HOST: [00:00:00] December of 1967 was a pivotal time to arrive in Vietnam. A month later, during the Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebration known as Tet, the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong launched more than 100 simultaneous attacks across South Vietnam, a level of coordinated aggression they weren’t supposed to be capable of in territory that was supposed to be firmly controlled by the US and its allies. From a strictly military standpoint, the Tet Offensive was a defeat for the North, but the fact that it could happen at all would alter the course of the war. American public sentiment about its prosecution, and the direction of a presidency, Joe Zengerle couldn’t have seen any of this coming when he arrived at USA RV headquarters in Ben Hoa that December. He was a graduate of West Point, Airborne School and Ranger School, and had already accumulated impressive experience in both infantry and intelligence roles. Arriving in Vietnam as the new Special Assistant to General William Westmoreland, Joe held a unique vantage point as the world in the first half of 1968 became unrecognizable. Stick around. From the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, Founders of The Wall. This is Echoes of the Vietnam War. I’m your host, Michael Croan, bringing you stories of service, sacrifice, and healing from people who still feel the impact of that conflict… More than 50 years later. This is Episode 45: Joseph Zengerle.

HOST: [00:01:54] Well, 2023 is shaping up to be a big year for our little podcast. We’ve got big plans and even bigger ambitions, but you know, it all starts with stories. So we’re asking for a little audience participation. We have a couple of ideas for upcoming episodes, one on replacement companies and another on Tunnel Rats, but we’re having trouble finding interview subjects for these topics.

HOST: [00:02:17] So if you or someone you know had either of those jobs in Vietnam that is either processing men into and out of the war or clearing and destroying enemy tunnel complexes, we’d love to hear from you. Send an email to [email protected] to get the conversation started. Do you have loved ones who survived the Vietnam War but died after returning home? Did you know you can honor them at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial? We’re accepting applications for the 2023 In Memory Honor Roll through March 29th. We also have an In Memory Facebook group with almost 20,000 members, so be sure to join that if you want to feel part of a community of people who’ve experienced a loss similar to yours. You’ll find the In Memory Honor Roll application and a link to the Facebook group by going to NPR.org and clicking on In Memory. We’re just about six weeks away now from kicking off the 2023 tour of the Wall That Heals. That’s VVMF’s exact replica of The Wall at three-quarter scale that travels to cities and towns all across America. If you want to know more about this traveling exhibit and the impact it can have on a community, check out Episode 15 of this podcast. More than 100 communities applied to host the Wall That Heals this year, which is the 50th Anniversary of the close of combat operations in Vietnam. The tour schedule includes more than 30 cities and towns stretching from South Carolina to Idaho, and Maine to California. Is it coming anywhere near your town? Visit vvmf.org to find out.

SINISE: [00:03:55] Hello, I’m Gary Sinise. Nearly 3 million Americans served in Vietnam, and more than 58,000 have their names inscribed on The Wall. Those that pay the ultimate price in service to America. Some might ask why the Vietnam War still matters. It matters because more than 58,000 lives were cut short and their families forever changed. It matters because we should never forget how Vietnam veterans were treated when they came home. A lesson learned so that our current generation of veterans are treated with respect. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, the organization that built The Wall, works to ensure that future generations will understand the war’s impact. I’m asking you to help keep the promise The Wall was built on. Never forget. Visit vvmf.org to find out how you can get involved.

HOST: [00:04:57] Joe Zengerle is a long time friend of VVMF. He was on the original VVMF National Sponsoring Committee and provided the hangar at Andrews Air Force Base where the design competition for the memorial was held. Long before that, though, he built a distinguished military career, earning the Bronze Star and the Outstanding Airborne Leadership Award for Excellence and Service. Joe was the first Vietnam veteran confirmed by the Senate for a policy position in the Pentagon. He shared his story with Jim Knotts, starting with his days at West Point.

