Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler hits #1 with “Ballad of the Green Berets”

Thanks to Hollywood, America’s collective memory of the Vietnam War is now inextricably linked with the popular music of that era. More specifically, it is linked with the music of the late-'60s counterculture and antiwar movement. But opposition to the war was far from widespread back in 1966—a fact that was reflected not just in popular opinion polls, but in the pop charts, too. Near the very height of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, on March 5, 1966, American popular-music fans made a #1 hit out of a song called “The Ballad Of The Green Berets” by Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler.

Sadler was exactly what his name and uniform implied he was: a real-life, active-duty member of the United States Army Special Forces—the elite unit popularly known as the Green Berets. In early 1965, Sadler suffered a severe punji stick injury that brought a premature end to his tour of duty as a combat medic in Vietnam. During his long hospitalization back in the United States, Sadler, an aspiring musician prior to the war, wrote and submitted to music publishers an epic ballad that eventually made its way in printed form to Robin Moore, author of the then-current nonfiction book called The Green Berets. Moore worked with Sadler to whittle his 12-verse original down to a pop-radio-friendly length, and Sadler recorded the song himself in late 1965, first for distribution only within the military, and later for RCA when the original took off as an underground hit. Within two weeks of its major-label release, The Ballad of the Green Berets had sold more than a million copies, going on to become Billboard magazine’s #1 single for all of 1966.

While it would not be accurate to call “The Ballad Of The Green Berets” a pro-war song, it was certainly a song that enjoyed popularity among those who opposed the growing anti-war movement. A year after “Green Berets” came out, Buffalo Springfield would release the anti-war anthem “For What It’s Worth,” which continues to be Hollywood’s go-to choice for many films and television programs depicting American involvement in the Vietnam War. On this day in 1966, however, the American airwaves belonged to a clean cut, uniformed member of the U.S. Army and his anti-antiwar epic.



Article from History Channel

December 5th 1964, Captain Roger Donlon awarded first Medal of Honor for action in Vietnam

The first Medal of Honor awarded to a U.S. serviceman for action in Vietnam is presented to Capt. Roger Donlon of Saugerties, New York, for his heroic action earlier in the year. Captain Donlon and his Special Forces team were manning Camp Nam Dong, a mountain outpost near the borders of Laos and North Vietnam. Just before two o’clock in the morning on July 6, 1964, hordes of Viet Cong attacked the camp. He was shot in the stomach, but Donlon stuffed a handkerchief into the wound, cinched up his belt, and kept fighting. He was wounded three more times, but he continued fighting—manning a mortar, throwing grenades at the enemy, and refusing medical attention.

The battle ended in early morning; 154 Viet Cong were killed during the battle. Two Americans died and seven were wounded. Over 50 South Vietnamese soldiers and Nung mercenaries were also killed during the action. Once the battle was over, Donlon allowed himself to be evacuated to a hospital in Saigon. He spent over a month there before rejoining the surviving members of his Special Forces team; they completed their six-month tour in Vietnam in November and flew home together. In a White House ceremony, with Donlon’s nine surviving team members watching, President Lyndon B. Johnson presented him with the Medal of Honor for “conspicuous gallantry, extraordinary heroism and intrepidity at the risk of his own life above and beyond the call of duty.” Donlon, justifiably proud of his team, told the president, “The medal belongs to them, too.”



Article fron History.com

This Day in History, 11 September

Today is the 20th anniversary of the Islamic Terrorist flying airplanes in the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon. And let's not forgot the passengers who took over an airliner from terrorists bent on flying it into the US Capitol instead driving that plane into the ground into famr land, knowlingly giving their lives to save others. But I chose not to expand on what is known as 9-11, as that attack and the debacle that unfolded just two weeks ago in Afghanistan where the US withdrew, souring massive amounts of top end US military equipment and leaving American citizens and our Afghan allies at the mercy of a terrorist group, its just too much sorrow and shame to remind ourselves of. Instead I'd like to focus on another day, this on in 1965 where 1st Cavalry Division arrives in South Vietnam.

1st Cavalry Division (Airmobile) begins to arrive in South Vietnam at Qui Nhon, bringing U.S. troop strength in South Vietnam to more than 125,000. The unit, which had a long and storied history, was the first full U.S. Army division deployed to Vietnam. The division consisted of nine battalions of airmobile infantry, an air reconnaissance squadron, and six battalions of artillery. The division also included the 11th Aviation Group, made up of three aviation battalions consisting of 11 companies of assault helicopters, assault support helicopters, and gunships.

The division used a new concept by which the ground maneuver elements were moved around the battlefield by helicopters. Initially deployed to the II Corps area at Qui Nhon, the division took part in the first major engagement between U.S. and North Vietnamese forces during the Battle of the Ia Drang Valley fought in November, just two months after the division began arriving in Vietnam. Later, the division moved further north to I Corps in 1968 to relieve the embattled U.S. Marines at Hue during the Tet Offensive; in October of the same year, they redeployed to III Corps to conduct operations to protect Saigon; and in 1970, the division took part in the invasion of Cambodia and conducted operations in both III and IV Corps (the Mekong Delta). Thus, the 1st Cavalry Division, popularly known as the “First Team,” was the only American division to fight in all four corps tactical zones. The bulk of the division began departing Vietnam in late April 1970, but the 3rd Brigade remained until June 1972.
br> If you haven;t read the book "We were Soldiers Once and Young", then you are missing posible the best war bok every written and captured in a movie ofthe same title.

The 1st Cavalry Division was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation and “First Team” soldiers won 25 Medals of Honor, 120 Distinguished Service Crosses, 2,766 Silver Stars, 2,697 Distinguished Flying Crosses, and 8,408 Bronze Stars for Valor.

Article from History.com

Marine Who Earned Medal of Honor in Vietnam Finally Receives Burial at Arlington

At age 19, Marine Pfc. Bruce Carter fought off a swarming enemy in 1969, then threw his body on a grenade to save his buddies during a close-quarters battle in Vietnam's Quang Tri province. His actions with H Company, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, earned him a posthumous Medal of Honor, and he was laid to rest at Vista Memorial Gardens in Miami Lakes, Florida.

Over the years, his mother, Georgie Carter-Krell, came to think that it would be best for her son's memory to have his final resting place be with more than 400,000 of the nation's heroes at Arlington National Cemetery. Carter-Krell, who had been a receptionist at a huge Department of Veterans Affairs facility named for her son, the Bruce W. Carter Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Miami, worked with the Marine Corps and Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Florida, to make it happen.

It has been rare in recent years, though not unprecedented, for the remains of those killed in battle to be reburied at Arlington. Last year, Army Pfc. Lamar Williams, who was killed in Vietnam in January 1971 shortly after his 21st birthday, was reburied there.

On Oct. 30, motorcycle units from the Miami-Dade Police Department escorted the hearse carrying Carter's flag-draped casket to the Miami airport. Marines and police stood at attention as pallbearers placed his remains aboard a waiting American Airlines flight to Washington, D.C.

The 90-year-old Carter-Krell said in a statement at the airport ceremony: "We have finally achieved what should have been done 50 years ago." Airport fire trucks sent up huge sprays of water, forming an arc that the aircraft passed under on the way to take off.

On Wednesday, Carter's remains were reburied with full honors in Arlington National Cemetery's Section 60, where more than 900 of those who fell in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have their last resting place. His casket was escorted by Marines from Marine Barracks, Washington, D.C.; the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment (The Old Guard); and "The President's Own" Marine Band.

Carter was born in Schenectady, New York, in 1950. He attended schools in Miami Springs, Florida, and later West Jefferson High School in Wego, Louisiana, where he dropped out in August 1968.

In April 1969, he was a radio operator with 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines, in Vietnam's "I Corps," the area bordering North Vietnam at the Demilitarized Zone. The 3rd Marine Division had to adapt to numerous types of terrain in I Corps during some of the heaviest fighting of the war, from the rice-paddy flats along the coast at Cua Viet, to the scrub and rolling hills in central areas, and the triple-canopy jungle west of Khe Sanh.

The enemy was made up of main force North Vietnamese regulars. Much of the action for Marines was in small-unit patrols, interspersed with larger operations that had names such as Prairie III, Hickory, Cimarron, Buffalo, Kingfisher and Kentucky.

For Carter and his battalion in August 1969, it was Operation Idaho Canyon, north of a strange outcropping in central I Corps that rose to 790 feet and was called the "Rockpile" by Marines.

On Aug. 7, Carter's H Company came under a "heavy volume of fire from a numerically superior hostile force." He was with the lead element, which became separated from the rest of the company by a brush fire that was started by the fighting, according to his medal citation and Marine histories. Carter exposed himself to enemy fire to deliver return fire, giving the Marines in the lead element a chance to link up again with the main body of H Company.

"Shouting directions to the Marines around him, Private First Class Carter then commenced leading them from the path of the rapidly approaching brush fire when he observed a hostile grenade land between him and his companions," the medal citation states. "Fully aware of the probable consequences of his action, but determined to protect the men following him, he unhesitatingly threw himself over the grenade, absorbing the full effects of its detonation with his own body. He gallantly gave his life in the service of his country."

Carter's mother received the posthumous award of the Medal of Honor from then-Vice President Spiro Agnew in a White House ceremony in September 1971. In a statement issued last week, VA Secretary Robert Wilkie said, "Finally, this brave Marine is being laid to rest at the Arlington National Cemetery, where he belongs." Wilkie praised Diaz-Balart for his help in arranging the reburial and thanked Carter-Krell "for going above and beyond to ensure her son receives the burial he always deserved." "Fifty years have passed, and Pfc. Bruce Carter's legacy remains strong," Diaz-Balart said in a statement. The burial at Arlington was "a tribute to his heroism," he added, and also a reminder that a life lost in battle "is always valued, no matter how much time has passed."

