Jungle Rules Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Chapter 1 - FIRST LOOK

  Chapter 2 - DICKY DOO AND THE DON’TS

  Chapter 3 - RAYMOND THE WEASEL

  Chapter 4 - MAJOR DANGER

  Chapter 5 - LIKE MEAT ON A STICK

  Chapter 6 - “AIN’T ANY QUEER INDIANS”

  Chapter 7 - THE JUDAS KISS

  Chapter 8 - THE BODY

  Chapter 9 - CHINA BEACH PARTY

  Chapter 10 - THE SETUP

  Chapter 11 - TROLLS’ REVENGE

  Chapter 12 - THE MEASURE OF A FOOL

  Chapter 13 - I GIVES THE BEAST A LIGHT

  Chapter 14 - “MAJOR, OH, MAJOR!”

  Chapter 15 - THE CHU LAI HIPPIE

  Chapter 16 - THE GATHERING

  Chapter 17 - PENANCE AND CONSPIRACY

  Chapter 18 - “ONE BLACK MOTHERFUCKER”

  Chapter 19 - THE RIOT

  Chapter 20 - THE RAGE

  Chapter 21 - JAILHOUSE JUSTICE

  Chapter 22 - GACA

  Chapter 23 - “GOOD-BYE, RUBY TUESDAY”

  INDEX

  About the Author

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  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Copyright © 2006 by Charles Henderson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form

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  eISBN : 978-1-4406-1979-3

  Henderson, Charles, 1948-

  Jungle rules : a true story of Marine justice in Vietnam / by Charles

  Henderson.

  p. cm.

  Includes index.

  1. Trials (Military offenses)—Vietnam. 2. Courts-martial and courts

  of inquiry—United States—History. 3. United States. Marine Corps

  —History—Vietnam War, 1961-1975. 4. Vietnam War, 1961-1975

  —United States. I. Title.

  KF7654.3.H46 2006

  959.704’3—dc22

  2006023917

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For my friends Geoff Lyon and John Reynolds,

  Marine Corps lawyers,

  and for my pal John Britt,

  the Mustard King

  Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.

  —Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

  FOREWORD

  MOST MEN AND women who served in the U.S. Marine Corps, or who have lived in the company of a Marine, will quickly recognize the meaning of this book’s title, Jungle Rules. Unlike its literary derivative, Robert Service’s poem “Law of the Yukon,” the term, “Jungle Rules” has little to do with rules that apply to life in a jungle setting and nothing at all to do with a jungle itself. In fact, if the truth were known, the term more likely came from some Stateside origin quite remote from any tropical rain forest and more likely in a sandlot.

  “Jungle Rules” is a sports term describing a method loosely governing the play of a game. In other words, when observing Jungle Rules one overlooks many of a sport’s fouls or penalties that seem petty and that get in the way of the game’s fun, such as allowing tackling in flag football, or hockey-style body checking under the boards when battling for rebounds in a basketball game. Marines use Jungle Rules when playing unorganized contests of baseball, football, basketball, soccer, or any other team sport encumbered by too many rules that tend to overly slow down play. So they just don’t bother to call most fouls or penalties, unless the infraction is so harsh or blatant that it stops the game itself. Then they may step off five yards or allow two free throws, while they drag the victim of the penalty to the sidelines for resuscitation and medical care.

  Jungle Rules, therefore, are very flexible standards that are open to broad interpretations. Playing a game by Jungle Rules is usually rough, and adherence to any specific rules of a sport depends purely on the participants’ senses of fair play and sportsmanship. Generally, there are no referees.

  Throughout much of the history of the armed services of the United States, military regulations and the administration of justice also had broad interpretations and varying applications. Justice itself relied mainly on the sensibilities of the officer who held command over the individual who broke the rules.

  For more than a hundred years, U.S. military law was based on the 1774 British Articles of War. Until 1951, nearly four years following the creation of the Department of Defense, unifying the military services, each armed force branch had its own separate regulations, system of justice, and application of existing military law.

  The need to create a single, uniform system of military justice became clear during World War II. Until then, the United States had only a small standing army and navy, and the “Rocks and Shoals,” a popular term that described the 1774 British Articles of War, along with a few updated amendments pertinent to the navy or the army at the time, seemed to suffice, although some legal historians may successfully argue that the Rocks and Shoals denied justice and constitutional guarantees to those tried under them.

  However, the need for a major retooling of the military justice system became clear during World War II, when the United States put more than sixteen million men and women in uniform, and conducted more than two million courts-martial during the war years. Throughout the nearly four years of U.S. participation in World War II, the military obtained on average sixty general courts-martial convictions each day of the war, and totaled more than eighty thousand felony convictions. Many of the courts-martial involved infractions that dealt with rules governing good order and discipline, and outside the military community the committed acts would not hav
e violated any civilian laws.

