Duty, Honor, Country

By Joseph Murphy

A group of friends from the Irish section of the Bronx are graduating from college during a period of great political unrest. Communism was gaining support throughout the world, threatening the sovereignty of the United States. The lines of battle were being drawn, the Cold War was heating up, as the Soviet Union was stepping up its pressure on the United States in Wars of National Liberation; especially in Cuba and Vietnam. These native New Yorkers must make life-altering decisions; should they concentrate on starting their careers and finding love, or must they postpone personal aspirations in order to serve a greater purpose. These young men were part of an all but forgotten American culture that were willing to put themselves in harms way by answering the call to Duty, Honor, Country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 15, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462823024

Joseph Murphy

Joseph Murphy wrote, taught, counseled, and lectured to thousands of people all over the world, as Minister-Director of the Church of Divine Science in Los Angeles. His lectures and sermons were attended by thousands of people every Sunday. Millions of people tuned in his daily radio program and have read the over 30 books that he has written.

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Copyright © 2001 by Joseph Murphy.

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Contents

PROLOGUE

Part I: DUTY

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Part II: HONOR

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part III: COUNTRY

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

EPILOGUE

GLOSSARY OF

NAVY AND MARINE CORPS

TERMINOLOGY

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

CITATIONS

END NOTES

Dedication

This book is dedicated to a real American hero, Lieutenant Terence M.

Murphy United States Navy who was posthumously awarded The Distinguished Flying Cross, The Air Medal and The Purple Heart and who will reside in our hearts always. He was shot down on April 9, 1965 off the coast of Hainan Island, China during the Vietnam War. His name is engraved on Panel 1E, Row 103 of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C.

Edited by Robert Connolly

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

Duty, Honor, Country is volume two of a projected three volume work, The Wild Geese. The first volume, A White Sport Coat and A Pink Carnation was published in 2000. Each book in the series may be read and understood separately. It is part of the original plan that the three volumes will constitute a history of what transpired to a certain group of Irish Americans growing up in the early stages of the Cold War. It is based on the fullest as well as the most complete research.

PROLOGUE

Those who do not battle for their country Do not know with what ease they accept Their citizenship in America

Dean Brelis, the face of South Vietnam

World War II ended; the next day World War III, better known as the Cold War, began. Unlike World Wars I and II, it would be fought in an entirely different manner, good guys were not readily discernible from bad guys; there would be a blurring. The super powers at the time, the United States and the Soviet Union would not fight one another directly; it would be done by proxy. While the opening battles would begin in Europe they would spread to Malaysia, the Philippines, Algeria, Cuba and Cyprus. Ultimately they would explode on the fields of Korea and Vietnam.

The United States, an economic as well as a military superpower would parry all of the Soviet Union‘s thrusts. The latter a military superpower was not an economic superpower and could not keep pace with a United States in proxy wars fought conventional style, so they switched their tactics to low intensity proxy wars of attrition, wars of national liberation, which were directed at America‘s‘ heart; her moral fiber. The communist victory, Krushchev said, would not take place through nuclear war, which would destroy humanity, nor through conventional war, which might soon become nuclear, but through ‚national wars of liberation‘ in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the centers of revolutionary struggle against imperialism. It was another type of war, new in intensity, ancient in its origin-war by guerrillas, subversives, insurgents, and assassins, seeking victory by eroding and exhausting the enemy instead of engaging him. It required in those situations where they encountered it a whole new kind of strategy, a wholly different kind of force and therefore a new and wholly different kind of military training.

The U.S. Cold War strategy of a global communist bloc containment made it practically inevitable that the United States would engage in some major attempt to prevent communist takeovers in Korea in the 1950‘s and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the early 1960‘s. The United States by defending this strategy demonstrated its credibility as a military superpower both to its communist enemies and to allies, clients and neutral. Yet those who would execute their Country‘s Cold War strategy, those who believed that America‘s freedom could not be protected without a strong military, would only come from certain cultures.

This book takes place in the early 60’s during a period of the Cold War when young people belonging to those certain cultures grew up believing in particular ethos, obligations and responsibilities which appear to be lacking in today’s environment.

Until recently, the Cold War revisionists portrayed Korea and particularly Vietnam as an anti-colonial war rather than proxy battles of the Cold War. They ignored the fact that several hundred thousand Chinese troops fought in Korea and that hundreds of thousands of

Chinese logistical troops as well as Chinese and Soviet antiaircraft troops and Soviet fighter pilots took part in the Vietnam War. They overlook the fact that North Korea was forced to abandon it‘s effort to conquer South Korea and that North Vietnam would have been forced to abandon its effort to conquer South Vietnam, if not for massive Soviet and Chinese subsidies.

One of the primary goals of United States policy was to promote an orderly environment in which enemy great powers did not control the resources of Europe and parts of Asia, the center of world power outside the United States. In order to do this amongst other things they had to maintain a strong military in order to project military power and wage hot wars where needed.

