Vietnam • Love • Story

On April 10, 1985, Robert Schwab left Subic Bay in the Philippines in a small sailboat. His destination was Vietnam, and his goal was to win the release of his Vietnamese fiancée, from whom he had been separated during the fall of Saigon ten years earlier.

Schwab had been deeply involved in the evacuation effort, helping thousands of Vietnamese escape from the surrounding chaos. But his fiancée, too weak to travel, was not among them. For much of the next ten years, Schwab, a war-zone adventurer who had served six years in Vietnam and had made several covert forays into Laos and Cambodia, investigated legal, and then illegal, ways of gaining her release. That is what led him to the small boat Hubris and the 13-day voyage to Vietnam.

•

Hubris was newly finished and anchored in Subic Bay, in a cove near the huge U.S. Navy base there. The seas rocked her gently, but then, sailboats at anchor resemble themselves under sail the way 12-year-old girls resemble themselves at 16. The gentle waves of the bay were nothing compared with what Hubris would face on the South China Sea as she carried me on my clandestine return to Vietnam.

I had paid (continued on page 136)Vietnam • Love • Story(continued from page 105) the owner of a local fishing banca for 24 hours of towing, enough to get me out to dependable winds. As we left the beach, I watched the dim shape of Subic's high northern headland slide behind me a mile to starboard and remembered the last time I had sailed past it: going the other way one hot morning almost ten years before, standing on the deck of the carrier Hancock in clothes I'd worn for six days, my only possession a .38-caliber pistol.

For an exhausting week before my voyage on the Hancock, I had been working on the evacuation of Saigon. In the end, I had been extracted by a Marine helicopter from the roof of the U.S. embassy, driven from the country to which I had given six years, a citizen of a country shown at last to be incapable of keeping its promises. And I thought of Mai, the Vietnamese woman I loved, standing there, emaciated, clutching her sides and crying, and I wondered if I had done any better than my country.

As I made my way out of Subic Bay under tow, I remembered that day and my feelings well, and I remembered re-establishing contact with Mai in 1982 and my promise to do all I could to get her out. Alone among the hundreds of thousands of Americans who served in Vietnam, I was being given a chance to recover my honor. All I had to do was go back and get it.

Simply put, my plan was this: I would sail back to Vietnam alone in an 18-foot open boat, no motor, no weapons, along the same track on which the Seventh Fleet had retreated after our defeat, and I hoped to come away with Mai, my kept promise and my victory. My plan was neither simple-minded nor arbitrary, and the hard part would be over when I reached the coast of Vietnam. It was all so perfect.

•

I met Nguyen thi Mai (I've changed her name to protect her) in 1972, when she was 18 and I was beginning my fourth year in Vietnam. That was in Kontum, a mountainous tribal province in central Vietnam as rugged in its beauty as Mai was serene in hers. All but a few isolated parts of Kontum had been lost, U.S. ground forces were gone and we watched the infiltration of the North Vietnamese. Finally, their B-3 Front command element surfaced like the fin of a shark, and we waited for the strike.

In this atmosphere, the Nguyen family's rustic café, 100 yards from our compound, was a harbor for me. It was quiet, the home-grown coffee was good and the three beautiful Nguyen sisters, who floated among the tables when they were busy, would sit with me when they weren't. Traditional Vietnamese girls had both a fascination with and an aversion to Americans: Any girl seen in public with one was presumed to be sleeping with him, and traditional Vietnamese practice the cult of the virgin as religiously and as chauvinistically as Spaniards. That the girls would sit down and talk comfortably with me was a real compliment.

GIs who remember the debased side of Vietnamese women—the Tu Do Street bars, the Saigon teas, the roving hands, the five-dollar short times—will laugh, but there was an entire Vietnamese world they never got to see, just as the Vietnamese usually saw the roughest side of the GIs.

Mai was the youngest of the sisters, and the quietest. It was her older sister, a striking widow of 25, who first attracted my attention. A casual affair might have worked out with her, but that kind of thing would have been unconscionable with Mai. My first year in Vietnam, a girl much like Mai had left her family for me, and then I had left her. She was dead to her family the minute she walked out the door, and a traditional Vietnamese girl without a family and abandoned by the man she has chosen is a flame trying to burn without a candle. I didn't know that at the time, but after learning the rules, I was determined not to be the cause of anything like that again. There were plenty of liberated girls around, not to mention the professionals, who were just as pretty as the traditional girls and immune to their kind of grief. I enjoyed them. They were a necessary ingredient of the life I saw myself living, an aficionado of The Zone.

Michael Herr wrote that "Vietnam was what some of us had instead of happy childhoods." So it was for me. People lived because of my successes and died from my errors. I whistled up helicopters like other men call ducks, and information I gathered diverted B-52 strikes. I had myself dropped into tribal villages where I'd get soused in the company of men who drank from the brainpans of old enemies. Marriage didn't go with my spurs and my horse, and Mai was a girl for marriage. But I kept going back to the café.

After eight months in Kontum, I was transferred to another province. Mai was supposed to be a pretty young girl who would fade into a memory, but she didn't. Maybe because my background was as traditional as it gets in the United States—Southern, Catholic, Jesuit-prepped, old-school liberal arts—the virtues of the classic Vietnamese woman, antediluvian by contemporary American standards, were overwhelmingly attractive to me. Mai seemed to have become the archetype in both memory and imagination, and the remoteness of my subsequent postings kept her in place. I didn't meet many other women, certainly none as beautiful. I saw her only a few times more before the country started to collapse in 1975.

