Oswald's Tale (50 page)

From an affidavit by Donald Peter Camarata: “I heard a rumor to the effect that Oswald had been in some way responsible for the death of Martin Schrand.”
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Schrand and Powers and Oswald had traveled in the same car from aviation school in Florida to radar school in Biloxi, Mississippi, and all three had gone on together to Atsugi and then to Cubi Point. Epstein offers the account of another Marine, named Persons, who

. . . heard an explosion, which he instantly knew was a shotgun blast, and bloodcurdling screams from the area that Schrand was patrolling. “The screams were like some wild thing . . . . I knew I wasn’t supposed to leave my post, no matter what happened, but I just said, ‘Hell, the guy’s in trouble,’ and took off over there,” he later recounted.

About 50 yards away he found Schrand in a pool of blood, mortally wounded. His shotgun was about six feet away on the ground behind him . . . It was determined that Schrand had been shot under the right arm by his own shotgun. Suicide was ruled out because the barrel of the gun was longer than Schrand’s arm and no object with which he could have pulled the trigger was found at the scene.

At first . . . it was assumed that he had been attacked by a Filipino guerrilla and, in the scuffle, shot with his own weapon. But when no other evidence of infiltrators could be found, the death was ruled “accidental,” on the assumption that the weapon had accidentally gone off when Schrand dropped it. The enlisted men, continuing to suspect that something more was involved in Schrand’s death, grew increasingly nervous about guard duty.
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To this, Epstein adds the following note: “A number of Marines asserted that Oswald was on guard duty that night and was possibly involved in the Schrand incident,” but adds, “After questioning nine officers and enlisted men who were at Cubi Point that night, I was unable to find any corroborating evidence . . .”
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There is an uneasy gap in scattered details. How can a man be in position to get killed by a shotgun blast that enters under his right arm and exits by his neck? An undeclared possibility is that someone was being forced to kneel and commit fellatio and so was in position to pick up the shotgun from where it had been placed on the ground at his feet.

There is no record whether Schrand, after all his travels with Oswald from Florida to Mississippi to California to Japan to Cubi Point in the Philippines, is to be characterized as his friend or his tormentor, but given Oswald’s sexual reputation, there is no wonder that his name became vaguely attached to this event.

In World War II, it was not uncommon for many a combat veteran in the Philippines, hardened, mean-spirited, and never in doubt about his heterosexuality, to use Filipino boys while on guard duty and brag about it later. He was being serviced.

What was current practice in early 1945 on Luzon had probably not altered a great deal by early 1958; Schrand could have been killed by a Filipino.

If it was Oswald, however—and let us assume that the probability of that has to be small but not inconceivable—then what a sense he would have had thereafter of being forever an outlaw, an undiscovered and as yet unprosecuted criminal.

Of course, it is wholly questionable to base any serious interpretation on such an assumption: Other events, however, will soon occur which might also have a large and secret effect upon him.

MACS-1 would move from Cubi Point all the way over to Corregidor, and there Oswald would spend hours exploring the old tunnels and fortifications of World War II. Still assigned to mess duty for the illegal possession of his derringer, he seems to have found a sense of balance by comporting himself like a clown. Working breakfast in the mess, he exhibits his own method for scrambling dozens of eggs. A fellow Marine, George Wilkins, told Epstein: “Ozzie . . . [would] take a mess tray and slide it under the puddle of eggs [on the griddle] and flip them all at once. It was quite a sight.”
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When his outfit returned to Atsugi in March, Oswald began drinking with other Marines. On return from a liberty, he would wake up his end of the barracks by shouting, “Save your confederate money, boys; the South will rise again!”
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If only for this brief hour, he has come into union with American life: He is a Marine, and happy when shit-face drunk. Soon enough, according to Epstein, his drinking buddies

. . . introduced him to the vast array of cheap bars near the base and the girls who worked in them. From neonrise to neonset the bars served as bargain-basement brothels for enlisted men from the base. And they cheered him on when he finally had his first sexual experience with a Japanese bar girl.
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Powers remarks that he was now “more aggressive, and outgoing in his manner . . . now he was Oswald the man rather than Oswald the rabbit.”
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Of course, Powers knew less about thesis and antithesis than did Oswald:

