Some Americans at the Lang Vei U.S. Special Forces camp later suspected I had given the North Vietnamese information about the camp’s defenses. There’s no way I can defend myself. It was an assumption bound to be made because I was captured before they were and the attack against Lang Vei was successful. The camp was overrun the night of February 6, 1968. Obviously the North Vietnamese wouldn’t hit a special forces camp on three or four days notice. It was something that evidently had been planned a long time. They weren’t stupid. I think half the South Vietnamese soldiers at Lang Vei worked for them anyway. I later talked to Brandy, a Green Beret captured at the camp, and he said that a lot of desertions occurred two days before Lang Vei was attacked.
Lang Vei first entered my thoughts the evening of January 26. I was at the Da Nang Special Forces B Team headquarters. A clerk came by and said, “The sergeant major wants you out on the first flight tomorrow morning. You’ll be going to the Laotian battalion.”
I said, “Okay,” and went to find out more about the assignment. Nobody was in the ops center; they were all in the club. I looked up Lang Vei on the map. I saw that it was a small camp 200 astride Highway 9, several miles southwest of Khe Sanh and edging the Laos-South Viet Nam border. Along with Khe Sanh, it was the American outpost closest to North Viet Nam in the country’s northwestern sector.
The U.S. had tried for a few years to monitor infiltration from North Viet Nam by using helicopters to insert small special-forces reconnaissance teams on the strategic border mountains overlooking the dozens of north-south trails and small dirt roads collectively known as the Ho Chi Minh trail. The North Vietnamese had driven the teams off the mountains with larger forces and inflicted heavy casualties. Another tactic involved sending a U.S.-advised battalion of Royal Lao troops to try to control infiltration by launching operations into Laos from the South Vietnamese side at Lang Vei. It was better, of course, to have Laotians operating in Laos than South Vietnamese. Still, the fact that Laotians were based inside South Viet Nam was its own cause for secrecy under terms of the war, and little publicity was given to the work of the Royal Lao Brigade’s Thirty-third Battalion.
I checked around and found several troopers who were familiar with Lang Vei. They told me that the three noncommissioned officers assigned to work with the Lao battalion had quit and returned to Da Nang because they said they couldn’t get the Lao soldiers to go out on patrols and operations. Two new replacements had already been sent to the camp; I was to be the third. The choice didn’t surprise me. I was a weapons specialist. In the month I’d been in Viet Nam my job was to work with Nung security forces in Da Nang. The Nungs were mercenaries of Chinese extraction whose reputation for fierceness was not undeserved. They provided the guards and security patrols for the Da Nang base camp, which was headquarters for special forces operations in the First Corps area. It was my duty, supervised by an officer, to see that they carried out the assignment properly.
I returned to my quarters to put together my equipment, which included a carbine and a .45-cal. pistol, binoculars, ammo vest, web gear, two pairs of camouflaged tiger suits, two pairs of regular fatigues, some underwear and T-shirts, three pairs of canvasvented jungle boots, shaving gear, and a camera. Next morning I hopped a resupply chopper at the Marble Mountain air base. We went up the sandy white coast and cut inland near Hue toward the west. As we passed over Khe Sanh I looked down and said to myself, “Boy, am I glad that’s not where I’m going to be.” I could see bunkers dug into the red clay adjoining the airstrip and almost feel the tenseness of the marines moving around below. I didn’t like the positions of any special-forces camps I’d seen. They were usually in valleys because a level airstrip was necessary for resupply, despite the fact this violated all military concepts of commanding the strategic terrain—the high ground—and made them extremely vulnerable.
I could see as we approached Lang Vei that its position was better—but not by much. It sat on a low hill at the lip of a valley. When I got off the chopper I saw no one I knew. It was late morning. I walked to the team house to get something to eat. The unpainted wood-and-tin building was heavily sandbagged and lowered half underground. I got a cold beer and sat around for a while, then walked down by the heliport and along Highway 9 for a few meters to have a look around.
Lang Vei was garrisoned by a reinforced Special Forces A Team, maybe twenty Americans, plus a number of South Vietnamese soldiers, montagnard irregulars, and the Laotian battalion. Everyone was busy, and no one seemed to notice me.
Finally I spotted the sergeant major, who had choppered out with the colonel from Da Nang. I went over and said, “Am I supposed to go straight over to the Laotians?”
He said, “Yeah, go ahead.”
I stopped off in the ops center to look at the intelligence map. I realized why no one had paid me any attention. Lang Vei was surrounded by three North Vietnamese divisions.
It hit me in the pit of my stomach. I wasn’t going to make it out. I knew it. I had earlier got the feeling I wouldn’t be coming back when I finished at Fort Bragg. I wasn’t superstitious, and I’d tried to brush it off, but it wouldn’t go away. I told my wife before leaving that I probably wouldn’t return. It sort of disappeared after I got to Da Nang. I wrote to tell her not to worry, that Da Nang was fairly safe. I didn’t mention we were getting rocketed quite often. Now as I looked at the map and saw the small red rectangles marked in grease pencil surrounding Lang Vei, I said to myself, “I was right after all.”
