16
SOF BLASTS THE BALLOON WITH
THE ROYAL THAI AIR FORCE
“We are going to jump the balloon!” Jim Morris and Jim Coyne greeted me as I landed in Bangkok. They must have been bored from all the waiting around to find POWs, joining the Lao Insurgency, or believing promises of raiding an opium lab.
Apparently, Coyne, bored to tears, had been chomping at the bit to jump, and the devilish Morris thought he had finally found a scheme that would make me squirm or at least get me to sponsor a jump. We were all staying in the palatial, seventh floor SOF penthouse that overlooked the Chokchai Steak House in loud, smoggy downtown Bangkok.
Morris, who had orchestrated this plan, said he had first become aware of the balloon on the Mitrapab jump at Hat-Vai when a couple of guys from Major Mark Smith’s U.S. Special Forces Advisory Team (Korea) showed up wearing a pair of unusual wings.
“They’re Thai balloon jumper’s wings,” Smith told Morris, foot propped on the tailgate of a Royal Thai Air Force C-123.
“It’s a system they adopted from the British. The Belgians have one too. They use it like the 280-foot towers at Benning, only it’s better and cheaper. They have a barrage balloon on a thousand-foot cable. They winch it down; six jumpers climb in the gondola and hook up. They run it back up to 800 feet and go out on individual tap-outs.”
“There’s no wind blast. You just float out of the gondola. It takes a 6,000 count to open, which scares the shit out of you, and by the time you open you’re at 500 feet, which leaves you with about three seconds to get your reserve deployed if something goes wrong. I’ve got more than 350 jumps and this was the worst!” said Mark Smith, holder of the Distinguished Service Cross, Silver Star and many other decorations.
“If it bothered Smith that much, it had to have a pucker factor of about 9.6,” Morris said.
Coyne and Morris had decided that I had to jump the balloon. Far be it from me to not take a dare, especially one that only maniacs would accept. Besides, if the Crown Prince did it, Robert K Brown would.
When I arrived in Bangkok, Morris, the mastermind of this insanity, called Colonel Rut Komolvanich, G-3 of the Royal Thai Army Special Warfare Center. Colonel Rut was known for catering to the Special Forces old-boy network. He put us on the manifest for the following Wednesday.
I pre-empted that jump for legitimate reasons although they thought I was weaseling out. At the time we were all tied up in hours and days of long-range strategy sessions with spooks, phonies and crooks.”We will jump as the last thing before we close out,” I said. “We have come too far and worked too hard to take a chance of missing some combat patrol for our Lao Insurgency because of an injury like a broken leg.
We used up two months holding secret meetings in hot, stuffy hotel rooms. We learned a lot, most of which we could not print in the magazine without getting people killed.
Finally, “I’M READY TO JUMP THE BALLOON,” Coyne bellowed.
Morris called Colonel Rut.
“Sure,” he told him. “Come tomorrow. In the morning we jump the balloon and in the afternoon you can jump C-130 if you want.” Morris signed us up.
The next morning we rented an air-conditioned taxi for the day to drive Coyne, TR, Morris and Kat, his photographer wife and me, all squeezed in the small cab to Lop Buri and back. Coyne, professional photographer, took his video tape recorder so we could show the jump at the convention.
Captain Kitti Patummas, who had just returned from the States where he had attended the Ranger and Special Forces officers’ courses, met us there. He led us into the balloon hanger, where it hovered menacingly against the wall.
A young Thai sergeant gave us gondola training. He taught us the difference between the exit of a balloon and an aircraft. You just step out of the balloon, not jump like from an aircraft. If you jump up and out you could get wound up in a wire.
A two-and-a-half ton truck with an enormous winch on the back towed out the British-made balloon while we were doing some refresher PLFs (parachute landing falls).
The most startling thing about riding in a balloon occurred the moment the gondola swung free and the ground dropped away. Then it was so quiet and the breeze so pleasant one believed he could be on an imaginary cloud. Our jumpmaster, or “dispatcher,” in the British jump system, decorated with Thai, U.S. and British jump wings, assured us that they had never had a malfunction. He sensed our anxiety
“How often do you jump balloon?” Morris asked him.
