My spy-pilot life

[vinhtruong]

My Spy pilot life

After President Kennedy’ assassination, according the secret orders, many U.S military build up increase in intensity, magnitude; Impatience was driving the program, Bone-man McNamara had called for the first OPLAN-34A raid by February 1, 1964, incredibly, just seven days after SOG’ founding. Such insistence instigated perhaps the strangest episode of Vietnam’s cover war. Each proposed OPLAN-34-A operation had to weave its way between Defense, State and the White House for approval due the conflict was still between government administrations (Kennedy and Johnson) and Harriman, with each stop liable to change, restrict or delay SOG plans. Colonel Russell found this “a tremendous operational handicap” and complained that, “By the time we got it back, we were out of implementation time and the restraints were too many and too frequent because the president wasn’t policymaker”
OPLAN-34A perplexed Russell, because deniable attacks on objectives having little military value did not make sense. ”I don’t feel that the objectives of OPLAN-34A were clearly spelled out”. Colonel Russell later explained” So we didn’t know exactly what we were trying to do”. But this was not his only problems and so all generals as well. The secret agreement with China and Soviet wasn’t military and industry targets that are not the objectives because their personnel in there.

After President Diem’ assassination, strange chaotic-event take place, a certain evening of summer 1964, suddenly U.S helicopters flew to pick-up all U.S advisors in three Camps: Buon Ho, Buon Mega, and Boun Sapa to Ba Me Thuoc, highland province for the so called ‘urgent-meeting’ and typically during that night all Vietnamese officers were killed by highland minority (Rhade-Montagnard) After that massacre, the tribe Rhade’s soldiers were equipped with Carbine M.2 (automatic-firing-weapon) for their self-controlled, while ARVN troops were still equipped M.1. I was angry about having sacrificed my youth, professional flight operation to the traitor of U.S Special Forces from this Project-Delta. I was so frustrated
(However after four decades, by chance I found-out by discovering in the internet: authors Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, “The Wise-Men” Six Friends and the World They Made, book published in 1986 coinciding the death of the last Wiseman W A .Harriman, a leader among Six-Friends and the world they made at July 26, 1986, and his deputy Prescott Bush (death in 1972) Finally, by way of conclusion, I will just state my conviction that the war in Vietnam was a just war created by these Six Friends for their conspiracy in the Old ‘Eurasian Great Game’ And now resumed by George H W Bush for the New Game)
To support OPLAN-34A’s hit-and-run coastal attacks, the CIA had replaced its old junks with 88-foot high-speed Norwegian Nasty-class PT boats, bringing in former Norwegian skippers to help SOG SEAL instruct the new Vietnamese crews. Developed for 47-knot runs from Norway’s fjords to nip at passing Russian ships, the Nasty PTF (Patrol Type, Fast) were light, heavily armed and bat-out-of-hell fast, the naval cigarette boats of the 1960s. Accustomed to tiny runabouts and junks, however, our Vietnamese simply couldn’t master the Nasty boat at a tricky high speed maneuvers.
Within SOG’ Naval Advisory Detachment- a dozen SEAL from Boat-Support-Unit-One at Coronado, California; and five Marine Force Recon men-were plenty of eager volunteers to crew the Nasty for raiding the North, but political deniability absolutely precluded using Americans; indeed, throughout the war no SEAL ever would be allowed north of the 17th Parallel.
But, a SOG staff officer shrewdly observed, the Norwegians weren’t Americans. However, any Caucasian at the throttles of a covert boat in Asian waters flew in the face of plausible denial; How could a Norwegian possibly explain his attacking the coast of North Vietnam? But in the rush to get the raids under way the absurd became the acceptable; thus, due to impatience, SOG’ first covert attacks on North Vietnam would be led by Norwegians.
On the night of February 16, 1964, three Norwegian-piloted Nasty attempted to land Vietnamese frogmen to demolish a bridge, but heavy coastal fire drove them away, aborting the mission. A few nights later another swimmer demolition was attempted, but it, too, failed, with eight Sea-Commando swimmers lost (with my speculation, these are serious allegations U.S counterespionage in advance warning, because this concurrency scam)
By early summer the swashbuckling Scandinavian skippers began displaying a tad too much joie de vivre for their sedate SOG superiors. As one warned, “They were getting in trouble in Da-nang, so there were definite fears in Washington circles that the whole program would be blown, because these people were getting involved with Vietnamese girls and the police in Da-nang”. With new urgency, Vietnamese boat crews were prepared to take over from the Scandinavians, but not before the latter got in a final few licks.
By July, SOG’ Nasty and Vietnamese Sea Commandos had demolished five targets in North Vietnam, followed by two hit-and-run, over-the beach attacks on 9 and 25 July. On 30 July, SOG launched its biggest bombardment ever, employing five PT’ Nasty against radar sites so far north, they were closer to Haiphong than to Danang, an action SOG headquarters praised as “well executed and highly successful, with secondary explosions”
Two days later, when word came that North Vietnamese PT boats had attacked the U.S destroyer Maddox?, in what became known as the “Tonkin Gulf incident”. Although he made no reference to the SOG raids, of which he was informed, President Lyndon Johnson warned Hanoi that another high-seas attack would have dire consequences, and ordered the destroyer Turner Joy to reinforce the Maddox.
I will discuss the ‘Axiom-2’ “The U.S had no legitimate reason to be involved in Vietnamese affairs”, in the dominant interpretation of the U.S-Vietnam War that was produced by the Triumvirate, composing William A Harriman, Prescott Bush, and Robert A Lovett; and introduced to teachers at most schools and universities as the basis for explaining the war, subsequently taken up by the antiwar movement during the late 1960s.
So, Tonkin Gulf Incident was the good-reason for the U.S troop invasion and retaliation on Vietnam soil.
Although Hanoi still denied it had a single soldier in Laos, by October 1965 its security, engineer and logistics troops there numbered at least 30,000 not to mention an additional 4500 men passing through each month on their way to South Vietnam. About two hundred truckloads of supplies rolled down the Harriman’s Super Highway, parallel with its P.O.L pipe-lines (Ho Chi Minh Trail named by Western-countries with specific political purpose, in contrast Hanoi named it Route 559) monthly, and by the fall of 1965 the Air Force crews already knew Hanoi had spun its 900-miles road system the length of Laos, all the way to South Vietnam’s Central Highlands. On 2 October 1965, I flown on the treetops along Ho Chi Minh Trail, from Tchepone to Target D-1, only about 20 miles northwest of Kham Duc, and Master Sergeant Donald-Duncan hanging in the door side took the pictures; meanwhile RF-101 Woodo, and U-2 fresh photos disclosed new roads in Laos, while other aerial photos snapshots by H.34 showed new truck traffic.
SOG’ capabilities in North Vietnam had been expanding apace with the rest of the war. By 1966, SOG’ Nationalist Chinese aviators of the First Flight Detachment were penetrating North Vietnam’s night sky almost monthly. In addition to parachuting supplies and reinforcements to the five established agent teams, First Flight had inserted another three teams. Even the H.34 Queen-Bees got into the act, in November 1965, when they landed Team Romeo in the southern panhandle, near Mu-Gia Pass. The four new agent teams plus the five surviving ex-CIA teams- Bell, Easy, Remus, Tourbillon, and the singleton, Ares- gave SOG nine teams and 112 agents in the enemy’s heartland.
SOG had reinforced all the old CIA teams except Ares, with some so expanded that they were almost small platoons. SOG was planning to reinforce Ares by sea, the same way that I wrote on infiltration by sea; as he’d been infiltrated nearly five years earlier, but using high-speed Nasty boats. During the three years the CIA managed the agent team program, 18 of 23 teams were lost, mostly upon landing; by contrast, excluding the malingerers SOG purposely dumped into North Vietnam in the spring of 1964, SOG had lost not just one team, although a few individual team members had been lost in parachute accidents or clashed with NVA patrols. It was an impressive turnaround.
SOG sought authority to establish a resistance movement in North Vietnam and combine it with a SAFE areas program.(SAFE was the acronym for Selected Areas For Evasion) The program evolved from a Strategic Air Command plan to recover nuclear bomber crews from remote regions of the Soviet Union, in turn an idea not without precedent. During WW II, the American OSS and British Special Operations Executive (SOE), working with Tito’s guerrillas, maintained enclaves deep in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia for bailouts and emergency landings. Likewise, during the Korean War, the CIA had guerrilla bands on many offshore islands where crippled airplanes could ditch and fliers could bail out. Actually, SOG wanted similar SAFE areas west and north of Hanoi, where pilots could bail out and receive medical aid, food and protection, then be retrieved by helicopters from Laos; when properly armed and supported by tactical air for rescue.

**********************************

Short Term Road-watch And Target Acquisition (STRATA)
Although, at Honolulu meeting, William Colby trying to persuade with President Johnson for canceling to drop small teams in North Vietnam but in vain; yet in contrary Defense Secretary McNamara having secret ordered from…putting more teams along Laotian border, in the rugged mountain country above “Three Passes” were the target for infiltration. STRATA recruits received training similar to that of the long-term agents at SOG’ secret base, Long Thanh Camp, but were segregated for security purposes, then housed at Monkey Mountain FOB in Danang. To confuse the enemy analyst, the 14 STRATA teams were randomly numbered Team 90 through Team 122.
From OP 34’s Diversionary Program, other operations run by MACVSOG served to support the efforts aimed at convincing Hanoi that it had a serious internal security problem. One of these, the STRATA team program, which was also run by OP 34, did not have this as its primary mission, but reinforcing was a by-product of its operations. The original authority for the Strata project can be traced to a May 1967 Pacific-Command message. The first two Strata teams were inserted into North VN at the end of the year. The area of operations for Strata was South of the 20th parallel, approximately 150 miles North of the DMZ, where the teams were to collect intelligence on the road network leading to the Three Major Passes feeding into the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos. While the long-term agent teams had been assigned a different task in 1966 to collect intelligence on these, the few that had survived in place had accomplished very little. Therefore, “It was believed that the emphasis on short stay-time and mobility in Strata team training would enable them to survive and to be successfully exhilarated”
Strata Teams were composed of 5-10 indigenous personnel transported by VNAF/ USAF helicopters… missions were to be for 15-30 days. 24 such Teams were sent North in 1968. The Strata Teams targets can be seen along the Laotian/Vietnam border. Beside their primary mission was to watch a road, a path, or whatever and the ability to find the ex-filtration-site. Strata Teams were assigned secondary mission that included planting mines, capturing prisoners, and distributing “Psyop-materials” [antenna censor]. In the enemy heartland, the agents were said to have rarely gotten close enough to a road to actually observe a truck or identify a target worthy of an air strike. They did, however leave psyop materials in the areas where they were inserted. These materials had to do with the phantom resistance operation, the “Sacred Sword of the Patriot League.” Typically, this involved leaving a leaflet that denigrated a particular cadre in the area. The idea was either to run him down or to convince NVN security that notional groups were real and operating in this area. It was diabolical, but SOG analyst, black propagandists and counterintelligence experts put their heads together and plotted to combine all SOG’ real and imaginary assets “ in an integrated effort to exploit Hanoi’s almost paranoid fear of any perceived threat to their control of the population” The result was Projects Urgency, Borden, and Oodles.
While the Strata Teams were not accomplishing, all their intended missions, the fact that they penetrated North Vietnam 24 times in 1968 obviously had a reinforcing effect in terms of the Diversionary Program such as: “To add credibility, personnel presence is implies by the par dropping of ice block-weighted personnel parachutes to be found after the ice melts, hanging in trees”
Again, the message to Hanoi’s Police Force or whoever else found the parachutes was, “You’re too late...You just missed them!”
Another ploy: Pseudo-agents being inserted from both the ‘Borden’ and ‘Urgency’ projects were led to believe they would be met at their designated drop zone by members from one of ‘Oodles’ phantom teams. While these pseudo-agents may have believed they were actually going to meet up with an established team, OP 34 intended simply that they would corroborate other evidence that the phantom teams were real. Finally, radios that sent messages out from these fake teams were air-dropped into North Vietnam. This completed the communications loop. Messages were coming in and answers were being sent out. Additionally, devices known in the trade as agent-harassing devices were air-dropped into North Vietnam to cause their security forces to react. The objective was for the enemy to search and find the device but not the agents using it.
In light of all above, what use were Strata operations? How did this affect Hanoi? That means to believe that it told the North Vietnamese, “We can come into your country at will…We can put flags and leaflets on the trees at will!”
In effect, it was real evidence of spy-commandos, as Hanoi referred to them. As with other MACV-SOG operations that involved physically crossing into North Vietnam, however, the Strata program came to an abrupt halt at the end of 1968. In 1969, Strata were refocused on Laos and Cambodia. The objective remained intelligence collections, not deception.
STRATA teams were launched clandestinely from Nakhon Phanom Air Base in Thailand. They were delivered there by SOG C.130 Blackbirds and, like the American teams secretly staged there, stayed out of sight inside panel trucks or the SOG operations building. After changing into NVA uniforms, the STRATA men climbed into 21st SOS “Pony” helicopters then it was a half-hour flight across the 65-miles, narrow neck of Laos. The helicopter HH-3s had to climb to 10,000 feet to get out of range of antiaircraft gun concentrations, and then flew on instruments through the turbulent wall clouds above the Truong-Son mountain-chains, then penetrated North Vietnam at low level to avoid SAM sites and obscure their landing-zone approach. It was some of the trickiest helicopter flying in Southeast Asia.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

My spy-pilot life

In November 1965, SOG inserted by helicopter the ten-man Team Romeo into an area immediately north of the DMZ. Its mission was to conduct area reconnaissance for collection of intelligence information; perform the road watch mission, and conduct harassing and sabotage activities. Its major target was North VN Routes 103, which was believed to be a major route for infiltration of men and supplies to the South. How well did Romeo do? According to SOG documents, after mid-1966 its accomplishments were insignificant. The Team has not furnished any reportable information during 1967 and 1968.
Team Hadley was also infiltrated just north of the DMZ to conduct the road watch mission against North VN route 8, which connected route 15 to route 81, 12, and 121 in Laos. These routes were considered major troop and supply infiltration routes to the South. Hadley was also tasked to watch the Ngan Pho River, a principal water supply route. The team had initial problems, because of enemy detection. However, after that its response to messages from SOG was almost immediate. Still, there is no evidence that Hadley reported useful intelligence or identified potential air-strike targets.
In 1968, all radio contact with the team ceased. At the same time, the interrogation of a recently captured NVN prisoner of war revealed he had knowledge of the capture of a SVN agent team in the Remus area of operation in June, 1962. On May 13, 1968 Hanoi confirmed this by announcing the capture of a SVN agent team…all facts presented left no doubt this was Team Remus.
Ares was the CIA’s only singleton agent to survive. Those sent into North Vietnam after him were never heard from. According to the records, a case officer encountered Ares at the Refugee-Debriefing-Center, Saigon, on August 29, 1960 and assessed him as a capable man motivated by desire to revenge himself on the authorities of Hanoi. He was subsequently recruited.. Ares was inserted into North VN by sea in early 1961, up near the Chinese border. At first, he was considered very productive, providing information on North VN documentation, the Uong-Bi Power Plant, highways, bridges, Haiphong Harbor and other miscellaneous items which he was able to observe or gain information on through debriefing of his sub sources. However, by 1966, SOG began to wonder about his reporting and supply requests. When told to find a suitable drop zone for supply, Ares proposed alternative ways to supply that suggested he was trying to get SOG “to expose additional assets”. When SOG attempted to exhilarate Ares, he “failed to comply”. Nevertheless, Ares stayed in radio contact until 1968, as Hanoi continued to play the game.
The policy-conflict between ‘Democratic administration’ and ‘invisible Permanent- government’ resolved by President Johnson to announce, he would not seek reelection, because he don’t want his name in the U.S president defeat to the Vietnam War. Thereby, in his historic televised address of March 31, 1968 He ordered a bombing halt above the 20th Parallel in North Vietnam. Applying an expansive policy interpretation, the State Department insisted that SOG aircraft, too, cease flying above the 20th Parallel, in effect abandoning Six of SOG’ among eight long-term agent teams.
SOG leaders argued against abandoning them, warning it would erase any doubts Hanoi harbored about America’s covert sponsorship and unmask the “Sacred Sword of the Patriot League as tool of the imperialists. Observed Major Scotty Crerar, “If you’re not admitting you’re doing it to begin with and getting away with it, why stop it?”
Nonetheless, the cutoff of aerial supplies and insertions took effect the day after LB Johnson speech, April’s Fool’s Day. The irony did not go unnoticed in Saigon, where Chief SOG Colonel Jack Singlaub wondered to what extent the North Vietnamese had been playing SOG’ agent handlers for fools.
Unquestionably, Hanoi had captured some teams and was playing them back as doubles, but which ones? Several CIA and SOG handlers had long been suspicious. Colonel Singlaub felt an obligation to extract loyal teams, but if he was to confront the State Department [Permanent Government or Skull and Bones Harriman, and George H W Bush] he had to know exactly which agent teams were worth the political fight and physical danger of retrieving them.
At last, Colonel Singlaub convened an ad hoc panel of CIA and MACV J-2 experts to conduct a two-month review. The day their assessment began, SOG’ map of North Vietnam displayed eight blue pins, representing the current location of eight teams.
Suddenly, it all ended on October 15, 1968 with a “Frantic call from Washington” to Colonel Cavanaugh, “Do you have any STRATA teams across the border?” a Joint Chiefs staff officer demanded. SOG then had two teams in North Vietnam, Cavanaugh reported “You’ve got to get them out…You’ve got a day!” the JCS staffer demanded, explaining President Johnson was about to announce his total bombing halt. Once again, Robert Kennedy fell to an assassin’s bullet in 1968 caused Johnson in his panic-historic televised address his announced he would not seek reelection and ordered a bombing halt above the 20th Parallel, in effect abandoning six of SOG’ eight long-term agent teams.
“It was asinine”, Cavanaugh said later, “Nobody in Washington cared about a handful of people up there!” Chief SOG said it was impossible to retrieve the STRATA men in 24 hours, promising only, I’ll get them out as fast as I can” Due to operational inertia and weather delays, he could not make good on his promise until 23 October. The Washington bureaucracy raised not a peep.
From their first insertion until the final extraction thirteen months later, STRATA teams penetrated North Vietnam 26 times. Though hardly a returned man was wounded, STRATA lost 24 men MIA- including Two entire teams- the inevitable result of bad weather that delayed even emergency extractions an average of five days and made any contact likely to be lethal. Approximately one quarter of STRATA’ 102 agents were lost.
As of November 1, 1968, SOG was no longer authorized to run agent operations of any type in North Vietnam. Yet some minds at SOG headquarters began brainstorming: If SOG wasn’t allowed to run a genuine agent network, perhaps it could create a false one. It could be said that all SOG’ agent programs were changed decisively by President Johnson’s election-eve 1968 bombing halt, which caused them to cease, shift or begin anew in different ways. As well, though, the halt signaled a decisive change in the war, leaving U.S policy undefined until the new Nixon administration took office almost a year later and weighed its own options.
Richard Nixon had run on a promise to bring the war to honorable troop withdraw end but refused to disclose the secret plan by which he’d make that happen. The new strategy-fashioned by Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger-would commence in early 1969 on behalf of Harriman in performance the secret game “Pennsylvania”, and the secret bombing of Cambodia. And SOG would be in the thick of it?

