Joe Kamalick
 

My time with JD’s First Cav PIO shop at Phouc Vinh was both eventful and busy -- even though much of the time I wasn’t there.

I was a warm-body GI replacement sent to Vietnam in May ’69, and by sheer dumb luck I was assigned to the First Air Cav PIO at the division HQ at Phouc Vinh. It was my great good fortune to there encounter Major J. D. Coleman. I did some coverage for the Cav for a couple of months, and then JD sent me on TDY to Stars & Stripes in Saigon. I pretty much spent the rest of my year with Stripes, covering Army and Marine ops from I Corps to IV Corps -- including frequent trips back to Cav Country and Phouc Vinh. As “Vietnamization” of the war advanced, I went through the ARVN Airborne program at Tan Son Nhut Airbase to do a feature story for Stripes. I made my five jumps at Ap Dong north of Saigon and thereby earned my jump wings. It was a hoot!

That long TDY assignment to Stripes -- and an earlier assignment JD had given me to profile a dozen or so top US correspondents in Saigon -- helped significantly to advance my journalism career. In making those assignments, JD, the consumate PIO, was of course advancing the interests of the First Air Cav. But, coincidentally, he also gave me a helluva career boost. I am forever in his debt.

The end of my year in Vietnam for Uncle Sam also marked the end of my two-year Army draftee enlistment, and I returned home to central Illinois in eager anticipation for a job I had been promised at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch just across the Mississippi in Missouri. But the sad-faced Post-Distpatch managing editor said the position was not available, that the paper was undergoing a major RIF. Sorry, check back in six months or a year.

I borrowed $2,000 from my father and bought a $1,200 air ticket back to Vietnam. After a days-long and expensive layover in Hong Kong waiting for a Vietnamese visa, I arrived in Saigon with about $50 in my pocket. I quickly got free-lance work with UPI, AP, NBC Radio News and soon was hired full-time for Westinghouse Broadcasting’s Group W Radio News. My Group W colleague Paul Steinle and I were awarded the Overseas Press Club (OPC) citation for our coverage of the 1972 NVA Spring Offensive in I Corps.

With the withdrawal of the last US ground forces from Vietnam in ’73, I was assigned to open a news bureau for Group W in Beirut, Lebanon, arriving there in June. I just had time to get familiar with the Mideast story before the October War broke out that year. I covered it first from Beirut and then from Cairo -- after a 24-hour road trip from Benghazi, Libya across North Africa into Egypt. My Group W colleague Charles Bierbauer flew in from Frankfurt to cover in Beirut. Together with two Group W colleagues in Tel Aviv, we four won the OPC award that year for best radio spot news coverage from abroad, beating out much larger-staffed coverage of the war by the main US radio networks.

In the war’s aftermath, I was put on retainer for The Chicago Daily News, in addition to my staff work for Group W. I followed Henry Kissinger around for a couple of months in his famous “shuttle diplomacy” flights between Damascus, Jerusalem and Cairo. Just as that story faded, I got to Nicosia, Cyprus to cover the Greek Cypriot and Turkish conflict erupting there, arriving just days before the Turks invaded in early ‘74.

The Lebanese civil war broke out in April that year, and that increasingly hazardous conflict occupied the rest of my time in Lebanon. At times, the battle lines were just two blocks down the street from my apartment. I could trot down to the front line, get some radio actuality, get the latest from the Leftist commanders there, do a few ROSRs and then dash back to my apartment to file for Group W and the Daily News -- but with hushed voice and the apartment lights out for fear of drawing fire from Rightist lines further up the street.

Back in June ’73, barely a week after I had arrived in Beirut, I met May Aweida, the stunningly beautiful young Palestinian woman who later, inexplicably, would become my wife. May was an English teacher at the American University of Beirut (AUB). Instrumental and invaluable right from the start, she battled PTT bureacracy to get phone lines run in to my apartment and office in a week -- a process that in Beirut typically took six months. And she did crucial and exhausting real-time translations of Arabic language radio announcements and speeches by various Arab leaders and, later, war lords in the Lebanese conflict. And twice during the civil war -- with nothing more than the force of her personality and command of language -- this brave Episcopalian girl saved me from likely execution at the hands of Moslem Leftist militiamen. With scorn and ridicule she cowed militiamen -- neighborhood men and boys with more weapons than sense -- who were convinced that I, working along the front lines with my suspicious radio news microphone, was a Rightist or Israeli spy in their midst.

