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

by Orr Kelly

  Cavanaugh radioed for backup from Dale Brink, a friend who used the call sign Zorro 50. Brink and Rich Rose showed up in their A-1Es and strafed the enemy positions at Muong Soui as Cavanaugh came in for a landing. He describes what happened next:

  “I got down, and they [the enemy] were firing right at the airplane. Some of them were on the south side of the runway—it was an east-west runway—and some of them were on the north side of the runway, but they were so close to the runway they couldn’t get a good enough angle to shoot me.…”

  Cavanaugh found an old gas pump the Americans had used when they were flying out of Muong Soui. But the nearby gas barrels were empty. He and Moonface ran two thousand feet down the runway to a bunker where they knew gasoline had been stored. Wrenching open the door of the bunker, Cavanaugh found the most precious barrels of fuel he had ever seen. But the gas pump and the plane were at the other end of the runway.

  “Moonface and I took a barrel of gas, and we rolled it uphill two thousand feet at a great rate of speed. It’s amazing when you are scared to death how much strength you get,” Cavanaugh says.

  It was now dark and raining. The enemy soldiers were firing mortar shells at them but kept missing. Dripping with perspiration and rainwater, the two men righted the barrel beside the gas pump and then discovered they had no wrench with which to open the barrel. Desperate, Cavanaugh finally broke the wooden handles off his revolver and used the metal butt to pry open the barrel. Cavanaugh’s account continues:

  “Moonface was standing around saying, ‘No, no, we die. No, no, no, we die.’

  “I said, ‘No, we are not going to die. We are going to make it.’

  “In fact, he was so sure—I am sure he had been told and had seen enough death that he knew that upon death your bowels release, and it’s an automatic flush-out when a person dies. So he went ahead and flushed out ahead of time, and he was carrying a load around in his britches.… He smelled great, but I couldn’t have done it without him.”

  Cavanaugh set Moonface to pumping while he climbed up on the plane to insert the nozzle into the gas tank. Bullets were going just over his head.

  They could fill the tank on only one side because the other had been riddled with bullets. By the time they had enough gas, the wing was drooping noticeably.

  When Cavanaugh got into the cockpit, the battery had been hit, and none of his electrical equipment seemed to be working. He reached for the starter switch and thought, Nothing is going to happen. But as soon as he touched the switch, the engine started right up. He aimed at a point at the end of the runway where he had seen a bomb flash a moment before and gunned the engine into the darkness and rain. When it felt as though he had flying speed, he eased the plane off the ground and headed north toward Luang Prabang.

  Cavanaugh and Moonface landed there by the headlights of a Jeep. Cavanaugh brought the plane to a stop and sat there shaking.

  As the secret war in Laos went on, it gradually underwent a transformation. Vang Pao’s troops, so skilled as guerrillas staging hit-and-run raids on a road-bound enemy, were gradually sucked into battles to take and hold territory or to defend isolated outposts that were of considerable value to the Americans but of little value to the Hmong themselves.

  The history of the war in Laos is filled with accounts of fierce, bloody battles for radar installations, known as Lima sites, or little communities of fleeting strategic value. Out in the open, fighting for fixed positions, the Hmong suffered losses their small population could not long sustain.

  As early as 1966, in the days of the Butterflies, Lima sites were seen as lucrative targets by the North Vietnamese.

  In mid-February 1966, enemy forces overran Lima Site 36, which commanded a major north-south roadway north of the Plaine des Jarres. The site also served as a supply point for the guerrillas. But more important to the Americans, it was a staging site for helicopters standing by to rescue crew members shot down in North Vietnam or northern Laos.

  Three months after it was overrun by the enemy, Vang Pao’s guerrillas retook the site, and it resumed its role as a helicopter base.

  Early on the morning of 6 January 1967, an estimated six to eight hundred enemy troops attacked the site from three sides, cutting off all escape routes for the Hmong defenders and the two American advisers at the site. In the first assault, one of the Americans was killed. The other American, armed with a shotgun and barricaded in the radio shack, called for air support. But the weather was ideal—for the attackers: a two-hundred-foot ceiling with dense clouds shrouded the peaks surrounding the site.

