Fatal Vision

by Joe McGinniss

Kingston was the kind of guy that you would jump on a helicopter with or jump out of a helicopter with, or go into battle with. You sort of implicitly gave him your, you know, your life to hold for a while. And he gloried in it, to be honest. He was a real soldier. I mean a soldier who got his hands dirty. He was a man's man, no question about it.

  And it was at this time—when I told him I would like to serve in Vietnam—that Colonel Kingston told me that he really liked my style, that I was his type of doc, and that if and when he went back to Vietnam, which he felt would be within a year, he was fully planning on taking me with him as his group surgeon, and of course I jumped at that.

  I remember leaving his second-story, second-floor office flushed with pride that this hard-core Green Beret who later became a general who ran the Green Berets, and, much later, who was named the first commander of the new Rapid Deployment Force, had given me such high praise.

  And I remember going home and telling Colette how pleased I was with this evaluation from Colonel Kingston, and she was enthralled—or, actually, not enthralled, but she was proud.

  Her eyes always sparkled this beautiful luminous brown when I got excited, especially if it was something that, you know, I had done or accomplished. Sometimes I know she felt it was a little silly or boyish or mannish or whatever that such a thing would excite a grown man. But I remember coming back from this and her being—or appearing to be—very proud about the fact that Colonel Kingston found me such a good officer.

  I remember another time I took Colette to a retreat one Saturday morning early in our experience at Fort Bragg. I had just been given my Green Beret that I could wear with a training patch but couldn't yet wear with full insignia because I hadn't finished my Green Beret training, but I was proud of being able to wear my Green Beret, I remember, and I went to this retreat in my Green Beret and jump boots, and dress uniform and it was one of those really impact moments that stand out and I'll never forget it and Colette never forgot it either.

  It was like in late September or early October and we went to this retreat and we were standing in this clearing near the JFK Center for Special Warfare, having the review, and the flags, you know, were held by the troops and the troops were lined up smartly in their jump boots and Green Berets and Colonel Kingston gave about a five- or six-minute speech and it was one of those things that really did give you chills.

  He, ah, there was fog rolling in and you could hardly see the end of the little parade grounds and he used a couple of anecdotes to remind us that he had been other times, other places, where the fog was rolling in and he'd had good troops with him and he'd lost most of those troops and that some of those men now had Medals of Honor and Silver, you know, Stars, or whatever the hell they are, and that we were, you know, we were Green Berets and we were to do our best.

  It was a time of a lot of upheaval on Fort Bragg, of course. The beginnings of the antiwar movement were beginning and Jane Fonda was, within months, to descend on Fort Bragg, but Colonel Kingston gave this six- or seven-minute talk that was really sort of chilling in its beauty and its patriotism and I never forgot that and Colette was there and she was stunned by it also.

  And I remember when we went back to the house that we both talked about it a little bit and how impressive a guy he was, and I repeated to her at that time some of the legends about Bob Kingston.

  I went on one really exciting training exercise, down on Vieques, an island off Puerto Rico. There was Navy involvement. SEAL [Sea, Air And Land personnel of the Navy] involvement, submarine warfare expert involvement, and the Green Berets.

  We had large scenarios written up in which we were gonna go into cities in Puerto Rico and set up these sort of dummy teams that would be watching students' revolts— student, you know, student-fomented demonstrations—and pick out the leaders and prepare scenarios on how they would be assassinated if it was in the best interest of, allegedly, their country and our country to do so.

  And that's what we were doing down in the Caribbean: a mixture of Green Beret and SEAL teams, and of course they were in tremendous competition with each other, the Green Berets thinking the SEALs were dead on land and the SEALs thinking the Green Berets were pansies in the water. In fact, they were both good at both. They were both incredible sort of warrior-type people.

  My job was chief medical officer for Kingston and part of my duties, of course, involved checking out local prostitutes in Puerto Rico near our base, and that's where the famous episode occurred where I was sitting at a bar with a master sergeant and he picked up one of the girls in the bar and then there was this horrendous battle and these paper-thin walls and the door was flying off and the walls were smashing down and it turned out that the girl he had picked up wasn't a girl at all but a guy in drag.

  It was a female impersonator and he had been making out with this person for like ten minutes until he finally reached down between her legs and felt a hard-on, and went just crazy, he almost killed this person. I had to help pull the sergeant off this guy and then of course hush up the whole incident for the good of the Army . . .

  The sad thing, of course, that happened on that trip was that I got called to go help Jay. Everything was hunky-dory, or so I thought. I was down being a Green Beret and Colette was back at Fort Bragg, reasonably happily ensconced there, waiting for me, beginning the schooling that she was so proud to get back to each time, and the kids were in good schools—Kristy was in, like, a sort of a, basically a babysitting school, and Kimmy was, I believe, 1 guess, in kindergarten at the time. Yeah, she must have been in kindergarten. So we thought everything was fine and I got this telegram, the TWX, on the island of Vieques, that there was a family emergency.

