According to one of our military contacts, “When a Colonel gets the word directly from an Assistant Secretary of Defense, he damn well better pay attention or he will end up in charge of Quartermaster Sales in the Aleutians.” We had no more problems with Stringham or any of the Mil-Group from that time on. I won’t say it was a case of “Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir,” but damn near.
We were all issued Salvadoran I.D.s or “Get out of jail free cards,” as well as press credentials which allowed us to carry personal weapons on and off military bases and even arrest civilians on the street though we never did. We had our own arms room, supply room, and ate at the officer’s mess at Illapongo airbase. Imagine a bunch of foreigners, no matter what their importance or rank might be, allowed the same privileges and considerations on any U.S. military base. It would never happen.
WE GO ON COUNTER-GUERRILLA OPS
One of our many missions involved accompanying Lieutenant Colonel Jorge Adalberto Cruz, the officer in charge of guerrilla-threatened Morazon Province, and elements of the Morazan and Airborne Battalions that were in the field to observe counter-guerrilla operations. Cruz, who was 5’7” with curly black hair and raven black eyes, was one of the hottest officers in the Salvadoran Army and had received Army military training in Chile. He was among the first graduates of the controversial United States College of the Americas, a military-training school in the Panama Canal Zone that stressed low-intensity, low-level counter-guerrilla warfare tactics which was hated by the left-wing. He also later became one of the hottest faces for SOF readers when he and I posed in-country, decked out in full combat gear, well-armed for a sellout poster that had “Communism Stops Here” slapped below our in-your-face photos.
He was up to speed with, and engaged in most of, the techniques necessary to defeat guerrillas to the extent that his scarce resources allowed. He kept his troops and his officers out of the cuartel and in the bush where the bad guys were. He patrolled aggressively, moving quickly and at night. He took prisoners and supported civic-action projects. The morale of those of his troops observed by SOF appeared to be good.
On our mission with Colonel Cruz, the SOF team included Sheldon Kelly, a hard-charging Irishman journalist with a quick lip and a fast pen, who I was convinced worked for the Agency. We caught a 45-minute hop on a Salvadoran Air Force C-47 that must have made its bones dropping Allied paratroopers over “A Bridge Too Far” during WWII. We were hopping from San Salvador, EI Salvador’s capital city, to San Franciso Gotera, capital of embattled Morazan Department.
We had more than one anxious moment with pucker factors of 8 out of 10 during the white knuckle flight. When we couldn’t get the wheels down on the landing, I was sure I was going to get a belly landing to add to my “why-am-I-doing-this shit” list. Miraculously, we finally rolled to a stop near a 10x10 concrete terminal topped up with a dirty rag standing in for a windsock. This was not uptown, or even downtown.
We happily disembarked after our bumpy, will-we-get-there, flight, and noted two wounded young troopers suffering in silence, lying on their backs on the floor of a truck. Both had bandages on their chests. SOF medics Padgett and Gonzalez jumped to the occasion and as any worth-his-salt combat medic would do, rolled them over and found what they expected—bullet exit holes in their backs that meant sucking chest wounds. They quickly applied airtight compresses both front and back. If both entrance and exit holes had not been covered, the two victims would have bought the farm before they could be flown to the hospital in San Salvador. I fought my impatience after the emergency was over. “Colonel, are we going to see some action?”
He grinned and said, “Si, si, just wait.” That night we joined a company-sized patrol looking for a 1,200-man guerrilla column that was transporting a shipment of small arms and ammo from Nicaragua through western Morazan at that time. Cruz briefed us, his excitement contagious.
“My intelligence indicates they plan on attacking Gotera and other points on the road between Gotera and San Miguel. Our objective is to fix the guerrilla column in place by engaging them in a firefight they can’t break away from. Then my two other columns will smash them from the flanks.”
Cruz, later that night, told us, “The guerrilla column is composed of communist units from La Union, San Vicente, San Miguel and Usulutan Departments, as well as local units from Morazon.”
We dozed with half open eyes on alert during that night filled with the sounds of discharges from spooked troops, some friendly artillery fire and blinking lights from the guerrillas, but there was no contact.
