Originally published in Verbicide issue #11
“Kids were killed in Vietnam & that’s a fact that nobody wants to breastfeed. But they were also dead in every other war & to such an extent. Dead is dead–age doesn’t matter.
After my first month of war, my mind clicked into being a player on the ghostland. & there are always homicides in ghostland.
It was just the way it was—judge me harshly.“
–Bill Shields, excerpt from Rosey the Baby Killer and Other Stories, pp. 131, The Best of 2.13.61 Publications
A first time encounter with the writing of Bill Shields is a combative experience; a surprise attack of simplicity and brute force, the iron fist in the velvet glove, the phonebook and nightstick beating–pick your analogy. Think Charles Bukowski‘s Barfly meets Apocalypse Now and you will be headed down the right trail. Mixing the words “Vietnam” with the author’s name in any search engine nets a virtual punji pit of hits to sites that send the reader cart-wheeling into a world of split second death in jungle warfare, deep sorrow, profound pain and the lunacy of post-traumatic stress disorder. Just when you think the carnage can’t get any worse–it does. Of course, that’s leaving out the drug and alcohol addiction, spousal assault, child neglect, and grubby, backwoods sex.
For Shields, a former member of the US Navy SEAL’s distinguished SEAL Team 2, and three-time Vietnam veteran (“1970 9-10 months, 1972 for 6 months and in 1975 I was there for 3 months“), it’s all par for the course. Fighting a war against a sometimes-unidentifiable enemy became a mean and dirty task that simply had to get done. It was during his time with the SEALs that, by his own accounts, Shields was wounded grievously and awarded two Purple Hearts and the Navy Cross. The fighting was something you could live through. Coming home, on the other hand, was where the real battles began…
“One more bald headed prick on the wrong side of the interview. I was a fresh college graduate but not the fresh age & I needed this job – kids & a wife counted on this one. This guy had no scars, all his original teeth, couple pictures of his kids on the desk & a funeral suit draped on his frame.
It looked good, at least a strong maybe, until he came down to the veteran section of the application. There was truth told in three lines. It read: US Navy, Seal Team Two, 1969-1975, Vietnam veteran, two Purple Hearts, a Navy Cross, Honourable Discharge.
The job went to lunch.”
-Bill Shields, excerpt from Rosey the Baby Killer and Other Stories, pp. 57
But wait a minute… wasn’t Shields quoted in an online interview by www.thecreepshow.net as saying he served in Vietnam on three separate tours, spanning 1970 to 1975? Yet in his book he claims to have served six continuous years in Vietnam. A small generalization maybe…or blatant lie.
By way of history, in 1961, the Chief of Naval Operations recommended to President John F. Kennedy that a force be established to fight in the guerrilla warfare of the Vietnam jungle. A year later, President Kennedy, recognizing the need for such unconventional warfare forces in Southeast Asia, included those recommendations in his speech to Congress. In that same speech (in which he also announced his desire to land a man on the moon) Kennedy designated over $100 million to expand and strengthen existing conventional forces and, in particular, the Special Forces.
The US Navy SEALs were born.
The SEALs began to see combat in Vietnam in early 1963, when the CIA began deploying the teams in covert operations capturing enemy officers and ambushing supply lines. In conjunction with Brown Water Navy Boat crews, they deployed into such areas as the Mekong Delta and the Rung Sat Special Zone, where they made it their job to do as much damage as possible to the movement of troops and supplies coming into the south from North Vietnam.
In the Delta, the SEAL Teams saw the war from a very different perspective than most combat soldiers. Whereas conventional soldiers relied mainly on the safety net of being able to call air strikes or artillery fire into coordinated areas, SEALs fought in close quarters, inches from their enemy, often in gruesome, kill-or-be-killed situations. From 1965 to 1972, the SEALs took only 46 fatal casualties and amassed a kill ratio of 200:1.
Since their inception, SEAL teams have operated in almost every theatre of warfare and have earned themselves a reputation as some of the world’s most respected commandos.