  Despite the weather, the pilot of one F-105 jet worked his way under the clouds and buzzed the enemy. But he was forced to fly so low that he couldn’t drop any bombs. His presence, however, forced the enemy troops to keep their heads down until two propeller-driven A-1Es, with the call sign of Firefly, arrived. While one orbited above the clouds, the other descended and began firing on the enemy troops with rockets and his 20mm cannon.

  At this point, Charlie Jones—Butterfly 44—arrived on the scene and began directing attacks by other aircraft. As darkness came, Jones estimated that the site could be held if the enemy did not attack during the night and if the weather cleared on the following day.

  The night was quiet, and the weather the next morning was better. Vang Pao, who had arrived in the midst of the battle, guessed that the enemy troops had been led into the area by guides and that they would try to find their way out again by the same route. The Hmong general was right: Jones, flying over the likely evacuation routes, spotted a large group of soldiers, carrying at least a hundred dead or wounded, in a nearby canyon.

  A flight of Fireflies moved in. Captain John Roberts, the flight leader, later reported:

  “We arrived on the scene—the weather was pretty good—talked to the local FAC, Butterfly 44, and he marked an area, a kind of box canyon a little bit less than a kilometer from the actual compound of Lima 36.… We really raked this area over.… It was a heavily wooded area, but we left it completely blazing and really weren’t sure whether we’d done much or not. But later on that afternoon, I spoke to one of our sources here, and he said that he got a report back that it had been quite a lucrative strike.”

  With heavy air support, Vang Pao’s forces were able to hold the site. Their losses were 8 killed, plus 24 wounded—in addition to the one American killed. The enemy losses were estimated at 250 killed. The battle was a “victory” of sorts for the Hmong and their American allies, but there was a growing realization that there would be more occasions in the future where Vang Pao’s guerrillas would find themselves defending fixed positions in bloody battles. After the battle for Lima Site 36, the air attaché in Vientiane gave this sober appraisal of the future prospects:

  “… We feel that the enemy will continue to pressure Site 36, but as long as we can count on prompt and sustained close air support, when needed, we can hang on to it or at least be able to conduct an orderly withdrawal.…”

  In the case of another nearby Lima site, it proved impossible to hold the fort or even to conduct an orderly withdrawal.

  For the Americans, the loss of Lima Site 85 on 11 March 1968 was a terrible blow. Although kept secret for many years, the fall of this little mountaintop position in northeastern Laos was one of the most crucial and devastating defeats of the entire war in Southeast Asia for the United States.

  Lima Site 85 was located on a fifty-five-hundred-foot ridge known as Phou Pha Thi, about 30 miles from the border with North Vietnam and only about 150 miles west of Hanoi. Partway up the mountain was a short airstrip. At the top was a TACAN (tactical air navigation) station and a radio beacon. It was much like the other Lima sites. But then, early in 1967, it took on a new role and became much more important than the other sites. Prefabricated buildings and tons of electronic equipment were plunked down on the top of the mountain by helicopter.

  It was manned on a rotating basis by fifteen Air Force technicians, “sheep dipped” to appear to b
e civilians. Their job was to operate Commando Club, a system that promised a dramatic improvement in the accuracy of fighter-bomber attacks against North Vietnam. The system was based on the Strategic Air Command’s Combat Skyspot radar bomb-scoring system. But, instead of calculating where simulated bombs had fallen, it was used in this case to guide where real bombs would fall.

  Although the North Vietnamese probably didn’t know just what all the activity at Phou Pha Thi was all about, they saw enough to decide it was worth knocking out the site. Secord, whose job with the CIA was to defend the site, was alarmed to see aerial photos of a new road snaking through the jungle toward Lima 85. He called for air strikes to stop the road dead. He got enough to annoy the road builders, but not enough to stop them.

  If an attack came, Secord knew, the defenders—a mixed force of about four hundred Hmong and Thai soldiers—couldn’t hold the site. His hope was that air power could hold off the attackers long enough to permit an evacuation of the Americans and many of the Thais while the Hmong melted into the jungles to reform elsewhere. He also planned on the destruction of the radar-bombing equipment, codes, and encryption systems.

