6
ANATOMY OF A MISSION
FIFTEEN MILES EAST of Saigon, First Lieutenant Alan “Big Al” Yurman, from Kearny, New Jersey, found himself in the audience at Camp Martin Cox, aka Camp Bearcat. He’d scored a coveted seat only a few yards from Bob Hope, who strolled around the stage during his USO show with his signature golf club, cracking jokes for the troops, a sea of Army green that pushed right up to the cameramen and military police surrounding the platform.
Hope and his writers, whose research gave every show a personal touch, had discovered that while the VC were known to harass bases with rockets or mortars during or just after a USO performance, Camp Bearcat had never been attacked. The writers were also aware that a rash of venereal disease had swept through the 9th Infantry Division, prompting the base commander to place local villages off-limits.
“Merry Christmas, men, Merry Christmas,” said Hope. “We’re here with the 9th Infantry Division at Camp Martin Cox. This place has never been attacked. Until today. The Cong would like to attack this place, but they can’t. Everything is off-limits here.” The crowd roared. “The 9th Infantry Division is known as the Old Reliables. Funny, I thought that was mouthwash and penicillin!”
Yurman joined the throngs standing in their seats, snapping photos. He blew through half a role of film when actress Raquel Welch strolled onstage in white knee-high boots and a blue miniskirt, chatted with Hope, and then danced when the band started up. Some soldiers stared in silence with frozen grins, others whistled and hollered. All were able to forget for a brief period of time that they were in Vietnam.
But after Hope had delivered his final punch line, and the crowd had laughed their last laugh, Yurman was still at Bearcat, a new platoon leader at the 240th Assault Helicopter Company (1st Aviation Brigade, 12th Combat Aviation Group, 214th Combat Aviation Battalion), still sweating in the Southeast Asian heat. When he’d arrived in Vietnam a month earlier, a sergeant from the 240th had picked him up at the 90th Replacement Battalion at Long Binh and delivered him to his quarters at Bearcat: a tent with a pallet for a doorstep. “This is a good company you’re joining,” the sergeant told him. “We’ve been here since April and had a lot of missions and no casualties or accidents. A couple of ships got shot up, but nothing of any consequence.” Well, that’s great, thought Yurman.
Aside from its stellar luck, the 240th was structured just like the other assault helicopter companies operating in Vietnam. It consisted of four platoons. Two platoons were made up of five transport Bell UH-1H (Huey) helicopters each, known as “slicks,” one of which directed the insertion slicks during missions and was called the command-and-control (C&C) slick. Sometimes the company commander would act as C&C; other times, platoon leaders like Yurman would. Every slick had an aircraft commander—the primary pilot—in the left front seat and a copilot in the right. A crew chief, in addition to being responsible for maintenance of the helicopter, also manned the door gun behind the aircraft commander on the left side of the aircraft, while a second door gunner manned the machine gun on the right. The four-man crew was often joined by an infantry or Special Forces “bellyman,” whose job on board was to act as a medic, to help with loading during extractions, and in many cases to defend the aircraft with a personal weapon.
A third platoon had heavily armed Bell UH-IC gunships—known sometimes as “hogs”—with different configurations of pilot-fired rockets, grenade launchers, and miniguns, as well as two M60 machine guns manned by side door gunners. The gunships featured the same crew setup as slicks, but their focus was firepower, not troop transport, so they never flew with a bellyman.
The fourth platoon was the maintenance platoon, responsible, along with the crew chief of each helicopter, for keeping the aircraft in the air.
The assault helicopter companies were versatile units vital to the U.S. military’s air mobility strategy. Morale was particularly high in the 240th; as a captain from Oklahoma showed Yurman around, almost everybody he met told him that he could not have been placed with a better company or a better company commander.
“We’re called the Greyhounds,” the captain informed Yurman when Yurman commented that the nose art on all the slicks looked like the greyhound logos on buses in the United States. “It doesn’t look like it, it’s the same. You can thank Major Hoffman for that.”
