Special Ops: Four Accounts of the Military's Elite Forces

by Orr Kelly

  The Douglas Invader had started out as an A-26 in World War II. Then it became the B-26. Upon arrival in Thailand, it became the A-26K. The fiction was that it was an attack plane, there to defend Thailand, rather than a bomber, there to drop bombs on North Vietnamese targets in Laos. To carry on the fiction, the American insignia on the planes was painted over, and when they did something particularly notable, the public announcement said it had happened in North Vietnam and left out their base and unit identification.

  The crews adopted the word Nimrod as their call sign, and that soon became the generic term for the crews, the planes, and the entire operation. Unlike most call signs, this one was an almost perfect match for the A-26 missions. In chapter ten of Genesis, the Bible refers to Nimrod, son of Cush, as “a mighty hunter before the Lord.” The job of the Air Force Nimrods was precisely that: to hunt trucks and, when they found them, to kill them.

  The Nimrods became active on 11 June 1966 as Detachment 1 of the 603d Air Commando Squadron, part of the 606th Air Commando Wing, already operating out of Nakom Phanom with AT-28s, C-123 transports, and U-10 utility planes.

  They arrived during the rainy season, which lasts from April into October and makes the roads so muddy that truck traffic is almost impossible. Their first missions were thus orientation and training flights. But they soon learned how dangerous their job could be. On 28 June, the first Nimrod plane was shot down, with the loss of three lives.

  Lieutenant Gene Albee was flying as navigator with Gorski (call sign Oilcan Harry) in a two-plane formation with another A-26 that day and saw what happened. The Nimrod crews quickly learned that, as Albee said, “if you made the mistake of taking that black airplane out in the daylight, you got what you deserved.”

  They were out in broad daylight on this early orientation mission about ten miles from the North Vietnamese border, checking out the Ban Leboy Ford, a shallow place where the trucks drove through the water across a river. It was a natural choke point, where trucks might be lined up waiting to cross the stream. It was also a natural spot for a flak trap.

  In the other plane were Capt. C. G. Dudley, the pilot, 1st Lt. A. F. Cavelli, his navigator, and Lt. Tom Wolfe, who was showing them the area. Wolfe pointed out a typical antiaircraft gun emplacement of a type the North Vietnamese had copied from the Russians. It was in the form of a circle, with the fire-control setup in the center and the guns located in pits around it.

  “We were in the lead, but Chuck [Dudley] said he wanted to look at something on the ground,” Albee recalls. “We pulled off to the side. We’re pulling up, and he rolls in on the guns.

  “I heard over the radio, ‘I’m hit!’ We rolled up back over the top, and he’s in flames. We were supposed to follow him in on the guns, but we pulled off immediately. No sense going in, two people doing that.”

  Albee never did see the guns that got Dudley’s plane. He figured that the North Vietnamese had set up a decoy gun position, with logs instead of guns, and hidden the real guns back in the tree line.

  “He was really low, down in the trees, when he took this hit,” Albee says. “I saw it just before it hit the ground. It was on fire before it hit. And then it was rolling wing over wing and disappeared in smoke and flames. I thought maybe they hosed one of his engines and it caught on fire. That airplane is full of gas, and that aviation gas burns a lot hotter than jet fuel does.”

  Albee and Gorski called for rescue helicopters and circled the area for about half an hour.

  “We finally said, ‘Oh, hell, there’s no use risking anybody else’s life.’ So we sent the rescue ships back.”

  The Nimrods were qualified as forward air controllers, which meant they could identify and attack their own targets. After a while, they knew the area in which they were flying so well that they felt reasonably comfortable operating at night in areas where steep mounds of karst jutted up far above their altitude.

  They still worried, however, about the performance of their plane at high altitudes. The plane could struggle up to sixteen thousand feet with a full load of bombs. But if one engine went out, it could only maintain about eighty-five hundred feet. In northern Laos, there were areas where, at that altitude, the pilot would find himself surrounded by much higher peaks of karst. One pilot went over his charts carefully and found only two routes home if he lost an engine in that northern area. And both of those routes would involve weaving through the mountains on instruments.

