A Thousand Ways to Die

It seems apparent that death comes easy in the "Land of a Million Elephants" and it really does.  It is not just the bullets, hand grenades and booby traps you have to survive, but the the terrain, the weather, the diseases, the flora and fauna, and a whole lot of other things.  One of the very first lessons I learned was that you have to be a lot more vigilant on back trails as they are the ones most often booby trapped.  The main trails the villagers use along with enemy soldiers are watched for the most part, so in almost every case, they are not booby trapped.  Moving down the main trails in daylight is a guarantee for capture or death.  But at night, the villagers and enemy soldiers tend to stay in their compounds and houses or encampments. You can move, if you are very careful, down the main trails with some success.  A lot of times the soldiers watching the trails fall asleep or are otherwise occupied.  

Using the back trails is sometimes necessary, but must be done carefully.  Some areas are not booby trapped at all, others are heavily so.  Vigilance is the key here.  Looking for things out of place...things just not right.  Dead falls, punji pits, trip lines, etc., were all menaces of the back trails.  It was not normal for Bailey or myself to endure a lot of this because we usually just did the insertion and extraction duties, not make the humps with SF SOG guys.  Later on, some real hard core combat controllers were embedded with the SOG teams, but not at this particular time.  Now that I have said that, let me clarify a little.  We never knew what the other air force personnel in the panhandle and southern Laos were doing.  Some were with the Butterfly program and others could have done work with the SOG teams along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  Someone else would have to furnish that information. We only knew about our part of the Laotian War as we only operated in Northern Laos from Vientiane north to Chinese border and east to the North Vietnamese border. 

 

The flora and fauna could be a menace as well.  There were many kinds of poisonous plants, razor grass, and thorn bushes that would rip the clothes right off of you if you walked just a few hundred yards in them not to mention what they did to you body.  You certainly didn't want to try and run through them. 

Snakes were another problem altogether.  There were a lot of snakes.  This was the land of snakes. Leave them alone and they would probably leave you alone.  There was at least four kinds of Cobras. The Monocled cobra was the most prevalent of the Cobra family.....also the most aggressive.   The King Cobra was a big poisonous snake.  However, left alone it was pretty docile.  I saw several of these while in Laos.  For me the Russell's Viper was as dangerous a snake as there was.  It is almost invisible in the jungle, it packs a lot of venom and it tends to be aggressive.  More people die from Russell's Viper bites than from any other poisonous snake  in S.E. Asia.  There was a statistic provided by the Australian embassy that 37 out of every 100 poisonous snake bites ended up in death.  With Russell's Vipers, it was much higher.  The reason that 63 people did not die from poisonous snake bites is they probably did not get envenomed by the bite.  A great many times people were bitten but it was a defensive strike and the snake did not inject venom.  But if you sustained a real bite, there was not much help if you were out in the boonies.  The only real infirmary was in the Australian Embassy in Vientiane.  If you were close enough to aircraft, you might be flown to somewhere in Europe or Japan where you could receive treatment, but even then you had to be awfully lucky to survive.  The other dangerous snake (just because it likes to live near humans) is the Common Krait shown in the left picture.  The Russell's viper is on the right.  The Kraits venom is ten times more powerful than a King Cobra.

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Then there were the insects.  Scorpions as big as your hand (not deadly but very painful) and foot long centipedes head the list.  I have been stung by both and neither is a pleasant experience.  There were other biting bugs and stinging ants in plentiful supply.  But the one insect that would drive you nuts was the mosquitoes.  They could, at times, descend on you like a moving cloud.  Sometimes you could use a repellent supplied by the military, but out in the bush, the enemy could smell it a mile away so you didn't use it very often if at all.  

Next for me as a miserable creature were the leeches.  They were everywhere during the rainy season.  I was familiar with leeches because I had dealt with them when I was a kid.  We had a creek we swam in that at times had leeches in it.  My grandmother would put salt on them and they would then fall off.  In Laos, it was almost impossible not to have them attach themselves to you.  And once you removed them, or they got the meal they wanted and fell off, you bled like a stuck pig for hours.  Not dangerous but a nuisance of an unbelievable nature and you looked just like you felt, a bloody mess.

Then there were tigers, elephants, leopards, black bears, and a host of other mammals to contend with in the jungles and mountains of Laos.  I saw several tigers while in N.E. Laos and had personal encounters with two.   I heard a lot more of them at night in the mountains as they roared looking for a mate or after a kill.     I also did see some that hunters had killed for the skins and internal organs which had some perceived medicinal value to the Chinese.  Never saw a bear in the wild, but did see two leopards.  However, some villagers used elephants and did see a few of them, never in the wild however.  Someone asked about crocodiles.  I don't think that there was any large crocodiles left in northern Laos by the time I got there.  I saw some three to six footers, but never a big one.  There could have been some further south, but never saw a large on up north.  They were pretty well hunted out in the 1950's. 

