Baseball Maverick Page 4
Alderson’s job was to collect incoming cables from embassies, consulates, and aid offices around the world and code them to be distributed to the right analysts, who worked together in an area of the basement that looked a lot like a newsroom, humming with energy and activity. Talking about it now, Alderson downplays the work as being mostly trivial. “The cables that I was reading had to do with stuff like the wheat crop in Egypt is lousy this year,” he says. Then again, the cables offered what had to have been a highly educational glimpse of the ways of intelligence analysts: habits of mind, modes of expression, as well as a road map of the topics and areas that CIA analysts around the world felt worthy of study and dissection. Anyone who spent a summer reading such cables at that age and at that moment of heightened geopolitical tension would have to emerge from the experience smarter and possessing fewer illusions about the ways of the world.
Alderson’s tenth-grade French teacher in England had a Dartmouth alumni magazine that he leafed through one day. “That was the first I’d heard of Dartmouth,” he says. So he applied to Dartmouth, Stanford, and Yale, and only got into Dartmouth, where he studied history on a Navy ROTC scholarship. His first couple of years, he was more interested in playing baseball—first on the freshman team, then for one year on the varsity—than he was in studying. He was a second baseman, better in the field than up to bat. After two years of ROTC he faced an important choice: He could continue to work toward being a Naval officer or he could opt to become a Marine officer instead. He chose the Marines and it gave him a newfound motivation to study. “I got religion somehow,” he says.
Alderson’s father could stomach only so much time at a desk before he got himself transferred in the summer of 1965, just after Sandy graduated high school. John wound up as an adviser for a squadron of B-57 Canberras at an Air National Guard Base near Hutchinson, Kansas. A year later John was transferred to the Philippines and then Vietnam, joining the U.S. Air Force’s Thirteenth Bomb Squadron, dubbed the “Devil’s Own Grim Reapers.” By Sandy’s sophomore year at Dartmouth, John was back to flying combat missions, his squadron of B-57 bombers deployed in Vietnam for two months at a time, then back to the Philippines. As a military dependent, Sandy could jump transport planes and visit his family in the Philippines on his breaks from school and did that often. If he could get that far, he started thinking, why not continue on to Vietnam? The war was the biggest story in the United States, and Alderson wanted to see for himself what was going on. All he needed was a visa to get into Vietnam. “I was curious and adventurous,” he says. “I figured, ‘All right, I’ll be a freelance journalist!’”
Despite having no experience, he lined up a letter of introduction from a newspaper in Hutchinson, Kansas, and was able to secure a visa. But when he showed up at the Saigon Army Press Office in the summer of ’67, the press officer told him: “You’ve got to have two letters to be accredited. And by the way, we know you’re not here as a journalist, you’re just screwing around.”
With no accreditation, Alderson had no access to military transportation in South Vietnam. But Colonel Ellis, the man who had inflicted years of “Richie” torment on him, was stationed in Saigon at that time and arranged for him to hop a short military flight to the base at Phan Rang where John Alderson was stationed, flying night bombing missions to disrupt movement along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in North Vietnam. Ninety-four B-57Bs had been deployed for the war, including many from the Royal Australian Air Force. Sandy showed up at the base, located on the South Vietnamese coastline looking out at the South China Sea, near the ruins of a twelfth-century Cham temple. John was thrilled to see his son; he couldn’t wait to get him up in the air on a test hop. One of the rare pictures of Sandy in Vietnam shows him sitting in the rear seat of a camouflaged B-57, cockpit ajar, wearing a flight helmet and grinning broadly, and John in a flight suit, the picture of fly-boy cool and confidence. This was just before John ignored the rules and took Sandy up in the B-57.
“That was a major no-no,” said John’s good friend Don Graham, who also flew B-57s out of Phan Rang. “You don’t take up a civilian in a combat situation, even if that’s your own son. I’m amazed they even did that. Imagine if anything had happened!”