Major Glen Hoffman, the first in-country commander of the 240th, had brought the company over by ship nine months earlier in March 1967. Tasked with providing a name for the company’s helicopters, he and his junior officers settled on Greyhounds for the slicks, tweaking the bus company’s motto to make it their own: “Go Greyhound and leave the flying to us.” Playing on the company’s dog theme, the gunships of the third platoon were named Mad Dogs (motto: “Death on call, VC for lunch bunch”), while the maintenance platoon (fourth platoon) got the apt title of Kennel Keepers.
In an effort to build morale, Hoffman had taken a long shot and sent a letter to the CEO of the Greyhound bus company explaining why they’d chosen the name Greyhounds, “based on the idea of speed and dependability and—in line with the famous Greyhound buses—safety and service to our passengers.” The letter closed with a request: “We would be proud to have Greyhound sponsor our company.”
At a time when American casualty counts and body bags were daily media fodder, and antiwar demonstrations and sentiment were steadily increasing stateside, Hoffman had not anticipated even a response from the multimillion-dollar company. To sponsor a helicopter company in Vietnam could be construed as supporting the war, and that was a big public relations risk. When Hoffman received fifty seventeen-inch Greyhound logos as part of a care package, he was stunned. Not only did Greyhound sponsor the company, its employees adopted the 240th, sending along cookies, cards, and words of encouragement for the men. Soon the Greyhound logo was plastered on the nose and sides of all the 240th’s H-model Hueys, the newest, fastest, and most powerful slicks operating in Vietnam. “We’re one of a few companies flying these babies,” the captain told Yurman. “Everyone wants to work with us.”
At twenty-five, Yurman was an old man compared to the average warrant officer piloting the slicks in his platoon; most were nineteen or twenty, old enough to be drafted, but, like the majority of the troops in Vietnam, not old enough to legally buy a beer or to vote back home.
“That kid old enough to drive?” Yurman asked the captain about one pilot they saw while walking the flight line, where the 2nd Platoon slicks were parked in a row of revetments.
“I don’t know if he can drive a car,” the captain said, “but he sure can fly the hell out of a helicopter. Let me introduce you.”
LARRY MCKIBBEN had in fact learned to fly before he’d learned to drive. He had been with the 240th Assault Helicopter Company (AHC) for only a little over a month—transferred into the Greyhounds from the 162nd AHC, the Vultures, where he’d spent the first four months of his tour—and already he was known as one of the coolest, calmest, and most technically proficient pilots in the company.
As a thirteen-year-old in his hometown of Jacinto City, McKibben had rebuilt an old single-prop with his father, the area scoutmaster, for an Eagle Scout project. Eventually he flew his first solo flight, earning his pilot’s license when he was just sixteen.
Every couple of weeks since the beginning of his tour, he had sent home an audiotape to his parents and sister, narrating the war to them in his relaxed Texas drawl.
“Got your letter the other day,” McKibben said in his first tape, when he was based at Phuoc Vinh with the Vultures. “Ya’ll had said you heard an air base got mortared and rocketed, and wondered if it was anywhere nearby.
“Well, it was pretty near; I would say about twenty feet. It knocked me out of bed. I just grabbed my steel pot [helmet] and my flak jacket, got out the back door, and crawled in our bunker. I wasn’t hurt, just shook up a little bit, I guess, so don’t worry.
“Anyway, if ya’ll hear any loud booms, well, we have a couple artillery batteries here and they’re always firing. When I got here, I asked, ‘If we do get mortared, how in the heck can I tell the difference from that artillery going off and mortar rounds coming in?’ They said, ‘Don’t worry about it. You’ll know.’ And you know what? I knew. There wasn’t any doubt in my mind.”
