Vo Nguyen Giap, renowned Vietnamese general, dies in Hanoi

View Photo Gallery — Vo Nguyen Giap dies: The Vietnamese military commander and national folk hero who organized the army that defeated the Japanese, the French and then the Americans in 30 years of Southeast Asian warfare died Oct. 4 at age 102.

Gen. Giap was the last survivor in a triumvirate of revolutionary leaders who fought France’s colonial forces and then the United States to establish a Vietnam free of Western domination. With the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, who died in 1969, and former prime minister Pham Van Dong, who died in 2000, Gen. Giap was venerated in his homeland as one of the founding fathers of his country. To military scholars around the world, he was one of the 20th century’s leading practitioners of modern revolutionary guerrilla warfare.

He said: “The United States imperialists want to fight quickly. To fight a protracted war is a big defeat for them. Their morale is lower than grass. . . . National liberation wars must allow some time — a long time. . . . The Americans didn’t understand that we had soldiers everywhere and that it was very hard to surprise us.”

To at least one U.S. military commander, this strategy was apparent even in the early years of American involvement in the hostilities. Marine Corps Gen. Victor Krulak, in a 1966 memorandum to President Lyndon B. Johnson and Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, wrote that Gen. Giap “was sure that if the cost in casualties and francs was high enough, the French would defeat themselves in Paris. He was right. It is likely that he feels the same about the USA.”

Gen. Giap was a hard-line and tenacious Communist, and one of the early members of the Vietnamese Communist Party, which was founded by Ho in 1930. In the late 1940s, he led a program aimed at eradication of non-communist political organizations in Vietnam that is said to have caused the death of thousands. One technique of this campaign was to tie opponents together in batches like cordwood, then throw them into the Red River and let them drown while floating out to sea. This was known as “crab fishing.”

Soon after Gen. Giap left for China, his wife was taken into custody by French authorities and held in a prison facility that would become known 30 years later in the United States as the “Hanoi Hilton,” where downed American fliers were held as prisoners of war. Quang Thai would die in prison, either by suicide or while being tortured. Since her arrest, their daughter had been cared for by Gen. Giap’s parents. But not until late in World War II did Gen. Giap learn of his wife’s death. In 1947, his father would also die while in French custody, refusing to publicly denounce his son, although he never agreed with his communist ideology.

 

to many fans he was first and foremost Col. Sherman T. Potter

Colonel Potter’s office had several personal touches. The picture on his desk was of Mr. Morgan’s wife, Eileen Detchon. To relax, the colonel liked to paint and look after his horse, Sophie — a sort of inside joke, since the real Harry Morgan raised quarter horses on a ranch in Santa Rosa. Sophie, to whom Colonel Potter says goodbye in the final episode, was Mr. Morgan’s own horse. In 1980 his Colonel Potter earned him an Emmy Award as best supporting actor in a comedy series. During the shooting of the final episode, he was asked about his feelings. “Sadness and an aching heart,” he replied.

A particular favorite of mine.

Larger-than-life statesman

On the 15th of December, this story follows up:

With Mr. Holbrooke’s death on Monday, the administration has lost one of its most resonant voices, just as it completes its latest review of its Afghan war strategy. His death confronts the White House and State Department with some difficult questions, starting with how to replace a larger-than-life statesman in a post that was created for him and which he built from scratch.

His obituary:

A brilliant, sometimes abrasive infighter, he used a formidable arsenal of facts, bluffs, whispers, implied threats and, when necessary, pyrotechnic fits of anger to press his positions. Mr. Obama, who praised Mr. Holbrooke on Monday afternoon at the State Department as “simply one of the giants of American foreign policy,” was sometimes driven to distraction by his lectures.

