Copyright © 2007 by Robin Moore and Michael Lennon
Foreword copyright © 2015 by Scott Neil
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
Cover design by Laura Klynstra
Cover photo credit: Thinkstock
ISBN: 978-1-63450-416-4
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-5107-0145-8
Printed in the United States of America
The military man learns early to bury his friends, and to move on. Men have traditionally sought danger in the military, and have traditionally found it. Servicemen are always in motion, in the air at more than the speed of sound, underwater at depths whales could only dream of, or on the surface of the water cruising at thirty miles per hour through crashing seas with another ship almost touching theirs, hoses connecting them like weird sex, replenishing their oil supplies. Or they are on the ground, in the dirt, training and testing weapons that may someday kill others but today may deal them that same irony. The smallest margin of error separates a live man from a dead one, even in the boring vacuum of peace. And in war, of course, they are the first and usually the only ones to pay. The president and the congress may suffer bad-news stories and ulcers and hemorrhoids. The military man suffers the death of his friends, early and often.
—James Webb, A Sense of Honor
CONTENTS
Foreword
Preface
Prologue
BOOK ONE: Vietnam, 1970
BOOK TWO: The Persian Gulf, 1991
BOOK THREE: Somalia, 1993
BOOK FOUR: Afghanistan, 2001
BOOK FIVE: Iraq, 2003
Epilogue
Taps
Military Glossary
Additional Reading
Acknowledgments
Foreword
The Wars of the Green Berets captures the essence of the heroism and valor of the small group of men who risk everything for the love of their country and teammates and the pride of being the best of the best—Green Berets. The Wars of the Green Berets is a collection of little-known actions deep behind lines and on the edges of war that most Americans have never heard about nor would never know if they weren’t told in this collection.
I had the pleasure of meeting Robin Moore in 2002 at a private house party near Clarksville, Tennessee. I had just returned from my first deployment into Afghanistan following the tragic events of 9/11. Green Berets from 5th Special Forces Group, known as the “Legion,” were the first responders to this national crisis, and small teams of Green Berets had done in less than ninety days what the Russian Army could not do in twelve years, and what still faces the coalition forces fighting today—depose an oppressive regime that had been harboring Osama Bin Laden and his terrorist organization.
Fifth Special Forces Group and the local community were welcoming home the teams, and everyone was anxious to get back home and share their experiences with each other. Due to security and OPSEC reasons, in case anyone was captured or compromised, each team operated autonomously and had no idea what actions and activities other teams had conducted. Robin sat with all of us and shared his own personal stories of his time in Vietnam with the Green Berets and ultimately the writing of his 1965 book, The Green Berets. That book, as well as the movie starring John Wayne it was adapted into, is what had inspired not only me as a young man to join the Regiment but almost every other Green Beret I know. Green Berets felt comfortable telling Robin their stories, as we felt he understood the courage and commitment of the Green Berets and would be conscious of protecting our tactics and most importantly our identities as we continued to operate against our nation’s enemies.
The Regiment lost a great friend and lifelong member of 5th Special Forces Group when Robin Moore passed in 2008. I had the honor and privilege of attending his service and watched as all levels of the Special Forces Command down to the newest Green Beret paid tribute to a great man and author. Robin Moore’s legacy and contributions to the Green Berets still inspires the next generation of Green Berets and will continue well into future generations.
The Wars of the Green Berets is a tribute to the legacy of Robin Moore and told in such a way that honors the Regiment and protects the sensitivity of the men and missions. Green Berets are not about talking about ourselves; our stories are about the team and the sacrifices, the cunning and courage, and the mindset that has served the country since our first inception in 1952 and President John F. Kennedy’s remarks that, “the Green Beret was a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom!” Green Berets are known as Quiet Professionals and are still fighting on America’s frontiers and are deployed in over fifty-five countries and in every combat zone, known and unknown, at any one time. Since 9/11, Green Berets have suffered more casualties than any other Special Operations Unit and they remain America’s first responders, often already inserted into trouble spots and working quietly before conventional forces deploy.
Scott Neil
Green Beret (ret.)
Preface
This is a story of the men of the United States Army Special Forces: the “Quiet Professionals.” These shadow warriors neither get, nor generally want, a great deal of publicity due to the highly secretive nature of their work. They often operate behind enemy lines, making things happen without a sound. Only when they have spectacular success, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, or mass casualties, as in Somalia, do they receive press coverage. This sometimes works to their disadvantage at budget time. Special Operations Forces (SOF) account for less than 2 percent of the total Department of Defense budget; a single piece of military hardware often costs more than it takes to run a Special Forces Group for years. The difficult, often dangerous work they do usually goes unheralded and the public is rarely cognizant of the enormous debt of gratitude they owe these special warriors for protecting their freedom. Afghanistan brought to the forefront the capabilities of the Special Operations soldier, yet it wasn’t without cost. Many Special Operations soldiers were killed and wounded in Afghanistan. There was a high price to pay at home as well, especially among the families of these warriors.
