Witness to History: Reflections of a Cold War Soldier

By Robert R. Ulin

This book is a first person account of military service during the Cold War in Europe from the erection to the destruction of the Berlin Wall. It is also about combat in Vietnam as an artilleryman in the Central Highlands and as an infantry advisor in the Mekong Delta. The author participated in the investigation of a fragging incident that killed an NCO, he put down an attempted mutiny and directed the first artillery counter-battery attack on Soviet artillery manned by North Vietnamese regulars in the tri-border era of VietnamLaos, Cambodia and Vietnam. He worked with the CIA in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam managing the Phoenix Program while assigned to Tam Binh District where he met the legendary John Paul Vann and hosted visits by Sir Robert Thompson, the British guerrilla warfare expert and John Erlichman, advisor to President Richard Nixon. Between tours of duty in Vietnam, he returned to Germany with a Pershing Missile unit that experienced severe discipline problems including drugs, assault and attempted murder. This book is about a thirty-three year military career from private to colonel during a particularly difficult time for the US Army. He served in Germany, Vietnam and Belgium and conducted missions in Africa. While in Belgium he served at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), the American Embassy and finally NATO headquarters. The author participated in a NATO Summit attended by President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher and completed his career on the faculty of the Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania where he participated in the first uniformed visit to Warsaw, Prague and Budapest following the demise of the Warsaw Pact.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Jun 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781456736163

Robert R. Ulin

Robert R. Ulin entered the Army as a private and retired as a colonel. A seasoned business leader, he is chairman and CEO of the Center for Transitional Leadership, president of Ulin Solutions Group LLC, and executive vice president of Mobile Reasoning Inc.

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WITNESS TO HISTORY

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Reflections of a Cold War Soldier

ROBERT R. ULIN

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© 2011 Robert R. Ulin. All Rights Reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 05/06/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3615-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3616-3 (e)

ISBN: 978-1-4567-3617-0 (hc)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011901591

Printed in the United States of America

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Prologue

Introduction

PART I: THE BEGINNING

Chapter 1: Joining the Army

Chapter 2: Nuremburg, Germany (1960-1962)

Chapter 3: Back Home in Santa Maria, California

PART II: OFF TO WAR

Chapter 4: Reporting for Duty at Fort Irwin

Chapter 5: The Central Highlands of Vietnam

Chapter 6: Tet of 1968 and the Loss of Innocence

Chapter 7: Convoy Duty: Living on the Edge

Chapter 8: Hitting the Ho Chi Minh Trail

Chapter 9: Battery Command

PART III: THE INTERLUDE

Chapter 10: Neu Ulm, Germany: Pershing Missiles

PART IV: BACK TO VIETNAM:

THE MEKONG DELTA

Chapter 11: Returning to Vietnam

Chapter 12: Tam Binh District

Chapter 13: POW Interrogation

Chapter 14: The Phoenix Program

Chapter 15: Pacification and Vietnamization

Chapter 16: Closing Up Shop

PART IV: EUROPE AND NATO

Chapter 17: Schwaebisch Gmuend, Germany

Chapter 18: Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe

Chapter 19: The American Embassy in Brussels

Chapter 20: Duty at NATO Headquarters

Chapter 21: The Army War College

Chapter 21: Mission to Warsaw, Prague and Budapest

Chapter 23: Conclusion

Epilogue

Acknowledgment

About The Author

Awards & Honors

Glossary / Acronyms

Endnotes

For my Family

Past, Present and Future

PROLOGUE

In Leiman, Germany on the outskirts of Heidelberg in 1995, in a small quaint apartment just off the village square, I began my genealogical quest of tracing the Ulin and Parkhurst families. I traced the Ulin family to Benjamin Ulin, (b. 1754, Virginia) pioneer, hunter, woodsman, and Indian hunter and the Parkhurst family (my grandmother’s maiden name) to George Parkhurst (b. 1590, England). I discovered that the Parkhurst family dates to William the Conqueror in England.

My grandmother, Pearl Victoria Parkhurst was born in Esmond, South Dakota in 1888. Her mother was Elmira Clary (b. 1854, Indiana) who married John Spenser Parkhurst (b. 1854, New York). The Clary family had ties to General George Armstrong Custer.

My great grandmother, Rachel Ann Hooper married Dennis Batey Clary, a Methodist Episcopal preacher. Rachel Ann Hooper traces her lineage to William Hooper, signer of the Declaration of Independence from North Carolina (1742-1790).

