The Foreign Service Journal, January 2009

A n e-mail I received recently re- counted a dramatic, indeed heroic, event that took place during Operation Rolling Thunder, which—as older readers may recall — was the code name for the secret bombing of North Vietnam in the early part of that war. The mention of that operation reminded me of a very dif- ferent experience I had back then, one in which heroism played no role what- soever. My Foreign Service job in early 1965 involved standing rotating watches in the State Department Op- erations Center, monitoring informa- tion arriving from all sources and making sure the important stuff got to the pertinent senior levels right away. On one of the earliest days of “Rolling Thunder,” while being briefed for the midnight-to-8 a.m. watch, I was told we had lost an aircraft earlier that evening — the first such loss of this se- cret operation — and that the senior watch officer had phoned Secretary of State Dean Rusk at home to inform him. Rusk’s questions — and this was of vital interest to me in case it should happen again on my watch —were: First: Did the pilot get out safely? Second: Did the plane go down on our side of the North Vietnamese bor- der, where the operation’s secrecy could more easily be protected, or on the enemy’s side? Third: Precisely where did the plane go down? And don’t confuse the Sec- retary with map coordinates; what he wants is the name of the nearest town or village. Around 2 or 3 a.m., we got word that a second plane had been shot down and, unlike the earlier loss, this one happened in North Vietnam. The sen- ior watch officer decided that I, as the junior officer on the team, would ben- efit most from the experience of awak- ening the Secretary of State at 3 in the morning with the bad news. I went into the small side office occupied by the bird colonel who was our Pentagon liaison, and asked him the expected first question. Unfortunately, he said, there was no word yet as to the pilot’s fate. Regard- ing the exact location of the loss, he started to blurt out a set of coordinates. “Hold it,” I said. “The Secretary doesn’t do coordinates. He wants the name of the nearest town.” The poor colonel didn’t know whether to laugh or pass bricks. “Town?” he said. “What town? We’re talking boonies here. There are no towns out there.” I wasn’t prepared to accept this at face value, not with a dead-of-night wake-up call to the Secretary of State about to take place. At my insistence, we went over to his wall map, plotted in the coordinates on its plastic overlay, and there — within a mile or two — was a town. Or a hamlet. Or maybe just a few huts with a name. Whatever, it was a name. And because the Secre- tary had a map just like it at his bedside, it was a name I could refer him to. There was just one tiny problem. The name, I swear to God, was Phuc Kyu! “What,” I asked the colonel, “is the correct pronunciation of this name?” The smirk on his face toldme every- thing I needed to know, but he replied anyhow. “It’s pronounced exactly the way you think it is!” As I dialed Rusk’s home phone, I tried to mentally rehearse the way I was going to present this. But all I could hear in my mind was the Secretary thanking me effusively for waking him from a sound sleep at 3 in the morn- ing just to tell him to go screw himself, and how exactly did I spell my name because he wanted to be sure to get it right. I can’t remember exactly what was said on that call, but the initial greeting and my basic report went OK, as did my replies to the first two questions. Then he asked the third question. I took a deep breath, and said in a firm, clear voice, “Fook KIY yu, Mr. Secre- tary.” Hey, we can’t all be heroes. John J. St. John began his Foreign Serv- ice career inMonterrey in 1961 and re- tired as director of Mexican affairs in 1989. Among other postings, he was economic minister in Geneva from 1980 to 1984, served in London and Managua, and held two office director- ships in the Economic Affairs Bureau. R EFLECTIONS Dean Rusk and Rolling Thunder B Y J OHN J. S T . J OHN 76 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 9 The smirk on the colonel’s face told me everything I needed to know.