The Ether Zone: U.S. Army Special Forces Detachment B-52, Project Delta

by Morris Ray

  Records are essentially unavailable for the brave Vietnamese Special Forces, Chinese Nung mercenaries, Montagnard Road Runners and 81st Airborne Ranger Battalion personnel—all vital to Project Delta. They fought bravely along side their American counterparts and will forever remain an integral slice of Project Delta history.

  I am honored that the surviving Project Delta members have allowed me to write their story. However, this task was not easy. It was often difficult to get these former operatives to speak about their experiences. Their recollections were mostly about the brave deeds accomplished by others; the telling of others’ feats while remarkably skipping over their personal participation as either nominal or insignificant. Only after my review of their awards and decorations, did my evidence indicate quite the contrary. Hence, this account of Project Delta and its brave men result from information I’ve gleaned from many sources, meshed and woven, much like a patchwork quilt. It’s not as if there isn’t an abundance of untold stories within this secretive entity, but the U.S. Army Special Forces have a motto: “Quiet Professionals.” This trait is unique to their profession and they seldom speak of personal exploits or history, except during quiet conversations with those who have shared their experiences. Yet, if ever an opportunity arises to overhear one of them speak of some exemplary leadership or astonishing bravery, it’s wise not to dispute them. It will be the truth. In Detachment B-52, Project Delta, there are no phonies or “wanna-bes.”

  The Special Ops community has long coveted its privacy. Many did not reflect too kindly upon fellow veteran Barry Sadler for his song “The Ballad of the Green Berets” and scorned Robin Moore’s book, The Green Berets, and John Wayne’s adaptive movie, based on it. In 1965, Robin Moore traveled to Vietnam and visited the 5th Special Forces Group. A Project Delta NCO bumped into him in Nha Trang at the “Playboy Club.”

  “I don’t like your book,” said the NCO.

  “Have you read it?” Moore asked.

  “No,” was the curt reply. “I don’t have to read it. I don’t like it because of all the attention it’s giving Special Forces, and for the trouble I know it’ll cause us.”

  Many Special Forces soldiers believed this kind of publicity drew too much unwarranted attention to highly classified missions, inherently dangerous enough without adding notoriety that attracted others to volunteer, simply because they wanted to “cash-in” and become “heroes.” This philosophy was not, and is not, held in high regard. Attention also tended to evoke jealousy within some conventional Army organizations that resented elite organizations; they often attempted to get their own guys in to share the glory. Schemes and manipulations of this type could cause serious disruption and made Special Ops work all the more difficult and dangerous. Needless to say, attention such as this was not appreciated by the Quiet Professionals.

  Despite this notoriety, Project Delta’s veterans seldom speak of their own exploits, generally shunning those who boast of real or imagined adventures while serving with the organization. While they may speak quietly among themselves while honoring those no longer with them, outsiders should consider themselves fortunate to be privy to these tales of bravery and sacrifice.

  I’m convinced the recollections are but the tip of the iceberg. Names, dates and locations, while as factual as possible, may still be inaccurate due to lack of records, the passing of key personnel, or fading memories. Although I crosschecked material with Project Delta members or source documents prior to writing, mistakes do happen, and if so, they are purely unintentional. In a situation where information couldn’t be verified, I simply listed the operation and the names of those wounded, killed, missing in action, or receiving awards for valor. If any inaccuracies or omissions are discovered, I humbly apologize to any I may have slighted or failed to mention. It is my sincere hope that my efforts may be judged as a way to honor those living, and in some small way document the enduring legacy of these Project Delta members, for them and their families.

  Remarkably, none of the old warriors I interviewed would admit to being a hero, but to a man, they would stubbornly insist that the men they had fought beside certainly had been. Perhaps that’s what makes a man a true hero—an unawareness of personal bravery, the chalking up of heroic actions to the notion that they were, in fact, just doing their jobs and taking care of each other.

