The Legend of Doc Laporte : One Night, He Parachuted Behind North Vietnamese Lines. The Navy Declared Him Dead, a Hero. The Men Who Served With Him Say He Went Over to the Other Side--and May Still Be Alive.

The last thing that anyone knows for sure about Doc Laporte is this: Several hours before dawn on Sept. 5, 1967, he was the fifth of nine men who parachuted from a transport plane into a hellish place named Happy Valley.

They were leaping virtually into the enemy’s arms; they knew that. Hidden somewhere in the blackness below three canopies of jungle vegetation were two units of the fearsome 2nd North Vietnamese Army Division and an elite North Vietnamese special-forces battalion.

This secret mission was only the second combat parachute drop that the U.S. Marine Corps had ever attempted. The hand-picked commando team had been ordered to find what intelligence identified as a 300-millimeter Soviet-made missile launcher.

But the commandos never got that far. Operation Clubcar was a disaster from the second they plunged into the night from the Caribou tailgate. Thirty-seven hours later, with four Marines wounded and their mission abandoned, the men were hoisted by helicopter out of the jungle.

All of them, that is, except Michael Louis Laporte.

For the next decade, the military classified the young hospital corpsman from Los Angeles as missing in action. In 1977, it finally added him to the official death toll of the nation’s longest war. On Veterans Day, 1982, Laporte’s was one of 57,939 names unveiled on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the polished black granite monument in Washington that most people know as “the wall.”

John Jackson knew none of this. When Jackson returned from Vietnam, he went to work rebuilding his life and lost track of the fate of Doc Laporte. But he could hardly fail to notice last fall when the government put Laporte’s name on another wall--one in a corridor of the building where Jackson works, the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

Jackson glanced at the names, at first casually. Then: “This name jumps off there--goddamn Laporte.”

Laporte’s photograph is there, too. The muscular, strikingly blond corpsman with the wholesome looks wears a shy smile and a khaki uniform with his jump wings and two rows of decorations across the chest. He is cited along with 11 other hospital corpsmen who vanished during the Vietnam War and whose bodies were never found. “The 12 United States Navy hospital corpsmen that we honor here were not only professionals adhering to the noble ethic,” the exhibit informs passersby. “They were patriots as well. We will honor their memory.”

But to Jackson and to others who served with him, Michael Laporte was no patriot adhering to any noble ethic. The evidence that piled up in the days, months and years after Laporte disappeared convinced them that he was a traitor--one who abandoned his unit on a difficult mission and who actually may have slipped over to the other side, collaborating with the North Vietnamese Army.

Jackson, as a Navy hospital corpsman attached to the Marines’ First Force Reconnaissance Company, had shared a medical locker with Laporte. On the night that Laporte disappeared, Jackson was slated as his backup and would have made the jump if Laporte had been unable to go. These days, some gray has toned down the fiery red hair that everyone kidded Jackson about when he was a 25-year-old in Da Nang. It’s been almost six years since Jackson traded in his Navy uniform for a business suit and a civilian job as head of general service for the medical center. But seeing Laporte’s name on that wall brought back some old war wounds. “I realized it the other day,” Jackson says. “I go out of my way not to go down that hall. I walk down another hall and around.”

Now, as word of the new honor is getting around, so are the old, ugly stories about Doc Laporte. “I don’t want to dig up old bones,” Jackson says. “I want to put this thing to rest. I don’t want to see this guy being recognized with good kids.”

So the men who served with Doc Laporte have started wondering again--if they ever stopped. Though their lives inevitably took different directions, most made careers in the military; some rose to its highest ranks and won its most coveted honors. But whenever a few manage to get together for a beer, talk turns to the old days in Vietnam when they were all together, and Laporte’s name comes up. “What do you really think happened?” someone will ask. “You think he’s still out there?”

Several months after Laporte disappeared, Tom Eagles received a chilling official warning to watch out for anyone resembling Laporte because he was believed to be fighting with the enemy. “The bottom line to me is his name cannot stand with honorable people,” says Eagles, a Navy master chief who now works at the Marine Corps Research and Development Command in Arlington, Va. “Times change. People forget. People want to forget. People say, ‘Why are you worrying about it?’ But in some ways, it was yesterday.”

