In this episode of Veteran Led, we sit down with John Stevens Berry, Sr. to discuss his book, Those Gallant Men on Trial in Vietnam. As a former Captain and defense attorney, Berry shares gripping insights into one of the most controversial cases of the Vietnam War. He recounts his experience defending Fifth Special Forces officers and Green Berets charged with murder and conspiracy, revealing the complex interplay between the CIA, military, and political interests.​
Secret missions, people would go in with no name tags, maybe Swedish weapons, Swedish K, and they were being ambushed.
So, there was a leak. They discovered the leak. They knew who it was. Two of my defendants went into Saigon to talk to the CIA. They said, okay, we found him. He is our leak. The CIA gave the order that they kill him.
We’re here with John Stevens Berry, Sr., on the 40th anniversary of the release of his book, Those Gallant Men on Trial in Vietnam, where then Captain Berry defended the Fifth Special Forces officers and Green Berets who were charged with murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The first question that we have is, why did the CIA want to frame the Green Berets, our Fifth Special Forces?
Yeah, that was an interesting thing. We were operating illegally in Cambodia. We had a trilateral treaty that we would not operate in Cambodia, but we were. We were because that’s where the Ho Chi Minh Trail was. So, we’d have helicopters go down there to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Ho Chi Minh Trail was North Vietnamese regulars coming down with supplies and ammunition, then infiltrate across the border and have probing actions. So in order to stop them, we went into Cambodia. Well, people were waiting. Secret missions, people would go in with no name tags, maybe Swedish weapons, Swedish K, and they were being ambushed. So, there was a leak. They discovered the leak. They knew who it was. Two of my defendants, David Crew was one of them, I don’t remember who the other one was, went into Saigon to talk to the CIA. They said, okay, we found him. He is our leak. Can you take care of him? Can you imprison him? Can you put him on an island? What can you do? The CIA said, no, terminate with extreme prejudice. In other words, kill him. The CIA gave the order that they kill him. Now, I still do not say that they ever did kill him, but if they did, three men, Brumley, Marasco, and Williams, took a boat out, ran a rehearsal, then took him out on a boat, wrapped him in chain, shot him up with morphine.
The makes you bleed faster, and the sharks get to you. Shot him in the head and dumped him. There was a sergeant involved who had been in Korea, had borderline mental issues, probably shouldn’t have been there, and none of the guys would talk about it, of course. Well, he thought that meant that they planned on killing him. So he went and filed a a bunch of complaints. The CIA decided to deny that they’d issued the order, that they knew anything about it. I had an Article 32 hearing, and I grilled the hell out of the CIA guy, and he lied and lied, and lied. And this becomes important later. So they were bound over. And then the prosecution was leaking details. I was under direct orders not to say anything about the case, not even to talk to my fellow defense counsel. Well, that’s not how you defend a conspiracy case. And they’re leaking to the press. And I’m under order to say nothing. So I said, the hell with that. So, Marty Linsky and Bill Hart and I drove in to got a Jeep into Saigon, and I met with the networks. My mother saw me on Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley and so forth.
And I said, yeah, here’s what’s happening. They got these people locked up in a steel box. I just told them the way the defendants were being treated because I figured if they were leaking, I would leak. Now, there was later an investigation, and I read the investigation, and there was some discussion about pressing charges against me. The response was, it might be a very bad idea because they figured I wouldn’t go quietly. They picked up on that fact. Yeah, that started the thing. Melvin Laird, the Secretary of Defense, and all those people. That’s when I subpoenaed Richard Nixon. I said, the American people are going to find out the way this war is being fought. So go ahead, have your trial. But it’s not going to be a closed trial, and it’s not going to be secret. Someone said, well, here’s a funny thing. So, I went into Saigon on some business related to this, and I was being trailed by a member of the CIA who was being trailed by a Green Beret in civilian clothes. I mean, it was that complicated. I was in Henry Rothblatt came over to help us, and I later practiced with him.
And we were in an apartment of a Newsweek writer named Kevin Buckley and his girlfriend, a Chinese girl, Gracey Lim. And I remember this gunfire outside and the explosion going on. But it’s Saigon. It’s wartime. It’s funny if you think about it, a very nice dinner and a bread basket, and everything was laid out on a nice tablecloth while you hear the guns roaring outside.
So, the next question is, how did you win the Green Berets case? How did you get it dismissed? How were they acquitted? There are several questions of what was that turning point where you knew that you had won the case?
I decided to swing with both fists and kick with both feet. I decided to mail to Guam subpoenas for the President, the Secretary of Defense, everybody else I could think of. I talked to the press. I issued the military version of a request for the Chief Judge advocate general for USERVI. I told them all, I’m going to question you all, and I’m going to do it under oath. Someone said, well, you’re going to be in violation of Title 18 United States Code. And I said, well, you’re in violation of the fourth, fifth, and sixth amendments to the United States Constitution, so we’ll let the court sort it out. But everything they said, I’d say, we’ll let the federal court system sort it out. We have a nice trial in Guam. There’s a federal court there. I’m looking forward to it. I’m sure you are, too. And the interesting thing was that my next assignment was Chief Defense Counsel at the Presidio of San Francisco. The interesting thing was a colonel approached me at the end and said that, would you accept a regular army commission and promotion of major and assignment to the Paris Peace Accords?
