Doris Allen, who served as an Army intelligence analyst during the Vietnam War and whose warnings of an impending attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in early 1968, known as the Tet Offensive, were ignored by her superiors, died June 11 in Oakland, California. She was 97 years old.
Amy Stork, public affairs director for the Army Intelligence Center, confirmed her death at the hospital.
Specialist Allen enlisted in the U.S. Army's Women's Army Corps in 1950, hoping to use the knowledge she gained in intelligence training to save lives, so she volunteered to serve in Vietnam in 1967. She was the first woman to take the Army's prisoner of war interrogation course and served for two years as a strategic intelligence analyst on Latin American affairs at Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty) in North Carolina.
Specialist Allen, serving at the Army Operations Center in Long Binh, South Vietnam, detected a massing of at least 50,000 enemy troops, possibly reinforced by Chinese forces, preparing to attack targets in South Vietnam in late 1967. He pinpointed the start date of the operation as January 31, 1968.
In an interview for Keith Walker's 1986 book Pieces of My Heart: The Story of 26 American Women Who Served in the Vietnam War, Specialist Allen recalled writing a report that warned, “We'd better be ready, because this is what we're facing, and this is what's going to happen, and it's going to happen at this hour and this minute and this is what's going to happen.”
“We need to get this out there. We need to get the word out,” she reportedly told the operative.
But that was not to be the case. She pressured those higher up 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 scale and scope of their attack.
American and South Vietnamese forces initially suffered heavy losses but later repelled the attack, marking a turning point in the war and further weakening American public support for the Vietnam War.
The Army's refusal to take Specialist Allen's analysis seriously exposed her to prejudice as a non-commissioned black woman. She was one of about 700 women officers (known as WACs) who served in intelligence roles during the Vietnam War, of whom only 10 percent were black.
“My credibility, as a woman, and a black woman at that,” she told Newsday in 1991, “was worthless.”
In 2012, she told an Army publication, “I only just found out why they didn't believe me. They weren't ready for me. They didn't know how to think beyond a WAC, a black woman in military intelligence. I can't blame them. I don't bear any grudges.”
Lori S. Stewart, a civilian military intelligence historian at the Army Intelligence Center, said in an email that Allen's analysis was not the only one that was ignored.
“Both national and theater-level organizations believed that an enemy attack was likely to occur around the Tet holiday,” she wrote, but “too many conflicting reports and preconceived notions led leaders to misread enemy intentions.”
Of Specialist Allen, Mrs. Stewart added, “Like many of the nation's intelligence officers, she was a diligent and observant intelligence analyst, doing her job of assessing 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, the daughter of Richard and Stella (Davis) Allen. Her mother was a cook and her father a barber.
Allen graduated from Tuskegee University (now University) with a bachelor's degree in physical education in 1949. 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 and played trumpet, but she and two other black women were subsequently told by a warrant officer that “we can't have black people in the band,” she recalls in “A Piece of My Heart.”
She spent the next decade or so in a variety of roles, including entertainment specialist planning 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 sister Jewel was commander, public affairs officer in Japan, and information specialist at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.
In the early 1960s, Specialist Allen studied French at the Defense Language Institute and completed Prisoner of War Interrogation Course training at Fort Holabird, Maryland, and the Interrogation and Intelligence Analysis Course at Fort Bragg.
She requested a trip to South Vietnam and arrived there in October 1967 for the first of her three tours of duty.
“I had wasted a lot of my skills, a lot of my education and training in various domestic assignments, so I wanted to make a difference in an action-packed assignment like Vietnam,” she told Lavender Notes, a publication for older LGBTQ+ adults, in 2020.
She had no direct survivors.
Allen's Tet analysis was not the only warning that was ignored: she advised a colonel not to send a convoy to Song Be in southern South Vietnam because of the possibility of an ambush; five flat-bottom trucks were blown up, killing three and wounding 19.
But her words were heard when, in early 1969, she warned that the North Vietnamese had placed large numbers of 122mm rockets around the Long Binh operations center northeast of Saigon and would be used in a major attack. She wrote a memo that led to air strikes that destroyed the rockets.
Later that year, Specialist Allen learned that the North Vietnamese planned to use 83mm chemical munitions. She wrote a report, saving the lives of as many as 100 Marines. Their notes instructed them to stay clear of mortar shells as they fell in their area, but the mortars then exploded. A grateful colonel sent a memo suggesting that whoever wrote the report deserved the Legion of Merit.
Although Special Forces Officer Allen was never decorated, she received numerous awards, including a Bronze Star with two oak clusters. She left South Vietnam in 1970 after seeing stolen enemy documents that showed her name on a hit list.
After another 10 years in the Army She retired as a warrant officer.
In 1977, she earned a master's degree in counseling from Ball State University in Indiana. After completing her military service, she worked with Bruce Haskett, a private investigator she had met during her counterintelligence career. In 1986, she earned a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, where she mentored young psychologists.
“She had an incredible sense of people and a natural talent for judging people quickly,” Mr. Haskett said in an interview. “She was the kind of person who could walk into a den of vipers and have them all eating themselves within 15 minutes.”
Christina Brown Fisher Contributed report.