General Douglas MacArthur the great military leader who commanded the southwest pacific theater in World War II and led the United Nation‘s forces during the first nine months of the Korean war delivered on May 12,1962, what would become the most famous address of his career. It was made on a warm day in front of the graduating class at The United States military academy at West Point and would address America‘s moral fiber.

„Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be. They are your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail; to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith; to create hope when hope becomes forlorn. Unhappily, I possess neither that eloquence of diction, that poetry of imagination, nor that brilliance of metaphor to tell you all that they mean." Those words could easily have been uttered centuries ago to soldiers fighting for the Roman Republic. It should be remembered that the soldiers fighting for Rome were her own citizens for who defense of the state was a duty, a responsibility and a privilege.

On that same day on several different college and university campuses around the country, thousands of young men and woman were also listening to other keynote speakers as they graduated in uniform to serve their country. Some did it because they felt it was their duty, others because it was an honor. They answered the call to preserve the freedom that was passed on to them, like a ‘baton’ to a sprinter, from previous generations.

The General concluded his speech with ‘You are the leaven, which binds together the entire fabric of our national system of defense. From your ranks come the great captains who hold the nation’s destiny in their hands the moment the war tocsin sounds. The Long gray Line has never failed us. Were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, in brown khaki, in blue and gray, would rise from their white crosses thundering those magic words-Duty-Honor-Country.»

«This does not mean that you are war mongers. On the contrary, the soldier, above all other people, prays for peace for he must suffer and bear the deepest wounds and scars of war. But always in our ears ring the ominous words of Plato, that wisest of all philosophers: Only the dead have seen the end of war.»

«The shadows are lengthening for me. The twilight is here. My days of old have vanished tone and tint; they have gone glimmering through the dreams of things that were. Their memory is one of wondrous beauty, watered by tears, and coaxed and caressed by the smiles of yesterday. I listen vainly for the witching melody of faint bugles blowing reveille, of far drums beating the long roll. In my dreams I hear again the crash of guns, the rattle of musketry, the strange, mournful mutter of the battlefield.»

«But in the evening of my memory always I come back to West Point. Always there echoes and re-echoes Duty-Honor-Country.»

you to know when I cross the river my last conscious thoughts will be of the Corps, and the Corps, and the Corps.

Part I: DUTY

Chapter 1 cuba

And gentlemen in England now-a-bed Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here, And hold their manhood’s cheap whiles any speaks That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day

Eve of the battle of Agincourt King Henry V Shakespeare

T he Cuban people were heralding the future. As the news spread that Batista had fled and the dawn came, Havana and the Cuban nation itself exploded. Horns sounded. Shots rang out. Men, women and children ran into the streets of Havana singing, dancing, and cheering. Black and red pennants began appearing on buildings and cars. Soon young women wearing black skirts and red blouses joined the crowds. Students shouted their vivas to the balconies above, and the old people opened the windows and shouted back.

The bearer of the future was preparing to come down from the Sierra Maestra Mountains, as the bells tolled in Havana, to begin a triumphal six-hundred-mile march to the capital. Fidel Castro, a legend at thirty-one, had made his way into those mountains three years before with only twelve men. Now an almost unanimous Cuban public hailed him as something close to a Messiah, or at least an apostle of a new order of justice.

Castro traveled down the Central Highway of Cuba, for seven days, as thousands blocked his path to shower him with flowers and wave the black and red flag of his 26th of July Movement. A large black helicopter lumbered overhead, marking the progress for the towns ahead. On January 8 he moved into Havana, past the crowds along the Malecon sea drive, past decorated Morro Castle, past warships firing a welcome salute, and into Camp Columbia. There, one week before, Bastista had given his own farewell party and amid the popping of champagne corks, departed by plane at two o’clock on the morning of New Year’s Day.

At Camp Columbia, in his green fatigue uniform casually open at the collar, Fidel faced the masses. As he began to speak, someone released three white doves. They flew directly to him and one perched on his shoulder as he said: There is no longer an enemy.

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Cuba became a radical gangster society, which ultimately bred revolution. Corruption was linked to violence. In fact, the Presidency of the Student’s Union at Havana University, an institution almost as important as the army was settled by guns. In fact, police were not allowed on campus. The campus police were murdered or terrorized. One of the student gunmen, at the time, was Fidel Castro. His father came from Galicia, from a family of right wing Carlists and like most Spanish immigrants hated the Americans. He worked for United Fruit, got a farm himself, prospered and ended with 10,000 acres and a labor force of five hundred. His son Fidel became a student politician. Castro, in 1947 at the age of twenty, took part in an invasion of the Dominican Republic by an action group, armed with a machine gun. The next year he was involved in appalling violence in Bogota, during the Pan American conference. He was said to have helped to organize the riots, in which 3,000 people were killed. The same year he was in a gun battle with Cuban police and ten days later was accused of murdering the Minister for Sport; Batista, hearing he was an exceptionally gifted gangster, tried to enlist him. Castro declined for what he termed generational reasons. According to a fellow law student, he was a power-hungry person, completely undisciplined; who would throw his lot with any group he felt could help his political career. He later claimed his vocation was being a revolutionary. He had the urges, in short, of a Lenin as well as a Hitler: the two streams came together in his violent personality. But, like Peron, he modeled his political prose style on the Spanish proto- fascist Primo de Rivera until he adopted Marxist clichés.

