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

by Orr Kelly

  “I said, ‘General, I only know how to put on but one kind of show.’ I told my aides, ‘It may get us fired, but let’s put on a real show!’ And we did.

  “Another time, the general calls me in and says, ‘I want you to find out how we can get Terry transferred to the special operations command.’

  “I said, ‘You mean Captain Terry up at Wright-Pat [the Air Force test center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio]? Why?’

  “He said, ‘We want to get that son of a bitch under our thumb.’ They didn’t want the gunship. They were going to kill it. Wright-Pat was developing this thing. I told them, ‘They’re after Terry. Don’t let them get him.’”

  Terry himself seemed almost to thrive on the opposition. When his foes cut off funds, he used his own personal credit card to keep things moving. When other Air Force projects were encumbered by layers of bureaucracy and routinely coming in behind schedule and millions of dollars over the original cost estimates, Terry and his team did things faster than expected, under their cost estimates. And when a new system was ready to go to war, Terry himself flew the early combat missions to make sure the system was working right and to train air commando crews in its use.

  Some of the criticism of the gunship, especially in the AC-47 version, was not only justified but acknowledged by Terry and its other supporters.

  One disadvantage was that the C-47 is a low-wing monoplane. The position of the wing makes it hard for the pilot to see his target.

  Another valid criticism was that the plane flies at only about 180 miles an hour, hundreds of miles an hour slower than jet fighters. For a sophisticated radar-directed antiaircraft gun, it is, if not quite a sitting duck, at least a very slow-flying one. Terry and the other developers of the concept knew this and tailored the plane for a mission in which it would not operate in areas where deadly AAA guns or even rockets were deployed.

  This vulnerability was tragically demonstrated in early 1966, when gunships were assigned to attack trucks moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos into South Vietnam.

  In the first half of 1966, the 4th Air Commando Squadron lost four planes. The loss rate, projected over a full year, would have been an 80 percent loss of planes and a 61.5 percent loss of personnel. To make matters worse, two more gunships had been lost in the last two months of 1965.

  “The mountainous and totally dark trail, usually covered by bad weather and mobile 37- and 57mm AAA guns, was a pretty hostile environment for an old, slow gooney bird,” Riley recalls. “We were able to destroy a lot of trucks, but we lost four aircraft and over thirty aircrew members in a short time. These men are all listed KIA/MIA and are unaccounted for to this day.…

  “Shortly after this period, when we lost nearly a third of the squadron, we were reassigned to the in-country war, where we belonged. We did lots of good work, and during the first eight months in-country, the 4th Air Commando Squadron crews flew fifteen hundred combat hours, logged 3,463 combat missions, fired 7 million rounds from its 7.62mm miniguns, successfully defended 450 forts and outposts, and accounted for over four thousand enemy personnel killed in action.”

  The return to Vietnam did not mean the gunships were immune from enemy fire. On the night of 24 February 1969, an AC-47 of the 3rd Air Commando Squadron was firing in support of ground troops near Long Binh when the plane’s right wing was hit by what was later determined to be a shell from an enemy 82mm mortar. Although probably just a chance hit by a shell intended for the defenders, the lucky hit created chaos inside the plane.

  When the shell hit, one crew member had his finger through the safety pin ring and was preparing to drop a 2-million-candle-power magnesium flare. He dropped the armed flare on the floor of the plane. It was set to go off in twenty seconds, burning at four thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

  Airman First Class John L. Levitow, although severely injured by shrapnel from the mortar, picked up the flare, crawled to the open cargo hatch, and pushed the flare out just before it ignited.

  Levitow won the Medal of Honor for his heroism. He was one of five air commandos to win the nation’s highest award in Vietnam and the only enlisted member of the Air Force to be so honored.

