The Book of Honor

by Ted Gup

  At 1:00 P.M. on October 30, 1964, Judy Doherty and Mike Deuel were married in the Holy Redeemer Church in Bangkok. Pat Landry, who helped oversee the CIA’s Laos operations, was best man, and Dan Arnold gave away the bride. Deuel slipped a 1.4-carat blue and white diamond solitaire on her quivering finger. Both of them were so nervous that they would later laugh about the muscles twitching in their faces. After a brief honeymoon at the beach, the couple moved to Pakse in southern Laos. There Judy helped manage the Agency’s base operations and plotted on a map the reported sightings of enemy convoys and movements of matériel and men.

  “All in all,” wrote Mike Deuel to his parents on November 29, 1964, “things are a little too good to last; we’ll have to have some bad luck ere long. Meanwhile, the sun is shining and I’m making hay as fast as I can move, trying not to look too smug.”

  Deuel was fast becoming the romantic. In January 1965 his wife, Judy, wrote: “After two and a half months, I was finally carried over the threshold last Thursday . . . Mike had arranged all sorts of surprises for me, including a new, red bicycle, two beautiful Italian rugs, some perfume.” Awaiting her in the hall upstairs was a piano. “His last present for me,” wrote Judy, “was waiting at the Moffett’s house—a beautiful tan-colored horse, complete with English saddle. His name is Fahong, which means ‘Thunder’ in Lao.”

  But the stress of Mike’s work took its toll. He was frequently gone on overnight missions and flying over rough country in all manner of aircraft piloted by the Agency’s proprietary air wing, Air America. It was a harrowing beginning to a marriage, and Judy, a worrier by nature, could not help but fret. She feared that Mike could be hurt or killed, but she never spoke a word of it to him, believing it might jinx him or take his mind off his work. Nor did Mike discuss the risks, even after he had been involved in a couple of “minor plane crashes.” Such crashes were common among the CIA officers in Laos. An errant water buffalo would stroll across the dirt runways oblivious to incoming planes. A sudden gust of wind off a mountain would toss the slow-moving STOLs—short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft—pitching them sideways like discarded toys.

  Judy had her own brush with danger the night of February 3 during a casual visit to the Laotian capital, Vientiane. As she later wrote in a letter, she spent that night huddled on the floor of the U.S. AID vault, “lulled to sleep by the vibrations of mortars and grenades.”

  Judy Deuel’s parents were concerned for the safety of both their daughter and their gung-ho son-in-law. But on February 16, 1965, Judy’s parents received a letter from an Agency employee: “This is to assure you that Judy and Mike are perfectly safe and you have absolutely nothing to worry about . . . Mike is a very responsible and mature person in whom you can have full confidence. Judy and he are very much in love and very happy. Do not worry for them.”

  One day after the letter was written, Mike Deuel’s close friend Dick Holm was returning from a mission in another part of the world. Deuel and Holm had both been sent to Laos in 1962 to work with the indigenous tribes in fighting against the Communists. But in August 1964 Holm, a French speaker, received orders that he was to be transferred to the Congo to help put down the Simba’s rebel insurgency.

  It was February 17, 1965, and Holm was in the rear seat of a T-28 flying with Cuban pilot Juan Peron in the northeast corner of the Congo near the border with Sudan. Peron had been trained a year earlier by John Merriman at the CIA base at Marana in Arizona. A second plane was piloted by Cuban Juan Tunon. The mission had been a machine-gun attack on a power plant in rebel-held territory. After a successful assault the weather turned nasty and both planes had too little fuel to make it back to base.

  Peron crash-landed in a field of elephant grass. The left wing was ripped underneath and the remaining fuel caught fire. Peron jumped from the plane, assuming that Holm had also jumped. But as Peron ran from the plane expecting the .50-caliber bullets to go off, he heard Dick Holm’s desperate screams. Holm was still in the burning aircraft. Dick Holm pried himself free and Peron carried him some distance from the plane seconds before it exploded. It was getting dark and it was raining. The two were in rebel territory. They spent the night under cover of bushes.