Few diplomats could boast of his career accomplishments. Early on, Mr. Holbrooke devoted six years to the Vietnam War: first in the Mekong Delta with the United States Agency for International Development, seeking the allegiance of the civilian population; then at the embassy in Saigon as an aide to Ambassadors Maxwell Taylor and Henry Cabot Lodge Jr.; and finally in the American delegation to the 1968-69 Paris peace talks led by W. Averell Harriman and Cyrus R. Vance. Mr. Holbrooke was the author of one volume of the Pentagon Papers, the secret Defense Department history of the Vietnam War that cataloged years of American duplicity in Southeast Asia. The papers were first brought to public attention by The New York Times in 1971.

That is quite a pedigree.

Mr. Holbrooke also made millions as an investment banker on Wall Street. In the early 1980s, he was a co-founder of a Washington consulting firm, Public Strategies, which was later sold to Lehman Brothers. At various times he was a managing director of Lehman Brothers, vice chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston and a director of the American International Group.

He intended to become a journalist, but after graduating in 1962 he was turned down by The Times and joined the State Department as a foreign service officer. 

The Times's loss was the nation's gain, one can say.


When President Clinton took office in 1993, Mr. Holbrooke was named ambassador to Germany. He helped found the American Academy in Berlin as a cultural exchange center.


But there was to be one more task. As Mr. Obama assumed office and attention shifted to Afghanistan, Mr. Holbrooke took on his last assignment. He began by trying to lower expectations, moving away from the grand, transformative goals of President George W. Bush toward something more readily achievable. But his boss and old friend, Mrs. Clinton, expressed absolute confidence in him. “Richard represents the kind of robust, persistent, determined diplomacy the president intends to pursue,” she said. “I admire deeply his ability to shoulder the most vexing and difficult challenges."

Noted combat artist

Howard Brodie - A courtroom drawing by Howard Brodie from the trial of Klaus Barbie, the German war criminal. 


Howard Brodie, a noted combat artist during World War II who went on to sketch some of the most famous courtroom dramas of the postwar era, including the trials of the Chicago Seven, Charles Manson and Patty Hearst, died on Sunday at his home near Parkfield, Calif. He was 94. The death was confirmed by his son, Bruce.


Mr. Brodie was a staff artist at The San Francisco Chronicle when he enlisted in the Army during World War II. He was sent to the South Pacific as a combat artist and covered the last days of the Guadalcanal campaign. After being assigned to the European theater, he sketched his way with the troops through France, Belgium and Germany. His work was featured prominently in Yank, the Army weekly. He never carried a weapon, but he came under fire on several occasions and worked as a medic when necessary. He was awarded the Bronze Star for Valor.


A strong draftsman, he conveyed the drama of men under fire as well as the routine of life in the field. One of his most disturbing sketches, of a German prisoner’s execution during the Battle of Bulge — the prisoner was part of a team that had infiltrated American lines posing as G.I.’s — was censored by the military.

“A defenseless human is entirely different than a man in action,” he later wrote, in a caption to one of the drawings. “To see these three young men calculatingly reduced to quivering corpses before my eyes really burned into my being.”

Captured Life Under Communism

Mr. Lockwood in Cuba with Fidel Castro, whom he persuaded to sit for a long and highly personal interview in 1965.

Lee Lockwood, an American photojournalist who had rare opportunities to capture political, military and civilian life in Communist countries — documenting the treatment of an American prisoner of war in North Vietnam and persuading Fidel Castro to sit for a long, discursive, smoke-filled and highly personal interview — died on July 31 in Tamarac, Fla. He was 78 and lived in Weston, Fla. The cause was complications of diabetes, his sister, Susan Lewinnek, said.

As his work through the decades made clear, Mr. Lockwood regarded photojournalism as a potent instrument for social change. A freelance photographer, he was associated for many years with the Black Star agency, which furnished his images to newspapers and magazines around the globe. He also wrote several books, including “Castro’s Cuba, Cuba’s Fidel: An American Journalist’s Inside Look at Today’s Cuba in Text and Picture” (Macmillan, 1967).

