Saturday, June 29, 2024

A00044 - Doris Allen, Analyst Who Saw the Tet Offensive Coming

Doris Allen, Analyst Who Saw the Tet Offensive Coming, Is Dead at 97

Her warning of a big buildup of enemy troops poised to attack South Vietnam in 1968 was ignored, a major U.S. Army intelligence failure during the war.

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Doris I. Allen in an undated photograph. She joined the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Corps in 1950 and was the first woman to attend its prisoner of war interrogation course before she served in Vietnam in 1967.Credit...via Christina Brown Fisher

By Richard Sandomir

Published June 28, 2024Updated June 29, 2024, 1:26 a.m. ET

Doris Allen, an Army intelligence analyst during the Vietnam War whose warning about the impending attacks in early 1968 by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces that became known as the Tet offensive was ignored by higher-ups, died on June 11 in Oakland, Calif. She was 97.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Amy Stork, chief of public affairs for the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence.

Specialist Allen, who enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Corps in 1950, volunteered to serve in Vietnam in 1967, hoping to use her intelligence training to save lives. She had been the first woman to attend the Army’s prisoner of war interrogation course and worked for two years as the strategic intelligence analyst for Latin American affairs at Fort Bragg, N.C., now Fort Liberty.

Working from the Army Operations Center in Long Binh, South Vietnam, Specialist Allen developed intelligence in late 1967 that detected a buildup of at least 50,000 enemy troops, perhaps reinforced by Chinese soldiers, who were preparing to attack South Vietnamese targets. And she pinpointed when the operation would start: Jan. 31, 1968.

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In an interview for the book “A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 American Women Who Served in Vietnam” (1986), by Keith Walker, Specialist Allen recalled writing a report warning that “we’d better get our stuff together because this is what is facing us, this is going to happen and it’s going to happen on such and such a day, around such and such a time.”

She said she told an intelligence officer: “We need to disseminate this. It’s got to be told.”

But it wasn’t. She pushed for someone up the chain of command to take her report seriously, but no one did. On Jan. 30, 1968 — in line with what she predicted — the enemy surprised American and South Vietnamese military leaders with the size and scope of their attacks.

Several bloodied and injured U.S. soldiers are being transported by an Army tank being used as a makeshift ambulance during the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in 1968. — Wounded U.S. soldiers aboard a makeshift ambulance weeks after the Tet Offensive started in Vietnam in 1968. Specialist Allen had warned the Army in late 1967 of a large-scale attack by the North on the South, even pinpointing when it would happen, but her intelligence went ignored.Credit...John Olson/Getty Images

U.S. and South Vietnamese forces sustained heavy losses early on before later repelling the attacks. It was a turning point in the war, further undermining American public support for it.

The Army’s refusal to take Specialist Allen’s analysis seriously suggested to her that she was viewed with prejudice, as a Black woman who was not an officer. She was one of about 700 women in the corps, known as WACs, serving in intelligence positions during the Vietnam era, and only 10 percent were Black.

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In 1991, she told Newsday, “My credibility was like nothing: woman — Black woman, at that.”

In 2012, she told an Army publication: “I just recently came up with the reason they didn’t believe me — they weren’t prepared for me. They didn’t know how to look beyond the WAC, Black woman in military intelligence. I can’t blame them. I don’t feel bitter.”

Lori S. Stewart, a civilian military intelligence historian for the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, said in an email that Specialist Allen’s analysis was not the only one that went unheeded.

“Both national and theater-level organizations believed an enemy offensive was likely sometime around the Tet holiday,” she wrote, but “too many conflicting reports and preconceptions led leaders to misread the enemy’s intentions.”

Regarding Specialist Allen, Mrs. Stewart added, “Like many other intelligence personnel in country, she was a diligent and observant intelligence analyst doing what she was supposed to do: evaluate the enemy’s intentions and capabilities.”

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Specialist Allen was inducted into the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame in 2009.

Specialist Allen, in civilian clothes, receiving a framed certificate from an officer in a full dress olive green uniform. — Specialist Allen was inducted into the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame in 2009. Maj. Gen. John Custer, commanding general of the U.S. Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, presided over the ceremony.Credit...U.S Army

Doris Ilda Allen was born on May 9, 1927, in El Paso to Richard and Stella (Davis) Allen. Her mother was a cook, and her father was a barber.