Article from Military.com

Green Beret Medal of Honor recipient Bennie Adkins dies of coronavirus

Green Beret Medal of Honor recipient Command Sergeant Major (retired) Bennie Adkins, died April 17 from complications caused by the coronavirus. Killed by an invisible enemy after scores of communists with rifles could not get the job done.

Adkins, was 86, and was hospitalized March 26 at the East Alabama Medical Center in Opelika, Alabama. He was placed into ICU and put on a ventilator after experiencing respiratory failure. He is one of thousands of Americans to die from the virus since late February.

Born in Waurika, Oklahoma, was drafted into the military when he was 22 years old in 1956, during the very early years of the conflict in Indo China. He volunteered for Special Forces and completed three times to Vietnam between 1963 and 1971.

He was awarded the Medal of Honor for acts of valor during his second tour in Vietnam in 1966. At the time, he was a Sergeant First Class serving with detachment A-102, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) as an intelligence sergeant. He and his unit were responsible for tracking enemy troop movements. Providing exceptional intelligence on enemy movements, dispositions and strengths always made their A camp a target.

March 9th, 1966, in the early morning hours, hundreds of North Vietnamese attacked A-102's base camp, Camp A Shau, preceded by indirect fire from enemy mortars and rocket-propelled grenades. Adkins rushed through the extensive enemy fire to man a mortar pit, firing mortar rounds against the enemy onslaught, he was wounded with shrapnel but still left his relative protected position exposing himself to enemy direct fire in order to drag wounded soldiers to safety.

Enemy forces launched their main attack the following day. Within hours of the main attack SFC Adkins was the only soldier left firing mortars. When he was out of rounds, he used a recoilless rifles, small arms and hand grenades to fight off intense waves of attacking Viet Cong. He ran back and forth from a mortar pit to a bunker through enemy fire through the battle, gathering ammunition and killing NVA soldiers who had penetrated that far into the camp.

Adkins is credited with killing 135 to 175 Vietnamese in a nearly four-day battle while being wounded 18 times and helping fellow soldiers to safety. For those acts, former President Barack Obama presented Adkins with the Medal of Honor in 2014.

He and a small group of other soldiers destroyed their sensitive communications equipment and classified documents, then escaped by digging through the back of the bunker and fighting their way out of camp. Adkins led the men through the jungle until they were rescued by helicopter on March 12. “We were not going to be prisoners of war, whatever we had to do,” Adkins said in a 2015 interview with Stars and Stripes.

Adkins and Katie Jackson, an instructor at Auburn University, co-authored a book in 2018 titled, “A Tiger Among Us: A Story of Valor in Vietnam’s A Shau Valley.” The book details Adkins’ military experiences and his life after the Army. Jackson said she sat for multiple interviews with Adkins, collecting about 20 hours of tape to use for the book. “I think what probably struck me is that he wasn’t interested in bragging — it wasn’t about him,” Jackson said. “It was almost a challenge to get him to talk about himself. To talk about his own accomplishments was really hard for him to do.

Also apparent was his resilience, she said. “He not only survived the battle and a number of other close calls in his years of service, but he came back to a time when Vietnam veterans were discriminated against,” Jackson said. “That’s when he began to realize he wasn’t going to have opportunities, job wise, when he retired. His further education became important to him.”

Following his tours in Vietnam, Adkins held other jobs with the Army, including as a trainer at the jungle warfare school at Fort Sherman, located at the northern end of the Panama Canal. He retired from the Army as a command sergeant major in 1978.

Adkins obtained a bachelor’s degree and two master’s degrees after his military service. Later in life, he was inspired to help other retired service members with college. He created the Bennie Adkins Foundation to provide educational scholarships to Special Forces soldiers to aid their transition from military to civilian life.

He and Mary, who were married more than 60 years, had four sons, a daughter and many grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Mary Adkins died in February 2019.

Article mainly taken from Stars and Stripes

A-1 Skyraider - Low, Slow but earned it's place

Three and a half months after the first American combat troops, two battalions of Marines, waded ashore without resistance at Da Nang, U.S. Air Force jet pilots learned they wouldn’t have it so easy. On June 20, 1965, a McDonnell F-4C Phantom II was hit by a Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-17 near Ta Chan in northwest North Vietnam and became the first Phantom shot down in the war. The pilots of two MiG-17s from the North Vietnamese 921st Fighter Regiment thought a force of America’s most advanced combat aircraft would arrive to rescue the downed plane’s crew. Instead, they met ghosts out of the past: four gleaming white, straight-winged, single-seated propeller planes, Douglas A-1H Skyraiders of U.S. Navy attack squadron VA-25, “The Fist of the Fleet,” off the carrier USS Midway in the Gulf of Tonkin.

“At 12,000 feet and 170 knots we looked like Tweety bird to Sylvester the Cat,” remembered Lt. Clinton B. Johnson, who was leading the second pair of Skyraiders when they spotted the enemy jets. “Our only hope was to get down low and try to out turn the MiGs.” Following Johnson into the weeds to escape, wingman Lt. j.g. Charlie Hartman worried, “The familiar story of the No. 4 man being the first to be downed raced through my mind.” At the rear of the formation, he was defenseless against a tail attack.

“A silver MiG-17 with red marking on wings and tail streaked by Charlie and me,” Johnson stated. “Tracers from behind and a jet intake growing larger in my mirror were a signal to start pulling and turning….[The second MiG] was unable to stay inside our turn and overshot.” The first MiG, however, had gone after the other pair of Skyraiders. “I caught a glimpse of the leader and his wingman and headed for them,” Johnson recalled. “As we had been flying at treetop level in and out of small valleys, we had to fly around a small hill to get to them. Coming around the hill we saw … the MiG lined up behind them. … He turned hard into us to make a head-on pass.”

But that gave Johnson and Hartman a head-on shot, too. “We both fired our cannons,” Hartman said. Eight 20 mm guns — about 140 explosive shells all told — were fired at the North Vietnamese plane. “I saw the MiG’s canopy shatter,” Hartman said. The MiG had passed so close, Johnson recalled, “that Charlie thought that I had hit his vertical stabilizer with the tip of my tail hook and Charlie flew through his wake. … He never returned our fire, rolled inverted and hit a small hill exploding and burning in a farm field.” The venerable Skyraider had its first “kill” of the Vietnam War. One of the Phantom crewmen was taken prisoner, and the other was rescued by helicopter the next day.

The North Vietnamese pilots called the bare-metal, swept-wing MiG the “Silver Swallow.” U.S. pilots nicknamed the A-1 Skyraider “Spad” after a wood-and-wire World War I fighter. By June 1965, the Skyraider was a 20-year-old design. In those two decades, fighter planes had gone from pistons to turbines, from a few hundred miles per hour to over Mach 2.

The Skyraider was conceived in June 1944 when Navy planners rejected Douglas Aircraft Co. chief engineer Ed Heinemann’s concept for a dive/torpedo bomber. They wanted a single-seater designed around the huge twin-bank, 18-cylinder, 2,500-horsepower Wright R-3350 Duplex-Cyclone radial engine used in the Boeing B-29 Superfortress bomber. Up against deadline, Heinemann and his staff famously pulled an all-nighter and put drawings on Navy desks in the morning.

Too late for World War II, their A-1 Skyraider — the last tail-wheeled airplane in the Navy inventory — was the world’s biggest, most powerful prop-driven, single-seat combat aircraft, able to lift truly freakish weapons loads, greater than that of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. (In May 1953 a Skyraider in Dallas took off with fuel and ordnance totaling almost 27,000 pounds, comparable to a twin-engine Douglas C-47 transport plane packing two dozen troops.)

Former B-52 Stratofortress pilot Capt. Richard Drury called his A-1 “a time machine. … It carried nearly 40 gallons of oil, most of which wound up on the aircraft surfaces and on the pilots. It also burned about 100 gallons an hour of fuel. For all that, it barely went three miles a minute with an ordnance load. But speed was a relative thing and had lost all its importance in the sort of war we would be in.” Agility, not speed, would be the Skyraider’s best defense over Vietnam.

In September 1960, the Eisenhower administration saw the A-1 as the ideal combat aircraft — front-line, but no longer state-of-the-art — to bolster South Vietnam’s fledging air force. That November, South Vietnamese air force Skyraiders helped put down an attempted coup. In February 1962, however, two mutinous A-1 pilots bombed and strafed the presidential palace in Saigon.

The future South Vietnamese prime minister and vice president, Nguyen Cao Ky, began his rise to power as a flamboyant Spad pilot. “Never had I flown such a powerful aircraft!” he remembered of his first flight in 1964. “As I raced down the runway, the Skyraider was a tiger leaping into the sky. … It took all the strength of both arms and both legs to establish control. By the time I had stabilized aircraft altitude, I was at 12,000 feet. …The next time I took off in an A-1, I would carry a full load of bombs to drop on the enemy.”

When the U.S. Navy joined the war, Skyraiders led the way. On Aug. 5, 1964, carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation launched the first air raids into North Vietnam during Operation Pierce Arrow, in retaliation for reported torpedo boat attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Lt. j.g. Richard Sather was in an A-1H, making his third pass against patrol boats of the North Vietnamese navy, when he was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed in the shallows of Loc Chou Harbor. Sather, who had recently written home that he would “go into battle because this was the thing to do, the thing I’ve been trained for,” was naval aviation’s first casualty in Vietnam.

