by C. R. Ryder
“Out loud,” The quiet man with no name said.
“Toi hy vong ban thich gao. Banh mi la gi?”
“Stop.” The quiet man said.
“Jesus Christ that language is like fucking nails on a chalkboard.”
“Thanks”
“No offense.” The mustache guy offered.
“Why didn’t you go into linguistics?”
“I didn’t want to be stuck in some embassy somewhere listening to a radio.”
“You wanted to be a Combat Controller though. Didn’t make the cut in basic.” Mustache guy said.
That had been three years ago when I first enlisted. Combat Controllers were the special forces of the Air Force. They came to each basic training flight and show a video of what they do. Everyone is invited to try out. I had gone for it. You got to spend a day running around an obstacle course and swimming in a pool. It was better than getting ripped by the MTI all day. I had always been athletic, but I had not really taken it seriously.
“You almost did though. Did they tell you that?” Todd asked.
“How fast can you run a mile?”
“5 minutes 34 seconds.”
“How much can you bench?”
“150 pounds.”
“Christ! My mom can do more than that.” Mustache man sneered. “Look at those tiny arms.”
“Give him a break.” Todd said.
“Think you can carry a fifty pound ruck?” The Quiet man asked.
“Yes,” What the hell was I getting myself into?
“What do you say Jeff?” The Quiet man asked the Mustache man revealing his name at last.
“Won’t be much of a load if we have to carry him at least.” Jeff answered.
“He’ll do.” The Quiet Man said. “My name is Scott Walters. I intend to put you in harm’s way.”
“We need a translator. The personnel computer came up with your name on a very short list. If you accept you will be deployed in the field with us for a period of a few weeks.” Todd explained.
“Where?” I asked.
“Thailand and then possibly into Vietnam.” Scott Explained.
“Everything from this point forward is classified. That means keep your fucking mouth shut. Don’t tell your mama or your girl.” Jeff said giving me a hard look.
“Are you guys Green Berets?”
They ignored the question, but stopped to look at each other and smile.
“We cannot guarantee your safety, but you will be with the three of us and some of the best operators in the world.”
“You will be doing your country a great service.”
“I guess I’m in.”
“You guess? Are you in or not?” Jeff asked.
“I’m in.”
And that is how I joined Black Ops.
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Adams
State Department
Washington D.C.
The thing may have died then and there. At least it would not have come to violence. Seeing how things turned out it would have been better if it had.
Oil prices were rising with Iraq’s refusal to retreat from Kuwait. Americans were feeling it in their wallets. The protesters in September thinned out to about half the number of the month before. The cable news, which was new to all of us, was the only thing keeping the Thailand Box story alive.
We started to get the feeling that the whole thing was going to go away. It’s not like we had not rattled a hollow sabre before.
We still would have looked for the POWs. If they were found the military would have slipped some operators across the border and like many of the hotspots in the world it would have been a Spec Ops show. Using Big Green and Big Blue and Big Navy to solve this was going to leave a lot of people dead and broken hearted.
I could feel it.
It was our old enemies that hammered the final nail in the coffin for Vietnam. Poor Vietnam. With a friend like Russia who needs enemies like America. Out of some kind of ill executed Glasnost the Russian ambassador showed up at the White House on September 11th.
He brought with him what would be known as the 1205 Document. From the bowels of some shitty archive in Moscow a Soviet researcher found a report by a senior Vietnamese military officer. Addressed to the Vietnamese Communist Party, the 1205 document claimed that in September of 1972 the Vietnamese were holding 1205 US POWs. This was five months before Operation Homecoming where 591 POWs were released.
Simple math revealed that the 1405 Document claimed that 614 other living US POWs were still alive as of 1972.
This document gave Congress, the President and the public the war they ended up with.
The next day the WAR NOW group was made public. All of the protestors had been united and now marched under one flag. They were led by a lot of the activists that protested the first Vietnam War. Former antiwar advocates, retired military and former POWs were seen in their ranks.
It was Goddamn bizarre.
CIA and military said POW existence “questionable” based on the evidence up until the 1205 document. With Russian ambassador revelations, the status was changed to “probable.”
Two days later it was C-day.
Lieutenant Colonel Carol Madison
Air Force Intelligence Officer
Defense Intelligence Agency
C-Day was the day that the President committed forces to the recovery of American POWs in Vietnam. I was in San Antonio on leave when the announcement was made. Every television in every bar and restaurant on the Riverwalk was tuned to the President’s address.
“Is Cuba or North Korea next?” The cable news channels asked.
Listening to the President lean the country forward for another armed conflict in Indochina made me think of a conversation I had sat through the week before. We were briefing some NATO officers who were interested in the POW issue.
“Are airstrikes next?” the NATO representative asked.
“Beyond the embargo we have no plans for any military action at this time.” My commander explained.
We might not have any plans, but it was on everyone’s minds.
