BYE-BYE, TONG LE CHON . . .
My usefulness at Tong Le Chon was at an end and it was time to move on. I wrangled an assignment as the 5th Group Political Warfare Officer serving under my former B-Team commander, Lt. Colonel Lanter, where I primarily edited translated enemy documents while awaiting approval of my request for extension of service for another six months in-country with the then-mysterious Special Operations Group. SOG had been conducting, officially denied at the time, cross-border operations into Laos and Cambodia. I figured another six months would put me close to my discharge date and I might as well spend it in Nam where the action was. Furthermore, in my new position, I looked forward to traveling throughout Vietnam.
While at Group Headquarters, I once again bitched about Lt. Col. Murray, the duplicitous Captain Long and the “disappeared” VC, all of which essentially fell on deaf ears. In retrospect, what with the turmoil churning from the Calley massacre, the last thing my superiors wanted to deal with was another scandal. Within a couple of weeks I got word that my request for extension had been denied. Whether it was because of the withering officer’s efficiency report authored by my nemesis, Lt. Col. Murray, or because of my stirring the pot regarding the trouble at Tong Le Chon, or perhaps the fact that Special Forces Headquarters had only then become aware that I had, unbeknownst to them, somehow wiggled my way back into a Special Forces slot, remains a mystery. Or, maybe it was because higher echelons became aware that I still did not have a security clearance.
While with the 1st Division and later with SF, I periodically would drop by the intelligence section and inquire regarding my clearance, only to be told that I had an “Interim Clearance.” This security clearance limbo dragged on through the remainder of my active duty service and continued all the way through my subsequent attendance at the Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, from which I graduated in 1973. I undoubtedly had set another record, over and above being kicked out of SF twice, for being the only student to attend said school with no security clearance. My orders to Command and General Staff College read: “Security Clearance—None.”
BACK TO THE WORLD OF THE GREAT PX . . .
Once again, I lucked out. I was assigned to Ft. Leonard Wood, Missouri as a Basic Training Company Commander. Had I stayed in SF and returned to Ft. Bragg, I would have been simply one of hundreds of Vietnam veteran Special Forces captains. As it was I ended up commanding a company, a position considered by nearly all infantry officers as the best job in the Army. Granted, a basic training company was not a line company, but it was the second best thing. I ramrodded 250 young trainees through their eight-week introduction to the rigors and discipline of the U.S. Army. Seeing them graduate was almost as rewarding as calling in artillery on a concentration of NVA regulars.
Of course, there were a couple of assholes in every cycle of trainees. Two or three problem children took up 99% of the time I spent dealing with personnel problems. Back then discipline was going to hell in the Army, not only in Nam but stateside. I had young punks telling my Drill Instructors to “Go to Hell!” and they couldn’t lay a hand on them. Which was a bummer, as sometimes the only way to deal with such miscreants was to lay a right cross to the head bone out behind the barracks. For instance, one little shit, let’s call him Private Smith, a thin, slack-jawed whiner, was particularly vocal with the four letter words. Finally, on a sunny Saturday afternoon, good Drill Sergeant Minton, from a small town in Mississippi, had had enough. Minton, who was the Charge of Quarters for the day, had also had a few belts of moonshine. Private Smith walked by the Orderly Room and Sgt. Minton yelled, “Private Smith, go into the latrine and get the mop!” “Sergeant Minton,” Smith sniveled, “there’s no mop in the latrine.” Minton followed up, “Get the mop in the latrine.” “But there’s no mop in the latrine.” Minton growled, “Get in the latrine.” Smith did. And so did Sergeant Minton. A few blows to the body and they both exited. Private Smith now had just cause to snivel.
Shortly thereafter, my First Sergeant smiled his way into my office. Now my Field First was a hulk of a big, no-nonsense black who had been a contender in the ‘48 Olympics in the quarter mile. “Captain Brown, Pri-vate Smith wants to see you. He has a complaint.” And in came Private Smith, crying like a weenie wimp. “Captain, Sergeant Minton hit me. More than once!” I shot him my most unsympathetic glare, and said, “Well, Private, I guess we’ll have to look into it. Dismissed. Get out!”
