Chapter 12: Verdict First, Evidence Later: The Case For Bobby Garwood
by Monika Jensen-Stevenson
From Revised and Expanded Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press
© 2004 by Kristina Borjesson
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MONIKA JENSEN-STEVENSON
Monika Jensen-Stevenson is the author of Spite House: The Last Secret of the War in Vietnam, which was optioned by Columbia Pictures, and coauthor of Kiss the Boys Goodbye. A former Emmy-winning producer for 60 Minutes, Jensen-Stevenson has traveled throughout Southeast Asia as a writer and reporter, lectured widely to West Point cadets and veterans' organizations, and testified before the US Senate Select Committee on American POWs. The Vietnam Veterans Coalition awarded her the Vietnam Veterans National Medal. She is currently head of programming for ichannel, Canada's premier digital public affairs channel.
When in his 1961 farewell speech to the nation Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the looming dangers of the military-industrial complex, he left the Fourth Estate out of the equation and, consequently, out of the national discussion that ensued. Perhaps he had a premonition that to warn against a military-industrial-media complex would automatically preclude the kind of national discussion he wanted to engender. Even in 1961, an era now fondly regarded as halcyon, no national discussion of any subject, even one presented by the president, was possible without the participation of powerful media outlets like the New York Times. Eisenhower was probably aware that journalists -- like most of us -- have a great need to see themselves as heroic advocates of truth, the kind envisioned by Thomas Jefferson when he coined the name "Fourth Estate." Such high regard of one's own profession cannot easily absorb reality: that the profession is itself part of a potentially dangerous complex, and that it requires constant vigilance to maintain one's integrity.
Eisenhower warned, "Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." Yet he failed to mention how that could be achieved without a completely free and independent press divorced from that military-industrial complex he warned against. After all, his presidency oversaw the Joseph McCarthy debacle when hundreds of lives were destroyed in part because the media failed in its role to check and lend balance to an ego-driven senator who chaired a committee that was running amok. As a producer for CBS's 60 Minutes during the eighties I was proud -- as was the entire news division -- that the only reporter with enough clout to "alert the citizenry" to McCarthy's demagoguery and with the integrity to take him on was CBS's own Edward R. Murrow, who had so brilliantly reported on WWII from England. None of us then paid much attention to the fact that Murrow had paid for taking on McCarthy against the wishes of CBS's administration. Afterward, Murrow's position was never again as secure or prominent as it had been before.
McCarthy's intimidation of the media was a harbinger of the future when the press would, with few exceptions, seamlessly mesh with the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned against: The media leitmotiv, straight from the red queen in Alice in Wonderland, "Verdict First, Evidence Later." Less than five years after Eisenhower's speech, reporters would meekly mouth the Warren Commission's findings on JFK's assassination and defame anyone who dared to question those findings. When Oliver Stone, in the late eighties, dared to investigate what reporters should have investigated more than twenty years before, he was accused of being a conspiracy theorist and worse, before the first draft of his JFK screenplay was even completed. The attack on Stone was led by no less an institution than the august Washington Post. The press in all its modern manifestations, charged by Thomas Jefferson to keep the citizenry alert and knowledgeable had a new reason for being: itself. As guru Marshall McLuhan so aptly put it, "The medium has become the message."
For me, it was a hard lesson to learn that the medium to which I had dedicated myself often used its tremendous power to destroy ordinary citizens whose only currency was the constitutional guarantee of inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and whose only protection of those rights was the truth made public. No one symbolizes this better than former Marine Private Robert R. Garwood -- fourteen years a prisoner of the communist Vietnamese, who was found guilty of collaborating with the enemy in the longest court-martial in US history. I first heard of Garwood in 1979 when I worked for a Canadian news program. Wire reports referred to him as a defector whom the United States government -- specifically the Marine Corps -- was charging with being a traitor. Because I was an American who had recently moved to Canada, it was a story that interested me immensely, particularly when a few telephone calls to Marine Corps representatives in Washington made it clear that this was a defector who had gone far beyond simply going over to the other side ideologically. The Marine Corps directed me to high-ranking officers who said that Garwood was the first marine in history who had taken up arms against his own countrymen.