May and I were married in wartime Beirut in April ’76 -- with a change of church venue the morning of the ceremony after the originally scheduled chapel got shelled overnight. A month after we married, Group W decided to shut down its foreign news service, and my job evaporated. But Westinghouse made good on my contract and moved our household to my hometown Chicago, where May and I arrived in June. I was looking forward to a new job at The Chicago Daily News. The paper’s editors apparently had liked my nearly two years of Mideast coverage for them, and I was offered a job on the foreign desk. The plan was for me to work the foreign desk for a year, then to be sent back overseas somewhere. But a week after May and I got to Chicago, the Daily News was shut down, and a couple of hundred reporters and editors were out on the street.

With two news organizations having folded under me in as many months, I struck out on my own. May got a job with a Chicago company that had a major contract with Saudi Arabia making Arabic language maps, and I launched a monthly newsletter dealing with international trade restrictions, The Boycott Law Bulletin (BLB).

The BLB did well, and we moved to Houston in ’79 with our firstborn daughter, Zeyna, to escape the Chicago winters. Our second daughter, Leyla, was born in Houston in ’81, and we four spent the next 20+ years in a happy and hectic mix of soccer and tennis, school band trips and campouts, a visit to Disneyland and a couple of ski trips -- and lots and lots of homework and science projects. Having my own business for all those years was a real boon because it allowed me time with our daughters that most nine-to-five dads cannot have.

Despite my best efforts to launch other newsletter titles, my little publishing company foundered in the mid-‘90s, and I had to shut it down. In ‘97 I accepted an offer to launch a news bureau in Houston for a new Internet-based business newswire, CNI. It was an exciting news venture -- you can’t get more real-time than the Web. In addition to recruiting three staffers for the Houston bureau, I built a network of stringers in Canada and Mexico and in key cities in South America. CNI has two other bureaus, in Singapore and London.

Zeyna was graduated from Princeton in ’01, and Leyla from Dartmouth in ’02, both summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. (And, no surprise, with their mother’s academic genes.)

Last year, when May was promoted from her Department of Justice job in Houston to Washington, DC, I was named CNI’s chief correspondent in the capital, covering the Hill, the administration and regulatory matters. We moved to Springfield, Va., in September ’04, and for the first time in 25 years we again own a snow shovel.

And so it goes…!

Flashback for a moment, though, to Phouc Vinh and the time I made some Class-A, four-star trouble for JD.

A First Cav infantry company had unearthed a VC hospital bunker complex in III Corps, and the story came to my saw-horse and plywood desk at Phouc Vinh. The Cav troopers had recovered what was cited as 1,000 units of blood plasma from the underground hospital that also had surgical rooms, recovery bays, rudimentary wards and battery-powered lights. I mistook 1,000 “units” of plasma to mean 1,000 pints, which of course made the story a whole bigger deal. I wrote it up, and the Cav story went out in distribution. Stars & Stripes picked it up and ran it next day on page one with a banner head, something like “1^st Cav Unearths Giant VC Hospital.” That morning, MACV Commanding General Creighton Abrams saw the Stripes story at breakfast and, reportedly, blew his top. There’d been nothing in his ItSum-SitRep briefing of the day before about this massive enemy underground hospital, and $%^&$#@, the top general should not have to learn what’s happening in his command by reading about it the $%^&$#@ newspaper! That triggered a high-powered inquiry that that rolled down the chain of command from MACV to USARV, then to III Corps and on down to the First Cav HQ -- and by the time that steaming ball of trouble got to JD’s desk, it was about the size of a Volkswagon. First I heard of the problem was when JD hollered: “Kamalick! Get in here!” It all got sorted in the end, and JD was a forgiving CO. Come to think of it, though, I think it was after that incident that JD sent me off to Stripes -- maybe just to get rid of me!