They are fiercely proud of their accomplishments. Every year, many attempt to join their ranks and fail. Those who make it through BUD/S training and the dreaded infamous “Hell Week” are a close-knit brotherhood and would gladly defend their team members to the death if need be. So it is understandable that when someone pretends to have been a SEAL, they get a little pissed off.
Because of this, Security Enterprise Consultants (SEC) formed the VeriSEAL project in 1992 as a freestanding unit of the Counter-Terrorism/Protection Group to provide their clients, both domestic and foreign, with immediate confirmation of alleged SEAL and Special Forces credentials. In 1994, SEC went public with a list of impostors, publishing it as the “Wall of Shame” on a now-defunct web page called “The Teams.”
Military service is a matter of public record, and while the majority of SEAL missions are classified, enlistment in their ranks is not. In fact, according to VeriSEAL’s “Virtual Polygraph,” a claim of being enlisted as a part of a “classified” or “secret” SEAL Team is your first clue that someone is pulling your leg. VeriSEAL is one of only a few BUD/S database holders in the world, a database that goes back to the first graduating class of 1940 to the immediate present. If a man tells you that he is a former SEAL, VeriSEAL has a record of his military service. If they don’t, that man is simply a liar.
But is there a need for such a list? According to VeriSEAL’s web site [ed. note: this site no longer exists, and is not on the Internet Archive/Wayback Machine], there is. Their free record verification service is used by United States government agencies and law enforcement officials for routine background checks on potential employees and contractors who claim to be former SEALs or Special Forces. Think your neighbor’s “‘Nam” story might be a little over the top? Chances are he’s lying—again, according to their site, 95% of the names that are queried are SEAL impostors. Last updated in February, 2004, the Wall of Shame currently lists 535 names of impostors, ranging from petty criminals to police officers.
And according to one investigator for VeriSEAL, Bill Shields is about to become #536.
“When you pull my knife out of the wall/there will be a man attached by the palm of his hand/take the knife/forget the man/it’s my world drowning in spit”
-Bill Shields, excerpt from “The October Moon Melted the Mecong Delta,” pp. 45, Lifetaker
Initially, this article had been intended to be a review of Shields’ writing. From my perspective, it would be unfair and slightly deceptive to say that I have not had a personal stake in seeking out the truth in Shields’ claims of SEAL warfare. To explain further, when I first encountered Shields’ writing in The Best of 2.13.61 Publications, I was struck by the combative nature of the writing and immediately sought out more. I found his writing on several sites and interviews on several more.
With a little digging, I eventually tracked him down through the Internet and exchanged poetry with him. Shields was amicable to critiquing my writing and offered suggestions where it seemed appropriate. Further down the line, when I published my first chapbook with ISBN numbers, Shields even wrote an introduction for it, which I proudly displayed to friends. I tried to promote his books to anyone who would listen (and some who wouldn’t).
I had no reason to doubt his claims of having seen the violence and horror of jungle warfare; I grew up in a family where my Great-Uncle George died storming the beach at Dieppe, France, in World War II. My grandfather also served with Allied Forces in Africa and Italy in the same war. My father is a former member of the Canadian Armed Forces; to say I have a healthy respect for veterans is a bit of an understatement. So when Shields told me he has seen combat and was wounded twice, I believed him. After all, why would someone make up such a contemptible lie?
I corresponded with Shields for almost a year by email. The only thing that ever made me doubt his SEAL service was his lack of response to direct questioning. I never asked direct questions about actual warfare experiences; as youngster, it was drilled into my head that not only was that incredibly rude, it was sacrilegious to ask someone who had taken life in war to relive such a horrible experience for my imagination.
But I would deem it acceptable to ask about benign subjects such as the aforementioned “Hell Week” where SEAL candidates endure the torture of extreme physical and psychological stress of no sleep, lack of food, freezing water, all the while performing boat and beach physical training. Curiously, Shields would never answer these questions. Again, I chalked it up to, “The war was hard on him—don’t bug him about it,” and left it at that.
