The jury took eighty-six minutes to decide that Arnett was responsible for his own actions. As the judge mulled over the punishment, the defense presented medical evidence it hoped might soften the blow. A psychiatrist had diagnosed Arnett as a borderline schizophrenic with an “abnormal tendency to fantasy” and had learned of other mitigating circumstances in the course of a long interview with the deserter. Arnett’s parents had both been alcoholics. At the age of eight, he had witnessed the violent death of his twin brother. The judge was not much moved. The sentence was four years’ hard labor. Perhaps the judge sensed that Arnett’s account of himself was as reliable as his stories of ear necklaces and disemboweled infants. I looked long and hard through the records to find evidence that Edwin Arnett had a twin brother who was killed in an accident. There was nothing.
On the steps of the court, Arnett urged the public to write to the president about his case—not least because there were others in Sweden whose future depended on the outcome of his trial. In the Nixon archive, only one letter is preserved. It was signed by a group of twenty-five soldiers on active duty in Vietnam, and it offers a stinging criticism of his case. “We are all in agreement about the degree of punishment meted out to Specialist Arnett. We feel that the court was lenient on Specialist Arnett and he should be grateful that his punishment was not more severe.”
They also had a message to communicate to the other Stockholm deserters. “It is our contention; as citizens of the United States and as Servicemen in Vietnam; that our country does not need or desire this type [of] individual. We should not solicit the return of those persons who have no desire to conduct themselves by the standards of a True American. If these deserters feel that Sweden is so much more advantageous to their standard of living … we feel it to our Country’s benefit that they remain where they have chosen to live.”
Nobody at the offices of the American Deserters Committee seems to have written a letter to the White House. They had their own problems to consider. In the time between Arnett’s arrest and his court-martial, the ADC had torn itself apart.
7 / THE SPLIT
SO FAR, THERE have been very few women in this story. With the exception of Patton Hunter of the Army Times and the one-eyed Suntory whisky drinker who allowed Joe Kmetz to hide for sixteen months in her bedroom, they have remained indistinct figures. It reflects the nature of desertion: eleven thousand women served in Vietnam, and all seem to have stuck to their posts as air traffic controllers, clerks, doctors, nurses, and intelligence officers. But it also reflects the nature of the deserters themselves. They were not big readers of Simone de Beauvoir. Many arrived in Sweden believing it to be a country of depressive men and permissive women—and their unexpected celebrity status allowed even unprepossessing characters like Edwin Arnett to put that myth to the test. It took time for some men to treat exile as something more than a period of shore leave. “I’m a big, bad marine,” wrote Terry Whitmore in his memoirs. “Always ready to help a lady in distress, especially if I think I can get a piece of ass out of the deal.”
Whitmore had a wife and child at home in Mississippi. Some deserters had girlfriends back in the States, who became the source of mournful quotes in American local newspapers. Other men came to Sweden accompanied by young families. Many more found partners in Sweden. Chuck Onan married Margarjan Gambell, a fearless teenager active in anti-war politics.
Margareta Hedman was still at school when she met her first American exile. “I was a political person and participated in several illegal operations,” she told me. “The deserters were brothers-in-arms.” She joined the Maoists at fifteen. By sixteen she was helping some of the first arrivals, like Ray Jones III, to hide from the Swedish police. At seventeen she met Bill Jones in Michael Vale’s filthy apartment. At eighteen she married him. “Your questions,” she told me, “have brought up a lot of thoughts and memories—mostly bad ones.”
The same was true, I think, for a woman whose deserter spouse is the person with whom this story began: Michele Lloyd, whose old married name must remain a secret, not because she wished it that way, but because her former husband wanted to appear in these pages as Jim McGourty, the man he became in order to make a clandestine return to the States. Michele is a doctor, and she’s the kind you’d trust. I met her at a metro stop in a suburb of Washington, DC, for a day that included meze at a café-cum-political bookstore, souvenir shopping for my children, red beer and Maryland oysters in a neighborhood bar. I liked her instantly: warm, intelligent, a responsible adult, impressively frank about the strange and bitter turns of life with the deserters.
