Last Man Out

by James E. Parker, Jr.

  But the Thai mercenaries and the Hmong had not been overrun. They still held out. The North Vietnamese continued to attack Skyline, occasionally capturing Thai positions before being repulsed. The CIA forces were stretched to the limit.

  The last all-out attacks before the smoky season ended were pending when I finally received a transfer up-country. I joined CIA men known by their call signs: Hog, Digger, Clean, Ringo, Zack, Hardnose, Dutch, Kayak, Tiny, Electric, Bag, Shep, Bamboo, and Greek. Hog, who had been in up-country Laos for ten years, gave me my call sign—Mule.

  Like Hog, the CIA people tended to stay around in the mountains of Laos for years. They had good rapport with the Hmong and Thai mercenaries; they knew the territory; and, although they looked like weathered, backwater cowboys, they were effective. It was a closed society. Hog, the senior case officer, was the unquestioned leader. He had a keen, woodsy intelligence—he set the tone, he was our soul. Over a beer some night he might say, “Need to have all you girl singers on the dreaded ramp ’fore sunup. Bring a little hang.”

  “Girl singers” was a Hogism for prissy men, and he used “dreaded” somewhere in every other sentence. “Hang” was courage. Hog had hang and he expected each of us to demonstrate the same virtue.

  I also met two stalwart groups of pilots, the mighty Air America men and the fighting Ravens. Air America was the CIA airline. Its fleet of helicopters moved case officers, troops, and supplies from mountain to mountain. There were also fixed-wing, STOL aircraft, mostly Porters that could land on extremely short, dirt runways. Air America also had large fixed-wing planes for airdrops and for moving troops forward from rear bases. No roads led into the area where we operated, and everything had to be flown in. The Air America flying machines were the lifelines to the fighting units.

  Probably no other profession was as dangerous nor could any other organization attract such stout hearts as did Air America. Compared to the ten dollars a day GIs were making in Vietnam, the pilots and the kickers were reasonably well-paid, but they were not there for the money. It was the adventure. They were not sentimentalists. In fact, Air America people showed little emotion; every pilot had lost dozens of friends in that war. Their employer’s reason for being there did not matter to them. They simply wanted the action of combat flying for the CIA, and they wanted to be on the winning team. All of them had been in Vietnam, with its complicated rules of engagement, distracting media kibitzers, and lack of purpose. In Long Tieng, Laos, there was no politics. Air America did its job, and we were successful in Laos. We held the line. We did not lose. Air America helped make the difference. The U.S. government has rarely employed such irreverent, hard-living, competent patriots as the Air America pilots.

  Although my CIA training and all the stories I had heard prepared me for the case officer corps and Air America, I had to go back to my military days, to the U.S. Air Force forward observers, to find people comparable to the Ravens.

  U.S. ground troops were prohibited from fighting in Laos, but U.S. warplanes were not. Flying unarmored, light 0-1 observation planes called Birddogs, the Ravens challenged death every day to lead U.S. warplanes in on targets. If an Air America pilot knew an enemy position was on a ridgeline, he avoided it; the Raven went looking for it, in the hope of drawing fire. As military officers, the Ravens put great value on comradeship and each accepted his own death as the possible consequence of a mission. They were, it seemed, more willing to die than the Air America pilots and CIA case officers. God, were they impressive. Coming in from a reconnaissance, their little planes shot up, they coolly got out and walked proudly across the ramp. That day the rounds might have missed them by feet. Tomorrow it might be by inches, but they would still get out of their planes at the end of the day and calmly walk away, heads up, apparently unfazed. They looked like lawyers or preachers, but they were cool, committed killers, a breed apart, extraordinary risk takers.

  As were the Thai volunteers. Most came from humble, rural backgrounds in Thailand. They had tattoos, criminal records, and disrespect for authority, but put them on top of a mountain in Laos, surrounded by North Vietnamese, and they would fight and they would die. Every day we sent body bags to Thailand. Every day we received replacements. When they arrived, CIA case officers moved among those tough men to prepare them for deployment. They also smiled at the danger. Between attacks we sent them up to Skyline and, sometimes within hours, put what was left of them in body bags and sent them south on planes that had just brought in more replacements.