The Laotian battalion had set up a perimeter where the old Lang Vei camp had been, about a hundred fifty meters southeast of the new camp along Highway 9. The old camp had been overrun in mid-1967, a fact which I think was kept secret from the press. The old camp was positioned a little higher than the new camp and was maybe sixty meters in diameter. Nearly five hundred Lao soldiers were squeezed together in dugout firing positions which had poor fields of fire because the area in front was overgrown with weeds. Outside the perimeter was an old mine field. The map key for the field had been lost. No one knew exactly where the mines were laid, and no one was anxious to venture out past known safe areas.
There were many sandbagged holes but no real bunkers. What passed for a bunker was the corner of an old building that had collapsed under repeated rocket and artillery attacks. The still-standing corner was reinforced with sandbags. It provided shelter for a sergeant, a medic, our Vietnamese interpreter, and a Laotian. I got a piece of tarp and set it up outside as my hootch. A colored medic was there when I arrived. I introduced myself and he grinned and said, “Man, we’re in trouble.”
I went to talk to the lieutenant colonel who commanded the Lao troops. He was the only one of them who spoke English. I made him a gift of my binoculars and we began to speak casually about our families and then moved to the situation at hand. I learned he was no more optimistic than I about our chances. The Lao were equipped with an array of old weapons ranging from communist AKs to French BARs. They were limited to one grenade per man and that grenade had to remain on the perimeter at all times. Camp supplies were mostly airdropped. The Americans at the new camp grabbed them first; the Lao got the leftovers.
I began to collect the Lao’s old weapons, replacing them with M-1 carbines scrounged from the A Team. At least they would have weapons that fired the same ammo. The next day, January 28, I repaired machine guns. Most of them were old and in bad condition from lack of care. That night the A Team at the new camp received a ground probe from NVA commandos who set off trip flares. Everybody went wild; there was lots of unnecessary shooting.
On the twenty-ninth I continued to gather and repair old weapons. The day was mostly taken up by the doctor from Da Nang who came to give the Laotians a cholera shot with an automatic gun. Everyone at first refused the innoculation. The lieutenant colonel volunteered to start things. The troops lined up behind him and went through. The colonel moved slightly as he got his, causing a few drops of blood, and was given a piece of cotton for his arm. Every Lao thereafter demanded a piece of cotton whether bleeding or not.
I received a call on the radio that evening to report to the A Team. It had begun to turn cool as the sun fell and I could feel the layers of heat working up from the powdery red dust as I walked to the operations bunker. The A Team commander, a captain, had returned that day from a thirty-day leave in the States. The situation was desperate, he realized, but he hadn’t had time really to figure out what was going on. I think he was just anxious to get things moving. Action for the sake of action.
He walked to the big map on the wall, and said, “Young, I want you to take a patrol out tomorrow morning to recon this village right here.” He pointed to a small ville nearly two thousand meters northeast of Lang Vei. “Get your radio and anything else you might need.”
I said, “Who’s going with me?”
He said, “Nobody. We can’t spare anyone.”
That was the end of my briefing. I knew the marines at Khe Sanh couldn’t get two clicks from their perimeter without a battalion, and he was telling me to take a small patrol out.
I asked questions around the A Team about what things were like out there. They said, “Well, there’s the map. You can see the NVA are all around us. You’ll just have to be careful.” There was nothing else to say, so I left. To get back to the old camp I had to walk through eight rows of rolled concertina wire that surrounded the new camp. All the gates were closed for the night. It was pitch black. I was scared. I felt somebody was going to open up on me any minute. As I walked down the road I whistled loudly as I could without being obvious, hoping the ARVN would know I was leaving and the Laotians would realize it was I coming back.
When I returned I told the lieutenant colonel I needed some men for a patrol. I hoped he would give me a company. He said he could only spare seventeen men, less than two squads. The sergeant who technically commanded our three-man group was frightened to death and wouldn’t leave the camp perimeter. He and the medic suggested that I sandbag the patrol. I did not think one minute about not carrying out the assignment. I began to prepare for the morning.
Shortly after sunrise we moved out in a column of twos along the road leading to Khe Sanh. The heat settled on us like a wet blanket. As I worked out the stiffness in my legs I thought of the long day ahead. We passed several Vietnamese civilians. I started to stop and interrogate them but remembered I had nobody with me who spoke the language. We walked the road about forty-five minutes and then cut north through jungle scrub.
The point man was twenty meters in front of the column. We had scarcely cleared the road when he took the first round. Firing erupted all around us. I ran to get him but saw it was no use. He had taken it through the head. I turned to give a signal to the Laotians. There was no one to signal. They had fled.
I ran three steps. Got caught in a volley of fire. Took a round in my lower left leg. Another grazed me. As I fell I took two more. The bullets shattered both bones in my lower leg. Didn’t feel anything. It was as if I was running and my leg suddenly gave out. Tried to jump up again but couldn’t. Rolled over and looked at it and said, “Oh, my God!” Pants leg was blown away. Blood all over. Pieces of bone sticking out. Crawled to a gully.
I tried to calm myself. I knew I was hit only in the leg, I wasn’t dying. Bullets splatted in the dirt around me. I tried to call Lang Vei headquarters on my Prick-25. “Spunky Hansom, Spunky Hansom, this is Twenty-Bravo. Over.” No answer. Tried again but didn’t have time to finish. The area was too hot. I went through two thirty-round magazines, firing the carbine on automatic.
