In April of 1968, Roy reentered Vietnam at an American base near Cam Ranh Bay, a small coastal city located about 230 miles northeast of Saigon. To Roy, the American soldiers were practically unrecognizable from the men with whom he’d served on his first tour. “Gone were the short military haircuts,” he observed, “replaced by long hair and sideburns.… These were just boys.” Roy was disappointed by the lack of professionalism in this new, rapidly expanding American military. He assumed many soldiers were working class, the “kids who hadn’t been able to go to college to escape being drafted to fight in a war that they neither supported nor had the skills to endure.” Just hours after his arrival, he and another Green Beret started walking through the bunkers, telling the younger soldiers to cut their hair and shave.1
Roy’s time with the novice soldiers was short-lived. Within a day, he was sent about thirty miles up the road to another American base near Nha Trang, where he encountered other men like him—grizzled, professional veterans, many of whom were in Special Forces. It was through these soldiers that Roy learned about the recent death of one of his buddies from Special Forces training, a man named Stefan “Pappy” Mazak. Mazak, who had worked with the French resistance during World War II and fought rebels in the Belgian Congo, was a hero to many in Special Forces. He had been killed earlier that month while leading his unit in an intense firefight. Roy was shocked and saddened to learn about the death of this “aging gladiator” who had attracted Roy “like metal to a magnet.” “I couldn’t help wondering what type of war Vietnam had become,” he thought, “to claim such a soldier.” He would find out soon enough.2
Mazak had been part of a special and somewhat mythical unit. At the NCO club, Roy had heard men whisper about a group of elite soldiers engaged in top secret missions. He was dismayed that he couldn’t learn more details about Mazak’s death because these types of missions were “shrouded in mystery.” At the time, Roy only knew that Mazak was part of a Special Forces unit known as B-56 and that they were engaged in extraordinarily dangerous missions. He heard that “casualties in the field were so high that the command needed men as fast as it could get them.”3
Roy was never one to shy away from action. He became interested in serving in this elite unit largely because it was filled with Special Forces soldiers. “I figured I might as well be among friends,” he explained. Roy approached the B-56 commander and “announced to him my intentions to join the unit.” As millions of other Americans, and even the nation itself, desperately sought a way out of the war, Roy maneuvered his way into the center of it.4
Roy was assigned to be a light weapons leader with the 5th Special Forces Group Detachment B-56. Also known as Project Sigma, this unit was part of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam-Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG). Only about 10 percent of Special Forces soldiers in Vietnam were assigned to MACV-SOG. This was top secret stuff. Many of those involved signed nondisclosure agreements that carried heavy fines and jail times. Men in MACV-SOG units were forbidden from keeping journals, and the letters they sent home were read and censored to remove any sensitive information about their whereabouts or activities.5
Formed in June of 1966, Project Sigma operated out of a small base located less than twenty-five miles northeast of Saigon. It was one of two units with a combined strength of nine officers, sixty-five enlisted American soldiers, and 660 soldiers drawn from the native population of Southeast Asia—all organized into eight reconnaissance teams. Roy’s detachment was part of a group involved with Operation Daniel Boone, the cross-border campaign designed to collect intelligence of North Vietnamese and NLF activities in Cambodia.6
By the spring of 1968, Operation Daniel Boone had provided the CIA with extensive evidence of North Vietnamese usage of Cambodia. The CIA had good evidence of at least twenty-thousand North Vietnamese soldiers operating in Cambodia during the previous years. The communist forces were moving entire regiments through the border region on their way to fight Americans in South Vietnam. Captured documents and testimonies from enemy prisoners revealed how the North Vietnamese used these infiltration routes to resupply and reinforce enemy positions in South Vietnam. More than just a highway between nations, Cambodian territory was being used for training grounds, resting areas, and hospitals.7
The Tet Offensive added further urgency to the issue of enemy infiltration, as many of the weapons and materials used by communist forces during these widespread attacks had undoubtably entered South Vietnam from Cambodia. It was crucial to the United States war effort to expose North Vietnamese usage of Cambodian territory to either compel the international community to take action or justify a possible American invasion or bombing of Cambodia. Accordingly, Daniel Boone missions began increasing in number. In 1967, MACV-SOG had sent ninety-nine such missions into Cambodia. In 1968, they would conduct 287 more.8
These highly classified maneuvers involved teams of no more than twelve men—the largest allowed by the Pentagon—who boarded helicopters that flew them “across the fence” to remote landing zones in Cambodia. After exiting the choppers, these teams spent days in the wilderness searching for the enemy. In addition to studying and observing enemy movements, the men involved with Daniel Boone missions also sabotaged enemy weaponry, set mines along transportation routes, tapped lines of communication, and snatched prisoners for interrogation. The information they gathered was folded into confidential reports read by top military and political officials, including the president.9
The Vietnamese-Cambodian border region where B-56 operated was, and is still, a tropical jungle landscape that stretches across hundreds of miles of rolling hills. In some places, the brush is so dense that it’s impassable without a machete. In parts, farmers have cut back the jungle to make way for swampy rice fields fed by the many ponds and rivers that flow through the region. Other clearings are often thick with elephant grass that can grow as high as a man’s chest. Muddy, hot, and sunny, the region is an ideal ecosystem for all types of big, leafy tropical trees that envelop the jungle in a canopy of green. An endless array of flora covers the understory of these Cambodian forests, making them at once a beautiful place for plants to grow and live and an ideal place for humans to hide and kill.10
The wildlife of southeastern Cambodia added another disturbing dimension to these missions. In the rural jungle, the men of MACV-SOG encountered any number of dangerous animals, including tigers, crocodiles, elephants, monkeys, water buffalo, hornets, leeches, apes, and what one sergeant described as “some of the largest and most colorful spiders I have ever seen.” Wild crocodiles and tigers are now extinct in that area, but they were still around back then. Elephants and water buffalo can be territorial and can trample humans. The insects fed off the soldiers, attaching to their skin to suck their blood or sting them. And monkeys harassed soldiers by stealing food and even weapons. But the worst were the snakes—massive twenty-foot pythons and a host of poisonous cobras, kraits, and vipers, some carrying enough venom to kill an adult man in less than an hour. The troops inserted into the jungle always possessed the firepower to kill any of these animals, but any noises created while dealing with local wildlife could alert enemy soldiers. Silencers helped, but even still, the men couldn’t always see the animals coming.11