I was sorry to have to drop the story because it was not of enough interest to a Canadian audience, but I kept up with American news reports. Massive coverage was given to the court-martial. Out of hundreds of reports, only one report, in the Daily News on December 21, 1979, gave me pause. It hinted at "complexities behind the scenes," and went on to describe the case as "filled with moral ambiguities, and much of the testimony in the pre-court martial hearing at Camp Lejeune has been muddled. As a result the public perception seems to be one of confusion, combined with the uneasy feeling that a former POW [Prisoner of War] is being unfairly punished." But even this article like all others tipped the balance toward projecting Garwood as a known traitor when the reporter wrote, "... but unlike past cases of collaboration in Korea and Vietnam, which mainly involved propaganda activities, Bob Garwood is charged with having joined the enemy as a rifle-carrying guerilla who took direct and hostile action against fellow Americans. As unwanted as the case is, it really can't be dismissed as if the charges, if true, are no more than understandable conduct under the circumstance."
At the end of the court-martial, there seemed no question that Garwood was a monstrous traitor who had been treated fairly and leniently by the government, particularly since he was initially charged with desertion, a crime that carries the death penalty by firing squad. Everything I learned from the media convinced me that desertion charges had been dropped in the interest of healing national wounds left by Vietnam. When I think back on my naivete then -- my fervent belief not only that I worked for a free and independent press, but also that the stars of the medium truly were "the best and the brightest" our country brought forth -- I am appalled. My only excuse, to quote Paul McCartney, "But I was so much younger then ... "
In 1985, while working as a staff producer for CBS's 60 Minutes, I became interested in Garwood again. He was now speaking publicly about something that had never made the news during his court-martial. The Wall Street Journal reported he said that he knew firsthand of other American prisoners in Vietnam long after the war was over. I was surprised when I attended a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington on March 22, 1985, where Garwood spoke briefly: He was supported by Vietnam combat veterans whose war records were, to a man, impeccable.
These veterans told a story vastly different from what was made public during the court-martial and one that was intimately tied to another 60 Minutes story I was working on -- "Dead or Alive?" The title referred to Vietnam POW/MIAs. The resumes of my sources were extraordinary. They included outstanding experts like former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) General Eugene Tighe and returned prisoners of war like Captain Red McDaniel, who held the Navy's top award for bravery, had commanded the aircraft carrier Lexington, and was, for several years, director of liaison on Capitol Hill for the Navy and Marine Corps. McDaniel's heroism as a prisoner was legendary. With such advocates providing back up, it was hard not to consider the possibility that prisoners (some thirty-five hundred) had in fact been kept by the Vietnamese communists as hostages to make sure that the United States would pay the more than $3 billion in war reparations that Nixon had promised before his fall from grace. Particularly compelling was the fact that of the three hundred prisoners known to be held in Laos by the Pathet Lao, allies of the Vietnamese communists, not one was released for homecoming in 1973.
The big question was, why had the US government declared that all prisoners were returned in 1973, and then four years later officially determined that all but one --" symbolic" MIA Air Force colonel and pilot Charles Shelton -- were dead? It boggled the mind that no one in the media asked why all the men on the list, particularly those in Laos, were not returned. Instead of investigating, reporters accepted verbatim the government line that there was no evidence of prisoners being kept behind, certainly no evidence of anyone still alive after 1973.
What the media also missed -- or perhaps agreed to keep quiet for what they were told were national security reasons -- was the battle going on within intelligence agencies between those, usually old-timers with a military background, who believed in intelligence collected by human beings (HUMINT) whether they were hired spies or volunteers, and those who discounted this as unsavory and unnecessary. The opposition to HUMINT came from those who believed high-tech spying was all that was necessary. Although there was also state-of-the-art, high-tech satellite intelligence on live American POWs in Vietnam, the HUMINT coming in largely from South Vietnamese who had been our allies, was, according to General Tighe (who had made it a priority when he was head of the DIA), nothing short of miraculous. There were numerous sightings of Garwood in the prison camps of Vietnam. One South Vietnamese ally who reported that he had been a prisoner with Garwood for a long period of time was none other than General Lam Van Phat who had been military commander of the Saigon area until the 1975 collapse.