ZENGERLE: [00:05:31] At West Point, uh, discipline is an important, uh, feature of life. Um, and if you varied from the standard, you would get what are called demerits. And if you got too many demerits over the course of a particular month, the only way that you could. Uh, save yourself from, uh, being asked to leave the Academy was to walk punishment tours on the area. So that, let’s say the the maximum you could get for a month was ten demerits. If you got 12 demerits, you’d get two hours on the area while everybody on a Saturday afternoon was dating or sleeping or doing something else, you’d have to walk the area in full parade regalia after being inspected, where they could find more things to give you demerits for. I had, at the end of my four years at West Point, 100 hours on the area, which means or over 100, which means I was a member of the Century Club. There are only three or four members of my class in the Century Club, and the only thing I could say to defend myself is Eisenhower was also a member of the Century Club. So somehow I matured into, uh, uh, a fairly aggressive and creative young officer. I went to Airborne and Ranger schools. Um, and I was also a member of the glee club at West Point and the Protestant chapel choir. Um, and that meant that I could really belt out a Jody cadence for the Airborne troops… ‘If I served in a Russian front/Drop me down….’ I can’t remember anymore. It’s a long time ago, but in any event, uh.

KNOTTS: [00:07:29] It was probably not PG rated anyway, but. Yeah, exactly.

ZENGERLE: [00:07:35] So that was the beginning of my career in, uh, in the Army. And then I went to Germany and had met my wife as a result of my classmate who introduced, uh, me to his girlfriend working for a Senator Morton on Capitol Hill. We visited her office and put the pressure on her to fix us up, and she called her friend, working for Senator Russell Long, as an intern, who had already had a date for the next day. And I needed a date right away because my classmate and I, Mike Leonard, were going to England for Shakespeare’s 400th birthday and we didn’t want to cancel our MATS flight, military air transport tickets. So May Lee and Senator Morton’s office said to Linda, oh, Linda. And she broke down in tears and said, can’t you see this guy? The next day, Linda broke her date with an intern working for Senator Keating from New York, and we met the next day. She was the first Jewish woman I ever met. This was in July of 1964, and I went off to to Ranger School, and Airborne School, and I got a letter from Linda sitting in the Senate gallery in August of 1964, and it was a tear stained letter. And she said, I’m sitting in the Senate gallery and they’re passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.

ZENGERLE: [00:09:02] Uh, that was the beginning of the Vietnam War that summer. Guns and butter crossed. Lyndon Johnson wanted a the War on Poverty and the Great Society… And instead he got the Vietnam War. Uh, and that was the summer it all happened. So Linda, luckily was going to school in Geneva that year when I was assigned to the 24th Division in Augsburg and Munich, Germany. So we dated over the Alps. Um, and I decided to become Jewish, uh, to marry Linda. And my father disowned me. Uh, and it was a difficult period of time for us, but we were certainly a happy and moved to Nuremberg to take this intelligence job. And so the combination of infantry and intelligence experience that I’d had, I guess, set me up for this job that they assigned me to a year later to go to Vietnam, and late ’67, uh, as a special assistant to General Westmoreland, uh, to handle his, uh, special intelligence work and also a back channel. And it was a job that required a lot of hard work and focus and discretion, uh, as well as a security clearance and so forth. And so Linda and I had a year of stabilized tour with my intelligence assignment in Germany, and I went to Vietnam at the end of that year.

KNOTTS: [00:10:31] So when is this this is, this.

ZENGERLE: [00:10:33] Is this is late ’67.

KNOTTS: [00:10:35] December ’67.

ZENGERLE: [00:10:37] December ’67.

KNOTTS: [00:10:38] And you’re on a plane headed for Vietnam.