And I said, no, I got this job offer in New York City for a pretty good thing. My military career, I thought was over, but there was a part of the Judge advocate general’s corps that championed me. I was featured in an exhibit, years later, called The Lore of the Corps. I was invited back to lecture at the Jag School in the University of Virginia. The command in Vietnam was awfully mad at me, but the rest of the Jag Corps thought that I had done the right thing. Somebody said this, Captain Berry gave us all the right to call ourselves lawyers. That was a compliment that meant something to me.
So, one Veteran followed up and said, what can we, as Veterans and citizens of the United States, learn from this lesson, learn what happened to our Green Berets in Vietnam?
Well, there are a lot of lessons. There’s a very sad thing that we have to remember that loyalty is not always a two-way street, that sometimes the people we are loyal to will turn on us. So, we have to be vigilant. Eternal vigilance, of course. We must be vigilant. The people we trust and are supposed to trust may turn on us. They may turn on us in any one of a number of ways. So, you have to be very careful. You do what’s right, and you can’t always expect to be supported or trusted. But if you’re backstabbed, you don’t take it. If you’re backstabbed, you make them look them in the face. You look them in the eye. You never let a bully, even if the bully is General Creighton Abrams, you never let a bully keep you down. You’re not done until you say you’re done. Nothing’s impossible if you’re willing to fight.
What was the CIA doing in Cambodia? We knew what we were doing and that we weren’t supposed to be there, but why was the CIA there?
The CIA is a nefarious outfit. They go where they damn well please. Their funding is kept secret. Now, I will tell a little story, and this relates back to the Green Beret case. My client Lee Brumley I visited him in Houston shortly before he died. He stayed in, and he got into intelligence. Well, he was assigned to the Pentagon, and he was supposed to deal with the CIA. And one of the guys that had lied during the Article 32 hearing, came up and said, well, we’re all working together here and no hard feelings. Brumly said, the hell if there isn’t hard feelings. You lied and tried to get me convicted of murder. The guy said, yeah, but it was just my job. And Brumly says, no, it’s not your job to lie about your fellow Americans. But that different mentality. By the way, I have to tell you a Lee Brumly story. So as part of his career, he was assigned to MI6 in London. So, he went there and for lunch, they’d wear regimental ties. Well, he had a black horse tie with a big black horse on it from the 11th ACR before he was in Special Forces.
And he said this, MI6 has a lunch, and they just drink their lunch. And he’s Chickasaw, and he knows he’s not supposed to drink, and he doesn’t. He said, all the leaks that came out of England and all the nuclear secrets that went to Russia from England, he said, I’m beginning to understand why, because they do a morning’s work. Then they go to a club wearing their regimental neckties and drink for free all afternoon. That was his experience there. It just relates back a little bit. But the intelligence operations, I don’t think that the CIA, the culture of the CIA, believes that they have any of the duties of loyalty and honesty and honor. I don’t think they have any concept of that. The justification is, I suppose, that they think they’re working for the higher good, for the better good, that the more nefarious they are, the more dishonest they are, the further ahead will come. And yet it doesn’t seem to have worked awfully well. We seem to be getting taken by surprise quite a bit and quite often. And maybe a system of honor might make them a little more effective.
And by the way, for my fellow Veterans who’ve served in intelligence, I have nothing but good things to say about you in your work in intelligence. And I know that some of you had to work with the CIA, and I’m hoping your experience was better than mine. It may have been. I hope it was.
What was the Phoenix program?
There was all kinds of programs, Phoenix, Paris Hall, Switchback. Basically, there was the notion of Vietnamization of the war. We had hoped to increasingly put the Vietnamese people in charge of their own war. We were not there to stay. We didn’t want to stay. Hell, we could have owned Germany if we wanted at the end of World War II. America does not fight for real estate, we never have. And we didn’t want to stay. So, we wanted to get the Vietnamese people involved. And we wanted to, and I’m simplifying this because it’s a complicated issue, but the overall thing was to turn the war over to them. But as Colonel George Patton said to me, one evening over a sip before he went out in the country to try to get shot at. He said, the only thing Vietnamization will do is change the color of the bodies. A little more history. About three weeks before our President Kennedy was assassinated, the CIA assassinated Vietnamese President Diem. We changed their leadership. We have done that. We also did that in what was Persia, is now Iran, when we propped up the Shah. When we do that, when we go in and prop up governments and people die, it just doesn’t work.