Garwood's return created a huge dilemma for the US government. He was, in fact, proof that the communists had kept prisoners. More important, he was a living symbol of thousands of prisoners who had been declared dead too soon by a government that turned a deaf ear to families, veterans, and, most important, to some intelligence officials who had steadfastly maintained that there was at least enough evidence of live prisoners to keep their status open and make a concerted effort to negotiate for their return. Congress, too, was involved in what some veterans openly called a cover-up. Since 1975, two congressional commissions had formally declared, on the basis of communist assurances, that "there are no more Americans in Vietnam." There were more complicated dimensions to America's deaf-ear policy on POWs left in Vietnam after 1973. Strong intelligence indicated that the Viet Cong had allowed Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorists to interrogate and torture American prisoners who were left behind. In fact, Garwood maintained that before he was allowed to leave Vietnam, he was interrogated by the PLO and warned of the consequences to himself and his family if he ever spoke about the PLO in Vietnam. This, along with all intelligence on POWs, was considered not credible. General Tighe, loathe to lay blame on anyone in the profession to which he had dedicated his life, attributed this total opposition to any evidence about POWs in Vietnam to "bureaucratic mind-set."
The press too had easily succumbed to "off the record" advisories from the government. Those still concerned about prisoners were described as losers and loonies who couldn't readjust to society, or as distraught widows and others who couldn't face the fact that their loved ones were dead. There was an added factor to why the press belittled anyone who questioned whether the Vietnamese had kept any prisoners.
Many illustrious names in journalism had made their careers reporting either on Watergate or the Vietnam War, and on "the best and the brightest" who ran it. The POW issue was not a scandal like My Lai with an easy target. It was instead, what General Alexander Haig referred to as "a can of worms." Whether filled with hubris or not, most journalists considered it unlikely that with their connections they would have missed a story of such magnitude. No one concerned or knowledgeable about the subject fit in the category of "best and brightest." Instead, they were the ones who had actually fought the war, those described by Clinton cabinet member Donna Shalala as "not the best and the brightest." Most of them were, in fact, enlisted men who had made the military their career. With exceptions like Bernard Fall and Keyes Beach, most journalists who were famous for their war coverage had excelled at stories that exposed the viciousness and excesses of American fighting men. Bobby Garwood was on the top of their list as someone whose deprived background -- trailer park upbringing, broken home, mild juvenile delinquency -- made it a certainty that he fell into the category of "baby-killing and gook-hunting" soldiers journalists had delighted in exposing during the war. What exacerbated the situation was that even though the worst charges against Garwood had to be dropped for lack of evidence at the court-martial, government spokesmen continued to stir up animosity against him by openly calling him a deserter-traitor and thus someone who could not be believed. The fact that General Eugene Tighe, the intelligence expert, backed up what Garwood said, seemed to escape the notice of journalists. Even when Tighe spoke before congressional committees, he was ignored.
In 1985, in addition to the POW story, I began working on a story about Garwood. At that time, I presented one renowned Pulitzer Prize-winning war journalist/author with the impeccable testimony on missing POWs that General Tighe had given before a congressional committee. He told me, "I have it on very good information that Tighe is in the beginning stages of Alzheimer's." This answer flabbergasted me. I had spent hours talking to General Tighe, as had my researcher, Nellie Lide. We both agreed that he had one of the quickest minds we had ever come across. It would not be long before I began to understand how an influential journalist who had exposed some of the most illegal aspects of President Nixon's administration came to believe such slander.
I had heard of Col. Richard Childress, who was generally known as the government liaison between the National Security Council (NSC) and POW/MIA families as well as the president's advisor. Childress had joined the NSC as what was termed a Southeast Asian Political and Military Affairs Officer in 1961. Since he had no military background, it was generally assumed he worked for the only other government agency that awarded the rank of colonel to some of its employees -- the CIA. In what Red McDaniel's wife, Dorothy, considered an abusive telephone call, Childress had accused her husband -- one of my sources on the prisoner story -- of defying the official line by attacking the concealment of intelligence on prisoners; but not before acknowledging that there were indeed still live POWs in Vietnam.