  America’s first secretary of defense, James V. Forrestal, who assumed his newly created office on September 17, 1947, realized that the same logic that required unifying the armed forces under the Department of Defense also required a uniform code of justice for the military consistent with the U.S. Constitution and the command authority of the president.

  Thus, in 1950, Congress enacted Title 10 of the U.S. Code, Sections 801 through 946, known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Manual for Courts-Martial. The UCMJ and MCM embodied a full system of laws and directives for the administration of justice pertaining to those laws. The UCMJ and MCM went into effect the following year.

  By the mid-1960s, with the advent of the conflict in South Vietnam, many federal lawmakers began to recognize various shortcomings within that version of the UCMJ and MCM, many of which dealt with the qualifications of defense counsel, trial judges, and who might hold authority over these judges and lawyers. Accordingly, Congress made a number of sweeping revisions to the UCMJ and MCM. As a result of those changes, during 1967 and 1968 military lawyers found themselves struggling through a period of uncertain transition from the old UCMJ and MCM to the newer version. Understanding was often nebulous at best. Interpretation of the rules frequently depended on who read them.

  That period in South Vietnam left the judges and lawyers tasked to defend and prosecute cases in an often frustrating state, trying to adapt order from an unsettled system. It took several years for the military judges and lawyers to finally settle on some consistent interpretations of the new UCMJ and MCM. In the meantime, the application of justice took on the nature of playing the game by Jungle Rules.

  The events described in Jungle Rules are taken from actual transcripts of trials and investigations, primarily conducted by military lawyers assigned to the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, First Marine Aircraft Wing, during 1967 and 1968. Therefore, the stories told in Jungle Rules are true, at least inasmuch as the court transcripts, investigation records, and testimony reflect.

  However, except for those people of obvious prominence or historic importance, such as Lieutenant General Robert E. Cushman, Jr., the commanding general of the III Marine Amphibious Force in Da Nang, or President Lyndon B. Johnson, the names, and backgrounds of many of the characters in Jungle Rules have been altered.

  The Marines who committed most of the offenses described in Jungle Rules paid their penalties decades ago. Dredging up these people’s sometimes painful pasts could possibly cause harm to some who today may live respectable lives. They deserve to be left alone. The lawyers and some of the other Marines in Jungle Rules may prefer to be left alone, too. The true identities of any of these people would contribute little to the stories in this book.

  However, the events surrounding the people in Jungle Rules are true.

  Lastly, the idea that gave birth to this book came to me from a friend who deserves a great deal of thanks and rightful acknowledgment for his contributions. That friend is John C. Reynolds, an attorney who served as a Marine captain in South Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, assigned as a lawyer to the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, First Marine Aircraft Wing in Da Nang.

  I came to know John Reynolds in New York City in 1986 while I lived and worked there. We became good friends. During that time he told me many stories about cases that he and others tried in Da Nang, and about a riot that took place in the brig on Freedom Hill in August 1968.

  As those war stories amassed and grew more interesting, before long the idea for Jungle Rules began to take hold. In 1987, as I drafted the first outline for the Jungle Rules project, first envisioning it primarily as a motion picture screenplay, John Reynolds answered my questions and clarified issues about the circa 1968 military justice system, and the way things were done at First MAW Law.

  Although we had fun developing the outline, and sometimes argued over trivial ideas, the project never really got anywhere. John Reynolds even went to the trouble of registering the outline with the Writers’ Guild in New York in 1987, as a potential motion picture, but nobody at that time expressed any interest in a project about a brig riot and lawyers in Vietnam. In time, our interests in the project also waned, and the outline soon took residence in my file drawer for nearly twenty years.

  I left New York in 1990, and that is the last time I saw or heard from John Reynolds. In the summer of 2004, when at long last I knew that Jungle Rules would finally be a book, I tried to find my old friend and tell him the good news. Despite my repeated efforts through every means I could imagine, as of publication of the book I have not been able to locate him.

  I feel bad that we did not stay in touch after I moved from New York City. I hope that today John Reynolds is well and happy.

  Charles Henderson

  Chapter 1

  FIRST LOOK

  DOGPATCH.

  To get there from anyplace in Da Nang, just follow the smell.

  Rusted tin, cardboard, broken stucco, discarded cars, mud and thatch. All of it pinned, nailed, or wired together by desperate hands of humankind’s abandoned. A patchwork blanket of crap that spreads a square mile. Shacks, hovels, junk piles, hardly any of them providing real shelter, but all of them representing the overcrowded homes for the slum’s wretched inhabitants. Mostly shoved wall against wall, their roofs overlapping, these haphazard dins offer just enough space out front for a bicycle pushed by a skinny person to squeeze past.

