by admin » Wed Dec 06, 2017 9:21 am
Chapter 12: Spring of Hope / Winter of Despair
Honor in the sense that Shakespeare wrote of was not part of Garwood's vocabulary when he was growing up, but he always had a fine sense of right and wrong, of loyalty and responsibility toward those he loved and respected. He never once considered it a duty to take care of his younger brother Don, to turn most of his hard-earned wages over to his family, or to search for his mother despite his father's harsh and absolute opposition.
At III MAF he was the only one to write long, eloquent letters not just to his family and fiancee, but also to close friends. He did this because he valued kinship, affection, and friendship above all else. He knew they did not come cheaply. One of the reasons he was so happy in the Marine Corps was because its creed incorporated all of the values he instinctively admired and because it gave him the fellowship he had always craved.
Now in the prison camps of the North Vietnamese his honor, in every sense of the word, was tested far beyond the experience of men like Owens and McKenney. Like them he had his band of brothers -- albeit much smaller than theirs-and did not fear his fellowship to die with them. They were so important in his life, he risked both death and a chance for freedom by not abandoning them. When they died, he shared with men like McKenney and Owens the primeval need to see them properly buried on home ground. When the enemy denied his impulse to sanctify the dead, he was driven to rectify the violation, no matter how long it took. Later, need for friendship with his own people would become his Achilles' heel, providing a means not only for the VC to apply the cruelest mental punishment in the prison camps, but for both the enemy and some of his own countrymen to exact permanent revenge and ruin his life.
The charges that would be brought against him after fourteen years in captivity were drawn up by commanders of the same corps that had seemed the one safe anchorage in a troubled youth: and the full facts emerge now only through a reconstruction of events by military intelligence chiefs, Special Forces' specialists in highly secret operations, and others with special access to hitherto buried official reports. After the passage of so much time, allowance must be made for fallible memories, but there remain documents and sworn statements that are hard to refute, which back up Garwood's own story and which present a very different portrait of Garwood from the one fabricated to make him seem a traitor.
After enduring three months of interrogation and torture at Quang Da, the first prison camp to which Garwood was taken, his morale was shattered. He was very ill with dysentery and malaria. What he experienced and witnessed being done to South Vietnamese prisoners he could not have conceived of as human before he was captured. He was now living in a six-by-five-foot outdoor cage, four feet off the ground and with no roof, which was in itself a form of torture. The cages were made of bamboo poles strapped together. There were no mats. The rough wood had worn away his flesh and there were festering holes in his hips and buttocks that revealed his bones. These wounds would leave lifelong scars. Periodically he would, for no apparent reason, be placed in a punishment cell, five feet in length and three feet high, with his feet in stocks. He was uncertain about how long he would be allowed to live. More and more he wanted to die in the jungle to escape the horror and pain of the world he found himself in. The worst part of it was the isolation. He had always been a gregarious, outgoing person. It was one of the reasons he had been so willing to do favors for the officers at III MAF. Now he had not seen an American or even another Caucasian since his capture. He continues to believe that if he had remained in isolation much longer, he would have died.
A few weeks before Christmas, Garwood was moved to Camp Khu, situated somewhere between the three provinces of Quang Nam, Quang Gai, and Quang Tu. The camp was brand new, with some structures still being built by South Vietnamese POWs. For the first time he was housed in a thatched-roof structure called a hootch by Americans. At first he inhabited the hootch alone. It was the monsoon season. Dressed in shorts and skimpy shirt, Garwood was stiff with the damp, bone-chilling cold. By now he was almost oblivious to the realities of extreme deprivation. Hallucinating from hunger, his mind was in California with his fiancee, Mary Speer, and his brother Don.
At first, the tall, squinting, phantom-figure in black shorts appearing in the doorway of the hootch seemed part of the hallucination. The apparition leaning on a stick looked like the skeletal figures Bobby had seen of Holocaust victims. Later he would learn that he himself looked just as deathly frail. It was obvious the stranger could not see well enough to respond to Garwood. When Garwood moved closer and looked into his eyes, he knew the emaciated man was another American. Both men began to cry and hug each other, oblivious to the derisive snickers of the communist guards.
The newcomer introduced himself as Captain William F. (Ike) Eisenbraun, Special Forces. He was in terrible shape. Extremely nearsighted, his glasses had been taken when he was captured. He was frail and his body was covered with oozing, chronic wounds from beatings and swollen with hunger edema. He was bitter because he had been taken prisoner in what he considered a dishonorable way, betrayed by South Vietnamese comrades. He had been adviser to an ARVN command post at Pleiku working out of I Corps. Under attack from the VC, the entire ARVN battalion stationed in the outpost threw down their weapons and surrendered. Eisenbraun and two American colleagues were hiding in a trench when one of their own ARVN officers pointed them out to the VC. Eisenbraun had undergone the same forced marches and humiliations as Garwood. When he refused to answer interrogators' questions he was tortured. He kept on refusing until it stopped making a difference. The ARVN battalion commander and officers who surrendered and betrayed him also told the VC everything they knew about Eisenbraun and the I Corps command structure he belonged to. They did this during a confrontation between Eisenbraun and themselves set up by the VC, some weeks after his capture. Eisenbraun was surprised at the accuracy and extent of the enemy's information. Afterward, he had no compunction about writing confessions reiterating the same information the VC already had in their records. It was, he knew, a fallback position sanctioned by military regulations framed after the Korean War revealed the ruthless and finally irresistible methods of communist interrogators.
When Garwood realized that Eisenbraun had been interned since early July of that year and how much he had suffered, he no longer wanted to die. "I stopped feeling sorry for myself," he said later. Afraid his new friend might die any minute, he was desperate to keep him alive. He did not want to be alone again. For almost two years he helped Eisenbraun, doing whatever he could get away with, taking over his part of the labor, foraging food for him, and nursing him. Two years was an eternity; in retrospect, it became one long, endless night of struggle against despair.
