In late December 2017, in my day job as the managing Editor of Studies in Intelligence, I sat in on an interview with a reporter from the New Yorker magazine. The result appeared in the January 8th issue’s “Talk of the Town.”  It led to some ribbing–the reporter, Nicholas Schmidle, described me as “jauntily” dressed. I can’t say that the word “jaunty” has ever applied to me but then …

The important part of the story was triggered by my mentions of a an article I had just about finished editing for the December 2017 issue.  “A CORDS Advisor Remembers: The 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam and the Seizure of Hue” was a remembrance by a retired CIA officer of his being trapped in the city of Hue when it was overrun by communist forces in first days of the Tet Offensive of late-January into February 1968.  At the time, the author, Raymond Lau, was a Marine captain serving with two other Marines on detail to one of the CIA-led efforts to weaken communist control of rural areas in the northern region of South Vietnam.  In the eight days of his entrapment, Lau wrote of the deaths of the other two Marines, both killed by communist gunfire.

The New Yorker article was nice enough. What followed was better. It happens that people in Alabama also read the New Yorker. One reader, a senior attorney in the office of the Alabama attorney general noticed Lau’s story, pulled it up from cia.gov and saw that one the Marines killed in Hue during that episode was Marine Captain Robert Hubbard, a graduate of Auburn University who was commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1963  through Auburn’s Navy ROTC program.  The attorney, John Davis, called my office and explained that the Auburn NROTC was about to honor Captain Hubbard with a portrait painted by his wife, and he wanted to invite Ray Lau to attend. I gave Mr. Davis the contact information, and Ray accepted and agreed to speak of the late captain at the ceremony.  On February 6th, almost 50 years to the day of Hubbard’s death, I joined Ray. He spoke, and I presented a letter of gratitude for Hubbard’s service from CIA leadership—the first formal revelation of his actual mission at the time of his death. The event was described in the Opelika-Auburn News.

During my visit to the Auburn NROTC unit, I noticed that there was no recognition of the life and service of another Auburn University NROTC-commissioned officer of my own Marine cohort,  Lt. Matthew O. McKnight, who was killed in action on October 18, 1967 in northern South Vietnam.  I made the observation in a conversation with the Marine Officer Instructor, Major Daniel Murphy, and Mr. Davis. Generously, Mr. Davis and his wife took it upon themselves to provide a portrait of Matt, which was unveiled at a ceremony honoring local Vietnam War veterans that took place in Auburn High School on March 29. The event, which for eight of us from B Company who joined in, is told in a posting on the B Company (Basic School Class 1-67) web site and the Opelika-Auburn News.

And the third “another”?  That is the genesis of another project of reflection brought on by the presence at the  unveiling of Matt’s sister, Isobel. She brought with her some of Matt’s many letters home. Isobel later sent me the entire collection, which I have since read. They are at once heart warming and saddening and, of course, full of portent that would not have been evident when they were written in 1967—even though Matt hardly said anything about the war he was engaged in.  And that war looked a lot like mine, as we were both assigned to the First Marine Regiment.

My project?  Travel back in time, rummage through memory, through Matt’s photographs, through Command Chronologies of the Second Battalion, First Marines (Matt’s battalion), and the New York TimesMachine and try to learn and provide for Isobel (and myself) the context of his letters.

The results of those rummagings I will share when I can.

May 19.