The NVA were thirty-five meters away. I saw my rounds blow away the heads of two of them manning a machine gun. Thought I got another, but I couldn’t see well because I was spraying and trying to duck their fire. I inserted a third magazine into the underbelly of my carbine. Suddenly I felt two sharp points pricking my back. Two NVA had outflanked me unseen, approached from either side. They carried SKSs with flip-out bayonets. One of them said in a heavy accent, “Surrender or die.” He handed me a small calling card. One side was in English. It said I had been captured by the National Liberation Front and would be treated humanely.
They snatched my rifle, grabbed me under each arm, dragged me a little past their lines, and leaned me against a tree. They removed my pistol belt and web gear but left my ammo vest intact with sixteen magazines in it. Later before they moved me out they remembered to remove the ammo. A medic arrived almost immediately. He gave me a shot of tetanus and penicillin but no morphine. It wasn’t needed. I felt no pain for two days. I was in shock.
A captured Laotian had a leg wound identical to mine. The North Vietnamese put us in green-canvas hammocks stretched across bamboo poles and moved us off the high ground into the jungle toward a valley. Three hours later we were almost caught in a bombing raid. The NVA heard the hiss of the falling bombs and dropped me, ran for cover under rocks. The B-52S walked a mountain above us. When the earthquake started I crawled to the rocks faster than I would have thought possible. The attack over, the soldiers returned, dusting themselves off and laughing.
I was surprised to find them so cheerful. I could see on closer examination that they were a mixture of VC and North Vietnamese.
We moved awhile longer and stopped. I spent the night in a hole in deep jungle. I was exhausted. Before dropping off to sleep I thought about what had happened and wondered why I had made it this far. From everything I had heard about the enemy, I knew it was only a matter of time before they would kill me. I was told during my training that the VC showed no mercy to special-forces soldiers. The Vietnamese woke me next morning with a cup of powdered milk. They pointed to the hammock and motioned me to get in. We continued to move. It felt like we moved for two days. But I’m not certain because the pain had started, making it difficult to concentrate.
We reached a jungle camp. It was made up of underground bunkers. The number of soldiers in the area told me it was at least a battalion or regimental headquarters. It was obviously very secure; soldiers walked around weaponless. A Vietnamese came to interrogate me. He looked to be about thirty-five. He told me he was a math teacher in a Hue high school before joining the Liberation Army. He spoke politely and had a sort of British formality about him.
Some soldiers sat me on the edge of a bunker, with my legs hanging over. The interrogator explained why he was going to question me. “I am a Vietnamese fighting for my country. The Americans are here as aggressors. They are foreigners fighting against my people. You must understand why I have to ask you questions. It is not that I want to but because I must in order to help my country.”
He began to quiz me about Lang Vei.
I told him my name, rank, serial number, and religion.
He said, “You do not need to say that. I have your dog tags.”
I said, “I just got to Lang Vei three days before I was captured. I was with the Laotians. I never really went to the new camp. So I can’t tell you anything about it.”
He said, “You’re lying. We have ways to make you talk.”
They definitely have ways. He started with my wounded leg. He and two soldiers first pulled on it, then kicked it viciously. I passed out.
When I came to the interrogator told me that if I didn’t talk he would have the wounded Lao killed. The Laotian sat on the edge of a hole a few meters away, facing the other way.
I said, “I can’t tell you anything because I just got there.”
He gave a signal. A North Vietnamese shot the Lao in the back of the head with a TT-33 pistol. The Lao pitched forward into the hole. I was stunned. He ordered another Laotian brought up. I couldn’t tell whether he was from my patrol.
“You will be responsible for this man’s death too if you do not talk.”
I again told him I didn’t know anything. A soldier executed the second Lao in the same manner.
The interrogator showed me a regular 1:50,000 army map on which U.S. positions at Khe Sanh and Lang Vei were marked in detail. He had a dozen five-by-seven snapshots taken with a 35mm telephoto lens of Lang Vei’s mortar pits, gun positions, and team house. He pointed at the pictures and asked me to identify the obvious. He was seeking verification of what he already knew.
I pointed out the helipad and said, “Highway Nine runs through here and the Vietnamese and Americans are over here at the new camp.”
He asked how many men were in the camp, the locations of specific firing positions.
I repeated that I didn’t know. Which was actually true.
He raised his pistol even with my eyes, and said, “This is your last chance.”
I said quietly, “I can’t tell you anymore.” I guess he either accepted it or didn’t feel like killing me. He lowered the gun and motioned for them to take me away. The interrogation had lasted six hours.
Next day a doctor opened my wounded leg, cleaned out the multiplying maggots, removed some bone splinters, then put in drainage tubes and fitted me with a ladder splint. He gave me a tetanus shot and some penicillin and morphine. I was moved a few meters up the hill and placed in a dark bunker. The interrogator came every day or so to see how I was doing. Once he brought a reporter from the Liberation News Service. The reporter had a tape recorder but no camera. He asked my name and the circumstances of my capture.
On February 6 the interrogator stopped by for a few minutes. He was unusually cheerful. He said, “Would you like to watch us overrun Lang Vei tonight?”
That evening I could hear North Vietnamese artillery whistling overhead toward Lang Vei. I reckoned I was about three clicks directly from the camp. In the distance I heard the unmistakable clank and rumble of tanks. The sky southward was lit with flares. Several jets flew over. There was less air traffic than I thought there would be, possibly because the Tet offensive was taking place all over South Viet Nam simultaneously. The sound of gunfire died out next morning. I knew the attack had been successful when I saw Sergeant Thompson being led into our camp.