As the fighting intensified, the U.S. Air Force needed Spads to deliver the slow, accurate, close air support its fleeting jets could not provide. At first, bush-hatted U.S. air commando advisers shared cockpits with Vietnamese pilots in two-seat “fat face” A-1E Skyraiders with South Vietnamese air force insignia. Richard Foreman, a U.S. Air Force first lieutenant at the time, hitched a ride with a Vietnamese pilot from Tan Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon to Nha Trang, 200 miles to the northeast. “I was in the right seat,” Foreman remembered, “and in the back were five or six Vietnamese with their belongings, including a few chickens.”

In February 1965, responding to Viet Cong attacks on American bases, U.S. and South Vietnamese Spads crossed the Demilitarized Zone to hit North Vietnamese Army bases near Don Hoi. Ky, by then an air vice marshal, led his A-1s against anti-aircraft emplacements. “Their return fire was ferocious,” according to Ky. “Every one of the 24 planes I was leading was hit. My own plane was struck by four bullets, one of which grazed my body as I lifted my arm in reflex to protect my face. I found that bullet and saved it for my wife. Two of my pilots were forced to bail out into the sea.”

Less than two weeks later, Ky and his A-1s proved decisive in stopping yet another coup attempt when he threatened to bomb rebels in the capital. The coup plotters decided to negotiate. “I agreed but launched two flights of Skyraiders — eight aircraft carrying 32 tons of rockets — to fly over Saigon,” Ky remembered. “Those planes could remain aloft for four or five hours. With this move, I both controlled the air over the capital and would be able to quash further hostile troop movements into the city.” Ky’s Spads flew cover as loyalist troops and tanks retook control. He soon became prime minister, thanks in no small part to the Skyraider.

When Ky got wind of the Navy Spads’ aerial victory over Ta Chan that June, Johnson wrote, he “demanded our appearance for Vietnamese awards.” Ky told Johnson and Hartman that their MiG kill “had boosted morale tremendously” in South Vietnamese Skyraider squadrons. U.S. Navy and Air Force Skyraiders hunted truck convoys up and down the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia. “We went in at night — usually in flights of four,” according to then-Cmdr. George Carlton of attack squadron VA-215 off USS Hancock. They chose routes with minimal threats of anti-aircraft artillery. The standard combat load was four high-intensity parachute flares, 800 rounds of 20 mm ammunition, two 19-shot 2.75-inch rocket packs and a mix of four 250- and 500-pound bombs. But the Skyraiders had no onboard radar, infrared or night-vision aids.

“We were limited to our ‘Mark One’ eyeballs [naked eyes] for searching and tracking,” said Carlton, who later became a Navy captain. “It was a difficult cat and mouse game at best, for at the first indication of our presence, the trucks cut their lights and headed for cover in ditches and under trees. … We jokingly referred to these missions as making toothpicks the hard way.”

In March 1966, more than 2,000 troops of the NVA 95th Regiment, 325th Division, came down the trail to besiege a platoon of Green Berets and several hundred South Vietnamese in the A Shau Valley, near the Laotian border. Diving into the mountains surrounding the base, one pilot said, “was like flying inside Yankee Stadium with the people in the bleachers firing at you with machine guns.” During a March 10 attack on the NVA, Skyraider pilot Maj. Dafford W. “Jump” Myers of the 602nd Fighter Squadron (Commando) radioed, “I’ve been hit and hit hard.” He crash-landed his blazing Spad on the base airstrip. With enemy troops within 20 yards of Myers’ position and the nearest rescue chopper 30 minutes out, Maj. Bernard F. “Bernie” Fisher, an A-1E pilot of the 1st Air Commando Squadron out of Pleiku, told everyone, “I’m going in.”

The runway was so littered with battle trash that Fisher had to abort his first approach. On his second try he stopped at the end of the strip and rolled back to Myers, peppered with small-arms fire all the way. “The enemy was so close,” Fisher noted, “I was afraid a couple of them might jump aboard my Skyraider before Myers could make it.” The prop wash from Fisher’s Spad blew Myers off the plane’s wing. Fisher throttled back to idle, dragged Myers headfirst into the side seat, then revved up and rolled, dodging debris to get airborne. They landed at Pleiku with 19 holes in the Skyraider. Fisher received the Medal of Honor for his heroics. His Skyraider is at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.

Rescue missions sometimes turned into aerial combat. On Oct. 9, 1966, when a Navy Phantom went down 20 miles southwest of Hanoi, four Skyraiders of attack squadron VA-176 flew from USS Intrepid to provide cover for the rescue attempt. Four MiG-17s intervened. In the ensuing dogfight, the lead Spads scored one MiG damaged and another probable.

Then Lt. j.g. Tom Patton, flying the No. 4 slot, saw that “a MiG darting along above the trees was heading in my direction, but its pilot didn’t see me.” Definitely seeing 20 mm tracers zipping past from Patton’s guns, the MiG pilot pulled up. “This was a fatal mistake on his part,” Patton recalled. “He was climbing, losing speed, while I still had plenty. Maybe his reversal would have worked against another MiG-17, but … I ended up at his six o’clock.”

Patton stayed on the MiG’s tail, firing continuously. When his guns quit, he launched his 5-inch Zuni rockets. The MiG nosed over and plunged into the cloud deck. Patton saw the pilot eject. That was the last victory by a prop-driven fighter over a jet. Patton was awarded the Silver Star for his actions that day.

In the end it wasn’t enemy MiGs but American jets that put an end to the Skyraider’s days as an attack aircraft. An expanding inventory of turbine-powered birds, including the Grumman A-6 Intruder and LTV A-7 Corsair II — both intended to replace the Spad — meant U.S. carriers needed tanks just for kerosene-based jet fuel and no longer had capacity for the aviation gasoline burned by the Skyraider.

On Feb. 20, 1968, Lt. j.g. Ted Hill of VA-25 flew the Navy’s last A-1 attack mission, in support of U.S. Marines besieged at Khe Sanh. In April, Hill flew that Spad from Naval Air Station Lemoore in California to the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola, Florida, where it resides today. The Navy handed the rest of its Skyraiders over to the U.S. and South Vietnamese air forces.

Meanwhile in August 1967, the U.S. Air Force redesignated its air commando Skyraider units as special operations squadrons: the 1st SOS (call sign: Hobo); 602nd SOS (Firefly); and the 22nd SOS (Zorro), the Air Force’s last A-1unit. They flew from Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Airbase in eastern Thailand and covered all of North and South Vietnam as guardian angels. One of the most reassuring sounds a downed American pilot could hear, besides the throb of a Sikorsky HH-3E “Jolly Green Giant” rescue chopper, was the radio call sign “Sandy” from an escort of weapons-laden, long-loitering Skyraiders flying rescue combat air patrol, or RESCAP. (All Skyraider pilots were designated “Sandy” when covering rescues.)

Capt. John Flinn of the 1st SOS declared, “This rescue business is the best, most rewarding operation in the entire war. And if nothing else does, getting a man out makes sense. It’s really great to actually pluck a guy from the enemy after he’s been shot down.” In July 1969 Flinn, in Patton’s ex-Navy A-1H, was shot down over Laos and killed.

Skyraider pilots took a lot of ribbing from their fast-jet compatriots. A Spad jockey, it was said, could be recognized by his right leg, overdeveloped from standing on the rudder pedal against all that engine torque, and he had a greater chance of dying from slipping in an oil puddle than from an enemy bullet—but as one F-105 Thunderchief jock put it, “If a Sandy pilot walked into the bar, he would have a hard time paying for a drink.”

On Sept. 1, 1968, the 602nd’s Lt. Col. William A. Jones III took charge of a rescue at Dong Hoi on the North Vietnamese coast. The downed Phantom’s backseater had already been captured. The aircraft of the rescue force were seeking the injured pilot in the wrong place. Jones found him 8 miles away, covered by enemy 37 mm flak sites. “Trolling for fire” — going low and slow, daring enemy gunners to shoot and reveal themselves — was standard Spad procedure .Jones dueled with his 20 mm cannon and CBU-38 cluster bombs until his A-1H took a hit in the seat extractor. (Designed in the days before ejection seats, the Skyraider used the “Yankee” extractor system, a cockpit rocket that dragged the pilot out on a pair of straps.) Jones’ wingman called, “Get out! You’re on fire! Bail out now!”

But the extractor wouldn’t launch. Beating down the flames, suffering second- and third-degree burns, Jones pulled the Spad skyward to transmit the downed pilot’s location until his radio burned out. “Col. Jones successfully landed his heavily damaged aircraft and passed the [downed pilot’s location] information to a debriefing officer while on the operating table,” reads his Medal of Honor citation. The Phantom pilot was saved. That November Jones died stateside in the crash of a private plane in Virginia. His Spad, The Proud American, was repaired, but on Sept. 22, 1972, it too went down over Laos, the last Skyraider combat loss of the war.

By then, the U.S. was drawing down all forces in Vietnam. Air Force Spads flew their last mission on Nov. 7, keeping the enemy soldiers from the crash site of an Army UH-1 Iroquois “Huey” chopper near Quang Tri until seven survivors were rescued. In 1973 the Air Force handed its remaining Spads over to the South Vietnamese. They would take part in the last-ditch fighting during the North’s 1975 Spring Offensive, which ended in the Communist capture of Saigon.

On April 5, 1975, Nguyen Lanh, a first lieutenant in the 518th Fighter Squadron at Da Nang, was briefed that the NVA had crossed the DMZ in division strength, headed for a bridge over the Thach Han River to invade South Vietnam. Each Skyraider carried 12 500-pound bombs. Shooting up the tank columns and blowing the bridge, they forced the invaders to seek another crossing further inland. Over the course of the next week, Lanh was credited with knocking out 17 North Vietnamese tanks.