While moving through this war-torn tropical landscape, the men of Daniel Boone didn’t wear United States uniforms or carry anything that could easily identify them as Americans. They covered their faces in camouflage, and some donned the all-black uniform of the NLF. Needing to blend in in every way, these men didn’t use scented soap or aftershave in the days before a mission. None carried American weapons. Many fought with the same Russian AK-47s used by the North Vietnamese. Each man also brought ammunition, canteens, a flashlight, a wristwatch, a compass, grenades, a camouflage stick, and a machete. Many carried whistles, smoke grenades, flares, signal mirrors, hand restraints, ponchos, sleeping bags, a variety of explosives, freeze-dried long-range patrol meals, and first aid kits filled with anti-malaria pills, codeine cough syrup, Darvon, penicillin, gauze pads, and morphine. Some brought rucksacks modeled after North Vietnamese packs so they could blend in. And every unit had radios.12
Most of the men involved with Operation Daniel Boone were not Americans. Seeking to limit their own involvement in such highly classified missions, the United States military recruited talented soldiers from the South Vietnamese Army and others from the indigenous tribes of the tri-border area between Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. Collectively referred to as Montagnards, these soldiers knew the local landscapes and languages far better than any American ever could.13
Regulars from the South Vietnamese Army volunteered for MACV-SOG to receive higher pay, enjoy better conditions, and play a more important role in the war than they could in the regular South Vietnamese Army. The Montagnards usually joined for the cash or to help fight for tribal sovereignty. Many of them denied allegiance to any country and refused to take orders from South Vietnamese officers. According to one observer, “The main reason [the Montagnards] liked to fight with Special Forces is because they knew they could kill Vietnamese.”14
Once they volunteered for work with Special Forces, these native soldiers were grouped into separate units than other soldiers from Southeast Asia and trained by the CIA and Special Forces in counterinsurgency and psychological operations. Most were then sent out into the field to serve in Civilian Irregular Defense Groups (CIDGs), whose members were often known as CIDGs for short. The CIDGs who worked with MACV-SOG were typically stationed in isolated camps near remote border outposts. They accompanied American soldiers on operations into Cambodia, serving as soldiers, scouts, and translators.15
After Roy received his assignment, he was sent to a Special Forces base at Ho Ngoc Tao, a small encampment located just north of Saigon. While there, he began specialized training for missions into Cambodia. Hard as it was to qualify for Special Forces, no soldier was fully prepared for the uniquely dangerous missions that lay ahead. Almost none of them had ever done anything like this before, and few would complete enough missions to gain a significant amount of experience. A man who completed thirteen missions into Cambodia was “almost a statistical anomaly,” wrote one veteran. “By the time he had twenty missions behind him, it was a wonder that he was still alive.”16
Roy “started training immediately,” he remembered, working on “insertion and extraction tactics.” The men of B-56 would load onto helicopters to practice rapid insertions into the dense jungle. When the landing zone was in a large clearing, the helicopter would hover just a few feet above the ground and the men would jump from the chopper and scramble to a rendezvous point in the jungle. In cases when the landing zone was too dense with vegetation, the men would use a harness to rappel down one-hundred-foot nylon McGuire rigs to the jungle floor.17
Insertions needed to be done fast. The helicopters flew loud and low over the jungle, drawing the attention of any nearby forces. Green Berets had to escape the choppers within a matter of seconds so they could organize before the enemy came upon them. American Special Forces soldiers could generally win any firefight with a similar-sized NVA unit, but these small units could never be quite sure how many enemy troops they might encounter during an insertion. Some of the NVA encampments in Cambodia contained thousands of soldiers. If a team was inserted near an NVA battalion with hundreds or more troops, it would surely be quickly overrun.18
Extractions involved the same process in reverse. In a clearing, the helicopter could land, and the men would quickly climb aboard. But some of the extractions occurred in dense sections of the jungle that did not provide enough space for the forty-eight-foot rotor blades of the Huey helicopters. In those cases, the men on the ground would grab a McGuire rig and hang on for dear life as the helicopter cleared the treetops while they dangled a hundred feet beneath. It was a dangerous exercise even absent enemy fire, as lines can fray or snap, dropping a man to his death. “Coming out of a jungle in a McGuire rig,” Roy wrote, “is like going from night to day in a few minutes. First, there’s the darkness and dankness of the jungle, then as tree limbs snap as the soldier is pulled through them, day appears.”19
Extractions could be harrowing. In 1968, more than 50 percent of Daniel Boone missions required an “emergency extraction” due to close contact with enemy forces. Those who encountered North Vietnamese soldiers in Cambodia had to fight as they ran. Enemy soldiers would pursue the fleeing men, firing hundreds of rounds of bullets and explosives that chased the dangling soldiers into the sky.20
American Special Forces units operating in Cambodia did have one distinct advantage. When confronted by the enemy, they could use their radios to call in support from aircraft that would fly over the jungle and fire machine guns and rockets on enemy positions. Helicopters were the most common form of support, but also available were American A-1H Skyraiders, planes known as “Sandy,” that carried cannons, rockets, and explosives, including napalm.21
But even these advantages were severely curtailed by the war’s realities. The number of airships available for support was limited by the secretive nature of MACV-SOG missions, as the units could fly only so many helicopters into foreign territory. Most fighter planes were too loud and large to be fully unleashed over Cambodian airspace. And artillery—employed with devastating effects in support of American troops in other parts of the war—was not available to assist men engaged in firefights in Cambodia. The Army asked for artillery support, but it was denied.22
The delicacy of diplomacy created a spectacularly dangerous reality for the soldiers inserted into Cambodia. By choosing to operate in such covert fashion, America’s politicians and commanders ensured that these remarkable fighters would almost always be outnumbered and outgunned on the ground. Some of them never returned. They could not become prisoners, as being taken alive could lead to a major international crisis. The men of these units understood that they were to fight to the death, aided only by their training, skill, and courage.