After Ban Me Thuot fell, wholesale terror hit the highlands. Military units and discipline collapsed. All ethnic Vietnamese—civilians as well as deserting and leaderless military—began a horrific 100-mile exodus toward the coast.

For a week of that hell, Mai was there.

I kept trying to find people from Kontum and finally ran across someone who knew the Nguyens and where they were: Most of the family had made it to Saigon.

I had heard about some close-held plans to evacuate Vietnamese employees of various U.S. agencies and asked if I could help. At the same time, I had located Mai's family and had made up my mind: The Zone was dying and the intense, indulgent life I had there was going to fade. But I could still have the best of the Vietnam that was disappearing if I could take Mai with me. Marriage made sense now, selfish sense, and she would be a wonderful and cherished wife. But would she go?

Mai wasn't there when I tracked down the address in Saigon. The family was crowded into one room and a small loft and had lost almost everything. I told her parents I wanted to take Mai with me to America if she would go, and if they would agree. They said yes and that they would ask her for me when she came back. I told them how she could find me.

A few days later, Mai and her older brother, a priest, appeared in the chaos of a crowd of evacuees at what had been an officers' quarters. Mai, always thin, was now skeletal and was crying so hard she could say nothing. Her brother told me that she had been that way since the horror of the highlands exodus, but she had made up her mind to leave with me. He saw the shock on my face.

"She'll be beautiful again as soon as she can eat. She doesn't eat," he said.

It wasn't her beauty I was worried about but her physical and emotional condition. She looked ready to snap.

"She can't leave the family if she's in that condition," I told him. "That's the worst thing she could do."

"Take her, take her, she wants to go with you."

But I knew, or I thought I knew, that permanent separation from her family would be the worst possible thing for her just then—Vietnamese family ties are much stronger than ours and emotionally exhausting when broken. I thought that the worst was over for the family and for Vietnam and that Mai's health and peace of mind would come back a lot faster with them than without them. I also thought that there would be some way to get her out once the new regime had settled down. I tried to say all this. There was chaos around us. I was trying to get the right Vietnamese families on an evacuation bus and keep others off. It was a time of desperation, noise, exhaustion, stretched nerves.

"Mai, you can't go like this," I said. "I can't take you away like this."

She cried and cried, and I don't think even she could have sorted out all the reasons she was crying.

I left Mai and her brother there and headed for the next busload, hurting but certain I was right. After a tense half hour, I worked my way through the embassy gates, the teeming country locked out behind me.

The next day, Saigon fell. At President Ford's orders, we evacuated the embassy. I climbed up to the roof and onto a helicopter, which beat away into the darkness.

•

I went back to Southeast Asia and found things to do that were solitary, hard and worth while. They were approximations of the life I had led, but I got little from them but good stories and the cold comfort of having done my best. Even the few successes led to nothing. I didn't stay single because of Mai, but I did stay single. Always, always I thought this: If I was wrong to leave her behind as the country collapsed, I owed her.

In late 1981, I was in Thailand. A refugee in a camp for Vietnamese boat people heard I was looking for Mai and wrote to me. He said she had suffered a nervous breakdown after the fall of Saigon, had spent about two years in the hospital and had recovered mentally but was physically weak. She was unmarried. He could put us safely in contact via his family, still in Kontum, but, of course, it was up to Mai whether or not she would respond.

I heard nothing from her for months. Then, in the spring of 1982, I got a wonderful letter, and many more after that, full of bravery and heartbreak. She didn't blame me for anything (which made me blame myself), she had heart and stomach problems, her life was hard and unhappy, she wanted to leave Vietnam and she wanted to be with me. "What should I do?" she asked. She had tried twice to escape by boat and had been caught and jailed both times. Did I want her to try again?

I had already heard plenty about boat escapes from Vietnam: It is estimated that between 15 and 25 percent of the boats are lost at sea, and virtually every surviving boat is hit by pirates, who routinely abduct and rape any young women among their victims. Further escape attempts would be worse than foolish. And yet there was no hope through official channels, either. There were 500,000 people already waiting to join relatives in the U.S., and Mai and I weren't even married. With my history of activities in Indochina, I'd never get an exception for Mai.

At that point, I had to choose between giving up or planning something on my own. That is, there wasn't any choice.

My first idea was to try a run and snatch from Thailand or Malaysia, using a high-speed boat to make a rendezvous with Mai. By the time I had abandoned that impractical plan, though, I had a dossier on Vietnamese coastal security that was so thorough it seemed a shame to waste it.

My reluctance to let the adventure go was what led me to Hubris. I would sail to Vietnam in a small boat, approach land and arrive ashore in such a way as to be observed but not stopped, having meanwhile communicated the fact of my imminent arrival to the news media as I neared the coast. The difficulty of the voyage and the nature of its purpose would be newsworthy and would ensure widespread interest. That would have several effects.