  In Stephen Ambrose’ book, Band of Brothers, years after WWII had ended, Mike Ramsey was questioned by his grandson if he’d been a hero during the war. He pondered for a moment, then replied quietly, “No, but I served in the company of heroes.” It’s time for these Quiet Professionals to tell their tale. These are heroes America needs to hear about.

  Welcome home, Brothers.

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remembered—

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

  For he today that sheds his blood with me

  Shall be my brother...

  -William Shakespeare, Henry V

  A 1966 “Stars & Stripes” map carried by Project Delta Recon Sergeant James Jarrett

  1 Steve Sherman. Project Delta, After Action Reports, Detachment B-52 (1964-1970).

  2 A list of awards is documented in the Annexes.

  ONE

  1953 – 1964

  Find the Ho Chi Minh Trail!

  “A nation reveals itself by the men it

  produces and the men it honors.”

  — John F. Kennedy, President of the United States

  THE MUTUAL DEFENSE ASSISTANCE ACT OF 1949 allowed the United States to send a small military staff, equipment and related training technicians to Vietnam to act as advisors to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN), primarily after the French left in 1953. As an unforeseen consequence, this then became a “foot in the door” for subsequent involvement in the eminent Vietnam War. Although these advisors formed into small military groups, they actually served as an extension of the U.S. diplomatic mission. By 1953, approximately 300 “advisors” were in country, many, highly trained Special Forces personnel stationed in Okinawa, Japan.

  In essence, the War in Indochina really never ceased after the French surrendered to the Viet Minh at Dinh Bien Phu, and the country was divided along the 17th parallel, forming the two countries, North Vietnam and South Vietnam. Almost immediately, the North began incursions into the new South, attempting to influence political decisions. For years, the South Vietnamese government knew that supplies had been reaching VC insurgents from North Vietnam, via the same trails through eastern Laos that’d been used to supply the Viet Minh on their southern battlefields during the French Indochina War.

  Vietnam is shaped similar to an hourglass. The center (along the 17th parallel) is the smallest dimension, which allowed the French, and later the South Vietnamese Army, to effectively curtail the movement of supplies and personnel along that narrow point of entry. Aware of this strategy, Communist leaders decided to resurrect hundreds of miles of trails that side-tracked west into Laos. This allowed them to bypass the narrow, well-defended center along the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), the North and South Vietnamese border, and veer into South Vietnam further south. What had been previously known as the Truong Son Route, the U.S. news media would begin to refer to as the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

  The Ho Chi Minh Trail consists of hundreds of miles of small roads and trails, interdicting South Vietnam by way of Laos. This winding network of footpaths and small roads became a lifeline, essential to the North’s incursion into its southern neighbor’s territory. More than simply a supply route, it functioned for storage and as bases of operations for forces jumping off into the South. Estimates are that more than seventy percent of communist war materiel and personnel traveled down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.3

  Since the Laotian military had little control over that rugged, isolated section of their country, Communist porters were soon moving men and supplies without fear of reprisal along these old supply routes. As one senior Laotian officer noted, �
��The trail runs through tropical, dense forest...The jungles along these trails are almost impenetrable primitive forests; the mountains are steep and rocky. During the French colonial regime, as well as after Laotian independence, this part of the country was so remote, isolated and undeveloped that no effort was made to control it.”4

  Deeply disturbed by this activity, the authorities in Saigon approached its Laotian neighbors to allow forays across the border to suppress such activities. Early negotiations between the South Vietnamese and their Royal Lao Government counterparts allowed the Army of Vietnam (ARVN) to initiate intelligence-gathering operations from Lao Bao, along Route 9, across their western border, and into Laos. Because the Laotian authorities were having their own internal problems, the two governments mutually agreed that ARVN troops would disguise themselves in Laotian Army uniforms to hide the fact that they were Vietnamese. This agreement resulted in a semi-permanent ARVN outpost inside Laos. In 1960, the Royal Lao Government was overthrown by a relatively unknown paratrooper captain, Kong Le, who immediately declared Laos to be neutral. Soon, battles raged across Laos as Kong Le, backed by the Communist Pathet Lao, fought to retain power against a well-organized right-wing group of officers who battled just as determinedly to establish a counter-coup. This internal fighting allowed the NVA to strike up an alliance with the Pathet Lao and to cement them firmer into the border region of Laos. Within a few weeks, in December 1961, North Vietnamese Army elements overran the ARVN outpost in Laos, subsequently using that location to attack into South Vietnam’s Kontum Province. Not since the end of the First Indochina War had northern troops used a base inside Laos to attack South Vietnam; reverberations were felt at top government echelons in Saigon and Washington, D.C.