The men of Daniel Boone were conducting operations that were quite unique in the history of American warfare. American troops had operated far behind enemy lines before, but they had rarely been so isolated in the forests of a supposedly neutral border country crawling with enemy troops. As one Special Forces veteran observed, “Not since the French and Indian War had Americans roamed such complete wilderness to combat a numerically superior foe.” “You can’t find this stuff in ‘the book,’” noted a veteran of MACV-SOG, “because we’re writing ‘the book.’”23
When men returned from a mission “across the fence,” they would hold court over drinks at an NCO club on the base. The soldiers would gather around some freshly returned team leader to listen to harrowing stories of combat told by men engaged in some of the most dangerous missions in the world. Those tales not only regaled men with wild stories of death-defying escapes but also equipped their listeners with lessons crucial to the success of future missions. Special Forces teams would crowd around tables as their comrades diagrammed the action using “beer cans, glasses, and ashtrays,” remembered one soldier. In such a fashion, the officers’ clubs turned into classrooms, with the next men up learning from those who had just returned.24
Those lessons involved small but essential details, such as ways to sleep or walk or how to hold your weapon when scanning the forest. The men shared information on diet and smells, as any foreign aroma could alert the enemy that Americans were nearby. There were different ways to cross a trail or climb a ridge, and they devised unique methods for dodging human and canine trackers in the forest. The Green Berets in Daniel Boone were constantly learning more information about the best techniques for their tasks. Each mission, regardless of success, generated new lessons that survivors passed along to other men. The enemy soldiers were also continuously learning, making the missions all the more dangerous as they escalated from 1967 into the spring of 1968.25
The men bonded through lighthearted pranks between the action. Soon after Roy’s arrival, an anonymous helicopter pilot played a crude joke on him and some of the other men. Roy and his unit had been dropped into a village and were awaiting extraction near a large man-made latrine when a helicopter arrived to pick them up. Despite ample clearing, the chopper didn’t land. Instead, its crew dropped a McGuire rig to the soldiers on the ground. With no other choice for transport, the first soldier on the ground grabbed the rigging and was lifted from the ground before the helicopter once again lowered, dragging the man through the “huge brown lake” of human waste. The other soldiers were mortified. “No one wanted to volunteer to go next,” Roy remembered. But they had to go. The next few men went reluctantly, each worried that the pilot would repeat his prank. But the flier let them off easy until he got to Roy.26
Roy was the last to go. “Almost as soon as I was lifted, I felt the chopper descend and I knew I was going down,” he remembered. The helicopter dragged him waist high through the pond of filth before pulling up and carrying him back to camp, “dripping excrement all the way.” “The smell was so sickening,” he recalled. Roy appreciated that the pilot probably enjoyed “a good, long laugh… because none of the men of B-56 were amused.” Roy showered and went looking for the pilot, whom he never did find. “He better be glad I didn’t,” Roy jested. “It’s hard to fly a chopper with broken arms and legs.”27
In their downtime, the men of Roy’s unit built what he called “our own little version of an NCO club,” with a few chairs and a little television on which they watched broadcasts out of Saigon. Roy and his colleagues once raided someone else’s kitchen for a special celebratory meal, and at one point he wrestled with one of the Montagnards, playfully taking the man to the ground after having his green beret knocked off his head. That action earned him the nickname “Tango Mike” or “The Mean Mexican.” Some also called him “bean bandit,” a racialized nickname that never quite stuck. “No one was offended by the tasteless jokes we made,” Roy recalled. “We knew everything we said was in fun.”28
Outside of these respites, most of their time in Vietnam was deadly serious. Every time a group went out there was a distinct chance they could all die. “We would watch choppers leave the pad,” Roy recalled, “not having any idea where they were off to, what the mission was about, and most of all, totally uncertain as to which of our friends would return.” Living under such pressure, the men of MACV-SOG became extremely close. Few of them had known each other for very long, but they all understood that these were the most fateful days of their lives, and they forged lifelong bonds.29
Roy served with some talented and dedicated soldiers during his second tour in Vietnam. There was Lloyd Mousseau, a twenty-four-year-old Minnesota native, and Brian O’Connor, a twenty-one-year-old from New Jersey. Both their fathers had fought in World War II. Leroy Wright, the unit’s sole African American soldier, was a bit older at thirty-eight. A New Jersey native like O’Connor, Wright was a seventeen-year veteran, one of the few men in the unit who had been enlisted longer than Roy. He had a wife and two children back home in New Jersey.30
Like Roy, Wright was among the very few non-white men in MACV-SOG. The two had met months earlier at Fort Bragg during Special Forces training and quickly became “very close to each other,” Roy recalled, fondly noting, “There was no racial distinction between us.” While stationed in Vietnam that April, they shared pictures and stories of their young families. Leroy would show Roy the drawings his two sons had mailed to him, and Roy shared pictures of Lala and Denise, who by then was just a couple months shy of her second birthday. Wright had been in the miliary for nearly twenty years and was nearing his retirement. His family was eager for his military career to end. Wright was a great soldier, and Roy was glad to serve with him. “He was disciplined, had nerves of steel,” Roy remembered. “Everyone who worked with him trusted his abilities.”31