Then I got an email in my inbox from a man by the name of Josh, who publishes an online e-zine called Beyond The Pale, of which I was a contributor at the time. In that zine he mentioned that someone had told him that Shields was not the SEAL he claimed to be. It was an off-the-cuff remark, but suddenly, the emails from Shields slowed, then stopped altogether. Within a month of that email, he disappeared altogether.
Still wanting to write a review of his work and get his words out in the world, I began a search for the author. I still believed that he was the SEAL he claimed. My goal was not to prove that he was a fake, but rather that he was the real deal. Sadly, that was not the case, as my research would later prove.
Enter Steven L. Waterman, of VeriSEAL. Waterman is a former US Navy Diver and underwater combat photographer attached to Underwater Demolition Team 13 during the Vietnam War. His book, Just A Sailor, details his experiences with UDT-13, weaving in and out of the rice paddies and deltas of Vietnam, oftentimes under hostile fire. My initial email query to VeriSEAL was forwarded to him. His response came on April 28, 2003, and didn’t mince words:
“There has never been a Bill Shields graduate from the prerequisite training, BUD/S [Basic Underwater Demolition/SEALS] or UDT/R. He’s a fake. There is no mistake. Nothing he can say or provide for documentation will change this,” Waterman wrote. “Please get back to us with photos and other documentation of his claims so we can properly display this liar’s resume for the world to see.”
Another investigator for VeriSEAL, J.H. “Hoot” Andrews, a Plankowner of SEAL Team 2, also sent me a response to my query which reflected the indignation that only a true veteran and professional operator could have. On April 29, 2003, Andrews wrote:
“Your suspicions are absolutely correct about this Shields. He’s a pathological liar. He pumps his ego up with his imagination and spews out outrageous dribble. He’s the ultimate poster boy in the Psychiatrists Gazette. He never went thru the BUD/S training and isn’t listed in the database. Would be interesting to see his DD-214. As a writer, you should expose this anal specific to all. He treads on the hallowed graves of the SEAL’s that didn’t make it back. Thanks for the interest.
Resp.
J.H. “Hoot” Andrews, USN, Ret.
Plankowner, SEAL Team TWO”
(N.B. A Plankowner is a name originally assigned to sailors assigned to a ship’s first commission. Andrews was assigned to the very first boat crew of SEAL Team 2—hence the name. The DD-214 is the discharge from service document that everyone that has served in the Armed Forces receives at discharge. It’s used when applying for jobs, and other applications).
Upon being told that Shields claimed to have been awarded the Navy Cross (which falls just slightly shy of being awarded the Medal of Honor), Waterman was quick to refute and rebuke Shields again:
“There were eight SEALs who got [the Navy Cross] in Vietnam and I know about half of them personally,” Waterman wrote. “The eighth was a Vietnamese guy who was with Tom Norris when he was awarded the [Medal of Honor] for saving a couple Air Force guys caught behind NVA lines…This guy needs to be drawn and quartered.”
Andrews also had no kind words for Shields after hearing of the bogus Navy Cross allegation and suggested some new boxing drills for me to work on:
“[I] suggest that when you’re working out, sparring, you imagine your opponent is Shields and give him what he deserves,” Andrews wrote to me. “He’s treading on the hallowed ground of the SEALs that didn’t make it back. Take him out for the full count.”
When VeriSEAL confirms that a SEAL is an impostor, retribution is swift, often because the claimants are usually fraud artists using the fake credentials to steal or commit other crimes. They are not concerned with the light “war stories” some guy in a bar tells you, as Waterman explained to me, after I passed along an email from a concerned Shields fan who felt that I was destroying a man’s life.
“Lying a little now and then is not what this is about,” Waterman replied. “He’s a total fraud and liar and has incurred the wrath of all military veterans, combat or not. We will be placing his name in the VeriSEAL Hall of Shame very soon along with any photos we can glean of him, or his book jackets. Amazon.com and some of the other online booksellers will be advised that the man is a liar. If he was published by a recognized press we would approach them, also.”
