A True Story

This is a true story from my years as an Air Force Intelligence Officer during the Vietnam conflict. This happened when I was an analyst at Clark Air Base in the Philippines. I worked swing shifts gathering and reading and filtering and synthesizing information that came in through several top secret coded channels. Every Friday there was a briefing for Colonels and Generals that took a standard format to give the brass a weekly update of the state of the war. Some of my good friends who were also intelligence officers did those briefings. 

JC was one of my closest friends and this was his day to do the Friday morning briefing that I had prepared Thursday night. Rather than go home, I stayed for the briefing so that I could meet and talk with my friend after the briefing. So I sat in the back row of the briefing room waiting for JC to complete the briefing. One item that was always part of the Friday briefing was a casualty update – the number of Americans, South Vietnamese, and North Vietnamese killed in action that week. There was a bar chart on the slide I had prepared that showed virtually no difference in the number of Americans killed that week. The slide showed many more North Vietnamese killed that week even though I knew we had killed the entire population of North Vietnam several times over if one believed these reports. JC simply spoke the numbers ending with the American casualties, and JC said there was a significant increase in the number of Americans killed that week and then the next slide came up. 

The general stopped the briefing and said to go back to the casualty slide which the slide controller did. The general then said I thought I heard you say there was a significant increase in the number of American casualties but the slide shows hardly any difference and the numbers only show a difference of one. Without hesitation, JC said that if you were that one you would think it was a significant difference. I fell out of chair laughing and everyone turned around to look at me. After the briefing, the Colonel called both JC and me into his office. He gave JC a verbal reprimand and told him to leave. He then gave me a verbal reprimand and said he was putting a letter to that effect in my file, which I later learned that he did. The lesson I learned is that day was that the death of a single person is not a laughing matter, although I think the Colonel wanted me to learn a different lesson.

It is our responsibility to save lives in the midst of this pandemic.