We moved out three days later. Vietnamese medics put a regular hip-length plaster cast on my leg. It would have been perfect if I had not had an open wound. No hole was left in the cast for drainage. Several soldiers carried me in the hammock. When we reached the top of the first hill I saw Thompson, who was unwounded, and five ARVN who were captured with him. Thompson gave me a blanket. We moved south-southwest toward the Laos border, reaching a small montagnard village that evening. Thompson and the ARVN slept in a hootch elevated on stilts. I slept below on a bamboo platform.
Thompson and the others were gone when I awoke. My guards pulled me to another hootch, gave me some penicillin, and disappeared. Medics later came to remove the leg cast. It had turned soft and started stinking. The house belonged to a family of the Bru minority. For the following two weeks I was to be continually shocked by the treatment I received. The Bru respected the house as if it were mine. They brought me breakfast and supper of soup and rice balls. I was given my own private basket of potatoes and manioc. Villagers returning from the fields always made sure the basket was full. The younger women were bare-breasted, the older wore sarong-type dresses, and the men were interchangeable with peasant Vietnamese except for their darker skins. They were gentle farmers. And I began to re-examine my thoughts about the war.
During my two weeks in the Bru house I realized I knew little about Viet Nam or why we were there. I was not even very familiar with the country’s name until I got to Fort Bragg. Laos and Cambodia I knew were someplace in Asia, but I certainly couldn’t have placed them on a blank map if I had to. Nor was I familiar with the definition of communism. I had been told in general terms at Bragg that it was something bad, something we had to fight against. That was good enough for me. I considered myself 100-per-cent red, white, and blue.
An interpreter arrived at the Bru house. He was upset. Apparently a mix-up in orders had caused them to leave me alone two weeks. I was taken to a makeshift camp where I joined two other Green Berets. Thompson and Brandy had tried to escape before I arrived but had been recaptured. Brandy had a wounded leg; he’d taken grenade fragments at Lang Vei. We began to move northwest up the Ho Chi Minh trail.
It was my worst time. My leg was killing me. I put three bamboo splints on it and tied them together as tightly as I could. The ARVN POWs carried Brandy and me in hammocks. I tried to slide down the steep inclines and the pain was unbearable. We came to a camp in northern Laos after a few days. We stayed there two weeks, resting up. I was unable to eat and had dysentery, was swollen with edema. Two more American POWs joined us—McMurray, the radioman at Lang Vei, and Ridgeway, a marine from Khe Sanh who was taken in an ambush. Unknown to us, the Marine Corps sent Ridgeway’s “remains” to his parents and they buried him, only to discover five years later he was still alive.
We resumed our march and reached a river. It may have been an extension of the Ben Hai, which separates North from South Viet Nam, for shortly after crossing it we were put on trucks. We drove through areas that looked like the moon, the jungle was completely leveled. As we got deeper into North Viet Nam we saw that almost every village had been destroyed. Rice fields were churned up and cratered. Suddenly jets flashed out of the sun. We took cover beside the road.
Ted Guy
I landed at midnight from a mission in Laos. We were short of aircrews so I scheduled myself to fly next morning. I went to my sleeping trailer and had a bucket of popcorn and a couple of drinks with my roommate, Col. Ross Carson, the squadron commander. I got several hours sleep, awoke at 4:30, and went to the club for a breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast.
At 6:30 I was in the squadron room doing some paper work. A major who had been in-country four days walked in and said, “Colonel, when am I going to fly?”
I said, “How about right now?” My regular back seater was supposed to go on the mission with me. But he had been shot down recently with another pilot, his wife was having a baby, and because of the dual circumstances we had managed to get him a stateside leave. I told him to skip the flight and leave early for the U.S.; I would take the eager major with me instead.
I thought it would be a good mission for the major’s first. It was scheduled for a sparsely populated area of Laos. We wouldn’t have to worry much about the accuracy of our bombs. The mission had come down from Seventh Air Force in Saigon. Normally we got a prewarning frag about three o’clock the afternoon of the day before the mission was to be run. About 10:00 the same night it was finalized and my aircrews notified. It was to be a two-plane flight. In the front seat of the lead plane was a young captain later killed in Viet Nam. Flying his back seat was a colonel getting a routine instructor-pilot check. I was flying number 2 as the captain’s wingman, but as squadron-operations officer I had overall command. The mission was what we called “a dollar ride.” Theater indoctrination.
The briefing began before 7:00. When we were airborne we were supposed to establish radio contact with Hillsboro, code name for the flying control center that coordinated bombing missions in the south. Hillsboro would then direct us to operate under the instructions of a small propeller-driven spotter plane west of Khe Sanh. That’s all we really knew about the target. The prop-driven Forward Air Controller (FAC) would give us the specifics when we got there. We carried four 750-pound high-drag bombs. A high-drag has four large fins that open on its back to slow its descent. We can deliver it very low and very fast with excellent accuracy. I had flown my first high-drag mission in Laos in November, 1967. Now, five months later, I considered myself an expert with this type of ordnance.
