by Morris Ray
Captain Hugh Shelton, who later would become a four-star general and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. (Photo courtesy of Maurice Brakeman)
Any officer volunteering for Project Delta Recon had to first attend Recondo School. Many quickly fell out and were eliminated, either unwilling or unable to meet the harsh training demands.Upon graduating, they would report to Project Delta Headquarters in Nha Trang, only to face additional intense rugged training. Those demonstrating abilities were mentored by level-headed NCOs in charge, like Joe Markham, tough but fair. His leadership molded many of the young lieutenants earmarked for Delta Recon teams.
Jerry Estenson’s first time in the hole came in 1966. He was in the northern An Loa Valley with a young sergeant named Brewer and an old Delta hand, Jay Graves. That’s where he would learn certain principles that have remained with him to this day.
The An Loa Valley constricts to less than 250 meters in some areas. The team, out for three days, was tired. Reaching a river, they set up defensive positions in tall elephant grass and contemplated their best route across. In the grass behind him, Estenson heard what he described as a water buffalo thrashing. Checking, he discovered Jay Graves, pasty-faced and convulsing. Suspecting he’d been bitten by a snake, he scanned his arms and found small puncture wounds, apparently the imprint of a poisonous viper. Only through the quick action of SGT Brewer, who applied a tourniquet, was Graves able to make it until extracted. Graves was one of four Delta men documented as snake-bite victims.
A Delta Recon team ready to go. L to R: SSG Pappy Gleason, SSG Andy Shepard, SFC Joe Markham, SSG Brewer, SFC John Seal, Jr., 1LT Jerry Estenson, SGT Jay Graves. (Photo taken just prior to the An Lo Valley operation; courtesy of Jerry Estenson)
On that first operation, Estenson claims he learned the value of teamwork and “jointness.” He described this incident: The Recon team carried both the PRC-25 FM radio and the AN-GRE 109 radio, a Morse Code-sending device, as their primary and backup means of communication. Beyond FM radio range, the short-wave system sent Morse Code messages that would be picked up by Air Force units, then relayed to the right Army folks.
Team Lesson One: Unless the Commo folks kept the equipment in top shape, no communication could have taken place.
Al Groth, the Air Force FAC assigned to Delta, circled above Estenson until the C&C ship arrived.
Jointness Lesson One: The Air Force will be there to help when motivated by a skilled FAC or one of their own.
A small sandbar was located in the center of a two feet deep river. Estenson’s job was to place an orange panel marker on it to bring in the extraction chopper. Estenson recounted how he felt that day. He’d been clearly concerned about leaving the relative safety of the river bank to venture out onto that sandbar, but it was the only spot a chopper could set down. Waiting for the whooping of the helicopter blades to tell him they were in-bound, he felt his nerve slipping. From the signs he’d observed during the past three days, they were in the middle of “Indian Country.” He admitted he’d rather have done anything other than walk onto that barren sandbar, to be a sitting duck for the enemy snipers. His thoughts flashed back to his training at Recondo School and his old mentor, SFC Joe Markham.
“What would Joe do?” he thought, then silently answered himself. He’d say, “You’re in charge, L.T. Now, get your sorry ass out there and do your job.” As he heard the ship approaching, he stood and ran to the sandbar. It has been said, “Courage is being the only one who knows you’re afraid.”
First Lieutenant Jerry Estenson, 1967. (Photo courtesy of Jerry Estenson)
Once the choppers arrived, a robust conversation ensued between Estenson and the C&C ship, resulting in a decision to pull the team out. The Command’s staff man insisted they should extract the ailing Graves, and then leave the team to continue their mission. What had been Estenson’s stance on this matter?
“You’re f_ _ _ing crazy! We’re used up, the place is crawling with bad guys, and if they didn’t know we were here before your chopper hovered over us for fifteen minutes, they sure as hell do now. We’re coming out!”
Leadership Lesson One: Regardless of rank, the Team Leader on the ground makes the final call and is accountable for the decision.
