† Criminal InJustice is a weekly series devoted to taking action against inequities in the U.S. criminal justice system. Nancy A. Heitzeg, Professor of Sociology and Race/Ethnicity, is the Editor of CI. Kay Whitlock, co-author of Queer (In)Justice, is contributing editor of CI. Criminal Injustice is published every Wednesday at 6 pm.

 

A Dirge for Tucker, Torture, and Dirty Work

by Kay Whitlock

We all have our ghosts, the memories of singular people and events in our lives that changed us forever, in ways we still struggle to define with emotional clarity, and so haunt us still.

For the most part, these ghosts exist in the shadows of our lives, half-remembered more or less as we actually experienced them and half-invoked in service of personal storylines about who we wish we really were, who we think we are, who we hope to be – and, conversely, who we do not want to be.

The ghost I have been visited by most recently is a man, long dissolved into dust, probably tortured to death in Vietnam, having been responsible, in part, for the torture and assassination of countless Vietnamese people. His name is Tucker Gougelmann. He is the 78th person to be commemorated with a star on the Wall of Honor at CIA headquarters.

I knew him briefly, by accident or dumb luck, if you can call it that, in the years between 1972 and 1975, before the repatriation of (at least some of) his broken bones. I knew him not well but vividly. His very presence, by definition, was vivid.

It would be easy to hate him, but I don’t; I never have. My responses are much more complicated and have to do with a furious, searing, and ceaseless grief. He never really goes away. What am I supposed to do with him?

I suppose he rises again now from the miasma of the past to disturb my heart and spirit for several reasons. The first is the December 2014 release of the report on the CIA’s post-9/11 use of torture from the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.   The second is the relative placement of two recently-released feature films, Selma and American Sniper, in the contest for primacy in the American imagination – the Academy Award nominations be damned.

The third is the powerful and necessary campaign for reparations for survivors of Chicago police torture.  Next are the seemingly endless pre- and post-Ferguson killings of black people by police, security guards, and vigilantes in the United States.

Finally, there is my personal, apparently never-ending, search to explore the question why the most massive forms of violence are so terribly ordinary and routine, and how and why so many of us refuse to recognize or care about it; why we let it go on and on and on. And the subsequent, essential question: how is it possible to transform such lethal indifference and contempt, which produces systemic violence, into structural manifestations of civic goodness and generosity? (That is a question Michael Bronski and I explore in Considering Hate: Violence, Goodness, and Justice in American Culture and Politics. )

Meeting Tucker

It was around Christmas, 1972, in my hometown of Pueblo, Colorado.  I was the young anti-war activist and organizer – most recently an obscure field secretary on the East Coast with the U.S. section of the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom (WILPF) – back in Pueblo and spending the holidays with family.  We had been estranged for some time, because of my political beliefs and work, and that estrangement was trying to heal.  No other family/extended family members shared my radical views on race, class, gender, and war. My sister and her then-husband were both Army officers, she a nurse. My father, like all of the older men, had served in World War II and ardently supported the war in Vietnam. Nothing made him prouder than pinning my sister’s bars on her when she was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.

The women of my larger family- combined biological and extended – regarded my work as an embarrassment; the men regarded it as a disgrace, if not outright treachery. And I wasn’t even out as queer then; that would come the following year. But you know how family can be: love is still often there, somehow, messily, confusingly, despite chasms of difference and disagreement and betrayal; despite flare-ups of contempt and misunderstanding and even hatred. Everything can get all mixed up, so people like me often pick our way through various family gatherings trying to navigate this emotional high wire, sometimes successfully, sometimes catastrophically.

At the center of our extended family were Ruth von Ahlefeldt, a first-grade teacher, and her husband Rolf, a retired industrial engineer for the Pueblo Army Depot. They’d moved to Colorado from one of those communities surrounding New York City. We spent almost every major holiday and most minor ones, at their house where there was more room and a bigger table for our boisterous mix of people, which also embraced other families. When my own mother died, Ruth became my “second mom,” and our relationship continued to evolve in unexpected and remarkable ways until she died, at 96, in 2014.

Tucker Gougelmann, Rolf’s childhood friend, always stayed in touch with his old pal.  And when he unexpectedly showed up that Christmas, traveling from Bangkok, where he apparently was based, Ruth and Rolf were initially terrified. They were returning home from an evening out, just stepping inside the front door when he signaled his presence by hurtling some object down the stairs. And then terror gave way to delight.  I was told that Tucker always traveled under assumed names and never let anyone know his travel plans in advance. He would just not be there, and then suddenly he would be.  That all sounds so hokey and theatrical.  In this case, as I learned, it was real.

