A Message From Sweeney

By Ed Lowe

Corey Kilgannon, a freelancer for The New York Times, wrote a news feature about me in the Jan. 19 metro section of the newspaper.

Within hours of its publication, I had received a spate of e-mails, including one from a literary agent who later convinced me that I ought to tackle a novel I’ve been carrying around in my head for more than three decades.

I stared blankly at the computer screen for several days, until I convinced myself that it wasn’t a good idea. I picked up and re-read Nelson DeMille’s Up Country, wherein Paul Brenner, a freshly retired Army investigator, revisits the Vietnam of his youth, including the Quang Tri province of South Vietnam, where DeMille had served as an infantry officer.

Quang Tri triggered a 34-year-old memory of a 1971 court martial, in Quantico, Va. I decided I would start writing by simply starting to write. Inspired by DeMille’s use of his own memory, I employed the first-person singular, referring to myself as a fictional aging newspaper reporter indulging in reverie.

I began: “The early 1970s were pretty good years for me, productive…”

Through my fingertips, I reminisced about traveling to Romania, about converting an assignment on growing a victory garden into a 24-week series of humor columns on a “defeat” garden, and about the court martial.

I reminisced about USMC Pfc. Jon M. Sweeney, of West Babylon. The story came back in paragraphs, detail for detail, except for two I could not recall: the name of a European city in which Sweeney had escaped his North Vietnamese captors, and the bakery where his father worked. I had kept a box of notes and clips on the case, but I’d been through two divorces, two apartments and six houses since the trial.

“F. Lee Bailey’s Boston law firm defended Sweeney,” I typed. “The firm was called Bailey, Alch and Gillis. I watched all three

lawyers in action: first, Colin Gillis, a former Marine and JAG officer; then, Gerald Alch, who later defended James McCord in the Watergate hearings; then, Bailey, who set his fee at $5,000 plus expenses, which would amount to tens of thousands, plus the total proceeds of Sweeney’s share of any book or movie ever published or produced about the story.

“Sweeney’s father was a baker at [I wrote, ‘the Entenmann’s Bakery in Brentwood,’ though I was not sure.] The Sweeneys didn’t have much.

“Gillis and Alch were brilliant, and fun to watch.

“Sweeney eventually was acquitted. He never should have been allowed in the Marine Corps in the first place, let alone dispatched to a tropical jungle. All his life, he had asthma. Sweeney had beguiled his Marine recruiter with his passion for the Corps and its history, which he had memorized. His older brother, Kenny, had been a Marine, and Jon Sweeney idolized Kenny. Every sergeant in Sweeney’s service history gave him a pass on tests of physical durability, like running laps, so that he succeeded where he should not have succeeded, until he made it to the jungles of Vietnam, an asthmatic in a place with no air.

“One day, after his increasingly angry comrades literally had carried him for days,Sweeney collapsed on a trail in the Quang Tri province of South Vietnam.

“After first firing a .45-caliber round next  to his ear to inspire him to get up, Sweeney’s captain, Thomas W. Hinckle, ordered the platoon to advance, abandoning Sweeney on the jungle trail. Marines are not supposed to do that. They’re not supposed to abandon even their dead.

“The VC captured Sweeney, paraded and/or dragged him through a series of towns and villages, beat him half to death a number of times, imprisoned him in the ‘Hanoi Hilton’ and then believed him when he said he would cooperate with them by openly condemning the United States on broadcast radio.

“Sweeney later testified that he knew his first duty as a prisoner of war was to escape, and that he had decided that fooling his captors into believing he was a turncoat would be an effective way of doing it. Other POWs resented the hell out of it.

“Sweeney’s pro-North Vietnamese radio broadcasts from Hanoi were monitored and taped by the CIA. Later, the North Vietnamese flew Sweeney to [I could not remember the city. I wrote, (“Brussels?”)] for a worldwide press conference, wherein Sweeney would condemn the U.S. and praise the North Vietnamese. While in a [“(Brussels?)”] hotel, Sweeney telephoned his parents and asked them to meet him there and bring along a fresh uniform. They complied. Following a cinematic cloak-and-dagger episode, Sweeney escaped with his parents, changed his clothes in flight and was greeted at JFK Airport in New York by a colonel who saluted and then embraced him, the first-ever POW in the Vietnam War to return.

“Not long after the debriefing, the Corps charged Sweeney with desertion, aiding and abetting the enemy and abandoning his weapon in the face of the enemy, the latter two charges punishable by death.

“I covered the Article 15 investigative hearing in March and, later that year, the court martial. Sweeney was acquitted of all charges.”

Mildly satisfied that I had least started the project, I declared myself finished for the evening and repaired, first to Runyon’s restaurant in Seaford, for Thai mussel soup, and then to the Changing Times Pub in Farmingdale. There, after about five minutes, a woman tapped me on the shoulder.

“You don’t remember me, do you?”she said.

I didn’t. I said, “Well, you look vaguely familiar, but no. Give me a hint.”

“You bought me my first lobster dinner. I was 16.”

Blank. Dumbstruck. No memory.

“All right. What if I tell you it was in Quantico, Virginia?”

The hair on my legs snapped to attention. I couldn’t believe what was happening. I said, “You’re not going to tell me that you’re Jon Sweeney’s sister.”

She smiled. I started to weep. She said, “It was the night of the acquittal. You bought dinner for the whole family and Gerry Alch, all on Newsday. I had never eaten lobster, and you convinced me to try it.”

Stammering, I told her what I had been writing that afternoon, after 34 years. I grabbed the shoulder of the man next to me and blurted, “Are you hearing this? You have to hear this!”

I asked her about the city in Europe.

“Stockholm.”

“Did your father work at Entenmann’s?”

“No. He was a baker for the A&P Bakery in Flushing.”

I wrote down her name, Kathy Wylie. She told me that Jon had died in February, 2003; Kenny, five days later. All three of her brothers—and her father—were deceased. She lives in the family’s West Babylon house, now a two-family, and her mother is still alive. Kathy and her husband have four children.

“What are you doing here?” I asked. I was freaking. She was attending an office party. She said that for the last 20 years, she’d worked for Newsday. People always had asked her if she ever saw Ed Lowe, but she was in a different department, and I—when I worked for Newsday—worked mainly at home.

She said Jon worked for years as a security guard at the United Nations. He’d never married. He also was on disability, suffering from many medical problems from the beatings.

“You were like part of our family,” she said.

I hugged her, straining to not sob.