Michael Lennon has been fortunate enough to spend most of his career in Special Operations, almost all of it as a staff officer, although he has very fond memories of his time in the field with the ODAs (Operational Detachment Alpha—the “A” Teams) as a team member and commander. He was also fortunate enough to work at the company, battalion, and group level, as well as assignments at the SOF higher headquarters, and United States Army Special Operations Command (USASOC), and the joint command, and United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM). As a third generation US Army officer, he aspired to be the best. He remembers sitting in the barracks as a freshman cadet at Pennsylvania Military College (PMC), listening to Douglas MacArthur’s “Duty, Honor, Country” speech (Farewell to West Point), and later watching John Wayne in The Green Berets. This was pretty heady stuff for an impressionable eighteen-year-old. The story we tell here has been rattling around in our heads for a long time. It is a tribute to the men, especially the noncommissioned officers (NCOs), who are the United States Army Special Forces.
Because it is a historical novel, it is based on true events, although in some cases we have altered the names, the details of some incidents, and the units to ensure security and privacy in much the same way as the original version of The Green Berets, published in 1965. To describe publicly known events we’ve used open-source documents and our own recollections, no classified material has been compromised by this work.
—Robin Moore and Mike Lennon
Prologue
Half a league, half a league, half a league onward,
into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
“Charge of the Light Brigade”
Darkness swirled around the flickering firelight as the men squatted like Bedouins in the dust. The fire was banked against the wall of the roofless mud hut, with a blanket angled down to keep the fire from reflecting off the opposite wall. It was as much for light as to lessen the biting cold that knifed through even the thickest wool. The hut was in the high snowy pass above the valley that was the Hindu Kush. The air was very thin at this altitude, with slightly more than two-thirds of the oxygen available at sea level.
They were big men, bigger than most Central Asians, with fierce eyes and wild, full beards and dirty scarves falling down over their long Afghan coats. Their features were more Occidental than Asian, these descendants of Alexander’s Greek warriors who swept across Afghanistan more than two millennia before, leaving their genes to be passed on from generation to generation in this isolated wilderness. They wore thin cotton shalwar kameez shirts, pants under their coats, and flat pakol hats on their unkempt heads. A couple of them wore comical looking “bear suits”—long fuzzy underwear used by US troops a decade before. Unlike their forefathers who carried jezails, the long flintlock rifles favored by Afghan soldiers for centuries, these fighters carried a variety of assault rifles from SKS carbines and AK-47s to newer AK-74, which fired a 5.45 mm bullet with greater accuracy, velocity, and killing power than the 47. A few had the SOPMOD M4, the most advanced weapon found in the American arsenal. They had dark complexions, made more so by exposure to the sun, except for one. The soldier drawing in the dust had a head covered with shocking red hair and beard and piercing blue eyes. He looked up at the biggest and fiercest of the men gathered around the crude sand table drawn in the dust.
“What do you think, captain?” asked Chief Warrant Officer (CW2) Ryan Gallagher in English.
“I’m worried about those mortars. We’re really channelized going through the pass; are they sure we can get through before they can open up?”
The chief had memorized the Intel reports. The enemy, mostly Chechen and Arab al-Qaeda, had nothing to lose and nowhere to go. The various courses of action (COA) developed by the Intel weenies were not reassuring. They would run, fighting a rear-guard action, or stay and die, taking as many of the Americans and their Northern Alliance Afghans as they could. With most of the passes into Pakistan cut off by a variety of coalition and conventional US forces, it looked to Gallagher like they would stand and fight. The Intel reports showed that a formidable stockpile of arms and tremendous firepower were awaiting them. And mines. There were mines everywhere. By some estimates there may have been as many as 30 million mines planted in Afghanistan during the last twenty-five years.
Then there was the US Air Force. While it was true that the air force tactical air controllers (TAC-Ps) could call death and destruction down on the enemy in close air support (CAS) with frightening accuracy from the over-flying fast movers and AC-130 gunships, they were also the source of many of the US and Afghan friendly fire casualties. They tried to do everything to prevent this fratricide, from maddeningly slow vetting procedures to reflective tape, VS-17 panels and radio beacons carried by the teams, but it still happened. It was an inevitable consequence in the fog of war, shattering to those responsible, devastating to the comrades and the families of the dead and wounded.
The captain had been reading his mind. “Are all the vehicles marked properly?” he asked Master Sergeant (MSG) Mike Apin.
“Yeah, I personally checked them. Let’s hope the Airborne and 10th Mountain troops know who we are,” he replied. Apin was the team sergeant and known to the Afghans as “Grey Beard.”
The captain looked at one of the others and barked in Pashtun, “Wahid, does everyone understand the plan?”
