THE BOMB, THE BUGLE, AND THE GUY WITH NO NAME

During my initial checkout in the Bird Dog I carried a .38 in a shoulder holster because this was more comfortable than a gun-belt. It didn’t interfere with the seat belt or dig into my back. When I began to fly the SOG mission I augmented my personal armament to include an AR-15 which I bungeed to the door, a helmet-bag full of ammo clips under my seat, and about a dozen frag and smoke grenades which I hung from a wire across the back of the seat. I thought it was so cool to lob these grenades out the window while pretending to be as lethal as the B-24 bomber my father flew over Burma; just flip the Bird-Dog over on it’s back in a sloppy split-S, get right down on the trees, and fling my little weapon at a deserted hooch. Fighter-bombers are us. This lasted about a week. While occasional ground-fire was a fact of life, the first time my airplane took a hit was nothing if not a come-to-Jesus moment. When I got back to Kontum and inspected my “battle damage” I realized that a well-placed round into one of those grenades would provide me with an immediate and personal introduction to whomever it is that welcomes you to eternity. The grenades went back into their storage boxes and I traded the shoulder holster for a gun belt. When I got back into the airplane I turned the holster so that the gun nestled between my legs. As far as I was concerned, this was body armor!

In the late winter of 1970 I took a Special Forces E-8 on a recon of potential landing zones for an upcoming mission he would be running in North East Cambodia. The sergeant was a tall, skinny guy who had been in Vietnam for at least three tours, and his specialty was demolitions. He showed up in Dak To, our launch airfield for SOG missions, with a C-ration box, on top of which was attached a red smoke grenade. I have no idea why I didn’t question the contents of the box; I was probably preoccupied with the location of the LZs, which were in some ugly areas with respect to terrain and ground fire. When I did inquire as to the contents of the box I must have half-heard the explanation. On the way over to our area of reconnaissance my passenger asked me over the interphone if I thought we’d see a few hooches or maybe a bridge. Still not connecting the dots I said I knew just the place, two small valleys connected at one end, making an “L” that had some huts and a gun emplacement, but no gun. I dropped down onto the deck and came into one of the valleys at 90 degrees then banked hard and came right over the huts. I felt the box bump my right shoulder and then it was out the window. Another hard bank and we were crossing the ridge away from the valley, but we could see some red smoke and then a bang that stopped my heart. This whacko had packed the middle of that box with C4, arranged claymores around the outside of the C4, and used the smoke grenade to mark the box’s path down. I don’t know what was used as a detonator and I never want to know. What I do know is that, almost always, stupid is as stupid does. That was really stupid. I’m pretty sure that the C-Ration Box Bomb incident coincided with apex of my bullet-proof stage. I wasn’t finished being bullet proof at this point, but I given up all pretense of, as Curtis LeMay said, “bombing them back into the stone-age”.

John Plaster was another Special Forces E8 who rode with me on a recon of potential landing zones for a linear patrol he would lead in the same area of North East Cambodia. After the war he authored a book about the SOG mission and the people involved in CCC (Command and Control Central), and was featured in a documentary shown on the Learning Channel in the late 90’s about the secret war in Laos and Cambodia. The recon was uneventful, unusual for that area, and on the way back we chatted about this mission, which was to be his final one before going home. That you can have a casual chat while traversing very hostile enemy territory is surreal, but our conversation was even nuttier. John had written to his Dad and requested a bugle, which he was going to use on the patrol. His Dad couldn’t find one so he sent John an air-horn instead. Sgt. Plaster explained that a favorite tactic of the NVA was to parallel the route of recon and just before the SOG patrol reached the extraction LZ the NVA would set up an L-shaped ambush and spring it just as the team was ready to come out. John planned to use the air horn to see if it would upset the NVA strategy.

By pure coincidence my daughter and I watched the Vietnam documentary on the Learning Channel. And to my surprise there was John, talking about the SOG operation. I recognized him instantly by the moustache he retained, not the hair he had lost. I looked at Alanna and said “that’s John Plaster. Let’s see if he tells the story about the air-horn”. He did. As the NVA moved into position he blew that thing and waited, and waited, and waited. The NVA took off in a panic and the extraction went off without a casualty. John was laughing as he recounted this in the documentary, and so was I. Just nuts. Alanna looked at me and asked how I knew about the air horn, so I told her that I flew Sgt. Plaster on the recon of the LZs. “What were you doing over there” she demanded. “I just don’t know”, and I still don’t.

One of the missions I liked the least was a low-level photo recon almost immediately after a B-52 strike. This area of N.E. Cambodia and S.E. Laos looked like a moonscape because of the bombing, and when you went in to photograph you could still smell the burning from the high explosives. We started out using a SOG photographer from CCC until one morning when we took extremely intense ground fire. The low ship, piloted by Phil Phillips, had the aileron controls shot out and the photographer was killed. The next time we had to do this, I flew low ship, and I did this without a high bird-dog as cover. When I got to the airfield in Kontum I was met by The Guy with No Name. A guy with no uniform. A guy with a really big camera with an even bigger lens and a rapid-fire shutter. I introduced myself and no return introduction was forthcoming. Then off we went.

We flew into Laos at around 9000 feet, and then started a slow spiral down into an eventual split-S which got me down to about 500 feet above the ground. I know, I know, 1500 feet was supposed to be the minimum altitude allowed, but you couldn’t see squat so we usually operated a whole lot lower. The Guy With No Name took about 100 rolls of film as we covered the area, then low-leveled out of Laos, breathed a sigh of relief as we climbed up to altitude over Vietnam, heading back to Kontum. Like nobody could shoot at you over Vietnam, only over Laos and Cambodia. After landing we had a little debrief. I told my photographer that if I got shot down I had a 50-50 chance to survive if I got captured. I then said that with him in my backseat I had no chance. Because The Guy with No Name was dressed in an olive-drab T-shirt, camouflaged fatigue pants, jungle boots, and a bush hat. No name, no uniform, no rank, no chance. I told him that I didn’t care if he showed up in a Sea Bee uniform. Just wear something official. So the next day he showed up in Navy fatigues with the rank of Chief Petty Officer. Just what I’d expect to find in the Central Highlands. As my daughter Meighan was fond of saying, “I can’t know”. Oh yeah, I never remembered his name.