NARA, College park, MD

[Deering, Brian R.]

I hope everyone had a great 4th!!

 

I spoke with the College Park folks earlier today and learned the following.

 

• The records we seek are still in paper form.
• I can access the records on the Saturday when I visit.
• There is a copy machine available in the "reading room" where I can make copies at $.15 per page.
• I can bring a digital camera to take my own pictures
• I can bring a laptop and a flatbed scanner and scan my own images.

When I go to College park on July 21 I will take a digital camera and capture a few pictures although my intent is still to assess the level of effort required to capture all of the documents we need.

 

I'm still unsure of how records are retrieved. I don't know if I can ask for 1st Cav INTSUMS for a specific date range or if I can only ask for 1st Cav records for a specific time period, or if I can isolate records by the J-2 and then by date range.

 

Exciting stuff!

[Bergerson Fred]

Dear Brian,

 

Your enthusiasm is motivating. I’ve already implicated two other innocent victims in our enterprise. Both of them, however, recalled how anxious I was before the symposium and ordered me not to commit to more activity than I was capable of handling. Being a grown up is hard for me. Yesterday, the computer guy came and installed my new computer. It is glorious, but he deleted various stuff including my calendar, list of phone numbers and addresses and perhaps the thing that allows me to access our little group. Did you put me on? Or, do I need to put myself on? If you put me on, can you put me on again?

 

Your notions of how to deal with the intsums are fine with me. Whatever works best. Tet begins basically Jan 30, ’68, and I took over as order of battle chief on Feb 12. Some people say the end of Tet is as late as June. For our purposes, for our first go, the relief of Khe Sanh, on April 1^st, which took about two weeks, would suggest an April 15^th termination for our first consideration. As I mentioned, since the intsums were compilations of my men’s work, I kind of knew what was in them so my recollection of them is imperfect. I think brevity was valued so I’m going to guess two to four pages per day. If this thing starts to run into money, we need to talk about that. I don’t want you bearing the bulk of significant costs alone.

 

I’m pretty sure that I’m going to give a class for alumni in late October. My mind is racing with ideas. I think I’m going to try to put my mil-strat kids together with the Alumns in a good sized room and show stuff. Your guidance here is imperative. I’m also playing with the notion of the 40 years that the Israelites wandered in the desert and the necessity of the passing of the older generation before the Exodus’ young Turks replaced the senior generation and crossed the Jordan into Israel. Remember, when Moses sent the twelve spies about two years into the Exodus, the ten older guys said the Canaanites were too tough, but is was Joshua and Caleb who had a different world view but had to wait thirty-eight  years to implement their vision. I want you to help me with this analogy to the current forty years since Tet and how current American national security policy needs to shift from the old ways of thinking.

 

Justin is here typing this with me. He is on board, though he will not be doing work study in the fall, so it’s going to be on a voluntary basis. The two additional volunteers were on my Symposium Alumni committee and are two of my former student assistants. One is the director of Alumni, and the other is Jenn Rangel’s brother.

 

How can I get them on our little secret network? Perhaps you recall my fascination with Cabals from The Army Gets an Air Force.

 

Thanks for everything. Keep chasing bureaucratic malefactors into positions where they have to do right.

 

Best to All.

 

CPT Freddie

[Deering, Brian R.]

Fred

 

Re: New Members and you being dumped from the List.

You're still in the Listserv, nothing has changed. If you would like to access the "Tet Project" home page you need to go to http://groups.google.com/group/tet_project and you'll need to setup a member profile (ask Justin for help; don't answer any questions you're uncomfortable with and there's no reason to be thruthy) and then remember yet another password unless of course you do what everyone else does and use just one single password for everything. I can add anyone to the List as can Justin because I gave him admin rights. I'm comfortable doing the additions, just have the innocents send me an e-mail at bdee...@mitre.org and I'll add them to the list.

 

Re: My Document Recovery Plan

In a perfect world I would use a flatbed scanner to capture all of the pages. That would make it easiest for us to electronically capture (OCR) the text from the images and make it electronically searchable. This would also be the best for a surviving archive of these records. Unfortunately, I don't own a compatible flat bed scanner. So, I'm going to try the camera routine. The camera resolution is actually better than most inexpensive scanners but because the orientation of the camera to the paper changes between pages it may be more difficult to OCR the camera images; I'll experiment.

 

Re: Exodus

I'm religiously ambivalent and didn't grow up with bible stories and we didn't go that far back in my requisite history class. So, it'll all be news to me. I'll do what I can. I do, however, have some experience with current US national security and some of the changes that need to be made.

 

Re: An Interesting Aside

I'm learning more about the workings of NARA, which is good. For many years, dating back to my time at Fullerton PD, I have wanted to research the public building projects undertaken by the WPA. Fullerton PD is housed in a WPA building and it's fascinating. When originally built it was on a grand scale and, in what was then the City Council chambers, the WPA painted a huge mural depicting California history. You may remember that mural from the presentation you did for a group of my fellow crime analysts.

 

That mural and the building captured my interest. The mural had nothing to do with the conduct of government and its only practical purpose was that it was beautiful and pleasing to look at (and employs a bunch of artists at the time and then again 40 years later when the artistes salvaged and repainted the mural because the City had painted over it several times and bashed big holes in the walls. Anyway, what I wanted to do was locate the buildings constructed by WPA (like a catalog) and then, in my retirement years, take a large format camera around the country and photograph some of these buildings and make it into a book of photos, building histories, and interviews with current occupants.

 

NARA in College Park keeps the WPA records and few are available electronically. So, the Tet Project could be a good lead in for me.

 

 

Take care all and have a great weekend and try to stay cool.

 

Brian

 

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From: tet_p...@googlegroups.com [mailto:tet_p...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Bergerson Fred
Sent: Friday, July 06, 2007 2:28 PM
To: tet_p...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: NARA, College park, MD