First, the fact that news stories would be on BBC and Voice of America broadcasts at the time of my arrival would prove to the Vietnamese that I had no secret purpose: No spy announces his infiltration. Second, both Mai and I would be protected by the international awareness of my presence and innocent purpose. Third, the international attention would persuade the S.R.V. (Socialist Republic of Vietnam) to put us together and let us go—it would be good public relations for them and cost them nothing: I wasn't "rescuing" Mai but simply asking them to make a bureaucratic exception for her, because she didn't meet administrative requirements for the Orderly Departure Program. Hubris was not one among many possible ways for me to win Mai's release—it seemed like the only way.

•

When you are the only thing on it, there's nothing as enormous as the sea. Even under fire, I've never felt my mortality more keenly than I did staring at so much huge and potentially destructive indifference so few inches away.

I thought a lot about this during my first two days at sea, because the northeast monsoon, supposedly on its way out, started blowing again as if it had eminent domain. The wind stuck about 30 knots. Because the waves were steep and confused, breaking close together, Hubris couldn't be sailed. I helped her the only way I could: I put her under jib and wedged myself beside the centerboard trunk to keep my weight low and to windward.

I couldn't believe the rigging would stand the strain, even if by some miracle we weren't swamped, but Hubris stood it. When the wind dropped to a reasonable rate, I let out a yell that rolled right off the sea's back. I strung everything wet out to dry and ate for the first time in two days.

Besides an air-communications transceiver, I had one for ship-to-ship relays. My course was perpendicular to several major shipping lanes. I had planned to use freighters as a check on my navigation, and also as a backup for establishing my distance from Vietnam. Fixes from the two ships I did reach by radio showed me that my navigation was better than I had hoped. The second one, which I reached on April 20, 150 miles east of Nha Trang, was an Evergreen Lines ship out of Hong Kong. The affable Filipino officer said that he would pass a message on to my friend, Tom O'Donnell, a commodities broker in Hong Kong, when the ship got to Singapore on the 22nd. That turned out to be the only indication the outside world could have had that Hubris and I were near Vietnam and in good shape. Tom never got the message.

The ten days between the high winds and reaching the Evergreen ship had been fantastic: ten-to-15-knot steady, beamreaching winds that died for a while every afternoon about five so I could dry my sleeping slot and put everything straight before dark. I luxuriated in the grandeur I awoke to every morning and sailed through all day. Those bounding blue acres and that shining sky were mine: Crossing the South China Sea that way gave me title—I owned that sucker.

Then came the 13th day.

Things went bad about ten in the morning. A front headed by line squalls as far north and south as I could see was closing astern. I still remember the particular cloud that did us in. It had an extraordinary aspect as it bore down, its base just above the water, a towering face that drew itself up higher and higher, blotting out the sun, then burst with a roar of thunder, lightning and wind. The black-green bruise color under the cloud and the white-caps like teeth had warned me, and I was in a panic to douse the mainsail before the wind blast hit. When those things strike, there's always a wind shift the second the force hits you that can tear your rigging out by its roots. In an instant, the jib collapsed on one side of the mast and exploded drum-tight on the other with a sound like a shot; but Hubris held.

She held all day while I was down shivering and bruised, wedged against the centerboard again, worrying. Not just worrying about whether or not Hubris would get us through it but about where we were headed—which was in the wrong direction at the wrong time. The storm was driving us southwest, toward Cam Ranh Bay, when we were already close to Vietnamese territorial waters. Cam Ranh is the billion-dollar naval and air base America left behind after the war. It's now used by the Russian navy, a strategic and sensitive place, one where neither Hubris' clearly innocent appearance nor outside radio reports could prevent spying charges.

Contacting airliners on my radio was a crucial part of my plan, to advise friends of my progress. I had tested the sea-to-air transceiver on my second morning at sea, and the captain of a Singapore Airlines flight came up so clearly he sounded as if he were in the bow of my boat. On the 12th day, the day before the storm, I went on the air again. I passed under an airlines crossroad, where there should have been five or six flights within hailing distance. Looking up, I could see the flights; checking my flight chart, I could name them. But my transmissions drew no response. Except for being adrift or dead, I was near the worst circumstances I'd envisioned.

Without communications with the outside world, I became obsessive in my determination not to land anywhere near Cam Ranh. I decided I had to get the information I needed from the next Vietnamese fishing boat I saw—I'd already seen about ten—and to get it in such a way as not to show that I could speak Vietnamese. I also developed a story about being on my way to Singapore from Manila. My reason for approaching Vietnam was stomach trouble, which would be easy to mime.

I sailed up to a 40-foot fishing boat at nine in the morning of the 14th day, pointed to a map, said "Nha Trang? Nha Trang?" then pointed questioningly southwest, west and northwest. I figured the fishermen would answer by pointing; the comparison between my compass and the direction they indicated would give me a rough relative bearing of Nha Trang.

They did point, and a compass check told me I was actually north of where I wanted to be, having overcompensated after the storm by sailing northwest, heading toward my lesser evil, Qui Nhon.

One of the fishermen had hold of Hubris' forestay to keep their boat from damaging her as both of them rose and fell in the choppy sea. The fishermen were talking among themselves in a heavy accent I couldn't understand. The one at the forestay didn't let go. More talk. They started motioning me to lower my sails. I realized then the stupidity of giving them control of Hubris—for a small sailboat, a hand on the forestay is all it takes—and also realized that their heavy boat could be used as a weapon to disable Hubris if I got out my diving knife and forced the man to let go.

