I Am Soldier of Fortune

by Brown, Robert, Spencer, Vann

  Our wiry little Hmong guides, with legs like coiled steel springs, literally jogged up the steep trails, carrying all our gear without difficulty as we grunted and panted behind them, trying to keep up. We crossed the last deep stream and kept climbing. After another hour of straight-up climbing, we stopped for a 15-minute break and looked up at the increasingly rugged hills. By the third hour we had to stop every 25 meters so that we would not keel over.

  To our right, two klicks off the trail, was a CPT (Communist Party Thailand) redoubt, under daily pressure from the Thai Air Force and Border Patrol Police, but we were told that it was not a problem. The CPT wanted to join with the Lao resistance to fight the Vietnamese!

  KMT (Kuomintang) soldiers, stationed in strategic locations, glared at us suspiciously. When the Chinese communists drove Chiang Kai-shek out of China in 1949, portions of his army retreated southwestward into Laos, Thailand and Burma. The KMT forces were used by the Thais in some places as border pickets. They provided border security where it would be impractical, or impossible, to garrison regular Thai troops. In return, the KMT was provided limited support, resupply and medical evacuation capabilities.

  The KMT guards looked us up and down but never threatened us. Anxious to see any form of life in this Godforsaken country, they offered us cloudy home-made, sweet spiced-ginger whiskey from a gallon jug. We rudely grabbed the welcome brew. The local proverb, “The more Mekong whiskey you drink, the more languages you speak,” made a lot of sense just then.

  Crossing the Laotian “border fence,” a single strand of rusty barbed wire, into the eerie, wild, lawless hills was a creepy, anti-climactic non-event. The whiskey had worn off and my head was pounding. My legs were numb from endless miles of slipping and falling down in the mud after a downpour; grasping for a tree branch then grasping for the next so as not to go sliding backwards down the steep slopes.

  TR and our wiry legged guides were only alive because I needed both of them. Besides, I did not have the energy to waste TR with his annoying chant, “Time flies when you are having fun.” Its funny how such statements can stick in your mind for years. I eased the pain by fantasizing about filling out the pink slips for those sitting back at the office who called the treks into Laos “boy scout hikes.”

  But we had to make it another klick in the dusk to get to the camp at the mountain elevation of 5,000 feet.

  Coyne had given the LULF heads up that I was making the journey to meet the anxious freedom fighters who would not give up until they had their independent Laos. Word had spread fast, and several tribal leaders and chiefs were waiting for me when I arrived. They were standing at attention beneath the Soldier of Fortune “Death to Tyrants” banner flapping there in the hills of Laos.

  “I swear, with your appearance, the sun came out for the first time in weeks,” Coyne said.

  The LULF troops raised their flag, the ancient symbol of Laos: three white elephants co-mingled on a field of red. The tribesmen were convinced we were representing the U.S. government and nothing we could say would disabuse them of this belief.

  From dawn until nightfall, we had been humping straight up the mountains in the constant mist and fog, but we were far too achy and tired to sleep. As one man who had been to Laos many times before told us, “If you sleep in Laos, you should always be half awake.”

  Our superman hosts, who probably never slept, awakened us in the “guest suite” as soon as we dozed off in feverish sleep, bringing us tea before the foggy sunup with smiles in response to our groans and moans. These men made that trek constantly without a whimper, some of them daily, down and up for needed supplies or to relay information. Finally with daybreak, I could see the camp I had funded and the lay of the land. The “cooks” offered us the traditional stomach-ripping bowl of boiled rice covered with hot red peppers for breakfast.

  I could see the camp more clearly in the daylight. It was built of bamboo and thatch and it sat on high ground above the Mekong River. Zigzag trenches linked defensive bunkers built to ring the compound in case the communist Pathet Lao decided to foreclose on our lease.

  It reminded the group of us, all Nam vets, of some of the Special Forces “A” camps in Nam. The four or five hootchs (small thatched huts) in the main area were all dug into the ground with dirt banked up against the sides. Log bunkers were placed with good fields of fire and heavily fortified with dirt and rock.