Then there were the inevitable aircraft crashes.  Whether from mechanical trouble or from ground fire, many Laotian and Air America aircraft and helicopters made hard landings.  Sometimes the aircrews walked away from the crashes, sometimes they didn't.  The UH-34 helicopter was made in part from magnesium which when set on fire went up like a giant sparkler.  If it got hit just right, even if you managed to get it on the ground, you could still be burned alive from the fire before you could get out.  SAR (Search and Rescue) missions were run by Air America when it came to Laotian and Air America aircraft downings.  At some point MACV and the USAF ran SAR for USAF aircraft, but at times the only SAR available were the Air America aircrews.  One of the times that the helicopter I was riding in went down was when we were on an SAR mission looking for a downed C-123 out of Savannakhet in the panhandle of Laos which caused an SAR mission to retrieve us.  There was a lot of ground fire going on but we never saw or heard anything that would indicate we had been hit, but that's sometimes the case.

 

Anyway, this is just a few of the many ways to die in Laos. 

Part III - The Poppy Wars or, to the ones involved, 

"Poppy Ops"

One of the most eye opening things that happened in Laos was what was known as the Poppy Wars, or as Bailey and I observed, "Poppy Ops."  For all the denials of drugs for weapons that went on in the Reagan Administration during Iran/Contra investigations, it was nothing in comparison to what went on in Laos.  There was a literal war going on between Gen Vang Pao and at least two drug lords in China and Burma.  I am not sure of their names although I heard them named several times.  Up to 400 tons of opium was being moved out of Burma and through Laos into Thailand each year. I had heard that the amount was 40 tons from 1958 until 1961 when apparently the flood gates opened up for trafficking down into Thailand.  I remember the CIA in the late 1960's denying that they were involved, but involved they were....right up to their eyeballs.  In the motion picture "Air America" the pilots were depicted as moving dope for guns and such.  Although I am sure that some of that went on, most of the Air America pilots never really knew what they were flying from one place to another except for what was marked on the bags and crates.  They may have some inkling that it was drugs, but it wasn't openly discussed even if they knew.  There were other more secure ways of moving drugs in Laos than using Air America to do the job.

On almost any visit to Vientiane you could spot the drug runners by how they dressed and the weapons they carried.  The French Secret Service was involved along with Vang Pao and two other notable Laotian generals.  And for the record, the North Vietnamese were involved as well.  The North Vietnamese wanted control of the drug trade just as much as the Laotian generals did.  After the Geneva accords were signed, all foreign military personnel except for embassy guards were supposed to leave the country.  Never happened.  Some left of course, but many remained and just changed into civilian clothing and denied they were military personnel.  The French Secret Service had people there along with the Australians  There were Russians and Chinese and Vietnamese there as well.  The U.S. Military was present represented by non-uniformed servicemen including Army Special Forces guys, U.S.A.F. personnel including yours truly (all in civilian attire), ex-military types that had resigned their commissions or left the service and were working for the CIA, and all sorts of undercover foreign military types.  In the end, no one was fooling anyone.  The place was teeming with military personnel of many nations all wanting control of Laos and its busy drug trade.

For people like me, it was a strange environment.  I don't think I ever thought about illegal drugs even when I was in high school.  I never knew anyone who took them and about the heaviest thing I ever did was a couple of beers.  None of my friends did drugs and I just didn't see drugs in the 1950's.  I am sure they probably were in our high school and other places, but I just never saw it.  In Laos lots of people did drugs.  Many people smoked opium.  Others turned opium into #2 or #4 heroin and used it or sold it. Others even took the refinement further and turned it into morphine.  But for the most part, it was opium that moved through Laos and the refinement was done elsewhere in Thailand or some other part of the world.  However, General Vang Pao did his refinement of opium into heroin right in Vientiane and he didn't spend a lot of time trying to conceal it from anyone..

Who was really in charge of all of the opium movement in Laos remains unknown to me.  It was apparent that the CIA was heavily involved and knew exactly what was going on.  Just how much MACV knew, I cannot say.  But I know this, the "Poppy Ops" involved the U.S. Military because in involved Baily and myself and apparently several  SF MACVSOG teams.  Again, without anyone wearing uniforms, it would be impossible to know for sure who was involved.  Certainly former French Foreign Legionnaires were operating for the drug cartels in country.