It felt like the Cuban Missile Crisis all over again. We were back to the John F. Kennedy rules of projecting national power. His best move was embargo. Worked beautifully against the Cubans. Against North Vietnam, not so much.
And here we were doing it again.
Vietnam was a hard country to threaten. We already had a trade embargo against them and they were pretty poor to begin with. It was difficult to take something away from someone who didn’t have anything to begin with.
They told us to blow off when we wanted to send in inspectors. It was not so much that we wanted to send in inspectors. We’d done that before. We wanted the inspectors to have unlimited access to the country and their own government records.
They said no way.
That night there was the speech. It must have gotten Vietnam’s attention.
The Vietnamese government capitulated the week after my two kids went back to school. United Nations inspectors were allowed into the country.
Major Timothy Sullivan
United States Air Force Combat Controller
Hanoi was a relatively modern city by Asian standards. It was the capital of the Communist government and center of business for Vietnam. Downtown was a series of office buildings and city parks. Dominating all other structures was the Ho Chi Minh tomb. It was a concrete monolith in the center of the city. The lights were on there day or night. The building supposedly had three backup generators.
I got off the plane with the rest of the American delegation wearing a suit and tie. We were greeted by representatives of the Vietnamese government as soon as our feet hit the ground. I was there officially as one of five military advisors to the secretary of state. In my briefcase I carried a GPS transmitter/receiver.
For their part the Communists were being fairly accommodating. This was before the shooting started though so I could not tell you what their state of mind was. I do
n’t think they saw us as a threat yet, just an inconvenience. We weren’t the first official US group to come to Vietnam looking for the lost. Certainly public outcry in the states was at a frenzied height that had never been seen before. There was more clamor for action than there had been during the entire all of V1. Still the Vietnamese had being the winners on their side. They felt safe. At least they felt like America would not go down the same road twice. Not a road that had been built on blood.
I had one mission and one mission only on the trip. When we got to the hotel I got it done.
The hotel had a small courtyard. I took my briefcase with me as I went for a stroll. When I found a bench I sat down. I opened the briefcase, took a GPS reading and then put the machine back into the case.
The rest of the visit was uneventful. We were taken out to prearranged inspection sites to look at empty camps and prisons.
The GPS receiver stayed in my briefcase for the rest of the trip and the briefcase never left my possession. I took it with me to every meal, every meeting and even the toilet. When I got back to the states I took the GPS receiver out again and I handed it over to an intelligence agency in Langley. From that one reading, the exact coordinates of that courtyard were determined by aerial photography and cross checked to my GPS reading. Then that position served as the origin of a coordinate system used to determine targets all over Hanoi and the entire country of Vietnam.
When the plane departed for home I remember watching the city from my window. It was lit up at night and you could mistake Hanoi for any midsized city in the states. The next time I saw it would be after and it would be in ruins.
BUILD UP
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Adams
State Department
Washington D.C.
America’s first move was to hurt the Vietnamese economically. U.S. seapower moved into the Gulf of Tonkin to deny Vietnam access to the resources he needed to maintain their own forces. The United Nations imposed an embargo, which was enforced by an international force of destroyers and frigates in the Gulf of Tonkin. They blocked arms shipments. Until the moment the embargo began, Vietnam had spent very little on spare parts and ammunition; famously, they had depended on the Soviet Union for maintenance and resupply. Now the Soviet Union was no more and outliers like Vietnam and Cuba were scrambling to find their way. Their only other major supplier had been China, but their wartime ally had become their wartime enemy by the early eighties.
Vietnam was effectively alone.
Like all embargoes, this one could not be foolproof, but it was effective. Blocking Vietnam’s resupply had important wartime consequences. Without arms and ammunition they would not be able to sustain combat. That meant that every day they would grow weaker as the U.S. military remained at the same level. This was important as the last months of 1990 came to a close Vietnam had the fifth largest army in the world. America’s army was not even in the top twenty.
Theoretically the embargo would hurt them as they would not be able to reconstruct or replace their wartime losses. On a long enough timeline it got real scientific. Of course with Congress and the American public there was no guarantee that we would have all the time we needed.
Other measures would have to be taken to find the POWs other than a full frontal assault.
The embargo was only made possible by a ship-tracking system that had been developed for tracking the Soviet fleet. It had only completed its tests and brought into service a month before the crisis began.
In addition shipping was unopposed. Vietnam lacked friends along the routes the ships took.
The embargo also had the virtue of giving American forces something to do. Had negotiations been the only tool for civilian lawmakers then there would have been more pressure not to fight. As it was the buildup of forces meant to pressure the Vietnamese would also become an overwhelming force demanding a consensus for military action. The next test would be for the Vietnamese government to pass. Would they give up the POWs peacefully or would force be necessary.