ZENGERLE: [00:10:40] I’m on a plane headed to Vietnam. So I arrived in Vietnam. Um, and it was. Any time you enter a war zone for the first time, you don’t know what to expect. You have no clue. So we got on this bus from the aircraft and Ben Hoa USARV headquarters. Uh, and, gosh, there were bars over the window and the bus was well guarded and took us to a, uh, place in Saigon, down the road where we could sleep overnight and, um, got an orientation. And ended up in MACV headquarters with my predecessor, walking around to meet various people that I’d have to get to know for my job, which required basically a visit to General Westmoreland, the commander of the Military Advisory Command, Vietnam, and his deputy, General Creighton Abrams. His, uh, basically talked to those guys every day about stuff coming over the channels that, uh, I especially was responsible for. And the bowels of MACV headquarters, uh, sensitive intelligence and sensitive communications and, uh, messages from, uh, the Pentagon. General Wheeler, as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Rostow and the White House, and Ellsworth Bunker, the ambassador down the road, and, um, Sullivan in Thailand and. Uh, just a lot of communications coming back and forth. Um, I had described in a piece that I wrote for The New York Times, uh, that one of my, uh, colleagues in the office, uh, took me downtown and Saigon in early January of ’68, and it was like, uh, a social occasion. We went to the Continental Hotel, and we were sitting on a table outside under a, uh, a rolling, swirling fan above us, ordering drinks and looking out at the cyclos, cycling around in the circle in front of the hotel. And you’d almost not be aware that you were in a war zone, except for occasional explosions in the distance. Um, and we went to a place where we got a massage, and I had a small Vietnamese woman powder my back and walk on it and cracked my back with her toes. Um, that’s not something you would ordinarily expect to be happening in a hot war. Um, but then I got back, uh, to my office, and within a couple of days, in early ’68, um, I kept trying to get a hold of my plebe roommate, uh, who was commanding a unit up country. Uh, his name was Kirby Wilcox, and I couldn’t ever get through. Finally, I got through on one of these hand-cranked phones that they use in in the field, I got the first sergeant of my ex-roommate’s company, and I said, I’d like to talk to Captain Wilcox. And his his response was like a Saturday Night Live skit.

ZENGERLE: [00:14:23] “Uh, sir, I’m sorry you’re too late. Captain Wilcox tripped the booby trap coming across the stream bed on patrol and banks on primary this morning. His last words were ‘Top come get me.'” And that really struck me. I mean, I learned that my roommate had died within hours of my call. And boy, did the war ever come home. Kaboom! Just like that. Really sobered me up. And within a few days after that, I was in my dock in downtown Saigon. In the middle of the morning, I was hearing explosions, and I went out to the balcony and looked, and there was the gunship firing into a cemetery a couple of blocks away. I mean, this is close up stuff. And so I was just in my shorts. It was hot trying to sleep and Saigon. I grabbed my weapon and I went downstairs and went to the entry to the block, and they had a little guard post there, and jeep came by and we sort of commandeered the Jeep so we’d have communication. We had a bunch of people that we needed to protect in the hotel, and we were trying to communicate to find out what was going on, because there were there were explosions and gunfire all over the city. Uh. But we couldn’t get through on the radio that the Jeep had, because I remember, and these are all very vivid memories that don’t go away.

ZENGERLE: [00:16:18] I remember listening on the radio of the Jeep to this soldier who’d been wounded and was crying for help because he was badly wounded. And he was also saying that describing enemy troops that are coming toward him. And he wouldn’t let go of the push to talk. So we couldn’t use the radio. And I don’t remember what happened after that. I, I moved to another location. I mean, to tell you how how surprising and thoroughgoing this event was. The Embassy, United States Embassy was, oh, a mile or two away from our block. They have pictures of the Viet Cong inside the embassy looking out, uh, the night of that attack and that morning. That was the Tet Offensive that erupted all over the country. Uh, and it basically marked the end of the war as we knew it. Uh, Westmoreland, who I worked for, uh, had been fairly optimistic testifying before the Congress the previous month. Uh, saying it looks like things are starting to go our way or words to that effect. But after the Tet Offensive, uh, it was basically all over for us. And it’s hard to know exactly whether the effect was military or political. I guess if I had to balance it out, I would say the effect of the Tet Offensive was more political than military in terms of, uh, actual defeat of enemy forces or victory for other the enemy.

ZENGERLE: [00:18:29] Uh, there was a report that was created by Westmoreland civilian deputy Robert Komer, who came out of the CIA. They called him “Blowtorch.” Uh Komer was a blowtorch, and he was responsible for producing the Hamlet Evaluation System. The HES system. It was a color-coded chart that showed the varying degrees of control we had on a Hamlet by Hamlet basis throughout South Vietnam below the Demilitarized Zone. And if you took a look at that color coding, you’d have a great deal of confidence that we controlled this area for all day long and all night long, we controlled such and such an area for most of the day – but not some of the night, and so forth. But the colors made you feel as though we were really making progress as you watched the colors advance from a year earlier to current time and so forth. By the time of the Tet Offensive, that Hamlet Evaluation System was, was blown up and never returned. Nobody relied on it anymore. It used to be something that people looked at every day to get a sense of the progress in the war, but it was completely misleading in terms of not predicting what would happen at the Tet Offensive.

