by Eric Blehm
Dan Christensen, the only man who had been on Greyhound One to survive the war, never did find his .38. Though he attempted to return to the 240th—with his jaw wired shut and on crutches from the bullet wounds to his leg—he couldn’t talk his way out of the hospital and back to Bearcat. He was sent home and medically retired. Forty years later, his grown children learned about a 240th reunion online. “Seeing those guys was one of the best days of my life,” Christensen says. “We spent the whole weekend just hammering out a lot of things that needed hammering.”
The aircraft commander of Mad Dog Three, Louis Wilson, was wounded on July 31, 1968, while supporting B-56 in another mission, but he survived the war and returned to duty at Fort Benning, Georgia. After leaving the Army in 1970, he earned a degree in nuclear engineering, then joined the Army National Guard in 1980 as a helicopter pilot, retiring as a Chief Warrant Officer 5 in 2006 and from his full-time job as a nuclear engineer in 2013.
Al Yurman returned home to the United States after having attended the memorial services for each of the thirty-five of his fellow 240th brethren KIA during his one-year tour. He was asked by the Army to go back to Vietnam because of his experience in the Fishhook area, but he turned down the request and finished his military career toward the end of 1970. (A few months later, American forces under the directive of President Nixon invaded Cambodia to take out North Vietnamese bases, matériel, and troop concentrations.) Yurman went on to work for the National Transportation Safety Board, investigating major airline and private aircraft crashes for more than sixteen years. He remains an expert witness and aviation accident investigator in the private sector.
There wasn’t a man in the room who hadn’t been affected by the war or the May 2, 1968, mission. For Jerry Ewing it was those four words he’d uttered that continued to haunt him, even more than the memory of McKibben’s hunched-over body in the wreckage of his slick.
“It’s not my turn,” he had said when Yurman told him to take a run into the PZ to extract the team. That night after the mission, he had admitted to Yurman how devastated he was by McKibben’s death, that he was so sorry for what he’d said. Yurman had replied, “Jerry, you were just confirming. I had said it wasn’t your turn; you didn’t hesitate. Once I told you I needed you, you were going in. You were doing your job. Larry cut you off.” Yurman’s words did little to console Ewing, who couldn’t shake the fact that he had not just said, “Yes, Sir.”
Ewing returned home from the war a month and a half after the mission and became an instructor pilot for a couple of years at Fort Rucker before getting out of the military and landing a job at Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems. He got divorced, then met and married the love of his life, had kids, and life was once again pretty good. Except for those four words. After three decades, he still felt like a coward. If it hadn’t been for that momentary hesitation, he thought, it could very well be Larry McKibben at this reunion rather than Jerry Ewing.
And he might have made it out alive the way William Armstrong, Greyhound Four’s pilot, did after being shot in the head. He’d managed to hold the controls steady and get his slick above the trees before handing them off to his copilot, James Fussell. As it turned out, the bullet had entered at the base of his head as he’d leaned forward and traveled upward between the curve of his skull and helmet lining, fracturing but not shattering his skull. His crew chief and door gunner Gary Land and Robert Wessel, who had kept their M60s running despite their own wounds, had kept the enemy from overrunning the aircraft. As far as Armstrong was concerned, they had saved his life, as he told them when he saw them at the reunion.
As a result of the traumatic brain injury he sustained, Armstrong could no longer fly. After being medically retired from the military, he earned a degree in electronics engineering, worked in the nuclear power industry for twenty-five years, earned another degree in education, and taught until his retirement in 2014. Fussell joined the Air Force and eventually retired as a major after flying line fighters and ground attack aircraft. Land spent nine months in the hospital, finished his enlistment, and was eventually discharged from the Army; he went on to work as an IRS agent and receive a degree in accounting. Wessel finished his enlistment before going to work for the Ohio State Veterans Affairs as a councilor. The Special Forces bellyman who had also been on Greyhound Four, James Calvey, became a custom display designer for high-end trade show vendors.
