Alexander Demitri "Alex" ShimkinShimkin's nickname sometimes appears as "Alec", as in Lynda Zimmer, "Urbana Class of '62 reunites; alum on trail of classmates," The News-Gazette, Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, July 26, 2008. (October 11, 1944 – July 12, 1972) was an American war correspondent who was killed in the Vietnam War. He is notable for his investigation of non-combatant casualties in Operation Speedy Express.
Early life and civil rights work Born in Washington, D.C., Shimkin moved with his family in 1960 to Urbana, Illinois, where his parents, anthropologists Demitri B. Shimkin and Edith Manning Shimkin, had joined the faculty of the University of Illinois.Shimkin's father was born in Siberia and emigrated with his family after the October Revolution. See Demitri Shimkin obituary, The New York Times, December 25, 1992, and L. Daniel Myers, "Memorial to Demitri Boris Shimkin," Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, (17)1, University of California Merced, 1995, pages 1–4. Shimkin's paternal uncle was cancer researcher Dr. Michael B. Shimkin (1913–1989). See Dr. Michael B. Shimkin obituary, The New York Times, January 20, 1989, and Michael B. Shimkin, University of California: In Memoriam, 1989. Although he was baptized an Episcopalian, Shimkin and his family were members of a Methodist church in Urbana.Oral history interview. Shimkin was interviewed in 1965 in Jackson, Mississippi, about his civil rights experience by KZSU, Stanford University's student radio station. Intensely interested in military history, he made notebooks listing the order of battle for World War I armies.Turse, Kill Anything That Moves, page 248.
Shimkin graduated from Urbana High School in 1962,In Memoriam: Urbana Class of 1962. then attended the University of Michigan where he majored in history.Oral history interview. He left college in 1965 and became an activist in the civil rights movement, first with the Northern Student Movement in Alabama, then with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). After the first of the Selma to Montgomery marches, on March 7, 1965, ended with violent attacks on the peaceful marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, Shimkin traveled to Selma, arriving in time to join the March 9 "Turnaround Tuesday" march, led by Martin Luther King Jr.Oral history interview. Shimkin called this "the great U-turn that Dr. King led." During the leadup and completion of the third, successful, march to Montgomery, Shimkin was arrested on March 18 and again on March 22.
In Mississippi, he was among 140 demonstrators arrested in Natchez on October 2, 1965, and detained three days at Parchman State Prison Farm, where he and others were kept naked in cold cells with no bedding.Bierstein. He wrote an eight-page "Natchez Political Handbook" outlining the local political structure and the right to demonstrate.Facsimile: Civil Rights Movement Archive: Tougaloo CollegeFacsimile: University of Southern Mississippi Digital Collections.Shimkin wrote a similar voter guide for the 1967 elections in Holmes County. Sojourner, pages 231–232.
Shimkin was a full-time MFDP staff member in Quitman County in 1966.Freedom Information Service Mississippi Newsletter, number 1, June 22, 1966, page 3. Facsimile accessed October 23, 2012, through the University of Georgia Civil Rights Digital Library. On June 9, 1966, he joined the March Against Fear organized by activist James Meredith who had been shot and injured a few days before.Goudsouzian, pages 51–53. One of Shimkin's companions from Quitman County, a 58-year-old African American named Armistead Phipps, died of heart failure during the march. "He was a decent Christian man," Shimkin said of Phipps. "I feel honestly that if he'd known he was about to die he would have done it this way." In Holmes County, he helped organize a Head Start program and a voter registration drive that registered over 6,000 African Americans for the 1967 election.Logan and Frate in E. Shimkin et al., pages 9, and D. Shimkin in Eaton, page 96. Logan and Frate cite a 1968 report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights that shows a jump in nonwhite voter registration in Holmes County from 20 to 6,332 following enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The registration effort contributed to the election of Robert G. Clark, Jr., the first African American in the Mississippi House of Representatives since Reconstruction. Together with his father, Shimkin organized a project through which 18 African American students from Holmes County were selected to attend the University of Illinois.Logan and Frate in E. Shimkin et al., page 11. This was called the "Mississippi Pilot Project." All but three of the students completed their undergraduate work. Shimkin also launched a drive on the University of Illinois campus that raised $1,325 for needy Mississippi children. In a note that he left behind in Mississippi, Shimkin wrote, "Since I was barely twenty, I've devoted almost every moment of my life to the [civil rights] movement...."Sojourner, page 254.