The more Garwood got to know Eisenbraun, the more he respected him, so much so that at first he found it hard to call him anything but "Sir." Eisenbraun quickly told him that with only two there was hardly need for a chain of command. It was also the one thing the communists stomped on hard. If they sensed any chain of command, he told Garwood, the two prisoners would be separated. He insisted on being called Ike and always addressed the younger man as Bob, but privately maintained his responsibilities as the officer in command. In Garwood's mind, Ike became the father figure he had always craved. After kinship with his mother, it became the most important relationship in his life. Ike began teaching him how to survive the bewildering and cruel circumstances they found themselves in.
A graduate of the Army's established Jungle Warfare School in Panama, Eisenbraun was a mustang who had volunteered for three tours of duty in Vietnam. One of that small, tightly knit group of Special Forces advisers who came to Vietnam in the early 1960s, he fit the mold of men both Colonel McKenney and Captain Owens held in highest regard. In 1955, as a staff sergeant, he was Issac Camacho's squad leader at jump school, which the communists seemed to know about. In prison, Camacho later said, he was interrogated about it: "Again and again, I was shown Ike's picture and asked to identify him." Issac Camacho said he too had idolized Ike.
Eisenbraun was appalled at Garwood's lack of survival training, telling him bluntly that to have any chance of surviving, he would have to listen and learn. Eisenbraun explained that he would teach him not only because it was his duty as an officer, but also because they were friends. The first thing he taught Garwood was how to look for, recognize, and eat nonpoisonous plants, insects, and small animals-no matter how unpleasant-because they provided the only nutrients essential to surviving the diet provided by the communists. Garwood soon saw for himself that Eisenbraun was teaching him to supplement his diet just as their Vietnamese guards did. It was at least one of the reasons the guards remained healthy on food that at first appeared only marginally better than that of their prisoners. Garwood began to volunteer for work details, cutting and carrying logs used for firewood. He did this even when he was weak and sick so that he could forage for the nutrients Eisenbraun had taught him about. The center of the banana tree and the achua (sour fruit) contained vitamin C. Large green insects provided desperately needed protein. Eisenbraun also taught Garwood which green vegetables and leaves could be eaten as salad.
American prisoners were not allowed to cook their own meals like South Vietnamese prisoners. The VC believed the Americans might try to signal their spotter aircraft with smoke signals from the cooking fires. Eisenbraun told Garwood the VC had watched too many American Westerns. But harsh experience had taught the VC to pipe their own smoke out of the camp in tunnels, using the technique familiar to special operations men like Sam Owens. In the first few weeks of their being together Eisenbraun's weak condition continued to scare Garwood. Since he was the one sent to pick up their rations from the guard kitchen in separate baskets, he made sure that the older man got the greater portion despite his insistence that it be fifty-fifty. Garwood knew that his youth gave him a much better chance of surviving. The outcome of all this foraging and dissembling was that Ike's health improved marginally before "it kind of settled in." It was a matter of optimism for both of them that their health did not get worse and helped them to put up with the daily psychological harassment of their guards.
The two Americans were constantly put on display for the increasing numbers of NVA regulars who were coming through the camp. The guards whose families were suffering from the effects of the war often seemed to be just looking for an excuse to kill them. Neither doubted that their lives could be extinguished at any moment. For a time after the appearance of NVA regulars, though, there was little of the physical beatings, torture, and harassment both had experience earlier. Eisenbraun was grateful for the reprieve. He guessed there must be political reasons. Perhaps the communists were responding to a move from Washington. He was certain it did not mean a change in basic policy.
Ike had no illusions about the communists. He deliberately resigned himself to the notion that it was likely the two of them would remain prisoners for ten years or more. He told Bobby that was why the younger man must learn to understand their captors; to be able to figure out what was happening to the enemy and consequently to themselves. It was important to get a sense of where they were going when they were moved, which happened periodically, always on short notice. Only by staying alert in every way would they have a chance to get out information to international agencies that their status was that of live POWs. It was the only way they could survive. Ike told Bobby that in the sordid game they were involved in, there was only one hard and fast rule: "No American prisoner ever consciously harms another American prisoner." Going by more realistic rules than the Marine Corps, he said Bobby had done nothing wrong in signing the Fellow Soldier's Appeal under duress. Ike reassured him that he had signed similar documents. "The only people who will pay attention to it are the intelligence units," Bobby remembered him saying, "and they will use it to find us."
Like Colonel McKenney and Captain Owens, Eisenbraun had an unshakeable trust in the American intelligence system. He would not have believed the truth: that Special Forces operatives had, several times since his capture, received hard information on his whereabouts. This information had been quickly transmitted to those who could have authorized a rescue operation, a course of action that was not followed. [1]
Not all of Bobby's conversations with Ike were about the practicalities of survival. There was a lot of talk about home, their families and upbringing, and the importance of faith in God. It was the first time Bobby had spoken to someone who was in Vietnam out of commitment and conviction. Eisenbraun clearly loved his family with a very special attachment to his little daughter, yet he had volunteered for three tours in Vietnam. For all of his cynicism brought about by the South Vietnamese who betrayed him, he had a kind of innocence. He told Bobby he saw the peril the Vietnamese people were in and wanted to help prevent a communist takeover. Eisenbraun believed in the ideals of America, and was willing to give his life if necessary so that Vietnam could have a chance at democracy. He had been betrayed by some South Vietnamese, but Eisenbraun made a clear distinction between those Vietnamese who genuinely wanted democracy and those who didn't care or wanted communism. Until then Garwood had been convinced the Vietnamese, South and orth, "didn't want Americans there and couldn't care less if Americans lived or died."