As noted previously, the extraction site was only a narrow valley with its small river; the sandbar was the LZ. The 281st Army Helicopter Company (AHC) pilot who had inserted them, returned to retrieve them from a very tight spot.
Jointness Lesson Two: Although Project Delta was all about placing recon teams on the ground, their mission couldn’t have been accomplished without the superb flying skills of the 281st pilots and their crews who risked their lives to insert and extract these teams.
According to Estenson, that mission was accomplished repeatedly and well, “. . . even when some of us Recon guys behaved like arrogant unappreciative pricks.”
Estenson recalls his seven months in Delta taught him life-long lessons. He observed the professional NCO behavior, those who had to train some numb-nutted lieutenant to do a job they were far better at, and remembers an incident that left him with enduring memories of these men. During an extraction, after his team had climbed the rope ladder and he’d been the last man, the chopper “red lined”—lost power—in immediate danger of crashing. Estenson had only reached halfway up when the pilot pulled pitch and lifted off, dragging him through the trees as it struggled to gain altitude. The airspeed, rotorblade wash, his equipment, and just having to hang on for dear life, wore him down. As he was about to lose his grip and plummet to the valley below, some welcome hands gripped his web-harness and pulled him aboard. Those hands were Doc Simpson’s, one of the most outspoken NCO’s about officers on Recon teams. “For him to believe as he did,” said Esterson, “then to risk his life to save mine, well, we had some remarkable NCOs in Project Delta!”
Estenson, now a professor at California State University, Sacramento, wrote, “I learned to appreciate the permanent bond between men who do hard things together in hard places. The experience is my privilege of being able to share a life-long pride among this group of men who placed duty, love for their brothers and professionalism far beyond self. The price for these lessons might have been great, but my rewards are extraordinary.”
Another effective Recon officer was an athletic lieutenant from Virginia, Doug Coulter. Coulter was traveling in Madagascar when the Selective Service tracked him down with a draft notice. Estenson emphasized that Coulter’s intellect and deductive abilities, when combined with his innate leadership traits, appealed to even the most hardened and opinionated NCOs; they all wanted him to be with them on dangerous missions.
In Special Forces: A Guided Tour of U.S. Army Special Forces, coauthored by Tom Clancy and John Gresham, Clancy interviewed General Henry “Hugh” Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. He shared this about Coulter:
“But to go back to the original question about special or unique individuals. One I remember particularly was Doug Coulter, a Harvard graduate who came to Vietnam when that was not a very popular war, and said, ‘I’m going to do my duty. My number came up and I’m going.’ He did, and was a very professional guy, one of the best officers I saw during my two years over there. Today he teaches Harvard business case studies in China. Before that, he also taught in Russia. He’s as professional as they come, and went out on some missions and did some things that would make the hair on the back of your neck stand up; all out of range of U.S. forces and artillery. He was truly good.”
Specialist 6 Estelle Kerley, a tall youth from the hills of Tennessee, had been assigned to run recon with Estenson. About the same height, they made a good team and became close friends. Whenever possible, Recon teams were paired with other members similar in stature, in the event one became wounded and had to be carried. Estenson gave Kerley high marks for his quiet, solid approach to running field operations; he never lost his cool. Kerley and Estenson remained together throughout the An Lo and A Shau Valley operations. After return
ing to the States and marrying the love of his life, Kerley was killed in an industrial accident. The pain of his friend’s untimely death still troubles Estenson.
* * * * * *
Recon personnel always stipulated duties would be strictly on a volunteer basis—anyone could choose to leave at any time. The most experienced Recon man was in charge of the operation, regardless of rank. They had an implicit agreement with the Project Delta Commander, MAJ Art Strange: “If you don’t trust us, don’t use us; but if you use us, trust us. If we request extraction don’t question it, just come and get us. No discussion, no questions. We can discuss it later.”
These were the rules, and they proved to be good ones. It wasn’t as if they didn’t exactly trust officers, although many were younger and less experienced than the seasoned NCOs. Most learned quickly and did their jobs well. After a short shakeout, several were released for employment elsewhere. For the most part, the primary concern of NCOs was more about the officer chain of command, beyond Special Forces channels. They knew it could take just one conventional-thinker or less adaptable officer to get them killed.