*******************************


Operation Loky and Sacred Sword of the Patriots League (SSPL)
We pay attention about Colonel Jack Singlaub as SOG chief, described the three week program as follows: We would spend our time feeding them well, fattening them up [Permanent Government’ conspiracy of silence when they were released, Hanoi easy identified them by physical healthy, and put them in the reeducation camp; because this is a War-Game for Axis of Evil’s scam] so to speak: “we cured any medical problems they had, whether it was rashes or whatever. This indicated that things were better in the resistance area than they were in their own village. We collected information from them and provided them with information about the Hanoi government on corruption, etc. So when they went back, they were healthier and certainly had more poundage. We’d give them very high-calories foods. But we spent a lot of time discussing the fallacies of communism, and they would tell us about acts of corruption and dishonesty among officials. We would then be able to broadcast very specific cases to create disruption inside”
According to Harriman’s mastermind and his staffs, John Paul Vann as I said can drive a tank but couldn’t carry a tank on his shoulder because his rank Lt Colonel never command at least a regiment, brigadier, division or more, and Colonel Singlaub don’t know how weary caused by physically, mentally exhausted as by hard work lack of nutrition and paled people in North Vietnam even cadres. So when they returned to his homeland appeared clearly that they were just out from the imperialist arms, Hanoi wouldn’t eventually see through the ruse? In light of this fixable with ‘Three Axioms’ that Wise-man Harriman had produced to universities for introducing in late 1960 as the basis for conducting explained the war (There was never a legitimate non-communist government in Saigon, and all the activities in North Vietnam were just defeated, with purpose: motivated arrogantly Communist to infiltrate and overran South Vietnam, through Highway Harriman (Ho Chi Minh Trail). He was just on a strongman side in the war game between CIP and NLF (National Liberation Front and Counter-Insurgency Project)

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

My spy-pilot life

Project Sanitary “was to be an expansion of SSPL [Sacred Sword of the Patriots League notional resistance movement, CIA named it by Vietnamese heroic history] activities through the use of a redemption coupon leaflet… They were designed to convince the North Vietnam security elements and people that the SSPL efforts were extensive, to have popular support, and to entice the people to conceal the coupon for possible reward”. This project was also stopped in November 1968 due to Johnson…and He wouldn’t be on the seat of power. He turned down second term because two among three in his triumvirate fell to the assassin’s bullets.
The SSPL, begun in 1965, also contributed to the Diversionary Program. Its two operations were both directly linked to and supported the OP 34’s triple cross. Once abducted, the fishermen or other North Vietnamese picked up on shore were told that they were in the hands of the Sacred Sword of the Patriots League, a secret patriotic movement, and were to be taken to liberated territory along the coast. The abductees, for security reasons, were informed that they would have to be blindfolded, bound, and put below deck. They were also told the trip would be purposefully long to mask the real location of the SSPL villages. The gunboat would then head to Paradise Island (Cu Lao Re Island in the map, east from Chu-Lai 20 miles) a trip that often took several hours. Once in one of the island’s coves, the captives were brought on deck, their blindfolds were removed, and they saw before them a liberated village somewhere along the coast of North Vietnam. This was only the beginning of the subterfuge. Next came their indoctrinated
The main purpose of this elaborate charade was “to convince them they were in a liberated coast area of North Vietnam. When they were sent back, they would spread the word that there was a real resistance movement and liberated areas in North Vietnam”. The detainees stayed in the liberated coastal village for approximately three weeks. During this period, they met only Vietnamese who spoke a northern dialect. They spent their time eating, talking about life under communist rule, and learning about the SSPL. Some of the detainees were taken into the hill of the island to small villages “resembling types found in the hills of North Vietnam. The purpose of these locations was to…lend credibility to the guise that the SSPL secret zone was located in the highlands of North Vietnam”.
In the final days before their departure, the detainees were told of other SSPL cells operating in their region and given secret ways of contacting them. This, of course, was for the edification of the North Vietnamese security forces that were sure to interrogate the detainees once they returned. Finally, they were given gift kits to take back with them. With cloth, soap, and other such items in short supply in North Vietnam, the gift kits were snapped up by the fishermen. Also included was transistor radios all tuned to the Voice of the SSPL frequency, which the detainees had heard everyday of their stay on Paradise Island. Once their stay was over, the detainees were again blindfolded and returned to North Vietnam in the same manner they were brought to Paradise Island.
In 1966, its most active year, 353 North Vietnamese were cycled through Paradise Island. Between 1964 and 1968, a total of 1,003 detainees were indoctrinated there. OP 39 proposed ways to expand the project to make it even more credible. They believed that one could maintain this fiction for only so long. If something more plausible were not added, Hanoi would eventually see through the ruse. OP 39 proposed several ways to make the operation more realistic and Washington approved some of the more modest ones. For example, when detainees were taken in armed this was encountered between North Vietnamese junks and SSPL boats, the “detainees were tried by an SSPL court, found guilty of crimes against their country, and sentenced to death. It was then granted under the pretext that the SSPL was an organization devoted to peace”. Next the detainees went through extensive indoctrination, and “prior to their return, they made statements condemning their actions and took the SSPL oath of allegiance”. This was then used in SSPL propaganda broadcast. A second example involved “detainees who appeared to be sincere in their desires to assist the SSPL cause”. Some were “recruited as SSPL agents… trained in making crude leaflets and methods of spreading the word of the SSPL. In addition, they were assigned low-level missions to collect intelligence”. A few were sent back to “organize defections to South Vietnam among friends”.

Project Urgency, the maritime element of SOG’ diversionary program, recruited captured fishermen as pseudo agents- and to keep it all the more confusing, occasionally recruited the more reliable ones as real agents, too. At its start, Project Urgency built upon two real agents, recruited at Paradise Island and code-named Goldfish and Pergola, who were specially trained and landed on North Vietnam’s coast in late 1967. They never came on the air and failed to arrive at their rendezvous to be extracted by Nasty boat. To inaugurate the Urgency deception, SOG disseminated the myth that the presumably captured Gold-fish and Pergola were just the first agents of a whole new network. Then Urgency recruited eleven low-level agents at Paradise Island and returned them, plus two pseudo agent to convey disinformation. SOG also found ways to incriminate many other fisherman agents who would do little more than generate interesting debriefs. Then there came the double sting: The most zealous Communists among the fishermen brought to Paradise Island were returned to North Vietnam far away from their homes, with money and false messages hidden in their clothes that would implicate them in especially insidious ways.
“By way of conclusion, Operation Loky and Project Urgency were humiliating!” that anything what the Permanent Government wanted to. Of course the masterminded Skull and Bones had insight that reality full well, expending over the years of the war an immense effort in analysis, tactics, sensors, ordnance, aircrafts, and manpower in an effort to constrict the Hanoi logical flow. In the end the result seemed to mirror a famous comment. I supposed the WIB and Bones take on the whole war: “Everything worked, but nothing worked enough or failure”

********************************


The Double Cross and Triple Cross:
At last, all the teams that OP 34 assumed were legitimate were actually under the control of Hanoi’s Ministry of the Interior. Some of them had been run back against first the CIA, and then SOG. Hanoi had instituted what British’s John Master-man had described as a “double-cross system.” During WW II, he ran such an operation against Nazi-Germany for MI 5, Britain’s security service. In his account of that exploit, Master-man explained that the double-cross system was much more than simply “A number of isolated cases” of doubled agents and “did much more than [just] practice a large-scale deception”. Through The double agent system [MỊ] actively ran and controlled the entire German espionage system in this country.
Experts in deception operations argue that both the deceiver and the deceived must contribute to the operation if it is going to succeed. Neither the cleverness of the deceiver nor the receptivity of the target of the deception is sufficient by itself. It takes two for a major deception operation to work. Certainly, this was true of the operation run by North Vietnam against SOG. Hanoi succeeded because of SOG’ mission uncertainty, inept operational concepts, a lack of expertise, and inadequate procedures for agent recruitment, motivation, and training, another words agents were either enthusiastic and inexperienced or lackadaisical and inexperienced, while plus Hanoi’s own skill in running a double cross, but with KGB help CIA was in useful acted Triple-Cross such as agent Pham Xuan An, Bui Tin …
An agent operating inside North Vietnam had to be highly motivated and highly trained. It was a difficult environment, high mountain, gusty velocity wind, a few individual team members had been lost in parachute accidents due to carrying so much weight with him ( SOG purposely just dumped them into North Vietnam), given the nature of the Hanoi regime. However, agent recruitment, motivation, and training were endemic problems that plagued OP 34 from its inception in 1964 until the Diversionary Program was established in late 1967.
The quality of the individuals recruited for long-term agent program was at best uneven. While some were patriotic and zealous, the OP 34 leadership believed they were more the exception than the rule. There were many difficulties with the recruits, motivation being at the top of the list. Low agent commitment was a direct result of the recruitment process.
But as strange as it may seem simply by Colonel Russell’s solution to the problem was just to send them up North by ordering McNamara; Russell “didn’t expect them to come up on the air”
And communicate but to “surrender immediately upon landing, which they did”. There was only one reason for sending them, according to order from high command (Permanent-government). After all chief of SOG:” We had to get rid of them…Our solution was to put them up North!”

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

My spy-pilot life

Meanwhile Hanoi’s Skill at Running the Double-Cross System:
The double-cross system that North Vietnam ran against MACV-SOG fit the tradition of similar operation run against Western intelligence organizations by their communist counterparts throughout the Cold-War. Like other totalitarian communist states, North Vietnam placed a high premium on internal security, counterintelligence, and control of the population. It was a ‘counterintelligence state’. In such regimes, there is overriding concern with domestic security matters. Intelligence and police forces abound, and their mission is to counter any and all internal security threats. In the intelligence lexicon, this is referred to as defensive counterintelligence. It involves identifying, apprehending, and neutralizing saboteurs, subversives, spies, commandos, counterrevolutionaries, and any ordinary citizen who might express even minor opposition to the party’s authority. Regimes like Hanoi take all these matters quite seriously. In fact, they tend to be paranoid about the whole business of conspiracy, espionage, and subversion.
To ensure internal stability and control, totalitarian regimes establish and maintain massive police, security, and intelligence services. Organizational redundancy is their hallmark. This was certainly true of the former Soviet-Union, which served as the model for other communist states. From its inception, the “search for enemies, their discovery, and elimination was an overriding state objective”.
North Vietnam adopted this approach to counterintelligence and internal security. Like its Soviet counterpart, it was fixated on these matters. According to expert-officers in Defense Intelligence Agency worked to help the United States counter the KGB and its surrogate services in other communist states, such totalitarian political systems “display an overarching concern with enemies, both internal and external. Security and the extirpation of real or presumed threats becomes the premier enterprise of such systems”. To defeat these enemies, counterintelligence states make a ‘very heavy commitment of state resources.’ “This fixation demands the creation of a state security service that penetrates and permeates all [of the country’s] institutions.”
Hanoi maintained such an apparatus. Its sine qua non was organizational redundancy, tight control of the population, and total vigilance. The apparatus extended from Hanoi down through each of North Vietnam’s administrative levels to the lowest units, the villages. The People’s Police Force (PPF) was at the base of Hanoi’s internal security system. Under the authority of the Ministry of Public Security, the PPF was to discover, prevent, and repress all sabotage and subversive activities, and to control, neutralize, and reeducate all counterrevolutionary elements. To this, it was accorded broad powers to search, detain arrest, seize evidence, apply coercion, and use weapons to exterminate spies, counter saboteurs, and unearth plots of subversion.
At the village and at higher administrative levels, the PPF maintained a close liaison with its counterparts in the local militia, military, and intelligence agencies. Here is where organizational redundancy came into play. Each of these other agencies had internal security responsibilities and powers that overlapped those of the PPF. So did the Armed Public Security Force. Under the auspices of the Ministry of National Defense, it had among its duties the protection of all key facilities against sabotage; security of the border areas to thwart or detect infiltration by commandos; and surveillance, detection, and suppression of counterrevolutionary activities by ethnic minorities in the mountainous region along the Laotian border. These were the groups that the first three chiefs of SOG proposed to employ to establish a resistance movement up North. Although Washington did not see their potential or disregard them, but Hanoi apparently did.
As one moved up the state administrative structure through the districts, provinces, cities, someone found parallel representatives of each of these village agencies. This was redundancy with a vengeance. Finally, at the ministry level, in addition to public security and national defense, the Ministry of the Interior had a major responsibility for combating subversion, espionage, and sabotage by spies and commandos infiltrated into North Vietnam, more and more redundancy.
This apparatus allowed Hanoi to conduct a massive defensive counterintelligence campaign.
It was, as William Colby explained: “total permeation of the society…It leaves nobody free.”
SOG’ long-term agent teams were pitted against an imposing security apparatus. The agent teams, given all the problems that plagued OP 34, hardly stood a chance. It was a total mismatch.
“I can best sum-up my personnel perspective to the result seemed to mirror a famous comment, supposedly War Industries Board’ Bones take on the whole war “Everything worked, but nothing worked enough”
According to “Commando-Vaught” for Second Indochina Wars/1954-75, in April 1959, and “Aid to Russia 1941-46” of WIB-Bones investment (Website: VietnamGear.com, surplus C. Rations were used in both Korea and Vietnam) Thereby in 1959 to 1962, Colby, a mediator with W A. Harriman at WW-II, was now assigned station chief in Saigon, and headed the agency’s Far East division from 1962 to 1967. Then from 1968 to 1971 he directed the Phoenix program in South Vietnam, and head of the entire CIA later. According to Prados, a historian and author of 10 other books on national security, Colby thought the United States could win the war by supporting President Ngo Dinh Diem. Unfortunately the Skull and WIB Bones in the then Kennedy administration did not and encouraged the generals who overthrew and killed him and his brother. The intrigue in Washington [Harriman’s mastermind order to kill Diem] Langley and Saigon surrounding 1963 coup was a rat’s nest; Prados struggles manfully, with only partial success to penetrate it.
In Phoenix Program, which sought to identify and eliminate communist activists (The Viet Cong) at the village level. Colby felt that the program was superior to the use of military force, which he believed was too blunt an instrument and alienated the Vietnamese. Nevertheless, estimates of the number killed under Phoenix range as high as 60,000 people. (Colby put the number at 20,587). Phoenix has also been defended on relativist grounds-the Viet Cong assassinated nearly 40,000 of their enemies in the period from 1957 to 1972. But none of these arguments could prevent the program from becoming a focal point of the antiwar movement. Although Colby maintained that the deaths characteristically arose in combat and not as a result of cold-blooded murder, critics of Phoenix labeled it an assassination program and a crime against humanity. At a General Conference of the United Methodist Church held in Atlanta, the majority of delegates approved a statement calling American involvement in the Vietnam War “a crime against humanity” then rejected a resolution that would have condemned “the appetite of North Vietnam to wage cruel and inhuman war”.
After Phoenix, Colby rose within the CIA’s Washington bureaucracy, and on 4 September 1973 President Richard Nixon appointed him director of the agency. During his tenure the press and Congress turned on the CIA, accusing it of crimes and misdemeanors ranging from assassination plots to espionage against Americans at home. When in 1975 both houses of Congress set up inquiries into the activities of the intelligence community, Colby offered significant if limited cooperation. For example, he handed over to the Senate committee- chaired by Idaho Democrat Frank Church (Frank Church and New Jersey Republic Senator Clifford P Case authored an Amendment, which bore their names Case-Church Amendment of 1973 caused President Ford has his hands tied double knotted. That’s says American must do nothing. No military equipment, no American forces, nada zip – at the direction of the then Godfather George H W Bush, emperor-II of Skull and Bones Dynasty) details of the CIA’s recent operations against the left-leaning government in Chile. The agency’s attempts to sabotage the Chilean economy had contributed to the downfall of South America’s oldest democracy and to the installation of a vicious dictatorship. Colby’s candor on such matters shocked colleagues in the CIA, some of whom never forgave him for opening up the activities of what was, after all, a secret agency.
His only daughter, Catherine, had died after a painful illness in April 1973, and colleagues speculated that the tragedy unlocked what some regarded as Colby’s already overdeveloped Christian-conscience. Though he sternly denied that his daughter had opposed Phoenix, perhaps Colby did want to atone for his part in the program. It is also clear that he disapproved of certain of the CIA’s activities that he called “deplorable” and “wrong” and wanted them stopped. In any case, he realized that a display of flexibility in his dealings with Congress would increase the agency’s chances of survival.
With CIA morale at a low-ebb, Colby’s enemies began to line up. On the Left, a coalition of muckraking journalists, Vietnam War critics, and ambitious legislators refused to give him credit for attempting to open up the agency. On the Right, conservatives such as Barry Goldwater disliked Colby’s liberalism and concessions to the Church committee, Colby had become politically vulnerable, and on 30 January 1976 President Gerald Ford, under pressure of second generation of Skull and Bones, replaced him with George H W Bush (behind political platform, Godfather A Harriman was working to derail George H W Bush’s head of CIA by slotting him as director). Colby had introduced some significant reforms, such as the prohibition of assassination as instrument of national policy and the practice of informing select members of Congress about the CIA’s activities, but his intelligence career was over, because he was always on noble cause of US administration side, wasn’t on Permanent Government side. But personally, I should presume that all plan setting up above was originated by the next Skull and Bones’ generation [George H W Bush] described by Evan Thomas and Walter Isaacson.
Colby’s life continued to be eventful. In 1978 he published his memoir, “Honorable Men” in which he defended himself against the Left over Phoenix and against the Right over his decision to clear the air while director of the CIA. He was right as for the Skull and Bones, it’s seemed to me, they don’t have “Honor”, however they should have “Duty” and “Country”- In 1982, following the enactment of stringent secrecy legislation in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, the US government began proceedings against Colby for making unauthorized disclosure, in the French-language edition of his memoir, about American efforts to retrieve secret codes from a sunken Soviet submarine. His agreement to pay a $10,000 fine in an out-of-court settlement barely covered the cracks between Colby and his enemies on the Right.
In 1984 Colby divorced his first wife and married a former diplomat, Sally Shelton. He had resumed legal practice and lectured widely, taking up a new cause- the campaign for a freeze on nuclear arms. On a spring day in 1996, Colby went down to the waterfront near his weekend home in Rock Point, Maryland, and launched his canoe into a stiff breeze. Until his body was found several days later with no evident signs of foul play, the press had one more chance to speculate about the fate of a man whose manner of death seemed to conjure up the enigma of his life.
May 14 1996, the remains of former CIA Director William Colby were buried with military honors, Monday at Arlington National Cemetery. After a private service for family and friends, an urn bearing Colby’s ashes was transported by horse-drawn caisson to its final resting place in a clearing surrounded by maple and pine trees. For Tuesday, a public memorial service is scheduled at Washington National Cathedral.
Army marksmen fired a 21-gun salute, and a bugler played taps as a flag was presented to Colby’s wife, Sally Shelton-Colby. William Colby, 76, disappeared April 27 while canoeing near his Rock Point, Maryland, vacation home. His body was recovered eight

Behind the political deceptive-platform
Intelligence reports in May 1964 contained more evidence of “extensive enemy military activities in Laos” As result; the Joint Chiefs received permission to “authorize COMUSMACV
To initiate joint planning with the South Vietnamese government for cross-border operations and to proceed with limited covert intelligence patrols in Laos”. The Chiefs finally got their way. However, the restrictions placed by Washington on these intelligence collection operations made it clear that the State Department [Wise-man A Harriman, though number 3 in this Department] was still in the game. Cross-border operations were limited to those “areas in Laos between Route 9 and the 17th parallel [Provisional Military Demarcation Line] adjacent to the border, and the area east of Tchepone”. This was a relatively small part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but considered the critical entry point. That critical zone reserved for dumping spot all military material obsolete of both Soviet Union, (debtor) and U.S (creditor) cast-off WW II, will be in targeting of incoming Operation Lam Son 719 in 1971. Continuously, batches by batches, years by years those repeated materials for war production were initiated money credited by U.S Company Dynasty that U.S had bank loans to the Russian Revolutionary government since Russian revolutionary government until now [under Aleksandr Kerensky a $325 million credit to be spent on war materiel exported from the United State]
Forcefully “No U.S advisers could lead the teams” As for “The Vietnamese that crossed the border were” not to wear South Vietnamese military or other uniforms”, and they could engage the North Vietnamese troop only in “self defense”. Our Combined Area Studies flight-crew must be strictly discipline.
Consequently, due to the Gulf Tonkin Incident in 1964, most Americans canvassed in spring of 1965 as Lyndon Johnson officially sent U.S combat-troop into battle for the first time, sup- ported the commitment, after the war was terminated. However, American overwhelmingly repudiated the intervention as having been a blunder. But roughly the same proportions of the nation hold in retrospect that, once involved, the U.S ought to have deployed all its power to succeed.
Post war opinion poll showed that American blame their political leaders for denying victory to the U.S forces in Vietnam by imposing restraints actions. A survey conducted in 1980 for the veteran administration disclosed that 82% of former U.S soldiers engaged in heavy combat there believe that the war was lost because they were not allowed to win.
In conclusion, I named William A Harriman who was a real U.S policymaker. General
William Westmoreland who command U.S forces in Vietnam 1965-1968, seriously criticized president Johnson, [of course how he knew Harriman was a very-culprit’s South Vietnam dissolution?] for intensifying the war effort too slowly, refusing to approved incursion against enemy sanctuaries in Laos, along Ho Chi Minh Trail plus P.O.L lines parallel, and Cambodia, giving the South Vietnamese army inadequate equipment. He also faulted President Nixon and Henry Kissinger for having abandoned the South Vietnamese regime by conceding to a cease fire accord in January 27, 1973 that permit North Vietnamese troop to remain in the South. So why it forced Saigon fall?

