5
THE SECRET WAR
BASED OUT OF Fort Bragg, Company E of the 7th Special Forces Group became Roy’s new home. There he continued honing his skills as an operations and intelligence sergeant, destined for a foreign assignment either to a South American country, because of his fluency in Spanish, to teach counterinsurgency tactics, techniques, and procedures to allied government troops—or back to Vietnam.
The war he’d deployed to two years earlier had steadily escalated, with LBJ’s most recent surge in troops bringing American forces in Vietnam to more than 400,000. By late 1967, close to half a million Americans and 250,000 South Vietnamese Army of the Republic of Vietnam soldiers were fighting an estimated 400,000 North Vietnamese Army and Vietcong soldiers in a country roughly the size of the state of New Mexico. It was a war of attrition, a bloodbath in which American and ARVN forces had killed roughly 180,000 NVA/VC, and the NVA/VC had killed 16,250 American and 24,600 ARVN soldiers. These numbers did not include civilian deaths on either side.
The Americans and South Vietnamese were confident the North Vietnamese could not sustain such losses indefinitely. The key to victory would continue to be a combination of devastating airpower—tactical bombers and massive B-52 strategic bombers that targeted industrial sites in the north and enemy positions in the south—and air mobility, the use of helicopters for troop movements, resupply, medical evacuation, and tactical air support for ground troops. Massive search-and-destroy operations had become the most effective ground strategy to locate and wipe out the enemy in their jungle redoubts.
Assault helicopter companies flew combat assaults, inserting hundreds of troops into an objective area. Accompanied by heavily armed helicopter gunships, these Hueys, or “slicks,” flew in formation to a landing zone (LZ), where they briefly touched down, one after the next, in a line or a staggered trail (depending on the LZ) and just one or two rotor-disc (blade length) distances apart. Six soldiers would spill out of each, yielding platoons or entire companies of men in jungle clearings, on roads, mountain ridges, or the berm-like dikes that surrounded rice paddies.
A wave of landings could systematically surround a village, section of jungle, valley, or other suspected enemy stronghold. Assaults could be small in scale—a couple of platoons pushing through a village. Or they could be much larger, perhaps employing a horseshoe-assault strategy with some troops positioned as blocking forces on the sides and others configured at the open end of the horseshoe, pushing forward. If Charlie was there, kill him, capture him, or drive him toward the blocking forces that would do the same. When the job was done, the Americans and their ARVN counterparts would search the bodies and gear for intelligence, blindfold any captured enemy, bind their hands and feet for security, call the helicopters back in, and fly back to their staging area or base camp, where prisoner interrogations would take place. Dead enemy bodies—not territory gained or held—were the measure of success.
Corpse by corpse, the Americans were winning the battles and destroying enemy weapons, food, medical, and ammunitions caches in the process. But with its population of over 16 million, the north was prepared to replace its casualties for as long as it took to create a unified, communist Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh—the aged, sickly, yet steadfastly popular revolutionary leader and president of North Vietnam, remained brazenly confident. “You will kill ten of us, we will kill one of you,” he said in response to American victories on the battlefield, “but in the end, you will tire of it first.”
IT WAS difficult to judge whether or not the North Vietnamese people were tiring of the killing. Nearly 200,000 of their own people had been lost, but North Vietnam had no freedom of speech or press; all distributed information was censored. U.S. Psychological Operations dropped millions of leaflets over the north, informing the populace of the massive defeats and body counts in the south, telling them that their Uncle Ho was sending them to slaughter. Still, voluntarily or not, they came, as Ho promised they would.
A key American strategy to bringing eventual peace to the south was to deny the North Vietnamese access to the “battlefield” by closing off enemy ingress at the borders. By the time Roy earned his green beret, the combined branches of the American military working with their ARVN allies had effectively limited the communists’ ability to send war matériel and replacement troops into South Vietnam via both the demarcation line between north and south (the 17th parallel) and the entire eastern coastline of the South China Sea, which wraps around the southern tip of South Vietnam and into the Gulf of Thailand.
The western border of South Vietnam, on the other hand, was abutted by the countries of Laos and Cambodia, whose representatives had signed legal declarations of neutrality during the 1954 Geneva Peace Conference, which prohibited them from joining any foreign military alliance. Nor could they allow the operations or basing of foreign military forces to occur on their territories. Representatives from the Associated State of Vietnam (the predecessor of the Republic of Vietnam, or South Vietnam), the People’s Republic of China, the Soviet Union, France, Great Britain, and the United States had also signed the document, acknowledging that their countries would adhere to and respect the stated rules.
