Keeping the Promise: The Story of MIA Jerry Elliott, a Family Shattered by His Disappearance, and a Sister's 40-Year Search for the Truth

by Elliott Donna E.

  Staffer William LeGro attended a meeting of the US-Russia Joint Commission group in Washington on October 28, 1992, at the Department of State (DoS). The discussion was about information Senja had provided to the SSC. Ambassador Malcolm Toon called for Senja’s dismissal. Two days later, LeGro was directed to read a letter from the CIA to the SSC, which discredited Senja’s information, and reportedly indicated his information had been checked, but not confirmed by his former government of Czechoslovakia. Senja had not yet been deposed when the letter from the CIA was received. Staff investigators did not know all Senja knew, or would say under oath, yet the CIA had already written off his testimony. McCreary declared, “anticipatory discrediting of a Select Committee potential witness is tantamount to tampering with the evidence.”

  The second incident of suspected misconduct concerned the Committee witness Le Quang Khai, a veteran of Vietnam’s Foreign Ministry. Le had made a public statement concerning American POWs on September 12, 1992, but no USG agency had contacted him until he was linked to the Committee investigation. Le told McCreary that men who identified themselves as FBI agents, had contacted, and attempted to recruit him. If he would return to Vietnam for six months as a spy for U.S. intelligence, favorable asylum in the United States afterwards was offered.

  McCreary and LeGro took Le’s sworn statement on October 26, 1992. Key points Le made in his deposition were that in 1980 or thereabouts, he had been a student at the Institute for Foreign Affairs when a fellow student and friend told him, “not all the U.S. POWs were returned.” The friend was a lieutenant in the Ministry of National Defense who, at the time, had recently been reassigned to the Institute from a position as a guard at a prison camp. Le told the investigators in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “it was common knowledge” that U.S. POWs were withheld during the 1973 Operation Homecoming.

  In the 1980s, the Ministry conducted academic discussions at the Institute regarding obstacles to normalization between the U.S. and Vietnam. The POW issue came up as one of a number of obstacles. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Communist Party of Vietnam split three ways on the issue: the minority believed Vietnam should admit mistakes had been made. All the records, files, information, and even live POWs should be released at once. About a third of the Party members were “hardliners.” They maintained the view that the POW issue was the only “bargaining chip” Vietnam had in dealing with the U.S. They thought information should never be released because the POW issue kept the U.S. “engaged with Vietnam.”

  The majority held the view that the issue was ambiguous. They did not know how strong the issue was in America, or what to do about it in any case. All of the groups believed the U.S. used the POW/MIA issue to punish Vietnam “for winning the war.” Among other things, Le told the investigators the U.S. must insist all information be released while holding out a promise the embargo would be lifted. The U.S. must insist that Vietnam “be honest.” Hanoi would then slowly release the other information it possessed. Le said he had no information to base an opinion on whether men were still alive in captivity in 1992, but that Vietnam had tried repeatedly to resolve the issue. He cited instances in the early to mid-80s, and told the SSC investigators the Vietnamese offers were always rebuffed. Two days after McCreary and LeGro took Le’s deposition; the FBI again contacted Le to set up a meeting to discuss his working as an agent for the FBI’s POW/MIA office. When McCreary investigated, he found there was no such FBI office.

  Included in the evidence unearthed by SSC investigators was the document Harvard researcher Stephen Morris discovered while researching Soviet archives in 1993. General Tran Van Quang, according to a 1972 transcript, told politburo members in a briefing that Hanoi was holding 1,205 American prisoners but would keep many of them at war’s end as leverage to ensure getting war reparations from Washington. Quang said, “The total number of American POWs captured in combat actions and who are now in the DRV consists of 1,205, of which six hundred seventy-one were taken prisoner in North Vietnam, four hundred twenty-six in South Vietnam, forty-three in Laos and sixty-five in Cambodia.” Le Dinh, a defected North Vietnamese intelligence officer, told American debriefers in 1978 that more than seven-hundred POWs were held as a “strategic reserve.” Although Le Dinh’s story confirmed the authenticity of the Morris document, Hanoi called the transcript a fabrication.