The flow of drugs from far northern Laos and Burma went in two directions.  On path south of the China - Laos border back into China.  The southern path took it through the Laotian mountain ranges  south to the Mekong River and depending on the season, either down the river by boat, or, in the dry season, down one of three trails that followed the river south.  All the routes except the China route were susceptible to raids by bandits, the CIA, contending drug cartels, or the Laotian generals.  I can't prove it, but I don't think any of the drug raids were initiated by the U.S. Military.  U.S. troops were involved, but how they were involved still is in question even to this day.  Although I primarily worked with Bill Lair's PARU mercenaries, I also worked with the SF SOG guys as well.  In a future chapter on this blog I will detail one of the missions to intercept a drug shipment coming out of Burma.  This was, without doubt, a CIA hit on a shipment made by a noted drug lord in Burma. This I know, Laos was the wild west of the heroin and opium world in Southeast Asia.  One of the drug lords of the north was Khun Sa.  He was located in the Shan State in Burma.  Another was Gen Ne Win who headed the Burmese Governments Army.

                                                                                                                 Khun Sa of the Shan State

To show you how valuable and important was the drug trade, I will give you a few 1963 statistics as made known to me by people in the know.  The typical poppy grower in N. Laos or Burma made an average of 100,000 Kip Laotian for growing poppies.  That relates to about $200.00 per grower per year.  Turned into 5 lbs of raw opium it was worth $1,000 to $4,000.   That 5 lbs of opium turned into #2 morphine base heroin was then worth $8000 to $10,000 on the wholesale market and much more when sold on the street. It still had to be refined down to #4 grade heroin.  Once that was done, it was worth upwards of $250,000.  And of course, it no longer weighs 5 lbs.  No wonder Vientiane was awash in cash.  And no wonder, that the CIA along with countless other entities wanted a piece of the action.

Until next time.

How I Got To Laos in the First Place

The story behind getting to Laos is not too complicated.  After tech school, I was sent to Sheppard AFB, Wichita Falls, Texas, as a 27230 trainee.  This was in January of 1961.  I got my 5 level sometime in the late spring of that year.  After coming in from a mid-shift at the GCA unit, I was approached by a Captain in the flight facilities building who requested some time to talk to me.  I found out later that he had cleared this with my immediate commanding officer.  He introduced himself and stated that he had been looking at my files and thought he might have a perfect job for me in the air force.  He explained that there was this special unit in the air force called a Combat Control.  He said that there were very few people doing this job and he could guarantee that I would be overseas before long.   He went out of his way to not inform me much about what this was all about but said that there would be a lot specialized training.

He had me fill out some forms and sign them and said he would get back with me later.  I had almost forgot about the thing as a month passed and I had heard nothing about this "combat control" thing.  It is interesting that the term "Combat Control" was never used during any of our training or ever mentioned again.   As I went through flight facilities one morning, I was told I need to talk to my commanding officer.  He told me I had been accepted for a special project and warned me that it was a mistake to volunteer for this unit as it might not be as advertised. He asked me if I wanted to cancel the whole thing.  I was kind of bored at Sheppard as traffic was sparse except during alerts so I decided to go ahead with the training.

About a week later the captain I had originally been contacted by had me meet him in a private room at the flight facilities building where he briefed me on what was coming up.  He told me I needed to get in good physical condition on my own as most of my training would be done on my off days from the radar unit.  He said I need to build up my endurance and told me I need to get a rucksack and put about 25 pounds of rocks in it and start running.  Let me tell you that the first couple of weeks of that like to have did me in.  On my off days I was sent to Webb AFB TDY for special training in the ways of what I believed to be combat control. After two or three days at Webb, I would be flown back to Sheppard to do my regular shift rotation in the radar unit.  This went on for about 8 months.  The interesting thing about Webb AFB is the fact that they had T-28's stationed there.  I worked with pilots flying these aircraft not knowing that my future would be filled with T-28's flying overhead.

 T-28's stationed at Long Tieng (LS20A) Laos 1963,

I was then sent to Ft. Bragg for two intense weeks of jump training with the Special Forces guys who were on their way to Vietnam.  Little did I know this was done for a particular reason.....that being that the people I would work with most in Laos would be SF guys.

