“Jungle Rules” is a sports term describing a method loosely governing the play of a game. In other words, when observing Jungle Rules one overlooks many of a sport’s fouls or penalties that seem petty and that get in the way of the game’s fun, such as allowing tackling in flag football, or hockey-style body checking under the boards when battling for rebounds in a basketball game. Marines use Jungle Rules when playing unorganized contests of baseball, football, basketball, soccer, or any other team sport encumbered by too many rules that tend to overly slow down play. So they just don’t bother to call most fouls or penalties, unless the infraction is so harsh or blatant that it stops the game itself. Then they may step off five yards or allow two free throws, while they drag the victim of the penalty to the sidelines for resuscitation and medical care.

Jungle Rules, therefore, are very flexible standards that are open to broad interpretations. Playing a game by Jungle Rules is usually rough, and adherence to any specific rules of a sport depends purely on the participants’ senses of fair play and sportsmanship. Generally, there are no referees.

Throughout much of the history of the armed services of the United States, military regulations and the administration of justice also had broad interpretations and varying applications. Justice itself relied mainly on the sensibilities of the officer who held command over the individual who broke the rules.

For more than a hundred years, U.S. military law was based on the 1774 British Articles of War. Until 1951, nearly four years following the creation of the Department of Defense, unifying the military services, each armed force branch had its own separate regulations, system of justice, and application of existing military law.

The need to create a single, uniform system of military justice became clear during World War II. Until then, the United States had only a small standing army and navy, and the “Rocks and Shoals,” a popular term that described the 1774 British Articles of War, along with a few updated amendments pertinent to the navy or the army at the time, seemed to suffice, although some legal historians may successfully argue that the Rocks and Shoals denied justice and constitutional guarantees to those tried under them.

However, the need for a major retooling of the military justice system became clear during World War II, when the United States put more than sixteen million men and women in uniform, and conducted more than two million courts-martial during the war years. Throughout the nearly four years of U.S. participation in World War II, the military obtained on average sixty general courts-martial convictions each day of the war, and totaled more than eighty thousand felony convictions. Many of the courts-martial involved infractions that dealt with rules governing good order and discipline, and outside the military community the committed acts would not have violated any civilian laws.

America’s first secretary of defense, James V. Forrestal, who assumed his newly created office on September 17, 1947, realized that the same logic that required unifying the armed forces under the Department of Defense also required a uniform code of justice for the military consistent with the U.S. Constitution and the command authority of the president.

Thus, in 1950, Congress enacted Title 10 of the U.S. Code, Sections 801 through 946, known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Manual for Courts-Martial. The UCMJ and MCM embodied a full system of laws and directives for the administration of justice pertaining to those laws. The UCMJ and MCM went into effect the following year.

By the mid-1960s, with the advent of the conflict in South Vietnam, many federal lawmakers began to recognize various shortcomings within that version of the UCMJ and MCM, many of which dealt with the qualifications of defense counsel, trial judges, and who might hold authority over these judges and lawyers. Accordingly, Congress made a number of sweeping revisions to the UCMJ and MCM. As a result of those changes, during 1967 and 1968 military lawyers found themselves struggling through a period of uncertain transition from the old UCMJ and MCM to the newer version. Understanding was often nebulous at best. Interpretation of the rules frequently depended on who read them.

That period in South Vietnam left the judges and lawyers tasked to defend and prosecute cases in an often frustrating state, trying to adapt order from an unsettled system. It took several years for the military judges and lawyers to finally settle on some consistent interpretations of the new UCMJ and MCM. In the meantime, the application of justice took on the nature of playing the game by Jungle Rules.

The events described in Jungle Rules are taken from actual transcripts of trials and investigations, primarily conducted by military lawyers assigned to the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, First Marine Aircraft Wing, during 1967 and 1968. Therefore, the stories told in Jungle Rules are true, at least inasmuch as the court transcripts, investigation records, and testimony reflect.

However, except for those people of obvious prominence or historic importance, such as Lieutenant General Robert E. Cushman, Jr., the commanding general of the III Marine Amphibious Force in Da Nang, or President Lyndon B. Johnson, the names, and backgrounds of many of the characters in Jungle Rules have been altered.

The Marines who committed most of the offenses described in Jungle Rules paid their penalties decades ago. Dredging up these people’s sometimes painful pasts could possibly cause harm to some who today may live respectable lives. They deserve to be left alone. The lawyers and some of the other Marines in Jungle Rules may prefer to be left alone, too. The true identities of any of these people would contribute little to the stories in this book.

However, the events surrounding the people in Jungle Rules are true.

Lastly, the idea that gave birth to this book came to me from a friend who deserves a great deal of thanks and rightful acknowledgment for his contributions. That friend is John C. Reynolds, an attorney who served as a Marine captain in South Vietnam in 1967 and 1968, assigned as a lawyer to the Office of the Staff Judge Advocate, First Marine Aircraft Wing in Da Nang.

I came to know John Reynolds in New York City in 1986 while I lived and worked there. We became good friends. During that time he told me many stories about cases that he and others tried in Da Nang, and about a riot that took place in the brig on Freedom Hill in August 1968.

As those war stories amassed and grew more interesting, before long the idea for Jungle Rules began to take hold. In 1987, as I drafted the first outline for the Jungle Rules project, first envisioning it primarily as a motion picture screenplay, John Reynolds answered my questions and clarified issues about the circa 1968 military justice system, and the way things were done at First MAW Law.

Although we had fun developing the outline, and sometimes argued over trivial ideas, the project never really got anywhere. John Reynolds even went to the trouble of registering the outline with the Writers’ Guild in New York in 1987, as a potential motion picture, but nobody at that time expressed any interest in a project about a brig riot and lawyers in Vietnam. In time, our interests in the project also waned, and the outline soon took residence in my file drawer for nearly twenty years.

I left New York in 1990, and that is the last time I saw or heard from John Reynolds. In the summer of 2004, when at long last I knew that Jungle Rules would finally be a book, I tried to find my old friend and tell him the good news. Despite my repeated efforts through every means I could imagine, as of publication of the book I have not been able to locate him.

I feel bad that we did not stay in touch after I moved from New York City. I hope that today John Reynolds is well and happy.