It was 1965, and the Vietnam War was moving from an advisory condition to full-on military intervention. JFK was President and as an ardent believer in containing communism and the “Domino Theory.” Young men believed in this President and in America. The draft caught many right out of High School while many others volunteered to join the military and fight for the cause of freedom. The ideal for Kennedy was to stop communism by supporting the government of Diem in South Vietnam to prevent its spread. Many in the media and Hollywood castigated this ideology and were rabid anti-war adherents. The death of John F. Kennedy and subsequent transition of power to Lyndon B Johnson elicited even more intense and violent aversion to this conflict. That hatred would eventually morph from hating the war to hating the soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen who were ordered to fight in that theater. As combatants in a faraway place, none of us had ever heard of, we only knew we were called to fight in defense of innocent civilians under threat of communist rule. We did not understand why so many influential people were so opposed to our service. However, as time has gone by we had come to realize that LBJ was the chief cause of that misplaced hatred we saw when we came home. His gross mismanagement of the war was directly responsible for the misplaced avarice aimed at us. War turned young men into old men with all its debilitating side effects. Some of us came home but never left that battlefield. We came back to a country that had changed for the worse just like the country of Vietnam had. We took jobs, raised families, fought the demons of death, destruction, and chaos in our heads and slogged through life with vivid and haunting memories of blood, death, the stench of burning flesh, the screams of dying men, women, and children and seeing our fellow soldiers lying dead in mud and blood. Most of us persevered and went on to make a difference in many lives. Those of us that came home cannot help but remember our fellow brothers and sisters that didn’t, and the sacrifices they made for all the right reasons in a war that no one really understood or wanted to be in. This is my part of the story, and only 1 of many millions that will be lost to history because they were never told for reasons I will shine the light of truth upon, finally.
September 10th, 1965 boarded a bus in Port Arthur, headed to San Antonio, Lackland AFB for boot camp. On the way, we passed Port Acres on Hwy 73. Several of the passengers had boarded the bus in Atlanta, GA. Some were from New Jersey, New York, Chicago, and other points north. As we passed Mr. Daniels pasture where he kept his Brahma cattle, one of the guys screamed: “what the hell are those things?” I told him they were Brahma cows and two bulls. He raises them for beef. He said, “Wow, I have never seen them walking around like that.” I nearly peed my pants. It was going to be a learning experience for a lot of guys, including myself
We got off the bus at Lackland, and the temperature was about 99° and the humidity at about 80%. Those poor guys from up north were panting from the heat and humidity that we took for granted. Boot Camp was nothing for most of us from Texas, and I wondered why my brothers had told me horror stories about it for years. Of course, I was 18 and full of piss and vinegar and accustomed to the climate and luckily in excellent physical condition. We were asked what we wanted to do in the Air Force several times and given three choices each time. I always said Medic, Medic, and Medic. I did not know how big a mistake that was.
Boot Camp ended October 1st, 1965 and we got a two-week furlough home. My orders were to arrive in Tampa Florida for training after another 2 weeks back at Lackland for Combat Indoc which usually is 9 weeks, unaware of what Medic meant to the Air Force. October 15th I was in Tampa at Hurlburt Field for Pararescue training. They told us we were in for holy hell week and I laughed. If this were anything like Boot Camp, it would be a cinch. I was wrong. It was indeed a week in hell, nothing holy about it. After 6 weeks the TI called me into his office and told me I was the strongest candidate in my class; however, a pleural bleb had been noticed on my left lung, and since Pararescue required in-depth sea training I could not continue, and I was washed out. I was devastated. But then again, that would have been two years more training to be a PJ in some God awful places. Later still I did not know what life held in store for me.
My new assignment was to Biloxi MS for AC&W Operator School. I had no idea what that was, but I would make the best of it. I learned a lot, including how to write backward as fast as most people can write forward. After completing the training, we were asked where we wanted to go for our next assignment. We had two choices, Vietnam or Alaska. Since I had friends in Nam, I chose Vietnam. I had no desire to go to Alaska. Leave it to the military to upend your wishes. Everyone who decided Vietnam was sent to Alaska and vice versa. After two weeks leave I caught a DC3 to Dallas then to Seattle Washington and from there to Elmendorf AFB in Fairbanks Alaska. A deuce and a half picked us up and drove for about two hours up, up, up we went. We ended up on top of a mountain called Murphy Dome Air Force Station. It was February 1966, and all you could see was snow about 8 foot deep, and the only thing visible were strange looking domes rising above the storm. To enter the site there was one entrance cleared of snow, and that was the chow hall back door. That was where everything entered and left the site during the winter.