I knew that we were going to see some shit rolling downhill right towards us shortly. Sure enough, he called his mommy who of course called her Congressman.
I saw this coming and called my First Sergeant and Sergeant Minton into my office and said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to flat ass lie. We’ll portray him as the trouble-making sniveler he is. We all stick to our stories. He has no noticeable bruises. He must have fallen down.”A couple of days later, I was notified that a Congressional investigation for brutality was in the works. But we all held to our stories.
The investigating officer knew we were lying. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Harold Riggs, knew we were lying. The brigade commander was sure of it. But they couldn’t break our stories and the investigation went nowhere. Private Smith was eventually busted out of the Army for being unable to adapt. There was a plus, however. Word got out to the trainees, and we had no discipline problems the rest of the cycle. No more, “Screw you, Sarge.” It was nothing but, “Yes, Drill Sergeant” or “No, Drill Sergeant.”
Come April 1970, my tour was up and I returned to Boulder, which had become Hippietown, USA.
After such an untidy career, I still puzzle as to how I got promoted to Major and then Lt. Colonel in the Reserve, much less how the Army, in its questionable wisdom, selected me for the Command and General Staff College. But I did not complain.
Though I stayed in the Reserves till my mandatory retirement date in October 1984, nothing much of significance occurred. My days of fun and games with the Army were over. But other challenges were waiting.
6
JUMPING INTO HELL
“Who the hell is it?” I fumed over the phone, reacting to a rather nasty hangover. I had been tossing a few down the night before and was not in a particularly good mood, especially since it was o’dark thirty.
“Brown, it’s Hemming, Gerry Hemming. I need you to recruit a team of paramedics and fly down to Peru.”
I had known Hemming, tall, half-crazed and creative farfetched storyteller extraordinaire since the early ‘60s and he was always involved in some kind of weird scheme, mostly involving Cuban exiles, though they seldom reached fruition. My foggy mind started to brighten up a bit. “Hemming, what the hell are you talking about? It’s not even light here!” I grouched at him.
“There was an 8.0 earthquake in Peru on 31 May . . . 75,000 dead, 25,000 missing, 200,000 injured.”
“So what am I supposed to do about an earthquake,” I grouched some more.
Hemming replied, “I’m down here with a team of paramedics and we’re going to jump into the Cordillera Blanca Mountains to aid the Indians. The roads into the AO have all been destroyed and the only way to get in is by parachute.” I said, “Yeah?” He said, “I need another 12-man team. I want you to recruit, find equipment and get them on a plane ASAP!” Hemming assured me that all expenses would be paid including, of course, roundtrip airfare, which I insisted was to be provided in advance.
Since I was getting the airfare, I figured I’d at least get a trip to Peru. At the time I felt I could use a jolt of do-gooder excitement since I had been bored since I got back from Nam. I got on the phone and started rounding up a team via the old boy net, and recruited a former SEAL, a couple of Green Beret Nam vets, a couple of Israelis, and as my XO, a highly competent Nam company commander and Special Forces A-Team leader who was my business partner in Paladin Press, Peder Lund.
I flew to LA where the team linked up and I purchased a dozen parachutes and reserves, jump suits, boots, th
e whole shebang. We were on a plane south in 72 hours. On arriving, we were briefed regarding the damage estimates, the terrain, and the types of medical and support problems they were having. A part of the peak of 22,000-foot Mt. Huanascan had slid down the mountainside into a canyon, hitting two cities, Jungay and Rhanrhica, with a wall of mud and water 30 feet high at an estimated speed of 248 kilometers per hour.
“Lima’s hospitals had soon been filled to overflowing,” Doctor John Peters, from a small mining town in Colorado, recalled. Doctor John, jovial, handsome, heavy set and jump-qualified, headed up the medicine men that made up the first team lead by Hemming. Sixty nations were actively participating in the relief effort.