With this nation’s triumph in the Persian Gulf, President Bush has declared, “By God, we’ve licked this Vietnam syndrome.” And maybe as a nation and a military, this is true. But on a personal level, Vietnam lingers. It left empty spots in tens of thousands of families. It changed the people who served there. These soldiers did their duty and returned one by one, not to a hero’s welcome but to angry questions about the atrocities of My Lai, the morality of mining Haiphong harbor, the humiliation of the Tet offensive. Inside, they carried their own questions: Was it worth it? Why did some live and others die? Is it possible to come home, only to discover you are lost? Today, these questions remain unanswered, a murky backdrop to fluttering yellow ribbons and jubilant homecomings.

When Laporte disappeared, the military tried to answer some of the questions about him. It conducted an investigation that produced a file several inches thick. Today, it says it has no such record. Yet some who saw that report, and others who talked to the investigators, believe that Laporte survived the jump and may still be alive. According to information that these men consider credible, Laporte was spotted with the North Vietnamese as late as 1975, fully eight years after he vanished.

“I’ve always thought Laporte would come out, in my heart of hearts,” says Lt. Col. John Cole. Now the administrative officer of the personnel management division at Marine Headquarters in Virginia, he was a staff sergeant then and administrative chief of Laporte’s unit.

In 1986, United Press International reported that Laporte was one of at least seven U.S. servicemen who, though listed as missing in action or dead in Southeast Asia, had been seen alive since 1974. That was after the government had declared that it had no knowledge of living American POWs or MIAs still there.

Three years after his disappearance, “Laporte, who had a Vietnamese wife and child, was spotted in a Viet Cong camp, but under conditions which indicated he was receiving special treatment,” UPI reported. “In 1975, he was seen in a Vietnamese agricultural commune near Hanoi, Quang Phien, and was again seen at another former French internment camp called Ba Vi, or the Frog Pond.”

The news account, which received little attention at the time, cited Defense Intelligence Agency documents that UPI said had been provided by several sources. It noted that while the vast majority of the 2,441 Americans then listed as missing and unaccounted for in Southeast Asia were generally agreed to be dead, some were also thought to be “stay behinds” who chose to remain.

The DIA, which is the CIA’s counterpart at the Pentagon, disputes the report to this day, but reporter Jim Anderson, a veteran journalist based in Washington, says he stands by the accuracy of his story.

Laporte’s family has heard these rumors and reports as well. They do not accept the idea that Laporte, who would now be 46 years old, would have collaborated willingly with the North Vietnamese. Still, they have never quite believed the government’s version of his disappearance either.

“We always kind of felt like there was something they weren’t telling us,” says his stepmother, Sally Laporte. When they asked to learn more, the government sent them polite form letters.

Michael Laporte was not yet 21 years old when he reported for duty in Saigon in June, 1965. Even with a military haircut, he looked as though he belonged in one of the songs that were playing on the radio then, the ones about fast cars and California beaches. However, his childhood in Los Angeles and Florida was not the sort anyone wrote breezy anthems about; after his parents’ bitter divorce, he and his loyalties were pulled back and forth by feuding relatives. He lived at various times with his mother, his father, his older half-sister and an aunt and uncle.

“There was always, I think, something in Mike’s mind that maybe he didn’t belong anywhere,” his stepmother says.

Yet his family remembers him as compassionate and almost childlike in his idealism. He had spoken of wanting to become a doctor, and as a hospital corpsman in Da Nang, Laporte spent much of his time inoculating children and passing out soap and other supplies in Vietnamese villages. Laporte studied the culture, the religion, the history and the language of the country. He fell in love with a Vietnamese woman and wrote that they planned to live in Vietnam after the war.

A traitor? Never, says his family.

“Everyone who has a boy in the military thinks he is the best boy on earth. Michael was ,” says Willard Swanson, the uncle who helped rear Laporte from the time he was 9, when his mother died. “I remember when he was at (Camp) Pendleton, President Kennedy came out to see the troops and to give them a pep talk. He patted Michael on the back. God, he was so proud of that. Wouldn’t you be?”

Swanson and his wife, Margaret, live in a retirement home in West Covina. They keep the Christmas card in which Laporte explained, almost apologetically, that he was re-enlisting “because, as you know, I am very sentimental toward patriotism.”

