by Ed Marohn
“Look, Tuesday night was unbelievable for me, and I want this to go somewhere with us if you will let it.” I paused and then said, “I’ll call you tonight.”
“I’ll be home,” she answered, a nicer tone emitted over the phone. “Just be careful, because I do care.” She hung up. The silence on the other end caused me to reflect again on why I was doing this trip. I again second-guessed my coming to DC. What could I really do? In the end, Reed’s death impacted only his daughter and grandson. I felt unsure.
Next week was Christmas, which left me a short window of time to learn anything. I needed to finish this in the next few days. Throwing my uncertainty aside, I picked up my cell phone.
My planned next call resulted from an idea I had while flying to DC last night. During Reed’s session, the CIA’s Phoenix Program came up, and it gave me direction: I would pursue this further with Edwin C. King, a political science professor at Georgetown. I met him at an academic seminar on psychological manipulation of politics and government. He had been one of the speakers, and we had talked several times by phone since the seminar to get a reality check on the polarization of American politics. We both felt the ultra-extremes—right and left were counterproductive, the no-compromise mentality drew a line in the sand: my way or the highway.
The waitress poured me another cup of coffee as I dialed. I mouthed my thanks to her as she left the bill. I knew Edwin King taught mostly in the afternoon, so there was a good chance of catching him in the morning.
He answered with his professorial, educated voice—pleasing to the ear. “Hello, Professor King speaking.”
“Professor King, this is John Moore.”
“John, how are you? Good to hear from you. Are we going to discuss the politicians who avoided the Vietnam draft?”
“No, not today,” I said. His remark reminded me of the first young soldier to die in my arms—an eighteen-year-old black American, a draftee with no political clout to avoid the draft.
“OK, John. But we do have a wealth of war hawks who never served. Maybe we should call them chicken hawks,” he answered, gleefully.
“I’m not calling about these zealots, Professor. I need some solid information about the Phoenix Program during the Vietnam War.”
“Well my dear boy, I have done some research on that program. When do you want to discuss it?”
“Today, hopefully, since I’m here in DC,” I said, looking at my watch, which showed eight o’clock.
“You’re in luck. I have the whole day free. I’m finished with my classes for the semester and am just grading final exams in the office. Why don’t you swing by? I think you know how to find me. We can start, do a nice lunch and then work the rest of the afternoon. Lots of material John, all of which makes me sad on how the politicians mismanaged the war.”
I confirmed, hung up, checked out of the hotel, and headed for the exit to get my car rental, a black S60 Volvo. I planned on staying with Schaeffer tonight. If Sally wanted me back sooner, then I pondered on skipping the Christmas stay with Jim.
As I walked to the parking lot, my memories of Vietnam emerged again; the Phoenix Program was indeed a sad remembrance. Ramsey had been a part of that program when he tried to kill the unarmed POW NVA officer in front of me. The murder I prevented that day. Now Reed’s death pushed me back into the quagmire of the Vietnam past, a swamp full of leeches sucking on my current life.
Shaking off the recollections, I made my last call before pulling out in my rental. Schaeffer didn’t answer his cell, so I left a voicemail message confirming that I was in town and would be there this evening for dinner and to stay at his place.
The seminar where I first met Professor King had been held on the Georgetown University campus, so with a little finger-pointing from students still roaming the campus prior to Christmas break, I located the offices of the Political Science Department, leaving my rental in visitor parking. Professor King’s office, situated on the second floor, seemed deserted when I walked into the small reception area. Peering to my left and through the open door of the first office, I saw him at his desk reading a book, his feet resting on his cluttered desktop. He put down the book as soon as he noticed me, lowered his feet, and moved agilely around his desk. For an overweight sixty-five-year-old, his movements impressed me. He grasped my right hand with both of his.
“John, it’s good to see you. It has been a while. A year?”
“At least. Thanks for seeing me.” I returned his smile.
“On the contrary, I love research, and you just whetted my appetite. Why are you digging into this?” His bushy gray beard, the matching unruly thick hair piled on his round head, and his short, plump body all conveyed the stereotype of a college professor enjoying tenure.
I waited to answer him as he offered me one of the two chairs in front of his desk, while he returned to his, sinking heavily into the old-fashioned wooden desk chair; its swivel base squeaked in protest to his weight. I noticed the book he had been reading: The Pentagon Papers.
“I thought I would reread this book. Good stuff on how our government blundered along in the conduct of the war,” he replied to my inquiring look. “Again, why the Phoenix Program?”
“My knowledge is limited. I remember being briefed about it when I served in Vietnam, mostly in reference to neutralizing the peasants who were communists. I knew the CIA operated it. I even had a serious confrontation with one of the agents in the program, but I had a different mission: to fight the North Vietnamese Army while trying to keep my men alive. Now I have questions related to one of my former patients who committed suicide.”
Professor King looked at me. “Sorry to hear about the suicide. Seems to be a growing problem not only with military vets, but also active-duty personnel. Well, let’s get started. I have tons of notes and reference books. So let me give you a quick overview and then we can go into the details. OK?”
I nodded in agreement.
