It comes as no surprise then that when the crew of the Pueblo was finally released at the border village of Panmunjom, on December 23rd, 1968, it was Team Alpha’s film that was shown around the world. As to who gets the credit for the U.S. having its own film crews on the ground, and a logistics system in place to process and release the film to the world first, before anyone else, the thanks belongs to Captain Bache. His efforts to set up a film processing system able to logistically handle the footage his men were generating, and get it back to the States and into the hands of those in the Office of the Joint Chiefs, so that they could review it and release those portions they wanted the world to see, worked. In this first of many future incidents, General Decker’s demand that the U.S. Army give him something with which he could counter Curtis LeMay’s constant showboating paid off.

It was from this early experience in South Korea, with the Pueblo incident, that DASPO decided that rather than set up permanent teams in permanent locations, such as Seoul, it would reapply the CONUS model being used to cover Europe in a form that would allow it to cover all of Asia. The result was that a number of Teams were dispatched to hot spot areas, where they would set up a series of semi-permanent local headquarter detachments. These HQ detachments would then stay operational in the country/area until things quieted down and there was no longer a need for DASPO coverage.

One of the first of these types of local HQ detachment Teams was assigned to Saigon. However, since it wasn’t generating much in the way of footage that supported the mission the Army Joint Chief had in mind—of promoting the U.S. Army—part of it was moved to Thailand, where it slowly morphed into a semi-joint command shared with the boys in Saigon. For the Thai portion of this regional command, the mission was one of documenting the joint Thai– U.S. military training and support activities. These took place throughout the country, and provided an excellent opportunity to introduce the public back home in America to Thailand, its people and its culture. More importantly, while perhaps less interesting than watching films of the combat activities taking place in Vietnam, from the viewpoint of the Joint Chief’s the Thai footage was perfectly suited to the mission, as it helped to demonstrate to the American public that America indeed had allies in this fight... Thailand, a capable, stable, proud and determined ally who was behind America’s Vietnam war efforts.

All in all, the DASPO concept seemed to be working, at least from the standpoint of the Joint Chiefs, DoD and even the American public. Unbeknownst to these people however, DASPO, as an operational unit, was not only pumping out film, but also life experiences never before experienced by any war photographer or correspondent. With certainty, Frank Capra never came close during his WWII stint to living the cockeyed life that a DASPO photographer of the Vietnam War lived. The fact was that the psychedelic Jim Thompson life style of the '60s caught up with the war in Vietnam, and tainted all who came close to it... especially those that lived off base in private housing such as the men of the Saigon and Bangkok DASPO detachments. For these men, their war experience was nothing like that of their fathers in WWII. The simple fact is that back in the early ‘60s, young men of war age that went to Asia to fight the communists found themselves living an experience every bit as strange as what one would find in Haight-Ashbury, even if no drugs were involved.

One can see this in the strangeness of the Team Thailand situation. Early on the team was based in the Bangkok home of a Chinese national whose unlikely name was Johnny Siam. Yes, Johnny Siam. If that doesn’t make you think of a life of Asian intrigue, gun running, hot sweaty nights ducking down dark alleyways in Siem Reap (เสียมราฐ), and maybe a little sex, drugs and rock and roll too, nothing will.

Johnny owned a rambling two-story house located in the heart of Bangkok. To make money on the side, and vacuum up intelligence that he could resell to the Thais, he rented rooms to Americans. To provide an additional veneer of credibility, he also ran an antique shop. There one could buy, according to one former lodger, “jewelry, trinkets, and artifacts stolen from remote ancient Thai temples.”

On weekends Johnny would hold Thai barbecue cookouts on his patio. There he would personally grill water buffalo steaks for the DASPO photogs, miscellaneous Air Force pilots, left over Red Cross girls on their way to or from Vietnam, passel of local girls, and odd journalist or two that happened to show up... all the time "Hoovering up" intelligence where he could. Later, when everyone was well hydrated with local Thai rice wine, he would move the entire entourage to the bar in the Fortuna Hotel, Bangkok.

By now this should be sounding familiar to you. If you haven't seen the shenanigans of this kind of war story portrayed in a thousand Vietnam War movies since the end of that war, you have been comatose for the past 50-odd years. The concept of an exotic kill by day, party by night lifestyle somewhere in Bangkok, Saigon, Hong Kong, Kampong Cham or Phnom Penh is part and parcel of the story of the Vietnam War. The only problem is that for the boys of DASPO, it wasn't a story, it was real.

