2

Always an Eagle

“Let’s strap it on, buddy.”

It wasn’t yet four o’clock. Sullivan, my groggy partner, rolled out of his hotel bed, looked at the alarm clock in disbelief, then slipped into the same clothes he had worn since we had left Boston. There was no one to impress in Mae Hong Son, and clean shirts and pants were not to be frivolously worn. Clothing had to be rationed as carefully as food and water, Xanax, and Absolut vodka. Sullivan, the leader of Boy Scout Troop One in Dover, Massachusetts, was, as ever, prepared.

This was not the first time we had found ourselves in the outback of Thailand, far from the scenic beaches of Phuket or the sinful temptations of Bangkok. Our road to Burma, in fact, had begun less than two hundred miles to the east of Mae Hong Son, with a September 1991 trip to the Golden Triangle town of Chiang Khong. Then, I had come with Sullivan to Southeast Asia in pursuit of a quarry even more elusive than opium warlords.

In his youth, Sullivan had known these places: Indian country, where intrigue, insecurity, and death stalked a man through elephant grass and triple-canopy jungle. He thought he had seen the last of these badlands in 1971, the year he left Vietnam. Back in the world he married a general’s daughter, started a family, and began a lucrative business career. Yet he could not shake the persistent ghosts of Asia. These phantoms were to be found in the blurred, grainy photographs of middle-aged men he believed were American prisoners of war, men he swore had been left behind in the ignominious cut-and-run from Southeast Asia. At work, at play, in the sleep that came once he muffled his head with a pillow—a wartime habit acquired to shut out the crump of fire-base howitzers—he could not avoid their cryptic stares. So, like a Victorian explorer, he plunged headlong into the tropical unknown, driven by obsession, compelled by the necessity for action and stoic self-deprivation.

Sullivan had come to Thailand to continue the exorcism. But Bangkok, an odalisque grown flabby and familiar, would no longer satisfy. The tempting new mistress was Chiang Khong, less than thirty miles east of the infamous Golden Triangle, the nexus of Thailand, Laos, and Burma. And so, on that September 1991 trip, we had foresaken Bangkok, crammed into a Toyota van at Don Muang International Airport, and bored northward along Highway 1 through the hot night and hotter day that followed. Along the five hundred miles to the borderlands, we chased boredom and fatigue with lukewarm Absolut and Coca-Cola and the tape-deck twang of Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson crooning “Seashores of Old Mexico”—redneck counterpoint to the endless Asian vista of rice paddies, water buffalo, and Lampang cattle. In the late morning, at the provincial capital of Phayao, our route broke northeast of Highway 1 onto a secondary road that followed the meandering Ing River nearly one hundred miles to its confluence with the Mekong. Every few minutes, the varicose, two-lane roadway bisected a small village shaded by the feathery leaves and dagger-like seedpods of tamarind trees, and a Buddhist wat would appear like a fantastic castle surrounded by a lake of green paddy. The landscape was immutable, familiar, ominous.

In his futile search, Sullivan had exhausted his life savings, jeopardized his insurance business, alienated his ex-wife, taken foolhardy chances that could have left his two teenaged children without a father. The way Sullivan saw it, he had no choice. Not since he was a teenager and had donned the olive-drab sash festooned with twenty-one merit badges, raised three fingers in the familiar salute, and pledged fealty to the oath laid down by Lord Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. Honor. Duty. God. Country. The lessons learned in adolescence had served Jay Sullivan, Eagle Scout, well as he slouched toward middle age.

“There are no former Eagle Scouts,” he was fond of telling me, a man who had washed out of scouting while barely a Tenderfoot. “You carry a responsibility and a liability with you for the rest of your life.”

Responsibility and liability: the twin-edged sword repeatedly prodded Sullivan and his longtime partner, Cal Bowden, a tall, taciturn CPA from Tampa, Florida, to the Mekong River bordering Laos, a landlocked, hardline Communist country that had long been the hotspot of POW hunters. Bowden, who wasn’t a veteran, had met Sullivan through a mutual acquaintance involved in the MIA issue. The two men had diametrically opposed personalities—Bowden was as laconic and laid-back as Sullivan was loquacious and impulsive—but they had struck up a close friendship cemented by frequent travel to Third World hellholes in their search for missing American soldiers. The burden of morality had exacted a financial cost upon both men. Bowden, who had funded an American POW hunter living in Bangkok, had taken a half-dozen trips there himself. He had also invested heavily in commercial real estate and the economic downturn in Florida, coupled with his POW-hunting expenses, had left him flirting with bankruptcy. As for Sullivan, in five years he had made eight pilgrimages to Thailand, and the journeys did not come cheap.