Volunteer service in Vietnam and the Ba Chúc story
Returning to his studies, Shimkin graduated with "high distinction" in government from Indiana University Bloomington in 1969,E. Shimkin et al., page ix. "Government" was the name that Indiana University used at the time for its political science program. then became a community development worker with International Voluntary Services (IVS) in Laos and South Vietnam. While with IVS in Vietnam, Shimkin and another volunteer, Ronald Moreau, became sources for a New York Times story by Gloria Emerson published in January 1971 about the forced use of Vietnamese civilians by South Vietnamese officers and their American advisers to clear land mines near the village of Ba Chúc on the Cambodian border.Emerson. In 1978, Ba Chúc became the scene of further tragedy when over 3,000 Vietnamese civilians were killed there by forces of the Khmer Rouge in what became known as the Ba Chúc Massacre. As Moreau later described the situation, North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers planted mines on hillsides near the village to protect their upland positions and successfully resisted combined American and South Vietnamese air and ground attacks. Believing that the villagers knew where the communist forces had placed the mines and booby traps, the American and South Vietnamese officers forced the Ba Chúc villagers at gunpoint to use hand tools to locate and remove the mines, a task that resulted in several deaths and serious injuries among the villagers when the explosives detonated. There were also casualties from mortar attacks by the communists who wanted to disrupt the operation.Memorial website in honor of Gloria Emerson: A Letter from Ronald Moreau in Islamabad (Newsweek Magazine) Tuesday, September 28, 2004.
After contacting Emerson, Shimkin and Moreau went with her to interview the villagers. According to Moreau, Emerson's story "had an immediate impact", causing the Pentagon to order an immediate halt to the mine-clearing operation. The story also brought a halt to Shimkin's and Moreau's service with IVS, which fired them for speaking to the press without permission. According to Moreau, Emerson intervened again, getting Shimkin a job as a stringer with Newsweek and Moreau one with The Washington Post.Ronald Moreau later became the correspondent for Newsweek and The Daily Beast in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He died May 13, 2014.
Investigation of Operation Speedy Express
Working for Newsweek, Shimkin read documents released by the United States Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV). Reviewing the MACV (pronounced "mack vee") documents about Operation Speedy Express, conducted in the Mekong Delta from December 1968 through May 1969, Shimkin noticed the large disparity between the American claims of 10,899 enemy dead and the reported capture of only 748 enemy weapons. Shimkin's conclusion, based on further documentary research and on interviews with American officials and Vietnamese witnesses, was that a large number of the reported dead were unarmed Vietnamese non-combatants whose deaths, whether accidental or deliberate, were used to enhance the body count that commanders of the Ninth Infantry Division considered the measure of the operation's success.Turse, A My Lai a Month. Former Senator Charles Hagel of Nebraska, later Secretary of Defense, a veteran of the Ninth Infantry, said, "You used that body count, commanding officers did, as the metric and measurement as how successful you were...." Quoted by The Washington Post reporter Patricia Sullivan in a blog posting, "A Vietnam War That Never Ends," August 5, 2009.In a letter to The Nation in 2008, Richard Brummett, who described himself as "a hanger-on at the Newsweek office in Saigon in 1971–72", wrote: "I remember Alex Shimkin concluding from his 'captured documents' that the peak killing hour was the time when school let out every afternoon in the Delta." Among the specific incidents uncovered by Shimkin was the one at Thanh Phong on the night of February 25–26, 1969, in which United States Navy SEALs led by Lieutenant (jg) Bob Kerrey, later Governor of Nebraska and a United States Senator, killed 21 civilians who were added to the body count of enemy dead, information that did not become public until 2001.Turse, Exposé. Turse reports that Newsweek suppressed a story by Gregory Vistica about the Thanh Phong incident in 1998. It finally became public in 2001 when Vistica published an article in The New York Times Magazine. See Gregory Vistica, "One Awful Night in Thanh Phong," New York Times Magazine, April 25, 2001. Vistica also described the Thanh Phong raid and how the body count was tallied in his book,
Shimkin and his boss, Newsweek's Saigon bureau chief Kevin P. Buckley, produced a 4,700-word story that specifically alleged "that thousands of Vietnamese civilians have been killed deliberately by U.S. forces."Buckley. The numbers, if not the deliberate nature of the casualties, were later supported by an official, though secret, U.S. Army report that concluded: "[W]hile there appears to be no means of determining the precise number of civilian casualties incurred by US forces during Operation Speedy Express, it would appear that the extent of these casualties was in fact substantial, and that a fairly solid case can be constructed to show that civilian casualties may have amounted to several thousand (between 5,000 and 7,000)."Turse, My Lai and Lockerbie.
Pared back to 1,800 words by Newsweek editors who feared that the allegations would be seen as a "gratuitous attack" on the administration of President Richard M. Nixon following the revelations of the My Lai massacre,Knightley, page 400. Ironically, both the My Lai Massacre and the start of Operation Speedy Express took place during the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson. the story was published in the June 19, 1972, issue under the title "Pacification's Deadly Price", but it attracted little attention.Knightley, page 400. Buckley stated, "There was a flurry of low-level Congressional interest and then it faded." A few weeks later, Shimkin was killed.
Shimkin at Trảng Bàng
On June 8, 1972, a month before he died, Shimkin was one of the journalists present at Trảng Bàng in Tây Ninh Province when photographer Nick Ut captured his famous image of the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl Phan Thị Kim Phúc and some other children fleeing a napalm attack. Two South Vietnamese Skyraider aircraft went off course and dropped the incendiary bombs near the journalists, resulting in the deaths of two children and inflicting serious burns on others, including Kim Phúc.