I was going to explore the notion of “nullification” this morning, a fascinating topic that could unravel the United States, but I guess we can get to that tomorrow. That is not all that is unraveling. I wound up in a conversation with a buddy about days gone by and wound up going back down the rabbit hole on Admiral Rex’s quest to have he memory of MIA Jack Graf recognized.
 
We have talked at length about Rex, but there is some lingering doubt about what could have happened to Jack. Long ago, I read a Nelson Demille novel called “The Charm School.”
 
If you have read his stuff, you know he can spin a yarn pretty well. The book came out in 1989- the Age of Glasnost, and the first thaw of the Cold War.
 
Woven neatly into the thriller was the evolution of thought about the conflict in Vietnam. There was enough distance in time for a more nuanced view. The psycho-vet of Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo” in 1982 had passed through Oliver Stone’s more thoughtful treatment in the 1986 film “Platoon.”
 
A cottage industry in POW matters had emerged to deal with the missing, the men who had been “left behind.” At the end of Operation Homecoming in the Spring of 1973, 2,646 Americans were officially missing in action. The popular view was that the Nixon Administration had cut and run, leaving hundreds behind.
 
This was much to the consternation of the Vietnamese, who had lost more than a million citizens- some estimates go as high as three or four on both sides. I had a chance to support negotiations in Hanoi, in 1995, and I was convinced then that no one was being held- then, at least- against their will.
 
Demille brilliantly wove the issues of the day into a Cold War tapestry.  It starts out with an American tourist phoning the U.S. embassy in Moscow to report an unusual encounter with a USAF major in a forest near Borodino. The tourist vanishes, and a records check reveals the Major’s name is on the list as a Vietnam MIA.

Fictional Attaches Sam Hollis and Lisa Rhodes eventually uncover a village populated with real US military to interact with Soviet agents preparing to go overseas. The conclusion to the story hinged on a fanciful hostage rescue, which failed, though knowledge of the camp’s existence made it to the West.
 
The Charm School was a mirror image to the program that really existed in West Germany that provided émigré East Block personnel to interact with people being assigned behind the Wall- a final exercise in tradecraft against the Real Deal like the Allied Military Mission in Potsdam.
 

(There are villages like that elsewhere, too, or at least were.)
 
There was enough that was plausible in the thriller that I immediately thought about Jack Graf, the missing Naval Intelligence Liaison Officer in Vietnam.
 
Jack would not have been suitable for a role as a lap-dog in some Soviet training program. He was too stubborn. But he did have some exotic clearances no one else in Vietnam had, and training at the Eastman Kodak Company about new satellite reconnaissance capabilities. That information would have been a  pearl beyond price to an adversary.
 
The Russians had long memories, too- Solzhenitsyn’s “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” contained the haunting image of German SS troops who were never released and instead were held until they died as revenge workers.
 
Around the time of Operation Homecoming, Personnel Recovery Officers at speculated about a “sweetheart list” of US POWs known to have been captured but never recovered. The composition of the list featured aircrew from most tactical and strategic aircraft employed in the Theater.
 
The brief opening of the KBG and GRU archives did not reveal any information of the kind, but the archives are closed now, and the matter of some airmen being transferred to Soviet or Chinese custody remains open from events early in the Cold War and up through Vietnam. Soviet participation in the 50th Air Army fighting the Americans in Korea was acknowledged though.
 
So, if a few select US personnel were retained for extensive debriefing, it would not necessarily have been left in the records to be found.
 
Navy people I have talked to who where there at the time don’t recall any supposition about that, but of course they were not cleared to know what Jack did. They also did not credit the Russians with a presence in the Delta, though my pal Larry found the remains of a Russian Signals Intelligence post on Cambodia’s Kaoh Tunsay island around the time of the invasion, and a long time after Jack had been captured..
 
My sources tell me that debriefing notes by Jack’s Vietnamese interrogators were found in one of the BRIGHT LIGHT rescue attempts that came awfully close to getting Jack back. That was not one of the areas we went after in Admiral Rex’s campaign to have Jack’s story told, and his sacrifice recognized. The fact that everyone breaks under torture was not one of the features of the memorial drive, so I did not follow up.
 
Rex’s energy on this particular case, along with his job as Chief of Collections after he left Saigon offers the tantalizing possibility that he knew what information Jack had been carrying in his brain when he was captured.
 
There is the curious matter of my pal Mac, who remembers having dinner with Rex and Admiral Zumwalt six months after Rex had transferred. The date is unmistakable, since he Admiral has a copy of his travel claim and I have seen it.
 
I can’t explain it, and it could be memory that is at fault. But the belated recognition that something very valuable had gone missing could have warranted a trip back to Saigon for Rex.
 
We will never know. Jack’s body was never found, the Vietnamese who held him was asked, and they told he Operation Full Accounting people that they shot Jack, he drowned, and they buried him in an embankment place that was later washed away.
 
At that late date, there was no point of lying, though of course it is possible that they were.
 
Whatever the story really was, it is gone now. Jack could have perished right there in the Delta, or he might have died in Lubyanka. Unless the archives are opened again, and something remarkable pops out.
 
I am pretty sure that is not going to happen, though, and we will just have to deal with the mystery.
 
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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