Roy started his own combat duties as a helicopter “bellyman,” a soldier who straps himself into the helicopter cargo bay just behind the pilots. In cases where extraction was needed, the bellyman would peek out from the sides of the helicopter to instruct the pilot where to position the vehicle for extraction. When the chopper couldn’t land because of dense vegetation, the bellyman was responsible for securing McGuire rigs to the cabin and tossing them to the men on the ground. Bellymen also helped deliver supplies to troops on the ground. Roy’s duty as a bellyman was short-lived, as he was needed for the reconnaissance missions. Soon, he too was being inserted across the fence.32
On Roy’s first foray into the jungle, his team was charged with capturing an enemy soldier for interrogation. They started their day before dawn and spent most of their time squatting in the bush near a small path, waiting for an enemy soldier to pass. Special Forces soldiers were ordered to avoid Cambodian civilians at all costs, so they had to remain hidden from anyone and everyone, even nonthreatening passersby; although one never could be entirely sure who was a threat. They sat in the bush all day, “tormented by the nagging insects and communicating with hand signals,” wrote Roy. It was hot and “boring,” he recalled.33
After several hours, a man walked down the path carrying a rifle. Roy alerted his partner and then jumped out of the bush and attacked the man, “knocking him unconscious.” The American soldiers bound the man with hand and foot restraints and then pulled him into a thick stand of trees. When he woke, they began to question him. The captive denied knowing anything about the NLF. In fact, he said he was carrying the rifle to protect himself from communist forces. That was about all they got out of him. But that was alright because their primary job was merely to abduct the prisoner so he could be questioned by professional interrogators in a more secure area.34
Their ride home was scheduled to arrive soon, but they grew nervous because the presence of one suspected enemy could mean many more nearby. Soon they began to hear a helicopter moving toward them. When the prisoner heard the motor, he tried to make a desperate dash into the forest. One of Roy’s fellow soldiers reacted instantly, spinning on his feet and aiming his weapon at the fleeing prisoner. But Roy was standing between the panicked soldier and the fleeing captive. In a split second, Roy ducked, landing “face first” into the ground just as a bullet whizzed past him and into the stomach of the fleeing captive. “We were all stunned,” Roy recalled. “I was scared to death.” When the helicopter arrived, the men loaded themselves and the wounded prisoner aboard the chopper for the flight back to the base. “I never knew if he made it or not,” Roy remembered of the prisoner.35
On another mission, Roy and his men found themselves “in the middle of some pretty heavy gunfire” and had to call for an emergency extraction. At least one of the men had been hit by a bullet. There was no time or space for the helicopter to land amid the gunfire, so a bellyman dropped a McGuire rig. But then the bellyman was struck by a bullet and had to roll back into the cargo bay, incapacitated but having at least accomplished the task of pushing out the lifelines to the men on the ground. Roy helped the wounded soldier fit into one of the harnesses and then secured himself into another harness. The helicopter took off, climbing above the jungle canopy with the men hanging in tow below.36
As Roy and the wounded soldier flew over the treetops, he suddenly noticed a problem with the McGuire rig. “The ropes had become entangled and were rubbing together,” he wrote. “If this continued, my injured man and I would plunge about three hundred feet to our deaths.” Normally, the bellyman would help, but that bellyman was too badly wounded, having been shot during the extraction. Luckily, Roy’s friend Leroy Wright was also on that helicopter, and he strapped himself in to replace the wounded bellyman. Wright leaned out from the chopper, with bullets dashing through the air, and untwisted the fraying harnesses holding Roy and the other soldier high above the ground. The wounded man later died from his injuries, but Roy made it through untouched. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you all angels are white,” he later joked of his savior, Leroy Wright.37
Near the end of April, Roy had been in Vietnam for less than three weeks when a special assignment came through his unit. Three Americans—Leroy Wright, Brian O’Connor, and Lloyd Mousseau—and nine CIDG soldiers were to be inserted into Cambodia to locate and surveil a contingent of NVA regulars moving south near the border.38
The team trained for several days before flying to the American base at Quan Loi. From there, they would travel to Loc Ninh, a remote outpost located closer to the border. Roy was on separate orders from Wright’s team, but their entire unit arrived in Quan Loi on May 1, the night before the mission. They spent that evening together playing cards, “insulting each other,” Roy wrote, “and having a good time.”
Leroy Wright won most of the hands that night. He seemed happy, Roy remembered, joking with his friends as he swept his winnings from the card table into a hat. It seemed like a normal evening in the war, “like any other night, hanging out in the barracks,” Roy described. They enjoyed some beer and food, and everyone was in a good mood. After they tired of playing cards, they played a stag film that someone had brought and then spent the rest of the evening laughing and teasing each other. It was a good night. Wright, Mousseau, and O’Connor retired early. After they went to bed, Roy hopped on a helicopter that took him to the forward operating base at Loc Ninh, where he bunked down for the night. The other men would go out the next day, Thursday, May 2.
Before dawn on May 2, the team led by Leroy Wright flew to Loc Ninh to launch their mission. They made instant coffee and loaded their equipment before boarding the two helicopters that would insert them into Cambodian territory. It was a short flight into their landing zone, but the pilots couldn’t proceed directly to the location because the enemy was learning how to track these American missions. The pilots flew in irregular patterns to throw off any enemy soldiers who might be trying to anticipate the location of their landing zone. Another aviator was flying nearby in a command and control (C&C) helicopter to provide direction and oversee the insertion in the correct location.
