Standing Next to History: An Agent's Life Inside the Secret Service

by Petro, Joseph

  My response was “This was Mrs. Reagan’s idea. Complain to her.”

  Fifteen minutes later, a very peeved Mark Weinberg, who was Larry’s deputy and my good friend, called to say, “You should have told me. We should’ve known.”

  I reminded him, “If I’d told you, you would have been obliged to tell Larry. No one knew. I couldn’t tell anyone.”

  The next morning, I arrived at work to discover that Larry and Mark weren’t the only ones angry with me. The entire White House press corps was fuming, too. In my own mind, I knew that we never took any unnecessary risks with the president and the first lady that night. They were always in an armored car, we had plenty of protection and backup, nobody knew we were leaving, nobody knew where we were going, and we had enough contingency plans in place that we could respond to anything. To this day I am convinced that no one dining in the restaurant ever knew we were there. So I decided to write off everyone’s fury as just part of the deal. But the media was so annoyed that they demanded a meeting with the president, and his secretary put it on the schedule for six that evening. It took place in the Green Room on the first floor of the residence. I wasn’t personally worried, because I had two things going for me: The dinner was Mrs. Reagan’s idea, and all I did was make it happen safely; and I had the president to defuse the situation.

  He was unbelievably good at this sort of thing, and handled it perfectly. The reporters walked out of the room chuckling, although Bill Plante of CBS News turned toward the president with one final admonition. “Please, Mr. President, in the future, treat us like your American Express card. Don’t leave home without us.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  JUST A KID FROM ALLENTOWN

  On November 22, 1963, John Kerry was a sophomore at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut; Ronald Reagan was finishing his last film in Hollywood, an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers”; and I was packing to leave for a football game.

  I’d never heard of John Kerry. I had, of course, seen Ronald Reagan in the movies and on television. But in my wildest dreams, as I packed an overnight suitcase, I could never have guessed how that Friday afternoon in Dallas would change my life forever and, to some small extent, mix mine with theirs.

  I was just a kid from Allentown, Pennsylvania, gone to the big city—Philadelphia—on a football scholarship to Temple University. We were playing the final game of the 1963 season at Gettysburg on Saturday, and the team bus was scheduled to leave in an hour. At around 12:40, I was in my dorm room when I heard on the radio that shots had been fired at the president’s limousine in Dallas. The announcement that the president was dead came as we were boarding the bus.

  Like most people, I spent the weekend glued to the television, watching the events that followed in the wake of the assassination. I listened intently to descriptions of Secret Service agent Clint Hill jumping onto the rear bumper of the president’s Lincoln convertible, then scrambling up the trunk to get to Mrs. Kennedy. I watched reporters describe how, two cars back, Rufus Youngblood had thrown Vice President Lyndon Johnson to the floor of his limousine and fallen across him. I read how Secret Service drivers in the president’s limousine, and in the vice president’s limousine, and in the follow-up cars had sped away to Parkland Memorial Hospital.

  In the months following the Kennedy assassination, I read everything I could about that day in Dallas and about the Secret Service.

  Two years later, my final game as Temple’s quarterback was at Hofstra, on Long Island. It was not only the last time I put on my lucky number 12 jersey but also one of my most memorable games, for all the wrong reasons. We kicked off, they did nothing with their first possession, and we took over. I got us inside the twenty-yard line, called a “sprint out left,” and ran the ball myself to the three, where I got knocked out of bounds, then tackled. I never came back onto the field. My right hand was badly broken, we lost the game, and that was the end of my college football career. But it didn’t appear that it was going to be the end of my playing days. Around Thanksgiving, I received a phone call from the Cleveland Browns to say they’d drafted me as a defensive back. I graduated on June 17, 1966, and was looking forward to training camp in July, when, the next day, I received a letter which famously began “Greetings from the President of the United States.”

  Once the initial shock of getting drafted by the army wore off, I called the Browns’ coach, Blanton Collier, to tell him the bad news. He said, “Let me work on it,” and phoned me back a few hours later to announce that I’d just been enrolled as a graduate student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. As such, I would be deferred from military service. Three days later, my notice to report for an army physical was rescinded. On July 1, I joined the other rookies in Hiram, Ohio. Ten days into camp I got another induction notice. The draft board had suddenly decided to take everyone who’d already had a four-year deferment, and that put an end to my career with the Browns. As of August 3, I was to become a soldier. Instead, I rushed to a navy recruiter, and by the time my date with the army arrived, I was in the navy pipeline for Aviation Officer Candidate School.

