A quest for love and glory
In 1985 an American man departed the Philippines in a sailboat and, 13 days later, illegally entered Vietnam where he hoped to find a young woman he’d promised to marry – what could possibly go wrong?
“To surrender dreams – this may be madness.” ~ Don Quixote
NEVER LEAVE A GIRLFRIEND BEHIND IN A COMBAT ZONE. I mean, not forever anyway. And not if you’re a special ops commando, and an aspiring dragon-slayer, and not if you have told her family that you will, with their blessing, marry her and take her to the US. And especially not if you promised her, face to face, amidst the evacuating chaos of April 30, 1975 in Saigon, that you would do everything in your power to come back and get her. And certainly not if your name is Robert W. Schwab III, and you’ve been building a quest up in your own head for 10 years, until one day, why the knight-errant has a plan! A seemingly mad but yet perfect plan – sailing an 18-foot plywood boat for 600 miles and umpteen days from the Philippines to the shores of Vietnam, where the authorities will be told: ‘I know what it looks like, but really, there’s no need to worry, I’m not a spy. I’m just here to find my girl… Her name is ‘Mai’, she’s about yay high, speaks with a Kontum accent, and has a smile that would melt any man’s heart…”
"I wish I'd been born at a time when there were more dragons around to slay. There's so little left." ~ Robert W. Schwab III
AS UNLIKELY AS IT ALL SOUNDS, this is the true story of Robert W. Schwab III of Atlanta, Georgia, a former Green Beret, a frustrated novelist, an avid analyst of politics in Laos and, above all else, an adventurer, who sailed from Subic Bay (the Philippines) to Qui Nhon (Vietnam) in the month of April, 1985, risking his life on the high seas in a flimsy boat (that he had christened Hubris), but utterly convinced, like all fearless buccaneers through the ages, that fortune would favour the brave. Because yes, okay, Robert W. Schwab III had left a girl behind, but only because he believed he could still save her…
“Having given a name to his horse and decided on one for himself, he realised that the only thing left for him to do was to find a lady to love; for the knight-errant without a lady-love was a tree without leaves or fruit, a body without a soul.” ~ Don Quixote
AFTER THE VIETNAM-AMERICAN WAR WAS OVER, Schwab spent time in Thailand, where he apparently contacted some ‘resistance groups’ battling the communist takeover of Laos. In the late 1970s, he apparently also made unofficial forays into southern Laos to search for American prisoners of war (he was convinced they existed, but he never found one) and searched for remains of missing American servicemen (he managed to recover some bone fragments from Laos)1. These deeds of derring-do were just a rough approximation of what he did as a Green Beret. They scratched an itch, but basically Schwab felt unfulfilled.
Through the late ‘70s, he also tried his best to get in touch with Mai, the young woman from Kontum that he wished to marry (although they’d never been lovers, but we’ll get to that later). For six years he heard nothing and then, one day in 1981, he received word that she was still in Vietnam. She had been jailed twice for trying to flee by boat. But at least she was alive. Schwab then moved to the Philippines, where it’s said he opened a hamburger stand, near the U.S. naval base at Subic Bay. There he extensively questioned Vietnamese refugees and yachtsmen about the hazards of the South China Sea (known as the East Sea to Vietnamese) and, after turning things over his head for years, he finally decided the time had come. So, on April 10, 1985, he sailed out to sea, and the quest of all quests had begun.
“When you are the only thing on it, there is nothing as enormous as the sea. Even under fire, I’ve never felt my mortality so keenly than I did staring at so much huge and potentially destructive indifference so few inches away.” ~ Robert W. Schwab III
BACK IN 1985, Vietnam was still a pariah state for the US. It goes without saying that Schwab, as a US citizen, and former commando, had no visa to be in Vietnam, and no one’s backing outside of Vietnam – this was an entirely clandestine and wholly solo mission (although he had mentioned his rough plan to at least one friend, a commodities trader in Hong Kong, who tried and failed to dissuade him). But for Schwab the die had been cast a long time ago. In his mind, he had no choice. He had explored legal angles, and illegal ones, too. This was the only way he’d get back to Mai. In a way, when Schwab set sail that day, it seemed simple. At least it did to him.