Despite the miserable circumstances, Eisenbraun made Garwood feel secure and safe, and, against all probability, certain that "we were going to make it out of that hell hole." For the rest of his long internment Garwood would remember this time as his one spring of hope bracketed by winters of despair. He said, "Everything Eisenbraun told me, I ate it up. Every little joke was funny to me. When he got serious, I got serious. When he felt pain, so did I. When he laughed, so did I. I learned quickly. I don't know what it was but it seemed I had a natural ability to pick up on the Vietnamese language." It was a matter of great pride to Garwood that Eisenbraun told him it was a shame that he hadn't been sent to foreign language school. He was that good. For Ike, Bobby's adulation was probably normal, a part of the same syndrome noted by Colonel McKenney where enlisted men often latch on to older officers they admire. Issac Camacho had done the same with Eisenbraun. Such an attachment was even more understandable in the case of Bobby, who attributed it to Ike that he was still alive and would make it to freedom.
Ike's guidance and tutelage was, at first, an advantage to Garwood. Later it became a cursed gift that denied him any possibility of release from prison because it made his captors certain he was not the low-level Marine he claimed, but instead someone, like Eisenbraun, highly skilled in special operations and sabotage. Later, men with Eisenbraun's training were put in a separate prisoner category by the North Vietnamese, with no possibility of release. Skills he learned here would also isolate Garwood from American prisoners who came to the camps later. His progress in the Vietnamese language and survival and adaptability skills would make him look like a "white gook" and affront fellow Americans. Building on that impression the VC would playa vicious kind of deception that made "gook" interchangeable with "cong." The VC who had been suspicious of his G-2 connection from the day of his capture became progressively more certain that Garwood had espionage training of a kind that could have sinister repercussions for them. Garwood's interrogations by Ho dwelt endlessly on this theme. He never budged from his story that he was a simple private and driver, because it was the truth. They called him an luc gaao, (hardhead) but seemed strangely impressed by what they considered his intransigence. It was more proof that their suspicions were right. As long as he could talk to Ike, the interrogations, harassment, and even punishments rolled off him.
The South Vietnamese prisoners who were released during Tet 1966 and had reported to Marine headquarters that Garwood was a prisoner were some of the men who had been under Eisenbraun's command. Ike and Bobby were hopeful that word of their incarceration would finally get back to the Americans and that there might be a rescue attempt. But they knew the chances of this happening diminished each time they were moved to another camp. All the camps were much alike, with a kitchen, a camp commander's hootch, a guard hootch, a bamboo fence around it, and separate buildings for South Vietnamese and American prisoners, who were moved constantly to keep from being found and rescued. From Eisenbraun, Garwood learned that the administration of these camps came under the North Vietnamese psychological warfare section.
Both men's spirits were lifted that spring when they were joined by Sergeant Russ Grisset, another young Marine who had been taken prisoner just the week before. Grisset had been Sam Owens's radio man, presumed dead by the Marine Corps until one of Colonel McKenney's patrols killed a Vietnamese courier almost two years later and recovered an order transferring Grisset from one camp to another.
Grisset told Eisenbraun and Garwood that he had been separated from his patrol during an ambush and was then captured. He was not wounded. He surrendered when the enemy surrounded him with insurmountable fire power. To have done otherwise, he told them, would have meant annihilation. But he had not surrendered his shoes. Probably because they were too large to fit any Vietnamese, he had been allowed to keep them although he was not allowed to wear them. He kept them around his neck like a treasured necklace ready to be used at a moment's notice. He was just looking for the opportunity to escape. Like his two new friends soon after their capture, he made two attempts. To the two Americans he looked like an Arnold Schwarzenegger, and it was clear to them that their emaciated frames "scared the hell out of him." When told that Garwood, who now looked like an old man, was only nineteen years old, Grisset's face went white. He did not want to believe that he too would contract the same diseases Garwood and Eisenbraun suffered from.
Along with Grisset came another big change. Where formerly Americans had been separated from the South Vietnamese, they were now being housed together in one gigantic hootch. It did not take long for Eisenbraun to figure out why. He told the other two that the communists were using some South Vietnamese prisoners to spy on the Americans as well as their own countrymen. There were three Americans now and more joined them within weeks. Knowing there was strength in numbers the communists believed Eisenbraun would take command and plan an escape. Eisenbraun was certain that the South Vietnamese who agreed to spy had been promised freedom in exchange. It was obvious to all three Americans that one man, in particular, not only allowed himself to be used in this way, but seemed to enjoy it. His name, Garwood reported later to retired Defense Intelligence Agency chief General Eugene Tighe was Le Dinh Quy, who played informer on his own countrymen as well, which led to the execution of a Captain Nghia, an ARVN artillery battalion commander who had been captured in Pleiku, and whose courageous conduct won the admiration of the three Americans.
When Nghia was first captured by the Viet Cong, he gave a false name and rank. Quy, who knew him and had himself used several aliases, immediately went to the camp commandant and told him Nghia's true identity. This incensed Nghia, who took him to task before the other prisoners, calling him a traitor and threatening to kill him. This only made Quy go to the camp authorities again, charging Nghia with atrocities against the Vietnamese people, which, he said, he had personally witnessed. As a result, the camp authorities held a military tribunal with the informer as major witness against Nghia. The ad hoc tribunal sentenced Nghia to death. Unrepentant to the last, he promised the communists they would be defeated as he was led to his execution. In a last act of defiance, with his hands tied behind him, he bolted, running blindly into the stream next to the camp. Thirty seconds later his body was shredded by eight automatic rifles. Garwood never forgot him. Nghia made him proud to be an ally of the South Vietnamese. From that day forward, both he and Ike actively showed their contempt for Quy. Garwood told Tighe, "perhaps that was why Quy never forgot me." When Quy became one of the communists' early releasees he reported to the Americans that Garwood had collaborated with the enemy in prison camp. Fourteen years later, having become a U.S. citizen and presenting himself as a staunch former South Vietnamese patriot, he testified before a court martial that Bobby Garwood had collaborated with the enemy in prison camp.