But, like water from a leaking dam, tons of communist war matériel and thousands of troops continued to flow steadily from North Vietnam, through sections of Laos and Cambodia and into the south—a direct violation of the aforementioned declarations.
This communication and supply route was known by the United States as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and by the north as the Truong Son Strategic Supply Route. The word trail had become a misnomer by 1967, since it had evolved from a centuries-old smugglers’ pathway, hacked out of the jungle and only wide enough for a person pushing a bike or a small cart, to thousands of miles of interconnected footpaths, waterways, and in places, multilane roads. The route was built, camouflaged, repaired, and maintained by Group 559, a transportation and logistical unit of NVA men, women, and children, whose sole purpose was to keep it passable.
The trail began in North Vietnam and entered directly into Laos, allowing the enemy to bypass American and South Vietnamese defenses at the line of demarcation. It then continued southward for more than a thousand miles: a vast and geographically treacherous journey through steep mountains, jungle, and swamps inhabited by tigers, poisonous insects, snakes, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes. At various points along the way, branches ran east as infiltration routes into South Vietnam.
The trail advanced roughly two hundred to three hundred miles south through Laos before entering Cambodia, where it paralleled the eastern border for another seven hundred miles all the way down to the Gulf of Thailand and the Cambodian seaport of Sihanoukville. Communist troops used this pipeline to stage and launch offensive operations into South Vietnam, then retreat and regroup inside the Laotian or Cambodian jungle sanctuaries that U.S. air and ground forces were not permitted to enter.
Cambodia’s leader, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, publicly and adamantly denied that North Vietnam was using his country militarily. Intelligence gathered by the United States, however, suggested that Sihanouk both knew of and was profiting from the arrangement, selling rice by the ton to the North Vietnamese, who rationed out 700 grams (three cups) per day to trail builders, porters, and troops in transit to the battlefields of the south. The general wartime allotment per person per day in their home villages in North Vietnam was around 450 grams (two cups), making it a lucrative black market business.
Sihanouk also permitted communist ships from both China and the Soviet Union to dock at the Sihanoukville seaport and off-load into warehouses. At night, covered Russian trucks—their headlights off—departed the warehouses and headed north. This suspected northbound transportation system for supplies was referred to by U.S. intelligence as the Sihanouk Trail, or Sihanouk Road, which merged into the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
JUST AS the North Vietnamese and Prince Sihanouk staunchly denied the existence of communist bases and supply lines within Cambodia, so too did President Johnson deny the presence of U.S. troops in that country. “We are in Vietnam to fulfill a solemn promise,” he said regularly during television and radio addresses. “We are NOT in Cambodia.”
Covertly, however, LBJ had begun to authorize small-scale reconnaissance missions into Cambodia as early as April 1967, albeit with a laundry list of restrictions. These highly classified operations were conducted under the guise of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam, Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG), whose mission on paper was to “study and observe” U.S. military operations. The name deliberately evoked a think tank of analysts or statisticians holed up in a reinforced Saigon basement and removed from the action.
In fact, very few high-ranking officers in the U.S. military and intelligence communities were even aware of the existence of SOG, the Studies and Observations Group, and fewer still were privy to its ultra-secret, anticommunist, counterinsurgency mission. In 1967, the commander of SOG was Colonel Jack Singlaub, a hard-charging Special Operations veteran who had conducted covert ops behind enemy lines in both World War II and Korea. As chief of SOG, Singlaub reported directly to General Ray Peers—the special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities as well as the conduit to the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon. “General Westmoreland had the authority to veto our operations,” says Singlaub, “but we had to get approval from the White House and the Commander in Chief Pacific Command Admiral U. S. Grant Sharp. It was a very short list of people; we were well shielded. I don’t believe I was ever asked to be interviewed by a reporter while I was in Saigon. Who wants to interview the Studies guy?”
For the first two-plus years of its existence SOG had focused on Laos and North Vietnam, but when LBJ finally authorized cross-border reconnaissance (recon) teams to operate deep in Cambodia, “the intelligence was alarming,” Singlaub says. “The number of communist troops, NVA and VC, the bases, and hospitals, R & R centers, it was alarming, and it was frustrating. Especially at first, before we could take the fight to the enemy.”