  Coups and political disorganization on both sides of the border prevailed for a few years as the Communists ran operations along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, while basing their troops with impunity inside Laos. It was during this period that U.S. Army Special Forces began to train commandos who would later become the nucleus of the South Vietnamese Army Special Forces (VNSF).

  General William C. Westmoreland, Commanding General of MACV and U.S. ground forces in South Vietnam, 1964 – 1968. (Photo courtesy of US Army)

  In 1962, the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) was created as the Command and Control element for an ever-increasing volume of equipment, military advisors, technicians and staff to manage rapidly growing efforts to support the tottering Saigon Government. Although MACV’s stated mission was to serve as an extension of the diplomatic mission, and as an allied headquarters, when the first major U.S. units arrived in Vietnam (1965), General William C. Westmoreland and his top military commanders became mired in a quandary. This wasn’t like fighting in Europe and Korea. They hadn’t been trained to fight in Vietnam’s terrain, weren’t equipped to fight a war like this, and Army doctrine needed a dramatic shift to accomplish its new mission. The difficult jungle terrain was much more than an obstacle, it offered a formidable place to hide for an enemy who preferred to fight with hit-and-run guerrilla tactics instead of slugging it out toe-to-toe, as the German war machine had done. Military leaders knew the well-trained and equipped U.S. soldiers could defeat this elusive enemy, but first they’d need an effective means to find him. In 1965, William Sullivan, Ambassador to Laos, pointed out, “...impenetrable tree canopy that high-speed, high-flying jets cannot see through...flying over slowly with a helicopter, a road was not discernable from above. It seems clear to me. . .that significant quantities of logistics can still be moving over routes which...our strike aircraft are unable to discern.”5

  3 BDM Corporation: A Study of Strategic Lessons Learned in Vietnam , Volume 1, The Enemy. McLean, VA, November 30, 1979, 5-14.

  4 Brigadier General Soutchay Vongsavanh. “RLG [Royal Laotian Government] Military Operations and Activities in the Laotian Panhandle,” Indochina Monographs. Washington, D.C., U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1981, 4.

  5 U.S. Department of State [DOS], telegram from Sullivan to DOS, 21 June 1965, Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS], 1964-1968, Volume 27, Laos. www.state.gov/www/about_state/history/ vol_xxviii.

  TWO

  1964

  Leaping Lena

  THE ARVN COMMANDERS, ALONG WITH THEIR U.S. advisors, recognized the urgency for intelligence a full year earlier when initiating a classified operation, code-named “Leaping Lena,” to conduct long range reconnaissance missions across the international border into neutral Laos and to locate enemy bases and foretell enemy troop movement.6 U.S. Special Forces (USSF) had been operating in Southeast Asia under the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) auspicious control since the French had been kicked out in the 1950s, with, as yet, unpublicized achievements. Organized by the CIA, Leaping Lena initially consisted of several allVietnamese recon teams who were trained by U.S. Special Forces personnel on temporary duty (TDY), operating out of Okinawa. These were the predecessors of Project Delta or as the unit’s old timers prefer to say, “Leaping Lena was the operation—Project Delta, the name of the organization.

