Up and running

After dropping this a year ago it’s time to crank it up before we take another trip around the sun. My family needed me and there was no way to keep this blog going regularly.

My father, retired First Sgt. Aubrey Lee Barber, born in Texas in 1930, died July 5, 2009 after a long struggle against Alzheimer’/dementia.

He was an Army veteran of the German occupation, Korean and Vietnam war eras, and at one time, at age 22 back in 1952, the youngest master sergeant in the Army. Not "one of the youngest" as his obit said, THE youngest master sergeant.

They made them special in that part of Texas where he came from, which gave us the likes of Audie Murphy. My father and his brother, Herschel, served in the same signals intelligence unit early on, and their oldest brother, Eugene served in the Navy in the Pacific on the USS Corregidor, an escort carrier.

Dad was the youngest of nine kids and after he graduated from high school when he was 17 and could not get into the Merchant Marine, asked his mother to sign a release so he could join the Army before he was 18. He was so bright that one of my relatives recalled a wealthy lady in their hometown offering to send my dad to college. But he was a humble man and while appreciative, did not want handouts and favors, preferred to make it on his own.

Another uncle, my dad's younger brother, recalled the day my dad said his goodbyes, leaving home to catch a bus, walking down a dusty road with his bag in hand, never looking back.

Since his death I've had the job of sifting through his papers and old orders, like the orders from the 1950s in which we as a family were pointed toward Tehran, and his graduation certificates from classes at the National Security Agency.

My dad took a lot of top secrets from his Cold War days to his grave, having been under a lifetime oath to do so. He served with a select group the old top secret Army Security Agency nicknamed the Supergroup and when he retired was a senior sergeant in charge of electronic warfare and signals intelligence and cryptography.

But once, when he felt it was okay to do so, related to me some sketchy James Bond-style Cold War exploits involving spy vs. spy humint from his early Army days. Some people thought he looked like a James Bond character, though at one point in his life he was a dead ringer for actor Montgomery Clift.

That was when he was managing couriers out of Arlington Hall, then the center of U.S. military intelligence.

Dad never talked much about himself so my mom filled in the blanks from some puzzling times I recall while growing up. Dad wanted to be an officer but was declined a few times until he put in his retirement papers. Then they wanted him badly to stay, but he was no fan by then of the new action Army, Westmoreland or what he saw as political meddling with his old black-budget intelligence outfit, and called it a career.

One of his commanders and mentors was the late Maj. Gen. Joe McChristian, who dad revered throughout his life for McChristian's integrity. I often wonder if it wasn't McChristian, who as the MACV J2 in Vietnam in 1967, became one of those soldiers criticized for being right, who played a role in a puzzling episode in my dad's military career.

McChristian, who is now a member of the Military Intelligence Hall of Fame, had drawn criticism for predicting that the North Vietnamese would launch a major attack. That flew in the face of political insistence that the war was going fine and dandy and we were winning. The Tet Offensive in 1968 blew apart that perception and silenced McChristian's critics.

I wonder about McChristian's role because my dad had volunteered to go to Korea and Vietnam but was always denied. He was considered too risky an asset to lose to capture. So in 1966 and 1967, when McChristian was in Vietnam basically straightening out intelligence, my dad was a first sergeant with Third Corps and the 303rd ASA Battalion. Often I recall he came home muddy in his fatigues, engaged in field exercises at Fort Hood as he and his unit prepared to go to Phu Bai -- which a lot of people didn't know was home to a large ASA presence.

Then something happened that seemed weird even to my young ears as it involved a big tussle by Army brass over an enlisted man, my dad.

As my mom later told me, the Pentagon intervened to stop my dad from going to Phu Bai, fearing the base could be overrun and he could be captured. The did not want to risk his capture because of what he knew. (Dad many years later told me that at the U.S. embassies where he worked, the Marine guards had orders to shoot him and a few other "assets" if the embassy were ever to be overrun.)

Dad wanted to be with his men in Vietnam but was caught in the middle of something beyond his control. He had been an infantryman for a brief period with the Third Division out of Ford Ord when he first enlisted, and routinely requalified with the top "Expert" rating for pistol, carbine and machine gun shooting, according to his DD 214 and the badges he wored.

So a tug of war ensued between someone high up the Defense Department, who did not want him to go, and my dad's Fort Hood commanders who were insisting he go. The Pentagon won and he remained behind.

The concerns of whoever was making that call were realized in early 1968 when McChristian's intelligence analysis came true and the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive. Overrun were locations all around Phu Bai, a unique base that was only a dozen miles from Hue, where Marines fought house to house to take it back.

But by then, my dad had filed his papers and retired to civilian life.

He spent a low key career working for Sears, seeing all three of us kids grow into adulthood, and becoming a granddad. He also became one of those little old Army retirees who ply the PX and commissaries at Carlisle Barracks, near where he retired. In one of our last outings together before dementia became more serious, I drove him to his favorite Saturday outing on that Army post. He melted into a barber chair, almost his form of therapy, to receive a regulation military haircut.

Though a bit slower and weaker, he told me how he loved visiting Carlisle Barracks, that it was a sanctuary, almost like home. He was the happiest I had seen him in ages. A moment crystallized in my memory recalls when we returned home and he walked through the door with glee on his face, telling my mom of our outing to Carlisle, "I am going to smile for a month"

Somehow he and my mother, who is part of that unpaid shadow army of military spouses, managed to rear three Army brats around the world.

We three were born in places like Walter Reed and Fort Belvoir and mostly remember my dad out of uniform, working out of embassies in Europe and South America with occasional forays to Fort Meade, Fort Hood and Fort Devens.

He was old Army, at times grumbling about things like modern references to those in uniform as “warriors.” In Germany after WWII, the proudest expression one heard was “Soldat Amerikan,” he once said. “American soldier. When you heard that you were proud. "Warrior' -- sounds like spearchuckers.”

Don't pull any punches, sarge.

So that's here I've been the last year, caring for family, sorting out papers and other things, and making a sentimental journey.

Enough about me.

Now Hear This……