McKinley Nolan with his common-law wife and family in Southeast Asia. The photo is said to have been taken by the Viet Cong. Courtesy Dan Smith
Cham Sone, center, tells Dan Smith, left, about McKinley Nolan's life in the Cambodian village of Chamkar Cafe. Smith's interpreter, Koung Thol, listens at right. Courtesy Dan SmithThe Daily News online
TDN.com
Saturday, May 31, 2008
By Tony Lystra
Part 1 of a two-part series
At night, Dan Smith sees the face of McKinley Nolan, the Vietnam war traitor, the man who wandered into the jungle and, according to the U.S. government, joined the Viet Cong. He can’t shake the image. The high cheekbones. The narrow nose. The blank, fearful stare in the black-and-white photo he keeps.
For more than two years, Smith, who lives in Kelso, has been searching for Nolan, an Army corporal who, in 1967, abandoned his unit and set out for neighboring Cambodia. The U.S. labeled Nolan a defector, saying he collaborated with the communists and dispatched messages urging his fellow black soldiers to oppose the war. Nobody’s exactly sure where Nolan is today.
None of it would have anything to do with Smith, a 57-year-old retired 911 dispatcher who lost his right leg in Vietnam. Except, in 2005, Smith says, he encountered a man vaguely matching Nolan’s description near the Cambodian border.
Smith has promised the Nolan family that he will find out what happened to the corporal. He has been researching the case with Henry Corra, a New York documentary filmmaker, Nolan’s brother Michael, and Richard Linnett, a New Jersey journalist. (Linnett wrote a story about Smith’s search, which appears in this month’s Penthouse magazine.)
In the last two years, Smith said, he has traveled to Cambodia twice to search for the missing soldier, most recently in April. He has talked with villagers who said they knew Nolan. And, Smith said, he’s passed along tips to U.S. officials, who have become particularly cagey about the subject.
Smith has at times declared he’s done with the hunt, that it’s taken over his life. Then comes another late-night call from his friend and interpreter in Cambodia, and again he’s talking about going back to resolve the mystery once and for all.
“People have accused me of obsession with this,” Smith said last week. “I even thought, ‘Man, am I going nuts? Am I really blowing this out of proportion?’ ”
“I have tried to let go of this thing and I just can’t,” he said. “It’s something I’ve got to see through, wherever it takes me.”
Smith, a sergeant with the Army’s First Infantry Division, arrived in Vietnam in 1969, two years after McKinley Nolan is said to have deserted. Smith said he operated in the same areas that Nolan had.
In 1971, Smith was shot seven times during a Viet Cong ambush near Bon Loc. The injuries left him without a good portion of his right leg. He declined last week to talk about the battle, or his tours. But, he said, “Once you kill someone it destroys you for the rest of your life.... The war’s never going to be over for me. I used to think it would be. I’m going to suffer through this until my dying day.”
Those who have been working with Smith to find Nolan said this isn’t merely a detective story. It’s about redemption. Making up for the past. Helping a family that hurts. Finding peace. By tracking down a deserter he’s never met, they suggested, maybe Smith can find something of himself again.
Smith, with his bushy mustache, Camel cigarettes and an intense yet pleading voice, has been searching for some sort of atonement for years. In 2002, he began saving his money and flying into Saigon, Vietnam’s capital. He’d buy up crutches and wheelchairs, he said, then haul them into the countryside for poor villagers. He’d also dig wells, talk with the locals, listen to their stories.
It was during one of these humanitarian trips in 2005 that, Smith said, he visited Tay Ninh, a rapidly modernizing Vietnamese city near the Cambodian border. Smith said he had fought there more than three decades earlier, when it was little more than a rural village.
“It was the most horrifying place I had been in my life,” he said.
He had worked up enough courage to return. And now, as he walked the streets, Smith said, he spotted a black man standing near a building. People of African descent are rare in Southeast Asia. But there was something else about this man, Smith said. This guy somehow looked like an American G.I.
As he approached, Smith said, the man backed into an alcove, as though he were trying not to be seen.
“I looked at the guy and said, ‘Hey, are you an old soldier?’ ”
The man said yes.“He didn’t really say much,” Smith recalled.
“He kept looking over my head.”When Smith asked his name, the man said, “Call me Buller.”
“Buller,” who said he was from Texas, spoke broken English, as if it were rusty. His teeth were rotted out, the whites of his eyes yellow. He looked “very thin, haggard,” Smith said.Smith mentioned he was headed back to the States soon.
“And that’s when he said a real odd thing,” Smith recalled. “He said, ‘Man, I wish I could go home.’ Like a real deep regret.”
When Smith asked if the pair could have a picture together, the man waved him off and hustled away.
Then, Smith said, a local, who had been watching this exchange, ran across the street and explained none-too-subtly that the man was an “American V.C.”
“Oh my God,” Smith recalls thinking. “I wonder if this guy’s a deserter.”
When he returned to Saigon, he said, he spoke with an American official charged with finding missing G.I.s. The investigator, Smith said, mentioned that it sounded like the case of McKinley Nolan, who was known to go by the nickname “Buller.”
