Doris Allen, analyst who saw the Tet Offensive coming, has died at the age of 97

Doris Allen, an Army intelligence analyst during the Vietnam War whose warning of impending attacks by North Vietnamese and Vietnamese forces in early 1968 that became known as the Tet Offensive was ignored by her superiors, died June 11 in Oakland, California. She was 97.

Her death at a hospital was confirmed by Amy Stork, director of public affairs for the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence.

Specialist Allen, who joined the U.S. Army Women’s Army Corps in 1950, volunteered for service in Vietnam in 1967, hoping to use her intelligence training to save lives. She was the first woman to take 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.

From the Army Operations Center in Long Binh, South Vietnam, in late 1967, Specialist Allen gathered intelligence that revealed a buildup of at least 50,000 enemy troops, possibly reinforced by Chinese soldiers, preparing to attack South Vietnamese targets. And she gave the exact date for the start of the operation: January 31, 1968.

In an interview for Keith Walker’s book A Piece of My Heart: The Stories of 26 American Women Who Served in Vietnam (1986), Specialist Allen recalled writing a report warning, “We’d better get a grip, because this is what’s coming, this is what’s going to happen, and it’s going to happen on such and such a day, at about such and such a time.”

She said she told an intelligence officer: “We need to get this out there. It needs to be told.”

But that wasn’t the case. She pushed for someone in the chain of command to take her report seriously, but no one did. On January 30, 1968, as she had predicted, the enemy surprised the American and South Vietnamese military leadership with the size and scope of its attacks.

U.S. and South Vietnamese forces suffered heavy casualties at the beginning before later repelling the attacks. This was a turning point in the war and further undermined American public support for the war.

The Army’s refusal to take Specialist Allen’s analysis seriously led her to suspect 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 served in intelligence positions during the Vietnam War, and only 10 percent of them were black.

In 1991, she told Newsday: “My credibility was unparalleled: a woman – and a black woman at that.”

In 2012, she told an Army publication, “I just found out the reason they didn’t believe me – they weren’t prepared for me. They didn’t know how to look beyond the WAC, a black woman in military intelligence. I don’t blame them. I’m not bitter.”

Lori S. Stewart, a civilian military intelligence historian with the Army Intelligence Center of Excellence, said in an email that Specialist Allen’s analysis was not the only one that went unnoticed.

“Organizations at the national and regional levels assumed that an enemy offensive might take place sometime around the Tet festival,” she wrote. “However, too many conflicting reports and prejudices led politicians to misjudge the enemy’s intentions.”

Referring to Specialist Allen, Ms Stewart added: “Like many other intelligence officers in the country, she was a diligent and attentive intelligence analyst who did what she was supposed to do: assess the intentions and capabilities of the enemy.”

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 mother was a cook and her father was a hairdresser.

Ms. Allen graduated from Tuskegee Institute (now the 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 played trumpet for the WAC Band. But she and two other black women were later told by a chief warrant officer that “they were not allowed to have blacks in the band,” she recalls in “A Piece of My Heart.”

Over the next twelve years or so, she held a variety of assignments: as entertainment specialist organizing soldier shows; as editor of the military newspaper for the Army’s occupation forces in Japan during the Korean War; as broadcast specialist at Camp Stoneman, California, where her sister Jewel was her commander; as press secretary in Japan; and as information specialist at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey.

In the early 1960s, Specialist Allen studied French at the Defense Language Institute and completed her training in the Prisoner of War Interrogation Course at Fort Holabird, Maryland. She completed interrogation and intelligence analysis courses at Fort Bragg.

After requesting permission to go to South Vietnam, she arrived in October 1967 for her first of three deployments.

“I had so many skills, so much education and training that were wasted at various posts across the country that I decided I wanted to make a difference at an action-packed post like Vietnam,” she told Lavender Notes, a publication for LGBTQ+ older adults, in 2020.

She left no immediate survivors.

Specialist Allen’s Tet analysis was not her only warning that went unheeded. She advised a colonel not to send a convoy to Song Be in southern South Vietnam because of the risk of an ambush. And sure enough, it happened. Five pickup trucks were blown up, killing three men and wounding 19.

But she was heeded when she warned in early 1969 that the North Vietnamese had placed dozens of 122-millimeter rockets around the Long Binh operations center northeast of Saigon and were about to use them for a major attack. She wrote a memo that led to an air strike that destroyed the rockets.

Later that year, Specialist Allen learned that the North Vietnamese were planning to use 82-millimeter chemical munitions. She wrote a report that saved the lives of as many as 100 Marines who had been instructed in her memo to avoid all contact with them if they fell in her area; they later exploded. A grateful colonel sent a memo suggesting that the report’s author deserved the Legion of Merit.

Specialist Allen did not receive this award, but did receive a Bronze Star with two oak branches, among many other awards. She left South Vietnam in 1970 after seeing a stolen enemy document that included her name on a list of targets to kill.

After another 10 years of service in the army She retired as Chief Warrant Officer.

By this time, she had earned her master’s degree in counseling from Ball State University in Indiana in 1977. After her military service, she worked with private investigator Bruce Haskett, whom she had met in counterintelligence. In 1986, she received a doctorate in clinical psychology from the Wright Institute in Berkeley, California, and supervised young psychologists.

“She had an incredible understanding of people and an innate ability to read people quickly,” Haskett said in an interview. “She was the kind of person who could walk into a snake pit and have them all eat out of her hand within 15 minutes.”

Christina Brown Fisher contributed to the reporting.