  An estimated 20 people lived within the main area, while other LULF troops scattered in nearby sites in the mountains. The troops had a miscellany of weapons: M-2 carbines, a few M-16s, the rest AK-47s or Chinese Model 56s, but all of them were well-oiled and maintained. Ammunition and magazines were in short supply. Many men had only one or two mag-azines full of ammunition with an additional few rounds loose in their pockets.

  The Vietnamese had a nearby garrison of approximately 200 men, 12 klicks away, but they kept to themselves. When the team first got to the camp, they were told how the easternmost LULF outpost had surprised a six-man Vietnamese recon team a quarter klick away the previous week. But the Vietnamese, once they realized they’d been spotted, faded away into the tall grass because the villagers had been spreading the rumor that there were four battalions at the camp. It’s funny how rumors would fly through those hills devoid of cyber space and electronics. When the LULF troops went to investigate further, they found skid marks all the way down the hill where the Vietnamese had tried to break their rapid retreat with their heels.

  The LULF troops spoke virtually no English, and the interpreter they provided didn’t speak much better. The tough little warriors did not have much military training, but they had a common enemy, the Vietnamese who occupied their homeland, and they wanted blood. What held them back was the shortage of enough weapons and ammo to make their fight a success. They mainly engaged when surprised by the bad guys on the trails or in the villages where they went to resupply themselves.

  Occasionally, a runner would charge in with news that a 20-man Pathet Lao patrol was going from village-to-village about two klicks below the camp asking questions about the farangs. The camp would immediately go on alert. Earlier, one courier ran into the camp from the lowest outpost that was closest to the patrol: six of the Pathet Lao had pistols, four had binoculars, one a rocket-propelled grenade launcher (RPG-2), and the rest AKs.

  The first training we provided our people consisted of basic hand and arm signals, and a straight-from-the-textbook version of a squad-size immediate-action breaking contact drill.

  Some of the men had been to China for training, but the training didn’t amount to much, although the Chinese had provided equipment and uniforms, including brand new Type-56s (AKs) and a basic load of stick grenades. Each small squad was also issued an RPG-2 and as many rockets as they could carry. Uniforms and webbed gear were basic Chinese-issue green with leg wrappings that looked no different than the uniforms of the Pathet Lao or Vietnamese in Laos, who wore the same soft, short-billed cap as the Chinese, but with a shiny black brim and trim.

  DIA JOINS THE SEARCH—HALF-ASSED

  The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency had been collecting various reports of American POWs allegedly sighted throughout Vietnam and Laos. A report of the Senate Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, issued several months after Admiral Paulson gave me the go-ahead and our mission was in full force in Southeast Asia, summed up some of SOF’s activities:

  “On 30 July, 1981, Admiral Paulson requested the appropriate DIA element to research the Lao resistance forces to help answer the question . . . as to whether it may be more profitable (strictly in terms of accounting for U.S. MIAs) for the U.S. to deal with the Lao resistance forces or attempt to continue to secure a full accounting from the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (LPDR).”

  The assessment was also to consider the possibility of penetration by Lao or Vietnamese hostile intelligence services or even allied resistance groups such as those under former South Vietnamese Army Colonel Vo Dai Ton. DIA favored two major resistance group
s: the Hmong in northern Laos and the Lao People’s United National Liberation Front headed by Phoumi Nosovan.

  The Agency Report went on to say: “League employees and the Joint Casualty Resolution Center (JCRC) were not the only persons searching for POW/MIA information from Laos and Thailand. Early in August 1981, staff members of Soldier of Fortune magazine contacted the Joint Casualty Resolution Center (JCRC) coincidental with SOF’s own effort to establish Camp Liberty, a base for Chinese-trained Hmong resistance forces in northern Laos. During this period, SOFhad contacts from time-to-time with the various private Americans operating in Thailand and col-lecting POW/MIA information. SOF also learned quickly that a major POW/MIA information peddler, Phoumi Nosovan, operated from the area of Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, and that he was notoriously unreliable and someone to avoid.”

  We were happy to be of service to the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and flattered that they found SOF’s findings useful. But I still think they might have ponied up some funding of their own for the project rather than having it come from my own pocket.