  In addition to bombs and ammunition for the eight .50-caliber guns mounted in the nose, they also carried their own flares so they could illuminate suspected targets. Later, however, the standard practice was to drop a flare—known as a brick—that did not ignite until it hit the ground. There, it looked like a streetlight shining in the jungle and could be used as reference for a bombing or strafing attack.

  Although the A-26s were sent to Thailand on temporary duty, they remained there for more than three years, until late 1969. In the early period, the Nimrods normally flew alone. But they soon adopted the practice of flying in two-plane flights—either two A-26s or an A-26 and an AT-28, in a kind of hunter-killer team.

  One tactic used was to fly one plane low over the ground, trolling for antiaircraft fire, while the other circled overhead, ready to swoop in if the first plane attracted any ground fire.

  Some crews also liked to confuse the enemy by tuning their engines out of synchronization. Albee explains:

  “One of the things we did was we’d try and lure activity. We’d go out and fly low—fifty feet sometimes, sometimes between the trees, depending on who was driving. Then we’d go up to a higher altitude and put the props out of synch so they couldn’t tell where we were.

  “We’d bring the power way back and loiter, just see if anything happens. Often enough it did. It was a pretty good tactic. They couldn’t tell where the airplane was. You could hear the airplane, but you’d hear a rroww, rroww, rroww. It could be anywhere. Lots of times, they’d start shooting at where they thought the noise was, and in all probability it would be the wrong place.”

  Using flares to try to expose the enemy or trying to fool him into exposing himself by firing his guns left a lot to be desired for the mighty hunters. What they needed was some way to see in the dark so they could spot the trucks and hit them before they had a chance to hide.

  The infantry in Vietnam was using a device called the starlight scope, which intensified whatever faint light happened to be available, such as that from the stars, to pierce the darkness. Aderholt, who was by that time back in Thailand running the interdiction operation out of Nakom Phanom, knew that if he asked for starlight scopes through the normal bureaucracy, he wouldn’t get them. Instead, he called his friend Secord and borrowed several from the CIA’s stocks.

  Major Tom Wickstrom made some practice runs with the scope and found that, as promised, it helped the Nimrods see in the dark. But the bulky, twenty-five-pound scope was an awkward device to hold and keep pointed in the right direction while sitting in the narrow cockpit of an A-26. The solution was to mount a scope in the waist of the plane and aim it down through the open bomb bay. Clyde Howard, a jack-of-all-trades combat controller, was one of those assigned to fly with the Nimrods and operate the scope. He vividly recalls what it was like:

  “There was a pilot and navigator up front. I’d fly in the cargo compartment with the bomb bay doors open. I’d watch the road through the starlight scope. If I saw a target, I’d tell them to drop a flare. They’d drop a flare so they could see the target, and then they’d swing around and come in toward it.”

  Of all the jobs Howard had, operating the scope for the Nimrods was one of the scariest. The scope not only magnified the faint ambient light, but it seemed to turn antiaircraft fire into great balls of fire, headed right toward him. When the plane went into the attack mode, the pilot and navigator were busy and not talking. Alone back in the waist, all Howard knew was that the plane was in a steep dive toward the dark Laotian jungle. Perhaps something had happened
to the pilot and navigator. Maybe he was the only one left alive and there was nobody to pull the plane out of its dive. Every time, it was a terrifying few moments before he felt the comforting tug of gravity as the pilot pulled back on the wheel.

  As the Invaders, with their newfound ability to see in the dark, racked up a growing toll of damaged and destroyed trucks, the enemy responded with more and more antiaircraft guns. By 1967, it was estimated, there were as many as ten thousand guns along the trail, ranging from .50-caliber to 57mm. Fortunately for the aircrews, many of the gunners were not very good. But enough of them were sufficiently skilled to make life very dangerous for the A-26 crews.

