"What in the Hell is so Special About Eddie Caudill"

Mountain Eagle newspaper, Whitesburg, Ky.  August 3, 1972
by:  James G. Branscome, Investigative Reporter

Vietnam War story -  Wounded mountain boy faces desertion charges

     Fort Gay, West Virginia :  Six years ago this May Eddie Caudill left his home here on the banks of the Big Sandy River to board a bus for Fort Knox, Kentucky. Nineteen years old and married only three weeks, Eddie was not particularly interested in joining the army, but his Lawrence County, Kentucky, draft board had said go, and he went.   In words that one hears often in the mountains, he says, "When I got orders, I sure didn't want to go because of Vietnam.  But I went because I knew there was a lot of other guys going, and I wasn't one bit better than them."

     On Thursday morning of this week Sergeant Eddie Caudill will again board the bus for Fort Knox, Kentucky.  He will be asked to step forward just like did when he was a green recruit.  But this time, he will not be asked to take an oath, but to answer to charges of deserting the U.S. Army.

A VIET CONG BULLET

     When he makes that step forward, his left leg will be dragging behind the right one, its muscles and nerves wrangled by a Viet Cong rifle bullet.  His body will lean slightly forward to avoid pain from a large, deep hole in his left side, the entrance of the bullet that has yet to completely heal after five years.  After that step, Eddie will get the verdict on whether he will get a court martial or a dismissal. The court martial is the more probable.

     Eddie Caudill was a good solider.  His eighth-grade education got him into the Army to begin with it; it also got him into the jungles instead of behind a desk when he arrived in Vietnam.  His superior performance as a foot soldier won him fast promotions.  In a year and a half he rose from a Private carrying a M-60 machine gun to a Sergeant commanding his own ten-man unit weapons squad.

     A Veterans Administration spokesman in Huntington says the statistics show that, "mountain boys make superior soldiers but I can't recall one doing as well as Eddie Caudill."  The army statistics also show that mountain boys die at rates twice the average of other state groups.  Eddie Caudill almost became one of these statistics.

     On October 28, 1967, Caudill was ordered to take his squad on a patrol into enemy territory.  "They don't usually do this," he says, "because I had only 19 days to go before I was to leave for home.  But they were short of E-5's and sent me on patrol even though I tried to get them not to."  As Caudill was preparing to report to headquarters on a successful patrol, he was struck in the shoulder and stomach by rifle bullets fired by a Viet Cong soldier with a captured American weapon.  "I covered the knot sticking out of my stomach with my bandage and passed out," he says.
 

     Thanks to a successful medical evacuation mission, Caudill awoke alive in the Long Bin hospital. After 20 days, he was transferred to the army hospital in Yokahama, Japan.  He thought he was progressing well.  Nurses changed his bandages three times a day and gave him a total of 16 pills a day to prevent infection.  After two weeks, he was transferred to Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, D.C.  It was here that problems developed.  Caudill tells it this way: "A doctor came in and looked at my wound.  He told the nurse that I could care for my own wound and gave me a thing I could use to stick back into the wound to pull the pus out of my side.  They didn't change the solution that I put into my side, so each time I used it, I was just reinfecting myself.  They gave me no pills and no packing.  The wound healed from the outside, closing the pus in, and they just had to bust it open.  It was just as big as ever.  All that work for nothing."

     The only treatment Caudill got at Walter Reed Hospital was in April of 1968 re-connecting his severed intestines and restoring his bowel movements to normal, instead into a sack on his side.

NO MEDICAL SUPERVISION

     After a short period of recovery, he was reassigned to a barracks outside of Walter Reed with no medical supervision.  On his initiative Caudill bought bandages, Q-tips, and hydrogen peroxide to clean his wound.  Despite his continued infection, he was assigned on regular detail at the barracks and had to care for his wound "whenever I could fine time."

     Several times during this period, he asked to be sent to a Veterans Administration hospital.  "Each time they said they was going to do something, but they never did," he says.  Finally, in May of 1968 he asked a Walter Reed doctor for a leave of absence and received it.  After being home for two weeks, he asked his sister to call the doctor and request another week of leave.  According to Caudill, "The doctor gave it to me and specified no time that I was to return.  So I stayed home until the first of September.  They knew where I was.  If they'd have said 'come back' I'd have gone back."