“Now, let’s see where to start . . . ah, here we are.” He pulled a file from the foot-high stack of files and magazines on his desk, threatening to collapse, adding chaos to the war zone he called his desktop. He had his own system for locating material.
“Yes . . . indeed, here we are. In 1967, the CIA dreamed up a program to eliminate the communist cells in South Vietnam, naming it the Phoenix Program. The phoenix, or phung hoang in Vietnamese, has its roots in many cultures, based on ancient mythology of a bird. Per legend, it resembles a colorful feathered eagle that had lived for five hundred years. The lore told how the phoenix burned itself to death on a pyre and then resurrected itself. A rebirth.”
I knew that the phoenix represented a sacred symbol used in celebrating Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. “And from its ashes another phoenix arose, becoming a symbol of death and resurrection. This is Taoism. The Yin and Yang for the Vietnamese,” I said.
He grinned at me, nodding. “I’m impressed, John. In Chinese cosmology, the Yin is the female, where the Yang complements as the male. Both are needed for harmony of life on Earth. If one part is missing, there is disharmony, an incompleteness in life.” Professor King leaned back after his explanation.
“I can see the CIA planners choosing the phoenix symbol to represent the killing of the communists to ultimately resurrect from their ashes, so to speak, Vietnamese who are loyal to the South Vietnamese government and are anti-communists,” I said.
“It’s a very loose application by the CIA, but certainly a more appealing symbol than some of the other creatures used mythically in Chinese or Vietnamese lore, such as the turtle or the goat.”
“So what were the actual details of the American plan?” I asked, wanting to get to the crux of the matter, unlike the professor, who enjoyed the lecture and its building-block approach to teaching.
“The CIA and selected American military advisors worked jointly with the South Vietnamese officials, mostly the intelligen
ce services, which had the duty of preventing or destroying the communist cells and cadre that had infiltrated the villages and the countryside. As you know from your own tour, corruption was rampant in the South Vietnamese government. Its intelligence services had competing factions and individuals manipulating each other for power, for money or gold. Graft ran amok, and these South Vietnamese, and possibly some Americans, saw the new funding source for the Phoenix Program as another way to make money off the backs of the peasants.” Professor King frowned at me.
At that moment, a young woman walked in carrying a deli bag and three sodas on a cardboard tray. I looked at my watch—it was noon.
“Perfect timing, Marcie. I am hungry,” the professor said.
“There was no line,” she said. “Students are abandoning campus for Christmas.”
“May I introduce Marcie Malcolm, my student assistant? Marcie, this is John Moore. John . . . well, this is Marcie. What have we got for food, my dear?”
“I decided healthy, and we have turkey hoagies loaded with vegies.”
The professor had discarded the idea of going out to lunch.
He said, “I didn’t want to interrupt this meeting by going to a restaurant. This is exciting stuff, John!”
We paused to break out the food. The professor didn’t wait for us as he chomped down, chewing with gusto, thoroughly enjoying his sandwich.
Marcie, a thin, young woman with black hair tied in a bun, peered at me from behind her librarian glasses and then said to both of us, “My research for my thesis on various forms of corruption in world governments, past and present, found that anti-war Americans called the Phoenix Program a mass murder operation.”
I looked at her quizzically.
She anticipated me. “Professor King already briefed me on your meeting, so I’m not a mind reader.” She giggled.
“I’m sorry, John. I should have told you Marcie was helping us today.” He smiled at me, enjoying his passion for research and his tendency to forget those around him in the process.
I turned to Marcie. “Welcome. Maybe we can get Professor King to slow down a little for us average humans.” She laughed, and I sensed that behind her staid librarian disguise existed an attractive young woman.
King, now refreshed with his first bites of food, jumped in again. “This is the key. The program was riddled with corruption, inefficiency, and severe abuses. The task was to neutralize the structure of the Viet Cong in the villages and the rural countryside, and to stop supplies, food, asylum, money, and recruits for the Viet Cong. If the CIA program could destroy this support, then in theory the communists would wither away, and thus help win the war.”
Again King chomped into his hoagie like a bulldog devouring table food before his owner discovered the theft, noisily enjoying the flavor, eyes flashing satisfaction with the food, burping as he slurped his drink. Marcie looked at me apologetically while I grinned, knowing the professor’s eating habits.
“So now you had all these South Vietnamese intelligence agents, police, and soldiers going into the villages, trying to destroy the cells built up by the communists. They were even assigned quotas—head count, in other words, which was a serious mistake by the planners because of the corruption in the South Vietnamese government. Quotas created abuses, and innocent Vietnamese were arrested to achieve the allocated goals and monetary rewards.”
Marcie quickly added, “Some data reveals that 70 percent of the captured VC suspects were able to bribe the South Vietnamese for their freedom. Figures vary, but Colby, the CIA executive who headed Phoenix, claimed in 1971 that twenty-eight thousand Viet Cong had been captured, another twenty thousand killed, and seventeen thousand repatriated to the South. Thousands died in captivity, tortured by the South Vietnamese in the notorious Saigon prisons. Records of others have never been found. Individuals lost forever.”