Everyone worried about how I would react to Tucker; I was given to understand in vague asides that he either was or had been with the CIA in Southeast Asia. Nobody actually said “CIA,” not before his death, anyway, but the meaning was clear.

And everyone revered him, this big, tall guy with the noticeable limp, the buzz cut, the ever-present short-sleeved shirt and khakis, the teller of bawdy jokes, the two-fisted whiskey drinker who simply dominated any room he was in, even with silence, but often with laughter and brusque, off-color remarks. The men worshipped him; he was the very embodiment, they thought, of heroic masculinity, the World War II officer, grievously wounded in the Pacific, improbably fighting back to health, scarred but mobile, and then joining the CIA, which took him, as I later learned, to India and Tibet; to Korea, Eastern Europe, and on, inevitably, to Vietnam.

The women bestowed upon him a special regard. My mother was a gentle person, imaginative and fun when she wasn’t exhausted, very loving and talented, both musically and artistically, but so often worn to the bone by work and money worries. Many people who didn’t know her well underestimated her; thought her not much worth noticing. But Tucker adored her; he often sat next to her, engaged her in conversation, and somehow made her feel both seen and significant. It was as if she’d gained an older brother who was looking out for her, always taking her side.  The two of them together always meant laughter.  When he came over to my parents’ house for supper – perhaps two or three times in all – he made the other men follow him into the kitchen to do cleanup and wash dishes. And the other men, who always avoided such tasks, followed him like devoted puppies. When I witnessed this then, and in my memory, Tucker’s easygoing kindness to my mother feels real and unforced. He was the same toward my second mom, Ruth. He was not flirting; he and they were basking in one another’s good company and kindness.

When we were first introduced that Christmas, I noticed a ring he wore. I don’t recall the design, exactly, but even though I was many years away from taking refuge vows as a Buddhist practitioner myself, I knew it was in some way related to Buddhism. “I cut it off the hand of a dead Buddhist monk,” he said, grinning. There was always the whiff of braggadocio with Tucker. The implication was that he’d killed this monk. Was this his sick idea of a joke? Was it a taunt? Or was it true? I still don’t know; I will never know.

But what I said then was something like, “That’s disgusting. But no, you didn’t. You just want to make me think you did. You’re baiting me.” He laughed and shrugged. He didn’t talk about his work. He made jokes, he made pronouncements – he intensely disliked Nixon; he thought marijuana should be legalized – but beyond the realization that he was larger than life, it was impossible to know him.  Public accounts of him say he was probably associated with the Bay of Pigs, but only the CIA really knows.  He told me he saw the dead body of Che Guevara, but I don’t really believe it. It becomes impossible, beyond certain documented facts, to separate the man from the machismo myth.

Still, I knew something about myself. I came of age as an activist largely under the influence of nonviolent groups and mentors: the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee; Clergy and Laity Concerned; the Joan Baez-affiliated Institute for the Study of Nonviolence/Mountain West; the Resistance; the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC); and WILPF.   I worked closely with segments of the GI movement against the Vietnam war (in Vietnam, it is known as the American war) and with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. They were good men trying to come to terms with horrific violence in which they were implicated.

Over the years, I learned of atrocities committed in Vietnam by U.S. and allied forces, first from veterans who witnessed and too often participated in them firsthand, and then directly from people living in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. When he toured the United States, speaking at colleges and universities, I went to hear Thich Nhat Hanh, older than I, but still young then, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam who recited poetry and spoke about the war and seeking peace, often with a young woman from Vietnam, Cao Ngoc Phuong, who later became the Buddhist nun Chan Khong. And I learned from listening to women from Southeast Asia who were at that time living through the war.

As a WILPF field secretary, together with representatives from Canada’s Voice of Women, Women Strike for Peace, and anti-imperialist women, I served on the North American planning committee for a 1971 gathering of women from North America, South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and Laos (Cambodian women planned to attend, but finally could not) while the war raged. The purpose was to come together outside a framework of enmity to build a stronger women’s voice against the war. The meetings – one in Toronto, the other in Vancouver – had to take place in Canada because the United States considered the Southeast Asian women to be wartime enemies. The overwhelming whiteness of the North American planning, of which I was part, had its own profound problems, but that is a discussion, an important one, for another time.