The weather briefers told us the monsoon was creating a heavy haze below ten thousand feet. The intelligence officers said over forty thousand NVA troops were massed in the Khe Sanh area. They showed us map locations of known flak sites and where our best bail-out areas would be in case of a shoot-down. The brief was finished by 7:15. Take-off was scheduled for 8:30. We returned to the squadron office. I briefed the major on emergency procedures in the event we got hit. I’d tell him to eject at once and he’d better get out fast because I would be right behind him. I explained his crew duties. He was my RTO, primarily responsible for radar navigation—what we pilots informally called a GIB, guy in the back seat. I had been hit on two occasions. Neither was particularly serious. I lost an engine near the Cambodian border and had to land at Saigon. I lost another engine one day down in the Delta and recovered at Bien Hoa. Small-arms fire both times.
Before Viet Nam I’d never flown two-engines. I’d always wanted to be a single-engined fighter pilot where you only had yourself to worry about. I volunteered five times for the war, beginning after the ’64 Tonkin Gulf incident, but was not released from my job at Randolph Air Force Base until early 1967 so I could go. I hoped to fly single-engined F-105s from Thailand into North Viet Nam—that was my first choice. Da Nang was my second choice, and Cam Ranh my third. I would have had to wait two months until a new replacement-training class started in order to get F-105S. Headquarters told me I could get into F4s in one month, so I took that instead. My GIB and I graduated number one in the F4 class, as top gun out of thirty-five crews. Then I was sent to Cam Ranh Bay.
I changed my mind about two-engines after I flew the Phantom awhile. The F4 is a good weapons system, a very stable missile platform, and a capable fighter-bomber. Below 350 knots it handles like a truck. Get above mach one and it flies super. There are two hand throttles on the left side of the cockpit that move back and forth and control speed as well as the extrathrust afterburner. A stick in the center of the floor controls steering. It is studded with an assortment of firing buttons. You’re flying with the left hand on the throttle and the right hand on the stick and in front is a small radar scope. There are many, many subsystems with scores of switches and dials. It’s a complicated piece of machinery.
I wore a flying suit, a G suit, survival vest, and a parachute harness. I carried a .38 Police Special strapped to the small of my back. A survival knife was fastened to my leg. I also carried two emergency radios and a tree-lowering device. Before going on a mission I usually took off my wedding band, removed my wallet and other personals. For some reason I did not do that this morning. We went to the airplane and strapped in. Ross Carson came to the flight line just before I took off. I was starting the engines. He had held a helluva party the night before. He smiled bleary-eyed at me and waved good-by. We took off and were refueled by a KC-135 tanker near Plei Ku. Then we continued to Da Nang and contacted Hillsboro. The control center gave us the code name of our FAC and told us to contact him by flying fifteen miles on a 270-degree radio due west of Khe Sanh into Laos.
Frankly, I hadn’t realized we had a war going on in Laos till I got to Viet Nam. I had read a little about it, a few excerpts in magazines, but not much. On my first mission we had tried to knock out a NVA supply road. We cratered the road with our bombs. Which, of course, they fixed thirty minutes later. That was why we had such a large air effort in Laos and Viet Nam. We knew they had up to thirty thousand people out there repairing roads all the time. The bombing was a great deterrent. First of all, it took away a large part of the labor force from North Viet Nam; and second, the factor of harassment was always there. We worked out tactics where we tried to find out where they were repairing craters and then we hit them. If we hadn’t had the bombing, a lot more supplies would have been moved into South Viet Nam.
Still, I suppose I did not think some aspects of what we were doing were totally effective. We often worked with FACs on road cuts and truck parks. Sometimes when they told us there were truck parks and troops concentrations on the ground, I’d say, “Bullshit.” There was nothing, just jungle. But as I walked up the Ho Chi Minh trail, I found there were a lot of truck parks in these areas, and I saw some of the damage we had caused.
We ran a lot of missions around the Tchepone area, which was a major junction of the Ho Chi Minh trail. In fact that’s where I got my first Silver Star. I went to Tchepone one night when the weather was twenty-five-hundred-feet overcast. The FAC wanted us to come down and hit a river fording. Other flights had not been able to get below the ceiling. Like idiots we broke through and took what the FAC later estimated to be three thousand rounds of automatic weapons fire. There were numerous trucks on the road and we hit them. Six days later I got another Silver Star for going after automatic-weapons positions.
Of my hundred twenty missions, most were in Laos and fifteen were in North Viet Nam. We seldom went north from Cam Ranh. We wanted to get to North Viet Nam, very much so. Those missions were what we called a “counter.” Everytime you went north you got two points toward an air medal, whereas a mission in Laos or South Viet Nam counted only one point. It took twenty points to get an air medal, and you could get one twice as fast flying north. Of course, I don’t think air medals were the main reason. The main reason we wanted to go—and there were some guys who didn’t—was the challenge, the excitement of flying into North Viet Nam. I had already made up my mind to extend my tour to get an assignment flying north when my time at Cam Ranh was up.
We passed over Khe Sanh and reached our area. A flight of F-105s was working the target, doing the usual dive bombing from twenty-five thousand feet. And, of course, hitting absolutely nothing. I’m kidding. But it looked to me like they were getting no lower than that. The FAC called and asked what kind of ordnance we carried. We replied four seven hundred fifty optional select bombs. He asked if we would go high-drag and try to hit a ZPU, a 14.5-mm antiaircraft gun. The captain radioed and asked what I thought. We didn’t like to get into pissing contests with guns. But this site overlooked Highway 9. The FAC said it was important. He had tried to get rid of it for two days. I said, “Okay, we’ll go.”
