American Desperado

by Jon Roberts

  They sent us to Thailand for R&R. They had very nice hotels. Can you imagine how good a bed feels after you’ve been living in the mud? Our last trip to Thailand, Steve had gotten so wacko, me and him and George check into the hotel and Steve kept saying, “I don’t know if I can handle this.”

  I said, “Shut up and fucking enjoy it, man. Look at the nice beds we got.”

  We’d always get two or three Thai girls. They’d bathe you, massage you, and take care of you. I’m in my room getting my brains fucked out by these two girls, and I hear a commotion in Steve’s room.

  I go in, and the place is destroyed. There’s blood on the wall. Steve’s on the bed fucking one girl, and the other girl is in the bathtub, drowned.

  “What is this?” I ask.

  Steve says, “I didn’t like her. I like this one.” Steve is screwing this girl. A few feet away her friend is floating dead in the bathtub.

  I’m not judging anybody, but this was awful. I mean I was fucked up on that shit. It’s not easy to talk about these things.* Sometimes after I tell you something, today it doesn’t make sense anymore. Why would you kill a girl who was giving you a bath? Those guys we skinned. I wonder about some of the things our interpreter told us about the gooks we grabbed. Did he make things up, like tell us the guy we grabbed was a colonel when he was really a cook, so he’d look good? A lot of the craziness that made sense to me then doesn’t make sense anymore.

  Steve was my brother. But when I saw him in the hotel with the dead girl, I knew he was totally gone. He was a psycho. I’m not saying I wasn’t psycho, but I knew I was. Steve didn’t know what he was anymore.

  George and I helped clean up the mess. We paid off the one whore to tell the hotel her friend got drunk and drowned. We left. Nobody ever questioned us.

  AFTER THE incident in Thailand they sent a bunch of us for jump training in Okinawa and Korea. I had never jumped in Vietnam. Now they trained us for a new kind of jumping—High Altitude, Low Opening, or HALO, where they fly you 35,000 feet in the sky and you jump. It’s so high, you have to breathe pure oxygen before you jump to adjust your blood, and when you go out, you carry an oxygen can because the air is so thin up there. You don’t open your chute for a long time. You fly in the air. If the plane is going 200 miles an hour when you jump, that’s how fast you’re flying. This way they can drop you one place, and you fly another 20 or 40 miles before you open your chute and land.

  The idea of a HALO jump was, the plane could go to the border of a country and let us out to fly in ourselves. That way if anybody asked, America could say, “No, we never flew our plane into your country.” That was technically correct. The plane didn’t fly in, but me and Steve and George did.

  Many times we’d crawled across the border into Cambodia when we were looking for arms caches. This time they wanted us to go in farther to a river town south of Cambodia’s border with Laos. There was a specific group of guys they wanted us to kill who met every week at the back of a restaurant. What made this operation different was, these guys were all civilians. The main guy we were after was the mayor of the town. That’s why they wanted us to jump in from a distance.

  There were six of us who jumped, Steve and George and three other guys. They dropped us at just under 20,000 feet, which meant it was technically not a HALO jump but an extremely high free-fall. The effects from falling from that height were the same as HALO. It’s so cold you become frozen. You turn blue. As you come down into the warmer atmosphere, your brain starts to rush like you got high on the best drug in the world. When you land, you’re so cold you don’t feel nothing. You touch the ground, and it’s like, where are my feet? It takes twenty minutes to thaw out. But it isn’t a bad feeling at all. I felt high when we hit the ground in Cambodia. I remember thinking, I can’t believe I get to go kill a bunch of guys with this rush on.

  It took us a day to sneak into position. It was a nothing town, a few buildings around a small bridge on a river. There were no soldiers or police. The place we hit was a bar that was up on stilts. There was a dry canal on one side where two of our guys stayed to watch our backs. George and another guy took out a guard on the stairs at the rear entrance of the bar. The mayor’s meeting was in a room at the back of the building. Steve and I climbed up the stilts by the side of the building and waited by a window. As soon as George dropped the guard, we went in.

