Legend

by Eric Blehm

  He sent off the tape in the second week of March, right before the 240th Assault Helicopter Company was assigned to work with a Special Forces unit at a small base camp just a five-minute flight from Bearcat. None of them had heard of Project Sigma, Detachment B-56.

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  LIEUTENANT COLONEL Ralph Drake—the cigar-chewing commander of Project Sigma, Detachment B-56—was responsible for carrying out SOG recon missions in the Daniel Boone area of operation, a task that had become increasingly more difficult due to increased enemy strength and movement, especially in the Fishhook area.

  Detachment commanders such as Drake and his subordinates were responsible for both the lives of the men they sent into harm’s way, as well as the tangible results of their reconnaissance missions. If a team was compromised—the enemy had spotted the men—the standard operating procedure was to immediately extract them. The interpretation of “compromise” was usually left to those on the ground. SOG teams were a highly professional and intrepid lot, men like Jerry “Maddog” Shriver, whom a SOG recon man and eventual historian of the unit, John Plaster, would describe as “a walking arsenal with a sawed-off shotgun or suppressed submachine gun, pistols, knives and grenades [who]…teased death scores of times.”

  It was Shriver who coined what Plaster would credit as “the most famous rejoinder in the history of the Studies and Observation Group.” During a reconnaissance mission in Cambodia, Shriver found his small team outnumbered and completely surrounded by the enemy. He radioed the situation to his superiors and told them not to worry. “I’ve got ’em right where I want ’em,” he said. “Surrounded from the inside.” Shriver and his team made it out alive that time. He was severely wounded on a future mission, but his body was never recovered and he is listed as MIA.

  In the spring of 1968, Drake had a solid group of recon men assembled at Ho Ngoc Tao, but B-56 headquarters was having a difficult time keeping teams on the ground long enough to gather the intel being requested. In March, the area of interest was the Fishhook area.

  The recon company commander reporting to Drake was twenty-three-year-old Green Beret first lieutenant Fred Jones, who had been with B-56 for nearly nine months. One of the most experienced officers at Project Sigma, he was well liked by the team leaders because he spoke their language, having personally led numerous recon missions along the Cambodian border himself.

  In March his teams had encountered heavy infiltration coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail southeast through the old French War Zone C toward Saigon. Keeping Drake apprised via radio from their forward launch site—the brigade base camp of the First Infantry Division at Quan Loi—Jones had inserted a handful of teams thirteen times in ten days at various locations in the Fishhook border region, and every one of them was either visually compromised or took fire upon or immediately after insertion and had to be pulled out. His teams were exhausted—mentally and physically—and Jones decided to make the fourteenth the final attempt to keep a team on the ground.

  This team “was led by two of my best NCOs,” says Jones, “and it seemed to be the perfect insertion spot. They went in, got off the helicopters, and came under fire immediately. We called in gunships to suppress the enemy fire, barely got them out, and they came back to Quan Loi, shut the choppers down, and I said, ‘No more.’ It was a really hot area, just lots and lots of bad guys on the ground, and I wasn’t going to send anybody in before we went back to Ho Ngoc Tao, regrouped, and looked at the maps.”

  Jones radioed his decision to temporarily abort insertion attempts back to command at Ho Ngoc Tao. He heard back directly from Drake, who told him to put a team on the ground that afternoon: “That’s a direct order.”

  “Sir,” Jones replied, “as soon as you get on a helicopter and get up here, you and I will take a team out. But I am not sending anybody else from my company on a recon mission today. Sorry, can’t do it.”

  In response to Jones’s refusal to obey his order, Drake ordered Jones on the next helicopter back to Ho Ngoc Tao, where he relieved him of duty as the recon company commander. He later gave him the only negative Officer Efficiency Report Jones would receive in his thirty-plus-year military career: “LT Jones eagerly sought this combat command,” wrote Drake in the OER. But “he was greatly influenced in his performance of duty by senior NCOs in his command and seemed unable to reject or overrule suggestions that did not serve the accomplishment of the mission. He did his best work while actively engaged in field operations.”