     When he returned to Walter Reed in September, he was arrested by military police for desertion.  "They put me in a little cage with a six- or eight-inch bench to sleep on.  I had to treat my wound laying on that bench. I had to stick the Q-tip all the way in to its tip, just like always," he says.

     From the cage Caudill was transferred to Fort Meade, Maryland.  There he was taken before a Colonel and given a summary court martial, but no demotion and no sentence.  Despite his continued requests, Caudill was never given a release date from the army.  On December 23 of 1968, "It didn't look like I was any closer to being released, so I asked for a leave to go home for Christmas:  "They gave it to me.  I never went back.  "By this time Caudill had already spent more time in the army than was required.  He was receiving no medical attention at Fort Meade.  He never returned, he said "because I didn't feel I was being taken care of the way I should have been after I went over there and got shot."

GETS HIGHWAY DEPT JOB

     After returning home, Caudill tried working.  A job with the highway department lasted until his leg started giving him problems.  An examination by a local physician revealed that the nerves in the leg were severed by his stomach wound.  The examination also revealed-- to Caudill's surprise -- that he still has metal stitches inside his body and must have them removed in an operation.  "They never told me they put any stitches in there," he says.

     Caudill was forced to go on welfare after giving up his job. He draws a monthly check of $112 to support his wife and three children ages 4, 2, and six months.  He pays rent on a two-story frame house that has no plumbing and stands a few feet from the main line of the N & W Railroad and across the river from the Kentucky border.  Since he left on December 23, 1968, he had not heard from Uncle Sam, no letters, no checks, nothing.

     It was the welfare department that advised him to contact the Veterans Administration.  The Veterans Administration in turn advised him to write his Congressmen and try to establish his military standing.  He wrote Rep. Carl Perkins because he lived in Kentucky until he was drafted; then Rep. Ken Hechler; then "even President Nixon." After a string of letters from each, Caudill decided the best thing he could do was "to go in and settle up with the army."

     Settling up with the army is not an easy matter, though.  It took the Veterans Administration several days to even find his records - they were located in Fort Benjamin Harrison in Indiana, the headquarters for all files on AWOL's and deserters.

     A Major at Fort Knox would give no assurance about what the army will do when Caudill arrives Thursday.  Caudill isn't certain himself.  "If  I get a bad discharge, I don't deserve it," he says, adding, "I want to get medical help` and GI Benefits.  I need an education.  When I was in this trouble, I didn't even know who to write for help; even who my Congressman was."

     Caudill has asked the welfare department for assurance that his family will be cared for if he is imprisoned.  They have agreed.  He has also tried to sell his litter of pigs, the only tangible property he has besides a 1956 Mercury automobile.
 

     Caudill says he is not bitter about the army and would serve in Vietnam again "if they asked me to."  But he does not believe he deserves a court martial and a sentence.  "I was proud toward the uniform I was wearing. I never had any problems -- not even an Article 15 -- with the army until I got to Walter Reed."

     Caudill's recitation of his problems with army bureaucracy left reporters shaking their heads at his home last Saturday.  Somehow, you just can not believe that Eddie Caudill could be in trouble with anybody, particularly an army that he served so well.  The only decoration on Eddie Caudill's living room wall is that hauntingly familiar blue sign seen all over the mountains:  In white letters it says, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."

     One week after Sergeant Eddie Caudill surrendered to authorities at Fort Knox, Kentucky, he has still to receive medical treatment or to get any definite word about desertion charges that will be brought against him by the army.  He is lodged in a fenced and guarded confinement center and assigned to "limited duty" on the base.

     Army spokesmen are refusing specific information to a reporter about when the wounded soldier will be court martialed.  One commanding officer, however, says that it could be in "three or four weeks."

     Caudill reported to the Personnel Confinement Facility last Thursday night.  On Friday morning he arose at 5:30 a.m with two hundred others accused of desertion. When a reporter arrived at the facility to inquire about Caudill's status, the commanding officer, Major J. L. Deryck, refused to disclose whether he was there. After several questions, however, he shouted, "What in the Hell is so special about Eddie Caudill?"