Wright’s team arrived at their landing zone without incident and dropped into a clearing in the jungle. The clearing was free of trees but covered in tall elephant grass. They scrambled off the helicopters and ducked beneath the tall elephant grass while the helicopters flew away over the treetops. Once on the ground, they were alone in Cambodia, dangerously isolated from the rest of the war. The Ho Chi Minh Trail lay just a half-mile to the west.
The men moved to the edge of the clearing and paused to gather their bearings. Every insertion carried the possibility of detection, and they needed to make sure they were not about to be attacked. Just one man in a tree with a radio could alert hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enemy troops who could quickly overrun their twelve-man team. But Wright’s team was ready. This was what they had been training for. They lay still and quiet in the darkness of the jungle, watching for any sign of danger.
After about thirty minutes, the team felt confident they had avoided detection and began to move. They took out their machetes and began chopping their way through the brush. They soon reached a trail and paused to wait for traffic. They didn’t have to wait long. In less than ten minutes, a group of enemy soldiers came ambling down the path. Wright saw them first and motioned to attract O’Connor’s attention. The Americans froze and prepared to reverse course, if necessary. When the enemy soldiers drew closer, the Americans could tell they were woodcutters chopping a path through the forest. There were only a few of them, but they carried AK-47s. Most likely, they had friends nearby.
The American soldiers and their Vietnamese allies backed deeper into the foliage. They sat in the brush in two small groups, each crouching just a few dozen yards from one another. Unexpectedly, the woodcutters made a sharp turn and began chopping a path directly toward one of the groups. The woodcutters didn’t appear to suspect anything yet, but their path was heading right toward the American unit.
O’Connor, crouched near the rear, could hear breaking branches as the woodcutters approached their position. Suddenly, he heard a short burst of gunfire from an AK-47. Mousseau and one of the CIDGs had waited until the woodcutters were right on top of them before jumping out and quickly killing the unsuspecting workers with silenced pistols. The AK-47 fire came from one of the woodcutters who had reacted too late to save his own life. The American team hid the woodcutters’ bodies in the dense brush. But the sound of the AK-47 fire threatened to attract more enemy soldiers to the area. They had to move quickly to avoid detection.
Another noise came from behind them. Toward the clearing, they could make out the faint sound of what O’Connor described as “voices and commotion.” It was an alarmingly fast second encounter, which suggested that enemy soldiers might have heard the machine gun fire. The team leader, Wright, considered calling for an extraction right then and there. They could hear enemy forces several hundred feet away, “talking and occasionally hollering,” described O’Connor. Wright tried to get on the radio to speak with their superiors, but the signal didn’t work.
The group decided to move back through the jungle in search of better reception. As they worked their way along the edge of the clearing, the CIDGs tried to make out the words of the enemy troops but struggled to hear them clearly. They didn’t know if the other group were NVA soldiers or a small detachment of woodcutters. The translators thought they heard the Vietnamese word for helicopter, which could mean that the soldiers may have heard the insertion helicopter’s engine and were looking for a team of Americans. Perhaps the translators heard wrong. No one could be sure. Either way, the American team had good reason for concern.
After circling back around the clearing to reassess, the American team heard additional noises moving toward them. This was all the reason they needed to call for an emergency extraction. They were able to radio the call through the C&C helicopter orbiting nearby. It was a difficult call to make so quickly after insertion, but they had no clue what was out there and wanted to evade any serious conflict. Command disagreed with the decision to leave. The team had made contact, their superiors acknowledged, but the threat of the woodcutters had been neutralized, and they had yet to face the other men moving about across the landing zone. Command denied Wright’s extraction request and ordered him to proceed. The men accepted the order but still wanted to leave that area as quickly as possible.
At that point, they dashed into a small opening between the trees and ran directly into about a dozen NVA regulars. Each side froze. The Americans were dressed as Viet Cong, with their faces shaded and camouflaged. They carried no identifying markers or American weapons, disguised just well enough to make the enemy pause. One of the interpreters started talking to the enemy leader. The Americans pulled out a piece of paper and began studying it to further cover their faces. For a moment, “all seemed well,” remembered O’Connor. The leader of the enemy unit started issuing orders, and the American team moved as if they were getting ready to follow some direction. Then, something happened. It might have been that one of the enemy soldiers caught a glimpse of the Americans’ faces or was simply overwhelmed by intuition. No one will ever know. But in that tense moment, the Americans’ interpreter sensed the change and uttered, “They know.”
The Americans immediately opened fire with their machine guns, quickly killing most of the men standing in front of them before diving for cover. One of the enemy troops managed to fire off a rocket-propelled grenade that flew into the trees across the clearing. The subsequent explosion ended any hopes of concealment. The team was exposed. They had to get out immediately or they would certainly be killed.
Wright’s team retreated to the edge of the clearing and set up a defensive perimeter along the wood line. They radioed in the request for extraction, which was granted. Wright lit a fuse to destroy sensitive documents he carried, telling the others, “They’re no good to us now.” The men in the unit, still fully intact after two separate run-ins with the enemy, crouched beneath the dense brush of the Cambodian jungle, waiting for the helicopter to take them home as any number of enemy troops bore down upon them. This extraction would be what they called “a hot one.”
After a few moments, they started hearing helicopters in the distance. Four choppers—two transport ships and two gunships—were flying their way. As the helicopters approached, the men on the ground heard gunshots being fired at their escape vehicles. “It was quiet around us,” O’Connor recalled, “but it sounded like they had the whole jungle firing at them.” Three of the choppers turned away. One began bellowing smoke, forcing the pilot to make an emergency landing several hundred yards away. On one of the Hueys, a door gunner named Michael Craig had taken a bullet to his midsection before his pilot pulled them out of the fray.