  As early as March 1964, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara expressed his belief that reconnaissance teams were extremely beneficial and urged greater use.7 In May 1964, Captain (CPT) William J. Richardson Jr., assisted by Sergeant Major (SGM) Paul Payne, handpicked volunteers from an Okinawa-based Special Forces company, flew them to Vietnam and began to train various indigenous ethnic groups; Chinese Nung, Montagnard tribesmen and Vietnamese army personnel for the sensitive Leaping Lena operation. Sergeants Paul Tracy, Bill Edge, Donald Valentine, Tony Duarte, Sergeant First Class (SFC) Henry M. Bailey and SFC Ronald T. Terry were among those on that first team, joined later in the year by NCOs Larry Dickinson, Norbert Weber, Harold “Catfish” Dreblow, Eddie Adams, Ronald Gaffney, James Malia and Sterling Smith. The Command’s initial intention was for these USSF personnel to serve only as trainers and advisors, not to accompany the recon teams into the field. Initially, Leaping Lena recon teams were comprised of indigenous personnel (reflecting a cross-section of the local population) termed the Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG) and a few of the new Vietnamese Special Forces (VNSF) the USSF had been training. In anticipation of their insertion into Laos, Leaping Lena teams had been trained by Green Berets, using proven long range recon patrolling techniques, such as the use of smoke jumping equipment for parachuting into dense foliage.

  Vietnamese Army and Air Force elements provided aviation support for Leaping Lena in the form of Forward Air Controllers (FAC), troop carriers and on a limited basis, close air support. Before 1961, the Vietnamese had no system for directing or controlling air strikes. In December 1961, advisors from the 13th U.S. Air Force developed a plan for the first Tactical Air Control (TAC) system in Vietnam, to be located at Tan Son Nhut Airbase. The plan called for establishment of an Air Support Operations Center (ASOC), Air Liaison Officers (ALO)and Forward Air Controllers (FAC), manned by both USAF and VNAF personnel. The following year, an ASOC was created at Da Nang Air Base, which was assigned to I Corps combat operations, and subsequently ASOCs were also implemented in II and III Corps. Vietnamese pilots flew limited FAC support until the U.S. 19th Tactical Air Support Squadron (TASS), with its twenty-two O-1F aircraft assigned, arrived in July 1963.

  During June and July 1964, five Leaping Lena teams, each composed of eight Vietnamese Special Forces NCOs, parachuted into the Laotian jungle along Route 9. Immediately, the operation ran into trouble; one man died from his injuries as he attempted to rappel 120 feet from the tall trees after his chute became entangled in its thick triple-layer canopy. Several more were also seriously injured in the tree landings, robbing the teams of critical skills they’d need to survive and send back intelligence. Without American leadership and expertise on the ground, the mission was doomed to fail, and despite being warned about going into villages, most teams ignored the orders. It didn’t take long for the enemy to become aware of their presence and essentially wipe them out.

 
; A broad consensus is that the first Leaping Lena operations were disasters. Of the forty Vietnamese team members initially dropped into Laos, most were either killed or immediately captured after their insertion. Only five survivors straggled back, weeks later. Of the data gathered, little was deemed to be useable intelligence, but it had still been more than MACV had collected prior to the operation. At the least, they knew the area across the border had been saturated with the enemy, many in NVA uniforms, clear proof that the North Vietnamese were sponsoring the South’s insurgency. Roads and bridges were all guarded by a minimum of two personnel, and additional roads supported huge convoys that couldn’t be detected, even from the air. Several battalion-sized units were reported just inside Laos, with evidence that one had already crossed into South Vietnam near Khe Sanh. Here, a Special Forces camp would be overrun in 1968, the site of one of the war’s bloodiest battle between U.S. Marines and the NVA.

  An immediate search for the missing Leaping Lena team survivors was initiated. MAJ Fred Patton and MSG Robert Mattox arrived as advance party for two SF teams deployed from 1st Special Forces Group Airborne (1st SFGA), A1/111 and B1/110, on a six month TDY assignment with orders to search for the missing Leaping Lena team members. Joined by teammates from Okinawa, their intensive search failed to turn up any more of the missing Vietnamese soldiers, except for the five initial stragglers. The others who had descended into the dark rugged jungle that fateful evening over Laos were never heard from or seen again.