The Forgotten Pirate Hunter: The True Account of American Librarian Ted Schweitzer Pursuit to Free Refuge At the End of Vietnam
Real heroes don’t just fight with weapons—they fight with knowledge. At the end of the Vietnam War, Americans had left thousands of refugees to fend off evil for themselves. When trying to escape on small boats many were taken by pirates. Some were raped. Others tortured. Too many were senselessly murdered. Ted Schweitzer stood alone and fought back against the injustice. He rescued thousands of women and children from bondage. And then he too, like the people he rescued, was forgotten into obscurity.
From fighting pirates to helping recover POWs, this book uncovers a story that should have never been left untold.
This book uncovers a story that should have never been left untold.
From fighting pirates to helping recover POWs, this book uncovers a story that should have never been left untold.
This book uncovers a story that should have never been left untold.
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The Pirate Hunter PDF and ePub |
Excerpt
Prologue
November 16, 1979 was a beautiful day for flying. The weather was balmy, not a cloud in the sky, and visibility was clear for miles. As the helicopter roared over the turquoise blue ocean, the pilot kept his eyes peeled for any trouble, or damage, around the area he was required to check. The huge gas rigs, which soared above the water like skeletal fingers pointing to the sky, appeared to be in good shape and working fine. The pilot smiled, grateful for the sight. Not only would he be home early, but he knew his boss at the gas company where he worked would be pleased there were no problems to report.
Arcing the helicopter to the right, the pilot radioed in that all was secure, and then swung wide over the gulf of Siam to begin his return journey home. Passing above the tiny island of Koh Kra, an uninhabited atoll of rock and jungle approximately 34 miles from the shore of Thailand, he peered down, and then did a double take. The island was supposed to be uninhabited, but what he saw made him swing the chopper around again and do a second pass.
There below him, looking like tiny scraps of colored paper, were dozens, maybe hundreds of people, and no ships in sight. He knew the people shouldn’t be there, yet he was not all that surprised to see them. He was well aware that Thai fishermen used the island as a prison to hold Vietnamese refugees, and undoubtedly this was a large group of them.
Perhaps ‘fishermen’ was too kind a word to describe those who literally kidnapped the Vietnamese boat people trying to escape their country. Pirates was much more appropriate.
Swinging the chopper back around, the pilot headed for home. He needed to alert someone, but he knew calling the Thai authorities, or any government officials, would be useless. They seemed oblivious to the plight of the Vietnamese refugees, and unconcerned about what happened to them. No, the pilot thought, he would call neither of those agencies. Instead, he would call the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees).
Speaking to someone on the phone, the pilot described what he had seen. The man on the other end of the line asked if he would fly him back out to the island, but the pilot was reluctant. He didn’t want to get involved. After some pleading however, he finally agreed.
Two days later the chopper was flying back towards Koh Kra Island, the official from UNHCR sitting next to him, binoculars on his lap and a tense, determined look on his face. Reaching the atoll, the official raised his binoculars and was appalled by what he saw. The people were still there, clearly visible, but now ships were there as well; pirate ships. As far as the man could tell, at least 20 of them rested just offshore. Scanning the island more widely, the official saw something that made his stomach turn. Bobbing in the surf, floating less than a hundred yards from shore, were numerous dead bodies.
“They’re slaughtering them down there!” The official shouted. “We need to land!”
But the pilot, who had also noticed the bodies drifting in the sea, shook his head.
“I’m not hired to fly combat missions.” He said, swinging the chopper around and beginning to gain altitude.
The man sitting next to him felt defeated and distressed, but he couldn’t blame the pilot. He knew this was not the end. He would have to come back; he’d just have to find another way to get here.
Chapter One
Theodore Schweitzer, the official who sat next to the pilot in the helicopter flying over Koh Kra Island, was a man fiercely dedicated to issues he found morally inappropriate.