Lee Lockwood/Black Star - Lt. Cmdr. Richard A. Stratton of the Navy, a prisoner of war in Hanoi in 1967. “His eyes were empty,” Lee Lockwood wrote.

In 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War, Mr. Lockwood was the first outside photographer in more than a decade to be allowed into North Vietnam. (Not long before, while in Havana to research his Castro book, he had prudently obtained a North Vietnamese visa there.)

The fruit of Mr. Lockwood’s 28-day visit, a long, heavily illustrated essay titled “North Vietnam Under Siege,” was published as the cover article of the April 7, 1967, edition of Life magazine.

Though Mr. Lockwood’s trip to North Vietnam was carefully controlled — he was forbidden to photograph military installations and had a government official with him at all times — he managed to traverse 1,000 miles in the month he spent there.

In words and photos, Mr. Lockwood portrayed the life of a country then under heavy bombardment by United States forces: bare, ruined villages; deserted factories; a boy with a missing leg, lost to a bomb. There were also calmer, quieter images of farmers, flower sellers and hemp dyers plying their trades.

His most striking encounter, in Hanoi, was with Lt. Cmdr. Richard A. Stratton, an American Navy pilot who had been captured in January 1967. As Mr. Lockwood and other foreign newsmen listened, a man identifying himself as Commander Stratton read over a loudspeaker a long “confession” attacking United States involvement in the region. Then, from behind a curtain, Commander Stratton appeared, looking, Mr. Lockwood wrote, “like a puppet.”

“His eyes were empty,” Mr. Lockwood wrote. “He stood stiffly at attention while movie lights were turned on and photographers took pictures. His expression never changed.” Accompanying Mr. Lockwood’s account was his photograph of Commander Stratton, clad in prison pajamas, making a deep, supplicating bow on orders from a North Vietnamese officer. The image, which occupied a full page of the Life article, was widely reproduced. Partly in response to Mr. Lockwood’s article, the State Department accused North Vietnam of brainwashing American prisoners to elicit antiwar statements from them. In an interview with The New York Times in 2008, Commander Stratton, who had been released in 1973, suggested that such statements were less the product of brainwashing than of common sense. “You are being tortured and all you have to do to get them to stop is say the same thing that Bobby Kennedy is saying,” Commander Stratton said.

Lee Jonathan Lockwood was born in New York City on May 4, 1932, and took up photography as a boy. He earned a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature from Boston University in 1954 and later did graduate work in the field at Columbia. In the mid-1950s, he served with the Army, stationed in Munich.

Besides his sister, Ms. Lewinnek, Mr. Lockwood is survived by his wife, the former Joyce Greenfield, whom he married in 1964; a brother, Roger; two children, Andrew Lockwood and Gillian Rubin; and six grandchildren.

His other books include “Conversation With Eldridge Cleaver: Algiers” (McGraw-Hill, 1970) and “Daniel Berrigan: Absurd Convictions, Modest Hopes — Conversations After Prison With Lee Lockwood” (Random House, 1972).

Mr. Lockwood’s best-known book was the one born of his marathon interview with Mr. Castro, which unspooled over a full week in Cuba in 1965. The discourse ranged over Marxism, the Cuban missile crisis, American race relations, sex, prostitution and much else.

It was vital, Mr. Lockwood believed, that American readers be given a full portrait of a man known here as a cipher at best, a demon at worst.

“We don’t like Castro, so we close our eyes and hold our ears,” he wrote in the book’s introduction. “Yet if he is really our enemy, as dangerous to us as we are told he is, then we ought to know as much about him as possible.”

August 7, 2010

Lee Lockwood Dies at 78; Captured Life Under Communism

By MARGALIT FOX

Two-Time Honduran President

Oswaldo López Arellano, who twice served as president of Honduras and was its top military leader for nearly two decades, died on Sunday in Tegucigalpa, the country’s capital. He was 89. The cause was prostate cancer, his family said in a statement, according to The Associated Press.

