In June 1968, while I was in basic training, Gen. William Westmoreland had been kicked upstairs by President Johnson. He was promoted out of his job as commander of our troops in Vietnam and into the job of heading [...]

Testimony of William J. Bowe before U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC), Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee After I left the Army, Sen. Sam Ervin continued to work on making sure the military stayed out of the business of collecting intelligence [...]

My three-year enlistment was coming up in the spring of 1971, with my last day of active duty being May 12. In Army parlance, I was “getting short.” Given the times in Washington, I was also going out with [...]

In January 1970, Christopher Pyle, a former captain in Army intelligence, wrote an article in the Washington Monthly magazine criticizing the Army for going beyond proper bounds in collecting information on civilians. Pyle’s article prompted inquiries to Secretary of [...]

Also in May 1970, at the same time as Kent State was becoming a symbol of the country’s extreme division over the Vietnam War, a different kind of seminal event of both racial and student unrest was about to [...]

My single worst intelligence assessment was in underestimating the future extensive campus demonstrations against the war that came in the wake of the events that unfolded in May 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio. The violence attendant to [...]

Kwajalein Atoll was then the western terminus of the Pacific Missile Test Range. Then and now, Kwajalein functions as a critical facility that tests the accuracy of U.S. ICBM missiles and their Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) nuclear warheads. [...]

Iknew Kwajalein was going to be a very different place, but I didn’t understand that getting there would turn out to be a surprise, too. Northwest Airlines, with its distinctive fleet of red-tailed passenger jets, had a contract with [...]