“Every time you get on that damn plane,” he groused, “you figure it’s gonna cost five grand. Minimum. But I’ve been bitten on the ass by the dragon. I can’t give up.”

Their hunt, begun in 1986, had netted fascinating material—photographs, I.D. cards, letters, dogtags, even a jawbone—but irrefutable evidence of a live American prisoner had eluded them. Along the slippery red-clay banks of the Mekong, hard truth flitted like the hazy silhouette cast by a shadow-puppet god. By the autumn of 1991, their funds were dwindling, and this trip was to be the last hurrah. A few months earlier, Sullivan had collared Patrick J. Purcell, the publisher of my newspaper, the Boston Herald, and poured out his story. In short order, the Herald’s editor, Kenneth A. Chandler, had pulled me out of the feature department and assigned me along for the ride. I would take a break from my steady diet of oddball assignments—Elvis impersonators, female private investigators, llama farmers—and have a real, ripping adventure. At worst, reasoned Chandler, the Herald would have a series about private cloak-and-dagger operations to run as a “curtainraiser” to the November 1991 Senate committee hearings on the POW/ MIA issue, which were to be chaired by the junior senator from Massachusetts, Democrat John F. Kerry. At best—well, at best my tabloid could trumpet a worldwide scoop in sixty-point type: AMERICAN POWs RESCUED FROM HELL.

At the heart of Chandler’s gamble was U.S. Army Captain Donald G. Carr, MIA in Southeast Asia for twenty years. The Green Beret had disappeared July 6, 1971, while flying a covert, armed reconnaissance mission over Attapu Province in extreme southeastern Laos. In the summer of 1991, a flurry of pictures of alleged POWs appeared in the media. All but one were quickly debunked. All but the photograph of a smiling, jug-eared, middle-aged man who bore a striking resemblance to Carr. The photo had been released to the press by Jack Bailey, a controversial POW hunter who divided his time between Garden Grove, California, where his family lived, and Bangkok, where he had set up his Thai girlfriend. The picture had caused a sensation among POW activists, Washington politicians, and Department of Defense brass. A respected forensic anthropologist, Michael Charney of Fort Collins, Colorado, using high-tech computer superimposition to compare Bailey’s photo with preshootdown pictures of Carr, had pronounced, “I don’t think it’s the same man; I know it’s the same man.” Two official photo analyses done by Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories could not debunk the picture. The Carr photo immediately topped the Pentagon’s investigation list.

What intrigued Chandler was that Jay Sullivan also possessed the Carr photo, which he had obtained months before Bailey had it published. Sullivan also had the same intelligence that Bailey was providing to the Pentagon in secret briefings. The two POW hunters, who had never met, shared another thing: their primary source. For both searchers, the conduit to the sewer world of private POW/MIA operations was Phoumano Nosavan. A Lao expatriate who lived in a villa in suburban Bangkok, Phoumano was a witty, urbane man who loved country-and-western music, had waterskiied the Mekong in pre-Pathet Lao days, had flown combat missions as a Royal Lao Air Force pilot, and now commanded an anti-Communist resistance group, the majestically titled United Front of Lao People for the Liberation of Laos. His late father, Phoumi Nosavan, had been a right-wing general who briefly ran Laos courtesy of a CIA-rigged election. General Phoumi had gone on to amass a small fortune monopolizing the vice rackets in Vientiane before fleeing into comfortable Thai exile in 1965.

Phoumano, depending on the point of view, was either a true patriot dedicated to the liberation of his homeland, a wily politician like Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk, or a situational ethicist on the order of Captain Louis Renault in Casablanca. Sullivan, always the trusting Eagle Scout, considered Phoumano a patriot. The portly freedom fighter, whose search efforts Sullivan and Bowden underwrote with monthly checks for hundreds of dollars, had produced the precious Carr photo, he noted. And Phoumano had promising news to relay during our sweltering ride northward. We would hold secret meetings in Chiang Khong with men who claimed to hold POWs in off-limits Phong Saly Province in the far north of Laos. The Lao wanted to deal, said Phoumano, and the deal could include Carr. According to Phoumano, the Green Beret was now mentally unbalanced and imprisoned in a border camp about thirty miles northwest of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam. Chiang Khong was a logical meeting place; it offered the quickest egress from Phong Saly Province to Thailand.