We were all billeted in the “Hospital Obrero,” the Lima’s workers’ hospital. A huge, drab building, surrounded by a plethora of funeral parlors, did not encourage one to be treated there, so we couldn’t wait to get out in the field.
During a briefing, organizers explained we would be jumping into an unmapped area. Hemming had asked, “If we go in and helicopter operations are found to be impossible, how do we get out?” The answer was not very encouraging. A Peruvian Army general told him, “Only two possible ways,” he said. “Climb over the Andes in the middle of winter, or follow the Baranon River down to the Amazon to Iquitos.” “How far from our area to Iquitos?” someone asked.
“Seven hundred miles,” the general smiled. Seven hundred miles through some of the most primitive and remote areas in the world, down a river infested with piranhas and through jungles inhabited by hostile Indians. I asked some Peruvian commandos who were preparing to launch an operation down the Amazon from our launch-site where they were going, and their commanding officer said, “We are going down the river. There have been reports of the Indians selling human flesh in the market again.” And that disabused us of the intriguing idea of floating down the Amazon, especially since we had no small arms.
We then started running into delays in getting jump aircraft. The U.S. refused to let us jump from their C-130’s. The Argentines offered us the use of their F-27’s, but they lost one on a supply drop in a narrow canyon. All of the crew was killed. We finally looked to use the old C-47s of the Peruvian Air Force, but it wasn’t till some days later we found out why they came up with excuses not to drop us. There were no maps of the mountainous area, and no emergency landing strips or areas that could serve as an emergency strip. If one of the engines went out on the WWII transport, whoever was on board was dead. The Peruvian pilots were adamantly against flying their decrepit craft. Finally, we contacted officials at the Moa Bay Mining Company who put pressure on the Air Force to get us planes.
Finally we jumped in two four-man teams along with Doc Peters and George Speakman. The last two pushed their luck as they jumped at 15,000 feet over the desolate up-mountainside town of Silhaus, 3,000 feet below, avoiding steep slopes and jagged rock outcroppings. Peters remembered, “I would go first, with Moore following me on a second run. I would be jumping with a drop bag containing 100 pounds of medical supplies, surgical equipment, some drugs and 5,000 doses of smallpox vaccine.” “Butterflies were working overtime in my stomach. I exited the aircraft, got a good canopy and noticed I wasn’t going down,” he told us. “I felt I set a record as my chute caught a thermal for twelve and a half minutes.” The drop bag of medical supplies broke away from Doc and was stolen by some renegade Indians when it landed.
Doc Peters called in a medical and food resupply and for the next five days treated the locals until they could get evacuated by a Brazilian Huey—two at a time! Two choppers had already crashed trying to make it over the high mountain passes.
When we arrived back in Lima, representatives from all walks of life greeted us enthusiastically. We were driven to the Presidential Palace, where President Belasco welcomed us back, thanked us warmly for our efforts and announced we would be decorated both for valor and compassion. That afternoon, the Minister of Health awarded us medals created especially for our teams. Ironically, the American Ambassador, who had done nothing for us, showed up grinning, backslapping and posing with us for pictures. So with that we logged another adventure in our journals.
7
HOW I WAS TO BECOME DEFENSE
MINISTER OF A NEW NATION
While attending Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth during the last three months of 1972 and the first three months of 1973, I became friends with a classmate who was a major in the Cambodian army. With such a contact, I decided after I graduated that it would be an interesting break from the tedium of work at Paladin Press to go to Cambodia as a sniper. I saw an opportunity for a little adventure as well as popping some bad guys. We had a long weekend break over the Easter holidays so I flew down to see my favorite rogue, Mitchell Livingston Werbell, III, who was now a self-styled Lt. General in the Free Afghan Army. How he came by this title I do not know, nor does anyone else. Nor had anyone heard of the Free Afghan Army. However, wearing the appropriate rank, it gave him another badge of importance, at least to those who didn’t know him.