In the 1970’s he had taken a job as a librarian at the international school in Bangkok, Thailand, and immediately fell in love with the land of Southeast Asia. He was fluent in both Thai, and French, and had married a stunning, dark haired Thai girl.
When his school contract ended, he had no desire to return the states and so took a position as a ‘media consultant’ at the American Air Force Base in Udorn, northeast Thailand. His job was for the defense department at the Ramasun Station, where he oversaw the highly sensitive secret archives.
While there, he was sent to Cambodia, just before the capital fell to the Khmer Rouge, where his assignment was to help salvage documents and equipment from the American military mission during the Vietnam War. It was during this time that Schweitzer realized he was in his element doing this type of work. He functioned well under pressure, and confusing situations only made his adrenaline pump faster. He quickly became skilled at using computerized systems, long before the ‘world wide web’ became a household word.
Between these skills, and his fluency in the Thai language, it was no surprise that in 1979 he was hired by the UNHCR as a field officer at the regional office in Bangkok. But Schweitzer was not one to sit behind a desk, and having seen the plight of the Vietnamese people while in Cambodia, he begged to be given a position in the ‘field’.
“I’m a field officer.” He told his boss at UNHCR. “I don’t want to shuffle paper, I want to help refugees. Send me to the field.”
Granting his wishes, the UNHCR assigned him to the port in Songkla, Thailand, where he lived in a comfortable house along the shore. But any relationship Schweitzer may have forged with Thai officials quickly deteriorated after he was approached by a woman who showed him a letter she had received from her Vietnamese daughter. The woman had not known what had become of the girl until the teen had somehow smuggled the letter to her mother, revealing that she, along with 16 other refugees, were being held in a brothel in Songkla.
Schweitzer went in and rescued the 17 Vietnamese girls, who had been kidnapped and forced into prostitution, and in doing so had brought upon himself the wrath of Thai police. The brothel, it soon became known, was owned in part by a Thai police officer.
Schweitzer had only been working for the UNHCR for a short time when the pilot of the helicopter called him about the mass of people spotted on Koh Kra Island. When the pilot refused to land, and they returned from their trip, Schweitzer immediately secured a Thai Marine Police patrol to sail him back to Koh Kra.
Reaching the shores of the little island, which was barely three and a half miles square, was difficult. Surrounded by a reef of white coral, which made beaching any watercraft virtually impossible, the boat would need to anchor off shore and use motorized rubber rafts and dinghy’s, to reach land.
The pirate ships had since departed, and once Schweitzer and the men came ashore, they found 157 Vietnamese refugees, many hysterical, and in need of medical attention. Schweitzer did what he could to get the group stable, and then the men began the arduous task of bringing them back to the mainland.
Schweitzer would take the survivors to a refugee camp in Songkla, which was originally built in 1976 to house the inpouring of refugees entering the country. At that time the camp was small, and quickly ran out of room. So in 1978 construction for a bigger camp was begun, and was still a work in progress now. But by 1980 Songkhla Camp would contain 32 wooden barracks and house 6,000 refugees.
The camp was a lot like a prison, surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and patrolled daily by a company provided from the Thai army. It may not have seemed like the most accommodating of conditions, but compared to the fate of those refugees who fell into the hands of pirates, it could have been the Beverly Hills Hilton.
There were three wells on the property to provide fresh water for drinking and cooking, but no place to gather wood for the fires. UNHCR provided a monthly limit of charcoal, but it never seemed to be enough, and the refugees were forced to try and find other fuel to cook their food.
This, of course, aroused the greed in others to quickly rear its ugly head. The men who patrolled the camp encouraged their friends to open small markets outside the enclosure, and sell firewood and other goods for astronomical prices. Most of the refugees had no money, nor anyone on the outside to help them with income. For these people, charity would be their only means of survival.
Still, it was better than what happened to those who fell prey to the pirates, as Ted Schweitzer was learning, while listening to those he had just rescued from Koh Kra Island. The story they would tell was so horrific and brutal that it would stay with him for the rest of his life.