Now it was my turn. In an effort to get an interview about existing evidence of live prisoners, I had made several fruitless calls to Colonel Childress. After I had locked in Garwood and Tighe for 60 Minutes, Childress called me at my Washington office. His voice definitely not polite, he demanded, "Are you doing a piece on POWs?" Without waiting for an answer, he proceeded to slander most of the people with whom I had done preliminary interviews. Included was the smear I had already heard from fellow journalists about General Tighe. Since it was none of his business and I was highly suspicious of how he had gotten such precise information about my conversations with potential interviewees, my back was up. He modified his tone slightly and tried another tack: "You could jeopardize the lives of prisoners still over there," he said. If I had any hesitation about doing the story before his call, the shock of this revelation verifying what Garwood had said about other prisoners made me determined to see it through. The conversation ended with the threat that I would do myself no good by continuing with this story.
Despite continuing pressure from intelligence agencies -- particularly the National Security Council and the Defense Intelligence Agency -- to drop the story, it aired as "Dead or Alive?" in December 1985 thanks in large part to General Tighe's participation. He too had come under tremendous pressure to drop out, just as the network had come under subtle pressure not to interview General Tighe. Correspondents were taken aside by the head of Pentagon covert operations who gave them the definitive spin on the matter of POWs. Even the president of CBS's news division was taken aside at a cocktail party by a prominent former national security advisor. The pressure was subtle and, it was explained, had to do with sensitive matters of national security. CBS administrators were too savvy to believe the smears against an American general who received nothing but the highest praise from his peers in NATO and other allied countries. General Tighe's worldwide reputation as one of the finest intelligence professionals this country has ever produced could not be marred.
Tighe's participation in "Dead or Alive?" insured the program was separately screened by Congress several times after it was aired, triggering the formation of a DIA commission on MIA/POWs chaired by General Tighe. Tighe Commission members included the most knowledgeable professionals in the field, including air ace Gen. Robinson Risner who had been imprisoned for six years in the former French colonial fortress dubbed the "Hanoi Hilton" by his fellow American POWs -- mostly pilots -- who were held there during the war. The Tighe Commission concluded not only that live prisoners had been left behind, but that there was strong evidence many were still alive. It was immediately classified without public explanation. Its commissioners had advised, among other recommendations, that the DIA hire Garwood to work on the prisoner issue. The suggestion was ignored.
Robert Garwood also appeared in "Dead or Alive?" albeit briefly. Despite my best efforts, I was never able to persuade my superiors to let me do Garwood's full story on television -- not even after I got hold of film footage of him in Vietnam that proved his prisoner status. Garwood's court-martial conviction along with continuing government propaganda against him made networks shy away. I would finally write his full story in a book entitled Spite House: The Last Secret of the War in Vietnam, published in 1997. General Tighe, by then deceased, provided the road map for me to pursue Garwood's story at the beginning, when I interviewed both men for "Dead or Alive?"
Despite the Tighe Commission recommendation that Garwood be hired by the Pentagon, government policy continued to dictate that only distortions of Garwood's history be made public. Keeping alive the image of Garwood as devil incarnate of the Vietnam War insured no one would pay attention to what he had to report about the men who, like him, were abandoned in Vietnam. To keep this truth from surfacing, in the words of highly decorated Army Major and former Vietnam POW Mark Smith, "Robert Garwood had to become our token sacrificial lamb on the cross of honor and integrity."
When Bobby Garwood returned home in 1979 after fourteen years in communist detention, he was like Rip Van Winkle. His knowledge of American history ended with his capture in 1965, his belief in his country -- as the Marine Corps had drilled it into him -- unshaken. In 1973, the communists had played Henry Kissinger's statement that all American prisoners from the Vietnam War were now home, over camp loudspeakers. But Garwood fervently believed the communists had deceived the US government. If Washington only knew the truth, it would immediately act on it. It was inconceivable to him that by escaping he had given lie to the government dictum that all prisoners returned in 1973. Worse, for those who had staked their careers on this point and been showered with accolades for bringing about an honorable peace, Garwood knew firsthand that there were others still alive -- a lot of others.
As an ordinary grunt, Garwood was probably unique among American prisoners in that he had a formidable natural (untrained) talent for the Vietnamese language. He had used his language and survival skills -- learned from a fellow American POW, Special Forces Captain William F. (Ike) Eisenbraun -- to survive. Mindful of Ike's advice to stay alive and try to escape at all costs -- as long as he did nothing to harm other American POWs -- he used, after the war, his talent for fixing machinery of all kinds to repair the broken-down American vehicles scattered all over Vietnam. That had provided him with limited freedom to travel to wherever something needed to be fixed, although never without guards.
