Reclaiming History

by Vincent Bugliosi

  The radar operators at Atsugi were also intrigued. The planes simply vanished from their radar screens when they exceeded 45,000 feet, the altitude limit on their MPS-11 antennae, and the U-2 pilots would sometimes request information on winds at 90,000 feet, well above the known world altitude record of 65,889 feet.299 While anyone might easily have surmised that the plane was flying aerial reconnaissance missions over China and the Soviet Union—other patrol planes had been doing that for a long time—it’s doubtful whether anyone could have guessed just how deep their penetration of enemy airspace might be.

  Although conspiracy theorists have made much of Oswald’s brief proximity to the U-2, suggesting he traded his knowledge of the U-2 to the KGB in exchange for special treatment when he later defected to Russia, there is no evidence that his particular unit actually dealt with the spy plane’s operations, nor is there any evidence that Oswald displayed more than a normal curiosity about the plane.

  Oswald’s unit at Atsugi, MACS-1, code-named “Coffee Mill,” had just under a hundred men300 whose duty was to man a semicircular radar room called “the Bubble,” usually in groups of three officers and about seven men. The room was kept dark to improve the visibility of the hooded UPA-25 radar scopes, and the noise and temperature levels were very high owing to the many pieces of heavy electrical equipment. The grease pencils the men used to plot positions and courses would sometimes melt on the translucent plotting board. The men worked in their skivvy shirts and mopped the perspiration from their faces as they shouted over the din of the machinery.301

  The crew members worked four-hour shifts staggered in such a way that over the course of time they worked at all hours of the day or night—not that it made much difference in the Bubble, where it was always so dark that they couldn’t recognize their coworkers more than a few feet away. They monitored a quadrant of airspace stretching from due west to due north, tracking all aircraft movements and radio communications with the pilots. They directed friendly planes to their destinations and detected incoming foreign aircraft, notifying their presence to the Tactical Air Control Center at Iwakuni as well as plotting fighter intercepts of the intruder. They also served as communication liaisons with Japanese air defense forces.302

  The new men arriving for duty at Atsugi were appropriately hazed by the veterans, and most of them laughed it off or responded with good-natured insults. One marine in Oswald’s barracks, Jerry E. Pitts, thought Oswald took it too personally. Once the men discovered that Lee reacted badly to being called “Harve” or “Harvey,” they called him that relentlessly, infuriating him. It was, of course, his middle name, but it was also the name of the famous invisible rabbit in a popular Broadway play. “We all had to go through the same thing,” Pitts recalled, “but Oswald never understood that…He just never knew how to read the system. If he could have just taken the initial insults, he would have become one of the boys.”303

  Daniel Powers thought Lee became more aggressive and outgoing at Atsugi. “He took on a new personality, and now he was Oswald the man, rather than Oswald the rabbit.304 Other marines reported, though, that Oswald would mimic Bugs Bunny by wiggling his ears, squinting, and pushing his teeth out over his lower lip, which earned him another nickname—“Bugs.”305 And other marines who served with Oswald at Atsugi remembered him in diverse ways. Zack Stout was quite impressed with Oswald, finding him to be “honest and blunt…and that’s what usually got him into trouble…He was absolutely truthful, the kind of guy I’d trust completely.” Stout said that Oswald “would read deep stuff like Mein Kampf or the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” and was one of the few men in his unit whom he could hold an intelligent conversation with. Another friend at Atsugi was George Wilkins, who thought Oswald’s resentment of young officers fresh out of college entirely natural. “Hell,” Wilkins told author Edward Epstein, who did some valuable investigative work on Oswald’s entire military period, “we all thought we were smarter and better than any of the officers, and Ozzie was just like the rest of us. We all resented authority.” Wilkins taught Oswald how to use a 35-millimeter camera, and Oswald bought a camera for himself—the famous Imperial Reflex that Marina eventually used to take the backyard shots of him holding his rifle, pistol, and left-wing publications.306

