Kevin McLoone, the good Samaritan Chick found in Vietnam, had served four years as one of the first US Marines in Vietnam, starting in 1963. McLoone returned to Vietnam to work for Dynalectron, the contractor tasked with installing the scrambling systems into the military helicopter radios to decrease the possibility of them being shot down. With that technological advancement, the war became very different.
In 1969, one year after Chick had encountered Kevin in the jungle and after they both survived the Tet offensive, the number of US soldiers in Vietnam peaked at more than a half million. Perhaps recognizing that McLoone and his coworkers had experienced some close calls as they hustled to make choppers safer in the midst of the fighting, the boss sent him on a choice assignment to one of Vietnam’s most beautiful spots. It led to a bizarre encounter.
“A coworker named Bill and I were sent on a job to Vung Tau, an incountry place where guys went for R & R,” McLoone recalls. “It was on the coast on a beautiful peninsula where a lot of the black-market people had mansions on the water. The French used to love Vung Tau—they called it Cap Saint-Jacques—and after we pulled out in 1975, oil was discovered offshore, and the Russians moved in.”
After work one night, McLoone and Bill repaired to a bar. Inside, McLoone recounts, “We met a guy from the army who ran a Mike boat—an LCM-8, which, like the Higgins boats from World War II, were landing crafts that could open fully in the front to let tanks and trucks drive right onto the beach. He said they were having a lot of trouble with their radio communications with the Loran (long-range navigation) station on Con Son Island, about two hundred miles out in the South China Sea.* Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had ordered that five of these radio towers (each roughly six hundred feet tall) be constructed throughout Southeast Asia to aid in long-range navigation of ships and planes in the era before we had global-positioning satellites.
“The Mike boat crew was about to depart to bring equipment to the coast guard station on Con Son Island,” McLoone recounts. “The officer asked us if we could take a few days off to go with them and help with their radio problems. We said okay and got clearance from our supervisor to help the army. I thought, I wouldn’t want to be out in the middle of the South China Sea with a bum radio.
The Mike boat crew brought them up the Mekong River to the headquarters of the Ninth Infantry. “We got there during the night and refueled, and they picked up some equipment,” McLoone recalls. “We were going to leave the next morning, when, all of a sudden, the place lit up. The base was being attacked with rockets, and a fuel dump had been hit. We were in the enlisted men’s club on the base when the boat’s warrant officer ran up and said, ‘We gotta take off, or they’re gonna sink the boat.’ So, we hustled down to the river, and off we headed to the island.”
The two-hundred-mile voyage was a long, overnight trip. “Bill and I were working on the radio below deck,” McLoone recalls, “when halfway between the mainland and Con Son Island, I suddenly heard a loud noise and then a voice yelling, ‘Identify yourself!’ It was a US Navy Swift boat. Two army staff sergeants and two warrant officers were on our boat, and I heard one of them yelling, ‘Get the hell out of here, you swabbie!’ and he was cursing at them. The Swift boat was off a navy destroyer, and the Mike boat was an army boat, and I guess there was a little competitiveness between the services. I ran up on deck and said to him, ‘No, no, no; they’re gonna sink us!’ And I yelled to the guys in the Swift boat, ‘Hey! We’re Americans! Don’t be hasty!’ After a few minutes, they let us go.”
They arrived at Con Son Island the next morning, at high tide. McLoone and his coworker had fixed the Mike boat’s radio, and “everything was shipshape,” he recalls. They were with the crew on deck, waiting for low tide, when the warrant officer came up to McLoone and said conspiratorially, “You know, I’ve got a case of frozen steaks and a whole bunch of beer on the boat.”
“Outstanding!” McLoone replied.
“Let’s have a barbecue after we unload all the equipment,” the officer ventured.
“Sounds like a plan,” McLoone concurred.
“There’s one problem,” the warrant officer said.
“Oh, what’s that?”
