The search for McKinley Nolan

Courtesy of Henry Corra
During the documentary film crew's visit to Cambodia, Dan Smith, center left, of Kelso watches as Mike Nolan meets the former Khmer Rouge guard who is suspected of involvement with his brother's death.

http://tdn.com/

via Khmer NZ News Media

By Tony Lystra / The Daily News
Posted: Saturday, June 19, 2010

Early in the new documentary film "The Disappearance of McKinley Nolan," Dan Smith of Kelso reassures himself: "It's like I'm getting answers to things that have been plaguing me. Yeah, I think I'm doing the right thing."

The film, which debuts this week at the SilverDocs film festival in Silver Spring, Md., chronicles the search for McKinley Nolan, an Army corporal who went missing in 1967 in Vietnam and was later thought to have deserted and crossed over to the Vietcong. The U.S. government labeled him a traitor.

McKinley Nolan, who had a young wife and children in Texas, remarried and had another baby with a Vietnamese woman. They traveled into Cambodia, then were never heard from again.

The film crew follows Smith, McKinley Nolan's brother Mike Nolan and journalist Richard Linnett as they retrace the accused defector's steps across Vietnam and Cambodia. As the team tracks down those who knew him, they learn McKinley Nolan may have deserted after killing several American military police. Then, in Cambodia, Smith and the others encounter a Khmer Rouge guard suspected to have been involved in McKinley Nolan's death.

The Daily News first told the story of Smith's search for Nolan in a two-part series in June 2008.

The film, directed by New York filmmaker Henry Corra and produced by actor Danny Glover, surely wouldn't have been made had Smith, 59, not encountered a black man in a city called Tay Ninh near the Cambodian border in 2005.

Smith, who lost his leg in the Vietnam war and had been doing humanitarian work in the country, contacted military investigators. He said he picked McKinley Nolan's picture out of a lineup, believing that the man in the picture resembled the man he encountered in Tay Ninh.

Smith then reached out to McKinley Nolan's wife and brother, wwho live in Washington, Texas, and have been waiting for decades for the U.S. government to give them any shred of information about what happened to corporal. In the film, the Nolans listen rapt as Smith, who is meeting them for the first time, recounts his run-in with the mysterious man in Tay Ninh.

"I do feel he's reaching out for us," Mike Nolan says of his brother.

Linnett, a writer who has researched missing POW cases, had already been working with the Nolan family. He contacted Corra, who put together the documentary team and financing for the trips to Vietnam and Cambodia. They arranged for Smith to meet the Nolans in person, and from there they asked him to accompany the film crew through Vietnam and Cambodia.

More than anything, the movie is about atonement. For Smith, it's trying to heal his own emotional and spiritual combat wounds by helping a hurting family. For Mike Nolan, it's trying to heal his own family by finding out what happened to his brother. And for the Vietnamese and Cambodians who knew McKinley Nolan, it's trying to somehow make up for the violence that tore through their countries.

"It's really a meditation on longing and loss and the desire for closure," Corra, the director, said in an interview with The Daily News last week.

In the film, Smith watches from a distance with awe, sadness and quiet satisfaction as Mike Nolan hugs the Khmer Rouge guard who knew McKinley Nolan and is later suspected of involvement in his death. The guard touches Mike Nolan's face and laughs, saying, through a translator, "You and your brother is like the same guy."

The men chat casually. And then, Mike Nolan says, "So, you know my brother's dead?"

"I'm certain," says the former guard, who has rested his hand on Mike Nolan's knee.

Mike says to the translator, "Tell him I'm glad he had love for my brother."

But others tell the Americans that they suspect the guard was involved in McKinley Nolan's death. The guard said he was only told about McKinley's killing. But Mike Nolan said later he had to be have been involved. The guard said McKinley was taken into the woods and beaten to death. The guard couldn't have known that unless he was there, Mike Nolan says.

Later, Mike Nolan is seen carving a marker into a tree near where McKinley Nolan is thought to have been killed in 1977 by the Khmer Rouge, the Communist regime that killed an estimated 3 million Cambodians.

A villager who was held with McKinley by the Khmer Rouge tells Mike Nolan that he asked the Khmer Rouge guards, "Where's McKinley?"

"Doesn't look good," the guards told the villager.

"I'm certain he's dead," the villager tells Mike Nolan. "Don't hope for him to be alive. I was there. I was with him."

Smith reminds his companions, almost apologetically, that he was never sure who he saw in Tay Ninh in 2005. (It's still unclear who that man was.) Smith cries and wonders if he did the right thing by raising the Nolans' hopes that McKinley could be alive.

Toward the end of the film, an official from the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command excavates the site where McKinley Nolan is thought to have been killed. Human bones were recovered, according to the documentary, but the remains were too deteriorated to yield DNA evidence.

On Friday, a JPAC spokesman said he was not prepared to talk about the case.

In an interview with The Daily News this week, Mike Nolan said he is "very grateful for what we have done. ... I'm very grateful that I was able to walk in his steps." But, he said, he still wants the U.S. government to open its files on his brother.

The filmmakers' research suggests the U.S. military knew where McKinley Nolan was living in Cambodia, and a U.S. government memo shows that then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger considered pardoning him.

Mike Nolan said he wonders if his brother was a U.S. spy or whether he'd been taken prisoner. "A lot of questions still haven't been answered," he said.

This week, Smith said hunting down McKinley Nolan wore him down and that he's not sure he wants to see the movie. He said he didn't want to comment publicly about the film.

"I'm spent," Smith said.

Yet, toward the film's end, McKinley's American wife, Mary, explains to other members of the Nolan family that, following Mike Nolan's trip to Southeast Asia, she is "99.9 percent" sure that her husband is dead.

"Dan Smith kind of opened up the doors to finding out," she said. "His mistake brought some light."

Corra said there are no plans to show the film in the Longview area, but he is open to the idea of a Northwest screening.