Enter Henry Rollins of 2.13.61 Publications.
“I’m a liar…a liar…I’ll rip your heart out…I’ll burn your soul…”
-Rollins Band, “Liar”
Responding to my email requesting an interview about one of his authors, Rollins basically shrugged it off and declined to be telephoned for a lengthy comment.
“I am not all that moved about this revelation [that Shields lied],” Rollins wrote. “His books are out of print at our place and we are selling off the remainders but no one is buying. He lied to good people and he had me working my ass off editing his work…There’s nothing for me to say really besides, ok you got me good…”
I was surprised by this, considering that Rollins himself has published volumes of pages detailing how he hates liars and fakes. He was also not able to offer me any contact information of how to reach Shields directly. I was back to square one.
A sudden lead came through Liz Logan at authentiSEAL, another phony SEAL hunter website. Passing along my request for information, I was suddenly in contact with one of Shields’ ex-wives, Joan Sticha.
According to Ms. Sticha, the stories that Shields portrays through the four books that 2.13.61 Publications published are a mix of fiction, delusion, and reality.
In his writing, Shields portrays himself as a workin’ class man with white trash roots, surviving abuse and neglect as a child and youth before enlisting with the Navy.
“I only hit my mother in the face once; it was a beginning. My right hand dripped the blood from her nose. She just stood there, eyes too stunned to blink, then the tears and wails began.
My father ran down the steps and I caught his ear with my left hand. He took his mind off my mother’s pain.
The family dog barked.
It was the day after my high school graduation.”
-Bill Shields, excerpt from the chapter “Son of a Bitch,” pp. 109, Lifetaker
According to Sticha, however, Shields’ family comes from “East Coast upper crust” with “many connections.” This much is for certain—Shields graduated high school in 1970 from the prestigious Stanton Military Academy, which lists, among others, Barry Goldwater as a graduate. It’s not exactly a franks-and-beans education by any stretch of the imagination.
In 1971, Shields enlisted with the US Navy and became a Corpsman. After completing basic training in Great Lakes, Illinois, he was assigned to Great Lakes Naval Hospital until 1972, when he was transferred to Jacksonville Naval Hospital in Florida. In 1973, he was again transferred to Portsmouth, Virginia, where he attended EKG School. After completing that training, he was again transferred to the pilots’ physical exam center at Naval Air Station (NAS) Pensacola, Florida. It was during this time Shields Sticha met and later married.
But all was not well with the newlyweds. According to Sticha, the pair separated numerous times due to Shields’ ongoing drug habit, which he details throughout his writing. Also during this time, Shields is again transferred, this time to the biomechanical repair school in Denver, Colorado, in 1976, and then again in 1977, to Great Lakes Naval Hospital in Illinois.
So…when did he go to Vietnam? According to Sticha, he was never deployed. The closest he came was being attached as a Corpsman to a Marine detachment on a destroyer out of Norfolk, Virginia, which never shipped out due to a termination of the war. Although he can technically call himself a “Vietnam Veteran” for having been enlisted in the military during those years (as can members of the National Guard who were enlisted during Vietnam), at no time in their seven-year marriage was Shields ever posted overseas. Sticha remains emphatic that he never saw combat, he never completed BUD/S training, and he was never a US Navy SEAL.
Sticha and Shields divorced in 1980, just shy of a year after his discharge from the Navy. After that, he bounced around from job to job, town to town, woman to woman, the majority of the time staying in Pennsylvania.
In the 1980s, he attended the University of Pittsburgh and graduated in the top of his class with a major in English. From time to time, he would be called as a guest lecturer at various schools around Pennsylvania, but his main sources of income were, according to Sticha, “meaningless,” (i.e., printer, auto store clerk, etc.).
In her email correspondence to me, Sticha never comes across as a spiteful ex-wife, but rather, someone who is deeply saddened by having been with, lied to, and hurt by Shields. She describes him as a “very disturbed and lonely personality,” who is “an exceptionally clever sociopath, bordering on manic depressive, who is persistently looking for something that to this day, eludes him.”
