by Orr Kelly
They had a battalion of Vietnamese marines ready to come in and give us a hand. We didn’t call them because black pajamas are black pajamas and we did not want friendly forces coming to our aid, thank you very much.
We even had naval gunfire. I hate to tell stories on the marines, but …
We had walked in three thousand meters. We didn’t know where we were. We had a helo above us. We’d ask, “Where are we?” He’d put us back on track. By the time we got spotted and got into a firefight with this reaction force, we had no idea where we were.
I’m telling this marine, who’s got the radio, “Have you called for extraction?”
“Well, no, not yet.”
“I think it might be a good idea because I think they know we’re here.”
“Well, yeah, but naval gunfire wants to work out.”
I said, “What? What did you say?”
He said, “Yeah, there’s a destroyer out there and they want to give us a hand.”
I said, “Captain, we don’t know where we are! Where are you going to have them throw these shells?”
He said, “Well, I’ll take care of that.”
About that time—we’re on a canal, maybe ten foot wide. We look down, you can see them crossing this canal. They’re trying to encircle us. I take a couple of the Vietnamese and say, “Let’s go back here a little ways.”
So we set up a rear guard. We did good. We caught ’em.
And then I hear this, way out somewhere, this boom. He’s not kidding. He’s really calling in the gunfire.
Did it come very close?
No. It was somewhere in Vietnam, or maybe Laos. They fired two or three and said, that’s enough.
When the firefight started, I grabbed some of the Vietnamese and we started hacking out a landing zone. I’m standing out in the middle of this thing.
You know, if you have a pipe, and you can see the daylight completely through the pipe, you figure, gee they must be aiming that pipe at me.
I’m looking up and here comes one of these OV-10s—the Black Ponies?
And I’m looking and I said, “Oh, Lord, I can see through his rocket pod. Hey, Gunny, I think we’re in a heap of trouble!”
I know he was looking right down my throat. There isn’t any doubt in my mind. The gunny and I are just watching. We figure we’re going to eat one of these things.
The gunny is telling me—I had just bright blond hair—he kept saying, “Take off your hat! Take off your hat!”
I knocked the pith helmet off and this pilot just jogged the stick and then he let them loose and they went on the back side of us.
That’s as close as I ever want to come.
How could you see through the rocket pod?
They had been making runs. There was no rocket in that one I was looking through.
Did you get out of there all right?
We didn’t have any injuries. We know we killed five and we gave the air credit for, I think, seven. As we loaded on the helos, you could see bodies. We know we got five.
Were you under fire as you extracted?
No, we had a lot of air support. Cobras. Black Ponies. We were throwing diversion out the doors. We learned in UDT and SEALs: If you’re lifting out of a hot LZ, throw some lead out there. That made the army pilot and copilot nervous. They told us to cease fire. We said, “You fly the bird. We’ll do the shooting.”
What about the POW you were going after?
The trailer we snapped up, we asked him where their camp was. He said they’d moved the camp. The Vietnamese were getting a lot out of this guy without threats or anything. He said they kept moving the camp. And he said they had moved their prisoners a long time ago.
This all happened in late January, early February 1972. By March, I was home.
CHAPTER
26
A Taste for Ears
From their earliest days in World War II, the navy’s frogmen have surrounded much of what they do—at times, even their very existence—with secrecy. This has led to constant tension between the press, intrigued by the mystery surrounding the SEALs and UDT, and the men themselves, whose very lives often depend on stealth.
Command Master Chief Hershel Davis, a veteran of Vietnam, where the conflict between the press and the SEALs was most pronounced, says: “The warrior caste and the journalist caste will never be soul mates. If you talk to a journalist, you have violated a sacred trust.”
Perhaps part of the tension came, too, from the fiendish sense of humor of men like Blackjack Macione, who tells of an elaborate sting he pulled on a reporter and of another humorous incident years earlier:
The press in Vietnam? They were dangerous. They would sensationalize things that didn’t need to be sensationalized.
