The Book of Honor (25 page)

From the jungles of the Canal Zone, Deuel was dispatched to Langley to serve on the Laos desk, providing tactical and logistic support to the men in the field and acting as a transit point for outgoing orders and incoming intelligence. Deuel understood, as did everyone in the clandestine service, that Laos was center-stage in the struggle with Communism.

As far back as January 19, 1961—the day before Kennedy's inauguration—the incoming president and the outgoing Eisenhower had spent more time discussing the prickly issue of Laos than any other subject. Following a 1954 international agreement, Laos was to remain neutral, free of outside intervention and superpower meddling. But the Communists brazenly ignored such restraints, and the United States, in what came to be known as “the secret war,” fought bitterly to repel them and disrupt the tide of men and matériel that flowed through the country along the Ho Chi Minh Trail and into the hands of the North Vietnamese.

“Laos,” Kennedy once declared, “is far away from America, but the world is small . . . The security of all Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its neutral independence. Its own safety runs with the safety of us all—in real neutrality observed by all.” Instead of neutrality, Laos would be decimated by undeclared war. Not since the Bay of Pigs had the CIA staked so much on a single foreign gambit.

Deuel seized the first opportunity he had to go to Laos. Four members of his JOT class volunteered for that country assignment. Among them was his friend and colleague Dick Holm. Both he and Deuel thrived in the primitive backcountry. To his mother and father Mike Deuel wrote: “After about a week starts a job big and responsible enough to inspire equal parts of pleasure and panic. In times past, this combination has been enough to overcome my habitual mental lassitude; there may be cause for optimism . . . But, now to my rude bower. Tomorrow, I must fight off wild Asian tigers and semi-wild Eurasian girls. Once more into the Breech?”

It was not only the job that captivated Deuel but the physical splendor of Laos as well. “This area is volcanic,” he wrote. “A plateau dominates south Laos and then drops from the plateau are sheer and green. Throughout the year, huge waterfalls drop down to the lowlands around the plateau . . .”

It was a raw existence that Deuel lived, working fifteen to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, then collapsing in exhaustion. But he never lost his sense of humor. In time he acquired an odd and exotic menagerie of pets, including cats, dogs, monkeys, and civets. “Chou,” he wrote his parents, “is the horniest dog that God ever put on earth; he even stares at young girls. At age five months and height at the withers of 7½ inches, he sired a litter out of a middle aged female who stands 15 inches high. I am lost in admiration.” In time, his penchant for animals was jokingly referred to as “Deuel's Zoo.”

But it was work that kept Deuel's mind focused. At times he saw his role in almost Wagnerian terms, but was always quick to puncture any sense of self-importance. In a letter home, twenty-six-year-old Deuel wrote:

“In fact there are no dramatic reports a'tall a'tall. All is prosaic, too much so . . . I dream of glory and future excitements. Of course when I get them, I'll probably ask for the next boat home but I think the time has not yet come for the dread assassin of the sea to become the sacred defenders of the home.

“Besides, the Creeping Red Menace still threatens which should justify continued gainful employment for citizens abroad (and at home). Of course before you can fight the Reds, you must survive local traffic and VD—and that's no easy thing.”

At about the same time that Deuel arrived in Laos, a comely twenty-two-year-old CIA secretary named Judy Doherty was working back at Agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia. She was asked where she might like to be posted. She had grown up in the small coal-mining town of Bulpitt, Illinois, population 250. She had listed Paris and Rome and Lima, names out of a small-town fantasy. Some time later an Agency officer informed her she had been assigned to Bangkok, Thailand. She had never heard of it. In November 1962 she found herself working at the embassy there under State Department cover. There she met the dashing young Mike Deuel, though she had earlier caught the eye of both Deuel and his friend Dick Holm, when all three were still at Langley. Judith Doherty was far too pretty to have escaped the notice of men like Deuel and Holm. “We didn't walk blindfolded up and down the halls,” Dick Holm would say.

But it was Deuel who began courting Judy Doherty. “Saw my favorite secretary for two days in Bangkok,” Deuel wrote his father. “She showed her normal distrust of my intentions which gives evidence of good sense on her part. I'm not sure whether she was relieved or not to see me go.”