I was fascinated by the characters in my family tree that included pioneers, scholars, lawyers, preachers, railroaders, frontiersmen, hunters, farmers, Indian fighters, and a few scoundrels. I was thrilled that my ancestors fought in the American Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, and World War II.

I spent years documenting my lineage through birth, death and census records. I visited graveyards, county courthouses and the Family Research Center in Salt Lake City, Utah to establish the linkages of my past. As a trained historian, I delighted in reading historical vignettes of my ancestors and discovering the hardships, misfortunes and triumphs of those who came before me. It was at this time that I pledged to write my own story.

I had an interesting career as a soldier in peace and war and then a successful business career in the for-profit and non-profit sectors. This book is about my military career during the period of the Cold War.

I write this story grateful for the love of family, the support of friends and the blessings of a great country I was privileged to serve.

INTRODUCTION

I was the quintessential cold war soldier. I was a private in Germany when the Berlin Wall went up in August 1961 and a colonel on the Military Committee of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) headquarters when the crack in the wall occurred (Oct 89) that eventually led to its dismantling a year later. While the first half of my military career I was a combat arms soldier serving as an artilleryman, the last half I served as a Foreign Area Officer (FAO), a political-military specialist in high level multinational headquarters and diplomatic posts. I had an exciting, challenging and adventurous military career.

The Cold War was East versus West, Capitalism versus Communism, the U.S. versus the U.S.S.R. We were locked in an ideological struggle that was global in scope. It was a bi-polar world, predictable and relatively stable and did not directly threaten the American or Russian homeland. It lasted from the end of World War II in 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. My military career started 15 years after the end of WWII and ended the year after the Soviet Union disintegrated. It spanned 33 years of which 20 were spent overseas. Except for two and a half years in Vietnam during the war, my overseas assignments were in Germany and Belgium with forays into Eastern Europe and Africa. I served in Germany in tactical (280mm Atomic Cannon and Pershing missile) units and in NATO assignments in Belgium. My NATO assignments included my job as a nuclear target planner for the 56th Field Artillery Brigade at NATO’s Central Army Group (CENTAG) in Germany, a speech writer and policy analyst at the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Casteau, Belgium, an advisor to the Belgian Para-commandos while assigned to the U.S. Embassy in Brussels, and the Military Assistant for the Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee at NATO Headquarters in Brussels. I have more than a passing interest in and familiarity with multinational operations.

During the Cold War, NATO was a very useful multinational organization designed to keep the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact within their respective borders. We spent more than 40 years scaring the hell out of each other by threatening the use of nuclear artillery, missiles, aircraft and submarine launched ballistic missiles. We had enough nuclear weapons pointed at each other that if we had fired them, they would have rendered all of Europe uninhabitable for thousands of years. The situation was mad and so was our strategy of Mutual Assured Destruction.

During the Cold War, the threat kept us focused. The United States was the lead player in the West and the Soviet Union (the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics [U.S.S.R.]) was the dominant player in the East. Each of us kept our respective alliances together by force of will and the expenditure of great sums of money. While the U.S. was the major arms supplier within NATO, the U.S.S.R. was the main supplier to the Warsaw Pact. The war in Vietnam was about rolling back Communism in Southeast Asia, preventing other Southeast Asian states from falling to Communist rule. Life was a bit scary but otherwise good. During that time we clearly understood who the enemy was and had a pretty good idea of how to deal with it. In retrospect those were good times. Now we face numerous threats from transnational groups that don’t wear uniforms, don’t adhere to the Geneva Convention and have attacked us on American soil. Today we live in a very complicated and dangerous world.

My story begins in Santa Maria, California where I graduated from high school and a few months later joined the Army. It was 1959 and I was 17 years old.

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PART I: THE BEGINNING

Chapter 1: Joining the Army

I was a mediocre student in high school but in spite of this lackluster performance I was selected to give a speech at graduation about observing a missile launch at Vandenberg Air Force Base where my father worked. I guess that was the beginning of my public speaking career. I wanted to go to a four-year college but my grades and the fact that my parents were not prepared to fund such a venture, limited my options. Consequently, I attended Hancock Junior College in Santa Maria, California. Three months later, bored and eager to see the world I enlisted in the Army on Pearl Harbor Day (December 7, 1959) to get away from home and begin an adventure. I left behind my parents, Dick and Helen, two brothers, Don and Mike and a sister, Marsha and a record of academic underachievement.

