Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam
528
Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam
528eBook
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Overview
For many Americans, the recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan bring back painful memories of one issue in particular: American policy on the rescue of and negotiation for American prisoners. One current American POW of the Taliban, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, stands as their symbol. Thousands of Vietnam veteran POW activists worry that Bergdahl will suffer the fate of so many of their POW/MIA comrades—abandonment once the US leaves that theater of war.
Kiss the Boys Goodbye convincingly shows that a legacy of shame remains from America’s ill-fated involvement in Vietnam. Until US government policy on POW/MIAs changes, it remains one of the most crucial issues for any American soldier who fights for home and country, particularly when we are engaged with an enemy that doesn’t adhere to the international standards for the treatment of prisoners—or any American hostage—as the graphic video of Daniel Pearl’s decapitation on various Jihad websites bears out.
In this explosive book, Monika Jensen-Stevenson and William Stevenson provide startling evidence that American troops were left in captivity in Indochina, victims of their government’s abuse of secrecy and power. The book not only delves into the world of official obstruction, missing files, censored testimony, and the pressures brought to bear on witnesses ready to tell the truth, but also reveals the trauma on patriotic families torn apart by a policy that, at first, seemed unbelievable to them.
First published in 1990, Kiss the Boys Goodbye has become a classic on the subject. This new edition features an afterword, which fills in the news on the latest verifiable scandal produced by the Senate Select Committee on POWs.
Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781632200150 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 11/18/2014 |
| Sold by: | SIMON & SCHUSTER |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 528 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
William Stevenson was trained in aerial espionage as a British naval fighter pilot during World War II. A respected historian and expert on covert warfare, he is the author of sixteen books, including A Man Called Intrepid, Intrepid’s Last Case,. and 90 Minutes at Entebbe.
William Stevenson was a journalist and author of the bestselling books A Man Called Intrepid and 90 Minutes at Entebbe, He also worked as a movie scriptwriter, a television news commentator, and producer of award-winning documentaries. He died in 2013.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
TRAITOR
In 1985 I had been a producer at the CBS TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes for five years. Home was in the Georgetown area of Washington, D.C., and I often walked to my office at 20th and M streets, even after learning I was pregnant. My husband, William Stevenson, seemed happy to live wherever he could write his books undisturbed. Sometimes I wondered if there was anywhere he had not lived both as a fighter pilot in the British navy during World War II and as a foreign correspondent. He had reported from inside most of the Communist countries from Poland to Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam and had spent fifteen years in Asia as a foreign and war correspondent. He had written a number of books about national movements and counter- terrorism, such as Ninety Minutes at Entebbe and A Man Called Intrepid. If I could not reach someone by going through 60 Minutes' files, I generally could by going through his contact book.
One morning, as I entered my office and checked for messages, I found a scribbled card from Angie Prijic, my classmate at college. She was writing to say that someone in Indochina had found an Air Force Academy ring belonging to Lance Sijan, a Phantom pilot we had known when we were at school. Why, she was wondering, would his ring show up eighteen years after he disappeared in Vietnam? She had heard conflicting reports on rescue missions.
It was an intriguing question, but a busy day loomed ahead. I turned to a more immediate matter: Lucille Ball. Her press agent had called to confirm an interview if we still wanted to do it. Fred Astaire's press agent also had a good idea for a segment. It would be fun to produce a show biz item for once.
However, Don Hewitt, our executive producer at 60 Minutes, phoned from the New York center to say he couldn't go for a profile on Lucille Ball. She had been part of the CBS stable of talent, but she didn't fit 60 Minutes' criteria — not enough of a legend. Fred Astaire? There was a star Hewitt loved, and whose name was already in the history books. "Go for Astaire!" he said. "Forget Lucille Ball."
Hewitt had an uncanny instinct for what kept fifty million viewers watching our show each Sunday night. He combined street smarts with years of television and journalistic experience. He might seem to fly by the seat of his pants, but his one hour of prime time generated a quarter of the CBS network's profits, said his admirers. He had held only one meeting since he started at 60 Minutes some twenty years earlier. Conferences took the form of ideas barked on the run, strangled shouts in the screening room, yelps of the wounded when Hewitt and the lawyers, the brass, the producers, and the correspondents battled over weekly segments that were usually around fourteen minutes in length. It always amazed me how much drama Hewitt could compress into so short a span of air time, or within such narrow corridors. He was as disdainful of routine as only a $2-million-a-year man could afford to be, as Vanity Fair once observed with undisguised envy.
