Missing soldier's family finds clues to his fate in Cambodia

ERICH SCHLEGEL/SPECIAL CONTRIBUT / 138869
Mary Nolan holds a photo of her husband, McKinley Nolan, as son Rodger looks out the door of his mother's home in Texas. McKinley Nolan vanished from his Vietnam unit on Nov. 9, 1967.

THE SEATTLE TIMES (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

On Nov. 9, 1967, weeks from completing a two-year hitch in the Army, McKinley Nolan disappeared from his 1st Infantry Division unit. Communist Viet Cong propaganda broadcasts and leaflets later featured him urging fellow black soldiers to lay down their weapons.By Gregg Jones
The Dallas Morning News

DALLAS — McKinley Nolan's letters from South Vietnam to his wife in Texas hinted at his anguish. He wrote of playing dead to survive on the battlefield and the suffering of Vietnamese civilians.

"He was just telling me how bad it was over there, all the fighting, all the killing," Mary Nolan said.

There was no clue of what was to come.

On Nov. 9, 1967, weeks from completing a two-year hitch in the Army, McKinley Nolan disappeared from his 1st Infantry Division unit. Communist Viet Cong propaganda broadcasts and leaflets later featured him urging fellow black soldiers to lay down their weapons.

The Army branded Nolan as one of the war's two confirmed defectors but offered no explanation as to why he deserted or what happened to him.

Joining forces

McKinley's younger brother, Michael, has joined forces with a New Jersey journalist, a Vietnam War veteran, a New York filmmaker, a Hollywood star and a Houston congresswoman in hopes of unraveling the mystery.

Their efforts last month pushed the Pentagon's MIA search unit, the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC), to act on a witness's account and dig for McKinley Nolan's remains in a Cambodian village.

Michael Nolan, of Austin, flew to Cambodia to watch the U.S. team chip away at the Cambodian clay. It was the latest stop in a long journey to understand who his missing brother was: a deserter who turned his back on his country and his family or a hero who stood up to the Viet Cong and Khmer Rouge and paid with his life.

The Nolan case long has fascinated POW-MIA aficionados. It spawned such varied tales as Nolan quietly slipping home to Washington County, Texas, to his living the high life in Cuba as a guest of Fidel Castro.

"In the world of the conspiratorial POW-MIA guys, McKinley Nolan is like Bigfoot," said journalist Richard Linnett, who has spent years tracking missing Americans in Cambodia. "He's spotted everywhere."

As a rifleman in the Army's 16th Infantry Regiment, Nolan was based in Tay Ninh province, near the border with Cambodia. A Pentagon document shows he earned a Purple Heart and a Combat Infantry Badge.

The Army didn't respond to questions for this article.

By November 1967, Nolan was one of about 500,000 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam. A poll that fall found that 46 percent of Americans believed U.S. military involvement in Vietnam was a mistake. Black soldiers openly questioned why they should die for South Vietnamese freedom when they were denied equal rights at home.

If McKinley Nolan shared those sentiments, he didn't tell his wife.

"If he had a job, he did it," she said.

But Nolan's commitment to the Army was flagging. He was AWOL — absent without leave — from Sept. 7 to Nov. 6, 1967, according to the Pentagon document.

He was jailed for two days. Then, on Nov. 9, the 22-year-old disappeared.

Mary Nolan said the Army revealed little about her husband's disappearance. Months passed before she received a letter stating that Nolan had defected to Viet Cong forces, she said.

In January 1975, three months before the war ended, the Army notified her that her husband had been seen alive in Cambodia.

In 1992, a U.S. military team thought it had found Nolan's remains in Cambodia. But DNA tests proved negative.

Eight years later, Linnett, of Newark, N.J., stumbled onto Nolan's trail. Linnett was working on a book about a 1970 mutiny aboard an American freighter transporting napalm to U.S. forces in Thailand. One of the two mutineers, Clyde McKay, sought refuge with Khmer Rouge guerrillas and later was executed.

Linnett was searching for McKay's grave site in eastern Cambodia when a local resident pulled him aside. The villager told Linnett an intriguing story about a black GI who supposedly lived in the area during the time of the Khmer Rouge.

A Pentagon investigator told Linnett the villager was talking about McKinley Nolan.

"I thought this story was truly amazing," Linnett said. "This guy had lived with the Viet Cong and the Khmer Rouge."

Linnett pried loose U.S. military-intelligence documents and began sharing information with Michael and Mary Nolan.

Mysterious appearance

In 2006, Michael Nolan phoned Linnett with incredible news.