Although Skyraider pilots near the DMZ were having some success, they were far removed from their headquarters in Saigon and didn’t “know the whole story on how bad the war was going for us,” recalled Maj. Ho Van Hien of the 514th Fighter Squadron. On a 150-mile flight from Phan Rang Air Base southwest to the capital, his Spad hauled more refugees than bombs. “I flew back to Bien Hoa [Air Base outside Saigon] with 25 people in the back of my A-1E,” he said.

As the fighting closed in, the 514th withdrew from Bien Hoa across the city to Tan Son Nhut and, when that became untenable, to Bien Thuy in the far south. “Columns of smoke were rising up from various parts of Saigon following indiscriminate NVA mortar attacks,” noted Lt. Thai Ngoc Van, who flew a Spad in South Vietnam’s last stand on April 29. “We spent quite a long time over the target area, working with ARVN troops that were trying to hold their positions against a considerably larger NVA force that was advancing on Saigon. We spent all the remaining bombs and cannon rounds before heading back to Bien Thuy.”

Like many other South Vietnamese pilots, Hien escaped to U-Tapao, Thailand, with another two dozen refugees stuffed into the A-1E. “We were disappointed to see American soldiers with their guns leveled meeting us on the ramp,” he recalled. The Americans quickly applied U.S. insignia on the Skyraiders to cover South Vietnamese air force markings. “They took our weapons and all of our flying gear,” Hien said. “We were devastated.”

More than 40 years later, an A-1 painted in a semblance of U.S. Air Force colors is on display at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City, and two others are at a military history museum in Hanoi. In all, 144 Skyraider pilots and 266 planes were lost in Vietnam, most from ground fire, but five were downed by surface-to-air missiles and three fell in air-to-air combat, including two struck by MiGs. Today only about 50 Skyraiders survive.

“We were flying anachronisms,” said former B-52 and A-1 aviator Drury, “piloting Spads through a supersonic world, tasting the thunderstorms at 8,000 feet when an SR-71 [supersonic spy plane] was hitting three times the speed of sound above 70,000 feet. It was a ludicrous situation but one I applauded. … Some of the greatest and most dangerous and heroic flying ever done was right there … in old A-1 Skyraiders.”

This article was originally published in Military History Magazine

RIP LTG Hal Moore - "We Were Soldiers Once, and Young"

Retired Lt. Gen. Harold G. "Hal" Moore, the American hero known for saving most of his men in the first major battle between the U.S. and North Vietnamese armies, has died. He was 94. Joseph Galloway, who with Moore co-authored the book "We Were Soldiers Once ... and Young," confirmed Saturday to The Associated Press that Moore died late Friday in his sleep at his home in Auburn, Alabama.

Note: Joe Galloway has came to New Mexico State University in nearby Las Cruces to speak at annual ROTC events, including the annual event that awards the former SFA Chapter IX member CSM Mike Jefferson Memorial Scholarship.

Galloway said Moore, his friend of 51 years, died two days shy of his 95th birthday. "There's something missing on this earth now. We've lost a great warrior, a great soldier, a great human being and my best friend. They don't make them like him anymore," Galloway said.

Moore was best known for his actions at the 1965 Battle of Ia Drang, where he was a lieutenant colonel in command of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment. His actions were later reflected in the movie "We Were Soldiers" in which actor Mel Gibson portrayed Moore. The book tells what happened to virtually every trooper involved in the 34-day campaign and the climactic four-day battle in which 234 Americans died at landing zones X-Ray and Albany in November 1965.

Galloway, a former war correspondent for United Press International, said Moore was "without question, one of the finest commanders I ever saw in action." "Those of us who survived Landing Zone X-Ray survived because of his brilliance of command. I think every one of us thought we were going to die at that place except Hal Moore. He was certain we were going to win that fight and he was right," Galloway recalled. The picture at left, depicts LTC Hal Moore, Commander of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, on the radio during the fight for LZ X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley of Vietnam.

Galloway and Moore wrote a second book, "We Are Soldiers Still," which he said grew out of a journey back to the battlefields of Vietnam 25 years later. "We went back and walked those old battlefields. At the end of the day, Hal Moore and Col. Nguyen Huu An, the North Vietnamese commander, stood in a circle in the clearing and prayed for the souls of every man who died on both sides."

He said the two shared an "instant brotherhood that grew out of combat." "When we were discussing the book contract with a lawyer/agent, he asked to see the contract between me and Hal Moore, and Hal Moore said 'I don't think you understand. This isn't just a matter of money. We have trusted each other with our lives in battle and we have no contract before that.' I absolutely agreed."

On a Facebook page managed by Moore's family, relatives said he died on the birthday of his wife, Julia, who died in 2004 after 55 years of marriage. "Mom called Dad home on her day," the statement said. "After having a stroke last week, Dad was more lethargic and had difficulty speaking, but he had always fought his way back."

Before serving in Vietnam, Moore graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and then commanded a battalion in the newly formed air mobile 11th Air Assault Division at Fort Benning. Born in Bardstown, Kentucky, he served in the U.S. military for 32 years. Galloway said the family has tentatively scheduled a religious service Friday in Auburn and a memorial service at the National Infantry Museum at Fort Benning Army Base in Columbus, Georgia.

Larry Thorne - Special Forces Legend

The crazy story of the man who fought for Finland, the Nazis, and US Army Special Forces. Larry Thorne enlisted in the US Army as a private in 1954, but he was already a war hero. That's because his real name was Lauri Törni, and he had been fighting the Soviets for much of his adult life.

Born in Finland in 1919, Törni enlisted at age 19 in his country's army and fought against the Soviet Union in the Winter War of 1939-1940, according to the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.

He quickly rose to the rank of captain and took command of a group of ski troops, who quite literally skied into battle against enemy forces.

In 1942 he was severely wounded after he skied into a mine, but that didn't slow him down. In 1944, during what the Finns called The Continuation War, he received Finland's version of the Medal of Honor — the Mannerheim Cross — for his bravery while leading a light infantry battalion.

Unfortunately for Törni, Finland eventually fell to the communists in 1944.

But instead of surrendering, he joined up with the German SS so he could continue to fight the Soviets.

He received additional training in Nazi Germany and then looked forward to returning to the battlefield.

But then Germany fell, too, and the Finn-turned-Waffen SS officer was arrested by the British, according to War History Online.

Not that being put into a prison camp would stop him either.

"In the last stages of the war he surrendered to the British and eventually returned to Finland after escaping a British POW camp," the account at War History Online reads.

"When he returned, he was then arrested by the Finns, even though he had received their Medal of Honor, and was sentenced to six years in prison for treason."

He ended up serving only half his sentence before he was pardoned by the president of Finland in 1948.

Törni's path to the US Army was paved by crucial legislation from Congress along with the creation of a new military unit: Special Forces.

June 1950 saw the passing of the Lodge-Philbin Act, which allowed foreigners to join the US military and allowed them citizenship if they served honorably for at least five years.

Just two years later, the Army would stand up its new Special Forces unit at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

More than 200 Eastern Europeans joined Army Special Forces before the Act expired in 1959, according to historian Max Boot.

Among those was Törni, who enlisted in 1954 under the name Larry Thorne.

"The Soviets wanted to get their hands on Thorne and forced the Finnish government to arrest him as a wartime German collaborator," the account at Arlington Cemetery.net reads.

"They planned to take him to Moscow to be tried for war crimes. Thorne had other plans. He escaped, made his way to the United States, and with the help of Wild Bill Donovan became a citizen. The wartime head of the OSS knew of Thorne's commando exploits."

A Special Forces legend

Thorne quickly distinguished himself among his peers of Green Berets. Though he enlisted as a private, his wartime skill set led him to become an instructor at the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, teaching everything from survival to guerrilla tactics.

In 1957 he was commissioned a second lieutenant, and he would rise to the rank of captain just as war was on the horizon in Vietnam.

But first he would take part in a daring rescue mission inside Iran. In 1962, then-Captain Thorne led an important mission to recover classified materials from a US Air Force plane that crashed on a mountaintop on the Iran-Turkish-Soviet border, according to Helsingin Sanomat. Though three earlier attempts to secure the materials had failed, Thorne's team was successful.

According to the US Army:

Thorne quickly made it into the U.S. Special Forces and in 1962, as a Captain, he led his detachment onto the highest mountain in Iran to recover the bodies and classified material from an American C-130 airplane that had crashed. It was a mission in which others had failed, but Thorne's unrelenting spirit led to its accomplishment.

This mission initially formed his status as a U.S. Special Forces legend, but it was his deep strategic reconnaissance and interdiction exploits with Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observation Group, also known as MACV-SOG, that solidified his legendary status.

In Vietnam, he earned the Bronze Star medal for heroism, along with five Purple Hearts for combat wounds, War History Online writes. According to Helsingin Sanomat, his wounds allowed him to return to the rear away from combat, but he refused and instead requested command of a special-operations base instead.

On October 18, 1965, Thorne led the first MACV-SOG cross-border mission into Laos to interdict North Vietnamese movement down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Using South Vietnamese Air Force helicopters, his team was successfully inserted into a clearing inside Laos while Thorne remained in a chase helicopter to direct support as needed. Once the team gave word it had made it in, he responded that he was heading back to base.

Roughly five minutes later, while flying in poor visibility and bad weather, the helicopter crashed. The Army first listed Thorne as missing in action, then later declared he was killed in action — in South Vietnam. The wreckage of the aircraft was found before the end of the war, and the remains of the South Vietnamese aircrew were recovered, but Thorne's body was never found.

