by Eric Blehm
Years later at a field exercise in Fort Bragg—when O’Connor was deep in his advanced MOS training—this passion for radio and communication became evident to the thirty-year-old E-6 staff sergeant who sat shoulder to shoulder with him for several days in a two-man commo rig. O’Connor was drawn to this older staff sergeant, who had just returned from Vietnam and told of his days on an A-team, when he’d set up the communications at a B-detachment and started running missions that seemed straight from the pages of Robin Moore’s bestselling novel The Green Berets. The sergeant took O’Connor under his wing and taught him a few things about communications in war. “Like a wide-eyed kid listening to an uncle’s tales,” says O’Connor, “I got to hear story after story about B-56 and something called SOG.”
So when the sergeant major at Nha Trang asked him if he knew anybody from B-56, O’Connor gave the name of his E-6 staff sergeant friend.
“You’re sure about B-56?”
“I know what I’m getting into,” O’Connor told him. “I have experience with their commo rigs, and it looks like they’re shorthanded.”
Three days later, on Halloween morning 1967, O’Connor joined eight other Green Berets in an Air Force C-7 Caribou as they leapfrogged from A-camp to A-camp across Vietnam, dropping Special Forces soldiers at some bases, picking them up at others, turning what would have been a two-hour flight into most of the day. Eventually, he transferred to the smaller aircraft that would be needed to get onto the short dirt airstrip adjacent to the American Special Forces camp at Loc Ninh, in Binh Long Province, South Vietnam—a few miles from the Cambodian border.
For the previous two days, entire companies of VC had attempted human-wave attacks against Loc Ninh. Now there was either a break in the battle or it was over, and engineers had bulldozed hundreds of enemy bodies off the runway. O’Connor’s aircraft was cleared to land.
It was O’Connor’s first look at the “real war”: a fast-and-hot landing and almost immediate takeoff, the surrounding jungle filled with smoke, fires, bodies, and the enemy. The Green Berets at Loc Ninh—along with the camp’s three companies of CIDG soldiers, an artillery battery, and air support—had fought off the attack from roughly 3,000 to 3,500 NVA and Vietcong. According to the after-action report, “Approximately 9 NVA battalions were believed to have participated in the Loc Ninh Attack…. These units were: 3 Battalions from 273d Regiment; 1–2 Battalions of 165th Regiment; plus a mortar and anti-aircraft Battalion. Each battalion, except for heavy weapons battalion, is believed to have had approx 300–400.” The enemy retreated back across the Cambodian border, leaving behind 850 of their own confirmed dead. Forty-six Americans and fewer than 100 ARVN were killed.
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EVEN AS U.S. generals looked to the west, knowing full well that this large-scale attack, as well as another against the Special Forces camp at Song Be, had originated from Cambodian soil, Sihanouk continued to staunchly deny any communist military presence within his borders. So confident was he in the communists’ ability to camouflage their movements and bases, he challenged foreign media to prove the communist presence.
Foreign journalists in Cambodia had been closely monitored by Sihanouk’s ministry of information and escorted throughout the country. They had not been free to roam. The ministry of information, however, was overwhelmed in early November 1967, when First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy arrived in Cambodia to fulfill a childhood dream to visit the ruins at Angkor Wat. From the moment she stepped off the plane onto a plush red carpet covered with jasmine blossoms, throngs of reporters and photographers from around the world were there to document her every move.
During her weeklong visit, three American journalists slipped away from the media circus, hired a driver, and headed out of the capital of Phnom Penh, following directions from an American intelligence officer in Saigon who had received the information from one of SOG’s recently authorized cross-border recon teams. After a few hours on roads cut through the jungle, they pulled over at a dirt road barricaded by a bamboo gate just four miles west of South Vietnam, in a border area known as the Fishhook.
The reports of what they found hit the papers the following week and were then summarized in Time magazine’s November 24 issue.