For most men, the decision to go into exile was a lonely one. They made their choice, and their loved ones read about it in the newspapers. Not in Jim McGourty’s case. His desertion was a family affair, and its impulse originated with Michele’s father, a radar specialist who, as a navigator in the Marine Corps, had flown dozens of bombing missions over Korea. When the Vietnam War began he wrote a letter to his daughter in Anaheim, California, telling her that he could not participate in a repeat of the same carnage. Michele had not even realized that he’d had a role in the conflict. When one of her schoolteachers told the class, “We have somebody here whose father is in Vietnam,” she was shocked to discover he was talking about her. “No,” she said, “my dad is off the coast of the Philippines on an aircraft carrier.” It had not occurred to her to ask where the aircraft were flying, and what each plane carried beneath its fuselage.
Warrant Officer Lloyd was not forced to declare his position: the death of his mother allowed him to take a hardship discharge from the marines. But by the time Michele left home to study bacteriology at UCLA, her father’s dilemma had spread to her peers. UCLA was not a radical institution. Michele was faintly disgusted that the most dramatic protest of her college days took place when students blocked the freeway with burning cars because the football team had failed to reach the Rose Bowl. But she was accustomed to cutting against the grain: she was the only pupil in her high school to go to college; the only one to find a sympathetic history teacher pressing a copy of John Kenneth Galbraith’s American Capitalism into her hands. She was better prepared than her boyfriend for the coming fight.
Jim McGourty, as we must call him, was also born a Californian, but this was all that fitted him for radicalism. His parents were Nebraska Republicans who opposed the Vietnam War because they thought isolation a splendid state and Asian politics an unworthy cause for sacrifice. “To them,” Jim told me, “America was a fortress.”
At first, he was content to remain within its walls. He attended a Catholic seminary, then studied pharmacology at Oregon State University. When the math became too hard, he transferred to UCLA, where he met Michele. They were married in October 1966, a year before Jim was due to finish his degree. When his studies were over he enlisted in the marines, hoping to exercise some control over his posting. The power of nepotism was also invoked: Michele’s father had a friend in the Pentagon whose influence, they hoped, might keep Jim away from the fighting. Jim signed his papers in July 1967 and became an artillery clerk at Camp Pendleton, processing orders that dispatched men from training to the front line. The following summer, his in-tray was hit by an order that bore his own name. He was bound for Vietnam.
“He would have been a forward observer,” said Michele. “He would have been killed. I knew enough to know that.” So she researched how to desert and read about an activist group called RESIST, cofounded in September 1967 by the MIT linguist Noam Chomsky, upon the assertion that “every free man has a legal right and moral duty to exert every effort to end this war, to avoid collusion with it, and to encourage others to do the same.”
Michele sent her husband to see the local RESIST representative, who supplied him with contact details for Hans Göran Franck, the ADC’s helpful lawyer. Jim sold his car to his brother and spent the money on air tickets, flying in August 1968 from Canada to Copenhagen and then taking the ferry across to Malmö. “It was an open sec
ret,” said Michele. So open that before she followed her husband to Sweden, a group of marines came to implore her to use her influence to bring him back. There would, they said, be no penalty. Jim would even be free to change his military occupational specialty to something less dangerous. Michele knew the consequences of refusal. “Once you turn down an offer like that,” she reflected, “the punishment is much worse.”
Jim and Michele haven’t seen each other for years. They don’t write, they don’t talk. Their memories of exile run along parallel lines. Michele recalled poverty, isolation, and the charmless sex-segregated accommodation into which she and Jim were placed. (“It was just like being in camps,” she said. “You didn’t feel like you were being integrated into society.”) Jim, on the other hand, spoke wistfully about deserters landing in Stockholm like fallen leaves. Michele enthused about the attractions of the American Deserters Committee. “It was a group of people who were in the same circumstances. I really was sustained by an idea that we were part of something bigger and making a difference.” She became its bookkeeper and administrator. Jim, however, insisted that he had been suspicious of deserter politics from the start, and even professed to have felt unease about Hans Göran Franck’s association with Amnesty International, because some of its members were Communists.