[Just days before his departure from Subic Bay, Vietnam had released William Mathers, a former navy officer in the Vietnam-American war, after eight months’ captivity. Mathers, who had sold a dock-construction company that he ran in Singapore for 14 years, said he was going to Hong Kong to sell his 88-foot schooner; when he got too close to the Vietnamese coast (36 miles) he and his small crew were taken into custody and held for eight months. In 1969, Mathers, a deep-sea diver, had bought the vessel, which was used by the US Coast Guard during World War II and had it outfitted with State-of-art electronic equipment to detect ancient ships loaded with treasure at the bottom of the ocean. Naturally, the Vietnamese suspected he was a spy. In the end his dad, a successful Manhattan lawyer, paid a $10,000 fine to the Vietnamese embassy in Bangkok, and Mathers and his crew were released. The souped-up boat, however, was not].
Now, if Schwab’s plan all sounds (to you and I) completely naive, or… just fucking crazy, we should remember that he knew a thing or two about cross-border forays into the jungles and mountains of Indochina. In the age of ‘First Blood’, here was a proper ‘John Rambo’, although you’ll have to picture a slender man of 5 foot 7 with no bandana, and no bulging biceps. But he certainly had the wits and cojones for illegal border crossings; based on the interviews he gave in 1986, and his own writing, it’s also clear he had a sense of duty – the USA had failed to keep its promises in Vietnam and that deepened Schwab’s determination that he would keep his.
“One man scorned and covered with scars still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars; and the world will be better for this.” ~ Don Quixote
SCHWAB WAS A DREAMER, a lover of literature, and perhaps even a fantasist. He looked up to Sir Walter Raleigh, and wished to live in the golden era of explorers2. On his voyage across the sea, he brought along nine books, among them Barbara Tuchman's ‘The March of Folly’, a Penguin world history, and some poetry by T.S. Eliot. When writing of his actions later, he said he believed that his own voyage of folly was neither simple-minded or arbitrary: “The hard part would be over when I reached the coast of Vietnam. It was all so perfect.”
But, unsurprisingly, the Vietnamese, once they encountered Schwab, assumed the man was a spy. As part of his grand plan, Schwab had banked on the international press getting wind of his capture, which would (he had figured) pressurise the Vietnamese to play ball. But this never transpired, so basically ‘the Schwab gambit’ fell flat on its face. After arriving on Vietnamese soil, he would spend a total of 15 months in captivity (first Qui Nhon, then Danang, and later Saigon), at times wondering if he would die of malaria, or if he should just kill himself, while the Vietnamese tried to figure out what to do with him. Some of the interrogation was obviously aggressive because, well, some of his captors really did think he was CIA. But some of his captors eventually seemed to believe him, even if they couldn’t believe it. One even said to him: “You did all this… for a woman?”
"If there were two identical Mais, twin sisters, one living next door and the other living in your country, I would choose the one in your country." ~ Robert Schwab (speaking to Vietnamese authorities trying to explain why he had illegally entered the country).
BUT LET’S BACKTRACK A BIT. Who was the young woman? I’ve called her Mai because that was the pseudonym Schwab used (when speaking to the press in 1986, after he had been released). Like many a foreign man has done in Vietnam, Schwab essentially courted her while she was at work in a cafe (run by her family in Kon Tum). It was 1972. Schwab was in his early 30s, Mai was 18. At this stage Schwab, who spoke Vietnamese fluently, had been in Vietnam for four years; long enough to witness a bad situation deteriorate (from an American perspective). Most of Kon Tum was now controlled by the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN), and the Yankee troops were gone. Prospects were bleak for the US. Schwab (a fervent anti-communist) knew this, so that rustic cafe in Kon Tum was his happy place. A sanctuary from the tumult swirling around him. Mai was one of three sisters who floated around the coffee shop, taking turns to chat with Schwab, who appreciated that they would speak to him, an American man, who had come to accept that, in spite of good intentions, his country’s presence had made everything worse (in his words: “We destroyed the country [we] set out to save”). The family-run cafe was also a world away from the seedy Saigon scene that catered to horny US marines – the girlie-bars, the ‘Saigon teas’ (lady drinks), the roving hands, the 5-dollar short-times… – and that appealed to Schwab. He didn’t try and seduce Mai; they were, he would later say, never intimate. The thing is, Schwab wasn’t exactly a saint. He had slept with hookers like pretty much every other American soldier. They were, in his words, ‘a necessary ingredient’ to his life ‘in the Zone’. He had also broken an innocent woman’s heart before – a young Vietnamese lady who had left her family to be with him, only for Schwab to get itchy feet and pull the plug. Looking back he would admit that it might have been easier to have an affair with Mai’s older sister, a widow. But Mai, in all her sweetness, innocence and beauty, was the one who caught his eye, and he was determined to play this one with chivalrous honour.