This was it, Sullivan kept saying. This was no drill, no fool’s errand. The Carr photo was the smoking gun. Doctor Charney said so. The Carr family said so. Even the doubters that staffed the Pentagon’s POW/MIA office could not shoot down the picture. This was the undeniable proof that live Americans were being held against their will in Southeast Asia. And if the Lao were serious and had brought American prisoners with them to the border, he and Bowden would find a way to close the deal.

“There’s more circumstantial evidence to prove there are MIAs alive than there is to prove the existence of God,” Sullivan said in his dramatic manner. “And I believe there is a God.”

Sullivan was buoyed by a faith his government did not share. The Pentagon had remained unswayed, had discounted the fifteen hundred live-sighting reports of POWs filed since 1975. Only one serviceman, Air Force Colonel Charles Shelton, shot down over northern Laos in 1965, was listed as a prisoner of war. Shelton’s designation was purely symbolic, meant to convince activists that Washington had not forgotten the men it allegedly left behind. Since the spring of 1973, when 591 Americans were released by North Vietnam during Operation Homecoming, only one American POW, Marine Private Robert Garwood, an accused collaborator, had come out of Indochina. In cold, hard, official numbers, the Department of Defense listed more than two thousand Americans as MIA in Southeast Asia.

Official United States policy did not discount the possibility of live American prisoners. But activists viewed the government’s “highest national priority” status as so much lip service. Some private groups even accused Washington of a giant cover-up. Darker conspiracy theories—often involving the CIA, covert operations, and the heroin trade—were also prevalent. And people other than POW activists were doubtful: in a Wall Street Journal poll conducted a month before we departed for Chiang Khong, 69 percent of respondents said they believed U.S. servicemen were still imprisoned in Southeast Asia. For true believers such as Sullivan, there was no question but to chase wraiths and shadows all the way to the banks of the Mekong River.

Laos, with its porous border and its shady history, was the perfect venue for POW intrigue. During a decade-long secret war conducted by the CIA, more than five hundred servicemen—Army long-range reconnaissance patrols, Air Force pilots and forward air controllers, Air America crewmen—went missing in its mountains and jungles. Only nine men captured in Laos by the North Vietnamese were repatriated during Operation Homecoming. No Americans captured by the Communist-backed Pathet Lao, which during the war had publicly claimed to hold “some tens of prisoners,” were ever released.

Until now, thought Sullivan. Until Donald Carr.

But at what cost? Old Bangkok hands could attest that nothing, absolutely nothing, in Southeast Asia was free. That was rule number one. The second ironclad truth: Nothing was what it seemed. And rule number three held the key to maintaining sanity in Thailand: Nothing ever went as planned. In accordance with rule number one, Sullivan and Bowden had paid for the cramped van and all the expenses for our entourage: Phoumano, a pair of drivers, and our bodyguard—a former Royal Lao Army officer we called The Captain, whose dessicated looks belied a killer’s mien. The outlay of millions of baht had worked a miracle for the searchers, who believed they now had the first shot at making a deal for Carr. But rules two and three clouded Sullivan’s mind. This was a land of smiles, façades, and surprises.

As we neared Chiang Khong on a hot September afternoon that held the humid residue of the 1991 monsoon, Sullivan opened his wallet and pulled out a Roman Catholic prayer card he had carried for most of his adult life. The crinkled, laminated card was an invocation to Saint Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes.

Dear Lord, Sullivan thought, just give me a sign.

Chiang Khong was a two-wat town, with a main street that looked to have been paved sometime before the French abdicated Indochina. The cafe au lait–colored Mekong, full of flotsam, ruddy and swift with the summer monsoon runoff, was the town’s lifeblood. It provided sustenance—including plaa buk, the giant Mekong catfish (Pangasianodon gigas) that could exceed ten feet in length and weigh nearly half a ton—and gave smugglers easy access to its twin city in Laos, Ban Houei Sai, a centuries-old ferrying point for trading caravans. Very little had changed in the town since the arrival of the first Europeans, a doomed French river expedition that came through Chiang Khong in 1867. Then as now, Chiang Khong was the limit of the Thai king’s suzerainty. Upriver lay petty, primitive, feudal states where political strife was a constant and the authority of any distant monarch carried little weight. The area’s most recent notoriety had come in the early 1970s, when Ban Houei Sai was the hub of the Golden Triangle’s heroin industry and Chiang Khong was the convenient port of entry.

