by Tim White
“Then don’t—don’t go back.” I cried. I got on my knees. “Ulee, will you marry me? I promise to protect you as long as I live.”
He laughed. “Protect me from what?”
“From yourself—you are your worst enemy,” I said as I smiled.
That afternoon we got a marriage license, and a Hawaiian pastor wedded us on the beach. Ulee’s dad was his best man, and his mom was my maid of honor.
Right after the wedding, Ulee’s folks flew back to the Tri-Cities. They explained that we didn’t need a chaperone anymore. Our wedding pictures are one of the precious treasures that I have. We both look so young. Ulee could never have been more handsome. And I did not look so bad myself. And that night, when we returned to our room, we both had tears as he reached out for me. I grabbed his hand and felt where his ring finger had been cut off. I ran my hand down the knife scar on his cheek that he received fighting Raul for my freedom. Ulee was so handsome. We said nothing. I took off his shirt; he was scarred from the torture. I kissed each scar as I cried. We loved each other more than time or eternity. It felt so right to sleep with my husband that night; even though memories of abuse as a child ran through my mind, our Godly love and his gentle touch brought healing to me. The next three weeks were heaven on earth. We were together for only three weeks when he received a call to report to the airport for transport back to Vietnam.
I told him that he had to quit. He said he couldn’t leave those orphans there; he needed to see this thing through and get them out, at least. We fought, and I even slapped him.
“I will always love you more than life itself. But I have to go back to war to see this thing through and at least try to bring some of these kids home. I know we are going to lose this war, and I know I am going to die. But I could never live with myself unless I do what I think is right. And it is wrong for me to survive and live out my life in bliss when so many are suffering.”
Ulee looked so rugged and strong of body and heart. I told him he was suffering survivor’s guilt and asked him how he could expect me to wait for such a fatal outcome.
“You are right. I love you and I need to set you free.” He left and went to the courthouse to get our marriage annulled. As he did this, I did not mention that marrying him was my one shot at becoming a US citizen. I would not marry anyone else to become a citizen. I cried all the way home.
Later that month I found out that I was pregnant with our child. I did not write him. In our church, I was treated with grace as an unmarried mother. My family treated me with respect also, and both Ulee’s family and mine told me they would help with the child. In February, 1972, I gave birth to a little brown-skinned boy that I named Telemachus Cruz Morales Sundown. He was a legal citizen of the United States.
Chapter Eight
Trapped with Calypso
AT THE LODGE the days were full of fishing, hiking, canoeing, reading, and long talks; most of them were about the series of stories that I was telling. Sometimes we would take a break from these oral history lessons about our family, allowing everyone time to absorb these stories and discuss them. These stories were not new, as I have said. But the way I tell them and what I emphasized sometimes changed. I have found that if you change the way you tell a story, you can create new meaning. After a few days of rest, I continued, speaking about my beloved.
Ulee was attached to the 3rd Division South Vietnamese Marines, based in Quang Ngai. The division was initially raised in October, 1971, in Quảng Trị. They collapsed in the 1972 Easter Offensive and were reconstituted and destroyed at Da Nang in 1975. This was not something that Ulee wanted to talk about because he was now serving in black ops. Black, or covert, operations take place in any war. It is heroism with secrecy—no more medals, no recognition, only plausible deniability. He would become a ghost because of his special skills. For Ulee, the benefit was that he was in range to look after the Buddhist orphanage that he had grown to love. He wrote a rare letter to me saying that he did not understand himself. He spoke about my beauty. He would never get it out of his mind how I looked on the beach in Hawaii: my brown skin, long hair, young figure—and he always talked about my eyes. He told his brother Patty in a phone call that he did love me with all of his heart, but he could not leave this war at this time. He honestly believed that if he did not fight the NVA that thousands of tribal people would be killed, massacred, and tortured. He was dumb enough at eighteen to believe that he could make a difference. I felt guilty for manipulating him into marrying me in Hawaii. Even though I would not trade that time or our child, Telemachus, for anything. At the same time, Ulee was being emotionally manipulated by his superior officers to join the black ops. He worked with Rangers, Green Beret, Marine Recon, and Navy Seals. He always played the role of sniper or hunter—a menacing threat as a diversion to instill fear in the hearts of the enemy.
