A MEU is the smallest Marine Corps unit capable of independent operations. While it is rare for them to be identical in composition from one deployment to another, a MEU usually consists of a re-enforced infantry battalion, a re-enforced squadron (typically 12 CH-46s, 4 CH-53s, 4 Cobras, 2 Hueys, 4 Harriers, and when needed, 2 C-130s that would deploy from the states to the nearest shore base), and a re-enforced logistics unit. All three elements are commanded by lieutenant colonels under a full colonel, the MEU commander.
To gain the MEU-SOC designation, the MEU would undergo additional training on their build-up to deploying as the Landing Force 6th Fleet (LF6F) and take a complex final exam: a Special Operations Capable Examination, a “SOCEX,” before receiving the designation. The SOCEX would be undertaken from shipboard and would involve a detailed series of scenarios covering many of the events that the MEU-SOC might be called upon to execute. Evaluators, the top Marine Corps experts in all areas to be examined, would come in from all over the world to observe and report on how well the MEU performed.
The SOCEX missions include such things as a “NEO”—Nationals Evacuation Operation (i.e. removal of US and allied civilians from a war zone) and “TRAP” (Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel—an expanded version of a traditional search and rescue). As an aside, I was there when the mission was first discussed for inclusion in the Marine Corps SOP. I told the leaders that “Tactical” was not the right word for the name since the mission would only be done under hostile conditions, so perhaps the word “Combat” should be substituted. I almost got away with it until someone deciphered the acronym—it would have been a “CRAP” mission. They stuck with “Tactical.” The missions were usually done at night and using NVG (Night Vision Goggles). All missions were covered by an extensive checklist that listed all things that should be done to plan and execute the missions, which the evaluators filled out as they went along. It was not a “gentleman’s evaluation”; squadrons could and did fail. For this particular evaluation, we were joined by our “real” Army Special Ops colleagues from Fort Campbell and Fort Bragg. They saw a chance to get some shipboard operations in and to see how they worked with us “regulars.”
The mission was complex, but not for us Marines. We would take a flight of eight Frogs loaded with infantry to the outlying airfield where the “hostages” were being held, and land them at the north end as a blocking force so that the bad guys could not be re-enforced. Simultaneous with our landing, the Special Ops guys would swoop in onboard their Special Ops aircraft and storm the bad guys. To make sure everything was coordinated between the marines and the Special Ops aircrews, one of our pilots would deploy with their Command and Control element in an unmarked “biz” jet that was outfitted with the latest in communications equipment that would be overhead during the mission. The Marine lead would be in touch with the Special Ops C&C aircraft by secure radio at all times so any changes could be made with no difficulties.
The CO liked to be in the lead aircraft on missions like this one, so he had the Ops O put me down as his copilot. In effect, that meant that I would do all the planning and heavy lifting, which is as it should be since I was the Weapons and tactics Instructor (WTI) and an old combat pilot. He was the CO and also an old combat pilot, but did more paperwork than flying now, also as it should be. I was looking forward to the mission because I felt some of the Army Special Ops guys looked down on us regular, Marine Corps “Special Ops Capable” aircrews. Maybe I was more sensitive to it than I should have been because not only had I been an Army aviator for seven years, I thought I knew one of them from my long ago Army days.
* * *
The Special Ops maintenance officer was a very old CW4. He was standing in the back of the ready room talking to our maintenance officer when I first saw him. Something about him was so familiar I could not help but introduce myself and tell him that I had once been an Army warrant officer myself. He laughed and asked me what Warrant Officer Candidate Company (WOC) I was in at Fort Wolters and I told him, “9th WOC, Dec 68—Jun 69.” He laughed again and told me that he was the senior TAC officer (short for tactical officer, the main harasser of officer candidates) for the 9th WOC during that time. He, of course, did not remember me in particular since he saw so many of us go through, but he certainly remembered my platoon TAC officer and told me that we were right, the guy was crazy. Even the other TAC officers considered him crazy. It seems my TAC officer never completely recovered from being shot down in a Cobra and nearly being burned to death. His experiences let out a sadistic streak that went way beyond “normal” Officer Candidate School (OCS) harassment. Once I watched him swing a swagger stick, made from a piece of stainless steel from a tail rotor drive shaft, at the head of a candidate he had braced up against a wall. He missed by a couple of inches and hit the wall so hard it bent the steel. Had he misjudged, he would have probably killed the man.
I asked the CW4 why some people “washed out,” were eliminated from flight training, when there were others that we knew were not as good in the cockpit who were not eliminated. He laughed for the third time and confirmed what I always thought—it was quite often purely arbitrary. Higher HQ would take a look at the losses in Vietnam and the number of pilots staying in the Army verses the numbers getting out. From this they would determine how many they needed in the pipeline as replacements. Since there were so many of us going through training, word would come down to the senior TAC officer to “eliminate four.” Based on flight and ground school grades, military bearing, and sometimes just because it wasn’t your day, you would be told to pack your stuff. Flight school was over for you. You still went to Vietnam but instead of being a pilot, you were shipped out as a grunt or clerk or whatever. In retrospect, it may have saved some lives since casualties ran very high among the warrant officer pilots in those days. But that’s not how it seemed to us in 1969—it was another arbitrary roll of the dice, like your draft number coming up.
