Sometimes you have to follow your heart.
Your heart sets the destination and your mind, intellect, ambition, and even your physical body may then follow. Some may call such a thing a mission, others see it as obsession, but no matter its name, James B. Wells, author of Because: A CIA Coverup and a Son’s Odyssey to Find the Father He Never Knew, a “memoir/biography” of sorts in which he tells the tale of the search for the cause of the death of his father, Jack J. Wells, is an extended act of devotion by a dogged son who spends thirty years of his life in the search.
James B. Wells lost his father, Jack, when the boy was nine years old. The father was serving as an officer with a United States agency in Vietnam that sought to assist the locals in policing and keeping civilian safety. Jack’s responsibilities took him into dangerous parts of Vietnam where he often came upon “inconsistencies,” likely instances of corruption, bribery, and other elements of social breakdown amongst both the locals and the occupiers that seem to occur during times of war and disruption.
Wells’s father was not one to hide his aversion to such behaviors. Outspoken and given to including his honest assessments of corrupt practices in his reports back to U.S. superiors, his letters to his wife suggest that he knew he was ruffling feathers, knew there might be blow-back to his candor. What becomes the mission (or the obsession) of this book, follows when the author begins to explore the details of what happened to his father, who never returned from Vietnam following a plane crash whose cause the author comes to believe was covered-up by the CIA.
Wells states that he is a “retired criminology and criminal justice professor at Eastern Kentucky University. He also includes that he has been a “carpenter, soldier, correctional officer in a super-max prison, and later earned an MS in Criminal Justice, a Ph.D. in Research; then later an MFA in Creative Writing.” One can observe the aspects of these professions in the suspicions and the minutiae with which the author approaches his book. It is titled Because from the valediction his father used in his letters to his wife from Vietnam. It is a 290-page book with twenty pages of research citations, and a nine-page index. Reading it through is not for the faint of heart.
We see the arc of Wells’s plunge into hundreds of archived records, personal interviews, speculations, library binges, spirals out to other sons-who-lost-their-military-fathers’ stories which he elaborately tells as if to illuminate his own. We read many of his father’s letters to his wife from Vietnam, complete with misspellings and references to the joy of good bourbon. But interestingly, while the letters are filled with love to his wife, Jack Wells doesn’t mention his three children at home, focusing only on his mission and frustrations with authorities.
Near the half-way point in the book, the author comes upon a crash report indicating that there was not just one listed passenger (his father) in the Air America Twin Beech that went down, but three—the other two unlisted. Official reports only mentioned one passenger. There is also other startling evidence of bullets having been discharged within the cabin—again not seen in official reports. And finally, in fragments of a radio call from the airplane just before crashing there was a communication saying, “Taking gunfire…” Following the crash, there is also confusion as to who arrived at the site of the now burning plane, and exactly how Jack’s body was treated before it arrived at a mortuary in the U.S. The author deduces from this pieced-together information that due to his father’s honest reports of probable misbehavior within country, the CIA had decided to silence him permanently. The author will spend the next three decades and the rest of this book attempting to follow every shadow of information to prove such a connection.
In what are sudden and distracting attempts to bring the past to life, the James Wells chooses episodes in the life of his father which he completely fictionalizes. Again and again, he places real-time conversations in the mouths of Jack and his colleagues; he describes Jack’s sweaty clothing; the way the bourbon tastes as it goes down; how pretty the Vietnamese concierge was. All of this is fiction in the middle of a tightly documented sleuth-tale. It feels as if the book might have been better served to have been either a fictionalized documentary, or remain as a careful chronicle of the author’s search for truth.
James Wells is candid about his own wife’s exhaustion with his decades-long immersion in his father’s death mystery. The author at last comes to a kind of peace following hours of conversations with his priest and group of interested friends, and a dream of his father that allows him to call off his search—even though knowing he may not ever know the factual truth.
The last words are from a priest: “I know that people who read your book will, at a minimum, know of a faithful man who stood for the truth, did very brave and difficult things, when it would have been much easier to…let sleeping dogs lie. What a heck of a legacy it is…” The priest could be speaking of both the father and his son.
It is good to think that an author with such fine writing skills will at last be free to go on to explore other genres and other tales.
James B. Wells
James B. Wells is a retired criminology and criminal justice professor in the School of Justice Studies in the College of Justice, Safety, and Military Science at Eastern Kentucky University, and is the recipient of the 2025 Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences John Howard Award, an award given intermittently, upon significant demand, to recognize an individual who has made significant and sustained contributions to the practice of corrections. A former carpenter, soldier, and correctional officer in a super-maximum-security prison and later as a researcher/planner assisting architects in prison design, he has multiple degrees, including an M.S. in Criminal Justice, a Ph.D. in Research, and an MFA in Creative Writing. He’s authored or co-authored over sixty-five books, chapters, articles, and essays, as well as over a hundred and fifty research reports for various local, state, and federal agencies.
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