Life on a remote radar site was pretty dull and lonely, but since I knew how to sew, and didn’t mind washing dishes, I made the best of it. I earned a ton of money sewing on patches, stripes and even taking up fatigue shirts and pants. I also made a lot of money taking KP duty for 20 bucks a shift. We worked 12-hour shifts in the control center, so we ended up having 3 and 4-day breaks, and a 7-day break. Since there wasn’t a lot to do on site I had plenty of time for KP and sewing. Otherwise, it was spending time playing BooRay, ping pong, or drinking in the NCO club. KP duty was preferable since the chief cook was from New Orleans and we hit it off right away. I got to hang out after finishing KP duty, and he would cook special stuff like gumbo and steaks, customarily reserved for the Officer staff.
My job was tracking and plotting aircraft from the North Pole to Kodiak Island. We often, nearly every day, tracked Russian Bison and Bear aircraft that would fly just outside our airspace. Sometimes they would enter our space, and we would initiate intercept by F104, or 106’s out of Eielson AFB in Fairbanks. It was always funny to listen to the pilots talking to the Russian pilots as they flew back and forth along the parallel. They actually knew each other by name and knew their kid’s names. One day in early September, several men in black suits showed up and started asking questions about all combat ready Intercept Controllers and Control Technicians. By that time I was one of the most experienced Intercept Control Techs on site. They called me into the Station Commanders office with two other Techs. We were told that we had volunteered, or had been “asked” to volunteer, for a particular assignment that was critical to the war effort. They said it would be TDY for only 90 days but that it was the most important assignment we would ever have. We were ready to go anywhere by then just to get off that mountain and not be around for Red Phase. Red Phase is when you are restricted to quarters and not allowed outside except for emergency or critical duty because the temperature was 40 to 70 below zero. Little did we know that those 90 days would be life-altering and cause serious psychological issues for the rest of our lives.
We were flown out of Eielson AFB on an AC130 and taken to an unknown location for specialized training. We spent two weeks crushing grapefruits and tennis balls 12 hours a day while learning lethal specific hand to hand combat tactics. We had no idea why, but this training was grueling and extremely challenging, this was combined with evasion and escape training that Special Forces are required to have, but they have 8 to 12 weeks to complete it. We had two. Our fingers would literally bleed from those damned tennis balls until we developed calluses, which only emerged after the two weeks of hellfire and brimstone. We were taught to move through any environment without making a sound and would take down dummies, or sometimes really badass Marine Corps Force Recon personnel. We learned to silence enemy combatants instantly without us making a sound. This two-week nightmare was done with no more than 4 hours of sleep per 24 hours. We could not imagine how Intercept Control Technicians could possibly need this crap. But in the end, it saved our lives and the lives of many others. It also meant taking many lives in gruesome and gut-wrenching ways that are in my head to this day and caused decades of sleepless nights and troubled days that cost me dearly. I could only silence the screams, and the smell of blood, guts, and the sound of men dying with crushed windpipes, with copious amounts of alcohol. It was like the cure for what ailed me was only found at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey, rum, vodka, gin, or any other potent liquor. It took many decades to finally come to my senses and get the proper help with what is now known as PTSD. It did not exist in that era.