The big Afghan grinned in a most cruel manner; it was the same grin that haunted the nightmares of so many former Soviet soldiers. “Ready, Captain! We will be victorious.”
“Insh’Allah!”—if Allah wills it—said Captain Charles Rogers. “Let’s saddle up.”
As Tiger 501 moved down into the narrow valley, the world suddenly exploded.
BOOK ONE
VIETNAM, 1970
He which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us . . .
He that shall live this day, and see old age . . .
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile . . .
—William Shakespeare, Henry V
CHAPTER 1
To pour money, material, and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory would be dangerously futile and self-destructive.
—John Fitzgerald Kennedy
April 6, 1954 speech
Like most seventeen-year-olds, Mike Apin was consumed with his transition from the adolescent to the adult world, and in 1968 he paid scant attention to the growing conflict in Southeast Asia. His world revolved around a neat, manicured middle-class neighborhood in a suburb of Washington, DC. Football, baseball, basketball, beer (when they could get it), and girls (not necessarily in that order) commanded much of his attention. Mike drove a blue 1965 Mustang that his father had bought him, and he loved that car. With a 289 high performance engine and a Holly 4-barrel carburetor, he could really haul ass.
Friday and Saturday nights usually started at a party or the drive-in, and ended at the McDonald’s in Forest Heights, Maryland. In those days, there were no indoor seats at McDonald’s (300,000 hamburgers sold) so you got your food and ate in your car. The local cop, “One Bullet Barney” as they called him, was usually around to enforce the no-loitering rule so singles and couples hopped from car to car to socialize. Mike had a cute girlfriend, one of the junior varsity cheerleaders, and was a regular with several loose social groups. They had grown up with the Mickey Mouse Club, Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and Mike’s favorite TV show, Sea Hunt.
Mike and his best friend, Dennis, who turned eighteen within a week of Mike, went down to register for the draft at the county seat in Upper Marlboro on a cold drizzly February day, and although it should have brought the war a little closer to home, it didn’t.
Mike was your average high school student; average grades, average good looks. He was five foot-eleven inches tall, a muscular 190 pounds, with sandy brown hair and green eyes. Although broody at times, like most teenagers, he was well liked by most of his peers. The dress at Oxon Hill High School in Oxon Hill, Maryland was still conservative in 1967 and varied only with your social caste, of which there were three or four. You could tell them by their uniforms: the “Blocks” (called Greasers elsewhere) wore high-top black Chuck Taylor tennis shoes, wide Mack work pants, Banlon shirts, and leather letterman jackets. The girls dressed like they were out of West Side Story. The Collegiates wore white Levis, button-down shirts, and penny loafers; the girls wore “coulottes,” bright dresses, and looked like the girl next door. The Nerds looked pretty much like nerds have throughout the ages; striped ties and short-sleeve plaid shirts with pocket protectors, high-water pants, “fag bags,” and uncool shoes. The Jocks sometimes crossed clothing lines, but usually wore the ubiquitous letterman’s jacket. Mike was a Jock of the Collegiate variety, having just earned his jacket and varsity letter the previous fall with the football team.
Mike’s parents were both immigrants of Eastern European origin who had been forcibly relocated to Germany as slave labor during WWII. His father was Polish and his mother was Lithuanian/Ukrainian. They met, fell in love, and married in a dislocated-civilian camp in Germany after the war, then immigrated to the United States in 1949. Mike was born the following year. His father had wanted to name the new baby Stanislav, after his father, but his mother insisted on an American name. He became Mike Armstrong Apin. His maternal grandparents also immigrated eventually, both of his father’s parents having perished at the hands of the Nazis. Mike spent his early years growing up in an Eastern European community on the Jersey shore with his extended family. Mike’s parents were fiercely proud of their new American citizenship, and after years of backbreaking work his father landed a comfortable job and a home in suburban, middle-class Maryland.
The antiwar movement, or hippy movement as his dad liked to refer to it, really had not penetrated this small-town, middle-class suburb on the edge of Washington, DC, yet. Drugs were almost unheard of and life was simple and uncomplicated. But the whole fabric of life that seemed so American in the 1950s and early 1960s was slowly changing. Mike’s father, “Stash” Apin, gradually became consumed with the nightly coverage of the war and the growing divide in the country, and insisted that dinner be either before, or after, the nightly news. He could not seem to interest Mike in the events that he knew would shortly have an impact on his son’s life.
Mr. Apin was torn between his hate for communism that had consumed his native Poland and his desire for peace. Those who had witnessed the horrors of the worst war in human history could hardly be expected to embrace the US intervention in Vietnam, but Mike’s father had also learned that evil men must be stopped at all costs. He considered Stalin and the communists to be every bit as bad as Hitler. In many ways Stalin had been worse. He had certainly managed to kill more of his own people. Millions of peasants perished at Stalin’s hands during the collectivization of the farms in the 1930s, and more than a million died during the Russian–Finnish war in 1939. Untold millions died on the battlefield and in the gulags before, during, and after WWII. Trotsky once called Stalin “Genghis Kahn with a telephone,” before Stalin had him assassinated. Stalin himself used to say that if he “killed one person it was murder; if he killed a million it was a statistic.” Stash had been too young to go to war in 1939, and now he was too old in 1968, but not Mike. He worried, and at the same time almost wished that Mike would volunteer or be called to serve. His mother was afraid Mike would do something foolish and enlist in the Marines, like the Murphy boy across the street.
