SWEENEY, JON M.
Deceased 02/2003
Name: Jon M. Sweeney
Branch/Rank: UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS/E3
Unit:
Date of Birth:
Home City of Record:
Date of Loss: 19-February-69
Country of Loss: SOUTH VIETNAM
Loss Coordinates: 162100 North 1070400 East
Status (in 1973): Returnee
Category:
Aircraft/Vehicle/Ground: Ground
Missions:
Other Personnel in Incident:
Refno:
Source: Compiled by P.O.W. NETWORK from one or more of the following: raw
data from U.S. Government agency sources, correspondence with POW/MIA
families, published sources, interviews and CACCF = Combined Action
Combat Casualty File.
REMARKS: 700817 RELEASED IN HANOI
30 MI SE KHE SAHN ON LAOS BORDER
No further information available at this time.
========================
Library of Congress files:
RVN: Biographic Site Report for REFNO 1563.
Country: RVN
Name: SWEENEY, JON H.
Subjects: Captured; RELEASED; PWC; QUANG TRI PROVINCE
Reel: 360
Page: 1-2
Type of Document: Automated Data Extract
Date of Report: 93 09 24
Date of Information: 70 02 22
Originator: JTTFA
Category: MISC PW FILES
EXECUTIVE ORDER 12812 REFERRAL - (Senate Select Committee) POW/MIA AFFAIRS
CASE CONTROL NO. 9203138/Military Absentee Jon Martin Sweeney
Name: Jon Martin Sweeney
Reel: 299
Page: 40-41
Type of Document: Telegram
Date of Report: 70 09 02
Date of Information: 70 08 31
Category: MISC PW FILES
NVN: Anti-war Propaganda Statement by Jon M. Sweeney
Country: NVN
Reel: 402
Volume: 49
Page: 59
Type of Document: Open Source
Date of Report: 70 01 20
Date of Information: 00 00 00
Category: CIA Files
Marine Cleared of All Charges (New York Times)
Name: Jon M. Sweeney
Reel: 409
Volume: 33
Page: 124
Type of Document: Open Source
Date of Report: 00 00 00
Date of Information: 00 00 00
Category: CIA Files
===========================
A Message From Sweeney
Corey Kilgannon, a freelancer for The New York Times, wrote a news feature
about me in the Jan. 19 metro section of the newspaper.
Within hours of its publication, I had received a spate of e-mails,
including one from a literary agent who later convinced me that I ought to
tackle a novel I've been carrying around in my head for more than three
decades.
I stared blankly at the computer screen for several days, until I convinced
myself that it wasn't a good idea. I picked up and re-read Nelson DeMille's
Up Country, wherein Paul Brenner, a freshly retired Army investigator,
revisits the Vietnam of his youth, including the Quang Tri province of South
Vietnam, where DeMille had served as an infantry officer.
Quang Tri triggered a 34-year-old memory of a 1971 court martial, in
Quantico, Va. I decided I would start writing by simply starting to write.
Inspired by DeMille's use of his own memory, I employed the first-person
singular, referring to myself as a fictional aging newspaper reporter
indulging in reverie.
I began: "The early 1970s were pretty good years for me, productive..."
Through my fingertips, I reminisced about traveling to Romania, about
converting an assignment on growing a victory garden into a 24-week series
of humor columns on a "defeat" garden, and about the court martial.
I reminisced about USMC Pfc. Jon M. Sweeney, of West Babylon. The story came
back in paragraphs, detail for detail, except for two I could not recall:
the name of a European city in which Sweeney had escaped his North
Vietnamese captors, and the bakery where his father worked. I had kept a box
of notes and clips on the case, but I'd been through two divorces, two
apartments and six houses since the trial.
"F. Lee Bailey's Boston law firm defended Sweeney," I typed. "The firm was
called Bailey, Alch and Gillis. I watched all three lawyers in action:
first, Colin Gillis, a former Marine and JAG officer; then, Gerald Alch, who
later defended James McCord in the Watergate hearings; then, Bailey, who set
his fee at $5,000 plus expenses, which would amount to tens of thousands,
plus the total proceeds of Sweeney's share of any book or movie ever
published or produced about the story.
"Sweeney's father was a baker at [I wrote, 'the Entenmann's Bakery in
Brentwood,' though I was not sure.] The Sweeneys didn't have much.
"Gillis and Alch were brilliant, and fun to watch.
