Last American POW of the Vietnam War

The story of Marine Pfc. Robert "Bobby" Garwood is one of the strangest of the strange war America fought in Vietnam from 1959 to 1975. Captured by the Viet Cong on September 28, 1965, near Da Nang, Quang Nam Province, he spent 14 years in North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps, and when he was finally released in 1979, he came home not to a grateful nation but to a vengeful U.S. Marine Corps that put him on trial for allegedly collaborating with the enemy. 

To begin with, the circumstances surrounding his disappearance are suspicious. Garwood claimed he was ambushed when he got lost at night when driving alone in a jeep to pick up an officer. He says he was stopped by Viet Cong, stripped naked and his jeep torched. Marine Corps records show he was absent at the 11 pm bed check on Sept. 28, 1965. No unauthorized absence (UA) was reported since he was thought to have had a "late run." He was reported UA when he failed to appear at formation at the next morning.

The next day, the Division Provost Marshal was notified of Garwood's absence and an all-points bulletin issued for him and his vehicle. This was repeated for three days with no results. Motor pool personnel searched the areas of Da Nang city that Garwood was known to frequent, but nothing was found. On October 2, the division's Provost Marshal notified the Republic of Vietnam's Military Security Services. Their search efforts also produced no information. Garwood's commanding officer reported to the Commandant, USMC, that in view of Garwood's past record of UA, he believed he had gone UA again and had possibly been taken prisoner of war. However, he recommended there be no change in Garwood's status and that he remain UA until evidence proved otherwise.

Two separate South Vietnamese agents eventually reported that the Viet Cong claimed a U.S. serviceman and his jeep had been picked up in the Cam Hai region, about 11.5 miles from the Da Nang Marine Corps base, when the serviceman had become lost. However, a ground and aerial search for Garwood's jeep produced no results, nor did four platoon search operations on October 1. Two additional infantry platoons swept the area near Marble Mountain the next morning but also found nothing. On October 12, the 704th ITC Det (CI) authorized a 100,000 VND reward for information leading to the recovery of the missing serviceman and additional 2,500 VND for the recovery of the vehicle.

On December 3, 1965, Company I, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment found a document on a gate near Da Nang titled Fellow Soldier's Appeal with Garwood's name on it. The document recommended that U.S. troops stop fighting in Vietnam and return home. The signature (B. Garwood) may well have been made by a rubber stamp and the English usage suggests it was not written by a native English speaker. Based on this, on December 17, 1965, Garwood's status was officially changed from "missing" to "presumed captured."

On July 15, 1968, a Marine Corps reconnaissance team named "Dublin City" operating in the vicinity of Troui Mountain near Phu Bai battled a Viet Cong unit. According to contemporaneous debriefing notes, now declassified, four members of Dublin City reported that one of the VC fighters was a Caucasian, who was shot during the action and yelled to his VC comrades "Help me!!" in English. The "white VC" was described as 20 - 25 years old, with brown hair, 5' 6" tall, "round eyes," and speaking very distinct English. Because they were outnumbered, Dublin City broke off contact with the enemy but were followed. In a subsequent firefight a few minutes later, Pfc. C.G. Brown was killed. 

In September 2011, 43 years later, President Obama awarded one Dublin City team-member, James Wilkins, a Silver Star for heroism on that day. Following receipt of the Silver Star, he recalled the white VC incident and stated, "Myself and three other Marines looked at about 200 photos of guys who were missing in action. All of us were positive it was Bob Garwood, who apparently had defected and was helping the VC." 

Beginning in the late 1960s, early 70s, Garwood was listed either as having volunteered or been forced onto a workgroup repairing a generator at Lien Trai I, one of the Yen Bai reeducation camps near Hoang Lien San Mountain in northern Vietnam. Other reports describe him as working at an unnamed "island fortress" in Thác Bà  Lake, North Vietnam, or having been kept behind in mainland labor camps as a driver and vehicle mechanic. None could be verified and soon the U.S. military in Vietnam gave up the search.