“I’ve got all the good stuff, but I don’t have charcoal. We’re gonna be out here for a couple of hours, and I can’t leave the boat. But you can. You gotta go in and find us some charcoal. It may take some time, so I suggest you leave now.”
The warrant officer told McLoone that a coast guard lieutenant in charge of the unloading operation was waiting for them on the beach. The lieutenant might know where to find some charcoal, he suggested.
“All right,” McLoone said. “I’ll swim in, meet the guy, and I’ll have the charcoal for you by the time you come in.” The warrant officer gave a slow, wide smile, and McLoone jumped over the side and swam toward shore.
“It wasn’t that far, maybe two hundred to three hundred yards,” he recalls. “I grew up in Long Beach, New York, so I was a pretty decent swimmer. I emerged from the waves and met the coast guard lieutenant.
“‘Sir,’ I said, ‘after the unloading operation, we’re going to have a little soiree—you guys are invited, of course. But we’re going to have to find a bag of charcoal.’”
The lieutenant was only too happy to help. They hopped in his jeep, and, to McLoone’s surprise, they soon pulled up to the gates of a huge POW camp. The French had built Con Son Island prison in the eighteen hundreds, right after they built one on Devil’s Island in French Guiana for the same purpose: to have an almost inescapable spot on which to keep political prisoners. In the 1930s, French colonial authorities had shipped a young Le Duan and his wingman Le Duc Tho out to this sandy hell, later exposed for its shallow tiger cages used to hold human prisoners lying in the sun. Le Duan and Le Duc Tho had plenty of time to make plans out on Con Son Island. Le Duan later became North Vietnam’s chief military strategist and mastermind of the Tet offensive, and Le Duc Tho duked it out with US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger during protracted peace talks, only to turn down the Nobel Prize they were both granted for negotiating the Paris Peace Accords that brought the war to a close on January 27, 1973.
“The lieutenant and I stood outside the gate, and he nodded toward the prisoners inside,” McLoone recalls. “‘He said, ‘They’ll get you charcoal.’
“The South Vietnamese guards let us into the camp, and I was immediately surrounded by about twenty prisoners, each wearing a colored piece of cloth indicating whether they were North Vietnamese army regulars, Vietcong guerrillas, or nonmilitary political prisoners. They looked at my feet and started pointing and laughing and saying, ‘Ho! Ho!’
“I had on what were called ‘Ho Chi Minh sandals’: flip-flops cut from rubber tires and laced with inner-tube straps. They were good for the boat because they supplied good traction. North Vietnamese soldiers wore them in the jungle; not even punji sticks could go through them. The POWs thought it was hysterical that I had them on. Then one of them asked in English, ‘What do you want?’
“‘I want charcoal,’ I said.”
The South Vietnamese prison guards would let the POWs chop down trees, cut them up, and burn them just enough to make charcoal and sell it to the US Coast Guard or the few other residents of the island. The prisoners used the money to pay for desperately needed food or other necessities, so the guards benefited.
“They sold me the charcoal for about two hundred piastres,” McLoone recounts, “and I brought it back to the beach.” By now, the Mike boat had landed, and the crew was unloading it. The warrant officer grinned at the sight of the charcoal, took it with thanks, and happily began firing up the grill.
“Bill and I were having a couple of cold ones on the beach,” McLoone remembers, “when we saw three old DC-3 prop planes with South Vietnamese flags painted on the sides. They flew into the airstrip which the Japanese had built during World War II when they controlled Con Son Island. Then three South Vietnamese Swift boats pulled in, and they were just idling there. Suddenly a guy wearing mirrored aviator glasses and a baseball cap came strolling up the beach with a whole entourage, heading toward the Swift boats.
“Bill and I walked over to him, and I said, ‘Hello, sir. What brings you here?’
“The wingmen looked at each other. The man with the mirrored shades said, ‘I’m President Thieu.’ He was as cool as a cucumber in a Frigidaire.