It had long been known that these ten-foot-long rockets, with a range of twelve to twenty miles or more, had been supplied to the North Vietnamese by the Chinese and were knockoffs of the Soviet Katyusha rockets. With nineteen-kilo high-explosive fragmentation warheads, they were highly successful as both explosive devices and psychological weapons, and their range allowed them to be fired from over the border in Cambodia or trucked on mobile launchpads, giving reach to a wide range of targets within South Vietnam.
Thus far, U.S. intelligence agents had been unable to learn exactly how the rockets were getting into the hands of the North Vietnamese, where the NVA stored them, how many were stockpiled, and, most important, how to go about destroying them. The most likely point of entry was the port of Sihanoukville, Cambodia. CIA agents and informants in Shanghai had reported hundreds of rockets being loaded onto freighters from neutral countries such as Liberia and Panama; when some of these freighters reached Sihanoukville, however, only agricultural machinery and products were off-loaded. Either the rockets were cleverly concealed within the cargo, or the agents were missing something.
Preceding the November 1967 elections in Vietnam, Army intelligence major James Reid briefed Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., former U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, who had returned to oversee the election. Reid, a linguist who spoke French fluently, identified these rockets as a significant security threat to both the coming elections and to American forces, and suggested using the deeply rooted French society, including French plantation owners who owned large tracts of land along the Cambodian border, to help keep watch in their regions and perhaps provide intelligence on the rockets. Also in attendance, General Westmoreland was intrigued enough to form a task force—named Operation Vesuvius by Reid. Westmoreland gave the major three months to solve the puzzle.
Upholding his oath of secrecy, Reid would not discuss Operation Vesuvius, nor his findings, for decades. More than thirty years later, he finally told retired foreign correspondent and New York Times managing editor Seymour Topping details of his account, which were included in Topping’s memoir, On the Front Lines of the Cold War. Topping verified that Operation Vesuvius was the brainchild of Reid and described Reid’s discovery of how hundreds of these rockets were smuggled into South Vietnam by the freighters belonging to neutral countries. While en route to Sihanoukville, the captains would anchor offshore in the night, wait for U.S. Navy patrol boats to pass, then ferry the missiles ashore via smaller boats and man-to-man lines into the surf.
This bold technique was, according to Reid, witnessed by a French plantation owner who also watched the rockets being loaded onto trucks that were driven through the plantation roads into Cambodia. CIA agents and informants within the Cambodian populace were tasked with gathering intelligence as to where these rockets ended up. SOG recon teams that had already identified numerous bases within Cambodia soon joined the effort.
Of course, these sites could not be bombed or attacked because Cambodia was neutral territory. “Isn’t this a political problem?” Reid posed the question when he briefed Westmoreland on his findings. “If they’re [the rockets] going into Cambodia, isn’t there something our diplomats should arrange with Cambodia?”
Westmoreland’s response was “I will get in touch with Washington.”
MCKIBBEN’S AUDIOTAPE letter did not mention that in one attack that lasted about fifteen minutes, the Vietcong fired eighty rounds of 122 mm rockets and seventy-two rounds of 82 mm mortars at his base in Phuoc Vinh, killing twelve Americans and injuring sixty-eight.
Instead, he talked to his family about the high-quality stereo he’d bought at the base PX and set up on a shelf by his cot. One afternoon he flipped on the recorder to tell them that some nurses were flying over from Saigon for a party in their officers club that night. “I might even meet a girl over here,” he said. “How about that?” Another time he recorded the laughter and banter going on in his tent and had his roommates introduce themselves. In Jacinto City, Cecil and Maxine McKibben listened to the tape with a smile—until they heard a loud artillery BOOM! Their smiles vanished, and they just stared at each other. Their boy Larry was in the middle of the most dangerous place in the world, flying a bullet magnet 140 hours a month over hostile, enemy-occupied territory.
