Phoenix Program Read Free Page B

the corner starts to stir, so I pull out the sidearm and put it against her head and shoot her. She’s dead. Of course, by this time the whole village is awake. I go out, waiting for Swetz to come, because the gun’s been blown. People are kind of wandering around, and I’m pretty dazed. And I look back into the hooch, and there were two young girls. I’d killed the wrong people.”
    Elton Manzione and his comrades returned to their base at Cam Lo. Strung out from Dexedrine and remorse, Elton went into the ammo dump and sat on top of a stack of ammunition crates with a grenade, its pin pulled, between his legs and an M-16 cradled in his arms. He sat there refusing to budge until he was given a ticket home.
    In early 1984 Elton Manzione was the first person to answer a query I had placed in a Vietnam veterans’ newsletter asking for interviews with people who had served in the Phoenix program. Elton wrote to me, saying, “While I was not a participant in Phoenix, I was closely involved in what I thinkwas the forerunner. It was part of what was known as OPLAN 34. This was the old Leaping Lena infiltration program for LRRP [long-range reconnaissance patrol] operations into Laos. During the time I was involved it became the well-known Delta program. While all this happened before Phoenix, the operations were essentially the same. Our primary function was intelligence gathering, but we also carried out the ‘undermining of the infrastructure’ types of things such as kidnapping, assassination, sabotage, etc.
    â€œThe story needs to be told,” Elton said, “because the whole aura of the Vietnam War was influenced by what went on in the ‘hunter-killer’ teams of Phoenix, Delta, etc. That was the point at which many of us realized we were no longer the good guys in the white hats defending freedom—that we were assassins, pure and simple. That disillusionment carried over to all other aspects of the war and was eventually responsible for it becoming America’s most unpopular war.”
    The story of Phoenix is not easily told. Many of the participants, having signed nondisclosure statements, are legally prohibited from telling what they know. Others are silenced by their own consciences. Still others are professional soldiers whose careers would suffer if they were to reveal the secrets of their employers. Falsification of records makes the story even harder to prove. For example, there is no record of Elton Manzione’s ever having been in Vietnam. Yet, for reasons which are explained in my first book, The Hotel Tacloban, I was predisposed to believe Manzione. I had confirmed that my father’s military records were deliberately altered to show that he had not been imprisoned for two years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II. The effects of the cover-up were devastating and ultimately caused my father to have a heart attack at the age of forty-five. Thus, long before I met Elton Manzione, I knew the government was capable of concealing its misdeeds under a cloak of secrecy, threats, and fraud. And I knew how terrible the consequences could be.
    Then I began to wonder if cover-ups like the one concerning my father had also occurred in the Vietnam War, and that led me in the fall of 1983 to visit David Houle, director of veteran services in New Hampshire. I asked Dave Houle if there was a part of the Vietnam War that had been concealed, and without hesitation he replied, “Phoenix.” After explaining a little about it, he mentioned that one of his clients had been in the program, then added that his client’s service records—like those of Elton Manzione’s and my father’s—had been altered. They showed that he had been a cook in Vietnam.
    I asked to meet Houle’s client, but the fellow refused. Formerly with Special Forces in Vietnam, he was disabled and afraid the Veterans Administration would cut off his benefits if he