Ms. Allen graduated from Tuskegee Institute (now University) in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education. She taught at a high school in Greenwood, Miss., and enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps the next year.

After basic training, she auditioned for the WAC Band, playing trumpet. But she and two other Black woman were told afterward by a chief warrant officer that “they couldn’t have any Negroes in the band,” she recalled in “A Piece of My Heart.”

She served in a number of roles over the next dozen or so years: as an entertainment specialist, organizing soldiers shows; the editor of the military newspaper for the Army occupation forces in Japan during the Korean War; a broadcast specialist at Camp Stoneman, Calif., where her commanding officer was her sister, Jewel; a public information officer in Japan; and an information specialist at Fort Monmouth, N.J.

In the early 1960s, Specialist Allen learned French at the Defense Language Institute and completed her training in the prisoner of war interrogation course at Fort Holabird, Md. She completed interrogation and intelligence analyst courses at Fort Bragg.

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After asking to go to South Vietnam, she arrived in October 1967 for the first of her three tours of duty there.

“I had so many skills, so much education and training being wasted in various posts around the country that I decided I wanted to make a difference in a high-action post like Vietnam,” she told Lavender Notes, a publication for older LGBTQ+ adults, in 2020.

She left no immediate survivors.

Specialist Allen in Vietnam in an undated photo. She is wearing her Army uniform, a hat, black rimmed glasses and a watch. — Specialist Allen at the Women’s Army Corps barracks at Long Binh, Vietnam, in an undated photo. She left in 1970 after seeing a stolen enemy document with her name on a list of targets to kill.Credit...via Christina Brown Fisher

Specialist Allen’s Tet analysis was not the only warning of hers to go unheeded. She advised a colonel not to send a convoy to Song Be, in southern South Vietnam, because of a possible ambush, which occurred. Five flatbed trucks were blown up; three men were killed and 19 wounded.

But she was listened to when she warned in early 1969 that the North Vietnamese had placed scores of 122-millimeter rockets around the perimeter of the Long Binh operations center, northeast of Saigon, and that they were to be used in a major attack. She wrote a memo that led to an airstrike that destroyed the rockets.

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Later that year, Specialist Allen learned that the North Vietnamese were planning to use 83-millimeter chemical mortars. She wrote a report that saved as many as 100 Marines, who had been instructed in her memo to avoid any contact with the mortars when they fell in their area; they later exploded. A grateful colonel sent a memo suggesting that whoever had written the report deserved the Legion of Merit.

Specialist Allen did not receive that decoration but did earn a Bronze Star with two oak clusters, among many awards. She left South Vietnam in 1970 after seeing a stolen enemy document with her name on a list of targets to kill.

After serving 10 more years in the Army she retired as a chief warrant officer.

By then she had received her master’s degree in counseling from Ball State University in Indiana in 1977. After her military service, she worked with a private investigator, Bruce Haskett, whom she had met when they were in counterintelligence. She earned a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., in 1986, and mentored young psychologists.

“She was incredibly savvy about people and had an innate ability to size people up quickly,” Mr. Haskett said in an interview. “She was the kind of person who could walk into a pit of vipers and have everybody eating out of her hands in 15 minutes.”

Sunday, April 14, 2024

A00043 - Rumi Missabu, Avant-Garde Drag Performer

Rumi Missabu, Avant-Garde Drag Performer Who Glittered, Dies at 76

He was one of the stars of the Cockettes, a psychedelic collective formed at the turn of the 1970s in San Francisco, that was short-lived but inspired generations.

Rumi Missabu in 1972. The Cockettes, the drag ensemble with which he performed, were briefly the bohemian darlings of San Francisco.Credit...Chuck Roche

By Penelope Green

April 12, 2024

Rumi Missabu, an avant-garde drag performer who was best known as a member of the anarchic, glitter-encrusted, hippie-drag troupe known as the Cockettes, which bloomed briefly at the turn of the 1970s in San Francisco, died on April 2 at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 76.

