Thy Will Be Done

by Gerard Colby

  With all this excitement, something more significant than Bibles seemed afoot, but the press could not grasp it. In the end, Cam had his cake and ate it, too: He built the International Linguistics Center that Dallas’s oilmen and electronics bigwigs wanted. He got southern California businessmen to donate land and raise funds for a new SIL headquarters in Orange County’s oil-rich Huntington Beach, the future home in exile of South Vietnam’s Nguyen Cao Ky.

  Cam was now moving in different, more mainstream financial circles than from those he was accustomed to. Hunt notwithstanding, Cam’s business allies in Dallas were part of a corporate network whose financial lines ran north to New York’s financial establishment and south and west to oil exploration in the Amazon and Southeast Asia.

  The Dallas–New York connection had a direct impact on SIL. Cam’s ambitions for SIL had led him into financial dependence on backers of Lyndon Johnson’s deepening commitment to a war now spreading across all Southeast Asia.

  REVOLT OF THE MONTAGNARDS

  As the war escalated, the American press generally remained loyal to the presidency, rather than to its constitutional mission under the First Amendment. Truth was once more the first casualty. British author Philip Knightly correctly noted that American journalists were not trained to question basic national beliefs, including a Cold War turned hot. He pointed out that “the correspondents were not questioning the American intervention itself, but only its effectiveness.” Atrocities were ignored, not because they were unbelievable, but because they had become commonplace and therefore unnewsworthy.13 Anticipating censorship by military authorities or editors, some reporters became self-censors.

  It took political earthquakes to break this trance. The highland rebellions of 1965 were one such seismic warning.

  In September of that year, more than 3,000 heavily armed tribesmen in five Green Beret camps revolted against the military regime in Saigon. Raising a black, red, and green flag with three white stars that represented the largest of the thirty-three highland tribes, the Montagnards killed twenty-nine members of the Vietnamese Special Forces and seized hundreds of prisoners, including twenty Americans. The revolt of one-third of the 10,000-man Montagnard army threatened to sever General Edward D. Lansdale’s “trip wire” for Vietnam’s vulnerable lowlands. The lives of SIL translators and their associates in the Christian and Missionary Alliance and the International Voluntary Service were put at risk. The mountain people were angry and provided the rebels with a popular base of support. Lowland Vietnamese migrations into the highlands had been sponsored by Saigon and the developers of AID. The U.S. Command had participated in securing Vietnamese control over U.S. aid to the tribes, and Vietnamese had been appointed province district chiefs and commanders over tribal soldiers, much to the resentment of tribal leaders.

  By pledging loyalty to the Radê tribe in their desire for reforms by Saigon and by exercising a timely display of General Ky’s airpower, the Green Berets’ coolheaded approach ended the revolt. But the economic origins of the revolt—AID’s colonization schemes for the highlands—remained generally ignored. Only a month later, Cam’s translators held their first Translation Workshop in Kontum,14 oblivious of almost all but their millennial vision.

  Nevertheless, much more was influencing SIL than millennial visions. In the neighboring Philippines, long the United States’ armed forces’ stepping-stone to the Asian mainland, the CIA-funded Asia Foundation granted $1,500 to SIL to finance the production of primers for hill tribes. The strategic importance of the Asia Foundation in the region and the possibility that this grant could lead to the financing of SIL operations elsewhere was not lost on SIL officials. “We have been cultivating them for quite some time,” branch leader Les Troyer wrote Cam, “and feel this has great potential for Wycliffe in the Orient.”15

  Tribes in Southern Asia “Occupied” by SIL or Languages Under Study by SIL in 1972 During Vietnam War

  Source: SIL.