"He said, 'Richard, someone saw McKinley in Vietnam,' " Linnett recounted.

That someone was a Vietnam veteran named Dan Smith, and he had contacted the Washington County sheriff in search of Nolan's family.

Linnett was skeptical. He phoned Smith, a retired Pacific Northwest 911 operator who said he had lost a leg serving with the 1st Infantry Division in Vietnam. In 2005, he made one of his periodic trips to Vietnam to deliver medical supplies.

In the city of Tay Ninh, near the Cambodian border, Smith encountered a black man, about 60, with rotted teeth and jaundiced eyes. The man said he had served with the 1st Infantry Division in 1967.

When Smith mentioned he was going home soon, the stranger sighed.

"Man, I wish I could go home," he said.

"Where's home?" Smith asked.

"Washington, Texas," the man replied.

Smith reported the encounter to U.S. officials, and the Pentagon MIA search unit sent an investigator to his home. Smith said he picked two photographs of McKinley Nolan out of a mugshot book.

Afterward, Smith said the investigator refused to take his calls. So did the MIA unit.

But Linnett heard him out, and he arranged for Smith to tell his story in person to the Nolans.

Meanwhile, Linnett had piqued the curiosity of New York documentary filmmaker Henry Corra. When Smith arrived in Washington-on-the-Brazos, Texas, to meet the Nolans, Corra's camera was rolling.

After a tearful meeting with the Nolan family, Smith vowed to return to Southeast Asia to find the GI.

Trips to Cambodia came next, first Smith alone, then with Michael Nolan, Linnett and Corra. Smith became convinced the man he encountered in Tay Ninh was another U.S. deserter who had assumed Nolan's identity.

But the search continued, financed in part by actor Danny Glover, who agreed to produce Corra's documentary on the search for McKinley Nolan.

The group tracked the GI to a village outside the town of Memot, in eastern Cambodia, where a man named Cham Son recalled Nolan's life during the tumult of war and Khmer Rouge genocide.

Nolan's missing years emerged from the mists.

Friendly guy

When he arrived in Vietnam in 1966, Nolan was happily married, the father of a 2-year-old son. He was a friendly, muscular guy who loved baseball and horses.

By the time he disappeared in 1967, he had grown disillusioned with the war, said Linnett, citing interviews with Nolan's friends in Vietnam and Cambodia.

A Vietnamese girlfriend "convinced him to go with her," Linnett said.

It's unclear whether Nolan willingly worked with the Viet Cong, Linnett said.

In any event, Nolan grew disenchanted with the group and in 1973 slipped into Cambodia with his Vietnamese wife and their baby, Linnett said.

In eastern Cambodia, Nolan drove a truck and farmed, local residents told Linnett and Smith. When the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975 and emptied cities to return Cambodia to "Year Zero," Nolan was forced to move to a village deeper in the jungle.

"Because of his size and strength, they made him pull an ox cart loaded with people being taken to an interrogation center," Smith said. "Villagers said he would beg for their forgiveness."

Nolan told jokes and sang songs in pidgin Cambodian to lift people's spirits.

"He would literally step in front of guards to keep them from beating people," Smith said. "McKinley was a hero. Everybody there loved him."

In 1977, the villager Cham Son recounted, Khmer Rouge soldiers took Nolan away.

"He saw McKinley being marched off," Linnett said, "and knew when the soldiers came back without him that he had been killed."

Comfort in answers

In April 2008, after hearing that account, Linnett and his comrades gave the Pentagon's MIA search unit precise information on the suspected grave site.

Last month, after the Nolans enlisted the help of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, a JPAC team began excavating the site identified by Cham Son.

The team dug for two weeks in February but found no remains, said Air Force Lt. Col. Wayne Perry, JPAC spokesman. Cham Son, noting the terrain had changed, said he wasn't sure of the precise burial spot, Perry said.

The Nolans and Linnett, with Lee's help, are trying to force the Pentagon to release McKinley Nolan's personnel file and classified documents on the case. Linnett and Corra are tracking leads that they believe will lead to Nolan's remains in eastern Cambodia.

Mary Nolan, 62, never remarried. She believes the government should compensate her for her husband's loss.

"I should have been given a good explanation as to what happened, when, why," she said.

After years of anger at "the system" for taking his brother away, Michael Nolan said he found peace retracing McKinley's footsteps and seeing him through the eyes of Cambodian villagers who revered him.

"Whether he's dead or alive," Nolan said, "I feel he would be happy that we're bringing the truth to light."