Kidney transplant reunites former ambassador James McGee, fellow Vietnam veteran 47 years later

BRADENTON — The day before his inaugural meeting with despot Robert Mugabe in 2007, newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Zimbabwe James McGee was escorted through a ceremonial dry run at the presidential palace in Harare.

McGee was told to stand at a spot on the floor marked with an X, from which he was not to move. He was not to offer his hand until Mugabe extended his arm first. No allowances for improvisation — control was paramount.

McGee was in for a surprise the next day. The X had been moved back from its original position. Furthermore, the 5-foot-6 Mugabe would be standing atop a soapbox. That meant, in order to reach Mugabe, the 6-foot-3 McGee would have to bow as the cameras rolled. But the American diplomat had other ideas. When the formal introduction began, the decorated Vietnam veteran took two steps forward, initiated the handshake, met the revolutionary leader straight up, and blew protocol to smithereens.

From that point on, McGee was an enemy of the regime. For the next two years, state media — “Mugabe Threatens To Kick Out U.S. Ambassador,” “McGee: Behave or Face Expulsion,” “McGee’s Conduct Undiplomatic” — kept the pressure up. And no wonder. He visited Zimbabwe's “re-education camps,” discovered logbooks filled with the names of torture victims, and distributed $10,000 worth of cheap cell phones to election monitors, with instructions to grab photos of unadulterated voting tallies posted at precincts around the country.

In 2008, with “92 percent certainty,” McGee and his aides watched opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai collect enough votes to win the race — only to see Zimbabwe’s political machinery declare a runoff. After reluctantly agreeing to participate, Tsvangirai abandoned the runoff campaign amid the violence that followed. And Mugabe, the one-time hero of an African independence movement who went on to murder political enemies, jail dissidents, plunder his nation’s treasury and destroy its economy was re-elected with more than 85 percent of the vote.

There may be no good way to frame the negation of McGee’s best efforts in Zimbabwe or Madagascar, where he was also ambassador before a military coup upended civilian governance in 2009. Yet, the seven-year Bradenton resident is keeping faith in American core values by mentoring aspiring young bridge-builders, and encouraging them to make the world a better place via the Selby Scholarship Program.

And he’s been given an extension of that mission because a figure from a distant chapter of America’s own bleak past decided he wasn’t finished making a difference, either.

“Doug is the star of this story,” McGee insists. “Doug gave me the gift of life.”

Post-war paths

The last time James McGee, 69, and Doug Coffman, 71, saw each other was in 1971, when planeloads of coffins were still returning from Vietnam. They had dinner together on Okinawa. Like so many young comrades in arms, they lost touch after parting ways. Looking back, it was almost like the passing of ships in the night.

“We knew each other, but not well. You couldn’t say we were close friends,” recalls Coffman. “But I remember Jim as good natured, a jolly fellow.”

“We didn’t really hang out a lot together back then,” McGee adds. “But I remembered Doug as a really nice guy.”

They met in 1969 as students at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California. Both studied Vietnamese, and were attached to the Air Force’s 6994th Security Squadron. Its mission was to eavesdrop on enemy communications from aboard slow-moving EC-47s, locate transmitters, and direct air strikes onto communist troop movements. Seventeen of its airmen were killed in action.

McGee and Coffman left the Air Force on different trajectories, and their post-war careers took divergent paths that would ultimately intersect.

An environmentalist and cultural anthropologist, Coffman wound up in Eugene, Oregon, where he developed a fascination with buffalo. He would turn his research into a book, “Reflecting the Sublime: The Rebirth of an American Icon,” which revisited the work of legendary zoologist William Hornaday. Hornaday’s activism is credited with saving the American bison from extinction.

McGee, who earned three Distinguished Flying Crosses in Vietnam, would become a globetrotter with the State Department. His assignments took him to 11 nations, and he earned ambassador appointments to Zimbabwe, Madagascar, the Comoros and Swaziland. His home in Bradenton is accented with photo poses alongside luminaries such as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Nelson Mandela.

Zimbabwe’s tragedy lingers with McGee. Both Mandela and Mugabe were imprisoned for resisting apartheid, both brought those racist institutions to an end, and both were hailed internationally as human-rights heroes.

