Night Fighter

by Hamilton, William H. ; Sasser, Charles W. ;

  Second Battalion, 9th Marines, went ashore in one of several World War II–style beach landings the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade had made since LBJ committed the first land troops to Vietnam. Marines heard the VC had fourteen combat units within fifty miles of Da Nang. Most of them would probably be waiting on China Beach when the Marines landed.

  Growing up beneath the dark cloud of the Cold War, living under the threat of nuclear war and communist expansion, they were finally getting their chance to stop the commies by going to a foreign and exotic land and battling evil on its doorstep.

  Roberts found himself on a landing boat asshole-to-belly button with the rest of his platoon, so packed in he was gasping for a breath of air. Long lines of gray flat-bowed boats kicked up a giant washing machine of froth and charged toward the beach, leaving wakes that spread out behind and made even the Pickaway bob like a fishing cork.

  The only things missing were bugles.

  “One hundred meters to sand!”

  Still no fire from the beach. The gooks must be waiting for the landing gates to drop in the surf.

  The gates dropped. Roberts glimpsed a sandy strip backed by palm trees. Almost like a postcard from Hawaii or Miami Beach—“Having a great time, wish you were here.”

  “Go, damn you, go! Go, go, go, go, go …!”

  Caught up in the excitement, Marines charged toward dry sand, screaming and yelling rebel war cries. Ready for action. Expecting it. Wanting it.

  They dove face first in the sand and executed combat rolls to keep the enemy from marking their positions. Weapons swiveled back and forth across the front of brown-and-white sand and rattling palm trees and shimmering heat devils, eyes darting and busy.

  Where were the human hordes?

  Roberts saw a kid. About eight years old with an eight-year-old’s grin, yellow skin, no shirt, and a baggy pair of too-short black trousers. His first gook. Holding out two bottles, the kid positioned himself directly in front of the weapons.

  “Hey, Joe… You buy Co’Cola?”

  All around, kids and toothless old women who grinned like kids. All up and down the beach—the enemy. Selling Cokes and beer and cigarettes.

  Marines slowly clambered to their feet and looked stunned.

  “Buy Co’Cola, Joe? Buy Co’Cola?”

  * * *

  I knew from the beginning that the escalation was wrong, that UW operations were the best method of countering insurgencies, that a war fought by conventional means seldom overcame guerrilla action. Unconventional warfare and terrorism were calculated to slowly bleed a conventional force of its will to continue. It had worked before in history—a numerically inferior force triumphing over a much stronger force, bleeding it dry by a series of small and repeated cuts. The French suffered from the strategy and withdrew from Vietnam in 1954.

  I helped the new DCI present our assessment of Vietnam. The communist nations, we noted, would no doubt ally themselves with Ho Chi Minh, but we did not think they would do it actively as the Red Chinese had in Korea. Instead, they would contrive to win victory through supporting a continued guerrilla insurgency.

  The U.S., we said, was “proceeding with far more courage than wisdom. … [The NVA and VC] appear confident that their course in South Vietnam promises ultimate and possible early success without important concessions on their part. They seem to believe that they can achieve a series of local military successes which sooner or later will bring victory through a combination of a deteriorating South Vietnam Army morale and effectiveness, a collapse of anti-communist government in Saigon, and exhaustion of the U.S. will to persist.”

  In the Cold War, Army and Navy special forces were designed to fight limited wars, clandestinely, in a way that averted the nuclear powers from squaring off against each other. Under CIA patrimony, Army Special Forces established permanent headquarters in Nha Trang, from which they eventually established more than 250 CIDG (Civilian Irregular Defense Group) outposts throughout the country, each generally defended by a single A-team of a dozen SF soldiers and a few hundred local civilian irregulars. “Winning hearts and minds” by building schools, hospitals, government buildings, canals, and fish ponds, while defending against insurgents. Classic unconventional warfare.

  SEALs also operated in classic UW but in a different capacity. In addition to training South Vietnamese in combat diving, river warfare, and counterinsurgency tactics, they made their bones and their reputation in sustained direct-action efforts along the seacoast and the Mekong River in the Rung Sat Special Zone. Harassment of the enemy, hit-and-run raids, recon patrols, intel collection, ambush and counter-ambush, interdiction of enemy troops and supplies coming from North Vietnam.

