Chapter 17: Bennies, or Limited Assignments of Assassination
Colonel McKenney had been puzzled by some aspects of the story that Garwood led an enemy NVA unit attack on Marines, but he felt the overall account fully vindicated the assassination work he had husbanded during his tour of duty in Vietnam. To him, the Phoenix program seemed right for traitors.
Some who pulled the triggers were not able later to square their consciences so glibly. Periodically, such men would come to McKenney in his role as elder Marine. They picked up some hint that he'd had experience in this line of work. McKenney himself adhered strictly to his secrecy oaths. But other Marines knew what his formal position at III MAF had been, and deduced some of the rest. The men with troubled consciences came to Colonel McKenney in a blind search for absolution from someone of stature within their own military culture who was also a man of God; at the very least they were looking for reassurance that they had not damaged their souls by following orders to kill men who were American soldiers like themselves. McKenney, becoming more and more fundamentalist in his religion, always prayed with them. He assured them of God's forgiveness. They had, after all, acted as Marines under instruction. He was still so self-righteous, so morally certain that the orders they had followed were justified, that he was able to shore up most of the distressed men. But not always. Some remained uneasy and vaguely apprehensive. And some even began to infect him with a sense that perhaps they had been used, their innocent faith in the infallibility of their commanders exploited far beyond what even in McKenney's ligid view was the Marine way.
One of those troubled Mmines was Bruce Womack, who joined the Corps in April 1972, at age nineteen. Originally from Arkansas, his family moved to the Detroit area for a time while he was growing up and then moved back to Arkansas. McKenney at first thought of Womack as a hillbilly who had joined the Marines while young enough to be malleable-one of those decent boys who almost invariably become the best Marines, those he always affectionately called mud Marines. Womack was referred to McKenney by Wesley Keith, a retired Marine captain who had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Single Mission Air Medal, and the Navy Commendation Medal. Keith had flown AH Cobra gunships with Marine Observation Squadron 21 and Helicopter Squadron 367 from the Marble Mountain air facility just south of Da Nang around the same time McKenney was at III MAF. He knew McKenney had worked with intelligence, but not much else. Keith had become an ordained Southern Baptist minister after retiring from the Marine Corps, often counseling Vietnam veterans. He thought he had heard just about every awful thing he could have about the war, but he found Womack's story appalling. It was instinct that made him think McKenney could ease Womack's obvious pain.
Womack told McKenney that he seemed destined for the military even though he never cared for any kind of confrontation. Perhaps it was this very dislike of being at odds with anyone, particularly his father, that made him submit to his family's tradition of military service. It came as a surprise to Womack that he was the only one in his recruiting class to be chosen for a highly specialized course in night operations and survival training given at the Army Military Police School at Fort Gordon, Georgia. He was never told why he had been put on an unadvertised and apparently tough and elitist track, but he was acutely conscious of a peculiarity in the way he was informed. The benefits of the course training were described to him by a full colonel, which was extraordinary enough. Even more surprising, the colonel carried a thick folder on Womack that contained more information on his short life than he imagined could exist. The colonel said the class had only eight men. It seemed a kind of compressed sniper course, heavily focused on operating in darkness and on staying alive in hostile terrain.
Womack became skilled in using a .308 Winchester sniping rifle, the M14 semi-automatic rifle, and the M60 machine gun. For months after completing the course Womack wondered what it had all been about. He was assigned as a driver to the motor pool at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, which certainly did not require any of the skills he had learned at Fort Gordon. No one ever explained why he had received the special training.
Womack figured because the war was winding down, the special warfare skills he had acquired under intense pressure and in double-quick time were no longer required. He was shaken out of his complacency when, in March 1973, after the peace accords had been signed and American prisoners of war were coming home, he and two others were assigned to quarters near the shooting range. Then, for six hard weeks, night and day, he was sent out on the range to perfect his shooting skills under the relentless eyes of reputedly the best marksman-instructors in the service.