Those at the gathering began to seat themselves for dinner, and Roy Benavidez, whom the 240th had invited as the guest of honor, approached the LaChance table and asked Mike if he could take the chair next to his. They introduced themselves, and then Mike noticed the medal around Roy’s neck and asked what it meant. When Roy explained that it was the Medal of Honor, Mike innocently asked why Roy had one and his father did not.
Putting his hand on Mike’s shoulder, Roy said, “You know what, son? I’m alive today because of your father and other men in this room. He should have one just like this. He earned it.”
Mike’s face lit up, and he leaned toward his father as he took his seat and said, “You never told me you were a hero, Dad.”
Had it been anybody but his son, LaChance says he would have denied the comment. But this one time he let it hang in the air, like smoke from a rocket strike.
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WHEN THE United States finished its involvement in Vietnam, its soldiers returned home but their Vietnamese counterparts would continue the war for two more years. The fate of most—including Bao and the other two CIDG who survived the mission—is not known. The CIDG interpreter, Tuan, however, had been flown to the United States for surgical procedures, where he remained, reportedly living somewhere on the West Coast.
After writing his letter to the Army Decorations Board, Brian O’Connor moved his family to the East Coast, continued his artistic pursuits—both academically and professionally—and earned various awards and degrees, including a master of fine letters and master of fine arts in Shakespeare.
Others veterans continued their military service. First Lieutenant Fred Jones rose to the rank of colonel, having served five years on active duty and twenty-seven years in the U.S. Army Reserve. He retired in 2001, but after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Jones was recalled to active duty, serving five more years in support of the Global War on Terrorism. Currently, at the age of sixty-nine, he serves as a government civilian at the U.S. Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany, supporting counterterrorism efforts on the African continent.
Robin Tornow, the forward air controller who risked his career by calling the Daniel Boone tactical emergency, was never reprimanded for doing so. In 1989, then Colonel Tornow wrote a letter to Roy, saying, “My 6 months as a FAC with B-56 were probably the most fulfilling in my career. I’ll always reflect proudly on having served with such a great group of individuals.” He retired in 1993 after thirty years of service as a brigadier general in the U.S. Air Force and passed away on August 22, 2010.
A few months after the 240th reunion, Roger Waggie succumbed to cancer; he was awarded the Silver Star posthumously for his actions on May 2, 1968. Most recently, Paul LaChance lost his own battle with cancer in the fall of 2014 after a full life of working various jobs—from trucking to catering—that allowed him to support and spend time with his wife, three children, and his boat, The Other Woman.
Some veterans dropped off the map, becoming difficult or impossible to reach, having moved on completely or continuing to fight private battles more than four decades after the end of the Vietnam War.
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ON NOVEMBER 29, 1998, sixty-three-year-old Roy Benavidez passed away at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio from complications of diabetes. Moments before his death, his family circled his bed, held hands, and prayed over him. Noel kissed his father good-bye and said, “No regrets, Dad.” Yvette and Denise did the same.
A soldier in battle dress fatigues entered the room, stood at attention, and s
aluted Roy’s body, which was then escorted to St. Robert Bellarmine Catholic Church in El Campo, where he and Lala had been married, where his children were married, and where he attended Mass every Sunday he was home. He was buried with full military honors at Fort Sam Houston, not far from the Drop Zone bar and café, Roy’s old hangout where his Army buddies from the Alamo Silver Wings Airborne Association continue to tell his stories at Special Forces Association meetings. They often refer to him as Tango Mike Mike, his almost mythical call sign that they’ll tell you is known throughout the Special Operations community as a phrase spoken when courage needs to be summoned and quitting is not an option: “Tango Mike Mike.”
