In May 1968, that project was gathering momentum. Volunteers were needed to give speeches on campuses and at anti-war rallies and to talk to journalists asking for interviews. (Student publications got the deserters for free; American papers were charged a hefty administration fee.) Copy was required to fill the pages of the Second Front, a newspaper distributed to potential deserters on bases in West Germany and printed for the ADC by an anti-war press in Paris.
New arrivals wrote up the story of their desertion and exhorted readers to acquire one of their own. The tone was friendly and foul-mouthed. “The man with the guts is the one who tells Uncle Sam to fuck himself,” declared Don McDonough, a deserter from Boston who, like Bill, had been educated in a Catholic seminary. “The more shit you will take, the better the officers like it,” argued former petty officer Ray Krzeminski, late of the aircraft carrier USS Wasp. “The more you suffer, the more those sadistic bastards enjoy it.” The paper also carried poetry, graphic pictures of U.S. soldiers posing with the severed heads of National Liberation Front fighters, and travel tips for fugitives coming north to Sweden. (Legal entry with a passport was preferable to more exuberant strategies, such as screaming up in a stolen jeep or arriving by hijacked plane.) A sister publication, the Second Front Review, featured longer, less demotic pieces, and was eventually published in both English and Swedish.
Not all their propaganda was printed. It also came in the form of radio programs. Vincent Strollo, a mechanic’s son from Philadelphia who deserted from a military hospital near Landstuhl, told me how these came about: “At one point very early on I was so disgusted with the war that I said, ‘Well, I can go to North Vietnam and fight for the North Vietnamese.’ So we went for a meeting at their mission in Stockholm.” This generous offer was declined, but the officials proposed another idea. “So myself and a number of other people made tapes, with a lot of music, encouraging men to desert.”
These programs—many featuring a jive-talking Terry Whitmore—were recorded on a reel-to-reel tape deck at the ADC offices, hand-delivered to the North Vietnamese mission, and sent on to Hanoi, where they were played on Second Front Radio, along with demoralizing sentimental music and the admonishing voice of a female announcer nicknamed Hanoi Hannah. By 1970, the mix included Steppenwolf’s “Draft Resister,” Bob Dylan’s “I Threw It All Away,” a Mandarin version of “The Internationale,” and sardonic patter that was the unconscious house style of propaganda stations throughout the twentieth century: “Hello, all you happy defenders of freedom out there in Viet Cong land. This is Second Front Radio prepared by the American Deserters Committee here in Stockholm, Sweden, and broadcast to all you schmucks and peons in Southeast Asia over Liberation Radio, South Vietnam. The National Liberation Front urges you to form local cease-fires with the local Viet Cong units. You form your own peace talks. Only you can end this war. Demand to be sent home immediately. Kidnap an airplane, go home anyhow!”
* * *
THE DESERTERS PUT on a special performance for Independence Day 1968. Its leading man was Chuck Onan, a marine from the Chicago projects—an eighteen-year-old boy with long curly hair and a short temper, who had arrived in Sweden in February and had become one of Michael Vale’s most loyal lieutenants. Its unwitting host was Ambassador William Womack Heath, newly returned from Washington and protected by a pair of armed security men.
Heath decided to coax some warmth back into Swedish-American relations with a Fourth of July garden party on the embassy lawn. Hundreds of guests, a mixture of U.S. tourists and diplomatic families, turned up. Hot dogs and bottles of Coca-Cola were handed out. A band played “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
But just as Heath was about to begin his speech, twenty deserters—among them Chuck Onan, Bill Jones, and Mark Shapiro—leapt over a rope barrier and sat cross-legged under the flagpole. George Carrano, standing on the sidelines, started up a chorus of “U.S. out of Vietnam!” A knot of outraged guests tore the wooden stakes from the grass and steamed into the cordoned area to confront the protestors. One hundred fifty Swedish police officers followed. Chuck Onan shinnied up the flagpole. A security guard dragged him down, got him in a headlock until he lost consciousness, and threw him into the back of a paddy wagon with six of his comrades. George Carrano was too slow and felt the hand of the law on his shoulder. The rest of the ADC contingent melted into the crowd.