Motorized pirogues, dubbed reua hong yao (long-tail boats) for their lengthy propeller shafts, buzzed across the river, ferrying local passengers and their day-trip purchases. Along the single business block, a few shops displayed tiger teeth, hilltribe pipes, and silken Lao sarongs known as sin. A column of solemn, saffron-robed monks, each clutching a black umbrella, walked through the late-afternoon rain. Dining was no problem in Chiang Khong—there was only one restaurant. On the restaurant’s stage, a two-man band backed a local beauty warbling Thai songs, including a minor hit by Phoumano’s younger brother, now a Bangkok nightclub entertainer. On a restaurant television, elephants kicked a soccer ball. On the menu, only khao phat kai, fried rice with chicken, looked safe. A Western-looking black man entered the room, gave us the once-over, and took a seat in a dim corner by the door, where he was soon greeted effusively by a local Thai man. There were no tourist attractions to lure farang to this part of Thailand. The only draws were drugs and other contraband from nearby Laos.

“Just talk of tourist things,” Phoumano whispered.

After a hurried dinner, we headed for our riverside “resort” hotel, a prefab building with a view of Ban Houei Sai and its moldering French colonial garrison, Fort Carnot. In town only a few hours, we were already an item. Word of farang traveled fast here, and Sullivan and Bowden wondered if the black man in the restaurant was Drug Enforcement Administration or, worse, CIA. Sullivan amended the three laws of Southeast Asia. Rule number four: There was no such thing as coincidence. It was my first trip to the East and I didn’t know if his reaction was paranoia or prudence. Fearing an after-hours visit to our hotel room, Bowden rigged a homemade alarm system: he placed a small, plywood table against the door, then balanced a glass ashtray on the table’s edge.

“Not that I’d know what to do if the glass ever broke,” he drawled, then turned out the lights.

*   *   *

The sounds floated like ghosts across the morning mist that blanketed the Mekong. The crowing of roosters. The barking of dogs. The sputtering of a reua hong yao. The noises were distant and disembodied, yet proof of life in a small town in Laos. Likewise, the circumstantial evidence compiled by Sullivan and Bowden—the grainy photos, the scrawled letters, the cryptic prison rosters—was enough to convince them that somewhere beyond that thick shroud of fog, American POWs like Donald Carr were very much alive. And given the diplomatic inertia and bureaucratic red tape of Washington, and the actuarial tables for men they believed to be languishing in primitive jungle camps for decades, any rescue effort was morally justified.

I already knew that Sullivan, a self-described “tenacious bastard,” would go to any extreme. He had started ten Boston Marathons and finished them all. He’d stalked brown bears in the Alaskan wilderness, refusing to quit until he bagged one. I was only surprised that he had never before infiltrated Laos on a covert operation with retired Army Lieutenant Colonel James G. “Bo” Gritz, the old Green Beret who had mounted several cross-border forays during the early 1980s. (The exploits of Gritz’s team would inspire an entire Hollywood subgenre—the Vietnam POW film—that included Chuck Norris’s Missing in Action series.) But Sullivan and Bowden had chosen the businesslike, not the bellicose, approach. Rambo was not their m.o. They had spent nearly $300,000 of their own money and refused to work with the lone wolves, Army vets such as Vinnie Arnone and Mark Smith, who got the headlines and the on-camera face time with journalists covering the issue.

“It’s easy to see why private efforts like ours haven’t worked,” sighed Bowden. We sat in the hotel’s riverside pavilion, staring at a breakfast of canned Vienna sausages and runny fried eggs. “It’s just been a comedy of errors.”

There was no united front among the various private POW/MIA groups. Constant feuds erupted over conflicting motives and methods. There was little communication, less cooperation. The climate of self-interest bred deceit, and there were enough two-timing rogues to pack a bar in the Patpong, Bangkok’s notorious red-light district. Con men passed off animal bones as human remains. Charlatans bilked families out of thousands of dollars for POW “rescue attempts.” Activists such as Jack Bailey conducted emotionally charged fund-raising campaigns. Sullivan and Bowden had purchased their share of fakes, yet their steady, dogged approach had brought them, they were now sure, to the edge of success. Who could doubt the Carr photo? Say the right words, pay the proper people, and a POW might really come floating across the Mekong.

Our meeting with the Lao officials would take place in our twelve-dollar-a-night hotel room, where geckos clung to the walls and worms flowed from the faucet along with the discolored, unpotable water. There was one glitch, however. We had been followed. The Thai man who had greeted the black man so warmly in the restaurant last night strolled through the veranda, eyed us warily, then left.

“Rule number four,” said Sullivan. No coincidences.