I lowered the sails. They motioned me to go aboard their boat. One man jumped down onto Hubris and began searching through her lockers, pulling out all my equipment. It was as if she were being violated. I felt shamed, having to stand there and watch it.

They asked me what country I was from. "England," I said. That must have satisfied them, because they left me alone, talking among themselves. I don't remember much of what happened next. The lifting of the nervous strain of the voyage hit me like depressurization and I went to sleep in the wheelhouse.

I woke up a few hours later, held fast in the grip of my fixations. Christ, I thought, my story is that I'm on my way to Singapore, but there are documents on Hubris that prove I'm headed for Vietnam. My only idea was to get rid of them.

It was a mania, and I wasn't careful how I did it. Not even waiting for dark, I began pulling out papers and charts and tossing them overboard. No one tried to stop me. At the time, the Singapore story seemed like a necessity. Then, when the officials in Qui Nhon let me call my parents or my friend Tom, or at least talk with the Australian consul (Australia helps with diplomatic affairs for the U.S. in Vietnam), everything would be back on an even keel, and with the press alerted, Mai and I would have our guarantee of safety and our assurance of success. Everything wasn't lost, not by a long shot.

We came into Qui Nhon harbor about 10:30 at night and docked beside a stone quay that had been broken up by U.S. bombs or Vietnamese artillery during the war and never repaired. On the low headland above it was a small stone-block house. The scene—lit by a single bulb on the wall of the building—looked like a stage set. A young officer in charge of the small detachment took me up to the building and struggled to match his few English words with the needs of his forms. Punchy with fatigue, I ached to shorten things by speaking Vietnamese, but according to my cover story, I wasn't supposed to know how. Finally, he finished and invited me to walk with him and a few soldiers to town. Some invitations can't be refused.

That was how I made my return to Vietnam. I never thought crossing over into hell would be such a quiet process, or that I'd be guided there by a polite young officer pushing a bicycle.

•

Despite the international treaties protecting seamen of all countries, especially those taken at sea, my captors refused me all outside contact and did not notify the U.S. that I was alive, much less that I was in custody. This extraordinary treatment convinced me that divulging my six years of wartime experience and the fact that I had planned to go to Vietnam, not Singapore, was more dangerous than ever. For three days, I refused to eat unless allowed to contact someone, and I maintained my Singapore story. A year later, I learned that my interrogators had known of my past and my plans since the first day: They'd found and translated my letter requesting Mai's release and were letting me spill my cover story while their suspicions of espionage grew into certainty.

After the third day, there were no signs that my hunger strike was having an effect. When a higher official came to question me, a man in civilian clothes who I was told was the province chief, I decided my only hope was to tell him the truth. But I withheld Mai's name.

My admission had no positive effect. At midnight, I was moved north under heavy guard to Da Nang.

The city is directly below the air corridor commercial airlines use between Bangkok and east Asian capitals. From my cell, I watched the planes fly over; that might have been the worst part of my first days in prison. In an hour, people would be stepping down from those planes, awash in freedom they didn't even feel, annoyed with the heat and customs formalities and pirate taxis. I would have given anything to be annoyed about those things again.

They put me on the second floor of a building at China Beach that used to be an orphanage supported by U.S. Marines. Now it's a Spartan R&R barracks for the S.R.V. army. From my window, from time to time I could see Russian advisors and their huge wives on the beach. The Vietnamese seemed to avoid them.

For two or three weeks, nothing official happened. Then an old man who spoke careful, perfect English showed up to begin interrogation. His looks and manner strangely reminded me of Alec Guinness. We sat in a small room at opposite ends of a small table, an overhead fan going listlessly through the motions of dispelling a heat that had nowhere to go. Before he left the first day, he said, "Many of my superiors are convinced you are a spy."

"If I tell you my fiancée's name and where she is, and you find out she's real, then will they see I'm not a spy?" I asked.

"That will help you in the short run but not in the long run. It is necessary, you see, but it is not sufficient."

I answered the old man's questions for three more weeks, assuming that I was going to be imprisoned for the rest of my life, however short, and planned an escape. I knew the odds were astronomical against my ever reaching Thailand alive via the Montagnard highlands and Laos, but I decided I would rather die trying to escape than live in their prisons and die according to their whims or their laws. Then, too, there was always the chance that I'd make it. On top of everything, God help me, was that voice telling me, What an adventure, boy, what an adventure just to try it.

There was no lock on my door. At night, a chair was pushed against it, not so much to hold it closed as to make a loud noise on the stone-tile floor if I moved it. After midnight, the guard on duty was usually asleep. The top half of the door was made of glass panes, and one panel was missing. When I realized I'd have to lift the chair to escape, I added isometric biceps work to a daily exercise routine so I could lift it. After ten days or so, I could lift it.

From my door, it was only two steps to get over the parapet and onto the ledge. I'd seen the outside of the wall when the guards walked me to another building to wash; there were construction rods and latticed brickwork under the ledge that would get me the 30 feet to the ground. It was about 75 feet from there to a urinal built into the perimeter wall above the beach. The concrete side of the urinal was a couple of feet high; that would get me over the wall.