High above, a forward air controller took stock of the situation. “Everywhere I looked,” he recalled, “I saw swarming khaki uniforms. I estimated nearly 250 NVA in the open. No telling how many still in the trees.” The sheer number of enemies suggested that Wright’s team had been inserted near an NVA base camp, which could mean the presence of thousands of soldiers.
A single helicopter made it through the wall of fire and flew over the trees. It began to lower itself into the landing zone, about one hundred meters away from the isolated unit. Just as it began its descent, about a half dozen NVA soldiers appeared below the chopper and began waving for the pilot to land. The men in Wright’s unit were stunned; their rescue craft was being duped into landing into an ambush.
One of the CIDG soldiers opened fire on the NVA soldiers waving to the helicopter. This attracted return fire from the chopper’s door gunner, who didn’t realize that the men standing in the landing zone were actually enemy soldiers and that the men on the edge of the clearing were the very ones they were there to extract. Other team members from the stranded unit tried to call the helicopter on their radios while some continued firing at the NVA soldiers standing in the landing zone. After a moment, the helicopter’s door gunner realized the mistake and aimed his weapon at the NVA troops below, who returned fire, shattering the chopper’s windshield.
As the helicopter hovered over the clearing, the men in the stranded unit tried to warn the pilot to flee, signaling with a mirror and then smoke grenades. Wright had a radio and was frantically flipping through “the frequencies to get a better channel,” described O’Connor. Finally, he managed to contact the extraction team, and the chopper ascended into the air. As the helicopter lifted, the men in Wright’s unit spotted more than two dozen North Vietnamese moving into the clearing underneath the chopper. Wright’s men alerted those on the helicopter, who quickly turned and strafed the enemy troops with machine gun fire before their chopper flew out of the pickup zone.
After the extraction helicopter left, the men of Wright’s unit scrambled to prep for their defense until another extraction attempt could be made. Every passing minute gave more time for NVA soldiers to arrive at their position in the jungle. The American team couldn’t see their enemies through the tall elephant grass, but they could hear them moving and shouting. The jungle filled with “orders and commands being shouted out by the NVA units,” remembers O’Connor. On the radio, Wright talked to the pilot flying high above the action. The man flying above could see troops pouring through the jungle toward the American unit. He didn’t know how many there were, but there were a lot. “The big shit” is coming, Wright warned his men.
Wright wanted to move closer to the landing zone to speed their escape if and when another helicopter arrived. He ordered Mousseau and a few others to run across the clearing to a small stand of trees, while Wright and the rest applied suppressive cover fire. Wright’s men would then scramble past the position of the first group while Mousseau’s unit covered them in return. Mousseau’s team dashed out into the clearing as the North Vietnamese unloaded rounds of fifty-caliber machine gun fire. Somehow, they made it to the trees without being hit. Wright’s team followed and had just passed Mousseau’s position when “the jungle exploded with auto and crew operated weapons,” wrote O’Connor.
O’Connor took a bullet to the arm. Wright was hit too. “His body boomed and jerked in front of me,” O’Connor remembered. “He said he couldn’t move his legs.” They pulled each other toward a large anthill rising just above the tall elephant grass. Behind them, two of the CIDGs lay dead in the clearing. The stranded men opened fire into the trees. Mousseau, positioned about twenty meters behind his comrades, yelled that he was hit. O’Connor looked over and saw a group of NVA soldiers moving toward Mousseau’s position. Wright and O’Connor’s team started tossing grenades and laying cover fire to protect their friends.
Another enemy unit charged Wright and O’Connor’s position. The Americans pointed their weapons and opened fire. One of the charging NVA soldiers fell but continued to fight, rolling two grenades toward the American position. Wright caught the first grenade and tossed it into the air, where it exploded. As the second grenade approached, Wright yelled, “Get down! Get down!” and rolled onto his side to position his body between the grenade and the rest of his men. The weapon exploded, and Wright’s “legs flew up as we continued firing,” recalled O’Connor. “We thought he was dead.” But somehow, he wasn’t. O’Connor crawled toward Wright to retrieve his radio and was surprised when the wounded team leader turned his head and said, “Give me a gun.”
As hundreds of rounds pierced the air between the separate teams, O’Connor grabbed a radio and started screaming for help. The air controller told O’Connor that more support was on the way. As O’Connor yelled into the radio, he glanced over at Wright and saw that his team leader had taken a bullet to the forehead. Wright was now surely dead.
O’Connor was shot again in his left ankle and right thigh. He turned to face the field so he could identify targets to the forward air controller who was communicating with air support. One of the CIDGs, whose arm was barely “hanging on to the shoulder by a hunk of muscle and skin,” tugged at O’Connor to alert his attention to Mousseau, who was signaling for more ammunition. “Ammo—ammo—grenades,” Mousseau yelled. O’Connor crawled over to the dead CIDGs and pulled off their ammunition clips and unspent grenades and tossed them to Mousseau. The forward air controller marked a target with smoke, and O’Connor confirmed. Seconds later, two F-100 fighter jets came screaming over the treetops and decimated the target with rockets.
With the enemy badly hit, O’Connor and his men had a moment of calm. They used the brief pause to begin patching their wounds. Air control asked for more targets over the radio, and O’Connor identified a few spots that soon lit up with explosions. This bought the stranded unit a few more seconds before Mousseau yelled, “They’re coming in!” O’Connor braced himself, terrified that an untold number of NVA soldiers was about to overrun his position and kill him in the clearing. A bullet tore through his abdomen. Another hit his radio. “I was put out of commission,” O’Connor later testified. He laid on the ground behind Wright’s body, “firing at the NVA in the open field until the ammo ran out.” “I was ready to die,” remembered O’Connor.