My policy was to try to get there and give the FAC at least twenty minutes of work. From Cam Ranh to target and back usually took anywhere from an hour fifty minutes to two hours and a quarter. Sometimes, though, we went the 335 miles to Tchephone, made one pass, and came straight back if we didn’t get refueled. And if a lot of missions were being run into North Viet Nam from Thailand, we didn’t get refueled because the tankers were busy.
We were flying a floating-wheel pattern. As we circled the target, Lead went one way and I another to distract the gunners below. There was no reported flak or ground fire. Going around on the first pass I lost sight of the captain as he rolled in but saw his bomb go off. The FAC told me to put mine fifteen meters to the east of Lead’s. I rolled in and released the first one. The FAC said it was very long. This upset me a little because I’m a pretty good bomber.
I called him and asked, “Are you sure?”
He said, “Roger that. It was two hundred meters long.”
I should have known right then something was wrong. Looking back, I think I had a malfunction of the bomb-ejector rack.
Lead radioed and said, “Next pass we’re going to deliver two bombs.” I acknowledged. Lead made his run and dropped. The FAC told me again to put mine fifteen meters to the east of Lead’s bombs. I rolled in and pickled the first and then the second. I was delivering at five hundred knots in a ten-degree bomb angle and releasing at about two hundred feet, which put me about fifty feet off the ground when I pulled up. Right after I released the second bomb and began to pull up the airplane was shaken by a violent explosion. I later figured out the bomb-ejector malfunction caused me to get caught in my own bomb blast.
I looked to my left where automatic weapons fire was coming from ground troops. Then I saw two ZPUs firing. I wasn’t worried. If you can see muzzle flashes that means they aren’t hitting you because they aren’t leading.
I called my GIB and said, “Did you feel that?”
The major said, “Roger, I felt it.”
The Phantom has a taletell panel with about twenty-eight lights that go on when something is wrong. I looked down and it said, “Check hydraulic systems,” which give power to the landing gear and flaps. It was a common failure with the F4s. We sometimes lost our hydraulic resevoirs. It meant when you returned to the base you had to make a careful approach and then a cable-arrest landing like on navy carriers. I’d had two of them in the last month. I didn’t consider it a major emergency.
I pulled up in the downwind leg, and said to the major, “How does everything look back there?”
He was very gung ho, said everything was fine.
I said, “If it’s all right with you I’m going back to get the damn gun.”
I had a phobia against automatic weapons. I thought we ought to get it while we could. I called Lead and told him I had the gun in sight. I said I would mark it with my 20-mikemike cannons and for him to put his last bomb on it. The gun was in a bunker on a bare hilltop. At the base of the hill were the gooks who were shooting at us with rifles. As we circled around I lost all control of the airplane for a moment but regained it. I went in on the final approach. I started firing about four thousand feet out, could see my tracers cut through the middle of the target. One thousand rounds. The cannon firing so fast I could hear only a loud vibrating whine—ssszzz.
Halfway through the pass the airplane suddenly felt as if it was sitting on top of a ballpoint pen. I pulled back on the stick. Nothing happened. We were heading straight for the hilltop. I went into max afterburner. It gave me just enough extra thrust to lift me over the hill by five feet. I radioed the emergency distress signal: “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! This is Phantom Eight-Two.” No response.
The taletell panel was lit up like a pinball machine. I had almost three quarters of aileron stick left to hold the wings level. I had, to the best of my knowledge, no elevator control at the time. I had a failure of the hydraulic systems, later lost the pneumatic system, and was losing fuel at the rate of three to four thousand pounds per minute. I had also lost the radar system. I told the major to call Lead. Our radios were dead. I told him we would try to make it to Da Nang. I didn’t want to try Ubon in Thailand because we would have had to go clear across Laos.
The afterburner increased thrust; as speed builds up the airplane tends to climb. With my little aileron and rudder control I thought I could make it to Da Nang. The major couldn’t see the front cockpit, and I chose not to worry him with everything going on.
He said, “Colonel, this is the most fun I’ve had in years.”
I said, “Negative. We’re up the creek without a paddle, buddy.” We got to ten thousand feet and started the turn toward Da Nang. I didn’t want to bail out at that point because I knew forty thousand NVA would be waiting to greet us. I was about to tell the major to take out his UFC-10, which is the emergency radio, the beeper, when the airplane rolled over on its back and started a nose dive to the ground.
I yelled, “Eject now! Eject now!” I looked down and saw my pocket containing the escape and evasion gear, the maps and escort chits, was unzipped. I zipped it, then reached down to the seat lowering switch. Next thing I remember is a red and white parachute blossoming above me. The airplane blew up and somehow triggered the ejection mechanism. The major didn’t make it. I didn’t see another chute, didn’t see a seat, didn’t see the airplane. It was 9:32 in the morning.
I was in beautiful shape coming down. I took out a cigarette and lit it with my Zippo. I remembered I had been told that the gooks can smell tobacco from a great distance, so I put it out. A strong wind began blowing me westward deeper into Laos. The chute was swinging back and forth. I tried pulling on the risers to steady it. I looked down to find some high ground to land on. Everything looked to be dense green jungle. I could imagine myself dangling three hundred feet up, that was the size of trees in the area. If I had to use my tree-lowering device, I knew I would probably hang myself in the process.