His death, from complications of chronic respiratory disease, was announced by Griffin Cloudwalker, a friend.

For a moment, the Cockettes were the bohemian darlings of San Francisco. Their members were a diverse collective that included Rumi, a voluble drama student from Los Angeles. Like many in the group, he went by his adopted first name only. And like so many in the late 1960s, he had fetched up in the Haight-Ashbury district, drawn there by the alluring swirl of spiritual questing, political activism, experimental theater, free love and psychedelics.

The Cockettes lived communally in the derelict Victorian houses there and devoted themselves to self-expression. Their bodies were their canvases, which they bedecked in feather boas, tutus, corsets, Victorian petticoats, Edwardian frock coats, wigs, wings, headdresses, ribbons, sequins, rhinestones, satin, face paint and an abundance of glitter.

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Their leader was a young actor named George Harris III who had made his way from New York City to San Francisco in 1967, the same year he was famously captured by the photojournalist Bernie Boston at an antiwar protest, tucking flowers into the barrels of the rifles held by the military police. In San Francisco, he transformed into Hibiscus, a show-tune-loving mystic with flowing hair and a glitter-coated beard — “like Jesus with lipstick” is how one Cockette described him. He gathered his friends first into street theater, then onto the stage of the Palace Theater in North Beach, where the Cockettes made their debut on New Year’s Eve in 1969.

A black-and-white image of two people in Kabuki-like costumes. One is wearing a white dress and long gloves and carrying a parasol. — Rumi, right, and his fellow Cockette Hibiscus in costume for the 1970 production of “Pearls Over Shanghai.”Credit...David Wise

They named themselves just before that show, as a spoof of — and perhaps in homage to — the high-kicking Rockettes, and poured out onto the stage that night in a chaotic, campy cancan that ended in a joyful nude scrum, with the audience joining them onstage to the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women.”

They became regulars at the Palace, appearing monthly, and began, sort of, to plan their shows: In “Gone With the Showboat to Oklahoma,” Rumi played Belle Watling, the madam from “Gone With the Wind”; “Pearls Over Shanghai” was about three girls kidnapped by a brothel owner named Madame Gin Sling, again played by Rumi.

“It was extremely experimental theater,” Fayette Hauser, an artist and photographer who was one of the few female Cockettes — and whose visual memoir, “The Cockettes: Acid Drag & Sexual Anarchy, 1969-1972,” was published in 2020 — said by phone. “We had themes. There were no scripts. No rehearsals. Everyone was very individuated, and we expressed ourselves in drag. High drag, we called it.

“Rumi, in particular, had a complete and glorious sense of self, which I admired,” she added. “He knew who he was and wanted to put it out there. It helped that he had trained as an actor, unlike most of us.”

Rumi, with dramatically arched eyebrows and a cigarette in his mouth, reads a magazine titled “Personal Confessions.” One of the cover captions reads “I Wrote That Dirty Best Seller! Now They Think I’m Dirty, Too!” — Rumi in the 1972 underground film “Elevator Girls in Bondage,” about a staff revolt in a seedy hotel.Credit...Blair Paltridge

He also performed, invariably and reliably, on acid, though not every Cockette was tripping onstage, Ms. Hauser said — herself included, because LSD made her nonverbal.

By 1971, the Cockettes were stars of the underground press and attracted audiences beyond their counterculture peers. One Friday in September, Rex Reed, the syndicated New York-based arts critic, brought Truman Capote; Johnny Carson’s former wife, Joanna Carson; and a few San Francisco socialites to see a show that night called “Tinsel Tarts in a Hot Coma.”

Writing about it the next week, Mr. Reed summed up the evening as “a nocturnal happening comprising equal parts of Mardi Gras on Bourbon Street, Harold Prince’s ‘Follies,’ and movie musicals, the United Fruit Company, Kabuki and the Yale varsity show, with a lot of angel dust thrown in to keep the audience good and stoned.”

The filmmaker John Waters, interviewed in “The Cockettes,” a 2002 documentary directed by David Weissman and Bill Weber, said their shows were “complete sexual anarchy, which is always a wonderful thing.”

