The sanest of the gang, it seemed clear to Mark, was its only African American: Corporal Terry Marvel Whitmore, a marine infantryman from Memphis, Mississippi, who had been wounded in action in Vietnam and received a Christmas bedside visit from President Lyndon B. Johnson, who saluted his bravery and pinned a Purple Heart to the pillow. When Whitmore learned he was also to receive the honor of being returned to the front as soon as he was upright, he discharged himself from the military hospital at Yokohama and lay low with a Japanese girlfriend, pretending to anyone who asked that he was a student from East Africa—and hoping not to encounter any actual East Africans.
Their Beheiren guide, a Mrs. Fujikowa, encouraged the deserters to behave discreetly on their trip. Easier said than done. As they boarded the plane, Mark got into an argument with the flight attendant about the size of his suitcase. When they landed at their destination, Nemuro airport on the island of Hokkaido, Phil Callicoat struck up a loud conversation with a local bar owner whose establishment offered more than just cocktails.
Before they could get into any serious trouble, the deserters were steered toward a pair of waiting cars and driven for four hours to a remote spot on the coast, where a gaggle of Beheiren sympathizers were huddled around a radio unit, exchanging messages with a Soviet ship—which informed them that the handover would have to wait until the following night. The plan postponed, the Americans were taken to a nearby fishing village, where the captain of their escape vessel was waiting at his home to greet them. He poured out the sake and told his nervous guests not to worry. He had been a kamikaze pilot in the Second World War, and he had come back.
The following night, the captain supplied the deserters with a change of clothes calculated to increase their chances of passing as Japanese fishermen during the short walk from his house to the floodlit harbor. Terry Whitmore wrapped himself in a blanket to conceal his conspicuous blackness. Fortified with more alcohol, the deserters went out into the freezing night and climbed aboard their host’s fishing boat. They were told to stay belowdecks and keep quiet: most of the crew were unaware of their existence. As the vessel began chugging from the harbor, a sixth man stumbled into the hold: army private Kenneth Griggs, born in Seoul but adopted as a baby by a white couple from Boise, Idaho. Griggs—who introduced himself under his Korean name, Kim Jin-Su—had spent the better part of a year hiding out in the Cuban Embassy in Tokyo, and he seemed to have made good use of the free literature. His reasons for desertion were expressed as an intense critique of U.S. imperialism. He had a position to maintain: he had already said his piece in a four-minute film, shot by Beheiren and screened for journalists in a Tokyo restaurant.
When the Russian coast guard pulled alongside, Kim was the first to jump, leaping with reckless enthusiasm into Soviet-administered space. Joe Kmetz, his fears numbed by alcohol, went just as eagerly. Callicoat followed, sliding across the deck and launching himself with a Tarzan yodel. Mark went next. Hesitated. Watched the rust-marked hull of the Russian ship surge up and down before his eyes. “Jump, you dumb cunt!” shouted Kmetz, unsympathetically. Arms flailing, Mark made it, his suitcase tossed after him by the Japanese skipper.
Edwin Arnett, though, was in a worse state, paralyzed by the sight of the rising, falling ship. Whitmore muscled past him, hurled himself across the divide, and was caught by two burly Russian sailors before he hit the deck. Left behind, Arnett seemed unable to compute the physics of the situation. Instead of jumping as the Russian ship fell, he jumped as it rose, colliding with the railing and leaving himself dangling over the sea by one leg. Whitmore and one of the Russians dragged him back to safety.
* * *
THE SOVIET SHIP was old. The plumbing hissed and thudded. The deserters registered the signs in Cyrillic and knew that they had passed from one political sphere to the next. But the Russians made them comfortable, allocating the deserters quarters beside the officers and giving them as much vodka as they could hold. For their whole time in the Soviet Union, it seemed to Mark, they were carried on a small river of colorless alcohol. “I guess,” he reflected, “they thought it would increase the amount of careless talk.”
There were toasts at dinner. To each other. To the interpreter, an incongruously flamboyant man with a cigarette holder. To the captain, who ended the meal by challenging his guests to a drinking game. Only Callicoat accepted, pushing a hunk of black bread inside his mouth and taking a huge slug of some unidentified spirit. He was soon carried back to his bunk.