“I affirm, that there never could be a knight-errant without a mistress; for, to be in love is as natural and peculiar to them, as the stars are to the heavens.” ~ Don Quixote
IT’S EASY FOR US TO NOW SEE Schwab’s infatuation for a young, good-looking, traditional woman as something redemptive for him. Other soldiers lived and died off his decisions. If he made an error, young men returned home wrapped in a flag. As for the collateral damage and civilian deaths he may have caused, or prevented, well, who knows. In his words: “I whistled up helicopters like other men whistled up ducks, and information I gathered diverted B-52 strikes. I parachuted into tribal villages where I’d get soused in the company of men who drank from the brain pans of their enemy.”
So, going to see Mai surely took his mind off his own troubled soul. As the war waged on, he must have realised he couldn’t actually ‘right any wrongs’. It was all going to shit. By choosing to pursue Mai (with noble intentions), Schwab gave himself a new mission and something worth fighting for. There were days when he doubted himself – he didn’t think he was the marrying type, but yet… he kept going back to that cafe. And even when he was transferred, she was always on his mind. He would later admit that there was something quaint, even antediluvian about courting such a girl that appealed to him (Mai came from a Catholic family; Schwab’s religious background was also Catholic, ‘very southern’ and ‘Jesuit-prepped’). The remoteness of his postings (after he had been transferred away from Kon Tum) only reinforced his feelings for her….
“The Zone was dying and the intense, indulgent life I had there was going to fade. But I could have the best of the Vietnam that was disappearing if I could take Mai with me. Marriage made sense now, selfish sense, and she would be a wonderful, cherished wife. But would she go?” ~ Robert W. Schwab III
WEEKS BEFORE THE END OF THE WAR on April 30, 1975, the Central Highlands are in chaos. Amidst a mass exodus, Mai’s family make it to Saigon. Schwab is there, too. Not only that, he is helping with the evacuation. That means he can get Mai on a helicopter or plane, then take her back to the States, marry her and start that quaint life he’s been dreaming of…. so Schwab rides across town and, after a frantic search, finds her family, all huddled into one small room. Mai is not there but Schwab makes his proposal to the parents. They happily accept and tell him they will tell Mai to come looking for him…
Now picture this, Mai materialising a few days later, accompanied by her brother, a priest. Surrounded by evacuees in a chaotic scene, Schwab immediately notes that Mai, always a slim girl, is now skeletal and visibly in duress. The brother reassures him: “She’ll be beautiful again soon.” But Schwab suddenly has cold feet, not because of her diminished beauty, but because he believes Mai is in no fit mental state for leaving her family behind. She’s threadbare. On the brink of a breakdown. He convinces them that Mai should stay but promises that he will come back or get her out of Vietnam. They have his word.
So Schwab departs (first on a helicopter, then on board the aircraft carrier, USS Hancock, wearing the same clothes he has worn for six days straight) and Mai remains. The decision haunts him. Of course it does. But he is a man of valour. A chivalrous knight (and a problem solver). He’ll figure it out. And that’s really why Schwab remains in Southeast Asia, after the war is over. That’s why he spends the guts of 10 years trying to come up with a plan. As the Andy Williams’ song goes: “And I know if I'll only be true to this glorious quest. That my heart will lie peaceful and calm. When I'm laid to my rest…”
"I feel good . . . . It's not a great story. Really, the sailing was the only good part." ~ Robert W. Schwab III, after his release in 1986.