It could be that Laporte is a victim of gossip, the kinds of stories that grow more outlandish as they are repeated year after year. Certainly, his supposed exploits have become part of Vietnam War folklore. Laporte was mentioned in a 1985 issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine, in which it was asserted that he maneuvered to be the last man to jump, and “once on the ground, he immediately opened fire on his former buddies.” Neither of those contentions is accurate, say the sources who were interviewed for this article.

But what is true? Was Michael Laporte a hero who made the ultimate sacrifice to a failed cause, or a turncoat who deceived the comrades who trusted him? Or was he, perhaps, another kind of casualty--a sad boy who got lost seeking something in Southeast Asia that had eluded him at home?

Gunnery Sgt. Walter M. Webb Jr. jumped first, into a night so dark that he could barely make out the haze creeping across the valley floor below. “Oh, Christ,” he thought.

The mission was turning into a debacle. Bad enough that B-52s had blown up the forest beneath them, forcing the men to land on broken trees and twisted ground. Then, the pilots had dropped them in the wrong spot--and from twice as high as Webb had ordered. Now, on top of everything, a vicious wind had picked up and was yanking them toward a 125-foot canopy of trees near the eastern end of Happy Valley.

All of them except one. Webb turned and counted the eight olive-green chutes, barely visible against the black sky. Seven were pulling together in a good, tight “stick.” But one guy was going off by himself. “We were headed west; he was headed off to the north,” Webb remembers. “Not that far, but Christ, in the jungle, a hundred meters is forever and a day.”

Webb looked down. “I knew we were in for it,” he says. “I crossed my hands and legs and started bouncing off tree limbs.”

Sitting in his apartment more than 23 years later, Webb repeats the date: “Sept. 5, 1967--it’s like the bombing of Pearl Harbor. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that day.” He lives on Puerto Rico’s Vieques island, but he is now in St. Louis being treated at the VA Hospital for lymphoma, which he blames on exposure to Agent Orange.

Gunny Webb had not been enthusiastic about the jump. Asked to lead it, he had been blunt about his misgivings: “Hey, this is really stupid,” he told his superiors. The second combat parachute drop in Marine Corps history. Big deal. Some major was getting close to going home and wanted to see if he could pull off something spectacular before he did, Webb thought.

Webb was told that he could pick his own team; he asked for eight men. Problem was, even a unit like First Force Reconnaissance Company did not offer much of a choice for parachute work. Though Webb had made 159 practice jumps, most of the others--including Laporte--had logged fewer than 20. Two-thirds of them had never even jumped at night. “But Doc Laporte was a jumper. I knew him,” Webb says.

Earlier on the day of the jump, Laporte had disappeared, violating Webb’s orders that the men of Clubcar stay in a secure area. Webb says Laporte had pleaded that he had “some last-minute squaring away to do.” When he did not come back for more than two hours, Webb scoured the camp for him.

Laporte finally returned, explaining he had been to the Freedom Hill PX to buy a few candy bars. “Hell, it only took 10 minutes to go to that PX and get back,” Webb says. “I was pretty perturbed, but I figured, what the hell, I knew him. I trusted him.”

Laporte was uncharacteristically nervous in the plane, sweating so much that he had to reapply his camouflage paint several times. Webb asked him about it, and Laporte explained that he was feeling superstitious. “It’s my 13th jump,” he said.

Webb found that strange. “Doc wasn’t like that,” he says. “He had a pretty good head on his shoulders.” And before that night, Laporte had been “hot to go,” even insisting upon being included, Webb remembers.

“For a Navy guy,” Webb adds, “he was a hell of a Marine.”

In a corps that has built its image storming the beaches--hi diddle, diddle, straight up the middle--Force Recon were and are the silent commandos, the Marines’ eyes and ears among the enemy. Force Recon Marines love the dicey work, like going first into the U.S. Embassy in Kuwait after the Iraqi surrender to check for booby traps.

Even accomplished infantrymen often washed out of Force Recon. “They could not take the loneliness and the helplessness of the duty, of being in enemy territory hiding,” says Col. Andrew Finlayson, then a platoon leader and now executive officer to Assistant Defense Secretary Stephen Duncan.

But the work had a lot of appeal for another type of military man. “Most of the people in that outfit were professionals. They were a little crazy or they wouldn’t have been in that outfit,” one former member recalls. “A lot of them would have gone looking for a war.”

