Reclaiming History (133 page)

On October 27, just five weeks after Lee reported for duty at Atsugi, Oswald’s resurgence came to an end. Another marine, Paul Murphy, heard a pistol shot and rushed into Oswald’s cubicle in the barracks. He found Oswald sitting on a footlocker looking at a wound in his arm. “I believe I shot myself,” Oswald told him calmly. He had been keeping a loaded .22 caliber Derringer pistol in his locker. As he was removing some gear, the gun fell to the floor and discharged, the bullet hitting him in the left elbow.
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The injury was serious enough to keep him in the U.S. Naval Hospital at Yokosuka, where the slug was excised from his arm, until November 15.
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The shooting put Oswald in trouble with the office of the Judge Advocate General, the military’s legal branch for enforcing the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). The officers who reviewed his case were, however, lenient, concluding that Oswald had “displayed a certain degree of carelessness or negligence,” but that the injury was incurred “in the line of duty” and not as a result “of his own misconduct.”
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He was, however, charged with a violation of Article 92 of the UCMJ for “having in his possession a privately-owned weapon that was not registered,”
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and punishment would have to be meted out. Zack Stout told author Epstein that the unit was scheduled to leave Japan on maneuvers to the Philippines, and Oswald wasn’t happy about it, possibly because of trouble he was having with the hostess. Some of the marines thought Oswald may have shot himself deliberately in the hope of remaining at Atsugi while the rest were shipped out.
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The trial for Oswald’s minor court-martial offense would have to wait, because on November 20, 1957, just five days after he was released from the hospital, his unit was sent aboard a landing ship called USS
Terrell County
to the Philippines.
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The unit expected to return to Atsugi in fairly short order, and in fact after less than a week of amphibious landing maneuvers, the men were already embarked on the
Terrell County
for the return trip, but a crisis growing out of a civil war in Indonesia caused a long delay in their return—they spent the next thirty days or so, including Christmas, sailing about the South China Sea without ever seeing land. By the time that crisis was resolved, further maneuvers in the Philippines planned for February or March 1958 were looming, and it made little sense to send them back to Atsugi only to return them almost immediately to the Philippines.