We left Fort Polk, Louisiana in a convoy of buses immediately after our basic training graduation parade. We pulled into Fort Wolters late in the evening after a long day of excitement from graduation and the bus ride from Leesville, Louisiana, to Mineral Wells, Texas. Graduation meant the end of basic and the beginning of flight school, the end of “90 days between you and the sky.” We all knew there would be harassment, but none of us were prepared for the scale of it. The TAC officers were waiting as the buses pulled in and as the doors opened, they came running in, screaming for us to get off the bus and into formation. Yelling and screaming far more than the drill instructors at Polk, more than we had ever heard. All around, men were on the ground doing pushups, jumping jacks—the weeding out process started right then.
As the Army always does when you arrive at new post, they immediately marched us off to eat dinner, even though it was 2300 hours and we had already stopped at a cafeteria for dinner three hours before. I was assigned to be equipment guard while everyone else went into the mess hall. I stood at attention over our duffle bags for three hours, forgotten in the excitement of fresh meat arriving. Finally, one of the company NCOs saw me and sent me over to the barracks where the chaos was expanding as everyone tried to get “squared away” to the TAC officer’s satisfaction, an impossible task.
That first night, my platoon filled both floors of the old WWII barracks. Six months later when we graduated from the first half of flight school, there were not enough of us left to fill even the lower floor. Between the TAC officer’s arbitrary washouts, and the lack of flying adaptability, attrition over the entire class was about 60%, normal for late 1960’s Army flight school.
Seven years later on the first night of Marine OCS at Quantico, I thought back to that first night at Fort Wolters. The yelling was the same, but this time all the fear was gone, for me at least. I knew exactly what was coming and that they would not kill us. I also knew that unlike Fort Wolters, if you washed out for any reason you just went home. At Fort Wolters you owed the Army two years and if you washed out
, the next stop was Vietnam.
* * *
But that was a long time ago and we both had our missions, so after a few minutes conversation the CW4 went back to his tasks and I to mine.
It was a good night for NVG operations, clear march skies and nearly a full moon. Our flight loaded up with troops and took off from the deck of the Guam in two waves of four. I made the takeoff into the night while the CO took the map to navigate. The high level of moonlight made the world very clear through the green lenses of the NVG. We arrived at our hold point on time and did a slow orbit in tactical cruise while the second flight of four took off to join us.
While we waited, our liaison officer had flown to Washington, DC, in one of their unmarked biz jets with the Special Ops command team. He put on a business suit instead of a flight suit and carrying a briefcase, went out with them to an unmarked Gulfstream IV (G-IV) parked in the general aviation portion of Reagan National Airport. to the casual observer they were just another group of “businessmen” off to carry out some corporate business. The G-IV was not a corporate aircraft but rather a flying command post, full of secure communications gear. Hooked into the Special Ops command center, it could control operations anywhere in the world.
That was the theory anyway …
In our orbit, we were maintaining complete radio silence. In my wide turn, I could see the remaining aircraft join us. When our flight of eight was complete, I called the G-IV on our secure UHF radio to tell them we were in position. No reply. I tried twice more but still had nothing in return. The plan, at that point, was to switch to a back-up frequency, so the CO changed the radio to the new channel and I called again. Still nothing. At that point the CO was contemplating aborting the mission. If the mission was compromised, the bad guys would know we were coming and be waiting for us. We would be taking eight CH-46 loads of Marines right into an ambush. Just then, we heard a call over UHF guard, the emergency frequency that everyone monitors. It was our liaison officer doing something that would never, ever have been done in combat, calling us to tell us to proceed with the mission. It seems they could not get the radios on the Command and Control G-IV to transmit in a secure mode so instead of aborting the mission, they gave up and called us in the clear—On Guard. Had the mission been real, the bad guys would have known for sure we were coming now.
Pushing the start button on the eight-day clock mounted in the helicopter’s dash, I began the countdown to “push,” the time we would leave our hold point and start on our route to the airfield where the blocking force was to go in. As I had been since takeoff, I was flying the aircraft and the CO was “navigating.” I put it in quotes because we were flying in our local area and I had flown in and out of the target airfield many, many times as a flight instructor in MHT-204. I could find it day or night by following a big set of power lines until they made a sharp left turn. At that point the airfield was 30 seconds straight ahead at 90 knots ground speed. Even so, we had planned the mission exactly like we would have, had we never seen the area before. The maps were marked just so, the timing of each leg planned exactly, all the things that must be done for a successful mission.
Had it been a real mission, we would have been flying with our lights out; but it was not real and we were in the middle of North Carolina, not some far away war zone. That said, the Special Ops aircraft were flying lights out and right down on the trees in near nap-of-the-earth flight (50 feet or less). Us regular Marines had to follow normal stateside rules, but not them. They were “Special” while we were just “Special Operations Capable.” We would go no lower than 200 feet on the NVG until we were on short final to the target airfield.