  It was the same year John Kerry enlisted in the navy and Ronald Reagan became governor of California.

  My orders said that I was to report for training at Pensacola, Florida, by 1800 hours on October 3. I figured getting there an hour and a half early would give me a chance to look around. The film An Officer and a Gentleman hadn’t yet been made, but that’s what this place was like, and if I’d seen the film, I wouldn’t have arrived at 4:30. Instead of looking around, a marine drill instructor decided I should spend the time doing push-ups.

  The first four weeks were challenging, but my dreams were crushed when I couldn’t pass an eye test for flight training. I was transferred to Officer Candidate School at Newport, Rhode Island, and sixteen weeks later was commissioned an ensign. I didn’t know it then, but John Kerry was there at the same time, although he was a few classes ahead of me.

  My first ship was the USS Plymouth Rock, a landing ship dock out of Little Creek, Virginia. Shortly after I joined the crew, we got a new skipper who’d just come back from Vietnam, where he’d been in charge of the Riverine Forces—large river assault boats. One night in the wardroom he was showing slides of his experiences, and up came a slide of a PBR, a river patrol boat just like those in the movie Apocalypse Now. They were much smaller than the Riverines, only thirty-one feet long, with a crew of four. It was love at first sight. I said to myself, That’s what I want to do. As soon as he finished showing us his slides, I asked the skipper, “How do I get on PBRs?”

  It took eight months to get off the Plymouth Rock, but on my twenty-fifth birthday, March 28, 1969, I arrived at Mare Island, in Vallejo, California, for PBR school. There were fifty enlisted men and four officers in my class, one of whom was an Annapolis grad named John Poe. He had a wife and two young children in San Diego, and every weekend for the next twelve weeks he’d fly down there to be with them. John and I got to be great pals, and because I was single and could always find use for a car over the weekend, I’d drop him off at the airport on Friday night and use his convertible until it was time to pick him up on Sunday night.

  We trained with Navy Seals in the sloughs of the Sacramento River, which were similar to but more difficult to maneuver in than the canals of Vietnam. I didn’t know it then, but for every Navy Seal who died in Vietnam, five PBR sailors were killed in combat. From there we went to Whidbey Island, Washington, for SERE, survival-evasion-resistance-escape, which is prison-camp training. They put us on a mountain, in the cold and snow, gave us a parachute and a knife, and left us there to forage for food. John and I bunked together under the parachute. After that they took us to another mountain, gave us a coordinate, and challenged us to get to “Friendly Village.” If we made it, they said, we could have an apple and an orange before being taken to prison camp. If we got caught on the way down, we would be taken straight to the camp.

  Everyb
ody was on his own this time, trying to avoid Asian navy guys with AK-47s going through the woods hunting us down. I was in good shape in those days, so I could run and made it to Friendly Village. I got my apple and my orange, and was then hauled off to prison camp. That was the most intimidating experience I’ve ever been through. They put us all in prison garb, locked us away in little boxes, fed us gruel, threw cold water on us, deprived us of sleep, hit us, knocked us down, made us move rocks, and constantly shouted at us. We quickly lost track of time, and it seemed as if we were there forever. Anyone who escaped got an apple and an orange. I tried several times, but it was too hard to get out of there. Somehow, one guy a few classes before ours escaped fifteen times. He was later shot down in Vietnam, and thanks to this training, he was one of the few pilots to make his way safely out of the north.

  They never told us how long this was going to last, which was part of the torture, and for all that any of us knew, this misery could go on for weeks. On what I think might have been the third or fourth day, they lined us up, and the camp commander started ranting and raving. Out of the corner of my eye I saw someone hauling down the North Vietnamese flag and sending up the American flag, and then they played the National Anthem. All the guards saluted us, and we all broke down in tears. The training taught us the trauma of being captured, reinforced the idea that we really didn’t want that to happen, and made every one of us believe that, if it did happen, we had to depend on our buddies.