  On 22 February 1967, a two-plane flight found a large convoy and set fire to a number of trucks before coming under heavy fire from several guns. One of the planes dove on the guns and fired a long burst of .50-caliber machine-gun fire. But the gunner on the ground was the better shot. Several of his .50-caliber rounds smashed into the plane’s starboard engine and set the plane on fire.

  The two planes turned toward Nakom Phanom. The damaged plane, piloted by Capt. James McCluskey, with Lt. Mike Scruggs as navigator, made it back across the Mekong River into Thailand. Only a few miles from Nakom Phanom, McCluskey and Scruggs were preparing for a crash landing when the pilot of the other plane, Dwight S. Campell, pulled up alongside. He saw the whole wing on fire and shouted: “Get out! Get out!”

  Scruggs jumped first, but his harness caught on the canopy. McCluskey gave him a hard shove and followed him out. Moments later, the plane exploded.

  Aderholt, who was at the air base, saw the explosion light up the sky.

  McCluskey and Scruggs were both injured but survived. The explosion of their plane, however, engulfed the other A-26. Campell and his navigator, Robert L. Scholl, were killed. It was the only time that two A-26s were destroyed on the same day.

  Although the Nimrod crews were authorized to act as their own forward air controllers, they also often had help from Ravens, airborne control planes, and teams on the ground. On occasion, the A-26s acted as escorts for helicopters inserting Army Special Forces road-watch teams near the enemy supply route. These highly secret operations had several code names. Project Shining Brass began in 1965. It was changed to Prairie Fire in 1968 and, finally, to Phu Dung, in 1971. Whatever intelligence they gathered came to the Nimrods indirectly. Often, however, they worked directly with Hmong forward air control teams operated by the CIA in Laos.

  “We had some very good results with these people because they were sitting right on the side of the hill,” Gorski recalls. “They knew where this stuff was parked and hidden and everything else.”

  One of the ground teams gave Gorski precise directions for dropping his bombs and then said: “Okay, you go home now, and they’ll shoot at you. They’ll shoot at you with 37mm.”

  Gorski asked how he knew the enemy had a 37mm gun.

  “He said, ‘Well, I sold a gun crew some bananas this evening.’ Apparently, the guy was on his way to work, and he sold the bananas to the gun crew, and he was up there talking to me. They’re really a strange group, but very effective, very effective.”

  In their three and a half years operating out of Thailand, the A-26s were responsible for the destruction of hundreds of trucks.

  Just how effective they were is uncertain. Certainly, the North Vietnamese were able to move enough men and munitions south to stage the Tet offensive of 1968 and cause heavy casualties to the United States and South Vietnamese for many years.

  Albee, who was flying out of Nakom Phanom during 1966, in the early part of the Nimrod deployment, has his own view:

  “We liked to think we were real effective. I think we had the effect of deterring a lot of traffic more than we did destroying traffic. I remember seeing movement on the ground, trucks in twos and threes and fours, maybe. But I don’t recall seeing any long lines of trucks out there. You read stuff, even back then, about a lot of activity, a lot of trucks destroyed, a lot of damage inflicted on the enemy.

  “I think it was a lot of bullshit, myself. There’s no way to tell. You could go blow a hole in the road and come back two hours later, and they’re running trucks over the road. They had ten thousand people out there with shovels. They had a hell of a lot of trucks. In the thick of the battle, you have a feeling of wanting to have accomplished something. It was a very boring job most of the time. A nasty, boring job. Sometimes, you’d find something to shoot at, and sometimes you wouldn’t.”

  Tim Black, who flew as a pilot there in 1969, toward the end of the Nimrod deployment, says: “The A-26 had the most truck kills of any airplane in Southeast Asia. That is a remarkable statistic when you think of all the planes flying, day and night. We only flew at night. We only had fifteen airplanes—one squadron—flying only at night.”

  But the toll on the planes and their crews was heavy. Of the thirty planes assigned to Nakom Phanom during that period, twelve, or 40 percent, were lost to enemy action or accidents.