It didn’t stop him joining in. Almost as soon as they walked through the door of the ADC offices, he and Michele became converts to the Michael Vale project. “He asked me what I was planning to do,” recalled Michele, “so I told him that I wanted to finish college.” Michael’s reply was quick and brutal. “Well,” he said, “you could always be our contact inside the bourgeoisie.” The criticism hurt. Michele reprimanded herself for not being a sufficiently serious revolutionary, and the idea was forgotten.
Michael’s plans for Michele’s husband were more unusual. “The first thing I heard from him,” said Jim, “was that they were doing a movie, and I had gotten there just in time. So I could be in that.” And that was how the American Deserters Committee members became film stars.
* * *
THE STOCKHOLM DESERTERS made a surprisingly large number of screen appearances, though some are harder to detect than others. When audiences watched Bo Widerberg’s Joe Hill, a biopic of the Swedish American trade union activist who founded the Industrial Workers of the World, the credits did not tell them that Hill’s comrades were played by a quorum of the ADC. And yet there is Walter Marshall, the reform school runaway, playing out scenes of personal and political humiliation that went to the heart of his own experiences: beaten up and thrown into the back of a police van, sluiced with human waste in a police cell, driven to a gibbet in the woods where he and his fellow prisoners are forced to kiss the American flag.
Terry Whitmore sustained something close to a career in cinema. His first paid job in Sweden was as an actor in The Peace Game, a dystopian science fiction picture by the radical British director Peter Watkins. Watkins was a species of exile himself, propelled from England by two bad experiences: the poor reception of Privilege, his feature about a pop star in the pay of a British totalitarian state, and the suppression of The War Game, a newsreel-like account of a nuclear attack on southeast England, unscreened by the BBC under secret pressure from Downing Street.
In the more sympathetic cultural climate of Sweden, Watkins took Whitmore and his cast to a disused brick factory outside Stockholm to film a story set in a future where war has been superseded by a TV game show on which small teams of competitors fight to the death. Whitmore, in U.S. Army fatigues, ran through the waterlogged corridors pursued by a Chinese People’s Liberation Army major.
Soon after, he saw his name in the title of Terry Whitmore, for Example, a documentary shot by the Canadian filmmaker Bill Brodie, and in 1975 Peter Watkins put the deserter back in uniform for The Trap, a TV drama set in a Swedish nuclear waste dump on the last night of the twentieth century. Whitmore also got to play a version of himself; in Georgia, Georgia, a film scripted by Maya Angelou, he appears as the most talkative member of a group of African American deserters encountered by the white hero, Michael Winters, in a Stockholm bar. “We might get political asylum instead of this humanitarian bullshit we got,” says Whitmore’s character. But Winters (played by Dirk Benedict, future leading man of Battlestar Galactica) will not help.
* * *
BY 1972, THAT argument had been lost. But in the summer of 1968 it was a live issue, and one of the reasons why the ADC was so squarely in the public gaze. Journalists buzzed around its offices hungry for interviews. Look magazine made it the focus of a lavish illustrated article, which featured a full-page portrait of four members in moody rock-star formation on a Stockholm street corner. (In the photograph, Chuck Onan scowls; Bill Jones clutches a fat book about the Cuban revolution.)
The Italian film producer Carlo Ponti came talent scouting among the exiles and commissioned Gregory Vitarelle, a twenty-two-year-old army private from Texas, to develop a script called “The Denial.” (Vitarelle drowned in a boating accident before his work was done: his father back in Texas, ashamed to acknowledge the desertion, told friends his son had been working undercover for the CIA.) The American intellectual Susan Sontag, then at the height of her influence, landed in Stockholm intending to make a film about a Vietnam deserter. She was thwarted. Her script, “Duet for Cannibals,” had to be rewritten, as its production company had already signed a distribution deal for a different film on a similar subject titled Deserter USA—with a cast plucked from the ranks of the Stockholm exiles.
