I was sitting alone at The Front Page last night, flirting with the lovely Kristina, daughter of a real Frog Man, a term favored by some of the early SEALs, to demonstrate their heritage. I was not flirting that hard- Kristina was born in the early 1990s, so she is in no danger of falling under my failing charms. But she has an old spirit, for one so youthful, and is filled with the passion for writing.

I tried to break down the fact that there is no money in it- that one of my talented pals in New York who has been published in glossy hard cover volumes and who has an acerbic wit and a skewer for a keyboard was bemoaning the fact that she will never, ever, have the kind of resources it takes to live the sort of life she lives to lampoon….so naturally I was planning my next project that will waste my time and scarce resources on another feckless effort of ego and whimsy.

But as you well know, no one does this for anything but the love of it. When I was a young pup just out of school and working for McGraw-Hill Publications at 1221 Avenue of the Americas in NYC (a place much in the news this morning) that of every one hundred books on our list, ninety were going to be dogs, eight were going to break even, and two were going to be break-outs and profitable.

Those are long odds in any racket, so it is clearly not the path you go down if you are looking for life on easy street.

I was looking up in the blackness this morning in the period between the two sleeps- the first one of physical collapse, broken at two or so by necessary accommodation to Nature’s needs, and then the second phase in which the dreams can come, summoned like we did with the Northern Lights in Labrador as the Indians taught us, by whistling to them.

I did not quite whistle, but as I turned on my side and wrestled with the My Pillow-Brand lump under my head, I thought about what I would like to explore in the land of Nod, where specters dwell.

(Batista in military garb).

I had been struck by the old POW/MIA tale that emerged during the President’s visit to Cuba. Being of an age where I can (barely) recall the time before there was a Fidel, that of Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar and his predations on the people of his island nation. Mr. Obama’s visit evoked more memories than it was possible to contain, including the awful days in May of 1961, during which we schoolchildren were told to be prepared for atomic annihilation.

Due to the controversy attending the diplomatic initiative, there was a lot of old baggage unpacked to go along with that, and the coincident attack in Brussels. Some of it sparked other memories, some trailing back to the end of the Cold War that now seems so distant and quaint.

It was anything but that, back in the day. I read an article about Russian advances in aircraft structural engineering that allegedly came from exploitation of American jets brought down over SE Asia. I saw the crew compartment of an FB-111 Aardvark at the Bauman State Aviation Institute in Moscow one time, and marveled at how it had made the journey from America, to Thailand to Vietnam, and then by ship to the hall in Russia. And I wondered about the human cost, and the lingering stories of the guys who did not come home after the POWs were released in 1973.

There were all sorts of stories about the Missing, and in particular the fact that of the 600 MIAs in Laos and Cambodia, only a handful came out. In its way, it was like the old Nelson Demille thriller “The Charm School,” which recounted the lives of the POWs who were spirited off to the USSR from captivity in Vietnam to serve as role players in the finishing school for Soviet deep cover agents ready to be assigned to their sleeper cells in the USA.

I don’t know if anything like that really occurred, and with the current state of relations with Mr. Putin, any chance that a secret like- even if true- that will emerge is exceedingly remote. And there was an imperative for U.S. Administrations of both parties to de-bunk the possibility that we had deliberately decided not to press the issue about who might have gone where.

I decided I was a skeptic when I stood the watch at the Bureau of personnel on weekends. There not being much else to do except wait by the phone for the news of the loss of a sailor somewhere in the wide world, I looked through the files in the milk-crate under the duty desk, and there was one with a thick file about the return of a set of remains from Vietnam.

The pilot described therein had been shot down only a few weeks before Homecoming, but did not show up for a decade or more. The Widow refused to accept them, since the forensic examination reportedly showed “well healed” breaks in the legs- something that could not have happened unless he had been held well after the war had ended.

That meant someone was fibbing. The Vietnamese, for sure, and we were apparently prepared to go along with it.

There is much more that I learned later, as I supported an effort to memorialize the only Naval Intelligence officer who is still MIA in the war, but that requires a story all its own. It had become a passion after visiting Vietnam and North Korea in the interest of getting a full accounting of the missing, and permission to look for where the dead might be resting.

There is not enough time for that this morning, anyway, though I am continuing to sift through the increasingly distant threads, some of the tales told to me by those who have gone on themselves since then.

One part that I had missed was the Cuban connection to the POWs. There is a court suit over FOIA request to gain access to Pentagon files about what happened. It appears that there were Cuban interrogators at The Farm and other POW sites in north Vietnam, and some dark mutterings that Americans had been transferred to Cuba as involuntary participants in ongoing experiments in how to most effectively break American prisoners. The allegations bore an uncanny resemblance to the files in the milk crate at the duty desk at The Bureau of Personnel:

(LT Clemie McKinney, USN).

“An opinion piece published in “Accuracy in Media” by John Lowery describes at least 17 U.S. airmen captured during the Vietnam War and reportedly brought to Cuba for “medical experiments in torture techniques.”

When U.S. Navy F-4 pilot Lt. Clemie McKinney’s plane was shot down in April 1972, he was reportedly held in the Cuban compound called Work Site Five in North Vietnam.

The Department of Defense reportedly said he was killed in the crash, but a CIA document later published included a picture of McKinney standing next to Fidel Castro.

Lowery also reported: “More than 13 years later, on August 14, 1985, the North Vietnamese returned Lt. McKinney’s remains, reporting that he died in November 1972.

“However, a U.S. Army forensic anthropologist established the ‘time of death as not earlier than 1975 and probably several years later.’ The report speculated that he had been a guest at Havana’s Los Maristas prison, with his remains returned to Vietnam for repatriation.”
I have no way of verifying the report, but it made feel creepy, stumbling over another of the loose ends of the Cold War, an era that appears to keep on giving.

Then I thought about context. LCDR C. B. was a squadron-mate in VF-151, who had been shot down and (briefly) held at The Farm late in the conflict. He gave an All Officer’s Meeting (AOM) presentation in Ready Room Two on Midway that stayed with me for years after to give some context for what occurred there. We know about the savage and extended beatings, the horrible stress imposed by relentless steel on defenseless joints and muscles, but Carroll recounted other, weirder, darker things that happened as a daily experience, and it was then that I began to think about the ‘why’ behind it.

It is the stuff of nightmares.

I thought of updating the DeMille thriller idea by following up on what might have happened to those 16 other Americans in Cuba who probably were killed at the same time as Clemmie McKinney, having become inconvenient.

Suppose one had survived the unspeakable and not been murdered? Suppose he was sitting at a table in some quiet Havana ramshackle bar….suppose he could speak of what happened….

Anyway, it was an idea that flitted through my sleepy brain in the second sleep of last night. I might even write something about it. Someday.

Copyright 2016 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com