I Am Soldier of Fortune

by Brown, Robert, Spencer, Vann

  Nunn, who had been in the Special Forces Reserve, finally fought his first battle in Rhodesia. The fearless Nunn died tragically, way too young, just a few years later in Boulder in what was another daredevil act on his motorcycle. He was still with SOF at the time.

  I finally found my first and last firefight in Rhodesia. To me, that’ll always be its name.

  Ian Smith stayed active in Rhodesian, then Zimbabwe, politics and wrote two books about the betrayal of his government. He died at the age of 88 in South Africa in 2007, a broken man. His only son and business partner had died a few years previously. My big regret is that I was not able to visit him in South Africa, as I had planned, before he died. The corrupt, evil and invincible dictator Mugabe has hoarded billions and impoverished his country, which used to be called the “Bread Basket of Africa.” His opponents are regularly eliminated while the West looks the other way.

  11

  CONS, PSYCHICS AND AN ABORTED SEARCH FOR POWs

  In early 1981 I received an urgent call at the office from a voice from the past. “Brown, we need your help,” the gruff voice bellowed so loudly that even with my half-deaf ears I about dropped the phone. “We were recruited by Bo Gritz to participate in a POW rescue operation in S.E. Asia which has turned out to be the mother of all cons. I need you to go to New York with me and see a guy who laid down a bundle for the mission and convince him of what was going on with our getting stiffed. He’s George Brooks (Chairman of the Board of Directors of the National League of Families of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia). You know, the guy whose son Nicholas was shot down over Laos in 1970. He gave Gritz over $20,000. Some of it was to pay our expenses. We did not get a dime,” the angry voice roared.

  It was Jim Monaghan, a hard drinking, blue eyed, hot tempered, curly haired, medium height, muscle bound Irishman. He was a former SF Captain with four tours in Nam and a chest full of decorations. We had crossed paths several times when the restless, half-mad vet who recklessly lived on the edge was trying to suck me into some wild scheme or the other. I was on guard.

  Monaghan had been a member of the elite Mike Forces, Special Forces units composed of a small number of specially trained SF personnel that led company-size units of Montagnard tribesmen. The Mike Forces were deployed throughout Vietnam, mainly when A-Team camps were threatened or overrun. The vast bulk of Special Forces personnel and their Mon-tagnard mercenaries only operated around the A-Team camps. Monaghan had become a legend for his fearless actions in the Mike Force Third Company—China Boy 3—and made his bones several times over in his four years in Nam.

  Monaghan had touched a raw nerve.

  “Slow down, tone it down and fill me in,” I told him.

  “My buddies and I went to Florida to join a group of Vietnam vets and other former SpecOps guys to join a POW mission, a convoluted mess that Gritz concocted and called Operation Velvet Hammer. Like I said, it never got off the ground,” he said. “All expenses were to be paid, plus a lump sum. Or so Gritz told us.”

  “OK, you have my attention. Go back to the beginning,” I told Mon-aghan.

  “It all started in February, when Gritz called Medal of Honor recipient Fred Zabitosky, a friend of Senator Jesse Helms, inviting him to participate in a POW rescue attempt. Gritz asked Zabitosky to recruit other Special Forces Vietnam vets.”

  I knew the tight community with its active network and was not a bit surprised that in no time over a dozen recruits were on board. Monaghan went on to describe the haphazard fiasco.

  “In addition to Zabitosky and Earl Bleacher, a Son Tay Raider, we recruited several other vets who jumped at the chance to participate,” he said, rattling off the names of the volunteers, most of whom I knew or knew of.

  Fred Zabitosky had come under heavy enemy fire with his reconnaissance patrol team in Nam. He took charge of the defense and counterattack until rescue helicopters arrived. The first rescue helicopter crashed and Zabitosky, although injured, saved its pilot during the battle. Zab was tall, dark and a bit shady looking with a contrived attitude that said, “Don’t mess with me because you don’t know who you are messing with.”