I drifted down and the wind abruptly stopped. I prepared for tree penetration by putting hands over eyes and pointing toes downward. When I opened my eyes I was swinging to and fro. I looked down with dread. My feet were two inches from the ground. I’d fallen through the only hole in the triple canopy probably in all of Laos! I unbuckled my harness and opened my survival kit. Normally you do this coming down. But it’s a bright yellow color and I thought if I opened it in the air the enemy would see it. It opened with a loud hissing noise as the dingy inflated with compressed air.
As the hissing began I heard a rustle of movement to my right. I took out my emergency radio and yelled, “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Phantom Eight-Two. Anybody read?” I ran a hundred meters and put the radio on automatic beeper. I stopped out of breath behind a large tree felled by lightning. Heard a noise behind me. Turned and saw seven men in green uniforms, carrying AK-47S. I dove on the other side of the tree and jerked out my .38. I had loaded my pistol with five rounds, leaving a space between the first four and the last. I had decided long ago to commit suicide before allowing myself to be captured. I told my family before I left for Viet Nam that if they heard I was shot down but didn’t hear anything further, they would know I was dead. I didn’t want to experience what I’d heard some of the POWs in Korea had been through.
I fired. In the excitement I went bang! bang! bang! bang! … click … bang!
I said, “Oh, shit. That was my last bullet.” I hit two of the seven men.
I started to run down a path, grabbed my radio and accidentally broke off the antenna. A grenade exploded. Fragments stung my legs.
A North Vietnamese ran at me on the path. He held an AK-47 with a fixed bayonet. I pushed at the bayonet with my forearm, deflecting it slightly. It just missed my jugular vein as it ripped a two-inch gash into my neck. The blade felt as if it was coming out my nose. I was dazed. The Vietnamese swung the rifle butt around. He slammed me on the left side of the head.
When I came to I felt no pain. Thirty NVA stood around me. They had stripped me of everything but my white shorts. Then they took those off and conducted a very thorough body search. None of them spoke English. One removed my Seiko, a twenty-one-dollar Sportsman. He pointed at my gold wedding band. I said, “No.” He tried to pull it off. I flexed my finger. He got my survival knife and returned with a big grin. It was best, I decided, to give him the ring.
A short Vietnamese slapped me in the face, and pulled me over to two men lying on the ground. One of them had a bullet in the chest. He was still alive but appeared to be dying. The other I had shot through the stomach and he was dead. I was taken to a sapling, and my arms and feet were bound around it with nylon cord. Someone put a green T-shirt over my face as a blindfold. I was certain they were going to shoot me.
A whistle sounded. A tall, distinguished-looking Vietnamese arrived. He talked to the short guy who had been slapping me around. The short one pointed to the two men I had shot and pointed to me, jabbering away. The tall man said, “No.” Lying on the ground near the tall Vietnamese, whom I assumed to be an officer, was my flying suit with its lieutenant colonel’s insignia. I think that’s what saved me. It was their day to take a quota of one prisoner. I later found I was only the second or third American pilot to be taken alive in Laos. The tall Vietnamese cut me loose and returned my shorts. I put them on. They led me back up the path several hundred meters.
We entered a base camp. I saw about seven hundred North Vietnamese troops in clean green uniforms, tennis-shoe boots, carrying new AKs. They looked like fresh reinforcements heading for Khe Sanh. Several soldiers slapped at me as I walked by. Their officers kept them away. I stayed there twenty minutes and was given tea and cigarettes. I figured out my position. I was due south of Highway 9, about twelve miles inside the Laos border, and maybe thirty miles southwest of Khe Sanh. I had bailed out in the middle of a major North Vietnamese bivouac.
My arms were tied behind my back duck-wing fashion. I was marched up the trail by three armed guards. After thirty minutes the pain in my arms was so intense that I didn’t think I could go farther. I was bleeding heavily from the bayonet wound in my throat. The calves of both legs were peppered with shrapnel wounds. At a fork in the trail we turned right. Commo wire led in all directions. The North Vietnamese had a prepared battlefield—wires, trenches, machine-gun nests, phones. Morale seemed high. I wondered why we didn’t have intelligence information about the extent of their operations. Maybe we did, but I wasn’t aware of it.
My wounds coagulated after a while. I was encrusted with blood. We walked two hours till we reached a camp with bunkers and hootches dug half underground. The camp was surrounded by barbed wire and a bamboo fence. It was a first-aid station. As I walked past several hootches I looked down and saw wounded Vietnamese soldiers in hammocks. My guards left me at a small wood shack marked with a red-and-white cross. They returned a few minutes later with a medic. He was very kind. He carried an ounce bottle of iodine in the center of a roll of white adhesive tape. He got a basin of water and washed my legs, which were badly scarred by jungle thorns and grenade shrapnel. He cleaned the wounds and taped my legs, and examined the base of my chin where the bayonet had entered. He indicated by sign language that he had no surgical thread or needle for stitches. I nodded. Then he taped my chin very tightly and motioned for me to sleep. Apparently he did a good job. I was only left with a one-inch scar after it healed. The guards had brought along my survival kit and parachute. One made me a pillow from the gear, another brought me some rice, vegetables, and a meat I didn’t recognize. I was surprised by my treatment, especially since I’d killed two of their people.