Westmoreland and his conventional U.S. and ARVN forces, both air and ground, were champing at the bit to go after Charlie in his Cambodian lair. But without the green light to cross over the border en masse, the best they could do was stretch their leashes across the rarely marked and always rugged boundary. The NVA/VC became infamous for hit-and-run-for-sanctuary tactics. But what about the grunt whose buddy just got shot through the neck? Does he stop chasing his ambusher at the border or does he push the limits for payback?
Skirmishes between U.S. and ARVN troops and communists retreating over the border were inevitable, and when Cambodians were caught in the cross fire, Prince Sihanouk was quick to denounce U.S. and South Vietnamese “acts of aggression.” He made his stance clear as far back as May 3, 1965, by closing the U.S. Embassy in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, thus ending diplomatic relations with the United States. In a public radio broadcast, Sihanouk explained that this was retaliation “for an April 28 bombing-strafing attack by four South Vietnamese planes against two Cambodian border villages in which one person had been killed and three wounded,” reported Newsweek on May 5. “Recalling his previous warnings that Cambodia would sever diplomatic ties with Washington if another Cambodian were killed in a Vietnam border incident, [Sihanouk said] ‘Our warnings were not heeded.’ ”
There was speculation that Sihanouk’s motivation for closing the embassy wasn’t retribution, but instead was a means to deny the Americans a way station for spies—a diplomatic perch from which to watch over the prince as he provided for and plotted with the Soviets, Chinese, and North Vietnamese. The Johnson administration, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and CIA were all but certain that the communists had his ear while their guerrillas and soldiers had his jungle, his rice, his roads, his sanctuary.
“Once it was done, and the last of the U.S. Embassy personnel had packed their bags and left, taking their radio transmitters and other espionage equipment with them,” Sihanouk wrote in his memoir, published seven years later in 1972. “I felt as if an enormous weight had rolled off my shoulders.”
While the politicians bantered back and forth and pointed their fingers, and journalists clamored for the next big story on the war, never once was the Studies and Observation Group outed by its members, who stealthily roamed around enemy encampments, performed their reconnaissance duties, rescued downed pilots, raided prisoner-of-war (POW) camps, and killed quite a few North Vietnamese and VC along the way. There were no newspaper headlines, television special reports, books, memoirs, or magazine articles published in the weeks, months, even years after the war ended that exposed what SOG was about. How small teams of two or three American Special Operations warriors—predominantly Green Berets, but also Navy SEALs, Force Recon Marines, and Army Rangers—and three or four indigenous mercenaries would sneak over the border to harass the enemy, reconnoiter his sanctuaries, and provide accurate intelligence regarding his bases, weapons, numbers, and plans. The cloak of secrecy was so effective that nearly all the men recruited or assigned to SOG had never heard of it or its mission beforehand. On rare occasions, a SOG warrior leaked its existence—but only to exceptional fellow warriors, whom he respected and felt would fit in.
IN THE last week of October 1967, twenty-one-year-old Special Forces Communications Specialist 4 Brian O’Connor stood before “the big map” inside the assignment office at 5th Special Forces Group headquarters, Nha Trang, Vietnam. Bristling from the wall-size rendition of South Vietnam were eighty-four pushpins bearing different-colored flags to represent the Special Forces A-team and B-team camps and bases dotting the countryside. Fifth Group headquarters, the C-team, was on the central east coast with a big “you are here” arrow pointing at it.
A sergeant major explained to O’Connor how each flag had a dash, a dot, or an X—a symbol of some sort—penciled on it, representing the personnel needs of that particular team or detachment: weapons specialist, medic, operations and intelligence, engineer. If there had been a symbol for commo, O’Connor’s MOS, on the company HQ flag, he could have stayed right there at headquarters in Nha Trang, where Vietnamese girls at the mini-PX shop around the corner sold ice-cream cones for ten cents apiece. Instead, he requested to go to the team called B-56.
The sergeant major hesitated and then pointed to the flag numbered “61” northeast of Saigon. “B-56 is at Ho Ngoc Tao,” he told O’Connor. “Do you know anybody there?”