“The plot is about agents who try to infiltrate the ADC and break it up,” Bill Jones told a reporter from United Press International. “But it is not a thriller.” He was right. Deserter USA is an unclassifiable oddity: an agitprop picture with an espionage angle, in which the Stockholm deserters star as the Stockholm deserters, but not necessarily as themselves. There was a glorious precedent: a decade after the Russian Revolution, Sergei Eisenstein re-created the storming of the Winter Palace with a cast of thousands and successfully displaced our sense of a much less dramatic historical event. Using loans from their parents and a cast of nonprofessional actors, the two directors of Deserter USA—Lars Lambert, a new graduate of the Swedish Film Institute, and Olle Sjögren, a student researching a thesis on the French film journal Cahiers du Cinéma—made a modest attempt to do the same for the story of the American Deserters Committee, creating a heroic account of its struggles against the American war machine, the CIA, and affluent Swedish liberals.
The film begins with the image that defined the deserter story for most of 1968: four young Americans getting off a flight from Moscow. But they are not Craig, John, Mike, and Rick. The Intrepid Four had spurned the ADC. John Barilla and Craig Anderson had become street buskers. Rick Bailey was living in Åke Sandin’s spare room, where he painted the windows black and tended a pet boa constrictor named Olsson. The protagonists of Deserter USA are composite characters brought to life by four of Michael Vale’s protégés.
John Ashley, the shock-haired speed-freak son of a Pentagon official, plays a GI named Alan Miller, who seems driven by Ashley’s hedonistic impulses, but has also inherited war wounds and a Purple Heart from the backstory of Ashley’s friend Terry Whitmore. Mark Shapiro’s alter ego, Ben Rosen, shares a thoughtful manner and a Minnesota birthplace with his creator, but his ill-fated trip back to the States is a detail borrowed from the life of Ray Jones III. The leader of the ADC, however, has undergone the most dramatic transformation. Bill Jones plays John Lane, whose backstory is much more dramatic than that of a medical technician with a military career that took him no farther east than Frankfurt. “I was an interpreter working with army intelligence in the Delta,” his character reports. “I came in close contact with the Vietnamese people and I realized what they were fighting for and what the National Liberation Front stood for.”
Like the heroes of most propaganda films, John Lane talks in complete sentences and is always right about everything. He lectu
res middle-class Swedes on American imperialism, rattling off statistics about U.S. interests in the Venezuelan oil industry. He senses the treachery of a deserter named Fabian, deducing, correctly, that he is an intelligence plant. (One scene puts Bill on a sun lounger, reading David Wise’s 1964 exposé on the CIA, The Invisible Government.)
Most perceptively, John holds his ground against a patrician figure called Lundberg, who lavishes hospitality upon the deserters, warns them against contacting the student Maoists, and then plots against them when they refuse to comply. Lundberg is an unsubtle caricature of the deputy chair of the Swedish Committee for Vietnam. When Bertil Svahnström saw the film, it killed the last of his goodwill toward the ADC. He procured a 16 mm print and kept it in his office like a piece of evidence.
“I didn’t really have enough experience to make a movie,” said Olle Sjögren, when I met him on a trip to London. “If you’re a director you have to be strong, you have to be clear. And since we weren’t paying anyone we couldn’t expect them to be Marlon Brando.” Despite these shortcomings, the deserters made a strong impression on him. John Ashley, he remembered, was a skittish figure bubbling with amphetamine enthusiasm. Bill Jones, he recalls, was strangely affected by working on scenes with the visiting American academic who had agreed to play the part of John Lane’s father. The deserters’ conversation, he remembered, was often a fevered discussion of who might be the resident CIA plant in the American Deserters Committee. A discussion led by Michael Vale.
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