For four days and nights the deserters knocked back vodka, dined on salmon, looked through the portholes, and watched the thickening ice. The interpreter took the opportunity to steer each man away from the group for a thorough discussion of his background and history. On April 25 the ship neared the coast of Sakhalin island, where a patrol boat brought the passengers ashore. Officials confiscated their passports and identity papers. A doctor examined Arnett’s injured leg and shrugged.
Then, for four dizzying, vodka-sluiced, bouquet-filled, flashbulb-illuminated weeks, Mark Shapiro and his comrades went on a publicity tour of the USSR: Vladivostok, Moscow, Tbilisi, Gorki, Leningrad, with a short break in the Black Sea resort of Batumi. They accepted flowers from little girls. They saw circus shows. They browsed at the GUM department store. They visited Lenin’s tomb. (“Who’s Lenin?” asked Terry Whitmore.) They saw more circus shows. All under the supervision of a small staff of well-mannered KGB officers and neckless security men in Al Capone fedoras. Some of the security men, they learned, had also kept an eye on the Intrepid Four. One had been taught a single phrase of English, which he repeated over and over again: American cinema—I love you.
In Leningrad the deserters were installed in the Hotel Astoria, where Mark shared a room with Terry Whitmore. “Terry could hear this whining noise,” Mark recalled. “He was convinced that the Russians were bugging the room. So he turned everything over, looking for a hidden microphone. But it was only the sound of the elevator. Just being in Russia made us all nervous.”
Their edginess caused conflict: Kim and Callicoat got into a fistfight, apparently over Kim’s plan to acquire and burn an American flag. On the rare occasions they were allowed to wander about on their own, the deserters assumed they were being followed. Assumed, too, that they were being informed on by the local women who were so eager to come up to their rooms—not least because they seemed so fascinated by the intricacies of the U.S. Navy. The minders never objected to these one-night stands, as long as they took place in the hotel. Conversely, when Whitmore and Kmetz broke bounds and spent the night with two women in an apartment, the security guys were not pleased and accused them of going out on a spying mission for the CIA. It wasn’t, it seems, a very relaxing evening: the women expected payment and though the Americans obliged, they were soon interrupted by a jealous husband, who upended the dining table in anger and then, rather more weirdly, began to show a gentle curiosity in the texture of Terry Whitmore’s hair.
The grand propaganda coup of the trip happened on May 3. The broadcast of We Cannot Be Silent, a half-hour television program in which the six deserters were interviewed about their experiences in Vietnam. Joe Kmetz, hiding under his shades, said the war was a sickness. Terry Whitmore compared the conflict in Indochina to the U.S. Civil War. Phil Callicoat read out a protest poem of his own composition. Kim Jin-Su played the ideologue, suggesting that a nuclear strike on the States might be the only way to defeat “stormtroopers and criminals who are carrying out Washington’s policy of annihilating the Vietnamese as a race and proud people.” He delivered his message down the barrel of the camera. “For those of you on the battlefields,” he said, “I would advise you to follow me and hundreds of others, and just remember that it may take guts to go, but it takes balls to say no.”
I asked Mark about his contribution to the film. “I said as little as I could,” he replied. “It was Pappy Arnett who did most of the talking.”
Arnett couldn’t shut up. In his droning monotone, he gave test
imony that shocked and baffled the world. He said that he’d been trained at a special intelligence school at Fort Meade, Maryland, where he had learned forty ways of torturing a suspect. He said that he’d been assigned to a chemical warfare unit, and arrived on the coast of Vietnam aboard a ship loaded with gas that could cause hemorrhages, paralysis, and blindness. He spoke of saltwater poured in the wounds of prisoners, of GIs making necklaces with the ears of dead North Vietnamese. He said that his commanding officer had “treated the sweeps we made through peasant villages as a turkey shoot”; described how the same officer had executed a Puerto Rican serviceman who refused to join the hunting party and then recorded the dead man as a victim of the Viet Cong; and reported that on another occasion, a superior had disemboweled a baby and thrown the tiny corpse back into its mother’s arms. The interviewer, Yuri Fokin of the Soviet television service, was silent. The camera operator began to weep. The other deserters were horrified. They might have been more horrified had they known the truth: that Edwin C. Arnett had been an army cook on board a floating maintenance shop moored in Cam Ranh Bay. The only violence he had witnessed in Indochina had been inflicted upon potatoes.
