by Gayle Rivers
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
MAP - Yunnan Province
PART 1
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
PART 2
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
PART 3
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Back Cover
THE FIVE FINGERS
CHINA
(Yunnan Province)
Part 1
THE MISSION
CHAPTER 1
What was the Englishman doing here? Everyone else looked appropriate for the setting. But a British SAS operative was as out of place at Bien Hoa as he would have been in the middle of Peking. When I had stepped in the door and spotted his pale blue beret, I thought at first that he was a New Zealand helicopter pilot. But that was a different shade of blue.
It was 0600 hours on the last Friday of April 1969. Barry Wiley and I stood in the door of a briefing room in the "south side" at Bien Hoa, the big United States tactical air base fifteen minutes by helicopter north of Saigon. Bien Hoa was a front-line tactical base, but American air bases were not quite so prefabricated as people might imagine. No Nissen hut knocked together with wood and string; this was a proper building. Air conditioned. Room 40B looked like a classroom or a hotel conference room. Several rows of chairs with pivotal desk arms faced a long conference table with a blackboard above it. Standing behind the table was a U.S. lieutenant colonel; he nodded curtly when we entered. Seated to the right of the colonel were a U.S. major and a second lieutenant, to his left four men in civilian dress. The lieutenant rose, handed us each two maps and a briefing pad. He directed us to two desks behind the five men already seated facing the colonel. The colonel ordered the lieutenant to shut the door, then turned to us. He did not mess about.
"Gentlemen," he said, "you have been selected for a special mission. The mission is of the highest security and will be so treated. Apart from training exercises, you will be confined to quarters until mission-start. We'll be seeing a lot of each other in the coming days, so we'd better get acquainted. Please rise as I introduce you. Major Toliver will be your commanding officer."
The colonel indicated the American Green Beret major seated in the front row. The major rose, half turned, and nodded at us.
"Lieutenant Tan." A wiry Korean Ranger stood briefly, then sat down.
"Master Sergeant Jackson." U. S. Green Beret. Lots of ribbons, lots of hash marks. He looked very sharp, very much a sergeant.
"Warrant Officer Rivers." I rose.
"Corporal Wiley." Somehow Barry looked a little wrong for this company.
"Private First Class Morrosco." A Green Beret medic. A big man with broad shoulders. Quite young. He appeared relaxed.
The colonel had skipped over the man we all wanted to know about.
"You will have an observer assigned to the mission from the British SAS. Regimental Sergeant Major Prather." Prather looked older than even the major. Mid-forties, I guessed. The SAS patch and the ribbons meant he was good. But he had been away from this sort of environment for some time. His skin was pale; the rest of us were burned coffee brown. And he looked fresh. His face did not have the appropriate strain for a man of recent combat experience. I did not like
seeing him here. "Observer'' could mean anything, but one of its meanings was "baggage," like a war correspondent. We all hated baggage. Prather would know that. He appeared as uncomfortable about being here as we were about having him.
"Let's see what it is all about, gentlemen," the colonel said, pulling down a map over the blackboard. He had not introduced himself nor any of the people beside him. I noticed he had removed the name tag from his uniform.
The colonel launched into a full-scale briefing. He proceeded to tell us everything but what we were there for. We were shown films similar to ones I had seen in Saigon earlier in the week. It was brought out that we had all recently heard more or less the same political background briefing. It seemed obvious at first that we were being briefed to go back to our separate units and brief them. As the films were of the same people we had seen before, I assumed new units were being formed in Laos and North Vietnam, and we were going in to displace these units. My assumption was reinforced when we got a topographical briefing on northern Laos and the adjacent North Vietnamese frontier. This was not an area that saw much insurgency activity, because it was too far north for dependable support. If the units were being formed up there, it would take several RFI teams to keep them spotted.
After more than an hour of nonstop briefing and still no hard information, I began having second thoughts. I had noticed a sequence of unusual things since Barry and I had reported for the briefing. I stopped listening and started watching. The colonel was very agitated, almost anxious. He kept glancing nervously at the civilians, who were oblivious of his lecture; they never took their eyes off us except to scribble quickly in a notebook. These were hard men, but even they could not suppress the tension in the room. At last I realized that this was a commitment briefing. For something very big. We seven were in this as a team. The men up front were monitoring our responses
to one another; if we did not mesh, we could be sent back to our units none the wiser. There would be no hard information forthcoming until they had decided we worked as a team.