  Another marine, David Christie Murray, said that Oswald had a “chip on his shoulder” and “did not often associate with his fellow marines.” And Murray said he had his own reasons for staying away from Oswald. “I had heard a rumor to the effect that he was homosexual. I personally observed nothing to support this rumor, and am not sure that I heard it from more than one person.”307

  Yet another marine, John Rene Heindel, told the Warren Commission that Oswald was frequently in trouble for failing to adhere to rules and regulations and for his express and open dislike of authority exercised by his superiors in the Marines. Heindel also said he, Heindel, was often called, as a nickname, “Hidell”—pronounced “to rhyme with ‘Rydell’ rather than ‘Fidel’”—by other marines, although he could not specifically recall Oswald doing so.308*

  After a few weeks at Atsugi, Lee seemed to be coming out of his shell, and he occasionally went with other marines to carouse in local bars that doubled as cheap brothels for the troops. As author Epstein noted, “Oswald had found a camaraderie with a group of men that he had never experienced before,” and in one of the bars he found a Japanese bar girl he lost his virginity with. He started to drink for the first time that anyone knows of, sometimes drinking to excess. He watched the other guys’ late-night poker games—watch standers kept very odd hours—but never played himself. Occasionally, when the weekly rotation of watchers brought him two days’ liberty, he took off for Tokyo. He apparently scored with a striking Japanese woman he seemed to be crazy about and who he told a friend was a hostess at the expensive Queen Bee nightclub in Tokyo. His mates, seeing Oswald with the woman when he brought her on base, wondered how the rabbity Oswald rated such a classy and expensive woman. They never got an answer.309*

  On October 27, just five weeks after Lee reported for duty at Atsugi, Oswald’s resurgence came to an end. Another marine, Paul Murphy, heard a pistol shot and rushed into Oswald’s cubicle in the barracks. He found Oswald sitting on a footlocker looking at a wound in his arm. “I believe I shot myself,” Oswald told him calmly. He had been keeping a loaded .22 caliber Derringer pistol in his locker. As he was removing some gear, the gun fell to the floor and discharged, the bullet hitting him in the left elbow.310 The injury was serious enough to keep him in the U.S. Naval Hospital at Yokosuka, where the slug was excised from his arm, until November 15.311

  The shooting put Oswald in trouble with the office of the Judge Advocate General, the military’s legal branch for enforcing the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The officers who reviewed his case were, however, lenient, concluding that Oswald had “displayed a certain degree of carelessness or negligence,” but that the injury was incurred “in the line of duty” and not as a result “of his own misconduct.”312 He was, however, charged with a violation of Article 92 of the UCMJ for “having in his possession a privately-owned weapon that was not registered,”313 and punishment would have to be meted out. Zack Stout told author Epstein that the unit was scheduled to leave Japan on maneuvers to the Philippines, and Oswald wasn’t happy about it, possibly because of trouble he was having with the hostess. Some of the marines thought Oswald may have shot himself deliberately in the hope of remaining at Atsugi while the rest were shipped out.314

  The trial for Oswald’s minor court-martial offense would have to wait, because on November 20, 1957, just five days after he was released from the hospital, his unit was sent aboard a landing ship called USS Terrell County to the Philippines.315

  The unit expected to return to Atsugi in fairly short order, and in fact after less than a week of amphibious landing maneuvers, the men were already embarked on the Terrell County for the return trip, but a crisis growing out of a civil war in Indonesia caused a
long delay in their return—they spent the next thirty days or so, including Christmas, sailing about the South China Sea without ever seeing land. By the time that crisis was resolved, further maneuvers in the Philippines planned for February or March 1958 were looming, and it made little sense to send them back to Atsugi only to return them almost immediately to the Philippines.

