Some Vietnam and Special Forces history for Sunday morning.
Robert B. Rheault, Green Berets commander who faced scandal in Vietnam, dies at 87
By Matt Schudel, Published: October 26 E-mail the writer
Robert B. Rheault, a charismatic Army colonel who could scale mountains, dive to the ocean floor and speak flawless French, arrived for his second tour of duty in Vietnam in May 1969, when the war was at its raging peak. He had the job that had been his destiny, commander of the Green Berets, the elite Special Forces unit that often operated outside the standard Army chain of command.
Within a month, Col. Rheault (pronounced Roe) was embroiled in a case that spread to the highest levels of the Pentagon, White House, CIA and Congress and brought a premature end to his promising military career. The Green Beret murder case, which was splashed across magazine covers and in headlines for weeks, became one of the most puzzling, disturbing and tragic episodes of the war, but it has largely been forgotten in the decades since.
(AP) - Col. Robert B. Rheault, a former commander of the Army’s Green Berets in Vietnam in 1969.
In the words of Time magazine, it was “a Vietnam War scandal second only to the My Lai killings” — in which U.S. troops killed hundreds of innocent civilians — “and one of infinitely more complex moral overtones.”
Col. Rheault died Oct. 16 at his home in Owls Head, Maine. He was 87.
His wife, Susan St. John, confirmed his death. She did not disclose a cause.
Col. Rheault, a 1946 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., joined the Army’s Special Forces in 1960. He traveled all over the world, engaging in actions along the East German border and peering into China from high in the Himalayas. He trained military units in Jordan, Pakistan, Tunisia and Iran.
In one training exercise, according to Jeff Stein’s 1992 book “A Murder in Wartime,” Col. Rheault’s commandos sneaked into the headquarters of a sleeping U.S. general, drew a red line across his throat and left a note on his pajamas that said, “You are dead.”
During Col. Rheault’s first tour in Vietnam in 1964, he was an intelligence and operations officer with the Green Berets. Few people knew what he did on his long solo forays into the jungle, but he always came back alive.
In the mid-1960s, when he received a master’s degree in international relations from George Washington University, Col. Rheault also worked as a counterinsurgency specialist for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He had close contact with top officials at the White House, State Department, Pentagon and CIA. He was among the few people who knew about clandestine U.S. operations in Vietnam and neighboring Cambodia and Laos.
As the war in Vietnam began to be questioned on the home front, the Green Berets remained one of the few popular parts of the military during an unpopular war.
In 1966, “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” a song co-written and sung by Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler, was a No. 1 hit on the pop charts. In a flattering 1968 film portrayal of Special Forces units in Vietnam, John Wayne played a colonel in “The Green Berets.”
‘A scintillating leader’
(Continued at the link below)
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