  Peron did not yet know the extent of Holm’s burns, but now, in the first light of morning, he could see his friend twisting in agony. Holm pleaded with Peron to kill him. Peron wrested away Holm’s Walther nine-millimeter pistol from him, fearing he would shoot himself to end the pain. Peron could now plainly see the horror of Holm’s burns—his flesh hung from his hands like an oversized pair of plastic gloves. His arms, too, were badly burned and his face swollen beyond recognition. Peron unsheathed his hunting knife and, without any anesthetic, cut off the burned flesh from Holm’s limbs. He left Holm beneath a bush beside a stream and told him he would go for help. He swore he would return. Tunon, the pilot of the second plane, Peron would later learn, had been captured and cannibalized. Peron carried thirteen rounds in the magazine of his pistol, twelve for the enemy and the last one for himself. He was not going to allow himself to be taken alive.

  By sheer luck, Peron wandered into one of the few friendly villages in rebel-held territory. There a young warrior of the Azande tribe named Faustino offered to help carry Dick Holm to safety. When Peron, Faustino, and two other villagers returned to Holm, they found him completely blanketed with bees. Holm was swollen from the stings and crawling in a vain attempt to escape them. The Azandes fashioned a crude stretcher from branches and limbs and carried the semiconscious Holm to the village. They fed him fruit and water and hid him by the riverbank, regularly salving his burns with snake grease.

  Faustino and Peron took the village’s only two bicycles and began what was to be an arduous eight-day journey through jungle and five-foot-tall grass. They headed for the base camp at Paulis more than 280 kilometers away. The morning after their arrival, they flew back to the village and picked up Holm. His flesh was now as black as that of the villagers who tended him—black from the pitchy snake grease that covered his burns. Holm was flown to Léopoldville and then on to the army’s special-burn unit in San Antonio, Texas. There army surgeons marveled that he was still alive.

  Months later, when the fighting in the area subsided, the air force sent a team to the Azande village to study the remedial properties of snake grease on burns. And the CIA, in an effort to express its gratitude to the village that showed Holm such kindness, sent in a C-146 fully loaded with new bicycles, medicines, tools, and sacks of rice for the villagers.

  But for Dick Holm the ordeal was only just beginning. For the next two years physicians at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington would treat his burns, perform skin grafts, and reconstruct portions of his hands and face. Holm had lost his left eye and was in jeopardy of losing sight in the other.

  Mike Deuel was devastated by the news of Dick Holm’s crash. Though he was a seasoned marine combat officer and had two years in the field with the Agency, this was the first time one of his close friends had been hurt. He brooded about Holm’s condition, searching for some way to help him. Finally he sat his wife, Judy, down and told her he had been thinking about what he could do for Dick Holm. Deuel, then twenty-eight and married for less than a year, had an idea. “Would you mind,” he asked her, “if I offered one of my eyes to Dick?”

  Judy Deuel was speechless. “For heaven’s sake,” she said, “do you think that’s necessary?” But Mike persisted. “It would be better,” he argued, “if each of us had one eye than if one of us had two and the other had none.” Judy was silent for a moment. “It’s up to you,” she said. A short time later Deuel wrote Dick Holm’s father formally offering one of his eyes.

  For months, senior CIA officers quietly made their pilgrimage to Walter Reed Army Medical Center’s Ward Nine to visit Dick Holm. Among the visitors were Desmond FitzGerald and Dick Helms—who smuggled in a thermos of martinis. But none was more faithful than Mike Deuel’s father, Wally, who spent each Sunday for nearly a year at Holm’s bedside,
reading aloud the Sunday paper and keeping him abreast of Mike and Judy’s latest exploits in Laos.

  After each visit Wally Deuel would dutifully send a detailed report to Mike and Judy of the medical and emotional progress their friend had made. One such letter, dated August 23, 1965, notes: “His morale’s especially good these days because Dick Helms went out to see him Friday or Saturday and, of course, completely captivated him.

  “The plastic surgeons are ever-so-gently nudging the ophthalmologists to get on with their eye operation so Dick [Holm] can go on outpatient status for the treatments still to come . . . The plastic men haven’t decided yet whether to rebuild Dick’s ears with wee pieces of a rib as the base, or to try to do it all with strips of skin which they would detach from his neck below the ears and roll up into suitable shapes for the ears.