The Marines had no medical specialists of their own, so the Navy assigned hospital corpsmen to units like Force Recon. Laporte was starting his second yearlong tour of duty in Vietnam when he joined the company in July, 1966. After a year working in a hospital in Saigon, he had complained to his family that he had done little more than shuffle paper. He wanted a taste of the real war.

In Force Recon, Laporte got it--and relished it. Never one to hang back in a firefight, he won a Purple Heart near Dong Ha, when a piece of shrapnel caught him behind one ear and left a distinctive, crescent-shaped scar visible through his regulation haircut. In a show of bravado, he sent his father and stepmother the cap he was wearing that day, so they could see and touch the holes.

Webb figures he went on at least a dozen patrols with Laporte. “As soon as it hit the fan, he was right up front, returning fire,” he says.

One fight, Webb recalls, was a “prisoner snatch” near Chu Lai. There had been 160 enemy sightings in the area; Force Recon was to ambush a few of them for interrogation. But the Marines were surprised on a trail by two Viet Cong, and the covert operation turned into a gun battle.

When it was over, “one of the (Viet Cong) was still alive. I saw Doc go up to him and kick the guy in the neck, break his neck. It was pretty brutal. He crunched his throat,” Webb says. “He said the guy was going to die anyway.”

That was the warrior. But there was another side of Laporte. He had grown deeply attached to Vietnam and its people; he sought them out, spoke to them in Vietnamese, studied Buddhism.

His attachment to them mystified some of his comrades. “Talk was, he loved the Vietnamese,” says Charles N. Owens, another member of Clubcar. “The word was he went Asiatic.”

This was a war where, to an American, friend looked just like foe; everyone knew the stories about the innocent-looking child who turned out to be carrying a grenade or the old woman hiding a machine gun in a basket of vegetables.

“Mike took a loving interest in the Vietnamese families,” Jackson says. “A lot of us couldn’t do that. How could you love the Vietnamese one day and the next day go out and shoot them?”

Laporte ached when he saw the hopelessness of Asian poverty. Once, he gave a schoolteacher a year-old Reader’s Digest that he had planned to toss out. Whenever Laporte saw the man again, the teacher was carrying that battered old magazine as if it were a prized Bible. He even taught his students from it.

“He said they were such friendly people, eager to learn. But they had nothing, none of the things that we take for granted,” Laporte’s stepmother recalls. Sally Laporte says he also cajoled her into sending Campho-Phenique medication by the case because he found it relieved the hideous gum and mouth sores of the Vietnamese children he was treating.

At the same time, recalls one of the men who shared a tent with him, “the questioning was there.” Laporte was beginning to have quiet misgivings about whether the United States was doing more harm than good in Vietnam. His hero, John F. Kennedy, had said we would support any friend, oppose any foe for liberty. But maybe in Vietnam, we were the enemy.

Some of those feelings came through in letters and clippings that Laporte sent to his half-sister, Geraldine Boling, who was living in San Diego with her husband and two daughters. Boling died in 1972, but her daughter Rebecca Pulizzi, 35, recalls that her uncle “was very angry about how the (South Vietnamese officials) were brainwashing our men. He was angry about how the Vietnamese people were being treated.”

Laporte also wrote that he had fallen in love with a rich Vietnamese woman and that they planned to be married. He posed for a snapshot with the pretty young woman on what seemed to be the lawn of her house, which “looked like one of the old Southern plantations with all the columns in front,” Rosslyn Eavenson says. Eavenson, Pulizzi’s 37-year-old sister, cannot find that photograph today, but she says it stands out in her memory. “He really liked her parents, and they liked him,” she says. “He said that when the war was over, they might stay there.”

Sally Laporte tells a different story. Far from being wealthy, the woman’s family had turned to Laporte for financial support. When he went home on leave, the woman vanished. “He went back and tried to find her, and she was gone,” Sally Laporte says.

After he transferred to Da Nang to join Force Recon, his stepmother recalls, Laporte began a romance with another Vietnamese woman. “I don’t know if he married this one, or if (his wife) was someone else,” she says.

Webb recalls Laporte telling him that he had signed up for a six-month extension in Vietnam on the expectation that he could be transferred to Saigon, where his wife and child were living. At the end of April, 1967, about four months before Operation Clubcar, “he found out that his transfer was canceled, and his personality changed,” Webb says. “He got give-up-itis.” Still, Webb was confident enough of Laporte to choose him for the jump.