  The Asia Foundation was one of AID’s top technical service contractors.16 The Asia Foundation was also involved in the economic planning for Vietnam’s highlands being conducted by the South East Asia Development Advisory Group (SEADAG). Working out of Asia House, the Manhattan headquarters of John D. Rockefeller 3rd’s Asia Society, SEADAG’s planners worked on the very nation-building development schemes for the Saigon regime that had inspired the Montagnard tribesmen to revolt twice in the mid-1960s. SEADAG’s use of linguists, anthropologists, and other social scientists was part of the government’s “expanding effort aimed at co-optation of the academic community and its more general intention to use academics as a cover for covert activities in Southeast Asia.”17 Like Ho Chi Minh, SEADAG’s corporate sponsors were “nation-building” through war; a major difference, however, was for whom.

  Behind SEADAG was AID, and behind AID was David Rockefeller, Rockefeller Foundation president J. George Harrar, Chase Manhattan Bank director Eugene Black (former head of the World Bank), and Cornell University president James Perkins (another Chase Bank director, as well as a director of Nelson’s IBEC). These men led Johnson’s General Advisory Committee on the Foreign Assistance Program. It was David Rockefeller who chaired the group’s Subcommittee on Private Enterprise and who recommended in 1966 the deletion of President Kennedy’s prohibition against transferring U.S. foreign-aid funds to the World Bank to pay off Third World debts to private banks such as Chase.

  By then, Nelson’s IBEC also had financial links to lucrative credit operations in Southeast Asia. On IBEC’s board since 1964 sat Christian Cardin, executive vice president and then president of Paribas Corporation and its parent, Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas, France’s largest privately owned bank and a major backer of IBEC’s ventures in Europe, as well as an important IBEC stockholder.18 Paribas representatives sat on the boards of French companies with investments in the former French Indochina. Carrying out the directives of David Rockefeller and his colleagues on the Foreign Aid Advisory Committee was the committee’s fifty-four-year-old executive director, Howard Kresge. Kresge was SIL’s liaison, and Cam made it a point to visit the committee’s offices when Cam was in Washington.19

  Yet, even though he had a sixth sense about who held power, Cam rarely looked further to see what those people did with their power. Nor was he immune to manipulation within the grander schemes. For Cam, and for most Americans imbued with a similar Cold War ideology, it was enough to identify with the Christian West, in general, and with the U.S. military presence in Vietnam, in particular. And that self-identity by SIL translators was not lost on Vietnamese communists.

  Local NLF organizers might have looked upon Cam’s translators with unexpected tolerance, having learned the religious predomination of their work from villagers. But this experience was to be shared by regular army troops from the North who were moving across the demilitarized zone or down the Ho Chi Minh trail along the western borders of Vietnam.

  These units were the army of Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV), which was at war with the United States and its allied regime in Saigon, the Republic of Vietnam. They were imbued more with nationalist than with communist ideals. To confront the Americans and Saigon’s troops, General Giap and the DRV leaders chose the mountains surrounding the village of Khe Sanh for their battleground.

  THE BATTLE OF KHE SANH

  It was from this area that the CIA had directed the Green Berets to lead Brú tribesmen in ambushing DRV soldiers and their supply caravans heading south to aid the communist-led NLF.

  Khe Sanh was also the base from which the U.S. commander in Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, hoped to launch an invasion into Laos to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Border violations on all sides were rampant. The commander of “unconventional warfare” in the Khe Sanh area, Colonel John K. Singlaub, was not unknown to the Vietnamese opposition. Singlaub, who would be exposed years later for his part in the Iran-Contra arms scandal, had helped set up the “Eagles Nest” headquarters at Phou Phi Thi in Laos for the CIA
’s secret war using Hmong tribesmen.20

  Cam was aware that Khe Sanh was coming under increasing pressure. SIL’s Translation magazine reported as early as January 1966 that two SIL women translators among the Brú had been forced by a mortar attack to retreat to the U.S. Special Forces camp nearby. Two years later, the camp had grown into a fortress with an all-weather runway as U.S. Marine units were hurried up from the lowlands. Harassment from CIA’s Montagnard strike forces was now being answered by well-trained regular North Vietnamese Army units. The SIL translators had their own responses, handing out Old Testament Bible stories in the Brú language to the Khe Sanh village’s district chief.