She needn’t have worried. Politics and international affairs just weren’t important to him at this stage in his life. Besides, the slide into the war had been gradual and had been eclipsed by other events in the early 1960s; the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Civil Rights Movement, the assassination of Kennedy, just to mention a few. The average American couldn’t even find Vietnam on a map and only the most politically astute could see the coming danger in the mid-1960s. Mike’s father sensed it; his son did not.
It was only after the great battles during Tet that he became aware that a real war was going on. The possibility that he might have to go seemed negligible. He had no real anxiety about it; he was going to college and would be draft-exempt. Mike certainly had no interest in enlisting. It wasn’t that he was unpatriotic; Mike just wasn’t particularly interested in the military or world affairs. He had been accepted to the University of Maryland and he and his friend Dennis were to be roommates in the fall. He planned to study to be an engineer, like his dad wanted, and to make the most out of college life. Mike’s father considered education to be of the utmost importance. He had studied nights for five long years to become an electrical engineer when they first immigrated to America. He worked two jobs to make ends meet but it had been well worth it. Education had been the salvation of the Apin family in America, the ticket of poor immigrants to the middle class. Yes, education was everything. He constantly hounded Mike to get better grades. Work, work, work was all he seemed to think about. What Mike couldn’t understand, what children never understand, is that parents, especially parents with a lifetime of hardship and sorrow, live vicariously through their children. It is inevitable. They want the absolute best for their offspring.
Mike always felt vaguely embarrassed around his father. It wasn’t just that he didn’t feel he was living up to his father’s high expectations; it was his inability to talk to him. He loved his father, but just did not know how to relate to him. He always considered his father to be a cold, unemotional, humorless man.
Then one night during his sophomore year, he had found his father sitting in the back yard at the picnic table. Mike was just about to ask him what he was doing when he suddenly realized he was wringing his hands and weeping silently. Mike retreated, confused and upset. He never saw his father show any emotion before except anger. He was profoundly disturbed by the incident, but it took him weeks to mention the subject with his mother.
It had turned out to be a letter from a long-lost cousin, an officer in the Polish army, one of the few that survived the slaughter perpetrated by the Russians when they “liberated” Poland from the Nazis at the end of the war. The relative, just released from a gulag, had returned to Poland only to discover that the entire Apin family had died. Mike wanted to ask his father about it, but he could never get up the nerve . . . maybe someday.
Mike graduated high school as the last man in the top quarter of his class in ceremonies at Cole Field House at the University of Maryland, got his college draft deferment, and went on to have the best summer of his life down at Ocean City, Maryland. He and Dennis, both lifeguards, shared an apartment with two other guards and got all the sun and girls they could handle. Life was good! War, what war?
CHAPTER 2
In the final analysis, it is their war. They are the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisers, but they have to win it—the people of Vietnam.
—President John Fitzgerald Kennedy
September 3, 1963
Mike’s mom yelled at him as he rushed in the door, late for a date as usual. “Mike, there’s a letter for you on the kitchen table. It looks important.”
He stayed home for the summer for about three weeks and was working at a local pool as a lifeguard. He and Dennis had taken Senior Life Saving down at the YMCA on 14th Street near the White House in DC and they spent that first summer at the beach, but this summer he decided to stay closer to home. The beach had been fun, but they blew all their wages, and their parents wanted them to save some money this summer. They went back to the YMCA during the spring of that year and took scuba-diving classes; they became Water Safety Instructors as well. Now they taught swimming lessons, while lifeguarding. They partied hard and were, in general, having a great time. It was merely a long continuation of the fun they had experienced at school that year.
He made himself a sandwich as he tore open the letter, without looking at the return address. He hoped it was his grades or a letter from the dean taking him off suspension. He and Dennis had shared a room their first year with a kid named Giovanni in Dorm 14, one of the new high-rise dorms on the campus of the University of Maryland. All they did was party their first semester, and the University of Maryland was the place to do it, seeing as it rated in the top ten of the nation’s party schools that year. If they weren’t going to frat parties, they were down to the Campus Club or the “Vous,” where they could drink vast quantities of cheap beer, or they just pitched in and bought a keg. There was a girl’s dorm next door and it always seemed as if there was a floor party somewhere. Their resident assistant (RA), a young graduate student, didn’t really care what they did, just as long drugs were not involved.