In late August 1964 Deuel “smuggled” Judy Doherty into Pakse, Laos, aboard one of the Air America planes at his disposal. His purpose was to give her a “cold-eyed look” at his lifestyle and to see how she might cope with it. His home was a farmhouse with high ceilings and many windows, a mix of French and Lao. His bed was a cotlike affair, a bamboo platform warmed by two blankets. Judy passed the test brilliantly. “She's so sensible that she's downright unromantic sometimes,” he wrote. “This is good. Starry eyes would not be an asset.”

“I'd swear an oath before the Commission of the American Baseball League to marry this one, she's that good,” he wrote his father a short time later.

At 1:00 P.M. on October 30, 1964, Judy Doherty and Mike Deuel were married in the Holy Redeemer Church in Bangkok. Pat Landry, who helped oversee the CIA's Laos operations, was best man, and Dan Arnold gave away the bride. Deuel slipped a 1.4-carat blue and white diamond solitaire on her quivering finger. Both of them were so nervous that they would later laugh about the muscles twitching in their faces. After a brief honeymoon at the beach, the couple moved to Pakse in southern Laos. There Judy helped manage the Agency's base operations and plotted on a map the reported sightings of enemy convoys and movements of matériel and men.

“All in all,” wrote Mike Deuel to his parents on November 29, 1964, “things are a little too good to last; we'll have to have some bad luck ere long. Meanwhile, the sun is shining and I'm making hay as fast as I can move, trying not to look too smug.”

Deuel was fast becoming the romantic. In January 1965 his wife, Judy, wrote: “After two and a half months, I was finally carried over the threshold last Thursday . . . Mike had arranged all sorts of surprises for me, including a new, red bicycle, two beautiful Italian rugs, some perfume.” Awaiting her in the hall upstairs was a piano. “His last present for me,” wrote Judy, “was waiting at the Moffett's house—a beautiful tan-colored horse, complete with English saddle. His name is Fahong, which means ‘Thunder' in Lao.”

But the stress of Mike's work took its toll. He was frequently gone on overnight missions and flying over rough country in all manner of aircraft piloted by the Agency's proprietary air wing, Air America. It was a harrowing beginning to a marriage, and Judy, a worrier by nature, could not help but fret. She feared that Mike could be hurt or killed, but she never spoke a word of it to him, believing it might jinx him or take his mind off his work. Nor did Mike discuss the risks, even after he had been involved in a couple of “minor plane crashes.” Such crashes were common among the CIA officers in Laos. An errant water buffalo would stroll across the dirt runways oblivious to incoming planes. A sudden gust of wind off a mountain would toss the slow-moving STOLs—short-takeoff-and-landing aircraft—pitching them sideways like discarded toys.

Judy had her own brush with danger the night of February 3 during a casual visit to the Laotian capital, Vientiane. As she later wrote in a letter, she spent that night huddled on the floor of the U.S. AID vault, “lulled to sleep by the vibrations of mortars and grenades.”

Judy Deuel's parents were concerned for the safety of both their daughter and their gung-ho son-in-law. But on February 16, 1965, Judy's parents received a letter from an Agency employee: “This is to assure you that Judy and Mike are perfectly safe and you have absolutely nothing to worry about . . . Mike is a very responsible and mature person in whom you can have full confidence. Judy and he are very much in love and very happy. Do not worry for them.”

One day after the letter was written, Mike Deuel's close friend Dick Holm was returning from a mission in another part of the world. Deuel and Holm had both been sent to Laos in 1962 to work with the indigenous tribes in fighting against the Communists. But in August 1964 Holm, a French speaker, received orders that he was to be transferred to the Congo to help put down the Simba's rebel insurgency.

It was February 17, 1965, and Holm was in the rear seat of a T-28 flying with Cuban pilot Juan Peron in the northeast corner of the Congo near the border with Sudan. Peron had been trained a year earlier by John Merriman at the CIA base at Marana in Arizona. A second plane was piloted by Cuban Juan Tunon. The mission had been a machine-gun attack on a power plant in rebel-held territory. After a successful assault the weather turned nasty and both planes had too little fuel to make it back to base.