* * *
VIETNAM WAS THE place the bodies were buried or flown back from, the place where the bombs fell and the air burned. But the Vietnam conflict raged far beyond the borders of a former French colony on the South China Sea. It was an undeclared world war, fought between the representatives of two opposing ideologies to spare them the agony of adding Moscow, Peking, and Washington to a list that had begun with Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Nothing about it was clean or uncomplicated. In 1954, the Geneva Accords split Vietnam into two zones, the Communist north, administered from Hanoi by the revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh, and the non-Communist south, ruled from Saigon by a succession of Western-backed leaders, who were advised—and sometimes hired and fired—by the hidden hand of the Central Intelligence Agency.
From 1960, the National Liberation Front, a Communist insurgency also known as the Viet Cong, added its firepower to the argument. Away from the bullets, the war’s foreign stakeholders invested their millions. China and the Soviet Union supplied expertise, money, and guns. The United States matched that commitment and, from 1965, sent roughly 2.7 million ground troops into the territory. Most found a place in the war’s decade-long ritual—boredom and terror in the battle zone, rest and recuperation in Tokyo, funerals and homecomings back in the States. But thousands of GIs rejected their roles and became deserters. The act carried the penalty of imprisonment and hard labor—and the possibility of becoming an unwitting combatant in the propaganda war.
As Mark Shapiro’s little platoon went in a vodka haze on their guided tours around Russia, Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB and future leader of the USSR, must surely have permitted himself a smile of satisfaction, if not a high-kicking rendition of “Kalinka” on top of his mahogany desk. He and his colleagues had been expecting the deserters’ arrival since the first week of March. It had been their idea to use a Japanese fishing boat to transport the men. (The Intrepid Four had been put aboard a Soviet passenger steamer, which had caused some diplomatic awkwardness.) They had planned their itinerary, scheduled their media appearances, authorized the Novosti Press Agency to offer them a book deal. To obscure the KGB’s involvement, they had appointed a state-backed peace group, the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee, as official sponsor of the trip. The Central Committee of the Communist Party had even discussed some of the deserters individually, causing phonetic Russian renderings of their names to be added to the Politburo minutes: Knet, Arnet, Kollikot.
During the first week of May 1968 those names chuntered from telex machines all over the world. America’s journalists went hunting for more details. A former Singing Callicoat responded to the sudden reappearance of her brother Phil: “I thought he was dead or we would have heard from him by now,” she said. “If it’s true, we disown him,” said Joe Kmetz’s stepbrother. But Arnett’s tales dominated the headlines, in all their wound-salting, village-burning, baby-killing horror.
Before the tour came to an end, Yuri Andropov paid the deserters a visit. Mark remembered his polite manners and exceptional English, the feeling of being inspected. Had the deserters been used? Of course they had. But the process was more complex than exploitation. “They showed us the country,” said Mark, “in the hope that it would make us more supportive of Russia in later years. In my case it worked. I sometimes wonder whether I wasn’t a little brainwashed on that trip.” He wasn’t talking Benzedrine injections and a psychedelic light show, but something subtler. Something that ensured that he never developed an enthusiasm for capitalism and, during his years of exile in Sweden, was always happy to pop into the Soviet Embassy for a chat. Something that put him at odds with America for the rest of his days.
* * *
THE SOVIETS DID not grant every wish of the deserters but hinted that they might help realize their future plans. Each man was given a pencil and a piece of paper and asked to describe his ideal post-military life. Whitmore and Kmetz looked at a map and plumped for a future in Finland. Kim dreamed of a new life in North Korea. But the six knew that Sweden would be their first port of call, and they were given the name of a helpful contact in Stockholm: Bertil Svahnström, a veteran foreign correspondent and vice chair of the Swedish Committee for Vietnam, an alliance of liberals and Social Democrats opposed to the war in Indochina.