The idea, if we had been able… Vietnam goes back to Eisenhower. Eisenhower said, give them weapons, give military personnel. Kennedy did the same. Lyndon Johnson, because he wanted to be a great President, came up with a Gulf of Tonkin resolution and the big buildup. They had kids that couldn’t read or write being drafted. They call them McNamara’s Boys. They changed the rules. They put in kids that didn’t what they were doing or what they were there for. Kids going through basic training, they just say, okay, I don’t know what they did. Because when I ran troops through basic training in 1961, they could read and they could write and they understood the code of conduct, and they understood everything they were supposed to understand. They were just young, unprepared kids being over there in a huge buildup. So we’re sending more Americans over, purportedly on the underlying theory that we’re going to be able to turn the war over to our Vietnamese allies, which we were unable to do. When we backed out and North Vietnam came down in violation of the Paris Peace Talks, they came down the road unresisted. They not only put the people that work for us in reeducation camps, they put the Viet Cong in there, too.
The Viet Cong that had been fighting their fight for them. The Paris peace talks were a colossal failure. It got Henry Kissinger a Nobel Award, a Peace Prize. But the fact is they had no intention ever of adhering to any of the agreements. I was watching Lawrence O’Donnell the other evening. He’s sometimes very insightful, so I was watching him. He described this as America losing the war. We never lost a battle. We lost, politically, the political will to go ahead, and we decided, politically, to get out of there. But we didn’t lose that war, and our military never retreated. When it was combat, we did very well indeed. I’m not talking about Viet Cong. I’m talking about when we got to meet the North Vietnamese regulars. We had some good allies that got to meet because I was everywhere. Got to meet some good Australians. I got to tell this story that Australians are friendly, they’re nice. But after 10 o’clock, you want to get out of there because their idea of recreation is to break chairs over each other’s heads. The North Koreans were the toughest I ever… I mean, the South Koreans.
The Korean soldiers, once they were going to entertain the Special Forces, and they knew that their nickname was snake eaters, so they got up there and started eating live snakes. They opened up a box and grabbed live snakes and started eating them. I mean, I have met some pretty rough and tough guys. I tell you when Cholan was the Chinatown of Saigon, the Viet Cong owned it. It was off limits. But I was there because I was assigned to be with a Vietnamese colonel. And we went into one of those cobra places where they put cobra blood in a little booze in the cup and then put the cobra’s heart on the guy’s tongue. I’ve seen things like that. I’ve been all kinds of places. My permissive travel orders and the fact that I was fluent in French, and I’m pretty good at languages, picked up a little Vietnamese, a little Korean. It got me to see a lot of things. I saw a lot of interesting things while I was over there.
Got a lot more questions, but I’m probably just going to ask this one. What was your understanding of what the relationship was supposed to be like between the CIA and the military in Vietnam?
The CIA was supposed to be gathering information, passing it to the commander of MACV, Military Assistance Command Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams, who replaced William Westmoreland. He was supposed to get the information and decide the chain of intelligence for it would be given. That was supposed to be what happened. But the CIA always went rogue. They were always cowboys. They always had their own agenda. They always thought they knew how to do things, and they always denied it. A guy under oath saying, we never kill anybody. Not even the Russians do that, the guy said. And by the way, I’m telling you, my memory is from 1968, ’69, ’70, it might not be exactly the same as some of my brothers and sisters in arms. And if your memory is different from mine, I’m going to trust your memory over mine because you’re probably right, and I’m probably wrong. I do the best I can. I’m not a spring chicken, and I’m reaching back now. So, if my memory is a little different from yours, I’ll say, okay, you’re probably right, and I’m probably wrong, but I sure be interested in hearing from you.
All right. So, one more. Someone asked, in what ways did the case of the Green Berets reflect the tensions between the different branches of the United States government during the Vietnam War? In other words, we’ve heard about the CIA and the military, but what about all the other agencies? Were there agencies that were much more friendly to United States forces, or was it all just a mess?
I think, okay, I’m going to use a very bad expression, but I have heard soldiers referred to as bullet stoppers. I have heard that expression. I think that our government during that whole time saw us as expendable. I think they saw us as usable and expendable and a means toward a political end. I really do not think that there was a great deal of care about the military. There was enough to make the people back home think we were being taken care of. I saw Bob Hope at Long Bend. I mean, there were some nice people that came over to try to cheer us up. I have to mention, we, recent death of Brenda Allen. And there were others, but there was support among many people and hostility among many people. I mean, we really did get spit on sometimes when we get off the plane coming back. And I was told there are certain places you don’t go in uniform. Well, strangely enough, I went to those places in uniform. Did anyone spit on me? Yeah, one guy even bled all over my knuckles and my sleeve. I mean, yeah. So maybe I was a little…
I might not have handled it as tactfully as I could.
Well, certainly being a post-911 Veteran, we’ve seen the sentiments which come back the other way and a lot of gratitude from our public and from our politician, from the government agencies.
So, yeah, we were never called bullet stoppers. At least not to our faces.
John, I don’t think anyone would ever call you anything bad to your face.
Well, thanks so much for answering the questions of many of your fans who have read Those Gallant Men on Trial in Vietnam and wanted to learn more. Once again, this being the 40th anniversary of the release of the book, it’s a great opportunity to answer some of those questions. If you have any additional questions, please just reach out to us on Veteran Led on your favorite social channel and leave comments, and we will address them.
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