Finally, one night, the conditions were perfect, the moon was down and I could hear the guard snoring. I got up noiselessly and eased my way to the door. He was stretched out on a mat right in front of me, and to open the door, I would have had to lift both the chair and the guard. The next night, another guard brought a friend and they stayed awake. The dim glow of their cigarettes burned up the hours, and when they finally went to sleep, there wasn't enough time to give my plans a chance.

The next morning, a group of hard-faced men in civilian clothes arrived and ordered me downstairs, into a three-car entourage that carried me back to Qui Nhon.

This time, I was to be held in the prison of the Cong An—Vietnam's K.G.B. The loss of the chance of escape on the verge of my attempt was demoralizing: It was the only way I could have got out of the nightmare without involving Mai. Now her corroboration of our relationship was my last hope—"necessary but not sufficient," as my captors had told me.

I knew that sooner or later, they'd find Mai no matter what I told them. Praying that the information I gave would not result in her arrest, I gave my questioners her name and told them where she lived. The Cong An would press its interrogations about my "secret mission" for another year, never believing I'd already made the only betrayal that was mine to make.

•

It's the job of any country's security service to be skeptical. Given the fact that the Vietnamese Communists have been continuously involved in warfare since World War Two, with real spies in large numbers to look for, and given my background and the fact that the Vietnamese see China and the U.S. as enemies in league against their regime, their skepticism about me was logical (if they could overlook several points). I had lied about being headed for Vietnam when I was first questioned in Qui Nhon; I had had a radar detector on board Hubris (to keep me from being run down by freighters) and, in theory, it could be used to pinpoint coastal radar emplacements; I had, in the past, worked in Laos and Cambodia with anti-Vietnamese resistance movements and could be doing the same thing now.

Supicious that I was a spy, the Vietnamese had the option of using physical torture to compel my cooperation, but they used it only once. They did, however, use mental torture, and it hinged on their declaration that they were keeping my capture a secret, exploiting my fear that no one—Mai, my parents—knew where I was. Over and over, they repeated the questions: "Why isn't anyone asking about you? We haven't had any questions about you from your parents or from your Government. Why are they silent?" At first, I was puzzled, then I got worried. Could my letters have been lost, the ones I'd sent in a large envelope to Tom O'Donnell from the Philippines, to explain what I'd done and why, in case something did go wrong and no news ever broke? And Tom was supposed to talk with reporters if he hadn't heard from me in a month; I thought news stories might still have proved my true purpose to the Vietnamese, even if they hadn't appeared as soon as I landed.

But if the letters were lost, and if, for some reason, Tom hadn't talked with reporters, a deadly silence would fall over my case. Nothing could have been worse for me. Silence about a possibly captured agent is standard procedure on the part of the Government. It would have been strong evidence to the Cong An that I was a spy.

The envelope with the letters had been lost. Tom never got it, and he waited three months before he told anybody—my parents or the press or the Government—that I was gone. The delay was bad luck and my fault, not Tom's. I hadn't been explicit enough, except in the lost letters, about what he should do and when he should do it. So there was silence for three and a half months, until an article appeared in The Wall Street Journal and an A.P. dispatch by my friends Jon Swain and Denis Gray. Then the U.S. had asked questions.

The Vietnamese said they knew nothing about me. Of course, they never told me there had been inquiries.

•

Subconsciously, you get to know the sensory patterns of any place you spend time in. In solitary confinement, it takes only a few days. I was aware of a new set of footsteps outside my cell, the smell of a different kind of cigarette smoke, a light that stayed on 20 minutes longer than usual, five extra beats in the cadence count of the guards' morning exercise. It reminded me of the way I would wake up at sea when the slap of the waves changed against the hull of my boat.

A week after the first interrogation sessions ended, there was an ominous shift in the routine. Normally, the only voices I heard were those of the guards, in small talk among themselves or in battle cries as they slammed their pieces around in Co-Tuong, Vietnamese chess. But on that particular morning, there were more voices outside the cell than usual, and they were lower and more serious.

Then there was a shifting of furniture, uncertain footsteps on the stairs as more pieces were carried in and repeated small scrapings of wooden legs on the tiles, minute alignments, as if they were preparing for a conference of VIPs. "Tomorrow," I heard one guard say to another.

Three long days later, a guard told me to "get ready to work." They call interrogation "work," with no sense of irony. I put on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt they'd left for me and walked into the next room, which was packed with about 20 men wearing the expressions the Romans must have worn when the first Christians stumbled into the ring. I was ordered into a chair. There was silence for a few seconds. Then an old man leaped up and yelled, "Tie him up! This man is CIA! Tie him up now!" I held my hands in front of me, hoping at least for that much, but two men forced them behind my back and handcuffed them. The interrogation began and the faces around me got that glint—the lions had started their work.

That went on for about five days. The constant dread of painful death, plus the behind-the-back position and pain of the handcuffs, made sleep impossible. Time, for me, was reduced to drifting in and out of consciousness. In desperation, I decided to try to shock my captors into treating me humanely, and the only way I could see to accomplish that was to make a convincing attempt at suicide. I'd never thought of myself as the suicidal type, but at that point, a quick death—if I lost too much blood and my fake turned unintentionally real—seemed preferable to the slow, painful death I thought I faced.