  At various times during the Vietnam conflict, the AC-47 carried three different sizes of guns. When not enough of the new miniguns were available, Terry found a batch of World War II-era .30-caliber machine guns that were about to be destroyed and arranged to have them installed in the gunships. Later, heavier .50-caliber machine guns were used. For some types of targets, the AC-47 was short of the needed firepower. And the basic plane was relatively small, limiting the weight of guns and ammunition it could carry. Almost as soon as the concept was proved in combat, attention focused on developing a bigger gunship with more powerful guns and with armament to protect the crew.

  The obvious choice was the Lockheed C-130, a four-engine cargo plane that, by the time of the Vietnam War, had taken over the basic workhorse role filled by the C-47 in World War II and Korea.

  Work on the new gunship coincided with an all-out push by the Pentagon to overcome one of the most serious problems United States forces had encountered in Vietnam: the enemy traveled and often fought at night, taking advantage of the darkness to move in and launch attacks. The original gunships also operated at night, but they couldn’t bring their guns to play until the enemy had committed himself to an attack—and by that time, the defenders were already in serious trouble. One of the most important hoped-for attributes of a new gunship was the ability to see the enemy moving in the dark and hit him while he was getting ready to attack, not after he was already climbing the ramparts.

  A partial answer to this problem was the appearance in Vietnam on 21 September 1967 of the first AC-130A gunship, a prototype of the plane that was later to become one of the most valued weapons in the Air Force special operations inventory.

  The Gunship II, as it was called, was a dramatic advance over the original AC-47. It carried four 7.62mm miniguns plus four 20mm cannons capable of firing at the rate of twenty-five hundred high-explosive incendiary shells a minute. Probably even more important were the advanced sensors: a starlight scope, a kind of telescope that enhanced the faint light from the stars so the crew could see in the dark; a forward-looking infrared system, and a side-looking radar. The infrared system made it possible to detect the heat of a truck even after the driver had parked and turned off his engine.

  Once the target had been spotted, it could be lit up by two twenty-kilowatt xenon lamps. They were not only capable of giving off visible light but could also radiate infrared or ultraviolet light, making it possible to illuminate the target with a light the enemy could not see.

  The sensors were all linked up to an automatic fire-control system that permitted the pilot to fire accurately without ever seeing the target with his eyes.

  With its more powerful engines, the plane was also able to operate at altitudes of six to ten thousand feet—two or three times as high as the AC-47—providing greater protection from antiaircraft fire.

  Despite the success of the earlier gunships in Vietnam and the urgent need for the ability to fight in the dark, the Gunship II project got something less than enthusiastic support from the brass. The plane assigned for the tests had already been in three major accidents. Its serial number was 54–1626. The crews called her “sick-two-six.”

  For the tests at Eglin and the introduction into combat, half the crew was made up of scientists, such as Lt. Col. James R. Krause, a master navigator and one of the Air Force’s leading infrared experts, and gunship pioneers such as Terry.

  Considering the amount of brand-new equipment carried by the plane, the time taken for its development and testing was amazingly brief. Modification of “sick-two-six” began on 1 April 1967, tests at Eglin began on 6 June, and the plane arrived in Vietnam ready for its introduction to combat on 21 September.

  Even in its early, prototype version, the AC-130 seemed in many ways the ideal gunship, useful n
ot only for defending outposts under attack but also for finding and destroying trucks moving down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  But, at least partially because there were not enough C-130s in the Air Force inventory to serve as gunships and also to fill the plane’s basic role as a carrier of troops and cargo, the decision was made to develop another plane—the older twin-engine C-119 Flying Boxcar—as an interim gunship.

  The AC-119 was no match for the AC-130 and, some critics complained, was not even as good as the AC-47. Its major disadvantage was that it was seriously underpowered for carrying the gunship’s heavy load of ammunition. If an engine failed on takeoff, it had a climb rate of only one hundred feet a minute. As one bemused pilot noted, a minute is a long time when there are tall trees at the end of the runway. Critics called it a “flying anachronism.”

  Perhaps reflecting the critical attitude toward the AC-119, it was originally given the call sign Creep. Furious crew members complained, and the designation was changed to Shadow and, later, to Stinger.