“[T]hree American newsmen—the UPI’s Ray Herndon, the AP’s Horst Faas and George McArthur—took Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk up on his offer to prove, if they could, that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong were using Cambodia as a sanctuary. Armed with specific map coordinates from U.S. intelligence in Saigon, they uncovered a headquarters complex only nine miles from the South Vietnamese town of Loc Ninh, which the Communists unsuccessfully attacked three weeks ago; the complex included a well-stocked dispensary, officers’ quarters, storage facilities and huts for some 500 men. Leading towards the Vietnamese border was a road paved with six-inch-diameter logs for trucks, and truck tracks were everywhere.”
McArthur and Faas reported in their own AP story that “Cambodia’s ruling prince reportedly regards the discovery…as a fabrication and part of a campaign against him by the U.S. press. We found the Vietcong camp, very recently used, on the border opposite War Zone C. It had been used for several months and was most probably a staging area for the Loc Ninh battle.”
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CAMBODIA WAS a “PROBLEM.” So stated in the first line of the Special National Intelligence Estimate Report dossier delivered to President Johnson and his cabinet on December 14, 1967. The top secret report, prepared by the CIA, the intelligence organizations of the Departments of Defense and State, and the National Security Agency (NSA), “estimated the extent and significance of Vietnamese Communist use of Cambodian territory in support of the Communist war effort in South Vietnam.”
According to the report, “During the past year, increasing Allied pressure on the Communists’ military structure in South Vietnam [including combat assaults, search-and-destroy missions, defoliation efforts, and tactical bombing of enemy positions] has caused them to depend more heavily on the use of border areas. They use Cambodian territory as a sanctuary to evade Allied Forces, as a refuge for rest, training, medical care, and…as a route for the infiltration of personnel and military supplies from North Vietnam.”
The report went on to detail specific examples and locations of the communist tactical sanctuary, troop movements, infiltration routes, supply routes, foodstuff, types of ammunition and weapons being stockpiled or moved along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as well as chemical agents, known and mapped base areas, and the identification of specific NVA or VC units. In one instance, during a search-and-destroy mission into War Zone C (a region near the Cambodian border where Vietcong activity was exceptionally strong), “elements of the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) took refuge in adjacent Cambodian territory.” COSVN—the U.S. acronym for the Communist North Vietnamese political and military headquarters—was supposedly located somewhere deep within South Vietnam, but many, including General Westmoreland, believed it to be hidden within Cambodia. Pinpointing the location of COSVN became the American forces’ highest priority.
The report concluded: “If the Communists continue their present strategy, the importance of Cambodia to their war effort will probably grow in 1968, particularly as a sanctuary and as a source of rice. Denial of Cambodian sanctuary would probably not cause the Communist war effort to collapse in the neighboring areas of South Vietnam, but would make it much harder for the Communists to conduct effective military operations in these areas.”
Behind each word, sentence, and succinctly crafted paragraph of this and other classified reports was the gritty, often bloody story of the warriors who risked everything to obtain the intelligence the reports contained. These men in the murky shadows of the secret war didn’t expect recognition. They didn’t expect Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, or President Johnson to consider the source. They were content to debrief after a mission and have a beer. By the time th
ey buried their dead, the three- to four-page after-action reports of their operations were buried as well, the teletyped copies from Saigon to Washington sealed in an underground vault at the Pentagon. The originals—filed alphanumerically, with a single digit preceded by a letter for Laos and two digits preceded by a letter for Cambodia—were stored in vaults marked “top secret” and “BURN” inside the S-2 (Intelligence) bunkers at SOG bases scattered throughout South Vietnam.
The reports archived at Camp Ho Ngoc Tao recorded the missions of Project Sigma, Detachment B-56, the least-documented MACV-SOG “Special Projects” detachment operating “over the fence” in Cambodia—code-named Daniel Boone—during this period of the war. The Sigma/B-56 camp would relocate from Ho Ngoc Tao to Ban Me Thuot, two hundred miles northeast of Saigon, in February of 1969. During the old camp’s breakdown, the vault—a virtual treasure chest of reports and photographs documenting many of the war’s most covert missions—would remain at Ho Ngoc Tao, with a handful of guards and a couple of radiomen. It would sit in the back corner of the communications bunker to await transport to the new base.