Having done that, let’s get back to our importance to the war effort. An AC130 picked us up and flew to another unknown location, landing on a bumpy dirt runway in the middle of nowhere with mountains on one side and jungle on the other. Then, we boarded another Sikorsky helicopter called a Jolly Green Giant that brought us to a ship stationed in the South China Sea. From there we were assigned to a CIA Agent Supervisor, only referred to as the “Boss” and two DIA operators. Our unit consisted of 20 men from three branches of the military. There were 4 Marine Corps Force Recon Snipers, 4 Army Recon, 2 Air Force Medics, 2 Combat Controllers, 2 Combat Control Technicians, 2 Intercept Controllers, 2 Intercept Control Technicians, and 2 Team Leaders. One from the Marine Corps, and one from an unknown source, but most likely DIA or one of the other unnamed government agencies you don’t want to know about. The team also included several Laotian Hmong and Vietnamese Montagnards. There were no rank, insignia, or any other identifiers on our BVD,s. They were solid black or dark Olive Drab. All our tactical gear was Drab. The only lethal weapons in our unit were the Force Recon Sniper Rifles, and BAR14’s carried by the Army Recon team. The rest of us were only allowed to carry a 1911 Colt 45, a special tactics AFSK knife, and a wire garrote. Otherwise, our hands were the weapons and that is not just a saying, it was seriously for real. The Combat Controllers were responsible for calling in air strikes on targets throughout Laos and Cambodia along the borders with Vietnam. Our principal objective was the interdiction of all movement of food and other supplies along the Ho Chi Min Trail. We were also responsible for rescuing and returning women and children that were kidnapped from villages, and orphanages in Vietnam, to be held in Laos or Cambodia for ransom or sold into slavery of one kind or another. This, in fact, became our most pressing duty and we carried out these rescues from Andoung Meas, Cambodia to Ban Mat, Laos. I will not mention many other actual locations from this point on since some of them may remain classified due to the lethality of our unit or one of the other 4 groups just like ours.
Ban Mat was the farthest North we were ever reconnoitered to find missing captives from South Vietnam that were brought North to Hanoi then valued by the NVA’s before being carted across the border to the waiting Laotian rebels. Our job that week was to rescue 8 nuns and 30 children from an orphanage in Quang Tri. This was the most dangerous of all our assignments by far. The region was a miasma of swamp, jungle, flat land, and hills. The operation took place at 0330 Zulu from 8 Kilometers away from Ban Mat proper. We walked the 8 K through dense jungle, and the main contingent remained in the low lands while the Army Recon and Force Recon snipers held to the high ground. The encampment we were looking for was East of Ban Mat toward the border near Dinh Pha Luong, Vietnam. Intelligence gave coordinates that fell in a small valley between two high foliage hills. As we approached the encampment, the Army Recon team reported a force of about 20 Laotian Rebels and 80 NVA soldiers.
We were ordered to remove them and leave no survivors. Force Recon set up above the encampment while the Recon team made their way to the North. Our unit moved into place to the South and infringed on the campsite completely silent. The first encounter was ten NVA soldiers standing guard while the Laotian rebels and the other NVA slept nearby. I was the first to make contact, along with the Marine Team Leader. We took out four NVA at the outer perimeter and made way for the rest of the team to approach the other NVA and remove them. At that point the Force Recon Snipers reported ready, so we split up and entered each hooch where the rebels were sleeping. One rebel had apparently gone to take a piss at the outer edge of the encampment, and he raised all kind of hell when he didn’t see the NVA soldiers we had killed. That was an oh shit moment I will never forget. Those little rats came out ready to do battle, and it was on. The snipers started picking them off when they exposed themselves to moonlight. The rest we had to take out with the help of the Army Recon team. It took 45 minutes to take all of them out because we lost the element of surprise. It was a bloody mess, unlike anything I had ever seen. We gathered up the captive women and children and called in a Jolly Green Giant for evac. They were taken South and eventually returned to Da Nang AFB where they were medically evaluated before being taken home, wherever that was.
