The Wrong Side of Honor

by Marshall Ginevan

  “I must object to this, Mr. President. We are needlessly risking –—”

  “Shut up, Burt,” the Secretary of Defense snapped. “Mr. President, we need more than a handful of F-4’s at Pinnacle Press. We’ve got other assets that we can use over the next few months. The Chiefs of Staff and I can rework the Thai base closings to expend our munitions stored there rather than ship that stuff out. It won’t cost us any more to use it than to ship it.”

  “Okay,” the President decided. “Your people have the job. Burt, warn your people. Reel them in if necessary. But we’re going to hit the opium trade hard. It will be our parting shot. Pinnacle Press continues as is.”

  The President looked around the table, said, “Thank you, gentlemen,” then walked out.

  HEADQUARTERS BUILDING

  UBON RTAFB

  4 March 1975

  At 10:10 Jake stepped into the base commander’s outer office and the administrative captain pointed toward the commander’s door. Jake tapped on the door and stuck his head in.

  A gruff voice growled, “Come on in.”

  Jake stepped in and saw an older man with crew cut gray hair sitting behind the base commander’s desk. He wore a loud Hawaiian shirt and had a cigar clenched in his teeth.

  “Damn, you’re a big son-of-a-bitch. Ugly, too.”

  “That’s why they call me Big Jake and usually tack a ‘sir’ on the end.”

  The old man laughed and Jake looked around the room. Eddie sat making a face and Hank Renwick was slowly shaking his head.

  The old man walked around his desk laughing and stuck out his hand to Jake. “I’m Braswell Bellford, but the troops usually refer to me as Brass Balls Bellford.”

  “Brass Balls? Well, that’s got a nice ring to it,” Jake said. “You earn that name?”

  “Oh, hell, son. I’ve tried. I’ve damn sure tried. Have a seat. We need to talk.”

  Jake noticed that neither Eddie nor Hank were smiling over the exchange.

  The old man opened a hand-crafted leather briefcase and pulled out a couple of TOP SECRET messages. Jake saw a 9-mm automatic pistol laying in the briefcase.

  “You and the kid here - Donevant right?”

  “Yes, sir,” Eddie answered.

  “Donevant sent a message to the President asking him to kick the CIA out of Southeast Asia and to let you use the Pinnacle Press planes to thump on the opium flow. Well, you got an answer back.” The old man set his cigar in the ashtray and put on a pair of reading glasses. “I hate these damn things,” he muttered. He then handed out three copies of the message. “There’s a lot of bullshit in there, but let me summarize what he said. He’s not kicking the CIA out of Southeast Asia, and no, you can’t use Pinnacle Press birds to hit the dopers.”

  “Figured they were too weak kneed to approve it,” Jake said.

  “You didn’t completely strike out, Jake. Let me tell you the rest. Bill Burroughs from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Plans, called me and asked what all we had left to work with over here. Well, Korat has a squadron of A-7’s and Udorn still has your squadron of F-4’s. Then there’s all that special ops shit at NKP. U-Tapao still has blackbirds flying. And I can bring in Jim Water’s squadron of F-4’s from Kunsan. The Wild Weasels feel at home here at Ubon. He bought all of that, but said we’ll have to use our on-hand jet fuel and what ordinance we have stock piled to do the job. My question is, can you do the job by June?”

  “You mean cut the drug flow?” Jake asked.

  “What’d you think I meant? Bomb the CIA?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. You’re not making much sense to me. And I sure don’t know any Bill at JCS Plans. Just explain what it is that we’re supposed to do.”

  The old man picked up his cigar and said, “Use tac-air to interdict the opium flow. Stay out of North Viet Nam and China and you can’t bomb inside Thailand. Each strike must be verified that the target is drugs. I can’t have you guys blasting school kids and convents.”

  “This a black op?”

  “See, he’s slow, but he does catch on,” the old man said to Eddie and Hank, then stuck the cigar back in his mouth.