Mr. López Arellano was a lieutenant colonel in the Honduran Air Force when he helped lead a military coup that overthrew the dictator Julio Lozano Díaz in 1956. He became minister of defense in a government led by President Ramón Villeda Morales. A provision in the new Honduran Constitution effectively gave the military junta — of which Mr. López Arellano, by then a general, was a part — veto power over Dr. Villeda Morales. In 1963, Mr. López Arellano led a coup against Dr. Villeda Morales and became president himself after leading an interim military government for two years. In 1969, President López Arellano led his country in what came to be known as the  “soccer war”  against El Salvador, because the two countries were then playing hotly contested matches to determine which nation would advance to the World Cup.

Issues transcended sport. Salvadorans were streaming into Honduras seeking land and a better life. After Honduras began evicting the Salvadorans, most of them illegal immigrants, El Salvador invaded Honduras. The five-day war ended inconclusively with several thousand killed, including military forces and civilians.

In 1971, Mr. López Arellano stepped aside to make way for another civilian president but retained a constitutional right to ignore presidential orders. He led a coup less than a year later and again assumed the presidency. In 1975, Mr. López Arellano was himself deposed by a military coup, after evidence emerged that he had taken a bribe, said to total $2.5 million, from the United Fruit Company to cut taxes on bananas.

Curiously, the WSJ obit is quite different, including the reported amount of the bribe: In 1971, Mr. López stepped aside as president to permit elections, but remained head of the armed forces. He returned in December 1972 in a second coup. This time there were few casualties. Mr. López himself was removed from power in a 1975 coup, amid a bribery scandal in which he was implicated in a $1.25 million payment by United Brands Co., the successor to United Fruit Co.

Now, who is to be believed?

Mr. López Arellano was born on June 30, 1921, in Danli, Honduras, and learned fluent English at the American School in Tegucigalpa. He enlisted in the Honduran Air Force, became a pilot and trained in Arizona during World War II. By the time of the 1956 coup, he had risen to chief of security in the Air Force. Mr. López Arellano, who went on from his military and political career to become president of the Honduran national airline, is survived by his wife, Gloria Figueroa, and several children.

Another difference: the Journal has his education thus: A career military officer who attended flight school in the U.S. during World War II, Mr. López served as minister of defense in the late 1950s. He had a reputation for opposing communism at a time when policy makers in Washington feared Cuba would export its revolution around Latin America.

And the Times makes no mention at all about the moon rock Nixon gave López Arellano.

May 18, 2010 - By Douglas Martin - NY Times

Shot in head, Walks away

Not an obit, but still worth a look.

FEBRUARY 15, 2010

U.S. Marine Walks Away From Shot to Helmet in Afghanistan

By MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS

MARJAH, Afghanistan—It is hard to know whether Monday was a very bad day or a very good day for Lance Cpl. Andrew Koenig.

On the one hand, he was shot in the head. On the other, the bullet bounced off him.

In one of those rare battlefield miracles, an insurgent sniper hit Lance Cpl. Koenig dead on in the front of his helmet, and he walked away from it with a smile on his face.

Lance Cpl. Andrew Koenig shows the spot on his helmet where a Taliban bullet struck, almost centered, between the eyes.
"I don't think I could be any luckier than this," Lance Cpl. Koenig said two hours after the shooting.
Lance Cpl. Koenig's brush with death came during a day of intense fighting for the Marines of Company B, 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment.
The company had landed by helicopter in the predawn dark on Saturday, launching a major coalition offensive to take Marjah from the Taliban.

The Marines set up an outpost in a former drug lab and roadside-bomb factory and soon found themselves under near-constant attack.

Lance Cpl. Koenig, a lanky 21-year-old with jug-handle ears and a burr of sandy hair, is a designated marksman. His job is to hit the elusive Taliban fighters hiding in the tightly packed neighborhood near the base.

The insurgent sniper hit him first. The Casper, Wyo., native was kneeling on the roof of the one-story outpost, looking for targets.