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

My spy-pilot life

THE SO CALLED A PRETEXT OF “MIA AND ORANGE AGENT”
Aerial-defoliation: W.A Harriman was a businessman, diplomat, politician, and a significant figure in Soviet-American relations during WWII and an architect of Cold War. Despite his intricate-nature-cohesion to Republican background, but his ambitious will becoming in the list of the presidents of United States history; so why He chosen a Democratic Party avoiding Nelson Rockefeller defeated him at least in the almost no one else in the Company-Dynasty (In the past, he served as governor of New-York for just one term until Republican Nelson Rockefeller defeated him in 1958)
As a Democrat, he should concern to look after the various class-wealthy businessmen, during that episode in his life of Cold War, in the chunk two as one of the worst event in Vietnam War. For preparedness ready to U.S invasion (1960-1963): some Food-Companies have had the production the billions “C-Rations” for U.S combat troop incoming consummation in South Vietnam [Defense Supply Center Philadelphia and Southern Packaging Storage C.O, VietnamGear.com, surplus C Ration were used in both Korea and Vietnam] and as likewise Middle East, a hundred million “rescue-C-Rations” but not put ‘pork-meat’ inside the cans for the readiness to the incoming of U.S troop involved Afghanistan War later.
Shortly thereafter, many giant U.S corporations muster themselves into the South Vietnam. U.S capitalists (not yet capitalists in branch war-machine complex-industry such as War Industries Board of Bush’s dynasty) thirty seven companies produced the chemicals agent dioxin of herbicides (poison-gas), like Dow Chemical, Occidental Petroleum, Monsanto…used to the so called defoliate Viet Cong sanctuaries. Therefore, President Diem very please and President Kennedy had authorized an experimental program of aerial spraying of herbicides, at first alongside roads, rail lines, and outside military bases to deny the Viet Cong use of the thick jungle to conceal troop movement and ambushes. Obviously, South Vietnam regime was very pleased for that campaign.
VNAF helicopter H.34s took part with USAF C.123s in the Ranch-Hand operation; a box of three transports C.123s, fitted with 1,000-gallons chemical tanks and spray bars under their wings, had begun spraying in 1962 under an operation called “Rand-Hand.” Apparently, the preplanning of the protracted war widened in 1965. Therefore the USAF C.123s increased a box five C.123s in the “Hot-Tip” operation, in spraying of strong herbicides alongside corridor of Ho Chi Minh Trail. But inland of Laotian border that Hanoi called Truong Son Tay means West Ho Chi Minh Trail parallel with East old-Trail. From now on, aerial spraying was increased dramatically, and the Ranch-Hand flights were employed in tandem with offensive air operation. The C.123s began spraying suspected guerrilla strongholds hidden under triple-canopied jungle growth herbicides were also used against crops believed to be grown for or by the Viet Cong.
During Operation Ranch-Hand took part with helicopter H.34s spraying alongside roads or rail lines only. But C.123s dispensed a variety of color-coded herbicides. Agent Orange, introduced early in 1965, proved the most effective and was used most extensively. An average 11,000-pounds load could be dispersed over a 300-acre area in about four minutes. Within days the leaves started turning brown. Entire trees died in only five to six weeks. Over the door of the Ranch-Hand ready room at Tan Son Nhut air-base, hung a plaque bearing the inscription Only You Can Prevent Forest
Naturally, herbicide spraying became extremely controversial. Critics equated the practice to the use of poison gas in WWI, and the Viet Cong and Hanoi exploited it for its propaganda value Local peasants did not comprehend the purpose of herbicide spraying. All they knew was that their crops were being destroyed.

Two high beam of flashlight concurred to one spot, the engine oil leaked of usual pre-flight inspection. I and my crew-chief were wondered how serious this helo could flying with the mission during two hours oil consumption. Very strange, the first time we had to inspect the spray bars gears component like the flapping-wing with numerous nozzles, extended with fifteen meters each side. Today we have flown formation two H.34s to spray alongside of rail road line from Long-Khanh to Long-Binh right in middle of thick jungle.
Yesterday, before leaving my 211th Squadron, I rode on my scooter by passed two helicopters equipped with strange spraying gear bar component, seeing them like sleeping of two fly-dragons on the grassy field. We have only fifteen minutes to take-off and should on target TOT just right a moment the sun appeared. We had a briefing yesterday by U.S advisor, Lt Colonel Kentroity saying in the early morning, the air was stable, and when we sprayed that agent chemical having fall slightly vertical to absorbent entire of the foliage of the tree with full effect
At the dusk, the air humidity gave us some fresh wet breezing on my ears, I had auto-suggestion that prejudicial itchy in my nostrils, the odor of orange agent spreading everywhere in the atmosphere from two hated-H-34. I realized the way from my squadron to helipad, every small trees were died became barren branches without leaves after theirs brownish; even we closed entirely the ejection-pumps, but still consequent effected air gas only.
Lieutenant Dien started engine, he flies H.34s Army A-model so powerful than mine with Army color dark-brown. I flies U.S H.34s Marine model been somewhat heavier but more instruments equipped, with color dark green Marine. However, we must fill up only two gas tank for able take-off with full plastic-tank chemical fluid orange inside the cabin.
“Butterfly Two… One radio check! Over”
“Butterfly Two …reading you five by five, ready for take-off! Over”
I taxied the helo to runway and take-off (these runways like cross with 60 meters each. The French Air Force made it with the inscription plaque “Heliport” and with the risk when take-off because around so many antennas though they had red light on the tops). For maintaining good engine regime, I managed to make a running take-off. Even carried only two gas tanks, but I must used at 2,800 RPM and 51 torque PSI that H.34D could able airborne due a hot-temperature day.
We jointed together for combat formation, avoiding crowded area and climb-heading right 90 degree in compass. I saw the red-blue flashing lights of three C.123s just took-off, might be they had the same mission like us, but alongside of Saigon’s river tributaries to Vung Tau.
The war intensified in coordination with the number of U.S combat troops come into South Vietnam and also the communist Hanoi continued developing the Harriman’s Super-Highway. The NVA groups infiltrated to South were strictly controlled by “Fence electronic McNamara” Every box of “Hot-Tip” composed five C.123s sprayed on them, look like correct and readjust-tracking a path of straight route over them; and monitoring the sound-activities by hundred-thousand antenna devices been air-dropped alongside. Some antenna were hanging on the branched of triple-canopied jungle by theirs propellers or penetrate pierced into ground floor. NVA troop moving safely meanwhile at their vicinity some box B.52 were pretended with carpets bombs, the so called was a campaign with the “roller-thunder” (just noisy-listen only – no harm)
We’re flying in formation at 1,000 feet, keeping this level because heavy aircrafts traffic in this busy space between two crowded airway, Tan Son Nhut and Bien Hoa Air-bases. The sky was still dusk in closed visibility, but I could familiar with some stratus clouds scattered in front of us. Now we’re over Chau-Thoi hill some patches stratus flowing back on me.
Today we have a good chance discovering the twilight, the dim, scattered light from the horizon and the period during which the light for life prevails…the miracle of God. I could see farther to the horizon through few hazed clouds sometimes in the vagueness, obscurity. Few dazzling light with my fiercely piercing look keep me in blind in few seconds. Abruptly I closed my eyes and opened them broader again. Now in front of my cockpit windshield, there is all over the glaring light prevails reflected above on the surface of the thick stratus cloud, in shining splendor, radiant in the brightness of the sun. “Darkness vanishes forever?” I pulled my sun glasses down from my helmet with no choice to piercing look straight to the half sun appeared that was a few moment actual a huge round dazzling brass-dish glaring over the horizon. This was another beginning day. As God said, welcome peace for every one on earth. How can the selfish capitalists whose neglected their narrow interest, derailed the help out the jobs for humanity not for kill weapon machination but economic interest for humankind.
I was myself prompted by or showing a sense of guilt: a guilty conscience to destroy all beauty forests of my country. I must being responsible for an offense of wrongdoing. In-fact I had having a feeling of responsibility for some real ruin-devastated forest offense in the next few minutes spraying would be occurred. How can...How can…If it was both an intellectual change of perspective and an emotionally satisfying experience to jettison the guilt about the war destruction? Could I turned down this spraying mission and accepted to go to jail caused discipline? I dismissed this, because I could see no point in doing that, for I did not believe that the war was at a moral level sufficiently low to require civil resistance. The war, as I understood it then, was not in itself an evil; if there was evil, I thought it was in how ineptly.
My wickedness action was scarring deeply in my mind, compulsive preoccupation with a fixed ‘devastated-defoliation’, unwanted feeling haunted somewhere in this cockpit to scare me. I couldn’t glance below over the forest but guilty. I knew below them many beautiful bushes, creeks, wild fruits ripped which once I recalled at Khe Sanh in a rendezvous romantic spot with my tribe-girl Ni, those foliage were a coverage a couple of us concealed our clinging shadow together with small birds made the lively chirping sound. This scenery was painted representations on my mind, and in my mind cannot enough describe the scene. As the morning fog, the air humidity but fresh and pure with perfume of wild flowers spread everywhere in the hill creek rock in my Forward Operation Base at Khe Sanh. There’re so romantic and very impressive.
I felt sent cold shivers down my back by guilty, because very soon I will push the button for defoliation, destroying every the foliages below us. I was the image of frustrated, it repents me that likely I used the razor blade cross-cut on my tribe-girl face. I felt ashamed to do so… something, of doing something wrong or to be lost of all sense of shame? God wasn’t tolerated that crime. More shameful when I realized that Madame Wangari Maathai, a respect lady at Kenya country in Africa had received the Nobel prize of winning. She became the first-lady in Africa continent, selected by United Nation for deserving this precious-reward. Because she was a spearhead to struggle in the movement “planted million…million trees, for evergreen the Africa continent. She was to take in part strengthening the peace and happiness to the world. She was prevails over 194 candidate-ladies and getting the prize as the 1, 36 million U.S dollars reward.
Madame Wangan Maathai established a trustee organization composed all ladies members with the name “Evergreen-Belt Movement” for redeeming the space devastated forests. She tried to persuade earnestly all the poor-ladies growing planted the 30 million trees that all the other countries imitated like example or specific model. She said: This planting program might decrease the threat of forest-devastation, and protecting the wild-life for wild-animal, created the resources and good environment for mankind.
As a distinguished lady, more talent, genius, she outdid all her husband who could not contain himself, and hasn’t no more patience than to her divorce due to her unbridled

We’re on the target, over a thick jungles keeping from rail road track in sight. Every where the fresh exposed green foliage were completely inundated with sunbath; I hated myself, just close my eyes and felt shame in guilty, the Bad-omen sun’s rays baking my face, but inhaling the pure fidelity scent of the forests; beneath of them, birds chirped and the waters splashed and bubbled, and as always in the memories of Khe Sanh are being engraved on my heart. We had to spray both side of rail road track, Lt Dien at right side and mine in the left. We descended to 300 feet for axing spraying performance. Now we continued descend to 100 feet for spraying, heading to west avoiding sun rays. There was very secure because a full Army battalion was underneath there for us protection. Along side with the track, I discovered some soldiers scattered by groups on nearby of the lines.
“Butter-fly Two on right side, starting now…from East to West over”
I radioed to Lt Dien for preventing the glazing sun pointed directly to our eyes. I saw Lt Dien at my right, the hazed smoke cloud from his helo was spraying look beautiful but I couldn’t see my helo, “it should be the same shit”. Only eight minutes, the red-warning light come one. We’re run out of liquid chemical. Now the fresh pure air were gone instead the bad odor penetrated to our nostrils. We flies back to 180 degree for check out the outcome though they don’t have the effect yet. Soon aircraft became lighter that air speed faster we get. We continued climbing back to home base. Mission was accomplished.
In this operation, USAF C-123s used different orange chemical agent. Particularly the “Hot Tip” operations beginning of 1965 with five C-123s flight missions, each on carried 11,000 lbs could destroy 300 acres forests. After one week, the testing forests in the lab-zone, all leaves becoming brown, and fall down from barren branches; that was affected by agent dioxins spread to nearly area beyond a diameter one mile, and after that about 5 or 6 weeks the entire trees were completely perished.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

My spy-pilot life

Capitalism had always relied on government by its preponderated prevail upon toward world wide, to enforce these protections. Shrewd manipulators, like clique wise-men [A Harriman and Bushes] running world war strategy, are adept at using the good reputations of Americans to cover their bad narrow interest intentions. In Vietnam War, they had plan to, when the U.S troops coming for combat training that created so many jobs saving many businesses developed in war time for instant Civil-Airlines prevented bankruptcy and well development in “Jet-Engine Age” On the course of final decisive schedule table they forced Congress to withdraw the troop for a space to take a break time for inventories and seeking the cause another provocative war again and again so on, likewise the next should be Middle-East for example.
So look like the Vietnam and Iraq War produced cogent reasons for surrogate of similar policy, so whosoever said U.S was stuck or defeat the war, they don’t mind, it was just keeping silent, but were very happy to exploit the huge, profitable lucrative market in war industrial production. For the people of the South Vietnam, the about face of their only friend and ally during the time they needed them most, was a terrifying, shocking, and painful experience. And moreover on all the sacrifices Americans had made there as well.
Right after on September/21/1960 National Security Council established a institution on the segment-side of Pentagon, for study and examination; there were already having the direction of post of Vietnam War after ‘Three’ anticipated stand-point: [axioms] (1)-There was never a legitimate non-communist government in Saigon. (2)-The U.S had no legitimate reason to be involved in Vietnamese affairs (3) The U.S could not have won the war under any circumstances
Subsequently, taken up by teachers at most universities was as the basis for explaining the war. So why in this book “The New Legion”, I brought up two battle, Ap Bac and Lam Son 719 to remind the readers these two unofficial actions of U.S stand-points of the war involvement: Battle Ap Bac, the U.S didn’t have yet the legitimate reason for involved the war, though suffered some casualties (2, Jan/1963) yet She must wait until fabricated the so called “The Gulf of Tonkin Incident”. And the operation Lam Son 719, U.S troop had being withdrawn more than a half (almost 300,000 troops) but wait until “Paris Peace Talk” This was legitimate time-table for honorable withdraw for predominantly influence around the world even if forced the US combat troop to retreat.
A cruel April 1975 in Saigon fall created by same senior staffs with Gulf War [George H.W Bush, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld; So why it seemed to me that these wars were alike in a general way but not exactly similarity] Historian George C.Herring in an article called “America and Vietnam: The Unending War in the winter 1991-92 issue of Foreign Affairs, thought otherwise. “Such was the lingering impact of the Vietnam War. Herring explained: “That the Persian Gulf conflict appeared at times to be as much a struggle with its ghosts as with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. President Bush’s eulogy for the Vietnam Syndrome may therefore be premature. Success in the Gulf War (First-War) no doubt raised the nation’s confidence in its foreign policy leadership and its military institutions and weakened long-standing inhibitions against intervention abroad. Still, it seems doubtful that military victory over a nation with a population less than one-third of Vietnam in a conflict fought under the most favorable circumstances could expunge deeply encrusted and still painful memories of an earlier and very different kind of war.
Deeply in the Skull and Bones mastermind, herbicide spraying became extremely controversial. Critics equated the practice to the use of poison gas and Hanoi exploited it for its propaganda. Subsequently they, in the Vietnam postwar plotting on the course of the “Road-Map” for resuming negotiated with Vietnam, they sought the reasonable-pretext “ Agent-Orange and MIA”, after twenty years of closed door hostility (1975-1995) the same their anticipated plan with China 20 years of hostility, after Korea War (1952-1972). The chunk Two of Eurasian Great Game have had some coincidence likewise Inchon Operation cog-wheel to Operation Lam Son 719 blowing out obsolete war material on the spot battlefield. Wizard-Harriman was promised of cheating at B.29 support Dien Bien Phu and B.52 when Hanoi violation Paris agreement accords, stemming from OSS covert operation during WWII by Agent 019 Lucien Conein and now still a lingering sense of guilt by CIA, Richard Helms have done ever pull that trick again.
(I’m not writing in condemnation of the U.S decision to abandon the South Vietnam in the battlefields more than three decades ago, nor it is written to vindicate the leaderships of the GVN, but is written only to set the records straight. Vietnamese citizens who left the country in April 1975 have become Americans and have accepted the tragic disaster of 1975 as their fate. It is a concept deeply rooted in Vietnamese culture. The U.S and its ally, the GVN, were never defeated militarily by the communist Hanoi in Vietnam. Instead, the U.S was the architect of a new geo-strategy at the time global politics needed a change, and America’s socio-political situation must be reconciled.)
As for poison gas dioxin in Agent-Orange become a sharp political tool of U.S to return back Vietnam. Somehow there was the U.S to feel a special responsibility for healing relations between our two nations or at least at a time when Hanoi was in danger of becoming another Beijing. As for me, the fact that when we say the word: “Vietnam today I mean not just a war but a country, at long last, a place where, as I hoped more than three decades ago, “America turned and veterans helped in the turning”. If U.S do thus, as a “straight talker,” I am pretty sure that our mutual experience in transcending the “Vietnam trauma” was one important factor that our willingness to meet domestic challenges is as important a test of national will as our willingness to engage in warfare.
This pretext of negotiation “MIA and Agent-Orange” was ‘light-blow’; can you prove that my opinion is wrong? Instead of poison chemical agent in ‘food-can’ dropped by regular parachute (they can parachuted precision-accuracy on spot by sensor’ altimeter setting at very low altitude) At Khe Sanh besieged, 5000 Marines encircled by four NVA divisions, plus two artillery, armor supported regiments) and the rescue mission of Vietnamese Sea-Commandos to save the lives of Lieutenant Colonel Hambleton and Lieutenant Mark Clark in 1972, bail-out right in South DMZ.
The Strategic Air Command played the role so different with air campaign such as “The Rolling-Thunder” and “The Linebacker” together with Operations “Ranch-Hand” and “Hot-Tip” the nature of orange agent must so much stronger. Wherefore in Unites States, a General Conference of the United Methodist Church held in Atlanta, the majority of delegates approved a statement calling American involvement in the Vietnam War “a crime against humanity” then rejected a resolution that would have condemned “the appetite of North Vietnam to wage cruel and inhuman war”.
United States conscience pricks her to feel a significant responsibility for healing the wound of Vietnam War on sustainable development to be held in Vietnam in turn Vietnam should clarifying the MIA situation. Sir Jerry D.Jennings, deputy Secretary of Defense, and Co-chairman Soviet-U.S of POW and MIA announced that Soviet was better let Soviet Veterans recruited by U.S government for cooperated searching in document archives stored in KGB with the cause figure out U.S MIA during Korea and Vietnam War. Jennings informed that Washington has still been doing the same with Vietnam side.
Recently, Moscow agreed letting US examined the Soviet Defense Department’s document-archives, and determined of 264 U.S troops missing in action in the Korea War. Soviet was also informed to U.S the document included U.S shoot-down in Vietnam. In turn in favor with privilege, U.S did the best letting Soviet about information of 163 Soviet soldiers were missing in action from Afghanistan War and with numerous civilians of Soviet missing during the Cold- War.
Much has been made of the U.S high technology that she could discovered all alloy-material by satellites or aircrafts during the period search and discovery aircraft remain in Vietnam. So why She gave the coordinate spot on which a huge submerged bomb about 15,000 pounds called CBU-BLU 82B dazed-cutter-bomb dropped by C.130 Hercule, but due to some discrepancies when hit ground its wouldn’t exploded. The Press Trust of India and AP radioed that: Vietnam dismantled in separation a warhead from a huge unexploded-bomb, after 30 years of war. As a Project Delta pilot I conjectured that at the middle of year 1970, according to CIA, the sensors reflecting to McNamara’s electronic sensor fence that controlled the level NVA groups-infiltration if so heavy. There should be a yellow warning light alert; consequently U.S Army at Central Highland would like a must landing zone at anywhere even right in the middle of thick forest, for in case intercepted NVA before they come closer in green area, so why this BLU 82B bomb was badly needed for making a Big-LZ, the size least equal a soccer-field. Whereas BLU-82AL/pressure 1,000pds/square inch used at Khe Sanh, South Laos: Aluminum is a silvery while a ductile number of the boron group of chemical elements, it has the symbol AL, its atomic number 13 power and polystyrene (FAE) consist only of an agent and a dispersing mechanism and take their oxidizers from the oxygen in the air.
Right after local regional force was authorized. They expensed 20 days with 38 weapon-expert specialists made on trail to bring it down from the hill crest, after they accumulated about 3 tons of explosive powder. This bomb usually dropped by parachute and exploded over the surface to blow-out destroyed everything equally one foot-ball yard made helicopter landing zone. I conjectured the long tube first in touch-hit with the ground-surface, might hanging or broken on the foliage before free fall to the ground or may be the parachute wasn’t opened. Thereby that bomb pointed through a 2/3 in the earth. Out of explosive power the iron remnant was two tons. They brought back to Hanoi stored the PAVN’ museum.
According to U.S forces, more than 15 millions tons of bombs, mines, artillery shells, and various ammunitions were exploited in Vietnam War. But 10% among them didn’t explode scattered everywhere in land of Vietnam. I’m sure that the U.S should to redeem this financed aid support instead of “Orange Agent”. As for those exploded devices created many accidents effecting to wounded even perished few peoples, in majority the children. Statistically in Vietnam from 1975 there was had 38,000 perished victims and 100,000 wounded by them. That’s why like I have conjectured, U.S government gave aid to Veteran association 5.000,000 dollars in term de-exploded ammunition plan.
In the past Vietnam used ‘Agent Orange’ like political weapon for U.S must paving path a specified sum of dollars in redemption but fail without scientific evidence. Once Vietnam claim, a demand as of right, because the victims of dioxin as they experienced on Ho Chi Minh Trail operation, they were under the cloud spraying from aircraft with color orange. Thereby in U.S side they said: It’s so ambiguous, the mist wasn’t this color but dark white like water. The orange was just painted cross outside of barrel container. The substance liquid inside the barrel didn’t having this orange color. Agent-Orange translated by Vietnamese was familiar with the U.S and Vietnam. This is a regular herbicide, this agent chemical was the first time in used at Vietnam, on date 13/Jan/1962 in the operation called “Ranch-Hand”. Station was at Tan Son Nhut Air Base.
In the summer time of 1962, two helicopters H.34s (028 and 511). I and my wingman Lt Dien have flown the defoliation mission on course of railroad track line from Trang Bom, Long Khanh; Counties underneath having a full army battalion for ground protection. My eyes witnessed my wingman spraying with a mist of dark white color. It wasn’t orange color at all? This Orange agent was used spreading to 1967 and 1968 and terminated at 30/June/1971.After 1971. This activity-event Ho Chi Minh Trail was in status-commission 100%. I dared named it like Harriman’s all weather Super Highway with Blood-POL along its corridor. Significantly that emerged a coincidence of “Cooper-Church” amendment 1970 (anticipation with Case Church later 1973) to the defense appropriations bill, a measure denying funds for U.S ground force operation in Laos and Cambodia. This left the communist Hanoi’s sanctuaries and lines of communication once again safe from American interference. This time under pressure of Congressional action behind it was haunting by a Second Company-Dynasty generation reigned by George H W Bush Meanwhile according to a 1994 history published in Hanoi, the quantity of supplies shipped from North Vietnam to its forces in the South was four times that shipped in the entire previous year. Even so that was miniscule compared to what was sent south from the beginning of 1974 until the end of the war in April 1975, a total during those sixteen months, reported the Communists, that was 2.6 times the amount delivered to the various battlefields during the preceding thirteen years.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