The existence of a wife is only one of many contradictions between what the official records say and what those who knew Laporte remember. The Pentagon says that its records show no dependents, and his family says he never informed them of a marriage. However, several of the men who served with Laporte say that he mentioned his wife often; Webb and others were also under the impression that the couple had a child.

It could have been a marriage only in the informal sense--except that John Cole recalls filling out the paperwork for a dependent identification card, which Laporte’s wife would need to receive free health care and to shop at the commissary. A copy of that form should have been in Laporte’s service record, he says. “It was there. I know it was there because I put it there.”

Two days after Laporte’s colleagues returned from the jungle, a Marine sergeant came around the First Force Recon command post to record their recollections on the reel-to-reel audio tape that is now part of the corps’ official oral history archives.

Webb described on the tape how one chutist inexplicably moved away from the others--into the wind, instead of with it. “The person who was drifting in this direction I assumed was Doc Laporte,” Webb said. “The man is still missing at present in the vicinity of Happy Valley, and they are sending out a team to try to locate him.”

It had seemed a miracle that anyone survived what Webb told the interviewer was “the hairiest and the biggest nightmare of my life.” After freeing themselves from the trees, seven members of Clubcar found each other on the ground; they could account for everyone except Laporte and Webb. They tried to patch each other up, but two were hurt so seriously that they had to call a medical evacuation helicopter. Those who remained searched for their missing comrades, at one point engaging three Viet Cong in a firefight.

Webb, meanwhile, had been having problems of his own. Dangling from a limb at least 60 feet in the air, he was losing feeling where his harness cut into his legs. One of his kidneys hurt. With the first light, he struggled down the slick, mossy tree to a trail and heard what he thought was his radioman. “Hager, Hager,” he whispered. James Hager heard him, but so did three Viet Cong. Webb figures they chased him about 200 yards, away from the others, before he lost them in the underbrush. It was not until early evening that a medevac found him.

The next day, a spotter plane directed the five remaining Marines to something that appeared to be Laporte’s parachute, but it turned out to be a crashed Navy drone aircraft. For two hours that same day, military aircraft flew over Happy Valley, calling through loudspeakers: “Doc Laporte. Doc Laporte. If you are able, pop your smoke.” Finally, the five were hoisted out by helicopters.

Over the next few days, the Marines and Air Force scoured the jungle for Laporte but found no trace of him.

“They should have been able to find his helmet. They should have been able to find his parachute. They found nothing,” John Cole says. “If he’d have been injured, we’d have found him.”

About the time that Webb and the others were giving their interviews, another company in the battalion sent over a major to conduct what everyone assumed would be a routine investigation into Laporte’s disappearance. No one interviewed for this story can recall that investigator’s name. As administrative chief, however, then-Staff Sgt. Cole was assigned to accompany the officer to Laporte’s hooch--the tent where he lived with a dozen or so men--to start going through his personal effects.

When Cole turned back the covers on Laporte’s cot, he was stunned. Everything Laporte owned had been packed up and inventoried. “There were a lot of packages . . . one to his mom, one to his sister, I believe,” Cole says. “It was as if he knew he wasn’t coming back.” Other accounts, including some that are in government files made available to The Times, corroborate Cole’s recollection.

And then there was the letter he left for his buddies. No copy is known to exist today, but Cole insists that he remembers it clearly. “It made us all mad. It said something to the effect that Ho Chi Minh was right, and we shouldn’t be there,” he recounts. “That letter bothered us a lot. It said, ‘I love all of you like brothers. You are good guys, but what you are doing is wrong.’ It wasn’t abrasive or strident. It was a very calm letter.”

Later, they found more. Stashed in a corner of a small warehouse, Cole says, was everything that Laporte should have had with him--pencil flares, signal mirror, food, ammunition, everything. They knew it was Laporte’s because some of the gear had his name stenciled on it. It seemed crazy that he would have ventured into the jungle without it.

What made it all stranger was the fact that, despite admonitions to pack lightly, Laporte’s jump bag had been heavy and bulky when he carried it aboard the Caribou. “He could hardly walk up by himself,” says Charles Owens, who had been right behind Laporte. “I had to help push him up the ramp.” Webb had asked Laporte why he was carrying so much, and the corpsman explained that he thought he might need extra whole blood and other medical supplies.