  General Westmoreland was convinced that the long-awaited Korea-type invasion from the north was finally about to happen and intended to meet it at Khe Sanh. A true believer in technology, Westmoreland was a promoter of integrated air-land combat systems. He was convinced that Khe Sanh’s mountainous terrain would make it impossible for North Vietnam’s General Giap to move in the necessary forces and artillery to surround and entrap the marines. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Johnson, needing a victory to persuade American voters that progress was being made, concurred.21

  Even as the Khe Sanh area was heating up, neither Cam nor Vietnam branch leader Hank Blood ordered the withdrawal of local missionaries. SIL’s two translators continued their work among the Brú while U.S. Marines kept arriving in greater numbers. And in the hills surrounding Khe Sanh, more and more North Vietnamese units kept arriving, building up their forces, moving up artillery, and doing exactly what the omniscient U.S. Military Command in Saigon believed was impossible. Here at sensor-sowed Khe Sanh, Westmoreland assured the Joint Chiefs of Staff that a target was emerging for massive American firepower that was more tangible than body counts.

  And yet Westmoreland’s body counts also continued to grow, often inflated beyond any totals the CIA estimated for the Viet Cong. Civilian massacres in the lowlands resulting from vanguard aerial bombings followed by “free fire-zone” sweeps by U.S. forces were, just as CIA’s William Buckley warned, driving the desperate peasantry into the ranks of the NLF.

  In the highlands of Laos, the retreat southward and westward of Hmong tribesmen also grew, especially after a January 1968 offensive by the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese regulars. In South Vietnam’s highlands, too, the tribes were being bloodied. But Lansdale’s “trip wire” against North Vietnamese troop and supply movements southward remained intact, even if it took a terrible toll on the Montagnards. In fact, the trip wire now was stretched south through the heart of the Annam Mountains, studded with Special Forces forts from which spurs of the Green Beret-led Civil Irregular Defense Groups (CIDG) struck westward, with local tribesmen recruited for cross-border patrols.

  The SILers, like the missionaries of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and AID’s agronomists, played an important part in erecting this trip wire and keeping it intact. The compassion shown Montagnard villagers by American missionaries lessened traditional tribal mistrust of outsiders and eased the task of recruitment. Like the Green Berets who fought alongside the tribesmen, SIL translators saw themselves as helping an embattled country and its threatened tribes. More objective observations were left to less involved visitors. “Pawns in a war of surprise and ambush,” wrote National Geographic’s Howard Sochurek, “the primitive villagers often change loyalties to survive.”22 But surviving to become cannon fodder was never promising in any war, whether the victims were Scottish Highlanders at Culloden or Brú highlanders at Khe Sanh.

  Reporters began to chronicle the war’s ugly racial undertone. Green Berets, leading SIL-evangelized Jeh tribesmen toward the Laotian border to ambush North Vietnamese supply lines, still used a tactical guide card made up of orders attributed to Major Robert Rogers, organizer in 1759 of the Rangers, the British Empire’s first antiguerrilla strike force and the most notorious Indian killers of the French and Indian War.23 And although a 1940 Small Wars Manual’s account of Custer’s nineteenth-century defeat by the Plains tribes was no longer required reading for eager young U.S. Marines, American soldiers were still calling the foes they hunted in Vietnam’s rain forests “Indians.” British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, appalled by the indiscriminate “carpet bombing” and use of chemical weapons like Agent Orange, branded the relentless slaughter “genocide.”

  For the Johnson administration, this label was particularly embarrassing, especially since the United States was one of only a few governments in the West that had failed to ratify the 1925 Geneva Convention banning the use of poison gases and the United Nations Human Rights Covenants that had come out of the Nuremberg trials. Yet, despite a rising chorus of alarm from the United States’ allies, intelligence officials inside the White House still missed Russell’s historic allusion. A veteran’s proposal to celebrate the Indian wars on the heels of the 100th anniversary of Custer’s massacre of the southern Cheyenne had even gotten as far as presidential aide Douglas Cater, a former CIA operative, before it was derailed.