Kelly described the long sleepless night. “The only place for us to stay was a bunker outside the wire. We laid there wondering if we were going to get hit. Every time I thought we were all asleep, someone would say, ‘Hear that?’ ‘Hear what?’ Then we’d ready up for an attack, then, finally get back to the cots. It was like this all night. I doubt if any of us slept much.” For unknown reasons, the guerrillas slipped away.
SOF MAKES IMPACT IN EL SALVADOR
From 1982 on, SOF had teams down in El Salvador nearly year round. For instance, on one of our early trips, SOF provided several thousand dollars of parachute-related supplies, equipment and spare parts, which allowed John Early, a Special Forces Nam vet and Captain in the Rhodesian Airborne, to square away the Airborne riggers’ loft. He provided training for riggers and taught a bloc instruction on rigging equipment for dropping by air. By the time of our departure, 480 complete parachute rigs were ready to go.
Jack Thompson, a husky, 6’2” former Marine Vietnam vet with thinning blonde hair and blue eyes, was one of the world’s most competent small arms/sniper instructors, with kills on several continents. He had also been a Selous Scout Sergeant Major in Rhodesia. He conducted a series of three-day classes for FAS door-gunners. He taught basic sniper techniques for the FAS Airbase Defense Battalion and advanced sniper training for the Atlacatl Battlion. The door-gunner training resulted in significant improvement in engaging targets. His previous sniper class had killed 17 guerrillas between April and August.
Weapons guru Peter Kokalis, known as “Mr. Machine Gun,” who was down there 30 times, completely overhauled the weapons inventory of the Atlacatl Battalion. He and Early conducted a three-day ambush and counter-ambush training program for selected junior officers and NCOs of the unit.
Gonzalez and Padgett, our medics who saved the lives of the two troopers at Gotera, conducted Medcaps that treated several hundred civilians, and held classes on field-health and sanitation for Salvadoran troops and civilians. They also trained FAS helicopter door-gunners in basic life-saving procedures and held classes for enlisted medics of the Atlacatl Battalion and the FAS.
At the time Congress, worried about another Vietnam, had authorized only 55 advisors at one time in El Salvador. As one SOFer, straight shooting, no bullshit Harry Claflin, who I sent down in 1984 and who stayed in El Salvador for most of the duration of the decade-long war, said during the thick of the chaos: “There was nothing the paltry group of 55 U.S. military trainers in El Salvador could do about it but bitch and get on with the task despite the frustrations of having their hands tied by political considerations. Making waves might swamp the leaky boat in which the soldiers float through their assignment in Central America.” When Harry and SOF parted ways, he worked for the El Salvador government until the war was over and “it wasn’t fun anymore.”
The bottom line was that with the 55 advisor limit that the U.S. had imposed, boots-on-the-ground training and maintenance were sadly neglected, and that’s where the private sector (us) provided back-up.
SOF MAKES A SPLASH WITH THE GOE TEAMS
I first met Harry at an SOF convention in Las Vegas in 1984. I asked him, “Harry, you game to go to El Salvador to fight the commies?”
“I would like nothing more than to finish the job that never got done in Vietnam,” he responded bitterly, remembering how we were sold out in Nam by the limp dicks in Washington.
Harry was a Marine R
econ vet. He was tall, lean, scraggy, and just plain mean. He served two tours in Vietnam as a member of the 1st Force Reconnaissance Company. After leaving the Marines, he worked overseas as a private contractor for four years as a weapons consultant for the Agency for International Development (AID). He then hired on with the U.S. State Department as a security consultant, providing security protection for government VIPs traveling abroad. At that time, Harry owned and operated Starlight Training Center in Liberal, Missouri, which offered courses in outdoor survival, ranger-type operations and parachute ops. His expertise was a perfect match with El Salvador’s ill-equipped Air Force and Army who needed all the help they could get.
“The paratroopers were El Salvador’s primary special operations, quick reaction force, and a natural attraction for SOF trainers, most of whom have similar military backgrounds,” Harry discovered.
Harry was in El Salvador for two weeks the first time and stayed for a few months the second time when, in November and December, he returned to Ilopango air base as an SOF-sponsored advisor. After he got back the second time, I called him.