As a kid, O’Connor had learned Morse code in Boy Scouts, and along with his father—who worked on top secret radio and electronics development projects during World War II—built several radios out of bits and pieces they found around the house: cardboard tubes, wires, and the key ingredient, a galena crystal (a piece of rock used as a semiconductor to recover audio from radio frequency waves). He’d even set up an illegal FM radio station one summer with some buddies, prompting the legitimate radio stations to contact the Feds, who quickly shut it down.
Years later at a field exercise in Fort Bragg—when O’Connor was deep in his advanced MOS training—this passion for radio and communication became evident to the thirty-year-old E-6 staff sergeant who sat shoulder to shoulder with him for several days in a two-man commo rig. O’Connor was drawn to this older staff sergeant, who had just returned from Vietnam and told of his days on an A-team, when he’d set up the communications at a B-detachment and started running missions that seemed straight from the pages of Robin Moore’s bestselling novel The Green Berets. The sergeant took O’Connor under his wing and taught him a few things about communications in war. “Like a wide-eyed kid listening to an uncle’s tales,” says O’Connor, “I got to hear story after story about B-56 and something called SOG.”
So when the sergeant major at Nha Trang asked him if he knew anybody from B-56, O’Connor gave the name of his E-6 staff sergeant friend.
“You’re sure about B-56?”
“I know what I’m getting into,” O’Connor told him. “I have experience with their commo rigs, and it looks like they’re shorthanded.”
Three days later, on Halloween morning 1967, O’Connor joined eight other Green Berets in an Air Force C-7 Caribou as they leapfrogged from A-camp to A-camp across Vietnam, dropping Special Forces soldiers at some bases, picking them up at others, turning what would have been a two-hour flight into most of the day. Eventually, he transferred to the smaller aircraft that would be needed to get onto the short dirt airstrip adjacent to the American Special Forces camp at Loc Ninh, in Binh Long Province, South Vietnam—a few miles from the Cambodian border.
For the previous two days, entire companies of VC had attempted human-wave attacks against Loc Ninh. Now there was either a break in the battle or it was over, and engineers had bulldozed hundreds of enemy bodies off the runway. O’Connor’s aircraft was cleared to land.
It was O’Connor’s first look at the “real war”: a fast-and-hot landing and almost immediate takeoff, the surrounding jungle filled with smoke, fires, bodies, and the enemy. The Green Berets at Loc Ninh—along with the camp’s three companies of CIDG soldiers, an artillery battery, and air support—had fought off the attack from roughly 3,000 to 3,500 NVA and Vietcong. According to the after-action report, “Approximately 9 NVA battalions were believed to have participated in the Loc Ninh Attack…. These units were: 3 Battalions from 273d Regiment; 1–2 Battalions of 165th Regiment; plus a mortar and anti-aircraft Battalion. Each battalion, except for heavy weapons battalion, is believed to have had approx 300–400.” The enemy retreated back across the Cambodian border, leaving behind 850 of their own confirmed dead. Forty-six Americans and fewer than 100 ARVN were killed.
EVEN AS U.S. generals looked to the west, knowing full well that this large-scale attack, as well as another against the Special Forces camp at Song Be, had originated from Cambodian soil, Sihanouk continued to staunchly deny any communist military presence within his borders. So confident was he in the communists’ ability to camouflage their movements and bases, he challenged foreign media to prove the communist presence.
Foreign journalists in Cambodia had been closely monitored by Sihanouk’s ministry of information and escorted throughout the country. They had not been free to roam. The ministry of information, however, was overwhelmed in early November 1967, when First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy arrived in Cambodia to fulfill a childhood dream to visit the ruins at Angkor Wat. From the moment she stepped off the plane onto a plush red carpet covered with jasmine blossoms, throngs of reporters and photographers from around the world were there to document her every move.
During her weeklong visit, three American journalists slipped away from the media circus, hired a driver, and headed out of the capital of Phnom Penh, following directions from an American intelligence officer in Saigon who had received the information from one of SOG’s recently authorized cross-border recon teams. After a few hours on roads cut through the jungle, they pulled over at a dirt road barricaded by a bamboo gate just four miles west of South Vietnam, in a border area known as the Fishhook.
The reports of what they found hit the papers the following week and were then summarized in Time magazine’s November 24 issue.