I was sent to Fort Ord, California for basic training. I was 6’ 1" tall and 145 pounds soaking wet—in other words, skinny. When I graduated nine weeks later I weighed 165 lbs without an ounce of fat. I was a bit of a smart ass and that earned me several tours of duty scrubbing pots and pans in the back of the mess hall. One day after popping off to my drill sergeant, he took me behind the barracks and fed me a knuckle sandwich (ah, the good old days). Although somewhat battered and bruised, my performance improved markedly. I graduated towards the top of my class.

Upon graduation from basic training and a week off to go home and show off my uniform, I boarded a train to Fort Sill, Oklahoma where I received Advanced Individual Training (AIT) as an artilleryman. The journey by train was interesting but uneventful. When we arrived in Wichita Falls, Texas we boarded another train that seemed like something out of a Wild West movie. We stowed our duffle bags in a boxcar with straw on the floor and sat in an old passenger car with air blowing through the open windows of the car as it rocked back and forth and journeyed north to Lawton, Oklahoma. I fully expected an Indian attack along the way but we were spared that adventure. We arrived in Lawton to the bellowing of a drill sergeant who loaded us on the back of an open truck and off we went for nine more weeks of training. We were housed in World War II barracks with large squad bays that accommodated about sixty soldiers. There was a separate building that housed the showers and toilets so when you had to get up in the middle of the night and take a pee, you had to go outside and trek to another building. I don’t remember much about my training other than the fact that we were up before dawn each day and either in class or out on the range until dusk. However, I do have memories of life in Lawton in the center of town that was lovingly referred to as the impact area. Pawn shops, speakeasies, tattoo parlors and floosies were the order of the day. Oklahoma was a dry state. You had to be a member of a club to get a drink or you could go to the impact area, knock on a door in a back alley, a little window would slide open, and you could get a beer or other libation in a paper bag; sort of a walk-through as compared to the fast-food drive-through that we have become so familiar with today. Every month just before payday, a bevy of lovelies from Texas stormed into town on the train to relieve soldiers of their hard earned money. A week later they went home exhausted and we went back to the barracks broke.

I thrived at AIT. I enjoyed soldiering and liked being an artilleryman—the King of Battle. I earned the distinction of Honor Graduate upon completion from that course and received orders for Germany.

Following graduation, in March 1961, I departed on a train to New York and then walked up the gangplank of a World War II liberty ship for the nine-day journey to Bremerhaven, Germany. Officer country was topside. They stayed four to a room, while we soldiers slept below in canvas cots stacked five high. It was very unpleasant when somebody in a top bunk got seasick. Since there were more soldiers than cots, we hot bunked. Those in the cots slept while the others remained topside—some hugging the rail, then at a predetermined time there was time to clean the troop accommodation and then those topside went to bed below decks while the others moved topside. Nearly everybody on board had a job. I volunteered for duty in the kitchen and was assigned to cooking breakfast. Two eggs per man per day for nine days for about 500 soldiers—you do the math. That’s a lot of eggs. That was such a defining experience that when I shipped home about two and half years later, I immediately volunteered for the ship’s newspaper. I did not want to get stuck in the galley again.

Chapter 2: Nuremburg, Germany (1960-1962)

My new duty station was Merrell Barracks in Nuremberg. This barracks was occupied by Hitler’s SS during WWII. The front of the building was pockmarked by bullets during the final American assault that captured the barracks.

I was assigned to the 3rd Gun Battalion, 39th Artillery. There were only two guns per battery. Our guns were the 280mm Atomic Cannon. Each gun weighed 83 tons while the projectile weighed 600 pounds.¹ We had high explosive (non nuclear) ammunition that we fired in the Grafenwoehr training area near the Czech border. We also maintained a supply of atomic munitions in a stockpile on our base in the event of war. Every six months we would deploy on border patrol to Bayreuth, a city in northern Bavaria, best known for its association with the famous German composer Richard Wagner who lived there from 1872 until his death in 1883. We positioned our guns on an abandoned World War II Wehrmacht² airfield some distance from the city and pointed them towards our Warsaw Pact enemies in Czechoslovakia. I was on border patrol when the Berlin Crisis (4 Jun—9 Nov 1961) erupted. The Soviets provoked the crisis with an ultimatum demanding the withdrawal of Western armed forces from West Berlin — culminating with the city’s de facto