Our timing was working out just about right. I had been holding the airspeed close to what I had planned but we must have had more of a tailwind than forecast because we were approaching our final checkpoint 30 seconds ahead of plan. Our landing had to be exact to prevent the noise of our aircraft giving away the mission too soon. Just as I started to slow the 46, the CO said, “OK, I’ve got the aircraft. You take over navigation.” I was floored as he handed me the map and took the controls. As he took over, he did a slight turn that took us a little off course and at the same time he descended below 200 feet, greatly shortening how far ahead we could see. No problem, while I might be slightly disoriented from the abrupt change from pilot to navigator, I had done this run many times. There went the power line on its turn so we should just continue straight ahead and we would be there in a few seconds. Then the right hand door gunner called, “Airfield at 3 o’clock.”
It couldn’t be. The airfield should be directly ahead. But maybe in the handoff of the flight controls, we got further off our course than I thought we did. “turn right,” I called to the CO over the ICS. He started the turn and as he did, I saw through the NVG that the gunner had mistaken a private grass airstrip for the target field. Behind us the other aircraft were handling the turn with no problems in the tactical cruise formation.
“Roll out and turn left to 020, Sir,” I told the CO. As he steadied out on the new course, the target airfield came into sight. As we planned, we landed at the north end, leaving space for the other seven CH-46s behind us. As we stopped, the ramp was down and the Marines in the back were out and running to their blocking positions. I looked at the clock as our wheels touched. We were exactly on time, not early or late—exactly on time. Twenty seconds after touchdown the ramp was coming up and we were airborne again, climbing out rapidly to our holding point. Ten minutes later, we were coming back in to pick up the grunts. Their blocking mission was complete and we just had to fly them back to the ship.
The flight back was uneventful. We climbed to 500 feet and one at a time, took off the NVG and transitioned back to normal visual night flight. Crossing the beach inbound to the ship, we made the normal radio calls. Emcon (emissions control, meaning no radio transmissions) was over now that the mission was complete. The first four aircraft landed in order and we barely got the blades folded after shutdown before they were towing us to the boneyard to make space for the second four Frogs. The entire mission had taken two hours, one and a half of it on NVG. Thirty minutes after the last aircraft landed, we all gathered in the ready room for the debrief. Nearly all the pilots were there, even the ones that did not fly on the mission wanted to know how it went.
After the marine infantry mission commander and his platoon leaders joined us, the CO, as flight lead, did the honors of beginning the de-brief. He was all smiles since our part went exactly as planned. The XO had been leading the second division of four. He complemented the CO on the “S” turn on the final leg to burn off the few seconds that would have made us early. The CO did not mention the turn was made because our crewman called of the wrong airfield. The aircraft commander of the last 46 reported the tactical cruise worked as advertised. All the other ACs agreed in turn that it had gone very well indeed, as did the grunt commander. We put them exactly where they wanted to go exactly on time. The projected reenforcing bad guys did not show up, so no shots were fired and no casualties were suffered. Pickup and the return flight were uneventful from their viewpoint, just about as perfect a mission as you could get.
Our squadron debrief complete, the CO, XO, and I went down to the Ward Room for the overall mission debrief by the Special Ops major general. Because of how the mission had been conducted, we had no idea how it went overall, we just knew our portion was as planned. We had passed our “final exam” for the MEU-SOC designation.
The Special Ops guys were already there when we came into the back of the Ward Room. They were all very quiet, none of the earlier cockiness in evidence. The MEU commander (a Marine colonel) and the LF6F commodore (a Navy captain) were seated at the front table, but it seemed that we were waiting for someone. Then an Army two-star in camouflage uniform stomped, literally stomped, into the room. His face was red and it was readily apparent that he was very, very angry. He was the Special Operations overall commander and his Special Operations had not worked well,
had not worked well at all. He started off strong and got louder and stronger as he talked.
The problems started when the Special Ops assault troops, the ones that would be taking out the bad guys and rescuing the hostages, elected not to fly down to Camp Lejeune with the helicopter unit. Instead, they would drive down. to do this they used three unmarked rental vans, the kind that tradesmen use. They would travel in “civies” so that the locals would not get too curious about all the military people passing through.
In a small North Carolina town not too far from the target area, they stopped to buy gas and several of them got out to use the men’s room. One of the Special Operators left the door to the back of the van open just a crack. Of course three van loads of muscular young men did get the locals curious. One of the gas station workers casually walked past the open van door and saw a machine gun. Keeping as calm as he could, he went back inside and called the local sheriff, “Sheriff, we got a bunch of what looks like to me to be terrorists here at my station! they got machine guns and who knows what!”
The Sheriff had spent a lot of money equipping a SWAT team and now it looked like they would be needed. He hit the panic button, and in short order they were descending on the gas station. Faced with real armed men, the Special Ops guys tried to explain but would not tell the Sheriff what they were doing in his territory. Try as they might, they could not talk him into letting them go. In fact, they right pissed him off by being evasive about what they were up to. No one had told him about any military exercises in his county. Finally the Sheriff agreed to call their commander at Fort Bragg. When he talked to the general, he told him he would let them go if and when the general himself came down and signed for them.
Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond Page 25