  “Our intel can pin point the drug shipments pretty accurately. It should be no problem hitting them. Keeping the lid on could be a problem,” Eddie explained.

  “Our biggest problem with an op like this is going to be those assholes at Thirteenth Air Force,” Jake said. “If they get wind of this, some lame-dick with stars will be down here trying to shut things down. They already think we’re trying to start our own private war.”

  “I guarantee you, son, ain’t no lame-dick from Thirteenth Air Force gonna mess with your operation. I don’t care who the son-of-a-bitch is. If they try, you just call old Brass Balls Bellford.”

  “And just what the hell do you do to have so much stroke at Thirteenth Air Force?”

  The old man turned to Eddie, who had his hands up frantically motioning for Jake to shut up. “I knew he didn’t do his homework. Now I caught the stupid son-of-a-bitch,” the old man said, then roared with laughter.

  Jake looked surprised, then horrified when Eddie said, “This is Major General Bellford, the new Thirteenth Air Force commander.”

  “Ah, shit,” Jake said. He slumped in his chair. “I’m sorry, sir. I meant no disrespect to the general.”

  “You buy the first round at the Club tonight, Dumbo,” the general said, still laughing, “then maybe I won’t court-martial your ass.”

  Jake was not sure if he was humored or angry, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “Well, our job is to put a plan together that the Pentagon can sell to the White House. And it has to be tightly controlled. A neat tac-air package that will mean night takeoffs for the most part. You three get started. I’ve got a suitcase to unpack. That message gives you the parameters you’ll have to work in. I’ll be back in about an hour.”

  Jake, Eddie, and Hank worked on a plan all day and well into the evening, taking breaks only for meals. The general came in a couple of times to check their progress, make suggestions, and obtain information for them. They ended the planning session at 9:00 p.m.

  General Bellford went to the Club that evening with Mack Klevenger to drink some beer with the troops, get into some arm wrestling matches, and tell war stories.

  At 11:00 p.m. the general and Mack Klevenger left the Club to make a post and perimeter check while they discussed the base closure and the security of the base.

  Mack told the general, “One of the best points about Ubon right now is that with only 300 total military personnel assigned we have the lowest off-base incident rate of any base in the Pacific. Our relations with the people downtown is very cordial and friendly.”

  “You’re proud of that, I’ll bet.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mack smiled.

  The general puffed on his cigar and asked, “What’s your V.D. rate here, Captain?”

  Mack’s smile left his face. “The base wide V.D. rate?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “About fifty-four percent.”

  “I guess your relations with the locals are very good. Anything over ten percent is a fuck’en epidemic. Next highest V.D. rate to yours is at eighteen percent and I put the whole fuck’en town off limits. And another thing. I found that eighteen of the twenty-one officers assigned to this base have been treated with penicillin in the past five months. Only Colonel Limp-Dick Waldrop, the chaplain, and you have escaped it so far. How’d you do it?”

  “I lucked out, I guess. I got a clean ‘ying and neither of us butterfly.”

  “Don’t believe in sharing her?”

  “No, sir. I want to go home clean. I’ve got a wife and kids.”

  “If you could keep as close an eye on that ammo as you do on your pecker I’d feel a damn sight better.”

  “Sir?”

  “Fifteen Thai guar
ds don’t burn up 5,000 rounds of .38 ammo on the day it’s scheduled to be shipped out. But at least you gave it the old college try.” He glanced at Mack and saw him sag in the seat. “Don’t worry, Captain. You got away with it. In fact, it sounds like something I’d do.” The general then broke into a big smile.

  The next day General Bellford joined Jake, Hank, and Eddie for lunch. He reviewed their final draft of the plan and approved it.

  He then assured Jake that he would not be found at fault in the loss of the F-4 and that no adverse information from Colonel Suwit that could affect their future promotions would be entered into their service records.

  They could expect the White House approval of their plan in about five days.

  With that General Bellford boarded his T-39 Sabre Liner and returned to Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

  INTELLIGENCE CENTER

  UDORN RTAFB

  10 March 1975

  Eddie sat down at the conference table in the Udorn Intelligence Center with Big Jake and Hank Renwick and read over the reply from the White House.