My spy-pilot life

Thereby according to many Americans would not like hearing it said that the totalitarian states of China and the Soviet Union had proven to be better and more faithful allies than the democratic United States, but that was in fact the case. Washington Post wrote that “It is almost unthinkable and surely unforgivable that a great nation should leave these helpless allies to the tender mercies of the North Vietnamese, but that is what we did!” South Vietnam cannot survive without U.S military aid as long as North Vietnam’s war-making capacity is unimpaired and supported by Soviet-Union and China.

U.S used various and different categories herbicide agent. They were contained inside the barrel, capacity about 50 gallons with different color as such called by the color of the barrel. For instant, agent purple, agent white, agent green, agent orange…Agent Orange deposited in the barrel painted orange-mark, composed two liquid agent 2,4-D and 2,4,5-T was two substance associated with botanical hormone in phylogeny, as result an Auxin like acetic acid. Agent Orange was made as powder, one mixed with petroleum or diesel. It’s simple ready to spray from aircraft.
However, in the past one tried to constitute an agent composed 2, 4, 5-T, that created another substance but couldn’t eliminated out of them. This was “Dioxin” which was among a mass of chemical substance. It was usually called 2, 3, 7, 8-TCDD. Unsurprisingly Dioxin was a poison chemical gas for illness effect. Dioxin when absorbed in the human body, it was stayed in the fat-greased parts. But dioxin should be automatically come out by immunized self-help body reaction; dioxin come out annually for a period of seven years, the body human being should be O.K. But male specially wait until dioxin self released by unabsorbed. And female the dioxin would come out by the nutrient to placenta. Beside that after giving birth, dioxin could come out by way milk feeding.
Therefore how much dioxin assimilated in my body so I shall serious ill? Doctors studying on the animal realized that sometime we were assimilating just little bit dioxin but still very ill about hormone, immunization, and maturity. If so much dioxin assimilated in our bodies must be created a cancer. Medical academy science in United States proclaimed: 13 sorts of illness encounter with Dioxin such as: cancer ‘Lympho Hodgkin’, cancer lung, cancer arteries, cancer brain
Apparently, how they used the dioxin (orange agent) in the Vietnam War?
This poison gas had a mixture with 50/50 of two chemicals as Dichlorophenoxy acetic acid (2.4D) and Trichlorophenoxy acetic acid (2, 4, 5-T). This mixture sprayed direct from the air by scale/20-1/50. In the Lab-Vietnam War, had about 19 million gallons this poison-gas were sprayed all over Vietnam, with density five kilograms equal with 6, 4 liters. According to U.S the Veteran Dispatch Staff Report, November/1990, take a rubber plantation for testing examination, this chemical agent was a mixture of various same samples above, and sprayed for every acre. Within one week, all the trees were sprayed becoming barren leaves and the effect after that contagious to the nearby of rubber trees in effect of one kilometer diameter.
One Top secret report in 1967, for all U.S forces in Vietnam was amplified the information. They were be ordered by keeping far away the zone treating defoliation, at least two kilometers away from them. In short the actual civilization live, the people could escaped from assimilating the various vulnerable chemical gas in our environment that included the dioxin…but the important was how much we could withstand?
Depend on the different countries they accepted the amount of dioxin assimilation in body for each day
TDI (Tolerable Daily Intake) of dioxin was varied and counted on by pg or 10-12 such as:
Holland: 4 pg/day/kg depend on body weight
W.H.O: 10pg/day/kg
F.D.A: U.S.A, 0.03-pg/day/kg
USEPA: 0.006-pg/day/kg.
For instant, one specific body was weight of 50 kilograms, based on statistic standard: 1pg/day/kg was assimilated dioxin 50pg/day, as result one year getting 18,250 pg or 18, 25 days.
After 20 years living in United States, the amount of dioxin absorbed in the liver and in the fat-tissue was 365pg/20 years. If We counted on half-life of dioxin was 10 years that means a total of amount dioxin stayed in a body was as 185.5 of “trillion”.
Now, in comparison with a amount dioxin in blood, in the milk breast of one habitant in zone Chu-Prong (Pleiku) or zone D, C, U-Minh Thuong, Ha [base on standard an every of 10 ppt or pg (trillion) was the amount dioxin comprised permanently in the body of Vietnamese, in compared with one living in U.S was still much better than on U.S soil] If creation of cancer, strange abnormal-birth…of Vietnamese living area above were increased as “Hatfield” reported. There should be in United States, the majority U.S people subjecting to get cancers, unborn strange birth too higher. As for scientists, academic studies, specialists worked in the Lab-room for decades in contact direct with dioxin, in exposure with various chemical poisoned for everyday. And of course the amount of this poison gas should be comprised in blood. All of them should be physical examination check annually. Particularly, in 1993 were 40ppt, thus however, they were health condition normal not adverse symptom or side-effect or indicates the existence and character of something else.
I had another instance about the wasted chemical poison. Corporation General Electric, a huge amount of PCBs, estimated about 43 wasted tons flowing in distance of the Hudson-river, New York. After 50 years, the habitants living both sides of that river were located in two districts, Hudson and Fort Edward that having nothing of symptom of any illness. In comparison with 170kg of dioxin spreading on superficial 24,500 km2 on Vietnam soil. I thought if the threat of dioxin toward Vietnamese. With a certain amount, I took instance maximum amount dioxin assimilated in the weak body. How was serious degree-level? How He or She was affected and sustained? Why Vietnam reported officially and newspapers clarified it with some proof- evidences. There was existed a threat of death or last for decades?
We reviewed over the global, many cases of poison gas assimilation in the human body; specific the dioxin was none human perished except only destroyed the trees by herbicide action.
And also no animal was account for extinction of life. Actually, we are living in the environment which enveloped by so much of various chemical and poison that we couldn’t escape from them. For instant, an electric-pylon in front of my apartment with so much isolated devices as color brown: this is a PCBs which was also a sort of dioxin; right in my back yard, yesterday I burned the wasted stuffs, after barbecue grilling…unintentionally I was created the amount for account of dioxin. (This actual incident created 19% a huge amount dioxin in the United States).
In contrary, If I was scared of dioxin but I couldn’t escaped: in the smoke of cigarette had dioxin, fire wood had dioxin, the smoke in the highway had dioxin, fish, meat, milk were involved with dioxin. Dioxin was everywhere by nature phenomenon as wild-fire, as volcano erupted, by artificial human activities as reciprocating engine burned gas formed a huge amount of dioxin in highway…
Some liquid substance like Chloral, we used for laundry having creation dioxin, as detergent composed sodium hypochlorite (bleach). Some sub-product from plastic fiber…having source of dioxin when they were being burned.
Now, I talk about accidents related with agent orange ‘dioxin’: At Times Beach, Missouri, United States; a company sold the wasted stuffs containing TCD to another company that took care in service clean the dirty-dust in the public roads; Company used these huge amount of wasted petroleum to spray on road surface, thereby shortly after that…The local authority must to evacuate 1,400 residents out of vulnerable area at once. Company must have cremation all those danger stuffs by mandatory.
The food stuffs for domestic quadrupeds serving for food as bovine animals, at Brazil the cattle-food had mixed with fresh-limes powder with purpose ameliorating the gas inside cow stomach. Therefore, the milk contained some amount of dioxin, after discovered that some millions milk gallons were destroyed. Whereas French and Holland have product for cattle food mixed with ‘sludge’, the wasted stuffs from industry-complex with fiber plus vitamins. As result the hog’s fat tissues and poultry as well existed so high amount of dioxin (presently, French was still applied this formula even though the European food safety association proclaimed to product prohibition (1991)
The subject Dioxin was deliberated. This delicate matter, also so much complicated. It was complicated because affecting to every country in many spheres: the human health, environment, economic, and political too. Delicate sensible, because there was discussed in debate for neutralization all zones were treated by orange agent; it was both side between Vietnam and U.S, and refereed by some Europe countries.
Therefore the good-relationship between two countries depended on specific testified evidences that be scientists and their influence to clearing like I said above.
In early March 2,002 there was a symposium between United States and Hanoi, a conference for discussion of the poison gas comprised the dioxin which was treated to over South Vietnam soil, creating some disaster consequences for its habitants of those areas. Hanoi was strong ‘ill-feeling’ and purposeful, unreasonably obstinate in one’s ways as propaganda as ‘ill-fortune’ by political purpose and the U.S must to make amends for its wrongdoing as by paying back something. But I’m pretty sure that the money was never come right in the hand of victims.
As for the United States, there is something the matter which had been in the CIP anticipated planning by Harriman’s senior staffs after National Security Council discussion on September 29/1960: “Welfare imperialist”, to pretend declared it goal of U.S policy in Vietnam (both South and North Vietnam) to “create in this country a viable and increasingly democratic society”? By way of conclusion, I assumed that: “might well have to be considered the ‘new pattern of the social scientist’ war” for the next project to all the countries in Middle East.
Because so a carefully preparedness, U.S was so patiently to resolve this matter in the preponderant attitude by the pretext “MIA and Agent-Orange”. But not for others poisons which it had been used in the food-canned C-Ration?(asked for Captain Tom Norris in document film “BAT-21” in the rescue-mission saving lives two pilots Colonel Hambleton and Lieutenant Mark.Clark by Vietnamese Sea-Commandos in 1972 right in DMZ). Thereby in return, U.S threat to review the trading-agreement between two nations that increasing on Vietnam side was so much embarrassed to beset with financial difficulties.
Recently the “Labor” newspaper had quoted that physiologic doctor Nguyen Quoc-Tuan, branch-chief of industry science of environment stated: The orange fruits growing on Ha Giang province were composed the 2, 4-D and fruits imported from China were been comprised the 2, 4, 5-T. Right after few days, this newspaper remind to the readers: “Doctor Tuan was punished by disclosed the national secret document”. The Youth Newspaper declared by explanation “a source from Food security department gave a firm-recertification in those fruits were only the 2, 4-D but none the 2, 4, 5-T, implying an indication of no sign of 2, 4, 5-T means so safe-security fruits because it were not composed the dioxin. However the article didn’t clarify that mean the fruits in Vietnam soil or imported from China. “There is once again something the matter”.
A group of delegated scientists were not agreed the significant consequences of the orange agent by natural or artificial causes. They would needed some substances of proof-evidences demonstrated by manifestation or to establish by reasoning; from the aircraft spraying defoliation contained dioxin to the creation of diseased illness. In this mixed liquid contained the orange agent had how many percent of dioxin? And how many percent of those assimilated to human body? The amount assimilated to convert dioxin into a substance suitable for absorption into the human body by the cause from aircraft spraying or from other the cause of diversionary sources
Purposely U.S would like to resolve this matter for it economic and political interests. So she was pretended to concern about that to appease U.S media of all products made exported from Vietnam in condition safety, like fishes, vegetables, fruits…(in this event the New Vietnam was under-pressurized by its creditor [U.S] like South Vietnam in the past)
Moreover, U.S played the role of “Big Brother” to drive to speed, effort to act of urging, and advocate earnestly all academic scientists to clarify so bringing it to bottom-line of final decisive solution after a collection of opinions on dioxin, poison-gas topic. Furthermore, Vietnam would like the job should be done, She should considered in treating with U.S as a distinguished Guest, like welcome U.S honorable VIP; and also self demonstrated seriously in struggling to achieve some level of cooperation between two governments.
Whereas the U.S side, thousands of its own MIAs and deal with a pretext ‘POW/MIA and Orange Agent’ advocacy network that fed every wild rumor or conspiracy theory, preying on the grief of families of Americans who had not come home. Because of continuing media reports and family hopes that raised for everyday that a significance number of Americans were still being secretly held in Vietnam. U.S must review a thousand old documents due to the sons and husbands of those who anxiously followed the hearings, a special committee on POW/MIA affairs where they were held, beaten, and tortured for too long. This Special Committee made a total of eight trips to Vietnam during and immediately after their hearings. These visits were filled with unforgettable experiences, and one of the most deeply moving of them was to the site of the so called “Hilton-Hotel” and seeing the tiny room, really almost a cage where POW sacrificed a good part of their young adulthood for their country, in pain and fear and isolation. Committee insisted on examining all the evidence, demanded that witnesses be held accountable for the reliability of their testimony, and, in the end, convinced the entire committee to agree on a report that concluded that there were likely no “Americans still alive in Vietnam”

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

My spy-pilot life

In the past, the bad blood between emperor-II [George-1] and Sir Perot, who was once described by “The Economist” as a short little man, with a yapping drawl, sticking out ears, and a head like a bottle brush, began in the late seventies as George H W Bush was ending his tenure as CIA director. Perot, who had grown wealthy by obtaining federal contracts to handle Medicare payment via his Electronic Data Processing company traveled to Maine to offer Bush a job managing one of his new oil companies. Emperor-II politely declined, but the eccentric, temperamental Texas took the refusal personally. Also during the Regan administration, emperor- II then Vice president, Perot traveled to Vietnam in violation of the Logan Act on a personal mission to locate 39 American POWs allegedly performing slave labor in Southeast Asia. When he returns empty-handed; President Reagan refused to meet with him and pawned him off on his loyal vice president. Perot suggested that he might offer to buy all of Cam Ranh Bay as a form of ransom, or attempt to pay $1 million for each returned prisoner. Emperor-II rejected both ideas due to ruined his world strategy [“Eurasian Great Game”] Green with envy, Perot alleged: “Well, George, I go in looking for prisoners, but I spend all my time discovering the government has been moving drugs around the world and is involved in illegal arm deal” In the US history emperor-II was notorious a vice president of “death merchant dealer” Again, Sir Perot “He told the vice president that other officials around him were not corrupt but merely incompetent. As for Bush himself, Perot told him. “The world is full of lions and tigers and rabbits. And you’re rabbit” Bush later acknowledged that he was then in Perot’s crosshairs.

Consequently, their alliance continued to the next steps, Unites State needed to take to honorably put the war behind by anticipated Permanent Government on schedule tracking course “abandonment of the economic boycott against Vietnam and normalization of diplomatic relations” They anticipate as seeing what is going to happen or what will need to be done and take action to prepare for it in advance, scheme resume relationship with Vietnam an arrangement by pretext “MIA and Agent Orange.” Once more time in repetition as the Congress, “Cooper-Church” (1970) and “Case-Church” (1973) by one Democrat Frank F Church and one Republican Clifford P Case authored amendment; now the so called ‘The Senate majority leader to chair a special committee on POW/MIA affairs orchestrated by one a Democrat John F Kerry, a famous War-protester, and the other a famous POW John McCain.
However, this issue above was kept up the pretence that moreover, had led to the continuation of their economic boycott against Vietnam and their refusal to resume normal diplomatic relations with that country even though the hostilities had ended nearly two decades earlier. (In their stratagem China two decades hostilities 1952-1972 and Vietnam was the same 1975-1995 in a similar plan-time-table) So why, eventually the United-States have decision to resume normal diplomatic to Vietnam.
Issue MIA or POW, I recalled the Vietnam War, it not easy to be the wife of a Delta Force Pilot. When a woman falls in love with any man like mine, she knows she is inviting a difficult marital life. A volunteer pilot who is committed to the service of his country must first obey his orders; the needs of his family will always take second place. There will be long periods of separation, assignment to faraway and unattractive places, and the constant tension of an uncertain future. The families of our SOG’ Flight Group members lead semi-normal lives, develop social circles, and manage to keep their children in the same schools for extended periods.
But when a woman falls in love with one flight personnel, she knows she’s in for a roller-coaster ride. Marry a SOG recon, spy-pilot or any members of Vietnamese Special force (LLDB) or Sea-Commando and you can forget about counting on celebrating birthdays, holidays, or anniversaries together. You might be in the throes of honeymoon bliss when his beeper goes off and he jump up to leave. You might be clutching his hand in the final agonies of your first labor, when he kisses your sweat-soaked brow and walks out the door. Your father might pass away and he won’t make the funeral. His mother might die, and you will have to watch him kneel at her graveside, stricken with remorse, long after she’s cold.
If you are a woman in danger of falling for one of these men, your family and closed friends may wisely warn you to cease and desist. “But the heart is a blind hunter!”