  Six battalions of Hmong worked out of Long Tieng. After ten years of fighting they were happy to see the Thais taking the brunt of the attacks, so that they could act as guerrillas, the maneuver elements in our little war. Many of the Hmong soldiers were young, but they all had hang. Recalcitrant, unorthodox, dirty, tenacious, they were defending their homeland, and they were good soldiers.

  What army in the world could beat people like Hog and Air America and the Ravens and the Thais and the Hmong?

  Not the North Vietnamese in Laos. They never took Skyline.

  As I was getting into my first job up-country, locating, organizing, and training the Hmong village militia north and east of the fighting on Skyline, the North Vietnamese pulled back. They had suffered heavy casualties in unsuccessful efforts to rout the CIA men. As the North Vietnamese retreated, the Ravens pursued them every step of the way. The North Vietnamese were a shattered, defeated force when they reached the Plain of Jars.

  On Christmas Day, during a break in the fighting up-country, Brenda and I visited the Catholic orphanage in Udorn and in a second’s time, she fell in love with a runty, sickly, ugly little two-year-old Thai boy who was recovering from an operation and had been left out of the Christmas party. I saw it all happen.

  We had brought some fruit as a token gift and were being escorted to the back play area of the orphanage by one of the Catholic sisters when we passed the nursery. This kid—the only child in the room—was standing up in his bassinet and rocking from side to side, looking mean and sad. Brenda and he made eye contact and something happened. She walked on a couple of steps, leaned back into the doorway, and saw the boy leaning to the side to see her. They were at crazy angles—he and she—like yin and yang, and Brenda straightened up and asked the nun if she could bring that lonely little boy out back. The nun extended her arms out as if he were hers for the taking, so Brenda went into the nursery and picked him up and joined me outside. As we sat on the edge of a picnic table, she bounced him on her knees. She got him to laugh and she looked at me, that woman I loved so much, and her eyes were twinkling and her smile was radiant and she looked back at the boy—the nun said his name was Joseph—and he smiled again and she hugged him so hard he cried out.

  There were so many other kids there that after a while Brenda began to feel guilty about focusing so much attention on one, so she tried to set Joseph to the side and he cried out in a lonely, desperate wail. Forever bonding their relationship, he then reached out his hands to her. Brenda picked him up and he stopped crying, snuggling into her arms.

  We adopted Joseph two months later.

  Two days after that a man appeared on the doorsteps of our house on the outskirts of Udorn and asked if we’d consider adopting an American-Asian girl. We followed the man back to his home—he was leaving for the States soon and was not able to bring Mim, his foster daughter, with him. He was looking for a good home for her. Mim was escorted into the room and I was smitten—she was so beautiful a child that she was startling. She had been the center of attention all her brief life and did not take my adulation as anything out of the ordinary.

  A week later Mim was adopted and our family was complete. We were so proud of our children. They held such promise. There was so much more to life with them around.

  Because of the fighting up-country, I was not able to spend much time at home in Udorn. My family had grown considerably since February so we decided to move to Vientiane. Brenda rented a house; hired a cook, a maid, and a gardener
; and settled in. She was comfortable in her surroundings and was not afraid of things that went bump in the night.

  Up in the mountains, I expanded my contacts with village militia north of Long Tieng and had positioned Hmong irregulars on a mountaintop in preparation for a move into a village previously held by the North Vietnamese. After training that group, my Hmong ops (operations) assistant/interpreter, Va Xiong, and I were resupplying them when the plane he was on hit a mine as it took off. Va barely escaped with his life. My parents were visiting us in Vientiane and Va went back with them to the States.

  In late summer 1972, I received a Hmong battalion, GM 22. With Digger’s GM 21, we came down out of the mountains for training and refitting prior to what would be our dry season offensive against the North Vietnamese dug in on the Plain of Jars.