At the Toronto gathering, I met women who spoke firsthand of the impacts of the war; of widespread use of torture and assassination by South Vietnamese and American authorities. One woman told of her daughter who, along with thousands of others suspected of being Viet Cong or sympathetic to the VC, vanished into the notorious tiger cages of Con Son. There, thousands of women and men were tortured by South Vietnamese officials as American advisers stood by, observed, and made suggestions.  This mother had no idea if her daughter was dead or alive; had not known for months.

More generally in my work, I learned about what the destructive social impacts of the war from friends and colleagues who had worked in South Vietnam, in orphanages, fitting people for prosthetic devices, helping anyone who needed humanitarian support and assistance.

So all of this was on my mind and in my heart when I met Tucker. I was in his presence for only two or three brief periods between 1972 and 1975, when Saigon was falling, the United States was getting out of Vietnam, and when Tucker went back in and came home, literally, as a disembodied collection of broken bones.

Bearing Gifts, with Inchoate Intent

Two of those periods were Christmases; maybe all three, but I don’t think so. That first year, I gave him a copy of the then-new book The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred W. McCoy, a blistering exposé of CIA involvement in opium trafficking in that part of the world.  Ironically, it appeared just as Nixon’s “war on drugs” was in formation, and the CIA attempted to subject it to prior review and censorship.   (Much later, a new and expanded edition of the book was published, documenting wider CIA involvement in global drug trafficking.)

I think that was also the year that I gave him a brown Afro wig, with a note suggesting that it would help him travel incognito by better “blending in” with the cultural trends of a younger generation.  Somewhere, I have a photograph of him wearing it.  Only three items that signified Tucker remained in the best guest bedroom at the von Ahlefeldt household for years: a giant, almost-but-not-quite-empty bottle of Old Grand-Dad whiskey, that wig on a styrofoam head, and a framed photograph of an old ad for World War II war bonds, featuring Tucker as a wounded Army hero.  The wig finally came home to me after Tucker’s death.

But the real gift, the one not so clearly marked “smart ass,” was a beautiful music box that played “Born Free,” then a popular theme from a movie.  I presented it complete with a message that said something like, “This is given to you in memory of the freedom-loving people of Vietnam.” He didn’t joke about this gift; indeed, he seemed speechless when he opened it.

Later, in the late 1980s, more than a decade after his death, I improbably met, quite by coincidence – or serendipity – Tucker’s sister. She was, to my surprise, a Quaker, a member of a Friends Meeting for Worship in – I think – Tucson, Arizona, an active member of the Sanctuary Movement, which helped bring political refugees from El Salvador and Guatemala across the U.S./Mexico border and shelter them from authorities in churches.  Coming of age in the 1980s, the Sanctuary Movement was an imaginative and bold act of resistance to Reagan’s crackdown on immigrants and refugees. At its height, about 150 U.S. churches and faith communities openly defied the government, and many more endorsed its ideas.

She told me that Tucker cherished that music box; that when he was a very small boy, he’d wanted a music box so much.  But no one was about to give a little boy so feminine and weak a gift; that was a wish forever denied and finally forgotten about until it unexpectedly arrived.  He’d entrusted it to her for safekeeping.  When he retired, she told me, they planned to locate somewhere together and create a bird sanctuary.

A bird sanctuary!

Tucker?

A bird sanctuary?

Once a little boy who desired a music box that he was never going to receive?

Oh, how much easier it would be to have never met her, to have heard none of this from Tucker’s Quaker sister.  How much easier to never have seen the kindness that flowed between my mother, my second mom, and Tucker. How much easier to never have known the human being at all.

By that time, you see, I’d learned – from an informal narrative about Tucker written by a close friend and business associate in Asia as well as from various books and documents I accessed later – that Tucker was one of the principal architects of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, an operation that, in time, would become something of a model for American use in Afghanistan.

…America’s Central Intelligence Agency secretly initiated a sweeping program of kidnap, torture, and assassination devised to destabilize the infrastructure of the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, commonly known as the “Viet Cong.” The victims of the Phoenix Program were Vietnamese civilians, male and female, suspected of harboring information about the enemy—though many on the blacklist were targeted by corrupt South Vietnamese security personnel looking to extort money or remove a rival. Between 1965 and 1972, more than eighty thousand noncombatants were “neutralized,” as men and women alike were subjected to extended imprisonment without trial, horrific torture, brutal rape, and in many cases execution, all under the watchful eyes of US government agencies.