Right after Christmas, MACS-1 arrived at Cubi Point in the Philippines, where they set up a temporary base. Cubi Point was adjacent to Subic Bay on Bataan, the famous peninsula where U.S. and Filipino troops surrendered to the Japanese on April 9, 1942. Though there was a landing strip at Cubi, the marines did not set up a radar station there. The temporary assignment in the Philippines ended up lasting for months, until March 18, 1958.
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While at Cubi Point, Oswald passed an examination that made him eligible for the rating of corporal, although he was never promoted.
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He also learned, according to his November 1959 interview with Priscilla Johnson McMillan, to “sympathize with local Communists and conceived a hatred for U.S. ‘militarist imperialism’ for exploiting the Filipino natives.”
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Cubi Point was also the scene of an incident that to this day continues to intrigue conspiracy theorists who believe Oswald may have had a hand in it. Around seven o’clock on the night of January 5, 1958, Private First Class Martin Elmo Schrand, one of Oswald’s classmates at Jacksonville and Biloxi, was found lying on his back in a pool of blood, having been shot to death near a hangar where he was on guard duty. A January 1958 investigation by the Marine Corps at Cubi Point concluded that the shooting was caused when Schrand’s weapon, a Winchester Model 12 riot-type shotgun, was “accidentally discharged.” An investigative report ruled out “suicide” and said the “investigation disclosed beyond doubt that no other person or persons were involved in the incident.” It also revealed that the weapon was discharged within eight inches of Schrand’s left armpit.
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Pursuant to a request from Warren Commission general counsel J. Lee Rankin in 1964, the Department of the Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence conducted a reinvestigation into Schrand’s death, including a determination of the position of the body at the time he received the wound, and concluded that “Schrand’s death was accidental and the result of a malfunction in the receiver section of his weapon caused by an impact on the butt of the piece incurred in the course of [Schrand] conducting Manual of Arms evolutions.” Interviews with three of Schrand’s close associates at Cubi Point revealed “that Schrand was a ‘bug’ for drill and spent considerable time practicing the Manual of Arms.”
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A few days after Schrand’s death, Coffee Mill was sent to the island of Corregidor forty miles away, where the unit set up another temporary camp, this time including a radar “bubble” in a tent. The unit remained at Corregidor, another island where U.S. troops were defeated by the Japanese (May of 1942), until the end of its Philippine maneuvers. Oswald had been doing mess duty throughout this entire three-month Philippine period—probably as a sort of informal punishment, since he was still awaiting court-martial on the weapons charge. One of the marines to whom author Epstein talked recalled that “Ozzie could really put on a show with those eggs. He could have three gallons of eggs on the griddle and take a mess tray and slide it under the puddle of eggs and flip them all at once. It was quite a sight.”
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However much he pretended to enjoy mess cooking, though, his military career was definitely slipping. At the end of January he received his lowest marks yet on his semiannual evaluation—4.0 for conduct and 3.9 for proficiency.
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Shortly after setting up camp at Corregidor, actor John Wayne, on location filming
The Barbarian and the Geisha
, landed in a helicopter. Wayne, a grizzled veteran of many heroic Marine battles on the back lots of RKO and Republic Pictures in Hollywood, was besieged by the marines, and in a photo of Wayne dining with the troops in their mess hall, Oswald can be seen standing in the doorway to the Duke’s left rear.
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On March 7, 1958, MACS-1 was loaded aboard another landing ship, the USS
Wexford County,
and sent back to Atsugi, where the men arrived eleven days later.
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For Oswald, homecoming also meant facing the music: on April 11, 1958, he was finally court-martialed on the weapons charge, and on April 29 sentenced to twenty days’ confinement at hard labor, docked twenty-five dollars a month for two months, and busted to private. The confinement at hard labor was “suspended for six months, at which time, unless the suspension is sooner vacated, the sentence to confinement at hard labor for twenty days will be remitted without further action.”
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Oswald began to go haywire. In addition to the formal punishments, he was not returned to the radar crew, as he requested, but was formally reassigned to serve as a mess cook. According to the marines Epstein talked to, Oswald’s carping about the corps became extremely bitter and may well have led to a second incident less than two months later. Technical Sergeant Miguel Rodriguez, the man who reassigned Oswald to mess duty, said that Oswald approached him at a party in the Enlisted Men’s Club at Atsugi, looked at him with “those small, dreamy eyes,” and said, “You’ve got guts to come in here.” Rodriguez laughed it off, assuming that it was an instance of prejudice against Mexican-Americans. A few days later, though, on June 20, Oswald again accosted Rodriguez in the Blue Bird Café, a squadron hangout just off the base, in Yamoto. Oswald spilled a drink on Rodriguez—who rose and shoved him away—and then cursed the sergeant, calling him yellow and inviting him outside. Rodriguez, who was more sturdily built than Oswald, nevertheless turned down the invitation to duke it out and filed a complaint against Oswald.

Oswald had a right to be represented at the ensuing court-martial trial on June 27, but elected to represent himself. There were two charges under two different articles of the UCMJ, one of “wrongfully using provoking words to a Staff Non-Commission Officer,” the other of “assault [on] a Staff Non-Commission Officer by pouring a drink on him.”
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Oswald cross-examined Rodriguez and tried to get him to admit that the spilling of the drink had been accidental, and to some extent he prevailed—the court decided the question could not be proved one way or another and found Oswald not guilty on that charge. Oswald also testified on his own behalf that Rodriguez had been picking on him, that he had requested to be transferred away from the sergeant’s supervision, and that he had merely approached him in the Blue Bird Café to discuss the situation. He admitted to inviting Rodriguez outside, but denied calling him yellow. He also claimed to be slightly drunk at the time. Oswald was convicted on the charge of wrongfully using provoking words and sentenced to twenty-eight days’ confinement at hard labor and forfeiture of fifty-five dollars out of one month’s pay.
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The conviction and sentence were approved by the First Marine Aircraft Wing on July 14, 1958, by which time Oswald had already been incarcerated for over two weeks. Because of his second conviction, he would now also have to serve the twenty-day sentence originally suspended at his first court-martial in addition to the twenty-eight days meted out in the second.
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There were other blows to whatever hopes Oswald may have had for a successful career in the Marine Corps. When he was busted to private on the first conviction, it dashed any immediate hopes for promotion to corporal, in spite of the fact that he had passed the examination. His military obligation period would also be extended by the time served in incarceration.
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Further, a request he had made in mid-April to extend his tour of overseas duty to May 1959, routinely approved the same day, was revoked in June.
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However much Oswald may have wished to stay in Japan, he would be returned to stateside duty in mid-September, and most of his time in that interval would be spent in a place worse than boot camp—a Marine brig.

