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RECOLLECTIONS: Little Pink Pages and One Big Lie

By Dave Curry

Philippines
By Dave Curry
VVAW National Office Staff

Earlier this year, Colonel James Rowe was terminated with prejudice by unidentified assassins in an exclusive suburb of Manila in the Republic of the Philippines. Commander of Joint United States Military Advisory Group, Colonel Rowe, a former Vietnam POW, is the kind of soldier that most of us would have expected to have been honored extraordinarily in death. However, his body arrived in the U.S. without fanfare. There was no overt attention from the President, no special recognition for this man who was one of the highest ranking logistics officers in the Philippines.

I think I know the reason. Colonel Rowe wasn't exactly a logistics officer. He was something more—something much more. In fact, Colonel Rowe was once a teacher of mine, but it wasn't in logistics school.

Rowe's lessons were in person, though they weren't personally presented. They were lessons that as memories would join me and my fears during the first part of my tour in Vietnam. More important than lessons about weapons and strategy, Major Rowe's lessons were about people—people as instruments and objects of war both declared and undeclared. My experiences of James Rowe, the teacher, occurred at Fort Holabird in Dundalk, just outside Baltimore, Maryland, in 1970.

When I was a student there, demonstrators picketed the gates of Ft. Holabird protesting scab lettuce in the mess halls. Just inside the gates, beyond the demonstrators with their anti-lettuce signs, were rooms filled with tens of thousands of files on American dissidents. Large rooms. Well before the current age of computerization, there were computerized file systems on "key" radicals. Twenty-four hours a day, second lieutenants watched all three major TV networks ready to preserve on videotape anything that might be of interest to or in violation of national security. (Actually, I've always thought that despite the dangers of soap opera addiction theirs was an enviable job.) Ft. Holabird was the nerve center of Army intelligence. Army intelligence made national news in the early seventies for outstripping all of its competition—the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and other military service intelligence agencies—in efforts at domestic surveillance.

I was in the "research" officers course. Its name had just been changed from "counter intelligence" course. In fact, many of the materials were still marked "counterintelligence." The MOS had stayed the same—9666 or simply "triple six" in the trade—through it's changed now. For five months, each day we took classes on all the tricks of our trade. (Actually, five weeks were sacrificed to map reading and typing.) There was an $18.10 per day TDY (temporary duty) pay to help us deal with any tedium. We had classes on surveillance and subject interviews (still called interrogations by some). There were even near comical exercises in which we followed people around downtown Baltimore. Actors portrayed ordinary Americans from whom we attempted to extract information about their friends and relatives while our classmates watched from the other side of a one-way mirror. We took notes during our classes in little red notebooks with lined pink pages officially marked "SECRET" at the bottom of each page on both sides. Our notebooks were kept locked in a file safe in the front of our home classroom. During preparation for tests, the class security officer (one of the captains, more senior than the assortment of second and first lieutenants who made up the general throng) would be responsible for signing out each student's notebook for supervised study.

Amidst the more boring stuff on how tow rite reports to ruin people's careers, Major Rowe's class was unquestionably a treat for young male hormones longing for adventure. For one thing, it was really "SECRET." While many of our classes were "CONFIDENTIAL," most were only "NOFORN"—that is, not for foreign nationals. Major Rowe's class was taught by video (in those days an innovation in itself). It was not only SECRET, it had real surprises that we hadn't already heard in the news. These facts we would NEVER hear in the news. The most shocking of the not-for-prime-time facts was that Major Rowe was ONE OF US! James Rowe, a military intelligence officer, had been captured and held by the National Liberation Front in Vietnam, and he'd never been discovered. What he wanted us to know was that we could do it too, if only we could learn the lessons that he could teach us about dealing with hostile representatives of the third world.

As far as we in his eager audience could tell, James Rowe had mastered the third world—body and mind. His personal story is the embodiment of that mastery. From the very beginning, his relationship with his Vietnamese captors was a successful falsehood. The Vietnamese had believed Rowe's collar insignia and identification that said that he was a member of the crops of engineers. In Rowe's account, his Vietnamese captors had believed his story of his imaginary career as an engineer. Every minute of his dealings with the Vietnamese had been a lie or the manipulation of a lie to project a new lie. Major Rowe was lecturing a new class of neophyte Military Intelligence guys just like he had been. He wanted to let us know that we, too, could deceive people of the third world even if we were under the gun, under their control, as he had been. One of his key strategies was to construct our lies in layers. The more elaborate and detailed the initial lie, the longer its durability. The more powerful the lie that lay behind that first lie, the greater the chance for success, because it could always be presented with the air of confession in the context of a truth confided after days, months, or years of personal contact. Major Rowe's ability to develop his lies had made it possible for him to survive and wait until he could overcome his captors. This was the substance of the details of Rowe's presentation.

In the years following my exposure to James Rowe's lesson, I went to serve as a counter-intelligence officer in Vietnam in my own right. I followed Rowe's teaching until I grew sick of serving the interest of corporations in supposedly duping the people of the so-called developing nations. I wore civilian clothes. In my pocket, I often carried identification that said I was a civilian government service worker in logistics. One of my units was called Military Manpower Detachment. I identified Vietnamese dissidents for assassination or incarceration without trial. I identified American citizens for further scrutiny and defamation. Finally, I just couldn't handle it and became a dissident myself.

Major Rowe became Lieutenant Colonel Rowe, then Colonel Rowe. He served as head of the counterinsurgency school at Ft. Bragg. He trained many more MI guys just like me and just like himself. It is said that in his role in the Philippines, Colonel Rowe masterminded a low intensity war against the people of the Philippines The death squads that have become such an aggravation to human rights advocates in the Philippines are said to have been his brain children. Finally, though, Colonel James Rowe died of bullet wounds inflicted on him despite the fact that he was riding in a specially purchased bullet-proof Toyota. For the people of the third world, the last lie has peeled away. But for most Americans, the layers of lies are still intact. Colonel Rowe reported back to his country in his coffin and was met with the silence usually reserved for one of us MI guys.