Castro’s chance came in 1951-1952 when Edwardo Chibas, the eccentric leader of the Orthdoxos, went mad and shot himself, leaving the idealist role vacant, and Batista, in an attempt to end a Capone- like environment, abolished the parties and made himself dictator. His ‘freedom coup’ was popular with the workers and he probably would have restored constitutional rule, as he had done before, however, Castro did not give him time. He seems to have welcomed the coup as a chance to get down to some serious fighting, Le hora es de lucha, as he put it in his first political statement. His guerilla campaign was never very serious, though urban terrorism cost many lives. The Cuban economy flourished until 1957. The battle for Cuba was essentially a public relations campaign, fought in New York and Washington. Castro’s principal advocate was Herbert Matthews of the New York Times, who presented him as the T.E. Lawrence of the Caribbean. Just as the Hearst Press helped to make the Cuban revolution in 1898, so the Times sponsored Castro. This influenced the State

Department. William Wieland, in charge of the Caribbean desk, had hitherto taken the view, «I know Batista is considered by many as a sonofabitch But American interests come first At least he is our sonafabitch.» Now Wieland changed sides. Earl Smith was the appointed Ambassador to Havana in 1957. He was told, ‚You are assigned to Cuba to preside over the downfall of Batista. The decision has been made that Batista has to go. Wieland sent him to be briefed by Matthews, who told him, „It would be in the best interests of Cuba... the world...if Batista were removed. Roy Rubottom, Assistant Secretary of state, was also pro-Castro, as were the CIA in Havana.

Once in Cuba, however Smith grasped that a Castro victory would be a disaster for America, and sought to prevent it. He insisted on flying to Washington, at his own expense, because Rubottom refused to authorize the use of state funds. Smith wanted to hold a press conference warning that the United States would never be able to do business with Fidel Castro because the latter would never honor international commitments. The pattern of muddle, duplicity, and cross- purpose recalled Roosevelt diplomacy at its worst, and attempts by some State Department officials to undermine the Shah of Iran in 1979. On March 13,1958 Smith saw Batista in his study, lined with busts of Lincoln, and agreement was reached to hold free elections and for Batista to step down in February 1959. The next day, unknown to Smith, Washington made the decision to suspend all official arm sales to Cuba. A shipment of Garand rifles was stopped at the New York dockside. As Castro‘s American well wishers continued to subscribe for arms to him, America was now, from early 1958, arming one side: the rebels. This same scenario was to play itself out again in 1975 with the Cooper-Church amendment which in effect stopped all supplies, previously pledged by President Nixon, to the South Vietnamese while the Soviet Union supplied the North Vietnamese with the latest equipment enabling the latter to defeat the former.

The US arms embargo was the turning point in Castro‘s road to power. Before it, he had never had more than three hundred men.

After it, the Cubans concluded the Americans had changed their policy and switched sides accordingly.

Castro‘s support rocketed while the economy plummeted. Even so, Castro never had more than 3,000 supporters. His battles were public relations exercises. Batista‘s total losses were estimated at 300. The real fighters were the anti-Batista elements in the towns, of whom between 1,500 and 2,000 were killed. The guerrilla war was largely propaganda. As Che Guevara admitted, after it was over, „The presence of a foreign journalist, preferably an American, was more important for us than a military victory." Apart from America‘s switch, the morale of the Batista regime was destroyed by the urban bands, which were non-Castroist.

At what point Castro became a Leninist is unclear. He had obviously studied carefully the methods both Lenin and Hitler had used to make themselves absolute masters. When he took over in January 1959 he had himself made Commander-in-Chief and, using as his excuse the necessity to prevent the re-emergence of a gangster like society, secured for him a monopoly of force. All police forces were placed under himself, except the Interior Ministry, and key posts in both police and army were rapidly taken over by his guerrilla colleagues. The critical moment was when he got the rival anti-Batista forces, especially the Democratic Directio Revolucionario, to lay down their arms. Thereafter he could do what he liked; and did so. The provisional President was made to agree with Castro‘s demand to postpone elections for eighteen months, with rule by decree in the meantime. This was the Lenin technique. One of the first decrees abolished all political parties, his January 7, 1959 paper Revolucion, explaining, „Worthy men who belong to definite political parties already have posts in the provisional government...The others... would do better to be silent." That was the Hitler touch. So was the decree of February 7,1959, described as a fundamental law of the republic, investing legislative power