Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  To avoid hitting the defenders, the attack pilots normally flew parallel to the defense line. But, sometimes, they flew over the outpost and dropped their bombs or strafed as they crossed the wall. On occasion the pilots boasted, they dropped napalm so close it splashed on the outpost walls. Actually, they tried to drop their ordnance at least fifty meters away—about the distance of a city block and a half.

  Attacking in the light from the flares was a hellish challenge for the pilots.

  If they flew below the flares, they were silhouetted against the light, a target for every enemy gun in the area. It didn’t take long to change tactics and drop the flares off to the side so they would illuminate the battlefield but not make the planes such glaring targets.

  On a bombing run, pilots were often blinded by the light of the flares and the reflections on their canopies. In the B-26, especially, the instruments were difficult to read. Often, the pilot concentrated on flying, and the navigator used a flashlight to watch the instruments. If he saw that they were getting too low, he gave the pilot a friendly tap on the shoulder.

  As soon as a plane ended a bombing or strafing run, it nosed up out of the bright glare of the flares into the deep blackness of the night. With their pupils contracted by the light of the flares, pilots were almost literally blind as they maneuvered for the next attack. Even the most experienced pilots suffered from severe bouts of vertigo, unsure whether they were going up or down or whether they were right side up or upside down. And all of this was compounded by the difficulty of reading the instruments.

  The Farmgate pilots were a picked crew, the best pilots in the Air Force. But in those early days, they were more like the barnstormers and mail pilots of the 1920s than the jet jockeys of the 1960s.

  For newcomers to Vietnam, even finding one’s way around in the daytime could be a challenge. Frank J. Gorski, Jr., then a captain, recalled his second combat mission as an AT-28 pilot in 1962. He and 1st Lt. Tom Shernak took off from Bien Hoa on a helicopter escort mission. They were then ordered to help out at an outpost under attack deep in the delta.

  “We proceeded south and, shortly, I flew off my map into IV Corps [the southernmost of the four military districts into which the country was divided],” Gorski says. “We pressed on. I casually asked over the radio where we would be recovering. He [Shernak] said, ‘Soc Trang.’ Well, I had no idea where Soc Trang was. We went on down there, and Tom proceeded to get shot down. We had a regular old firefight going there, as I recall. He got hit by ground fire and bellied into a rice paddy. No problem. He got out all right. Nobody got hurt. We lost an airplane.

  “But I remember circling my downed leader, wondering where and what to do next. My initial thought was to head east because I knew there was a coast out there someplace and then head north, which would get me back on my map. But I called rather blindly over the radio and said, ‘Does anyone know where the nearest air patch is?’

  “Some fellow—I didn’t know who he was at the time—I turned my head and I saw him sitting out on my wing in another T-28. A big mustache, commando hat—looked like Terry and the Pirates.…

  “So I said, ‘Well, you look like a friendly old cuss, so I’ll just hang on.’

  “He said, ‘We’re going home to Soc Trang.’

  “So I said, ‘Thanks, I’ll finally find out where this place is.’

  “That was sort of my initiation into early combat in Vietnam.”

  Soc Trang, deep in the delta, soon became a home away from home for Gorski and the other pilots as they alternated between Bien Hoa and Soc Trang. One flight was on alert at Bien Hoa and one at Soc Trang while the other pilots took a day off.

  “There were times when we were covering pretty much of III and IV Corps [roughly, the southern half of South Vietnam] with maybe three or four airplanes, trying to keep all the corners nailed down, which was obviously not quite working. But we did a good job, I think. It was probably the most interesting flying I have done in my career,” Gorski says.

  In July 1963, with the growth of the American involvement in Vietnam highly visible, General LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, decided it was well known Farmgate was an American operation and removed the secret classification. Det 2 became the 1st Air Commando Squadron (Composite) of the 34th Tactical Group, although they continued to use the Farmgate name, at least unofficially.

  The change in Vietnam coincided with a dramatic expansion of the Air Force counterinsurgency force.