KNOTTS: [00:19:55] Well, and I want to go back for just a second here, because you start off the article in the New York Times, which I think is very important. You mentioned it very briefly, but in putting the Tet Offensive into perspective and why the political effect was so great, I want to just recount the fact that, um, General Westmoreland, at the direction of the president, had been on a train tour throughout the country to a couple of places in the fall of 1967, saying essentially the same thing: the war is all but won. And they were reassuring the American people the progress being made. And I think at one time he said something to the effect of they are not even able to mount a credible offensive.

ZENGERLE: [00:20:48] Oh, I didn’t realize that.

KNOTTS: [00:20:50] And and so then, end of January 1968, all of a sudden, simultaneous attacks, near-simultaneous attacks…

ZENGERLE: [00:21:01] Throughout the country…

KNOTTS: [00:21:02] A several-hour period throughout South Vietnam. Yeah. That the US and the ARVN, the South Vietnamese Army, were patrolling, occupying and other things, and according to the this Hamlet Evaluation System, it thought was safe. All of a sudden, over 100 near-simultaneous attacks across the country shocked the nation.

ZENGERLE: [00:21:26] Yup.

KNOTTS: [00:21:28] And you know what came out of that the first week or so, I think it was less than a week where Walter Cronkite made his famous report. Yes, yes. And that’s what really kicked off a lot of things, uh, including President Johnson saying if I’ve lost concrete, Cronkite, I’ve lost the nation. Yeah.

ZENGERLE: [00:21:50] Well, I the most specific example of, uh, its consequence in Vietnam, and I wasn’t aware of the train tour and so forth, because we were leaving Germany in the fall of ’67, coming back, I had this TDY in the Pentagon. Lynda was looking for a job. I was thinking about going to…. I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to the current political environment. I was preparing to go to war myself. Uh, and so I sort of missed that. And I, historically I missed it, too, i wasn’t aware that he he had said that about, you know, confidence. But not long after the Tet Offensive, Westmoreland, uh, uh, called me up to his office, one day, in an unusual move, and he gave me a message, and he said, I want you to send this to General Wheeler, uh, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. And he said, I don’t want you to show it to anybody. Don’t talk about it. Um, I have a memory that he requested 212,000 more troops, but I think I’m pretty clear it was at least more than 200,000. And I used our backchannel capacity and privately sent this message to General Wheeler. Um, and my understanding of the trace of that message is that it went from Wheeler to the new secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, uh, who was an impressive lawyer and very close to, uh, Lyndon Johnson over the years as an advisor.

ZENGERLE: [00:23:34] Um, and Clifford, uh, took the message into Johnson and said, we can’t do this. Uh, and basically, uh, that was the decision that ended the the Vietnam War as we knew it, we were no longer ramping up. We were ramping down. Vietnamization was about to come around the corner. Uh, and that happened, as a result of Lyndon Johnson’s decision to bring General Westmoreland back to Texas. I remember when he was back in Texas. Uh, uh, I got an emergency message, uh, in the early morning hours, and I woke up general Abrams. Um, it was all about the siege of the Citadel and Hue. Uh, and Abrams was such a competent, uh, man and such an impressive commander of troops, uh, basically marshaled forces himself, took charge, relieved the, the siege at, at Hue, which was in fact memorialized in a movie called Full Metal Jacket. That was the fight around Hue. It’s a nasty fight, but the point is, Westmoreland was back in Texas, as I recall, when all that happened, and West, and Abrams was fighting the war. And, um, after that, a General Westmoreland was promoted to become the Chief of Staff of the Army and left Vietnam, and General Abrams was appointed to take over as, uh, as they call them, COMUSMACV, Commander, U.S. Forces Military Advisory Command, Vietnam.

KNOTTS: [00:25:32] And when was that?