While he had not begun seriously writing his false exploits as a SEAL while they were married, she says that she has found herself, her children, parents, and in-laws to be “unwilling characters” in his now-published works. Sadly, Sticha feels that Shields believes in his heart and mind that the life history he has created is real.
Perhaps the worst lie Shields tells is the story of how his daughter contracted and later died of leukemia due to his exposure to Agent Orange. Although it is still denied by Dow Chemical and the United States government, many veterans are still struggling to be compensated for their strange illnesses and the birth defects of their children, blaming direct exposure to Agent Orange during their service in-country. Agent Orange is defoliant that was liberally sprayed over the Vietnam landscape in an effort to reduce the concealment capabilities of the Vietcong and North Vietnamese soldiers.
“I loaded an M-14, 2 white phosphorus grenades, a Browning automatic shotgun, a Ruger .44 magnum, & 2.2 pounds of C$ plastics into my Ford Escort. Ammunition went in the back seat, covered over by my daughter’s blanket. A Visa card & a Rand McNally map. I wasn’t planning on living long enough for a change of clothes. My daughter had been dead only a few days; I was going to kill anyone directly involved w/ developing Agent Orange at Dow Chemical…”
-Bill Shields, excerpt from the chapter “Blood Rain,” pp. 19-20, Lifetaker
Unfortunately, this is another falsehood that Shields has created to make his life seem darker and fleshes out the battle-hardened alter-ego. According to Sticha, there is no daughter who passed away:
“There is no truth to the daughter dying from cancer…leukemia or other. The only children we lost were miscarriages, never full term. And I am certain there are/were no other children by other wives. This is just another fabrication (he even had our youngest daughter believing it for awhile!),” Sticha said, via email.
As if those were not enough nails in the proverbial coffin lid, a veterans’ advocate by the name of Teresa (no last name was given in the email) was also introduced to me by AuthentiSEAL. Her encounter with Shields was similar to my own in the sense that it was correspondence-based. She initiated contact with Shields by sending him a card saying “Welcome home” (although he never left Stateside), and, “If you don’t have a place for Christmas dinner, come spend it with me.” Teresa describes herself as “nice to despondent vets as a way of life.”
Shields responded and, according to Teresa, the pair carried on a correspondence for a year or two. The correspondence came to a head when Teresa decided “he was just too totally full of shit” for her to continue trying to assist him. Again, by her account, Shields began pursuing her romantically, calling her at work, swearing he was in the process of a divorce. Unable to distinguish lie from truth, Teresa cut off contact with Shields, but still received phone calls and messages on her machine from the author, which she chose not to respond to.
Thinking she had put a bad situation behind her, Teresa picked up her phone one day to find Lisa Shields, Shields current wife at the time, on the other end of the line. Lisa had found the age-old telephone number evidence in Shields’ wallet and phoned the number. The two women had a long conversation in which it was discovered that Shields had been calling and pursuing Teresa while Lisa’s father had been dying of brain cancer.
According to Teresa, “I was his way of not being there for him.” It was during this conversation that Lisa revealed to Teresa that Shields had never been with the Teams and had never seen combat. Completely disgusted with him, Teresa says she now chooses to “make a point not to read any of his shit because I don’t need all the negativity,” and suggested I do the same:
“My suggestion to you is, do your best to simply opt out of his bullshit. He won’t be sorry. There won’t be any acknowledgement; there is no suitable explanation…be sure that life will pay him his due,” she wrote.
I am not that easily satisfied. Like many quests, the path changes the minute you cross the threshold; the destination intended is not always where you end up.
So what does Shields say for himself?
“…all I have left is my skin/& a light wallet/I don’t hope for anything/the plaster falls/walls crumble/I take 2 more antacids/a sip of coffee/there is nothing/else”
-excerpt from “Ghost Poem,” pp.67, The Southeast Asian Book of the Dead
I would like to say that I was able to contact Shields himself, that he was able to prove his accusers wrong. This was not the case. A contact number that was slipped my way unfortunately didn’t pan out. I can only go by the countless words Shields has published in books, interviews, documentary films, etc.