Inside that vault, an after-action report dated May 2, 1968, outlined a daring “heavy team”—twelve men, double the standard recon team size—mission into the Fishhook. The mission objective was to capture a high-value target, an NVA officer, off the Ho Chi Minh Trail deep in the Daniel Boone area of operations. But there was another objective—a “capture” of another kind—that never made the ink on any official documents. The detachment commander had conveyed this off-the-books objective verbally and only to the team’s leader and the platoon leader of the assault helicopter company that would fly the mission. These two men then filtered the verbal objective into their ranks on a need-to-know basis.
This proposed “capture” was so audacious and politically valuable that, if successful, it could represent ironclad evidence that there was a North Vietnamese military presence in Cambodia, thus potentially changing the course of the war. It was an objective that would—like one of the players in the impending events—become legend.
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FOUR MONTHS and a week before that mission would launch, far from the hot and humid jungles of Vietnam, the Kingdom of Cambodia, and the politics of Washington, DC, it was Christmas ’67 in El Campo, Texas. Staff Sergeant Benavidez didn’t yet know he would be going back to Vietnam for a second tour. He reveled in the warmth of the house he’d grown up in, surrounded by an extended family that now included his nieces and nephews, breathing in the nostalgic aromas of his Mexican American youth: corn and tamales, turkey and stuffing. Lala, too, soaked in every second of home and family, looking on as Denise was doted on by relative after relative. These were the times that made her realize how much she missed El Campo, and how much she loved—and was proud of—her husband. Just look how far he’d come! Roy, in uniform, was the centerpiece of the celebration.
Grandfather Salvador had recently passed away, and Roy felt his spirit as he sat in the living room and told stories of the Benavidez family. He had worn his uniform not to show off, but because he remembered the message a man in uniform had conveyed to him as a boy, the respect and the dreams the uniformed paratroopers had inspired in him. It had been a gift, and what better time than Christmas to pass that gift on.
The children wanted to hold and wear his green beret, which he allowed. The younger boys asked what the men wanted to know: Had Uncle Roy killed anybody in the war? He told them simply that, yes, he had because he had performed his duty. Then he explained what the green beret stood for, in terms the young might grasp: explained how they fought when they had to, how they helped good people more than they fought bad people. And, Roy told them, there are bad people in the world. He firmly believed the NVA and Vietcong were bad—evil, in fact. The image of the three dead Vietnamese children was bored so deeply in his mind that he still had to shake his head to make the vision go away.
“But let me tell you about your Great-grandfather Salvador when he was a vaquero…” Roy ended the story of the narrow mountain pathway with his grandfather’s words: “If someone needs help, you help them.”
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EIGHTY MILES northeast of El Campo, in a neighborhood of small wood-framed houses in Jacinto City—a post–World War II steel mill town near Houston—Cecil and Maxine McKibben were celebrating the holiday as well, though it wasn’t the same without their son, Larry.
When the “Bob Hope Christmas Special” aired, they, along with their sixteen-year-old daughter, Debbie, were glued to the television set. Warrant Officer Larry McKibben was stationed at one of the Vietnam bases where Hope’s USO troupe had performed, and they thought there was a sliver of a chance they’d catch a glimpse of Larry in the crowd.
When Hope called out “Merry Christmas, men!” the camera panned across the audience, and the men shouted back a resounding “Merry Christmas, Bob!”
“Did you see him? Did you see him?!” Debbie asked her parents, who shook their heads. The crowd had gone by too fast, and there was no pause, rewind, or replay button to hit. In fact, there was barely reception in Jacinto City during the winter storms.