  So I remember still being in battle fatigues, and, you know, jungle gear, and getting onto an Army transport and Colette had been warned by the Army that I was on my way and she had a bag packed for me, and I changed into my dress Army uniform—I was wearing, you know, the Green Beret and paratrooper boots at this time and took, I believe, a commercial flight to JFK and that's the time when this priest who was sitting next to me began telling me how much he admired men in uniform and the next thing I know he's got his hand on my thigh.

  Anyway, to make a long story short, that's the time Jay flipped out. He had this apparently psychotic break. It turns out later he admitted to being on amphetamines for a period of weeks, if not months.

  He had been tending bar in Greenwich Village and had just moved out of one apartment and was living with a merchant seaman, I believe, and apparently the stress of tending bar, drinking too much, taking amphetamines to stay up all night and party and then taking some LSD flipped him out, and he had this raging psychotic break including breaking away from my mother—inadvertently, apparently, knocking her down one time—policemen finally getting ahold of him and there being a struggle with the police, straitjacket, handcuffs, brought to the state mental hospital on Long Island and tried to dive through a window from the second story. This really horrendous episode. Finally sedated with Thorazine. And, now, several days later, I was arriving on emergency leave.

  I went to this mental hospital with my mom, you know, this incredibly depressing place with the raging psychotics in their zombie-like Thorazine trances, and found my brother overweight, disheveled, with a psychotic thought process, and was, you know, absolutely stunned by the whole thing.

  I could understand taking some amphetamines. After all, they weren't so bad, just stay up a little bit and party. But I couldn't understand the LSD, and Jay, of course, assured me that it was given to him unknown to himself. All the rest of the people around him were the bad guys and that if only I could get him out of the hospital he would be fine.

  Well, he clearly wasn't fine. There's no question he had been sort of a fringe Mafia player for a while. All the people he was dealing with were those fringe types that go on junkets to Las Vegas—they all have businesses that are legitimate in New York, but they all go to the track and they bet a lot of money and they gamble
with bookies, and— some of the businesses are not quite so legitimate, like Jerry the Drug Man, a guy who apparently buys up drug samples from drug salesmen and then wholesales them illegally to pharmacies.

  And Jay would run up gambling debts on some of these Las Vegas junkets apparently, when he was taking amphetamines and feeling good, sort of in a manic phase, and he ended up at one time owing about $15,000 and my Mom had to cough up when some people came to visit her. She called me in Fort Bragg asking me what to do, and I said, "Well, if you have the money you're gonna have to pay 'em," because I didn't know what else to do. I certainly didn't want my mother's arms and legs broken, so there was a major amount of money that she took out of, I think, the life insurance policy from my Dad's death, that was used to pay off some loan sharks.

  So when he had this schizophrenic break, ah, his main focus was on this Mafia-type personality. There was a lot of element of realism here, but when he had the psychotic break of course it became totally unreal, and The Godfather became sort of his Bible, he would walk around holding it, believing that he was a character in the book or that the book had become real and that people were really out to get him.

  And I have to tell you that seeing someone in a state hospital is an incredibly awesome event. It's just shattering, the type of care that I know they get and having gone through medical school and taken a period of training at an institute like this and knowing all the scare stories. Seeing your own brother—who was always sort of an All-American hero—truly psychotic, was a very frightening thing. A tremendous, scary, vacant, desolate feeling about Jay and how he looked and the unbelievable turmoil that my mother was in from this.

  So I went in and checked out his apartment in New York and that's when I went down to the bar he worked at and found a guy who may or may not have given him some of the drugs, but I thought he did, and he was the local supplier for some of the bartenders, and we had a little altercation—I sort of punched him out. Then I had to go back to Fort Bragg.

  But the overriding feeling that immediately comes to mind about Fort Bragg^as the sense of ease that Colette and I finally had and the new togetherness that really developed nicely.

  Colette was getting out of, you know, a reasonably tough situation because she had been forced to live with my mom on Long Island and not really have control over her own life for a while, so there was the relief of getting together again and building our house again and her being able to go back to school, and having the cheap shopping available and the steady income.

  So we were becoming really reacquainted and it was kind of fun because there was no pressure on me. It was low-key. I could be around, play with the kids, and there weren't other contributing things. There were no other women, I wasn't dating any nurses, I wasn't seeing people on the side. We were really recommitting ourselves to each other and it was a nice feeling.

  I think emotionally, without any question, our relationship was getting stronger. I think the trust was building. I think some of the more obvious past escapades were beginning to fade. The little things that I did, the little affairs and the motel trips and stuff like that, that was nothing. It just meant absolutely nothing except it was a guy away from home, and it didn't make any difference one way or the other. Colette had never been happier. I think the kids were growing by leaps and bounds and were extremely happy and essentially oblivious to any problems at all between us.

  So the Army remembrances are of, you know, for the first time in five years, a reasonably easy life and enough money coming in and new enjoyment with the kids.

  It was really a flowering of the fatherhood and childhood times. It was Kimmy developing and running and playing and reading and becoming bright and inquisitive and us realizing that we had a super-bright daughter, and Kristen just beginning to be a little tomboy and running around the neighborhood and protecting Kimmy, and being a little more aggressive than Kimmy, and us realizing that we had a beauty on the way up, also bright and cheery and nonstop, and that we had a, you know, a good future ahead.