John showed Sandy what the B-57 dive-bomber could do with some hair-raising bombing runs over those twelfth-century ruins, though not actually dropping any bombs. They also did strafing runs, John operating the .50-caliber machine guns—but not over land. “That was out in the South China Sea,” Sandy explains. “He wasn’t that cavalier.”
John did everything he could to make Sandy queasy.
“He tried to make me throw up,” Alderson says.
“I took him up and got him sick, which was exactly what I wanted to do,” John crowed to the New York Daily News. “But it was very enjoyable. I know Sandy’ll never forget it.”
That week at his father’s base in South Vietnam did indeed stay with Alderson. His father would fly off on night bombing runs and Alderson, nineteen at the time, would hang out at the hooch with a fun-loving squadron of Australians, hearing tales of action they’d seen. Rather than concluding he’d been foolish to try to talk his way into a press pass to cover the war in Vietnam, Alderson vowed to give it another try.
Instead of one letter from a newspaper editor vouching for his credentials, he would show up in front of that same press officer in Saigon a year later with two such letters. He’d still be a college kid, but in the meantime he’d have worked to make himself smarter about Vietnam. He asked for and received permission to construct his own independent study course on Vietnam at Dartmouth in the spring of 1968. This was shortly after the decisive phase of the war, the January 1968 Tet Offensive, a massive coordinated campaign of North Vietnamese attacks, despite an agreement to have a cease-fire during Tết , the Vietnamese New Year celebration. U.S. forces were caught off guard and fierce fighting raged all through February, especially during the battle for the city of Huế in central Vietnam, home of the walled Imperial Citadel, where Vietnamese emperors had lived and ruled from the first decade of the nineteenth century up until 1945, when Ho Chi Minh declared Hanoi the capital. U.S. forces prevailed at Huế and inflicted huge losses on the North Vietnamese, but Tet marked a decisive turning point in attitudes back home.
For the course Alderson read the work of many journalists, figures like Bernard Fall, the Austrian-born expert on Vietnam who reported from Southeast Asia and taught at Howard University. Fall flew back to Vietnam in February 1967 and asked an officer “where the action was,” as R. W. Apple later reported in the New York Times. Fall was out on patrol with a company of Marines, dictating book notes into a tape reporter, when he stepped on a mine and was instantly killed. His last words were: “We’ve reached one of our phase lines after the firefight and it smells bad… . Could be an amb—”
Alderson was intrigued by Fall and Graham Greene, the Oxford-educated former journalist who had come back to Saigon sixteen years earlier after reporting in the field and hunkered down in room 214 of Saigon’s French colonial hotel, the Continental, to write The Quiet American. Alderson in 1968 was not quite on board with Greene’s thesis of America as a blundering innocent abroad, but he found it interesting, and the novel’s hypnotic prescience was not lost on him, as when a character observes, “The French may hold, poor devils, if the Chinese don’t come to help the Vietminh. A war of jungle and mountain and marsh, paddy fields where you wade shoulder-high and the enemy simply disappear, bury their arms, put on peasant dress.”
For Alderson there was a palpable thrill in walking the halls of the Continental right after he arrived in Saigon. “I went there because I was a Graham Greene fan,” he told me. From his room at the Continental he could walk one block to the Rex Hotel, where foreign correspondents gathered at the rooftop bar and where the famous press briefings known as the “five o’clock follies” occurred. “The people who went to those press briefings were the people you’d see on CBS or NBC, network correspondents,” he says
. “I was big into that. I really thought that was fascinating. I did go out in the field with some of these TV people.”
Like Greene, he wanted to be out and about as much as he could, not cooped up in a hotel. Alderson arrived in May during the Mini–Tet Offensive and captured developments in Saigon during his first forty-eight hours there for an article he published in the Dartmouth, his student newspaper. CONG CLOBBER SAIGON AS ALLIES DIG IN, read the headline, and a short editor’s note followed, explaining that “Alderson is spending several months in Vietnam and will be sending THE DARTMOUTH regular dispatches.” The article began:
SAIGON—For several days, parts of this city have been absorbing a renewed offensive by Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars, a follow-up to the murderous “Tet offensive.” While most of the city is vulnerable at night, during the day fighting is centered in the suburbs and in Saigon’s sister city, Cholon. Thus much of the city carries on as usual, even as smoke billows only blocks away.
