The Colonel and the Lady

She planned on employing 400 women--200 for massages and 200 to sit in a big, dark side room and drink Cokes with the soldiers. After I saw them, I knew she had an awful lot more in mind for them than just sitting there and drinking.

Like some latter-day Yossarian. Retired Army Colonel Edmund Castle last week told a Senate investigating subcommittee of his final battle. His enemy was a perfumed, persistent Vietnamese entrepreneur named Madame Phuong, whose friends included some of the U.S. officers and service club noncoms under investigation by the Senate panel (TIME, March 8). Assigned to the massive 25-sq.-mi. Long Binh supply depot as post commander in 1968, Castle discovered that Brigadier General Earl F. Cole, a deputy chief of staff at the depot, had authorized Mme. Phuong to open an on-post steam bath and massage parlor. Cole has since been demoted to colonel and stripped of his decorations by the Army for his part in Viet Nam service club frauds.

Flying Dragons. The steam bath, recalled Castle, "was a beautiful layout. I rode by every day watching it go up. I hadn't thought too much about it until one day . . . there were these big nude statues on the front. On an Army base, big bronze nudes! The first thought that entered my mind was, 'Oh my God, if TIME or LIFE or somebody comes by here, we've had it.'*I told Mme. Phuong that she had until 4 o'clock to get the nudes down or I would have my sergeant major there with a sledgehammer."

Castle also gave Mme. Phuong two hours to get the 200 Coke-sipping ladies off the post, and ordered her to take the doors off her massage rooms as a further bar to hanky-panky. In addition, he sent agents of the Criminal Investigation Division into the steam bath to keep an eye on what was happening. "1 may not have had the best CID over there," he told amused Senators, "but I had the cleanest CID."

Polite Threats. Mme. Phuong did not give way easily. "She threatened me in a polite way," said Castle. "She said she had several general officer friends and she would go see them." Castle began to receive anonymous telephone threats. Eventually, the colonel was wounded in a Viet Cong attack on his depot and sent home.

Another witness, Major Clement E. St. Martin, told the subcommittee that when he protested the steam baths he was upbraided by former Sergeant Major William Woolridge, the Army's top noncom and one of six sergeants indicted for service club infractions. Woolridge menacingly asked St. Martin: "Don't you know you can get hurt?" St. Martin replied: "Let me remind you a major still outranks a sergeant." Not always. St. Martin is now executive officer of the armed forces induction center in Newark, N.J.--hardly the kind of assignment designed to further a career.

-TIME had upset Army brass with reports on prostitution parlors established by the Army in An Khe for the 21,000 troopers of the 1st Cavalry (Airmobile) Division. It was not a TIME photographer, but Colonel Castle himself who supplied the photograph which appears on this page.

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