Mike tried out for the freshman football team as a walk-on. Even though he had grown two inches and added twenty pounds of muscle, he was still small compared to most of the scholarship students. He was amazed by the size, speed, and strength of the competition. This was definitely not high school ball. He made it to the last cuts before he was told, “Coach wants to see you, bring your playbook.” The head coach, always very nice, told him that he’d like to have him in the program; all he had to do was get “a little bigger, a little quicker, and a little faster.” Mike wasn’t as upset as he thought he’d be. He’d made a lot of friends and just trying out for the team seemed a good way to meet girls. The football team always had groupies hanging around.
The whole fabric of American life was changing around them; sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The Civil Rights Movement was in full swing, as was the antiwar movement. It was a time of idealism and change. The nation seemed to be polarizing into diametrically different camps: hawk versus dove, conservative verses radical, old versus young, white versus black. Mike wasn’t sure whether the war was justified or not. He respected the sincere protesters like Joan Baez, but he found Jane Fonda to be abhorrent. He wasn’t even really sure where Vietnam was. He confused French Indochina with Dutch Indonesia (something the United States Post Office also seemed to have some problem with). Most of what he knew about Vietnam concerned the debacle of the French following WWII, the assassination of Diem and the Nhus, and the immolation of Buddhist monks. Ho Chi Minh, “Uncle Ho,” was alternatively painted as a social nationalist or a vicious communist despot like Stalin. Mike’s opinion of the war swayed depending on who was on the soapbox.
His father periodically railed against the Republicans and the right wing in America, the Joseph McCarthys, for eliminating some of the best minds in the state department after the “loss” of China to the communists. As a result of the purges, America went into Indochina largely blind, and without the years of experience of the so-called “old Oriental hands.” We gave the French back their colonies and then compounded the error by supporting them in their suppression of Vietnamese nationalism. To compound the error we then took the whole mess over from them. It represented nothing but continued French imperialism by American proxy. It was too bad Kennedy was killed on the eve of his decision on what to do with Vietnam. Mike’s father was sure Kennedy would never have committed large numbers of conventional troops, as Johnson did later. Now they were in it, for better or for worse. It was the domino theory; they had to prevent communism from sweeping over Indochina and, subsequently, the rest of the world. It was really just an extension of the Cold War, a fight against the Soviets for world domination.
All the debate on the war and civil rights was fine, but it was also the era of free love. Mike and Dennis took full advantage of that. While they were largely ambivalent to the antiwar message, the protests added to the climate of reckless excitement that many college freshmen feel when first freed of the constraints of their parents. Mike and Dennis attended all of them. During one rally, the crowd blocked Route 1 and the Maryland State Police (the Free State Porkers as they were dubbed) were called in. Both Dennis and Mike got clubbed and sprayed with tear gas, but all in all, it was just plain fun. Drugs were also plentiful, but except for the occasional puff of marijuana at a party, they pretty much stuck to beer and Boone’s Farm (apple wine), or “Purple Jesus,” a concoction of grain alcohol and grape juice served at the fraternity parties. The only time Mike smoked grass he was already pretty drunk and didn’t like the feeling it gave him, the loss of control. As for LSD and the rest of it he had no real use for it. Mike just liked beer.
College, which Mike first approached as he had high school (by never taking a book home) was a lot harder than he expected and he failed miserably his first semester. His father was furious and only relented a little when Mike told him engineering proved too hard for him. He had not taken the right courses in high school to deal with the calculus and physics. Mike changed his major to political science, perhaps to become a lawyer. Although he tried hard that next semester, his heart wasn’t in it. There was too much else going on around him. While his midterm grades were passable, finals proved to be a nightmare. Mike was deathly afraid he was in danger of flunking out. He had no idea what he would do if he flunked out. As it was, he didn’t have to worry; that little problem had been solved for him.
After opening the envelope, he sat down hard as he read the “Greetings from Your Uncle Sam” letter. Mike was to report to the draft board induction center for a physical the following week. He guessed he flunked out after all.
CHAPTER 3
If you ain’t Airborne, you ain’t shit.
—Airborne proverb
Mike passed his physical and two weeks later boarded a bus for Ft. Dix, New Jersey, close to where he had grown up. Except for the first few days, Mike found he actually enjoyed basic training. He was in excellent shape, a lot better than almost anyone in his company, and received the highest score on the initial physical training (PT) test. His DI (drill sergeant) found him to be a natural leader and he worked hard to master all of the soldier skills thrown at them. He also had a better attitude than most of his fellow soldiers, three quarters of whom were draftees. Mike took the training very seriously and was made acting corporal, graduating as the Honor Graduate of his platoon. He scored high enough on the army’s IQ test to qualify for any of the army’s many specialties and decided to become an electronic-intelligence warfare specialist. As a kid, Mike had a neighbor who happened to be a ham radio operator and Mike had been fascinated by the radios and spent many childhood hours with the old man talking to far off lands.