I'd learned how to loop my arms up under my buttocks and bring them around to the front. It was a useful, if painful, skill. I waited till late at night, when the guards checked on me only about once an hour. Right after a shadow moved away from the door, I got my hands around to the front and pried the frame off a small mirror in my cell. I have prominent veins, and I started sawing into my forearms, pressing the biggest veins against the bone to sever them. When the grisly task was done, I was able to annoint myself and much of my cell with blood. When the guard arrived, he saw one of the more memorable tableaux in his young life.

It was still dark when I came to. A doctor was sewing up my forearms. The head officer of the prison facility was there, alternately angry and worried. His worrying was just what I had been hoping for.

Instead of daily visits with the interrogators, I was now under the care of a doctor, who came every day to check for infection and change dressings. The handcuffs were gone and the quality of my food improved. There was no sympathy, but there was a kind of cover-your-ass attitude. They did not want a dead American on their hands, especially one who hadn't confessed.

About a week later, I was called to work again.

"We have been to see Mai in Saigon and her parents in Kontum," they told me. "Her parents say they were friendly to you under the puppet regime. But now, after studying their past behavior, they realize you deceived them. They don't want their daughter to have anything to do with you. You didn't come back here for Mai. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam is lenient to those who confess but hard on those who run away. Go back to your cell and think about that."

It was clear what had happened. Mai's old parents had already had problems because of their being Catholic, and apparently, their son, the priest, had got into serious trouble. Questioned about their relations with an American "imperialist," they naturally tried to distance themselves and their family from me. Who could blame them?

The heartening thing was that the interrogators didn't claim any wavering on Mai's part. In fact, they didn't, at first, say anything at all about her. It was clear to me that despite the risk to herself—and to her parents—she must have confirmed our relationship. By putting herself and her family at risk to protect me, she had shown tremendous courage. That realization gave me new strength against my captors.

•

At four o'clock one morning, three months into my imprisonment, I was awakened, told to get dressed, taken downstairs and put into an old Toyota sedan. Oddly enough, my escorts were at pains to be affable. I came to understand that their attitude was that of men ordered to deliver a volatile element from Qui Nhon to Saigon without an explosion.

At one point along the coast, we stopped at a snack bar that was trying for all the world to be a tourist attraction. It was built on rocks near the sea, but for some reason, it turned its back on the water and gave patrons a view of a dirt road scrambling up a bare hill. The guards put a Russian version of an English country-squire hat on me and said, "If anything happens, if anybody talks to you, you are a movie star from Czechoslovakia. Keep this hat on. Do not speak Vietnamese."

Seated in the café, I couldn't believe my good fortune. I was among people again, people who didn't wish me harm, who probably would have been sympathetic had they known my story. Completing the strange experience was a large cassette player that was propped on a window sill, banging out a tune by Jerry Lee Lewis. Despite everything that had happened since my capture in the South China Sea, I'd been able to keep my composure. But what my interrogators failed to do through hours of questioning and mental and physical torture, Jerry Lee Lewis, open air and friendly faces accomplished in a moment: I wept openly and uncontrollably, which is hardly what you'd expect from a visiting Czechoslovakian movie star.

By the time we hit Saigon—that is what the eastern part of the city is still called—it was dark. I tried to sneak past the memories that lay in ambush at every corner, but it was useless. Worst of all was the knowledge that I was within a mile of Mai. I learned to deal with the memories, but I couldn't get over being so close to her yet farther than if I'd never left the Philippines.

They put me in a large cell on the third floor. There was a plank bed, no mattress, a small table and a chair. There was a big window, but because there was no other opening, only a little fresh air drifted in. In a separate cubicle was a crumbling toilet and a faucet. There was room to sit under the faucet and bathe, but usually, water was short, and each day, I'd have to choose between a three-minute wash or dumping all the water down the toilet to flush it.

Although the cell itself was decent, it had one feature that preyed on me mentally at a time when I was least able to handle it. Scratched into the paint on the walls and the door, along with a lot of Thai and Cambodian writing, were crude pictures etched by men who had occupied the room before me. There was a drawing of a man in leg irons and handcuffs and a sketch of a man with his biceps tied excruciatingly behind him, a torture many POWs suffered.

But most disturbing of all was a drawing next to the peephole in the metal door. It showed a man holding sticks in his hands out before him; there was a lightning bolt beneath him, and he looked as if he were dancing. In place of his head was an electronic haze that graphically indicated the scrambling of his brains. The sticks, of course, were electrodes.

Pushed to the point of desperation, I found a thin piece of metal with sharp edges that had been used to fasten an electric cable to a wall in my cell. I worked it until I could break a small rectangle off. I sharpened it against the cement step under the faucet and kept it near my back teeth between my gum and upper lip, should suicide—not the counterfeit kind—become my only option for escape. It was the only weapon I had against my interrogators. And I could use it against only myself.

•

The key part of the investigation centered on my relationship with Mai. What it came down to was my having to prove that my motivation was sufficiently compelling to cross the South China Sea in a sailboat for a woman.

Because the various components of my motivation depended so much on my own character, and on the American tradition of rugged individualism, which is diametrically opposed to the Vietnamese (and particularly to the Communist) concept of collective behavior, the investigators found it easy to disbelieve me.

