Surprised at Being Alive: An Accidental Helicopter Pilot in Vietnam and Beyond (25 page)

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SPECIAL OPERATIONS CAPABLE

USS
GUAM
■ MARCH 1987

The military loves acronyms. To be an acronym the letters must make up a word you can actually say, not just be a collection of letters. Neither FBI nor CIA, for two examples, is an acronym, because no one says “fib ah” or “cee ah,” they just say the letters, but NATO, being a military organization, is an acronym. No one says “N-A-T-O,” they say the word” NATO.” Of the US Armed Forces, the Naval Forces are probably the worst. In this case I mean “MEU-SOC” (pronounced “Mew-Sock”), Marinespeak for “Marine Expeditionary Unit—Special Operations Capable.”

I
n the 1980s everyone had “Special Operations” forces, everyone except the Marine Corps. The Army had the Green Berets, Delta Force, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and others. The Navy, the SEALs, and even the Air Force had Special Operators, but the Marines only had “Recon” as “elite” forces. Recon has a very specific mission not usually involved with the things the other services’ “special operators” do. Of course, the Marine Corps, quite rightly, considered every single Marine elite, but needed some designation to show that the units they were deploying were more than just your run-of-the-mill units, hence the need for “Special Operations Capable” units. Note that they are “capable” of Special Operations, not full time Special Operations units like the SEALs and Green Berets. Perhaps it is best to think in terms SEALs and Green Berets being sent out as precision instruments, a scalpel perhaps. A MEU-SOC can do similar things, but is more of a meat ax than a scalpel. The cutting gets done, but perhaps not as smoothly, and certainly messier.

A MEU is the smallest Marine Corps unit capable of independent operations. While it is rare for them to be identical in composition from one deployment to another, a MEU usually consists of a re-enforced infantry battalion, a re-enforced squadron (typically 12 CH-46s, 4 CH-53s, 4 Cobras, 2 Hueys, 4 Harriers, and when needed, 2 C-130s that would deploy from the states to the nearest shore base), and a re-enforced logistics unit. All three elements are commanded by lieutenant colonels under a full colonel, the MEU commander.

To gain the MEU-SOC designation, the MEU would undergo additional training on their build-up to deploying as the Landing Force 6th Fleet (LF6F) and take a complex final exam: a Special Operations Capable Examination, a “SOCEX,” before receiving the designation. The SOCEX would be undertaken from shipboard and would involve a detailed series of scenarios covering many of the events that the MEU-SOC might be called upon to execute. Evaluators, the top Marine Corps experts in all areas to be examined, would come in from all over the world to observe and report on how well the MEU performed.

The SOCEX missions include such things as a “NEO”—Nationals Evacuation Operation (i.e. removal of US and allied civilians from a war zone) and “TRAP” (Tactical Recovery of Aircraft and Personnel—an expanded version of a traditional search and rescue). As an aside, I was there when the mission was first discussed for inclusion in the Marine Corps SOP. I told the leaders that “Tactical” was not the right word for the name since the mission would only be done under hostile conditions, so perhaps the word “Combat” should be substituted. I almost got away with it until someone deciphered the acronym—it would have been a “CRAP” mission. They stuck with “Tactical.” The missions were usually done at night and using NVG (Night Vision Goggles). All missions were covered by an extensive checklist that listed all things that should be done to plan and execute the missions, which the evaluators filled out as they went along. It was not a “gentleman’s evaluation”; squadrons could and did fail. For this particular evaluation, we were joined by our “real” Army Special Ops colleagues from Fort Campbell and Fort Bragg. They saw a chance to get some shipboard operations in and to see how they worked with us “regulars.”

The mission was complex, but not for us Marines. We would take a flight of eight Frogs loaded with infantry to the outlying airfield where the “hostages” were being held, and land them at the north end as a blocking force so that the bad guys could not be re-enforced. Simultaneous with our landing, the Special Ops guys would swoop in onboard their Special Ops aircraft and storm the bad guys. To make sure everything was coordinated between the marines and the Special Ops aircrews, one of our pilots would deploy with their Command and Control element in an unmarked “biz” jet that was outfitted with the latest in communications equipment that would be overhead during the mission. The Marine lead would be in touch with the Special Ops C&C aircraft by secure radio at all times so any changes could be made with no difficulties.

The CO liked to be in the lead aircraft on missions like this one, so he had the Ops O put me down as his copilot. In effect, that meant that I would do all the planning and heavy lifting, which is as it should be since I was the Weapons and tactics Instructor (WTI) and an old combat pilot. He was the CO and also an old combat pilot, but did more paperwork than flying now, also as it should be. I was looking forward to the mission because I felt some of the Army Special Ops guys looked down on us regular, Marine Corps “Special Ops Capable” aircrews. Maybe I was more sensitive to it than I should have been because not only had I been an Army aviator for seven years, I thought I knew one of them from my long ago Army days.

