The Beverly Deepe Keever Collection

Photos by Beverly Deepe Keever, undated

Le Phan Hung

Upon ending my interview with Khanh, I said that to make is assertions more credible to readers, I needed to interview at least one new captive because the U.S. government had for years been accusing North Vietnam of infiltration but had yet to produce prisoners for journalsits to interview. Khanh facilitated this interview. Vuong, An, and I flew to Hue in late July and talked with a twenty-three-year-old North Vietnamese private, Le Phan Hung, whose name means the “Heroic One.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 128)

Huong

“South Vietnam is not prepared for peace any more than it was prepared for war a decade ago,” one Vietnamese influential politician explained. And, as another added, “The question is whether Huong can unify the Vietnamese nationalists enough to prepare us for the luxury of peace.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 124)

Lieutenant Colonel Ma Son Nhon

I soon learned that the pacification effort had been hit hard. A U.S. official confided to me that in eleven provinces it had been set back “a minimum of six months.” A Vietnamese source agreed, saying, “The whole pacification program has been blown skyhigh.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 53)

Taylor

Ambassador Maxwell Taylor, a French-speaking retired genral, recognized this xenophobia, however, when he argued unsuccessfully in February 1965 against introduing U.S. Marine combat units into Vietnam, prophesying that the United States – like France – would fail. “The ‘white-faced’ soldier cannot be assimilated by the population,” Taylor warned. “He cannot distinguish between friendly and unfriendly Vietnamese.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 29)

Special Forces

The United States officially repudiated the anti-Buddhist crackdown moves and blamed Nhu for them. Widley considered to be the brains and the iron fist Diem relied on, Nhu controlled his own private CIA-funded and trained Special Forces troops and secret police, which had conducted the raids.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 107)

Gulf of Tonkin

I later was able to describe these kinds of covert opearations in connection with Tonkin Gulf incidents that catapulted the United States into a massive air war against North Vietnam and a buildup of its troop strength in the South.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 11)

Aircraft Carrier

Morale remained high, with many Vietnamese repeating with a singsong lilt: “The more Americans keep coming, the deeper the grave.” U.S. bombing was galvanizing the North Vietnamese like the stealth attack on Pearl Harbor had the United States in World War II.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 145)

Danang, USAF

The marines’ mission “to secure enclaves in the northern region of Vietnam” included the strategic Danang airbase and the six hundred square miles surrounding it, inhabited by 411,000 people. The marines’ area was included in the five northernmost provinces in South Vietnam, and area of about ten thousand square miles, where about 2.5 million people lived.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 154-155)

Vietnamese Soldiers

Politically, the South Vietnamese armed forces manifested a glaring contradiction of the war – they had helped to reconquer the city and then proceeded to damage it further by looting. Their troops had in effect nullified their prime political mission – to reestablish law and order – and instead simply added to the anarchy and destruction.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 202)

Train

Diem also used substantial outlays of U.S. funds and materials to push viorously for economic development. He intended the province to showcase high-impact programs for fast rural development that might serve as successful prototypes in other provinces.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 48)

Vietnamese Children During War

I though that the Communists’ countrywide offensive opened up the possibility of the United States losing its first major war in history. The United States, the most powerful nation militarily in history, had become the underdog in the multifaceted war of politics, psychology, military battles, and xenophobia.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 192)

McNamara

The 46-year-old Secretary believes a man who can not explain to him clearly and lucidly a subject probably does not understand the subject at all. One night in Washington he was helping his son with his mathematics. His son said he understood the problem, but could not explain it. “Then you don’t understand the problem at all,” his father replied. McNamara has put a premium on being articulate.
Beverly Deepe Keever

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 90)

American Troops

“Suppose you lose your billfold in a dark place,” one Vietnamese provincial official explained. “But you insist on looking for it where there is light because it is easier. Well, you are now looking for the Communists in the light place — the military field — but you never, never find them all — they are also where you refuse to look.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 100)

Saigon

 

Saigon is beginning to be a capital without a country. It is beginning to suffer visibly from strangulation in slow-motion – but it is not yet being starved to death. “The Viet Cong are putting the squeeze on Saigon,” one Vietnamese intellectual who had once served with the Communists explained. “But they won’t go to the breaking point to starve Saigon–until they are ready to seize power. and that is several years away.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 98)

Navy

The U. S. Navy’s official interest in the Vietnam area dates back 15 years, when the United States and France signed an agreement to provide military assistance to Indochina. The miliitarty Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) Indochina was created to carry out this agreement, and the first Mutual Defense Assistance Program (MDAP), later renamed Military Assistance Program (MAP), was initiated.
Unknown

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 127)

US Airforce

At first, the bombing of North Vietnam was a policy of tit-for-tat — if you destroy our installations, we’ll destroy yours. But it soon gave way to general retaliation, and then to regular and continual bombing. In the beginning, the policy was officially proclaimed an inducement to the north to negotiate. High ranking American officials said hopefully: “We’ll be at the conference table by September.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 274)

US Aircraft/Aid

The immediate and overriding United States objective in South Vietnam is to help the Vietnamese government and people resist and defeat the Communist insurgents. To achieve this goal, the United States provides two forms of assistance: military, administered by the Department of Defense, and economic, administered by the U.S. Operations Mission (USOM) of the Agency for International Development (AID).
Government paper for US Embassy in Saigon