  “Boy, talk about some sorry shit,” Jake said.

  “Well, let’s stop and think about this a minute,” Hank said. “Our targets are mainly on the Ho Chi Minh trail trying to make either Phnom Penh or Saigon. The bricks going through Bangkok aren’t our concern and we can’t touch anything moving through North Viet Nam. That leaves us a pretty narrow target area over ground we’re pretty familiar with. And look what we’ve got to work with. Four fast movers with a FAC, four slow moving Sandies, and a Spectre gunship. We’re backed up with one air rescue chopper and it has four OV-10’s for cover fire. That’s great versatility. All we need now is the intel to locate the dope.”

  Jake thought about that for a few seconds. “Yea, maybe it is a good mix, but it isn’t what old Brass Balls promised us.”

  Eddie shrugged. “Our intel can locate the dope loads. The stuff is usually moved in small amounts and lightly guarded. But since John Slaughter has been hitting them, they’ve built up larger loads and put them in the hands of mercenaries to move. They pay the Communists protection money to move the dope through their territory and that money buys the protection of the NVA. Those were NVA guns we were facing at Pirate’s Pier.”

  “Damn dopers are buying protection from the NVA?” Jake asked.

  “Not officially, but yes. That’s what our intel is telling us. Even a Commie can be bought if the price is right.”

  “Do we have any targets?” Hank asked.

  “Yea, but we’ll have to fly out of NKP and Ubon to reach them without a tanker for refueling.”

  Hank commented, “This is going to be loads of fun. All I need to do is figure some way to fit this into my job résumé so I can use it to get a job with the airlines when I get out.” On his fourth tour in Southeast Asia, he just did not get excited about combat flying the way he used to.

  SOUTHERN LAOS

  18 March 1975

  It was late afternoon on the dusty mountain road that was part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail network. The big Russian built diesel truck lumbered up the switch backs from the valley floor and neared the top of the ridge line. Rusty wrecks of bombed out trucks could be seen on the sides of the road. They had been there for two years or more, the Laotian driver knew. There was little danger now of air attack, but bandits did come out to rob the occasional lone truck traveling the Ho Chi Minh Trail at night. It would be dark in less than two hours. By then they would be in the next valley and could spend the night safely in the village.

  On the front seat his two young sons lay sleeping. His wife sat leaning against the passenger door trying to sleep, her jacket pulled up around her neck. The two men in the back sat on a sack of rice, armed with AK-47 rifles. This mixed load of rice and brick opium would earn them each more than a year’s pay. And coming back they would haul pots and pans, guns and ammo, canned food and clothes. This would be a good year for their village. It was their second load of the dry season.

  The top of the ridge was barren of trees and the road was wide. He stopped the truck so they could rest and relieve themselves before they started down into the jungle growth below. They had to be careful as they neared the valley floor. That is where the bandits waited. The driver checked his M-16 rifle once more before they continued their journey. Overhead he saw a little plane pass over, but it was high and did not seem to be interested in them.

  The truck moved along the level road for just over a kilometer and started into the first bend leading down the hill when he heard one of the men in the back yelling. He looked in his mirror and saw him hanging off the tailgate, pointing up in the air with his rifle. The driver turned his head and looked up. He saw a large single engine war plane circling around his truck from the rear, dropping in altitude. There was no cover, no place to hide. All he could do was watch it bank around until it was flying directly toward him. Then, to his horror, he saw a rocket streak from the plane. It seemed that it was going to come right in the windshield. The driver’s eyes filled with tears as he thought about his family seated next to him.

  The rocket struck the bed of the truck and exploded. The seventeen-pound warhead on the 2.75-inch rocket blew most of the contents from the bed of the truck and killed the two men in the rear. Two seconds later a second rocket struck the road in front of the truck to the right, forcing it over the left edge. The truck rolled over twice and came to rest on its wheels against some thick brush. The back of the truck was on fire.