He also suggested Smith might have encountered another missing American, or someone who had taken Nolan’s identity as a fraud.
‘Oppose the dirty war’
Nolan, of Washington, Texas, appears to have had a promising military career at first. He joined the Army in 1965 and went to Vietnam the following year, according to press reports from the 1970s. He left behind a wife and son.
Nolan was awarded a Purple Heart, although the nature of his injury is unclear. Then something changed. Nolan apparently began wandering away from his unit and was reported absent without leave on several occasions, the news reports said. He disappeared for good on Nov. 9, 1967.
Four years later, U.S. officials wrote Nolan’s wife and said he had been seen “in the company of Viet Cong forces,” according to a United Press International story. The UPI reported that Nolan had also been seen alive in Cambodia seven years after he’d gone missing.
It was “not clear whether Nolan was a prisoner or a collaborator with the communists,” the account said. “However, returned American POWs said they had seen an American moving freely among the Viet Cong troops and apparently working for them.”
The New York Times and Chicago Tribune reported in 1973 that Nolan had been “working in North Vietnamese prison camps and preparing propaganda.” A story in the Times said Nolan was “warmly received” by the communists. It also said he had taken a wife and “moves freely through prison camps in the jungle.”
In 1968, according to press accounts, Nolan was said to have been dispatching letters and radio broadcasts to black U.S. troops, telling them to “oppose the dirty war.”
Picking up the trail
Smith hadn’t heard of Nolan until after the 2005 Tay Ninh encounter. But now, he said, he was angry. He thought of his friends killed in the war and wondered if Nolan had a hand in it.
“There’s a difference between killing the enemy and killing your own people,” he said.
He said he began talking with officials from the U.S. Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command, or JPAC, which tracks lost soldiers.
It seems every village in Southeast Asia has a story about a missing American G.I., Smith said. The villagers bring out old U.S. pistols and tell wild stories of how they were procured. They lead visitors to helicopter wreckage wound tight with vines. There’s also a black market for American bones, he said. And many of the locals want to trade tips for money. (Smith said he never paid anyone for information in his search for Nolan.)
Smith said he relayed to American officials the stories he’d heard from the villagers during his trip, including his strange encounter in Tay Ninh. He said he even picked two photos of Nolan from a photo lineup. He was just trying to help, he said last week, and the officials seemed open, friendly and interested at first. Then, Smith said, when he followed up with a phone call weeks later to see if his tips had been useful, JPAC officials stopped talking to him.
JPAC’s coyness piqued Smith’s interest. He still wanted to know if the man he’d seen in Tay Ninh really was Nolan. And, Smith said, he wanted to find Nolan, if in fact that’s who he’d seen, and bring him home to face trial.
“I really had this bent to get him,” he said.
‘What the hell, let's talk to this guy'
Smith decided to track down the Nolan family. Early last year, he got a good lead from the sheriff’s office in Washington County, Texas, where Nolan was from. The sheriff’s office reached out to the Nolans, who in turn called Richard Linnett, the New Jersey journalist and author who had been researching the McKinley Nolan story.
Linnett had befriended the Nolans and also planned to write a book about the family’s story. In an interview last week, Linnett said he’d tabled the project after the Sept. 11 attacks because publishing houses were suddenly looking for stories about American heroes, not “anti-heroes.”
But Linnett said he was intrigued when Nolan’s brother, Michael Nolan, told him a Vietnam vet from Washington state claimed to have seen someone resembling McKinley Nolan in Vietnam. The story was particularly strange, Linnett said, because he suspected Nolan was dead.
Michael Nolan, though, had long hoped that his brother had survived and was willing to meet with Smith. Linnett recalled Michael telling him, “What the hell, let’s talk to this guy. Let’s see what he has to say.”
Linnett arranged a meeting for Smith at the Nolan home in Texas. He also called Henry Corra, a New York documentary filmmaker, to see if he was interested in the story.
On an afternoon in the spring of 2007, Smith sat in the front yard of the Nolan residence, ringed by McKinley’s family members — including his wife, Mary, and son, Roger. Smith told the story of the man he saw in Tay Ninh. The Nolan family craned their necks in the damp, Texas heat, soaking in every word.
Smith told the family he wasn’t sure if he’d truly seen Nolan or not, but he couldn’t rule it out.
Michael Nolan said by phone last week that Smith’s story “was very exciting news.... It was joy. No doubt about it.”
Still, Michael said he was leery of Smith, who, he said, appeared to be on a macho, gung-ho mission.
“His intentions were to try and capture my brother,” Michael said. “My first impression wasn’t good.”
And yet, Michael said, the family had hardly heard anything about Nolan since the 1970s. U.S. officials had been mum and wouldn’t release his records, he said. After years of silence, he welcomed any information about Nolan, even from a man who wanted to hunt him down and imprison him.
“Any search for him was good for me,” Michael said.
But Smith said he softened as the day wore on and his plans for Nolan changed.
