The Eagle Mutiny

In the past one-hundred fifty years there has been only one armed mutiny aboard an American ship. This is the story of that incident which occurred on March 14, 1970. It is presented as a serious piece of journalism but told with the narrative drive of a novel, including dialogues solidly grounded in sworn testimony and buttressed by hundreds of interviews with the crew and investigators who were the first to arrive on the scene. The mutiny was carried out by two young crew members of an American tramp steamer transporting napalm to Thailand for the war in Vietnam. After casting most of the crew into the Gulf of Thailand in lifeboats, the mutineers--fireman Clyde McKay and bedroom steward Alvin Glatkowski--made their way to Cambodia, where after a tense impasse with the U.S. military, the Columbia Eagle was turned over to Prince Sihanouk's government, and the mutineers, declaring themselves antiwar revolutionaries, were granted asylum. But two days later the two were imprisoned when a coup put pro-US Lon Nol in power, with Sihanouk charging that the CIA had masterminded the mutiny to deliver weapons to Lon Nol.

A tale of idealism and risk-taking, madness and ultimate tragedy, the book not only chronicles for the first time the mutiny and the investigation and trials that followed, but looks at the psychological factors involved as well. Beneath the surface story of a selfless and grand political gesture, the authors find an incident with deeper, more complex motivations. As events unfold, the authors draw readers deeply into the adventure for a full appreciation of shipboard life and the vagaries of human relationships.