In the spring of 1967, after a year of being together, the American prisoners were moved again in what seemed to be a northward direction. They tried to get coordinates from the sun but it was difficult. The triple canopy jungle kept them from seeing the sun except at sunup and sundown. In reality they were being led in circles, which became more apparent with each move. Despite always being led along different trails, the three Americans knew they remained in the same general area because they kept running into the same indigenous people who traded and bartered with their guards.
The third camp was larger, and run primarily by NVA regulars rather than VC. Garwood was by this time almost as proficient in Vietnamese as Eisenbraun, and almost as sensitive to what was happening. Grisset had difficulty with the language. He saw no need to learn it when the other two already had. He also saw no need for scavenging or eating the kind of food the other two tried to persuade him to eat. He did not object to taking food Garwood was able to steal from the guards' food bins although he worried about the consequences to all of them if Garwood got caught. Later Garwood would admit to being guilty of a kind of collaboration with the enemy, if collaboration meant volunteering for any work run that got him near the food bins-like tidying up the kitchen. The better he got, the more chances he took. One night after a severe bout of stomach illness had left Ike unable to eat for two days and nights, Garwood determined to get him some good food. He knew there were extra stores in the kitchen because the camp commandant was hosting a North Korean visitor. At the creek that ran next to the camp he smeared muddy clay allover his body and then crawled low through the gate, right past the guard post and to the kitchen and back. It was one time, he said, "Ike reamed my ass. He told me only a Marine would try a stunt like that." Had he been caught, he would have been shot on the spot. But the little can of French condensed milk he brought back for Ike was worth it.
After the three Americans were moved again in response to an American bombing of the camp, their circumstances changed radically. They were no longer the only American prisoners of war. They were segregated and, for the first time, there seemed a possibility for release. The other American prisoners-Ortiz-Rivera and Santos -- were Puerto Rican, which gave them special privileges. Ortiz-Rivera, in particular, seemed healthy as a horse. He was big, looked something like Fidel Castro, and affected the Cuban dictator's mannerisms. He spoke no English. The prisoners were told that Puerto Rico was a colony of u.s. capitalism and that, unlike the other Americans, Ortiz-Rivera and Santos had been forced to come to Vietnam. They had been used. If Ortiz- Rivera and Santos promised to work as agents for the Vietnamese they would be liberated and could return to Puerto Rico.
In May, came word that one of the American threesome-the one who proved himself most "progressive"-would be liberated. The bearer of this message was Mr. Ho, Garwood's frequent interrogator who had let them all know he was a member of the presidium of the intellect committee and head of the South Vietnam Liberation Front. Whether that was true or not, he was clearly a man of importance. "People jumped through hoops when he came to a camp. He always traveled with bodyguards and a doctor," Garwood would say later.
When Grisset and Garwood asked Eisenbraun if he thought Ho was telling the truth about one of them being released, he said it was possible, but only in a manner of speaking. No American prisoners were ever just "released," he said, but there were prisoner exchanges going on all the time. The communists had freed some South Vietnamese prisoners and it was possible that they would let one of the Americans go as a political move. Initially, the three prisoners agreed that if one got out it would give the other two that much more of a chance to survive. Both Grisset and Garwood thought that Eisenbraun, a captain, would be chosen over enlisted men. After Ho's announcement, their rations increased. They got more rice, some pork fat, and fruit occasionally. This was encouraging because it seemed to mean the communists wanted them to look healthy if they were released. But they were moved into separate hootches. It became difficult to talk to each other. They were not even allowed to eat together. It was devastating. Together, they had been strong. Now they were vulnerable.
When Ho told Garwood and Eisenbraun that they would be released, leaving out Grisset, Garwood began to feel that if he let himself be liberated, he would breaking Ike's golden rule: Grisset would suffer. There was another problem. Ho told Garwood he would have to travel to villages in the Mekong Delta for a month showing the appropriate gratitude to the VC and repent of his and his country's crimes. Garwood, who had only signed one statement during his incarceration when he thought he would die, was in a real quandary. It also seemed as if Ho was saying that Garwood was to be "liberated on his own." Perhaps that meant Garwood would be released first and then Eisenbraun would be sent on a separate "gratitude tour" through the villages; but more likely it meant that Ike would be kept prisoner along with Grisset. The thought of leaving Eisenbraun was unbearable to Garwood. His instincts told him he would be abandoning to almost certain death the man who had saved his life.
A liberation ceremony was set up by Ho. It seemed to Garwood that there was a good chance he would be tricked, just like a group of ARVN prisoners who had been "released" the previous Christmas with much fanfare, only to be marched back a few months later, to the derisive laughter of the guards. Anyway he looked at it, he would be abandoning not only Grisset but also Ike, who himself seemed certain that trickery was in the offing and that the VC would certainly never release the senior officer in the bunch. Garwood searched for a way to reject Ho's offer of liberation without provoking his wrath. The ceremony was already under way when Garwood brought it to a crashing halt. "I do not feel worthy of being selected for return to the United States ... not until I know more about Vietnamese customs and culture," he announced.
It was not the last time during his imprisonment that moral compunction prevented Garwood from doing something that he had been certain would gain release. 1ke approved of the way he handled the matter. That was the only thing that counted. But he paid heavily for his decision.
Ho was paranoid in his reaction: he behaved as if Garwood wanted to stay because he was an infiltrator and had some way of communicating with American intelligence. Still, Ho was very much aware of Garwood's attachment to 1ke. Vietnam was a society where one's highest duty was to take care of one's elders. To Garwood, it seemed that maybe Ho respected this in spite of himself.