  The A-26s stayed longer and did far more work along the Ho Chi Minh Trail than was originally intended. When they were sent to Thailand in mid-1966, they were intended as a stopgap measure until the AC-130 and AC-119 gunships arrived. But it was not until October 1968 that the first AC-130s became operational in Thailand, and a year later that the AC-119s arrived.

  At first, the Nimrod pilots were skeptical about the newcomers, but they soon came to appreciate the firepower of the gunships. Tom Wickstrom recalls being ordered to move off to be replaced by an AC-130 during an early test in the fall of 1967. Wickstrom had been trying unsuccessfully to knock out four trucks. Within a few minutes, the gunship not only hit the four trucks Wickstrom had been after but also had four more trucks burning.

  With their sophisticated electronic equipment, the gunship crews were able to pick out trucks moving through the darkness, even under the jungle canopy. One device picked up the electrical signal given off by the spark plugs of gasoline-powered engines. If the drivers pulled off the road and stopped, another device detected the heat of the engine even after it had been turned off. The same device pinpointed diesel-powered trucks even though, without spark plugs, they did not give off the telltale electrical signal.

  During the trials in 1967, the AC-130s were credited with hitting almost five times as many trucks on each sortie as the A-26s. But in those days, the Pentagon wanted a measure of cost effectiveness for almost everything. In this case, the sharp-pencil experts calculated that the cost per truck destroyed was about the same for the two types of planes—about $5,100 for the gunship and $5,900 for the A-26—considering that the $350,000 Invader carried a crew of two or three, while the gunship cost many millions of dollars and carried a crew of fourteen.

  With the initial trials ended, the first AC-130A Spectre gunship began operations out of the Thai air base at Ubon on 27 February 1968 and quickly began showing impressive results. On its third sortie, it destroyed nine trucks and two storage areas. During the year, it destroyed a total of 228 trucks and damaged another 133. Air Force leaders began to believe they at last had a way to stop traffic on the infiltration route into South Vietnam.

  In early 1969, with only four planes available, the new gunships were soon accounting for as much as 40 percent of all the trucks destroyed. On one night, a single AC-130 managed to find twenty-five trucks—and destroy all of them.

  With the demonstrated ability of the gunships to find and destroy trucks, more planes, and improved models, were moved in during each winter dry season for a series of interdiction campaigns code-named Commando Hunt. In 1969, the gunship force was augmented by the AC-119K Stinger.

  In January 1971, a single Spectre destroyed fifty-eight trucks and damaged seven more on a single mission. By March, the Spectres were averaging thirteen destroyed trucks per sortie.

  While the gunships had an impressive ability to find trucks by themselves, the interdiction effort was also bolstered by an increasingly sophisticated system of sensors that detected mo
vement and thus told the aircrews where to look for targets. The system was known as Igloo White. It was also known as the McNamara Barrier, for then–Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara.

  While many of the air commandos took a dim view of this complex and expensive system, it was gradually improved to the point where it was making a useful contribution to the interdiction effort.

  The success reported by the gunship crews raised a serious question: with all those trucks destroyed, how did the enemy keep fighting? The mystery was highlighted by a message from Air Force officers in the Pentagon early in 1971:

  “ACT-130 BDA [bomb damage assessment] is the hottest thing in the theater this moment. Seventh Air Force is really concerned about the validity of BDA reported by the AC-130 gunships in their truck killing operation. They stated all aircraft BDA for this hunting season indicated over twenty thousand trucks destroyed or damaged to date, and if intelligence figures are correct, North Vietnam should be out of rolling stock. The trucks continue to roll however.”

  Perhaps the planes were hitting the trucks but not destroying them. A truckload of rice, for example, might absorb a direct hit by a 40mm gun and still keep rolling. The rules were changed to tighten the conditions under which a truck could be claimed as destroyed.

  But the answer may have been that the North Vietnamese were simply replacing trucks faster than they could be destroyed. In each of the first four months of 1971, an estimated eight thousand trucks were spotted from the air, and intelligence reports indicated that North Vietnam was receiving about four hundred new trucks a month from the Soviet Union and other allies.