“I was hugged. I was embraced. I was so well-received by this family,” he said last week, his throat tightening as he spoke.
Smith said Nolan’s wife, Mary, who remains married to her missing husband, and Roger, Nolan’s now-grown son, asked him, “if I would please try to find out what happened.”
“There were tears in their eyes,” Smith said. “I knew then, Jesus Christ, I needed to get this man home so he could be loved by his family, not rotting in a prison.”
Smith cried as he recalled the meeting.
“Two months later,” he said, “I was gone to Cambodia.”
The real McKinley?
Smith began pushing Linnett, the journalist, to go to Cambodia and retrace Nolan’s steps. Linnett protested that he was too busy with other projects. So, Smith said, he went on his own.
“I think Dan at first wanted to be a hero in a way,” Linnett said. “I saw in him a need to be respected again. He wanted people to believe that he still mattered, like he did back when he was a warrior, back when he was a soldier and a fighter. I think over the years he didn’t matter any more and he wanted to matter again.”
But Linnett said he saw a rare combination of passion and realism in Smith.
“I’ve been traveling in the world of POW-MIA people for a while, and there are a lot of nut cases in that world,” he said. “But I think he’s for real.”
Smith had to go back to Southeast Asia, Linnett said, “because he loved the place and he probably hated the place, too. It was a place (where) his friends died, where he saw incredible horror.”
Smith left for Cambodia in May of last year, carrying with him photos of Nolan as well as Linnett’s research on where Nolan had last been seen.
In the Cambodian town of Sangkum Mean Chey, near the Vietnam border, Smith said he met people who said they remembered Nolan. They led him to a Cambodian village about 50 miles away called Chamkar Cafe, where, they said, Nolan was last seen.
As Smith listened to the older villagers talk about Nolan, he began to get a different idea of the man his government had labeled a traitor.
Cham Sone, a man who said he’d been a friend of Nolan’s, patted the corporal’s photo and cried. People said they’d loved Nolan, Smith said. Some, it was rumored, had named their children after him.
“I swear to Christ, everybody I spoke with said the same thing, that they loved him. And they missed him,” he said.
Most astounding, Smith said, is that, based on what the villagers told him, Nolan may not have defected to the communist side. After he deserted his unit, according to Cambodian locals and news stories, Nolan took a half-Cambodian, half-Vietnamese common-law wife and tried to escape to Cambodia. But, the villagers said, Nolan and his family were captured by the Viet Cong. The communists, Smith said, may have used him as a propaganda tool, and there’s some indication they had planned to kill him. A Cambodian military official, who had taken a liking to Nolan, appears to have taken him off the Viet Cong’s hands, Smith said.
Smith said the villagers told him that Nolan was made to live in Sangkum Mean Chey, in a compound with several Cambodian soldiers. He was allowed to move freely (there was nowhere to go) and to cultivate his own rice paddy, Smith said.
Nolan had made friends of the villagers, Smith said. He shared his food and was known to help anyone who needed it.
Everything changed, he said, when the Khmer Rouge, the communist regime that slaughtered more than a million Cambodians, came to power in 1975. Soldiers forced Nolan and the villagers to march 50 miles from their homes in Sangkum Mean Chey to the Cambodian village of Chamkar Cafe.
Smith said the villagers told him that Nolan was forced to “work like a cow” in the coffee and corn fields. He cooked for the villagers. And, Smith said, Nolan was known to have stepped in front of Khmer Rouge soldiers and taken beatings on behalf of the villagers.
Nolan was also forced to haul the villagers to an interrogation room, where many were killed. All the way, Smith, said, Nolan is said to have apologized. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
“He would sing Cambodian songs to ease their pain,” Smith said. “He would try to tell jokes. He would try everything in the world to lift their spirits.”
Cham Sone told Smith that, in 1977, 10 years after he’d deserted, Nolan was bound and blindfolded, lead into a grove of rubber trees, and beaten to death by four Khmer Rouge soldiers. The soldiers, Smith said, didn’t want to shoot him, because they feared they would start a panic in the village.
When Nolan was dead, Smith said, the soldiers killed his common-law wife, his son, infant child and his dog.
Then, Smith said, the killing continued. The Khmer Rouge, he said, wiped out more than half the village.
Smith said that Cham Sone, who escaped the slaughter, led him to what is said to be Nolan’s shallow grave, beneath a cashew tree near the place where he died.
This was a far different Nolan than the man Smith expected to find. Nolan “screwed up” when he deserted, Smith said. “He had to have been a scared kid. I was a scared kid when I was there.”
And yet, Smith said he suspects Nolan stayed in Chamkar Cafe, even though he could have easily escaped, to protect the villagers from the Khmer Rouge.
“Thirty years after his death, he’s still got villagers that cry over him,” he said. “The guy did something right.”
Tomorrow in Part 2: Dan Smith and the documentary team return to Cambodia, Smith wonders who, exactly, he saw in Tay Ninh, and the U.S. Government discusses the McKinley Nolan case.