Finally, one morning, they said, "We have talked with Mai and her parents several times. She's waiting for you. But her story and yours are only similar; they aren't the same. And her parents contradict most of the things you say. The committee has decided we do not believe you came here for Mai."

And then he began to scream, "You are a snake! You are an American snake and we will kill you."

I was taken down to the interrogation room two or three more times after that and handed small pieces of paper with questions on them. The interrogators themselves were gone. I was in complete despair again, and the questions were designed to keep me that way during the empty months that followed:

"Name the French, British and American secret agents you met during the war."

"Explain the intelligence functions of the Orderly Departure Program."

"Tell all you know about the supervisory influence of the CIA over the Peace Corps."

They took me back to the cell. It would be eight months before I walked through that door again.

•

In the cell, shutters and blinds were arranged and bolted outside the window so that light came in but there was no view—except for a few square inches below one shutter. Ironically, I could see the front gate and the life passing through it. Sometime in the fifth or sixth month, one of the children in the compound—some of the staff's families lived there—tricked the guard into going outside the gate, then ran back inside and shut the gate and locked him out. I started to laugh out loud, but at the first sound, I caught my breath in astonishment. I hadn't heard my own laughter in a year.

•

My mind watched for the slightest changes in conditions and from them divined salvation or dived deeper into despair. In the eighth month of isolation, the 13th of my captivity, there were signs and miracles. I got toothpicks and a broom—both on the same day! A few days later, they began letting me out for exercise again. Something had changed.

A few days later, I went back to work with a new set of interrogators: a tough old man of about 70, a sarcastic young hot-shot and an interpreter of about 30 who spoke perfect, idiomatic English and wore Western shoes and cologne.

In the beginning, they concentrated minutely on questions about my voyage and especially about where I had been caught. In a legal sense, it was crucial: If I'd been seized outside Vietnamese territorial waters, then the fishermen would have been guilty of piracy and the S.R.V.—or at least the Cong An—would have sanctioned it by imprisoning me.

We reached a compromise of sorts: I agreed that I'd planned to come to Vietnam without a visa and would have been arrested on land, anyway, as part of my plan, and that lacking a detailed log, I couldn't prove that I had been in international waters when seized.

That in itself was encouraging, beyond the point of law: They seemed to accept the idea that coming ashore and being arrested was what I had had in mind. Did that mean the "secret purpose" idea had been shelved?

Then my hopes took a dive again. The interrogators started on my infiltrations into Laos and Cambodia with anti-Vietnamese resistance forces. They read me an astounding law: It's against Vietnamese law to enter Laos or Cambodia without a visa. My protest that these "crimes" had taken place five years earlier made no difference. They added up the years and the fines and told me that my punishment might amount to 80 years and $800,000.

"But the policy of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam allows you to apply for clemency to the chairman of the council of ministers," they told me. "There is no guarantee you will get it; anyone may apply. Everything depends on your attitude."

At the next session, the old man said, "Well, do you want to write your request for clemency?"

"Yes, naturally."

"Here's what I suggest you say."

I wrote what they suggested, including the fact that I'd been a soldier in the U.S. Army of aggression (that made me, according to early interrogators, liable for prosecution as a war criminal). At the end, I added something of my own: that I hoped my reason for coming to the S.R.V. illegally, to get permission to marry a Vietnamese girl, would enter into the minister's consideration for clemency.

"We accept that that was your purpose," the interpreter said.

Now he tells me.

Then they looked at one another and started beaming in a kind of complicity. "Do you know Dick Childress?"

Christ, I thought, Dick is the National Security Council's highest ranking official for Southeast Asia and in charge of all dealings with Vietnam. And he's one of my best friends. For his sake—that is, for the sake of the delicate M.I.A. discussions he has regularly with the Vietnamese and the Laotians, and for my own, since I was sure the Cong An would see our friendship as sinister—I had never mentioned Dick. They're really going to nail me now, I thought.

The old man handed me a letter. Surely, that was the first time a letter from the Executive Office of the President had been seen in that prison.

"Dear Rob," the letter said. "I've been officially notified by the Vietnamese government that you are being held by local authorities. Your family is fine, have never given up hope and look forward to your safe, speedy return. Be patient and I'll buy you a meal when you return. As ever, Richard T. Childress, Director of Asian Affairs."

•

My release was due to Dick's never having given up trying to learn what had happened to me and his eventually coming across accounts from boat people in refugee camps that an American had gone to Qui Nhon in a small boat, had asked for his fiancée and had been arrested. Too close to my story to be coincidence, that, in effect, proved I had made it to Vietnam. Dick suggested to the foreign-ministry officials with whom he worked that they might check with their local officials again, because it sure did look as if I had made it, and maybe a new look would turn up some news. A month later, they determined that those old boys out in the provinces did have me after all.... A hell of a surprise.

At the end of the week, there was nothing. Another week. Another. And then a month. I was beside myself. What was happening?

Then one morning, "Get ready to go to work."

We didn't go to the interrogation room but to a larger one down the hall. It was filled with people, some seated around a U-shaped table, others standing up and taking pictures and video-taping.

Mercifully early in the proceedings, it was announced that the prime minister had granted clemency. Those formalities were an "administrative settlement" by the People's Committee of Nghia Binh Province.