The VC decision to keep Grisset weighed heavily on Eisenbraun, who at least was given a promise of release, however it might have been hedged. Grisset was desperate to get out anyway he could; and on the verge of doing something that could only result in a horrible death. As the senior officer, Eisenbraun felt responsible for both younger men. A few days later, he made an escape attempt. Garwood remains convinced that this was self-sacrificial. "He wanted to be eliminated without getting the guards' backs up. He wanted to give Russ a chance." Ike was almost blind because the guards had never returned his eyeglasses, and he had to move through mountainous jungle terrain. He managed to get half a mile from the camp before being caught.
His punishment was a twenty-minute beating with rifle butts and sticks of bamboo, deliberately administered within hearing of the silent camp. Grisset and Garwood were held back, guns to their heads. Afterward the guards dragged 1ke's unconscious, bleeding body in front of his hootch and put him in stocks. Garwood was determined to nurse him back to health. He had done this once before when Ike had felt dutybound to make an escape attempt with Grisset after failing to dissuade him.
Now, when Garwood was taken over to look at Ike, he knew "this time Ike would not make it." It was the most severe beating he had seen. It had been done to teach Garwood and Grisset a lesson.
When Grisset was brought over, Ike looked up at them both and managed a smile. "Don't quit guys," he said, "don't quit!"
Three days later Ike called Garwood's name. Perhaps out of pity or for some other unknown reason, Bobby was allowed to see the dying man alone.
Ike looked at him. "Bob," he said, "I don't know what they're up to, but they are not going to release you." He stopped for breath. "They are not going to release anybody. Maybe they'll try, again, to take you to a village to use you for propaganda. Next time go along with it. The closer you get to Hanoi, the better your chances. You have none here." Garwood remembered how the older man tried to prepare him. "It's going to be rough for you, Bob. I can't tell you what to do or how to do it. Just remember what I taught you. For God's sake, don't let all three of us die here!" Then, as if he believed Garwood could make it out, Ike added, "When you get out, look up my daughter, and tell her I send her my love."
In a curious way, the guards seemed to respect Garwood's sorrow over Ike's death. Mourning for a comrade seemed to be the one bit of common moral ground between the Americans and the enemy. When Garwood and Russ insisted on burying Ike alone, under the biggest tree near the camp, the guards acquiesced. Garwood was adamant there would be no typical Vietnamese three-foot grave for Ike. They dug it deep and six feet in length. There was no coffin so Ike's two comrades wrapped him in bamboo they were allowed to cut themselves. Ortiz-Rivera and Santos, the two Puerto Ricans in the camp, did not attend the simple, makeshift service of prayers put together by Garwood and Grisset.
A part of Bobby Garwood died on September 27th, 1967, the day Ike died. His friendship with Ike had been a kind of rebirth. It had turned him from frightened teenager into someone able to marshal all of his own inner resources to survive the physical and spiritual debasement of what would be a fourteen-year incarceration. After Ike's death, he became hard, rebellious, and bitter, refusing to go on work details. Ho resented the fact that Garwood blamed him and the guards for Ike's death. Garwood was told that if he could not bring himself to be more "progressive" he was not long for this world.
Four months later, Garwood noted bitterly that Ike had been wrong about only one thing. It wasn't true that none of the American prisoners would be released. Ortiz-Rivera and Santos were liberated. Each wearing a red sash in honor of the occasion and to insure that the NVA would not shoot them, they were ceremoniously put at the head of a small platoon of VC soldiers to do some propaganda work in nearby villages and then released. They had paid the price by consistently and publicly denouncing their fellow prisoners in the camp. Garwood and Eisenbraun, in particular, had been singled out as spies and agents of the CIA. Fourteen years later, Ortiz-Rivera, who could speak no English when he was in the camp, was housed in a separate hootch, and had no direct communication with Garwood of any kind, denounced him again at his court martial-accusing him of being a collaborator and agent of the Vietnamese.
Garwood had no idea, of course, that Ortiz-Rivera denounced him to the Marine Corps as soon as the Puerto Ricans reached their own side. Ortiz-Rivera's denunciation put a smokescreen around the circumstances of his own release, and it confirmed the worst suspicions of CI investigators, who never doubted Ortiz-Rivera's allegation that Garwood had refused repatriation. They counted this as an act of desertion. Therefore, they determined, if he had not deserted in 1965 he deserted in May 1967. [2] Not long after Ortiz-Rivera's allegations, the secret death sentence that so obsessed McKenney seems to have been passed: from that time forward the special operations world accepted as an official directive the elimination of "the traitor, Garwood."
Because of his rebelliousness after Eisenbraun's death, Garwood was separated from his fellow Americans. It was the cruelest punishment his jailers had yet devised for someone who had just lost the most important person in his life. He was devastated when he and Grisset were moved to separate camps for some months. In the new camp he was again separated from other Americans. He was overjoyed when he met up with Grisset again at the next camp. But despite his pleading, he was not allowed to live with Grisset and the other prisoners. As a result he became emotionally isolated from the fourteen new American prisoners who joined them in the early spring of 1968, right after the Tet offensive, at yet another camp, this time S.T. 18. [3] His first impulse was to search desperately for an officer to pick up the leadership gap left by Ike but there was no one who wanted to fill such a role. The ranking officer was Captain Floyd Harold Kushner, a doctor who, because he was a noncombatant, refused to assume leadership. He did not consider himself qualified. Like Russ when he first joined Eisenbraun and Garwood, the new prisoners were still healthy and wearing their own uniforms.
The sight of both Garwood and Grisset scared them. Both prisoners were unconscious of how they must appear to newcomers from a relatively rational world. Garwood actually looked Vietnamese. He had always been a handsome man with a particular midwestern casual style. Now, some of his fellow countrymen did not even recognize that he was American when they first met him. Unlike Grisset, he was not only skeletal, but in his forced isolation and association with the enemy, he was beginning to walk and squat "like a gook." He spoke the Vietnamese language fluently but to his own distress, his English was beginning to break up. Most disgusting to many was the food he foraged and ate. His mouth was permanently stained a dark, vampire red from chewing betel nuts. Ike had taught him that chewing the nuts created warmth in the body-something sorely needed in the cold depths of the triple-canopied jungle. He was an affront to the new prisoners. They had no sense of the torture and long imprisonment undergone by the man they found repulsive, and it was inconceivable that the route Garwood had taken was the only route to survival.