  “Drake accused me of letting the enlisted men influence me,” says Jones. “He thought that they were telling me they didn’t want to go out. It was my decision. I could see the tension they were under, the physical condition they were under; nobody was sleeping. These people had to get a break, and so I made that determination.”

  The next morning as Jones was eating in the mess hall, Drake approached his table. “Lieutenant,” he said, “finish your breakfast and get your gear. You’re going back to Quan Loi. You’re now the launch officer; you’re the assistant S-3. You’re running the operations.”

  In Jones’s opinion, Drake realized Jones was the most experienced guy he had to launch these missions. “So he slapped my wrist by taking away my command of the recon teams, but then kept me doing the same thing as the launch officer [but] with more responsibility.”

  Meanwhile, the Pentagon, the White House, the CIA, and SOG headquarters were clamoring for intelligence in that area. “You could feel the pressure to perform,” says Jones. “I’m sure Drake felt that pressure.”

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  ON MARCH 19, 1968, Special Assistant for National Security Affairs Walt Rostow delivered to President Johnson a list of recommendations compiled by the members of the Southeast Asia Coordinating Committee, the same group that had organized the delivery of the Vesuvius package to Sihanouk two months earlier. The list “emphasized the great importance of the collection and exploitation of specific hard intelligence on the Vietcong/North Vietnamese Army use of Cambodia, as well as of circumstantial evidence which is convincing by dint of its quality and quantity. Collection of all types of intelligence on Cambodia should be given higher national priority than heretofore. Use of more aggressive intelligence collection methods should be authorized where necessary to obtain such intelligence. Movement of supplies to and through [the seaport of] Sihanoukville is a particularly important area for an increased intelligence collection effort.”

  The need for Special Forces–qualified Green Berets for a range of assignments was so great in Vietnam that many were being sent straight to the war upon graduation from the Q Course. For his part, Staff Sergeant and Vietnam War veteran Roy Benavidez and his bad back remained poised in purgatory at Fort Bragg, uncertain as to whether he would return to Southeast Asia or be given the South American assignment he half-expected and that Lala prayed for.

  Roy received orders at the end of March for deployment to Vietnam, and he moved Lala—who sighed at the news but never complained—and twenty-month-old Denise back to El Campo the first week of April. He leveled the trailer in the lot beside Lala’s parents’ house, kissed his wife and daughter good-bye, and on April 20 was at the 5th Special Forces Group headquarters in Nha Trang, standing in front of the “big map” bristling with the flags of fate.

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  IT HAD been six months since Brian O’Connor had stood in front of that same map, and with half of his tour behind him, he had garnered a solid reputation as a technically sound, battlefield-calm radioman. He’d worked the larger company-size reaction and assault missions along the border, and pulled a recon mission or two with Stefan Mazak, who, O’Connor noted, “had an uncanny ability to lay low and still and wait for an hour or two or more for the NVA/VC to come to us, rather than hunt them down. He crawled very, very slowly. Could be still like a lizard on a hot rock, and was able to sense the nearby presence of the enemy before we could.”

  That was what O’Connor witnessed fir
sthand as Mazak’s radioman on April 18 when Mazak set up an ambush on a trail, reportedly in Long Khanh Province. According to the citation written to award Mazak the Silver Star, “SFC Mazak led his force to a known enemy-occupied area and began preparing an ambush position for the night. As his men dug in, a Vietcong force attacked their perimeter from the left and rear with intense automatic weapons and grenade fire.” Says Jones—who as launch officer listened to events unfold over the radio and later debriefed the team members—“One indigenous troop at the very lead end of the ambush position got nervous and opened fire early, thus alerting the enemy to the ambush. That allowed the bad guys to flank the ambush position and assault their position.”

