Vietnam Frees American Trying to Rescue Woman

A Vietnam War veteran who returned on a long-shot mission for a girl he left behind was freed Wednesday after 16 months in captivity, Radio Hanoi disclosed Thursday.

Robert Wilfred Schwab III, 44, was released in Ho Chi Minh City to Richard K. Childress of the U.S. National Security Council. The two men flew to Bangkok, but the girl, who is about 28 now, was not with them.

“I’m a little bit pale but otherwise all right physically, a little bit numb,” Schwab told his father in a call to the family home in Atlanta.

Schwab could not be reached immediately by reporters here.

The radio report of the Vietnam News Agency said Schwab was arrested April 23, 1985, for violating territorial waters and committing acts “against the sovereignty and security of Vietnam. . . . He undertook not to repeat them and asked for clemency from the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.”

The radio report said that Schwab was ordered expelled by the people’s committee of the province of Nghia Binh, in central Vietnam north of Ho Chi Minh City, but it did not say where he had been seized or held.

“Apparently the officials thought he was a spy,” his father told reporters in Atlanta. He quoted his son as saying: “They tried to make me over a little mentally, but I was not tortured or anything like that.”

Reagan Ordered Effort

In Washington, White House spokesman Larry Speakes said President Reagan had personally directed Childress, the National Security Council’s director of Asian affairs, to pursue Schwab’s case after normal search and rescue efforts by the State Department proved fruitless.

“It was generally assumed he was at the bottom of the South China Sea,” said NSC spokesman Dan Howard, who credited Childress with “following up and following up” until Vietnamese officials finally acknowledged in May that Schwab was being held by local authorities in southern Vietnam.

Childress then met with high-level Vietnamese officials in New York and Hanoi to negotiate Schwab’s return. A White House statement said Schwab had set sail alone on April 19, 1985, from the Philippines in a small sailboat in an apparent attempt to bring back a female Vietnamese friend. In June, his family reported him missing.

In Good Condition

White House officials said Schwab left Vietnam without the friend, his mission to retrieve her an apparent failure. He is currently undergoing routine medical examinations in Bangkok, where his condition is described as good.

Schwab’s family told the Atlanta Journal that the girl in Vietnam was not Schwab’s girlfriend. “It wasn’t a romance,” said Brittain Pendergrast, Schwab’s aunt. “They were friends. She was only 17 at the time and a member of a prominent Vietnamese family. I’ve seen her pictures and she is beautiful.”

Schwab’s father, Robert W. Schwab Jr., told United Press International that the girl had wanted to leave Vietnam during the American evacuation in April, 1975, but that his son dissuaded her on the grounds that she was too young to leave her family.

Six years later, Schwab learned that the girl, whom he calls Trai, had suffered a nervous breakdown and had been jailed twice for attempting to escape by boat. Schwab then managed to contact her by mail and vowed that he would rescue her. “It is a little late, but now I’m going to get her out,” he wrote in a note left with friends in the Philippines.

Daring rescue missions are not new to Schwab, who has traveled to Laos and Vietnam on his own to search for MIAs. “He did it solo,” his father told the Atlanta Journal. “I don’t think the U.S. government liked it at all.”

Schwab was the third American to fall into Vietnamese hands for alleged territorial violations in recent years. In 1984, Californian Frederick Graham was released after being jailed when his boat was seized on a treasure-hunting expedition. In April, 1985, William Mathers, a Vietnam veteran and salvage expert, was freed after more than eight months in custody. His ship, rigged for salvage work, remains in Vietnamese hands.

But Schwab’s case was by far the most dramatic. He was an Army officer in Vietnam in the early 1970s, later staying on in civilian jobs until the war ended in April, 1975.

According to reports here, Schwab was active in the final days in organizing the evacuation of Vietnamese who worked for the Americans during the war. He reportedly left on the last day, April 30, being evacuated from the U.S. Embassy roof by helicopters as the North Vietnamese army prepared to enter Ho Chi Minh City, then called Saigon, capital of the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam.

Sometime before he left, perhaps while he was still in the Army, he met the girl. He would identify her to friends only by a pseudonym, Trai. Acquaintances of Schwab here said she was a teen-ager when they met, and that she was his fiancee. According to their accounts, he tried to get her out of Saigon before it fell to the Communists, but was unable to do it.

Last fall, six months after Schwab disappeared after sailing from the Philippines for Vietnam, Associated Press reporter Denis Gray spoke to Schwab’s acquaintances here about the mission. Gray had known Schwab in his postwar years in Thailand.

Thomas O’Donnell, an American investment adviser based in Hong Kong, told Gray that Schwab had written him from the Philippines and said: “I don’t see that I have any choice. It is a little late, but now I’m going to get her out.”

According to O’Donnell and others, Schwab had planned his mission for 18 months. They said he intended to deliberately court arrest by sailing to Vietnam and then attempt to somehow negotiate freedom for himself and the girl. Both O’Donnell and Schwab’s father said that a second, younger girl was involved. O’Donnell told Gray that it was his impression the second girl was Schwab’s child. The father said she was the sister or niece of Trai.

Schwab left the southern Philippine island of Palawan in April, 1985, in an 18-foot motorized sailboat, heading west for Vietnam, 600 miles across the South China Sea.

Vietnam Silent on Capture

According to the Vietnamese report, he was seized just days later, but no announcement was made at the time. Six months later, O’Donnell told Gray:

“The chances that he is alive are pretty slim at this point, but stranger things have happened and Schwab is a great survivor. . . . Nobody was going to convince him not to do it.”

In July, 1985, according to White House spokesman Speakes, U.S. officials told the Vietnamese that Reagan was personally interested in what had become of the missing veteran. The Vietnamese reportedly responded that they had no information.

No Disclosure

According to U.S. officials Thursday, it was not until last May that the Vietnamese admitted that Schwab was in custody, and the Americans made no public disclosure of that report until Schwab and Childress, the NSC Asian affairs director, had flown to Bangkok.

According to Gray, Schwab was obsessed with going back to Vietnam for the girl. Schwab, he said, was one of the American veterans who could never escape the war, who stayed on in Southeast Asia to be close to the scene of those traumatic years.

In Thailand after the war, according to Gray, Schwab worked at various jobs, including taking part in an anti-opium program and reportedly joining anti-Communist Lao guerrillas on a foray into Laos in a futile search for American prisoners of war.

Times staff writer Eleanor Clift contributed to this story from Washington.