Increasingly suspicious, Cole and the investigator checked with some of Laporte’s friends among the other hospital corpsmen. They visited about 25 sick bays, Cole recalls, “and in the majority, we were able to find at least one person who Laporte had taken into his confidence.” Laporte had told the other corpsmen that he was going on a dangerous top-secret jump and needed more supplies than he was allowed to carry.

Although only two made him sign for it, all 25 or so gave him morphine, Cole says. “We figured the bag (that Laporte carried on the jump) was full of morphine. The only reason you’d take that much morphine was to give to the VC.”

The Viet Cong were so short of medical supplies that a load of painkiller “would be invaluable,” Cole says. “You couldn’t put a price on it.”

“If he was going to try to ingratiate himself, that was the best thing he could take--even better than gold,” agrees Finlayson, a former platoon leader. Pentagon officials insist that there could be a logical explanation for any of these peculiarities. Laporte’s chute may have caught an updraft. Maybe he had a premonition of his own death that prompted him to pack up his belongings and leave notes. Perhaps he should have been commended, not suspected, for his precaution in taking extra medication on a dangerous jump.

“I can’t say that things didn’t strike people as strange, but it’s not conclusive that he was a traitor or a deserter or a collaborator,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Ned Lundquist says.

The Defense Intelligence Agency keeps a file on Laporte, as it does for all MIA cases. But it has not received any evidence that warrants opening a new investigation, officials say.

Certainly, it strains credulity that anyone would have picked a dangerous operation such as Clubcar as an opportunity to defect. “There was no way he would do it on a parachute mission,” says Charles Welzant, a former operations officer who was aboard the Caribou over Happy Valley. Welzant believes that Laporte survived the jump and was taken prisoner. “He’s not a turncoat as far as I’m concerned,” Welzant says.

A. King Dixon II, then-commander of First Force Recon, was also aboard the plane when Laporte made the jump. Asked whether Laporte’s parachute might have drifted away from the others by accident, he says, “No. I believe he knew what he was doing.

“We brought them all back but him. He will always be on my conscience,” continues Dixon, who is now the athletic director at the University of South Carolina. “I’d just like to know if he was alive. That would mean the most to me. I never served with a greater group of men, and it’s bothered me that I can’t answer that one question.”

Much of the speculation about Laporte and his motives is no more than rumor, some of which the men say they heard from investigators. Cole and others say they were told that officials looked for Laporte’s wife in Saigon, only to find that she had vanished. Investigators also checked his bank account. “It had been wiped clean. There was no money in that savings account,” Cole adds. Dixon says he heard the same thing from the investigator.

The written record of the probe could clear things up. Several sources say they know it existed, because they saw it in Vietnam. But Freedom of Information requests made to the Naval Investigative Service, the Navy Judge Advocate General and the Defense Intelligence Agency failed to yield such a document.

One account made available to The Times was a brief report, filed on Sept. 19, 1967, recommending that Laporte be classified as Missing in Action. It read in part: “It is most probable that his value to his captors alive would be recognized, and his chance of detention and survival are high. Reports have shown hostile forces value medical knowledge.”

Andrew Finlayson had gone home in 1967 unsure what to make of the strange talk that surrounded Doc Laporte’s disappearance. “In my own mind, I was never convinced of anything,” he says. “It was just a big mystery.”

Months later, he returned to Vietnam for another hitch, this time as part of a special operations unit near the Cambodian border. “I saw all the reports on POW sightings because one of our missions was to be ready to respond to a rescue attempt,” Finlayson says. Laporte’s name had stayed on the official list of the missing and on Finlayson’s mind as well.

Now a colonel at the Pentagon, Finlayson speaks with certainty when he recalls the startling information that came to his attention in May, 1970, almost three years after Laporte disappeared.

A few months earlier, a Vietnamese agent for the United States, posing as a woodcutter in the Ong Thu slope area near Da Nang, visited the headquarters of the 2nd North Vietnamese Army Division several times. He told his handlers that he had seen two Americans. “They were not prisoners, they had weapons and they were actively talking to the North Vietnamese in a friendly manner,” Finlayson says.

One was a black man in an Army uniform, and the other was a Marine in black pajamas.

“His name was Doc and he had blond hair,” Finlayson says. “The description fit Doc Laporte to a T.”