Another group of civilians was captured and brought into Laos near Cho Na Meo on Hwy 6. Off we went with about 6 hours of rest from the event at Ban Mat. We were still bloody and worn out. But we were given intel that those civilians would be killed because the villagers were trying to rescue them from the NVA and rebels. We arrived just in time to meet up with a small force of NVA and Laotian insurgents as they were killing villagers and captives. This was going to get ugly fast, and it did. We were outnumbered, but those Force Recon snipers were excellent up close and personal just as much as at a distance. We did have to fight against the odds but when adrenalin kicks in, it is just another day with assholes in the CIA, the Boss, pointing at whoever they wanted dead. I still don’t know how many innocent civilians we killed thanks to those assholes, but we ended that fight and saved what was left of the village population and most of the captives. A team of Army Infantry came to the border with 2 ½ ton trucks and returned them to their homes. This was when we found out that one of the teams had been ambushed and all killed in Laos. The idea of small units was to move so fast and so silent that the thousands of NVA and Laotian Rebels looking for us 24/7 couldn’t keep up. It worked but for this one time. As it turned out we Intercept Control Techs actually had a purpose. Sorties of F4 E’s had doubled since 1964 and were kept entirely secret. It was our job to handle intercepts of Russian or NVA pilots crossing into Laos. We were also training Laotian controllers. That answered the question for us as to why we were there.
One mainly routine day started out with us moving on foot toward a known NVA rendezvous point just north of the Cambodian border pretty much in line with Pleiku Vietnam. We were to take out a small contingent of NVA rebel forces transporting food and weaponry North along the Ho Chi Min Trail. We hadn’t slept in two days, but Intel said that this could decimate a continuing resupply of NVA troops working near the DMZ. The Combat Controllers had called in gunships and FACs’. They could not find anything even though Army Recon had called in the coordinates. Suddenly a Mig 21 came out of nowhere and began strafing the Recon unit. Our Intercept Controller called in F4E’s from Pleiku and began intercept.
I was the tech giving flight data to the controller. They called Tally-ho on the Mig and began a severe and deadly aerobatic dance with the devil. That is when the Combat Controllers from across the border in Vietnam notified us that three more Mig’s were en route and would be on us in mere moments. One of the F4’s went down in extremely thick jungle about 2 clicks from our location. A PJ chopper was dispatched to rescue the pilot.
Meanwhile, the second F4 had taken out the first Mig and was engaged with the other three. Two F111’s showed up to finish off the Mig’s and returned to Vietnamese airspace with the F4. Meanwhile, the two PJ’s sent to rescue the downed F4 pilot radioed that they had encountered heavy fire and were both severely injured along with the pilot. The chopper had to dust off and take evasive action due to the heavy fire until it could call in coordinates on the location. The one PJ called our team for help. The Boss said we could not help them because it would give away our position and forfeit our mission. That is when the Marine Capitan and even the two DIA agents told him to go F himself. Mind you, the two DIA bastards were the most insane and lethal maniacs any of us had ever seen, or would ever see but even they would not leave anyone behind. Since I had some medic training, I was tasked with doing triage on the three that were down. Two Marine Force Recon and one of the DIA agents went with me. To say the PJ’s and the pilot were under heavy fire was way off. They were being bombarded with everything the NVA had on that side of the border. I radioed the Combat Controllers, and they called in a C130 Specter, and within 30 minutes it silenced everything in its path. It literally looked like the place had been plowed by a massive tractor.
We found the PJ’s and pilot, but we had lost the two Marines and the DIA agent in the gun battle. I was alone. I demi packed one PJ’s thigh to stop the bleeding, but the other PJ had bled out from a neck wound. The Pilot had a broken leg and some ribs, but otherwise, he was ok. I radioed back that I was bringing out the PJ since he was worse off, but the Boss said to bring the pilot because he was the more valuable capture for the NVA. Why he wouldn’t send any help is still beyond me but he wouldn’t. I brought out the pilot and went back for the PJ.
We are talking about 2 kilometers in and 2 back, but they had to come out. I got the PJ out and headed back for the remaining PJ. The Boss screamed at me to stop. He said we were not going back for a dead man. Both the Marine Captain and I throttled him at the same time. The Captain told me to go get the PJ, and I did. We were not leaving a man behind, even a dead one. The Boss did not like it, but every man in our unit told him he could disappear and be listed as AWOL too. He never said another word the rest of our time. I honestly believe those trips through the jungle, and hilly terrain caused a lot of my back issues, but it was worth it. That rescue would be a massive benefit to my last two years in the Air Force.