Thorne's exploits in combat made him seem invincible among his Special Forces brothers, and with his body never recovered, many believed he had survived the crash and continued to live in hiding or had been taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese, according to POW Network.

"Many believed he was exactly the sort of near-indestructible soldier who would have simply walked back out of the jungle, and they found it hard to believe he had been killed," Helsingin Sanomat writes.

The mystery was finally put to rest in 1999. The remains of the legendary Special Forces soldier were recovered from the crash site. DNA confirmed the identities of the aircrew, while dental records proved Törni had died on that fateful night in 1965, Helsingin Sanomat reported.

"He was a complex yet driven man who valorously fought oppression under three flags and didn't acknowledge the meaning of quit," US Army Special Forces Col. Sean Swindell said during a ceremony in 2010.

Article by Paul Szoldra on the Business Insider

COL James N. "Nick" Rowe, true American Hero

Today is the 26th anniversary of Nick Rowe's death by assassination by the New People's Army insurgent/terrorist organization in the Philippines. Unless you have been in hiding for the last 40 years, you should have an appreciation of what Nick Rowe did for Special Forces.

Rowe was a West Point graduate of 1960 and was subsequently commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Army. In 1963, then First Lieutenant Rowe was deployed to Vietnam as Executive Officer of Detachment A-23, 5th Special Forces Group. The mission of A-23 was to organized a Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) for a basecamp in the Mekong Delta.

On October 29, 1963, Rowe was captured by Viet Cong elements along with Captain Rocky Versace and Sergeant Daniel Pitzer. Rowe spent 62 months in captivity in the U Minh Forest, most of this time in a cage. Over powering a guard, Rowe escaped captivity on December 31, 1968, and during evasion, managed to signal a Huey helicopter for recovery. Rowe subsequently wrote his account of captivity in the book Five Years to Freedom. Nick Rowe retired from active duty in 1974.

In 1981, He was recalled to active duty as a lieutenant colonel to develop a Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) course based upon his experience as a POW. The SERE course is now part of the required training for all Special Forces candidates in the multi-phased Special Forces Qualification Course (SFQC). This course is universally considered the best SERE course in the U.S. Military.

In 1987, Colonel Rowe was assigned to the U.S. Military Advisory Group (JUSMAG) in the Philippines providing training and advisory capabilities to the Filipino Army fighting the New People's Army (NPA), the communist insurgency.

In February 1989, Colonel Rowe warned that the NPA was planning on assassinating several prominent figures, himself included. On April 21, 1989 Colonel Rowe was assassinated in an ambush on his vehicle while traveling to JUSMAG headquarters.

Not only just the developer and driving force between the US Army Special Forces SERE school, there are facilities in the Philippines, Fort Huachuca and Fort Campbell named after COL James. N. "Nick" Rowe.

 Camp MacKall, the Special Forces Training base at Fort Bragg was re-named the Rowe Training Facility. The infamous obstacle course that every Special Forces Candidates grew to hate is called the "Nasty Nick" and fittingly is called the hardest obstacle course in the military. And last, but not least, a High School and major Boulevard in Nick Rowe's hometown of McAllen are named after him. Special Forces and indeed this Country, owe a huge debt to this man.

First Kill

First Kill, by Keith Nightingale, COL USA (ret)


Killing is not hard.  In facts it’s easy.  That’s the problem.  We can all do it.  It’s just a situation where either opportunity knocks or we have no choice on a primordial level.  It’s managing the capability that becomes the issue.
                                                       
Thousands of years ago, the Lieutenants antecedents learned to survive and passed their genetic factors forward to this place in time. They had dealt with animals large and small, trapped, free, vicious and relatively tame.  They were superb hunters and had a primordial sensitivity that underwrote the success of the hunt. These instincts while passed on over hundreds of generations, remained subordinated to others as their existence became less and less critical. Until today.


The encounter was very sudden as most are.  It was mid-day in the dry season and the air was heavy, torpid, fetid and unmoving. The air seemed almost visible through the tendrils of convection currents that coursed from the jungle floor to whatever small patch of light shown through the canopy.  The slightest movement brought dots of sweat to exposed skin.  Breathing was an effort.  With some time of exposure to the environment, the senses had become blanketed and the brain dulled.  The ground and vegetation ahead blended into a broad and undistinguished green and yellowish canvas. Still, the Lieutenant walked slowly eyes fixed on the Ranger to his front.  Some of the primordial skill sets began to emerge though still sublimated to the conscious.


Ahead, a Ranger stopped and held his hand up, ivory colored in the dappled light.  He quietly moved his rifle from his hip to his shoulder and looked intently over the front sight-seeing nothing but with the growing primordial sensing that goes with this existence, instinctually knowing that a danger was just ahead but still out of comprehension.  To his rear, the rest of the column stopped, focused forward and awaited with a practiced level of detachment for resolution.


The lead Ranger took half a step forward and halted.  Immediately several shots rang out-shots that clipped leaves, thudded into tree trunks and softly but clearly impacted into flesh dropping a Ranger to the Lieutenant’s immediate front.  Birds screamed and flew in all directions.  Leaves fell and the harsh sudden cracks echoed from the tree trunks in all directions as to come from no discernible direction.


Suddenly, all the Lieutenant’s core survival instincts were awakened.  Man had replaced the Mammoth.  Without seeing a target, the Lieutenant brought his rifle up and began shooting toward the lower throaty sound of the AK’s.  His companions simultaneously did the same and the jungle erupted into screaming birds, yelling people, falling leaves and limbs and the dull thuds and musty grey black smoke of exchanged grenades. The noise was so intense that there was no single noise but a coalesced mass that shrouded the senses and created a supreme isolation for each participant who continued to reactively contribute to the effect.  This went on for what was probably less than 10 seconds when the Lieutenant bounded forward to the point to get some sense of the enemy presence.   He passed the wounded Ranger at a low quick trot and quickly gained the point stopping at the lead and cuing on his direction of fire.


As quickly as the incoming fire started, it stopped.  The jungle ahead resonated with the echoing sound of retreating movement in the leaves, the screeching of birds and the distancing echo of the last shots.  There had probably been less than 20 yards between the adversaries.  Out of the corner of his eye, the Lieutenant saw movement to his right front where the ground gave rise to a small sunlit bare knoll.  More a rise in the ground than a real feature.


He saw the momentary flash of glinting black hair melding into a light green shirt collar.  Reacting with a deer hunter or skeet shooter’s skills, the Lieutenant raised his rifle to his armpit and fired an unconsciously aimed single shot with animal hand and eye coordination.  His only momentary registered image was a spread of windblown coal black hair as the VC disappeared.  Other Rangers began to move forward, firing as they went.  Quickly overtaking the Lieutenant’s position, they all gained the slight high ground to his front, spread out, dropped to the ground and began to search forward with their eyes.  Less than 20 feet from the Lieutenant appeared an anomaly at the base of the knoll.  Nothing could be discerned from his position but some light green of irregular shape against the brown jungle floor in the discrete shaft of light the jungle permitted entrance.


The Lieutenant pointed toward the area.  Several Rangers fired on its flanks.  With no return fire, the Lieutenant and two of his companions crouched and slid down the hill on the soft wet red laterite clay.  A Ranger reached in and grabbed the green.  It was a shirt collar worn by the Lieutenant’s snap shot victim.  He pulled the shirt and head up the hill to where it lay, bathed in the soft dappled light that escaped through the canopy.  The features of the face were spread in an exaggerated moon shape with no real definition between the cheeks and the nose.  The bullet had penetrated the base of the skull, tumbled on the top vertebrae and exited sideways just under the nose in a wide tearing moustache gash.  The dirt-rimmed eyes were wide open with a mixture of yellow fluid and dust exuding from the corners of the eyes and ear holes.  Already, ants were crawling across the eyes beginning the process of decay.  A small fly sat on the right iris and began to probe the cornea.


The Lieutenant stopped and stared intently at the face and the eyes.  He had a mixture of curiosity and morbid detachment.  He had never seen a dead enemy let alone one he had killed.  He felt nothing emotionally other than a detached professional interest.  This was his first kill.  The genes had been useful.


COL Keith Nightingale is a retired Army Colonel who served two tours in Vietnam with Airborne and Ranger (American and Vietnamese) units. He commanded airborne battalions in both the 509th Parachute Infantry Regiment and the 82nd Airborne Division. He later commanded both the 1/75th Rangers and the 1st Ranger Training Brigade.


This article was published on Small Wars Journal

Glory Denied, the COL Jim Thompson Story

Thanks to Chapter brother Brian Rodriguez for reminding us about COL Jim Thompson.

"The discussions about COL Howard and COL ROWE bring back very special memories. As a point of history who knows the name and story of the longest held POW in U S military history? Hint: It is widely mentioned that a Naval Aviator from Vietnam era held that distinction; but this is not correct. The reality is it was a SF brother, COL Jim Thompson. Held over 5 years in solitary confinement and over 8 years total. If you have not read it, as part of our history, you must read (the book) GLORY DENIED.

From the POW Network website:THOMPSON, FLOYD JAMES Longest-held American POW - RIP 07/16/2002 Name: Floyd James Thompson
Rank/Branch: CPT/O3 (when captured), US Army Special Forces
Date of Birth: 08 July 1933
Date of Loss: 26 March 1964
Country of Loss: South Vietnam Loss
Coordinates: 163912N 1064621E (XD890419)
Status (in 1973): Released POW

Army Special Forces Capt. Floyd "Jim" Thompson was held prisoner of war longer than any other POW in American history, suffering nine years of brutal torture and deprivation in jungle cages and cold prison cells. Yet, he still remains a relatively obscure figure of the Vietnam War.