ZENGERLE: [00:25:33] That was in, uh, the spring of 1968. I want to say April, May time frame. Um, and the timing. I’d have to go back and and check the records. But it was… I think it was before Lyndon Johnson gave his great speech to the country in which he declared, “I shall not seek, and will not accept the nomination of my party to be your next president.” He declined to run for presidency. He was going to devote himself to winding down Vietnam as best he could. That, that was what General Abrams job came to be, Vietnamization. Turn it over to the Vietnamese and and leave country. We’re not going to support a force that was going to break down the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese. And the war in that sense, was was dramatically changed. Um, it changed lots of attitudes and lots of minds. But Abrams was an extremely capable guy. Uh, and and someone we could all have confidence in. And he was, he established, in my mind, an extraordinary principle that I’ve always thought about, uh, when there had been, uh, helicopter gunships that got misdirected in the Cholon section of Saigon and fired upon friendly forces, and I think a couple of, uh, political figures – Vietnamese political figures – were wounded and killed in that, uh, friendly fire mistake. And I remember Clark Clifford sending a message to General Abrams excoriating Abrams for command and control of friendly forces, so as to avoid this, this conflagration and this terrible mistake.

ZENGERLE: [00:27:46] And I remember Abrams. Giving me a message back to the Secretary of Defense, writing that he had a son who was wounded in the war, had been over in Thailand. He understood the grave responsibility he had to protect the lives and health of everyone under his command, and that if the Secretary had lost confidence in his ability to command the troops and control the war prosecution, then he could consider that message his resignation on the spot. And Clifford wrote back, uh, taking the offered resignation off the table and expressing confidence in General Abrams and so forth. And it never became a public question that Abrams had offered to resign. But I think about resignations and principle by people who make a difference, and I contrast General Abrams offer to resign, on that situation, uh, and I – sadly – uh, relate it and compare it to Colin Powell as Secretary of State, uh, when he was brought to the United Nations and had been influenced by Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld to portray, uh, weapons of mass destruction as being alive and well in Iraq and providing the basis for, uh, a decision to send the troops into Iraq. And I thought to myself that if General Abrams had been in charge in Vietnam and said that he wanted to bomb the industrial facilities, the war making facilities around Hanoi, to close the port in Haiphong, where shipping supplies were arriving, to chase the enemy across the border to the Ho Chi Minh Trail and Laos and Cambodia, uh, to engage in hot pursuit across the borders.

ZENGERLE: [00:30:23] If A, Abrams had been confronted with those limitations during the hot part of the war before the Tet Offensive, My guess is he might well have tendered his resignation then, rather than live with those limitations, saying, “I can’t live a war, win a war under those restrictions.” And I think the restrictions, as I understand it historically, and I’m no scholar of the matter, but I think Dean Rusk, the Secretary of State, was worried about going over the borders like that because he didn’t want to bring China into the war, much the same as General MacArthur wanted across the Yalu in the Korean War. And President Truman didn’t want to risk bringing the Chinese into that. Uh, so these are all sort of global considerations. Um, but they all matter in the prosecution of a war, and I still remember the high regard I had for General Abrams, who had the strength to stand up and say, if you don’t have confidence in the way I’m running this operation, then I resign on the spot. Quite impressive. Anyway, that was the the Tet Offensive was the end of the war. Uh, from the standpoint of, uh, aggressive, “we’re going to win this,” uh, and “we’re going to do whatever it takes to win it.”

HOST: [00:31:50] In June of 1968, with Westmoreland gone and Vietnamization ramping up, Joe moved to a new assignment, commanding a special intelligence unit for the 23rd Infantry Division at Chu Lai in southern I Corps.

ZENGERLE: [00:32:03] I had an unusual assignment with the Americal Division, in fact, my hooch with the Americal was only a stone’s throw from Colin Powell’s hooch. I was a captain. He was a major. Um, and we had occasion to deal with the commanding general of the division, uh, Charles Gettys. Gettys had been the deputy J-3 and the Joint Staff before he came to Vietnam to command the division. And the division was a controversial one. I think Getty’s predecessor was General Koster, who became the superintendent at West Point after his command of the Americal Division, and then was… Lost that job, because while he’d been commanding the Americal Division, the My Lai massacre occurred in his area of operation. And that had not been exposed or, uh, investigated properly, and as a result, he lost his job as Superintendent, and I think he retired. I don’t know whether he was, uh, lost, uh, lost a star, but but his career was ended by by the resurrection of My Lai. And so the, the Americal Division had a very, uh, controversial kind of position in all this. Um.