The article is competent enough, if unspectacular. The surprise comes in the vividness of the quotes from U.S. soldiers. “This morning I saw six or seven rangers run a hundred meters across an open rice paddy and then swim a stream to catch two VC who tried to break contact,” one helicopter gunship pilot told him. “They shot the hell out of both of them.”
Soon after filing his dispatch from Saigon, Alderson caught a military transport to Da Nang and headed up to the Imperial City of Huế, along the banks of the Perfume River, a place of grace and beauty, at least up until a few months before Alderson arrived. I visited the place myself in 2010, and even then there was a haunting poetry to once regal gardens fallen into neglect. Deep within the inner reaches of the elaborate Citadel complex, I poked through a half-renovated building that had been the royal reading room, a red-slatted fence marking space before the red-squared wall of windowed sliding doors over which a massive pagoda-style roof lifted to the skies. Many in the United States are familiar with the Vietnamese name “Nguyen,” thinking it like “Jones” in being merely popular, but the name spread far and wide because the Nguyen dynasty ruled Vietnam from 1804 until 1945. Its seat of power was this Citadel.
Michael Herr, author of the classic study Dispatches, arrived in Vietnam not long before Alderson did in 1968 and soon was on his way to the massive Imperial Citadel. This was right after the Tet Offensive had started, and Herr caught a ride to get to the action and wound up with a group of Marines fighting its way into Huế, passing by hundreds of dead civilians and feeling the blast of napalm being dropped within a hundred meters of their position. “Up on the highest point of the wall, on what had once been a tower, I looked across the Citadel’s moat and saw the NVA [North Vietnamese Army] moving quickly across the rubble of the opposing wall,” Herr wrote. “We were close enough to be able to see their faces. A rifle went off a few feet to my right, and one of the running figures jerked back and dropped. A Marine sniper leaned out from his cover and grinned at me.”
Three months later Sandy Alderson showed up on a bicycle. Seriously: He rented a bicycle and went pedaling around to get a look for himself at the Imperial Citadel. “I would just bicycle around Huế City,” Alderson says. “It was totally destroyed, but it wasn’t deserted by any means. I bicycled through the Imperial City and along the Perfume River, basically what a tourist would do, except for the fact there was a war going on.”
Based in Da Nang with a military press pass, Alderson showed up at the military press office each morning to see what press excursions were planned that week. “It was like going to a hotel in the Catskills, and you could sign up for a variety of different activities,” Alderson recalls. One day he might be out on one of the huge gunships nicknamed “Puff the Magic Dragon,” looking down into the emerald-green rice paddies fanning out in every direction and waiting to hear the thunder of the rapid-fire .50-caliber mini-guns opening up on a perceived threat hiding in the tree line. Another day, he might tag along on an Operation Ranch Hand sortie dropping the toxic defoliant Agent Orange. It was May 1968 and back in America young men his age were doing everything they could to avoid having to come fight in what they saw as a pointless war, some fleeing to Canada, many burning their draft cards. Alderson was fleeing deeper into the war, catching press flights to famous firebases like Con Thien and Khe Sanh.
“It was like a college student going to Europe,” Alderson says now. “This was the biggest thing going on in the world at that time. Really it was like an adventure. I’ve always liked doing what other people don’t.”