On March 26, 1964, an L-19 observation plane co-piloted by Thompson was shot down by small arms fire 20 kilometers west of his Special Forces camp at Khe Sanh in the Republic of South Vietnam. Thompson, who suffered a broken back, a bullet wound across the cheek and burns, was captured shortly thereafter by the Viet Cong. The Viet Cong strapped Thompson to a bamboo stretcher and quickly moved him away from the crash site through a maze of jungle trails which led to a series of camps, from which they conducted their attacks on the South Vietnamese.

The Viet Cong provided Thompson with very little medical care, telling him there was nothing wrong with his back. For more than a month, Thompson was unable to care for himself, depending on his captors to keep him alive by feeding him rice gruel, the only food he could keep down. When Thompson inquired about what happened to his pilot, Air Force Capt. Richard L. Whitesides, the Viet Cong told him that Whitesides had been killed.

Whitesides is still listed missing in action. U.S. search planes and ground patrols failed to find any sign of Thompson's downed L-19. No one knew if Thompson or Whitesides were alive or dead.

Thompson began to lose weight rapidly in captivity and then suffered his first attack of malaria. He realized that unless he learned to take care of himself, he would certainly die. He disciplined himself to ignore the and began to wiggle his toes and to stretch his arms and legs. By June, 1964, Thompson had recovered to the point that he could sit and walk.

Soon after, Viet Cong interrogators made him the target of three months of torture that almost killed him. Finally in August, Thompson gave in and signed a propaganda statement saying he was being treated well and praising the strength of communist forces.

It was that same month a young Navy pilot, Lt. (jg) Everett Alvarez was shot down over North Vietnam during a retaliatory raid that later became known as the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Alvarez's capture was highly publicized by the international press.

As the war continued to escalate and the public became more interested in the plight of U.S. servicemen held captive in Vietnam, Alvarez was presented over and over again as the longest held U.S. prisoner of war. He and a handful of other prominent POWs, mostly aviators, became the symbols of a national campaign to free captured U.S. servicemen.

The American servicemen held captive in South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were virtually ignored. They were mostly enlisted men captured on the ground who were being held in primitive bamboo cages and as a result, had no organized command structure within their peers as was developed by American prisoners in North Vietnamese prisons. Although Alvarez topped every Pentagon list of POWs by 1969, there was no mention of Thompson, whose name the Pentagon refused to make public.

In the late 60's, when POW/MIA organizations began engraving the names of America's missing servicemen on bracelets as part of their campaigns to force communist Vietnam to release American prisoners, Thompson's name was never engraved on a bracelet. The POW/MIA organizations had been refused permission from Thompson's wife to put his name on POW/MIA bracelets.

Thompson had left for Vietnam the day after Christmas, 1963, leaving behind Alyce, his wife of nine years, and three daughters -- Pam, 6; Laura, 4; Ruth, 3. He had been in Vietnam less than three months on a six-month temporary assignment from Ft. Bragg, N.C., when he was shot down. The day after he was shot down, an Army officer visited the Thompson home to notify Alyce that her husband was missing in action. The news sent Alyce into labor and she gave birth that evening to the couple's only son.

Alyce, now with a newborn and three more small children to care for and not knowing if her husband was alive or dead, felt overwhelmed. In the beginning, relatives, friends and sympathetic neighbors gave her much needed support. But that slowly dissipated until she was again alone. In the spring of 1965, Alyce sent word to the Army to forward Thompson's allotment checks to an address in Massachusetts belonging to an Army sergeant she had met a year before at the post bowling alley. She gathered her kids and moved in with the sergeant who had just retired to Massachusetts.

Alyce, insisting she needed privacy for the sake of her children, warned the Army never to release Thompson's name to the public. "He went through hell, but I went through hell too," she later claimed. "There are certain things I did I'm not too proud of. But I felt I had to do them for my children and to keep my sanity."

In the meantime, the Viet Cong continued to brutalize Thompson with constant beatings and deprivation. In July 1967, the Viet Cong started Thompson walking, blindfolded, on a long journey up the Ho Chi Minh trail toward North Vietnam. He was kept isolated from other U.S. prisoners.

Upon reaching the eighth POW camp on the trail, his Viet Cong interrogators escalated their torture. They wanted him to sign statements proving that the United State's involvement in Vietnam was criminal and when he refused, his guards beat him with bamboo sticks. They choked him and hung him by his thumbs. They tied his elbows behind his back and hung him from a rafter until he passed out. At night he was tossed into a tiny wooden cage in which he was handcuffed and shackled in leg irons. When he refused to bow to his captors, they denied him food for three days and nights and followed with a "lesson" in bowing. The guards grabbed him by the hair and slammed his head onto the hard earth until he was unconscious.

It wasn't until Thompson was nearly halfway through his captivity that he was confined with other American prisoners. He later made an escape attempt with Lew Meyer, a Navy civilian employee. The Viet Cong captured them within two days. Both men were severely punished for the attempt. Thompson was finally moved to the "Hanoi Hilton" in Hanoi on January 28, 1973.

Two weeks later, Alvarez was released from there in the first group of prisoners to go home. Headlines all over the United States declared that Alvarez, the longest held POW, had finally been released. A month later, the "mystical" Thompson was returned to the United States.

SOG Project "Eldest Son"

Secrets of the Vietnam War: Project "Eldest Son" Top Secret U.S. S.O.G. Operation to Plant Sabotaged Ammunition in Enemy Hands During the Vietnam War, the Studies And Observations Group (SOG) created an ingenious top-secret program called Project Eldest Son to wreak general mayhem and cause the Viet Cong and NVA to doubt the safety of their guns and ammunition.

Amid a firefight near the Cambodian border on June 6, 1968, a North Vietnamese Army soldier spotted an American G.I. raising his rifle, and the NVA infantryman pulled his trigger, anticipating a muzzle blast. He got a blast, alright, but not quite what he'd expected. United States 1st Infantry Division troops later found the enemy soldier, sprawled beside his Chinese Type 56 AK, quite dead - but not from small-arms fire. Peculiarly, they could see, his rifle had exploded, its shattered receiver killing him instantly. It seemed a great mystery that his AK had blown up since nothing was blocking the bore. Bad metallurgy, the G.I.s concluded, or possibly defective ammo. It was neither.

In reality, this actual incident was the calculated handiwork of one the Vietnam War's most secret and least understood covert operations: Project Eldest Son. So secret was this sabotage effort that few G.I.s in Southeast Asia ever heard of it or the organization behind it, the innocuously named Studies and Observations Group. As the Vietnam War's top-secret special ops task force, SOG's operators - Army Special Forces, Air Force Air Commandos and Navy SEALs - worked directly for the Joint Chiefs, executing highly classified, deniable missions in the enemy's backyard of Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam.

The genesis of Eldest Son was the fertile mind of SOG's commander, 1966-68, Colonel John K. Singlaub, a World War II veteran of covert actions with the Office of Strategic Services. "I was frustrated by the fact that I couldn't airlift the ammunition we were discovering on the [Ho Chi Minh] Trail" in Laos, Singlaub explained. It was not unusual for SOG's small recon teams - composed of two or three American Green Berets and four to six native soldiers - to find tons of ammunition in enemy base camps and caches along the Laotian highway system. But SOG teams lacked the manpower to secure the sites or carry the ordnance away. Further, it could not be burned up, and demolition would only scatter small-arms ammunition, not destroy it. "Initially I thought of just boobytrapping it so that when they'd pick up a case it would blow up," Singlaub recalled. Then it hit him - boobytrap the ammunition itself!

Though obscure, this trick was not new. In the 1930s, to combat rebellious tribesmen in northwest India's Waziristan - the same lawless region where Taliban and al Qaeda terrorists hide today - the British army planted sabotaged .303 rifle ammunition. Even before that, during the Second Metabele War (1896-97) in today's Zimbabwe, British scouts (led by the American adventurer Frederick Russell Burnham) had slipped explosive- packed rifle cartridges into hostile stockpiles, to deadly effect. SOG would do likewise, the Joint Chiefs decided on August 30, 1967, but first Col. Singlaub arranged for CIA ordnance experts to conduct a quick feasibility study.

A few weeks later, at Camp Chinen, Okinawa, Singlaub watched a CIA technician load a sabotaged 7.62x39 mm cartridge into a bench-mounted AK rifle. "It completely blew up the receiver and the bolt was projected backwards," Singlaub observed, "I would imagine into the head of the firer."

After that success began a month of tedious bullet pulling to manually disassemble thousands of 7.62 mm cartridges, made more difficult because Chinese ammo had a tough lacquer seal where the bullet seated into the case. In this process, some bullets suffered tiny scrapes, but when reloaded these marks seated out of sight below the case mouth. Rounds were inspected to ensure they showed no signs of tampering. When the job was done, 11,565 AK rounds had been sabotaged, along with 556 rounds for the Communist Bloc's heavy 12.7 mm machine gun, a major anti-helicopter weapon.

Eldest Son cartridges originally were reloaded with a powder similar to PETN high explosive, but sufficiently shock-sensitive that an ordinary rifle primer would detonate it. This white powder, however, did not even faintly resemble gunpowder. SOG's technical wizard, Ben Baker - our answer to James Bond's "Q" - decided this powder might compromise the program if ever an enemy soldier pulled apart an Eldest Son round. He obtained a substitute explosive that so closely resembled gunpowder that it would pass inspection by anyone but an ordnance expert.

While the AKM and Type 56 AKs and the RPD light machine gun could accommodate a chamber pressure of 45,000 p.s.i., Baker's deadly powder generated a whopping 250,000 p.s.i.