“‘Well . . . How do you do?’ I replied, trying to be formal. After all, I thought, this is General Nguyen van Thieu, the guy who runs the show. But Bill, he’s from Greenville, South Carolina, he’s a good ol’ boy, and a great guy. He reached out and shook hands with Thieu and said, ‘Pleased to meet ya!’
“We stood there for a minute. Finally, I said, ‘Excuse me for asking, but what are you doing here?’ I mean, it was pretty remote.
“Thieu answered, ‘This is where I go fishing.’
“Whenever he could get away, he would try to relax by fishing off the island, he told us.
“‘I’ll tell you what,’ Thieu added. ‘If we catch some fish when we go out tonight, I’ll give you some.’”
By now, the army crew had finished unloading, and it was playtime.
“We went back over to the crew, who were standing around the barbecue grill sipping beers as the warrant officer was tending the steaks.
“‘What were you talking to those guys for?’ the warrant officer asked us.
“Bill said, ‘That’s the president of South Vietnam right there!’
“‘Yeah, right. Bull––!’ the officer responded.
“‘No, it really is Thieu,’ I insisted. ‘I recognize him from the newspapers.’
“‘Damn it!’ he swore. ‘This tears it!’
“‘Why?!’ Bill asked.
“‘Because now he’s gonna wanna see the boat!’”
Who wouldn’t? The seventy-ton boxy steel bruiser, built by Marinette Marine on the Menominee River in Wisconsin, could carry two Stryker armored fighting vehicles, or an M1 Abrams tank, or a herd of trucks or jeeps—any of which you could drive right into the surf off its drop-down bow.
The warrant officer ordered his men to put down their beers and return to the LCM-8 and start swabbing it down and putting everything in order. “They did it,” McLoone recounts, “but they were not happy. Meanwhile, Thieu and his cadre took off on a motorboat, accompanied by the Swift boats. The crew got their boat spic-and-span and finally got to eat their steaks and have a few beers. By then, everybody was exhausted, so they went to sleep on the deck.”
The next morning was a day off for the crew members, who were joking and laughing and seemed relieved that they wouldn’t be doing anything official that day, much less giving a tour of the boat to Thieu and his officials. They took a swim and hung out on the sand for a while before the warrant officer fired up the grill again.
“Then, what do you know,” McLoone recalls. “Along came President Thieu again, back down to the beach. He had a bunch of fish in his hand—I guess they do pretty well fishing at night out there. He handed us two huge red snappers, and we boned and filleted them and put them on the grill. We asked him if he would like a beer, and he took it, but then he handed it to one of his associates, who chugged it down. In Asia, I found, people don’t want to offend anybody, for example, by rejecting a gift, so he accepted it, but delegated the actual drinking to an aide.
“Before long, the snappers and steaks were ready, and President Thieu and his men ate with us. Afterward, sure enough, he expressed curiosity about the Mike boat. We all boarded, and he took a look around and was impressed. We were hanging out on deck when one of Thieu’s aides handed him a Remington Nylon .22 survival rifle and the aides started throwing empty beer cans—we had plenty of them—up in the air. Thieu started shooting at them.
“‘I also like target practice,’ Thieu said.
“Bill came up and said, ‘Mind if I give it a try, Mr. President?’
“Bill might have been a hunter in South Carolina, because he was a great shot, and he would ping! the can every time. Thieu and Bill were handing the rifle back and forth, and the aides kept throwing cans up off the back of the boat, and they kept shooting them. I thought, If the New York Times got a picture of this, with the POW camp up the road and the war going on, wow! Bill had had a few beers by then, and I quietly said to him, ‘Make sure you keep that thing pointed up.’ Thieu’s bodyguards were pretty on point all around him.”
Then it was time to go, and the members of the two groups said their good-byes and went their separate ways. During the entire encounter, the president of South Vietnam hadn’t said a word about the war going on in his country to the Americans who were there fighting in it.
“He didn’t have to,” concludes McLoone. “The war was obvious.”