Michael Edward Sullivan served from August 14, 1968 to June 4, 1970. He was awarded the National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal with 1 bronze service star, Combat action ribbon, Vietnam Campaign Medal w/device, Good Conduct Medal and Sharpshooter Badge with Rifle Bar. NO PURPLE HEART is noted. NO POW MEDAL is noted. NO hospital time is noted. He served as a rifleman, and was in Vietnam when he claimed captivity. Primary duty was a rifleman until he returned to the U.S. Prior to discharge he was a "group guard". The name of the CO that signed his record of service on 31 July 1969 after review - is Captain George V. Best, S-3 with 2-26.

Moved to P.O. Box 9554 Ashville, North Carolina

STILL A CAPTIVE OF VIETNAM

FOR $35 A COUPLE, Michael E. Sullivan and his date dined on roast beef, frozen peas and mashed potatoes and listened to The Drifters and The Thymes, live, at the Huntington Town House. It was the spring of 1968; he was a member of the first Mepham High School graduating class to hold its senior prom off campus.

Toward the end of that summer, on Aug. 17, Sullivan, who lived in North Bellmore, enlisted in the Marine Corps. By the following March, he and the young man who had become his best buddy, Rick Gaston, of Richmond, Va., were lance corporals attached to the 1st Marine Division, 2nd Battalion, 26th Regiment, operating mostly in the mountains 35 to 40 miles north of Da Nang, in the Republic of South Vietnam.

On June 9, 1969, not quite a year after commencement at Mepham, Sullivan and Gaston were part of a night patrol in the jungle, headed out to set up an ambush site, when Sullivan heard or thought he heard a suspicious noise. He stopped to listen.

"We usually walked about five yards apart," he recalled recently. "I stopped; the guy in front of me kept going. I listened, but I listened for too long. Rick was behind me. It was pitch dark. I said, 'Rick, we lost 'em.' We waited, hoping to hear the squad come back. It didn't happen. We knew there was a village nearby, but we didn't know if it was friendly."

"Within seconds of entering the village," Sullivan wrote in a letter dated March 25, "we were surrounded by at least six Vietcong soldiers. Forced to strip naked, we were led away into the mountains, where we began our captivity as prisoners of war for the next 64 days.

My mother, who now is 81 years old, still has no knowledge of my internment, as my father never let her read the letter that the Department of Defense sent to my parents, informing them of my capture."

Painstakingly hand-printed on four pages of green, lined paper, Sullivan's letter continued: "The pain and torture Rick and I were subjected to was carried out on a daily basis. We were poked, prodded, molested, and deprived of food or water for the entire time."

According to the letter, they ate whatever crawled into or near their cages and drank only rainwater they caught in cupped hands.

In a telephone conversation, Sullivan said that his cage was kept separate from Gaston's, except for two occasions, and that every day, his captors forced him to play Russian roulette.

He assumes they made Gaston do the same.

"I heard only four words for the whole 64 days," he said, "but I heard them over and over, every day, every day:
'Marine, you die tomorrow.' One soldier used to pound on my right arm with his rifle butt, just pound and pound.

'Marine, you die tomorrow.' After a while, it just got like mush. I lost about 50 percent use of my right arm because of nerve damage, but through therapy, I got about 30 percent of that back.

"I was so convinced that I was going to die," Sullivan said, "that I gave myself the last rites every night. I was
brought up a very religious Catholic.

The sacrament was called extreme unction at the time, and I gave it to myself as the sun set, every day. Every day the sun would rise, and the torture would start all over, again.

"So it was in this state of desperation," read the letter, "that Rick and I tried a million-in-one chance of escaping. The Vietcong got a little sloppy one day, putting our cages next to each other. We both said it's either die, now, while trying to escape, or die in captivity. We forced our cages open, with me grabbing my guard by the head and snapping his neck in half, and Rick knocking out his guard with one punch.

"I have to admit that not all of what followed is 100 percent clear, Mr. Lowe, as the Navy corpsman later told me that I was almost in a delirious state of mind when they found me, but for some hideous reason, I still remember with complete clarity the Vietcong firing at us after we were about 50 yards out from the camp. I also remember with all too much clarity my dear friend Rick being shot in the back and killed about 5 feet behind me. I had all of about 5 seconds to pick up his head and say, 'Rick, I love you, pal, but I've got to go.'

"I ran about 4 miles, I was later told by my own troops.

When I came to, I heard Vietnamese voices... [and thought] that this was 'the end,' that the Vietcong were all around me. By the grace of God, I was able to see that it was a South Vietnamese ranger unit... I told them who I was, and they returned me to my unit." He was back home the following year.

Sullivan's father, Patrick, then a Long Island Rail Road employee and an Army veteran of the Normandy invasion,
took his 20-year-old son out of the Veterans Hospital and signed him into South Oaks Psychiatric Hospital in
Amityville, where doctors administered electro-convulsive shock therapy to treat what they called his "extreme" post-traumatic stress disorder.

Discharged after 11 months in South Oaks, Sullivan enrolled in classes at Nassau Community College and earned an associate's degree in business administration-despite flashbacks, exaggerated reactions to the sounds of helicopters or fireworks and interminable nightmares, the worst and clearest of them about Gaston.