  The Chief State Archivist of the Russian Federation, Dr. Rudolf Germanovich Pikhoya, stated in August 1995, “I am absolutely certain that the numbers-that is the numbers of POW’s cited by General Quang—are true. I believe the data still exists in Vietnam which deals specifically with U.S. POW’s...I am absolutely positive that the 1,205 figure is absolutely true and correct as far as intelligence data is concerned. As an archivist and someone who has analyzed a great many documents, military and otherwise, I can tell you this is an absolute truth.”

  The Committee’s concluding report contained the following quote: “It should be enshrined in both attitude and law that the right of a POW/MIA family to know what the government knows about its loved one is as in alienable a right as any spelled out in the Constitution.” A paradoxical statement because on January 13, 1993, the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs confirmed there was no proof U.S. POWs survived, but neither was there proof all of those who did not return had died. There was evidence, however, that indicated the possibility of survival for at least a small number of American POWs after Operation Homecoming.

  J. Thomas Burch, Chairman of the National Vietnam Veterans Coalition, expressed his concern over the Committee’s final report, “It is difficult to understand how the Government can effectively negotiate for the return of live prisoners when it lacks the confidence of its own negotiating position. Basically, they’re telling the Vietnamese they want information about live Americans at the same time they’re publicly saying that they’re all dead.”

  Established in 1993 under DoD regulations, the mission of the DPMO was to provide centralized management of the POW/MIA efforts. The Director, Presidentially appointed, has authority to participate in official negotiations with foreign governments concerning accountability for U.S. POW/MIAs. The Director is responsible for implementing timely, effective procedures to improve personnel recovery operations, accurately determine the status of unaccounted-for-personnel, and provide current information to the families of those missing.

  The Joint Task Force-Full Accounting (JTF) passed a copy of Jerry’s case narrative to the Vietnamese Government during the June 1993 Technical Meeting. The cover letter attached to my copy advised this was a routine administrative procedure to aid in the accounting process. I was surprised to discover the one-page English translation of the document contained three errors: the incident date given was June 21, 1968, instead of January 21, 1968; Jerry’s eye color was listed as blue, instead of hazel; and Elliott was misspelled with one “t.”

  Soon after this document arrived in my mailbox, I received the Field Investigation Report of the 24th Joint Field Activity (JFA). The report summarized an interview with a local Khe Sanh resident, Cong Duc Long. Long’s family had come to the Khe Sanh area in 1975 during the North Vietnamese resettlement plan. In 1982, his family had found the wreckage of a helicopter while farming. He said the local people had buried pieces of the rotor, but after all these years were uncertain of the exact location.

  The JTF-FA Investigative Element (IE) team surveyed both the witness location and incident location coordinates recorded in U.S. records. They discovered the two sites were three-hundred meters apart. The reported loss location had rolling hills at a forty-five degree slope, with the top of the plateau, where the NVA ambushed the Black Cats, cultivated with young pine trees. The team found nothing, reported all leads exhausted, and recommended no further joint field investigations at the Old French Fort. This was discouraging news.

  The same month, Senator Robert Smith [R-NH] wrote a letter to the Justice Department alleging that ten present or former U.S. government officials, which he
identified by name, had provided false statements to the Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, or committed other potential violations. Smith asked for an investigation. Six months later, Acting Assistant General John Keeney told Smith that the Department had concluded further investigation was not appropriate based on their thorough review of the documents the Senator had provided. The Justice Department review did not include interviews or depositions of the individuals directly involved.

  Senator Smith responded the following January by saying, “I believe Justice officials should have at least talked to all of the individuals named or involved in these matters. Attorney General Janet Reno had publicly pledged to review “all the available evidence” on cases referred to her for criminal investigation. However, she is clearly not in the investigative mode these days. First, we had ‘Whitewater’ and now we have ‘Whitewash.’”