  “The only other medical development to report is that they’ve got Dick’s right hand in a Rube Goldberg sort of contraption which holds each finger in a sling which in turn is suspended by a rubber band from a brace above the hand—the brace being held in place by a plaster cast on the forearm—all of which is supposed to help the fingers recover a considerably greater capability for use than they now have.”

  Seven months after the crash, observed Wally Deuel, “Dick’s hands are still in such bad shape that he wouldn’t be able to pick up a grape, even if he could see it.”

  In the months ahead Dick Holm underwent an endless series of operations, major and minor, providing him with new eyebrows, rebuilding the bridge of his nose, the corner of his mouth, and the skin between his thumb and index finger.

  In September 1965 Judy Deuel wrote her mother-in-law a letter. “Have they found a cornea donor yet?” she asked timidly. “I’m kind of holding my breath on this question for obvious reasons.”

  After a series of operations, including a corneal transplant from an eye bank, Dick Holm’s remaining eye began to improve. The doctors used the word “miraculous.” Mike Deuel never had to make good on his offer, but neither was it soon forgotten.

  By that summer the covert operations within Laos were expanding daily and more Agency case officers were needed. Mike Deuel was about to get some help and, if things worked out, even a replacement, allowing him to return to the States and begin another assignment, perhaps to Hong Kong or Taiwan.

  In September 1965 help arrived in the person of Mike Maloney. Maloney, like Deuel, was a paramilitary officer, a quiet young man with a gleaming smile, deep-set dimples, and—from his father—full brows and a barrel chest. He was a soldier’s soldier, every bit the man his father, Colonel Mal Maloney, hoped he might be. And like his father, Mike Maloney’s first choice had been the military. But the military refused to take him because of asthma. And so, by default, he, too, had joined the CIA.

  To break in the younger Maloney, Deuel invited him to Pakse, Laos. That Saturday night, October 9, 1965, the two young officers could get acquainted and Deuel would brief the new man on what to expect. Maloney’s wife, Adrienne, was just getting settled in Bangkok. Later they planned to move to Pakse. It seemed a perfect match—the two Mikes, both young, gung-ho case officers, both the sons of CIA officers, both their wives pregnant.

  Mike Maloney had married his college sweetheart, Adrienne La Marsh, on October 5, 1963. Already they had a one-year-old son, Michael, and the second child was due in four months. The Maloneys had just celebrated their second wedding anniversary. The Deuels were two weeks from celebrating their first. That night the two Mikes stayed up late talking about the mission and looking forward to a collaboration that seemed certain to mature into a friendship.

  It was hard for Mike Maloney not to be impressed with the life Deuel and his wife, Judy, had carved out for themselves in Pakse. Their oversized French Colonial home featured four bedrooms, bright terrazzo floors, the spoils and artifacts of Laotian culture, food flown in from the commissary, a Vietnamese cook, a houseboy, a girl to keep things tidy, and in the upstairs hallway, the blessed piano—Deuel’s gift to his wife.

  The next morning, a Sunday, the two Mikes were scheduled to board a chopper, survey the region, make some payroll stops at area villages, and introduce Maloney to the tribal leaders with whom he would be working. Judy Deuel was slightly miffed that her husband had to work even on Sunday. She watched as the two Mikes piled into Deuel’s Morris Mini and sped off on the drive across the river to the airstrip. They were scheduled to be back home about two that afternoon.

  That morning Judy went by herself to a French Mass held in a small country church, then returned home. At two the men had not yet returned. She began to worry. She sat down at the piano, as she often did, to play a piece of classical music and drown out the voice of fear that often preceded Mike’s belated returns. She had one eye on the ivory keyboard, the other on her watch.

  It was three. It was four. It was five. Now it was dusk. She knew they would not choose to fly in such poor light. She could not help but suspect the worst.

  Not long after, an Agency operations officer arrived at the house. He looked grim. He said that some villagers had reported seeing a chopper go down near a place called Saravane. The officer took Judy to the airport and there they waited for word of what had happened.