After basic training, Mike went to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, for AIT (advanced individual training) at the Army’s school for electronic intelligence and surveillance. There he learned basic communications and radio procedures, as well as RDF (radio direction finding) procedures, signal intercept, counter measures, jamming procedures, and other classified techniques. He trained as a signals-intelligence analyst, MOS (military occupational specialty) 98C. He was a model student and consistently scored at the top of his class. The only real problem he had was getting his top secret security clearance because of his family’s background. After an exhaustive background investigation, to make sure he wasn’t a Soviet “mole,” it was finally granted. Toward the end of the course one of his instructors asked if he would like to attend Airborne School next and become a qualified parachutist. He jumped at the chance, figuring he would wind up with the 82nd Airborne Division, since the 101st Airborne, now in Vietnam, had gone Airmobile. He wasn’t really thrilled about going to Vietnam. Anyway, he knew the 82nd, as America’s strategic reserve, was still at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and were unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon, although the 3rd Brigade had just been deployed to Vietnam in 1969 for six months on an “emergency” basis.
Airborne School was a blast compared to the mind-numbing code and intel/intercept work. It was a mixture of physical training, fear, and adrenalin-charged excitement. He had shown up at Fort Benning, Georgia for “zero” week (mostly physical conditioning and harassment) in the best shape of his life. There were significantly fewer soldiers present for “ground” week that next Monday. Ground week consisted of various torture apparati such as the lateral drift apparatus, swing-landing trainer, and suspended harness. The PT was intense, especially the Friday runs up “Cardiac Hill.” If you dropped back in formation, you were out of the course. One soldier complained to the “Black Hats,” as the Airborne instructors were called, about having diarrhea, asking to drop out of a Friday run to go to the latrine. His request was refused and the man finished the run with shit running down his leg. That took guts.
The physical training (PT) was even more intense for Mike because he had some wise-guy Navy BUDS (Seal) students in his stick (squad) who all thought Army PT was a joke. As a result, the whole stick went to the proverbial “gig pit” on a daily basis for extra PT, while the rest of the students were smoking and joking. It didn’t really matter to Mike; he was young and strong and he reveled in Airborne’s espirit de corps. The troops at the school were completely different than those in basic and AIT; they were really motivated, all volunteers.
By the time the third, or “tower” week had rolled around, only half the students remained. The thirty-four-foot towers weren’t bad but the two-hundred-foot towers were really scary. It was like the Coney Island parachute ride he rode as a kid, but here, you were on your own. You didn’t ride down on cables and it was the only part of the course Mike found really terrifying. When they raised him to the top and he got that jolt, and then swung suspended, he was so petrified he almost couldn’t respond to the commands of the Black Hats on the ground. It didn’t help that before they went up the Black Hats had dropped a dummy from one of the towers with a “malfunction.” They watched in horror while the parachute fluttered ineffectually as it screamed into the ground right in front of them. It took several moments before they realized it was just to get their attention. Then one of the first guys on the first tower run steered—or was blown—into the tower and left in an ambulance. Mike had plenty of company in his apprehension.
After that “jump” week was almost anticlimatic. On their first real jump Mike sat right next to the door, first in his stick. His stomach tightened in a knot, just like before a high school football game, until they opened the door and that rush of cool air came in. Mike could see the countryside flying by through the other door. Man, they seemed low! The jumpmaster stood up, hooked up his static line, did a door check, and turned to the jumpers:
“Inboard personnel, stand up!”
“Outboard personnel, stand up!”
“Hook up!”
“Check static lines!”
“Check equipment!”
“Sound off for equipment check!”
“OK, OK, OK,” The last man slapped Mike on the butt and he gave the jumpmaster the thumbs up. “All okay jumpmaster!”
“Stand in the door!” Mike handed his static line to the jumpmaster and stood in the door with his hands on the outside skin of the door as the world hurtled by. Look straight out; don’t look down. He could see the orange flanker panel coming up far out on the grassy field.
“Go!”
The jumpmaster slapped him on the butt and Mike automatically and involuntary jumped up and out of the C-130 in the tight-body position, his feet and knees locked to the rear, head tucked on chest, and hands over his reserve parachute, just as he was taught, adrenalin screaming through his body. The world went spinning below, his breath gone. He caught sight of the tail of the airplane as he went into freefall and was on “three-one-thousand” of his four count as his T-10 parachute opened with a jolt causing him to grunt, his helmet strap snapping against his chin. Suddenly, he was floating high above the grassy calm. The only sound was the drone of the aircraft moving off in the distance. What a rush! The wind fluttered the edges of his canopy and he could see for miles. What a sight! His reverie was shortly broken by a Black Hat on the drop zone screaming at him through a bullhorn.
“Get control of your parachute. Slip right.”