Roy is survived by his wife, Lala, his three children—all of whom have college degrees framed and on the walls of their respective homes in El Campo—and eight grandchildren, who are either in college or heading in that direction. In addition to his family and his legacy among the Special Operations community, Roy’s name lives on through the Roy P. Benavidez National Guard Armory in El Campo; a conference room at West Point; a U.S. Navy troop and cargo ship (the first U.S. Navy ship to be named after an Army enlisted man); a U.S. Army training center; a community park; two elementary schools (in Houston and San Antonio); and several sculptures.
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THE CLASSIFIED after-action reports and briefings that documented Roy’s and other SOG warriors’ actions during the Vietnam War had been teletyped and sent from forward operating bases (including, but not limited to, Kontum, Ban Me Thuot, Song Be, and Ho Ngoc Tao) to the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observation Group headquarters in Saigon. They were then forwarded to the Office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities.
Copies were stored temporarily at each base in locked file cabinets and archived at the headquarters until April of 1972, when all of the records were burned. Though nobody seems to know exactly who ordered the destruction, “it’s not a stretch to say that the order came from Washington,” says SOG unit historian John Plaster. “Then-Chief SOG John Sadler would not have destroyed the records unless directed to do so by higher authority, and he told me face-to-face that they had been burned.”
At the end of April 1972, MACV-SOG was officially deactivated and the headquarters was closed. The copies of the after-action reports that had been sent to Washington during the war are also apparently gone. Says Plaster, “Several scholars, writers, and SOG veterans have spent years trying to find them. For all we know, they were destroyed, too. When, where, and how, is unknown.”
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MACV-SOG WAS officially honored for the first time in April 2001, when President George W. Bush authorized the unit to receive the Presidential Unit Citation (Army) during a ceremony at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The citation reads, in part:
The Studies and Observations Group is cited for extraordinary heroism, great combat achievement and unwavering fidelity while executing unheralded top secret missions deep behind enemy lines across Southeast Asia. Incorporating volunteers from all branches of the Armed Forces, and especially, U.S. Army Special Forces, SOG’s ground, air and sea units fought officially denied actions which contributed immeasurably to the American war effort in Vietnam.
MACV-SOG reconnaissance teams composed of Special Forces soldiers and indigenous personnel penetrated the enemy’s most dangerous redoubts in the jungled Laotian wilderness and the sanctuaries of eastern Cambodia. Pursued by human trackers and even bloodhounds, these small teams out-maneuvered, outfought and outran their numerically superior foe, to uncover key enemy facilities, rescue downed pilots, plant wiretaps, mines and electronic sensors, capture valuable enemy prisoners, ambush convoys, discover and assess targets for B-52 strikes, and inflict casualties all out of proportion to their own losses…. SOG’s cross-border operations proved an effective economy-of-force, compelling the North Vietnamese Army to divert 50,000 soldiers to rear area security duties, far from the battlefields of South Vietnam….
Despite casualties that sometimes became universal, SOG’s operators never wavered, but fought throughout the war with the same flair, fidelity and intrepidity that distinguished SOG from its beginning. The Studies and Observations Group’s combat prowess, martial skills and unacknowledged sacrifices saved many American lives, and provide a paragon for America’s future special operations forces.
Close to three hundred Special Forces Green Berets assigned to the MACV-SOG were killed in action. Over fifty more remain missing in action—their last known whereabouts being either Laos, Cambodia, or North Vietnam.
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IN 1991, during the surge of patriotism that resulted from the onset of Desert Storm—the First Gulf War—Pete Gailis went to the public library near his home in Salem, Massachusetts, wearing for the first time in public a sweatshirt he’d ordered years before. On his front was an American flag with the words: “Vietnam Veteran, Proud of my Service.”
As he headed into the library, he held the door for a woman around his age. “How can you be proud of that?” she asked him.
She walked past, and Gailis replied to her back, “I am proud of my service, Ma’am.”
