Doris Allen, an Army intelligence analyst throughout the Vietnam War whose warning about the impending assaults in early 1968 by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces that grew to become referred to as the Tet offensive was ignored by higher-ups, died on June 11 in Oakland, Calif. She was 97.
Her demise, in a hospital, was confirmed by Amy Stork, chief of public affairs for the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence.
Specialist Allen, who enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Women’s Army Corps in 1950, volunteered to serve in Vietnam in 1967, hoping to make use of her intelligence coaching to save lots of lives. She had been the first girl to attend the Army’s prisoner of conflict interrogation course and labored for 2 years as the strategic intelligence analyst for Latin American affairs at Fort Bragg, N.C., now Fort Liberty.
Working from the Army Operations Center in Long Binh, South Vietnam, Specialist Allen developed intelligence in late 1967 that detected a buildup of at least 50,000 enemy troops, maybe bolstered by Chinese troopers, who had been making ready to assault South Vietnamese targets. And she pinpointed when the operation would begin: Jan. 31, 1968.
In an interview for the e book “A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 American Women Who Served in Vietnam” (1986), by Keith Walker, Specialist Allen recalled writing a report warning that “we’d better get our stuff together because this is what is facing us, this is going to happen and it’s going to happen on such and such a day, around such and such a time.”
She mentioned she instructed an intelligence officer: “We need to disseminate this. It’s got to be told.”
But it wasn’t. She pushed for somebody up the chain of command to take her report critically, however nobody did. On Jan. 30, 1968 — consistent with what she predicted — the enemy surprised American and South Vietnamese navy leaders with the measurement and scope of their assaults.
U.S. and South Vietnamese forces sustained heavy losses early on earlier than later repelling the assaults. It was a turning level in the conflict, additional undermining American public assist for it.
The Army’s refusal to take Specialist Allen’s evaluation critically prompt to her that she was considered with prejudice, as a Black girl who was not an officer. She was certainly one of about 700 ladies in the corps, referred to as WACs, serving in intelligence positions throughout the Vietnam period, and solely 10 % had been Black.
In 1991, she instructed Newsday, “My credibility was like nothing: woman — Black woman, at that.”
In 2012, she told an Army publication: “I just recently came up with the reason they didn’t believe me — they weren’t prepared for me. They didn’t know how to look beyond the WAC, Black woman in military intelligence. I can’t blame them. I don’t feel bitter.”
Lori S. Stewart, a civilian navy intelligence historian for the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, mentioned in an electronic mail that Specialist Allen’s evaluation was not the just one that went unheeded.
“Both national and theater-level organizations believed an enemy offensive was likely sometime around the Tet holiday,” she wrote, however “too many conflicting reports and preconceptions led leaders to misread the enemy’s intentions.”
Regarding Specialist Allen, Mrs. Stewart added, “Like many other intelligence personnel in country, she was a diligent and observant intelligence analyst doing what she was supposed to do: evaluate the enemy’s intentions and capabilities.”
Specialist Allen was inducted into the Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame in 2009.
Doris Ilda Allen was born on May 9, 1927, in El Paso to Richard and Stella (Davis) Allen. Her mom was a cook dinner, and her father was a barber.
Ms. Allen graduated from Tuskegee Institute (now University) in 1949 with a bachelor’s diploma in bodily training. She taught at a highschool in Greenwood, Miss., and enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps the subsequent 12 months.
After fundamental coaching, she auditioned for the WAC Band, taking part in trumpet. But she and two different Black girl had been instructed afterward by a chief warrant officer that “they couldn’t have any Negroes in the band,” she recalled in “A Piece of My Heart.”
She served in numerous roles over the subsequent dozen or so years: as an leisure specialist, organizing troopers exhibits; the editor of the navy newspaper for the Army occupation forces in Japan throughout the Korean War; a broadcast specialist at Camp Stoneman, Calif., the place her commanding officer was her sister, Jewel; a public data officer in Japan; and an data specialist at Fort Monmouth, N.J.
In the early 1960s, Specialist Allen realized French at the Defense Language Institute and accomplished her coaching in the prisoner of conflict interrogation course at Fort Holabird, Md. She accomplished interrogation and intelligence analyst programs at Fort Bragg.
After asking to go to South Vietnam, she arrived in October 1967 for the first of her three excursions of obligation there.
“I had so many skills, so much education and training being wasted in various posts around the country that I decided I wanted to make a difference in a high-action post like Vietnam,” she told Lavender Notes, a publication for older LGBTQ+ adults, in 2020.
She left no rapid survivors.
Specialist Allen’s Tet evaluation was not the solely warning of hers to go unheeded. She suggested a colonel to not ship a convoy to Song Be, in southern South Vietnam, due to a attainable ambush, which occurred. Five flatbed vehicles had been blown up; three males had been killed and 19 wounded.
But she was listened to when she warned in early 1969 that the North Vietnamese had positioned scores of 122-millimeter rockets round the perimeter of the Long Binh operations heart, northeast of Saigon, and that they had been for use in a significant assault. She wrote a memo that led to an airstrike that destroyed the rockets.
Later that 12 months, Specialist Allen realized that the North Vietnamese had been planning to make use of 83-millimeter chemical rounds. She wrote a report that saved as many as 100 Marines, who had been instructed in her memo to keep away from any contact with the mortars once they fell of their space; they later exploded. A grateful colonel despatched a memo suggesting that whoever had written the report deserved the Legion of Merit.
Specialist Allen didn’t obtain that ornament however did earn a Bronze Star with two oak clusters, amongst many awards. She left South Vietnam in 1970 after seeing a stolen enemy doc along with her title on an inventory of targets to kill.
After serving 10 extra years in the Army she retired as a chief warrant officer.
By then she had obtained her grasp’s diploma in counseling from Ball State University in Indiana in 1977. After her navy service, she labored with a personal investigator, Bruce Haskett, whom she had met once they had been in counterintelligence. She earned a Ph.D. in medical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, Calif., in 1986, and mentored younger psychologists.
“She was incredibly savvy about people and had an innate ability to size people up quickly,” Mr. Haskett mentioned in an interview. “She was the kind of person who could walk into a pit of vipers and have everybody eating out of her hands in 15 minutes.”
Christina Brown Fisher contributed reporting.