  Mazak was wounded, but refused treatment, moving instead to assist a wounded teammate, and then, “With bullets striking all around him,” reads the citation, “he led part of his force in a furious counterattack to prevent the envelopment of his patrol. The Vietcong began to withdraw. SFC Mazak directed [his teammates] to take cover and attacked the enemy alone. He was mortally wounded while fearlessly leading his men in close combat against a determined enemy.”

  O’Connor fought back the enemy alongside the CIDG while manning the radio throughout the bloody engagement. “Brian O’Connor earned the respect of everyone for the way he handled himself during that op,” says Jones. “He made sure Mazak’s body came with them as they fought to break contact and made it to a location where they could be extracted.

  “I identified Stefan Mazak’s body at the hospital morgue at Long Binh post. He had volunteered to go recon even though he was encouraged to take a less dangerous position. He had a wife and a young child back home. He’d fought in World War II, Korea, the Congo—and Vietnam is what got him.”

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  BACK AT Fort Bragg, Roy had done some reconnaissance work at the noncommissioned officers club, speaking with some of the returning Green Berets, and here in Vietnam he was friends with the sergeant major in charge of assignments. When Roy told the sergeant major he wanted to go to the same place where Stefan Mazak and Leroy Wright were assigned, the sergeant major informed him that Mazak had been killed two days before.

  It saddened Roy but did not dissuade him; his friend Wright was there as well as a couple of other guys he really respected, and he felt more comfortable going to a place with a few people he knew. At first the sergeant major declined Roy’s request, but Roy persisted and eventually the sergeant major consented, saying, “All right, Roy, go ahead. But goddamn it, if you get killed, I don’t want Lala blaming me for it. I tried to keep you from going to that outfit.”

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  WHEN ROY passed through the gate that separated Camp Ho Ngoc Tao from the rest of the war, he left behind the army he’d known for most of his career and entered the realm of MACV-SOG: a turnkey interpretation of sixties-era soldier/author Jean Lartéguy’s “real one” army.

  “I’d like to have two armies,” Lartéguy wrote in The Centurions in 1970. “One for display with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals, and dear little regimental officers who would be deeply concerned over their general’s bowel movements or their colonel’s piles, an army that would be shown for a modest fee on every fairground in the country.

  “The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage uniforms, who would not be put on display, but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. That’s the Army in which I should like to fight.”

  “Welcome to Detachment B-56” was the first typed line of paragraph one on a single sheet of paper handed to Roy after he was assigned his billet, a steel-framed bed inside a metal-roofed, plywood-walled hooch. “By the time you read this you will probably be hot and tired from the trip from Nha Trang. Please bear with us for a short time while we process you into the Detachment. It will be practically painless, and a cold beer or soda awaits you at the club shortly. There are a few things you should know.” A couple of paragraphs outlined the camp’s location (between Saigon and Long Binh on Highway 1) and added some props about the excellent meals prepared at the mess, plus its hours of operation:

  Room maid service, laundry, haircuts, and some tailor services are included with your membership in this detachment. Your Mess fee covers these services. There are movies practically every night….

  After-dark travel on Highway #1 is banned because of the ever-present danger of ambush. Weapons should be carried at all times when leaving this camp…. Use good judgment in the display of weapons in the city of Saigon itself. NEVER LEAVE A WEAPON IN A VEHICLE. Do not travel alone. Generally, a “shot-gun” rider is necessary.

  The mission of Detachment B-56 is highly classified. Just about everything we do here is classified. Do not write home about your operational activities. Watch your conversation, especially when you are off-post. DO NOT TALK SHOP! We frequently have visitors from other units and from Saigon, both military and civilian, American and otherwise. They should not learn from you what you are doing or what the detachment is doing. Your life could depend on your conversational discretion, especially among indigenous personnel.

  We hope you will thoroughly enjoy your assignment here. You are now a member of a very closely knit family and we are very glad to have you on board. If you have any questions about anything, our operational and administrative personnel will be very glad to help you. Welcome once again to Detachment B-56.