Little is known about Oswald’s stint in the brig, except that it amounted to nearly the full forty-eight days he had to serve on the two sentences—he was confined on June 29 and released on August 13, a total of forty-five days, and he made it tougher than it had to already be by getting into a fight with a brig guard.
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It is well known that a Marine brig can humiliate the strongest of men. A 1963 play at New York City’s avant-garde Living Theater,
The Brig
, by Kenneth H. Brown, was a depiction of an hour in a typical Navy–Marine Corps prison, filled with shouting, brutal guards and their utterly silent, utterly cowed prisoners, who are kept hard at work at menial, demeaning tasks or braced at rigid attention every moment of the day. It no doubt depicts the living hell—much worse than any civilian prison other than the Alabama chain gang—Oswald lived through for a month and a half in 1958.

The experience left Oswald a changed man, more embittered than ever before. He told a fellow marine, “I’ve seen enough of a democratic society here in MACS-1. When I get out I’m going to try something else.”
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He also backed away from his nights out with the boys, tending once again to keep to himself and disappearing into Tokyo on his longer liberties. One of the marines who spoke with Epstein told him that he had been surprised to meet Oswald in a private house in Yamoto with a woman who worked there as a housekeeper for a naval officer. Also present was a young Japanese man for whom Oswald had bought a T-shirt from the base PX. The marine was impressed that Oswald had a girlfriend who was not a bar girl and who was cooking sukiyaki on a hibachi grill for him.
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In her testimony before the HSCA, Marina said Oswald had mentioned “his Japanese girlfriend” to her. He said that “she was very nice and…a very good cook and…she prepared special dishes for him, that he was pampered.”
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“Fortunately, I moved around, began visiting places where youngsters meet, and established contacts with some more progressive and thinking Japanese,” Lee told Dallas friend George de Mohrenschildt many years later, “and this is what led me to Russia eventually.” De Mohrenschildt remembered the conversation in a manuscript he was writing at the time of his death in March 1977, quoting Oswald as saying, “I also learned there of other, Japanese ways of exploitation of the poor by the rich. Semi-feudal, industrial giants which act paternalistically yet exploiting the workers—proletarians. The wages in Japan were ridiculously low.” Lee spoke glowingly of Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, saying he, like Lee, had awakened to the fate of the poor in Central America.
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On September 14, 1958, just a month after his release from prison, Lee was with his unit aboard an attack cargo ship, the USS
Skagit
, which steamed out of Yokosuka for the South China Sea.
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The occasion was the shelling of the disputed offshore islands Quemoy and Matsu by the Chinese army, who regarded them as Chinese territory although they were occupied by the Nationalist Chinese forces settled on Taiwan (or Formosa, the Japanese name it was often called then). A week later, Coffee Mill set up its radar bubble at P’ing-tung, North Taiwan, as part of an effort to forestall a major war between the two Chinese forces. Very little happened, although an air control officer at the site, Lieutenant Charles R. Rhodes, told author Epstein that MACS-1 soon discovered that their IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) codes had been seriously compromised. When Chinese pilots were challenged to identify themselves, they obligingly sent back codes that identified them as friendly, allowing them to sail right through the airspace MACS-1 was trying to control. “We really caught hell about that,” Rhodes told Epstein.
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