“Almost every day,” he boasted, which I guess was a boast well earned. “It’s my balloon.”
It was my turn.
I saw my life flashing before my eyes. “If the Crown Prince can do it, I can,” I chanted. “If the Crown Prince can do it, I can.” I let out a great Hail Mary when I went over the edge. It’s just a battle cry, I told the boys.
Then it was Morris’ turn. He described blow-by-blow his jump. “I wheeled into the door and assumed a standard door position. The DZ was way down there, stationary, almost like a sand table,” Morris said.
“Ready!” said the dispatcher.
Morris came to attention, grasped his reserve at the sides and took one step forward, as he said, “like a tin soldier.”
“It wasn’t like skydiving,” he wrote in an SOF article. “Where you don’t feel weightless until you get away from the aircraft. There was a feeling of instant buoyancy, like the Moonwalk or the Big Slide, only longer and better. My legs just sort of floated up until I was sitting in midair in the shape of an ‘L.’ Then I felt the first little tug at my back, my trash streamed out and ever so slowly billowed and inflated.
“I reached for the right toggle, as I checked my canopy. The plan was to hold against the wind, saving a long walk to the turn-in point. For a while I seemed to be dropping straight down on one of the two trees on the DZ, but I drifted away without correction. Then the ground got close and I locked my eyes on the horizon and got my feet and knees together. For most jumpers the moment of truth is the exit; for fat boys it is the parachute landing falls.”
Like a great proud peacock, Morris strutted to collapse the chute but two little boys beat him to it.
Meanwhile, in the air, Coyne was in a panic, trying to find his toggles. He swore he was jumping a blank T-10. He got in a stiff position and crashed in for a right front PLF, moving at about ten knots, hitting his left heel and twisting his ankle. “Mekong Jim,” as Morris called him, was done.
A little over an hour later, Morris, Reisinger and I sat on the tailgate of an airborne C-130 staring out at a sea of eager young faces of a class of junior cadets at the military academy preparing for their fifth jump. The balloon had been installed in September 1981, and had jumped 5,000 jumpers by the time we took the challenge. The first two of the five qualifying jumps for the cadets had to be from the balloon. The military ran the country and paratroopers ran the military, so paratroopers they trained. Up to 100 small, lightweight Thais would shove into a C-130, sitting on the floor in the up position.
Morris made a good assessment of the balloon: “It does one of the basic things that parachute training is good for. It teaches the soldier to perform simple mechanical tasks while scared shitless, which is pretty much what soldiering is about.”
I was first on the left. Morris was the first man in the right door, with T.R. right behind him. I prepared myself for my “Hail, Marys,” a ritual I do mechanically every time I jump.
The light went green. The third man was going out the left door. Morris disappeared.
“Out and open I grabbed and pulled, turning to make a surprising discovery. The cadets were in T-10s. They had no directional capability, other than a slip. As I held into the wind, the entire stick from the left door drifted directly toward me, a ragged, solid line of olive-green parachutes. I wondered what the kid below thought when he saw the imprint of my size i2s sprinting across his canopy,” he remembered.
Morris and I landed fine, but T.R., tall slim and looking totally fit, lan
ded flat on his ass and messed up his spine. He had a football-sized bruise on his hip and wanted to disappear. Morris chalked our fitness compared to the others up to the daily jogs that he and I took in Boulder.
“Well, we finally did something,” I said with big-time pride as I walked off the DZ.
But I swore that I would never do it again, and I never did there, though I went on to earn jump wings from Israel, Guatemala, El Salvador, Taiwan and Peru. Not very impressive when compared to Donavan who earned jump wings from 28 different countries.
17
SAY GOODBYE, COMRADE JAWS:
SOF BREAKS BREAD WITH THE KGB
The wire-service reporter next to SOFs man-in-Bangkok, Jim Coyne at the bar of the Foreign Correspondents Club of Thailand, nodded toward the crowded bar and whispered, “The KGB’s here.”
“You mean TASS?” Coyne referred to the Soviet “news” agency synonymous with spying. “No, the KGB.” His eyes darted around as he spoke. “Him—the big smiling guy with the beer.”