  Another member of the dirty dozen or more was Bleacher, a mean SOB, handsome, dark, tall, slim, with a sloping forehead and piercing eyes. He was part of the Son Tay Raid to rescue 70 POWs held in a torturous prison camp 23 miles outside of Hanoi. In November 1970, 56 Green Berets were divided into three groups, each with a different mission. Blue-boy was the 14-man assault group assigned to crashland its helicopter in the small prison camp with fighter cover above. The 22-man Greanleaf group would land outside the prison camp to support Blueboy, and blow a hole in the compound wall. The helicopter carrying Blueboy departed from the CIA-operated security base in Thailand at 11:25 on 20 November at 02:18. It successfully crashlanded inside the compound at Son Tay. Greenleaf landed a quarter mile from its intended LZ, and attacked a North Vietnamese barracks. Within 27 minutes on the ground, the Green Berets killed between 100—200 enemy soldiers sleeping in the barracks. Blueboy reported that there were no POWs in the compound. They had been moved the previous July, but the mission was still considered a success because no American lives had been lost while a strong message had been sent to the NVA.

  Another guy who came to Florida for the project was Lt. Colonel Mark Berent. He was a decorated pilot with three tours, totaling four years in Vietnam from 1965 to 1973. On one tour, he flew F-4Ds out of Ubon Air Base in Thailand with the Night Owl Squadron as commander of the famous Wolf Forward Air Control (FAC). Berent flew the F-100 jet aircraft on over 250 missions out of Bien Hoa from December ‘65 to December ‘66. In one of his following tours, he flew 250+ missions in the F-4 aircraft out of Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base (RTAFB), from November ‘68 to November ‘69. The first seven months he was a flight commander in the Night Owl squadron. The last five months he was the commander of the Wolf FAC unit.

  Berent and Monaghan had first hooked up in Saigon in 1966. After the war, Berent recalled, “Monaghan called me to see him in Florida to meet with Bo Gritz about the POW/MIA search and rescue. “I then called Lieutenant Colonel Dick Hébert, and San Sok (Sam), a Cambodian Army Lieutenant who had saved my life several times. He was trapped in the States when Cambodia fell in 1975 and I had taken him in for six months. They agreed to come down to Florida (Sam at my expense).”

  “I brought Dick with me down to the Velvet Hammer affair,” Berent said.

  “We flew down to Florida where the operation was being organized to join over a dozen other former special operators in early March. We were broken down into different sections including intel and planning. We were just hanging around awaiting the promised intelligence. Reporters were to be present to publicize the search for the POWs so Gritz could raise more funds. The flashy Gritz, who did everything with the main focus on himself, even claimed that he had organized a parade down 5th Avenue in New York,” Monaghan said.

  OF PSYCHICS AND HYPNOTISTS

  “To top off the show, Gritz, who used spiritual mind tricks and claimed to be a hypnotist himself, had hired a hypnotist and psychic to give the intelligence brief. She went into a trance in this weird séance and gave a spooky vision of the sight of captive Americans in a cellar,” Monaghan said.

  “A few days of Gritz’s stalling and after several whacko meetings with psychics, we were beginning to get antsy and smelled a con game. Each day, we asked for reimbursement for our expenses, but Gritz kept blowing us off. For the next two days, nothing happened other than the smoke and mirrors.

  “Finally the elusive Gritz showed up and asked us if we knew anyone who could provide automatic weapons and transport them to Thailand. We contacted an international arms dealer we knew who promised to get the weapons as soon as he received a down payment. The money never came and there still was no intel. One more psychic session, and fed up with the BS from this big time conniver, we once again asked Gritz to cough up our expense money and give us enough to get back home. No go. If we had hung aro
und much longer, it would not have ended very well for Gritz or for us, so we booked flights back home on our own nickel,” Monaghan said.

  Berent contacted Fred Smith to see if he could help with the POW search. “Fred, the owner of Federal Express, which he founded it in 1970, was a former Marine and Vietnam vet who had worked for Dick Hébert in an A-4 fighter squadron at Da Nang,” Berent said.

  “After that fiasco, we decided something needed to be done, so Hebert and Monaghan and I went to Memphis and met with Fred Smith who said he would put everything at our disposal if we could give proof of just one POW being found. While we were in Florida, Ann Mills Griffiths of the National League of Families had said that she had the proof.