  The room was a dining area with one table and a bunch of chairs. There was a Chinese girl with a microphone who couldn’t sing singing an American song, a couple waitresses or whores in silk dresses, and three or four guys in suits. These weren’t straw-hat-and-pajama guys. The mayor and his friends looked like businessmen. I have no idea why we had to kill them.

  We had a system for killing a bunch of people in one room. Steve and I would divide the room in half. We’d each kill everybody on our half of the room, moving in opposite directions until we met on the other side. You face the person you’re shooting to make sure none of your guys are behind him. Always move forward. You shoot and move. You can roll toward the people you want to kill, but you got to be careful you don’t lose your orientation and turn your gun in the wrong direction when you come up to shoot.

  There were eight or ten people in the room, and we killed them all in under half a minute. We killed the guards, the waitresses, the singer, and the guys in the suits. Click click click. Everybody was dead. We made sure with shots to the head. There could be no witnesses to say the shooting had been done by Americans. We even used short-barreled Chinese AKs carried by the Communists so nothing would be linked to us. It was like a Mafia hit, but done by the United States government.

  When we were done, we crawled through a dry canal to the edge of the town and walked into the woods. It took us a couple days to walk back to the border with Vietnam.

  That was the high point of Vietnam for me. We did a couple more jumps, but we could not find the actual people we were supposed to kill, so we had to walk back empty-handed. But I loved jumps so much, I still had fun.

  IN 1968 they sent me and Steve and George back to Hau Nghia Province. Our first time out we found an underground storehouse for weapons and called in the coordinates for an artillery strike. We climbed into a tree to wait for the strike. We’d seen no people near the targets, but sometimes after a strike, gooks would run out of holes we hadn’t seen and they would lead us to a new set of tunnels.

  Standard U.S. military training is that at least one man stays up on watch at night. But when it was just the three of us, we would all sleep. Our reasoning was that if we found a good hiding place up in a tree, the enemy would have to have one-in-a-million luck to find us. And if he had that much luck on his side, we’d be done anyway. To our thinking, we were more effective out in the woods if we could sleep a little bit, which you can’t do if everybody’s taking turns on watch.

  Our way of doing things never let us down. The enemy never surprised us. It was the U.S. Army that got us. We were set up in our tree one night, waiting for a fire mission we called, when we got blown up by an off-course American artillery round.

  I never heard the explosion. One moment I’m up in the tree at night. The next moment I’m waking up on the ground in the daylight. My clothes were shredded. I had no weapon. There was blood on my arms and stomach. I ran my fingers over my body but didn’t find any deep wounds. I didn’t touch my head right away because I thought, If I’m thinking, my head must be okay.

  But when I touched my face, I felt clots of blood. I moved my hands up past my ears, and at the top of my head there was a mushy hole. I put my fingers in and they went in my fucking head. I thought, There’s a hole in my head.

  It was in the crown of my head. The hole was as wide as a baseball. I poked my finger in and felt tissue inside. First I thought, How the fuck am I alive?

  Then I thought, Am I alive?

  I didn’t have a mirror. I couldn’t look inside my head. I had to deal with it. I took green leaves off the ground and pressed them into the openin
g. I tore off my pant leg and wrapped it around my head to hold the leaves in place.

  Then I saw the chunks of meat on the ground. That was George. His head was sitting by a pile of intestines. I saw Steve in one piece, sleeping on the ground a few feet away. His foot was moving on the ground like he was pedaling a bicycle. I rolled him over and saw the side of his face was gone. His nose and half his jaw were missing. He had one eye, and it looked at me, like he might be awake.

  I wasn’t sure if he could hear, but I said, “You’ve got no face left.”

  He put his hand to his head and made it like a gun, motioning for me to finish him off. I said, “If you can’t stand up, I will blow your head off. But if you can stand and walk, you’re coming with me.”