As the police van screeched off, Gunnar Helén, the governor of the county of Kronoberg and heir to the leadership of the liberal Folkpartiet, stood on the lawn and gave a speech about how Swedes were too sensible to listen to the sloganeering of the New Left.
That night, his words acquired a measure of irony. A hundred-strong crowd from the ADC and the radical student groups stood outside the police station and chanted their demand for the release of Bill, Mark, Chuck, and their fellow prisoners. “And inside,” Mark Shapiro told me, “all the Swedish prisoners started banging their tin cups against the wall and shouting, ‘We don’t want the Americans in here!’” The duty officer, fed up with the noise and unable to locate the correct paperwork, unlocked the cell doors and propelled Bill, Mark, Chuck, and the others back out on the street, much to the delight of the demonstrators.
Mark Shapiro looked back on that day with pride. So much that on July 4, 2007, he went back to Stockholm, put on his best suit, and attempted to gate-crash the Independence Day garden party at the U.S. ambassador’s residence. “Sir, what are you here for?” asked the security guard. “I’m here to protest peacefully,” replied Mark. The old deserter enjoyed telling me the story. Half a century on, his radical credentials were still intact. “You could almost see the smoke coming out of his ears,” he said.
We began chatting about the people who had accompanied him to the cells on that afternoon in 1968. “Who are you talking to next?” he asked. I told him that I was about to fly to Eugene, Oregon, to see his old comrade Chuck Onan. The look on Mark’s face was pretty unambiguous. He thought this was a terrible idea. All the same, I got on the plane.
5 / PETUNIA
MARK SHAPIRO WAS not the only person to warn me off a meeting with Chuck Onan. Chuck, I was told, had a complicated relationship with the truth. But Michael Vale encouraged me to get in touch, curious to know what kind of impact he’d made on the life of his former follower. “I am not so sure,” Michael said, “whether it might not be likened to that of a wrecking ball.” He asked me to send Chuck a book on his behalf. The Birds—a novel by the Norwegian author Tarjei Vesaas. I read it before I mailed it. The protagonist is a naïve man named Matthew, who comes to an unfortunate end in an icy Scandinavian lake.
Chuck’s welcome, however, couldn’t have been warmer. I’d booked myself into a nearby motel, but he insisted that I stay in the spare room of his home, a bungalow beside a gravel pit on the industrial edge of Eugene, Oregon. Sitting in his kitchen, with his agreeably scruffy terrier, Ninja, asleep under the table, Chuck told me his story. He had, he said, once worked as a management consultant. A course in Ayurvedic medicine, however, had so convinced him of the health benefits of the cannabis plant that he took advantage of Oregon’s liberal drug laws and set up a business cultivating and refining medical marijuana. He sold cannabis oil capsules, cannabis watermelon drops, cannabis sour worms.
His commitment to the drug was an article of faith. Chuck, I learned, was the founding pastor of Canna Church Rocks, a group that assigned a sacramental role to the spliff. Marijuana, he asserted, brought spiritual as well as medical benefits. It allowed him access to a higher astral plane. Recently, while in a trance, he had seen a vision of his long-estranged brother, bathed in an aura that indicated his spirit had departed the earth. Tears filled his eyes as he described the experience. Then he pulled back his long steel-gray hair to reveal a scar: marijuana, he said, mixed with black pepper and pink Himalayan sea salt, had cured his stage-four melanoma. I became lost in his explanation of the cancer-killing properties of cannabinoids.
Despite this enthusiasm, Chuck’s business
seemed in trouble. His website pictured thriving greenery, but the propagation bays in his garden were empty; the fence used to screen the crop from the street was in a state of disrepair; the car parked outside his house was clearly going nowhere. The dry yield of an older crop, stored in airtight jars on a kitchen shelf, seemed to be his main source of income. Staying with him showed me something of the precarious nature of American life. When we left the house, either to go for burgers at a nearby strip mall or to walk Ninja by the river, we passed a small encampment of homeless men. Faces deformed by poverty and alcohol. It was a picture out of Steinbeck. They sat in folding chairs beneath the trees, waiting for America to be somewhere else. And each time we passed, Chuck gave them a respectful nod.