I reached for Astaire's file and, on my way through the A's, prepared to put away Angie's card under A for Angie. I had opened her file a few months before, in late 1984, after she told me Lance Sijan had been awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.
I felt a surge of pride. Angie and I wore prisoner-of-war bracelets with Lance's name on them at the University of Wisconsin. He was twenty-five in 1967 when he dragged his way for forty-six days and nights through the Vietnamese jungle with a smashed leg and broken hands.
"No one's ever told his story," Angie had said.
The medal was for the way he resisted torture and mental thuggee. Prisoners who did come home described his resistance as awesome. It was a great story. But for 60 Minutes? Ed Bradley, the correspondent I had been assigned to work with, was amused. Profile a dead Medal of Honor winner from the Vietnam War? Not in 1985.
However, something about Lance Sijan's story bothered me. And now here was Angie with rumors of a rescue mission and retrieval of Lance's ring. Funny that nothing official was ever said. Trust Angie to ferret out awkward facts. She'd become a psychologist, working among down-and-outs in city slums, and although she was the busy mother of three children, she remained the kind of person who would look unflinchingly at things others preferred not to see.
My husband, Bill, did not get involved in my work. As a writer, he found my stories could be a terrible distraction. However, when I told him about it, the mystery of Lance Sijan's ring intrigued him as well. He was going to Thailand on a writing assignment. Could he inquire into the rumors Angie had passed along? It was said that U.S. rescue missions had been launched from Thailand into the Communist territories.
"I'll drop by Lucy's Tiger Den in Bangkok," he offered. He generally knew what watering hole to visit in a foreign place. He had spent part of his life rubbing shoulders with intelligence spooks. His father had worked in Nazi-occupied France with the Resistance networks. Bill had worked in strife-torn Malaysia while wars raged in neighboring Indochina. I felt I could reasonably draw upon his experience just this one time.
Before he got within ten thousand miles of Lucy's Tiger Den, though, a letter came to Ed Bradley from Bill Davison and Kyle R. Eddings in Pennsylvania. "60 Minutes continues to be concerned about human rights in every country except the United States," it said. "Why can't — or why won't — 60 Minutes cover Americans missing in Southeast Asia? 2,483 are still there...."
The letter was routinely investigated by a 60 Minutes researcher who told me, "The government says it's nonsense. There are no Americans left alive and held against their will." Usually a researcher's report satisfied me, but I found this issue was nagging at my mind.
I decided to follow up Angie's lead with a few questions for the Pentagon. I was particularly curious about a Green Beret colonel, Bo Gritz, who was reported to have led a mission in 1981 to recover American servicemen left behind in Southeast Asia. His service record made him sound like a resourceful, highly decorated commando type who had carried out daring behind-the-lines operations in the Vietnam War. General William C. Westmoreland, after commanding U.S. forces in Vietnam, singled out Gritz as the quintessential American soldier hero in his memoirs. But now one of my contacts sent me a Soldier of Fortune magazine with the cover headline: "Bo Gritz: Hero or Huckster?" Inside was a savage attack on Gritz, claiming that the rescue mission was a Gritz fantasy, typical of the barroom tales in Lucy's Tiger Den.
It was not uncommon for me to be casually interested in a potential story and then find myself tripping over relevant bits of information wherever I turned. Most reporters know the feeling. Either a significant bit of luck or a meaningless string of coincidences is at work.
One night I was at an informal dinner given by a highly respected former CIA official who had become a good friend. Among the guests were a number of journalists, a former CIA station chief, a Soviet expert, a counter-intelligence specialist, and Cord Meyer, such an old hand in diplomacy and intelligence that the New York Times had profiled him on January 7, 1973, as a man who had made a long journey from idealistic hopes for world unity to "the Department of Dirty Tricks." Newspapers had quoted Meyer as talking openly about his success in carrying out a CIA assignment to discredit a book alleging CIA involvement in the illegal drug trade.
Later, one of the guests came to me. "Bo Gritz is an unmitigated liar," he said.
I felt a stab of unease. Maybe Bill should avoid Lucy's Tiger Den. He was going up-country to research a book. Why get him tangled up with Bo Gritz, rescue missions, and a ring?
"It's such a nice project you're starting," I said to him when he telephoned later that night. "Forget Lucy's."
"If you keep to nice assignments."