  As soon as we got back to the base, John Poe and I went to the Officers’ Club, and, for some unfathomable reason, we were the only two people in the bar that night. He loved the Beatles song “Hey Jude,” so we drank margaritas, fed the jukebox, and played it over and over and over again.

  From Whidbey Island they sent us to San Diego for Vietnamese language training. That’s where I met John’s wife and kids and presented him with a shiny 45-rpm copy of “Hey Jude.”

  On my last night in the States, June 9, 1969, I went to the Coronado Beach Hotel, by myself, and blew what little money I had on a great meal and a bottle of wine. The next morning I was standing at the base bus stop, because I couldn’t afford a cab to the airport, when an older couple pulled up in a car and insisted on driving me. I guess they knew where I was going. I flew to San Francisco, took a bus to Travis Air Force Base, phoned my parents to say good-bye and spent several hours in the Officers’ Club looking at a group of young marine lieutenants, wondering how many of them would be coming home alive. From there I flew to Hawaii, then to Subic Bay, Manila, and on to Tan Son Nhut Air Force Base in Saigon, where I was assigned to quarters that had been bombed the day before. The next morning my name was on a list for assignment to River Division 512 in Tra Cu. I decided that was good luck in a way. I was wearing number 12 again.

  It was a long helicopter ride up to Tra Cu, a navy advanced tactical support base on the Vam Co Dong River, which paralleled the Cambodian border. The Vam Co Dong and the Vam Co Tay outlined the parrot’s beak of Cambodia, which is where a huge American invasion occurred a year later. River Division 512 was part of an operation called Giant Slingshot, and these guys were getting hit every night. It was a very bad place to be, so close to the enemy that you could see their camps across the border in Cambodia. I shared a hooch with a fellow patrol officer named Bill Waters. Every now and then the navy would send us a film, and every now and then Bill’s mother would send him one of those popcorn shakers that you hold over an open flame. To run the film we had to shut off most of the electricity in the camp. Bill and I would sit there in our hooch watching it, cooking his mother’s popcorn. It was as near to being home as we could get.

  Within a couple of weeks 512 was moved south to Chau Doc on the Bassac River, a few hundred yards from Cambodia. Our patrol area was now the Vinh Te Canal, which was even worse than the Vam Co Dong.

  A few weeks later I got orders to River Division 534, which had lost officers and needed replacements. I was back on the Vam Co Dong, four miles south of Tra Cu in Ben Luc, and now there was no number 12. I spent a few months there before our division got sent north to Go Dau Ha—we got into two big firefights on the way— and joined John Poe’s River Division 592. But within a week or so, we were down from twenty boats to four and had taken a lot of casualties. John’s executive officer, Lt. Philip Thomas Smith, of Austin, Texas, was due to leave, and his replacement, Lt. Andy Arge, was due to arrive. But the night before, one of the chief petty officers got sick, and Lt. Smith volunteered to take his patrol. His boat took fire and he was killed. The next morning, as Andy Arge stepped off the helicopter, sailors were loading a body bag on it. Andy asked me, Who’s that? I hated to tell him it was the guy he was replacing, but I did. Andy went out that night, took fire, and suffered a slight wound. He went out the next night and got wounded again. Two days there, replacing a guy who got killed, and Andy had two Purple Hearts. A few nights later, my boats got into a firefight with the Viet Cong coming across the river. I was later awarded a Bronze Star. The paperwork attached to it said it was for that night and a few similar nights. But all I was doing was trying not to get myself or any member of my crew killed. In my head, the paperwork should have read, “For perfect attendance.” Because all the time, deep down inside, I never thought I was going to get out of there alive.

  Eventually they moved us back to Ben Luc, and before long, President Nixon’s Vietnamization program kicked in, which meant we were going to turn our PBRs over to the Vietnamese. As soon as we handed the boats to them in October 1969, my career with Division 534 ended, and I got orders back to 512, where I hooked up again with Bill Waters and his mother’s popcorn.