  “It seems to me,” warned former Rockefeller Foundation fellow and political scientist John P. Roche, “that this is a rather bad time to celebrate the Indian wars. Bertrand Russell might, after all, enlarge his genocide charge.

  “Why not ship this off to the Commission on Indian Affairs? Bureaucratically yours … “24

  *The foundations, besides Ford, were the Crowell Trust (based on the Crowell family’s Quaker Oats fortune in Chicago), the Glenmeade Trust (based on the Pew family’s Sun Oil Company fortune in Philadelphia), and the Lilly Foundation (based on the Lilly pharmaceutical company).

  37

  TET: THE YEAR OF THE MONKEY

  THE GREAT WHITE WAR CHIEF

  Far from the domestic problems plaguing Lyndon Johnson, Americans in Saigon celebrated New Year’s Eve at the impressive U.S. Embassy with the air of optimism expected of them. Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker’s invitations had set the tone: “Come see the light at the end of the tunnel.” But after the Christian New Year of 1968 had passed, and with it the cease-fire that had been intermittently broken, the war resumed in all its fury. There would not be another truce until Tet, the Vietnamese New Year, at the end of the month. By then hundreds of Americans and thousands of Vietnamese would become casualties.

  Ten thousand miles to the east, a caravan of cars sped through the snowy Shoshone-Bannock Indian reservation in southern Idaho carrying government officials, reporters, and the chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Indian Education. Senator Robert Kennedy had interrupted his ski holiday at Sun Valley to carry out a surprise inspection of the reservation. It was part of his committee’s oversight responsibilities to review the work of Johnson’s reorganized Bureau of Indian Affairs and its new Division of Education. But the reporters who accompanied him speculated that this trip was also the beginning of Kennedy’s presidential campaign.

  Many Indians hoped it was. “The Kennedys increased the normal margin which minority groups gave to the Democrats because of their apparent interest in minority groups,” observed Indian historian Vine Deloria, Jr., a critic of the Kennedys’ record in office. “Indian people loved the idea of Robert Kennedy replacing Jack. For them it was an affirmation of the great war chief from the great family leading his people in his brother’s place.”1

  The Shoshone welcomed Robert Kennedy as if he were a godsend. They considered New York’s junior senator one of their few friends in Washington. Just a month before, after Pueblo and Oglala Sioux tribal leaders had testified at hearings on the BIA’s boarding schools before Kennedy’s subcommittee, Kennedy had called the BIA’s policy of forcibly separating school-aged Indian children from their families “barbaric.” Now Kennedy had come to Idaho’s Fort Hall reservation to see for himself. “Kennedy presented himself as a person who could move from world to world and never be a stranger anywhere,” Deloria explained. “His genius was that he personified the best traits of his Irish heritage and made an attempt to define white i
n a different way.”2

  Kennedy’s focusing on the BIA was not welcomed by Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, a member of the Mormon Church, which preached the racial inferiority of American Indians and had colluded with the BIA to “save” Indian schoolchildren by legally adopting them without their parents’ knowledge or consent.3 President Johnson also was not happy with Kennedy. All the polls indicated that he would have a tough time getting reelected this year because of the Vietnam War and domestic unrest. Already suspicious of Kennedy’s every move, Johnson did not need Kennedy’s spotlighting of BIA policies under his administration, especially ones that demonstrated racial and cultural insensitivity on top of Washington’s traditional negligence.

  “Why don’t Indians riot?” Kennedy had asked a Navajo during the hearings, wondering about a seeming difference between Indians on rural reservations and African Americans in urban ghettos. “It isn’t in their nature to demonstrate,” explained the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians.4 But anger among Indians over deplorable conditions, including Vietnam veterans returning to job discrimination and police violence at home, was building. It would soon explode in demonstrations at BIA headquarters and a shoot-out at Wounded Knee, the site of a historic massacre of Indians some seventy-five years earlier.