He was reaching back to his left for his rifle when the sniper's round slammed into his helmet.

The impact knocked him onto his back.

"I'm hit," he yelled to his buddy, Lance Cpl. Scott Gabrian, a 21-year-old from St. Louis.

Lance Cpl. Gabrian belly-crawled along the rooftop to his friend's side. He patted Lance Cpl. Koenig's body, looking for wounds.

Then he noticed that the plate that usually secures night-vision goggles to the front of Lance Cpl. Koenig's helmet was missing. In its place was a thumb-deep dent in the hard Kevlar shell.

Lance Cpl. Gabrian slid his hands under his friend's helmet, looking for an entry wound. "You're not bleeding," he assured Lance Cpl. Koenig. "You're going to be OK."

Marines took cover after coming under attack during the Marjah offensive Monday.

Lance Cpl. Koenig climbed down the metal ladder and walked to the company aid station to see the Navy corpsman.

The only injury: A small, numb red welt on his forehead, just above his right eye.

He had spent 15 minutes with Doc, as the Marines call the medics, when an insurgent's rocket-propelled grenade exploded on the rooftop, next to Lance Cpl. Gabrian.

The shock wave left him with a concussion and hearing loss.

He joined Lance Cpl. Koenig at the aid station, where the two friends embraced, their eyes welling.

The men had served together in Afghanistan in 2008, and Lance Cpl. Koenig had survived two blasts from roadside bombs.

"We've got each other's backs," Lance Cpl. Gabrian said, the explosion still ringing in his ears.

Word of Lance Cpl. Koenig's close call spread quickly through the outpost, as he emerged from the shock of the experience and walked through the outpost with a Cheshire cat grin.

"He's alive for a reason," Tim Coderre, a North Carolina narcotics detective working with the Marines as a consultant, told one of the men. "From a spiritual point of view, that doesn't happen by accident."

Gunnery Sgt. Kevin Shelton, whose job is to keep the Marines stocked with food, water and gear, teased the lance corporal for failing to take care of his helmet.

"I need that damaged-gear statement tonight," Gunnery Sgt. Shelton told Lance Cpl. Koenig. It was understood, however, that Lance Cpl. Koenig would be allowed to keep the helmet as a souvenir.

Gunnery Sgt. Shelton, a 36-year-old veteran from Nashville, said he had never seen a Marine survive a direct shot to the head.

But next to him was Cpl. Christopher Ahrens, who quietly mentioned that two bullets had grazed his helmet the day the Marines attacked Marjah. The same thing, he said, happened to him three times in firefights in Iraq.

Cpl. Ahrens, 26, from Havre de Grace, Md., lifted the camouflaged cloth cover on his helmet, exposing the holes where the bullets had entered and exited.

He turned it over to display the picture card tucked inside, depicting Michael the Archangel stamping on Lucifer's head. "I don't need luck," he said.

After his moment with Lance Cpl. Gabrian, Lance Cpl. Koenig put his dented helmet back on his head and climbed the metal ladder to resume his rooftop duty within an hour of being hit.

"I know any one of these guys would do the same," he explained. "If they could keep going, they would."

Peg Mullen, 92, Who Fanned Her Anger Over Son’s Death Into Antiwar Drive, Dies
by DOUGLAS MARTIN
October 6, 2009

Peg Mullen, an Iowa farm wife who made herself a living symbol of loss after her son was killed in Vietnam, as she sharply questioned the military’s explanations and became an outspoken antiwar crusader, died Friday in La Porte City, Iowa. She was 92.

Her family announced the death.

After her son Michael was killed by shrapnel from United States artillery on Feb. 18, 1970, Mrs. Mullen did not disguise her rage. She used his death benefit to buy two half-page advertisements in The Des Moines Register, each with more than 700 crosses, one for each Iowan killed in the war.

C. D. B. Bryan, an author and journalist, wrote about the suffering of Mrs. Mullen and her family in “Friendly Fire,” a book that was serialized in The New Yorker and received wide attention when published in 1976.