A smoke grenade on the drop zone indicated the direction of the wind and he reached up, grabbed the right riser and pulled it down to his chest. The ground came rushing up. Don’t look at the ground; don’t reach for it, balls of feet, calf, butt, push-up muscle. Bone jarring impact, roll, jump up, run around the canopy and collapse it before you get dragged. And it was over. Hot damn!
They made all five jumps at Fryar Drop Zone, in nearby Alabama. They conducted the last jump wearing rucksacks and weapons cases containing two-by-fours. Once they landed they received the coveted “silver wings” on the Drop Zone in a ceremony featuring Airborne generals from WWII. “Blood wings” were punched into their chests so the pins drew blood, a right of passage that nobody minded. That night they went into Phoenix City, Alabama and tied one on. They wound up in a tattoo parlor in the early hours of the morning. His two buddies got their tattoos first. Mike picked out a skull and crossbones superimposed on parachute wings with the words “Death from Above,” but he sobered up before it was his turn.
In the morning, with splitting headaches, they fell out to the company bulletin board to look at their unit assignments. Next to Mike’s name was a unit designation with no address, the 403rd Radio Research Detachment.
“What is it and where is it?” Mike wondered out loud.
The Black Hat First Sergeant was standing next to the board getting some kind of sadistic pleasure out of watching the soldiers sweat over their assignments, many of them heading off to Vietnam. He wore a CIB (combat infantry badge), Master Parachute Wings, and a Special Forces Combat patch. He laughed when he heard Mike.
“What’s-a-matter, Airborne? You don’t know? You must have asked for it!”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a hot-shit classified commo unit attached to the 5th Special Forces Group and MACVSOG.”
“What?” stammered Mike.
“Vietnam, stupid; you’re going to the ’Nam!’”
CHAPTER 4
At last there is light at the end of the tunnel.
—Joseph Alsop,
syndicated column, September 13, 1965
On a rainy monsoon day in February 1970, PFC Mike Apin landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport, Republic of Vietnam. He had traveled via commercial airline to Travis AFB in California. Travis was a flurry of activity. He had to spend two days in an old open-bay WWII barracks before boarding a “Freedom Bird,” a Boeing 707 charter that flew them to Hawaii. After RON’ing (remain over night) at Hickam Field on Oahu, he caught another military charter to Vietnam. It broke down in Okinawa for two days. On the last leg of the flight he sat next to a Marine Corps lieutenant colonel. Seated behind them were two soldiers going back to Vietnam after two weeks of R & R in Hawaii. They were drunk and one was crying the whole trip about having to go back to Vietnam. The Marine Corps officer sat stony face the whole trip, trying to ignore them. It was a long uncomfortable flight for Mike.
At least it had been a commercial flight. There were stewardesses (although they were a lot older than on regular flights), a movie, and food. This was a lot better than in the back of a C-130 or C-141, where you were either too hot or too cold, and you had to eat C-rations and wear earplugs. Looking over the colonel’s shoulder, he could see the coast coming up as they approached Vietnam. At thirty-thousand feet all he could see was blue water, a silver ribbon of beach, and green lush tropical land. He wondered if there would be time to go scuba diving. He knew they had good diving in Thailand. His mind drifted back to that last trip they had taken to Key Largo over spring break. They had camped out and enjoyed some of the greatest diving they had ever done. Then there had been those three hippy chicks . . .
“Take your seats and fasten your seat belts! We’re beginning our descent,” the pilot blared over the PA.
Mike stepped out on the tarmac of Tan Son Nhut Airport on the outskirts of Saigon. It had been cool in the plane, but when they opened the door a blast of warm heavy air greeted them, redolent with an almost visual smell of the East. So, this was the country that had been fighting invaders for two thousand years; the Chinese, Japanese, French, and now us, he thought. There were men on the tarmac in sweat-wilted, starched khakis carrying duffle bags waiting to board the aircraft Jack had just left. So that’s why it’s called the Freedom Bird; they were going back to the world. Most of them ignored the newcomers; a few called good-natured insults.
“Good luck . . . you’re going to need it.”
“New meat for Charlie!”
“You’ll be sorreee!”
Their days in purgatory were done. Their individual levels of hell determined by their MOS, unit, and circumstance.
Mike was struck by a déjà vu so strong that it made him dizzy.
“What?”
“I said ‘get on the bus private!’”
“Yes, sergeant,” Mike stammered. As quickly as the feeling came over him, it was gone.
They boarded a bus with screened windows.
“To keep out grenades,” a fat-bellied NCO explained to them. They rode down the airfield, past what looked like flag-draped coffins being loaded onto a C-141. Long lines, hurry up and wait, and confusion were the order of the day.
“Everyone get out four copies of your orders,” a clerk yelled.