His new orders-to report to the Marine Air Station at Kanehoe, Hawaii-were delivered by a full colonel, who told him he would get thirty days all-expenses-paid leave before he was to report for a special assignment that would be explained later. He was also told that chances were good he would not make it back. But if he survived the ninety-day assignment he could choose any duty station he wanted. Womack found all of this a bit strange. "I was a Marine private, though, and Marine privates don't question full colonels," he said later. What was even stranger, although more encouraging, was the order to keep receipts for all personal expenditures. This was unheard of. Whatever he spent out on the town would be reimbursed in Hawaii. It was like being handed an open expense account, and even Womack's father found this puzzling, though, like his son, he didn't think one could question the Marine Corps. His mother, as staunch a Baptist as Bruce Womack would ever know, was full of foreboding. She could think only that such a large sum of money was a kind of payoff for her son's life. It did not strike her as a good deal, but, aside from prayer, there seemed no way out. When Womack said goodbye to his parents, both were convinced they would never see him again. Both held his hands tightly, not letting go until an officer came to usher him onto the plane seconds before takeoff.
In Hawaii he was promptly reimbursed for more than twelve hundred dollars. Not bad for an E-4 corporal who normally made seven hundred a month. It was the first of many substantial payments that he carefully arranged to be deposited in an account with Pulaski Federal Savings in Arkansas. It would give a poor young man a nice start in life when his service was over. If he stayed alive.
His orders, received during a three-day stay in Okinawa, were for ninety days of temporary duty in Vietnam. He was told to let his parents know that he would not be able to communicate with them until the ninety days were over. Womack was full of questions about the assignment. He was told only that he would find out when he got to Vietnam. He was puzzled. Weren't American fighting men out of the war? He thought that perhaps his peculiar skills as a lone-wolf sniper were needed to clean out a nest of die-hard communists. He had once read an adventure story about small Nazi units calling themselves "wolf packs" who continued to fight the Allies, even after their generals had surrendered. Innocently, he thought he might be assigned to find and kill communists who, like the Nazis, were still fighting against Americans. He was flown directly to Bien Hoa Air Base outside Saigon. From there he left almost immediately for an area just outside of Tay Ninh, a few miles from the Vietnamese-Cambodian border. There he joined a compound comprising about fifty to sixty men. The site-approximately six hundred by three hundred feet-looked like a prison camp. It was closed in by a ten-foot high chain link fence topped by razor wire. He was one of fifteen Marines. The rest were Army.
Here, finally, he learned what his job was to be-the elimination of former American servicemen who had turned against the United States or engaged in activities-like drug running-harmful to their country. He would be part of a team of five men who were assigned missions of assassination. Each team lived in a separate, roughly assembled hut with a tarp roof and had no contact with other teams. Every mission was given a dossier on the individual to be eliminated. It included highly personal information like the location of birth marks and scars so that positive identification beyond dog tags could be made. But there were no specifics about their alleged crimes.
Womack had always been a serious Christian, attending Methodist services diligently since childhood. When he saw the dossier on his team's first assigned target with a photo of a young Marine in uniform, similar to the one of himself that his mother proudly displayed in the family room, he recoiled in horror. He told his superior officer, Marine Captain Rodriguez, he would not slaughter a fellow American. The officer had little sympathy for his moral quandary. "These men are vermin," Womack was told. "They are like dogs with rabies. They need to be taken out." When Womack still refused, he was told: "It's either you do that, or you'll wish you'd never been born. With one pull of this little finger," Rodriguez said as he lifted his index finger, "you're gone."
Somehow Womack persuaded himself that God had sent him here. It was important to be a good Marine. The fact that he would always be working with at least two other team members was some consolation, and the five men soon formed a tightly knit unit. It became apparent that the other four were as morally disturbed as he was, but the camaraderie discouraged too much introspection of this sort. The mechanics of the job were easy and never varied. Dressed in the masquerade team style of black pajamas and dyed hair and skin, at least three or more team members were taken to "the site." Significantly, "the site" was always the same Vietnamese-Cambodian border area, always within a nine- to seventeen-mile radius. They were taken there by jeep, by a "drop man," dressed in civilian clothes, whose name they never knew. The drop man told them where the target would be found. They had seventy-two hours to do the job and return to the drop-off point. If they took longer, they'd be stranded, a serious matter particularly if they were inside Cambodia, where the U.S. had no right to be. Womack was never sure whether the missions he undertook were on the Vietnamese side of the border. He suspected that he and his teammates were being sent to Cambodia. Why else would they need to disguise the fact that they were Americans?