One can see in this that while on the surface the mission U.S. military personnel were sent to do in Asia—including the DASPO photographers sent to document the Vietnam War—got done, the life that surrounded that mission went far beyond anything ever experienced by any American fighting man since the Revolutionary War. Just as the fighting that took place in Vietnam can be described as the most hellish of evils soaked in sweat, fear and the quaking hands and personal blood of the enemy, so too can the life that surrounded that fighting be described as the epitome of a mixture of emotional and intellectual turbulence, unsubscribed independent thinking and a psychedelically electric life style where, if sex, drugs and rock and roll were not part of your personal life style, they weren’t far from it either.

The ‘60s… there was nothing like it. Being assigned as a young military soldier—Officer or otherwise—to a DASPO Team, and sent to Bangkok, Saigon, Hong Kong, or even Seoul, resulted in you becoming the embodiment of what the 60s was.

For you, there was no need to be at Woodstock, you were not only at its antithesis, you were the antithesis... a young, devil may care, hard swinging, harder swigging, combat soldier living life to the fullest. After all, why not... tomorrow you might be dead.

For the DASPO men stationed in Bangkok, while getting the mission done always came first, living life to its fullest wasn't far behind. Johnny Siam made sure of that.

Among other DASPO Teams formed and moved to various places around the world was one assigned to the Dominican Republic, when civil unrest broke out there in April, 1965. The Dominican Republic DASPO Team was supported by the Panama Team, which was headed by Captain Herb Ballinger. Based at Fort Amador, Panama,  the normal mission of the Panama Team was to document Cold War activities in Central and South America. Interestingly, while on an assignment to film U.S. Special Forces in the act of training government forces in Bolivia, the Panama detachment Team found itself under unexpected fire from local insurgents, under the command of no less than the Cuban revolutionary himself: Che Guevara. The by product of this little firefight ended up being some of the best film footage ever taken of Che Guevara, courtesy of DASPO.

The DASPO Vietnam Team generally traveled to South Vietnam on three month-long Temporary Duty (TDY) orders. In Vietnam, for anyone that asked, each Team member would explain to others that he was assigned to DASPO “Team Charlie”. While this was technically true, for all practical purposes it meant little more than that he had a place to sleep, in a rented, privately owned home, located  in Gia Dinh, a suburb of Saigon. We say "for all practical purposes" because while a DASPO Team member might be assigned to Team Charlie, and have a place of abode assigned to him, he rarely if ever saw it or made use of the bed reserved for him. Instead, his "real" home was with whatever unit he could find to put him up while he was out in the field shooting film.

Notwithstanding this, the Gia Dinh facility did exist, and even had a nickname attached to it: the Villa. A building three stories tall, of non--descript design, it was well known to the locals, who saw men… and a few women… coming and going from it at all hours of the day (and night...). Serving as the detachment’s home away from home, it functioned as an office as well as a barracks, with most men sharing their room with others.

Operationally, the Vietnam Team consisted of an Officer in Charge, a Non-commissioned Officer and anywhere from 10 to18 enlisted sound specialists, motion picture men, and still photographers. In Saigon, it was from this Villa that the Team roamed to photograph the faces of the people, the protagonists in the war, and the country in which the war was taking place.

Staffing DASPO was a no-brainer. The Chain of command was largely made up of professional soldiers, with the senior Officers and NCO’s having photographic experience dating back to World War II and Korea. Younger Enlisted Men came mostly from the Signal Corps' Schools at Fort Monmouth. Officers came from U.S. Army Signal OCS, at Fort Gordon, Georgia.

As to DASPO’s predilection for staffing itself with Signaleers, the answer as to why that happened is easy to explain. Upon recruitment, when a civilian's skills were analyzed for branch, unit and training assignments, those with experience in writing, publishing, editorial activities, news gathering, broadcasting, photography, video and audio recording, film production, script writing, communications and the like were all assigned to the Signal Corps. After all, while it did happen, it made no sense to assign a writer or photographer for training as a tank driver when teletype operators and photographic archivists were in demand in the Signal Corps.

The net result was that most of the men in DASPO found themselves surrounded by and working with others that had gone through the same kind of Signal Corps training and schooling that they had. Many of them were even classmates. Because of this, in the minds of the men that staffed the unit, DASPO became a surrogate for the Signal Corps, even though it had nothing to do with it. It’s from the simple fact that the bulk of the people in DASPO were Signal Corps people that the idea was born that somehow DASPO must have been part of the Signal Corps too. It wasn’t.