“You understand now, John, why I said this is a sad part of American history. To fund such a program, which seems rational on the surface, then to allow our South Vietnamese allies to exploit it for personal riches and power, just shames our involvement.”
“Yes,” I said. “The war became an American mess. It was fought with our vast resources but no clear understanding of the people and their culture. We could have saved all those American soldiers if we had.” I thought again of the names on the Vietnam Wall Memorial in DC; many were young draftees sent to die in the war like chum, bait for communists in a conflict that engulfed five American presidents.
“The village heads, or elders, were given monthly quotas, which often resulted in innocent peasants being imprisoned or killed to further bulk up the numbers. Also, it was used to remove personal political enemies. Maybe the idea was that if you kill enough people, you eventually kill some bad guys as well.” King paused and stared out the window of his office, absently brushing breadcrumbs from his pink tie, finally shaking his head.
I thought of a question: “Were any of the Americans, CIA or military, legally charged with murder or extortion?”
“The tragedy is that there were observed abuses committed by some Americans, yet the military chain of command buried the reports due to insufficient evidence or to protect careers. There were episodes where prisoners of war were thrown out of helicopters by South Vietnamese military personnel. No doubt that some Americans assigned to the Phoenix Program did the same. I would offer this, John. Some of the American participants became damaged goods.”
“You mean psychologically?”
“Yes, exactly. Some suffered from PTSD with such experiences. But you would know this as a psychologist. Now, you have to ask yourself: Were the bad Americans bad when they got to Vietnam, or did they become bad after serving? I’m sorry, John, but the military archives that I have searched offer no input on corrupt Americans. They always point to some ‘bad’ South Vietnamese. And just think how a mentally stressed CIA agent or army officer could manipulate the ‘direct order’ bit. Threatening punishment by court-martial if a young American draftee hesitated to follow orders, say for argument’s sake, to shoot a Vietnamese civilian. These PTSD souls struggled, and by having someone else do the dirty work, they helped justify themselves.”
Unknowingly, he probably had described Ramsey’s use of Reed in the war, but I didn’t want to involve the professor in my speculation about the ex-CIA agent. There could be associated danger. After the revelation about his encounter with Ramsey, Tom Reed’s suicide had made me cautious, not knowing what role Ramsey really played in all of this. I didn’t want to expose those helping me.
My watch showed the day had gone by fairly fast and it was now close to three-thirty. I would have to leave soon, but first I needed my hunch addressed. I asked King, “Would the CIA resort to a cover-up if linked to past killings of unarmed villagers?”
“That’s a difficult question, John. I suppose yes because of the damage it could do to the agency and careers, not to mention possible prison time. A question you should ask: If an agent killed illegally in Vietnam, what would prevent him from doing the same during peacetime? Power is a heady thing, and power can corrupt one’s perception of the law. The Vietnam War, where everyone had weapons and killing was 24-7, strained the morals and ethics of some Americans, causing some to completely disregard them.
“Look at Lieutenant Calley and the My Lai massacre. His lack of leadership allowed his platoon to run amuck, killing innocent villagers and committing rape. Not a bright example for the American military. The army helicopter pilots who flew in and stopped the carnage deserve great accolades for decency!
“Whereas Calley lost control and failed as an army officer, some CIA agents would have more propensities to take matters into their hands, knowing exactly what they were doing and not giving a second thought to their illegal actions. They would have felt omnipotent and that the end justified the means. But I still go with the theory that some of the bad eggs turned bad after their o
wn anxiety and trauma invaded them. PTSD is a severe illness.”
“Thanks, Professor . . . and Marcie. I need to go. I have another appointment in Alexandria. You’ve been very helpful. As soon as I can, I’ll fill you in on why I’m asking these questions.”
“John, just a word of caution. If these CIA agents are still around, they may not like you bringing up these events. Be very careful. I appreciate your concern about our safety, but I want to help you any way I can. Just let me know what you need.”
Nodding, I got up and shook hands with King and Marcie, thanking them both. Departing from the office, I sensed that Reed’s suicide had been long overdue. I just didn’t have enough sessions with him to understand that. The killing of villagers and noncombatants violated decency as well as the Geneva Convention. Such illegal acts could get a soldier court-martialed and sent to the stockades. Reed killed himself for the horrendous acts he committed. His actions had been so brutal that even with his racist soul and cold heart, he could no longer bear it. These events that his mind had repressed for over thirty years finally drove him to suicide. Seeing Ramsey must have triggered Reed’s recall. They committed the war crimes together, and the more I explored, the more questions I needed answered.
Walking to my rental car, I pondered, what did it all mean? I hoped meeting with Jim Schaeffer tonight would give me more information on Reed and maybe on Ramsey.
Jim lived in Alexandria, Virginia, some ten miles from Georgetown University, and dinner at his house was set for seven. As four o’clock approached, I decided that I had time to find a local coffee shop, have an espresso, and call into the office. Afterward I would leisurely drive over to Jim’s. I checked the voicemail he had left me during my meeting with Professor King; Jim confirmed he would be at his house any time after five, as he got home from the office then. I retrieved my car from visitor parking and drove away.