Womack's first target was precisely where he and two teammates had been instructed to go. He remembered thinking that it was like a turkey shoot. Three armed men zeroing in from different directions made it almost impossible for the quarry to escape. It was, in loose terms, what had been sometimes called triangular fire during his training. Now, though, instead of three men firing from three points of the triangle at once, only one team member was assigned the kill. Triangular, simultaneous fire worked in clear spaces, not in jungle. Most victims were killed from a distance of seven hundred to nine hundred yards. The weapon most often used was a customized .308 caliber sniping rifle like the Winchester he had trained with at Military Police School, except that it had no manufacturer's marking and could be broken down to fit into a foam-lined aluminum carrying case. Another customized aspect was the large number of separated grooves in the barrel. Womack had learned at sniping school that the more turns to the barrel, the further the bullet would go accurately. Also unusual was the small number of customized rounds he was given for each job. On most military missions you took as much ammunition as you could carry. The unspoken message was that there was no room for mistakes. He was always handed the rifle at the drop off point and ordered to return it to the armory at the base camp as soon as he returned from patrol. Womack found this completely bizarre. As a Marine, he considered the job of cleaning his weapon before returning it to the armory as akin to a commandment from God.
On his first mission Womack was appointed the task of official assassin. His two companions were there for back-up, ensuring there could be no escape. Killing the man turned his stomach-as did undressing him, freshly slaughtered, to look for the body markings detailed in the dossier. When Womack got back to the compound he spoke to no one and went straight to his cot. For three days he floated between deep sleep and semiconsciousness, oblivious to his surroundings. Then he was sent on his next job. It was a routine that never varied-three days off after every kill, during which time the team members were confined to the camp but were free to play recreational games. Womack did not remember a single time when anyone felt like playing.
Somehow the second assassination felt easier. The third even more so. Then Rodriguez called Womack into the camp office for a chat. Womack arrived a few minutes early to an empty office. Curious about everything, he glanced at the papers on the desk. Reading upside down he could make out only Rodriguez's initials on a folder, before the captain came through the door. "Y or T seemed to be Rodriguez's first initial. Middle initial C." It would be the only off-limits information he was able to glean in his ninety days at the compound.
Rodriguez began by complimenting Womack on his work. "Some of you guys are better than others," he said, according to Womack later. "And some just are--." The tone made Womack uneasy.
"How does what you have done make you feel?" Rodriguez continued. The question, filled with innuendo, infuriated Womack. He answered: "What my government did, or what I did? I just follow orders. I didn't do anything."
The answer displeased Rodriguez. "Maybe you're getting into this too deep."
That was how Womack recalled the exchange. He did not know what Rodriguez meant. He was aware that some of his fellow assassins had left before their ninety-day tour was over. Somehow the rumor had reached his team that these were men who liked the job of killing too much and had therefore become too big a risk. But Womack felt himself at the other end of the spectrum, utterly helpless to change his situation and yet guilt ridden. Somehow he sensed that he, too, in some other way, did not fully meet Rodriguez's requirements. Disgusted he answered, "If you can't answer any of my questions and if I can't talk, what does it matter?"
Womack left this meeting with the very clear impression that he and all of his fellow assassins were expendable. If something "happened to him," no one would be any the wiser. He didn't know what Rodriguez had in mind for those who missed their seventy-two-hour deadline, but he didn't want to risk finding out. From that day forward he requested that the drop man pick him up after every mission thirty-five hours from the point of beginning rather than the standard seventy-two hours. In his stressed state of mind he figured, he'd have thirty-five hours to make it back to the compound on his own should his superiors somehow forget to pick him and his "family" up. Much later he realized that if his superiors had wanted to "lose" him, they could have, no matter what rescue plan he devised for himself.
The nickname for their targets was Bennies, short for Benedict Arnolds. Each successful kill reaped a hefty reward for the assassins- from twelve thousand to twenty thousand dollars to be divided between team members, usually five men. The amount appeared to depend on several factors: the nature of the target, the difficulties created by the impact of weather on terrain, and how long it took to make the kill. The sums paid were handsome in the early 1970s. The financial settlement for killing an American would provide a substantial down payment on a house in those days.
These individual missions were handled like Phoenix missions, McKenney later recognized. "The project had the mark of the Agency all over it," he said after listening to Womack's troubled confession of how each mission was highly compartmentalized. Team members were debriefed separately by different civilian debriefers who compared and analyzed the men's stories. If there was the slightest discrepancy in their recital of events, one or more team members could be grilled for hours. Sometimes neither Womack nor his mates could tell why they were subjected to such grilling. "One time they questioned L. A. Jones until he felt more like a POW being questioned by the enemy than [a soldier being debriefed by] his own superiors," recalled Womack. "They were trying to intimidate him into admitting that his time frame did not match [mine or] that of ... John Tyler, the man on the mission who had 'dropped that target.'"
