Legend

by Eric Blehm

  Peace protestors marched on college campuses and in Washington to bring the troops home, while the pro-war citizenry demanded that the job be finished. And the North Vietnamese returned to their safe haven in Cambodia to regroup and prepare for the next offensive, punctuating the need to expose, once and for all, the communist base of operations, supply, and sanctuary in Cambodia.

  7

  WELCOME TO DETACHMENT B-56

  WHILE THE TERM SOG was never breathed outside the gates of the unit’s top-secret bases, the effects of its missions became increasingly known—and feared—by the NVA and VC based in Laos and Cambodia: patrols along the Ho Chi Minh Trail were found dead or went missing. These attacks were silent and unpredictable, executed by SOG teams that seemed to materialize from the jungle to wreak havoc, and then just as quickly disappear.

  The records that made their way into the file cabinets at SOG headquarters and the secret archives of the Pentagon documented the one hundred or so missions of the SOG recon teams that launched into the Fishhook area during the last six months of 1967. In November and December the teams—tasked to remain hidden, observe enemy movements, bases, and storage facilities, and to avoid enemy contact unless absolutely necessary—captured two enemy and killed more than one hundred in Cambodia. They mapped more than 150 infiltration routes and trails and just under 100 enemy installations, as well as huge caches of weapons and ammunition along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  Combining psychological operations with ground operations in a project code-named Eldest Son—whose goal it was to create among the NVA and VC distrust of their weapons—the teams began to sneak sabotaged ammunition into the enemy’s storerooms, causing NVA rifles to blow up when fired. They planted thousands of self-destructing mortar rounds that would explode when launched, killing entire mortar teams. Company-size SOG assault missions were assigned to investigate known enemy strongholds and plant anti-personnel mines in and around enemy installations; if discovered, they had the firepower to fight back and, in some cases, overrun communist bases.

  The added benefit of these cross-border missions was the hamstringing of thousands of North Vietnamese troops, who were forced to remain within Laos and Cambodia to defend the Ho Chi Minh Trail against attacks. Postwar records show that more than fifty thousand NVA and VC troops stayed off the South Vietnamese battlefield to focus on fewer than a dozen U.S.-led SOG teams.

  At the same time, these teams were not untouchable. As they became wise to the Special Forces tactics, the North Vietnamese employed hunter-killer teams whose job it was to watch for the SOG teams. They patrolled the roads and various installations on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and kept a close eye out for potential helicopter landing zones, LZs, that the United States might use for team insertion, especially those LZs near key bases and installations.

  In 1967 and 1968, SOG recon team members were reported to have a nearly 100 percent casualty rate, meaning that if you were on SOG recon, you would eventually be wounded or killed on a mission. Purple Hearts weren’t a ticket home; they were a routine addition to a SOG man’s uniform and so commonplace that most were never even written up. These soldiers held to a strict code: fight to their death protecting one another and their indigenous counterparts. Being captured was not an option.

  That code, and the fact that these teams were being systematically hunted, led to increasing numbers of cross-border teams vanishing in Cambodia and Laos. Some had final radio transmissions marked by gunfire and static before their radios went dead; others seemed to be swallowed by the jungle, with no indication of trouble—nothing but radio silence. Were they victims of hunter-killer teams of equal stealth and tactics? Had double agents within their indigenous ranks turned on them? By the war’s end, over fifty SOG operators would go missing in action, including ten entire teams. Not a single one of these men was ever reported as a prisoner of war.

  —

  COMMUNICATIONS EXPERTS, or commo men like Brian O’Connor, were the lifelines for these teams. His first few weeks at Ho Ngoc Tao, O’Connor had remained mostly inside the wire at the base, but he quickly found that being a good commo man with Project Sigma was much like being a trusted barber in a small town. He became privy to everybody’s business—from the recon team leaders to the officers, agents, and politicians in Saigon and Washington—and the short radio bursts of information were like strokes of a brush, gradually painting a picture of what exactly was going on in his corner of the war.