# # #
In a shaking voice, Nhat Tien, and the other refugees among the 157 just rescued revealed for Ted Schweitzer what had happened to them on their perilous journey from Vietnam to the desolate island of Koh Kra.
Pirates had attacked their boat just offshore, and had thrown most of them overboard into the sea. Those who could manage swam to shore, but seventeen of them couldn’t make it and drowned trying.
When dawn broke those survivors huddled on the beach were met by the other Vietnamese who were already on the island. These fellow refugees told them that often pirates would tow entire boatloads of refugees to Koh Kra, where they would systematically rob them of any valuables and rape their women.
Nhat Tien and the others, although having heard horrific tales of what pirates did to the boat people from their country, were confused. The pirates who had attacked their boat had not followed them onto the island. But this fact alone was not enough for them to let their guard down. They would just have to wait and see what happened.
As the days passed and no pirates showed up, Nhat Tien and the others waited for help. They had virtually no food, very little water, and no means to leave the island, as their boat had been lost after the attack. Their hope was dwindling fast, and they prayed daily that a ship would come to rescue them. After a few days, a ship did stop by. But it was a ship loaded with pirates, and all too soon the refugees realized the only rescue they might offer was death.
As the pirates came ashore, they surveyed the women, grabbing any that caught their fancy, and throwing them to the ground. Then, stripping off her clothes, they would brutally rape her right in front of her husband, children, parents and all the others. The pirates took turns, each man having sex with as many women as he wanted, as the girls cried and pleaded for help. One girl would tell Schweitzer that she was raped ‘hundreds’ of times in little more than a 24-hour period.
Many of the refugee men, sickened by the sight of their women being brutalized, tried to intervene and were clubbed and beaten for their effort. One man, however, refused to be intimidated, and he bravely demanded that the pirates leave the women alone.
At first, the pirates were amused, laughing at the man and shoving him out of the way. But after a while, tired of the game, one of the pirates took an ax from his belt and swung it at the man, hitting him across the face. The refugee went down, and a second blow to the back of his head opened a wound several inches wide that sprayed blood and brain matter in a wide arc.
Those refugees who watched the murder began to scream in terror, but the pirates only laughed and continued to ravish the girls. They seemed oblivious to the dead man lying there, and the others who pleaded for mercy.
Every day, more pirate ships arrived, bringing different men to rape and ravish the women. Schweitzer would later learn that when women prisoners were on Koh Kra, word spread quickly among the pirates in the region, and hundreds of them would rush to the island to sample the new merchandise. Incredibly, on one single day, 50 ships had arrived to brutalize the girls, some of whom were literally raped to death.
On another day, the pirates lined up the refugees and examined each of their mouths. Taking one from the line, five pirates forced the man to the ground and held him down. Then, using a knife, one of them cut and pried the gold-filled teeth from the refugee’s mouth.
After the first series of rapes, many of the women had scattered about the island, trying to find shrubbery and caves to hide in. Pirates would search, finding many, but at other times, they would simply torture the male refugees until they told them where they were hiding, or until the man’s pitiful screams brought the women out on their own.
Schweitzer himself had come upon one of these hidden girls while he was on the island, and when he found her, her condition reduced him to tears.
The girl was young, barely in her teens, and for the past eighteen days she had been hiding in a rocky sea cave, trying to avoid the pirates. But the cave had not been a kind sanctuary for her. She had been forced to stand in waist deep water, and when Schweitzer finally pulled her from the cave, the girl could no longer walk. Her legs were little more than exposed bone, having been feasted on by sea crabs, and the caustic salt water had done the rest. The poor girls flesh was virtually rotted away.
Schweitzer was shocked and appalled by what he was hearing, although he later wondered why. He had seen the lighthouse himself, but until now, the words on it had not hit home.
