Douglas W. Bonnot

This is quite a book. I didn't quite know what to expect from THE SENTINEL & THE SHOOTER, a non-fiction book about the ASA in Vietnam, since so much of what the ASA did during that war (and before and after too) was classified. Well, it turns out that a lot of our work from that era has since been de-classified. So Doug Bonnot makes the most of it, letting us in on not just some of the content of what our SIGINT people collected in tactical combat situations, but also on the methods used, some conventional and some a bit unorthodox. For example, I didn't know that captured Chi-Com radios were often used for our own intercept against the NVA and Viet Cong. And his descriptions of how we tapped into enemy landlines found in the jungle were very enlightening. Bonnot also gives plenty of ink to the conflicts between the dual chain-of-command, explaining the tension that could arise when EM and NCOs were unable to tell "everything" about what they did to the officers and command structure of the combat units they were directly supporting. I mean anyone who's ever served in the military knows that officers do NOT like being told they are "out of the loop" - that they do not have a "need to know." But these were very real restrictions imposed by the ASA command, which was in turn overseen by civilian intelligence authorities at "the Fort" back in Maryland. ASA types were supposed to keep a low profile wherever they were assigned, to maintain a separate and "unequal" presence in the midst of regular army units they worked next to. But the fact of the matter was, this was damn near impossible, not to say impractical, in a combat situation. And this is the story of one particular unit, the 265th Radio Research Company, or RRC (Airborne), which was attached (notice I did NOT say "subordinate") to the famous 101st Airborne Division. (Note: "ASA" was never included in unit names in Vietnam; all ASA units became, for the duration, Radio Research Units, or RRU's.) The 101st units that the 265th supported for approximately five years were almost constantly stationed in forward areas, "in harm's way" you could even say. To be blunt, this was nearly always very dangerous duty. Because of this, the ASA personnel quickly learned the importance of sharing tactically significant intercept information with the unit they were supporting and co-located with. Doing this was often in direct conflict with their security directives from their own (ASA) command, but they did it anyway, and in the process undoubtedly saved the lives of countless soldiers.

Remembering my own ASA experiences at various field stations in Turkey and Germany, I recalled the eternal "soldier versus technician" argument and dilemma that often arose in those days, from the 60s into the early 80s. As EM and NCOs who had undergone many months of individual and specialized training, in my case as a Morse operator and later as a linguist, we would often grouse about periodic "soldier" stuff we were required to do - physical training, weapons cleaning and qualification, CBR training, field exercises, inspections, etc. All that regular "army" stuff that no one really much enjoys, except maybe the career guys we sneeringly called "lifers" or "retreads." After reading Bonnot's accounts of the ASA guys in Vietnam, I feel like a dumb jerk for holding that "elitist technician" attitude. Because those guys lived under very primitive conditions. They were a**hole-to-elboy with their combat counterparts and were in the same danger when their forward bases came under attack. They carried rifles everywhere they went, and when they weren't doing their regular jobs (which were performed under plenty dangerous conditions), they were on guard duty or sometimes manning the perimeter. Some of them manned mortars, most could fire a machine gun. They did their time filling sandbags to bolster their bunkers, probably griping and complaining about it the whole time, until they learned those sandbags could save their lives. As Bonnot puts it - "We lived in the dirt, we carried weapons, and we looked scruffy ... SIGINT Collection Teams deployed to the fire support bases were without the luxuries and simple amenities ... The austere and primitive living conditions on the fire support bases were also, quite unquestionably, more lethal."

The ASA troops helped with everything at these remote bases, even loading MedEvac choppers after intense firefights, giving them grim looks at what was happening to their grunt counterparts just outside, and sometimes inside, the wire ramparts. One of these ASA guys recalls this job in graphic detail -

"The first of the wounded we got to was lying on a cot cursing God; his right leg was blown off above the knee, his left leg was severed below the knee, his right arm was cut off above the elbow and his left hand was missing. He died as we lifted him onto the chopper. We were directed to remove him from the ship to make room for other seriously wounded."

Another man from the 265th, Traffic Analyst Bill Porter, recalls a fierce firefight in which he partook, after enemy sappers breached the wire and were wreaking havoc -

"I started up the hill with some others when I noticed some NVA making a hasty escape. I opened fire on them. I didn't notice another sapper that was a lot closer. He was shot by a trooper behind me and one round set off the satchel charges he had had wrapped around his body. The explosion was deafening and it rocked me back on my heels."

Later that same day, Porter's replacement arrived, and he choppered back to a rear area where while talking with some friends he felt something stuck to the temple of his glasses - "it was part of the VC that had blown up in front of me."

So no, you'll understand when I say that these guys probably never engaged in the "soldier vs technician" rant that we pampered Cold War veterans did. They were good techs and seasoned soldiers too, many of them earning the Combat Infantry Badge, Purple Hearts, and other various medals and awards during their Vietnam tours.

I have read numerous books about the Vietnam War, mostly memoirs, like Philip Caputo's classic A RUMOR OF WAR, Fred Downs's THE KILLING ZONE, Robert Mason's CHICKENHAWK, and Dr. Rick Snider's lesser-known gem, DELTA SIX: SOLDIER SURGEON. And there was Tracy Kidder's wry look at his time as an ASA officer, MY DETACHMENT. I've also read a lot of novels to come out of the war. The first was the late James Crumley's now-classic work, ONE TO COUNT CADENCE. Crumley was an ASA ditty-bopper who served in the Philippines, but never got to Vietnam. The first novel to come out of the war by a combatant was William Pelfrey's excellent THE BIG V. And just last year, MATTERHORN hit the bestseller charts, a mammoth work that author Karl Marlantes worked on for over thirty years.

Having read so many works like these, I guess my standards of what makes a good book are pretty high. So if I have any complaints about Doug Bonnot's book they would have to do with its language and structure. Bonnot spent 22 years in the army, probably much of that time as a senior NCO in administrative positions. He probably had to read - and write - a lot of reports. Military reports, and military-ese, are notorious for being screamingly boring and sometimes nearly impenetrable in their phrasing. I won't make that complaint about THE SENTINEL & THE SHOOTER, although there are sections here and there that I will confess I did some rapid "skim-reading." All those endless and repetitive unit designators, acronyms, abbreviations and jargon that sometimes serve to obscure rather than clarify - yeah, there's some of that here. So I had to keep reminding myself that this book is indeed a very necessary and long overdue "unit history." Because, as has already been noted by Bonnot and other reviewers (many of them ASA-ers who actually served in the 265th RRC), their story had never been told. In a way that's understandable - all that secrecy and layers of 'classification' that had to age off and disappear before it became officially okay to talk about it. So instead of criticizing Doug Bonnot's writing style - all that "official-ese" and "army-ese" and "government-ese," I'm going to recognize that this book is so much more than just a unit history, as evidenced by all the really interesting parts that tell the individual stories and exploits of the men, NCO's and officers of the 265th. And there were a lot of them (see the long list of names in the appendix at the back of the book), who rotated in and out of the unit over that five or six year period. They laughed and cried together, they were probably scared shitless together, they played practical jokes on each other. They endured primitive conditions. Some were wounded, some were killed. Bonnot has done yeoman's work in pulling all these stories together and researching the chronology of events. He has stayed in contact with these guys or reconnected with many of them while writing the book. He doesn't think of himself as the sole author of what is so obviously a labor of love. He prefers to call it "our book."

Kudos to you, Doug, and to all those other guys too. This is an important piece of work. Be proud.… (altro)