  “So I called Griffiths and had to really coax her to come to Memphis. I had to pick up the tab on all of this, including Monaghan’s, and flew her into Memphis,” Berent continued. I’ll never forget what happened when she showed up at the conference table where Fred Smith and his number two guy (a Marine buddy whose name I don’t recall), Monaghan, Hébert and myself were seated. Ann Mills Griffiths started just drawing circles with her finger on the table and said she could not release the proof. This she told Fred Smith, who had had many personal conversations with President Reagan. And just then we got a phone call from somebody who said that Gritz had released everything to the press. I made a panicked phone call to an Air Force three-star general at McDill AFB who had been getting ready to provide us with maps and told him to back off. It was a disgusting day,” Berent said.

  Indeed I knew Griffiths, who for years was head of the National League of Families—a player in her own mind who got off on the power she accumulated in that position, using everybody’s first name, e.g. “Nice to see you Colin [Powell].”

  Perturbed at not seeing a shred of evidence about the presence of Americans at Gritz’s target, Nhommarath, Laos, and having been fleeced out of their meager bucks and time, the formidable team told the oft-decorated Lt. Colonel Gritz to perform a long piss up a short rope, bid adieu to his Florida Follies, and decided to cast its lot with me if I was game.

  “You became involved after that and helped finance the Center for POW/MIA Accountability (CPMIA) that Monaghan, Hébert, and I set up,” Berent remembered.

  How Gritz had the cajones to mess over that formidable team escaped me.

  The SpecOps community was all too familiar with retired Lt. Colonel James “Bo” Gritz, a tall, ruggedly handsome, charismatic, highly decorated (though often awarded upon his own recommendation) Special Forces veteran. Some respected him for his Vietnam record. I did not. A legend in his own mind, Gritz became notorious in the SpecOps community when he later conducted several highly publicized private missions into Asia to rescue POWs, all to no avail. He paved a rocky if not hostile road for recovery teams to tread in the search for any POWs over the next few years when SOF was operating with his twisted missions that cost a lot of hopeful donors and families of POWs big bucks.

  I strongly believed we still had some Vietnam POWs imprisoned in some dank unknown prison in Southeast Asia, if alive, or lying in some unmarked grave if not. I had been watching for over a decade while official agencies and the scores of private parties searching for POWs in one mission after another could not get it right. With one unsolicited call, fate sucked SOF into a foray to take over where the prissy, lethargic bureaucrats or bungling private operatives had failed. Colonel Mike Peck mirrors my disgust for the political bunglers. He was chief of the POW-MIA Office, a division of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a position he resigned from because of principle.

  “The U.S. was not sending active agents into Laos or anywhere else to locate the missing. It took a civilian using his own resources to do what the government wouldn’t. I always felt that we had abandoned a number of our men in Southeast Asia for political expediency, and no one in Washington was willing to admit it. ‘Peace with Honor and a Nobel Prize,’“ Peck said.

  “It was not until later,” he continued, “that I discovered that the real mission of the organization was to bury the POW’s and the missing, along with the entire issue—quite literally. I was continually shocked and dismayed at what I witnessed, and could not believe the naysaying and obfus-cation that was the organization’s norm. A number of politicos in Washington were responsible for the fact that not everyone came home, and they were hiding behind phony organizations infiltrated by insiders, the POW-MIA flags, the postage stamps and insincere commemoratives,” Peck said.

  12

  SOF IS SUCKED INTO THE HUNT

  In April ‘81, after visiting George Brooks of the League of Families at my own expense (but of course that was the reason Monaghan called me), and convincing him to no longer fund Gritz, the now former Gritz loyalists and I returned to Boulder to hash out some plans for launching our own POW mission.

  Once word got around that SOF was heavily involved in the Yellow Rain and the POW search, Bill Guthrie, who was with SOF wearing many hats from 1981—86, fielded a parade of resistance movement chiefs who came begging.

  “The POW search was something that needed to be done and finished at the time, and you and Perot were the only people with money who had the balls for it,” Guthrie said.

