Word: rheault
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...agent, may be a North Vietnamese double. The agent represents a profound threat to what the Green Berets perceive as a sensitive covert White House operation. A low-level CIA official in the embassy gives a wink and a nod for termination with extreme prejudice. Colonel Robert Rheault, a Green Beret officer cut in the Ollie North mode, orders Chuyen's death...
...Rheault tells Saigon that Chuyen disappeared on a spy mission, but this cover story fails to convince the colonel's already suspicious seniors. The lie soon unravels -- accelerated, in part, by General Creighton Abrams' antipathy for the Green Berets. By early August, only six weeks after the killing, the Associated Press breaks the story: BERET CHIEF, 7 aides charged in viet killing...
...eight conspirators are clearly both villain and victim. Colonel Rheault was a "can do" officer reflecting the machismo he thought John Kennedy embodied. The CIA's signals were ambiguous. This was a war without finely drawn lines, geographic or moral...
This tautly written volume is The Caine Mutiny of the Vietnam War. Like Herman Wouk's wonderfully elusive Captain Queeg, the Green Beret conspirators, beginning with Colonel Rheault, seem indisputably guilty, however tragic the circumstances. But by the time Stein is finished, in Kafkaesque fashion no assumptions remain unchallenged. War, Stein implies, defies moral judgment, though judgments must be drawn. One such judgment was drawn by Daniel Ellsberg: the Green Beret case served to harden his determination to publish the Pentagon papers. The rest, as they say, is history...