"Sweeney eventually was acquitted. He never should have been allowed in the
Marine Corps in the first place, let alone dispatched to a tropical jungle.
All his life, he had asthma. Sweeney had beguiled his Marine recruiter with
his passion for the Corps and its history, which he had memorized. His older
brother, Kenny, had been a Marine, and Jon Sweeney idolized Kenny. Every
sergeant in Sweeney's service history gave him a pass on tests of physical
durability, like running laps, so that he succeeded where he should not have
succeeded, until he made it to the jungles of Vietnam, an asthmatic in a
place with no air.
"One day, after his increasingly angry comrades literally had carried him
for days, Sweeney collapsed on a trail in the Quang Tri province of South
Vietnam.
"After first firing a .45-caliber round next to his ear to inspire him to
get up, Sweeney's captain, Thomas W. Hinckle, ordered the platoon to
advance, abandoning Sweeney on the jungle trail. Marines are not supposed to
do that. They're not supposed to abandon even their dead.
"The VC captured Sweeney, paraded and/or dragged him through a series of
towns and villages, beat him half to death a number of times, imprisoned him
in the 'Hanoi Hilton' and then believed him when he said he would cooperate
with them by openly condemning the United States on broadcast radio.
"Sweeney later testified that he knew his first duty as a prisoner of war
was to escape, and that he had decided that fooling his captors into
believing he was a turncoat would be an effective way of doing it. Other
POWs resented the hell out of it.
"Sweeney's pro-North Vietnamese radio broadcasts from Hanoi were monitored
and taped by the CIA. Later, the North Vietnamese flew Sweeney to [I could
not remember the city. I wrote, ("Brussels?")] for a worldwide press
conference, wherein Sweeney would condemn the U.S. and praise the North
Vietnamese. While in a ["(Brussels?)"] hotel, Sweeney telephoned his parents
and asked them to meet him there and bring along a fresh uniform. They
complied. Following a cinematic cloak-and-dagger episode, Sweeney escaped
with his parents, changed his clothes in flight and was greeted at JFK
Airport in New York by a colonel who saluted and then embraced him, the
first-ever POW in the Vietnam War to return.
"Not long after the debriefing, the Corps charged Sweeney with desertion,
aiding and abetting the enemy and abandoning his weapon in the face of the
enemy, the latter two charges punishable by death.
"I covered the Article 15 investigative hearing in March and, later that
year, the court martial. Sweeney was acquitted of all charges."
Mildly satisfied that I had least started the project, I declared myself
finished for the evening and repaired, first to Runyon's restaurant in
Seaford, for Thai mussel soup, and then to the Changing Times Pub in
Farmingdale. There, after about five minutes, a woman tapped me on the
shoulder.
"You don't remember me, do you?" she said.
I didn't. I said, "Well, you look vaguely familiar, but no. Give me a hint."
"You bought me my first lobster dinner. I was 16."
Blank. Dumbstruck. No memory.
"All right. What if I tell you it was in Quantico, Virginia?"
The hair on my legs snapped to attention. I couldn't believe what was
happening. I said, "You're not going to tell me that you're Jon Sweeney's
sister."
She smiled. I started to weep. She said, "It was the night of the acquittal.
You bought dinner for the whole family and Gerry Alch, all on Newsday. I had
never eaten lobster, and you convinced me to try it."
Stammering, I told her what I had been writing that afternoon, after 34
years. I grabbed the shoulder of the man next to me and blurted, "Are you
hearing this? You have to hear this!"
I asked her about the city in Europe.
"Stockholm."
"Did your father work at Entenmann's?"
"No. He was a baker for the A&P Bakery in Flushing."
I wrote down her name, Kathy Wylie. She told me that Jon had died in
February, 2003; Kenny, five days later. All three of her brothers-and her
father-were deceased. She lives in the family's West Babylon house, now a
two-family, and her mother is still alive. Kathy and her husband have four
children.
"What are you doing here?" I asked. I was freaking. She was attending an
office party. She said that for the last 20 years, she'd worked for Newsday.
People always had asked her if she ever saw Ed Lowe, but she was in a
different department, and I-when I worked for Newsday-worked mainly at home.
She said Jon worked for years as a security guard at the United Nations.
He'd never married. He also was on disability, suffering from many medical
problems from the beatings.
"You were like part of our family," she said.
I hugged her, straining to not sob.
==
http://www.longislandpress.com/v03/i04050203/edlowe.asp
Published February 3, 2005