After one mission, when it seemed like the whole nation was being silently overrun by Viet Cong, Ulee ran into the moral dilemma. He came upon a familiar village close to the orphanage. He could hear the terrible sounds of women and children crying. He took a position from where he could hit almost any target in the village. There was a US platoon of “advisors.” They had found VC in the village and were burning it. Many of the men from the village lay dead, where a brief battle had taken place. The lieutenant colonel leading this group had just executed an old man; at the same time, a group of American and ARVN were abusing a young woman. Ulee spotted through the scope that the woman was Ahn, his friend from the orphanage.
Ulee walked in and yelled the name of the lieutenant colonel that he knew. “Wright, what are you doing?”
All the men looked like they had swallowed a frog. They knew what they were doing was wrong.
The lieutenant colonel said, “Savage, you have no room to talk or judge. This is a VC village. We found seven men with hidden AK-47s.”
While Lieutenant Colonel Wright spoke defensively to Ulee, it was obvious that he was afraid of this native known as The Savage. Five American servicemen were abusing Ahn and they did not stop. The other men watched.
Ulee yelled, “You know before God this is wrong.”
The lieutenant colonel said, “This is war and Aristotle said there is no morality in war because the Government becomes the parent–we are not responsible for this act of war.”
“You know this is wrong. Regardless of your position, Immanuel Kant said that there are Categorical Imperatives that are binding upon all reasonable men. There is justice that transcends the fog of war and you are about to meet that justice.”
Colonel Wright said, “I don’t know Immanuel Kant. Is he some Mexican folk singer?”
The lieutenant colonel pulled out his 45 and pulled back the hammer as he stuck the barrel up against Ulee’s forehead. The tall and muscular lieutenant colonel was a redneck in his forties. He snarled. “This is not the way you want to die.” Ulee dropped his Remington 700 and raised his hands.
Wright smiled because he felt in control. “Don’t make me do this; this stuff happens in every war. You don’t have to be part of abusing this girl, you just have to watch.”
Ulee spoke quietly as he had to Raul. “You are not going to get a warning—no bravado. But I can’t stand for a bully.”
“What? One kid who thinks he is an Indian is telling us we are not going to get a warning?”
The whole platoon began to laugh at Ulee. Then they stopped laughing because it began to dawn on them that he was serious. There was a long pause—everyone knew someone was going to die. Ulee turned his head just as Wright fired, taking the tip of Ulee’s ear off. With a smooth, lighting-fast draw, Ulee pulled his 44 magnum from his vest holster, cocked back the hammer, and shot Lieutenant Colonel Wright between the eyes, practically blowing off the back of his head.
The four men who were abusing Ahn reached for their weapons. Ulee shot each one in the head. It all took place in the blink of an eye.
A fifth man abusing Ahn started to cry as he stopped. “I’m sorry—you are right;
I know this is wrong. I was just going along with the others.”
His platoon watched with frozen guilt. Ulee executed him and his weapon was empty now.
Ulee turned and ordered the platoon. “Now get out of here and tell your commanding officer the truth—exactly what happened. You need to repent and maybe God will forgive you. But be afraid—be very terrified—because I doubt if I can ever forgive you.”
Ulee picked up a poncho and put it over the naked body of Ahn. She was broken and looked like—well something that no man wants to ever have in his mind. Ulee picked her up and carried her out of the camp, all the way to the orphanage, and gave her to Dawa.
“I am sorry—this doesn’t not represent the United States; this represents the evil inside men.”
In March, 1972, Ahn gave birth to a baby girl. She looked Vietnamese but she had blue eyes. She named her baby, Nhung, which means energetic and extremely likeable, after the kind hero who had saved her life. Ulee would visit this little girl every time he came to the orphanage, he told her that God had a plan for this little girl even though a terrible hurt had brought her into the world. Ulee treated the baby like a daughter even though he never treated Ahn as a wife—more as a sister.