Coyne toasted the Russian who was looking in his direction. The burly man, probably in his late 30s, toasted back, with a smile on his lips but not in his mind.
I sat nearby with a crowd of journalists. I was serving as a panelist with a group that was going to discuss the issue of “checkbook journalism.”
Television networks and others with megabuck budgets to spend, as far as I figured, come from the “money talks, bullshit walks” school of journalism. The end result is often very far from the truth and can be very damaging. They had no clue of the importance of our POW mission or the use of chemical and biological weapons by Vietnam or the Soviet Union, subjects they were reporting on.
I had been looking forward to this verbal combat for several weeks, and many journalists had shown up. That is probably why the big Russian was there. SOF was making quite the impression in Bangkok. We had rented a penthouse suite and I had two of my staffers investigating full time for months.
Alan Dawson, another panel participant, and author of the book 55 Days: The Fall of Vietnam, other panelists and I verbally blew away some clueless participant who was a former State Department spokesman.
At the bar, the big Russian and Coyne had hooked up, both chugging their beers and looking like the best of friends.’Anatoly Korolev, Soviet Embassy,” the Russian introduced himself to Coyne.
“Jim Coyne,” Coyne said. “Soldier of Fortune magazine; no doubt you’ve heard of us.”
“Of course. I’ve read your magazine, but it’s very difficult to get,” the Russian told Coyne. “What brings you to Bangkok?” he asked.
“Chemical and biological warfare violations by Vietnam and the Soviet Union,” Coyne said with a smile.
“Oh, that,” he said in perfect English, and shrugged. “We’re not doing any of that stuff.”
“I wouldn’t expect you to confide in me if you were,” Coyne said.
Anatoly said, “We should have lunch sometime,” then wrote his name, telephone number and address on a cocktail napkin. He was staying just a few blocks away from the SOF apartment. Coyne, intrigued, gave him his name and number.
We were scheduled to leave for Pakistan the next day. But Coyne told the Russian, “We’re going to Aranyaprathet,” naming the Thai-Kampu-chean border town 200 kilometers east of Bangkok. ‘I’ll call when I get back.”
“Fine,” the Soviet said, preparing to leave.
“What exactly do you do at the Soviet Embassy, Anatoly?” Coyne asked him. “I’m chief of the Political Section,” he answered with a smile.
The panel discussion was over and I won another small, humble victory over the forces of darkness and legions of evil.
I asked Coyne who his new friend was after the stranger left.
“Chief of the Political Section at the Soviet Embassy,” he said.
“No shit? KGB!” I was impressed. “What did he want?” “He wants to have lunch next week,” Coyne said.
“Fuck a bunch of Russians,” I said, not in the mood to meet up with the Chief of the Political Section or any other Russian.
Coyne and I headed to Pakistan the next morning, and were in the filthy hellhole Karachi by noon. After a week of participating in a couple of skirmishes in Afghanistan and nearly suffering sunstroke along Pakistan’s rugged Northwest Frontier Province, we returned to Bangkok.
We headed for the Grand Prix bar, a favorite watering hole for journalists in Bangkok’s notorious Pat Pong District. Rick Menard, an American Nam vet, had owned Grand Prix for more than 16 years. The last thing on our mind was the big Russian.
“Anatoly’s been asking about you,” Menard told Coyne, who nearly choked on his drink.
“What does he want?” Coyne said.
“I don’t know,” said Menard.
“Bob,” Coyne said, “the KGB guy’s been asking for me.”
“Tell him that we were in Afghanistan,” I told him, as impressed as I was the first time Coyne told me about the KGB guy.
Robert Moberg walked into the crowded bar. “Mo” had flown anything the U.S. government would give him for more than nine years, based out of the American Embassy in Bangkok. He wore a U.S. Special Forces Decade lapel pin on his western-cut jacket.
Coyne described Mo in SOF: “He looked like ‘McCloud,’ only nastier. He spoke with the low whisky drawl known only to southerners and army aviators. “I am,” he often said humbly. “A legend among my peers.”