With the help of his father, who died six years ago, Sullivan got a job with the LIRR. In fact, he recently retired after 28 years as the assistant train director at Valley Tower in Valley Stream.

Married and divorced as a younger man, Sullivan said that he and his second wife, Barbara, a registered nurse, have been happily married for 10 1/2 years.

They have two children, Katelyn, 10, and Daniel Patrick, 6. They live in East Islip, where Sullivan, now 51, recently
achieved the rank of firefighter II after only three years in the local department.

Sullivan said in passing that he hasn't slept a whole night in 32 years, nor talked about what happened. He wrote that he has two regrets: that his father never saw Daniel Patrick, and that despite years of therapy, he still cannot reconcile the death of Gaston. He thought that writing his story might help. His psychiatrist agreed; so did Barbara.

Sullivan thanked me for reading his letter. He thanked me for listening.

Imagine that.

There's only one way to handle this: I am profoundly sorry. The last story published under my byline represented a failure on my part to practice journalism the way I learned it.

The story in the LI Life section of Sunday's Newsday told of a letter written to me by a Michael E. Sullivan of East Islip, wherein the 51-year-old retired Long Island Rail Road employee related his agonizing experiences in the Marines as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam from June 9, 1969, until he escaped Aug. 11 with a fellow POW, Rick Gaston, who was killed while fleeing.

Sullivan did write the letter; I still have it. I telephoned him, talked to him, asked him questions and took notes. For
all I know, he may have been a prisoner of war in Vietnam, but no record exists supporting that status or his account, either for him or for the companion he named as a fellow Marine from Richmond, Va. 

Worse-worst, from my perspective-other than interviewing Sullivan over the telephone to augment the information he offered in the letter, I did not check any official source to verify his story or his service record. Sullivan had told me that if I tried, I would not be able to verify his POW status because he was involved in an operation in Laos at the time and had been told by his commanding officer that any such information would be disavowed by the United
States.

I bought that. I also bought that his post-traumatic-stress disorder had erased his memory of any number of such details as I might have have able to use to check out other elements of his tale. I bought the whole deal.

Why? First, it was easier than having to work hard or give up the story. I was moved by his saga of deprivation, escape and psychiatric damage. I was inspired by his tale of laborious, if imperfect, recovery. I was flattered by the notion that after 31 years of self-imposed silence, he would have selected me as a person who would read and hear his story and empathize with him. I was rendered sleepless by the recurring thought that my older son, spring-break-vacationing this week in Cancun, Mexico, is a year older than Sullivan was when he endured what he said he endured and suffered what he said he suffered. Moreover, as a  non-veteran, and probably guilt-ridden for it, I am a sucker for Vietnam veteran stories.

Yesterday, I received several calls and e-mails regarding this story, the most  compelling from Mary Schantag, of
Skidmore, Mo., who, with her Marine veteran husband, Chuck, founded an organization called P.O.W. Network in 1989 to establish and maintain an official list of POW's. They maintain an extensive Web site (www.pownetwork.org), which includes a list of 500 names of people who claimed to be POWs and were not.

"Our list of POW's hasn't been proven wrong," Mary said yesterday. "We have the names of every man during the Vietnam War who was lost, whether as a civilian, a member of the military or a foreign national. Over the last decade, we've built up biographies on these men from government records, people who served with them, family members or from testimony in Congress. The result is 5,000 pages of information posted on the Internet. The list of our names is the same list that the Pentagon uses, as well as Nam POWS Inc., the official organization of
returnees, and the American Ex-POWs. There are fewer than 30 returnees who are escapees. Your man is not on either list, neither is the companion, neither is the companion on the list of servicemen killed in Vietnam. So far, nobody has ever come forward with evidence of captivity who should be on the POW list and is not. Nobody, not one. And the 'covert operations' claim: the operations were covert, the men were not. Anybody who escaped captivity was debriefed and debriefed and debriefed, and it was all recorded.

"By the way, you're not alone," she said. "This is happening all around the world. We have a TV reporter and a camera crew in Wisconsin in the same predicament. We even have an American journalist in Hong Kong claiming, himself, to be a POW. He even took pictures of himself returning to Vietnam and all kinds of wonderful things. We've had about a dozen complaints of such claims and stories in the last week. Who knows why? You know, President [George W.] Bush has declared April 9, as always, to be POW Recognition Day for those who have returned. As it gets closer and closer to Memorial Day and the Fourth of July, we'll be inundated with more complaints."

Sullivan, meanwhile, sticks to his story. I'm content to let him. He now says that "Rick" was a nickname. He doesn't remember Rick's real first name. He isn't sure if Rick was from Richmond, though he'd said his parents lived there.

Sullivan doesn't remember his commanding officer's name, and he doesn't want to talk to anybody who wants any further information from him. He received a  call at the firehouse where he volunteers from an angry man who accused him of being a phony. He said he didn't expect this kind of reaction. He hoped I wasn't  mad at him.

I wasn't. Not at him, anyway.

House up for sale?? Moving so soon?? Maybe back to New York where the Governor awarded your medals?? Or maybe North Carolina?? Sullivan has been suspended indefinitely from the fire department (NOT connected with his claims...)

12/2003: Sullivan entered into a conversation and was confronted in O'FALLON, ILLINOIS. Seems he is now a preacher.

Distributed through the P.O.W. NETWORK in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.