All US Marines and troops were pulled out of Vietnam. Ulee, like others in the black ops, continued doing missions in Laos, Cambodia, even North Vietnam looking for MIA prisoners. Like others in black operations he assisted the South Vietnamese in conflict when they were over their heads. It was an advisory role, but for Ulee his advice was keep your head down while I go hunting. Ulee kept visiting and helping out the orphanage and continued dialogue with Dawa. The baby was told by her mother that Ulee was her daddy. Ulee wasn’t comfortable with that, but he also didn’t want to explain the real story to a two-year-old. His brother wrote to him and told him about Penelope and his son Telemachus, but being in black ops he never received correspondence from home. He and his superiors thought of him as a man who was yet to die. He did not plan on coming back from Vietnam.
Captain McCleary was becoming a lifetime friend. Ulee heard the captain was on his way to becoming an admiral. Ulee had been awarded the Navy Cross for saving the captain, and the captain was given the Congressional Medal of Honor for being one of the few to ever escape. Ulee’s Navy Cross was awarded in secret, just as everything in Ulee’s life in the black ops was a secret. Ulee and Captain McCleary met and Ulee told the soon to be admiral McCleary about his adopted daughter named after Nhung. A friendship had formed between the two that could never be separated.
Very few Americans escaped prison during the Vietnam. One of the most famous escapes happened on December 31, 1968. James N. Rowe, a Special Forces second lieutenant, was captured five years earlier. He overpowered a guard after five years of captivity and was picked up by a US helicopter. No other US military escaped successfully who were being held in North Vietnam, only Bud Day, who was recaptured in sight of a South Vietnamese base. There were thirty-three successful escapes of Viet Cong prisoner of war camps in South Vietnam. Of those escapes, thirty took place within the first year and only three were successful after one year.
The Yom Kippur War, also known as the 1973 Arab–Israeli War, was a war fought by the coalition of Arab states led by Egypt and Syria against Israel from October 6 to 25, 1973. The war began when the Arab coalition launched a joint surprise attack on Israeli positions in the Israeli-occupied territories on Yom Kippur, the holiest day in Judaism, which also occurred that year during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Egyptian and Syrian forces crossed ceasefire lines to enter the Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights respectively, which had been captured by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union initiated massive resupply efforts to their respective allies during the war, and this led to a near confrontation between the two nuclear superpowers. The war began with a massive and successful Egyptian crossing of the Suez Canal. After crossing the cease-fire lines, Egyptian forces advanced virtually unopposed into the Sinai Peninsula.
Ulee had not made a promise to Luau to fight for Israel. This conservative Christian and their Jewish friend somehow knew that someday Israel would need Ulee’s skills. Ulee never promised, but when the war broke out, he asked his commanding officers about it and Israel. It was a reasonable black ops assignment. So Ulee left for Tel Aviv officially as a private contractor or soldier of fortune. He was offered fifty thousand dollars—a fortune to him in 1973—to go and use his skills to carry out ambushes, as he had since he was fifteen years old. He was also given a battlefield commission and promoted to Marine captain. This would make him a far better consultant to the Israeli army.
For seventeen days, he fought to defend a kibbutz full of Marxist Jews from Muslim Egyptians who allied with the Soviet Union. It was almost like reliving the battle for the Montagnard village, only this time he could not get the kids out. He organized the defense of the walled kibbutz. The Israelis could fight just like the brave Viet Cong. Men, women, old, and young all took up arms. Even the children helped in the fight. Ulee disappeared into the night and again spent half his time ambushing the Egyptian army. The Egyptians in the desert of Sinai learned to fear the night just as the Viet Cong had when Ulee hunted. And during the day, his Remington 700 knew how to find his targets. There was so much killing that Ulee wondered if this was the battle of Armageddon described in the Bible.
