“Colonel Gritz presents an argument with more plausibility, at least to those aware of some of the Byzantine relations among the CIA, various White House officials, covert military operations, and the international drug trade. In 1987, Gritz made his second trip to a remote region in Burma that forms part of the Golden Triangle, one of the world’s major sources of heroin, to interview the drug lord and warlord General Khun Sa about American POWs in Laos. But the interview, which Gritz videotaped, evidently consisted mainly of detailed allegations by Khun Sa about his dealings with U.S. government agents, including officials high in the Reagan and Bush administrations, who were using the Joint Casualty Resolution Center in Bangkok not to resolve the POW/MIA question but mainly as a cover for their own illicit activities. The following year, Gritz published A Nation Betrayed, an astonishing document whose thesis is: ‘a parallel government has existed for decades, which led us into a war that cost more than 58,000 lives and infused our nation with drugs’; this ‘shadow government has used drug and arms trafficking to fund illegal covert operations’; and the agents of this ‘cancerous bureaucracy,’ realizing that the discovery of American POWs would lead to the unmasking of their own sinister activities in Indochina, have systematically sabotaged every effort to find and rescue the prisoners.”

“Gritz tells the story of how a project to modify one of the rotating barrels from an A-10 Warthog fighter plane, to be used as a weapon against Soviet tanks, went wrong. The program had gone up in smoke when the gun was brought into Washington for a demonstration. The A-10, which was in a covered truck, accidentally discharged on the main street, its projectile penetrating the vehicle and hitting a gasoline pump being used by a morning commuter. I can imagine the suits on Capitol Hill finding that one a tad difficult to explain to the harassed DC cops swarming the scene.”

“‘This is no longer a volunteer unit,’ Gritz had said [in Vietnam in 1967]. You’ll be issued a lightweight body bag. A number will be stencilled on the bag to correspond with your number on the roster. I want zippers on the inside and outside. You’ll use the body bag to stay dry when you sleep at night. If you’re shot you’ll crawl into the bag and do your best to zip it up to make recovery of your corpse easier. There are only four ways you can get out. First, you die and we ship your remains out in the bag provided. Second, you’re wounded and medivacked. Third, you DEROS (return home after tour of duty), or, fourth, you supply me with a suitable replacement.’”