  The North Vietnamese assault on the site began in a bizarre way in mid-January 1968 when two 1930s-era Soviet-built biplanes made a bombing attack on the new installation atop the mountain. It looked like something out of a World War I movie. The planes were so slow that a helicopter was able to pull alongside one of them while a crewman shot the plane down with an M16 rifle. The other was hit by ground fire and crashed in the jungle.

  When the attack by North Vietnamese infantry came in mid-March, it was much more sophisticated than the assault by the two old biplanes. Heavy artillery and mortars hammered the mountain, smashing defenses and destroying electronic equipment. The Skyspot system, which could have directed precise attacks against the enemy, went off the air. As expected, soldiers fought their way through defenses on the steep sides of the mountain. But enemy commandos also managed a feat that was not only unexpected but considered impossible. They scaled a sheer cliff more than a thousand feet high and suddenly appeared among the defenders atop the mountain.

  Secord’s pleas for air support finally penetrated the higher reaches of the Seventh Air Force in Saigon. On the second morning of the battle, the air was filled with planes, which turned the area surrounding the site into hell on earth for the attackers. The Americans listened to intercepted radio messages from the terror-stricken North Vietnamese. One battalion-level officer radioed: “My men are gone. I’m the only one left. Can anybody hear me? Can I come home?”

  An air commando in a propeller-driven AT-28 finally swooped down on the mountaintop installation and destroyed it with his bombs. But the North Vietnamese had already acquired a gold mine of secret technology and top-secret code systems.

  Of the sixteen Americans at the site, only six survived, and five of them were wounded. Many of the Thai and Hmong defenders were evacuated by helicopter, and the remainder of the Hmong showed up a few days later at Lima Site 36.

  In 1994, an American team located the man who, as a lieutenant, had led the North Vietnamese commandos. He was flown to the top of Phou Pha Thi in a helicopter and pointed out where he and his men had tried to bury three of the dead Americans by covering them with sandbags. Other bodies had been blown apart when the site was bombed to destroy the electronic equipment. No remnants of the dead Americans were found, so they remain listed as missing in action.

  The loss of Site 85 came in the aftermath of the enemy’s Tet offensive and the assault on Khe Sanh in South Vietnam. Although the destruction of the site—which had controlled a quarter of the bombing missions against North Vietnam—was kept secret from the public, it must have weighed heavily on the minds of officials in Washington. A few days after the fall of Site 85, President Lyndon Johnson called a halt to bombing of the north, and, on 31 March, he announced that he would neither seek nor accept his party’s nomination to run for reelection.

  Despite the battering they had taken from the air assault, the North Vietnamese regrouped and moved south once more toward Lima Site 36. The battle there was different from the previous battles for this stategic site. The defenders finally received as many as three hundred tactical air strikes a day, with the Ravens guiding saturation bombing attacks whenever the North Vietnamese massed their forces. Companies and even entire battalions simply disappeared as the battle extended into 1969.

  At one point, there were only three Ravens available. They flew as many as half a dozen sorties a day, often guiding attacks on enemy soldiers who had given away their own positions by firing into the air. Karl Polifka described the situation:

  “They had been taught they could shoot down F-4s with AK-47s [assault rifles], which you can, but you don’t start blazing away when they are twelve thousand feet in the air. There are many occasions—we would fly along, you know, at twenty-five hundred feet, three thousand feet, and you were just going somewhere, and you would look down, and here a ridge line would light up. They wouldn’t really be shooting at you; they would be shooting at a bunch of F-4s flying somewhere. You had no idea these guys were there; you just proceeded to beat the shit out of them.

  “I have no idea how many I killed that way. The CIA said, and they later confirmed, that there were three battalions that disappeared, just disappeared. We know of one case where there were three survivors of a five-hundred-man battalion that straggled into a regimental command post. They were all that was left. We were giving them a very bad time.”