There was this one New York smart-ass. Cocky. I don’t remember his name. He had given us the name “the assassins.”
He started bugging me, thought he was clever. What he wanted to see was our collection of Viet Cong ears.
I could tell you right now we didn’t collect ears. We were professional. It’s just a slight difference of fate that you’re not lying there and someone else is. We did not maim or mutilate any bodies. We didn’t cut anybody’s ears off.
But this guy wanted to see our ears. So I told everybody, “I’m going to get this son of a bitch.”
So for weeks, I would deny we ever had ’em. And then I’d give him a little clue. I’d say, “If I had ’em and showed ’em to you, you’d probably do a story.”
He’d say, “No, no.”
There’d be days or weeks I’d just taunt him some more.
So finally I let him convince me I should show him the ears. One night I set up a meeting and made him promise this was off the record.
Finally I meet him in the bar on the base. That day I had gone down and bought a big box of dried apricots. So I strung a bunch of them up on a piece of fish line. I took one big one and put it in my wallet.
So we meet in the bar and I taunt him for three hours until he’s salivating. I let the string of “ears” just peek out of my pocket. In the darkness you’re not sure what you’re seeing. I let him see them.
Then I said, “The big one, I’ve got right here in my wallet.”
It’s dark and it looks like an ear.
He says, “Ah hah! It took me three months but I’ve got you guys now. That’s awful! It is debasing!”
He’s going to expose us.
I says, “Awful? As a matter of fact, they’re pretty darn good.”
And I take the big one from my wallet and I start chewing on it.
I’m sure he tossed his cookies.
I’m sure he wrote about it but I never saw the story.
Macione recalls a much earlier incident:
During the Cuban crisis, we had this kiss-your-ass-good-bye mission. We were going to parachute into Havana. First, we were going to destroy the ships at the pier and then hold the power station.
There were something like seventeen of us going in and something like 250, 000 Cuban troops. So it’s like they didn’t have a chance. The only thing that kept you sane was you knew you were the only guy of the seventeen who was going to survive alive.
This was a one-way trip. We made out our last will and testament and strapped on another grenade.
We had bought these twenty-foot trimaran runabouts. The idea was we were going to parachute in with these things. We were going to run into the harbor with bazookas and shoot the ships. Well, it was hard enough just hanging on without firing a frickin’ bazooka.
As luck would have it, we never had to go in. I’m sure we would all have been killed.
Rudy Boesch was manning the quarterdeck. [Lieutenant] Roy Boehm was the CO. We’re all standing around in this kiss-your-ass-good-bye mode, ready to go.
[President] Jack Kennedy was calling the team several times a day. Personally. Checking to see if we have everything we need.
Well, Rudy is fielding the calls coming in. So Rudy has to tak
e a leak. So he grabs Kelly. Kelly was a seaman apprentice. Dumber than dirt. No common sense.
So Rudy says, “Watch the phone a minute. I’ve got to go take a leak.”
The moment he leaves, the phone rings. Kelly doesn’t know from shit.
This voice says, “This is President Kennedy. I’d like to talk to Captain Boehm.”
Kelly says, “Well this is Flash Gordon on the dark side of the moon. The captain’s not in.”
And he hangs up.
Rudy comes back, says, “By the way, Kelly, the president may be calling.”
Kelly says, “I think he just called.”
The president calls right back, Rudy takes the call. The president was laughing his ass off.
Rudy had Kelly paint the warehouse with a toothbrush. Literally.
CHAPTER
27
“Vous les Américains Sont Pires que les Français”
From January 1974 until April 1975, William G. “Chip” Beck served as an adviser with the Cambodian army as it fought a desperate battle against the Khmer Rouge rebels. Beck, trained by the navy as an expert in explosive ordnance demolition, is not a SEAL, but he has worked closely with SEALs in a number of overseas assignments. In the mid-70s, he was a navy lieutenant reporting to the U.S. Embassy in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh. Beck is now an artist with studios in Arlington, Virginia. This is his story of the heroic defense of one small city and the eventual collapse of the Cambodian resistance:
I was an adviser to the 11th Cambodian Brigade at the time. I was the only American in Kompong Thom, this little town in central Cambodia.