  Besides playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek with the enemy—and harassing him and killing him in his own backyard—these SOG teams were bringing some clarity to an enemy that had for years been invisible. Recon was exciting, albeit dangerous, and all of it intrigued O’Connor. He was respectful of the danger, but he also sensed he would perform just fine under pressure. The only way to find out for sure was to get out in the field, either as a remote relay for a team, or as the radioman on a reaction force or recon team. Less than a month into his tour, he got his chance. A team was being inserted into a known enemy area west of Nui Ba Ra (“White Virgin Mountain”)—the southern “sister” mountain to Nui Ba Den (“Black Virgin Mountain”) in Phuoc Long Province—and he would be their radio relay to the nearby Special Forces camp at Song Be and to headquarters at Ho Ngoc Tao.

  Shortly before Thanksgiving 1967, O’Connor was flown from the Special Forces camp at Song Be with six CIDG soldiers to the top of Nui Ba Ra. Mountaintop positions in Vietnam were predominantly “owned” by American forces, while the bottom and middle of the mountains were “owned” by Charlie. About fifty to seventy-five yards across and somewhat square, the crest of Nui Ba Ra was surrounded by a four-foot-wide, earth-filled bamboo wall topped by barbed wire built near the edge of the cliffs that sloped down steeply into the jungle tree line twenty to thirty yards below. Within the spartan perimeter were a helicopter pad, a few bamboo hooches, and some trench lines and fighting positions. Set along the outside of the barbed wire, the perimeter defenses included an early warning system of trip flares/pop flares and anti-personnel weaponry such as grenades, Claymore mines, and Bouncing Betty mines, which popped out of the ground when stepped on and exploded in the air, inflicting maximum damage at waist or head height.

  This station was where O’Connor was to be relay to the recon team of six men camouflaged on the floor of the jungle no more than five miles away in a remain overnight position—most likely only yards from an enemy base or trail, and with no fortified walls or defenses beyond their own stealth and the firepower they carried. During the day, such teams were monitored by forward air controllers (FACs), who flew small prop planes at higher altitudes and maintained line-of-sight radio contact. But at night, the FACs were replaced by radio relays who represented, in an emergency, help or deliverance just a call away.

  The few men making up a small radar unit on the mountaintop left shortly after O’Connor was dropped off, leaving him and the six CIDG to defend this critical high ground. At first everything ran smoothly. They set up the commo gear and made contact with the team and the headquarters—and would continue to do so every three hours. The panoramic views were “splendid,” says O’Connor, “and it all seemed so peaceful.” Then the sun went down.

  Trouble began with shouts from below, the VC taunting the men with obscenities in English, followed by scattered gunfire and total darkness. Around 2:00 a.m., a trip flare went off below one wall, alerting them to an approaching enemy. Not long after, another. Each time, O’Connor and the CIDG systematically handled the situation by activating Claymore mines, tossing grenades over the wall, firing their AK-47s down into the jungle. Screams of pain from the darkness below were the measure of their success.

  For O’Connor, this was his first time under fire. For the CIDG who guided O’Connor on dos and don’ts (do spread out the team’s ammo and grenades, stockpiling half on the crest for everyone’s easy access and the other half at a few locations near the perimeter walls; don’t keep it all in one
place), it was not. The CIDG were battle-hardened soldiers, whose ethnicity O’Connor was not certain of. They were South Vietnamese (not Montagnards or Nungs), but his eighteen- or nineteen-year-old Vietnamese interpreter, Tuan, also seemed to have some Chinese in his facial features.

  Over the next hour, the VC triggered most of the flares and large sections of defenses. “They were probably angry as well as motivated,” says O’Connor. “The flares had worked really well to signal their presence, but now most of them had been used, and it was pitch-black. You could not see three feet in front of you.”

  More shouts came from below, this time very close to the top of the wall, and a barrage of grenades sailed over the barbed wire, invisible in the dark. The men were far enough above that they were able to use flashlights to help them dodge the explosives without giving away their positions; they returned fire by tossing their own grenades back.