“You want to go back? How long can you stay?” No sense being subtle.
“How much?” Harry asked, just as delicately.
“$1,000 a month” I told him.
“Hell,” Harry recalled. “It didn’t take much to live in El Salvador and I decided to give it a try. I had been all over the world, in Vietnam, in India and other parts of Asia, in Europe, and it was time to try something new.”
El Salvador might consider using civilians with extensive military backgrounds to work as advisors without political restrictions, I decided, disgusted with Congress’ spineless restrictions on sending U.S. trainers to fight the communist insurgency in our backyard. SOF volunteer training teams had already completed several missions to help El Salvador’s Army and Air Force, from 1982 to 1984. That training included marksmanship, sniping, patrolling, small unit tactics, ambushes, demolitions, booby-traps, long-range land navigation, communications, insertion and extraction techniques and a host of other skills necessary for combat operations in the mountainous, volcanic countryside.
I heard through the old boy’s network that the 4th Brigade Commander, Col. Sigifredo Ochoa, would like to have some assistance from SOF to organize and train a small, elite special operations unit. Harry was assigned as the 4th Brigade’s Spec Ops advisor in 1984, and was hired by El Salvador’s military a couple years later.
“Everything was in a shambles when I got down there,” Harry said. “I had to help them with the military’s defunct communication equipment, then get their shabby uniforms cleaned up. From the time I went back, that’s what I did: commo, clean uniforms, then equipment then jumping once a week.”
LITTLE PARADISE, A LATIN DIEN BIEN PHU
“It was now 1985 and I was sent up to El Parisio [the Paradise]. Believe me it was anything but paradise, it was a little Latin Dien Bien Phu. It had been overrun three weeks before I got up there,” Harry said.
“A young SF captain, Ed Phillips, who had no idea why we were there, was in charge. I was with Rene Cardenas, who was a retired SF medic living in El Salvador. SOF paid Cardenas to be a translator. We went up and told Phillips what we were doing. He said we would have to get permission; he didn’t want to have anything to do with this.
“Col. Ochoa was commander of the 4th Brigade. Phillips called him and I laid down the plan—we were to train a unit as a direct action team, which means you train them to go out and find guerrillas and shoot them. He then calls Col. Steele, commander of the MilGroup who said ‘Yes, Claflin has the blessing of MilGroup, and give him all assistance.’ I was good to go, and that started my relationship with the OPACs.”
“My first assignment after I got back to El Salvador for the second time in 1984 started out real promising. Col. Ochoa, a seasoned officer, had studied with Israeli advisers in El Salvador, and later gone to Israel for training in the mid-1970s and later studied for over a year in the United States. He asked me to train teams of Special Forces for each brigade,” Harry recalled.
“I ran into Israelis all the time, who were still involved in training Mossad-type operatives, but they were limited in their numbers. The paltry group of 55 U.S. Special Forces military trainers could not accompany the El Salvador Army on combat ops. A lot of them were a hell of a lot more skilled than I was, but they were not allowed to do what I was doing. Even so, the Special Forces team was busy nation-building. They had to build an army down there. They did a wonderful job. Without these 55 advisers it wouldn’t have happened. They were responsible for changing the war and bringing it to the end. They couldn’t train much below the brigade level, so the platoon and squad levels did not have trainers at that time.”
“Col. Steele, the MilGoup commander, made it clear that the group was to give me all assistance. The CIA furnished money and equipment for our training. The CIA and MilGoup were butting heads most of the time, staking out their own claims and homesteading. But the Agency helped. I was going to teach the Salvos how to be inserted behind enemy lines, set up a base of operations, and go about hunting the guerrillas down, and capture or kill them. We organized to hit high-value targets such as guerrilla hideouts,” Harry said.
This was the beginning of the Goupos de Operationes Especiales (GOE) program in El Salvador.
“GOE teams were trained to operate clandestinely for extended periods deep in contested areas. A commander could employ the smaller GOE team without the necessity of committing larger units with their accompanying logistical requirements. A GOE team would be composed of 28 men organized into five groups—one command group and four action teams. The command group would consist of one lieutenant, one sergeant, one radio operator and one medic. Each of the four action teams would consist of a team leader, assistant team leader, a radio operator, a machine gunner, a grenadier and a sniper.”