They were also given a friendly warning. “They told us,” said Mark, “to keep our distance from a man named Michael Vale and an organization called the American Deserters Committee.” Vale, said their KGB guide, would try to contact them and gain their confidence.
On May 24, 1968, a fleet of limousines arrived at the Hotel Astoria to drive the deserters to the Leningrad airport, where they each received $300 in cash from the Soviet Afro-Asian Solidarity Committee and bear hugs and kisses from their minders.
After an hour staring at the legs of the Swedish cabin crew, the deserters touched down at Stockholm Arlanda Airport to a repeat of the reception that had greeted the Intrepid Four six months before. On that occasion, the waiting photographers had borrowed the iconography of a visiting rock band. Stepping from the plane in identical black suits, John, Craig, Mike, and Rick were framed as the Fab Four of Vietnam War desertion. The Soviets must have seen this, too, and counted it a mistake. The new band of six arrived unscrubbed, unsmartened: authentic members of the counterculture. The Rolling Stones to the Intrepid Four’s Beatles. In the shots from that day, Kim pouts from behind a pair of shades. Mark, in a Red Army fur hat, has a foot perched on his battered suitcase. Whitmore is dragging on a cigarette. Callicoat smiles wryly. Joe Kmetz, a chubby wise guy with a guitar dangling from his right hand, squares off with the camera like a nightclub bouncer. Edwin Arnett hovers at the back, eyes downcast, pale, serious. And, as it would turn out, doomed.
As the Russians had predicted, Bertil Svahnström was the first person to welcome the deserters to Sweden—a friendly, patrician figure happy to be acting as envoy for liberal opposition to the Vietnam War, and to be a conduit for messages from Moscow. But there was little opportunity for private conversation. Reporters and photographers had already swarmed into the arrivals lounge. A press conference was coalescing around the deserters. Reporters fired off questions. Were the men Communists? Had they been influenced by their Russian hosts? Terry Whitmore said the questions were stupid. Joe Kmetz got to his feet and declared that nobody would say a word until the representatives of U.S. press agencies had left the room. “We’ll talk with everybody but Americans,” he insisted. He didn’t trust them. They wrote bullshit and they were probably working for the CIA. The hacks from Associated Press and United Press International had little choice but to withdraw. Svahnström looked quietly pleased at that.
Once the questions had been exhausted, the deserters were whisked into detention by a phalanx of Swedish policemen so courteous that they carried their bags to the wa
iting cars. Svahnström followed behind in his Volvo. They were taken to a police station in Märsta, a northern suburb of Stockholm—a holding pen for asylum seekers to this day. Here, the men were searched, questioned, given Coke and hot dogs, and permitted to relax in front of the television. They watched a program in which the African American singer Lou Rawls received a rapturous reception from the studio audience. (“At least Sweden ain’t Mississippi,” thought Whitmore.) Although they were told not to smoke in the cells, Joe Kmetz managed to light one of his Russian cigarettes by heating a piece of metal in a plug socket.
Before lights-out, Svahnström came to speak to them. The deserters, he said, would soon be released and issued with permits to remain in Sweden. He could help them negotiate the complexities of the local benefits system, find accommodation and a job. But he also repeated the warning of their Soviet hosts. Recently, Svahnström explained, a group had been established to help fugitive GIs in Sweden. Its representatives would soon be paying them a visit. But the men from the American Deserters Committee, he said, were not to be trusted. They were ideological extremists who would attempt to make the newcomers follow their hard political line.
As the men considered Svahnström’s warning, one of the American news agencies banished from the Arlanda Airport press conference was exacting its revenge. On May 26, UPI sent out a story by Virgil Kret, a correspondent in Tokyo, that was calculated to humiliate the man who had bawled its reporter out of the arrivals lounge.
Kret claimed to have interviewed Joe Kmetz in February, just before Beheiren took the fugitive marine under its wing. The encounter, he said, had taken place in a bar in Tokyo, where Kmetz, drunk and disconsolate, confessed that he’d been hiding for the past sixteen months in the room of a one-eyed Japanese woman ten years his senior, drinking Suntory whisky and cursing his fate.
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