June 5,2020
Hello ,
With hundreds of thousands of people protesting across the nation, demanding— Listen to us! Black Lives Matter!—it seemed an appropriate time for the story of Doris “Lucki” Allen, a black soldier in the Women's Army Corps who served three tours in Vietnam.
George Floyd's plea, "I can't breathe" echoes centuries of countless black voices calling out for justice, for humane and equal treatment, to simply be heard and valued.
If the men of the U.S. military command in Vietnam had listened to Intelligence Analyst Doris Allen, the biggest surprise attack of the war, the Tet Offensive, would not have been a surprise!
Listening to one black woman could have blunted the Tet Offensive
“The shock of Tet was just enormous,” said Barry Zorthian, head of press relations for the US Military Command in Saigon. “That front page of The Washington Post in the morning, with the pictures of the American Embassy — the symbol of everything, not destroyed, but
pretty well damaged — and dead people all around — that had to be one of the great, great shocks and traumatic events in Washington.”
Americans watched the Tet Offensive unfold in real time. The attacks jolted a nation largely oblivious to the bloody events taking place in a tiny, faraway Asian country. Photo courtesy Warren K. Leffler, U.S. News & World Report Magazine / Public Domain
In phase one of the surprise attack launched by North Vietnam in the pre-dawn hours of
January 31, 1968, U.S. Forces suffered:
4,124 killed
19,295 wounded
604 missing
estimated 14,000 civilians killed.
These figures include casualties suffered by U.S. allies, Thailand, Australia and South Korea. South Vietnamese Army losses are not included, but more than equaled these military totals.
Doris volunteered for duty in Vietnam, arriving in the fall of 1967, and becoming one of only nine female Warrant Officers in U.S. Military Intelligence, and the only black woman.
As an enlisted intelligence analyst, her job was to collect reports on troop movements of the enemy, Viet Cong, and North Vietnamese Army, in South Vietnam and Cambodia.
She noticed a pattern in the reports from the field and deduced the communists were amassing troops and preparing for an all-out assault. She sent this information up the chain of command, but no one listened to her warning.
In actuality, Communist leaders meticulously planned a surprise offensive they would spring during Tet Nguyen Dan, Vietnamese New Year, the most popular holiday in Vietnam.
Some 84,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops assaulted military bases and hundreds of cities throughout South Vietnam, including Saigon, where elite forces broke through the perimeter of the U.S. Embassy.
Thirty days before the attack, Doris had filed a report detailing intelligence portending the attack. In an interview years later, Doris said:
"I asked myself why they weren't listening and why I wasn't being heard. I just recently came up with the reason they didn't believe me -- they weren't prepared for me. They didn't know how to look beyond the WAC, black woman in military intelligence."
It was not because she wasn't highly qualified to analyze intelligence. In 1963, Doris had been the first woman to graduate from the US Army Intelligence School as a Prisoner of War Interrogator, and she was an honor graduate of the Army Intelligence Analysis Course.
Prior to Vietnam she worked for the U.S, Defense department analyzing intelligence from Latin America, including keeping watch on the activities of Fidel Castro. She had proven her ability to see patterns in the reports that came over her desk.
But Doris hit roadblocks from her very first day in Vietnam. She arrived at the U.S. Army base at Long Binh on a plane load of more than 200 men. They all marched off to where they were supposed to go, while Doris waited ten hours for someone to figure out where she should report.
"When I first got to Vietnam it was a matter of 'You women shouldn't be here in the first place, now we have to protect you,'" said Doris. "They didn't like us being there. The nurses were fine because they were in a traditionally feminine role. Men would say, 'We need the nurses.' But here come these other women, taking up the good jobs that the men had comfortably sitting behind a desk."
Doris refused to be intimidated by conditions and men in Vietnam. She'd only in Long Binh a few days when a male officer took the liberty of slapping her bottom. Doris smacked him back. And warned him she would not tolerate such behavior.
SGT Doris "Lucki" Allen and her Commanding Officer Camp Stoneman, California, who happened to be her sister who was also a WAC, and whose name I have not been able to discover.
A year after the Tet Offensive, Doris once again put together reports of intelligence suggesting the communists would attack U.S. Marine forces in Quang Tri Province.
This time when her superiors didn't listen to her, fearing her report would be ignored and buried, she put up a more forceful defense of her work.
Doris refused to leave the briefing room until an officer agreed to test her claim. Test shots beyond the camp perimeter prompted rocket fire confirming the enemy was in position to attack. Doris's action saved the lives of as many as one hundred Marines.
After three tours in Vietnam, continued in the army as an agent in counter intelligence, working to stop espionage, sabotage, subversion and treason directed against the US Army and the Department of Defense.
She retired from the service in 1980 after 30 years in the military and went on to work as a private investigator, in time going back to school to earn a doctorate in psychology. She is the only woman ever inducted into the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame.
In 2015, the army named an award after Doris that is given each year to a deserving graduate of the U.S. Army Warrant Officer Career College. Below she is recognized when the CW3 (R) Doris Allen Distinguished Honor Graduate Award was first given under its new name.
Photo courtesy U.S. Army at the Fort Rucker Aviation Museum, 2015.
When Doris Allen confronted racism in the army, she chose not to blame or become bitter at those who "weren't prepared" to see her capabilities and value her for who she was. She showed courage in choosing this path, deciding to be on the lookout for prejudge and always know
the problem was "them" and not her.
It's our turn now as white people in America, to prepare ourselves to become aware of racism, to see bias within ourselves that we may not have seen before, and to have the courage to know that the problem is ours. Tackling it is long overdue.
Sources:
The list of familiar names grows longer.
Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Antwon Rose, Tamir Rice, Amaud Arbery, and now George Floyd.
The few names that stick in the minds of white America are a small percentage of the unarmed black men and boys killed by police in this country. Scroll through this list, see the faces, say the names.
Until next week...
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