  Far from using conventional warfare methods of firing artillery or dropping bombs from 30,000 feet, SEALs, who seldom numbered more than 120 in-country at any one time, experienced combat close and personal, killing at close range and responding without hesitation lest they be killed themselves. They made great headway with this style of warfare, bringing to Vietnam the most effective direct counterinsurgency of the war. Widely feared by the enemy, with their faces painted to blend into darkness and jungle, they became known as “the men with green faces.”

  Now, the “Invisible Front” war of Green Berets and SEALs began to fade into the background in the new U.S. policy toward full militarization. President Johnson placed the military in near total control of the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Administration, and other intelligence organizations operating in Vietnam.

  With LBJ’s approval, the commander of all U.S. forces in South Vietnam, General Westmoreland, initiated a strategy of attrition by employing U.S. superiority in firepower, technology, and mobility. His methods, contrary to the shadow war that existed before, turned to a series of search and destroy operations in which large U.S. and South Vietnamese units supported by air and artillery swept through an area to attempt to engage the commies in battle. In contrast, North Vietnam and the VC continued to rely on hit-and-run operations and ambushes, avoiding set-piece battle except at their own initiative. Classic guerrilla operations out of Mao and Clausewitz.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  ADMIRAL RABORN BARELY MADE it a year as DCI before he ducked out to be replaced by Richard M. Helms. I knew Dick from the Bay of Pigs and had run into him from time to time since. Former OSS during WWII, he had the appearance of a very successful businessman—tallish, handsome, with dark, slicked-down hair and a straightforward look in his piercing eyes. We would get along.

  “Bone,” he said, “the Defense Department and the White House might think the CIA has been put back in its place. But they’ll come running back on their knees.”

  Although CIA’s role in Vietnam had been minimized, we weren’t completely cast out. “Knuckle draggers” were still in demand to counter communist efforts at world domination. Communists never seemed to stop pushing and probing, instigating unrest and discontent and bringing death and destruction. I found it difficult to understand what deep pathologies must drive an ideology that led to famine, gulags, blind subjugation, and mass executions.

  The DCI kept me busy. One month I might be slipping operatives into El Salvador, the next in India or the Philippines. Accompanied by a former EOD man, I slid overboard from a freighter in the Caribbean and SCUBA’d with my swim buddy toward the green outline of Nicaragua. We towed a marker buoy full of nitro, dynamite, and plastic C-4 for use by insurgents combating the country’s communist takeover.

  In the Philippines I met with representatives of newly elected President Ferdinand Marcos to advise on maritime operations against Muslim fanatics influenced by communist insurrectionists.

  Anti-Semitism ran high all over the Middle East as fanatics preached the destruction of the state of Israel and the rise of a new Ottoman Empire. Arab states led by Egypt attacked Israel across the Sinai Peninsula. The war lasted six days. Arab casualties were many times those of Israel—less than one thousand Israelis killed, compared t
o over twenty thousand for the Arabs.

  Israel tripled its area of control, taking in the Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank. Nearly a half million Palestinians and Syrians fled to become refugees across the Arab world. The Middle East was becoming a hellhole with repercussions that promised to continue for decades.

  Not only in the Middle East but all around the world global chess pieces were lining up and taking sides. Events seemed to be unfolding as part of a grand picture, a scheme of things in which the world was slipping deeper into danger, in which both foreign and domestic affairs were interconnected and part of an enmeshed tapestry of violence and conflict.

  The stench that began the Cold War lingered on in Frankfurt where the Auschwitz trials got under way to try mid- to lower-level Nazi officials who helped run the Auschwitz-Birkenau death and concentration camps.

  China tested its first nuclear weapon. Put another nuke in the commie corner. Mao Tse-tung launched his “Great Leap Forward” to preserve “true communist ideology” to the tune of slaughtering millions of his own people.

