Sailing With Westmoreland

My siblings are an almost irritatingly accomplished and wise bunch, and so quite some time ago I invited Noble Sibling Number One to write a post for this blog based on some time we spent together.

Here she is:

Sailing With Westmoreland

Family gatherings often entail rediscovery and recreation in various loving ways. One group will pass an evening swilling & reminiscing, another will enjoy board games for hours. When it comes to MY family of origin, our time together often features researching for hours on end.

Our most recent reunion started this way:

“What kind of ship did we take when we sailed from Manila to Hong Kong in ‘68?” posed my brother.

As the oldest, I assumed the (know-it-all) position and stated simply, “ It was the President Wilson and General Westmoreland was on board with us.”

My mom and brother guffawed. “How could you possible know that!?” my brother challenged.

In reality, I had no proof, but I could sense my then-teenaged-memory informing my adult-present that this was how it had happened. We weren’t exactly combative, but we weren’t all in accord either. Therefore, we launched Google and went to work.

We then called on my other brother (the curator of our storied past) and asked if he had any shipboard photographs that would identify the actual vessel. Meanwhile, our mom tried to recall the actual date that we sailed out of the port of Manila.

Our mom faithfully chronicled our two years in Manila, and we knew that she had recently spent hours retyping those so that we would have that record of our time abroad. Her detailed descriptions of our life in the Philippines from 1966 -1968 might contain the evidence to prove me right, but no one could immediately lay their mitts on their copy.

So we commenced rapid-fire Googling, with mom calling out possible search strings:

• Westmoreland departs Manila
• Westmoreland arrives in Hong Kong
• Passenger Ships SE Asia 1968
• Sea travel between Manila and Hong Kong
• Passenger manifests + shipping lanes
• SS President Wilson
• President Line

…and so on for about 3 hours that night. Fortified with Atomic Cake we resumed our work early the next morning. Atomic Cake is another story, but if you’re from Chicagoland, you probably know what I’m talking about.

While we did not discover any definitive evidence, here are some facts discovered while we searched side by side. Amplification is provided by those letters our mom wrote so long ago (which were finally found) as well as some dates and places retrieved from a very old passport of mine:

• On February 13, 1968, during a visit to our Philippine home, our Grandma wrote this to our family in back in the States:

“This is a hard place for children to live, also for many women, especially the wives of ___ employees. They moved here in the first place because it was the only way a family could ever be together. The men were to get a week away from Saigon every 6 weeks. Now with conditions as they are, they don’t get to leave at all. 16 wives were allowed to charter a plane and go see their husbands. Fighting broke out and they tape-recorded the sounds outside their living quarters. After a long delay, all but 3 of them are back home. These three are trapped out in a province and can’t get out an airport” … she goes on to tell how “[me-as-granddaughter] is feeling bad about this thing in Saigon. It is very upsetting that she knew the kids of all of those people whose dads and moms are affected.”

(this “thing” in Saigon was probably the Tet Offensive.)

• On March 16 of that same Spring, as our parents were planning our return trip to the US, the Mei Lei massacre took place in Viet Nam. Oddly, the carbon of mom’s letter written that same day has only this to say about things military: “We had hoped to go to Europe to teach next year, but haven’t heard of vacancies there except in the military schools, and after my experiences working with them, I’m not the least bit interested in sending my children to Dependent school.”

• On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated. In a letter dated April 13, our mom wrote home “Things sound just terrible in the U.S. since the horrible death of King. From this side of the ocean, things look messy, but then our perspective isn’t any better, just different.”

• In Early June of 1968, Creighton Abrams replaced General William Westmoreland as the commander of forces in Vietnam, shortly after Westmoreland had requested an additional 200,000 men be sent into the conflict.

• On June 5, Robert F Kennedy was assassinated in the U.S.

• On June 10 1968, Westmoreland said farewell to his troops and staff in Saigon and left for Subic Bay in the Philippines.

• On June 12 1968 Westmoreland made final remarks to his people in Subic Bay.

• My ancient passport reveals that we left Manila on June 12, 1968, which is also Philippine Independence Day (from Spain), on board the President Wilson II, which we learned was serving Honolulu, Manila and Hong Kong in those days.

• On or around June 20, Westmoreland filed some papers which he had written some days earlier while aboard the President Wilson en route from Manila to Hong Kong, and he later returned to the United States where he was appointed Army Chief of Staff.

• We found the online diary of one Ann Downer, an author whose site includes this item: “One day our dad came home and announced we were moving to the Philippines” … … “so in 1968 my family boarded the SS President Wilson for the trip to Manila.” Why, this person was on deck of the very same ship!

• After spending the rest of June and half of July 1968 trekking through Asia and Europe, our family returned to the small town, where our journey had begun. Our parents spent a few weeks looking at job choices and finally chose Chicagoland as their future nest.


• The week we moved in to our new place, the Democratic convention of 1968 began in Chicago (August 26 – August 29). Our parents were further horrified to discover that the town minutes from our home, if that, was also churning with unrest and race rioting.

We never did prove (YET!) whether Westmoreland was a fellow passenger on our voyage away from the Philippine Islands. And none of my brothers ever served in Vietnam. No one in our family has been lost to anything political or violent in nature, and yet, when I look back on those few months spanning February–August, 1968, I can’t shake this mental image our little family’s odd sojourn in SE Asia, and our subsequent trek amid a world in chaos and grief.

As we threaded our way through places like Beirut, Athens and Amsterdam (where we accidentally toured the famous red Light District), we surely didn’t feel as though we were skirting danger at every turn, but those were actually very dangerous times and places. I actually think that we could not possibly have grasped the importance of the events of that time while we were living it.

We may well continue to dissect this brief period, including consulting a resource that my brother uncovered that’s just a few miles from the place I now call home which purportedly deals in passenger manifests from passenger ships of the 60’s.

In fact, who but us really cares about our Asian Adventures back then? Next time we all gather together, we will probably be researching some other aspect of our shared family experience. This time spent examining and reinterpreting the life we have shared and who we ultimately became has revealed some astounding juxtapositions.

Our geekness, our love for one another, our political liberalism, and our past binds us in a way that other families’ shared experiences bind them. That’s all we have and that’s all we need.

I will only add that the world through which our little family traveled is long gone, but the impressions it left on me -- especially the sense of outsiderhood that came with trying to fit into a suburban culture obsessed with conformity and status and where almost no one had ever been more than 50 miles from home -- have been with me ever since.

And now, as Paul Harvey used to say, you know a little bit of the rest of the story.