Bryan, C. D. B. (Courtlandt Dixon Barnes). (1976). Friendly fire. New York: Putnam.
959.704 B

In 1979, the book was made into a television movie starring Carol Burnett as Mrs. Mullen. It won an Emmy for best drama special.

Mrs. Mullen from the start refused to believe the Pentagon’s account of Michael’s death, that he was killed in an accident. Mr. Bryan’s investigation eventually laid out considerable evidence that the official story was, indeed, true. Mrs. Mullen remained skeptical.

She wrote her own book in 1995, “Unfriendly Fire: A Mother’s Memoir,” expanding on her doubts. Around 40 of her son’s letters added poignancy to the story.

Mullen, Peg, (1995). Unfriendly fire: a mother's memoir. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press
959.7043 M


Mrs. Mullen’s obstinacy, distrust of officialdom and wicked humor characterized her decades of antiwar activity, including those following the Vietnam War. An e-mail message she wrote to a columnist for The Register in 2002 showed her raw emotional power.

“I have no idea of your age,” she wrote the columnist, “but I hope you never have to stand in a quiet corner of an airport and say goodbye to a son in uniform, knowing in your heart that you’ll never see him again.

“I hope you never suffer the horror of a military man sitting at your kitchen table trying to tell how your son died — then wait 10 days for his body to be returned and his casket unloaded in a darkened corner of the same airport.”

Mr. Bryan suggested in his book that the Mullen family’s pain might be seen as a larger lesson of the Vietnam War, ultimately more important than definitively assigning blame for Michael’s death. Writing of the atmosphere in which the Mullens and similarly stricken families lived, Mr. Bryan wrote of “those sounds which were not spoken at all: the slam of a hand hitting the table in rage, the breath caught because an onrushing memory was causing too much pain.”

Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, Michael’s commander in Vietnam, met with Mrs. Mullen and her husband and tried to answer her questions as clearly as he could. But he could not satisfy them.

“To me, the death of Michael Mullen was not just one tragedy, but two: the needless death of a young man, and the bitterness that was consuming his parents,” the general wrote in his autobiography.

Margaret Goodyear was born in Pocahontas, Iowa, in 1917, and after graduating from high school moved to Des Moines to work in various federal jobs. In 1941, she married Oscar Mullen, known as Gene. They settled on the 120-acre farm near La Porte City that had been in the family for four generations. In addition to farming, Mr. Mullen worked for Rath Packing and John Deere. Mrs. Mullen worked at J. C. Penney and Santa Claus Industries.

Mrs. Mullen’s mother had been county Democratic chairwoman in the 1920s, and she herself was an active Democrat, serving as a delegate at the party’s 1964, 1968 and 1972 national conventions. Her forebodings about Vietnam were solidifying into opposition before the death of Michael, who had been a graduate student in biochemistry when he was drafted in 1968.

In an interview in 2005 with The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, Wash., she remembered trying to comfort a friend whose son had died in the war by saying, “He died for our country.”

The friend snapped that Mrs. Mullen should never say that to anyone again. “You can’t justify what’s going on,” the friend said.

After Michael was killed, Mrs. Mullen refused a military funeral and spurned her son’s medals. She returned President Richard M. Nixon’s letter with the note, “Send it to the next damn fool.”

Emphasis added.

She declined a free grave marker with a military inscription. She bought a tombstone, and used the verb “killed” rather than “died.”

Mr. Mullen died in 1986.

Mrs. Mullen is survived by another son, John; her daughters, Patricia Hulting and Mary DeJana; and six grandchildren.

Mrs. Mullen’s militancy never abated. At 74, she rode a bus for 38 hours to protest the first Persian Gulf war. In 2005, at 88, she said she was furious that she could not join Cindy Sheehan, a mother who lost a son in the Iraq war, in Ms. Sheehan’s protest outside President George W. Bush’s ranch in Texas.