  America joined the chaos. In San Francisco, Anton LaVey formed the Church of Satan—to worship the Devil! Colleges held teach-ins and snake-dances against the Vietnam War. Race riots boiled up in the Watts neighborhood, resulting in thirty-four deaths during six days of looting and arson. Additional riots broke out all over the nation—Tampa, Detroit, Cincinnati, Buffalo, Durham. Hippies dropped out and dropped acid and smoked anything, including banana peels. Drugs, sex, and rock ’n roll.

  Where the hell was this nation—this planet—bound?

  My personal life was just as chaotic.

  While I was running off to Cuba, Vietnam, Africa, Central America, or whatever other hot spot that required my attention, poor Mary, like wife Elinor before her, was stuck at home without attention. She should have known better than to marry me.

  I came home from a job in Central America to discover she had packed up and left for parts unknown, the only clue to her whereabouts a note on the kitchen table saying simply that she had had enough and was leaving. No “kiss my ass,” “sorry.” Nothing. Just gone. Her lawyer served divorce papers.

  Face it, Bone: my life didn’t call for a wife. Like the ground pounders in the Army put it: “If Uncle Sam wanted you to have a wife, he would have issued you one.”

  I vowed not to make the same mistake again.

  * * *

  Mary’s side of the bed hadn’t even cooled off properly before I met my third wife-to-be. Her name was also Mary. I called her “Mary II,” but not to her face. Call me a fool. But, hell, a man got lonely. This time the marriage lasted less than a month before, whoops! She was gone.

  “You fucking dunderhead,” Boehm said. “You do understand? You don’t have to marry them.”

  The same evening that Mary II left I walked the late night streets of Washington, another anonymous tourist tossed among the monuments. I collapsed on the cold stone steps of the Jefferson Memorial and gazed at the Capitol Building at the other end of the Mall. I was so damned tired of fighting America’s “shadow wars.”

  I got up presently and trudged home to an empty house.

  The next week I found a new fixture added when I walked into the CIA rotunda and took the stairs to the SOD floor where my Maritime Office was located. A tall, willowy blonde on temporary assignment as an analyst. She introduced herself as Barbara.

  I stared like the fool I knew myself to be when it came to pretty women.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  LAST TIME I SAW Che Guevara he was hanging from a Beechcraft James Bond–style in the middle of Africa. He dropped off the screen after that for more than two years. Rumors circulated Fidel executed him for political reasons. I didn’t believe that. He and Castro were Siamese twins, asshole buddies since they met in Mexico. They overthrew Batista together in 1959, orchestrated the Bay of Pigs victory, worked together to bring Soviet nukes to Cuba. No, Commandante Tutu was alive, torturing and executing people somewhere.

  In the file I kept on him was a copy of a letter Che sent to his parents: “My Marxism is firmly rooted and purified. I believe in armed struggle as the only solution for the peoples who are struggling for their freedom and I am acting in accordance with my beliefs. Many would call me an adventurer, and I am one; only of a different sort, one of those that risks his skin to demonstrate what he believes is true.”

  No matter that what he believed was a lie.

  I wasn’t all that surprised when the CIA station chief in La Paz informed DCI Dick Helms that Guevara might be fomenting Cuban-style insurgency in Bolivia. According to him, a man suspected of being Guevara entered Bolivia on December 2, 1965, using a forged passport bearing the name Ramon Beritz Fernandez. Soon after arrival, he disappeared into the countryside, where he assumed command of a small force of about fifty-five communists dedicated to overturning “capitalist exploitation” of Latin America by U.S. “imperialism.”

  In April 1967, the Bolivian Army’s 8th Division captured a member of Ramon’s band, a French communist writer named Régis Debray. He confirmed “Ramon’s” true identity to be Che Guevara and provided the general area of his operations. His base camp lay somewhere south of Bolivia’s Rio Grande River.

  In early July, CIA’s Ground Branch brought in veteran CIA operative Felix Rodriguez to recruit, train, and lead a team to track down and capture Guevara. Rodriguez was a twenty-six-year-old native-born Cuban who joined a group of exiles in 1960 for CIA-sponsored military training in Guatemala with Brigade 2506. I met him prior to the Bay of Pigs when UDT-21 inserted saboteurs into Cuba before the invasion; he was one of the infiltrators.