In the summer of 1965, B-52 began to operate near the Cambodia border, to the north of their Forward Operations Base (FOB) at Bien Hoa Air Base. It was their first operation after the CIA acquiesced and relinquished control of Project Delta to MACV. The men were apprehensive about falling under a non-Special Operations commander with not a clue as to how Special Ops troops were supposed to be used. The apprehensions proved to be well-founded. The area, War Zone D, had the largest concentration of NVA and VC in South Vietnam; this was a dangerous place for Americans.
SGT Morley had been among those on the first team inserted, and was shot through the thigh immediately after the team hit the ground. They’d inserted into a large enemy encampment and had to run for their lives from the very start. Morley and his Vietnamese medic quickly became separated from the rest of the team, but finally managed to break enemy contact and made it to the riverbank. Evading the enemy, they survived three days by using a large log to float down the river during darkness, and then hid in the brush during daylight. The remainder of Morley’s team, split up at first contact, had managed to evade the enemy until the next day, despite the Viet Cong and NVA saturation searching for them. As soon as they could break enemy contact, the team leader radioed the FOB that Morley and their Vietnamese medic were missing and that others had been seriously wounded. He reported the NVA had been waiting for them on the LZ. With half his team missing, and the mission compromised, he requested immediate extraction. But, when MAJ Strange told the MACV G3 Operations Officer that he was in the process of extracting a team, the G3 colonel said, “Major, you tell that team to continue its mission. This is only the first day of that operation, and they’re scheduled for six.”
Recon men running to board an extraction chopper. (Photo courtesy of the family of Roy Sprouse)
Major Strange told the colonel he was extracting his troops ASAP, and that’s what he did!
During the next two days, the Delta Commander had choppers in the air from his 145th Air Lift Platoon, searching for the two missing team members, with no luck. On the third day, SGM McGuire, MSG Shaw and SFC Valentine were on one of two search choppers scouring the area when Shaw spotted Morley’s orange panel near a river that flowed toward Bien Hoa. As soon as the chopper began to circle, it started taking automatic weapons fire from the trees. Other U.S. aircraft in the area were still searching, but out of sight. McGuire told Valentine to inform the FOB of what they’d found.
“We’ve located our missing MIAs,” Valentine reported. “We’re taking heavy automatic weapons fire, but we’re going in to get them out.”
To avoid the enemy’s fire, the pilot “dead-sticked” the chopper, spiraling it toward to the ground. When only a few scant feet before impact, he pulled up and leveled off. It was a risky maneuver, but he figured he had no other option. Captain Thompson, on a chopper minutes away, broke in on the radio.
“Wait for us to support you.”
“No,” Valentine declined. He never much liked Thompson, considering him pushy, a bully and disrespectful to NCOs. He knew those guys on the ground personally and wasn’t going to let him risk their lives. “We’re going in to get our troops out, now!” Valentine told Thompson. He proceeded to not answer when Thompson called him back. While some Delta officers and NCOs agreed with Valentine’s opinion of Thompson, others thought him to be a fine combat leader, smart, low-key, a great sense of humor. Strong personalities and strict leaders often clashed, even between officers and NCOs.
As the chopper spiraled down, the rounds pummeled its thin metal fuselage. The staccato of the left door M60 machinegun ceased as the Vietnamese door gunner was slammed backward, hit in the shoulder. Others fired as fast as possible from the chopper’s side doors, trying to keep the enemy’s head low until the pilot could get the fragile craft level. Valentine’s carbine jammed; it would only work single-shot, but since Shaw and McGuire had been armed with new, shorter CAR-15 rifles, they worked over the area on full automatic.