  O’Connor called in gunship support, but before it arrived, another hail of grenades wounded two of the CIDG, one severely. A slick quickly medevaced the wounded, and the remaining men repositioned themselves at the center of the perimeter and out of range of the grenade attacks, Tuan acting as the link between O’Connor and the other three CIDG. All took shifts along the perimeter walls, tossing grenades and mines off the side to keep the enemy guessing. At one point the VC attempted to mortar their position, but the rounds sailed overhead and exploded out of range. Through it all, O’Connor was able to keep the vital communication link open with the recon team.

  When the sun began to rise, Charlie faded with the night, and O’Connor returned to Song Be with a deep respect for the CIDG fighting men, and especially Tuan, who had reinforced the reputation he had around Ho Ngoc Tao for being trustworthy and battle savvy. Without the CIDG, O’Connor knew, Nui Ba Ra would have been overrun and he would have likely been killed.

  Likewise, Tuan had seen this new radioman perform well in battle. For the CIDG, the man with the radio was the key to survival. He was the one who would call for the “taxi” ride home at the end of a mission, or when things got too hot to stick around. An American, like O’Connor, who was calm on the radio but also good with a rifle was a desirable teammate.

  —

  OVER THE course of several missions together, Tuan and O’Connor became friends. O’Connor learned that Tuan, who was from Saigon, had attended university for a while and planned to return. He was well-read and a staunch anticommunist, but he also complained about corrupt Saigon politics. Tuan’s appreciation of Vietnam really shone through while talking about the food, the traditions, the culture, and history. “He enjoyed being a ‘tourist’ and a ‘guide’ in his own country,” says O’Connor, “an idealist of sorts—an intellectual who also had courage.”

  Eventually, Tuan invited O’Connor to dinner at a woman’s house in Saigon he introduced as his “sister,” a longtime friend rather than a blood relative. Though her apartment was adorned with photos of the South Vietnam president and a South Vietnamese flag, she and Tuan seemed more interested in O’Connor’s plans and dreams rather than his political bent or military aspirations. He talked about his lifelong love of the arts—inspired by the words and works of Shakespeare—and how he was an artist himself, sculpting, painting, and creating pottery. The military had been a tradition in the O’Connor family dating back to World War I, but for O’Connor it wasn’t a lifelong career; it was a means to an end. He believed in what the United States stood for, its freedoms, the importance of the Constitution. They espoused a way of life he was willing to fight for, and when the war was over, he dreamed of having a life, a family, and a house with a well-stocked bookshelf and a little art studio out back.

  Tuan agreed. Fighting and killing the communists was a temporary situation. The war would end and life would go on.

  —

  THE SECRET war in Cambodia was in full swing, with neither side reporting their losses, because neither was officially supposed to be there. Though isolated and unreported, these battles raged as bloody as any fought within Vietnam. As the years stretched on—not only in the sanctuary regions, but also within South Vietnam—both sides evolved and adapted their military and intelligence tactics to stay one step ahead. The United States and the South Vietnamese would, for example, perform false helicopter insertions with recon teams and combat assaults to throw off the enemy’s ability to ascertain when a team actually hopped off a helicopter. And the NVA and VC set up early warning systems, watching flight paths and anticipating landing zones, sometimes with deadly accuracy and suspicious timing.

  While working a combat assault mission near Dong Tam on March 8, 1968, the 240th “stepped into” one such “trap,” Larry McKibben told his family in an audiotape. “We got in a lot of trouble down there the other day. Got eight helicopters shot down. I was one of them. We only had two pilots killed, and the rest of us were pretty lucky. We went into this LZ, and they were waiting for us with fifty-calibers and all kinds of stuff. Ran into an NVA battalion, landed right in the middle of a trap. I don’t know where they got word that we were coming in there, but they knew it. Got hit on approach, got hit on short final—they really opened up on us.”