Some new prisoners-the Marines in the bunch-faced what others would rather not believe. These, at the start, were full of questions for Garwood. One was Fred Bums, who had been separated from his patrol and captured. Bums was first housed in a hootch next to Garwood. These single living quarters were smaller than previous ones-not tall enough for the men to stand up in-and they were designed rather like a chicken coop. A group of South Vietnamese prisoners were in the same row of hootches. When Garwood and Bums were locked in, Garwood spent the time carefully telling Bums how he had survived. He talked about Ike, and about the tortures and executions, and the character traits of interrogators and guards.
Garwood's briefing of Bums was reported to the camp commander by Quy, the informer who had betrayed Captain Nghia, the artillery captain who was executed as a result.
Garwood was immediately separated from Bums, and the longtime prisoner was forbidden any communication with American paws without permission. Garwood circumvented that order whenever he could but it became increasingly difficult. Desperate for the companionship of his own kind, he sadly watched his friendship with Burns eroding.
It was a pattern that repeated itself every time circumstance gave him an opportunity to talk to one of the Americans. After Bums moved in with the other Americans, Garwood was incarcerated near the hootches of the guards. He was made to look as if he lived in the same conditions as the guards. There were three perimeters around each camp. The outer perimeter was where the North Vietnamese regular forces were camped; the second perimeter housed Montagnards loyal to the communists. The first perimeter, which housed the guards, was the most important to the VC for controlling prisoners. Within it was a trenchline where the most ideologically hardcore guards-the ones who dealt with prisoners on a daily basis -- resided. When there was any threat of a prisoner rescue, these guards were under standing orders to kill prisoners before defending themselves. Like all the American prisoners, Garwood was within this last perimeter-evidence of his real status but by now only Grisset believed he was a prisoner. Garwood wanted desperately to eat with Grisset and the others but was forced to eat in the guards' kitchen. In truth, he lived like the other prisoners, the same hourly bed checks at night, the same slops for food, and the same regulations so that permission had to be asked even to go to the latrine. Since he spoke their language, the guards required him to follow these rules even more stringently. There would not be one time in his entire fourteen years as a prisoner when Garwood did not have to beg permission to go to the toilet in the following terms: "Honorable liberation fighter, may I please .... " Under his breath he allowed himself the satisfaction of calling the guards cong ga det-dead chicken. Roughly equivalent to a "limp pecker," this was the worst insult one could offer to a Vietnamese male. But it was small consolation and the only pleasure he ever got from knowing the Vietnamese language.
Garwood's mental suffering worsened. He knew he was a pariah among his own, and in their shoes, he would have responded in the same way to someone who appeared to cozy up to the enemy. He sensed that even Grisset-who had never understood the need to learn Ike's lessons-had trouble withstanding peer pressure. Garwood had become the White Gook and the White Congo He heard both epithets snarled at him by fellow prisoners. His bitter determination to spite the enemy by surviving held him together. Grisset at least knew who he really was and this saved Garwood's own sense of self. He could still help the other prisoners by stealing tiny scraps of food and passing them on through Grisset. He learned sleight of hand to steal bits of rice and other modest foodstuffs while he was on the move. If there was a loose piece of bamboo anywhere near the kitchen, he stuck his hand through the opening to steal what he could while he scurried on his errands for the guards. He discovered an almost foolproof way to steal eggs from the camp's highly valued hens. Sometimes he was even lucky enough to steal a prized chicken and pass it on to Grisset. Whenever he could, he stole small amounts of medicine-especially penicillin-from the camp dispensary for Dr. Kushner to use in aiding the other prisoners. When he discovered Kushner was hoarding the medicine and not giving it to those who were the sickest, Garwood stopped turning it over to him, and thus gained the doctor's enmity. Soon afterward, the camp interrogator accused Garwood of stealing food. When Garwood denied everything, the interrogator told him the camp commandant knew he was lying because Kushner had informed on him.
Soon after this incident Kushner was called in by the camp nurse because Garwood's foot had become badly infected from elephant grass cuts he sustained on food foraging expeditions. Garwood was immediately apprehensive when he saw the surgical pliers in Kushner's hands. Kushner said, "You understand I'm being ordered to do this." Garwood replied, "Just do what you have to do." Kushner then pulled the nail of Garwood's big toe on the infected foot and the nail of his other big toe as well. Later the camp nurse grinned at Garwood and said, "Kushner doesn't like you!" For a long time the "surgery" on Garwood's feet made it impossible for him to go on working parties to forage for food, or run the kind of errands where he could steal food and medicine. But Garwood remained determined to help the others in some small way. Assigned the job of tuning in Radio Hanoi's propaganda program for the Americans, he regularly fudged things so that for a few moments they could listen to the Voice of America.
To many of the Americans, growing apprehensive and suspicious of everything in such inhuman conditions, it appeared as if he gave such hard-won gifts only to spy on them and ingratiate himself with the guards. This feeling was encouraged by the prison commandant and the interrogators, who ordered Garwood to translate their orders and "progressive lessons and interrogations." They took every opportunity to make it look as if Garwood had been converted to communism. He fell into a kind of helpless rage.