What if everything should be fine, as on course anticipated stratagem, U.S will resume normal diplomatic relations with Vietnam even though the hostilities had ended nearly two decades earlier, and their alliance continued to the next steps U.S needed to take to honorably put the war behind, abandonment of the economic boycott against Vietnam and normalization of diplomatic relations like Henry Kissinger had to pledge in the past two decades ago. Whoever be president of “forty-Second” of United States shall be resuming to normal of diplomatic relation with Vietnam as the road-map agenda. In addition as historian George C. Herring in the article “America and Vietnam: The Unending-War in the winter 1991-1992 issue of “Foreign Affairs” Therefore in 1995, right after two decades (1975-1995 as same with China 1952-1972) President Bill Clinton had the “should-be courage” to put these policies into action, and he still says that he couldn’t have done it without the constant presence and united support to Vietnam.

“Vietnam today, U.S policy means not just a war but a country!”
After all, U.S learned several important lessons during its effort to put the war behind them for themselves, their generation, and their country. They learned how to reach across partisan and ideological divides to find common ground in the rich soil of American values and experiences.
They learned how to overcome the passionate convictions of narrow interest clique to build a consensus based on facts rather than prejudice. They learned how to make their individual experiences a platform for broader lesions about American ideals and their special place in the world’s struggle for peace and justice. If do it so, I’m pretty sure that the mutual experience in transcending the ‘Vietnam Trauma’ was one important factor!
So much international proof-evidences testified about dioxin was in real poison gas and certifying by the very most physic-chemical scientists in world wide. Literally during the Vietnam War, all flight missions on aerial defoliation were over some specific mountainous area, forests, and un-population-area; the most treatment was special over Ho Chi Minh Trail (Hot-Tip Operation) In short the population wasn’t a target for chemical spraying. The Hanoi’s plagued propaganda had wide-spreading evil in the Western Europe in the recent years, but fortunately its attitude was presently more acceptable than those that had come before.
In the past several years, Hanoi led the tourists tour in a brief trip for orientation or inspection the stranger unborn, crippled, disabled, all those should be cared for by humanity due to infected by dioxin from U.S sprayed-defoliation with poison gas herbicide during the Vietnam War that had ruined all the forests, devastated the whole country. Also they led tourists to visit the Tu-Du hospital seeing some unborn creatures stored in vessel-glasses, and said: this is the effect from the orange-agent disaster-consequences. Obviously, U.S side was badly needed some testimonial in which a certain of commission scientists certified these truth evidence in such exhibition. This political scandal was so wrong, because these exhibitions; but as far as I knew to anything exhibited at public show that our doctor-students were [before Saigon fall] notified
To set down in training-aid, these had been establishing from 1950s at medical institution, Cho-Lon district. Hanoi’s also show up some disease like Poliomyelitis infected by orange-agent but doctors were worked in the past noted the majorities of “sequelle” by virus not from dioxin
(The Switzeland magazine “Le-Man” on December/1998 described a baby girl who had the ‘sequelle’ of Poliomyelitis by virus not dioxin, so often occurred in Vietnam. Hanoi boasted this’ dioxin effect and played the role of scandal methodically spread to promote the humanitarian-cause.
This wrongful campaign itself to bring Hanoi into the brink of unpersuasive to the audience on world wide; However, as a straight talker, I’m pretty sure in confident that the U.S must take the serious key-step to help Vietnam, because U.S and Vietnam mutual experience in transcending the Vietnam trauma was one important factor that the U.S will passed away the Vietnam syndrome and deprived of one’s trauma drawback-burden.
I do feel US having a special responsibility for healing relations between two countries. My lest idea was the must to assist Vietnam’s leadership and people in taking a fresh look at how the country was developing, at a time when Saigon was in danger of becoming another Beijing, a city whose air is so dirty that its residents commonly wore surgical masks on the streets long before the advent of SARS.
For healing relations, the U.S conscience is pricking her now that she realizes what she has done in bringing corporate executives, scientists, and engineers from around the world to the table with the Vietnamese to discuss how that country could find cleaner ways to develop and keep higher incomes in tandem with higher standard for air, land, and water quality.

)Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Queenbee-1 in the cage

(At the end of Vietnam-War, the ARVN fought the war alone at the most difficult situation due to short supplies in logistics and the US military disengagement. However "I shall never repent having done what I did, nor complain about the consequences of my captivity. If history were to repeat itself, I would choose the same path. By so doing, I know from experience that I would lose everything but HONOR - The 1973 Paris Agreement allowed many communist divisions stayed deep inside South Vietnam territory (and actually supported by the whole Soviet block, including China) And then US Army leaving the battle fields from Mekong Delta to Ben Hai River, we, the South Vietnam Army Forces alone, I say again, alone, fought back the North Vietnam Army, supported Soviet block until the last day of April 1975. As my understanding, my opinion, General Duong Van Minh, the last president 72 hours surrendered not our ARVN; but no matter what, we are proud of what we had done for our country. The Vietnam-War is not over yet. We are still fighting for democracy and freedom for our country and waiting for the collapsing of Hanoi regime. For that reasons, we are still the soldiers. I’ll still hope U.S Permanent Government should have a wonderful solution that we still waiting for)
How to lose a war … when ever talking about Vietnam War, most of the U.S politicians, journalists, officials, or political pundit would mention it in a way the war is their own, the South Vietnamese at that moment seem to be invisible or just the bystanders outside their scam, bearing no brunt of the war effort. But there was one day, only single day in which all of them would shy away from that claim; the day they have nothing to do with that war. The day they return the outcome back to the South Vietnamese: The April 30th 1975, as a result an accomplished axiom-1. As you know, desire and struggle like a basic timeline of events that the U.S for more than a decade has been assisting the South Vietnam government, the people of Vietnam to maintain their independence, the quality or state of being self-governing, no subject to control by others, and to stop Communist expansion in Asia?
For that reason, one has heard some very familiar words like The Fall of Saigon, Evacuation, Frequent Wind Operation, Reeducation Camp, Economic Zone, Boat People …etc Those technical terms and euphemism are conveniently served just like toilet papers to cover somebody is own mistakes and to wipe-out (flush) his embarrassing accident. So let’s tell straight out what it is on that day: Cut and Run!
A Bitter April 30th, 1975: The day South Vietnam is delivered to Evil due to betray and abandonment. If you have never been told the real ugly stories that fatal day, then this is the chance, let the following scenes, artificial disasters speak for the innocent civilians, the abandoned plain soldiers and the deaths. The consequences of The Fall of Saigon drove many people into not only suicide but serious mental disorder as well. Few decades later, some physicians said that at least thousand peoples around the Saigon area suffered incurable insanity on that day of the Cruel-April.
In summary, this was a disappointing performance, I have to repeat once more: Right after in 1963, president Diem’ assassination, North Vietnam got the aids from the Russia, the China and the Eastern Europe who helped them with their personal and group weapons surpassing those of the South Vietnamese Army. The units of infantry and regional soldiers did not have R-15 or M16, M72, M79... while North Vietnamese Army stormily attacked us with all kinds of modern weapons such as AK and B40... It was not that the US did not see the truth. However intentionally the Permanent Government would like to dispense all of goddamn stuff cast off U.S weapon from WW-II, the unclassified documents show that puppeteer Kissinger wanted to cut loose from Vietnam since that period. Consequently, the Americans came to Vietnam just for merely military combat training exercise with slogan: “Everything worked but not worked enough” - the so called help us to defend ourselves, but not to win the war, or more clearly, the Americans did not want or did not let the Republic Vietnam Army or the United States Army to win and liberate the North Vietnam, because of the global strategy of the United States in order to win over communism. The Permanent Government fired General Westmoreland and at last they forced us to fall apart. South Vietnam and Republic Vietnam Army have been sacrificed, and in the world peace after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, there were the contribution of our blood and our honor. Personally, I have to say it to the world by my master-book “The New Legion”, now and in the future. My group of military veteran-writers had contributed our efforts to this hard mission of our country in general and of our South Vietnamese soldiers in particular... (No Peace, No Honor. War Industries Board Bones’ Henry Kissinger puppeteer and Betrayal in South Vietnam)
Ironically, at 7:53 on Wednesday morning, April 30, 1975 – brought down the Vietnam War’s final curtain. The fighting – The frustration – The nearly three decades of conflict – Done
“What did we die for?” I asked myself! “For what did we suffer and pay such a price?” And I shook my fist as I watched the helicopter race toward the sea. “We never lost a battle, so why did I lose the war?”
On the streets, in the villages, inside shanties and chateaus, people hid, terrified. Their Vietnamese-eyes too followed the U.S helicopter, and they cried, “Why did you forsake us?”
Men who had given their courage, their dedication, their blood to a noble cause now lost. They had zipped shut too many black bags filled with too many friends who had given their lives trying to win over here. For these, the flight of that last U.S chopper out of Saigon represented despair. “This is not our Vietnamese and our U.S comrades in arms doing! We didn’t lose this war. The U.S acted government was, but the War Industries Board Bones won the narrow in the war game. Solely, our American fellows in fight, and brothers died for freedom’s cause – for liberty!”
“Those damned communist pig-fucking war protesters. They did this. Those damned communist pig-fucking Congressmen and limp-willed political diplomat. They gave it to them. We won it, and then they gave it away!” I angrily stuck my middle finger skyward as that last chopper flew toward Seventh Fleet.
After three decades I found out the Axis of Evil play the CIP’s scam. It good to see that was the ultimate team effort, but every shrewd politician of the team had to have the skills of a quarterback like WSAG’ Chief-staff Donald Rumsfeld, the grit of a linebacker as George H W Bush and the brain of a coach such A Harriman’s strategist staffs. They did carry out their axiom-1; so why we did lose that war and then they gave it to Hanoi. As President Thieu recently lamented “America has turned its back. Deserted us in the breach! How do we stand in defense against such forces when they can now so easily overwhelm us?”

The collapse of South Vietnamese which was preset to scope “EurAsian Great Game” stratagem by Harriman’s masterminded strategist staffs has been attributed to any number of causes, but over time three have stood out as the most prominent:
* -A One, a simple matter of fact, had to do with termination of political support, reduction of materiel support, and eventually even denial of fiscal support to the South Vietnamese by their sometime American ally. This was only the very work of the Congress, wrought over the strong and eventually agonized protest of the administration, military leaders, and of course the South Vietnamese. Before Harriman retired from public life, giving the framework for the Vietnam with only Hanoi side; thereby in 1970 the first volley in Congress emerged “Cooper-Church” amendment and 1973 “Case-Church” amendment: U.S President who has his hands tied, double knotted, and must do nothing, no military equipment, no U.S forces, nada, zip. Ironically, sometime WSAG [Donald Rumsfeld] sent few A-4 Skyhaws to strike POL stations in the South Vietnam Airbase reduced our ARVN activities and moreover the “Project Enhance,” one by one in exchange permitted by Paris Accord Agreement none applicable too. It stood in stark contrast to the uninterrupted support rendered North Vietnam by her Soviet and Chinese allies. Ambassador Bunker, for one, argued that “We eventually defeated ourselves, but we were not defeated when we signed the Paris peace treaties. We had, I think, then achieved our objective. The fact that it slipped our grasp was our own doing.”
* -A second cause had do to with the task, never adequately accomplished, of providing effective leadership for a military establishment rapidly and hugely expanded over a relatively short time, and for the expanded civilian bureaucracy as well. The nature of Vietnam War was so strangely as a 1974 survey of generals who had commanded in Vietnam found that “almost 70 percent of the Army generals who managed the war were uncertain its objectives.” Once again, a survey conducted in 1980 for the veteran administration discloses that 82 percent of former US soldiers engaged in heavy combat there believe that the war was lost because they were not allowed to win. From my perspective, that a key step for ARVN troop to win the war would have been to eliminate CIA’s action intervene internal South Vietnam affairs, the most in a state of chaos (constitution and sovereignty abused) Therefore South Vietnam leader haven’t patiently formed an army good, competent and courageous. Despite some very significant exceptions, that judgment was hard to argue with, and in fact it was one that responsible South Vietnam themselves made after the war.
* - A third key cause was failure to isolate the battlefield, to cut off enemy infiltration and re-supply and to deny the sanctuaries in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam. Again sometime I was pointed and succinct, arguing that to succeed the allies needed to “cut the Harriman Highway [Ho Chi Minh trail] inside Laos”. Here some clue verbatim statement: NSC Micheal Forrestal cautioned Bundy that “to send the telegram without Averell’s approval is just asking for trouble” The telegram had already received presidential approval, but that was not enough. It still required an endorsement from A Harriman. He “favored sending non US patrol into Laos to try to find out the size of military buildup.” He also stood firmly against US advisers taking part in these patrols. It was a clever diversion. As a spy pilot, I flew with no US advisers could lead the STRATA team. The air crewmembers and teams that crossed the border were not to wear GVN uniforms, weapon, cigarette U.S made and we could engage the NVA only in “self defense”

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Queenbee-1 in the cage

Unsurprisingly, on midmorning today, 10:30 Hanoi’s tanks T-55, T-57 approached the Independence Palace in Saigon and, ramming their way through the wrought iron gates, took up positions in the courtyard. There Colonel Bui-Tin accepted unconditional surrender from General Big-Minh – South Vietnam’s President for all of about forty-hours – bringing to an end nearly two decades of Communist quest for domination of all Indochina but with Skull and Bones help give a hand in a stratagem: “On the strongman side.”
I clearly had heard the radio broadcast in which the 42hours-President ordered all Republic of Vietnam armed forces to cease fire and surrender. “It was 10:25 hours, 30 April 1975 by my watch,” On the sky the U.S fighters left the Saigon air space in replacing by the MIG-21 of Hanoi communist. The Axis of Evil named it a ceremony takeover of U.S, by ‘on the Strongman method’. Meanwhile, at Airbase Bach Mai, an aircraft C-130 Hercule camouflage unmarked from southwest maybe Thailand, this aircraft four turbo-propeller-engine abruptly landed. From an old building, one officer NVA proceeding toward the airplane and one CIA official step down from the aircraft. Simultaneously, both of them saluted in military manner, and left hand he showed up the letter to counterpart, and retreating back to airplane, no hand shake. I guessed this hand over Saigon to Hanoi in official procedure or maybe included the list USIS personal those who had exposed themselves on America’s behalf were still in Saigon failure to escape. All those will be departed in the next schedule ODP (Orderly Departure Program)
I recalled. “This was the end. I was most sorry for the outcome of the war, but I had done my best.” There followed the inevitable. “I was, of course, arrested by the Communists and held captive in various the so called Reeducation Camp in Northern Vietnam for not a uncertain future” In reality, now I’m a criminal of war that Communist North Vietnam fixed that name isolated us to remote confined zone as another Siberia in mountainous area and died for good with no one knew. “As Communist, you have to fight the enemy without clemency” Lenin’s policy indicated clearly “reeducation policy” with deceitful tactic to cheat the prisoners: Always give them false hopes of freedom by removing them around frequently until they meet each other at Siberia in death”
As a political officer in Political Education Department, Captain Quach Duoc Thanh is one of such case. He had a broad knowledge on deceitful tactic to cheat the prisoners. Thanh was arrested at home by two armed VC months after the fall of Saigon. He was sent to Chi-Lang camp in the former 4th military tactical region. On the eve of the invasion threat of the Khmer Rouge, the prisoners were moved to a new camp Vuon-Dao. The camp was built close to the road that leads to Moc-Hoa, Cai-Lay district. There were about 3000 South Vietnamese soldiers ranking from CWO’s to colonels. Among them the most steadfast were Colonel Nguyen Duc Xich (Gia-Dinh province chief under the later president Ngo Dinh Diem) the venerable Hoang Dinh Khang always showed the courage and steadfastness in the face of the enemy. To the camp authorities, they became the obstacle to be brainwashing.
In October 1979, Ba-Minh, the camp Communist party political commissar, accused Colonel Nguyen Duc Xich of being agent left behind by the CIA and locked him in an old US Army container (conex). One day, as the guards escorted colonel Xich to go out the barbed wire perimeter, they shot him from the back and told the prisoners that colonel Xich was attempting to escape. Whereas Captain Thanh could not avoid the same destiny, they put him in the container Conex in 15 days without food and drink. At about 9 o’clock one certain night in December, 1979, a VC captain unlocked the container and found captain Thanh was still alive. He then beat and suffocated Thanh to death; the event occurred not far from the barracks where prisoners were sleeping. Many years have passed but Vuon Dao camp ex-detainees still recall the story with horror. Captain Thanh died at age 37 survived by his wife and four children.

We were asleep. Suddenly some warm, salted, stinking drops of liquid had fallen all over our heads and our faces. We were awake to know that they came from an overflowed stinkpot of urine carrying up to the deck by a communist soldier. Under dim yellow light from the ceiling of the hold, I stretched my neck to see other almost empty stinkpots had been lowered down by a rope. Some stinking drops of urine did not let us alone. We did not know if the ship was to Con-Son Island or somewhere. Probably it was just of Saigon Newport to the ocean, sometime rocking on huge waves of the sea. We just waited for the sunrise to orientation, estimated our position.
We were sitting at the tail end of the ship because we were the last group to embark last night. Fortunately, probably because of a very strictly “press-diet regime” for a longtime that we suffered less stinking odor from defecation; Cellmates who embarked earlier had a wall of bulwark to rest their backs on. But closing to the stinkpots, we didn’t worry about making our pants wet! It was a miserable friend of Airborne named Cao Trieu Phat, a “Five Dot Bull” (slang for lieutenant Colonel that I met with full of war-medals on their uniforms during the war) who was under pressure on atmospheric of below sea level being condition constipation.
I woke up facing a long journey with where and nowhere in destination. That was the reality as another 411th dawn on 14/June/1976, slowly crawled up the steel walls of a fully-loaded boat with its hull deep under sea level. Who knew in the course of this nine decades’ history (1917-2008) of emerged intelligence-war, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of pilots and crewmen had been shot down and captured by Free-World’s enemies. They had parachuted into the waiting arms of the North Vietnamese, endured years of torment in Hanoi regime, and been used as pawn by the Soviet Union cadres; crashed in Burma and been hunted down by the Japanese. Some of them had escaped, some had lost their youth through years of captivity, and some had never come home. And from the moment of each one’s capture, each had surrendered his or her future to the unknown. None had known when or if they would see freedom again.
In the Southern of Vietnam, It was my 411th day as a prisoner of Saigon fall. I knew I couldn’t deal with my captivity in terms of years, but with Communist totalitarian, I had to mentally prepare myself for a long haul. So, as I stared at the crowd of POW, a mêlée of us; we’d all crowded into hull deck deep below under pressure of sea-level. Last night, a large crowd of over one thousand among 1,700 ARVN’ lieutenant colonel that Communist North Vietnam named the ‘criminal of war’ were departure from Saigon New Port by 759th Maritime Group to nowhere. I told myself that I would survive just one day at a time. I would not imagine my captivity as years of tortured waiting, because if I really believed that, I would probably die. My mind couldn’t accept being in prison for that long, and those kinds of thoughts would break me.
Like any major challenge in life, you have to take it in bits and pieces. You don’t try to tackle the whole thing at once. I remembered how I had reacted at the Saigon fall when the Hanoi’s troop was overrun and I had focused on surviving for a moment, and then making it through the next moment. And so, as 411th dawned and I needed a limited point of reference or that darkness would just overwhelm me. “You just need to make it to morrow, I told myself. “If you wake up tomorrow, you’ll figure out how to survive tomorrow. Today, you’ve got to figure out how to survive today!”
And still, there was no way to know when it was all going to end. So, even though I was trying to convince myself not to worry about it, those images of endless years would continue to ambush my mind. A worst terrible night of asleep might have helped the healing process, but my flat repose on the steel floor had also stiffened maybe with fear, me up again. Blood would have coagulated at my whole body numbness. I shifted my right leg a bit in the crowd, raised my head, and did the best rolled my shoulders forward. Yes, the un-pain-numbness was all still there. I looked around the cabin-hull compartment. The gritty steel platform floor was strewn crusty food wrappers, bottle caps, and most oily rags; from across this world I could smell oil, paint, musk, but it was no longer offensive. In a world of no colognes or perfumed soap, your nose quickly adapts to the scents of our fellows local skin, if not the local oil paint litter. That feeling of uncertainly and little faith in my perspective envelope would continue throughout my captivity. It was a constant source of tension, and it would remain with me long after my release. Yet the things that occupied my mind that morning wasn’t my stiff-numb or chances for survival and freedom; the fates of my comrade in fight from the Saigon fall weighed heavily on me. But even though I forced myself into these painful analyses; the temperature, humidity seemed to cause my heart to throb, and my slick skin sticking to the steel floor.
Now I lay back down from my elbow, letting the nourishment (instant-noodle) flow through me. I wasn’t exactly feeling healthy, fat, dumb, and happy, but it wasn’t a bad start to 411 days. I have plenty of time now to recall all of them. They were sitting side by side like a pack of ducks, tired and hopeless! Yesterday afternoon at Suoi Mau (Bloody Stream) concentration camp, after reading a list of chosen names, prison guards let them to another camp for “special treatment” probably those who had debts of blood to the communists. After, roll-call at a large yards, we were let through a barbed wire fence, barrack by barrack, on a rather wide road to the front gate of prison. Countless of fabric covered trunk Molotova-Trucks parked in lines waiting. This was a former prison for communist prisoners, divided into three parts surrounding by three rounds of barbed wire fence. Each of them had a large yard, a stand probably for selling goods to the prisoners, a kitchen and a well beside it, a huge empty house. Their floors made by cement-mixer. There were many of them located evenly side into side into a long line. There was a guard-watching tower outside concentration camp gate. A conex was right beneath in it which two “Three Dot Bull” (Captain) were kept without bandage and treatment for their prisoner wounded after a failed attempt to escape at Cu Chi. This was probably a harsh, inhuman warning to others (prisoners) in advance of a journey to the Northern concentration camps.
Right there, we were detained without hard labors and even without repeated propagandas like previous time in Long Giao Camp. Only a lesson of respect to people’s properties to be learned means not ‘robbing’ or ‘stealing’ Despite it, we had witnessed all kinds of properties loaded on crowded train wagons with NVA hat passengers passed by out camp from the south to north. That was just a beginning of an extraordinary corruption the new regime has committed long later until now. News from Saigon by French Press of Hanoi proved that too many Honda motorcycles on the streets of Hanoi Capital were looted from Saigon, as well as BGI soft drinks sold on the market, sofas, refrigerators, electric fans, stereo sets, fabrics, medicines, detergents. Around 8,000 tons of paper-rolls from Cogido-Mill were ordered to transport to the capital Hanoi. New cars from dealers like Citroen, Renault, and Peugeot had the same destination, included 165 cars of Engine C.O. An ironical wave of new folk song saying: “The South hosts its guests so the North get rich… now a grain of rice from the South must be shared a half or three third to the North”.

