sat down, closed my eyes, and unexpectedly clicked into a long-impacted, suddenly vivid memory. I started crying, not just soft-weaving, but spring-loaded, unhinged, free-fall sobbing. I was suddenly back in a faraway, unsunny place. A helicopter was roaring. I was with a different group of young troops, without any bright weapons or colorful uniforms. They wore muddy, tattered, gray-green jungle fatigues. There was nothing precise about them as they came off that helicopter. Some were on stretchers, several were carried individually. None could walk, most were barely conscious. All of them had recently been punctured by one or more pieces of high-velocity metal. They each had tags attached as if they were on consignment. The tags would have been filled out by the field medics, alerting the triagers to the not always obvious wounds and doses of morphines already applied. Every of them were laid out on stretchers, just above the mud, while their helpers tried to shield them from the stuff being blown by the helicopter's propwash. One had a chaplain for a shield giving him last rights. I instinctively started taking pictures, just for snapshots before a wave of shame hit me. What was I doing being a recorder instead of a participant? I was stunned, frozen. I was there but not there, with them but unconnected. What could I do? There's got to be something I could do, but there wasn't really. The medics and the docs had evidently done this before and were efficiently doing all they could be done for these young men. I remember going to one of the wounded who was sitting silently against the surgeon's bunker. He had taken a single round through his leg, dazed and medicated. He'd been triaged and left to wait while the more seriously wounded were treated. I tried to converse with him, seeking elusive words of comfort and support. Whatever it was, came out lame and useless. He didn't seem to want any of it. He just slumped there, holding his head in his hand, trying to wish away the pain and be somewhere else. Tom, I want to thank you for sharing that with us. That had to have been a deeply emotional piece of writing and it's not very easy in our society to share those kinds of feelings. But it's, I don't know, we all have those feelings. One of the things that you pointed out at the tail end of this essay was you felt the responsibility or possibly a responsibility for supplying information that got these guys into this jam. All I could offer you is that you were doing your job just like the rest of us. So, I don't know really what to say other than thank you for your job, but these guys, we don't know what happened to them, and I know we don't. There are times that I read that again and I still cry. And there's no explaining it, it just is. And I thank you for your comment that I was doing my job, just doing my job, I know. But there's, it may have been no connection at all with them. But one of the things about the Vietnam experience, there's a lot of things we don't know and we just have to hang out with the not knowing. And that's not always easy. And, yeah, I don't know what happened to those guys. They were, they had gotten to the age station. The guys there knew what they were doing. The chances are very good they survived, but not certain. We'll never know. So, yeah, that's. So, this experience has obviously had some impact on your life. Do you feel that your sense of compassion kind of led you into mediation or? Maybe, that's in lawyer terms, objection. Assuming fact, not in evidence that I have compassion. I like to think so, but it's, as a practicing lawyer, toward the end of my trial career, more and more my cases went to mediation. And I really enjoyed resolving cases that way better than going to trial. And so I became a mediator myself. And it's something that I get great satisfaction out of. There's never any guarantee that we can help people solve their problems, but there's a high rate of success at it. And even if there's no resolution or only a partial resolution, people who are in the process, frequently say how glad they were that they simply had to go at the process. And that maybe their relationship with one or more adversaries has gotten better, even though they still don't agree on everything. So yeah, mediation is something I've been very blessed to be a part of for the last nine years. That's great. That's great. Given your experience, especially the one that we just related, is there any advice that you would give to the returning vets? Yeah, keep in touch with each other. Be open to talking with people, whether they're vets or not, who are good listeners, who are willing to hear you out. I think one of the things I remember after I came back was a lot of people asked me, how are you, how was it? But somehow they weren't, by nature, put together to really stick around for the answer that might be longer than they had anticipated. And so other veterans may not be trained mediators or even trained listeners, but they're the ones that they should all keep in touch with. And veterans, I can't speak for all of them, of course, but by nature are inclined to listen to other veterans. And especially, as we've talked about, there are vet centers here that are made up of veteran counselors or counselors who are veterans or counselors who understand veterans. These are amazing resources for anybody that's come back from a war and has any thought at all that maybe something isn't quite right here or I can't put my finger on it. And it's not required that you be articulate about it. All it's required is you be willing to give it a go, give it a share, find somebody who will listen. That's all I can think of for other veterans. Well, I want to thank you for what you've done as far as our celebration of Christmas Eve, because it's the only date that we really have to celebrate, because we all remember where we were in Vietnam on our own New Year's Eve. You're talking about the 23 December event? Yes. Let me say a few things about that. This year will be the 23rd year that we've had a very informal gathering of Vietnam veterans and their families. On the capital lawn by the Korea Vietnam Memorial starts at 2,300 on the 23rd. That's 11 o'clock at night. That's a teaching aid for those of us who can't remember things. And the reason we do it on the night of the 23rd is because Vietnam veterans don't have any date that associates with our war. There's no December 7 or November 11. But all of us, as you suggested, that we're served over there, remember where we were on Christmas Eve and who we were with and where we were. And on 23rd, here in Hawaii, across the dateline in Vietnam, it's already Christmas Eve. So it's literally and figuratively going back there. Those of us who associate together are in some ways stand-ins for those that we serve with. Yes. And nothing is required of anybody who comes. Just show up and be respectful to others. Thanks, Tom. I promised I wouldn't make any lawyer jokes during this show, but I have to leave with this idea as far as military intelligence either being oxymoronic or mutually exclusive. We would love to have some feedback. We are also looking for people to interview. If you have some comments or would like to appear on the program, please send us an email at 808-VietnamVets at gmail.com. I would like to thank the staff here at Think Tech of Hawaii and for all their support and assistance. Truly without them, this program would not be possible. Please come back again next week for another issue of It Never Got Quiet. Mahalo.