As to why the men who served in DASPO feel it worked so well in achieving its mission, one can point to only one thing: because the unit was created and organized so that if functioned outside of the control of local U.S. Army commands, the men were at liberty to bring both their professional and artistic talents to the task at hand, without oversight. This allowed detachment operators in the field to move with ease through the various units they engaged with, focusing on their idea of how the scene should be shot, rather than that of the local commander. In essence then, working directly and only for the Department of Defense in the Pentagon gave each man, even the lowliest of EMs, enough clout to do the job his way instead of the Army way.

One story showing how much clout DASPO men had in the field has been bandied about for years, and from all of our research efforts appears to be true. The story entails Staff Sergeant Ray Goddard, who, due to a temporary shortage of Officers, was the acting Team Leader of one of the DASPO Teams in Vietnam.

As the story goes, Sergeant Goddard was collared by one of General William C. Westmoreland’s (who was at that time the Commanding General of U.S. military operations in the Republic of South Vietnam) aides, and “ordered to have his team cover an upcoming cocktail party the General was throwing.”

Not having enough rank to out-shout the aide that gave him the order, Goddard protested that his assignment forbid him to engage in local publicity stunts such as this, but that he would, under protest—provided that General Westmoreland knew that he was protesting the assignment—send a staffer to photograph the party. 

With this behind him, the party was shot, and the film developed. However, Goddard saw to it that an extra set of prints were also developed and sent up the chain of command to the Pentagon. Along with the prints were Goddard's instructions that they be delivered to the Army Chief of Staff. When the Chief of Staff saw the prints, he went nuclear. Seeking Westmoreland out, he took the time to reprimanded him directly, and in person, telling him in no uncertain terms to “keep his hands off of DASPO photographers.”

Later, as the story goes, while “Goddard was on assignment in the local boondocks, he had to hitch a last minute ride on a departing helicopter. 

“After scrambling aboard the slowly rising chopper, he landed at the feet of an Officer sitting in the rear. Looking up, Goddard saw the four stars on the Officer’s uniform and recognized General Westmoreland. 

"The general peered down at Goddard, noticed the camera and read his name tag. His only remark was, ‘so you’re Goddard.’“[1]

In terms of how they got their work done, because each DASPO three-man Team was not permanently stationed in any particular area of conflict, Team members found themselves with little to no logistical, in-country resources with which to support and/or enable their missions. Except for the Villa and what the men carried on their back, little else existed with which they could use to live a "normal" G.I.'s life. With no local TOE, the men were forced to depend on the units they found in their neighborhood to scrounge up the resources they needed.

Not surprisingly, these resources included everything from the food they needed to feed themselves, to the jeeps they depended on to “get around town.” This in turn required Officers and NCO’s to resort to non-military style ingenuity to accomplish their mission. Adding to this difficulty was the requirement that when working on assignments in different Corps areas, the men often operated as civilian journalists, in order to get closer to the focus of the story. This brought additional risk to them. To smooth everything out, the more creative among the DASPO people resorted to the use of “fresh bottles of scotch” to smooth their way, whether it was with a stubborn motor pool Sergeant, or a local Montagnard village leader.

Travel wise, the Vietnam Team usually flew out of Tan Son Nhut Airbase, in what many of our readers would recognize as the “Hotel Three” helicopter departure area. Alternately, when a fixed wing aircraft was needed, they would resort to the 834th Tactical Airlift Command, which some of our reader will remember offered regularly scheduled fixed wing passenger flights around South Vietnam.

Assignment wise, most projects were set and ordered by a Team’s OIC. He would contact the host unit where the photography was to take place, and make all arrangements for the squad that would do the shooting. The OIC in turn got his marching orders from the Pentagon. In many cases the Pentagon was asleep at the switch, and had no pressing photography or video shoots that had to be run. In those cases the team was expected to come up with its own story ideas. And if that didn’t result in any worthwhile missions, then the Team was expected to cover combat.

The net result of all of this was that the Vietnam DASPO Teams moved fluidly between the lowest level grunts that fought and sweated in the bush, the rear echelon clerks and support people that kept the war machinery oiled and running, and the highest ranking military and civilian men and women that gave the war its purpose. In simple terms, Team Charlie bore witness to some of the best of times and some of the worst... and they preserved that witness in celluloid.

When the final U.S. military pullout took place in 1973, DASPO went through the same downsizing that the rest of the Army did. “On December 6th, 1974, DASPO Pacific ceased to exist. The last commanding officer of DASPO Pacific, Louis Poirier remembered packing up the last of the Hawaii equipment and shipping it to DASPO CONUS at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Then, as he wryly recalled, he shipped himself up to the 25th division at Schofield Barracks.