During a month-long search-and-destroy mission in support of the 101st Airborne Division in the mountains of Binh Thuan called Operation Klamath Falls, McKibben logged 152 hours of flying for the 240th. Holding a hover at thirty-five hundred feet was exhausting work. One day he flew fourteen hours, and “the flight surgeon got real mad they had me fly that much,” he said in a tape. “They set a limit—not more than a hundred forty hours in any thirty-day period.”
The 240th suffered its first casualties in Operation Klamath Falls when a slick’s transmission froze up and the helicopter dropped from the sky, killing First Lieutenant Haron Brown, Warrant Officer William Clawson, Specialist 5 Matthew Amaral, and Specialist 4 Ronny Kindred. It was December 14, 1967—a date Al Yurman would remember forever because it was also his first mission. His initiation into the war was watching Brown’s slick crash and burn on the side of a mountain pass.
The men killed weren’t in his platoon, so Yurman didn’t personally know them, but he couldn’t stop thinking about how the sergeant had told him that the 240th hadn’t had any casualties and any accidents. He wished he hadn’t heard those words—it was as if they had somehow jinxed the company. Well, here we go, he thought. Welcome to Nam.
THE SOG recon men working the Daniel Boone mission were not privy to higher-level strategic planning such as Operation Vesuvius. They were, however, dismayed that they were gathering so much evidence (troops, weapons—including rocket caches—and matériel) and yet the conventional U.S. military was forbidden to cross the Cambodian border and destroy the enemy and its weapons.
In the second week of January 1968, under tight security measures, Major Reid joined a team that included fellow intelligence officer Lieutenant Colonel William White, the chief of Army operations Lieutenant General William De Pugh, and veteran State Department negotiator Philip Habib onboard two T-39 jets. The flight took them from Saigon to New Delhi, where they briefed Chester Bowles, U.S. ambassador to India, on the violations of the Cambodian border by the Chinese-backed North Vietnamese, and the proposed mission that had evolved from Reid’s Vesuvius operation.
From there, Ambassador Bowles flew to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Once a diplomatic friend to Sihanouk—who had refused to meet with the United States for almost three years—Bowles was able to convince him of the importance of a face-to-face, closed-door meeting, during which he presented the first Vesuvius package. This package was filled with transcripts of radio intercepts and interrogations of captured VC, photos of the rockets and of the carnage—the aftermath of the attacks on South Vietnam—and, most important, maps showing where the enemy bases and rockets were located and how they were being trucked from Cambodia to launch sites in South Vietnam or launched directly from Cambodia.
“Sihanouk was cornered,” says Reid. “ ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘you’ve been skipping over into [Cambodia] although international regulations prevent it, going after ground troops from the Vietcong after their hit-and-run operations. You would go across, they would go across. But I had no idea that they were using missiles.’ He was genuinely astounded, or played it off that he was. So an agreement was made as follows. He said, ‘If you let me know [in advance] information that you have about the location of these missiles, I will put out the word through my staff to the local villages to be out of the area pretending that they’ve got a festival or some agricultural event. And at two or two thirty, during the day, not in the evening when there’s a danger of error, your plane or planes will come over and bomb these installations.’ That was the agreement that was made.”
Sihanouk requested more evidence—undeniable, concrete evidence, in addition to photographs. Reid’s assumption was that Sihanouk could at some point present the evidence to his people, if necessary, to prove the communists were indeed breaking the international laws regarding neutrality. And perhaps even present the evidence to the media.
If the United States could provide such ironclad evidence, military advisers believed that Sihanouk might cooperate in both exposing the North Vietnamese as invaders of his neutral state and insisting that they leave. And if they did not vacate his country, he would accept the assistance of the United States in removing them. Ironclad evidence would also be a valuable card that the United States could reveal during the highly anticipated peace talks currently being planned.