In all, “there were three reports where I remember saying, ‘Gee, that sounds like Doc Laporte’ and (of) that one in particular saying, ‘There’s no doubt that’s Doc Laporte,’ ” Finlayson adds. “I’m convinced that he was alive in 1970.”

If Laporte was with the 2nd NVA Division--voluntarily or not--”he would have been working with the best the Vietnamese had to offer,” Finlayson says.

And he could have been of enormous value that went well beyond his medical expertise. He could, for example, monitor radio communications or even put out false ones, as the North Vietnamese were known to do.

“He knew that reconnaissance teams whispered, they never spoke. He knew our call signs. He knew our brevity codes,” Finlayson explains. There were several occasions on which the men of Force Recon believe they came close to finding Laporte. “One night, we thought we had him. We got a hot tip that he was in this village,” Cole says. When they got there, the villagers said they had seen a man of Laporte’s height and hair coloring traveling with the Viet Cong. They pointed to Cole’s belt buckle--a type found nowhere but on a U.S. Marine uniform--and also mentioned a scar on the man’s head.

Although the man had been walking freely, the villagers believed he was a captive, Cole recalls. “It sounded like they were showing him off or something. We got there just a few minutes late.”

One source who also claims to have had access to prisoner-of-war reports says, “They may have had half a dozen sightings on him where the people talked about his hair and that scar.”

Strange stories were circulating elsewhere, too--and some of them were being put out by the Navy. Tom Eagles, also a hospital corpsman, had met Laporte only once, when the two of them happened to be bumming hospital supplies from a warehouse at Red Beach in which the military stored items it would hand out to Vietnamese villagers. Eagles was wearing a South Vietnamese uniform--he was working at the time in Vietnamese regional force camps--and Laporte mentioned that he had a Vietnamese wife.

Months after Laporte disappeared, Eagles was horrified to hear his name again--this time, as the subject of a warning issued at one of the regular meetings Eagles attended at Naval Support Activity headquarters in Da Nang. The Navy suspected that Laporte talked his way into a South Vietnamese regional force camp by posing as a downed pilot or lost soldier. Some time that night, the North Vietnamese infiltrated the camp and killed everyone in it. The American vanished.

Any of these camps would be vulnerable to such a ruse. They were “little Fort Apaches, with barbed wire and sandbags,” Eagles says. “An American came by--lost, strayed or stolen--and you trusted him. But Laporte we were really watching for.”

Eagles also recalls seeing Laporte’s face on mimeographed wanted posters around 3rd Marine Amphibious Force headquarters at China Beach, although he doubts that they came from official sources. “The picture wasn’t all that good, but it had the name and the information and said he was running around with the enemy, so watch out,” he says.

When the government finally declared Laporte dead in 1977, it wrote Thaddeus and Sally Laporte, noting only one possible sighting after his disappearance, one that did not precisely match Laporte’s description. It cautioned that the information could not be confirmed and that it could not vouch for the reliability of the source.

The Pentagon mentioned none of the information that Cole and Finlayson relayed to their superiors, nor did it acknowledge the sightings that United Press International later claimed were in Defense Intelligence Agency files.

Laporte was one of 2,383 servicemen left unaccounted for after 591 prisoners of war returned to this country in February, March and April of 1973. After that, the U.S. government declared that it had no evidence of any more American prisoners left in Southeast Asia. But since then, according to investigators for the Republican staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, there have been 1,400 reports of first-hand sightings of live POWs in that region. About 1,200 are said to have been “resolved”--that is, dismissed as false.

Last September, Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, and several staff members spent 38 hours poring over about one-third of those still-classified reports and concluded that many merited further investigation. The dismissal of so many accounts is “typical of a bureaucracy defending a policy even if it’s ignoring the obvious,” Grassley says.

The politics of the Vietnam POW-MIA movement are complicated and fueled by the thinnest of hopes. Grassley is trying to stir up enough interest on Capitol Hill to reopen some of these cases--a drive that runs counter to the efforts of others in Congress who favor restoring diplomatic relations with Vietnam. At a minimum, Grassley says, the information from these reports should be made available to the families, who have never stopped believing that their missing loved ones may still be alive.

It was June 5, 1966, and Becky Boling’s mother was rushing around to finish preparations for her daughter’s 11th birthday when the phone rang. Uncle Mike was passing through San Diego on his way back to Vietnam for his second hitch; Becky’s party was suddenly a homecoming celebration.