Sweat was already staining Mike’s uniform. After processing they exchanged their money for military scrip, MPC (or Military Payment Certificates); ostensibly to cut down on black marketing, and then sat through a myriad of briefings. Because he had traveled alone, not as part of a group as most soldiers did, there was no one to greet and escort him when he landed. After wandering around and collecting his gear, he checked in at the Repo Depo (replacement depot) Barracks. The barrack was a large open bay (just like basic), with a row of double bunks along both walls, and a large latrine with open shitters and showers. It was stifling in the barrack, two large fans working ineffectually trying to cool it. While not very successful, they were very noisy. Even if it hadn’t been so hot and he hadn’t been so keyed up, he still wouldn’t have been able to sleep. Several world-class snorers saw to that. Mike couldn’t see how anyone could sleep through that.
After a morning formation and more in-processing and a series of additional briefings (including a sickening VD lecture, showing both male and female genitalia in various states of disrepair), he was sent to draw a mountain of field gear. When they looked at his orders and they found out he was going to the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne). They made him get back into line and turn all the stuff in.
“SF has its own stuff, stupid! Why didn’t you say where you were going?” snarled an overweight supply sergeant.
Mike was bewildered; especially when they told him he had to find his own transportation to the Special Forces operating base at Nha Trang. Mike went back to the Repo Depo and they let him spend the night and in the morning a surly SP4 (specialist forth class) took him over to an SF liaison office. There he was told they had a ride for him on a chopper in a couple of days.
Mike liked riding in the helicopter. It was a large double-bladed CH-46 and it was cool, the wind rusting through the open gun doors to the back ramp with a gunner sitting on the down tail. The loud “whup, whup, whup” of the rotor made talking impossible, and Mike had a good view out the back, watching the mosaic of rice paddies and the occasional village flash underneath. They were flying at about three thousand feet, just higher than his highest parachute jump, and from this altitude, the peasants working in the fields and the water buffaloes were mere specks. Gradually the ground changed from patties into a series of hills and forests. It had become cold in the chopper by the time they landed.
After grabbing his gear, he hitched a ride in a Jeep to the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) headquarters, Nha Trang.
“Where the hell you been?” asked the clerk in the S1 (personnel) shop when Mike reported into the 5th Special Forces Group headquarters.
“The sergeant major was about to report you AWOL; you were supposed to be here three days ago.”
“Got stuck at the Repo Depo.”
“Repo Depo? You weren’t supposed to go there, dummy. You were supposed to check in with the Special Operations liaison and come straight here. Let me tell the sergeant major you’re here . . . be careful, he’s in a bad mood today! Let me see a copy of your orders.”
Mike handed his orders, his medical file, and his 201 personnel file to the clerk.
“Oh, shit!” muttered the clerk.
“What’s wrong?” asked Mike, his anxiety level climbing.
“Where’s your S? You’re supposed to have an S, this says you’re only a P!”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“S stupid . . . Special Forces qualified . . . you’re supposed to be SF qualified . . . you’re only parachute qualified. You didn’t go to the Q-course?”
“No, I came here straight from AIT and airborne school.”
“Holy Mother and Joseph! When the sergeant major sees this he’s going to shit a brick. You wait here!”
Mike could here low murmuring and then . . . “YOU”VE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME! I told them to send me a SF-qualified RTO for a change. Send the little peckerwood in . . . babies, they keep sending me babies!”
The clerk came out with a nervous tic and whispered, “the sergeant major will see you now.”
By the time Mike was ushered into the CSM’s office he was sweating profusely.
“Get lost?” asked the CSM.
“No sergeant, I . . .”
The command sergeant major jumped up from behind his desk and cut him off, “Sergeant? I was a sergeant fifteen years ago. I’m a COMMAND SERGEANT MAJOR, and don’t you forget it, troop! Now where the hell have you been?”
Mike stammered through an explanation of his travels and the sergeant major softened a bit.
“Yeah, they’re always fucking with us SF guys. OK kid, we’re real busy here. It looks like Victor Charlie and his buddies from the north are getting ready to hit some of our camps with everything they’ve got. I talked to your CO at the C team in Pleiku and he wants you down at the B team at Kontum; they’re shorthanded.
“One more thing. You can drink beer when we got it but we don’t do grass or any other drugs . . . we got no potheads here. You get caught doing drugs and your ass is grass! Also don’t be putting peace signs or any other crap on your helmet or other gear or you’ll be burning shit your whole tour. Got it?”
“Yes, sergeant major!”
The sergeant major looked thoughtful for a moment. “We’re going to lose this war! My job is to see how much damage we can inflict on the enemy and to make sure you go home alive.”
The sergeant major stood up and unexpectedly put his hand out for Mike to shake.
“Good luck kid,” he waved Mike out of his office. “Kennedy! Get in here!”
The clerk rushed in from the orderly room.
“Get Apin signed up for the Special Forces extension course. Then go down to the library and draw a bunch of subcourses so he can get started. After he finishes his box-top course we’ll get him on an FTX and put him in for his S.”
“Roger that, sergeant major.”