     Major Deryck insisted that the reporter could not talk to Caudill because "he's at the hospital getting medical treatment."  A few hours later, however, the reporter saw Caudill walking around the facility.  He had not been anywhere near the hospital.  After this fact was called to the major's attention, he did interview Caudill and ordered that he be sent to the hospital for a "complete medical examination."

     Despite army information to the contrary, Caudill was never examined by a doctor on Friday.  This reporter was ordered out of the hospital after he found that Caudill was to be examined on Monday by a para-professional not qualified to give medical diagnosis.  On Monday, an army spokesman at the base confirmed that Caudill had seen a medic.  Asked what the examination revealed, the spokesman, a lieutenant colonel, said, "The examination shows that the man needs medial treatment."

     No date has been set for Caudill to enter the hospital "pending receipt of his medical records from the Walter Reed hospital in Washington, D.C.).  Caudill has an infection in a stomach wound, the result of metal stitches left in his body at Walter Reed.

     The chain of command at Ft. Knox is not of one opinion about whether Caudill will be court martialed.  A spokesman Friday morning said, "It's prime material for a general court martial.  A general court martial is the most serious, meaning a possible five-year sentence at hard labor, loss of all army benefits, and a dishonorable discharge.  On Friday afternoon, the same officer had changed his mind, saying, "If his story is true, he will get an honorable discharge."

     The base press officers, who control information going to newsmen, say that "nothing" will probably happen so far as a court martial is concerned.  But on Monday it was learned that Caudill has been given his rights and had a lawyer assigned from the Judge Advocate General's office to defend him.  This is the usual procedure before a court martial; on Friday the army had said Caudill had not been assigned an attorney since "we're not certain we're doing to do anything to him."

     Apparently, the commanding officers are not impressed by the congressional inquiries being made about Caudill. Two congressmen, Rep. Ken Hechler and Rep. Carl Perkins, and Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, have reportedly sent letters to the army asking that Caudill be given medical treatment and expeditious processing.  A commanding officer at the base, asked about the army's lack of concern over the congressional inquiries, said, "Oh, everyone writes their congressmen.  We get those things all the time and send a form letter back."

     Caudill has charged that he received unsatisfactory medical treatment at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington and deserted because he felt he should have been treated better  "after I went over there and got shot."  Caudill says he had to change his own bandages at the hospital.  He describes Ward 32 at Walter Reed where he was kept as a "dirty place" where "nurses mistreated guys by throwing water on them and things like that."  Asked whether the army was prepared to deny those charges, a press officer said, "No."

     Eddie Caudill is only one of hundreds of mountain men brought into the Fort Knox center for AWOL's and deserters (anyone AWOL for more than 30 days) each month.  On the same day that Caudill reported in, 32 other West Virginians arrived at the center in the custody of military police.  The army is not certain how many AWOL's and deserters it brings in each month at Fort Knox. One commanding officer said from 700 to 1,100 a month.  Army information officers say this figure may be exaggerated because "sometimes we catch the same guy two or three times a month."  Regardless, most of Ft. Knox's AWOL's are from the mountains, presumably because such a large number of mountain youth are unable to avoid being drafted by obtaining deferments.

     Even though the army is moving toward voluntary enlistment, it still gets a disproportionate share of its soldiers from the "job" poor Appalachian region.  The Department of Defense has reported, for example, that West Virginia leads the nation in per capita Vietnam deaths:  25 West Virginians die per 100,000 population compared to 17 per 100,000 population nationally.

     The army does not keep figures on portions of Appalachians states like eastern Kentucky.

     The army says it has a total of 50,000 AWOL's and deserters in the country at any one time.  If the figures quoted by the army are correct, then one-fourth of all those who are brought in come to Fort Knox.  About 90 per cent of those who desert have less than a high school education; their average age is 18.  Fort Knox has a total of seven army lawyers to defend these 700 to 1,100 soldiers who come in each month.

