Freed Ex-GI Never Saw His Viet Girlfriend

A former U.S. Army soldier who sailed to Vietnam in search of his fiancee today said that he spent most of the last 16 months in solitary confinement in a Vietnamese prison and that he never saw the woman he called Mai.

Robert Wilfred Schwab III of Atlanta arrived in Bangkok on Thursday, the day after Vietnamese authorities expelled him. He was accompanied by Richard Childress, director of Asian affairs for the U.S. National Security Council.

Appearing gaunt after losing 10 pounds in jail, Schwab, 44, told a news conference that he was not allowed to see the 31-year-old fiancee he left behind at the end of the Vietnam War, and that Vietnamese Foreign Ministry officials would not meet with him to discuss the case.

A Failure, but Exciting

“It really was a failure,” he said.

But it was exciting, he added.

“There are people like me who just can’t pass up something like this,” he told the “CBS Morning News” in an interview. He added that if he had succeeded it would have been “something no American ever had in Vietnam--that is, victory.”

Schwab said he was captured off the central Vietnamese coast in April, 1985, after sailing 600 miles from the Philippines in an 18-foot boat. The journey took 13 days.

The Vietnamese placed him in a 12-by-14-foot cell that had a tile floor, a hard bed and a desk, Schwab said.

“I did a lot of talking to myself. . . . Most of the time was not interrogation; it was just lonely and depressed. . . . The physical conditions were OK,” Schwab said.

$10,000 Fine Paid

He said a fine was paid for his release. A well-placed diplomatic source said it was $10,000.

Schwab said he first met Mai, the pseudonym he uses for his fiancee, in 1972 at her family’s coffee shop in the city of Cong Tum. “I think highly of a traditional Vietnamese girl, and she was the archetype of that.”

Schwab was in Saigon when it fell to the communists in 1975, and was among those rescued from the U.S. Embassy roof.

He decided against taking his fiancee with him then, he said, because she was “in terrible emotional and psychological shape, crying her heart out and very thin.”