Doris Allen, an Army intelligence analyst during the Vietnam War whose warning of impending attacks in early 1968 by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces that became known as the Tet Offensive was ignored by senior commanders, died June 11 in Oakland, California. She was 97.
His death, at 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. Women’s Army Corps in 1950, volunteered to serve in Vietnam in 1967, hoping to use her intelligence training to save lives. She had been the first woman to attend the Army’s prisoner-of-war interrogation course and worked for two years as a strategic intelligence analyst for Latin American affairs at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, now Fort Liberty.
At the end of 1967, Specialist Allen, working from the Army Operations Center in Long Binh (South Vietnam), produced information that allowed her to detect a concentration of at least 50,000 enemy troops, perhaps reinforced by Chinese soldiers. , which were preparing to attack South Vietnamese targets. Furthermore, she determined when the operation would begin: January 31, 1968.
In an interview for Keith Walker’s 1986 book “A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 American Women Who Served in Vietnam,” Specialist Allen recalled writing a report warning that “we better get our things together because this is what we’re up against, this is going to happen, and it’s going to happen on such and such a day, at such and such a time.”
He said he told an intelligence officer: “We need to get this out. We need to tell this.”
But it was not like that. She pushed for someone in the chain of command to take her report seriously, but no one did. On January 30, 1968, just as she predicted, the enemy surprised American and South Vietnamese military leaders with the magnitude and scope of their attacks.
American and South Vietnamese forces suffered heavy losses at first, but later managed to repel the attacks. It was a turning point in the war that further undermined American public support for it.
The Army’s refusal to take Specialist Allen’s analysis seriously suggested to her that she was viewed with prejudice, as a black woman who was not an officer. She was one of about 700 women in the corps, known as WACs, who held intelligence positions during the Vietnam era, and only 10 percent were black.
In 1991, she told Newsday: “My credibility was nothing like that of a woman… a black woman, at that.”
In 2012, he told an Army publication: “The reason they didn’t believe me recently occurred to me: They weren’t prepared for me. They didn’t know how to see beyond the WAC, the black woman in military intelligence. I can’t blame them. “I don’t feel bitter.”
Lori S. Stewart, a civilian military intelligence historian at the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, said in an email that Specialist Allen’s analysis was not the only one that went unnoticed.
“Both national and theater organizations believed that an enemy offensive was likely sometime around the Tet holiday,” he wrote, but “too many conflicting reports and preconceptions led leaders to misinterpret enemy intentions.”
Regarding Specialist Allen, Ms. Stewart added: “Like many other members of the country’s intelligence personnel, she was a diligent and observant intelligence analyst who did what she was supposed to do: assess 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 May 9, 1927 in El Paso, daughter of Richard and Stella (Davis) Allen. Her mother was a cook and her father was a barber.
Mrs. Allen graduated from Tuskegee Institute (now University) in 1949 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education. She taught high school in Greenwood, Mississippi, and enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps the following year.
After basic training, she auditioned for the WAC band, playing trumpet. But a senior noncommissioned officer told her and two other black women that “they couldn’t have any black women in the band,” she recalled in “A Piece of My Heart.”
During the next twelve years, he held various positions: entertainment specialist, organizing shows for soldiers; editor of the military newspaper for the army occupation forces in Japan during the Korean War; broadcast specialist at Camp Stoneman, California, where her commanding officer was her sister, Jewel; public information officer in Japan; and information specialist at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
In the early 1960s, Specialist Allen learned French at the Defense Language Institute and completed her training at the POW Interrogation Course at Fort Holabird, Maryland. She completed interrogation and intelligence analysis courses at Fort Bragg.
After asking to go to South Vietnam, he arrived in October 1967 for the first of his three tours of duty there.
“I had so many skills, so much education and training that was wasted in various positions across the country that I decided I wanted to make a difference in a high-action position like Vietnam,” she told Lavender Notes, a publication for LGBTQ+ seniors, in 2020.
It left no immediate survivors.
Specialist Allen’s Tet analysis was not his only warning not to be heeded. He advised a colonel not to send a convoy to Song Be, southern South Vietnam, because of a possible ambush that occurred. Five flatbed trucks were blown up; three men were killed and 19 wounded.
But they listened when she warned in early 1969 that the North Vietnamese had placed dozens of 122-millimeter rockets around the perimeter of the Long Binh operations center northeast of Saigon and were going to use them in a large-scale attack. She wrote a memo that led to an airstrike that destroyed the rockets.
Later that year, Specialist Allen learned that the North Vietnamese were planning to use 82-millimeter chemical bullets. She wrote a report that saved as many as 100 Marines, who in her memo had been ordered to avoid any contact with them when they fell in her area; they then blew themselves up. A grateful colonel sent a memo suggesting that whoever had written the report deserved the Legion of Merit.
Specialist Allen did not receive that decoration, but she did receive a Bronze Star with two oak clusters, among many other awards. She left South Vietnam in 1970 after seeing a stolen enemy document with her name on a kill list.
After serving 10 more years in the military He retired as a senior non-commissioned officer.
By then, she had earned her master’s degree in counseling from Indiana’s Ball State University in 1977. After her military service, she worked with a private investigator, Bruce Haskett, whom she had met while working in counterintelligence. She earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, in 1986, and mentored young psychologists.
“She was incredibly knowledgeable about people and had an innate ability to assess them quickly,” Haskett said in an interview. “She was the kind of person who could walk into a pit of vipers and have everyone eating out of her hands in 15 minutes.”
Christina Brown Fisher Contributed with reports.