On Koh Kra, there was an abandoned lighthouse that sat atop a concrete base. On the base were written these words:
KO KRA ISLAND – ISLAND OF THE DEVIL
The women and girls must hide
You must not let the Thai pirates see them
If they do they will be raped
The sign was only of help to refugees washed ashore or shipwrecked nearby. But for those brought to the island by pirates it did little good. There was simply no chance for anyone to hide at those times.
To Ted Schweitzer, Koh Kra appeared to be little more than a personal playground for area pirates. With anger mounting and his heart breaking, Schweitzer knew he would have to do anything in his power to help these people. And it didn’t matter how many missions to the island it took.
November 16, 1979 was a beautiful day for flying. The weather was balmy, not a cloud in the sky, and visibility was clear for miles. As the helicopter roared over the turquoise blue ocean, the pilot kept his eyes peeled for any trouble, or damage, around the area he was required to check. The huge gas rigs, which soared above the water like skeletal fingers pointing to the sky, appeared to be in good shape and working fine. The pilot smiled, grateful for the sight. Not only would he be home early, but he knew his boss at the gas company where he worked would be pleased there were no problems to report.
Arcing the helicopter to the right, the pilot radioed in that all was secure, and then swung wide over the gulf of Siam to begin his return journey home. Passing above the tiny island of Koh Kra, an uninhabited atoll of rock and jungle approximately 34 miles from the shore of Thailand, he peered down, and then did a double take. The island was supposed to be uninhabited, but what he saw made him swing the chopper around again and do a second pass.
There below him, looking like tiny scraps of colored paper, were dozens, maybe hundreds of people, and no ships in sight. He knew the people shouldn’t be there, yet he was not all that surprised to see them. He was well aware that Thai fishermen used the island as a prison to hold Vietnamese refugees, and undoubtedly this was a large group of them.
Perhaps ‘fishermen’ was too kind a word to describe those who literally kidnapped the Vietnamese boat people trying to escape their country. Pirates was much more appropriate.
Swinging the chopper back around, the pilot headed for home. He needed to alert someone, but he knew calling the Thai authorities, or any government officials, would be useless. They seemed oblivious to the plight of the Vietnamese refugees, and unconcerned about what happened to them. No, the pilot thought, he would call neither of those agencies. Instead, he would call the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees).
Speaking to someone on the phone, the pilot described what he had seen. The man on the other end of the line asked if he would fly him back out to the island, but the pilot was reluctant. He didn’t want to get involved. After some pleading however, he finally agreed.
Two days later the chopper was flying back towards Koh Kra Island, the official from UNHCR sitting next to him, binoculars on his lap and a tense, determined look on his face. Reaching the atoll, the official raised his binoculars and was appalled by what he saw. The people were still there, clearly visible, but now ships were there as well; pirate ships. As far as the man could tell, at least 20 of them rested just offshore. Scanning the island more widely, the official saw something that made his stomach turn. Bobbing in the surf, floating less than a hundred yards from shore, were numerous dead bodies.
“They’re slaughtering them down there!” The official shouted. “We need to land!”
But the pilot, who had also noticed the bodies drifting in the sea, shook his head.
“I’m not hired to fly combat missions.” He said, swinging the chopper around and beginning to gain altitude.
The man sitting next to him felt defeated and distressed, but he couldn’t blame the pilot. He knew this was not the end. He would have to come back; he’d just have to find another way to get here.
Chapter One
Theodore Schweitzer, the official who sat next to the pilot in the helicopter flying over Koh Kra Island, was a man fiercely dedicated to issues he found morally inappropriate.
In the 1970’s he had taken a job as a librarian at the international school in Bangkok, Thailand, and immediately fell in love with the land of Southeast Asia. He was fluent in both Thai, and French, and had married a stunning, dark haired Thai girl.
When his school contract ended, he had no desire to return the states and so took a position as a ‘media consultant’ at the American Air Force Base in Udorn, northeast Thailand. His job was for the defense department at the Ramasun Station, where he oversaw the highly sensitive secret archives.