Sihanouk had proven to be unpredictable, but Bowles and the team—including Philip Habib, who was also the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs—that put together the Vesuvius package made an educated guess that Sihanouk wanted the Chinese and Soviet–backed North Vietnamese out of Cambodia, but he’d gotten in too deep: “principally, because the Cambodian Armed Forces are just not strong enough,” concluded the CIA, NSA, and DOD in their top-secret National Intelligence Estimate Report, dated December 14, 1967. “The army totals only 32,000 and less than 9,000 regular troops are stationed in provinces along the entire 700-mile border with South Vietnam. In the two large northeastern provinces of Cambodia, moreover, there are only eight border posts and these are manned by small paramilitary units. Four of these are clustered around the junction of Route 19 and the South Vietnamese border, just north of the Communist Chu Pong base area. Along this sparsely manned frontier from Kontum to northern Tay Ninh alone are over 20,000 Communist troops.”
In addition, Sihanouk was contending with the rise of an insurgency known as the Khmer Rouge. In 1968 the movement officially became the Communist Party of Kampuchea (Cambodia) and was supported by North Vietnam. Like the NVA and the Vietcong, the Khmer Rouge used terrorism as a tactic, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands Cambodians during Sihanouk’s reign.
According to Reid, Sihanouk admitted to Bowles that he had to tread lightly with the Chinese government, which had warned him that there would be consequences if he was ever found to be working with the Americans. To keep up the appearance that Sihanouk was not working with the United States, an agreement was made, according to Reid, that Sihanouk “would expostulate violently each time we bombed [or there were border incidents]. Sihanouk said, ‘If I sit there and do nothing, the Chinese will say I’m working with you. And in my treaty I have with the Chinese, it stipulates that there must be no cooperation with the U.S. of any kind in Vietnam or we, the Chinese, will intervene in Cambodia,’ which meant an invasion. So Sihanouk did a wonderful act of ‘Oh! These damn Americans! They’re bombing us. It’s outrageous! This must be stopped!’ But it was all a game. Very few people knew about Vesuvius, even in Washington—it was kept highly, highly secret.”
EVEN WHILE Bowles was presenting Sihanouk with the Vesuvius package, record numbers of NVA and Vietcong fighters were sneaking from their Cambodian bases into South Vietnam, caching weapons, and staging troops in and around more than a hundred cities and towns, thirty-six of the forty-four provincial capitals, and most of the major cities, including Hue and the capital, Saigon.
They were the final preparations for what would be the single largest military operation of the war—a coordinated attack by more than eighty thousand North Vietnamese troops against key military and government bases and offices across South Vietnam. The North Vietnamese belief was that the U.S. and South Vietnamese military, after years of defending the population against sporadic, small-scale attacks, would crumble under such a massive onslaught, triggering the population of South Vietnam to spontaneously rise up to aid and join their brothers and sisters from the north to overthrow the “puppet government” of the United States.
On January 30, 1968, the Vietnamese lunar New Year—Tet—the NVA and Vietcong launched their attack, in what would become known as the Tet Offensive. The NVA and VC swept into the heart of the south, briefly seizing dozens of ARVN installations and inflicting significant casualties, prompting the U.S. media to initially report the attacks as a communist victory. But the U.S. and South Vietnamese forces quickly regained almost all the ground the North Vietnamese had taken and killed more than thirty-two thousand NVA/VC in the first seven days of the attack, taking another six thousand prisoner. (U.S. losses numbered around one thousand, the ARVN just under three thousand.)
The Tet Offensive would be considered a military victory for the United States and South Vietnam, but the subsequent fallout among the American people (arguably due to the media’s reporting of events) deemed it a political defeat. Many would say the nail in the coffin was CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite’s broadcast on February 27, 1968. “To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.”
Peace protestors marched on college campuses and in Washington to bring the troops home, while the pro-war citizenry demanded that the job be finished. And the North Vietnamese returned to their safe haven in Cambodia to regroup and prepare for the next offensive, punctuating the need to expose, once and for all, the communist base of operations, supply, and sanctuary in Cambodia.