He had been tailed before in small Thai border towns. We laid out a stack of baht to cover the breakfast bill and retreated to our room. Our life insurance policy, The Captain, began walking the perimeter of the hotel’s ragged grounds. Sporting a smartly pressed jumpsuit, aviator sunglasses, and ivory cigarette holder, the small, wiry soldier was a welcome vision of malevolence. Over the next two days, the Thai man would return periodically to the hotel to spy, hovering on a cheap motor scooter like an agitated dragonfly. He would not breach The Captain’s defense.

Inside our stark room, Sullivan and Bowden probed the story of the two wary Lao men. They had surreptitiously paddled across the Mekong in a pirogue, then beached the dugout on the banks of a small stream behind the hotel. It soon became apparent that these men were not senior officials but merely go-betweens, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of this dark, uncertain deal. Still, their conversation piqued the searchers’ interest. One of the men claimed to have viewed American POWs in a camp just a few months before, and to have seen one prisoner from a distance of just three meters. He offered no proof. No photos, no letters, no prison rosters. But he had come to this border before, he said, armed with documentation of POWs and under orders from a Vietnamese colonel to look for “interested parties.” He had returned empty-handed. This time, he said, he was so sorry, he had no papers. Very coy.

“There was difficulty on the other side,” Phoumano translated. “Before, he come for ten days. Sit like a bird. Nothing. He came back and was almost thrown in the river. Now they say, ‘Bring me something that shows you come from these people that are interested.’”

Sullivan and Bowden produced a letter that described their deal: two POWs for $1 million. Money was no problem, they assured the Lao men. After Vietnam, Sullivan had spent four years employed by Electronic Data Systems, the Dallas-based firm owned by H. Ross Perot, a staunch POW activist. Sullivan remained in telephone contact with a trusted Perot executive who served as the Texas billionaire’s point man on the POW issue. One phone call. One million dollars. No problem.

The senior Lao man sounded hopeful. He would return to Phong Saly. If his superiors wanted to deal, he would come back to Chiang Khong and alert Phoumano within thirty days. Phoumano could contact Mister Jay and Mister Cal in America, and we could all return to Chiang Khong. Agreed. Everyone posed for group Polaroid pictures, allegedly to be delivered to the Vietnamese officer as proof of a meeting with “interested parties.” The snapshots and the letter were sealed in a Zip-Loc bag. Sullivan also gave each man one thousand baht, about forty dollars, to cover travel expenses. After farang handshakes, traditional wai bows, and a vow to contact Phoumano as soon as they had received authorization from their superiors, the two men left. Perhaps they paddled back to Laos immediately. Perhaps they went uptown to admire the relative wealth of the small Thai shops, wads of baht burning holes in the pockets of their cheap pants.

A brief, hard rain of the waning monsoon swept across the Mekong, flushing the clogged ditches, cleansing the cracked streets, chasing the brutal heat. The smell of ozone, fresh mud, and jungle flora hung in the air. It was time to saddle up. There was nothing more to do but wait and, in Sullivan’s case, read the prayer card to Saint Jude and the Book of Job, reciting the lessons of hope and patience.

On the long drive from Chiang Khong back to Bangkok, the mood in our van was weary, yet optimistic. This last hurrah had brought the team to the brink. Ahead lay Laos and, they hoped, final resolution. In one month they would experience either unimagined success or yet another depressing scam. Enshackled by hope, obsessed with the Carr photo, Sullivan and Bowden would have to find the resources to prolong their search. This was not the time to give up. All a good hunter required was a slight sign, a furtive movement or a faint footprint, and the pursuit was joined again. The thrill of this chase, the hint of ultimate reward, was as intoxicating as the sweet smell of opium being put to the flame.

Indian country faded behind us. The driver ejected the Haggard-Nelson cassette from the stereo and loaded a pirated tape by Creedence Clearwater Revival, a band that had provided a virtual soundtrack to the Vietnam War. “Fortunate Son.” “Run Through the Jungle.” “Bad Moon Rising.” The opening chords of “Who’ll Stop the Rain” resonated through the van. The song had burst across the airwaves like an illumination round the year that Lieutenant Sullivan, fresh from Boston College ROTC, went off to basic training in Fort Belvoir, Virginia:

Long as I remember, the rain been comin’ down.

Clouds of myster pourin’ confusion on the ground.

Sullivan looked out the tinted windows at the fertile plains of central Thailand, cut into neat, geometric paddies, and the green, rolling hills, once stripped of their timber, now covered with second-growth forest. Time could be the great healer. “It’s twenty years later,” he sighed, his eyes misting. “And I’m still fighting the damn war.”