KNOTTS: [00:33:29] So what was your position in the division?

ZENGERLE: [00:33:31] I commanded a special intelligence unit. Um, and provided information to the commanding general and his leading brigade commanders. The Americal had been called Task Force Oregon when they landed in southern I Corps, which was a rice paddy area below the mountain, mountainous area. It was a very hot Viet Cong-controlled area. When Task Force Oregon landed there under Westmoreland’s command, and it was converted with three heavy uh battalions, The 11th, uh, I can’t remember the the numbers of the, uh brigades. Rather… I can’t remember the number of the brigades anymore… One was in Duc Pho, one was in Chu Lai, and one was further north toward Danang. But I used to go out and deal with the lower-level commanders on a weekly basis and provide them with information telling this information about the troops and so forth. Um, scariest stuff I ever did was get in helicopters. I mean, I didn’t mind ground fire. I didn’t even mind rocket attacks… What I minded were getting in those helicopters and going out to meet those guys, um, at the brigade command headquarters and out in the field. I once got on a helicopter when, uh, during monsoon season and and, uh, God, I remember updrafts and downdrafts would take that chopper thousands of feet up and thousands of feet down in seconds. And I remember I had a pretty good voice. I remember from airborne school, I was yelling as loud as I could just to get rid of the the nervous energy as that chopper was going up and down, and wondering whether I was going to ever land on solid ground again. Uh, those chopper pilots were the toughest guys. They had the toughest job, as far as I’m concerned, of anybody in the war.. Going into hot fire zones and so forth. They were a remarkable group of people.

HOST: [00:35:40] In December of 1968, Joe went back to the world. He talked to Jim about his first experience reconnecting with the civilian population on a TWA flight from San Francisco to Washington. After an extended and frantic effort to catch that flight, Joe stepped on board just as they were closing the cabin door.

ZENGERLE: [00:35:59] I stood in the front of the aircraft, I dropped my bags, and I was sweating and heaving and nervous and red-eyed, with my boots and my garrison cap and my. I was skinny, I lost 30 pounds in Vietnam. I was brown from being out in the jungle, and they closed the door behind me. Woof, woof. And I looked down the aisle of the plane, and there were all these people in civilian clothes with their drinks, and their ice, and their papers, and they had little screens, little television screens, and they all looked up at me. I must have been, uh, some sort of scary image. They took, the stewardesses, took my bags up front and went to my seat. Not a single person said a word to me. No “Welcome Home.” They all seemed sort of scared. And I told that story, uh, years later. Uh, gosh, I guess it must have been ten years later to a journalist in New York. Um, and at the end of telling the story of my coming home, I heard crying in the corner. I turned around and, uh, there was a woman crying, and I said, well, who’s that? It turns out it was the journalist’s wife. And I said, well, what’s what’s wrong? Her name was Lynda Van Devanter. And Lynda said she had been a nurse at an evacuation hospital in Vietnam for a year. And boy, they saw some bad stuff in those evac hospitals. They took care of some really hurt guys. And if she did that for a year, you can imagine what she went through. And she was crying and she said, “I did that for a year, and I’ve never talked about it until I heard your story.” And after that, she wrote a book called “Home Before Morning.” And that book became the basis for the television series China Beach.

HOST: [00:38:39] Lynda Van Devanter Buckley passed away in November of 2002 from causes that she attributed to her wartime exposure to chemical agents and pesticides. She is one of only a handful of women on our In Memory Honor Roll. Joe’s roommate, Charles Kirby Wilcox, is memorialized on the wall at panel 34, East line 12. Joe is a lawyer in Washington and currently serves as the executive director of the clinic for Legal Assistance to Service Members, which has helped clients from all five branches of the armed forces in various legal matters. He and his wife, Lynda, have endowed the annual Zengerle Family Lecture in the Arts and Humanities at West Point. If you want to read the piece he wrote for The New York Times on the 50th Anniversary of the Tet Offensive, you’ll find a link to it in our episode notes. We’ll be back in two weeks with more stories of service, sacrifice, and healing.

HOST: [00:39:40] We’ll see you then.

Full Interview with Joe Zengerle