Always on the lookout for a way to escape, Garwood used basic American business savvy to persuade his guards to let him buy a few of the small quantity of Western products available only in hotels frequented by visitors (mostly aid workers) to Vietnam and off-limits to them. With a borrowed white shirt and pants, Garwood passed for a Western aid worker. His guards then traded the soap, cigarettes, or caviar for a tidy profit. Garwood pretended all he wanted in return was an extra ration of cigarettes or food. It was on one of his rare trips to Hanoi that Garwood managed to pass a note to Finnish diplomat Ossi Rahkonen, who passed it directly on to the BBC and Red Cross. Rahkonen did not make the mistake of turning the note over to US authorities, as had previous recipients of Garwood's furtive notes. Those notes were never made public. Rahkonen was also wise in going to the BBC instead of American media. The American media had consistently upheld the US government position that there was not one live American prisoner, or even defector, left in Vietnam.
The BBC report that an American prisoner named Garwood was alive in Vietnam created a huge problem for the politicians and bureaucrats sitting on the prisoner issue. If they were to keep the country convinced Vietnam had returned all live prisoners, Garwood would have to be discredited. He would have to be transformed from heroic survivor of one of the most notorious prison systems in the world into a criminal traitor. People would have to be persuaded that he was more evil than the draft dodgers who had all gotten amnesty; than the pro-North Vietnam US civilians who had openly urged the Vietnamese to shoot down American war planes; and even worse than the Marine Corps colonel who, as a prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton, had collaborated with the enemy in torturing his fellow prisoners. In short, Americans had to be convinced that Garwood voluntarily joined the enemy to fight against other Americans. To make this believable, there had to be every appearance of legality. It had to look like Garwood, the traitor, was given full constitutional rights to defend himself. This could not be done without the full cooperation, witting and unwitting, of the American media. In early 1979, even before Garwood left Vietnam, the government leaked information to key newspapers that a live American defector was sighted in Hanoi.
Government memos from early 1979 in the Jimmy Carter presidential library archives state that "Garwood [claims] that he knows of other Americans who are alive in Vietnam." That information was not leaked to the press although it would have been a simple matter for the press to find out from the BBC that Garwood had contacted Finnish diplomat Rakhonen and then question Rakhonen on just what Garwood had said about himself and about other POWs. Instead, the media, for whatever reason, accepted what the government released on Garwood. "Garwood passed a note with his name and serial number to some western tourists in Hanoi," wrote Newsweek, April 2, 1979, "'I want to come home,' he told the tourist." Although Newsweek went on to state that Garwood also said he was in a forced labor camp with others, no one believed it. How could an inmate of a forced labor camp contact tourists in Hanoi? Never mind the fact that there were almost no Western tourists in Hanoi at the time. By referring to Garwood solely as a defector, the government had set the stage for Garwood's return. Unchallenged by the press, politicians and bureaucrats managed Garwood's story from that point forward, through the court-martial that would ruin him, and long beyond.
In the process, US officials had to ally themselves with their old enemy, the communist government of Vietnam. Each country needed to prevent the American people from finding out that some American prisoners had been kept by the Vietnamese after the official homecoming in 1973. That the United States had made no effort to get them back had to remain a classified secret. Otherwise, the morale of the armed forces would sink even lower than the all-time low it was at in 1979 -- to say nothing of the morale of the American people.
Initially held back by the communists to ensure that the United States would fulfill its secret promise to pay $4.5 billion in reparation monies, by 1979 American POWs had become worthless pawns. They were living ghosts. The United States had not paid the promised monies and had no intention of paying in the future. (president Nixon's letter of February 1, 1973, to Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong promising the money was not released until four years later.) To the communists who had never felt obligated to treat prisoners according to Geneva Convention rules, those who survived were useful as slave labor and as a possible embarrassment to the United States. Neither side could have the truth come out without tremendous loss of face and all that it implied. The poverty-stricken Vietnamese, desperate for diplomatic recognition and economic assistance, could not afford to alienate the American people and Western allies. Abandonment of war prisoners was the kind of mistake that could destroy not only careers, but entire political administrations. No amount of effort or money was spared in preventing that from happening.