The next time Garwood appeared was in 1979 when he passed a note to a Finnish national, who was a World Bank employee, at a hotel in Hanoi. This set off a chain of events whereby Garwood was returned to the United States and immediately charged with several offenses under the Uniform Code of Military Justice and held for court-marshal proceedings.

Garwood's court-martial began in February 1980 at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, where Marine prosecutors accused him of desertion, encouraging other American soldiers to defect, maltreatment of fellow POWs, wearing the enemy's uniform and carrying the enemy's weapons. 

Assembled as witnesses for the prosecution, a few American prisoners of war said they had encountered Garwood at the same jungle camp where he was being held. They vividly described the life of pain, torture, hunger and disease in jungle prison camps while Garwood was living with the Vietnamese camp guards and, in the words of Gustave A. Mehrer of the Army, "He was squatting like them, walking like them and giggling like them. In my opinion, he was a white Vietnamese."

"One time he told us he went to a U.S. fire support base and got on a bullhorn, saying that they should come over to the other side," says David Harker, a Virginia probation officer who was in the same prison camp with Garwood. "I always thought he was just an opportunist. He was a confused, mixed-up kid from a broken home. This was one way of getting a little attention. He had no real strong political convictions. It was like he had found a home." 

"He interrogated me," says Julius Long of Pulaski, Va. "He asked who my Captain was, that kind of thing. You try to lie as much as you can, but it's hard with an American asking the questions and you didn't realize what was going on at first. While we were locked up, he could walk around. We wore pajamas. He wore a green uniform like the Viet Cong."

Others testified that Garwood wore a Viet Cong uniform, carried an AK-47, guarded them, helped the Vietnamese interrogate and indoctrinate them, and informed on his fellow soldiers.

American POWs were not the only ones to testify. South Vietnam military POWs of the North Vietnamese that had relocated to America after the war, gave substantial evidence that the accused had engaged in various forms of collaboration with the enemy.

Following the fall of South Vietnam in 1975, tens of thousands of former South Vietnamese military officers were incarcerated in concentration camps - dubbed by the North Vietnamese "reeducation camps" in an area northwest of Hanoi. Garwood worked as a member of the staff of this camp complex where he was seen by many of the South Vietnamese personnel. Many of these South Vietnamese personnel later emigrated from Vietnam and told interviewers of their encounters with Garwood. Their testimony provides further evidence of Garwood's willing collaboration.

Maj. Werner Hellmer, the Marine Corps prosecutor said that the defendant ''did all those things,'' and throughout the trail gave continuous inferences that Garwood had fallen far short of the ideals and traditions of Marine Corps manhood. 

Garwood did not deny the charges that he lived with his captors and sometimes carried a weapon. The defense lawyers maintained that their client had for the better part of two years suffered the same torture and deprivation as the other prisoners and that his mental condition had deteriorated further from the experience before the other prisoners saw him. 

Coercive persuasion, more commonly known as brainwashing, produces such mental disorders as a dissociative reaction, which involves identification with one's captors. It also produces post-traumatic stress disorder, defense psychiatrists testified. All three defense psychiatrists said they were certain that the young marine did not have the mental capacity to appreciate the criminality of his acts or even have knowledge of them.

Civilian lawyer John C. Lowe of Charlottesville, VA, said his client "was driven mad by this coercive persuasion." Lowe went on to say that "he adapted his behavior to that demanded by his captors. It was a matter of survival. He was incapable of appreciating the criminality of his acts.'"

One of the most interesting and sensitive elements of the entire trail was Garwood's adamant claim about POWs left behind. He insisted he saw other American prisoners of war after the 1973 release of all American POWs, but none were ever found and his story never checked out. 

Long after the court-marshal, a U.S. task force examined the sites where Garwood claimed to have seen live U.S. prisoners. They interviewed nearby residents and met with Vietnamese officials. However, the task force reported that "no evidence could be found to suggest that there are, or ever were, any live U.S. POWs" in those areas.