  Slime-caked trenches carry a constant trickle of sewer water running alongside the narrow, hard-pac pathways that meander through the ramshackle maze. Flowing over or through the decaying body of a dead cat here, a dead rat there, spilling out of the ditch into big puddles that gather at every turn, the pestilent runoff wreaks a foul stench that adds a pronounced flavor to the dank, smoke-enriched air that wafts across Da Nang.

  Pigs, chickens, half-naked kids dart about the dark alleys of Dogpatch. A black-toothed old grandma tosses out a pan full of liquid, feeding the putrid trench in front of her home, while inside the dismal little warren where she had emerged, another black-toothed woman squats on the dirt floor by a charcoal fire, stirring with a stick a boiling concoction of catch-as-catch-can stew. Tromping in the shadows, a dog with mangy blotched skin stretched over rib bones, spine, and hips looks warily for a handout. Dusty and sad, he may try to steal a grab-and-run meal while dodging a fate that could land him in a soup kettle. Like everyone else in Dogpatch, luck of the moment is all he has.

  Poverty, filth, and disease live in Dogpatch. So does corruption.

  Crime bosses stockpile heroin, guns, and black-market booze here, often in the backs of dope-den bordellos that overlook galleries surrounding blood-spattered plyboard arenas where around-the-clock gambling takes place: dog and cock fights, pitched battles between snakes and mongooses, and once in a while a death match between human combatants, kick-boxing to the finish. Whatever the game, here they play for keeps.

  In Dogpatch, it’s all for sale. Flesh, lives, homicide, oblivion.

  Need a matchbox, lid, or kilo of pot or something stronger? Hash or opium? Something more refined? Pills perhaps? Blues, yellow jackets, reds, uppers, downers? How about some LSD? Perhaps an ounce or two of H? Take your pick, China rock, Burma white, or regular old brown shit, dealers have ample stocks. Little shops with lots of incense burning in their fronts to attract hungry clients, sell the dope both retail and wholesale from under the counter. Out back, the storekeeper may just be finishing bagging out a fresh batch of Buddha, opium-soaked marijuana, a particular favorite among American GIs. A few tokes of a pin joint and the blue bus cruises into Wonderland.

  Need a man dead? Hits for hire come cheap in Dogpatch. Just ask one of the cowboys leaning in a shanty door with his opium stare and a gun stuffed in his waistband, under his shirt.

  Tucked within the slum, large villa-style houses surrounded by high, concrete walls with razor wire on top lay hidden here and there, obscured from most prying eyes. Quiet little whore far
ms. Ranches, they call them in Dogpatch-savvy American lingo. Prostitutes raised, trained, and put on the streets from these urban spreads. A steady flow of girl children bought or snatched from hungry, displaced families keeps the flesh trade fueled with a fresh array of new talent, made ready in Dogpatch for the street hustle in Da Nang.

  Guarded by a crew of armed cowboys, the rancher, usually a crime boss, dope-dealing, Murder, Inc., pimp, lives here in luxury with his harem. He dictates the rules. He writes the laws. He makes it worthwhile for the local constabulary to leave his territory alone. Not even the Communists bother him.

  That’s because people come here to get lost. To avoid. To disappear beneath the putrid tide. They don’t come here to fight anybody’s war. If anything, they come here to escape it.

  Dogpatch is the Deadwood of Da Nang. A haven for outlaws, addicts, and misfits desperate to get away.

  IN THE LATE fall of 1967, James Harris ran to Dogpatch after slipping off the leash of a dimwitted brig chaser. The indolent fatso guard had flopped into the jeep’s front seat, and casually left his prisoner to bounce on the back cargo floor, unwatched, sitting on his cuffed hands, while they drove from the Freedom Hill lockup to a preliminary hearing at the First Marine Aircraft Wing head shed, for Harris to face charges of dope peddling and insubordination.

  Before his jeep ride that morning, the ratty-looking Marine lance corporal had managed to grab a shower and a shave with a dull, donated razor, but still wore his same old oil-stained and dirt-encrusted utility trousers, and sleeveless, green T-shirt from the Da Nang Air Base flight line, where two days ago a pair of narcs from CID had stung him in a fake buy. They nailed him dead to rights with three dozen pin joints of Buddha, a couple more loose ounces of the stuff twisted in a plastic bag, a dozen packets of Zig-Zag regulars and big Bambu’ rolling papers, a hash pipe, some roach clips, and a thick pile of cash.