  KMT WANTS TO GET ON BOARD

  Meanwhile, back in Thailand during the weeks that followed, various Lao tribal leaders, many of whom had been at odds before, held one conference after the other. Zabitosky eventually cemented together a tight coalition of tribes including the Hmong, Lao, LaoTseung and Yao.

  As our band of tattered musketeers continued to beef up defenses and living quarters up at Liberty City, disturbing word arrived that several hundred Yao tribesmen from farther north wanted to hook up with us for a share of rice and beans and a crack at the North Vietnamese.

  Then came news of a force of some 340 Kuomintang, which was offering back-up support for our thrust into Laos. The KMT commander was chomping at the bit to engage with the Vietnamese just across the Mekong. He promised that his guys would back us, guns ablazing, should we stumble into deep shit and need to beat feet toward the nearest friendlies.

  TR, a Special Forces medic in Nam, had figured that a late-night medical house call to aid one of the KMT commander’s ailing NCOs needed to be rewarded. So payback was the promise of hundreds of armed allies just in case our activities would trigger a very large war!

  I was, at the time of this most gracious but potentially costly-to-SOF offer, jetting back to the U.S. from a Chilean cesspool called Tierra del Fuego. TR knew he better squelch the offers of troops that would surely trigger an all-out war. All of this, undoubtedly on Uncle Bob’s nickel, meant that within 96 hours I’d be filling out their pink slips.

  They did some fast-talking and by the time I touched down at Don Muong International Airport three days later, the offer had been graciously refused.

  All this time we had heard not a word from the engineer “Ko” to whom you will recall I had given $500 for his efforts to arrange for the local governor to spring POWs, until the conniving little bastard finally slithered back in late August mouthing just four words: “Governor say not interested.” SOF was out another $500, a drop in the bucket in the whole scheme of things, but at the time this spoiled drop made a real splash. Had we been conned from the beginning? No doubt.

  Because we had tens of thousands of dollars invested in Liberty City, we decided to research the feasibility of having the LULF conduct recon patrols of likely POW sites inside Laos.

  Since it looked like we were there for the long run, we all got sick of no-star hotels with big cockroaches. The SOF team located a five-bedroom penthouse apartment on Soi 4S, Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok, that they set up for orchestrating the operations up north and over the border. This led to parties with the locals and dignitaries who were delighted to be invited to the SOF digs which soon became notorious for lavish bashes.

  ENTER THE MISSIONARY’S SON

  A few weeks into the construction of Liberty City, a renowned, highly decorated chopper pilot for the DEA, Robert Moberg, who had served several tours in Nam and as a special adviser in Laos, introduced us to William Young. Moberg had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross and half a dozen other medals. He was ruggedly handsome, the quintessential tough guy, with thick features and piercing eyes through large glasses who had gone native and made his home in Asia, mainly Thailand in between trips to CONUS, China and the Sudan. Over drinks, Moberg had promised to steal us a chopper if we needed one to extract POW’s. He bragged about Young’s extensive background in and around “The Golden Triangle.” Young’s family had been missionaries and he wove tales of hazardous horseback sojourns for God through hell-raising Kuomintang Chinese bastions.

  1949 Burma, where Young was born, was as deadly as 1880 Tombstone. Moberg boasted of Young’s contacts with local hill tribes and raved about his expertise, which would be very valuable to our mission. Zabitosky was reassured that Young’s polygraph exam as well as his CIA agent background checked out positive.

  We set up a meeting with Young in Chang Rai. Since we’d never laid eyes on him, we didn’t know whether to expect a hell and brimstone nerd with thick horn-rimmed glasses or a swashbuckling plant sent our way from “Spook Central.” TR fretted, “Young could be a burnout who’d bang the table as he embellished war stories or bitch about how the world had screwed him around.”

  The tall, handsome, by now portly American in his 50’s, who stood out in stark contrast to the locals, looked more like a professor than a renowned anti-communist fighter. He climbed out of his late-model pickup truck accompanied by his local much-too-young girlfriend, “Lek.” The SOFers inhaled a fair amount of cocktails while the former hard drinking Young, who was on the wagon, abstained.

