Vietnam Frees U.S. Hero After 15 Months as Captive

A Vietnam War veteran who is a hero of the Saigon evacuation has been freed after disappearing in Vietnam 15 months ago while sailing a plywood boat from the Philippines on a private rescue mission, Radio Hanoi said today.

“I’m a little pale but otherwise all right physically, a little bit numb,” Robert Schwab III told his father, Robert Jr., in a telephone call to Atlanta from Bangkok.

Schwab, 44, who sailed secretly and alone from the Philippines in April, 1985, had confessed that he violated the communist nation’s criminal code in his attempt to find two Vietnamese girls. He was released by the government Wednesday after promising not to repeat the crime.

“They tried to make me over a little mentally, but I wasn’t tortured or anything like that,” the elder Schwab quoted his son as saying.

In Washington, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said Schwab was released to the personal custody of Richard Childress, director of Asian affairs for the National Security Council, and that President Reagan “is pleased.”

Girl He Left Behind

Schwab’s father said the Vietnam veteran was going after the daughter of a family he befriended in Vietnam who was a child at the time of the 1975 evacuation. He said she had asked to go with “Robbie” when he left.

“He thought that was not a good idea (at the time),” the elder Schwab said. “She was still a child and had a fine family there.”

He said the son also went after the child’s sister or niece. “He was hoping to bring them both back.”

He said to the best of his knowledge, his son did not get to either girl.

“Robbie marches to a different drummer,” the father said with a laugh. “Apparently (Vietnamese officials) thought he was a spy.”

(Other reports quoted friends of Schwab as saying he went in search of the fiancee he left behind when Saigon was evacuated in 1975, along with a child he believed was his.

(They said Schwab had been certain of capture but had hoped to reach Ho Chi Minh City to make his case for exit permits for both. The friends said he met “Trai”--a pseudonym he used for her--when she was a teen-ager in Vietnam in the early 1970s.)

Schwab, who speaks Vietnamese and was trained in survival techniques, had a 17-foot plywood sailing dory built, stocked it with 50 plastic jugs of water, a plastic sextant and three small radio transmitters, and set sail April 9, 1985. He was last heard from when he neared Vietnamese waters nine days later.

Vietnamese authorities earlier denied any knowledge of Schwab, and after months with no word from the wiry American, many of Schwab’s friends believed that his quest had ended in death.

‘One of the Heroes’

Schwab had spent five years in Vietnam during the war--first as a soldier in the Special Forces and then as a civilian. His first rescue mission in Vietnam came in 1975, when the armies of South Vietnam were crumbling before a communist offensive.

“Schwab was one of the heroes of the evacuation,” said Alan Dawson, UPI bureau chief in Saigon at the time. “He and some friends helped get out thousands of people when the ambassador was still refusing permission to evacuate.”

In 1981, a refugee in a Thai refugee camp told Schwab that the girl he left behind had suffered a nervous breakdown and had been jailed twice for attempted escapes by boat.

He also suggested that the woman’s daughter was Schwab’s. Schwab then re-established contact by mail and decided to bring Trai out himself.

“I don’t see that I have any choice,” he wrote in the account left with friends in the Philippines. “It is a little late, but now I’m going to get her out.”