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  “HELLO, HELLO,” Roy heard Leroy Wright sing out the lines of the recent Beatles hit, “I don’t know why you say good-bye, I say hello…”

  The two friends embraced, and Wright invited Roy to his hooch in a nearby building, where they caught up with recent photos of their families and shrugged at the fact they hadn’t found the time for that barbecue. Taped to Leroy Wright’s locker were some drawings by his two young sons. Their father was also an artist; he loved to draw cartoons and planned to work that into his life after the war.

  The following day, Roy accompanied Wright, who was on the recon company, and fellow recon man Lloyd Mousseau on some McGuire Rig training, where he learned how to be a bellyman on a slick, hoisting men out of the jungle on long ropes when a landing zone could not be found. On April 30, 1968, when Roy had been in-country for ten days and at Ho Ngoc Tao for barely a week, he was told he would be sent to a forward launch site to help keep tabs on teams in the field from the base tactical operations center (TOC). The base he was heading to was as close to the Cambodian border as it got, a place called Loc Ninh.

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  OVER THE FENCE

  AROUND 5:00 P.M. on April 30, Larry McKibben, aircraft commander of Greyhound One, heard Big Al Yurman’s New Jersey accent come in loud and clear over the radio. “It’s a bust, guys.”

  McKibben and his wingman, Greyhound Two aircraft commander Jerry Ewing, had been sitting standby with two other slicks on the tarmac at the Quan Loi Army supply base near the Cambodian border for nearly three hours, ready to insert a Project Sigma B-56 recon team west of Loc Ninh. “We’ll take these guys home to their headquarters,” Yurman continued, referring to the recon team. “Then we can sleep in our own beds at Bearcat.”

  But on the final approach to B-56 headquarters at Ho Ngoc Tao, some forty miles from Quan Loi, Yurman was summoned by radio to land and shut down. The detachment commander, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Drake, wanted to see him.

  What the hell is this all about? Yurman thought as he hopped into the back of a truck with the recon team and was driven from the helipads at the camp’s back gate into the perimeter at Ho Ngoc Tao, where Drake awaited him outside his command office. Drake began the conversation by thanking Yurman for the work the 240th had accomplished for B-56 the previous five weeks. This had included some hot extractions that left quite a few bullet holes in the assault helicopter company’s slicks and gunships. Drake was particularly grateful for the w
ater drop and medevac mission of March 28, for which Yurman had recommended and Warrant Officer Jerry Ewing had received the Distinguished Flying Cross. His copilot, Warrant Officer William Armstrong, received the Air Medal with Valor.

  The B-56 distress call that Ewing had responded to on March 28 was from what was described as a reconnaissance-in-force search-and-destroy mission utilizing two of Project Sigma’s reaction companies. One company (six Americans and approximately 150 CIDG) led by Special Forces captain Russ Proctor had taken heavy casualties while assaulting a “heavily fortified, entrenched enemy base camp,” just across the Cambodian border. The other company of six Americans and approximately 130 CIDG, led by Special Forces captain Jerry Ledzinski, was to reinforce and quickly extract Proctor’s company.

  Upon insertion, Ledzinski says he was ordered by B-56 Command to “abort the extraction, stay in, and capture a prisoner.” Both companies were subsequently surrounded, resulting in one of the bloodiest battles of B-56 history. The American-led forces ran out of water after the first day; by day three, some of the men were delirious with thirst and even drinking their own urine. Heavy enemy anti-aircraft machine-gun fire had beaten back attempts at resupply, and the canteens and cans of juice dropped from high-flying and fast-moving helicopters became deadly projectiles that exploded on impact, the men trying to suck the moisture from the dirt wherever they hit.

  Proctor’s and Ledzinski’s companies had killed between two hundred and three hundred NVA, but not without heavy losses of their own. Virtually every American and CIDG was wounded, and at least fifty of the CIDG had been killed. Because of the smell, the bodies, in body bags or rolled up in ponchos, were moved away from their fighting positions and laid out in rows.