  Rodriguez flew to Washington and went as directed to an Agency-rented apartment downtown. It was a bright, nicely-decorated place within easy walking distance of the memorials. I was one of the agents who briefed him. I had a score to settle with Guevara because of Africa, but the DCI denied my request to go along on the ops.

  “The operation could take weeks, months,” he said.

  The basic plan called for Rodriguez and another exile to enter Bolivia under false documents posing as Cuban U.S. residents exploring business opportunities. In-country, they would train Bolivian soldiers in basic intelligence gathering and coordinate with government intelligence officers to help them react quickly to raw intelligence. At the same time, U.S. Army Special Forces Major “Pappy” Shelton of the 8th Group raised and trained a Bolivian Ranger battalion of six hundred soldiers. CIA officers from SOD oversaw the entire project—and the hunt was on.

  In La Paz, “Jim” from the CIA spent long workdays analyzing intel reports and documents captured from guerrillas. He built a file for each member of Guevara’s band, which included thirty Bolivians, seventeen Cubans, three Peruvians, one Argentine, and one East German.

  The chase received its first major break on August 31 with the capture of a guerrilla named Jose Castillo “Paco” Chavez in a firefight on the banks of the Rio Grande River at Vado del Yeso. A second was also captured. “Ernesto” was hostile and arrogant, so someone shot him on the spot.

  I telephoned authorities at Bolivia’s Third Tactical Command and helped persuade them to turn the captive “Paco” over to Rodriguez for questioning. Felix interrogated him at Nuestra Senora de Malta Hospital, where he was recovering from wounds.

  The poor, bedraggled prisoner sat in a chair surrounded by about a dozen soldiers pointing rifles when Felix arrived. He wore long, dirty hair, a droopy Fu Manchu mustache, and a wimpy little beard. He was thirty-three years old and looked frightened out of his wits.

  “You’re going to kill me,” he kept saying.

  “No, I’m not,” Felix reassured him.

  “I never wanted to be a guerrilla. I never wanted to fight. And now you’re going to kill me.”

  Felix spent two weeks with Paco, gaining his confidence and debriefing him every day. Paco said he met three characters other than “Ramon” in the band who were imp
ortant players in the guerrilla drama. One was the writer Debray, the other an Argentine named Ciro Roberto Bustos, and the third was Tania, Che’s lover. She was an East German whose real name was Tamara Bider, later discovered to be a KGB agent assigned by Soviet Intelligence to keep watch on Guevara. These three served as messengers, carrying secret documents and money to the guerrillas from La Paz.

  Paco recalled seeing Tania shot dead at Vado del Yeso the same day he was captured. He saw her fall into the river where her lifeless body wedged behind a rock by the weight of her backpack. Felix sent a group of Bolivia soldiers back to the scene of the firefight, where they found Tania’s body, somewhat decomposed but still identifiable.

  A diary recovered in the backpack of another shot-dead Cuban guerrilla lieutenant called “Braulion” gave some indication of what life was like in Ramon’s band.

  26 Feb. 67: We lost the first man at 3 p.m. It was our friend Serafin. He was passing close to the edge of the Rosita River and slipped in. He didn’t know how to swim. Others tried to help him, but we were weak (from lack of food) and we could not help him.

  2 March 67: We have no communications with the vanguard. I started having cramps in my legs and could not walk. Marcos could almost not walk too. The personnel was very, very weak. We were finally authorized to eat the reserve (food in our packs) because there’s no hope of finding a farmer.

  25 March 67: Ramon made a speech. He fired Marcos from his position and gave Miguel the position he had before.

  12 April 67: We buried Rubio and we retreated a bit higher (into the countryside). We returned again to the base, where we stayed for two days, after which we returned again to Nancaguazu. There, we left the rear guard, while Ramon and the vanguard proceeded toward a little place called Ballipampa.

  Going under the war name “Ramon,” Che had escaped the firefight, although not in so dramatic a fashion as in Africa. Bolivian Rangers and U.S. Army Green Berets closed in on the guerrilla members and surrounded them in the wilds near the small mountain village of La Higuera. I kept careful monitor as the sequence of events sped up. I intended to be there at the end to see Che Guevara in bondage, a fitting end to a communist revolutionary dedicated to putting the world in chains and behind iron walls.