  I pulled him onto his legs, and he was okay. I’m not telling you he could catch a ball and run down a field, but he held his own weight. I tied a T-shirt over his head and cut a hole in it for his one eye and his mouth—what was left of it. We started to walk. That’s when I felt the pain. With every step, it felt like somebody hitting my head with a hammer.

  It took us a day to find an army patrol. We scared the shit out of them. Can you imagine seeing me with fucking leaves on my head and Steve with one eye sticking out of his shirt? When they got us into a camp and lifted Steve’s shirt, one of the soldiers puked. They wouldn’t give me morphine because they were worried about my blood pressure dropping. I wanted to kill them. “I got a hole in my head. Blood pressure is not high on my list of worries.”

  Steve and I went out on separate medevacs. I went to Japan, then to Long Beach Navy Hospital in California. I was out of it for a couple of weeks because of a bad infection. Finally they put a metal plate in my head. When I got good enough to talk, I asked about Steve. They told me he was at a rehab hospital somewhere else.

  They let me send him a note. He wrote back weeks later, “You should have blown my brains out.”

  I didn’t see Steve until a year later. They had remade his jaw and given him a mouth, but he could barely form words. They couldn’t fix his nose, so they gave him a plastic thing with snaps that covered half his face. He looked disgusting. But his attitude had changed. He was planning to live in the woods in New Hampshire, and that made him happy.

  I loved Steve, and he loved me. I would never judge him. I did say to him, “Maybe what happened to us is payback for all the things we did to people out there.”

  “It’s possible,” Steve said. “But so what? We enjoyed every second of it.”

  * While the specifics of Jon’s accounts of prisoner abuse cannot be confirmed, in The Valley of Death, published by Random House in 2010, author Ted Morgan notes that from its start the Vietnamese conflict was notable for the grotesque atrocities committed on captive soldiers by the Vietminh and later the Vietcong. As Morgan writes on page 93: “Captured soldiers were impaled, sawed up, emasculated, drowned, buried alive.”

  * At this point in the interview, Jon had me stop the recorder as he appeared to struggle with emotions. Given that Jon often describes himself as a “sociopath,” I am never certain if his emotional displays are genuine or part of an effort to manipulate his audience, but here and at other points in his interviews on Vietnam, Jon stopped to cry.

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  J.R.: I had problems getting out of the hospital. I got more infections in my head. When I would stand, I would fall over. Weak as I was, I went crazy one night and beat up a male attendant. They moved me into a locked ward. They tied me to a table. I tried to chew through the restraints. They sent a new doctor, who pointed to chew marks on my restraints and asked, “What’s this?”

  I said, “There’s a fucking rat. He comes in every night and chews and chews.”

  The doctor cracked up. He became the first human I formed a relationship with after I came back. He untied me. He gave me his arm and helped me walk to a toilet, so I could pee standing up for once.

  Other doctors came. They gave me the psychological test where you pretend to be driving a car and you have to choose between running over a woman or a dog. They asked, “What would you do?”

  “I’d run the bitch over. It’s her fault for being in the road,” I said. “The dog don’t know any better. He’s innocent.”

  When they gave me crayons and asked me to draw something pleasant, I drew the woods, with stick-figure people in pajamas. I said, “This is my pleasant thing.”

  It was obvious I was thinking of gooks in the woods, and I wanted to kill the gooks in the woods. They sent in a priest. I had no strong feelings about priests. I’d never interacted with one. He said, “None of your thoughts are in the right place.”

  “Are they going to keep me locked up here forever?”

  The priest said something very strange to me: “Your body is overrun with evil.”

  I found this very unhelpful. “Why don’t you put your ass where I was, and then tell me what’s in my body? You fucking moron.”

  “I just want to help you,” he said. “I apologize.”

  The fact that this man apologized got my attention. The next day he returned and talked to me, without any mumbo jumbo. He said, “The powers that be are scared to let you go. They think you have not been rehabilitated to go among the general population. I want to help you get out.”

  This priest came every day. We’d shoot the shit, but without any God crap. The man did help. I’m not saying he showed me the light, because I certainly didn’t go to church afterward. But he explained to me I needed to change my thinking when I answered the doctors’ tests.