  Polifka was later told by CIA sources that fifteen hundred North Vietnamese had died as the result of the work of an average of five Ravens during the nine months he was there in 1969.

  The concentration of air attacks crippled the North Vietnamese forces so badly that Vang Pao and his guerrillas were able, in 1969, to take control of the entire Plaine des Jarres, which had been under enemy control for years.

  For Vang Pao, this was a proud achievement. Although the Hmong were mountain people who didn’t choose to live in the Plaine des Jarres in peacetime, control of this central piece of geography took on a kind of symbolic importance well beyond its practical value to the Hmong.

  But it was a costly victory. Hardly a building remained standing on the whole plain. And, by taking over this large area, the Hmong completed the transition from guerrillas to defenders of fixed positions. When the Americans left Southeast Asia, the Hmong, drastically reduced in numbers, became refugees, their way of life in the misty mountains of Laos a fading memory.

  As one Raven bitterly observed:

  “… The whole damn country is a wasteland, and half the people are killed. They probably have got more maimed and crippled people than they have had in their entire history. So what do you gain; what has he gained?”

  The air commandos’ support for Vang Pao and his Hmong had, for the Americans, the advantage of drawing North Vietnamese troops into Laos and away from what was seen as the main theater of the war in Vietnam. But the commandos were also involved at the same time in another major effort to disrupt enemy plans by stopping the flow of men and materials down the Ho Chi Minh Trail from North Vietnam through the eastern portion of Laos and into South Vietnam.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Third War

  In between the big public war in South Vietnam and the secret war over the mountains in Laos, the United States and the North Vietnamese fought another long, bloody war along the eastern edge of Laos where it bordered Vietnam. This war, too, was largely secret, with heavy air commando involvement.

  The focus of this war was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the main route for men and supplies headed from North Vietnam toward the battle zones in the south. Although perhaps originally the word trail was appropriate, the route soon had more in common with the New Jersey Turnpike than some primitive pathway through the jungle. Between 1966 and the end of 1971, the route grew from 820 miles of existing roads, most dating back to French colonial days, to a complex network totaling 2,
710 miles.

  The war for control of this vital supply line was a constantly escalating battle. Each improvement in the tactics or equipment on one side quickly brought a compensating adjustment on the other.

  At first, supplies were wheeled south on heavily burdened bicycles. The bikes were soon replaced or supplemented by trucks. The standard vehicle was a six-wheel Russian-built ZIL 157 truck, capable of carrying five tons at up to forty miles an hour over Laotian roads. The driver could even vary his tire inflation while moving to adjust for the condition of the roads.

  At first, the trucks moved by day. When that became too dangerous, they traveled at night, with the lights on. When that, too, became dangerous, they drove without lights. Elaborate bamboo trellises were constructed to camouflage truck parks.

  In the early years of the war, the United States jet fighter-bombers tried to stop the traffic. But, at the speeds at which they flew, it was hard for them to find trucks moving beneath the jungle canopy. And if they bombed bridges or caused landslides to close the roads, the damage was often repaired before they had returned home.

  Early in 1966, as described in Chapter Sixteen, AC-47 gunships moved in. They proved effective truck killers. But they also proved terribly vulnerable. When four planes and their crews were lost in a short period, they were withdrawn, and the Air Force reached down deep in its arsenal for the venerable B-26 bomber that had seen service in World War II and Korea and with the air commandos’ Farmgate and Mill Pond operations in the earliest days of the war in Southeast Asia.

  But the eight planes that arrived at Nakom Phanom in the spring of 1966 were not the battered old war birds that had been pulled out of service two years before when they began shedding wings. Beginning in 1963, a firm known as On Mark, in Van Nuys, California, had thoroughly overhauled and modernized forty of the planes at a cost of $325,000 apiece. Not only were the wings completely rebuilt, but many other modifications made the plane faster, gave it the ability to carry 60 percent more armament, and increased the altitude at which it could fly. Although it still had some deficiencies, crew members loved the reworked plane. Major Frank Gorski, who had flown in Vietnam as one of the Farmgate pilots, called it “the Cadillac of airplanes—it had everything.”