Garwood's court-martial ended up being the longest in US history. Millions were spent on an investigation that missed -- deliberately or otherwise -- the most fundamental and easily found truths. Most blatant: Garwood was charged with desertion during the war, a charge that carries the death penalty by firing squad. Yet if anyone had checked his military records, they would have found that he was just days away from the end of his Vietnam tour of duty when he disappeared. It was hardly a time when he would have deserted. Yet that simple fact never made the news until I researched it years later. During the trial, the prosecution put on the stand Lieutenant Colonel John A. Studds and Charles B. Buchta, who had been Garwood's company commander and battalion motor transport officer at the time of his capture. Both men had precise knowledge that Garwood disappeared while on an authorized chauffeuring job, yet they swore under oath that he had not had authorization to leave. Therefore, he must have deserted. When Billy Ray Conley, one of Garwood's fellow drivers at III MAF, Marine Corps tactical headquarters, voluntarily appeared to testify on Garwood's behalf, it never made the papers. He swore that Garwood had in fact been on an authorized mission. That fact was seared in Conley's mind. Hoping to get Garwood's position when Garwood went back to the States, he had been volunteering for some of Garwood's jobs. Garwood's superiors, annoyed that Garwood had his mind somewhere else (he was getting married to his high school sweetheart as soon as he got home), insisted that Garwood do the job. Conley had never forgotten he could have been the one in Garwood's shoes, and he had always made certain to tell Marine Corps investigators the truth.
When desertion charges had to be dropped, no newspaper asked why. No one interviewed Billy Ray Conley. No newspaper questioned whether Buchta and Studds -- when they swore under oath that no stone had been left unturned to find out why Garwood had left the base on the day of his capture --
had been pressured by the government in some way. Yet the media was consistently careful to note as did the New Republic on February 2, 1980, "[although] Garwood faced charges that could lead to his execution ... the Marine Corps has been scrupulous about due process."
For Garwood's attackers in the government "Live Americans" [were] a "political game" involving the prestige of many high-powered careers. "DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] and State are playing this game," wrote Michel Oksenberg of the National Security Council (NSC) to National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brezesinski on January 21, 1980. It would be "simply good politics" for Brezesinski to go along with the game, advised Oksenberg. It seems to also have been good politics for reporters.
The game was not one that a Marine Corps private, fourteen-year prisoner of the Vietnamese, without money or powerful friends, could hope to win -- or even play. What had sustained Garwood through fourteen years as a prisoner was an almost naive belief in the goodness of his country, the freedom of the press, and an unwavering belief in his rights as a citizen and soldier. He would have disbelieved it if told that soon after the BBC broadcast, the US State Department made sure that misinformation portions of its interdepartmental and interagency memos were leaked to the press. From the Oksenberg memo: it was "unlikely that PFC Garwood would be free to leave any camp without Vietnamese assistance and ... it could not be excluded that he had acted at the request or demand of the communist Vietnamese." It was more likely, the State Department argued, "that Vietnam, in its attempts to achieve normalization, was using Garwood as an agent to manipulate the U.S." Other government hacks put a different twist on this when they revealed in the Report to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command Control, Communication, and Intelligence, that senior NVS (North Vietnamese Army) officers had told them during bilateral meetings that Hanoi felt "forced to make Garwood leave the country." He had been no good to them. He had been "lazy" and a "troublemaker," not your ideal prisoner [italics mine]. No reporter noted this as a brilliant example of what Orwell called "doublespeak."
Garwood's reentry into the free world was carefully orchestrated. He arrived in Bangkok, his first stop after leaving Vietnam, on a French plane. This arrangement, worked out between the United States and Vietnam, gave reporters the impression that Garwood had been free to go or stay in Vietnam. Almost no reporter questioned this even though in 1973 all American prisoners -- even known collaborators like the Marine Corps colonel who helped torture his fellow prisoners -- had returned on American planes. On arrival, Garwood was kept away from clamoring reporters who nevertheless greeted him with cries of "How do you feel about the Marine Corps calling you a deserter?" Garwood, prevented from answering them by a cordon of military personnel, found the question absurd. So should the reporters asking it. Even elementary research on their part would have established that Garwood was ten days away from the end of his Vietnam tour when he was alleged to have deserted. This begs the question: Were reporters who only a few years before had hunted down every last detail of the Watergate scandal sloppy or simply disinterested in the fate of a low-level grunt whose life hung in the balance?