I asked Harry whether he had trained all of the GOE units.
“I trained four units and I went back to retrain them from time-to-time. In combat, you have attrition, new people come in, people get set in their ways, and you need to recall them back to go over the training to see what they are doing wrong, what they are doing right. Most of it was just hard work. I would go out with them on the first couple operations, then turn them loose. I was in the command and control, picked units and supplied equipment. I didn’t do a lot of shooting. I couldn’t have done it without the U.S. Army Special Forces advisers, the MilGroup, and the Brigade Operational Planning and Assistance Training Team (OPATT). Col. Rankin, the top U.S. Air Force advisor and Salvo Air Force liaison, was concerned that there were no forward air controllers in the Airborne battalion that had the capability of calling in air strikes. I worked out of his office. The MilGroup was overwhelmed, involved in getting brigades organized and operating,” he responded. U.S. helicopter pilots were using helos, smoke grenades, and Zuni rockets to teach them how to call air strikes. The AC-47 gunships came down in 1985.
THE DAY HARRY BECAME FAMOUS, OR INFAMOUS
“After my picture, which was taken by RKB at the Contra base camp where an SOF team was training the Contras, came out on the cover of Newsweek in November 1986, I became a real Pariah,” Harry said.
“I was there a couple weeks in El Salvador, after the earthquake and I go back to Santa Ana to start the next training cycle. I packed my gear up and went back to San Salvador for the weekend after a training session and checked into the Sheraton Hotel. One of the MilGroup said, ‘Hey, Harry, have you seen Newsweek magazine? You’re famous’! I said ‘yea, right,’ and he showed me Newsweek. The Operational Planning and Assistance Training Team (OPATT) guys thought this was too neat. The Ambassador and the MilGroup commander did not think this was neat at all.
“Stan Pickering had replaced Ambassador White. Col. Rankin, the ranking U.S. Air force with the MilGroup, informed me that Southern Air Transport, a CIA proprietary, had a seat for me on a C-130 flying back to McGill Air Force Base. I saw the artic
le Sunday or Monday, and I was back on my way back to the States . They decided that I needed to take a vacation, as the top brass feared that some journalist would recognize me and the next cover of Newsweek would have the heading of American Mercenaries fighting in El Salvador.’ That would compromise the MilGroup since I was involved in the thick of their training. I had to go, at least for a while till things cooled down. I was the only one on the plane other than the crew,” Harry said. Our most important contact in El Salvador was banished.
SALVADORAN TET
It was 1989, and Harry was back and working directly for the Salvadorans. No one seemed to notice that the guerrillas were amassing huge stocks of weaponry, preparing for a final roll of the dice, refusing to give up on overthrowing the ARENA (National Republican Alliance) government that had been elected in an atmosphere of violence the previous March. I asked Harry whether the Salvadorian military had any indication as to how the guerrillas were able to move all the arms positioned in the city before the offensive?
“The guerrillas positioned the arms a little at a time. They had 24 months to bring this stuff in from Nicaragua,” Harry replied. “Most of it came in through the remote areas on the Salvadoran-Honduran border. There was a large cache by the time it was all smuggled in.”
On 11 November 1989, the FMLN launched a surprise offensive against military and civilian targets across the nation, especially in San Salvador, San Miguel and Santa Ana. This was almost a re-make of the famous “Tet” offensive, undertaken by Viet Cong and North Vietnamese forces in South Vietnam, in 1968. The main similarities were the surprise factor and the real shock this large-scale attack caused. The ACIG described the offensive:
“. . . The Ilopango AB was almost overrun during the initial onslaught, the rebels threatening to destroy up to 80 percent of FAS assets. In bitter fighting, the military incurred extensive losses, but the FMLN not only failed to gain its objective, it also sustained a bitter blow from which it would never recover, including 1,773 dead and 1,717 wounded. The FAS suffered one of its most unusual losses during this period of time, when on 18 November an A-37B was hit by a Dragunov rifle round in the cockpit area: the co-pilot was killed, while the pilot ejected safely.”
I Am Soldier of Fortune Page 31