AFTER SAILING INTO VIETNAMESE WATERS, Schwab pretended to be lost at sea to some fishermen, and then sailed alongside their vessel into Qui Nhon. There he was casually taken into custody by a young officer, who wasn’t quite sure how to complete an immigration form for this unexpected foreign arrival. Along with some comrades, the officer, while pushing a bicycle, escorted Schwab to town. Schwab then spent a couple of weeks in captivity before an older official, who spoke impeccable English (and, oddly, looked just like Alec Guinness) turned up. After the interrogation gets ramped up, eventually, Schwab came clean and explained that he was just trying to find his fiancée. But as the weeks passed, he also began to sense that his plan hadn’t worked out so well (as no one outside of Vietnam knew that he was there). Sitting in his cell, he imagined he might be in jail for the rest of his life, however short. At a later stage, he wondered if he might try to escape in the dead of the night, and somehow make it to the highlands, the land of the Montagnards, and then beyond… ah yes, he thought to himself, now that would be an adventure….
But his chance never came. He was stuck in a grim reality.
'There is no doubt that knights errant of old suffered much ill-usage in the course of their lives'. ~ Don Quixote
AFTER BEING MOVED UNDER GUARD to Danang, Schwab was placed in an old orphanage now serving as a prison. From his window he could see Russian advisors and their “huge wives” on the beach, noting how the Vietnamese seemed to avoid them. Feeling the strain of his isolation, Schwab became more desperate. He faked an attempted suicide (to get better care). When Christmas rolled around, he sang carols into the courtyard, hoping another prisoner might tell others that he overheard an American wailing ‘Only the Lonely’ and ‘Georgia on My Mind’ from a cell (once Schwab heard clapping after a particularly fine rendition of ‘Country Road’).
In one of the more comical (and touching) scenes recounted by Schwab in a Playboy feature called Vietnam Love Story (published June, 1988), he is being transported along the coast to Saigon. His entourage takes a break at a beach destination with actual holidaymakers (or day-trippers) kicking back in the sunshine. One of his guards places a Russian hat on his head and says: “If anyone talks to you, say you are a movie star from Czechoslovakia. Do not speak Vietnamese.” He’d withstood months of mental torture and isolation, but sitting there among people again, listening to a Jerry Lee Lewis song with a buffeting breeze ruffling his hair, Schwab finally feels human again. And then, much to the surprise of everyone around him, he breaks down and cries.
BACK IN SAIGON, where he is tantalisingly within a mile of Mai, Schwab spent many more months in isolated captivity; he was continually accused of being CIA, his story of love still deemed too preposterous. By then the interrogators knew much more about Schwab. His status as a former Green Beret. His infiltrations into Laos and Cambodia, which he was told are ‘against Vietnamese law’. At some stage he contemplated suicide, a real one this time. But… there was one man who had figured that Robert W. Schwab III might be in Vietnam. Schwab’s old pal Dick Childress from the National Security Council somehow pieced together the story of Schwab’s disappearance; when he asked his contacts from Vietnam, if they knew of the American, Childress detected ‘loopholes in the language of denial’, so he kept pressing them, and pressing them, and, well, perhaps at some stage, the Vietnamese also came to a consensus: that crazy bastard Schwab really did just come to find his girl. Whatever they thought, they were happy to be done with him, and a deal with Childress was duly struck.
And so, one day in August 1986, Schwab was informed he would be granted clemency. A feast was served, with more food than Schwab had ever seen, and the next morning, he was whisked to Tan Son Nhat Air Base, where he sat in the VIP lounge, sweating in a clean pair of Khakis. Shortly thereafter, a small US Air Force jet touched down and when Childress hopped out (carrying money for the fine, having cashed a cashier's check from Schwab's father in the Philippines en route), he apparently said: "I don't know whether to hug you or kick your butt."
Before he boarded his flight, Schwab was told by more than one Vietnamese official: “All you have to do after you get back to the States is apply for a visa, come back and you will have your girl.”
After his release, Schwab inevitably had a spin in the spotlight. He was interviewed by multiple US newspapers in 1986; his feature for Playboy was published in 1988 (alongside a Chevy Chase Q&A and a Davis Foster Wallace short story). He was, it should be said, diplomatic when relating details of his captivity in Vietnam. His biggest complaint? The writing he had done during his captivity – three short stories and a long poem – had been taken away. He was promised it would all be returned, but it never was.