Sabotaging the ammunition proved the easiest challenge. The CIA's Okinawa lab also did a very professional job of prying open ammo crates, unsealing the interior metal cans and then repacking them so there was no sign of tampering. In addition to SOG sabotaging 7.62 mm and 12.7 mm rounds, these CIA ordnance experts perfected a special fuse for the Communist 82 mm mortar round that would detonate the hand-dropped projectile while inside the mortar tube, for especially devastating effect. Exactly 1,968 of these mortar rounds were sabotaged, too.

Project Eldest Son's greatest challenge was "placement" - getting the infernal devices into the enemy logistical system without detection. That's where SOG's Green Beret-led recon teams came in. Since the fall of 1965, our small teams had been running deniable missions into Laos to gather intelligence, wiretap enemy communications, kidnap key enemy personnel, ambush convoys, raid supply dumps, plant mines and generally make life as difficult as possible in enemy rear areas.

As an additional mission, each team carried along a few Eldest Son rounds - usually as a single round in an otherwise full AK magazine or one round in an RPD machine gun belt or a sealed ammo can - to plant whenever an opportunity arose.

When an SOG team discovered an ammo dump, they planted Eldest Son; when a SOG team ambushed an enemy patrol, they switched magazines in a dead soldier's AK. It was critically important never to plant more than one round per magazine, belt or ammo can, so no amount of searching after a gun exploded would uncover a second round, to preclude the enemy from determining this was sabotage.

Planting sabotaged 82 mm mortar ammo proved more cumbersome because these were not transported as loose rounds, but in three-round, wooden cases. Thus, you had to tote a whole case, which must have weighed more than 25 lbs. Twice I recall carrying such crates for insertion in enemy rear areas, and to our surprise, my team once witnessed a platoon of NVA soldiers carry one away. SOG's most clever insertion was accomplished by SOG SEALS operating in the Mekong Delta, where they filled a captured sampan with tainted cases of ammunition, shot it tastefully full of bullet holes, then spilled chicken blood over it and set it adrift upstream from a known Viet Cong village. Of course, the VC assumed the boat's Communist crew had fallen overboard during an ambush. The Viet Cong took the ammunition, hook, line and sinker.

In Laos, American B-52s constantly targeted enemy logistical areas, which churned up sizeable pieces of terrain. SOG exploited this opportunity by organizing a special team that landed just after B-52 strikes to construct false bunkers in such devastated tracts, then "salt" these stockpiles with Eldest Son ammunition. However, on November 30, 1968, the helicopter carrying SOG's secret Eldest Son team, flying some 20 miles west of the Khe Sanh Marine base, was hit by an enemy 37 mm anti-aircraft round, setting off a tremendous mid-air explosion. Seven cases of tainted 82 mm mortar ammunition detonated, killing everyone on board, including Maj. Samuel Toomey and seven U.S. Army Green Berets. Their remains were not recovered for 20 years.

But as a result of these cross- border efforts, Eldest Son rounds began to turn up inside South Vietnam. In a northern province, 101st Airborne Division paratroopers found a dead Communist soldier grasping his exploded rifle, while an officer at SOG's Saigon headquarters, Captain Ed Lesesne, received the photo of a dead enemy soldier with his bolt blown out the back of his AK. "It had gone right through his eye socket," Lesesne reported.

Chad Spawr, an intelligence specialist with the 1st Infantry Division, heard of such a case but, "didn't believe it until they walked me over and opened up the body bag, and there he was, with the weapon in the bag." Unaware of SOG's covert program, Spawr attributed the incident to inferior weapons and ammo.

Boobytrapped mortar rounds took their toll, too. Twenty-Fifth Infantry Division soldiers came upon an entire enemy mortar battery destroyed - four peeled back tubes with dead gunners. In another incident, a 101st Airborne firebase was taking mortar fire when there was an odd-sounding, "boom-pff!" A patrol later found two enemy bodies beside a split mortar tube and blood trails going off into the jungle.

On July 3, 1968, after an enemy mortar attack on Ban Me Thuot airstrip, nine Communist soldiers were found dead in one firing position, their tube so badly shattered that it had vanished but for two small fragments.

Boobytrapped ammunition clearly was getting into enemy hands, so it was time to initiate SOG's insidious "black psyop" exploitation. "Our interest was not in killing the soldier that was using the weapon," explained Colonel Steve Cavanaugh, who replaced Singlaub in 1968. "We were trying to leave in the minds of the North Vietnamese that the ammunition they were getting from China was bad ammunition." Hopefully, this would aggravate Hanoi's leadership - which traditionally distrusted the Chinese - and cause individual soldiers to question the reliability (and safety) of their Chinese-supplied arms and ordnance.

One Viet Cong document - forged by SOG and insinuated into enemy channels through a double-agent - made light of exploding weapons, claiming, "We know that it is rumored some of the ammunition has exploded in the AK-47. This report is greatly exaggerated. It is a very, very small percentage of the ammunition that has exploded."

Another forged document announced, "Only a few thousand such cases have been found thus far," and concluded, "The People's Republic of China may have been having some quality control problems [but] these are being worked out and we think that in the future there will be very little chance of this happening."

That, "in the future," hook was especially devious, because an enemy soldier looking at lot numbers could see that virtually all his ammo had been loaded years earlier. No fresh ammo could possibly reach soldiers fighting in the South for many years.

Next came an overt "safety" campaign, with Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) publishing Technical Intelligence Brief No. 2-68, "Analysis of Damaged Weapons." Openly circulated to U.S. and South Vietnamese units, this SOG-inspired study examined several exploded AKs, concluding they were destroyed by "defective metallurgy resulting in fatigue cracks" or "faulty ammunition, which produced excessive chamber pressure." An SOG operative left a copy at a Saigon bar whose owners were suspected enemy agents.

Under the guise of cautioning G.I.s against using enemy weapons, warnings were sent to Armed Forces Radio and TV. The civilian Stateside tabloid Army Times warned, "Numerous incidents have caused injury and sometimes death to the operators of enemy weapons," the cause of which was, "defective metallurgy" or "faulty ammo."

The 25th Infantry Division newspaper similarly warned soldiers on July 14, 1969, that, "because of poor quality control procedures in Communist Bloc factories, many AKs with even a slight malfunction will blow up when fired." Despite such warnings, some G.I.s fired captured arms, and inevitably one American's souvenir AK exploded, inflicting serious (but not fatal) injuries.

That incident spurned SOG itself to stop using captured ammunition in our own AKs and RPD machine guns. SOG purchased commercial 7.62 mm ammunition through a Finnish middleman - and, ironically, this ammo, which SOG's covert operators fired at their Communist foes - had been manufactured in a Soviet arsenal in Petrograd.

By mid-1969, word about Eldest Son began leaking out, with articles in the New York Times and Time, compelling SOG to change the codename to Italian Green, and later, to Pole Bean. As of July 1, 1969, a declassified report discloses, SOG operatives had inserted 3,638 rounds of sabotaged 7.62 mm, plus 167 rounds of 12.7 mm and 821 rounds of 82 mm mortar ammunition.

That fall, the Joint Chiefs directed SOG to dispose of its remaining stockpile and end the program. In November, my team was specially tasked to insert as much Eldest Son as possible, making multiple landings on the Laotian border to get rid of the stuff before authority expired.

Lacking the earlier finesse, such insertions had to have confirmed to the enemy that we were sabotaging his ammunition-but even this, SOG believed, was psychologically useful, creating a big shell game in which the enemy had to question endlessly which ammunition was polluted and which was not.

The enemy came to fear any cache where there was evidence that SOG recon teams got near it and, thanks to radio intercepts, SOG headquarters learned that the enemy's highest levels of command had expressed concerns about exploding arms, Chinese quality control and sabotage.

In that sense, Project Eldest Son was a total success - but as with any such covert deception program, you can never quite be sure.

SOURCE: Major John L. Plaster, USAR (Ret.). Wreaking Havoc One Round At A Time. American Rifleman. May 2008.

SOURCE: http://www.jcs-group.com/military/war1964/project.html

Green Berets: A complete video history

The United States Army Special Forces, also known as the Green Berets because of their distinctive service headgear, are a special operations force tasked with five primary missions: unconventional warfare (the original and most important mission of Special Forces), foreign internal defense, special reconnaissance, direct action and counter-terrorism.

The first two emphasize language, cultural and training skills in working with foreign troops. Other duties include hostage rescue, combat search and rescue (CSAR), security assistance, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, humanitarian demining, counter-proliferation, psychological operations, manhunts, and counter-drug operations; other components of the United States Special Operations Command or other U.S. government activities may also specialize in these secondary areas.

Many of their operational techniques are classified, but some nonfiction works and doctrinal manuals are available. Currently Special Forces units are deployed in Operation Enduring Freedom.

As a special operations unit, Special Forces are not necessarily under the command authority of the ground commanders in those countries. Instead, while in theater, SF soldiers may report directly to United States Central Command, USSOCOM, or other command authorities.

The Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) highly secretive Special Activities Division (SAD) and more specifically its elite Special Operations Group (SOG) recruits soldiers from the Army's Special Forces.

Joint Army Special Forces and CIA operations go back to the famed MACV-SOG during the Vietnam War. This cooperation still exists today and is seen in the War in Afghanistan.

Bringing Dead Heroes Home from Vietnam

It is a good story of the U.S. retrieving our KIA/POW dead from North Vietnam using C-130s. Some people always thought it was C-141's which flew into Hanoi for our people. It is told only by someone who may have bombed Hanoi and wasn't about taking any crap even in enemy territory. He also makes it humorous at times with the things they did in landing and taking off at the airport in Hanoi. Some of you have heard of Jack O'Connor, who is the author of this missive.