Ad nauseum, Shields’ words and writing maintain that he is a product of the Vietnam War, that the US Navy unleashed the closeted killer inside of him, many times for the better, a “Heartbreaker, Lifetaker,” as the old saying goes. Never once does he claim that the writing is a work of fiction. Never once in his countless chapbooks and subsequently published material with 2.13.61 is there the standard “this is a work of fiction” disclaimer.
After spending a year (almost to the day) tracking Shields through the Internet and into the homes of the people he has inflicted himself on, it is now almost impossible for me to read even one couplet of his verse. Whereas once I was glued to the page, feeling the agony and the sheer power of the words, I am now left with only disgust and anger at each word that passes in front of my eyes.
The evidence is stacked against him.
—
Bill Shields was never a SEAL.
He never saw combat.
He has never killed anyone, in combat or otherwise.
The devil may tell you a thousand truths to get you to believe one lie, but there is no power in a lie once you know it for what it is. Just prior to Christmas, I received an email from yet another concerned fan, saying don’t damage “the words,” the purity of the writing with my article. I replied by saying, in essence, that if I had owned a Van Gogh original and then found out later upon appraisal that it was a counterfeit, would it still be as beautiful? I said, no, it would not be, because while the fraud artist may have painted nearly the exact same brush strokes, got all of the lines in the exact right place, he did not live the life of the artist, he was not Van Gogh, so therefore he could not possibly have painted the picture from the heart of the real deal.
The same applies for Shields’ writing. While the words may be bleak and threatening, akin to rubbernecking a fatal car wreck, they are simply untrue. As far as the writing about combat experience is concerned, there is as much truth in it as there is in any Steven Segal movie (or any other action blockbuster, for that matter). If the books are not selling at 2.13.61 Publications, Rollins should do the right thing and eat the cost of publication, sending Lifetaker, Rosey the Babykiller, and The Southeast Asian Book of the Dead to the napalm of the incinerator.
“no one could have saved me/I can’t blame my wife or my kids/I’ve never turned around/& I don’t look at mirrors/Christ was never a sleeping pill/I’ve believed in nothing/4 years since I last went to jail/16 since drug addiction/I’ve killed more cars than men/I have tried to write about anything but Vietnam for the last year & a half/continually failing/even now/I wanted to tell you what a fuckup I’ve been/& it just feels like more of that goddamn war”
-excerpt from “Ghost Poem,” pp 65-66, The Southeast Asian Book of the Dead
Was it worth it, to find out yet another hero had let me down? Surely. But in my mind, the quest to confront Shields is still incomplete. Until I confront him directly with the body of evidence against him, it will not be over. I have lost respect for a literary influence, and with the lack of solid, hard-hitting writers getting exposure while hacks and fluffers surge ahead, being forced to take one off the podium my own mind has created does very little for my peace of mind.
So Bill, we need to talk.
—
Seth Gotro is a former sports and news reporter and has published three chapbooks through RoadRage Press. He would like to acknowledge the patience and assistance of the following (in no order): Jackson Ellis, Joan Sticha, Teresa, J.H. Andrews, Steven L. Waterman, the veriSEAL staff, Liz at authentiSEAL, and the US Navy SEALS.
Bibliography
Shields, Bill. Lifetaker. Los Angeles: 2.13.61 Publications, 1995.
Shields, Bill. Rosey The Baby Killer and other stories. Los Angeles: 2.13.61 Publications, 1998.
Shields, Bill. The Southeast Asian Book of the Dead. Los Angeles: 2.13.61 Publications, 1993.
Shields, Bill. “Rosie the Baby Killer and Other Stories.” The Best of 2.13.61 Publications. Henry
Rollins, ed. Los Angeles: 2.13.61 Publishing, 1998. 123-133.
Sperry, Rod. Stomp Hard: The War and Words of Bill Shields The Script. Massachusetts: 50
Gallons of Diesel, 1997.