     Part of the explanation of why mountain men find the army less than desirable may rest with the attitude of their commanding officers.  One high-ranking officer at Fort Knox, who asked not to be identified by name, said mountain soldiers are "unsophisticated, disadvantaged, can't see the big picture, lack proper values and are more concerned about themselves than they are the army."

     They're just different.  The same officer resents the "modern approach" under which the army handles those who go AWOL or desert.  "What we ought to do is take these guys out behind the barracks and pull their ears," the officer said. Even though he says he commands the AWOL center under the modern approach, the same officer said, "Most of these guys wish they were in the stockade instead of here when I get through with them."
 

     This officer refused to allow a reporter to visit the area where AWOL's and deserters are first brought in.  Asked why, he replied, "You'd just get in the way.  You write that these guys desert because they have strong family ties.  If you can't write something good, don't write anything about us.  We can handle affairs here without reporters snooping around."

     "The New Army Wants to Serve You" the signs in all the mountain courtrooms say. That sign should perhaps be amended to say exactly how the army treats those who insist on retaining some of their mountain independence.
 

     With all the talk about amnesty for those in Canada, maybe it's time to suggest that we have a similar problem for soldiers in the army who don't like Vietnam and army life either. Especially those like Eddie Caudill who "went over there and got shot up."

     Army officials at Fort Knox did an about face this week and announced that "in all likelihood" Sergeant Eddie Caudill will be a free man in less than a month.  When Caudill arrived at the base three weeks ago, commanding officers disagreed only on the kind of court martial that he would get, one commanding officer saying that "he's prime material for a general court martial" -- the most serious disciplinary action that can be taken against a deserter.  This week, however, the army press information office released a statement saying, "The Army feels there would be no justice in court martialing this man. He filled his time."

     The army chose an administrative maneuver that allows it to release Caudill without having to officially consider his absence of four years.  Technically, Caudill's case has been transferred to the Medical Review Board at the Pentagon with the recommendation that he be discharged from the army "for medical reasons."  The recommendation was made by a medical review board at Fort Knox, thus taking the case from the hands of the Commander of the Personnel Control Facility.  The Pentagon normally acts on such cases in about a month, a spokesman said. During this time Caudill will either be confined at the base and assigned to "light duty" or sent home on leave.  (After considerable delay, Caudill was assigned to the hospital for test and treatment last week.)

     For some unexplained reason, the Fort Knox spokesman still insist that Caudill's medical condition is "normal" despite the recommendation that he be given a medical discharge with all benefits.  Spokesmen have consistently played down a visible infection in a side wound the soldier received in Vietnam in 1967.

     On Friday a Major Gant with the press information office sidestepped a question about the infection by saying, "A little infection may have come from those metal stitches left in his side.  But, you must understand, these stitches always work themselves out.  The doctors usually tell a man to take a finger nail clipper and clip them off when they come out so they won't tear his shirt."  Major Gant said he would have to get a doctor's opinion before he could say whether four years was an unusually long time for stitches to take in "working themselves out."  Army spokesman remained tightlipped about Caudill's charges of mistreatment while at Walter Reed Army Hospital, saying that such questions should be directed to the Surgeon General's Office in Washington.

     Caudill's case has been followed closely by Congressman Ken Hechler, who made a personal call to Gen. Wm. R. Desorby, the commanding General at Fort Knox, and by Congressman Carl Perkins and Senator Robert Byrd, who wrote letters to the Commander of the Army.  Press attention, particularly that of the Washington Post, appears to have been a major reason the army changed its mind about Caudill's case.  The Army teletyped messages about press inquiries and newspaper stories back and forth between Fort Knox and the Pentagon Press information offices. It would not be an overstatement to say that Caudill so far has seen more of the Fort Knox press information officers than he has of the Fort Knox medical officers.

     Regardless, the good news for Sergeant Eddie Caudill is that barring some unforseen difficulties he will soon be a "civilian" for the first time since May of 1966 when he first entered the army.  The Army answered its own question about "What in the Hell is so special about Eddie Caudill?" In its announcement dropping charges against the wounded veteran, the army said, "The only obligations involved were ours to him."
end of story.