  The province road from the junction of National Highway 9 to the Khe sanh Combat Base, officially designated as Route 608, was called the “Plantation Road” by U.S. soldiers because it ran past the Poilane villa and the family’s coffee fields. July 2000.

  Chapter Twenty

  Cindy

  years of hard manual labor, fistfights, and car wrecks had taken a toll. With degenerative disc disease and a reconstructed knee, Cindy could no longer hold up physically to menial jobs. Unable to continue working by the age of twenty-eight, she became extremely depressed. Constantly plagued by nightmares and mood swings, Randy and I encouraged her to seek counseling. In an attempt to wipe out the pain of the past, Cindy Ann found a new form of escape. She self-injured to relieve to emotional pain with physical pain.

  Skin-deep cuts on her arms and legs weren’t meant to cause permanent damage or harm, nor were they a suicidal gesture. The cuts were a source of immediate, but non-serious physical pain. It was an obsessive battle, and one Cindy was deeply ashamed of losing. She wore jeans to the creek in summer to hide the ugly, embarrassing scars on her legs. Aware she longed to swim with us; we always found a fun excuse to toss her in the cool water so no one would question why she didn’t wear a swimsuit or shorts.

  After health professionals declared her physically and mentally unemployable, she began to receive Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments. There was a stigma attached to receiving SSI, Cindy called it her “crazy check.” Barely enough money to exist from month to month, occasionally she would enthusiastically find herself a new job. It was self-defeating, however, because she repeatedly failed. Although she completed a vocational training course, and was very quick with math, Cindy became so anxious behind the cash register she couldn’t function suitably. She soon embarked on a course of treatment for her depression and nightmares that led to her abuse of prescribed medications.

  Cindy and “Skippy,” 1987.

  In 1992, as the police pulled her over for a routine traffic stop, a passenger stashed an ounce of marijuana in Cindy’s carton of cigarettes. Already in trouble for speeding and no liability insurance, when the officer searched the car and discovered the drug, Cindy declined to implicate her friend. The judge sentenced her to five years at Tucker State Prison for possession of marijuana. Tucker was the prison farm where Thomas O. Murton, hired as a prison warden in the late 1960s, uncovered prisoner abuse, inhumane conditions, slave labor, and discovered a number of unmarked graves supposedly belonging to inmates no one had claimed. A 1980 movie about Tucker, Brubaker, brought national attention to the situation.

  Conditions may have improved somewhat, but Cindy wrote to me about guards impregnating female prisoners who were drug off in the middle of the night and subjected to forced abortions, or inmates beaten bloody by other prisoners with bars of soap stuffed into socks. Her greatest fear was the dark, damp isolation cell known as “the dungeon,” where mushrooms grew out of decaying walls, and enormous rats were common. Once, during a three-day punishment for not reporting a fight she witnessed, Cindy tried to escape her fear of being alone by taming a rat with breadcrumbs.

  Tucker didn’t segregate the inmate population based on the type of crime committed. The criminally insane and convicted murderers lived within the general prison population. On the first visit Randy and I made, Cindy pointed out an inmate who claimed that angry with her husband, she had served him their microwaved newborn on a platter. This woman appalled and frightened Cindy. Mean you could predict, crazy you could not.

  Her so-called friend sent a thank you card for not involving her with the drug charges, and then dropped out of her life. Cindy crawled deeper and deeper into her own survival space. In order to stay out of trouble, and earn good time towards early release on probation, she hung on the fringe of the general prison population. I received a letter where the pen suddenly scrawled erratically off the page, almost tearing the paper. A bitter inmate sentenced to life with no parole had walked by, knocked Cindy in the head with her fist, and they had exchanged a few blows before the guards broke it up. Unwritten prison code required she fight, or face more violence. Inmates existed in a perpetual state of fear, especially at night when attacks were most prevalent.