If it was important enough to shake these men, I wanted to know who I was going out with. I started doing my personals, my psychological assessments of the other six. They must be doing the same by now. The introductions had been abrupt, icy. Now the colonel began to draw on our experiences to open up the briefing with well-timed questions. Based on your previous trips to Laos, how would you move in this area, Rivers? As a radio operator, how would you handle this situation, Tan? We were soon talking back and forth across the room, closely watched by the briefing team. After another hour, the civilians left, and the briefing became purely military. We studied topographical models of Laos and were briefed on military activity there. We were briefed on the special jobs in die team. The young American, Morrosco, was our medic. Tan, the Korean lieutenant, would operate our radio. To my surprise, I was nominated second-in-command. I was outranked by Tan and Prather and, as an "adviser," held equal rank with Master Sergeant Jackson. Prather could not command, because he was officially an observer, but there was no obvious explanation for my commanding the others. It was not uncommon for a junior to hold rank in a special forces unit if the people in charge thought he was the right man for the job. Jackson did not look very pleased about it.
The briefing lasted four hours, after which we were dismissed for the day. Our next briefing was the following morning. We were being given time to get to know one another while the briefers analyzed their assessments of us. The major stayed behind when we were taken to new quarters within the south side compound. Our gear was already there. We spent the afternoon sorting our gear, just fooling around.
We talked tentatively over our evening meal, feeling one another out. When people have spent a lot of time alone in combat, it takes a while for them to open up. We needed a couple of days to get used to one another. With the exception of the Englishman, Prather, who kept very quiet, it turned out we all had pulled off th
ings that were well known among special forces people.
About nine o'clock, Toliver came into the barracks and dropped his guard a little. At the briefing he had remained silent, watching us as carefully as the men up front. Now he went on to first names and started to draw from us how we felt about working together. He had obviously been briefed to do this; I saw it was part of a psychological buildup of the unit to combat readiness, for the time when it would dawn on us well into preparation that none of us might make it back. I knew it was that kind of a mission as soon as I found out who the other guys were; this was too good a team to bring together for any ordinary job. Mind you, nobody went out on suicide missions. If it was that close a mission profile, they certainly were not going to let us know.
The purpose of isolating us, apart from security, was to give us time to get to know one another, to get over our initial distrust. When you have kept yourself alive for any length of time in our environment, you do not trust anyone. No one else is going to look after you the way you look after yourself. The first thing I did with any new unit was to file in the back of my mind the unit's weaknesses, from probables to possibles. This was an automatic function, because every unit had its weaknesses. The sloppy soldier was always a probable. If a guy was lackadaisical in the mess or barracks, he was the one you expected to make a mistake in combat, to throw his pack down rather than set it down, to overlook the trip wire that sends the mines up. You became acutely aware, almost in a paranoid way, that the tiniest mistake gets people killed. Even overcaution. A man who was too careful could work a time delay into a maneuver that would throw the rest of the party off balance. In combat, the only safe thing around you was your own awareness.
There was not one sloppy man among this lot Wiley bordered on it. He was also a chain smoker, which told me he had an inward problem he had not worked out. I knew from experience that Wiley was good. But I could not allow myself the luxury of relying on past experience. If you get used to a man, you are relying on his reactions based on your last mission with him. He may have gone through something in the meanwhile, and the man's reactions may have changed. I had to consider him a possible.
I had first met Barry Wiley at Terendak, a British base in Malaysia which was headquarters for the combined British-Malaysian activities against Indonesian insurgents. We were both undergoing acclimitization and combat readiness for Vietnam. Barry and I worked together on a joint exercise with the Gurkhas. Barry was a raw squadee with the Australian infantry then, a very green soldier. I was training as a member of the Third Squadron Twenty-first SAS of the New Zealand Army. I never felt green for one day. I adapted completely, just as I had at Wairora, where I underwent SAS training. Just as I had to every new situation since I struck off on my own. I don't do things halfway.
I grew up on a hill farm on North Island. My father was Irish, my mother English. They emigrated from Birmingham shortly after they were married. We were five children on the farm. It was a hard life, and the only peace I knew as a child was when I hunted game in the mountains with a small-bore rifle. In summer I worked as a shepherd. I put my life savings into a rusty old two-stroke motorbike. One hot December day in 1960, 1 rode the bike home, straight into a violent argument with my father. That same day, I packed my belongings on the back and rode away. I was fifteen.
I worked as a manual laborer by day. By night I raced bikes on dirt tracks all over New Zealand. Some people liked the slightly deadly approach I took to racing. The Wellington Hell's Angels made me an honorary member. I did not ride with the Angels.
I had quite a few fights, mostly on the job. I was small and looked even younger than my years, and I could turn out more work than anybody else. Sometimes the older men resented me for that, and for being such a solitary figure. I fought to win, with whatever was at hand. I suppose I was lucky I never killed a man. By eighteen, I was flying without a license, dusting crops in planes too dangerous to leave the ground. Insecticide ate away the rudder controls of one old biplane. I crashed into a tree. I was trapped in the cockpit for over an hour, with hot engine oil blistering my body. I broke some ribs that time. After that, I got my license and flew as a bush pilot, in slightly better planes.
In 1967 the American fleet was in Wellington, and the Yanks were tearing up the town. A drunken sailor bounced a beer bottle off the bonnet of my new truck. I whipped a U-turn and ran the truck up on the pavement. I caught him with the front wing and broke both his legs. He turned out to be a New Zealand sailor. I escaped a prison sentence by the good graces of a sympathetic judge. He told me to volunteer for the army.