With the firefight “increasing in intensity,” the grounded men once again heard the approach of a helicopter. “My hopes,” O’Connor recalled, “were that it was the strike force coming in mass to recover what was left.” But just one helicopter flew over the treetops. Its pilot steered the chopper over the clearing and hovered just above the ground, as its door gunners unloaded automatic weapon fire toward the North Vietnamese positions. Somebody tossed a rucksack out of the hovering helicopter. And then out jumped Roy Benavidez.
Earlier that day, Roy had awoken at the small encampment at Loc Ninh. The friends he had seen the night before had already arrived from Quan Loi and left for their mission into Cambodia. Roy’s day opened calmly; he didn’t have any pressing duties that morning. What he remembered most was the heat of the day. He had tried to sleep in, but the temperature pulled him out of bed.
Later that day, Roy walked out of his tent and came across a small prayer group. A chaplain had placed a small cross in the middle of a white cloth strewn across the hood of a jeep. Roy remembered “a small, attentive group of men” listening to the sermon. Roy joined them, pausing for a moment to take off his cap and perform the sign of the cross. He remembered the chaplain discussing the trials each man might face.
As Roy turned away from the prayer group, he caught sight of two men running toward the airstrip. Something was happening. Roy hustled to the Special Forces communication tent. “If there was action out in the field,” he remembered, “the operator there monitoring the radio would be picking it up.” Through the noisy crackling of static inside the tent, Roy could make out the loud sound of automatic gunfire and explosions. Someone was screaming over the radio. He heard what he described as “the voice of someone cursing and crying for help.” Roy rushed to the airstrip to see how he could assist.
Roy saw the helicopters returning from the first rescue attempt. The first one was “badly shot up,” he wrote, “but no one seemed to be injured.” The second chopper was in much worse shape. “I didn’t see how it could still fly,” Roy remembered. As it landed, Roy saw Michael Craig, the nineteen-year-old door gunner who had been shot in the midsection. Craig was in critical condition, barely hanging onto his life as he struggled to breathe.
Roy and others helped pull Craig off the helicopter, and Roy sat with the dying young man, cradling him in his arms and yelling for help. “[He] was like our son or little brother… full of life and happiness,” Roy remembered. Craig’s wounds were mortal. Roy held him for those final few moments of his life, remembering Craig’s final words as, “Oh, my God, my mother and father.”
Roy later said that he “felt my heart sink” upon learning who was in trouble. When one of the pilots said he was going back in to help the stranded unit, Roy jumped onto the helicopter. “I can’t explain what happened inside me,” Roy recalled. “I just couldn’t sit there and listen to my buddies die on the radio.”
A pilot named Larry McKibben flew Roy’s helicopter. Other choppers flew alongside to provide cover. They raced over the treetops, across the border, and into the firefight. McKibben was “zigzagging the chopper,” Roy described, “and making every attempt to dodge the bullets.” Roy’s seat jerked and lurched as the chopper dashed through the bullet-filled sky. “We flew into the firefight like a runaway rollercoaster,” he recalled. Fastened to the vehicle with only his seat belt, he repeated the sign of the cross over his face and heart. A clearing appeared in the jungle below, and the helicopter began to descend. As bullets pounded the walls of the chopper, Roy tossed a medical kit out onto the ground. With the helicopter hovering about ten feet off the earth, he leaped out and rolled into a crouch amid the tall grass as the air “vibrated with the roar of combat.”
Roy paused for a second amid the tall elephant grass before grabbing the medical kit and taking off toward the stranded men. He had caught a glimpse of their position from the helicopter, so he knew where they were trapped, about eighty yards away. Roy began to run as McKibben pulled the chopper out of the clearing. High on adrenaline, Roy was just a few seconds into a sprint when a bullet tore through his calf, knocking him to the ground. He got back on his feet and ran through even more gunfire to reach the stranded unit.
When Roy reached the men, “there was blood everywhere.” Everyone was wounded. They sat, shot up and bleeding, in a small stand of trees amid the tall elephant grass. As Roy remembered, “The fact that these men were still alive was a flat-out miracle.”
He found Mousseau sitting up against a tree trunk, covered in blood and shot through the shoulder and the eye. “One side of his face looked as if someone had sledgehammered it,” Roy recalled. But Mousseau was still fighting, returning the enemy’s fire to hold them at bay. “The other side could have overrun these guys at any time,” Roy later testified, but he suspected that the height of the elephant grass prevented the NVA from fully appreciating the vulnerability of the stranded unit. Of course, the enemy troops were probably also terrified by the sheer firepower that could appear from overhead whenever they moved.
Roy grabbed Mousseau’s radio and called for the helicopter pilot McKibben to come back to get them. He glanced over to O’Connor, who gave a thumbs up, indicating that he was okay for the moment. Roy didn’t see Wright, and he assumed the worst. McKibben flew over the clearing with guns blazing from his chopper. The North Vietnamese hit the helicopter with a barrage of bullets, and they sprayed additional gunfire toward the stranded men. A bullet punctured Roy’s thigh, the pain “spreading like a small hot fire through my legs,” he remembered.
Roy tossed a smoke grenade into a clearing to mark a pickup zone. He snatched a fallen man’s AK-47 and sprayed the enemy position with a hail of bullets before ducking back below the tall grass. O’Connor told Roy about Wright. Roy thought the deceased team leader had been carrying classified documents that should not fall into enemy hands, so he made a note to retrieve the papers before they left.
The survivors began moving toward the smoke grenade marking the pickup spot. As they moved, Roy and O’Connor spotted movement in the grass and lobbed grenades that exploded near two NVA soldiers, knocking them off their feet. Some of the CIDGs made it to the helicopter and managed to board. As the rest of the American unit slogged toward the chopper, Roy circled back to Wright’s body to grab the documents and a radio. Once he saw his friend, he knew he couldn’t leave his body behind in that jungle. Roy bent down and hoisted Wright’s body over his shoulder. As he rose, a shot hit him in the back. He collapsed and blacked out from the pain.