Other training continued until I received orders that I was being shipped out to Incirlik AB, Turkey.  I had no idea as to how this related to my new profession, but in world of "Black Ops" you are not supposed to know.    I was assigned to Incirlik tower although I had never had been in a tower since Keesler Tech School.  Again, the posting was designed for a particular reason.  It was far from Laos and it was involved in covert operations.  Stationed at Incirlik in those days were U-2's and several types of ECM aircraft including C-130's and a couple of B-47's. Just east of the tower was the famous "Black Ops" hanger that contained the U-2's and other covert aircraft.  I would pull regular shifts in the tower and then I would be summoned and sent to Laos on a flight that took most of a day to get to Udorn RTAFB in Thailand.  After a while, because of the frequent trips to S.E. Asia, I wasn't even regularly scheduled in the tower any longer.  I would just work for someone who wanted off for the day or night.

Eventually, a RAPCON unit was flown in and installed and I was assigned to it.  However, no other RAPCON or radar qualified controllers were ever sent to Incirlik AB until after I went back to the states.  That meant that I was the only one in the building at any time except for the occasional technician that was flown in when we had equipment trouble.  One of the advantages of not having anyone else assigned to the radar unit was the fact that there were no witnesses.  I could come and go as needed without a lot of questions.

Sometime later, maybe three weeks or so after the RAPCON became operational, the real piece of equipment I was waiting for showed up.  We had used this at Webb during some of my training.  It was a  portable radar unit.  It was small, compact and consisted of three pieces.  The CRT with a hood for use in the daylight,  a small camo radar dome, and a diesel powered power supply with super quiet exhaust system.  It was designed to be packed in or air dropped.  It had a maximum range of 47 miles.  I have tried to find this unit online over the last few years and can find no reference to it at all.  There were just two of these built and I had one at Incirlik.  The plan was that this unit was to be used during the monsoon season in Laos to direct air strikes against the Ho Chi Minh trail, although that was never mentioned to me.

It was highly reliable in perfect conditions.  It never saw perfect conditions.  We actually parachuted it out of a C-130 for test purposes and on landing it knocked every tube in the unit loose and broke at least two of them.  It was determined that the tubes should have been strapped in with small metal straps.  We tried it again and again it failed the test.  After that, it was determined that the only way the unit could survive a trip to a combat zone was that it had to be helicoptered in and moved by man-power to where ever it was needed.  It was a good idea that just didn't pan out like it should have. When the age of transistors and ROM memory modules showed up, I believe a unit could have been produced that would have survived air drop.  Not this one though. 

 However, we did prove the worth of trying it when it was used at Phou Phi Ti in 1963 in support of General Vang Pao's troops where we successfully were able to provide some air support during the daily rain storms.    More about General Vang Pao later.  What actually happened is the portable small  radar unit was phased out as impractical in S.E. Asia and a mobile/portable TACAN unit became the replacement.  It was much more robust and could handle being dropped out of the back of an airplane. It was relatively easy to set up and maintain.  On a mountain top it had pretty good range.

 Laotian General Vang Pao in the

early 1960's.

Once I was assigned to the RAPCON unit, going and coming from Incirlik was a lot easier than when I was in the tower.  I no longer had any responsibility to the tower and therefore really had no one in ATC directly over me at Incirlik after that.

Now, a side note.  I used the term "we" when I talked about what we did at Webb.  The word "we" meant myself and one other controller named James Bailey affectionately  known as "Beatle Bailey" after the comic strip character.  His call sign became "Beetle" in Laos.   He so reminded me of Beatle Bailey that you couldn't help yourself when talking about him or to him.   He was my counterpart.  He went through all the training with me and then was shipped to Okinawa or Japan.   I am not sure which because I never saw him again.  He would be in country when I wasn't or I would be in country when he wasn't.  They only wanted one of us there at a time.  I heard that Bailey died of brain cancer back in the 1980's. As far as I know, Bailey and myself were the only ones to have trained on or used the portable radar unit and the only personnel targeted strictly for Laos.

It wasn't until later that both of us found out several  reasons why we were selected for this duty.  First, we both were ham radio operators.  We could use CW (Morse code) without having to be trained for it.  All HF transmissions to Vientiane were carried out in coded CW.  The main radio in Laos was the AN/GRC 109 CW HF radio which wasn't much different than the old Hallicrafters radios we used in ham radio. We also carried a GRA71 (believe that is the unit) 300 WPM encoder. Being ham radio operators, we also kind of knew how to troubleshoot a radio and do minor repairs.  That was a big deal a couple of times.

We also had used VHF and UHF radios which would be used to contact aircraft and helicopters used in support of the Laotian Army.    No extra training would be required in either case.  The only real thing we needed to know was the protocols.   Secondly, we both were former boy scouts and had done survival training at summer camps. However, we did do survival and jungle training for two weeks in Panama with a SF team which was very interesting

And that is how I ended up  Incirlick AB, Turkey, and northern Laos.