  The AC-119G Shadow was first operational in December 1968. The AC-119K Stinger, which came into service about a year later, was a considerable improvement. To boost its takeoff power and the weight it could carry, it had two extra J-85 jet engines, which burned the same aviation gas as the plane’s two conventional engines. This raised the gross takeoff weight from the Shadow’s 64,000 pounds to 80,400 pounds for the Stinger. The Stinger was also more heavily armed, carrying two 20mm cannons along with four 7.62mm miniguns.

  The miniguns were used against personnel from about thirty-five hundred feet, duplicating the attack pattern of the AC-47. But the Shadow also moved up to seventy-eight hundred feet to attack vehicles with its 20mm cannons.

  Fortunately, the introduction of the Shadow and Stinger did not stop work on improvements to the AC-130.

  In the winter of 1969–70, a new version of the AC-130 gunship arrived. It was called Surprise Package. The surprise was the addition of a 40mm Bofors gun—originally a Navy antiaircraft weapon—capable of firing up to 120 rounds a minute. By this time, much of the Air Force’s attention was focused on stopping truck traffic from North Vietnam into the south through Laos. With its heavier guns, the new gunship was a much more capable truck killer than the earlier planes with their smaller-caliber guns. During the winter of its arrival, the new plane was credited with knocking out 822 trucks, or 7.5 trucks per sortie.

  To make the guns even more deadly, the 40mm shells were made with misch-metal liners. The liners work something like the flint in a cigarette lighter, causing sparks. If a truck was not destroyed by the shell, the sparks caused a fire that completed the job.

  When the new shells arrived late in 1970, however, the results were disappointing. Terry hurried to the scene and flew several missions to show the crews how to use the new shell effectively. During November, gunship crews attacked 202 trucks but destroyed or damaged only 37 of them. In the first three weeks of December, Terry and his team attacked 532 trucks and destroyed or damaged 361 of them.

  The gunship equipped with the 40mm gun was a major development, but the real surprise package arrived in February of 1971. It was the AC-130E. The program was given the code name Pave Aegis, and the plane was called Spectre—the same designation used by today’s gunships.

  One of the two 40mm guns was replaced with a 105mm howitzer. A proficient crew can pump out eight rounds a minute, until fatigue takes over. A steady three-rounds-a-minute firing rate can be sustained until the plane runs out of shells. Armament then consisted of one 105mm howitzer, one 40mm gun, and two 20mm guns. The plane also had a more advanced fire-control system, a digital computer, and more fuel capacity.

  The shells for the new 105mm gun were thirty-one inches long and weighed forty-two pounds apiece. Most important, they were packed with 5.6 pounds of high explosive, compared with only slightly more than half a pound in a 40mm shell. One disadvantage was that the casing of each shell had to be crimped by hand. Otherwise, when the shell was loaded into the gun, which was pointing down toward the ground rather than up in the air like a normal artillery piece, the projectile slipped loose and fell out of the barrel. It took fifteen man hours to crimp a hundred shells, and that was a nuisance, but the effort was a small price to pay for the added firepower of the new gun.

  At first, infantrymen and even forward air controllers did not understand the new firepower they had at their command. On several occasions, Spectre crews were put in a holding pattern while jet fighter-bombers were brought in. But the attitude of troops on the ground quickly changed. Once they saw what the big cannon could do, whenever they heard a gunship approaching, they demanded: “Do you have the Big Gun?”

  One ground commander was heard to radio: “Okay, all you other guys move off. Big Bertha is here!”

  During the enemy’s Easter offensive in the spring of 1972, only a single AC-130 had been fitted with the big new gun, but it quickly earned a reputation as a deadly tank killer. It was also incredibly accurate. In one test, half the rounds fired from a ten-thousand-foot altitude landed within twenty-five feet of the target.

  During a fierce battle at An Loc in the spring of 1972, Spectre crews were given hand-drawn maps of the town. Troops on the ground then gave them instructions like this: “Go north along Main Street for three blocks, turn east, and hit the second house from the corner.”