There were two other foreigners there—a Norwegian doctor and a French priest who had been a chaplain in the French foreign legion. He had been there twenty-eight years and spoke Cambodian like a native. We used to call his congregation “the Christian Soldiers.” After he said Mass, he would go out and show them how to put up a machine-gun emplacement with effective cross fire.
I had responsibility for an area between Kompong Thom and Siem Reap, where Angkor Wat is. I used to travel back and forth in that whole northern area.
I started out based in Siem Reap but I was so impressed by the quality of the officers and what they were doing with the men in Kompong Thom that I went back to the embassy and told them they needed a full-timer down there with the 11th Cambodian Brigade. They agreed.
The provincial governor was also a general whose name was Teap Ben. He was the political provincial adviser and senior military person. The man in charge of most of the combat forces was Col. Khy Hak, probably one of the two military geniuses I have met in my life. The guy didn’t go to school until he was eleven years old and ended up completing the national military academy at age eighteen at the top of his class.
Khy Hak had studied everything from Napoleon to Mao Tse Tung. In his library, I found these huge books on the Napoleonic battles. There were maps where he had drawn in red and blue where the troops had gone and where they had made their mistakes. He could think in strategic terms. He could send massive troop units out but also have his men infiltrate into the Khmer Rouge as guerrillas. He could fight as a guerilla or a major tactician.
When the war started, these two guys were at Siem Reap, a little outpost. They were maybe a major and a captain at the time. That became one of the few places where, when the North Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge started running over Cambodia, they didn’t get very far. They were not guys who sat in their offices and worried about their next corruption deal. They would go out and fight with the troops.
Khy Hak got wounded, for the first time in his life, during the battle for Angkor Wat. Instead of being evacuated, he had his men put him on a door and carry him into battle while he was still bleeding. It was an incredible battle because Khy Hak has a sense of history. He didn’t want to use heavy artillery to take out the North Vietnamese because he was afraid of destroying the historic ruins of Angkor Wat. So he had his men go in and fight hand to hand, tactical, down and dirty.
Kompong Thom had been overrun and almost taken by the Khmer Rouge in 1973, the year before I got there, and when they sent Teap Ben and Khy Hak, literally, the Khmer Rouge were in downtown Kompong Thom. The helicopter flew these two guys in, wouldn’t even land, as the troops were fighting to get back into the city. Literally, they retook the city house by house.
By the time I got there, the Khmer Rouge were still surrounding the town and attacking it, if not every day, every week. I was just so impressed by what was going on I decided to make my own headquarters there. The longer I stayed and saw what they were doing, the more impressed I got.
At one point in the dry season, Khy Hak had had enough of being surrounded by the Khmer Rouge and he said he was going to take back the territory beyond the town perimeter. We tried to get some equipment, some trucks and other stuff, from Phnom Penh to haul his troops but the corruption was such that none of that stuff was ever forthcoming.
Khy Hak decided he and his brigade, under cover of darkness, would walk out of Kompong Thom along Highway 5 and wreak havoc among the Khmer Rouge. And they did. In the course of three days they walked a hundred miles and they brought back 10,000 people from among the Cambodian population. By the time a month and a half was finished, they had brought back 45,000 people from the communist zone, brought them back into a little town that previously had only 15,000 people in it.
When Khy Hak went out there, he didn’t force the people to come back at gunpoint. He would get up on a tree stump or a chair and talk to the villagers.