 Tucker’s Death

It is said – you can see the same accounts circulating endlessly on the Internet – that Tucker retired from the CIA in 1972, but lived in Thailand, as a private businessman.  Is this true?  I do not know.  But it is true that during his years in Vietnam – apparently spanning the 1960s to 1970s – he had acquired a wife (said to be a common-law arrangement) and children.  Whether he fathered those children or not is not clear, but it really doesn’t matter.  When the United States withdrew from Vietnam and Saigon fell, Tucker went back in to try to secure safe departures for his Vietnamese family. And, with help, he did.

They made it out, just barely, but he did not. Vietnamese authorities took him into custody in Saigon.  Witnesses later placed him in prison.  Ultimately, Vietnamese authorities identified and repatriated his remains to the United States, and U.S. authorities authenticated them. It is said that his bones had been broken, healed, and broken again.  His remains were buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

It must have been a lonely and terrible death, a death exactly like that his work had inflicted on thousands of Vietnamese women and men.  I can’t imagine how painful and isolated his death or their deaths must have been.  Trying to imagine any of these losses, my heart shatters again and again and again.

Some have said his death was karmic, but I am not so sure.  Karma has always seemed more subtle and challenging to me than some sort of retributive, cosmic trap door/sledgehammer.  I’ve always thought that karma somehow provides us with the opportunity to begin understand the effects or impacts of our words and actions.  Where these are negative, for self and others, we are afforded the opportunity to speak and act differently. Whether we take that opportunity or not is up to us.

But who knows?

When I think of Tucker  – and I do, often – I ache.  I want to say something to him, but find I have no words.  I want to comfort all those who disappeared into the abyss of torture and assassination and disappearance that he helped construct.  But they are gone, and I cannot.

Some say he is a hero for rescuing his Vietnamese family.  I am grateful he was able to do so, even at the expense of his own life.  But what of the other families he helped to destroy?  Many say he was a patriot, willing to risk everything for his country.  But what does it mean to risk everything for the sake of inflicting massive pain and loss on so many others?  How did he reconcile the differing ways he treated those he consigned to dreadful torment and those he considered to be family?

Some say, well, at least he helped the Tibetans.  But even the Dalai Lama says that in those post-war years, the CIA’s involvement in Tibet was ultimately harmful.

What is the essential truth of Tucker?

I make no excuses for him.  Nor do I seek easy, uncomplicated evaluations of him.  Is he pure evil?  No.  Was he capable of goodness?  Yes. Can his culpability for such terrible violence be waived?  No.

The closest I can come is to contemplate something Friedrich Nietzsche once said:

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Good People and Dirty Work

In the 1960s, the sociologist Everett C. Hughes wrote a landmark essay called “Good People and Dirty Work.“[PDF]  It is included in the book On Work, Race, and the Sociological Imagination.

Hughes writes of all the ways in which society works to avoid becoming aware of the “dirty work” done in the name of public order and safety; of the structural violence embedded in the very nature of prisons, concentration camps, torture chambers.  He speaks of the relative ordinariness of this kind of violence, and the way so many people come to accept and tacitly endorse and justify it. To turn away from unpleasant and painful truths that challenge our flattering image of self. To imagine that the only problem, if there even is one, is in extremism and excess; not in the nature of the structure itself, and its imperatives.

In our recent book, Bronski and I examine this phenomenon, noting that “Attempts to justify or even deny the consequences of [structural] violence are part of a failed search for ethical coherence: society honestly decries violence and simultaneously perpetuates it on a massive scale.”

We spend so much time trying to identify and pin down the monsters; to eradicate them.  We want this coach or manager, this broadcast pundit fired.  We want to force this company or that to sever its connection with ALEC.  We want this police officer or that one convicted of a crime.  We want to go to war against anyone we fear or resent. This, we convince ourselves is real justice, the right use of power.

But we can pursue all the monsters we want.  We can rid ourselves of Tucker Gougelmann again and again, but he will always reappear because he is only representative of larger, oppressive systems of power.  And he will always complicate the picture, if we look closely, because he is not an extremist, a loner, a crazed misfit.  He is a good man – or woman – doing very dirty work.

In order to change those systems, we must shift the public consciousness.  But to what? Considering Hate offers this vision of civic goodness:

An awareness, translated into action, of the intrinsic worth and interdependence of all peoples and ecologies, and the determination to dismantle societal structures that support social inequalities and the violence that accompanies them.

It may be one place to start.

In the meantime, I remain haunted by Tucker Gougelmann.  This is the first time I have ever spoken or written publicly about him.

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