He did not want a pregnant wife producing more of what Hewitt called "the dirty-face stories." One, about a notorious killer, had won me an Emmy. Frothy subjects would be welcome now. Why make something of what was probably just coincidence? It was silly to think the government was out to make Gritz seem loony to me just because someone had sent me that critical article about him in Soldier of Fortune magazine and a former intelligence man had appeared to make a particular point of calling him an unmitigated liar.
A few days later, working on a segment about the Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island and the mob's involvement in faulty construction, I pulled an old memo from my research files in the New York office. "A Marine keeps trying to talk about Americans we abandoned in Vietnam," I had written. "The Marine came out of Communist hands long after the war ended, and long after the U.S. government decided no Americans were still held against their will. He was branded a traitor. Now there are sober reports he was framed.
The Marine's name was Bobby Garwood.
On September 28, 1965, Private Garwood, a staff driver for the Third Marine Division at Da Nang, had been sent to pick up a Marine lieutenant from a reconnaissance company near Marble Mountain at China Beach. There he had been ambushed and captured. He was barely nineteen and had twelve days left on his tour of duty in Vietnam.
Fourteen years after Garwood's capture, he managed to get a message out of Vietnam via a diplomat from a neutral country. That message, telling the world he wanted out of Vietnam, received world-wide attention after it was broadcast on the BBC. He was released. But on his arrival in Bangkok he was read his legal rights, given legal counsel, and taken into Marine custody. Shortly thereafter he was charged with desertion — for which he could have received the death penalty — with aiding and abetting the enemy, and with striking a fellow American prisoner. The prosecution pushed the allegation that Garwood had "refused" repatriation in 1973 when everyone else was allowed to come back; that he had made his decision and then could not live with it. Throughout the court martial Garwood seemed to be in a daze, totally under the control of his lawyers. He had forgotten much of his native language and spoke with a heavy Vietnamese accent. He never took the stand to defend himself.
The charge of desertion arose because Garwood's former commanding officer reported he could find no proof Garwood had been authorized to leave camp, though the C.O. "left no stone unturned." But a surprise witness appeared: a fellow driver who testified he raced Garwood to the jeep dispatcher's tent to get that next assignment. Garwood had won the race, but he had lost his liberty. The unexpected witness said he had never been approached by military investigators or he would have told them Garwood was in uniform and officially authorized to take that ill-fated trip. The desertion charge had to be dropped. But the other charges remained, and he was found guilty.
Nowhere during the proceedings had his claims about American prisoners been discussed. I began to understand why Garwood's court martial had been described by the presiding judge as "a travesty of justice." His conviction certainly made it easier to brand him a liar when he claimed he had seen large numbers of American prisoners still alive.
My memo had been shelved. But such memos at 60 Minutes are merely opening passes. The key to getting the full investigative resources of CBS behind you is to have Don Hewitt approve what is called a "bluesheet." This outlines a proposal in stark terms, but it must be backed by considerable research. A story with little immediate potential may blossom into a bluesheet as further events unfold. Thoroughly intrigued, I set out to look for such further events.
A former intelligence chief said Garwood's descriptions of other prisoners and their locations "rang true," though Garwood was prevented by the Marine Corps from placing this information into the official record. Admiral Jerry Tuttle, a former deputy director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), later told me he'd seen highly classified photographs of American prisoners, which seemed to back up what Garwood had said.
One man, now a military advisor on contract to the National Security Council, had operated inside enemy territory for the highly secret group known as Command and Control North (CCN). He told me that Garwood had made an attempt to escape before his success in smuggling the note to the diplomat. Another CCN veteran seemed to back that up when he told me that an American official had said, "We should have taken care of Garwood ourselves when he first tried to get out."
Garwood had tried to get out once before? That made me sit up. If he was a true collaborator, why had he tried twice to get out? And how did these officials know about it?
I wrote the formal bluesheet, but I left out the stuff about "taking care of Garwood." It sounded too farfetched. I gave the proposal the working title "Vietnam POWs — the Collaborator as Missing Link."
I got an enthusiastic go-ahead call from Hewitt. If I couldn't produce the TV segment on a certified hero, I could at least do one on a presumed traitor and maybe learn if there really were Americans left behind — Americans like Lance Sijan.