As soon as I began basic training with the First Infantry Battalion, I knew I could never make it as a regular squadee. That was a life for morons and zombies. I volunteered for the Special Air Services. I was twenty years old.
From basic training, twenty-five of us were selected for SAS training at Wairora as the First Twenty-third SAS Squadron. We were told straight off that our unit was selected for Southeast Asian combat training. That meant Vietnam. There were already New Zealand artillery and infantry regiments fighting there, as well as numerous SAS squadrons seconded as a unit or individually to the Americans or Australians. From Wairora, we transferred to Terendak to get ourselves ready for Vietnam:
I spent six months at Terendak, being based out of there for two missions into Vietnam. I had a natural leadership quality; I found myself taking over sometimes when strictly I should not have. I was among men who were the best, and I seemed to become leader without actually being given command. I do not know why this is; it is a thing that happens with me. Maybe it was because I liked the SAS and found my work absorbing; my earlier life was far behind me now, only a dim memory. Quick promotion followed. Maximum use of its manpower is the psychology behind any successful army. It must have the capacity to recognize and develop favorable attributes in an individual. It was certainly true in my case. Special forces people usually have a combination of higher intelligence and a technical specialization. My specialization was more general, an over-all spectrum analysis—an insight into various aspects of what an assignment was about and a detached view toward carrying it off in the best way possible. That incorporated two vital elements: leadership and an individual endurance factor that made me a character of slightly deadly capacity. More simply, I had the killer instinct. And an instinct for survival. And the ability to make other people think the same way. I had no special skill. I knew a bit about explosives. I was very good at unarmed combat. I was an expert marksman; I had a natural reflex action which just allowed me to be good at firing weapons. But I understood the technical application of weaponry to a particular theater of warfare; I had a knack for adapting weapons to obtain the most devastating effect.
After six months, the First Twenty-third was transferred to Saigon. We started going out on missions that lasted a month, sometimes two. We went out as small sections, or on joint operations with the Australians or Americans or Korean Rangers. We never worked with the Vietnamese. Their Panther Rangers
were supposed to be elite. As far as I was concerned, they were not up to RFI standards. They were no better than the U.S. Marines. The Marines were just shit. So were the ARVN, but at least they knew it. I had seen Marines fight harder for a Coca-Cola truck than for ammunition.
We did all sorts of jobs. RFI mostly—search and destroy. We often took out small parties of fresh Green Berets to give them their first taste of combat. We would go looking for a unit that had terrorized a district or were operating out of some friendly village where they kept a cache of arms. We hunted them down and destroyed them.
A year after, I volunteered for a second tour of duty in Vietnam and was transferred to the Americans as an "adviser." I was bumped up to warrant officer second class so that I would hold rank over the U.S. sergeants I was leading in the field.
I rarely carried more than twenty men on any mission, and half that number if they were special forces. The enemy could be Viet Cong or North Vietnamese regulars o
r Montagnards working for the other side. We might track quite massive units, then call in air support to hit them. But often we would by-pass the main body. The North Vietnamese officers would brief the NCOs separately from their men; it was a bit like having a field headquarters unit on the move. We would go in right under the nose of the main unit, hit the officers, and disappear.
We worked as bodyguards, escort patrols, observers. We went into high country where we could spot movement and relay it to headquarters. We had to avoid contact then, because we had all sorts of people looking for us. When you are in a combat zone, surrounded by enemy, you survive largely by your discreetness. We had to do crazy things like bury the enemy dead so that no one would spot our kill patterns. Missions might last several weeks, but they were not open-ended like some Green Beret missions. The end would be dictated by our getting the people we were after, or by
a large regimental movement, or headquarters simply deciding we had been in long enough.
One of the great strains of being in Vietnam was the mental discipline a man put on himself in order to stay alive. There were times he had a war of nerves going on, when he had to maintain peak alertness, and every part of his body was crying to knock it off. A man became slightly detached from himself. Sooner or later, this must have emotional repercussions.
If we came off a mission in decent shape, we might get a couple of days' rest and go straight back into combat. But we could come back from an extended mission in terrible shape. Heat and humidity quickly spread infection from any wound. We were likely as not to have malaria or dysentery, or both. We sweated the salt out of our systems, and our metabolism was shot to hell. Then we got a couple of weeks' or a month's leave, and our health recovered remarkably fast. Saigon was off limits to us, so normally we went out to Japan.
Early in 1969, I went out with another New Zealander and a Green Beret to zero in on the Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth North Vietnamese Rangers. We followed them for about three weeks, keeping headquarters informed of their movements as they crossed the seventeenth parallel into South Vietnam. We were in bad shape, low on food and ammunition, and on our way to a pickup point when the other two got killed. I was five days on my own before I got back.