  The kids were basically past, you know, the real diaper stage. Kristy still wore diapers but it wasn't like she was a little infant anymore. She was beginning to grow and, you know, talk and everything.

  Specifically, each day I remember like breakfast with the kids was so nice. I hadn't had that really, that luxury of sitting and enjoying the kids at breakfast, and it was an enjoyment; it wasn't a chore.

  Sunday morning, especially, was a beautiful, beautiful time. We always had a late breakfast. Very often, either Colette or I would get up and sneak out while the other one was sleeping and go down to the bakery and get some baked goods. We even tried to do this in Chicago and Bergenfield— get bagels and lox or something like that, which wasn't very available at Fort Bragg.

  But we—very often one of us would get up and do that, and begin breakfast and then come back to bed when the kids got up and fool around for a while. Um, and this was like a big thing, this was a reattachment of our entire family because we were having the time and I wasn't tired and I didn't have to rush off to work and I hadn't worked all night the night before and Colette was the most relaxed she'd ever been, and we were making love with, I think, more abandon than we ever had before.

  Lovemaking with Colette was always a love thing. It wasn't just getting laid or making out or, getting, you know, getting fucked or whatever you want to say. It was always a much prettier thing than that.

  Colette never, like, openly demanded love from me physically. She never sort of really grabbed me or she never said, ah, "I want you to fuck me tonight," or something like that. We never—it was never that kind of a thing between us. It was not like the incredible physical sex that I had had with Penny Wells. It was definitely lovemaking rather than pure sex. There's no question or comparison at all.

  Our lovemaking had a very gentle quality to it that was exciting to us both, I think. And it took us a long time for new things to happen—new positions, new techniques. It always seemed that we were gentle and considerate to each other in our lovemaking and that each effort sufficed. We didn't have to do the next major position or change, or—we didn't go through these things violently or passionately, we went through them sort of quietly.

  As a matter of fact, Colette was scared. I thought initially she was just a little vulnerable and a little naive, but it turned out that she had a real fear. You never really could pin down what it was from—whether it, sort of the unasked question: had she made love with her high school boyfriend, Dean Chamberlain, and had not been successful—which was quite possible, because, to be honest, Dean was a jerk as far as I was concerned, I always thought he was a nitwit.

  Or had the Purdue sophomore traumatized her? Or was it, in fact, that she was a virgin and had never really made love and was terrified of it and had, you know, quote, successfully, unquote, held off both Dean and the Purdue sophomore, and I was the first man she ever slept with—I don't know.

  But it took many, many, many, many months—in fact, years—before Colette was able to really lose her inhibitions in our lovemaking. It wasn't until, I think, maybe the middle years of medical school that she was really comfortable walking around naked in front of me, and she never really got over it totally—it was always a little bit of concern, and that, of course, was basically a turn-on. She was always

  feminine and a little bit naive and a little bit vulnerable and it was a very exciting thing.

  I don't mean to sound the music and roll the drums, but at Fort Bragg, finally, with more time alone with each other and me in certainly a better mood than I had been in for at least the prior year at Bergenfield and maybe even better than a lot of times in medical school, we could be more relaxed with each other, and we made time for each other and took a lot of time, and each person's—the other person's— satisfaction was important to us.

  And we were beginning to realize that the outside world, the civilian world, offered limitless opportunities to us, and that we would have this great, you k
now, sort of dream come true without too much effort from here on in.

  We also came to the realization that there was a world out there that we could conquer. I'd be at Yale for my residency and later probably teaching at Yale and practicing surgery and we'd have the farm, we'd have the horses, we'd have a boat, we had beautiful kids and a third on the way, and Colette was looking forward to the future with real glee and anticipation and Colette and I were very much in love again.

  10

  Instead of simply having a cup of coffee in a corridor, Jeffrey MacDonald had left CID headquarters for ninety minutes. When he returned, at 1 P.M., the radio had been turned off. Franz Joseph Grebner began to speak.

  "I have been sitting here most of the morning," Grebner said, "not saying very much, just listening to your story, and I have been an investigator for a long time, and if you were a Pfc.—a young, uneducated person—I might try to bring you in here and bluff you. But you are a very well-educated man—doctor, captain—and I'm going to be fair with you.

  "Your story doesn't ring true. There's too many discrepancies. For instance, take a look at that picture over there." Grebner gestured toward a photograph of the living room of 544 Castle Drive.

  "Do you see anything odd about that scene?" "No."

  "It is the first thing I saw when I came into the house that morning. Notice the flowerpot?" "It's standing up." "Yes. Notice the magazines?" "Yeah."

  "Notice the edge of the table right there?"

  "I don't understand the significance of it."

  "Okay. The lab technicians, myself, Mr. Ivory, and Mr. Shaw, and any number of other people have tipped that table over. It never lands like that. It is top-heavy and it goes over all the way, even pushes the chair next to it out of the way. The