  Right after Christmas, MACS-1 arrived at Cubi Point in the Philippines, where they set up a temporary base. Cubi Point was adjacent to Subic Bay on Bataan, the famous peninsula where U.S. and Filipino troops surrendered to the Japanese on April 9, 1942. Though there was a landing strip at Cubi, the marines did not set up a radar station there. The temporary assignment in the Philippines ended up lasting for months, until March 18, 1958.316

  While at Cubi Point, Oswald passed an examination that made him eligible for the rating of corporal, although he was never promoted.317 He also learned, according to his November 1959 interview with Priscilla Johnson McMillan, to “sympathize with local Communists and conceived a hatred for U.S. ‘militarist imperialism’ for exploiting the Filipino natives.”318

  Cubi Point was also the scene of an incident that to this day continues to intrigue conspiracy theorists who believe Oswald may have had a hand in it. Around seven o’clock on the night of January 5, 1958, Private First Class Martin Elmo Schrand, one of Oswald’s classmates at Jacksonville and Biloxi, was found lying on his back in a pool of blood, having been shot to death near a hangar where he was on guard duty. A January 1958 investigation by the Marine Corps at Cubi Point concluded that the shooting was caused when Schrand’s weapon, a Winchester Model 12 riot-type shotgun, was “accidentally discharged.” An investigative report ruled out “suicide” and said the “investigation disclosed beyond doubt that no other person or persons were involved in the incident.” It also revealed that the weapon was discharged within eight inches of Schrand’s left armpit.319

  Pursuant to a request from Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin in 1964, the Department of the Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence conducted a reinvestigation into Schrand’s death, including a determination of the position of the body at the time he received the wound, and concluded that “Schrand’s death was accidental and the result of a malfunction in the receiver section of his weapon caused by an impact on the butt of the piece incurred in the course of [Schrand] conducting Manual of Arms evolutions.” Interviews with three of Schrand’s close associates at Cubi Point revealed “that Schrand was a ‘bug’ for drill and spent considerable time practicing the Manual of Arms.”320

  A few days after Schrand’s death, Coffee Mill was sent to the island of Corregidor forty miles away, where the unit set up another temporary camp, this time including a radar “bubble” in a tent. The unit remained at Corregidor, another island where U.S. troops were defeated by the Japanese (May of 1942), until the end of its Philippine maneuvers. Oswald had been doing mess duty throughout this entire three-month Philippine period—probably as a sort of informal punishment, since he was still awaiting court-martial on the weapons charge. One of the marines to whom author Epstein talked recalled that “Ozzie could really put on a show with those eggs. He could have three gallons of eggs on the griddle and take a mess tray and slide it under the puddle of eggs and flip them all at once. It was quite a sight.”321 However much he pretended to enjoy mess cooking, though, his military career was definitely slipping. At the end of January he received his lowest marks yet on his semiannual evaluation—4.0 for conduct and 3.9 for proficiency.322

  Shortly after setting up camp at Corregidor, actor John Wayne, on location filming The Barbarian and the Geisha, landed in a helicopter. Wayne, a grizzled veteran of many heroic Marine battles on the back lots of RKO and Republic Pictures in Hollywood, was besieged by the marines, and in a photo of Wayne dining with the troops in their mess hall, Oswald can be seen standing in the doorway to the Duke’s left rear.323

  On March 7, 1958, MACS-1 was loaded aboard another landing ship, the USS Wexford County, and sent back to Atsugi, where the men arrived eleven days later.324 For Oswald, homecoming also meant facing the music: on April 11, 1958, he was finally court-martialed on the weapons charge, and on April 29 sentenced to twenty days’ confinement at hard labor, docked twenty-five dollars a month for two months, and busted to private. The confinement at hard labor was “suspended for six months, at which time, unless the suspension is sooner vacated, the sentence to confinement at hard labor for twenty days will be remitted without further action.”325 Oswald began to go haywire. In addition to the formal punishments, he was not returned to the radar crew, as he requested, but was formally reassigned to serve as a mess cook. According to the marines Epstein talked to, Oswald’s carping about the corps became extremely bitter and may well have led to a second incident less than two months later. Technical Sergeant Miguel Rodriguez, the man who reassigned Oswald to mess duty, said that Oswald approached him at a party in the Enlisted Men’s Club at Atsugi, looked at him with “those small, dreamy eyes,” and said, “You’ve got guts to come in here.” Rodriguez laughed it off, assuming that it was an instance of prejudice against Mexican-Americans. A few days later, though, on June 20, Oswald again accosted Rodriguez in the Blue Bird Café, a squadron hangout just off the base, in Yamoto. Oswald spilled a drink on Rodriguez—who rose and shoved him away—and then cursed the sergeant, calling him yellow and inviting him outside. Rodriguez, who was more sturdily built than Oswald, nevertheless turned down the invitation to duke it out and filed a complaint against Oswald.