“The three DASPO detachments [that were left] were then consolidated into one unit stationed at Fort Bragg, and the name was changed to [the U.S.] Army Special Operations Pictorial [Detachment] (ASOPD). Today the 55th Combat Camera Company stationed at Fort Meade, Maryland, carries on the visual documentary mission that was started by DASPO in 1962.   

As for the U.S. Army Signal Corps Officer Candidate School’s contribution to DASPO, it was fundamental to the existence of the command. Most of the Officers that led the unit came from the Signal Corps, and most of those were Signal OCS graduates. While our research is incomplete, these are some of the Army Signal OCS Officers that made DASPO a success:

DASPO’s first Commander, Captain Claude Bache was an Army Signal OCS alumni. He served as the CO of Company K, Headquarters and Headquarters Company (OCS K-HHC) — Bache, Claude V.; LTC 62-65 First Pacific Detachment Commander; Chief of DASPO, MOS 8511.

Captain Brown, John C., served as a commander in the Pacific DASPO team, from 1968 ­– 1970. He graduated from Army Signal OCS Class 14-67.

Major Davis, Donzelle, served as a commander in the DASPO offices in the Pentagon. He graduated in Army Signal OCS Class 17-52.

First Lieutenant Droll, Jr., Frank J. (Jerry), served in the Pacific DASPO Team from 1966 – 1968. He graduated from Army Signal OCS Class 18-66.

Captain Griffith, Richard M., served in the Pacific DASPO Team from 1967 – 1969. He graduated from Army Signal OCS Class 12-66.

Colonel Jones, Arthur, Augustus (Art), served as the 1st Chief of DASPO from 1962 – 1965. He graduated from Army Signal OCS Class 43-20.

Captain Letzer Sr., Larry L., served as a commander in the Panama DASPO Team, from 1970 – 1974. He graduated from Army Signal OCS Class Y66-06B.

Captain Richards, Wynn G., served as a commander in the Pacific DASPO team, from 1968 ­– 1970. He served as an Army Signal OCS TAC Officer for OCS Class 10-67.

Second Lieutenant Stanley, Jack, served as a commander in the CONUS DASPO team, from 1967 ­– 1968. He graduated from Army Signal OCS Class 21-67.

Captain Winn, Darrell, served as a commander in the CONUS DASPO team, from 1966 ­– 1969. He graduated from Army Signal OCS Class 14-67.

- - - - -

Overall, DASPO produced not only good film, but lots of it. As an example, during the first three years  of DASPO’s Hawaiian detachment operation (i.e., beginning in August, 1962) the Team produced over 750,000 feet of color motion picture footage, along with several thousand still images… all of which were for the exclusive use of the Department of the Army and, in particular, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

This, as well as their work in documenting the Pueblo Incident, the fighting, riots and revolution in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Korea, the early stages of the Vietnam War, the Communist Post-Tet Offensive period of May 1968, Cambodia, Thailand, the latter stages of the Vietnam War, the winding down and wrapping up of America’s combat involvement in Asia, the beginnings of the Cold War… and so much more, would not have been possible without the leadership of the U.S. Army Signal Corps OCS graduates that built and led the DASPO unit... a truly remarkable unit.

In our view, the Signal Corps men who staffed and commanded DASPO singularly stood forward and brought DASPO to life, to serve the unique needs of General George Decker, Chief of Staff of the Army, who called for the accurate documentation and depiction of the Army’s involvement in the burgeoning global challenges America faced at that time. To his credit, he ordered that this be done at just the right time in America's history... when more and more American people were beginning to look with skepticism at what its Presidents were doing with America's military, and in the process demanding more information about exactly what was going on in the wars then building.

In many ways it could be said that if it were not for the foresight of General Decker, and the effectiveness of the Signal Corps Officer Candidate School graduates that carried out his mission, the American public’s access to the facts and realities of what was really happening in Vietnam never would have become possible. Instead, the American people would have blindly stumbled forward, knowing that its young men were fighting a war somewhere out in Asia, but not knowing where, why, what was happening to them, or for what purpose. When seen from this perspective, the footage produced by DASPO became then and continues to be today the foundation upon which our visual history of the Vietnam War was built... coloring then, as it still does today, what people at large think the Vietnam War was all about.

In conclusion, it matters not whether DASPO was an element of the U.S. Army Signal Corps, or, as it was in reality, a separate command of the Department of the Army and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What matters is that if it were not for the U.S. Army Signal Corps, and its Officer Candidate program, the Department of the Army Special Photography Office would not have been able to document the U.S. Army's involvement in the events of the 1960s, and the Vietnam War in particular.