“He landed at the airport and called. My mom just about came unglued,” recalls Becky Pulizzi, who now lives in Modesto. “We were so glad to see him. Out of the clear blue, there was Uncle Mike.”

That may have been the last time any of Michael Laporte’s relatives saw him.

Laporte had gotten to know his half-sister Geraldine Boling only after he entered his teens. She had been the product of their father’s first marriage. Michael was born in Seattle in 1944, the only child of the unhappy union of Navy Lt. Thaddeus Laporte and his second wife, Evelyn Swanson. They were living in North Hollywood when they divorced a few years later, and Michael stayed with Evelyn in an apartment on Harcourt Avenue. Thaddeus Laporte continued to try to get custody of Michael. At one point, he heard that his ex-wife, an alcoholic, was not feeding Michael properly, says Sally Laporte, the woman Thaddeus married in the early 1950s.

Evelyn died of cancer when Michael was about 9, and another fight for custody erupted--this time between his mother’s relatives and his father. For a while, Michael lived in Beverly Hills with his Aunt Margaret and Uncle Willard, who sent him to California Military Academy in Los Angeles. “We loved him like a son. We have no children, so he was like a son to us,” Willard Swanson says.

Finally, after Thaddeus hired a lawyer to get his son back, 11-year-old Michael moved to Miami to live with his father and new stepmother, who was only 10 years older than he. Relations there were sometimes strained, and before his senior year, his aunt and uncle persuaded him to move back to Los Angeles and attend Dorsey High School. Sally Laporte says she does not believe that arrangement worked out well, either, and “by the time he graduated, he was living with friends.”

When Laporte enlisted and went through training at Camp Pendleton, he stayed with his sister’s family in San Diego for a while. Rebecca Pulizzi and Rosslyn Eavenson recall these as happy times spent watching television with their uncle as he ate peanut butter by the spoonful directly from the jar. “He was always laughing, joking,” Eavenson says. “He was like a big brother.”

But not much about Laporte’s life had been jolly or carefree. “Michael went through some very unhappy periods,” his stepmother says.

In Vietnam, most of the men in Force Recon talked endlessly about their families and what they would do when they got home, but Andrew Finlayson recalls that Laporte avoided the topic. “He said, yeah, he liked his family, but he didn’t feel particularly comfortable with them any more.”

His aunt and stepmother say they received letters written the day before he disappeared. And after his last visit, a new television arrived at the Boling house to replace a broken black-and-white set.

Looking back on that last reunion, Pulizzi sees Laporte’s unexpected visit in a different light: “It’s as if he knew he wasn’t coming back.”

“He didn’t have a whole lot to come home to,” adds Eavenson.

Laporte’s sister never accepted that he might have been killed, her daughters say. She spun elaborate theories--maybe he had made it back to his Vietnamese fiancee, and her family was hiding him. “I’m like my mother,” Eavenson says. “I’ll always believe he is alive until I have some concrete proof.” Thaddeus Laporte, now 85 and retired in Florida, has also had his doubts. “I was notified when he was missing that they went and searched for him, and that was all they told us,” he says. “I always had a feeling that he was alive because no one had any positive proof that he died.”

But his wife adds that if Laporte were alive, “he somehow, I think, would have tried to get word to us.”

Until 1986, when they read the UPI account that Laporte may have been seen alive, the family’s hopes were no less tenuous than those of thousands of other MIA families. Then, they began demanding some answers from the government. Pulizzi went to the local paper, the Modesto Bee, which printed a story about her plight. “I would like the government to know there is no peace for the families,” she told the Bee. “I can’t rest until I know whether he’s alive and what happened to him.”

She also appealed to her congressman, former Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced), who checked with the DIA. The Navy regarded the UPI account as fabrication, Coelho wrote her. The letter made no note of the report that Finlayson saw or any other possible sightings mentioned by other Americans who were in Vietnam in the years after Laporte disappeared.

No, his family says, Michael Laporte was no traitor. When KCBS-TV news interviewed Willard Swanson about the rumors in 1986, he snapped: “That just boils my blood. He loved his country.”

But in some ways, that is not even the issue to them any more. “If I could just see him come through the door, I would forgive him for everything,” Margaret Swanson told the television reporter. “Even if he had deserted, I would forgive him for that.”