“It was like a monkey fucking a football”: when Clint Eastwood secretly funded a disastrous military operation
Like almost every other A-list star who’s conquered the box office with a procession of action movies and hard-hitting thrillers, Clint Eastwood also played more than a few soldiers when he was one of Hollywood’s most popular and bankable leading men.
He had some military experience himself, too, after being drafted during the Korean War. He may have only been a swimming instructor and lifeguard, but he still found the time to have a near-death experience when a plane he was flying on as a passenger plummeted into shark-infested waters and forced him to swim for shore and avoid becoming their next meal.
Eastwood has been seen as a soldier or ex-soldier of various armed forces hailing from multiple time periods in movies like The Outlaw Josey Wales, Heartbreak Ridge, The Beguiled, and Kelly’s Heroes, to name just a few, but he ended up helping to fund a real-life operation that quickly snowballed into an unmitigated disaster.
In the early 1980s, Vietnam War veteran James ‘Bo’ Gritz began embarking on a number of secret missions into Southeast Asian regions, including Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, to locate and rescue American prisoners of war who’d been detained on foreign soil for years after the conflict had ended.
Gritz sought funding for an incursion behind enemy lines, and Eastwood was happy to lend a hand. The former requested that the director shoot his next film on the border between Laos and Thailand as a distraction so he and his men could slip into the country unnoticed, and the latter handed over $50,000 to help pay for the mission.
Eastwood orchestrated a meeting between Gritz’s representatives, film producer Fritz Manes, and then-president Ronald Reagan at the commander-in-chief’s ranch, where it was eventually decided that it would be better if the mission didn’t proceed. However, Eastwood still let Gritz and his team hole up at his own ranch for what was described as a “communications check,” which is where things got strange.
The local sheriff wanted to know why there were people in his jurisdiction with assault weapons, tactical gear, and military equipment, and Eastwood told him that they were testing radios for his next picture. Unconvinced, Gritz and his men were detained and questioned by the authorities.
“They had no idea what they were doing, and none of the equipment worked,” Manes told The Independent of Gritz’s motley crew testing out their new gear. “It was like a monkey fucking a football.” He eventually headed off on his mission, only to be ambushed in Thailand to leave Eastwood wondering what the hell was going on.
Three days into their two-week incursion, Gritz and his men were attacked by local guerrillas, resulting in the death of two Laos nationals and a captured American. The rest of the group fled, and the leader of the unit walked into a Thai police station and surrendered, where he and four of his number were fined for the illegal possession of a high-powered radio.
Several weeks later, Gritz was summoned to explain himself and his botched undertaking to the government’s House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs. As for Eastwood, when he was asked for his thoughts on the bungled operation, he neatly summed it up as “the Marx brothers go to Cambodia.”
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