Epstein:
Several witnesses recall a wild place in Yamato pronounced “Negashaya,” where men wore dresses and lipstick. One witness described the place as a “queer bar” and reported that he and Oswald once went there—at Oswald’s suggestion—and took out two deaf-mute girls. “Oswald seemed to know his way around the place,” the witness, who prefers not to be identified by name, recalls. “I don’t remember that he knew anyone by name, but he was comfortable there.”
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Part of Oswald’s bravura may have come from a reasonably successful resolution of his court-martial for owning a derringer. He was found guilty on April 11, a month after they had come back from the Philippines, and he was sentenced to hard labor for twenty days, a $50 fine, and loss of his PFC stripe, but the judgment was not operative, and would be canceled in six months if he got into no more trouble.

That proved unworkable. He could flip three or four dozen eggs at once, but mess duty was still demeaning. He wanted to go back to the work for which he had been trained, which was to recognize on radar all incoming aircraft, friendly or hostile. In class at Keesler, he had finished seventh in proficiency in a training group of thirty enlisted men with high IQs. He liked the work; it was a job that required a security clearance. Oswald’s erect posture and quiet voice, the frequently stiff-lipped set to his mouth, suggested a divinity student, and everything that was priestly in him must have resented the greasy routines of a military kitchen.

“Oswald finally took his resentment out on the man who had reassigned him to mess duty, Technical Sergeant Miguel Rodriguez . . . [who] saw Oswald at the Bluebird Café, a local hangout for Marines . . .”
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and “in the course of complaining to Rodriguez about his mess duty, Oswald spilled a drink on him, Rodriguez shoved him away and Oswald then invited the sergeant outside to fight. When Rodriguez refused, Oswald called him yellow.”
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Oswald, by general consensus, was no match for Rodriguez, but friends who were with the Marine sergeant talked him out of any visceral response. Rodriguez and his fellow Marine NCOs had recently been warned that there were too many fights in the local bars, and non-coms could be demoted if they were involved. So, Rodriguez held off long enough to file a complaint next day. At his summary court-martial, Oswald was judged guilty for using provocative language and given four weeks in the brig.

If the Marines prided themselves on basic training that could not be equaled by any other major branch of the military, their brigs were ready to compete with the punitive capacities of maximum-security prisons.

Epstein:
Prisoners were not allowed to say a solitary word to one another. Except for sleeping and eating periods, [they] were made to stand at rigid attention during every moment they were not performing menial duties . . . when a prisoner had to use the toilet, he had to toe up to a red line and scream his request over and over again, until the turnkey was satisfied and granted permission.
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By the time he was released from the brig, Oswald, according to a fellow Marine, Joseph D. Macedo, was “cold, withdrawn and bitter. ‘I’ve seen enough of a democratic society here . . . ’ Oswald said. ‘When I get out I’m going to try something else . . . ’”
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Somewhere around this time Oswald could have gotten in touch with, or been approached by, Japanese Communists. Atsugi airbase, given its high security clearances, its U-2 flights, and its warehousing of nuclear materials, was a focus for hostile espionage efforts in the Far East.

Epstein:
Two lawyers for the Warren Commission, W. David Slawson and William T. Coleman, Jr., suggested in a report which was released under the Freedom of Information Act: that “ . . . there is a possibility that Oswald came into contact with Communist agents at that time, i.e., during his tour of duty in the Philippines, Japan, and possibly Formosa. Japan, especially because the Communist Party was open and active there, would seem a likely spot for a contact to have been made . . . . Whether such contacts, if they occurred, amounted to anything more than some older Communist advising Oswald, who was then eighteen or nineteen years old, to go to Russia and see the Communist world is unclear.” The Warren Commission did not, however, pursue this in its final report.
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It may not be unfair to say that what the Warren Commission lawyers call a possibility is a probability. It certainly explains a good deal about Oswald’s actions then and later.