Even without mental torture, S.T. 18 was a painful and dehumanizing physical setting where everyone was sick with hunger edema, dysentery, and malaria. The majority suffered from a host of other tropical diseases as well. The place stank of human excrement, which was left everywhere by men who in a rush of sickness failed to make it to the latrines. Death became routine. Prisoners hallucinated, cried like children for their families, and died. Some, like Fred Bums, just seemed to give up and gradually fade into nothingness. Those with whom Garwood had developed small and fleeting bonds of friendship- all Marines-died. He felt guilty, as if their friendship with him somehow infected them, made them more vulnerable, and caused their death. He became certain the surviving prisoners thought that. And always, without success, he looked for someone senior among the Americans who would take charge; give him instructions; confirm he was doing the right things; tell him how else to prove himself. He needed someone to replace Ike.
Manipulating the prisoners in such a setting was easy for the VC. Edna Hunter, the psychologist in charge of the Pentagon POW program when prisoners came home in 1973, later described their tactic of alienating American prisoners from each other as so thorough that every prisoner who came home felt guilty of having betrayed his own. She said this was particularly true of the group of prisoners who accused Garwood of betrayal. Garwood "the spy" seemed to be the greatest challenge to his Vietnamese jailers. They knew how to fool those in the camps with him and those he left behind at III MAF. He was now periodically required to carry an AK47, its firing pin removed, when he left the camp or when he came back with a work patrol. Sometimes he was required to repair a bullhorn within sight of the other prisoners. He could tell from their reactions that the VC had subtly passed the message to his fellow Americans that he was using the bullhorn to get American troops to lay down their arms. The Americans' hostility became more and more palpable.
According to General Eugene Tighe, an Air Force intelligence specialist at the time, later director of the Defense Intelligence Agency where he made prisoners a priority, Garwood was probably seen as a threat to the Vietnamese: "They saw him as capable of building resistance among the other prisoners. Like the new American prisoners, but for different reasons, the communists were suspicious of Garwood's language and survival skills and the fact that he had a passion for passing on everything he had learned from Ike. His jailers knew that were he to be successful, it would give the other prisoners a measure of strength and ability to resist."
Ho constantly told him it was inconceivable that he had learned Vietnamese-which "is well known as the most difficult language in the world"-in prison. He must have learned it in "a special school for spies." Ho suspected that had been the reason for Garwood's close relationship to Eisenbraun, who was known to be a special-operations officer. Furthermore, reports were coming from the communists' own double agents within the highest echelons of the CIA in Saigon that the Marine Corps and CIA were increasingly obsessed with Garwood. The enemy knew that even the FBI had been called into the case. The high-level concern with Garwood did not seem reasonable if he was the lowly private he claimed. If he was CIA, therefore, it was useful to keep him alive but segregated, and subject to pressures and brainwashing techniques that would eventually break him. To the enemy, it appeared more than probable that he was, at the very least, a military intelligence officer who would try to organize a command structure among the camp prisoners.
In other camps that held Americans, one officer was usually willing to suffer the consequences of taking command. That was not the case here. Only after Kushner and younger and more highly educated men refused, did Army Master Sergeant "Top" Williams, a forty-eight- year-old career soldier and World War II veteran, reluctantly take on the job. Of all the prisoners in S.T. 18, Williams was the most set in his ways and the least able to understand Garwood. He too would die of malnutrition, disease, and hopelessness.
In the midst of Garwood's troubles with his fellow prisoners, something happened that seemed to affirm interrogators' [4] suspicions that Garwood was working for the CIA.
In late spring of 1968 Clyde Weatherman, another American, joined the group of prisoners. Garwood could tell immediately the man was in a special category, but had no idea how closely his own name and reputation would be linked to the newcomer. Weatherman was blond and had the same build that Garwood had before prison camp took its toll. Except for the difference in hair color, seen from a distance, the two could have been brothers.
Weatherman also fit the description of a man who later led an enemy attack against Marines at No Name Island. This report of treachery would spur Colonel McKenney to launch his most deadly hunt for Robert Garwood. Weatherman resembled as well a man who, wearing an NVA lieutenant's uniform, would be later pointed out to a number of American POWs in other camps as Robert Garwood. [5] In obvious good health, Weatherman wore decent civilian clothes and ate the same food as the camp commandant and Ho. He was housed separately one hundred yards from the camp, outside the perimeter where Garwood and the other American prisoners were held. Even though Garwood was supposed to stay away from American POWs, he was allowed to spend a lot of time with Weatherman, who was billed as a "progressive" prisoner. Garwood didn't believe Weatherman was a prisoner at all.
The respectful treatment Weatherman received from guards, the camp commandant, and even Ho indicated he was a plant who had been infiltrated to work on the "attitude of the other Americans." It was an opinion Russ Grisset shared. Grisset and Garwood managed the occasional furtive conversation when Garwood was allowed to visit the American section of the compound to tune in Radio Hanoi's English propaganda program. Weatherman himself told Garwood that he had escaped from the III MAF brig in Da Nang and that he had a Vietnamese wife and family in Saigon. On his way to meet his wife, he avoided the main roads and was apprehended in a village near an off-beat trail by the Vietcong. Unlike the other Americans, Weatherman asked Garwood a lot of questions about his capture and background-the same questions Ho repeatedly asked during interrogations. He talked a lot about the generosity of the VC and hinted that Garwood's life, like his own, could be a lot more pleasant if he collaborated.
Then, in August, Weatherman was allegedly killed in an escape attempt. Garwood was skeptical. He pieced together what really happened and tried to feed it back to the other American POWs. The camp commandant's story was that Weatherman had gone on a working party to forage for food with four other Americans and one guard. Away from the camp Weatherman had overpowered the lone guard and escaped with Dennis Hammond, another prisoner. The rest of the prisoners, according to the communists, refused to flee.
Two days later Hammond was returned to the camp with a bullet through his calf and, oddly, put in stocks in Garwood's hootch. He told Garwood that he and Weatherman were caught by Montagnard tribesmen loyal to the communists. Immediately after their capture, they were separated by the tribesmen and Hammond was taken down a creek bed; Weatherman was taken in the opposite direction. A few minutes later Hammond heard a shot. Then he heard Weatherman scream. Convinced Weatherman had been killed, Hammond got scared and ran away wildly until he was shot and crippled.
