11:29 PM CDT on Saturday, March 14, 2009
By GREGG JONES / The Dallas Morning News
gjones@dallasnews.com
McKinley Nolan's letters from South Vietnam to his wife in Texas hinted at his anguish. He wrote of playing dead to survive on the battlefield and the suffering of Vietnamese civilians.
"He was just telling me how bad it was over there, all the fighting, all the killing," said Mary Nolan.
There was no clue of what was to come.
On Nov. 9, 1967, weeks from completing a two-year hitch in the Army, McKinley Nolan disappeared from his First Infantry Division unit. Communist Viet Cong propaganda broadcasts and leaflets later featured Nolan urging fellow black soldiers to lay down their weapons. The Army branded the missing Texan as one of the war's two confirmed defectors, but offered no explanation as to why Nolan deserted or what happened to him.
The Nolan case has long fascinated POW-MIA aficionados. It has spawned such varied tales as Nolan quietly slipping back home to the Brazos River bottomlands of Washington County, Texas, to him living the high life in Cuba as a guest of Fidel Castro.
"In the world of the conspiratorial POW-MIA guys, McKinley Nolan is like Bigfoot," said journalist Richard Linnett, who has spent years tracking missing Americans in Cambodia. "He's spotted everywhere."
As a rifleman in the Army's 16th Infantry Regiment, Nolan was based in Tay Ninh province, near the border with Cambodia. His veiled references to haunting battlefield experiences are supported by a Pentagon document that shows Nolan earned a Purple Heart and a Combat Infantry Badge. Linnett made the document available to The Dallas Morning News.
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