  Oswald had a right to be represented at the ensuing court-martial trial on June 27, but elected to represent himself. There were two charges under two different articles of the UCMJ, one of “wrongfully using provoking words to a Staff Non-Commission Officer,” the other of “assault [on] a Staff Non-Commission Officer by pouring a drink on him.”326 Oswald cross-examined Rodriguez and tried to get him to admit that the spilling of the drink had been accidental, and to some extent he prevailed—the court decided the question could not be proved one way or another and found Oswald not guilty on that charge. Oswald also testified on his own behalf that Rodriguez had been picking on him, that he had requested to be transferred away from the sergeant’s supervision, and that he had merely approached him in the Blue Bird Café to discuss the situation. He admitted to inviting Rodriguez outside, but denied calling him yellow. He also claimed to be slightly drunk at the time. Oswald was convicted on the charge of wrongfully using provoking words and sentenced to twenty-eight days’ confinement at hard labor and forfeiture of fifty-five dollars out of one month’s pay.327

  The conviction and sentence were approved by the First Marine Aircraft Wing on July 14, 1958, by which time Oswald had already been incarcerated for over two weeks. Because of his second conviction, he would now also have to serve the twenty-day sentence originally suspended at his first court-martial in addition to the twenty-eight days meted out in the second.328 There were other blows to whatever hopes Oswald may have had for a successful career in the Marine Corps. When he was busted to private on the first conviction, it dashed any immediate hopes for promotion to corporal, in spite of the fact that he had passed the examination. His military obligation period would also be extended by the time served in incarceration.329 Further, a request he had made in mid-April to extend his tour of overseas duty to May 1959, routinely approved the same day, was revoked in June.330 However much Oswald may have wished to stay in Japan, he would be returned to stateside duty in mid-September, and most of his time in that interval would be spent in a place worse than boot camp—a Marine brig.

  Little is known about Oswald’s stint in the brig, except that it amounted to nearly the full forty-eight days he had to serve on the two sentences—he was confined on June 29 and released on August 13, a total of forty-five days, and he made it tougher than it had to already be by getting into a fight with a brig guard.331 It is well known that a Marine brig can humiliate the strongest of men. A 1963 play at New York City�
��s avant-garde Living Theater, The Brig, by Kenneth H. Brown, was a depiction of an hour in a typical Navy–Marine Corps prison, filled with shouting, brutal guards and their utterly silent, utterly cowed prisoners, who are kept hard at work at menial, demeaning tasks or braced at rigid attention every moment of the day. It no doubt depicts the living hell—much worse than any civilian prison other than the Alabama chain gang—Oswald lived through for a month and a half in 1958.

  The experience left Oswald a changed man, more embittered than ever before. He told a fellow marine, “I’ve seen enough of a democratic society here in MACS-1. When I get out I’m going to try something else.”332 He also backed away from his nights out with the boys, tending once again to keep to himself and disappearing into Tokyo on his longer liberties. One of the marines who spoke with Epstein told him that he had been surprised to meet Oswald in a private house in Yamoto with a woman who worked there as a housekeeper for a naval officer. Also present was a young Japanese man for whom Oswald had bought a T-shirt from the base PX. The marine was impressed that Oswald had a girlfriend who was not a bar girl and who was cooking sukiyaki on a hibachi grill for him.333 In her testimony before the HSCA, Marina said Oswald had mentioned “his Japanese girlfriend” to her. He said that “she was very nice and…a very good cook and…she prepared special dishes for him, that he was pampered.”334