  In rapid order, the 4400th Combat Crew Training Squadron was replaced by a new Special Air Warfare Center at Eglin. A new officer specialty in counterinsurgency was established, and the call went out for volunteers. The original 350-man Jungle Jim squadron grew, by July 1963, to 3,000 men.

  By that time, there were sometimes more pilots in Vietnam than there were planes or missions to fly.

  “I think that the main problem with morale over there was that there sometimes wasn’t enough to do in the way of flying—guys sitting around playing pinochle,” recalled Roy H. Lynn, who went to Vietnam as a C-47 flare-ship pilot in the spring of 1963. Someone, however, was always coming up with new jobs for the air commandos.

  In November 1961, they were given an assignment different from anything they had done before. Six C-123 transport planes were quickly modified into spray planes, and in January 1962, three of them arrived in Vietnam. That was the beginning of Project Ranch Hand. For the next decade, crews of air commandos flew their lumbering C-123 cargo planes at low levels over much of South Vietnam, the demilitarized zone, and parts of Laos, spraying chemicals to burn the leaves off the trees and wither food crops in enemy areas.

  The spraying opened up large areas of the jungle-covered countryside, making it much more difficult for Vietcong and North Vietnamese units to move without being seen and attacked.

  Each plane carried a thousand-gallon tank of herbicide—enough to spray a path more than eighty yards wide and as much as ten miles long. Flying in a four-ship formation, the Ranch Hand planes were thus able to defoliate a swath of jungle a fifth of a mile wide and ten miles long in one pass.

  Between January 1961 and its last mission on 7 January 1971, Ranch Hand delivered 18.85 million gallons of herbicide. More than half of that—11.22 million gallons—was a chemical known as Agent Orange, from the color of the markings on the containers in which it was delivered. Although the United States contended that the chemical was not harmful to humans, evidence later developed that it caused health problems for Vietnamese and for American servicemen in the areas where it was sprayed, as well as for crew members of the spray planes.

  At the time, the crew members worried more about the danger from enemy gunners than they did about the material spewing from the spray booms mounted under each wing and the tail. The missions were flown at 130 knots and as low as possible, making the twin-engine planes inviting targets for enemy gunners.

  On 2 February 1962, a C-123 was lost on a training mission, and its three-man crew was killed. Although the plane had probably not been shot down, from then on, the Ranch Hand planes were escorted by air commandos and later by jet fighters. Even with that protection, five more of the planes were lost in Ranch Hand operations. In only two of those instances did the crew members survive.

  The Ranch Hand planes also had an escort of another kind. Air commandos in C-47s flew ahead of them, dropping leaflets to explain the defoliation program to villagers. This was only a small part of the psychological warfare efforts of the special operations crews. On some missions, flying in small U-10 utility planes, the pilots carried powerful loudspeakers that broadcast tape-recorded propaganda messages to the populace. The “bullshit bombers,” as they sometimes called themselves, were probably shot at more than any other planes except for the Ranch Hand spray planes.

  One of the most demanding and dangerous leaflet-delivery missions was performed by a unit of Combat Talon MC-130s stationed at Nah Trang, in South Vietnam, in the late 1960s. The unit was Detachment 1 of the 314th Tactical
Airlift Wing, which later became the 15th Special Operations Squadron.

  Their job was to drop propaganda leaflets over the major population centers of North Vietnam. Ronald Jones, now a retired colonel living in San Antonio, was one of the pilots in the unit whose emblem was, appropriately, a stray goose.

  “It was strictly a single-ship operation,” he explains. “We would file a flight plan for Da Nang. Then, going into Da Nang, we would cancel our instrument flight plan and go tactical.”

  Instead of landing at Da Nang, they would drop down to about five hundred feet off the water and head north. If the wind was blowing from the east, they would climb to altitude over the water offshore from Haiphong and drop their leaflets. The more challenging task came when the wind was blowing from the west.

  “If the wind was out of the west, we would enter about five hundred feet and go inland and climb up, depending on how accurate the charts were. Many maps would just show big white areas: terrain data not available.