“[T]hree American newsmen—the UPI’s Ray Herndon, the AP’s Horst Faas and George McArthur—took Cambodian Prince Norodom Sihanouk up on his offer to prove, if they could, that the North Vietnamese and Vietcong were using Cambodia as a sanctuary. Armed with specific map coordinates from U.S. intelligence in Saigon, they uncovered a headquarters complex only nine miles from the South Vietnamese town of Loc Ninh, which the Communists unsuccessfully attacked three weeks ago; the complex included a well-stocked dispensary, officers’ quarters, storage facilities and huts for some 500 men. Leading towards the Vietnamese border was a road paved with six-inch-diameter logs for trucks, and truck tracks were everywhere.”
McArthur and Faas reported in their own AP story that “Cambodia’s ruling prince reportedly regards the discovery…as a fabrication and part of a campaign against him by the U.S. press. We found the Vietcong camp, very recently used, on the border opposite War Zone C. It had been used for several months and was most probably a staging area for the Loc Ninh battle.”
CAMBODIA WAS a “PROBLEM.” So stated in the first line of the Special National Intelligence Estimate Report dossier delivered to President Johnson and his cabinet on December 14, 1967. The top secret report, prepared by the CIA, the intelligence organizations of the Departments of Defense and State, and the National Security Agency (NSA), “estimated the extent and significance of Vietnamese Communist use of Cambodian territory in support of the Communist war effort in South Vietnam.”
According to the report, “During the past year, increasing Allied pressure on the Communists’ military structure in South Vietnam [including combat assaults, search-and-destroy missions, defoliation efforts, and tactical bombing of enemy positions] has caused them to depend more heavily on the use of border areas. They use Cambodian territory as a sanctuary to evade Allied Forces, as a refuge for rest, training, medical care, and…as a route for the infiltration of personnel and military supplies from North Vietnam.”
The report went on to detail specific examples and locations of the communist tactical sanctuary, troop movements, infiltration routes, supply routes, foodstuff, types of ammunition and weapons being stockpiled or moved along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, as well as chemical agents, known and mapped base areas, and the identification of specific NVA or VC units. In one instance, during a search-and-destroy mission into War Zone C (a region near the Cambodian border where Vietcong activity was exceptionally strong), “elements of the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN) took refuge in adjacent Cambodian territory.” COSVN—the U.S. acronym for the Communist North Vietnamese political and military headquarters—was supposedly located somewhere deep within South Vietnam, but many, including General Westmoreland, believed it to be hidden within Cambodia. Pinpointing the location of COSVN became the American forces’ highest priority.
The report concluded: “If the Communists continue their present strategy, the importance of Cambodia to their war effort will probably grow in 1968, particularly as a sanctuary and as a source of rice. Denial of Cambodian sanctuary would probably not cause the Communist war effort to collapse in the neighboring areas of South Vietnam, but would make it much harder for the Communists to conduct effective military operations in these areas.”
Behind each word, sentence, and succinctly crafted paragraph of this and other classified reports was the gritty, often bloody story of the warriors who risked everything to obtain the intelligence the reports contained. These men in the murky shadows of the secret war didn’t expect recognition. They didn’t expect Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, or President Johnson to consider the source. They were content to debrief after a mission and have a beer. By the time they buried their dead, the three- to four-page after-action reports of their operations were buried as well, the teletyped copies from Saigon to Washington sealed in an underground vault at the Pentagon. The originals—filed alphanumerically, with a single digit preceded by a letter for Laos and two digits preceded by a letter for Cambodia—were stored in vaults marked “top secret” and “BURN” inside the S-2 (Intelligence) bunkers at SOG bases scattered throughout South Vietnam.
The reports archived at Camp Ho Ngoc Tao recorded the missions of Project Sigma, Detachment B-56, the least-documented MACV-SOG “Special Projects” detachment operating “over the fence” in Cambodia—code-named Daniel Boone—during this period of the war. The Sigma/B-56 camp would relocate from Ho Ngoc Tao to Ban Me Thuot, two hundred miles northeast of Saigon, in February of 1969. During the old camp’s breakdown, the vault—a virtual treasure chest of reports and photographs documenting many of the war’s most covert missions—would remain at Ho Ngoc Tao, with a handful of guards and a couple of radiomen. It would sit in the back corner of the communications bunker to await transport to the new base.