Peron crash-landed in a field of elephant grass. The left wing was ripped underneath and the remaining fuel caught fire. Peron jumped from the plane, assuming that Holm had also jumped. But as Peron ran from the plane expecting the .50-caliber bullets to go off, he heard Dick Holm's desperate screams. Holm was still in the burning aircraft. Dick Holm pried himself free and Peron carried him some distance from the plane seconds before it exploded. It was getting dark and it was raining. The two were in rebel territory. They spent the night under cover of bushes.

Peron did not yet know the extent of Holm's burns, but now, in the first light of morning, he could see his friend twisting in agony. Holm pleaded with Peron to kill him. Peron wrested away Holm's Walther nine-millimeter pistol from him, fearing he would shoot himself to end the pain. Peron could now plainly see the horror of Holm's burns—his flesh hung from his hands like an oversized pair of plastic gloves. His arms, too, were badly burned and his face swollen beyond recognition. Peron unsheathed his hunting knife and, without any anesthetic, cut off the burned flesh from Holm's limbs. He left Holm beneath a bush beside a stream and told him he would go for help. He swore he would return. Tunon, the pilot of the second plane, Peron would later learn, had been captured and cannibalized. Peron carried thirteen rounds in the magazine of his pistol, twelve for the enemy and the last one for himself. He was not going to allow himself to be taken alive.

By sheer luck, Peron wandered into one of the few friendly villages in rebel-held territory. There a young warrior of the Azande tribe named Faustino offered to help carry Dick Holm to safety. When Peron, Faustino, and two other villagers returned to Holm, they found him completely blanketed with bees. Holm was swollen from the stings and crawling in a vain attempt to escape them. The Azandes fashioned a crude stretcher from branches and limbs and carried the semiconscious Holm to the village. They fed him fruit and water and hid him by the riverbank, regularly salving his burns with snake grease.

Faustino and Peron took the village's only two bicycles and began what was to be an arduous eight-day journey through jungle and five-foot-tall grass. They headed for the base camp at Paulis more than 280 kilometers away. The morning after their arrival, they flew back to the village and picked up Holm. His flesh was now as black as that of the villagers who tended him—black from the pitchy snake grease that covered his burns. Holm was flown to Léopoldville and then on to the army's special-burn unit in San Antonio, Texas. There army surgeons marveled that he was still alive.

Months later, when the fighting in the area subsided, the air force sent a team to the Azande village to study the remedial properties of snake grease on burns. And the CIA, in an effort to express its gratitude to the village that showed Holm such kindness, sent in a C-146 fully loaded with new bicycles, medicines, tools, and sacks of rice for the villagers.

But for Dick Holm the ordeal was only just beginning. For the next two years physicians at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington would treat his burns, perform skin grafts, and reconstruct portions of his hands and face. Holm had lost his left eye and was in jeopardy of losing sight in the other.

Mike Deuel was devastated by the news of Dick Holm's crash. Though he was a seasoned marine combat officer and had two years in the field with the Agency, this was the first time one of his close friends had been hurt. He brooded about Holm's condition, searching for some way to help him. Finally he sat his wife, Judy, down and told her he had been thinking about what he could do for Dick Holm. Deuel, then twenty-eight and married for less than a year, had an idea. “Would you mind,” he asked her, “if I offered one of my eyes to Dick?”

Judy Deuel was speechless. “For heaven's sake,” she said, “do you think that's necessary?” But Mike persisted. “It would be better,” he argued, “if each of us had one eye than if one of us had two and the other had none.” Judy was silent for a moment. “It's up to you,” she said. A short time later Deuel wrote Dick Holm's father formally offering one of his eyes.

For months, senior CIA officers quietly made their pilgrimage to Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Ward Nine to visit Dick Holm. Among the visitors were Desmond FitzGerald and Dick Helms—who smuggled in a thermos of martinis. But none was more faithful than Mike Deuel's father, Wally, who spent each Sunday for nearly a year at Holm's bedside, reading aloud the Sunday paper and keeping him abreast of Mike and Judy's latest exploits in Laos.

After each visit Wally Deuel would dutifully send a detailed report to Mike and Judy of the medical and emotional progress their friend had made. One such letter, dated August 23, 1965, notes: “His morale's especially good these days because Dick Helms went out to see him Friday or Saturday and, of course, completely captivated him.