Congress gets an earful
"It's a good day to die," declared James Gordon ("Bo") Gritz. The date was Nov. 27, 1982, and Gritz, 44, a swashbuckling former Green Beret, was about to lead three American daredevils and 15 Laotians on an improvised commando raid across the Mekong River. Their scheme: a 14-day trek to rescue American prisoners of war in the jungles of eastern Laos. After only three days, however, the bravado of "Operation Lazarus" was abruptly buried when a band of local guerrillas ambushed the raiders, killing two Laotians, capturing an American, and forcing the others to turn tail.
Four weeks ago, after parting with $17,000 to ransom his captured colleague, seeing two fellow mavericks arrested, and attempting fresh tragicomic excursions into Laos, Gritz (rhymes with sights) sauntered into a police station in north eastern Thailand and surrendered. He and four associates were each fined for the illegal possession of a high-powered radio, then released.
Cool and self-assured as ever, Gritz swaggered into a new mission last week: explaining his bungled exploits to the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs. There, seasoning his testimony with heroic nourishes, he reaffirmed his conviction that at least 50 American servicemen are still stranded in Indochina. Under questioning, however, each of Gritz's "facts" seemed to dissolve into fiction. His photographs of alleged prison camps revealed nothing but Laotian terrain; his claims that he had heard of sighted prisoners were, he conceded, beyond empirical proof. Pressed for concrete evidence, the imperturbable Gritz finally replied, "I have the same evidence that might be presented to a convention of clergymen that God exists." After he stepped down, one witness after another demolished what little remained of his credibility.
Gritz's mission implausible grew out of the reality that 2,494 Americans were never found after the Viet Nam War, including 568 left unaccounted for in Laos. By now, all but two are listed as "presumed dead." Most of the 484 "sightings" reported over the years have been as hazy and hopeful as the spotting of UFOs. After investigating the issue closely, a 1976 congressional committee concluded that no American prisoners survive. Yet Vietnamese prevarication, U.S. Government secrecy, and resilient wishfulness — especially among the National League of Families (N.L.F.), most of whose members are related to missing men — have conspired to keep hope, if nothing else, alive.
Gritz, the son of a B-17 pilot shot down over France in 1944, is a self-appointed caretaker of those hopes. Decorated 60 times during the Viet Nam War, he once led 250 Cambodian mercenaries on a daring raid that attacked 53 Viet Cong camps in 60 days; he lost only one man. Even after he left the Army in 1979 as a lieutenant colonel, Gritz never really left Indochina. In 1981 he rounded up 21 drifters, dreamers and desperadoes, recruited a psychic, a hypnotherapist and some reporters, and began practicing quixotic Laotian expeditions at an unlikely locale: the American Cheerleading Association Academy in Leesburg, Fla.