Roy awoke a moment later. He looked to the clearing and saw the rescue helicopter lying on its side, “a smoking ruin” on the ground. McKibben was in the cockpit window, shot through dead, his lifeless body leaning against the seat-belt straps. Roy quickly discerned that the pilot had been killed by enemy fire, causing the chopper to crash nose-first into the ground. Another member of the helicopter crew, Nelson Fournier, had been killed by the crushing weight of the chopper. Two other crew members were badly injured, and the CIDGs who had crawled aboard now crawled back out. Eleven men crouched in the field next to the downed helicopter, stranded in a no-man’s-land across the Cambodian border in the middle of a firefight with hundreds of enemy soldiers.
The helicopter was leaking jet fuel, and Roy was worried it might explode, so he ordered the men to crawl through the tall grass toward another stand of trees. When they reached their destination, Roy began organizing the battered men into a defensive perimeter. The noise of gunfire and explosives filled the clearing. Roy wiped away “tiny shards of shrapnel” that had landed in the outer skin of his skull. Blood covered his face and dripped into his eyes. He pulled out the medical kit and began injecting the wounded men with morphine and patching their injuries however he could. Roy took another bullet to his butt. He picked up the radio and called in supporting airstrikes. Moments later, helicopters and fighter jets zoomed overhead, firing guns and rockets into the enemy positions. The air support bought precious time for the men on the ground as the enemy temporarily stopped firing in order to take cover.
Roy and one of the CIDGs spotted the bodies of a few dead NVA soldiers and crawled into the clearing to drag the deceased men back to their position near the trees. They stacked the corpses in front of them, using the bodies as “human sandbags,” O’Connor later wrote, to shield themselves from the enemy gunfire. Another bullet ripped through Roy’s leg. He got back on the radio, transmitting more locations to the air support who came to their aid with a “blast of rocket fire from overhead.” The men of the stranded unit were growing inebriated from the morphine. The scene was wildly chaotic, and they struggled to hold onto their wits, their senses dulled from the morphine and the pain. O’Connor, whom Roy had injected three times, “was cross-eyed from the dope.” Roy continued attending to the men’s wounds while calling in airstrikes. He struggled to concentrate, knowing that the wrong coordinates could bring the overwhelming American firepower down on them instead of the enemy.
The men of the stranded unit were clustered in two groups about forty feet apart, lying on the ground just below the tall elephant grass. Their situation was incredibly dire. Bullets flew in from every direction. It seemed as if they were surrounded and could be overrun at any second. “We were in the middle of hell,” Roy wrote. “Every movement brought a hail of gunfire. Men were crying and screaming for help. I was one of them. We were going to die.”
The fighter pilots saved them. The jets screamed over the field, pounding the enemy positions with rockets and bombs. The planes flew so low that the men on the ground could feel the heat from their engines. Parts of the forest caught fire from the heat emitted by the afterburners. More helicopters arrived, spraying the tree line with thousands of rounds of automatic weapons fire. The jungle erupted into a concert of gunfire and explosions. Roy likened the air support to a “swarm of killer bees.”
Out of the chaos, a lone helicopter touched down in the clearing about thirty yards from the stranded men. Its pilot reported seeing “wreckage and bodies laying over the entire landing zone.” A member of the crew jumped out, and he and Roy started dragging their comrades toward the vehicle. Roy could barely see through the blood covering his face. The chopper’s door gunners unloaded their weapons into the forest. Even the pilots, armed only with pistols, desperately shot at the NVA positioned near the tree line.
After getting some of the men onto the chopper, Roy turned back to search for more. He located Mousseau and staggered back to grab his friend. With both hands, he picked up Mousseau and slung the wounded man over his shoulder. But just as he did, an NVA soldier ran up behind him and slammed the butt of a rifle into the back of Roy’s head. Roy spun and dropped his friend, coming face-to-face with the enemy combatant. The enemy hit him again, this time in the mouth, knocking Roy to the ground. Roy leapt to his feet and unsheathed his knife. As he rose, the NVA soldier stabbed a bayonet into Roy’s forearm. Roy struck the enemy soldier with his hand, knocking the man to his knees. Then he plunged his knife into the man’s abdomen. The man desperately waved his bayonet, “slicing my arm to ribbons,” Roy wrote, “as he sawed it back and forth.” Screaming, Roy mustered one more burst of energy, thrusting his knife deep into the man’s ribs. The enemy soldier fell onto him and died.
Roy left the knife in the man’s body and began to move. He found another gun lying on the jungle floor and pulled Mousseau back over his shoulder. He reached down and helped pull one of the CIDGs off the ground, and they all ran to the chopper. Roy held his hand over his stomach to hold in parts of his intestines that had started spilling out of a gaping wound in his abdomen. As he neared the rescue helicopter, he saw two enemy soldiers moving toward the chopper and shot them dead. A crew member from the rescue helicopter helped carry O’Connor, who told Roy that one of the Vietnamese CIDGs was still lying in the field. Shooting as he ran, Roy followed a trail of blood back to the position of the interpreter and helped him to the helicopter. He then looked around and spotted three more bodies, unsure if they were dead or alive, and picked them up and carried each to the helicopter and dropped them into the chopper’s cargo bay. Everyone who might be alive was now onboard.
As the helicopter began lifting from the ground, Roy turned once more toward the clearing and fired his weapon into the jungle. Covered in blood and cradling his outpouring intestines, he strafed everything in sight, filling the field with one more spray of bullets. As he shot, sets of hands reached out from the helicopter and pulled him into a cabin filled with blood. With gunfire panging against its walls, the helicopter lifted out of the clearing and sped away over the treetops, just as Roy slipped out of consciousness.