When I got back to the cell, it had been cleaned and there was a load of food big enough to feed three men and piles of fruit arranged like a hotel welcome basket. Several jailers stood around like waiters, urging me on, as if I needed it. Then the man with the video camera walked in and said, "Don't mind me."

Later, a jailer came back and said I'd be put on the first plane out when my parents paid the several-thousand-dollar fine imposed. Hubris and everything except the few things I had with me would be confiscated. He gave me a shirt and a pair of shoes.

About eight o'clock the next morning, they told me to get ready to leave. I walked out of that cell for the last time an hour later. They put me in a VIP lounge at the airport; there was a bevy of officials on hand, pushing lots of forced bonhomie. I was given assurances that if I wished to return for Mai, I would simply have to apply for a visa to do so. A tall man walked up and said in Oxford English with all the unction due a respected guest, "I have the honor to inform you that Colonel Dick Childress will be arriving in a few minutes to take you to Bangkok."

Dick walked in and I hugged him as if he were life itself, and he was. When no one was looking, I slipped the sharpened piece of metal out of my mouth and dropped it at my feet.

•

Not long after I arrived in the U.S., I got a letter from Mai. She had learned from news reports about my attempts to gain her release. She wrote: "Dear Rob! I write to you in the greatest happiness of mind. Freedom was given back to you! All the worries and longing overloading my heart flew away. I felt as if I personally was released. As soon as the speaker announced the hero's name, I wanted to run through mountains, valleys and oceans in search of him so that I might offer him my admiration, gratitude and love. I was all the more determined in my love and desire to be with you and to care for you. I heard your own voice, too, which I thought I should never hear again in my life."

•

I had gone back to Vietnam for Mai and my honor. I had achieved nothing tangible for Mai, but at least she now knew that I had done all there was to be done. I suppose I had got my precious honor back, but without success to go with it, honor meant very little.

Was I wrong to have tried? I think the question is meaningless. I don't see how there ever was a choice—giving up is not a choice; it's only giving up.

Perhaps that is why my return to the United States in the late summer of 1986 was so frustrating. I took Dick's advice and waited for the slow rounds of diplomacy to secure Mai's freedom. But waiting is not what I do best. Nor Mai: Since 1975, she had tried twice to escape by boat and was caught and jailed both times. I knew she would try again. But even jail is better than what can happen to young women when a refugee boat is hit by pirates.

As it happened, my fears were well founded; in December 1987, I learned that Mai had made a third attempt to escape from Vietnam.

Ever since my release, I had been trying to persuade Mai and her brother not to go through with their plans: for her to escape overland, then board a small boat that would try its luck among the pirates and other perils in the sea. I kept hoping, and writing to Mai with no real conviction of my own, that the Communists would act on their 1986 assurances and let me go back for her, working things out through paperwork and patience.

But late last fall, her letters stopped. I knew then that she had gone underground to begin her escape attempt. As the silence persisted, I railed at her brother, who had made the arrangements from outside Vietnam. As the weeks went by, even he seemed to lose faith in his dangerous plan.

In the end, the silence was broken. Mai literally surfaced, wading ashore at night from where her boat had dropped her 100 yards out. Exhausted, helpless and unprotected, she was met at knife point by one of an army of thieves who go down to the shore every night, waiting for the sea to deliver the next wave of victims.

A man she'll never know saw what was happening, drove away the attacker and led her to the local police station. She stayed there with other refugees from other boats for ten days, when she was sent to a refugee camp. (Because of circumstances in the camp, it's best not to say where it is.)

Her brother relayed the joyous news to me, and suddenly our impossible reunion was just a plane flight away.

•

Two weeks after her placement in the camp, Mai was looking for some sewing materials at the refugee market place. A friend of hers pushed through the crowd and said, "Come outside quick, quick; someone is here to see you."

She went out into the light, shielding her eyes against the bright sun. She saw me just after I saw her, and there was a look on her face that no man deserves. In a moment, her head was on my chest.

Everybody around us—all refugees who had lost home, country, spouses, children, parents and everything they owned—was standing in the dust of that strange land smiling for two people who had won.

•

We had one day together. I will probably not be able to see Mai again until she leaves the camp. It's a tightly controlled place, and I got permission to go in only through the intercession of the U.S. embassy. Even now, 13 years after the war ended, the rate of new arrivals is up, and the governments of Southeast Asian countries—responding to emigration caps placed by Western countries—have ordered their navies to begin driving the refugee boats back out to sea.

Mai was fortunate to have made it when she did. As it is, she must wait a minimum of five months while her immigration papers are ground through the bureaucracies of two countries.

•

Looking back on our few hours together in Mai's narrow, curtained space in the camp, it strikes me how strangely our story mirrors the larger story of the war.

America went into Vietnam with such good intentions, but then, to its own great cost in every sense, it became partners with the enemy and destroyed the country it set out to save. I sailed to the remnants of that country to help Mai and managed only to put her and her family into danger, my own parents through the grief of believing that they had lost their only child and myself into a situation that could well have made that a reality.

But when I think back on my time with Mai and remember how she had laughed as she told me how the Cong An had tried to convince her that I had a wife and three children back in the States, I figure that right there—in that dusty refugee camp—is where the awful parallel ends. The war is long over, but Mai and I live on.

"Their front command element surfaced like the fin of a shark. We waited for the strike."