The mayor of the little kibbutz, Abraham Schwarz, had seven children. His wife’s name was Miriam, and they treated Ulee like a son. They were Hasidic Jews and very pious. Ulee did not understand all their mysticism, but he improved in his Hebrew even though the Schwartz family all spoke broken English. He admired the Jewish people and saw their ability to celebrate even in the face of difficulty as something that primitive people in Vietnam and Natives in the US and Central America had come to appreciate and to know their families and traditions.
It was a war of immigration again. The Jews had immigrated to Palestine after the Holocaust trying to gain safety and a homeland. There were moderate Muslims fighting on their side and radicals who had been deprived of their land fighting against them. In Vietnam, it was a battle between moving people groups. The Japanese, the French, and the Americans were trying to either colonize or defend the South Vietnamese democracy in the face of Communist aggression.
There was one widow named Bathsheba who would fight like a man but was one of the most beautiful women Ulee had ever seen. She was obviously infatuated with Ulee, as he proved his skills in saving the kibbutz from the enemy attacks. Ulee was drawn to Bathsheba, but he prayed to resist temptation, and the devout Hasidic Jewish girl did the same thing. After one battle, she put a bandage on a knife wound on his chest. She saw the many scars from his torture and she spoke in Hebrew about how he was a young man to have seen so much war.
(You are a young man to have seen so much war and been tortured like this) Ulee answered her kindly but honestly. “You are a beautiful girl, very brave, and I respect you. I am sorry that your husband died in this terrible war. Yes, I am young and have seen a lot of war. But I have given my heart to the love of my life in my hometown. I pray that God has a wonderful husband and family for you in the future. But for today we are just fellow soldiers fighting for peace.”
While Ulee’s help was embraced by the community, there was a lot of work to do to survive this short, bloody war. He taught members of this Hasidic community how to shoot. Some of the older people showed him their concentration camp tattoos. He heard stories that were nightmares, but then he also had nothing against Islam that the Egyptians were following. They all believed in one God. Ulee respected the devout Muslims who abstained from many vices. It was all very confusing for a young man trying to make sense of senseless war.
Ulee had no idea how many men he killed in this war. The Egyptian tanks were destroyed by the Israeli air force. Even though the kibbutz was fighting against great odds, Ulee would not let them fail. He had tasted massacre before in Vietnam and would not stan
d for it again.
The fighting was fierce—night and day. Both sides were resupplied with artillery and tanks. It was its own kind of hell. One moment after the kibbutz he was protecting was shelled, he saw half the village die. He watched beautiful and heroic Bathsheba blown apart by a mortar round while trying to save a child. When the walls were breached, it was bloody hand-to-hand combat. Ulee took out his bone-handled knife after his weapons were empty. It was horrible killing these honorable people. After the enemy retreated, he stood there covered in blood—his shirt torn off and he just yelled, “God, where are you in a war?” He was a broken man. Suddenly it was just over. The war ended after two weeks of hell for Ulee, but even worse for his enemy. On October 22, a United Nations-brokered ceasefire quickly unraveled, with each side blaming the other for the breach. A second ceasefire was imposed cooperatively on October 25 to end the war.
Ulee was given two medals, a medal of defense for fighting in the Yom Kippur War, and Golda Meir awarded him the medal of valor. Neither of these were mentioned to the press because of the nature of his black ops position
Ulee was designated as Ger Toshev, or righteous among the nations. He had a tree planted in Israel in his honor and was made an honorary citizen of Israel. He was also invited to visit Israel any time at the expense of Israel. While he was there, he spent a few nights in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and ran around the walled old city of Jerusalem. He could smell Palestinian mothers baking their bread as he ran. He stopped on the Mount of Olives to look at the breathtaking view and prayed as the sun came up in the east, shining on the city. Jesus felt so close to him, but he again did not feel like a Christian. He was a mass murderer and carried the weight in his eyes.
In a moment’s notice, he was on his way back to Vietnam. He had a layover in New York. He called one of his brothers and heard the news that he was a father and I was getting straight A’s at Columbia Community College and working as a model at the Bon Marche. He called me, and when I answered, he could not talk. He could hear his son crying in the background. I finally said, “Ulee is that you? Are you alive? Where are you?”