As Jack O'Connor tells it:

I've been toying for years about writing the full story, but just haven't done it. May still do it some day.

I'll give you a down and dirty version so I don't waste too much of your time.

A little background first: I had flown in and out of Hanoi twice before---flying out of U-Tapao AB, Thailand---with the peace negotiating team. Both times, we were ordered to wear civilian clothes and be nice to them. They took our pictures as we sat around a table for a briefing. The infamous "Rabbit" was in charge. At least that's who we thought it was. Big ears. They then took us to a hotel and fed us in a banquet room. The food was delicious and we were ordered to drink their beer when offered. It didn't taste too bad and was only about 2-3% so the brass weren't concerned about us being able to fly afterwards.

Then they took us to museums---their War Museum on the first mission. They had parts of our warplanes that had been shot down and also showed us the gun where Hanoi Jane Fonda sat for that infamous picture. I don't know if it was the real gun or not---didn't matter---I think they just wanted a reaction. They got none from any of us. We were allowed to take photos of certain areas. They wouldn't let us take pix of their rail marshaling yard which was full of bomb craters and wrecked engines---I got some anyway with my little Minox spy camera.

On the next trip they took us to the Peace Museum. Absolutely stunning!!! Lots of HUGE White Jade figures. A beautiful museum. Our bombs never got close to it. Strangely enough---they told us that the wrecked train yard was where they were fixing their engines. If you didn't know better, it could have looked true. There was not a single bomb crater outside of the yard. All buildings were intact!! A lot more happened there, but don't want to bore you with all the details. They were very proud of their many manhole covers in the sidewalks which they used to hide from our bombing raids. All three trips were interesting!!

Anyway, that was why I was chosen to lead a two ship formation to retrieve out Heroes. I just happened to be TDY at U-Tapao from Clark AB where I was stationed. That should set the stage. A little too wordy, but it should help you to understand my involvement.

I was one of only a few crew members on either plane to have been there before. Our Mission Commander was Col Novas and we had a One Star on board with an open line to President Nixon. It was a fairly high priority mission.

After stopping in Saigon for a final briefing, our two C-130E's (with augmented crews) left Tan son Nhut AB and went "feet wet" up the coast of Vietnam. We stayed about 30 miles off the coast so as not to bother anyone. We hit the mouth of the Red River and turned upstream toward our destination---Gia Lam Airport just east of Hanoi. We were encountering broken clouds which were getting worse.

After going over Thuan Nghiep, the river straightens out considerably so I requested we drop to about 1500 ft so I could better make out the landmarks---both on radar but mainly visual---when I could see the ground. I wasn't about to trust the radio aids from Gia Lam nor Hanoi. Before we descended, we could easily make out Hai Phong harbor on our radar about 40 miles to the Northeast, so we were on track.

We made contact with Hanoi and advised them of our impending approach into their territory. This had all been pre-arranged, so no problem there. It was on up-river that they started screwing around with us and trying to subtly get us confused. They were trying to get us lost and force us to abort the mission so they could say we caused an international incident by not picking up those who died in captivity when everything had been arranged. That's another reason I had been picked to lead. They tried to spoof us on earlier missions by moving the ADF and VORTAC ever so slightly to locations which would cause us to fly into restricted airspace. In fact, a crew a few weeks earlier bought the spoof and was threatened with a "shoot down" if they didn't abort the mission, so that made this mission even more critical. If you were watching closely enough, you could see the needles quiver a little each time they changed location. They were good at it though, so I had the other nav continually watch for that in case we lost visual or radar contact. I had my head out the front searching for ground fixes.

Then, they really tried to get us fouled up. The second plane was following closely, mainly by keeping us on their radar---depending on us to lead them in. Hanoi Approach Control called us and told us to take up a heading to final. The pilot started to turn and I virtually screamed into the mike "Negative, Negative--Maintain Heading". That was the first of three times they tried to get us to turn too soon. After the second time, Col Novis told the pilot to ignore the tower and go by my direction only. I knew we were still about 30-45 miles out and they were doing their best to get us off course and lost in that bad weather with low ceilings and get us to an area with which we were not familiar. The weather was really bad---the cloud cover was closer to full than "broken". We would get a break in the undercast every mile or so.. We descended to about 1000 ft which helped some.

Now---remember that bridge that they tried so hard to take down during the war?? We lost a lot of Thuds & F-4's there. That bridge and a huge sand bar about 3 miles downstream were my aiming points. I was getting a little concerned when they weren't coming in view as fast as I thought they should. Guess I was just overly anxious. I checked radar and found both about 15 miles ahead. I alerted the pilot to be ready to turn and he relayed to #2 that we would turn in a couple of minutes. Ground Approach had given up trying to get us to turn early after a few scoldings from them that we were ignoring their instructions. We did not answer. We descended a little farther so I could get a visual on both the sand bar and the bridge. I remembered where we had turned on my earlier approaches. We flew about 30 seconds past the sand bar, and with the bridge in sight, I told the pilot to turn to the appropriate heading---I seem to recall it was 335 degrees---but not sure now. Descent was begun and both planes broke out at about 750 feet. There it was---right in front of us. I strapped myself in. The other aircraft radioed a "Talley Ho" so we knew everything was fine---or so we thought.

After we landed, Ground Control took over and marshaled us to the proper area to pick up the remains of our Guys. There were two green tents and they were having us come in and turn so that our prop wash would flow directly on the tents---probably blowing them away. Our Aircraft Commander called for neutral props and warned the second aircraft to do likewise. Both planes coasted in to a nice easy stop in the right place---I'm sure to the disappointment of the martialling crews.

Col Novas made the decision on the spot to set up an Honor Guard in front of each tent. This time, we were in our Class A's and were not under orders to associate with the enemy. We all felt better about that!! He sent us out two at a time at 15 minute intervals, Each pair did facing movements to relieve the previous pair as time dictated. The first pair at our tent was Col Novas and our pilot. The tent flaps were tied wide open. What the first set of Honor Guards---and ultimately all of us---saw was several stacks of green boxes with a rock on them with white painted names and dates. The sight was shocking and really ticked us off.. Unfortunately, I do not remember any of the names. The boxes---which in reality were coffins----were about 30 inches by 18 inches by 18 inches. It tore us up to think that our guys who had suffered so much were in those tiny green boxes. We all decided individually and as a team that the Vietnamese would never touch our fallen comrades again.

The Honor Guard rotation was maintained for well over two hours while the final release papers were being signed at their government offices in downtown Hanoi. Obviously, the North Vietnamese didn't know what to think of the Honor Guard. We saw the guys who had been our escorts on earlier trips. They smiled and waved at us. We glared back at them. Some civilians tried to get close to watch---they were chased back over the dikes by armed guards.

We were finally given the OK to load our precious cargo onto the waiting C-130's---their cargo ramps open, sat waiting. As the word came that we could begin returning our Guys to American Soil---in this case---our C-130's, the North Vietnamese moved in to begin loading. We immediately formed a cordon around the tents and, though unarmed, we motioned for them to stop and basically dared the armed Northern troops to try us. They stopped with a puzzled look on their faces---but never tried to cross the line. They had touched our Heroes for the last time.

It was early evening by then. The General was back and became part of our new makeshift Honor Guard---set up on both sides of the ramps. I was part of three pairs who tenderly picked up a "coffin" with its' "headstone" and proceeded up the ramp. two more were inside the plane to place an American Flag over each man as he came on board. We exited thru the crew door to go retrieve another Hero. The General led the others on either side of the ramps in a "Hand Salute" as each box of remains passed on board. I don't remember exactly how many bodies we recovered---seems like 36---but each was treated with ultimate respect. We took our time to make sure all were properly honored.. It took a considerable amount of time, but we didn't care. We did it right.

We finally all boarded and buttoned up the aircraft. As we were getting all four turning, I noticed the pilot had a wicked smile on his face. I listened on a discreet channel while he suggested to the other pilot to change pitch after they began moving and turn the planes so that the prop wash would now hit the tents and the Vietnam officials and soldiers gathered around them. The turn was smooth, slow and graceful until the Load master gave the word. Suddenly eight turboprops were at full forward pitch for about 3-5 seconds and brakes on. They changed the pitch back to the taxi setting but we got turned around in time to see the tents flying and some of the folks we left were on the ground. We received departure instructions from the tower and thus began an uneventful trip back to Saigon and on to U-Tapao to the Identification folks stationed there. The General informed President Nixon that extraction had been completed successfully.

Further ID would be performed at Hickam AFB as necessary. Our Heroes were taken to Hickam AFB by C-141's. I have talked to many people about this extraction of our Fallen Comrades---and to a man---they thought that the C-141's did the entire mission. I hope someone will set the story straight someday. In fact, I have never seen anything about C-130's being involved with the extraction of the first of those who died in captivity. Believe me----I know they were!! I may have missed some story about it because I had to get busy for my PCS stateside the next month. I have never heard anything about that mission since.

Well, Bill, that's about it. As I said a lot more little things happened on all three trips---even some funny things on the first two, but that third mission was the best thing I ever did in my 24 year USAF career. Sorry to be so wordy, and focused on "I" & "me", but I'm not sure how else I could tell it with any conviction.

PS: Somehow, I forgot to turn in my log and charts from the mission, and no one else thought about it. I had them for a long time, but they disappeared---probably on my move to CO from AL. I sure wish I could find them again!! They are really historical documents.

PS2: I did meet a woman at one of our OCS reunions whose husband was onboard that day. I was completely speechless as she thanked me.