  We returned to Long Tieng in September to launch our attacks. A fellow case officer was killed in the first week of the offensive. We eventually established positions in a crescent south, southwest, and west of the plain. Digger’s GM to the west, my GM in the middle, and Kayak’s GM to the south. The other Hmong battalions and the Thais were in reserve. Digger’s forces were hit first and pulled back. Kayak’s forces were hit and held.

  My forces were hit and fell back one ridgeline as we pounded the North Vietnamese with artillery. Air Force fast movers came in to help us, and the Hmong’s prop-driven T-28s flew through the smoke and haze of the battle to deliver treetop support. The converted trainers were equipped to carry bombs and .50-caliber machine guns. Flown by the heroes of the Hmong nations, committed only on Vang Pao’s order and often directed to targets by the Ravens, they were a very effective fighting element. My GM eventually pulled back to a staging area some distance from the plain, but we returned later.

  I went down to see my family every ten days or so, often leaving directly from the field and arriving home in my dirty and bloody field clothes. Brenda would know when I was coming and started a homecoming ritual with the children. Each kid had his own group of light switches to turn on so that, when I came in, every light in the house was on. The house would be aglow, and tunes from Walt Disney musicals would be playing on the reel-to-reel tape recorder. It was wonderful, coming in the front gate, the kids excited, Brenda smiling, the dog barking, the lights, and the music. Home from the hills. Home from the fighting. All I could do was stand there and smile.

  Mim and I developed a particularly close bond. It was her job to take my boots off, and that seemed to give her first rights to my attention. She snuggled up to me on the couch, sang along with the Disney songs, and told me about things that had happened while I was away. Brenda sat nearby with Joseph on her knees, both of them listening, laughing.

  What other citizen/soldier in our lifetime could have it so good? Fighting a winning war, coming home nights. On every family visit I said to myself, I am the luckiest man in the world.

  The war in Vietnam, that odd, politicized, hackneyed, never-ending embarrassment to America, was coming to an end. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was making deals. After years of U.S. support—the last ten years with up to half a million GIs in-country—the South Vietnam government still did not rule the countryside. The Saigon leaders, most of them French- or American-educated Catholics, had little in common with the unsophisticated Buddhist farmers in the provinces. The North Vietnamese Army remained strong. Every year, two hundred thousand young men in the North came of military age. Although they might be killed by the tens of thousands, the North Vietnamese leaders were prepared to deploy every one until the South fell. They knew that the Saigon government would never control the hearts and minds of South Vietnamese peasants, and they knew the United States would not stay forever.

  The United States and Kissinger simply wanted to get out, but leaving South Vietnam to its own destiny was difficult, and it would require, at minimum, a decent interval between the withdrawal of American forces and the certain collapse of the country so as not to implicate the United States as a fair-weather friend.

  Disengaging from Laos, however, was easy. A “secret war” did not require a decent interval. A cease-fire was called in early 1973, negotiations ensued, and, in short order, the Communist Pathet Lao, hosts to the North Vietnamese, overflew Long Tieng to quarters in Vientiane. Although the government that was created was ostensibly a joint pro-West/Communist coalition, Pathet Lao soldiers stood on every street corner of Vientiane, making it clear that the Communists were in control.

  Up-country at the CIA base in Long Tieng, we said among ourselves: “Hey, wait a minute, what the hell have we been doing here for ten years?” “Why did we fight so hard?” “Who gave it all away?” “How could they do that?” “What was the value of all those young men dying?”

  A new CIA boss came up-country and told us to get on with disbanding the Hmong and sending the volunteers back to Thailand. Pack up your base, he said, and go on to something else. It’s over. Air America understood and left without a word.

  So did we, finally. In November 1973, Hog drove me down to the ramp where I was to catch a plane south. I was going to pack the family out of Vientiane, go back to the States for some home leave, and return to Indochina. I had requested and received orders to Vietnam.

  Hog parked his Jeep in the shade of the air ops building and squinted into the sun. In his slow Montana drawl, he reminded me what our chief had said, that the fighting was all over. He thought a tour in Vietnam was after the fact.