The 2016 U.S. election was only a few months away. Chuck was voting for Donald Trump. Chuck wanted that wall on the Mexican border, and he scorned those who said it couldn’t be built. Chuck believed that a Muslim invasion of America was taking place and that rape was the enemy’s weapon of choice. He’d been thrown off Facebook for saying so, but that only increased his sense of being in the right. Feminism, too, was a dangerous and unjust force. Chuck played me videos of his favorite alt-right commentators explaining why. I told him I couldn’t concur. But it was easy to see why he was angry. What had America ever done for him?
* * *
CHUCK ONAN HAD a specific reason for giving me an interview. He wanted to defend the reputation of Michael Vale. Before my arrival, they had spoken together on the phone. It was their first contact since the early seventies. “In Vietnam,” he said, “Michael should be a hero.” We discussed the charges against his old mentor. The CIA rumors. The accusations of psychological manipulation. I described Jim McGourty’s account of one-to-one ego-stripping. Chuck dismissed it. I showed him my copy of Lucinda Franks’s book. Chuck’s brow furrowed as he read out those rough quotes about Rasputin and butchery. “It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered. “Michael Vale was a real revolutionary. ‘Ideas are the most important thing,’ he’d say. ‘The revolution will take care of itself.’ He read a lot. He worked a lot. He wasn’t our buddy. We didn’t drink together. But he helped us. To me he seemed selfless. He wanted to change the world. We were prepared for the shit to hit the fan, and when it did, we were going to go back to America like Lenin went back to Moscow.”
Chuck reminisced about their first meeting in the office of the lawyer Hans Göran Franck. It was February 1968, a couple of weeks after the arrival of Bill Jones, three months before the landfall of Mark Shapiro and his comrades.
“We’ll take care of this boy,” said Michael.
“I’m not a boy,” replied Chuck, gruffly. “I’m a man.”
But he was eighteen years old, and happy to be taken care of. Paternal figures were in short supply in Chuck’s life. His father, Thomas Onan, loved war more than he loved his family—loved it so much that after spending the early 1940s scudding over the Pacific in a patrol torpedo boat, he enlisted in the air force, which is why Chuck was born on an air base in Wiesbaden, Germany, in August 1949. The family did not remain intact. When a substantial sum of money went missing from the base, Technical Sergeant Thomas Onan’s gambling habit was found to be the cause. In February 1954, he received a dishonorable discharge from the air force.
He also discharged himself from his marriage. Rosemary Onan moved her children to Chicago, where the family rented an apartment in a high-rise block from which many of the internal walls had been removed in order to allow gang members swift passage from apartment to apartment. They were the only white residents, which made Mrs. Onan’s pale little boy an object of intense curiosity: the other kids were always asking him to hold his breath and make his face go red.
Life was tough. After school Chuck shined shoes and gave the money to his mother, who used it to buy the ingredients to bake her own bread. Enlisting in the U.S. Marines was a ticket out of deprivation. But it took him to a place that was worse.
During my visit to Oregon, I sat down with Chuck to watch a 2005 Swedish television documentary that followed Terry Whitmore on a return visit to the battlefields of Vietnam. Chuck translated effortlessly and made the odd affectionately disparaging remark about his old comrade’s clumsy command of Swedish. Whitmore, looking frail and bug-eyed from years of drinking, spoke of being ordered to go into a village and kill everyone there—men, women, children. The film showed him meeting survivors from that day, people who claimed to have seen the bodies piling up.
Chuck wept as he watched. He was reminded, he said, of the brutalities of his own military training, for which he and his fellow marines had run through a mocked-up Vietnamese village, throwing grenades into hidey-holes. Those exercises felt like an extension of his Chicago childhood. “I could beat the shit out of the other boys,” he said. “The most aggressive is always the winner. People don’t do that naturally. But a childhood like mine trained me that way. Thousands of others, too. Boys who believed all that stuff about the evils of Communism and weren’t afraid to shoot.”
Chuck feared he had become one of those boys. He was eloquent about this moment, and had posted a short account of it online, describing how, when he deserted from his base in February 1968, he had abandoned most of his possessions but felt compelled to bring his standard-issue M14 rifle. He recalled breaking the gun down, wrapping the pieces in duct tape, and taking them as hand luggage on board Flight 32 from JFK to Sweden. “I am not indoctrinated,” he muttered, as he placed it under his seat. “I am not wed to my weapon.” As we talked, he supplied an unexpected parallel scene: when Vietnam came around, said Chuck, Thomas Onan, too old to serve, went there all the same, opening a bar in Saigon where he supplied younger men with beer, cigarettes, and prostitutes.