  On November 23, 1969, there was a full moon with clear skies making the nighttime visibility excellent. Although the enemy rarely undertook major operations in moonlight, everyone in the division was on edge because, seventeen days earlier, one of our boat captains, Quartermaster First Class Jimmy Cain from Fort Worth, Texas, had been killed. That had been a cloudy night.

  I was on patrol in the same part of the Vinh Te Canal where Jimmy died, just west of Chau Doc. Our mission was to interdict the movement of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong crossing the border. “Interdict” was a fancy military term meaning shoot them before they shoot you. Lack of rainfall had lowered the water level of the canal well below the bank, making it impossible for us to use the weapons on our boats. I had to position our ambush on the north bank of the canal in a heavily wooded area.

  Some weeks earlier I had made a deal with a Special Forces sergeant, trading C rations for a 90 mm recoilless rifle. It was a big gun and gave our small group of two boats and nine men a little extra sense of security. The navy was equally concerned that we could be overrun—it had already happened several times to other crews—so they assigned to us six Cambodian mercenaries. That added considerably to our defensive capability, assuming they remained on our side. If they had not yet received their latest paycheck, we couldn’t be totally sure of their loyalty.

  After placing movement sensors around our position, in an effort to prevent anyone from sneaking up on us, I huddled behind a mound of dirt next to one of the mercenaries. There were North Vietnamese base camps less than a mile from us, just across the rice paddies, and in the quiet of the night I could hear them signaling back and forth using sticks to bang out some form of Morse-like code. There were also times when they played twangy Vietnamese music on loudspeakers, which, to our Western ears, was very annoying.

  Waiting for something to happen, I looked skyward. The night was brilliant and that full moon was sharply in focus. Nine days before, Apollo 12 had blasted off from Florida, and as I stared at the moon, I realized that Charles Conrad and Alan Bean were somewhere on the surface. My mind focused on them, and I slowly forgot where I was and what I was doing there. I stared at the moon and thought about my lifelong fascination with flight, and my own recently shattered dream of flying for the navy.

  Before long, the Cambodian mercenary wanted to know why I was watching the moon.
In a mixture of English, Cambodian, and Vietnamese, I tried to explain that while we were lying on the soft wet ground of a Southeast Asian jungle, two Americans were up there. He understood the irony of the moment, because in broken English he asked, “If your country can accomplish such an unbelievable task as putting a man on the moon, what in the world are you doing here with me, in this mud, waiting for the enemy to approach?” It was the first time I questioned my being in Vietnam. And to this day, each time I see a full moon, I think back to that night and wonder if I will ever come to terms with the experiences of that year. Sadly, the prospect of that, even all these years later, seems as distant and remote as the dark side of the moon.

  Most guys on PBRs had similar experiences. Mine was not at all unique. I know that because we spent a lot of time sitting around and talking about our experiences on patrol. One of the names I remember coming up every now and then was John Kerry. He was on PCFs, called Swift Boats. Initially, we patrolled rivers and the bigger PCFs were on coastal patrol. As the war progressed, the PBRs moved farther in, and so did the PCFs. By the time we were working along the Cambodian border, the PCFs were on the major rivers. I knew a few guys who knew Kerry, but I didn’t meet him. At least, not then.

  One year after I arrived in Vietnam, I was on a flight back to San Francisco. That year in combat taught me a lot about myself and also showed me that life is truly random and circumstantial. I came back a very different person. It wasn’t until we flew past the Golden Gate Bridge, and the pilot tipped his wings, that I really understood that I was one of the lucky ones. I was home alive.

  That was June 1970. I didn’t know what I wanted to do regarding a career, so I spent some time visiting friends, went down to the Jersey shore to be with my parents, and eventually made my way back home to Allentown. Then, out of the blue, I received a call from the Philadelphia Eagles. A players’ strike in the National Football League had just been announced, the Eagles had twenty-six rookies coming to camp, and they needed a quarterback. It seemed like an eternity since I’d put on a football helmet, and I wasn’t sure that I still had the right stuff, but the coach of the Eagles said, Come to Franklin Field tomorrow, spend some time with us, and if it works, we’ll take you to training camp. As soon as I hung up, I phoned my old friend, Jack Callaghan, who’d played quarterback at Rutgers. I told him to meet me at nearby Muhlenberg College, and for the first time in four years, I gripped a football.