Life with Charlie

A fourth American also gained his freedom last week in Viet Nam. He owed no thanks for it to the Viet Cong, though it must have been a relief for them to have him go. Major James N. Rowe, a 1960 West Point graduate, was captured in the delta in October 1963 while serving as a Special Forces first lieutenant advising South Vietnamese forces. Last week the crew of an American helicopter operating over a clearing near Ca Mau city spotted a bearded figure clad in black pajamas and waving a mosquito net. It was Rowe. He had escaped from his captors with the unenviable distinction of having been a prisoner of the Viet Cong for five years.

In the time since his capture, Rowe had become an almost legendary figure in Viet Nam. The Special Forces refused to give up on him. Occasionally, intelligence reports would drift in indicating that he was not only alive but making life difficult for his jailers. There were recurring tales about a prisoner that the Viet Cong called "Mr. Trouble," apparently because he had made several attempts at escape and remained utterly defiant of his captors. Some in Saigon thought that Rowe was Mr. Trouble. In 1967, a Viet Cong defector who had seen Rowe in a prison camp grudgingly characterized him as "stubborn, sneaky and very smart." At that time, the defector reported, Rowe was with five other Americans. Two of them later died, two were freed in late 1967, and one was executed in retribution for the execution of a Viet Cong.

A Degree of Respect. Rowe described his long internment on his return to the U.S. en route to his home in McAllen, Texas. During the last 14 months, he lived in a wooden roofed cage deep in the forest ("You sometimes question whether it's built for an animal or a human"). During the day, he was allowed to venture only 125 feet away from his "hooch," and spent most of his time cutting firewood, setting traps and snares for mice, snakes and wild animals that would spice up his daily diet of rice and fish. He tried to keep busy at all times. "You do anything to keep your mind occupied," he said. "Your mental attitude is what determines whether you live or die."

Throughout his imprisonment, the Viet Cong tried to persuade him to repudiate the U.S. or, at least, the war. They never overtly threatened his life, he said. Their methods were lectures, propaganda literature and films. Rowe found that their most effective technique --and the one most troubling to him--was to feed a prisoner bits and pieces of news of domestic trouble in the U.S. "All this is designed to create within the prisoner of war a feeling of defeat --the fact that even within the United States the dissension, the disorder is growing to the point that there is a loss of respect for authority, that the entire structure within the United States is shaken and about to topple, that United States efforts throughout the world are crumbling. This is the type of thing that is conveyed to the prisoner." Yet he developed "a degree of respect" for his captors, "merely for their dedication to what they believe in."

Never a Captain. Rowe's chance for escape finally came on the last day of 1968, when allied troops launched a sweep near the camp and the prisoners were moved out. "I got one guard to separate with me," Rowe recalled. "At that point, the guard became unconscious and I got to the chopper." How did the guard become unconscious? "I'd rather not go into that at this point," said the major with a smile.

Rowe has already volunteered to return to Viet Nam, where, he feels, his intimate knowledge of the Viet Cong should be put to use. To him, he explained, the enemy is no longer "a faceless mass, a group of screaming individuals. Having watched them over an extended period of time, I will be able to think ahead to interpret their actions, in many cases to foresee a lot of things which they might do."

One of the ways that helped Rowe pass his last year of imprisonment was to calculate the amount of back pay that the U.S. might owe him: he reached more than $30,000, then quit figuring. In fact, he was considerably short-changing himself because he assumed that he was still a first lieutenant, not realizing that his promotion schedule rolled on in absentia. His back-pay total will thus probably come closer to $50,000. "I just couldn't believe that I was a first lieutenant and now I wake up a major, like a modern Rip Van Winkle," said Rowe, now 30. Presumably the $20,000 in extra pay will provide some consolation for the fact that Rowe will never know what it is like to wear the double bars of a U.S. Army captain.

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