“To set captives free is the knight's pragmatic way of dealing with death." ~ Harold Bloom on Don Quixote.
IN SCHWAB’S FEATURE, Vietnam Love Story, he recounts how he (somewhat reluctantly) returned to the US in 1986. There he received a letter from Mai, congratulating him on his release: “As soon as the speaker announced the hero’s name, I wanted to run through the mountains, valleys and oceans in search of him so that I might offer him my admiration, gratitude and love.”
In the US, Schwab continued to try and communicate with Mai, mainly trying to discourage her from escaping on a boat, on which she would have been at the mercy of the ungovernable sea and pirates. He harboured a hope that the Vietnamese really would let him come back in person, this time with a visa. But after he pushed various US agencies for action, he was left frustrated by the wait: “Waiting is not what I do best. Nor Mai.” In December, 1987, she once again jumped on an illegal boat, but this one managed to get her within 100 metres of a neighbouring country (not named by Schwab in his feature). After wading onto the shore, Mai was mugged, and then arrested, and soon found herself in a refugee camp. But less than two weeks later, she at least had a visitor. Standing there in the dust of a strange land and hugging Mai, Schwab noticed that all the refugees around them were either smiling or sobbing at the sight of ‘the two people who had won’...
But their reunion was brief. Schwab could only spend a few hours with her, then he had to leave the refugee camp. So Mai remained. In 1988, Schwab was unsure of how long she would be in the camp but it would be a ‘minimum of five months while her immigration papers are ground through the bureaucracies of two countries’. In his story, he seemed to be claiming a victory of sorts. But it’s a very subdued victory (read: ‘well, honey, at least we’re not dead’). Of course, I know you’re all thinking: so what happened next. But when I searched the internet, I found… nothing; so I contacted some of the veteran journalists, who interviewed Schwab back in the 1980s but only one, Denis Gray of AP, wrote back to say he had no idea where Schwab wound up, or if he ever saw Mai again (he was doubtful). Denis’ email concluded: “Wherever he is, if he is still alive, I wish him well.”
“Take my advice and live for a long, long time. Because the maddest thing a man can do in this life is to let himself die.” ~ Don Quixote
“Never waste a midlife crisis.” ~ John Higgs
IT WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN SUCH AN ADVENTURE, but just a few years after his ill-fated voyage, Schwab could have just flown into Saigon with a tourist visa and met Mai for coffee and cake at Givral on Đồng Khởi Street, or wherever they wished. In 1986 the Đoi Moi (‘renovation’) policy formally reopened the Vietnamese economy to international markets and trade. By 1987, the first post-conflict American tourists were arriving in Vietnam. Numbers were small at first, but they would grow year on year. By the early ‘90s even veteran US soldiers and journalists, who covered the conflict, would have been among the many American tourists flowing into the country.
So, what do you think, did they ever see each other again? I can’t tell you for sure, but maybe once Mai got out of a refugee camp, and found a new home, perhaps it was enough for Schwab to know that she was alive and finally free to start a new life. As for Schwab, I can easily imagine that he continued to drift. Travelling back and forth from the Philippines to Thailand, frequently flying over Vietnam and thinking of a hundred thousand what ifs down below. But maybe at some stage, Robert W. Schwab III, who would be 82 now, returned more permanently to his ancestral lands, to see if he could ‘lead a pastoral life’ like Don Quixote did after his adventures. In Cervantes’ timeless masterpiece, it’s only there, in his weather-beaten town in La Mancha that the madness (yes, it really is a book about men in midlife crisis) that gripped Don Quixote, and inspired him to tilt at the windmills, finally relents. Alas, soon he is on his deathbed and suffering from a fever. But before the retired Knight-errant departs, he leaves the room with a proverb and one last declaration: “Señores! Let us go slowly, for there are no birds today in yesterday’s nests. I was mad, and now I am sane.”
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Richard ‘Dick’ Childress, the Asian director of the US National Security Council, knew of these forays; they weren’t just done for the shits and giggles.
From the article “A Knight and His Cell” by Art Harris.
Wow! What a story and you did an excellent job telling it. Bravo.
Excellent story.