I was never forgotten that Thursday June, 12, 1975 was a disastrous day for all of former South Vietnamese officials and officers. New regime required all of them to surrender next day for concentration camps for at least one month, bringing with their own $13,610 for one month food. Their subordinates (enlisted-men) also must surrender for three days reeducation camps exercise at their local authorities. The Saigon Liberation News explained: “They took their responsibilities for their own crimes of fighting and collaborating for the enemy” Many of them could not forget that historic sad day made by Kissinger and Le Duc Tho anticipated-solution. And be fooled by the naivety of French Ambassador Merillon. Following Kissinger, “choreographer” of the tragic theater “… an ordinary transfer from one government to another without destruction of Saigon”

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Queenbee-1 in the cage

In October 1975, there was a change in monetary system. No one be surprised, many rumors spread out, suggesting a North Vietnam currency has already been used in Hue and Quang Tri Inter-zone IV. People didn’t keep much bills but merchandises and jewelry for sure, even they feared of prosecution for illegal stocking in capitalist way. When new ruler declared curfew, everybody the monetary change has come! The wealthy looked for valuables to spend until the last penny. An exchange policy of $200 piaster per family was applied. The rest amount of money must be deposited in a government fund account. Any withdrawal must be approved by the new regime with limit reason and amount considered by the government. What a cunning robbery! No more, no less! Even facing a robbery, South Vietnamese must take a long day for that processing. Earliest service days reserved for government revolutionary families and government employees. They took advantage of a deal to earn 75 to 90 percent for helping-fee exchange of $100,000 and up. Many committed suicide for a loss of whole life saving. Some jumped to their deaths from a third or fourth story with their brand new bills flown like butterflies all over their house sidewalk.
After disastrous monetary exchange, poverty and unemployment forced people to sell their household stuffs at many black markets and open sidewalk markets. Vice President Do Muoi himself created a government department to purchase all stuffs such as Honda motorcycles, electric fans, refrigerators, cars by government valueless bonds, as well as endless waves of Northern “brothers and sisters” came to bring victorious war trophies back North. Meanwhile, many economic check points appeared on riversides and roadsides to prevent food from countryside go into big cities, especially Saigon. That strategic tactic is to help enforcing a policy of expatriation urban citizens to the so called “New Economic Zones”
War prisoners in the camp were still having temporary nutrition formula a little bit better during early days as long as long grain US rice in ARVN stocks existed. Milk like washing rice waste was kept for cellmates with edema, in contrast with NVA’ Truong Son out of date worm-rice. Joked cellmates called them “fake prosperous” rice for ironic-fun.
Each barrack appointed a cellmate who helps his camp everyday early exercise with four lessons at a time and cell inspectors stood by watching. Prisoners woke up by loudly speakers broadcasting a revolutionary song. Of Uncle Ho in which, a lyric of “holding our hands” was intentionally mispronounced into handcuffing our hand” for quietly protest!
Some doctors were released for probably services needed in hospitals. Propagandas from the camp commanders gave to prisoners whose relatives work for new regime saying pardon list was available. Meanwhile, a cellmate was appointed to work as a messenger to call prisoner for “work” (interrogation) and released afterward.
We used too much leisure time in organizing some classes like electricity, engine repairs, electronics theory about software and so on. We took some piece from roof aluminum and barbed wire to fabricate some household devices like knifes, spoons, guitars, music instruments. Every morning the lousy noise from every kind of man made hammer. We took a piece of firewood to make a chess table.
A nasty well located near the open human manure hollow-spots. That the field prisoner open rest rooms were also situated too close our barracks; so every chow time we feel so dirty shit atmosphere around. Majority of us bring the food tried as far as we can. As a result the most our cellmates frequently were been having the bad attack of diarrhea. The most of us were just used the towels for cover the mid-body. One of my closed-friend in Air Force, Colonel Tran Sao, a famous soccer-ball of VNAH Headquarters, subjected to two weeks on this kind of illness in which waste matter is emptied from his bowels frequently and in a liquid form, inflicting intestine infection. The communist considered human being like an animal. They put the victim illness in the mosquito-net and made surgery operation that involves cutting or removing parts of the victim bowels, undergo abdominal surgery. Of course after stupid surgery my friend was died afterward. Thank God I have some capsules antibiotic pill. The Camp dispensary having only the tablet similar Aspirin (Xuyen Tam Lien) a common drug used for relieving pain and reducing fever.
However, permanently staying inside the Camp, we wish to go out for hard labor in seeing the new worst society. The job was digging the hollow for raising the crops break up demolished land, dug up land for a new garden removing bushes from ground by digging. We dug up the trees by their roots, dug the potatoes out of the ground. We are skill and smart, only bare hand we take PSP steel and made a beautiful Camp Gate with three entrances the middle for truck and two small gates for pedestrian, above them so many flag with different color we couldn’t understand what the hell meaning. Adversely, we have some works that no one would like accept such as demolishment, or defuse the Claymore-mines around barbed wire camp. I was praised God bless us nobody injuries or dead from that risk dangerous stuffs. Sometime I saw on the sky, few aircraft took off and landing at Bien Hoa Airfield, now and then the train passing urging me to move in the clinging past.
Every evening, we have entertainment with Television for their propaganda purpose. The communist authority favor us by accepted our family sent into the camp some basic food like flours, candies, sugars, Maggie cubes Oxo, dries rice. We are all lack of malnutrition, illness, weakness, because so long time slept on the sheer earth floor. Beside that we frequently heart a rumor of condolence, it seemed to me God saying “Sons accept my condolences on your overcame through a terrible ordeal.” But I’m so patiently I knew the U.S POW must be in Hilton prison in maximum nine years that we must least the same or more than that. I am only patient in waiting U.S and North Vietnam solution to our plights though uncertain future.
Saigon city was still in curfew, but no one wouldn’t came out for this sadly stage. Our families in Saigon seemed subjected to the communist cadres coming to persuade that “every letters sent to us having the same written in conclusion “Be nice, Good study, labor hard prepare becoming good citizenship in this perfect actual society.

In the secret solution of Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, means took time for reunite both south and north to become One Vietnam. (I thought this 100 years planning of the Skull and Bones stratagem). In the world wide even U.S administration such as ambassador Martin didn’t understand what the hell of this solution. Martin simple think that Vietnam is still two nations. Therefore, he tried the best contacting to French Ambassador Merillon and Viet Cong temporary National Liberation Government on the already defeat situation. The four engine aircraft DC-6 belonging Martin is standby at Tan Son Nhut Air base after leaving from Thailand last night, now waiting at airbase on 25, April, 1975. Station at Saigon, CIA Polgar and General Timmes had been escorted President Thieu seated right middle of them like dangerous prisoner for ready of deportation. The black sedan of convoy proceeds to parking lot of Air America.
Ambassador Martin had presented over here little bite sooner. In his farewell trip, he said “That all the best I could do for you sir! Good luck” President Thieu responded respectfully “Thank you for excellent prepared trip for me…Good bye for good!” On the way back to U.S. Embassy (almost U.S officials and administrations were very nice with Saigon regime from Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon but except unless the Permanent Government, typically in the spotlight is Henry Kissinger and in dime light is WSAG chief staff Donald Rumsfeld and high supreme is George H W Bush masterminded) Hurry up resumed the political situation, for resolving the political solutions. In reality, Martin was innocent, couldn’t understand another side of Paris accords behind the stratagem platform.
Ambassador Martin innocently sent an urgent message to Kissinger. On 26 April 1975, so please Martin implied that after negotiated with French Ambassador Jean Marie Merillon; He strongly advocated the negotiation between Viet Cong and Saigon regime might on good élan.
At once, Kissinger angrily react “Mr. Ambassador, you misunderstood what I saying, I am never say negotiation between Saigon and Viet Cong, but only Hanoi with U.S. only at Paris talk. Now on I don’t want you interference in this critical situation the least with Viet Cong and Saigon regime in the nearest its abolition!” Another word, Kissinger didn’t want the contact in futile between Saigon and Viet Cong. Kissinger urged Martin cut and run as soon as we can; but a Ambassador philanthropist would pretend to slow down [take time] the evacuation campaign to the U.S personal out of Vietnam in purpose to rescued more and more Vietnamese.
The Chief Staff of WSAG, Donald Rumsfeld strongly urged: “We have just completed an interagency review on the state of play in South Vietnam. You should know that at the WSAG (Washington Special Action Group) meeting today, there was almost no support for the evacuation of Vietnamese, and for the use of American force to help protect any evacuation. The sentiment of our military, DOD (Department of Defense) and CIA colleagues was to get out fast and now.” “Too late for now included those Vietnamese who had exposed, themselves on America’s behalf”
And Kissinger urged Le Duc Tho when reaching Saigon the first priority must deported French Ambassador out of South Vietnam as soon as possible, didn’t let a change for Viet Cong regime having legal office to activate. Of Course Tho was very please for good opportunity unified One Vietnam according secret agreement.
Thereby, French Ambassador Marie Merillon was got out in humiliation feature. Hanoi now closed door without contact to outside. Because the votes in United Nation members voted almost double votes more than Hanoi regime for Viet Cong administration in power. Meanwhile, 1968 to 1970 the CIA covert Phoenix Operation killed 40,000 Viet Cong infrastructure created the hatred poison to Saigon regime. That is a cunning scheme creating Saigon and Viet Cong cannot reunion for fight back Hanoi regime afterward in betrayal in the Viet Cong. If they did that they will win in revolution that Permanent Government anticipated the know-how. This cunning trick strategy is similar in the first Iraq-War; when CIA in both secretly engaged in Shite and Sunny to create the next-bloodbath when United States forces reaching the border Kuwait/Iraq and immediately withdraw inflicting the future revenge-mediation as same as Phoenix operation in Vietnam.
In the auditorium we opened many classes for English grammar, technique by divided some separate seminars. Suddenly, many explosions blasted shaking around the camp melee with AK-47. We are stunning about what happened. Every oil lamps distinguished. All over silence prevail. It was as silent as a graveyard. Utter darkness. I looked desperately around as a cold chill rippled through my body and a wave of terror choked my throat. My heart was hammering, and I was hyperventilating, gripping my blanket in my sweat-soaked palms. After all, I found out no shelling, maybe man made device-explosion for exercise practical emergency? In the early morning we discussed that if we reacted like our men tried rescue us then they got this occasion and kill all of us; the bloodbath in Tet Offensive in revived another massacre in my mind. They tried to get a chance to check out the reaction of us to prevention.
Then afterward, they inaugurated an operation to screening search all of us the so called we secretly disguised the sharp weapon for camp escape or their conspiracy moving us to northern. It was an innocent deception, meant as an adverse event.
In the early June 1976, the TV announced the schedule in reeducation was lasted three years for officials and senior officers of South Vietnam in maximum before they were released by The Viet Cong regime. However we received this rumor news with skeptical half sad and self-cheered up, at least we do know when our ordeal experienced or a decision have reached by a communist jury on a question of fact in the law case. Unsurprisingly, the time will change. In mid-June 1976 we have known all families of officers and officials to Saigon government’ must be concentrated in one special confined space called Zone economic and their household head must keeping moving to the northern Vietnam for building camps for the next move to the north like hostages that estimated about 10,000 their named criminal of war and will died there in the most remote areas. We are the prisoners for life.

(continued)

[vinhtruong]

Queenbee-1 in the cage

In the mid-June, 1976, suddenly at late evening the whistle with clear high pitched sound made force us to concentrated in front yard for emergency instruction. I knew something was up. I could tell that something unusual was going on. There were low whispers outside the fence barbed wire, pattering sandals on the earth, and clatter of heavy iron objects. Then everywhere and no where all around appeared the communist soldiers with icy-face. When I lifted myself and moved up out of the earth floor and hurry up with my gear toward the front yard. The pain, numbness hardly registered, because my heart was already hammering in anticipation. All of us right tight and tough in the middle surrounded by communist guards. A creature NVA’ captain pronounced the individual name “last, middle, and first name to make a group sixty enough for one truck. Every one having one pack of biscuit green bean sweet made in Communist China, then the leader of guard serious proclaimed: “For your safety, we must move all of you out of here to the safety zone and we nowhere yet.
Shortly, we are escorted by a numerous AK-47 behind in guiding us toward every truck on line longer to the main-gate. We are disguised under the canvas trunk cover. There’s no disguising the fact, though communist Hanoi’s is a liar, a famous way of hiding or disguising prisoner, their soldier, military equipment with paint, nets or leaves, so that they look like part of their surroundings. While the convoy proceeding under the canvas-cover, everyone did not utter a word and spontaneously written the families addresses informed we are forced moving with nowhere its destination. All urgent messages that we wrote released through a gap of the cover. We recognized the convoy en route to Saigon via Bien Hoa Highway-1 to Newport; at this harbor, one by one we steps on the narrow boarding wood, one of our fellow felt disappeared in the deep water; no one worry about this accident. The procession is still progressing at normal speed. It was as if it did not happen.

Now in the midnight we don’t know where we are under pressure of hull deck below sea level. We must wait until to morrow morning by reflecting sun-ray for orientation in establishing one’s position in relation to sun ray direction. The war veteran like us should easier found it to orientate ourselves even under the hull-deck. First, we thought they put us in the isolated island Con-Son prison without released day. Tired and frustrated all of us felt in as slept.
I woke up facing 412th days of captivity. That was the reality as another dawn slowly crawled up the steel-walls of our big cell-hull-deck floating un-gently down the ocean. In this course of this Skull and Bones dynasty’s history, hundred thousands or perhaps more than captures by communist totalitarian dictatorship regime; now every one of us agreed that we missed Con Son Island; some segment sun-rays infiltrated above the hollows from right to the left cell-hull demonstrated the ship on proceeding forward in heading North, Northeast. In conclusion we missed Con Son but we don’t know where will be destination. But who knew? I’m sure, Kissinger and Tho all already knew it for their anticipated plots.
I glanced round a hull deck cabin, glanced up to distinguish something familiar with the boat made in China that was destroyed by our AD-6, Skyraiders at Vung Ro, Nhatrang province. I recalled on February 1965, I flown with General Nguyen Khanh, Prime minister and landed at the sea shore where the sank-boat located; inspected the orange color in upper hull, and below was black color, long about 100 feet, wide 30 feet. Right the place where we were loaded were the huge cargo supplies such as AK-50, automatic weapon made from China, and medical equipment and C rations. Now I could identified this boat was belonging to Group 759 (established in July, 1959 in the craps CIP/NLF.) This trophy, thank to U.S. Seven Fleet found out and led indication for the VNAF to bombardment on its. In the Vietnam War, the CIA (Permanent Government) authorized the U.S. Navy to intercept ships of Group 759 and calling South Vietnam struck on them. But there is seldom just three spots during the long war, equivalent in distance and space of time: One in the far south, Cap Ca-Mau – one in middle, Vung Ro, Nhatrang province – one far north near DMZ, Phong Dien, Quang Tri province. All look good logical shape in the axis of evil game. Another word strictly, U.S. Seven Fleet dominated and controlled all seaway activities.
Because it was protracted war game so I should justified in my conviction that Vietnam War was “an intelligence war” which was so much advantage from his experience, young George H W Bush. With his perfect strategic plan how about this protracted war, and in the end the result seemed to mirror a famous comment; supposedly I assumed CIA’s take on the whole war. This Permanent Government’s apparatus activated by its strategic direction: “Everything worked, but nothing worked enough!” For instant not until the spring of 1970 was authority granted for an “incursion” of limited duration and depth into Cambodia, and in earlier February, 1971 Operation Lam Son 719 commenced. But all supplies cargo scattering of the enemy’s logistical traffic along Ho Chi Minh’s corridor; the interdiction tactic of the past no longer seemed sufficient. The craps players warning advantage for all dispersal factors has been accomplished beautifully (CIA and KGB performed excellent agenda) All strange, ridiculous orders one certain general saying that “Higher Authority” – he meant “Higher Authority,” the transparent euphemism for the President – “has noted that each option involves considerable U.S participation.” That’s not true but the Skull, and WIB bones scam.