While there, he was sent to Cambodia, just before the capital fell to the Khmer Rouge, where his assignment was to help salvage documents and equipment from the American military mission during the Vietnam War. It was during this time that Schweitzer realized he was in his element doing this type of work. He functioned well under pressure, and confusing situations only made his adrenaline pump faster. He quickly became skilled at using computerized systems, long before the ‘world wide web’ became a household word.
Between these skills, and his fluency in the Thai language, it was no surprise that in 1979 he was hired by the UNHCR as a field officer at the regional office in Bangkok. But Schweitzer was not one to sit behind a desk, and having seen the plight of the Vietnamese people while in Cambodia, he begged to be given a position in the ‘field’.
“I’m a field officer.” He told his boss at UNHCR. “I don’t want to shuffle paper, I want to help refugees. Send me to the field.”
Granting his wishes, the UNHCR assigned him to the port in Songkla, Thailand, where he lived in a comfortable house along the shore. But any relationship Schweitzer may have forged with Thai officials quickly deteriorated after he was approached by a woman who showed him a letter she had received from her Vietnamese daughter. The woman had not known what had become of the girl until the teen had somehow smuggled the letter to her mother, revealing that she, along with 16 other refugees, were being held in a brothel in Songkla.
Schweitzer went in and rescued the 17 Vietnamese girls, who had been kidnapped and forced into prostitution, and in doing so had brought upon himself the wrath of Thai police. The brothel, it soon became known, was owned in part by a Thai police officer.
Schweitzer had only been working for the UNHCR for a short time when the pilot of the helicopter called him about the mass of people spotted on Koh Kra Island. When the pilot refused to land, and they returned from their trip, Schweitzer immediately secured a Thai Marine Police patrol to sail him back to Koh Kra.
Reaching the shores of the little island, which was barely three and a half miles square, was difficult. Surrounded by a reef of white coral, which made beaching any watercraft virtually impossible, the boat would need to anchor off shore and use motorized rubber rafts and dinghy’s, to reach land.
The pirate ships had since departed, and once Schweitzer and the men came ashore, they found 157 Vietnamese refugees, many hysterical, and in need of medical attention. Schweitzer did what he could to get the group stable, and then the men began the arduous task of bringing them back to the mainland.
Schweitzer would take the survivors to a refugee camp in Songkla, which was originally built in 1976 to house the inpouring of refugees entering the country. At that time the camp was small, and quickly ran out of room. So in 1978 construction for a bigger camp was begun, and was still a work in progress now. But by 1980 Songkhla Camp would contain 32 wooden barracks and house 6,000 refugees.
The camp was a lot like a prison, surrounded by a barbed wire fence, and patrolled daily by a company provided from the Thai army. It may not have seemed like the most accommodating of conditions, but compared to the fate of those refugees who fell into the hands of pirates, it could have been the Beverly Hills Hilton.
There were three wells on the property to provide fresh water for drinking and cooking, but no place to gather wood for the fires. UNHCR provided a monthly limit of charcoal, but it never seemed to be enough, and the refugees were forced to try and find other fuel to cook their food.
This, of course, aroused the greed in others to quickly rear its ugly head. The men who patrolled the camp encouraged their friends to open small markets outside the enclosure, and sell firewood and other goods for astronomical prices. Most of the refugees had no money, nor anyone on the outside to help them with income. For these people, charity would be their only means of survival.
Still, it was better than what happened to those who fell prey to the pirates, as Ted Schweitzer was learning, while listening to those he had just rescued from Koh Kra Island. The story they would tell was so horrific and brutal that it would stay with him for the rest of his life.
# # #
In a shaking voice, Nhat Tien, and the other refugees among the 157 just rescued revealed for Ted Schweitzer what had happened to them on their perilous journey from Vietnam to the desolate island of Koh Kra.
Pirates had attacked their boat just offshore, and had thrown most of them overboard into the sea. Those who could manage swam to shore, but seventeen of them couldn’t make it and drowned trying.