The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which called Garwood a "stay-behind," investigated Garwood's claim that he saw live American POWs after 1973 at a "motel-shaped masonry building" in North Vietnam. The DIA reported it could not locate any masonry structures at the indicated location. Senator Bob Smith requested that the DIA search again. After a second search produced no results, Smith initiated a personal search with ABC News, Garwood, and Bill Hendon. The group traveled to Vietnam in 1993. Following Garwood's directions, they reported they did find a building exactly as Garwood had described it. The Vietnamese government and a former head of the DIA POW/MIA office angrily disputed the finding, insisting the structure had not existed when Garwood was a POW.

While the issues of duty, duress and mental disease dominated the words in the courtroom in the two and a half months of the trial, other issues were larger in the minds of the officers and enlisted men throughout the Marine Corps.

Training officers said that that reaction is typical, that young infantrymen believe that Garwood disgraced the uniform. On the other hand, there is much talk on the post and in the restaurants along the highway that the prosecution of Garwood was unnecessary in light of the refusal of the Government to bring to trial other prisoners of war, including several officers, for cooperating with the enemy in a war the country would like to forget.

Some older noncommissioned officers express two thoughts most often. First, they say that the code of conduct establishes an unrealistic standard for teen-age servicemen, especially since, after boot camp, virtually no training is given in methods to withstand torture. Second, they seem to think that Garwood was not the standard by which other marines should be judged; that he was mentally ill upon entering the Corps. 

It could be argued that Garwood's life was blighted from the beginning. He was born on April Fool's Day, 1946. His mother abandoned him when he was 4 years old and his father had other wives.

As a youngster, he ran away from home twice and worked as a migrant laborer before his father had him declared a juvenile delinquent and placed in a detention home, from which the Marine Corps recruited him in 1963.

On February 5, 1981, a jury of five Marine Corps Officers deliberated two days before returning the conviction. The thin-haired 34-year-old marine, whose defense was based on a plea of insanity, stood motionless and expressionless while the verdict was read in the cramped courtroom. Donna Long, the woman with whom he lived, wept.

Garwood was found not guilty of desertion, not guilty solicitation of U.S. troops in the field to refuse to fight and to defect, and not guilty of maltreatment. However, he was convicted on communicating with the enemy and of the assault on an American prisoner of war interned in a POW camp, in violation of Articles 104 and 128, Uniform Code of Military Justice. He was also judged by the Department of Defense to have acted as a collaborator with the enemy. 

Within minutes after the verdict was announced, Marines were shouting from nearby barracks: "He got what he deserved!" Yet, within the first hour after the verdict, the base public affairs office received seven telephone calls from men and women, all protesting the verdict.

A hearing on any extenuating and mitigating circumstances in the Garwood case was convened over the next few days and the same jury decided on a sentence. The maximum penalty is life imprisonment because the court-martial judge, Col. R.E. Switzer, ruled out the death penalty. The assault conviction carried a maximum sentence of six months.

He was found not guilty of desertion, solicitation of U.S. troops in the field to refuse to fight and to defect, and of maltreatment. However, he was convicted on February 5, 1981 of communicating with the enemy, and of the assault on an American Prisoner of War interned in a POW camp, in violation of Articles 104 and 128, Uniform Code of Military Justice. He was reduced to the lowest rank in the Marine Corps and given a dishonorable discharge as well as forfeiture of veteran's benefits and stripped of all pay and allowances  -  including the $148,000 in private's pay that had built up during his 14 years in captivity. He was not sentenced to confinement, however.

His conviction was upheld on appeal. United States v. Robert R. Garwood, 16 M.J. 863 (N.C.M.R. 1983), aff'd, 20 M.J. 148 (C.M.A. 1985). Garwood's record of trial covered 16 volumes and 3,833 pages of trial record. 

With all the evidence given at Robert "Bobby" Garwood' court-marshal, he most certainly was not a Prisoner of War for fourteen years. He was arguably a POW for eight years, but he voluntarily chose to remain behind when all the rest of our POWs from the Vietnam War were released in 1973. That might have had something to do with the fact that he collaborated with the enemy.

Garwood was the only Vietnam POW to be tried by a court-marshal on collaboration charges. His conviction was also the first of such charges in the armed service since 10 POWs of the Korean War were convicted 25 years prior.

Branded a "traitor," Garwood became over the years the most vilified Marine in U.S. History.