  Back at CIA headquarters in Langley, a cable was received from Vientiane alerting the operations desk that Deuel and Maloney might have gone down. A plane was ordered up to search for the missing aircraft, but it was already dark and the area where the chopper was believed to have gone down was covered by a smothering double canopy of jungle. Even at noon such a search would have been taxing.

  That night a message was sent to the Canal Zone, where Colonel Mal Maloney was stationed under military cover, and where he had been involved in training and paramilitary activities in South and Central America. The first call informed Colonel Maloney that the chopper carrying his son was missing and that there was little chance he had survived. He gently woke his children up and walked them out to the patio overlooking the canal. There he told them his worst fears. It was the first time his children had seen the big man weep.

  At the first light of morning, October 11, the Agency dispatched a search team, some of them Lao, others seasoned American smoke jumpers trained at Marana Air Base in Arizona. That afternoon they spotted something through the trees and radioed for help. In Vientiane a medical officer at the embassy, Dr. Burton Ammundsen, was dragooned into a desperate rescue mission. He was told only that four U.S. servicemen had crashed in the jungle, that there was a chance they were still alive, and he was to do what he could for them. By the time the chopper carrying Ammundsen reached the approximate site where the wreckage had been spotted, it was sundown. Ammundsen was told he would be spending the night alone in the jungle and that the next day help would arrive.

  Carrying leg splints and a medical bag, he was lowered by rope through the jungle canopy, beside a river. On the way down, the rope swung wide and smashed him into a tree. When he finally reached the ground, he attempted to find the wreckage but was unable to penetrate the dense jungle without a machete. Armed with only a flashlight, he spent the night on a small island just offshore. The next morning an Agency rescue team linked up with him and cut its way through the forest. The wreckage was less than a hundred yards from the river where Ammundsen had spent the night.

  But it was evident that there was nothing for Ammundsen to do. The chopper had been badly mangled when it fell through the jungle. There were four bodies—the two Mikes, and those of an Air America pilot and mechanic. Three of the four—the mechanic, Deuel, and Maloney—had been killed instantly, thrown against the forward bulkhead. The pilot had survived the crash just long enough to crawl out of the fuselage. His body lay draped over the side of the chopper. When the rescue team reached the crash site, his body was still warm to the touch.

  The bodies of Maloney and Deuel were taken back to Vientiane for identification. It was Ammundsen who witnessed the postmortem examination at a Philippine hospital across the street from the emb
assy. The men had broken necks and massive internal injuries. For Ammundsen it was a particularly grim task. Just a few weeks earlier he had examined Judy Deuel, monitoring her pregnancy.

  Two days later the two young widows, Judy Deuel and Adrienne Maloney, were on Pam Am 2 on their way back to the States. The Agency had arranged for the wife of an Agency officer, Susan Gresinger, to accompany them. The women flew first-class, courtesy of the CIA. It was the first time the young wives, now widows, had ever met. Adrienne, pregnant, and clutching one-year-old Michael, sat next to Gresinger. Most of the flight she spoke of the comfort she drew from her Catholic faith.

  Immediately behind her sat Judy Deuel. She spoke not a word and downed more than a few Scotches. Judy Deuel had been twenty-two when she met Mike, twenty-four when they married, twenty-five when she lost him. He had died two weeks shy of their first anniversary.

  It was not long thereafter that an Agency employee drove out to Walter Reed Army Medical Center to break the news of Mike Deuel’s death to Dick Holm. “It seemed like a heavy price that we were paying,” Holm thought to himself. “The Agency, the directorate, us, my colleagues. I was part of that group. Why the best guys?”

  The deaths of Mike Deuel and Mike Maloney received scant attention in the newspapers. The brief obituaries spoke of two young AID officers killed in a helicopter crash. But one of Wally Deuel’s journalist friends and former Post-Dispatch colleagues, conservative columnist Marquis W. Childs, wrote a panegyric to Mike Deuel. The headline read: “Commitment of Young American to Life Ends in Death in Laos.” Childs, unaware that Deuel had been CIA and as much a warrior as a humanitarian, spoke of Deuel’s selfless efforts to resettle refugees, extolling him as part of a generation of peace-loving Americans risking their lives in the cause of peace.