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The first Cockettes performance consisted of just 10 men, three women and a baby. Rumi, who decades later appointed himself the archivist of the group, estimated that in later productions the cast stretched to more than 100 people — including Sylvester, who would go on to enjoy success as a disco singer, and, for a few performances before the group split up in 1972, Divine, Mr. Waters’s longtime muse. Many of the Cockettes, including Rumi, appeared in “Elevator Girls in Bondage” (1972), an underground film about a staff revolt in a seedy hotel.

A black-and-white photo of Rumi in a dramatic up-do, smiling at the camera. Sylvester, a singer wearing a bejeweled choker, feather bonnet and fur jacket, has an arm around Rumi. — Rumi in 1970 with Sylvester, a member of the Cockettes who was later a successful disco singer.Credit...David Wise

As early as 1971, however, the group was splintering into factions: those who wanted to make the shows more professional and those, like Hibiscus and Rumi, who wanted to keep to their improvisational and free-ethos origins. When the Cockettes were invited to perform in New York in the fall of 1971, Hibiscus and Rumi opted out. Poignantly, the Cockettesbombed there.

“This is a drag show to end all drag shows,” Mel Gussow of The New York Times wrote in his review, “the kind of exhibition that murders camp.”

Rumi, meanwhile, had joined a group of like-minded performers, convened by Hibiscus and called the Angels of Light, who staged happenings in the Bay Area before bringing them to New York City theaters, including the Theater for the New City, in the early 1970s. Hibiscus died of AIDS in 1982.

Rumi careened in and out of the Angels of Light, and in and out of New York, before making his way back to San Francisco later in the decade And then he more or less disappeared, working cash jobs as a house cleaner and occasional caterer. He had no bank account and no government identification, save for an old library card.

When a group of Cockettes held a 25th-anniversary reunion in 1994, he resurfaced. For the next three decades, he performed on his own and in revivals of the Cockettes’ shows and became a mentor to young gay performers.

“I came in out of the cold,” he told Daniel Nicoletta, a photographer, who began documenting his shows.

A black-and-white photo of Rumi, reclining, legs apart, on a chaise. Behind him are two people, one in round glasses taking a drag of a cigarette, and the other, with crossed legs and wearing a white button-down. — Rumi and friends in 1970 in one of the houses where members of the Cockettes lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco.Credit...via Fayette Hauser

Rumi was born James Allen Bartlett on Nov. 14, 1947, in Los Angeles, the eldest child and only son of Ruth Irene (Brown) Bartlett and Earl Oliver Bartlett, an auto mechanic and gas station owner.

He began acting in high school and studied drama at Los Angeles City College, living with his high school friend and theater pal Cindy Williams, who supported the two of them by working as a waitress. (Ms. Williams would go on to co-star with Penny Marshall in the long-running sitcom “Laverne & Shirley.”)

On acid one night, Rumi saw a low-budget exploitation horror film, “She Freak,” which sparked something in him. He took a Greyhound to San Francisco, moved into an empty water tower with three roommates and tumbled right into the Haight scene. He christened himself Rumi, for the 13th-century Sufi poet and counterculture favorite. His adopted surname came later, although friends don’t remember when, or what inspired it.

Rumi, in elaborate face makeup, a green rhinestone costume and fishnet stockings, wears a hat topped with a large red rose and extends his hands outward while being carried on the back of another person, also in colorful costume. A red velvet curtain can be seen in the background. — Rumi, reprising his role as Madame Gin Sling, and Michael Soldier in a revival of “Pearls Over Shanghai” in San Francisco in 2009.Credit...Daniel Nicoletta

Rumi is survived by his sisters, Mary Bartlett Dobyns and Debbie Mitzlaff. In 2015, he began donating his archive to The New York Public Library.

Rumi performed until he couldn’t, flying to New York, oxygen tanks in tow, to stage productions at venues like Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. The performances were elaborate and demented, always free and for one night only. His last show, at Judson in October 2019, was a Kabuki extravaganza called “Demon Pond,” adapted from a Japanese play of the same name. Rumi did not perform, but he directed and narrated the play, which involved, among other things, a lovesick dragon and an apocalyptic flood.

“The show was about tenacity and redemption,” said Mr. Cloudwalker, his friend, “and it was a great swan song.”