Hammond believed what he was saying but to Garwood, who had much more experience with VC deceptions, the story stank. Weatherman wanted to get back to his family and told Garwood that Ho had promised him anything he wanted. Having tried to escape twice himself and witnessed attempts by others, Garwood's instincts told him this was VC trickery. No working party ever went out with only one guard. Usually there was one guard per prisoner, each heavily armed with automatic weapons. In this case a lone guard for five prisoners had carried one old, single-shot, bolt action, Soviet-made rifle with only three rounds.
What really persuaded Garwood that Weatherman was not dead and that the escape attempt had been a set-up was that a few days later, the shirt Weatherman always wore appeared on a Montagnard guerrilla who came to the camp. Garwood knew the Montagnards had a strict taboo against wearing or even touching the clothing or other personal items of a dead person. They believed that breaking this taboo would result in the angry spirit of the dead person coming back to seek revenge. So Weatherman must be still alive. [6] It was another lesson Garwood learned from Ike-to familiarize himself with the customs and religious beliefs of the indigenous people they came across. But when he attempted to question the Montagnard, he was harshly interrupted. Colonel Pham Van Thai, the man in charge of interrogations and torture, who happened to be visiting the camp at the time, told him the shirt was none of his business.
Garwood then made a mistake that would have repercussions through all his prison years. During his next interrogation he told Ho that he knew Weatherman was alive. Ho took the news calmly, solicitously offering Garwood some tea. Had Garwood told this to any of the other Americans? "No," said Garwood.
"Well Bobby, now you understand why we can never put you back in with the other Americans," responded Ho. "All along you have confirmed our suspicions. We were thinking you to be CIA when we captured you."
Garwood kept insisting that he was what he was-a simple private, a driver. He recalled: "The more I tried to convince Ho of the truth, the more I convinced him of the opposite." Ho also told him that Quy, whose fingering of Captain Nghia had led to the latter's death, had informed the prison commandant about Garwood's seditious behavior with the other prisoners. Ho added that some of the new American prisoners were informing on Garwood as well, two of whom were soon thereafter put through the liberation ceremony and, decorated with a red sash, then released.
The sedition Ho referred to was the same behavior that convinced most of the prisoners that Garwood was a VC sympathizer. This went beyond irony. Garwood often thought that even if he died in some heroic act of rebellion now, other Americans would never find out the truth. In all likelihood they would think it served him right. He consoled himself that at least Grisset knew he had not broken Ike's one commandment-never to consciously hurt another American.
Then, in December 1969, Russ died, too, in a way that made Garwood so enraged he did break the commandment by shoving a fellow prisoner. Russ and Kushner had killed a guard's cat for food. All the prisoners had apparently shared the meat. The guards found tell-tale signs and the prisoners were lined up outside their hootches being interrogated, when Garwood came upon the scene. He had never seen the guards so angry. No one admitted to the deed. Garwood decided the prisoners were subtly making Grisset the scapegoat in the way they stood and averted their eyes from him. The guard commander began to beat Grisset viciously. Garwood panicked that the attack on Grisset would end in death, as Ike had been beaten to death. Enraged at the other Americans for not sticking together now, Garwood ran blindly past the guards toward David Harker, who was standing in the doorway of a hootch. He pushed Harker aside witl1 a shove in the gut: "You let Russ take all the blame. If you'd all kept your mouths shut, this wouldn't be happening." The response from the others was virulently savage. In their eyes he had no right to criticize them and no right to be concerned about Russ. They were so prejudiced against Garwood that they were blind to his relationship with Grisset-a friendship even the guards acknowledged.
When Grisset died, one of the guards told Garwood, "Russ was the only friend you had left."
David Harker had previously enjoyed Garwood's friendship. He had valued the extra food Garwood supplied and, even more, the forbidden information that came when Garwood slyly turned their radios to the Voice of America instead of the required Radio Hanoi broadcasts. After his repatriation, he was to tell a reporter from People magazine: "You can't imagine what a great morale-booster that was." But in the camps Harker succumbed to peer pressure and joined the others in treating Garwood as an outcast. It was a pattern he would repeat fourteen years later at Garwood's court martial.
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Notes:
1. From a synopsis of MACV Remarks: 670807 DIC - ON pPRG DIC LIST and The Case of Pvt. Robert R. Garwood, USMC, Final Report, Report to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command, Control, Communication and Intelligence (ASD / C31), Volume 1, June 1993.
2. The Case of Pvt. Robert R. Garwood, USMC, Final Report. Volume 1. The position taken by various government investigative agencies is unclear. In a confusing analysis, they maintain that Garwood was guilty of deserting on the day of his capture, yet also on the day Ortiz-Rivera accused him of refusing repatriation. The impression given by the final report is that Garwood deserted twice.
3. S was the communist symbol for prison. The T stood for trai (camp in Vietnamese). S.T. 18, Garwood's fifth camp, was actually a larger entity that incorporated some of the earlier camps he was held in as well as future ones he would be sent to. But, in discussing his camp experience, Camp 5 is the only one referred to as S.T. 18.
4. There were now two primary interrogators. Ho had been joined by Hum.
5. An example of this came from Army Major Mark Smith, the Special Forces specialist in behind-the-lines operations who later commanded a regional intelligence service. For years after his repatriation in 1973, when the North Vietnamese released American prisoners as part of the peace agreement, Smith nursed a deep hatred for Bobby Garwood, supposedly the man who had been pointed out to him in prison camp as a VC sympathizer and NVA lieutenant. It was only when he met Garwood and began a series of long and intensive debriefings that he realized the Vietnamese had fooled him and other prisoners in his camp.
6. Years later, Garwood would see Weatherman again-healthy and free to move about Hanoi on his own.