Jones never changed his story and the debriefers finally left him alone. When the three men compared notes later they found their stories matched exactly. They were never able to figure out what the point of the exercise had been. If the objective had been to intimidate, it worked. Womack prayed that God would just get him through his ninety days and back to the United States and his real family.
But he could not stop the questions that continued to swirl in his brain. The closest village was seven miles to the southeast. The village seemed to be where the once-weekly helicopter bringing supplies was based. Why couldn't they go to the village? Why was the helicopter pilot dressed in a baseball cap and civilian clothes with a fatigue jacket? What surprised Womack more than anything was that they were clearly surrounded by the enemy. "But," he said, "they never once bugged us."
There was a communications hut with highly specialized and expensive equipment run by men who were not military. McKenney felt it had to have been a CIA project because of the amount of money involved. The Marine Corps could never have afforded the cost of even the bounty payments, much less the whole project.
Womack found that he could remove himself from the reality of what he was doing when he operated with all his highly trained senses on full alert. It was like following a bayonet drill, with the target a bag in the shape of a man. There was an old Army manual for bayonet practice that included the advice: "In-Out ... Don't think of it as a man." Yet a question nagged each time he got a kill: why did the victims deserve the sentence? He had never been a great student of American history, but he knew everyone had the right to a trial, even in the military.
And he knew he wasn't the only one to nurse doubts. His teammates, who called him Hillbilly because of his accent, knew he was a conscientious Christian. He believed that was why they came to him individually with whispered questions about the morality of their missions. He had no answer to satisfy them or himself. When he took the matter to an Army chaplain on the site, the minister almost bolted. "I don't want to know about this," the preacher said. He advised Womack to just count the days until his tour of duty was over. He would be happy to discuss anything else with Womack, anytime, but he did not want the subject of Womack's mission goals to come up again. Secrecy shielded even the chaplain from personal involvement.
Yet despite their reservations, Womack said to McKenney, neither he nor the others ever consciously doubted the basic premise, that those they killed "like dogs with rabies" had done something indescribably wicked. Perhaps, he. conjectured, they had been a rebel army fighting against their own fellow soldiers. After the initial rebuffs, Womack never had the nerve to ask his superiors just what, specifically, his targets were guilty of doing. To his knowledge neither did any of the other snipers.
By the time he spoke to McKenney, he knew that most of his comrades, like himself, had felt their souls in jeopardy. Within two years of returning to the States, L. A. Jones and Quentin Williams blew their brains out. A year later, John Tyler, the teammate Womack had felt closest to, "someone who seemed to have everything to live for," committed suicide by jumping in front of a train. Twenty years later only one other of Womack's teammates would still be alive.
What saved him, Womack believed, was a religious experience he had while on a mission in Cambodia. "God," he said later, "helped me." He thought of himself as born again. It was the only way he could get through the ninety-day assignment, which took out thirty-two men. He shrank from thinking about the implications if the other ten or so teams had an equal success rate that meant over three hundred men were taken out while he was there. It was impossible to know how many more camps like his existed or whether he and his mates would be replaced by others who would continue the assassinations.
It would take him a long time to drop the language, in his private thoughts, that disguised what he had really been involved in: a free-ranging execution squad, dispensing rough, frontier-type justice without benefit of courts martial: a kind of disciplined lynch mob, officially sanctioned but mysteriously sworn to a secrecy that made it seem dirty. When the United States finally evacuated Saigon and completed its total withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, Womack was a driver in Hawaii. He was ordered back to Vietnam on the basis of a convenience of the government order. Womack was at the end of his tour. He already had his checkout sheets. He refused.