Twenty-year-old Larry had been in Vietnam for six months and ten days of his one-year tour and Debbie was counting every single day: 193 down and 172 to go. She remembered the evening he’d informed them at the dinner table of his plan to join the Army and become a helicopter pilot. He’d barely gotten out the words helicopter pilot before Debbie ran into her room, slammed the door, and started to cry. She associated helicopter pilots with Vietnam, and Vietnam was the place where young men went to die.
Following Debbie to her room, Larry put his arm around her, and as calm and firm as a big brother could be, he smiled, squeezed her tight, and said, “I’m going to go fight communism there so you don’t have to face it here. I’m not afraid—I want to go.”
Larry and his best friend, Frank McAvoy, had it all figured out. They’d become pilots, go and fight for their country as Larry’s father, Cecil, had in World War II, and this would give them the salt—the seasoning—they knew they needed to become men. They’d return from the war, each would find the perfect gal to marry, and they would move their families to Alaska and start a business: McAvoy and McKibben Bush Pilots.
That was the plan: to live a life of adventure, happily ever after.
6
ANATOMY OF A MISSION
FIFTEEN MILES EAST of Saigon, First Lieutenant Alan “Big Al” Yurman, from Kearny, New Jersey, found himself in the audience at Camp Martin Cox, aka Camp Bearcat. He’d scored a coveted seat only a few yards from Bob Hope, who strolled around the stage during his USO show with his signature golf club, cracking jokes for the troops, a sea of Army green that pushed right up to the cameramen and military police surrounding the platform.
Hope and his writers, whose research gave every show a personal touch, had discovered that while the VC were known to harass bases with rockets or mortars during or just after a USO performance, Camp Bearcat had never been attacked. The writers were also aware that a rash of venereal disease had swept through the 9th Infantry Division, prompting the base commander to place local villages off-limits.
“Merry Christmas, men, Merry Christmas,” said Hope. “We’re here with the 9th Infantry Division at Camp Martin Cox. This place has never been attacked. Until today. The Cong would like to attack this place, but they can’t. Everything is off-limits here.” The crowd roared. “The 9th Infantry Division is known as the Old Reliables. Funny, I thought that was mouthwash and penicillin!”
Yurman joined the throngs standing in their seats, snapping photos. He blew through half a role of film when actress Raquel Welch strolled onstage in white knee-high boots and a blue miniskirt, chatted with Hope, and then danced when the band started up. Some soldiers stared in silence with frozen grins, others whistled and hollered. All were able to forget for a brief period of time that they were in Vietnam.
B
ut after Hope had delivered his final punch line, and the crowd had laughed their last laugh, Yurman was still at Bearcat, a new platoon leader at the 240th Assault Helicopter Company (1st Aviation Brigade, 12th Combat Aviation Group, 214th Combat Aviation Battalion), still sweating in the Southeast Asian heat. When he’d arrived in Vietnam a month earlier, a sergeant from the 240th had picked him up at the 90th Replacement Battalion at Long Binh and delivered him to his quarters at Bearcat: a tent with a pallet for a doorstep. “This is a good company you’re joining,” the sergeant told him. “We’ve been here since April and had a lot of missions and no casualties or accidents. A couple of ships got shot up, but nothing of any consequence.” Well, that’s great, thought Yurman.
Aside from its stellar luck, the 240th was structured just like the other assault helicopter companies operating in Vietnam. It consisted of four platoons. Two platoons were made up of five transport Bell UH-1H (Huey) helicopters each, known as “slicks,” one of which directed the insertion slicks during missions and was called the command-and-control (C&C) slick. Sometimes the company commander would act as C&C; other times, platoon leaders like Yurman would. Every slick had an aircraft commander—the primary pilot—in the left front seat and a copilot in the right. A crew chief, in addition to being responsible for maintenance of the helicopter, also manned the door gun behind the aircraft commander on the left side of the aircraft, while a second door gunner manned the machine gun on the right. The four-man crew was often joined by an infantry or Special Forces “bellyman,” whose job on board was to act as a medic, to help with loading during extractions, and in many cases to defend the aircraft with a personal weapon.