He told them, “Look, there’s corruption in the government, there’s corruption in the army. But if you come back I will try to protect you. The Khmer Rouge will try to stop you from going. I will help you get back. Once you reach safety in Kompong Thom, they will try to attack us and kill you. I will try to protect you. It’s going to be hard to feed you. You will have to grow your own crops. We can’t count on anybody but ourselves. But you know what it’s like out here under the communists. Choose. Make your choice.”
And they made their choice, by the thousands.
I flew out in a chopper after the operation got going and I couldn’t believe my eyes. The Cambodian plain in central Cambodia is pretty dry, almost like areas of Kansas in some places. It’s very flat terrain, very dry, very good farmland, not infested with jungle or anything.
As the chopper was coming in to where Khy Hak’s field position was, I could see for seven miles a string of humanity stretching out over the horizon. It was an incredible sight. People were walking in single file, many with ox carts. People had all their belongings stuffed in these carts.
In some places you could see the wagons circled up where they had been attacked by the Khmer Rouge, almost like the old Wild West.
Khy Hak’s brigade was providing flanking protection and rescuing more and more people. At one point, when I got on the ground, we were pursuing this one group of villagers who were still hostages and prisoners. The leading Cambodian troops caught up with the Khmer Rouge and frightened them off.
We were coming through this one clearing into a somewhat jungly area. All the foliage and vegetation was falling down. We didn’t know what was coming toward us. It turned out it was women, children, men. This one man was carrying his six-week-old son in his arms. He had a boy sitting on his shoulders. He had a girl strapped to his back and all of his belongings. He was looking over his shoulder, afraid the Khmer Rouge were still behind him.
And this old woman came running up to us. She saw me, being the only foreigner there. She grabbed me, thinking I had something to do with it and started hugging my feet. Khy Hak told me she was thanking us for rescuing them.
I stayed out there with the troops for three days. I really wasn’t supposed to but Khy Hak challenged me, “How do you know I won’t lie to you? Or someone will ask you if I’m lying. See for yourself. You can tell them the truth.” So I stayed there.
Three days later, when I went back, a chopper picked me up. As we we
re flying back, a Cambodian captain mentioned there was a Khmer Rouge battalion headquarters down below us. So the Cambodians I was with wanted to see what was down there. We flew down. There were two choppers. They used one chopper as bait to try to draw fire. The chopper I was in flew about a hundred feet above the ground, in a circular formation, to provide covering fire as needed.
Then we switched places and the chopper I was on went in to be the bait. This guy jumped out of the bushes and started firing at us. We learned later from the refugees that this was the Khmer Rouge battalion commander. The clearing was surrounded by about fifty Khmer Rouge soldiers. They were scared to death the chopper would tear them apart. And this commander jumped out, screaming and shouting at his men to shoot us.
What they didn’t know was the .50 caliber on the chopper I was on suddenly jammed. They got one round off and the thing didn’t work. I was sitting there with this guy shooting at us. I had asked the embassy to send me up a Swedish K and some rounds. Just before I got on the chopper, my Cambodian assistant threw it up to me. As we’re flying off and I start to put the magazines in, they had sent me Uzi clips for the Swedish K. All I had was a 9mm pistol.
But we had captured some AKs. When this guy jumped out of the bush, the only thing I could do, I picked up one of the AKs and started shooting back. So I got in this gunfight with this Khmer Rouge battalion commander. Meanwhile, one of the Cambodian officers with me was yelling, “Don’t kill him! Don’t kill him!” They wanted to capture him for questioning.
I said, “I’m just trying to shoot him.”
I aimed for his legs. The chopper was three feet off the ground, a semimoving platform. I finally got him in the legs and he went down, sort of crawling for the bushes. I had the choice of going in after him. But something told me that wasn’t a good idea. Later we learned from the refugees there were all these other people—something like fifty Khmer Rouge—surrounding us, so it’s a good thing I didn’t go after him.
As Khy Hak had predicted, the more refugees we got into the town, the more of a political embarrassment it was for the Khmer Rouge. They intensified the pressure on Kompong Thom in March and April of 1974.