Khe Sanh was near the border with Laos, just south of the 17th parallel dividing North Vietnam from South Vietnam at the time. In January 1968, General William Westmoreland had declared it a priority to hold the Khe Sanh firebase at all costs, for psychological reasons, even with an estimated forty thousand North Vietnamese closing in on the five thousand Marines at the base. The only U.S. hope was air power. An estimated 100,000 tons of bombs were dropped around the perimeter of the base, as well as 158,000 high-caliber shells. Khe Sanh was seen at the time as so important, it even showed up in Walter Cronkite’s famous February 27, 1968, CBS Evening News commentary about Vietnam, when he declared, “We are mired in stalemate,” and President Johnson concluded that if he’d lost Cronkite, he’d lost the American people. “Khe Sanh could well fall, with a terrible loss in American lives, prestige, and morale,” Cronkite said. “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”
Michael Herr also visited the famous firebase. “Khe Sanh was a very bad place then, but the airstrip there was the worst place in the world,” he wrote in Dispatches. “If you were waiting there to be taken out, there was nothing you could do but curl up in the trench and try to make yourself small, and if you were coming in on the plane, there was nothing you could do, nothing at all.”
Three months later when Alderson caught a C-130 transport to Khe Sanh, the furious bombing had slowed down, but not died out. The landing strip, the key to survival during the pivotal seventy-seven-day siege in February, had become infamous. Coming in for a landing, Alderson could see the hulks of other C-130s that had attempted the same landing and been destroyed by incoming fire, often killing everyone on board. “So the C-130s would land and come to a stop for like thirty seconds,” he says. “They would dump their passengers, gear, and supplies and take right off.”
Alderson spent only one night there. At Khe Sanh, that meant sleeping in a bunker: Everything on that firebase was dug down deep, underground, covered by layers of timber and sandbags. The shelling might have let up from the heaviest days of the siege, but you never knew when a stray might land right on top of where you were sleeping. “It was harassment fire,” Alderson says now. “The North Vietnamese weren’t trying to dislodge the firebase; they were just trying to make the Marines nervous and keep them down in the bunkers.”
Above all he recalls waking up at night and having to pee. He couldn’t hold it all night.
“You could hear the rats running around all over the place on the floor of the bunker, so at night you didn’t even want to put your foot down from the cot,” he recalls. “I woke up and had to take a leak, but thought, ‘Oh shit, I don’t want to get a rat bite.’ I wasn’t going to go to the head. I was just going to get outside the bunker, take a leak, and get back in. You didn’t want to get caught outside.”
Alderson did not file a story from Khe Sanh. His output as a reporter was limited to that one article he’d published in the Dartmouth upon arriving. “I quickly realized I wasn’t really competent,” he says. “I didn’t want to comment on the war. I didn’t want to be an apologist for it to a bunch of undergraduate readers.” Alderson had learned a thing or two about accepting how little he knew.
2
POSTER BOY
One morning during his senior year at Dartmouth, Alderson was studying at the
library when a group of students at the same table got up and walked away. He noticed they’d left behind a scrap of paper. Curious, he unfolded the note and read: “That guy across from you is Sandy Alderson, the biggest militarist on campus.” He was more perplexed than angry. He could have pointed to many ROTC types far more militaristic than he was. Were they fans of Graham Greene? No way. Reading the note reminded Alderson once again of how much he was an outsider. He was apart from the experience of the great mass of the student body. He supported the war, if only because his father was part of it. He had hoped to attend the Air Force Academy and become a pilot like his father, but when it came time for his eyes to be tested, he flunked. He was color-blind.
His graduation from Dartmouth was rained out, leading to a modified, scaled-down ceremony inside. Alderson had been commissioned a couple of days earlier with more than one hundred other ROTC students, including one other Marine, and reported to Quantico two weeks later for training at The Basic School. Alderson finished first out of 250 in his group of officers, the “honor man,” a distinction that did not go unnoticed, given how rigorous the training had been: Up until the Tet Offensive, it had emphasized rural warfare, but by the time Alderson was at Quantico, the Marine Corps had built a model Vietnamese village with thatched huts. There was classroom study of tactics, but most of the work was in the field. Walt Zorkers, who went through the training about the same time as Alderson, recalled that it also included classes on leadership. “That was the only time I had that,” Zorkers says. “Later I went to Harvard Business School, but no one ever taught me anything at Harvard Business School about being a leader. They made me a technician. The only place I got leadership training was at The Basic School at Quantico.”