Bill did stop off at Lucy's Tiger Den, on a Friday night when hobo beans and bacon were given away to ex-'Nam Americans. The bar in those days was near the raucous sex clubs on Patpong Road in central Bangkok, and the patrons for years ranged from American fliers on CIA missions to American construction workers employed anywhere between the Mideast and Borneo. Tiger, an ironworker who dropped anchor here during the Vietnam War, was lassooed by Bangkok Lucy. She had a will of iron. Even Tiger couldn't bend it, so he stayed. Tiger liked to boast, "There ain't a pipe layer, a chopper pilot, a mercenary, a boilermaker, a construction stiff nor a deep-sea diver that didn't pass through my den leastways once." He was also proud to be Bangkok commander of Post No. 1 of the American Legion, "operating in exile till we toss out the Commies in China," where the post was originally registered.
The anti-Communist secret wars in this region were memorialized by quaint stickers, insignia, and photographs on the walls. Thailand had been the center for American covert activities in Southeast Asia ever since the late fifties, and many of them were run out of the U.S. embassy in Bangkok. The stickers referred to Project 404, the code name for secret U.S. Air Force operations, to chemical warfare, and to China Lake, which was a top-secret research center in California.
Bill found Tiger's spiced beans lived up to their reputation as the best this side of Chattahoochee; and Tiger lived up to his reputation as the best contact man this side of Suez. "Here's the guy you want," he said. The newcomer suggested he and Bill go somewhere less conspicuous, so they wound up in a neon-lit ice-cream parlor that seemed considerably more public. However, it wasn't for Bill to question these things; in the bright lights the Asian looked like an impoverished student and attracted no attention.
"I control a group that moves inside Communist territory," he said. "One of my teams came back with a ring inscribed 'Love forever, Sue." Another mission with Colonel Bo Gritz retrieved a ring identified as belonging to a Lance Sijan. Our official American liaison officers insisted the rings were fake. I know they are genuine."
The man was in a hurry. He said, "The American government view is that Asians make money by fabricating identity tags and such, to exploit relatives of men lost in Indochina. We are said to make a business of pretending to raid enemy camps and sell false information. Obviously there are safer ways to make money...."
Bill instinctively trusted him as one of those who had fought in the anti-Communist resistance. Nonetheless, he told me next day on the phone: "If the U.S. government says the Lance Sijan ring is a fake, I'd have to believe it."
And Bill got back to his research with a condescending sense of having saved me from a potentially difficult situation.
I was puzzled. I checked the credibility of the Asian Bill had seen in Lucy's Tiger Den. An old friend of Bill's, who was in a position to know, said, "The man is a lieutenant general in the Royal Laotian Army who remained loyal to his former American comrades. He's in close contact with Thai military intelligence. He is utterly reliable ... if he says something is so, you can believe it." Yet, officially, the Pentagon denied the man's claim that jewelry recovered from enemy territory belonged to U.S. servicemen. I couldn't understand why the Pentagon was so vehement.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Kiss the Boys Goodbye"
by .
Copyright © 2014 William Stevenson Ltd..
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments,
Map of Vietnam and Southeast Asia,
Overview: The Story,
Chapter 1: Traitor,
Chapter 2: "Roadblocks" in the Name of National Security,
Chapter 3: Taking on the Government,
Chapter 4: The White House Colonel,
Chapter 5: The Government Position,
Chapter 6: Betrayal,
Chapter 7: The Freelance Operative,
Chapter 8: There but for the Grace of God ...,
Chapter 9: Lies in Laos,
Chapter 10: Telling Dirty Secrets,
Chapter 11: Complications and Conspiracies,
Chapter 12: Prisoners and Politics,
Chapter 13: Silencing the Critics,
Chapter 14: The Radical, the Billionaire, and the Green Beret,
Chapter 15: The Vanishing Cabbie,
Chapter 16: The Drug Lord,
Chapter 17: Buried Lists,
Chapter 18: The Business of Covert Ops,
Chapter 19: The Sleaze Factor,
Chapter 20: Getting "Bo",
Chapter 21: Scott Barnes Tells His Story,
Chapter 22: The Party Line (or Else),
Chapter 23: Perot Makes a Move,
Chapter 24: Garwood Debriefed,
Chapter 25: Vietnam Revisited,
Chapter 26: What the Government Always Knew,
Chapter 27: A Matter of Ethics,
Chapter 28: The Secret War,
Postscript,
Afterword,
Appendix 1: Open Letter from Robert Garwood to the House Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs,
Appendix 2: Letter from Ronald Reagan to Mrs. Anthony Drexel Duke,
Appendix 3: Extracts from an Affidavit by Jerry Mooney,
Appendix 4: Affidavit of Clarence Edward Johnson,
Glossary,
Note to Readers,
Notes,
Bibliography,