  The driver scrambled out, pulling his two young sons with him. As he ran away from the truck he heard a second plane approaching. Behind him he heard the screams of his wife, who was crawling away from the burning truck. Her face was covered with blood from where she had struck the windshield. But he kept running with his boys. He had to get them away from the truck.

  An instant later the woman saw her husband and sons suddenly ripped to pieces by a swarm of flachettes from a 2.75-inch rocket fired from the second plane. She fell to the ground screaming as the A-1E Skyraider roared overhead.

  The first Skyraider returned to fire on the truck with a 20-mm cannon, leaving it a tattered, smoking ruin. The sky then became quiet as the planes flew off.

  The next morning an NVA convoy found the woman sitting on the side of the road. She was still in shock from the attack. The soldiers buried the five bodies and took her to the village in the valley below.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Nha Dong Camp

  Southern Laos

  21 March 1975

  Intelligence identifying drug targets had been coming in at a trickle since the anti-narcotics air operation had opened the previous week. SR-71 and U-2 blackbirds had identified only three possible targets, all in southern Laos. Due to the concentration of NVA troops along the Ho Chi Minh trail, John Slaughter’s teams had not been able to operate in those areas. Several A-teams supplying HUMINT [human intelligence] on NVA activity were unwilling to verify narcotics trafficking. A second anti-narcotics air strike was fragged for early afternoon against a suspected river boat convoy on the Se Khong River, southeast of Saravane.

  Hank Renwick was left to brief the mission. He would be the FAC for the four A-1E Skyraiders flying the raid. The F-4’s and the AC-130 Spectre gunship would be on alert status, but were not scheduled to fly unless narcotics targets were confirmed.

  Dr. Li asked Eddie to fly her to Nha Dong, an NVA supply camp located five miles west of Viet Nam and two miles north of Cambodia, inside Laos. The NVA had agreed to release three orphan children of the Meo tribal people to the Thais. The U-10 flight would save Dr. Li days of rough travel with three young children and would provide Eddie with a first-hand look at the NVA supply base on the Ho Chi Minh trail. The 150-mile flight from Ubon would take just over an hour.

  Hank agreed not to launch the air attack on the river traffic until Eddie was back across the Thai border, so as not to rai
se Communist air defenses against the unarmed U-10 Courier.

  Eddie and Dr. Li took off at 11:00 a.m., but were routed thirty miles north of the Se Khong Air Field to avoid a heavy thunderstorm building up along the Laotian-Cambodian border. They arrived over Nha Dong Camp about 12:20 p.m.

  The supply camp lay in a valley along a creek. The road was narrow, but Eddie judged that it was wide enough for him to safely land the U-10. He dropped into the valley, settled onto the road, and quickly braked to a stop.

  About 100 yards down the road he saw a soldier motion to him. He taxied to the soldier who pointed Eddie to a low wooden bridge that crossed the creek. The bridge was used by heavy trucks to move supplies into the camp, so he taxied over to the small truck park and shut down.

  An NVA officer met them at the plane, checked their passports, and escorted them into the camp. Eddie was surprised to see more than fifty trucks in the parking area and supplies stacked high under the trees everywhere he looked. They were led to a wooden shack where they were greeted by General Yen, a grandfatherly old man who was very pleasant and friendly. Dr. Li spoke to him in Vietnamese, translating for Eddie when General Yen spoke to Eddie.

  General Yen served tea and rice cakes while telling Eddie of his younger days with Ho Chi Minh, his work with the OSS [CIA of World War II], and of the People’s struggle against the Imperialist French. He proudly showed them photos of himself and Ho Chi Minh together and letters “Uncle Ho” had written him over the years. In about thirty minutes they left the general.

  Eddie spoke to the young woman caring for the three children. She explained that they were civilians moving supplies south under the protection of the NVA. Their weapons and their treatment by the NVA led Eddie to conclude that these were drug traffickers. He noted that they were driving two American made military trucks while all the other military vehicles were either Russian or Chinese built.