Reflecting on the Vietnam War in the years since 9/11, Gailis says, “Things have sure changed. People finally realized that politics and service are two separate things. They shouldn’t be, but they are. There were a lot of victories in Vietnam, there should have been a big one, but I think one thing the Vietnam veterans did for all the future generations: we took the bullet when we came home and eventually people realized it wasn’t right. I think one reason people are so supportive of the military today is because of how poorly we were treated after the war. There was a GI who got a cup of blood dumped on him at the airport by a peace protestor when I returned home to Oakland. I was in uniform too and was told by an MP to go to the USO and either stay there until my connecting flight or change into civilian clothes.
“Today I go to the airport and see strangers shaking the hands of men and women in uniform, and it makes me smile. I don’t think those people necessarily believe in the politics of our current wars, they just know this young man or woman is serving his country. That was all we did in Vietnam. I’ll say it again: I’m proud of my service.”
This story is dedicated to all those who served in the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG), and the pilots, crews, and maintenance personnel of the assault helicopter companies who supported their missions during the war in Vietnam.
RESEARCH AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
TO TELL THE complete story of any mission on the ground in Vietnam, you must also tell the story from the air. And so, I felt it was appropriate to combine my research and acknowledgments into one section—you cannot have one without the other.
During my research for this book, I was honored to speak to dozens of veterans of the Vietnam War—all of whom were either in the Special Forces or the aviation units that supported them. Thank you for your service, your trust, and your willingness to reach into the sometimes dark corners of the past. I simply could not have told the story of this covert mission in such depth without the candid and forthright interviews granted to me by those who were directly involved in the actions on the ground and in the air on May 2, 1968.
Thank you, Roy Benavidez, for your service and for sharing your inspiring story.
Thank you, Brian O’Connor, for spending hundreds of hours to clarify for me your part in the events leading up to and after, the mission, and for sharing with me details that had, until now, never been told.
Thank you to the men of the 240th Assault Helicopter Company for your interviews, writings, notes, documents, and photographs: Rick Adams, William Armstrong, Dan Christensen, Danny Clark, Jerry Ewing, James Fussell, Pete Gailis, Pete Jones, Gary Land, Morris Miller, Bob Portman, Louis Wilson, and Al Yurman. Thank you to Paul “Frenchy” LaChance, who spent hours with me in his home,
on the telephone, and answering my e-mails, right up until a few weeks before he passed away after his long battle with cancer. He told me that his goal in finally sharing his story was to honor his buddies.
Thank you to the men who served at Camp Ho Ngoc Tao, Project Sigma, Detachment B-56, who spoke with me and shared their mementos, writings, notes, documents, and photographs: Manny Beck, Ed Gammons, Nick Godano, Fred Jones, Jerry Ledzinski, Fred Lindsey, and Leonard Moreau. An additional thank-you to Nick and Jerry for the many, many hours they took to field my questions and answer my e-mail messages so that this story was “told right.”
Thank you also to SOG veterans Mike Ash, Ben Baker, Dennis Cummings, Merle Eckles, Troy Gilley, Jim Harrison, John Meyer, Steve Spoelly, Carl Vencill, and Art Wilbur.
Thank you, retired Chief SOG General Jack Singlaub, for your multiple interviews. Thank you, James Reid and the Explorers Club in NYC, for bringing to light the details of Operation Vesuvius.
Thank you to the family members of the men in the story who spoke with me and invited me into their homes: Lala Benavidez, Denise (Benavidez) Prochazka, Yvette (Benavidez) Garcia, and Noel Benavidez. Noel also coordinated my time in El Campo, Cuero, and San Antonio, Texas, and put me in contact with the members of the 240th, informing me that his father had always hoped the air component of the mission would be fully told in a future book. Thank you also, Gene Sr. (Roy’s older brother), Gene Jr. and David (Roy’s nephews), Marjorie Armstrong, Alice Christensen, Jeff and Debbie (McKibben) Connor, Cheryl (Craig) Granna, Donna (Fournier) Johns, Joan LaChance and her son, Mike, Nancy (Haddock) Meissner, Kathy (Mousseau) Mueller, and Joan Singlaub.