These were our daily routines, flying to one fight after another without any time for rest or recouping. If we weren’t rescuing civilians, we were taking out NVA that regularly crossed the borders to pick up food and other supplies from Laotian and Cambodian villages. The NVA would make deals with some of the elders of villages to provide food mostly, but sometimes a place to hide from American forces. That became a thing of nightmares for us. When intelligence reports came in that there were NVA in a village the combat controllers would call in air strikes with gunships, napalm, and in a couple of cases, white phosphorous. Our job then was to provide battle damage assessment. The worst was one particular Laotian village just North of the DMZ, I will not mention the name. There was a battalion-sized contingent of NVA that had bivouacked before being sent back into battle near Da Nang. A B52 dropped 500 and 750-pound bombs on the village to eradicate them. It did, along with 60 to 70 innocent Laotian civilians including children. It was a scene out of a horror movie. Bodies or pieces of bodies were strewn over an area that would cover 5 football fields. We found one baby, about 4 years old. She was holding a Rhinoceros Beetle in her hand. That seemed to be a common pet among Laotian kids. Her body was burned almost to charcoal except for her little arms and hands with that Beetle in it. She had clutched that beetle to her tiny chest to protect it. I witnessed 20 plus grown men cry like little kids that day when we saw that. When we asked why they had to be killed in that bombing instead of taking out only the NVA, the Boss said it was a necessary consequence of war and that the military couldn’t cross the border, so we had to do it and never question him again. We all wanted to cut his throat.
In other villages where white phosphorous was used the scene was beyond description. I cannot find the words to describe what that looked like. In one such village, several kids had been burned so bad that they had no skin or hair left on their little bodies, but they were still alive. The Boss told us to make sure they were dead. That was one of the hardest things any of us ever had to do during our 90-day tour. But in the end, it may have been a blessing in disguise for those babies, but that image will be forever burned into my mind. At one point we actually got a two-day break after a particularly horrid assignment. We camped with a mobile medical unit that was doing evaluations and a medical evac for wounded civilians and a couple of our outfit that had been severely wounded. I was cleaning my handgun in a nurses hooch when a young girl came into view with a basket of laundry. It was not uncommon for civilians near our bivouac to wash clothes for money or other goodies like candy or stockings for the women. She was about 11 or 12 years old. I could see she was crying and looked terrified, but it didn’t key anything dangerous within my thought process. The nurses that were sitting in their bunks screamed and told me to shoot the girl before she got any closer. I couldn’t believe they would say that until I saw 4 Viet Cong about 100 yards behind her. They were holding a woman of about 30 and were laughing while the woman was screaming and crying. The nurses yelled at me to do it because the girl may have a grenade in the basket. When she was about 20 yards away from the hooch, I yelled at her to stop, but she began to run toward me. I fired, striking her in the forehead. As she fell, the basket exploded and sent remnants of clothing 30 feet into the air. I will never forget that little face or the screams of her mother that the 4 assholes had been holding. They let her go, and she ran to see her baby in tatters. Those 4 bastards died that day, along with that baby. I chased them into the surrounding jungle along with two of the Army Rangers. We caught up with them, and they stopped laughing as we slit their throats. I still wake up to that little girls face to this day every once and a while.
These were common Tactics used by the NVA. They would use kids and women to inflict their killing and would also use them as shields. I hated those bastards more than anything I could think of. Not all of them were that cold-hearted though. Just like us, they were soldiers in a war that none of us wanted to be in. I have only recently been able to think of them in that light. As with all devastating and horrible events, time removes the blinders of hatred and ignorance and lets the truth come to the surface. Our unit survived the 90 days plus the training and debriefings. We were told more than once that to speak of anything to anyone outside this unit would immediately cause us to be listed as MIA or AWOL or both. No one wanted to be listed as AWOL because that was cowardice and after what we had endured that would have been an enormous lie to our families. So, no one ever spoke of it to anyone. At least I never did until the early 1990’s when I got terribly drunk one night and told my wife about the little girl with the laundry basket. She had been on my mind for years since my daughter had been born. I wondered what that baby would have become had she lived. It was more than I could handle. Yet, I moved on and didn’t ask for help with the visions, sounds, smells, and feelings that flooded my memories at night, and haunted my days when I would see Asians, especially children, and wonder if they knew what I had done. Our 90 days ended without much fanfare.
ife also had a plus
Antionus 