I woke around dusk. A group of Vietnamese appeared at my hootch door. I recognized two of them. One wore my wedding band, the other my watch. It was the slapper. The short Vietnamese hit me in the stomach. The others gathered round and took turns punching and slapping me. They jabbered back and forth and laughed, beat me at their leisure for two hours, then grew tired of the game and went to bed, leaving a guard outside holding a rope tied around my neck.
That night I made the personal code I was to try to live by for the next five years. The shock of my capture hit me full force. The men had beat me, I realized, to a point where I would have spilled my guts had there been someone present to interrogate me. Fortunately, they hadn’t asked a single question. For the first time I understood the meaning of my breaking point. I believed the formal Code of Conduct had no real specifics in it, personal values assigned to the individual, values you had to live up to yourself. I knew I had to have something specific and strong to satisfy my own needs.
I sensed that night I was going to Hanoi. I remembered all the things I’d heard about the Korean POWs, how some had gotten into trouble. I made up my mind not to let myself get in that kind of situation. I would die first before I incriminated or blamed any other American or caused camp secrets to be disclosed. My personal code made that night consisted of two main points: (1) I would resist till I could resist no longer; and (2) I would accept death before I would lose my honor.
At 7:00 the next morning the Vietnamese who had beat me got up and left without a word. I never saw them again. I stayed at the aid station the following days. I was given four meals a day and the medic attended my wounds.
An officer came the night of March 25. He knew one word in English: “Name?”
I said, “Guy, Theodore W.” I also told him my rank, serial number, and date of birth. He didn’t understand. I asked for something to write on. He produced a spiral notebook. I wrote the information, hoping he might later be killed or captured and my name found by U.S. forces.
Three guards came for me at daybreak. They brought me a khaki uniform. My flying suit had been returned to me earlier, so I refused to wear the khaki. I had intentions of trying to escape. I didn’t want to be caught in anything without my rank. The guards gave in and let me wear the flying suit. We started to leave camp. My feet were badly swollen. I was without boots. I stopped, pointed at my feet, told them I couldn’t walk. One of them ran back and returned with a pair of sneakers. I wear a size eight and these must have been sixes. The guards giggled as they helped me pull them on.
We walked a path for two hours and hit a road, Highway 9. After a short wait a jeep with four soldiers came along. They laid me on the back-seat floor under my parachute and other gear. I discreetly searched for my pistol but it was missing. It began to rain. We drove westward until we reached Tchepone. We crossed a river ferry and stopped at a house. I slept in a hole that night under guard. Next morning I was marched into a village near Tchepone. It was filled with people, mostly young. I was taken to a hut in the village’s center and told to sleep. I lay down on a bamboo bed and dozed off. I dreamed people were looking at me. I awoke with a start and discovered a dozen gathered round the bed staring silently.
Outside someone shouted in English for me to come out. I walked out the hut and saw an NVA photographer, who wore a pith helmet and a camouflaged scarf and was covered with an assortment of movie and still cameras. He explained that I was a criminal of war and he wanted to film my capture. I was given my flight boots and helmet to wear and moved to a nearby hill, where I was ordered to walk down slowly with hands up. A short fellow walked behind nudging the tip of his bayonet into my neck and looking mean. The middle finger of my upraised left hand was extended in American code. As I neared the camera I grinned. The photographer was upset. I was supposed to look sad. I had to repeat the scene. This time I looked solemn. Then a young girl came up, and she captured me. After that everybody took turns, including a twelve-year-old boy.
That night at 7:00 I started moving north. I always traveled at night usually by jeep or truck with two escorts, an officer and an enlisted man, who were changed every twenty-four hours. I had the hell bombed out of me by U.S. planes. It wasn’t doing much good. But they really bombed us. I crossed into North Viet Nam on March 31, the night President Johnson stopped the bombing above the twentieth parallel. My treatment by the Vietnamese became worse the farther north we went. I saw many signs of the bombing. I think we did a good job of wiping out the bridges. However, we never had any trouble getting across rivers. Makeshift pontoon bridges or ferries were always available.
We reached Vinh city at dawn on April 2. I had walked the whole night and was without sleep for a week. I was taken to a large bamboo building in a village on Vinh’s outskirts and placed in a cell, shackled with leg irons and handcuffs. I had barely lain down when a guard roused me. We walked across the village to a small one-room building. A Vietnamese who looked to be about twenty-one was waiting. He asked my name, rank, serial number, and place of birth. I gave him the rest but refused to tell my place of birth because under regulations I was supposed to disclose only my date of birth. He asked if I was married. I said no. He saw the white circle left by my wedding band.
He said, “You lie. You are a criminal of war! An imperialist pig! You will be tried for genocide!”
I lost my temper. “Untie me and I’ll show you who’s an imperialist pig!”
I kicked him on the leg. He shouted something. Two guards rushed from behind a screened partition. They grabbed me, tied a rope around my hands behind my back, threw the rope over a wooden rafter, and started pulling me up. The rafter broke. I fell and dislocated my shoulder. They beat me with empty rice sacks and kicked me in the stomach. That was the start of my hernia, and two of my teeth were knocked out.
When I awoke I was back in my cell in leg irons locked with U bolts. My wrists were bound together behind my back. I was tied to the bed. That night I was taken to a jeep and made to lie on the back-seat floor. We drove all night, reaching Hanoi early next morning. I could see as we arrived that it was a massive, dingy prison. I knew it could only be the Hanoi Hilton.