Surprisingly, one certain day before large scale prisoner moved displacement to northern Vietnam, They formed a so called people course jury intended to intimidate tactics. Every barrack sent one cellmate to their representative, and the rest prisoners in the barracks were just followed by hanging high speakers. Our representatives came back after session terminated, and said: Two captains attempted to escape but fail. The so called lawyers were illiterates never graduated from laws school. So they based on their war medals for prosecution. Shortly they decided “death penalty” make every one so surprise we called it “Jungle-Law.”
While among my cellmates, few of them felt comfortable while they declared war medal false evidence on their note reports. But I was proud while I was stand up in thirty seven times getting them every kind of values medals which reminded me the lightest moments of a brave soldiers; I claimed very clear every excellence indications in its included my heroic SOG missions, and my spy-pilot carrier. I signed my full signature, a particular scribble that would assure anyone one reading the identity-report that I had in fact written it. When I was done, I was patient proud seriously. To think that this individual document would soon be in the hands of opponents was just overwhelming in meditate revenge. I couldn’t believe it. I remembered that when I had been in captivity, it had taken years before the Hanoi communist let me write letters home. And then they’d torn them all up because I refused to include laudatory comments about the righteous ways of Communism. Honestly, I was capture where was held, beaten, held, and torture for thirty years, much of that time served after I refused to accept freedom on terms that violated the POW code of honor governing the orders of prisoner releases.
Right after, the illiterate judges announced death penalty then abrupt two innocent victims subjected inserting to their mouth by two citron fruits, and cover their eyes, the guards dragged two of them out of the crowd. Shortly afterward we heart an automatic weapon, the crisp, rattling sounds of AK-47s echoing in Camp wide. I saying pray in meditation God statement: “Fear not, I am with you; be not dismayed; I am your God. I will strengthen you, and help you, and uphold you with my right hand of justice!” (Isaiah 41:10)

Literally, I couldn’t see my nearest buddy faces clearly in the hull deck twilight or live in a hull twilight world of truth and half truth. I prepared for the next 413th night. Every one was so tired and frustrated. We tried to close the eyes imagined to the uncertain future. The delusion lasted for only seconds, but it was refuse, a brief retreat to a peaceful corner of my soul for a forced relaxation. I lay on my back on a warm flat steel floor, overlooking a orange hull wall. The sea water below made us with slight swing of the waves. I tried to love to just close my eyes and feel a swinging rhythm rocking my body to asleep in its cradle. I’m confident surely the axis of evil must having a properly solution for us. I slept after all.
Suddenly, nowhere gave a high pitched sound whistle, the guard announced us to line up for outboard leaving at anchorage. Everyone forced to open eyes in woke-up. We repeated the procedure in reverse the manner when we were boarding. After three days journeys, we got sea sick therefore got our foot anchored around something to stand up, to prevent our overbalancing.
Each group combined eighty prisoners, and group by group made queue disembarked from the hull deck by the long wood platform to land. Now know it named Ben Thuy harbor at Vinh Province. We were convoyed to the train in the darkness of a late evening by group eighty fellows proceeding along the rail road track to the railroad station. We walk between two flanks of lantern. I stared at their flickering oil lamps for quite a while, wondering if I could quietly step over obstacles; just don’t worry, proceeding in follow a precedent, should be okay. The atmosphere in this area had become strangely calm, yet that lifting of tension seemed only to increase my sense of irritation. I felt less threatened, yet more frustrated. Being a problem-solver by nature, I’d always had a powerful drive to fix things rather than bitch about them. But here I was, stuck in a situation over which I had no control, my fate completely in the hands of Communist-Hanoi. But the pain in my mind was horrendous, probably because the broken heart (home-sick) had now overlapped by more than I could imagine, the muscles atrophying and nerves twitching to compensate for the damage. My spine was locked stiff sustain of swollen flesh, and yet I would welcome the agony. There were eyes toward where the guard maybe they would spot my group waving the lanterns.
The darkness enveloped entirely the world in a tight, tough, and stingy mixture the manure smells of the wagon reserved for domestic animal. When I step up boarding, right in middle of wagon having three baskets full steamed sweet potatoes; everyone picked up one and go ahead to the end of wagon. We never uttered a word of complain like a regular passenger, making it difficult for me to breathe even I had a chance found out nearer a tiny window. A locomotive hit the carrier-wagons so hard push us in forward positions and back many times meant the head-tractor joined with their wagons. It irritates us to have to shock up and down, to cause discomfort to a part of the air-hot-body. The mass of flesh shake back and forth.
However, when the train started running, we felt little bit comfortable by some stream air infiltrated through the wagon. The much better both position and fresh air let us feel survive. But who know when the train reaching at Yen Bai, Hoang Lien Son province two our fellows (lieutenant colonel) were strangled to last dying breathe. I sat on a mess of manure but don’t know cow or water buffalo; so tired and frustrated I didn’t worry about it, continued seat comfortable on it. I must try on every hardship, agony which will stay ready in welcome me.
I tried to love sleep. The monotone sound of steel wheels running on railroad track cradled me into sleep like a dead-log. Now everyone slept under the faint yellow cabin lamp through a dull sound rattled volume remain the same.
I woke up facing 419th days of captivity as a prisoner of war, I found religion. It has often been said that there are no atheists in foxholes, meaning that even a nonbeliever will begin to pray when faced with his own mortality. But I had never been a Buddhist of convenience who only prayed when times were tough. Admittedly, as a boy I’d attended Pagoda regularly with my grandfather, while as an adult and full-time Vietnamese Air Force pilot I had allowed that tradition to lapse. Yet my absence from the pews hadn’t broken my bond with the God. I would offer my holiday weekend prayers from the flying cockpit. Or say a silent. It didn’t require the threat of death for me to recall the sacraments. So when I say that I found religion, I mean it literally.
Suddenly, the train stops right the middle of paddy prairie both side were the water inundated melee scattered with bomb holes and small bushes. All of us were authorized step down to take the water and releasing the shits. Unfortunately, few of us couldn’t hold that shit, so all done inside the wagon no one could distinguish which smell one belong human being or animal. Because last night we ate sweet-potato in ‘medium steamed cook’ so we get trouble. “We’re kidding drop bomb without piloted” As fast as we can able drops bomb (go to stool) simultaneously getting fill up water into our containers with another hand. I don’t remember dirty water being a problem because so too thirsty, we were so busy. It was supposed boiled, but I still came down with bloody dysentery. As usual, hearing the high tone whistles, so fast, about fifteen minutes and we must on board again. The Communist considered us like the domestic animal, so when everyone staying inside, then they locked the door by a big locker again.

(Continued)

[vinhtruong]

Queenbee-1 in the cage

Again, I managed to seat on the floor nearest the aerate hatch small than the window to take breathe for aeration. After the train has just struck three momentum pull and back slowly; we were felt little bite comfortable air coming into wagon though the smell world manure. Then the train cruising at the speed about 45 kilometer per hour, due to the rail never inspection and fixed ever. Every fellow continued close their eyes to meditate the uncertain future ahead. We were passing a tempo-rebuild bridge, the bomb-holes of both side the river filled up by rainy water, now became dark muddy color, maybe they raised fish there? I was so surprised, everywhere were thatched houses among them emerged a look-good brick-roofed with tiles long house; I stared the surprised-word inscribed on the wall “prohibited take these manure” I uttered myself, “Our fellow-Vietnamese from northern were to behave in an uncivilized way in a communist nation.” Who know, over-here was the famous revolution-cradle of Ho Chi Minh and Ngo Dinh Diem and the Hanoi called Inter-Region-4 Revolt-Headquarter then Inter-Region-5 was just executed the communist authorizations.
Long ago, in 1963 if it was happens the Ho/Ngo Solution, now our peoples would be prosperity. Who knew this was a ‘dirty-war’ that a United Nations Secretary U-Thanh had said. Only the WIB and Skull Bones won the silence-war. What was the outcome of that war in abundant proof of their guilt in vocabulary in dictionary having rich in unsavory words such as: Killing-Field, voted on foot, Reeducation Camp, Boat People, Economic Zone. What if the most damaged in Linebacker-II air campaign? On 8, May 1972, the MACV briefer stated that “pilots reported sixteen bombs out of twenty on the power plant. If there’re any lights burning in Hanoi tonight, they’ll be candlepower.” The U.S. tested new weapons for the next Middle-East-War in the stratagem “Eurasia Great Game” – Advances in technology since the bombing of North Vietnam earlier in the war were now providing greater accuracy and a humanitarian dividend as well. Newly introduced laser-guided bombs made it possible to take out in a single attack such point targets as key bridges that had withstood hundreds of attempts to destroy them with conventional munitions. “And with the smart bombs,” reported Seventh Air Force, “we don’t have any problem with the civilian population.” This aerial bombardment campaign, “ruined North Vietnam’s economy, paralyzed its transportation system, reduced imports (application Malthus theorem, an English Economic Science) by eighty percent and exhausted its air defenses.” Hanoi agreed, observed a history of PAVN, contrasting “Linebacker-II” with the “Rolling Thunder” campaign earlier in the war.
My perception, it was real war. This war was different than the first war of destruction. This time the U.S massed larger forces and made massive attacks right from the first day of operation, using many types of testing modernized technical weapons and equipment. Before ending the war according Cooper-Church and Case-Church, it’s very clear, easier understandable to me that – as far as my perception on this is concerned bombardment – and this air system is now running the best, and it is the most responsive, that it has ever been since the war started been over here.

Already the sun was hard and slicing through the morning haze, a warm-humid steady so light breeze coming in off the nearby mountainous area. One thing for sure, we were going to go the next remote and secret prison very far away from home – a Democratic Socialist Vietnam, it was simple the small communist country. It was a perfect day for prayer, a bright and tranquil morning. The skies and mountains were polished blue-green, slight soft winds bore silver-edged clouds, and it would have been easy to believe in some sort of heavenly power for the prisoners? No one in the wagon said a word. I all knew what had just happened to our cellmates.
The evening swept in quickly, draining the sunlight from my view and replacing it with dark, gloomy shadows. The mountain-world rapid drop in temperature brought a little chill to my skin, but if I sat very still, the throb from my stiff back and leg was bearable. With darkness in wagon, looking like Halloween goblins as I saw above the swinging oil lamp in faint hanging, I closed my eyes, laid my head back onto wagon wall, keeping patiently for another hard day.
Now the train passed a station Hang-Co, Hanoi, it made one round and slow down, I peered at the vicinity of Hanoi, there were still many peoples slept on the veranda in front yard of resident houses. There were still thatched, and mud-walls among isolated for brick and sandbag blockhouses. Any the communist countries were poor, why? Lenin in the hell should know imperialism still world wide prevailed. Why after WW-II, more than sixty countries restored their independent why not Vietnam! Skull and WIB men hijacked the Vietnam’s freedom and independence.
One more night passed away. I woke up that morning still bathed in the impurity of my dream, a nightmare. The numbness from my back and leg, which didn’t seem to keep me awake at night, gathered force the minute I opened my eyes. I wondered how it was that the human brain could shut down the nervous system during sleep, temporarily anesthetizing a disable man, but seemed incapable of doing the same while he was awake. At any rate, I lay here with my eyes closed the train continued proceed to nowhere how could I know. We are assumed in the status of U.S ally servicemen (the new legions) still officially as missing in action. Because with my sheer conception the Vietnam War wasn’t end yet – All right. Missing-In-Action is still better than Killed In Action. Historian George C. Herring in an article called “America and Vietnam: The Unending War” in the winter 1991-92 issue of Foreign Affairs, he explained, thought otherwise. “Such was the lingering impact of Vietnam War,” he explained, “that the Persian Gulf conflict appeared at times to be as much a struggle with its ghosts as with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
We were still many chances that some of us were alive out there, and my daily prayers for us went on almost like a subconscious litany. Sweat sprang from my face, my back, and I crashed onto my back against the wagon steel-wall, just trying to breathe again without cursing out loud.
The train heading to northwest and gradually goes up parallel along Red River. The atmosphere is little bite cool in the mountainous highland and I began to feel a bit uncomfortable with the situation. I still had a good view from the hatch-window. The sun continued its now rapid ascent to the higher top – Just another day in Hell.
The train is slow down and stops at Yen Bai Station. The guards walked out and opened the clock. The wagon big door slid wide-open, still chuckling to each other. Instantly, a serious voice like command-orders loudly cried, “hurry up…hurry up… unloaded” toward the standing by convoy of trucks which were too different as departure, now just no one truck having canvas-cover. Where about we heard the laughter of playing children, the sounds of old engines cranking to life, the calls of women to their neighbors; we are circled by numerous NVA troops.
After lined up in separated groups, each group composed 50 cellmates. Then we climbed up sat down flat like a duck flock.
Intentionally, the convoy proceeds with slow speed through the crowd of village-residents. Suddenly, the angry peoples welcome us by throw hail the stones toward our trucks with swear-word, an offensive express their anger such as Damn, Bloody very rude or offensive language.
Now we climb up on the unknown pass through numerous of stony hills and reaching a unknown county where we saw post placard inscribed word or phrase as power to people’ is their political campaign slogan. Now we saw a fighter MIG-19 was camouflaged under a thatched-roofed. I understood the subordinated country always being dependable to their patrons on spare parts like in Saigon regime in the past.
We reached at a ferry station. Everyone must steps down and walk to the boat been waiting.
We followed behind our truck driven on the ferry pier. Once again we climbed up to truck and set for a departure, arriving at a deep valley where has an old hanging bridge, once more time we going down to walk through the shake possible collapsing bridge, still hesitating about go ahead joining over whether to join expedition. Some distance don’t have bridge so that the convoy driven on the stone-rocks to pass the rivers. This scene recalled my view of bird when flown over Ho Chi Minh trail rock-bridges.
Now the convoy proceeded on highland road, left behind a huge earth mist dust. We crossed a long mile road along with the soviet invested plantation Tree “Bo-De” to the Soviet contracted this is a soft wood for reproduce paper. The sun continued its now rapid descent off to the west. The evening swept in quickly, draining the sunlight from this county, eventual replacing it with dark, gloomy shadow. After all, the convoy stops at a main gate of Prisoner “Inter-Camp-I” at Yen Bai headquarter. One guard tries to explain over here is village Viet Cuong, Yen Bai City and the province, Hoang Lien Son. Over here, we must courageous deal with our captivity in terms of live sentence. We must have to mentally prepare ourselves for a long haul. But I told myself that I ready would survive just one day at a time. We wouldn’t imagine our captivity as decades of tortured waiting, because if we really believed that, we would probably die. Our mind couldn’t accept being in prison for that long, and those kinds of thoughts would break us.
Finally, we steps down from truck and regrouped one by one in line and proceeding very far to a remote virgin forest and stay there cut trees, bamboo to made house for live. In the first week at North Vietnam, we were free for rest and relaxation. The screening individual identity will be processed during this week (checked to make sure they are suitable and able to be trusted) It was obvious to everyone that the prisoners of war must be treated like their held, beaten, and torture for years by years, much of that time served after they refused to accept freedom on terms that violated the POW code of honor governing the order of prisoner releases.
Two colonels got killed because strangled in tightest, lack oxygen inside a stingy wagon; now, during this week one more colonel was committed suicide by cut blood vein of his hand. But in the morning the blood automatically coagulated in air; so he was still survived.
One communist officer take among my group six peoples included me, to kill a cow for meat. Six of us go to the camp back yard, seeing a cow tied near a trunk of tree but not slaughterhouse. The guard said to me go head to kill the cow with a heavy hammer, the cruel killing of animal that I never did. We take turn to hit on her head, she’s still not unconscious. Meanwhile we believed the blow caused her to lose consciousness. The guard didn’t want waist time so he resumed only one blow, the cow fall on the ground and we used carving-knife to take out her blood. So cruel killing!
All Lieutenant colonels, we are now stayed in the Camp-3, and on the farther hill of the mountain was Camp-11 reserved for priests, monks. They celebrate a special class being so called “political study” (psychological warfare) that will be the main objective during the first week in North Vietnam. In this occasion the communist cadres were so proud to let us know, one U.S Progressive POW, when released but he wish to stay in the outstanding Communist society likely heroic Communist Hanoi. His name was Ho Chi Nam. Do you believe it this real?
After decades studying, now I do know, the CIA’s Standard Operation Procedure is a basic fundamental principle meant “come deep inside of tiger dens to catch the cubs or the enemy organ-sanctuary in ordeal for getting the truth information” So a decoy as None Commission Officer (NCO) named J. Garwood used to trick Hanoi into a position of witness the high officers of South Vietnam moving north as same 1945, Lieutenant Colonel Conein from OSS, agent 019 parachuted at Pat-Bo sanctuary into the waiting arms of Ho Chi Minh and Colonel Alfred Kitts watched the first French troop who enter the North Vietnam, come ashore at Hai-Phong on March 6, 1946.
In 1920, Soviet had the economic crisis, then dictatorship Stalin created a planning program that called the center Reeducation Camp. The main purpose forcing with hard labor work to class bourgeoisie or non-proletariat must be strictly activated in everywhere in Russia and the most was at Siberia. Therefore copying exactly to Soviet Union, the communist Hanoi moved the POW to remote area as Northwest of Hanoi for deprived of our physical plus mental and perished on the labor spot. How can we were forced doing so hard and struggling against starvation. If who were survived must settled in this remote area for live. In the past, 1950s, right here, the Vietnamese bourgeoisie had overcome meant not died. They had to be settled over here.
The communist has the experience to the exploitative policy of the most opponent like South Vietnam officials. So in starting program, they let us take easy for a while; labor with no quota for a limited number or amount of things, products that is strictly forced allowed. However after one month, they put on a harsh punishment worked schedule, we have to face up to the cruel realities of life harshly. We have done our quota of work for each day, fall the Bo-De trees and hand-saw to cut the wood for a fifteen feet tree-trunk, then carried them to the spot for truck loading to export to Russia paper-mill. Everyday our team must done 60 pieces in quota. They didn’t care about security; few time the tree-trunk slipped out of our shoulders because after the spell rain, on the slippery earth then gliding down to the mountain feet, hit our cellmates. If went to county dispensary there don’t have medicine, just merely helped by its rather antiseptic furnishings or an antiseptic bandage.
Next month we switch to go up the high mountain and fall the big tree for making furniture or coffin. It hard to believe that three hundred prisoners fastened round by the wild-strings on the edge of the trunk to form a knot and together pull it down to the feet of mountain; unbelievable, after one week the long tree-trunk was in front of the camp. Once again next month, we changed the job to invent a new road like the pioneers route constructors. Digging through the hill to make a tunnel, dig down into the stony-soil, dig the soil away from the roots, digging up the tree by its roots. But we are not on an act of digging like exploring of a place for the purpose of archaeology.
Now, all of us were already exhausted our strength, the state of being extremely tired, total loss of strength even into spirit to escape. Communist cadres, they understood this cruel policy very clearly and logically. They intended to damage our muscles and brains. The muscles becoming less elastic body tissue that can be un-tightened or relaxed to produce movement any more; how can we overcome through a terrible ordeal facing so much difficulty and painful experience; like any major challenge in life, you have to take it in bits and pieces. You don’t try to tackle the whole thing at once. Now we ventured farther into that black tunnel of captivity, we needed a limited point of reference or that darkness would just overwhelm us.
You just need to make it to tomorrow, I told myself. If you wake up tomorrow, you’ll figure out how to survive tomorrow. Today, you’ve got to figure out how to survive today!
And still, there was no way to know when it was all going to end. So, even though I was trying to convince myself not to worry about it, those images of endless years would continue to ambush my mind.
Naturally, during long years starving and harsh work, one certain day we were so weak to walk, weakened by hunger becoming such the weaklings. Thereby avoiding any exploitation-problems with hard labor, they recreated some particular-groups for weakling such as raising crop, vegetable; sliced bamboo skin string for weaving baskets carrying soil, stone to group road construction, or from strip of willow for kitchen. Brick, tiles production, tailor for prisoner uniform, raising pig. Staying inside, everyday numerous speakers encircled the Camp repeated Prime Minister Dong announcement “Let them work so hard but less food…” That meant soon or later all should be killed by starving. At night we had listened one communist cadre explained the communist doctrine after Lenin was excellent. For months we never see rice ever, just dries potatoes, cassavas (manioc) corns, or horse-food which we named Bo-Bo that if you didn’t have enough teeth all of them after digestive they came out the same. Few of them with merely salt water – That’s it!
Every one wished having a good Sunday, but some Sunday we must work and they called “work for support an excellent socialism”. Some prisoners their hairs color became salt more than pepper and so old-ugly. We probably bathed only once a week, that meant submerged under a small pond where the domestic shit-manure pots were frequently cleaned there too. And the so called bathed lasted about five minutes, and from across the pond we could smell manure sting, musk, but it was no longer offensive. In a land of no colognes or perfumed soap, your nose quickly adapts to the scents of the local sting environment, if not the local litter. We knew we couldn’t deal with our captivity in term of years, but we had to mentally prepare ourselves for a real long haul.