  “Nope,” I said, “it’s my war now. It seems to me the Americans on the scene there now don’t understand what we’ve gone through fighting this war—the human price we’ve paid. To them, it’s just some other man’s war. Someone who was around early on ought to be there now to speak for the Americans who died. Don’t you think?”

  Hog, tough and unsentimental, shrugged.

  We sat side by side in silence. I had requested an assignment to Vietnam because I was frustrated with the way things had turned out in Laos and, as naive as it might sound, felt I could make a difference in Vietnam. There was no question that I enjoyed paramilitary work, but I was also motivated by a sense of unfulfilled duty. Perhaps my feelings had been fostered by General Heintges when, at my OCS graduation, he had said that I was among a group chosen to uphold the dignity of our country. Perhaps it was because I had gotten out of the military when our country was still at war. Maybe because I had come to realize that I had a lot invested in the war: Memories of my friends and compatriots who had died—Patrick, McCoy, Goss, Ayers, Castro, Slippery Clunker Six, the Hmong, the Thai mercenaries, the Ravens, the Air America pilots—stayed fresh in those baskets at the back of my soul, where I had put them so I could get on with my life. Sometimes when I was alone I would take down one of the baskets and look at the contents, and then put it back. I felt a soulful obligation to ensure that the sacrifices of my friends in this war were not overlooked.

  “Just something I got to do, I reckon,” I told Hog. “Just got to do it.”

  Hog looked away, but smiled. “The dreaded Mule,” he said.

  On the way back to the States, Brenda, Mim, Joe, and I stopped in Hawaii and stayed in a beach bungalow at the Kahala Hilton. Bob and Linda Dunn were living on Oahu at the time, and they showed us the island as if they owned it. We went on to Los Angeles, California, where we made the obligatory two-day Disneyland visit. Then we drove a car across the southern United States for a company that transported cars from coast to coast. It was an almost new Mercury that was being repossessed from a sailor in San Diego. We returned it to a car dealer in Charleston, South Carolina, and then went on to North Carolina in time for Christmas. The kids assumed that everyone traveled around the world the way we had.

  After the holidays, I went to CIA headquarters in Langley. I spent a month on the Vietnam desk and read up on the deteriorating situation there.

  On 3 March 1974, we departed for Taipei, Taiwan, where Brenda and the kids would stay while I served in Vietnam. The wife of a man whom I had known in Laos and
a CIA support officer met us at the airport and delivered us to our quarters in a comfortable housing enclave in downtown Taipei. A neighbor said the name of the development was “Mortuary Manor,” after a funeral home at the head of our street.

  The kids were not sure that this was the best place in the world. When I left for South Vietnam, Brenda was in the process of moving to another development of forty or fifty houses on Yangmingshan Mountain, which overlooked Taipei.

  At Tan Son Nhut Airport in Saigon, a CIA station driver met me. He drove to the U.S. Embassy through streets clogged with traffic—motorbikes darting in and out among the larger vehicles, bikes, and pedicabs with passengers sitting in front all competing for road space.

  Standing in front of the main gate of the embassy, I remembered that Duckett and I had stood in the same place seven years before. We had been intimidated by the embassy then and reluctantly gone inside, only to jump out of the way when embassy staffers came by. It seemed less forbidding in 1974.

  I met with the CIA’s deputy chief of station, who told me that I was assigned as a case officer to the Mekong Delta, which included all of the area below Saigon. He said, in the way of an overview, that what was happening in the Delta countryside was of extreme interest to policy makers in the States. I was to work hard at developing new sources of information on enemy political and military activities, get as many reports as I could from the existing agents whom I would be handling, and work closely with the Special Branch of the South Vietnamese police, but I was not to let them lead me around or recruit me to report the war the way they saw it. My job was to work on building up unilateral—not liaison—operations. He said that I was needed and there was much work to be done. “Plus,” he said, “your presence out there reassures the South Vietnamese that the United States is still at their side.”