When dawn broke those survivors huddled on the beach were met by the other Vietnamese who were already on the island. These fellow refugees told them that often pirates would tow entire boatloads of refugees to Koh Kra, where they would systematically rob them of any valuables and rape their women.
Nhat Tien and the others, although having heard horrific tales of what pirates did to the boat people from their country, were confused. The pirates who had attacked their boat had not followed them onto the island. But this fact alone was not enough for them to let their guard down. They would just have to wait and see what happened.
As the days passed and no pirates showed up, Nhat Tien and the others waited for help. They had virtually no food, very little water, and no means to leave the island, as their boat had been lost after the attack. Their hope was dwindling fast, and they prayed daily that a ship would come to rescue them. After a few days, a ship did stop by. But it was a ship loaded with pirates, and all too soon the refugees realized the only rescue they might offer was death.
As the pirates came ashore, they surveyed the women, grabbing any that caught their fancy, and throwing them to the ground. Then, stripping off her clothes, they would brutally rape her right in front of her husband, children, parents and all the others. The pirates took turns, each man having sex with as many women as he wanted, as the girls cried and pleaded for help. One girl would tell Schweitzer that she was raped ‘hundreds’ of times in little more than a 24-hour period.
Many of the refugee men, sickened by the sight of their women being brutalized, tried to intervene and were clubbed and beaten for their effort. One man, however, refused to be intimidated, and he bravely demanded that the pirates leave the women alone.
At first, the pirates were amused, laughing at the man and shoving him out of the way. But after a while, tired of the game, one of the pirates took an ax from his belt and swung it at the man, hitting him across the face. The refugee went down, and a second blow to the back of his head opened a wound several inches wide that sprayed blood and brain matter in a wide arc.
Those refugees who watched the murder began to scream in terror, but the pirates only laughed and continued to ravish the girls. They seemed oblivious to the dead man lying there, and the others who pleaded for mercy.
Every day, more pirate ships arrived, bringing different men to rape and ravish the women. Schweitzer would later learn that when women prisoners were on Koh Kra, word spread quickly among the pirates in the region, and hundreds of them would rush to the island to sample the new merchandise. Incredibly, on one single day, 50 ships had arrived to brutalize the girls, some of whom were literally raped to death.
On another day, the pirates lined up the refugees and examined each of their mouths. Taking one from the line, five pirates forced the man to the ground and held him down. Then, using a knife, one of them cut and pried the gold-filled teeth from the refugee’s mouth.
After the first series of rapes, many of the women had scattered about the island, trying to find shrubbery and caves to hide in. Pirates would search, finding many, but at other times, they would simply torture the male refugees until they told them where they were hiding, or until the man’s pitiful screams brought the women out on their own.
Schweitzer himself had come upon one of these hidden girls while he was on the island, and when he found her, her condition reduced him to tears.
The girl was young, barely in her teens, and for the past eighteen days she had been hiding in a rocky sea cave, trying to avoid the pirates. But the cave had not been a kind sanctuary for her. She had been forced to stand in waist deep water, and when Schweitzer finally pulled her from the cave, the girl could no longer walk. Her legs were little more than exposed bone, having been feasted on by sea crabs, and the caustic salt water had done the rest. The poor girls flesh was virtually rotted away.
Schweitzer was shocked and appalled by what he was hearing, although he later wondered why. He had seen the lighthouse himself, but until now, the words on it had not hit home.
On Koh Kra, there was an abandoned lighthouse that sat atop a concrete base. On the base were written these words:
KO KRA ISLAND – ISLAND OF THE DEVIL
The women and girls must hide
You must not let the Thai pirates see them
If they do they will be raped
The sign was only of help to refugees washed ashore or shipwrecked nearby. But for those brought to the island by pirates it did little good. There was simply no chance for anyone to hide at those times.
To Ted Schweitzer, Koh Kra appeared to be little more than a personal playground for area pirates. With anger mounting and his heart breaking, Schweitzer knew he would have to do anything in his power to help these people. And it didn’t matter how many missions to the island it took.