  In that same battle, one ground commander adjusted the fire of the Spectre in twenty-five-meter increments, putting the bullets right where he needed them.

  By the time the new gunship with its “Big Bertha” arrived in Southeast Asia, the United States involvement in the war was winding down, and the Air Force was focusing more on the future than on developing new weapons to fight in Vietnam. It was at that time that a momentous decision for the future of special operations was made: the Air Force chose to include the gunship in its postwar arsenal.

  While the air commandos were among the first to fight in Vietnam and remained there until the end, they also wrote a long and important chapter in the history of Air Force special operations in a largely secret war over the mountains in Laos.

  PART 5

  Through the Looking Glass

  CHAPTER 17

  The Secret War

  The war over the mountains in Laos was an almost perfect mirror image of the war being waged in Vietnam.

  By geography and climate, Laos could have been created as a stage set for a war of fog and shadows, of secrecy and deception. Like a child’s image of “the other side of the world,” Laos really did look different, like a Chinese water-color, in muted shades of gray and faded pastels.

  Strange pinnacles of rock known as karst soared thousands of feet from valleys of jungle and tiny farms and fields of purple opium poppies. Fog often filled the valleys and drifted past the rocky cliffs. Caves dotted the karst—some big enough to hide large artillery weapons or enough fuel and supplies for an army.

  For the air commando crews, finding their way through clouds that were often filled with rocks was always dangerous and sometimes fatal.

  In the center of the country, near the border with North Vietnam, is a large relatively flat area covered with what look like large jars left by some ancient people. It is known by its name in French, the Plaine des Jarres—the “Plain of Jars.” The American pilots called it the PDJ, for the French initials.

  The contrast with the war in Vietnam, especially after 1965, when Americanization began in earnest, was startling.

  In Vietnam, the war was public, vividly portrayed on nightly television. The other war was a carefully guarded secret. Even when the broad outlines of what was going on became public, details remained classified. Even today, many documents about that other war are still considered secret.

  In Vietnam, the United States military took over the biggest burden of fighting the war. In Laos, most of the fighting—and dying—was done by a group of mountain people known as the Hmong. They even provided much of their own air support, flying mission
after mission until they died.

  In Laos, the American involvement was masterminded by the civilian ambassador in Vientiane, the capital, and carried on by a strange collection of CIA agents and military men masquerading as soldiers of fortune. For a long time, they succeeded in resisting efforts of the conventional war generals to take over the war, as they had done in Vietnam.

  In another important respect, this war on the other side of the looking glass was different. In Vietnam, the South Vietnamese and their United States ally held the big, valuable targets—the cities and the big military bases—while the enemy flowed through the villages and hamlets, able to pick the time and place for combat. In Laos, the situation was the opposite. The Hmong held the mountaintops, while the North Vietnamese and their Pathet Lao allies were tied to the cities, vulnerable supply depots, and roads, where they were subject to attack.

  Most pertinent, for this narrative, is that the war, especially in Laos, was very much an air commandos’ war, a continuation of the role played by the Farmgate crews in the early days in Vietnam. The commandos flew ancient propeller-driven planes or modified trainers, and they trained the indigenous people to fly and fight the war themselves rather than taking over and fighting it for them. They adopted exotic names for themselves: Butterflies and Ravens were forward air controllers; Nimrods flew the A-26s; Big-mouths broadcast propaganda from the air; and Litterbugs dropped leaflets.

  If Laos had been somewhere other than right in the middle of Indochina, it is doubtful that the United States would have become as involved as it did with the native people, helping them to fight off the neighboring North Vietnamese. But Laos, in addition to being one of the Indochinese “dominoes” waiting to fall to international Communism, was, because of its location, also crucial to the situation in Vietnam. For the North Vietnamese, Laos provided a critical link—the Ho Chi Minh Trail—by which troops and supplies moved from the north into South Vietnam. For the United States, Laos provided sites for radar and communications installations guiding bombers against targets in North Vietnam and bases close to the North Vietnamese border for rescue helicopters to go in after downed aircrews.