  “We were outside the SAM [surface-to-air missile] rings. The thing we were primarily concerned about was fighters. We had a set procedure. If we were picked up by GCI [ground controlled intercept] radar, if we started getting painted by a height finder, we would get the hell out of there. That meant they had you in azimuth and elevation, and they could vector a fighter in on you without his ever having his radar on. We got nervous if we were painted by GCI radar. But if we got hits by a height finder, we were gone.”

  The slow, four-engine planes were unarmed and had no fighter escort. If a fighter came for them, their only chance was to dive for the ground and hope the fighter wouldn’t follow.

  One of the planes disappeared on a mission in 1966, and the assumption was that a fighter had shot it down. Fortunately for the Americans, the North Vietnamese seldom scrambled their fighters in response to a one-plane incursion.

  Although their route was planned to avoid known missile sites, the possibility of being hit by a missile was always on the fliers’ minds. The planes were equipped with electronic countermeasures to detect a SAM launch and prevent the missile from locking on to their plane.

  “We tried never to put ourselves into a position, at high or low altitude, where we would be doing battle with a SAM,” Jones says. “That would be going into a fight unarmed. We were strictly unarmed. We relied on our ECM equipment [electronic countermeasures], and we had people watching. The loadmaster, with the ramp and door open, could see a missile coming. We were always watching.”

  Depending on the strength and direction of the wind, the crew would take up position sixty or seventy miles west of the city targeted for the leaflet drop at an altitude of up to about twenty thousand feet and then fly straight and level during the drop.

  “Our average drop leg was nine to ten minutes,” Jones says. “It was the longest nine minutes in the world. There is nothing more exhilarating than sitting up at twenty thousand feet at 150 knots with your ramp and doors open, looking out at the lights of Hanoi.

  “As soon as you reached your altitude, you kicked out the first bundle and then you had a specific interval, normally about every fifteen seconds, you would kick a bundle. In a ten-minute drop leg, you would have about forty bundles. Then you would immediately go back down to low level and get out.”

  The bundles of leaflets were rigged to pop open after leaving the plane. Tens of thousands of leaflets would spread out in a big paper cloud, to flutter down many miles away.

  The leaflets were cleverly designed to attack both North Vietnam’s morale and its economy. The propaganda message was printed on a tab attached to a skillfully counterfeited piece of North Vietnamese currency. The assumption was that those who found the leaflets might or might not pay any attention to the propaganda message, but they would certainly pocket and spend the money.

  Jones says the money-bombing strategy was so successful that the North Vietnamese demanded, during peace talks in 1969, that the campaign be stopped before an agreement could be reached. The dropping of the currency leaflets stopped about that time.

  On some missions, the planes also dropped tiny radios packed in a little styrofoam case. The radios were preset to the frequency of a station in the south broadcasting propaganda messages.

  The Stray Goose unit flew over the north once or twice a month. When they were not dropping leaflets, they flew a number of missions delivering Special Forces soldiers to enemy-controlled areas in operations reminiscent of the Carpetbagger agent-delivery flights in World War II.

  And some of the flying was, as Jones puts it, “just general trash hauling.”

  Other air commandos were involved in flying C-123s in Project Mule Train, in which they carried troops and an amazing variety of cargo all over South Vietnam. One of their unusual assignments was to deliver fresh meat on the hoof—live cows, pigs, chickens, and ducks—to remote outposts. If they could land, they did. If not, they delivered their live cargo by parachute.

  In one instance, three C-123s teamed up to reposition two 105mm and two 155mm howitzers into a firebase that could not be reached by road. In nine flights, they landed and took off from a narrow steel-mesh airstrip, delivering a total of one hundred thousand pounds of guns, ammunition, and troops.

  In all their combat missions, the air commandos relied heavily on forward air controllers (FACs) of various kinds to guide them to the target. In the early days, many of the FACs were Vietnamese. Often, the aircrews and the FACs had difficulty understanding one another. Even when the plane carried an English-speaking Vietnamese, there was a time delay in relaying information between the ground or airborne controller and the plane. As the American buildup continued, the Farmgate crews were delighted whenever they heard an American voice guiding their attack.

  Airborne forward air controllers were not all air commandos. But a number of air commandos served as FACs, and they were responsible for some of the most impressive chapters in the story of special operations during the Vietnam War.