Let us begin by noting that Oswald had learned to use a 35 mm camera, an Imperial Reflex, and was seen taking many a photograph of objects and buildings on the Atsugi base, including the radar antennae with which he worked.

Epstein:
He frequently went to Tokyo or otherwise disappeared on his passes. One of Oswald’s Marine friends recalls meeting him at a house in Tamato with a woman who was working there as a housekeeper for a naval officer. He was impressed at the time that Oswald had found a girlfriend who was not a bar girl or prostitute. In the house was also a handsome young Japanese man for whom Oswald had apparently bought a T-shirt from the PX on base. While the girls cooked sukiyaki on a hibachi grill, the men talked, but the Marine was unable to understand exactly what Oswald’s relation was to the group.
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So far, it is a small matter. He takes photographs on base, and could be sharing a ménage-à-trois with a Japanese man and woman. He states to Joseph Macedo that he doesn’t care to return to the United States. He will never forgive the Marine Corps for what those four weeks in the brig have done to his pride. On such a flimsy note, we can hardly bring in a case against him, merely a suspicion.

He forms, however, one relation that is virtually without explanation unless it is a quid pro quo between Oswald and a beautiful Japanese woman who is working at one of the best and most expensive nightclubs in Tokyo, the Queen Bee. Any hostess one chose for a night would cost more than Oswald could earn in a month. The Queen Bee was for officers, not enlisted men. Yet Oswald was seen going out with her often:

Epstein:
“He was really crazy about her,” observed [a Marine named] Stout, who met the woman with Oswald on several occasions in local bars around the base. Other Marines, less friendly to Oswald . . . were astonished that someone of her “class” would go out with Oswald at all.
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That the Queen Bee and similar places were marketplaces for the pursuit and purchase of pieces of military information seems to have been taken for granted. Epstein offers Marine Lieutenant Charles Rhodes, who

recalls an incident at Atsugi when a girl he was friendly with informed him that she was sorry to hear that he was going on maneuvers to Formosa. Rhodes, an officer assigned to MACS-1 as an air controller, told her that she was misinformed—that there were no plans for the unit to go to Formosa. Ten days later Rhodes was officially informed of the maneuver.
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MACS-1 was indeed dispatched to Formosa in order to provide radar surveillance. The U.S. military expected a possible invasion of Taiwan and/or a serious naval battle with the Chinese Communists.

Once installed in their radar bubble on Formosa, however, the officers in command of Oswald’s outfit discovered that their most crucial signals—the ones by which planes flying by could identify themselves as friendly—appeared to have been compromised:

Epstein:
The Communist Chinese seemed to know all the code signals, which, on one occasion, allowed them to penetrate air defenses and appear on the radar screens as “friends” rather than “foes.” . . . [Lieutenant Rhodes] vividly recalls the Communist Chinese jets “breezing right through the IFF system.” Someone with access to the [codes] . . . had apparently passed them along to the enemy. “We never knew how they got their planes through,” Rhodes observed, “but they all had the signals . . . we really caught hell about that.” . . .
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One night, soon after they had arrived, Oswald was on guard duty at about midnight when Rhodes . . . suddenly heard “four or five” shots from the position Oswald was guarding. Drawing his .45 caliber pistol, he ran toward the clump of trees from which the gunfire emanated. There he found Oswald slumped against a tree, holding his M-1 rifle across his lap. “When I got to him, he was shaking and crying,” Rhodes later recounted. “He said he had seen men in the woods and that he challenged them and then started shooting . . . .” Rhodes put his arm around Oswald’s shoulder and slowly walked him back to his tent. “He kept saying he just couldn’t bear being on guard duty.” . . .
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Rhodes reported the incident to his commanding officer, and almost immediately after that, on October 6, Oswald was returned to Japan on a military plane . . . Rhodes believed then, as he does today, that Oswald planned the shooting incident as a ploy to get himself sent back to Japan. “Oswald liked Japan and wanted to stay . . . . I know he didn’t want to go to Formosa and I think he fired off his gun to get out of there . . . . There was nothing dumb about Oswald.”
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