The helicopter was peppered with hits, as if “leprechauns were banging on it with ball-peen hammers,” Valentine said later. Bullets cut the hydraulic lines and flammable fluid began to spurt onto the floor, making it slick and dangerous for those standing near the door’s edge. The pilot leveled off about four feet above the elephant grass, and they could see the two Recon guys slowly making their way toward the hovering chopper. SGT Morley hobbled through the tall grass, using his M-16 as a crutch, leaning on the medic for support.
To those in the chopper, they were moving too slow. McGuire yelled above the racket, “We’re taking too many hits! We’re gonna go down if they don’t haul ass!”
Valentine jumped from the door of the chopper to help the wounded Morley, before realizing they were hovering four feet above five-foot elephant grass, which made it a nine-foot leap to the ground; he hit hard. Luckily he hadn’t broken anything. Limping toward the struggling Morley and the medic, he grabbed Morley’s useless weapon and flung it away. Wrapping the wounded man’s arm over his shoulder, he helped Morley to the chopper and inside. The enemy fire remained relentless, but the pilot held his chopper as steady as if it were a training exercise.
“They’re on!”
The pilot pushed the stick forward and the battered helicopter lifted away as sluggishly as an overloaded dump truck. By then, it was so full of holes that the pilot couldn’t get more than thirty feet of altitude out of it, so he lifted off as far as possible and then flew practically along the water, down the river to Bien Hoa. The 145th pilot performed some pretty gutsy maneuvers, and had it not been for his courage, Delta men would’ve surely been lost.
Behind them, the other chopper and the gunships arrived and their mini-guns could be heard blasting away at the enemy’s positions. Shortly, Air Force fast-movers the FAC called in arrived—then the party really began.
Sergeant Morley ultimately recovered from his wounds. He went on to become an instructor at Fort Bragg’s Special Forces Medic’s Course.20
* * * * * *
Many seemed to lose track of Major Strange; he simply vanished from the scene. Boulas remarked, “One day he was there, and the next, gone.” Boulas seems convinced it might have been one of the antics he’d been subjected to, perhaps related to the secret club the Delta NCOs ran at the beach in Nha Trang. But “insiders” know the reason. It was that incident at Bien Hoa when he’d stuck up for his troops who asked to be extracted that caused his demise. He had bucked the MACV G3, offering to let him “kiss his ass” when told to leave Morley’s team in for another three days. It had simply gone against the agreement he had made with his NCOs; and Art Strange was an honorable man.
* * * * *
While in garrison, problems magnified after conventional troops arrived. New commanders attempted to impose stateside rules on Special Forces troops who’d already been in combat for years. SF had been in countries throughout Sout
heast Asia since the mid-1950s, killing and being killed; on the other hand, conventional units only began to arrive in late 1964. When Project Delta personnel returned after a dangerous and stressful operation in enemy controlled territory, or had survived a savage battle with the Rangers and Nungs, they just wanted to wind down, drink some beer, play a little poker and have a fight or two among friends. Then just as quickly, it was always back to training; followed by another mission. So maybe they did pull off a few crazy antics, but usually the Commander looked the other way. He knew if he fired them he’d never find any others crazy enough to do their job, or be half as good at it. He also understood that after a few days of wild socializing, they’d be ready to go back out again—and do it damned well. Then, someone tried to change the routine.
A military police unit assigned to Nha Trang began to detain Delta personnel for speeding, and issued them speeding tickets. The explanation—they didn’t want anyone to get killed. SFC Don Valentine was among the first recipients. Infuriated, he marched that ticket straight to SGM William Fuller. Fuller, 6’6” and well over 260 pounds held a black belt in Karate. But beyond being large, he became ugly when angry—and he’d become very angry. Fuller stormed into the Provost Marshall’s Office waving the offending ticket, cussing a blue streak. He reminded the PM Duty Officer that his men got killed nearly every day, and had been doing so longer than any of his fuzz-faced MPs had been drinking Army coffee...and not by any freaking jeep accident! He tore up the speeding ticket, threw it on the Desk Sergeant’s desk and stormed out; finishing his tirade by yelling, “Shove it, where the sun doesn’t shine!” No further tickets were issued to Special Forces personnel.