  “Your involvement in Laos drew to the office a parade of people who either represented resistance movements, many of which we’d never heard of, or in some cases more frauds who wanted money for nonexistent campaigns. We were approached by Karen splinter organizations, other Burmese tribes, and Armenian and Kurdish organizations, largely because of the fame of the POW and Yellow Rain searches.” Guthrie had to help ward off the stampede while he held down the fort.

  GENERAL VANG PAO COMES ON BOARD

  After making a whirlwind estimate of the situation, I flew to Washington, DC with a couple of my guys to brief Rear Admiral Allan G. Paulson, the director of the POW/MIA office of the Inter-Agency Group, and the Deputy Director of Collection Management of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) of the SOF teams’ research and buy-out plan.

  Berent had first been the assistant air attaché, then the air attaché at the American Embassy, Phnom Penh, Cambodia in the ‘70s. Through some of his contacts, he introduced me to Admiral Paulson.

  “I was at the initial meetings with Paulson and I remember him being an absolutely superb guy, and I remember also that he was kind enough to give you a Pentagon china cup so you could spit your chewing tobacco into it,” Berent recalled wryly.

  Admiral Paulsen gave me the green light to hunt for American POWs in Laos. He never promised U.S. Government support, but he did promise to provide identifying questions to ask the POWs to vet them once we had a list of names.

  “I think that you should contact General Vang Pao, the Hmong general who led the CIA-sponsored war against the communists in Laos. Hopefully he can provide a source of reliable intelligence through his anti-communist contacts still deep inside Laos,” Paulson suggested.

  The General and his Laotian entourage, including bodyguards, were eager to come to Boulder. I had already met the General when I invited him to be a banquet speaker at the 1st SOF Convention in Columbia, Missouri a few months earlier in September 1980. His visit to Boulder clinched the SOF mission to search for POW/MIAs.

  “Gentlemen,” the small, dark, round-faced, tough-as-nails General began, as he leaned forward on my black phony leather rocker in my den and stared at me with his steely black eyes. I braced myself. His words were more of a calculated command than a request. “I realize what you really want is information about your missing comrades in Southeast Asia. I can help to provide such aid. But I want the following before my side can give you anything, and what I want will have to be in three phases. First, I want the issue of chemical and biological warfare against my people in Laos by the Vietnamese brought before the United Nations. Second, in exchange, I will have my organization turn over 17 sets of remains of missing Americans to you. Third, you must assist me in arming and equipping a battalion of my men in Laos who, in turn, w
ill form the nucleus of a fighting force which will eventually throw the Vietnamese out of Laos.”

  He drove a tough if not impossible bargain, but the General was the one to open the door for getting SOF firmly established in Southeast Asia. Rather than antagonize him by asking why he had not turned over the remains of the Americans to the U.S., the country that supported his “Secret War” efforts and had given him asylum, I decided to play.

  Aha, he had given me a tall order, but at what cost? SOF could hardly convince the world that a Laotian Revolution was feasible—or fund the purchase of arms for a battalion to overthrow the commies in Laos and eject the Vietnamese occupiers. But his was the best offer on the table thus far.

  “I will agree to your conditions, but I have to have hardcore proof of the POWs,” I told the General, my mind swiftly stacking up the cost in terms of time, manpower and funds for the multi-faceted mission.

  “I can do that,” the wily General said as he handed Zabitosky a letter of introduction to one of his agents in Santa Ana, California.

  Zabitosky and Bleacher flew to the west coast to meet with Gen. Vang Pao’s agent on 13 April 1981. The General’s contact produced a letter to be given to the chief of staff of the Laotian resistance forces covertly headquartered in a Lao refugee camp on the Thai-Laotian border. SOF staffer Jim Coyne, rugged, bearded, mocking blue-eyed, a Huey door gunner in Nam and former 12-year National Geographic photographer, joined them in LA. The three flew to Bangkok on 26 April 1981.

  INTO THE WILDS OF THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE

  For the next two years SOF POW/MIA teams journeyed to the mysterious and treacherous environs of the “Golden Triangle” of Thailand, Laos and Burma, and into the wild, foggy hills of communist-occupied Laos. Our Lao sources confirmed sightings of some of the 534 missing Americans, mainly air crewmen who had been shot down over Laos and never seen or heard from again.