Bangkok Babylon. Jerry Hopkins
in, believing that if the puppet South Vietnamese government fell in Ho Chi Minh's drive to reunite his country, the rest of Southeast Asia would tumble like dominoes. This theory was used to justify the U.S. war in Vietnam, a six-year-long conflict that killed nearly fifty nine thousand American troops and an estimated million Vietnamese. Poe was one of the men sent in to stop Uncle Ho's advance, specifically to protect the Laos border with Vietnam and inhibit the Vietcong's use of Laos territory that bordered North and South Vietnam along what was called the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Here, along with the Thai border police (working with Shirley again), he helped train Hmong tribesmen who at a peak strength of thirty thousand were the only effective Lao army, delivering to his agency bosses a fighting force that gave the Commies fits, but came with “liabilities,” some of the most damaging to Tony himself. This also was where, and when, the Legend of Tony Poe began, along with his heavy drinking.
He liked telling a story about going to the Chinese border for a week-long assault on a Vietcong-held Laotian village where some of his soldiers had family, using that as a carrot to get his attack force highly motivated. When the U.S. ambassador in Vientiane heard about the plan, he blew his stack, worried that the incident might bring China into the war. Tony's status was not improved some time later when, drunk, he came to a meeting at the ambassador's office with a rifle in one hand, a machete in the other. Still another time, when someone was sent to rein him in, Tony reportedly flew the guy across the Chinese border and threatened to land and leave him there. Another version of the story said he threatened to throw the guy out of the moving chopper.
In 1965, he was living in a remote village in northern Laos, subsisting on government rations and whatever was locally available, isolated by the lack of electricity, roads and phones. The enemy approached as he sat outside his grass-roofed hut drinking scotch. He picked up an M -1 carbine and shot seventeen of them, according to friends' accounts, while taking a bullet in the pelvis that exited through his stomach. Using his rifle as a crutch, he then limped to a friendly camp some miles away, where he insisted a helicopter go back for his wounded troops before taking him to safety; if you don't take care of your troops, he said, you can't expect them to take your orders. Fearing his continued illegal presence in Laos would be discovered by the press if taken to a hospital in Vientiane, he was airlifted back to Thailand, the official story being that he was a U.S. Air Force crewman shot down in “neutral” Laos.
The tales piled up like apocrypha and it was when he offered his troops a one-dollar bounty for every pair of Commie ears turned in, then strung them from the eaves of his house, carried them around in paper bags to shock new arrivals in-country, and stapled them to his official reports when his body count was questioned, that his reputation as a barberous sonofabitch was set. The way Tony told the story, he stopped the practice when he encountered a twelve-year-old boy with no ears and was told his daddy cut them off for the reward. After that, Tony paid $10 for heads, providing they came with a Vietcong cap. When asked if it were true that he dropped those heads onto enemy encampments, he said he'd only done it twice, once to deliver a message to a hostile village headman who'd taken a shot at his plane.
There was another time, a friend swears, that as Tony was conversing in a Bangkok bar, beneath the table he was silently strangling a cat. Hospitalized in the same city with wounds from a “Bouncing Betty”–a mine that springs up when stepped on, exploding at chest-height–friends supposedly sent him a bottle of vodka with a prostitute and, they insist, he was expelled from the hospital despite the fact that his playtime with the hooker had ripped open several stitches. He also lost two fingers when trying to defuse a booby-trap, leaving him with a claw that he used, when drunk, to great dramatic effect.
At the same time, he was a true friend of the hilltribe people, who came to accept him as probably few if any other foreigners before had ever been embraced. He learned enough of several dialects to converse, he lived with them for years at a time, he got knee-walking drunk with them on home brew that sometimes was flavored with a large centipede, he never asked them to do anything he wouldn't do himself, and, defying CIA policy, he married the niece of Touby Ly Foung, the Hmong chief, with whom he had two daughters.
The head of the CIA at that time, Bill Lair, said, “He was an actor who loved to play a part but then he forgot who he really was. I put that man in the jungle, in charge of primitive people, and gave him absolute power over them. They watched him perform magic, call in air strikes and saw rice and guns fall from the sky. They believed he was some sort of god.”
Consequently, it was no surprise when, years later, some in the media, including CBS TV in the U.S. and England's BBC, said the Marlon Brando figure in Apocalypse Now was inspired by Poe. Tony laughed and the film's director and co-writer, Francis Ford Coppola, reasonably denied the comparison, but certainly they had a lot in common, right down to the devoted hilltribe following and the severed enemy heads. When the original Kurtz was executed in the Joseph Conrad novel that inspired the film's script, Heart of Darkness, his final words were the same ones that ended the movie: “The horror, the horror...” That seemed to fit Tony Poe, too.
In the end, Tony was an embarrassment to his employers, a man who not only broke all the rules–some with permission, after all–but also was impossible to control and, eventually, consumed two bottles of whisky a day. (“I drank before I went out to kill,” he said. “There's nothing wrong with that.”) Although he fought in the cause of anti-communism for a decade in Southeast Asia, when he returned to the United States for a CIA retirement ceremony, he was perfunctorily thanked and told to get the hell out of town. One of the pilots recalled, “I drove him out to the National Airport afterward, accompanied by some Agency people who seemed to want to make sure he got on the plane, and it was as if they couldn't get him out of D.C. fast enough.”
Tony shrugged philosophically when asked to react, quoting Rudyard Kipling: “It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, and ‘chuck him out, the brute!' But it's ‘Savior of the country' when the guns begin to shoot...”
By the time the U.S. cut Tony loose in 1975–after he replaced Jack Shirley as head of training for four years in Thailand–he had more than thirty years in, enough for a military pension sufficient to live on comfortably in Thailand, so he settled with his wife in Udon Thani, the province where America had had one of its largest air bases and from which his old friend Bill Lair and the CIA had directed many of its wartime shenanigans. There were hundreds of disgruntled vets living there in raucous camaraderie, and Tony devoted his life to his family and raised sugar and cassava (tapioca). His demeanor was still subservient and polite when sober, calling everyone “sir,” as many career non-commissioned officers tend to do in civilian life, his drunken bar episodes cut back slightly by 1980 when he was diagnosed with diabetes.
His binges continued, nonetheless, and turned into violent anti-American rants–many of the stay-behind vets felt abandoned, even betrayed by the U.S. withdrawal from the war–and eventually Tony's swaggering drunks and bar “disagreements”–his .45 often strapped to his waist–eroded the patience of even the most good-natured Thais. He was tricked into going to Bangkok, where his passport was taken away and he was put on a plane for the U.S. It was made clear that he would not be welcome back.
At first, he settled with his family in Fresno, a city in California's agricultural belt, then home to thirty thousand relocated Hmong who still regarded him as a sort of demi-god, and then moved to a small house in San Francisco. More than a dozen medals hung in neat rows in a glass case in his home, including six purple hearts, but when an American magazine ran a story called “Meet the CIA 's Greatest Killer,” the photographs taken by the magazine showed him drinking an ice cream soda, blowing soap bubbles and pulling a grandchild's wagon full of toys, as if he were some sort of over-the-hill, pussycat with a killer tomcat's now romanticized and forgiven past. His social calendar was highlighted by weddings and other special occasions held by his Hmong friends who lived in the Bay Area. He called them “my people.” They called him “father.”
A few years ago in a California court, he fought a deportation order for one of the men who'd served with him in Laos, who was convicted of opium possession. Tony testified for the man, saying his contribution to America's anti-communism crusade outweighed his opium charge. The judge agreed.
Tony Poe died in July, 2003, at the age of