“Moberg had commanded the 281st Aviation Company in Vietnam during 1966 and 1967. Twenty-five helicopters known as radio call signs: ‘Intruders’ for the slicks, and ‘Wolfpack’ for the gunship platoon. They were always in the shit. I first heard of him in 1966, when the gunship I was gunner on was dispatched south along with one other ship to assist the 5th Special Forces in Nha Trang. Two ‘Shark’ gunships from the 174th Aviation Company. We flew some of the hairiest missions of the war during the day, and were often parked in Nha Trang by nightfall.”
Mo at the time was working for United Oil and Gas Services in Singapore and was well connected. He was as impressed with the fact that the KGB wanted to meet up with us as I was.
The next morning Anatoly phoned Coyne at our penthouse. “Jim, this is Anatoly, remember? I’ve been trying to reach you. Where have you been?”
Coyne told him that we had been in Afghanistan, and when Anatoly reminded him that he had said we were going to Aranyaprathet, Coyne, one of the funniest editors I had ever hired, gave some bullshit response.
“Something came up. Apparently the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan a few years ago. Maybe you remember reading something about it in the papers.”
“Brown get up!” Coyne yelled at me to wake up in the other room, “The KGB guy Anatoly wants to meet us.”
“I’m not talking to any Russians.” I said. Coyne would have none of it.
“I’m not going alone,” he said. “I told him we were in Afghanistan. Let ‘s go meet him and see what he’s up to.”
“ OK,” I said, “but I’m not shaking the hand of any KGB puke.”
“Even if you told him everything, he’d never believe you,” said Coyne.
We headed for the Narai Coffeehouse, a decaying hotel and guesthouse. None of the waitresses spoke English. We chose a 2:00 meeting time when there would be little traffic so we could monitor who was coming and going. And in best spook tradition we arrived an hour early to see if any other KGB bad guys arrived before Anatoly. I sat in a rear booth, facing the door. ‘‘I’m not sitting next to him.”
Anatoly walked through the door alone, on time. He hesitated while his eyes adjusted to the dark interior of the coffee shop. He spotted us and walked toward our booth. We stood up and Coyne shook his hand. He seemed surprised at my presence.
“This is Robert Brown, publisher of Soldier of Fortune,” Coyne said. “Bob, this is Anatoly Korolev from the Soviet Embassy.” Anatoly extended his hand, and after a brief hesitation, I shook it. What the hell.
“So,” Anatoly began, “I
understand you’ve been in Afghanistan. Where were you? What did you see?”
“We were in the countryside with the guerrillas,” Coyne replied. “We watched a T-62 get hit. A couple of mortar attacks. A couple of doomed outposts of the Kremlin. We were invited there to help the government put down the insurrection.”
The Russian shrugged, then laughed at the outrageousness of what Coyne had told him.
“Afghanistan is not my area of specialty,” he said.
“How long have you been in Bangkok, Anatoly?” I asked.
“Oh, for a few years now,” he said. “Before that in other areas of Asia.”
“It must be difficult to go back to Moscow after Bangkok,” Coyne said, no doubt basing his statement on all of the rumors of the stiff, austere Soviet Union in comparison with the party town that never slept and where anything goes.
“Not at all,” he laughed. “I just get on an airplane. You should come to the Soviet Union. See for yourself.”
“I don’t think I would be welcome there,” Coyne said. SOF made no secret of its rabid anti-Soviet stand.
“Why did you want to meet with us, Anatoly?” I was tired of the bullshit and wanted to get this meeting over with.
“Well, I was . . . curious. I wanted to see what Soldier of Fortune was really like. I’m here for the same reasons you’re here, you know.” He relaxed and leaned back confidently in the booth and ordered a beer.
A 3oish small, wiry Thai man with sunglasses sat down in the booth behind Anatoly, facing us. Hardly anybody else was in the restaurant so Coyne and I assumed the Thai was Anatoly’s tail.
We ordered lunch on the Soviet Union. I ordered my normal white wine with a cup of ice and found the most expensive seafood entry on the menu, as did Coyne.
Coyne livened up the party. “What are you going to do when someone, somewhere comes up with one of your chemical and biological rockets, and says ‘Here it is’?” he asked. “What about the flagrant CBW attacks by the Vietnamese in Laos and Kampuchea, assisted by the Soviet Union?”
I Am Soldier of Fortune Page 22