Natives' Return

In a shed on San Francisco's Embarcadero last week stood three young men, stiff and ill at ease, listening intently while an MP captain read an official paper. They had just had a happy reunion with their families, whom they had not seen in five years, and now the unpleasantness was about to begin.

"By command of the commanding general, Sixth Army, each of you is hereby taken into custody," barked Captain Walter R. Leahy. "You are further advised that court-martial charges have been preferred against you ..." When the captain finished reading the charges, three husky MPs stepped up to the young men and marched them off to a weapons carrier. Minutes later, the forbidding gates of the prison compound at Fort Baker clanked shut behind them.

Just 18 months earlier, the same young men had stood in the "Peace Pagoda" in Panmunjom, Korea, and damned their country. They had spurned the pleas of the families they greeted so warmly last week, and had gone off happily behind another, more forbidding wall. Now, disillusioned with Communism, they had come home to face whatever penalty their native land would impose.

For William Cowart, 22, Lewis Griggs, 22, and Otho Bell, 24, recently of Communist China, the grim homecoming was a portent of a grimmer future. They faced punishment (maximum penalty: death) for acts committed against their country and fellow Americans while they were prisoners of war in Korea. Each was accused of the gravest crimes under military law--aiding the enemy and ratting on their brothers-in-arms.

Though the Army's case against the three--compiled from the testimony of hundreds of loyal ex-P.W.s--looked substantial enough, there was some doubt about the Army's right to try them. Technically, Bell, Cowart and Griggs are civilians--dishonorably discharged from the Army at the time they, and 18 other American turncoats, turned their backs on their homeland and families and disappeared into Red China. But since 1950, the armed forces have claimed the right to seize and court-martial civilians for major crimes committed while in military service. The legality of that claim, as set forth in the 1950 Uniform Code of Military Justice, will soon be tested in court.* But if the Army should lose jurisdiction over the three, the Justice Department is prepared to step in and prosecute them as civilians.

* Veteran Robert Toth was arrested by air police in Pittsburgh in 1953 and flown to Korea to stand trial on a charge of murder committed while he was in the Air Force (TIME, Aug. 31, 1953). Before the court-martial could be called, however, the Air Force was forced to return him to the U.S., and Toth was released under a writ of habeas corpus. His case, a test of the military's authority over some 21 million living veterans, is pending before the Supreme Court.

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