  Cindy wanted out of Tucker so badly she agreed to participate in an experimental medical research program. Administered the antidepressant drug Nardil, she almost died from respiratory failure as a result. Tucker officials did not alert me that a life-threatening emergency occurred. Unofficial notification Cindy was stable and in recovery came from a prison employee, who asked to remain anonymous. She suggested I advise my sister not to participate in future research, even if it meant early release.

  Randy and I regularly made the twice-a-month visit to spend a few strained hours with Cindy in the sweat-permeated gymnasium at Tucker. A couple of times, I broke the rules to slip her my earrings in an attempt to cheer her up. No matter what, she cried at the end of every visit, which tore me up for days afterward. It hurt like hell to see my little sister struggle to survive in a horrid place like Tucker, where it wasn’t safe to sleep with your eyes closed. After I sent her money to buy a radio with a headset, she escaped at night through music. It was the most I could do for her.

  Since the wreck, I’d begun to keep a journal in order to help me keep my thoughts and memories organized. I began to write daily letters to Cindy in the same manner. Cindy, in turn, wrote beautiful, moving poetry from an ugly, gloomy place. In a strange way, our correspondence brought us closer together than we had ever been before, maybe because we were each other’s captive audience.

  Even though things looked bleak, a welcome ray of sunshine came into our lives. My son had fallen in love and married. In May 1993, his wife, Delana, gave birth to a baby boy. Cindy and I dubbed him “Sammy Sunshine.” When Randy looked down on his son for the first time he said, “I never thought much about what my son would look like, but he looks just like who I thought he would.” That’s my boy!

  After nine months, Cindy earned early release for good behavior, and was placed on parole. I couldn’t say the months in prison rehabilitated her in anyway. She tried three times to pass the GED Test for a certificate of completion for high school, but the prison only offered the test, not instructional classes. We encouraged her not to give up, but each failure lowered her self-esteem another notch. The only thing she really learned in prison was a time-tested recipe for “hooch,” a concoction of fruit allowed to ferment into alcohol. She was in worse shape mentally and emotionally than before being put behind bars.

  Home again, Cindy refused to go out in public, she couldn’t handle being around people, and startled easily. She tried hard to complete projects, taking her time, concentrating, but things seldom worked out the way she expected. Angry with herself because she was unable to fit into society, Cindy started to drink again. Within months, minor infractions with the law began to occur.

  It didn’t matter where Cindy landed, either a jail or mental facility, someone always recognized she wasn’t really a criminal, but a person with a host of challenges who needed support and guidance, not incarceration. Thro
ugh her own initiative most often, and court ordered at other times, she participated in numerous mental health programs. In the beginning, I took them seriously. In the late ‘80s, Cindy had signed herself into a rehabilitation center in Little Rock. She quickly established a rapport with her counselor, who requested I come in for a family meeting. The brutal session ended with Cindy in tears, and me feeling like I was a bad sister. I still had hopes this would open the door for discussion between Cindy and her counselor to talk about real issues, such as feeling abandoned by the deaths of our parents, instead of a temporary fix for the symptoms. That never happened; the counselor went on vacation the next day. Soon after, the hospital spit Cindy out on the street when her Medicaid coverage hit the twenty-one day psychological treatment cap.

  Only several weeks after her release from the hospital, Cindy was in trouble. Once again, I had to sign commitment papers for someone in my family. After two weeks in the state mental hospital, the doctors said Cindy was ready to come home. I told the caseworker it wasn’t possible Cindy Ann had stabilized enough in two weeks to be out on her own. Too bad, the state set the time limits at a two-week period unless a doctor determined the patient to be dangerous to themselves or others.

  The only change I could see in my little sister was a lot of new prescription medication, which calmed her down and occasionally helped her sleep without nightmares. She had been a real handful before her prison experience, now her problems were compounded. I couldn’t bring Cindy home to live with me, I was too injured. I knew I couldn’t keep up with her, and without a watchful eye, she would be back in trouble in no time. For lack of a better resolution, the state placed Cindy in the Oakview Nursing Home in Morrilton, Arkansas, a two-hour drive from home.