There seemed to be no adverse consequences for his refusing to go back at the U.S. government's "convenience." But when he was finally discharged, his Vietnam records were missing, removed by an unseen hand. In 1981, after revealing his history as an assassin of U.S. deserters to a Veterans Administration hospital psychiatrist, he literally watched while his service-related file was put through the shredder. When he spoke to Wes Keith and then Tom McKenney he had little documentation to corroborate his story. There was only his record of attendance at the Army Military Police School at Fort Gordon, his sharpshooter medal, and the record of deposits to Pulaski Federal Savings bank during his ninety days as an official assassin. His mother had had power of attorney and carefully monitored them. Nevertheless, both Keith [2] and McKenney believed him. McKenney told Keith, "From what I know of such classified, compartmentalized operations, everything-including the fine details -- fits." [3]
Womack's share of payment for each kill had made him richer by twenty-nine thousand dollars. He began to think of it as Judas money. When he came back from Vietnam, he wanted to be sterilized, to be "fixed," so that he could never have children. He thought that the awful thing he had allowed others to make him do was the result of a genetic weakness he might pass on. Today he is grateful that his family persuaded him otherwise. His wife and three sons make him want to live, despite the fact that he suffers from periodic bouts of severe depression when he goes for psychiatric treatment at the VA hospital. His children are the reason he has broken his vow of silence. If there is anything he can do to make sure American soldiers are never again forced kill their own, he wants to do it.
"I have suffered much guilt over what I did .... My job was more like a Mafia hitman than a U.S. Marine," said Womack.
It would take a long time yet for McKenney to agree. He knew that mud Marines, who actually had come face to face with the enemy and had killed with a knife or gun, always had a harder time living with the memories than men like himself or the desk types. He also knew that contrary to popular belief, time did not heal such deep wounds. Time allowed wounds to fester and made them worse.
Though at first McKenney did not consider the personal aspect of Womack's story exceptional, there were other aspects of it that bothered him, and not because he doubted Womack's memory or integrity. For the life of him, McKenney could not figure out what Marines were doing in Cambodia in the spring of 1973 when the war in Vietnam was over-or, for that matter, what they would be doing there at any time. He said to Keith, "Marines were never in Cambodia." The relatively short, ninety-day tour, too, was unusual. It indicated that someone higher up knew the sniper kids couldn't take much more. "And why," he questioned himself, "were they using kids fresh out of school to do a job that had been done by the most highly trained recon men before?" When his information on deserters had been current, there were large numbers of African Americans among them. He was puzzled that Womack's targets were all Caucasian, just as he was puzzled by the fact that the two or three Womack had to fight face to face had obviously been trained in the kind of martial arts learned in reconnaissance training. This was true of their survival skills as well. Womack's teams had usually spent a day observing their victims before killing them. Most of the men lived in cleverly hidden lean-tos and were well versed in the art of foraging for jungle food. They were nothing like the drop-outs and druggies who had made up the majority of deserters on the 1968-69 hit list.
What really bothered McKenney was the curious concentration of so many deserter-traitors in what was no more than a fifty-mile perimeter near the Vietnamese-Cambodian border, almost as if they had been herded into a slaughter yard. Never, during his tour in 1968-69, when he had made it a point to look at all the intelligence, did he see evidence that placed Garwood or other deserters in Cambodia. Nor had McKenney ever heard of John Sexton, the American prisoner who was set free by the North Vietnamese along the Cambodian border in 1971. So it did not occur to him, as it did to Sexton at the end of the war, that the communists might set free prisoners they had never acknowledged having. Sexton knew his fellow prisoners never showed up at the Hanoi Hilton or came home. He often wondered if the enemy, now that the war was over, would release them in the same casual manner they had released him, along the Cambodian border, where, unbeknowst to him, Bruce Womack completed his ninety-day tour.
McKenney tried to fend off the questions, and even more the possible answers, lurking at the back of his mind. He stayed in touch with Womack. Others came to see him and were even more troubled by their soldier / hit-man pasts. The questions and the logical answers refused to hang back in the shadows. Slowly, reluctantly, he learned more, but always against the grain of everything he believed. Whenever McKenney heard some new fact, offered by some patently honest man, and easily corroborated through his own official contacts, he hid it in a corner of his mind far away from where he nurtured his hatred of Garwood. His certainty about Garwood clouded his judgment of what he heard about any kills-about all those American soldiers who had been given no quarter.
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Notes:
1. Marine Observation Squadron 2 was Tom Selleck's unit in the 1980s TV series Magnum PI.
2. Wes Keith included Womack's story in a book entitled Victories of Christian Vietnam Veterans. Mountlake Terrace, Wash.: Wine Press Publishing, 1995.
3. In his position as religious adviser and confidante, Wes Keith was sought out by others who had been involved in assassination projects in the same area and time frame as those described by Womack. The difference was that none of the others had been as inexperienced in assassinations as Womack when they were recruited; all had a special operations background. One man told Keith that he had been wounded during a mission. Ordered never to talk about his wounds, he was advised to get plastic surgery. The U.S. government paid for his surgery.