You’ll recall that I first bumped into Werbell when he was mucking about during the abortive attempt to invade Haiti in 1966, and then ran into him before and during my trip to Nam. He was hanging around the army’s Advanced Marksmanship Unit promoting various weapons systems, and since I was the OIC of the XVIII Airborne Corp AMU, we crossed paths many times. Supposedly the purpose of my visit was to get the latest scoop on what would be the most appropriate sniper system to take with me. In fact, I just wanted to get the hell out of the boring environs of central Kansas.
I arrived at the “Farm,” a small mansion on 40 acres of Georgia pine, where Werbell conducted outrageously expensive personal security courses, marketed his Ingraham submachine guns and Sionics suppressors, and hosting an eclectic group of ever-changing arms dealers, rogues, veterans of various wars, law enforcement personnel, etc, etc. The usual aura of “excitement” was unusually high this time.
As the weekend wore on, I knew that some nefarious scheme was afoot. The “Farm” reeked of intrigue, guarded glances, whispered exchanges. Though I was never told what the plot was, simply by looking at numerous newspaper clippings scattered about and overhearing fragments of guarded conversations, I deduced that Werbell was heading up some cockamamie scheme to prevent the island of Abaco from becoming part of the Bahamas, which was scheduled to receive independence from Great Britain in the summer of ‘73. The majority of the inhabitants wanted to remain under the British Crown as the new black administration, led by Prime Minister Pindling, was corrupt, and the Nassau government already had a reputation for sucking out taxes from the outlying islands and giving next to nothing back. The racial mix of Abaco differed from the rest of the Bahamas, which was 90% black and 10% white. With a 55% black, 45% white racial mix and boasting the second largest land area in the Bahamas, Abaco had enormous potential for tourist development with its plentiful supplies of fresh water, sand, sea and sun. During this time period, there was a significant amount of racial unrest in the Caribbean and investors were looking for “secure” areas to develop to take advantage of growing tourism. Abaco could be the island that provided that security.
I decided it would be a worthy goal to cut Werbell out of the project, as I was convinced, for all his bluster, that he would never take any action to achieve independence for Abaco. He had huffed and puffed about bringing veterans of the United Kingdom’s “Highlanders” to fill out the ranks of the would-be independence advocates. Concurrently, the House of Lords was trying to preclude Abaco from being separated from the British Crown.
How to do this? Well, first I had to establish contact with the Abaco resistance. I decided on the perhaps foolhardy but most direct way to make contact. I flew to Miami and caught a white-knuckle flight to a dirt strip that proclaimed itself “Abaco International Airport,” which had flights to and from Miami. I guess that justified it tagging itself as “International.” I checked into a local hotel, grabbed a shower
and beer, and toured the capital of Abaco, Marsh Harbor. It didn’t take much “touring” as there were only about 1,000 inhabitants.
Following the direct approach method of revolution, I simply walked into the local dispensary and asked the first nurse I saw, “Can you put me in touch with the resistance?” A cute little thing, without makeup and curly brown hair, she smiled, “Why that’s easy. The leader is my husband, Harley.” And so it started.
After being introduced to Harley I said, “I am planning to conduct a short and promising area assessment and see what can be done—if anything. The islanders have only a few sporting weapons but on the other hand, there were only three Bahamian police on the whole island, armed with obsolescent .303 bolt-action Enfield rifles. No problem there. I think the project is worth further research.”
I flew to Nassau to meet the mouthpiece for the Abaco Independence Movement (AIM) Chuck Hall, a chunky, blue-eyed, dark-haired businessman.
“I am planning to recruit a small number of Special Forces Vietnam veterans to help seize the island, repel any foray of Bahamian cops from Nassau, and train a multi-racial militia. If the Bahamian cops struggle ashore, they would be easy pickings for our snipers since they are city cops, not infantrymen. We could pick them off at long range without the survivors being aware that we’re involved. The American operators, in the best of SF tradition, would remain unseen in the background but would provide guidance, training and advice to the new provisional government and militia,” I told him.
I Am Soldier of Fortune Page 11