  A day came when the doctors gave me a new round of tests. Again, they asked me to draw something pleasant. I gave them a sunset. When they asked about my views on life, I became a flower child. I said, “I realize how important peace is. War is really bad.”

  Their whole attitude changed. It’s funny, because these were army doctors. The army recruited me in jail after I was charged with attempted homicide. They trained me in better ways to murder and let me loose in the woods for a killing spree. They trained me to fly in the air so I could kill people that were hard to reach, and to use Chinese guns so nobody could finger America for the murders. But to go home I had to pretend I liked sunsets and rainbows.

  Once I understood the game, I played it. The doctors knew I’d killed a bunch of people, but they didn’t know my actual personality. If they did, they never would’ve let me out of the room.

  I left the army in late 1968. My army service cleaned my record.* I wasn’t a criminal no more. I was twenty years old and free. My mind wasn’t completely proper, but I was better off than most guys returning from Vietnam. I had a future. I knew I wasn’t going to be flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

  * In response to my Freedom of Information Act request for Jon’s military records, the National Archives and Records Administration replied that its technicians were unable to locate his records. I interviewed one person by phone, identified in the book as Steve Corker, who claimed to be the man who served with Jon in Vietnam, and I found records of the soldier identified in the book as George, who died from friendly fire as Jon described. I have viewed Jon’s medical records, and he does have a metal plate in his head. I have viewed records indicating that one of his associates was arrested in connection with the kidnapping and attempted murder case that Jon claims resulted in his entering the army. Jon’s sister, Judy, recalls his entering the military and returning from Vietnam. Police involved with Jon’s arrest in 1986 were told by informants on the street that Jon was known as a “psycho Vietnam vet.” Jon is an avid and skilled sky diver. Previously, as a reporter on military matters, I have encountered rare cases where records have been misplaced by the National Archives, but until Jon’s government records can be produced, his recollections of military service in Vietnam cannot be independently verified.

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  JUNE 2009—FORT LAUDERDALE

  E.W.: Jon emerges from his session with a therapist at a Broward County mental health center. A few months earlier, Jon’s pre
vious wife, the mother of his son Julian, filed a motion to alter their custody agreement so she could have more time with Julian. Jon countersued, and a judge ordered Jon and his ex-wife to undergo psychological evaluation. Now Jon meets the therapist, a woman in her thirties, two times a week. I watch from the waiting area as Jon shakes her hand good-bye. She is attractive in a slightly disheveled grad-student way. Jon smiles broadly and, as he releases her hand, says something that makes her laugh. As we walk out to his car, he says, “She’s completely on my side, bro.”

  Jon tells me he has shared everything with the therapist, including highlights of his tour in Vietnam.

  J.R.: She asked me, “Do you ever think you’ll be at peace with yourself?”

  I said, “How could I ever be at peace with myself? I just want to make myself calmer for my son’s sake.”

  E.W.: What did you talk about today?

  J.R.: Self-esteem. She asked me how I define self-esteem. I told her it’s the values you have of yourself, and what others think of your values.

  E.W.: Was that the right answer?

  J.R.: Who the fuck knows, bro? She seemed happy. She likes me. Obviously, I don’t tell her everything. I didn’t tell her about skinning people in Vietnam or beating that guy who hurt Julian.

  E.W.: What guy hurt Julian?

  J.R.: Two years ago Julian came back from his mother’s with bruises on his leg. It wasn’t his mother who hurt him. He told me a man who visited her house had kicked him for making too much noise. I knew who this man was. I had some guys pick him up off the street.

  E.W.: What guys?

  J.R.: Two kids who work as bouncers at Scarlett’s. They do odd jobs for me. They threw this piece of shit in the trunk of a car and drove him on I-75. Every half hour they’d pull over, open the trunk, and hit him on his leg with a hammer. They did this many times but never said a word. Finally the dumb fuck got it. “I understand,” he said. “I’ll never hit the boy again.”*