  McKibben was able to get his helicopter, Greyhound One, back in the air but was forced to land a couple of hundred yards away for a quick engine check. As his crew chief, Specialist 5 Paul “Frenchy” LaChance, jumped out and gave the aircraft a once-over, a distress call went out over the radio: one of their Mad Dog gunships was going down near the LZ. LaChance jumped back in, McKibben pulled pitch, and moments later was over the gunship, which was in flames on a dike surrounded by rice paddies. Running around the helicopter was a man on fire.

  Greyhound One started taking hits as it came in, landing fifty yards from the burning aircraft, and LaChance called over the intercom, “I’ll go get him.” He left the slick and sprinted along the dike, bullets kicking up all around him from machine-gun emplacements concealed in the jungle to his left, at the far side of the water-filled rice paddy. Another Mad Dog swooped down and launched rockets over his head toward the machine guns, then hovered, its side door gunner providing cover while LaChance reached the burning man, whose screams he heard even over the roar of the guns and helicopters. He tackled the man and lay on top of him, pressing his body into the earth to extinguish the flames. He could feel the heat as he picked the man up and ran back with him over his shoulder, unaware that the jet fuel had caught his own pants on fire.

  Greyhound One was hovering close by. The second LaChance threw the injured man in back and dove on board, McKibben raced forward over the wreckage—the bodies of both pilots were in their seats and engulfed by flames; the missing fourth crewman had presumably perished as well. As the door gunner blasted LaChance’s legs with a fire extinguisher and covered the burned crewman, LaChance couldn’t stop staring at the man’s name tag: “Warr.”

  “When we got off the ground,” McKibben narrated on the tape, “they got us again. This darn old Huey is unbelievable; it kept flying, took a fifty-caliber right in the engine. Dad, you know what a fifty-caliber does to things. God must have kept those blades spinning, I’m not kidding, ’cause I took a hit right in the damn motor. Went right through that thing, cut my fuel control. All my gauges went, my instruments were shot out, and I figured I better keep on going and see if I could make it to Dong Tam, which was about fifteen miles away. It started losing altitude—I lost my power and went down. I was lucky, though, made it to a little ARVN Special Forces compound, shot toward that, and made it just outside a couple hundred meters. Another ship came in and pulled out that crew chief and my crew chief, Frenchy, who got fuel all over him and got burned, too. Our ship was shot up pretty good though. I don’t know when I’ll get it back. I just hope I don’t have to go through that again. I’m telling you, it scared me to death.”

  —

  MCKIBBEN RETURNED to Bearcat the following day and learned that the two men killed in that fiery cra
sh were his good friend Warrant Officer Guy Eisenhart, who had come with him from the 162nd to the 240th, and the aircraft commander, Captain Charles Jilcott Jr. Specialist 5 James Warr died in the burn unit of a hospital in Japan three days later.

  Then there was the missing door gunner. “We never saw him,” McKibben continued in his recording. “We thought he burned up in the crash, but he was thrown clear from the aircraft as it was going down. Broke his pelvis. Charlie was all around him, and he couldn’t get up or Charlie would have shot him, so he just crawled into the water and stayed under some straw all night. Infantry found him the next morning, took him to the hospital, and he’ll be okay. I felt real bad, didn’t know he was down there. I could have picked him up.”

  After a few days, McKibben’s trusted Huey came back from maintenance. It had taken a hit to the tail rotor, and McKibben asked to keep the rotor blade for a souvenir, which he leaned up in the corner of his hooch, bullet hole prominently displayed. A week later, LaChance returned from Long Binh; his eyebrows, eyelashes, and arm and chest hair had been burned off, and his legs—from his boot tops to his knees—were covered in third-degree burns. He had snuck out of the hospital with an armload of bandages and ointment so he could rejoin his buddies.

  McKibben finished his recording to his family with “I’ve been getting a little homesick lately. I’ve been thinking a lot about all the places I’d like to see again, that I’ll be seeing again pretty soon. I guess I’m growing impatient in my old age—twenty years old now. No teenager no more. Oh well, I guess it’s kind of hard growing up. I know when I was younger, I always wanted to grow older, but now that I’m starting to grow older, I kind of wish I was younger again. People expect a lot more out of an older person than they do out of a kid.”