After boot camp and the Chicago projects, Stockholm seemed like paradise to Chuck. He spoke of it as a sunlit world from which he had been banished. (He could not acquire a new passport, he said, until he had paid off his debts.) Back in 1968, he flourished in the language classes and lucked out in the difficult business of finding accommodation, sharing a spacious apartment with an Italian American deserter named John Picciano, which, by coincidence, had just been vacated by Ambassador Heath. (They also inherited his dog.) It sounded unlikely, but Chuck opened up Google Maps and found the building with ease.
Chuck’s relationship with the American Deserters Committee was conducted on his own terms. Sometimes he joined in, sometimes not. His background made him useful to the group. Mike Vale and Bill Jones saw the ADC as a cell of proletarian deserter revolutionaries but found it hard to live up to the image. The core members were impeccably middle class. George Carrano was the son of an army colonel; Bill Jones’s family were a mixture of lawyers and nuns; John Ashley’s mother collected antiques and owned a Siamese cat named Sylvia. Chuck was authentically working class. Which is why he became the star of the ADC’s summer tour of Europe.
* * *
THE WORLD FESTIVAL of Youth and Students was a ten-day jamboree for socialist college boys and girls from all over the globe. In previous years, it had been held in Helsinki, Vienna, and Moscow, where most of the delegates had smiled for the camera and cheered in all the right places. Sofia was the host city for 1968, and in the year of the barricades the Bulgarian authorities had a small taste of student revolution. They confiscated Little Red Books. They took away placards bearing the image of Alexander Dubček, the reformist leader of Czechoslovakia. They kept a wary eye on the German student leader Karl Dietrich Wolff as he led an unofficial demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy. (Once he started disrupting the carefully choreographed political debates, they dragged him from the stage and smashed his glasses.)
The Swedish Aliens Commission warned the deserters against traveling to Bulgaria. They were free to leave the country, but they might not necessarily be granted permission to return—news that was reported with pleasure by the American press. Mark Shapiro was in a particularly vulnerable position. Most of the ADC delegates held valid American passports. Mar
k had only the temporary permit that Sweden granted to recent immigrants. But he began the journey all the same, taking the ferry to Helsinki, where George Carrano, the chief fixer of the ADC, proposed a somewhat risky solution.
Carrano advised Mark to go to the U.S. Embassy and apply for a fresh passport like a tourist in a spot of bother. The two men went together and soon found themselves in the middle of a diplomatic farce. An embassy official gave them some forms to complete and told them to wait while he fetched a colleague. Suspecting that they were about to be put in handcuffs, Mark yanked open the office window and jumped out. George followed a moment later. Both men threw themselves over a scrub hedge and scrambled into a taxi. “Floor it, driver!” yelled Carrano, and the car screeched off.
A few days later the ADC representatives arrived in Sofia. A Soviet production company, the Central Documentary Film Studios, committed the evidence to celluloid. A Time to Live opens with images of rosy-cheeked Bulgarian children hunkered down on the pavement, chalking a suspiciously accomplished picture of a Vietnamese mother breast-feeding her baby. We then cut to an immense montage of the world’s anti-imperialist youth, marching through the streets of Sofia and looking optimistically into a headwind. (All except the U.S. delegation, who look like they’ve come for a potluck picnic in Haight-Ashbury.) Fighters from Hanoi parade with bouquets of red roses to chants of “Viet-nam! Viet-nam!” Crowds make way for a fleet of miniature tractors donated to North Vietnam from the citizens of the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv. Delegates from Mozambique and Algeria parade in national costume. After the pageant, the film takes us to a meeting hall draped with a red banner declaring “Vietnam must win” in six languages. Here, Kendra Alexander, a leader of the American Communist Party, is speaking passionately about the war. Some in the audience are weeping. The camera moves along the front row and finds some familiar faces: Mark Shapiro, dressed in a neat jacket and striped tie, his face a mask of concern; Chuck Onan, his eyes unreadable behind shades; beside him, his flatmate John Picciano.
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