Inside that vault, an after-action report dated May 2, 1968, outlined a daring “heavy team”—twelve men, double the standard recon team size—mission into the Fishhook. The mission objective was to capture a high-value target, an NVA officer, off the Ho Chi Minh Trail deep in the Daniel Boone area of operations. But there was another objective—a “capture” of another kind—that never made the ink on any official documents. The detachment commander had conveyed this off-the-books objective verbally and only to the team’s leader and the platoon leader of the assault helicopter company that would fly the mission. These two men then filtered the verbal objective into their ranks on a need-to-know basis.
This proposed “capture” was so audacious and politically valuable that, if successful, it could represent ironclad evidence that there was a North Vietnamese military presence in Cambodia, thus potentially changing the course of the war. It was an objective that would—like one of the players in the impending events—become legend.
FOUR MONTHS and a week before that mission would launch, far from the hot and humid jungles of Vietnam, the Kingdom of Cambodia, and the politics of Washington, DC, it was Christmas ’67 in El Campo, Texas. Staff Sergeant Benavidez didn’t yet know he would be going back to Vietnam for a second tour. He reveled in the warmth of the house he’d grown up in, surrounded by an extended family that now included his nieces and nephews, breathing in the nostalgic aromas of his Mexican American youth: corn and tamales, turkey and stuffing. Lala, too, soaked in every second of home and family, looking on as Denise was doted on by relative after relative. These were the times that made her realize how much she missed El Campo, and how much she loved—and was proud of—her husband. Just look how far he’d come! Roy, in uniform, was the centerpiece of the celebration.
Grandfather Salvador had recently passed away, and Roy felt his spirit as he sat in the living room and told stories of the Benavidez family. He had worn his uniform not to show off, but because he remembered the message a man in uniform had conveyed to him as a boy, the respect and the dreams the uniformed paratroopers had inspired in him. It had been a gift, and what better time than Christmas to pass that gift on.
The children wanted to hold and wear his green beret, which he allowed. The younger boys asked what the men wanted to know: Had Uncle Roy killed anybody in the war? He told them simply that, yes, he had because he had performed his duty. Then he explained what the green beret stood for, in terms the young might grasp: explained how they fought when they had to, how they helped good people more than they fought bad people. And, Roy told them, there are bad people in the world. He firmly believed the NVA and Vietcong were bad—evil, in fact. The image of the three dead Vietnamese children was bored so deeply in his mind that he still had to shake his head to make the vision go away.
“But let me tell you about your Great-grandfather Salvador when he was a vaquero…” Roy ended the story of the narrow mountain pathway with his grandfather’s words: “If someone needs help, you help them.”
EIGHTY MILES northeast of El Campo, in a neighborhood of small wood-framed houses in Jacinto City—a post–World War II steel mill town near Houston—Cecil and Maxine McKibben were celebrating the holiday as well, though it wasn’t the same without their son, Larry.
When the “Bob Hope Christmas Special” aired, they, along with their sixteen-year-old daughter, Debbie, were glued to the television set. Warrant Officer Larry McKibben was stationed at one of the Vietnam bases where Hope’s USO troupe had performed, and they thought there was a sliver of a chance they’d catch a glimpse of Larry in the crowd.
When Hope called out “Merry Christmas, men!” the camera panned across the audience, and the men shouted back a resounding “Merry Christmas, Bob!”
“Did you see him? Did you see him?!” Debbie asked her parents, who shook their heads. The crowd had gone by too fast, and there was no pause, rewind, or replay button to hit. In fact, there was barely reception in Jacinto City during the winter storms.
Twenty-year-old Larry had been in Vietnam for six months and ten days of his one-year tour and Debbie was counting every single day: 193 down and 172 to go. She remembered the evening he’d informed them at the dinner table of his plan to join the Army and become a helicopter pilot. He’d barely gotten out the words helicopter pilot before Debbie ran into her room, slammed the door, and started to cry. She associated helicopter pilots with Vietnam, and Vietnam was the place where young men went to die.
Following Debbie to her room, Larry put his arm around her, and as calm and firm as a big brother could be, he smiled, squeezed her tight, and said, “I’m going to go fight communism there so you don’t have to face it here. I’m not afraid—I want to go.”
Larry and his best friend, Frank McAvoy, had it all figured out. They’d become pilots, go and fight for their country as Larry’s father, Cecil, had in World War II, and this would give them the salt—the seasoning—they knew they needed to become men. They’d return from the war, each would find the perfect gal to marry, and they would move their families to Alaska and start a business: McAvoy and McKibben Bush Pilots.
That was the plan: to live a life of adventure, happily ever after.