  As the night wore on and our defenses with it, he started looking more and more like a perfect match for SOF. A master storyteller, he told us of a run-in he’d had with his CIA superior, a well-known backstabber ever eager to bolster his career. Young, flying high as a kite in 1967 during the Vietnam War, paid the SOB a visit and thoroughly kicked his ass. His CIA gig was over. “You’ll never work in this town again,” he was told. Needless to say, he sounded like our type of guy.

  He went freelance after leaving the agency, picking up investigative assignments whenever he scored gigs, which was often, since he built up a smashingly respectable reputation. His low key and very polite manner sucked us all in, except for Zabitosky, who thought that anyone who didn’t take a drink or light up a cigarette had two strikes against them.

  We plotted into the wee hours how to photo recon Muong Sai. With our already wild imaginations enhanced by the booze, we concocted guidelines for future recruitment and training of our Liberty City contingent. Our initial major worry was that the possibility of initiating armed hostilities between Thailand and Laos, which would no doubt drag Vietnam into the fray, was real. It was SOF’s “Super Bowl,” as TR said, and I wanted a tight, disciplined unit without a bunch of Rambos getting creative and slipping across the Mekong to settle personal scores.

  I would make a site recon to Muong Sai, Laos with 30 of our Liberty City troops, TR, Zabitosky, Coyne and Mingo. Some of the team members had repeatedly slogged their way up the eerie, cloud-caped mountains of northern Laos, passing through KMT Chinese strongholds amid late-night thunderstorms—locales where white faces just weren’t seen.

  If we could confirm American POWs in Muong Sai, we assumed, some heavy cash and favors could be called in to finance a snatch op.

  Young was especially intrigued by the pan-tribal coalition Zabitosky had organized, claiming that it would score points for some quid pro quo as the mission progressed.

  The multi-lingual Young, who spoke four dialects (Meo, Lu, Lao and Lahu) like a native (which he was), would act as our interpreter for the Laotian tribesmen. He upped the ante by offering to serve as intermediary between SOF and the powers that be, both Thai and American, down in Bangkok.Little did I know at the time that that his machinations were slowly tightening the noose around my neck. The U.S. Embassy knew good and well that I was in the country and up to some hanky panky in Chiang Rai and parts north. While the Embassy
officials had assured us that all was “no sweat,” they had been non-committal regarding our planned recon.

  I was so impressed with Young, I ordered him put on the SOF payroll. He would be the linchpin to cement the diverse (and oft-times warring) elements of our newly formed Lao “confederation” and dispatch them quickly down the road to Muong Sai.

  Zabitosky, via some secretive sources which we never did identify, had formulated the theory that Muong Sai prison might hold a missing Air America crew downed by hostile fire on 27 Dec ‘71, for which the CIA had offered 2kg of gold per man. Whether Roy Townley, George Ritter, Edward Weissenback and non-Air America pilot Clarence Driver, or four other U.S.-types, were held there remained uncertain. What was crystal clear was the fact that the team faced 30 very rugged days in, and at least 30 out . . . and God knew what in between.

  CHINESE “CHECKERS” AND SHAN NASTIES

  Days later, Young dropped some disturbing news on us: some at the People’s Republic of China Embassy, he said, were salivating over our growing in-place armed force up at Liberty City, and were dancing around the idea of joining hands to do a major number on the mutually despised Vietnamese. Confirmation being impossible, we dismissed it as but the first of Young’s over-dramatizations and he never brought it up again.

  Young continued (he said) to grease the skids with our Embassy. The officials there were cordial enough but we had to remember that Bo Gritz and his coterie, back in March, had made international news for their stupid and incompetent over-the-border incursion into Laos on a POW rescue attempt of their own.

  (When Gritz ran for President on the Populist Party ticket, and conservatives asked why I would not support him, I responded: “Anyone who takes eight people armed with only three semi-automatic Uzis and one . 38 caliber revolver into a hostile situation, in this case communist Laos, is not playing with a full deck.” No one could argue with this and that quickly ended any argument.)