(continued)

[vinhtruong]

Queenbee-1 in the cage

What’s different between Old POW and New POW?
In the early 1977, one half prisoners of my camp must displace to the border China/ Vietnam. The job was road construction. Near China border located by a small county named Than-Uyen where the atmosphere was adverse effects of the virgin forest and so much poisoned in foliage, the animal, insect, and mushroom. As usual, we went into virgin forest took material from wood such as bamboo palm Tree-Vau to build shelters for the next our new coming fellow from south. In this new-Camp we met few Old POW means they were worn prison-garb color dark-pink and white strips like U.S POW worn, as for us we worn prison-garb blue and white strips. Among of them were captured in Operation Lam Son 719, and among them, a few were my buddies VNAF fighter pilot as Lieutenant Luong F-5, helicopter H-34 pilots Lieutenant Bưu, Khanh, and crew-chiefs On, Son, all they worn pink and white strips garb. Another word meant they were captured before Saigon Fall as for us after Cruel April 1975.
On December 7, 1971 the Permanent Government’s policy of progressive withdrawal through the so called “Vietnamization” was well underway. The burden of fighting the war was being passed more fully to the Vietnamese and U.S troops were being brought home at a dramatic rate. Indeed, and ironically in retrospect, the plan seemed to be going well. There was little enemy activity inside South Vietnam and the insurgent guerrilla war had pretty well ended. Literally, the calm did not last long however. [In early March 1972, Soviet General Pavel Batitski was in Hanoi to assess Hanoi’ requirements, the U.S-Company-Dynasty called “Inventory” dispensed old batch out of date weapons and will receive new batch weapon as SAM2, T-55, 57, rockets salvo…about 700 millions tons after Paris Talk, all this new batch weapon for overrun Saigon, invasion Cambodia, and defense counterattack to Red China in 1979]
Consequently, after General Batìtski left, right away General Vo Nguyen Giap launched his major offensive of the war. 30th March 1972, the NVA troops launched their attacks, it became known as the 1972 Easter Offensive. It was not an uprising of the insurgent Viet Cong, as had been the case in the Tet Offensive of 1968. Instead, this campaign was a series of conventional attacks by the regular NVA across the DMZ from Communist North Vietnam, and from sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia with advances designed to cut the country of South Vietnam in half through the Central Highlands, and to strike the South’s capital city of Saigon. The communist failed in 1972 after some very hard fighting by the South Vietnamese Army and Air forces, and the determined help of those American forces remaining. As I said because Hanoi don’t know the means of “Decent Interval” [wait for Paris Talk as officially announcement U.S troops honorable withdrawal in coming year and receiving 700 million tons new batch of weapons: axiom-1 and axiom-3 done]
The offensive began in early April 1972 with advances of NVA forces toward Saigon from out of Cambodia and attacks toward the ancient capital of Hue from out of NVA across the DMZ. The final movement of this well orchestrated battle plan came from northern Cambodia and southern Laos as the NVA attempted to replicate the 1954 successes of the Viet Minh against the French at Dien Bien Phu , in wrestling control of a wide belt across the central part of the south, and destroying French military capability in the process. The Communist Army achieved some initial success, but was denied every major objective. In the north, they advanced only to Quang Tri, and were defeated by South Vietnamese Airborne and Marine. In the south, they moved only as far as An Loc before being defeated. And in the Central Highlands, they captured some outposts surrounding Kontum, but were again defeated.

I recount this bit of history as background to a personal drama that played out at this time for Lieutenant Luong, a brave F-5 fighter pilot, now he was my cellmate in this camp: He recalled on July 9 1971. One combat formation of three F-5s had strafing on target at Katum, Tay Ninh province, closed border Vietnam/Cambodia at coordinated XT-140745. Three F-5s took turn in dived pattern, suddenly on wingman got hit in flames and crash. This wing man be shot down was Lieutenant Luong, his fate of the F-5 was sealed by an SA7-Strella shoulders-fired-missile. While his firebird at 4,000 feet. The missile scored a direct hit a severed impact on the jet-engine exhausted, causing the F-5 to burst into flames and crash. Luong managed to bail out the spot where the borders of Vietnam/Cambodia. The place was called Katum. There was a Ranger Battalion of about 350 soldiers and two American advisors. They were under attack by element for three NVA divisions supported by tank T-54 band PT-76. The tanks just had overrun the perimeter, and NVA regiments occupied much of the base.
The F-5 flight leader radioed for rescue at once and for a scrambled message fact orders for rescue. Permission was denied, the Flight leader hotly requested again, asked again, denied, more tersely this time, again, the leader didn’t yet know the degree of urgency at Katum fire-base, but was infuriated at the moment for not being allowed to help another pilot in obvious need. Now situation was worse, 5 tanks within the perimeter wire and NVA troops everywhere. The friendly forces survivors had consolidated in the command bunker at the center of the camp and were fighting very hard to keep the enemy at bay, they called friend’s artillery to fire on the Headquarters' area because the T.54 enemy tanks had crossed the defense line.
Two F-5s were still strafing for air-cover but in vain. Lieutenant Luong touch-down, he had a badly hurt his bruised neck and swollen face. Though superficial scratch on his neck, face, head, but he was in the midst of many thousands of attacking enemy soldiers, but was able to evade his foes for one day before being captured.
Now and then, Lieutenant Luong was interrogated for a couple days, treated pretty brutally. He was a physical mess, his head neck and face swollen in bruised scratch. His ankle swollen had filled tighten his boot with stiff rigid flesh that was now dried solid. He was felt couple day in the hell. He’d had no control over his bowels or bladder and had soiled himself badly. And Luong would had several leaches cling to his body, all of which itched he should pulled off, except for one which unknowingly was half way into his ass hole.
He was questioned, beaten, threatened, and had his arms tied behind his back with the telephone-wires increasingly tightened during intimidated-interrogation, until finally both his shoulders dislocated and Luong’s elbows were pulled tightly together against his stiff-rigid-numbness spine with terror. Finally, the interrogations ceased, and Luong was marched for seven consecutive days to a dip jungle prison camp that, by his estimation, must have been just across the border in northern Cambodia. He was, may be in security zone, given his flight-boots back, but no laces and no socks. After seven days of walking, his feet were like raw ground meat in big sausages by the time Luong limped, in much pain, up to the entrance to his first prison.

Finally, Luong was in the First prison on July 16, 1971. This camp was typical of the image many have. It was carved out of the virgin deep triple jungle canopies below and built of bamboo. The camp was surrounded by a bamboo wall that was reminiscent of an old cavalry frontier fort in the American WWW. There was one wall concentrically within another, with a ditch dug between the two, almost moat-like. In the ditch were many sharp-punji-stakes [Chong-Tre] pieces of bamboo, knife sharp, dipped in human waste and stuck in the ground. If someone felt on these, he’d die of a wound to a vital organ, or bleed to death, or at least die of infection if he were not killed outright. Across that ditch was a log that one had to balance across to gain entry to the camp. Inside the walls were numerous bamboo cages that housed priority ARVN officers, and of course two Americans POW. The prisoner population was South Vietnamese military, there were indigenous mountain people referred to as Montagnards or Mountain-ỳards who had allied with U.S Special Forces, and there were two Americans, himself and another helicopter pilot captured a month earlier. At least a couple hundred prisoner altogether, condition in that camp were deplorable, prisoners lived like worst animals. They were kept in cages, most of which were not tall enough to stand up in for even physical exercise. That wasn’t necessary anyway, because Communist Cadres want kept their feet in wooden stocks as lockers. With their starvation, disable, would escaped, prisoners could not lie back, so they slept sitting up. And every night rats scurried through the cages and nibbled on their dirty flesh, wounds, bamboo cuts scratches, for food; while they couldn’t move their feet in the stocks, and couldn’t keep them away, and they un-scared hate rats to those nights.
The only time they got out of those cages was for a daily toilet call at the camp latrine. The time never seemed to be the same on any given day, and if a certain prisoner’s internal schedule could not want for the appointment time [due to many suffered dysentery] them he went all over himself in the cage. When they did let them out, it was a walk to the “facility” in one corner of the camp. Over here, Luong discovered that the latrine was a couple of holes in the ground that one squatted over to relieve oneself. Problem was that many of the sicker prisoners were not able to hold themselves until getting all the way to the holes, and left their waste in piles all around the area. Some of the very sickest prisoners, near death, were placed in hammocks right next to the latrine, and they would either lay there and soil themselves, time after time, or roll out of their hammock, if they could and take a couple of steps and go there on the ground. The result was a substantial accumulation of human waste all around the holes that were the latrine. Those able to control themselves were forced to walk through that waste field and squat over the holes. On return to their cages, they had no way to clean themselves.
Lieutenant Luong didn’t remember water being a big problem. It was delivered in pieces of bamboo like a cup, and there seemed to be sufficient quantities. It was supposedly boiled, but he still came down with bloody dysentery. Food was a problem. Their diet was almost exclusively rice mixed dry-corn-potato. Prisoners would get one coconut sized ball mid-morning, and another mid-afternoon. Occasionally, they’d get the treat of a merely tuberous root called manioc. It is very much like yacca in Latin American countries, his weight went from around 155 pounds to something around little more than 100 in just a few weeks. He was skin hanging on bone with beard that grew very long over time, he did not shave for over half year. And he received no medical attention at all. And no one fared any better. One ARVN infantry officer next to him in his cage had a severe chest wound that had been bandaged long ago, but Luong never saw the dressing changed, and the hole in his chest wall was never repaired. He was too young and strong mind, but Luong was certain that gentleman did not survive.
Oh God! They lived like animals, and under these filthy, starvation conditions, without medical care, it seemed that someone died almost everyday; The bodies would be carried out and buried on a hillside just outside the camp. As a Project Delta Queen Bee pilot, I will always feel a great sense of admiration of our brave men who volunteered for the risky mission to rescue our fellow Americans in the heart of the enemy country. I am reminded of a scripture reading taken from the Old Testament: ISAIAH, Verse 8. Then I heard the Lord asking: “Also I heard the voice of the Lord saying, who I shall send and who shall go for us? Then said I, here am I, Send me” and "Whom shall I send as a messenger to my people? Who will go for us?" and I said, "Lord, I'll go. Send me."
William A. Harriman retired from public life urged his successor to assert his leadership while Hanoi put POW in the Buffalo-cart, or Oxen-cart went around Hoang Kiem’ Lake. That’s not right violated, against UN constitution, the POW’s plight final humiliation at the hands of Hanoi captured.

(continued)

[vinhtruong]

Queenbee-1 in the cage

-So why the mission? By 1970, the US had secured the names of over 500 Americans held in North Vietnam prisons. Many more were missing and presumed captured. Reports of the cruelty suffered by these men at the hands of their barbarous captors were received along with reports of resultant deaths from various sources. Anxiety, concern and anger among the next of kin, friends of the captives, commanders and government officials were very much in evidence throughout this country. What was being done to alleviate the growing concern? Negotiations were being conducted in Paris on a sporadic basis depending on the mood of the North Vietnamese representatives. An attempt was made to reach an agreement whereby an exchange of prisoners of war could be made. After over two years of such negotiations, the results were ZERO. The mood of the country demanded that something be done to help these suffering POWs. Was the time ripe for an initiative-- feasible alternative?
On November 20-21, 1970, a joint force composed of USAF Special Operations and rescue personnel and U.S. Army Special Forces, supported by U.S. Navy Carrier Task Force 77, made a daring raid on the Son-Tay Prison Camp located less than 45 kilometers from Hanoi, North Vietnam. Although no prisoners were rescued, the raid focused world attention on the plight of the prisoners of war (POWs) raised their morale and resulted in improved living conditions for all U.S. prisoners of the North Vietnamese. The men of the Joint Task Force earned the admiration of their countrymen for risking their lives in an attempt to bring freedom to others. -Execution: Final briefings were conducted on 20 November. All were told the exact location of the objective area and that the latest information indicated between 70 and 80 POWs should be at that location -- the Son Tay Prison. While they were confident that the plan had not been compromised, they would not be certain until they made the landing. If the enemy had foreknowledge of their plan, the reception would not be a pleasant one. Even though the task force was small, it was extremely potent for its size. While it could have been overwhelmed by a much larger force laying in waiting, the enemy would have paid a heavy price. Escape and evasion procedures were thoroughly covered. Satisfied that the mission force was fully in a "go" position, they proceeded to Monkey Mountain at Danang, where a mal staff had arranged for a command post from which the entire operation could be controlled. Communications were available to all elements including US Navy Carrier Task Force, as well as to Admirals McCain and Moorer. With leader-head at the command post were expert fighter were at Takhli and Udorn, Thailand respectively, and immediately available on direct communication lines. Frisbie, with a small staff, was airborne in a radio relay aircraft that could function as an alternate command post if they were to lose their communications capability. An intelligence staff member, Art Andraitus, was in Japan monitoring the SR-71 photo results of a mission during late 20 November. He reported them that the photo Intelligent was positive (signs of habitation - vehicle tracks, etc) for the troops 20 November was a day for "crew rest." Dr. Joe Cataldo issued sleeping pills. At 22:00 hours the men boarded a C-130 and left Takhli for Udorn Thailand where helicopters were waiting. Upon landing at Udorn the men transferred to three of the helicopters - two HH-53s and one HH-3 - carefully rechecking all the equipment that had been deemed necessary for the mission that lay ahead. At 23:18 hours the first helicopter launched; at 23:25 hours the last helicopter launched. They were led by two KC-130 air-refueling on airway to an air refueling area over Northern Laos. All standing out on the porches and wherever there was a place to watch. They all spoke a quiet word of greeting and wished us good luck, but none asked what we were up to. They had been ordered to stand down a couple of days or so before, to ensure their aircraft were in top mechanical condition for us to use. Even the tower operator was ordered to ignore our taxi-out without radio transmissions.
Just as they had practiced, the formation lead KC-130P refueled aircraft, Lime One, got off on time, as did the rest of them, the HH-3 Banana, and five Apple HH-53s. They routinely fell into the seven ship formation, three helicopters stacking high on each side of the leading HC-130 at about 1500 feet AGL. There was a partial moon and some clouds that they climbed through, when suddenly the call came to ''break, 'break, 'break!', indicating that someone had lost sight of the formation lead and they were to execute the formation break-up procedure. Each helicopter turned to a predetermined heading and climbed to a predetermined altitude for one minute and then returned to the original landing. The effect was a very widely separated formation, each helicopter 500 ft above the other and at varying distances away from the lead HC-140. They could see other members of the formation flying in and out of the clouds, and I thought they had blown the mission they had hardly started. Apparently a strange airplane had almost flown through the formation and someone had called the lost contact procedure to avoid a mid-air collision. As it turned out, their planning for such possible events, and the training for such, resulted in a rather routine formation break and with a subsequent rejoin being completed successfully. In the meantime, they had all topped off our fuel tanks from the lead HC-130 and had quite deftly exchanged formation leads from him to the just-arrived, blacked-out C-130 with all the fancy electronic gear."
Flight leader, A/C of the lead HC-130, "Lime One," recalls "Our mission was to launch from Udorn, join up with the six helicopters and lead them to the North Vietnam border. After joining up we refueled the five HH-53s and the HH-3. This was done in total silence without any incidents. The HH-3 stayed close behind our left wing in order to maintain the speed required by the rest of formation. After leaving the helicopters for their final assault, we immediately returned to Udorn for refueling. We were to refuel as soon as possible and return to northern Laos area to provide air refueling and search and rescue support as needed." Happily, the weather in the refueling area was clear. All refueling are accomplished without difficulty. All six helicopters then joined formation with an MC-130 Combat Talon for the low altitude flight toward North Vietnam. The area over Laos is a mountainous area requiring precise navigation by the MC-130 crews. In the meantime the five Skyraider/A-1s had departed Nakhon Phanom and joined formation with the second MC-130 Combat Talon. This formation was in close proximity of the MC-130/helicopter flight. All were en-route at low altitude for Son Tay Prison. Close air support was the job of the Skyraider-A/1s because they were ideally suited in precision-strike on targets. They had long endurance capability, carried a big load of ordnance and their relatively low speed permitted small orbits which would keep them close by overhead should assistance be needed on short notice. Ten Phantom/F-4s had taken off from Ubon to provide a MIG air patrol and five Thunderchief/F-105 Wild Weasels had launched from Korat to provide protection from the SAM sites. The Phantom/F-4s and Thunderchief/F-105s would be flying at a high altitude providing cover over the general area and would not interfere in any way with the primary force.
The Navy force launched on time with a total of 59 sorties. As the primary force reached the Laos/North Vietnam border, the enemy radar's became aware of the Navy force coming from over the Tonkin Gulf. The diversionary raid was having the desired effects. The presence of the Navy on enemy radar caused near panic conditions within the North Vietnamese defense centers. It became obvious that the North Vietnamese total concern was directed eastward. Our raiding force, coming from the west, in effect had a free ride. Meanwhile, in Apple-Two, as Jay Strayer vividly remembers - Tension was building up by this time, as they neared the Initial-Point for the final approach to the camp. They had done most of the flying up to this point, and Jack Allison took over the controls for the final phase, in turn picked up the navigation duties during this critical phase of the mission. As they had rehearsed so many times, the lead C-130 led them over the last mountain range and down to 500 ft above the ground. At the Initial-Point, they, along with Apple-Four and -Five, popped up to 1,500 feet to fly directly for the camp. A single radio transmission with the last vector heading to the camp was made by the C-130's navigator and they continued on, maintaining a disciplined radio silence. Now they were only four – Apple- Three in the lead with the HH-3, Apple'-One and -Two following in trail, with 45-second separations between. They’re particularly interested in this phase, for they had done the procedural planning for getting them separated in a manner that would allow room for each to "do his thing," while at the same time not delaying the following bird's initial assault details." Upon reaching the IP (Initial Point), the MC-130 climbed to 1,500 feet. The 130's mission at this point was to drop flares over the Son Tay Prison. Choppers-4 and -5 were to provide a backup and were to drop flares should the C-130 flares not be effective. The flares worked as intended. The choppers made a left turn and proceeded to a pre-selected landing area which was on an island in a large lake. There they would wait, hopefully to be called to move to Son Tay Camp to pick up some POWs. The C-130 made a right turn and dropped fire-fight simulators (deception) and napalm to create a fire as an anchor point for the Skyraider/AD-6s. The C-130 then left the area for an orbit point over Northern Laos. Immediately after the flares illuminated the prison compound HH-53 Apple-Three, under the command of Marty Donohue, flew low over the prison firing at the guard towers with his Gatling machine guns. The plan called for neutralizing the guard towers to eliminate that potential source of enemy opposition. Immediately following Donohue's pass the HH-3, whose crew was Herb Kalen, Herb Zender and Leroy Wright and carrying Meadows with his 13-man assault force, landed in a relatively small space inside the prison walls; So far all is going strictly according to plan and precisely on time.
The landing was a hard one, but successful. Rotors contacted some of the tall trees which bordered one side of the landing area. It was anticipated that damage would occur and the plan provided for the HH-3 to be considered a loss. By means of an explosive charge with a timing device, it was to be destroyed upon departure of our troops from the compound. The hard landing caused a fire extinguisher to dislodge and crashed against Sgt LeRoy Wright, HH-3 Crew-chief, fracturing an ankle. While undoubtedly this caused severe pain, the flow of adrenaline apparently was such that Sgt Wright ignored the pain and continued with his duties to perform as a member of Meadows' assault force. [Sgt Wright was later awarded the Air Force Cross by President Nixon] Dick Meadows and his highly trained and rehearsed assault force, including the helicopter Air Force crew members, went into action immediately. With bullhorns they announced that it was a rescue raiding party and were there to bring out the POWs. North Vietnamese military personnel exited the buildings in various states of undress and fired their weapons against the intruders. The raiders, however, having the benefit of initiative, a rehearsed plan of action and not suffering from the element of shock that was imposed on the defenders quickly disposed of the camp contingent. Meadow's primary concern now was to enter the buildings to search for Americans held prisoner by the North Vietnamese. The timed explosive charge was placed in the HH-3 to ensure its destruction upon departure of the raiders. With the use of another explosive device a hole was blown in the southwest corner of the prison wall. The raiders and the POWs would exit through this hole. Col Bud Sydnor's command-post would be established just outside the wall at the site of the hole.
Simultaneous with the landing of the assault force, HH-53s Apple-One and -Two were to land opposite the south side and immediately fan out and conduct a search of all the buildings in search of Americans and to prevent reinforcements from interfering in any way with the rescue effort. Apple-One, with Simons and 21 raiders aboard, mistakenly landed at a site enclosed by a fence that presented an appearance not unlike the Son Tay Compound. It was approximately 200 meters south of the objective area. A fire fight immediately ensued where the estimate of enemy killed ran as high as about 200 – [a number which may be somewhat exaggerated] This raiding element was on the ground for not more than five minutes when the mistake was realized. Simons and his men re-boarded the helicopter and moved to the correct position at the Son Tay Prison.

(continued)