Books: Committed Men

REPORTED TO BE ALIVE by Grant Wolfkill with Jerry A. Rose. 377 pages Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

There was a grinding whir above the sound of the helicopter engine, and the craft suddenly fell off in a long stomach-wrenching dive. It smashed hard into an open field, swerved, bounced, tottered and finally settled down in the dust.

The date was May 15, 1961, the day following the signing of a cease-fire agreement in Laos. The place was a field in the middle of the jungle north Vientiane, the Laotian capital. In the helicopter were three Americans and a squad of Laotian right-wing soldiers. Before the day ended, the soldiers had fled, and the Americans were captives of the Communist Pathet Lao.

Thus began 15 months of captivity for Grant Wolfkill, a veteran NBC cameraman, and his American companions, all of them caught up in the savage little Laotian jungle war, then as now largely unaffected by the official ceasefire.

Rats and Stocks. Wolfkill’s account of what happens to free men from a 20th-century society when they fall into the hands of primitive tribesmen just converted to Communism is blunt, jolting and thorough. A man of almost glacial self-control, ex-marine Wolfkilt became the natural leader of the American captives as they fought to preserve not only their lives but their sanity through more than a year of abject misery.

They were kept for months in the total blackness of a dank cell in a Laotian mountain prison, their lacerated bare legs locked each night in crude wooden stocks, helpless to do anything more than curse when rats ran across their bodies, even more helpless to care for themselves when dysentery and bladder infections racked their bodies. Sanity hung by such threads as U.S. Special Forces Orville Roger Ballenger’s calm recital each night of the 23rd Psalm, the creation of a deck of playing cards with tissue paper smuggled past the guards. Above all, they were sustained by the American determination not to crack under the Communist pressure.

For those who believe in the need for good men to resist the excesses of bad, this is a satisfying book. For those who see the Communists in Southeast Asia as simple, guileless and misled peasants, the descriptions of Laotian guards spitting into a cup of cold rice before giving it to the prisoners or shrieking with laughter when one of them looses a burst of machine-gun fire above the heads of the squatting, dysentery-stricken Americans should be enlightening. So, in a different manner, should be the details of the chill and efficient command role played in Laos by tough North Vietnamese Communists, whose presence the Pathet Lao then denied—and still do.

Little Society. Wolfkill is a member of that little society of men who, outside military service and each in his own way, have been fighting Communism in Asia for years. Some are missionaries, some are aid men, some are businessmen, some are doctors, some are teachers, some, like Wolfkill, are newsmen.

So was Jerry A. Rose, to whom Wolfkill told his story and who wrote this book between other assignments in Asia. Rose went to South Viet Nam in 1959 at the age of 25 to teach English at the University of Hue, stayed on to become a part-time correspondent for TIME and LIFE, a contributing editor for the Saturday Evening Post and finally, a special representative to the office of the Prime Minister. He and Wolfkill were close friends.

Wolfkill, now mostly recovered from the 15-month nightmare, continues to serve as an NBC cameraman in the area. Rose, the father of two small daughters who live with their mother in Hong Kong, last month accompanied a South Viet Nam Cabinet Minister on a trip up the country’s coastline from Saigon. The twin-engined C-47 had just taken off from the airstrip at Quang Ngai, 300 miles north of Saigon, when it crashed after engine failure. Forty-one persons aboard died, including the Cabinet Minister and Jerry Rose.