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 92)

Hospital/Camp

Besides missions and briefings, I took careful note of the humdrum camp activities so that I could make vivid the scene and conditions for readers half a world away. During the day the PX was open for drugstore items from 9 to 6, the post office from 7:30 a.m. on. Holes were being dug for a frame chapel near the mess hall, which served breakfasts of ham, eggs,and pancakes and dinners of mashed potatoes and meats.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 59)

Supplies and Equipment

Viet Nam, where many consider the “war of the future’ is being waged, has become a testing ground — a playground for the Pentagon as it toys with research and development of new weapons and experiments with new tactics and techniques, re-fashions equipment designed for conventional warfare but now employed in counter-guerrilla action and prepares servicemen on how to better advise the Vietnamese.
Beverly Deepe Keever

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 57)

Ai Lam – HK*

I lived with and taught English to Japanese students, hired interpreters to talk with South Koreans about the 1961 military coup d’etat that I witnessed outside of Seoul, interviewed prostitutes in Hong Kong and Macau, visited opium dens in Singapore, and traveled by tramp steamer to talk to descendants of headhunters in British-held Borneo.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 7)

Ca Mau

The demise of Diem’s Strategic Hamlet Program meant U.S. officials needed a new label to define their efforts to win the hearts and minds of the people. The Americans adopted the term pacification, despite warnings that the French had used it to describe their domineering colonial and military approach to the villagers.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 51)

Santa Claus and Vietnamese Children

Dear Mr. Jones:

Enclosed are color and black-and-white negatives of a Christmas party for Vietnamese orphans from an “orphanage without a name” given by American helicopter pilots and crew chiefs in Saigon.

The American GI’s took a day off from their fight against Communist Viet Cong guerrillas to entertain the orphans when they were half the world away from their own families.

Sincerely,

Bev Deepe, Saigon

Beverly Deep Keever

Letter from Bev Keever Collection (Packet 29)

Life in Vietnam

I learned firsthand how the lives of Saigonese of all classes were being ensnared by the war. In one frightening experience I was awakened about three in the morning by police knocking on my front door demanding to view the identification papers of the live-in maid, Sinh. She had helped me for years, doing the cooking, cleaning, and laundry, but had no papers registering her as living at my place. As she was being carted off to the police station, I insisted on tagging along, staring at the haughty police official as we went by and fuming away in a dank room until Sinh was released the next morning.
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 177)

Pagoda

It the United States government, Catholic or Protestant, Democratic or Republican, were led to order night raids on the Washington Cathedral, on the most important Catholic or Protestant churches in New York and Boston, if the United States government should be stupid enough to raid these churches, to order thousands of clergymen and nuns rounded up like criminals, carted off like criminals, some of them killed, if all the students of the Ivy League had risen in protest and they in turn had been rounded up like criminals–do you think it would be necessary to wonder if the crisis is religious or political?
U.S. Press Playbacks (1963)

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 128)

Fishermen

With war, the problems of the peasant throughout Vietnam obviously are greatly multiplied. His fate of being in the middle and racked and torn.
Jerry A. Rose

The Peasant is the Key to Vietnam, Bev Keever Collection (Packet 53)

Khanh

“A year ago yesterday, Maj. Gen. Nguyen Khanh in his first swift, silent coup d’etat entered the Prime Minister’s Office with three stars, a modest black goatee and a reputation for being an expert poker player. Today, he sports four stars, a Genghis Khan goatee plus moustache and the winner of an important round of political gambling. A year ago, he was the frontman Prime Minister for other generals and political rivals; today he is the behind-the-scenes strongman officially named only commander-in-chief of the Vietnamese Armed Forces and Chairman of the powerful Armed Forces Council, which has now officially become a super-government making all key decisions in the anti-communist sphere of influence in Viet Nam.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 32)

Martial Arts/Fight School

Dalat Military Graduation

“They (Khanh and Khiem) both became cadets in the French Military Academy in Dalat, a mountain resort city north of Saigon. Of the 17 members in that class, only 11 graduate-and those eleven are among the most important field commanders and administrators now in the Khanh government.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 32)

Monks

“Western correspondents found that reporting on the Buddhist events was becoming increasingly risky. On July 7, for the first time, government police scuffled with foreign correspondents and damaged their cameras while they were covering a Buddhist ceremony at the entrance of a pagoda.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

(Keever, 104-105)

BMT – IUS

Soviet Equipment

“I learned that Hanoi had persuaded Moscow bloc countries to support its master plan with sophisticated weaponry and supplies. I canned Hungarian goulash, Soviet trucks, tracked vehicles, field artillery pieces, and Bulgarian medicines.”
Beverly Deepe Keever

Keever, 217

During the week of 28 April, U.S. Forces fighting in the A Shau valley have captured various Soviet-built weapons and components from the North Vietnamese. The sophistication of these in firepower that they represent pose a definite increase in the threat to allied forces. In addition, the recovery of these items reflect the continued support of North Vietnam by the Soviet Union.

Dogs

“When it comes to the sentry dogs at Bien Hoa air base, there isn’t one there that leads a dogs life. It could almost be said that they lead the life of a human. They get fed a wholesome diet, have dry, clean pens, are exercised daily, get regular medical checkups, and work eight days on with one day off.”
United States Air Force News Release

Bev Keever Collection (Packet 36)

Miscellaneous Photos