In the meantime Americans deployed a holding force which would double as the embargo enforces. Behind them the army of personnel and mountain of material would flow into the Pacific theater and ready for battle.
Senior Airman Bobby Sherman
Airborne Radio Operator
Command Solo
Voice of the Gulf
I hated flying. I threw up every time no matter how smooth the air was at altitude. It made me feel bad. There were guys coming through basic all the time begging for a flying job and here one was wasted on me.
I was an electronic communication systems operator on Command Solo. The Command Solo was a specially modified Hercules C-130 transport. We conducted Military Information Support Operation (MISO) and civil affairs broadcasts in AM, FM, HF, TV as well as military communications bands.
“Do you want to practice it again?” I asked Airman First Class Barber. Her voice was about to be broadcast to millions of people. If she was nervous it didn’t show.
“No. I’m ready. Let’s roll.” She said looking confident as she reread the script for the final time.
We had forward deployed to Thailand a week ago and we had just gotten the word that we were going to start broadcasting. We flew alone. A typical mission consists of an orbit offset from the desired target audience. In this case we were able to cover a wide swath of the country of Vietnam and never leave Thai airspace.
“Alright,” I pointed at her and gave her thumbs up. I pressed the transmitter and we were live. “You’re on.”
“Good Morning Vietnam!” Barber said into the headset. “This is the United States Air Force. We want our countrymen returned. We do not want conflict. We just want our servicemen back.”
We broadcast on unused civilian frequencies for now. Anyone with an AM or FM radio should be able to pick us up. We were working on a video to broadcast on television as well, but we had not gotten the go ahead on that yet. The only thing we did not do was jam their frequencies. That was considered an act of war.
“Implore your leaders to return our countrymen. Let’s continue to live in peace together.” Airman Barber said in her best newscaster voice.
Lieutenant Colonel Carol Madison
U.S. Air Force Intelligence Officer
Defense Intelligence Agency
We got the word that they were standing up an Air Operations Center at Hickam to oversee the embargo. The requirement came down the next week for a member from our flight. I took a look at the usual suspects. Carter’s wife was having a baby in January. James’ wife was having a baby in February. Johnson was a good choice, but he was a cross trainee from Supply and had not completed his training. That left Luciano and myself and Luciano was on the verge of a divorce. So it looked like I was going to spend six months in Hawaii.
At least it was a nice location.
I told my family I would probably be home around Christmas and I really thought so.
The staff gave me a farewell like I was being sent to the Fulda Gap. It was sweet. I took my Best Boss Ever coffee cup with me when I left that Saturday morning.
When I arrived at Hickam things were jumping. They were putting the operations center together from the ground up. I followed the JX lead and tried to insert myself.
“Air Force is here.”
“A lieutenant colonel? We’re going to put you in charge of air intel.”
“What are we looking at for air intercept?”
“That is already ticking. We are getting in the weeds with tanker slots, but it is all coming together. What we need is a solid bombing plan. High value targets, infrastructure…we want to hit them where it will hurt the most.”
They gave me briefing slides to look over for the next stage. I stopped halfway through them.
“This looks like an invasion.”
“That’s it exactly. You’re up to speed. We want to know all the targets that are vital to the air defense system.”
“In which region of the count
ry? There are multiple air defense systems.” Most countries had multiple defensive systems in order to eliminate a single point of failure. Vietnam was no exception.
“All of them. We want to strike everywhere at once and gain air superiority within the first day, if not preferably the first hours of an escalation.”
I was taken aback. That had never been done before.
Escalation was a word that I heard a lot over the next few days. No one wanted to call it war or an invasion.
The operation did not even have a name yet. Officers floated different names around and it went upstairs to be blessed. Some of the operation name front runners included Absolute Freedom, Homeward Bound, and Lightning Strikes. Acronyms were a little different. Acronyms took on a life of their own. For example, even in those first few weeks when the embargo was in its infant stages and the air war was in its genesis I was starting to hear two other acronyms that would become part of the American experience. The first Vietnam War was referred to sometimes as VW1, but more often or not just V1. What we were planning for then and what I still had not accepted was going to happen at that point was V2.
Lieutenant Colonel Paul Adams
State Department
Washington D.C.
So far it was an all Navy show. Of course they would have the lead since they were the only service that could effectively execute a sea embargo.
For the Navy, the second Vietnam War was their first introduction to the post-Cold War world. It was the first major joint air operation since Goldwater Nichols and the services’ defeat in the first Vietnam War, and it again involved extensive tactical ground attack. New weapons, some developed from the lessons learned from the last conflict, would see combat for the first time. The debut of the non-nuclear version of the Tomahawk land attack missile was at hand. Vietnam II would call for littoral operations as well, including mine countermeasures and blue water combat against small Vietnamese missile attack boats, which were more likely to be featured in future Third World conflicts rather than the large capital ships like battleships and carriers the United States employed. All of these changes in hardware required new tactics.