The media establishment knew that the crime of desertion carries the death penalty. On April 9, 1979, Time magazine reported "pending the outcome of the Navy's official investigation, the Marines have tentatively charged Garwood with desertion, soliciting US combat forces to lay down their arms, and unlawful dealing with the enemy. If he is court-martialed on these charges and convicted, he could be sentenced to death."
After desertion charges were dropped because of Billy Ray Conley's testimony, it became increasingly difficult to prove in the courtroom that Garwood had defected and led the enemy in action against his own former comrades. That did not stop the prosecution from putting out a barrage of innuendo to the press and even to Garwood's own attorneys. The prosecutor, Captain Werner Helmer, grabbed every opportunity to take Vaughn Taylor, one of Garwood's attorneys, aside and tell him of Garwood's horrendous record in "harming our troops" in Vietnam. He told Taylor that he had a marine who had been blinded in a Viet Cong attack led by Garwood ready to testify. Helmer claimed the marine could identify Garwood by his voice. Taylor says, "You almost had to believe Helmer knew something the rest of us didn't." Finally, Taylor blew up. The military has a completely open disclosure system. He demanded that Helmer put up or shut up. Helmer's reply: "I don't have anything in particular." Helmer went on to explain that he knew Garwood was guilty because he had studied traitors of history like Benedict Arnold. No one in the media seemed to note that the prosecution had nothing to offer in the way of evidence.
By that time, it had become clear to Garwood that he was involved in a process that, for whatever reason, was unwinnable. He had wanted to take the stand but was talked out of it by his lawyers, who were themselves unsure of what exactly Garwood was guilty of, but were convinced that he was a victim of extreme psychiatric manipulation on the part of Vietnamese communists, and post-traumatic stress disorder. The Washington Post reported, "Garwood's attorneys do not deny the substance of the charges." Garwood withdrew into himself, exhausted and resigned to his fate. Only briefly in June 1980 did he think he might have a chance at acquittal because of the unexpected appearance of one potential witness.
Garwood saw newspaper accounts that a defector from Vietnam had given testimony before Congress. Although newspaper photos showed the defector disguised in a motorcycle helmet, Garwood immediately recognized him as Colonel Tran Van Loc, the communist secret-police chief who sat on a five-man tribunal that had determined each prisoner's fate. Of Chinese descent, Tran Van Loc fled Vietnam during the border war that broke out between China and Vietnam in the late seventies. The intelligence he brought with him was so important to the United States that DIA's best Vietnamese language expert and agent, Bob Hyp, was sent to Hong Kong to debrief Van Loc. Garwood never imagined that vindication would come from a former enemy, but the fact that Van Loc had defected to the United States persuaded him that he might be willing to tell the truth about Garwood's prisoner status. Garwood persuaded his lawyers to set up a meeting with Van Loc, despite extreme opposition from the prosecution. The complications of dealing with someone under the witness protection program made such a get-together difficult.
When Van Loc denied knowing Garwood as a prisoner, Vaughn Taylor, Garwood's attorney, lost confidence in defending Garwood on any basis except psychiatric. It would take more than a decade for him to find out that Garwood had not only told the truth, but that Van Loc had been pressured by the government to lie about Garwood. Ten years later, under oath in a deposition for the Senate Select Committee on POWs, Van Loc, questioned by counsel to the committee, described how he had been approached, through the government agency that provided both his protection and livelihood, to meet with a military officer who told him to lie about Bobby Garwood. But by then Garwood's reputation had been so utterly destroyed even Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.), the vice chairman of the select committee, could not get the media interested in the truth about Garwood. Nevertheless, Smith ended his opening speech to the committee with these words: "I believe Bobby Garwood." Van Loc's testimony is in the Senate records, and attorney Vaughn Taylor introduced the evidence vindicating Garwood to the Senate Ethics Committee.
Despite suborning the perjury of defector Tran Van Loc and keeping him as well as other witnesses who supported Garwood from testifying, the government had an uphill climb in ridding the public of the uneasy feeling, as the New York Daily News -- in an exception to what was routinely printed -- put it, "that a former POW is being unfairly punished."