WHEN THE BLOOD FLOWS TOGETHER

Lessons from a general who saw it all

Lieutenant General Samuel V. Wilson, who retired as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 1977. / Defense Department Personnel via Wikipedia

In 1965 I got lucky as a cub reporter for the Associated Press in Washington by being randomly assigned to cover the Pentagon just as the first American soldiers were openly sent into the war in Vietnam. The role of US personnel before that, beginning under Truman and through the John F. Kennedy administration, had been as—wink, wink—advisers, but it was widely understood inside the Pentagon that we were in a bitter guerrilla war against the North Vietnamese and their anti-government allies in the south known as the Viet Cong.

The Pentagon, I quickly learned, housed some senior officers and civilians who did not buy into the premises of the war as outlined by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara and the generals and admirals who carried out the covert policies set by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and now Lyndon Johnson, his fellow war-loving vice president and successor.

There were the daily stories I had to write—those relayed to Pentagon journalists in background briefings and news conferences—and alternative stories that I began doing based on evening telephone calls with those in the Pentagon and Congress who disagreed with official policy. The same reportorial cat-and-mouse game is going on now as President Joe Biden, desperate for re-election, seeks ways to end a disastrous war in Israel and to expand another disastrous one in Ukraine.

During these years, I formed private friendships with generals and admirals, especially after I wrote about an American military massacre in South Vietnam that had been covered up because it told a truth about American conduct in a war that had become murderous for some of the senior officers in charge. 

One of my private friends who served in high places was Lieutenant General Samuel Wilson. I became close to him years after he retired in 1977 as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Sam died at age ninety-three at his family farm in Rice, Virginia, in 2017. 

On April 6, 1865, the small hamlet of Rice, then known as Rice’s Station, was the scene of one of the last skirmishes between the forces of the North and the South in the Civil War. The war would end three days later in Appomattox, thirty miles to the west, when General Robert E. Lee, head of the out-gunned, out-supplied, and out-manned Army of Northern Virginia, reluctantly surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant.

Sam told me during one of my visits with him at Rice about exploring the battleground with a metal detector and finding remnants of the war, and those who died, when he was no more than ten years of age. Historical records today state as many as sixty-six Union soldiers died on the grounds of the Rice farm. There are no known estimates of the Confederate deaths.

I learned more about Sam from his obituaries than I did in our many hours of conversation. He joined the Army in 1940 when he was sixteen years old and just out of high school—he was first in his class—and by 1943 he was an expert in guerrilla warfare tactics and assigned to the staff of the Merrill’s Marauders, a famed unit that fought a brutal, deadly but ultimately successful campaign against the Japanese behind enemy lines in Burma during the Second World War. He was awarded a Silver Star for his work there. I also knew that like many American officers in the Army and Marine Corps during the war he became a counterintelligence expert and helped train early Green Beret and other units that were secretly active on the ground in South Vietnam long before the first American troops went in.