  On 5 March 1966, two defectors walked into a remote outpost in the A Shau Valley about twenty miles southwest of the city of Hue and only about two and a half miles from the Laotian border. The outpost, manned by 10 American Special Forces soldiers and 210 Vietnamese irregular troops, had been established to monitor enemy forces moving from Laos through the valley into position to attack South Vietnamese cities.

  The defectors reported that a North Vietnamese army division, plus two battalions, was in the area, in a position to overrun the outpost and keep on coming.

  American commanders, eager to draw the enemy into a battle where they could be hammered by United States firepower, reinforced the little compound with seven more Green Berets, 149 Chinese Nung troops, and nine interpreters. They became the bait in the trap.

  At 2 A.M. on 9 March, the enemy struck, destroying the camp’s supply depot and inflicting some casualties. By mid-morning, the post was in danger of being overrun. Low-lying clouds made close air support almost impossible.

  In a desperate effort to hold off the attackers, an AC-47 gunship (see Chapter Sixteen for an account of the development of the gunship) flew, at treetop level, under the clouds that covered the area. On its second firing pass, the plane’s right engine was torn from the wing by machine-gun fire. As Capt. Willard M. Collins and his copilot, 1st Lt. Delbert R. Peterson, fought for control, the other engine was hit, and they crashed into a hillside five miles from the camp, well outside the defense perimeter.

  The six-man crew survived the crash, although one gunner broke both legs. Enemy troops quickly moved in. The crew fought off the first attack, but on the second assault, both Collins and the wounded gunner were killed.

  As a rescue helicopter moved in to pick up the survivors, Peterson, armed only with an M16 rifle and a .38-caliber pistol, charged the enemy. He bought enough time for the chopper to scoop up the other three crew members and take off under heavy enemy fire, but Peterson was left behind, listed as missing in action.

  Overhead, Maj. Bernard F. Fish
er led a flight of two A-1E fighter-bombers from the 1st Air Commando Squadron base at Pleiku. He and his wingman worked their way back and forth, strafing the enemy. They destroyed the wrecked AC-47 and provided protection for two C-123s as they dropped medical supplies and ammunition to the defenders.

  At 2 A.M. the next day, the enemy resumed its assault with a barrage of mortar shells, followed by a human-wave attack that broke through the perimeter wire.

  When Fisher and his wingman returned a little after 11 A.M. that morning, they could see that the enemy held the south wall and half of the east wall of the triangular fort. The defenders were pushed back against the north wall, calling for napalm and strafing attacks on the south and east walls of their own fort.

  Fisher was joined by another two-plane flight of A-1Es from a fighter squadron based at Qui Nhon. It was led by Maj. Dafford W. Myers. The four planes set up a strafing pattern over the enemy positions. But Myers’s wingman was hit almost immediately and had to leave because one of the bullets had shattered his canopy, making it difficult to see.

  Then, on his third pass over the fort at about eight hundred feet, Myers was hit by at least three .50-caliber bullets. The cockpit filled with smoke. Oil on the windscreen blocked his view. With radioed guidance from Fisher, Myers made a wheels-up crash landing on the steel-mesh runway, which was outside the fort perimeter.

  When he hit, his belly tank exploded, and the flaming wreckage skidded two hundred yards before veering off into an embankment. Myers, who was not badly hurt, jumped out of the plane and ran for a weed-covered ditch.

  Fisher’s first thought was to call for a rescue helicopter. But the chopper would take too long to get there and probably had little chance of landing, picking up Myers, and getting away without being shot down. The only way to save Myers from death or capture was for Fisher to land and try to get him out of there.

  Fisher made one attempt to land from the north end of the runway, but there was too much smoke. So he swung around and came in from the other end. The twenty-three-hundred-foot runway was so short and in such poor condition that planes like the one flown by Fisher were not supposed to land there, even under the best of conditions. His landing was under the worst of conditions. As he rolled down the runway, he had to dodge mortar holes, old oilcans, and pieces of Myers’s plane. At the end of the runway, he spun around and taxied back the way he had come at full speed, looking for Myers as he went.