But where the late Mandela pushed for reconciliation in South Africa and relinquished power at the end of his six-year term, Mugabe succumbed to ego and greed, clinging to the reins for 37 years until he was ousted in a 2017 coup by his own party. At 94, ailing and unable to walk, Mugabe is currently being treated for an undisclosed illness in Singapore.

“It didn’t have to end that way,” McGee says. “As recently as the 1999, Zimbabwe had a literacy rate of 95 percent, which was higher than the United States. With the minerals in the Rift Valley, it’s got every natural resource known to man, and it’s being stolen by the few.”

McGee retired from the State Department in 2011, and retired to Bradenton with his wife, Shirley, the same year. Of all the honors he collected in the U.S. Foreign Service, the most prestigious was the Diplomacy for Freedom Award, presented by State Department Secretary Rice, for his work in Zimbabwe.

Conscientious objector

It may be simplistic to attribute Doug Coffman’s eclectic post-military career path to what happened in Vietnam. But he studied a lot of things after that, from ecology to psychology because “I wanted to learn as much as I could about the human condition, about who we are and why we behave the way we do.” And he spent a lot of time with his kids as a stay-at-home dad.

Nevertheless, after three years of running combat missions with the 6994th, the erstwhile sergeant Coffman found himself at a crossroads, about to make a life-defining decision.

“I realized that violence was not a productive or defensible approach to solving problems,” he says. “I had doubts all the way through the service, but I reached a point where I could find no justifiable reason for continuing the war. So I filed for conscientious objector status, more as an act of desperation than anything else. I was intimidated by the military complex — I thought it was going to chew me up and spit me out in prison.”

As he began filing paperwork complying with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, Coffman also feared how colleagues would regard his character. They stuck by him. One of his classmates wrote a letter of support. In his request for non-combatant status, Coffman was ordered to report to Thailand. But another colleague volunteered to swap orders with him, which meant Coffman would spend the rest of his hitch at a base in North Dakota.

“I was never mistreated in any way; I was always treated with respect,” Coffman says. “The whole process affirmed my hopes and beliefs about our system of government.”

After three years and seven months on tour with Uncle Sam, the native Hoosier received an honorable discharge. When Coffman saw McGee last summer, there was no doubt in his mind about his next move.

Reunion

Deactivated in 1974, what was left of the 6994th — or at least, seven of its members — gathered for a reunion last July in Monterey. Most had not seen each other since the war. Shirley McGee, James’ wife, recalls the scene: “They were like 2-year-olds in a candy store.”

But James McGee was on thin ice. Diagnosed with diabetes in 2010, he was put on kidney dialysis in 2017, with a projected life expectancy of five years. He had already been approached by half a dozen donor candidates, but none were a match.

When Coffman learned of McGee’s condition, he didn't hesitate. He was in excellent shape. “There were times in my life where people stepped forward for me, when they didn’t have to. So if I can step forward and help someone else, then why not?”

Long story short, a battery of tests proved Coffman a perfect fit. On Sept. 18, at Medstar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., their transplant surgery was a success. “I felt absolutely thrilled that we both survived,” says Coffman, who is regaining his strength for hiking the mountains again.

McGee: “I feel spectacular now. They tell me I’ve got the kidney function of a man half my age.”

The man who stared down Robert Mugabe looks forward to resuming his work with the Selby Scholar program, which accepts 40 high school graduates a year and now counts 141 active scholarship recipients pursuing degrees in fields as diverse as health and engineering. McGee is one of 140 community volunteers lending their insights and connections to the students. He enjoys talking up the daughter of Haitian refugees, now on a Fulbright scholarship and teaching English in Japan.

He also looks forward to joining “behind the scenes” political activism locally. But at the forefront of McGee’s post-op gospel is recruiting living donors for those in need of kidneys and livers. “Everybody checks ‘organ donor’ on their driver’s license, but more than 20 people each day die while awaiting organs,” he says. “These are people who can be saved by living donors.”

Coffman makes his sacrifice sound like a day at the office. “I liked Jim all those years ago, and I so admire and appreciate his service to our country in a peaceful way. But honestly,” he says, “I would’ve given my kidney to him if he’d spent his life sweeping floors.”