The Special Ops maintenance officer was a very old CW4. He was standing in the back of the ready room talking to our maintenance officer when I first saw him. Something about him was so familiar I could not help but introduce myself and tell him that I had once been an Army warrant officer myself. He laughed and asked me what Warrant Officer Candidate Company (WOC) I was in at Fort Wolters and I told him, “9th WOC, Dec 68—Jun 69.” He laughed again and told me that he was the senior TAC officer (short for tactical officer, the main harasser of officer candidates) for the 9th WOC during that time. He, of course, did not remember me in particular since he saw so many of us go through, but he certainly remembered my platoon TAC officer and told me that we were right, the guy was crazy. Even the other TAC officers considered him crazy. It seems my TAC officer never completely recovered from being shot down in a Cobra and nearly being burned to death. His experiences let out a sadistic streak that went way beyond “normal” Officer Candidate School (OCS) harassment. Once I watched him swing a swagger stick, made from a piece of stainless steel from a tail rotor drive shaft, at the head of a candidate he had braced up against a wall. He missed by a couple of inches and hit the wall so hard it bent the steel. Had he misjudged, he would have probably killed the man.

I asked the CW4 why some people “washed out,” were eliminated from flight training, when there were others that we knew were not as good in the cockpit who were not eliminated. He laughed for the third time and confirmed what I always thought—it was quite often purely arbitrary. Higher HQ would take a look at the losses in Vietnam and the number of pilots staying in the Army verses the numbers getting out. From this they would determine how many they needed in the pipeline as replacements. Since there were so many of us going through training, word would come down to the senior TAC officer to “eliminate four.” Based on flight and ground school grades, military bearing, and sometimes just because it wasn’t your day, you would be told to pack your stuff. Flight school was over for you. You still went to Vietnam but instead of being a pilot, you were shipped out as a grunt or clerk or whatever. In retrospect, it may have saved some lives since casualties ran very high among the warrant officer pilots in those days. But that’s not how it seemed to us in 1969—it was another arbitrary roll of the dice, like your draft number coming up.

We left Fort Polk, Louisiana in a convoy of buses immediately after our basic training graduation parade. We pulled into Fort Wolters late in the evening after a long day of excitement from graduation and the bus ride from Leesville, Louisiana, to Mineral Wells, Texas. Graduation meant the end of basic and the beginning of flight school, the end of “90 days between you and the sky.” We all knew there would be harassment, but none of us were prepared for the scale of it. The TAC officers were waiting as the buses pulled in and as the doors opened, they came running in, screaming for us to get off the bus and into formation. Yelling and screaming far more than the drill instructors at Polk, more than we had ever heard. All around, men were on the ground doing pushups, jumping jacks—the weeding out process started right then.

As the Army always does when you arrive at new post, they immediately marched us off to eat dinner, even though it was 2300 hours and we had already stopped at a cafeteria for dinner three hours before. I was assigned to be equipment guard while everyone else went into the mess hall. I stood at attention over our duffle bags for three hours, forgotten in the excitement of fresh meat arriving. Finally, one of the company NCOs saw me and sent me over to the barracks where the chaos was expanding as everyone tried to get “squared away” to the TAC officer’s satisfaction, an impossible task.

That first night, my platoon filled both floors of the old WWII barracks. Six months later when we graduated from the first half of flight school, there were not enough of us left to fill even the lower floor. Between the TAC officer’s arbitrary washouts, and the lack of flying adaptability, attrition over the entire class was about 60%, normal for late 1960’s Army flight school.

Seven years later on the first night of Marine OCS at Quantico, I thought back to that first night at Fort Wolters. The yelling was the same, but this time all the fear was gone, for me at least. I knew exactly what was coming and that they would not kill us. I also knew that unlike Fort Wolters, if you washed out for any reason you just went home. At Fort Wolters you owed the Army two years and if you washed out, the next stop was Vietnam.

But that was a long time ago and we both had our missions, so after a few minutes conversation the CW4 went back to his tasks and I to mine.

It was a good night for NVG operations, clear march skies and nearly a full moon. Our flight loaded up with troops and took off from the deck of the
Guam
in two waves of four. I made the takeoff into the night while the CO took the map to navigate. The high level of moonlight made the world very clear through the green lenses of the NVG. We arrived at our hold point on time and did a slow orbit in tactical cruise while the second flight of four took off to join us.

While we waited, our liaison officer had flown to Washington, DC, in one of their unmarked biz jets with the Special Ops command team. He put on a business suit instead of a flight suit and carrying a briefcase, went out with them to an unmarked Gulfstream IV (G-IV) parked in the general aviation portion of Reagan National Airport. to the casual observer they were just another group of “businessmen” off to carry out some corporate business. The G-IV was not a corporate aircraft but rather a flying command post, full of secure communications gear. Hooked into the Special Ops command center, it could control operations anywhere in the world.

That was the theory anyway …

In our orbit, we were maintaining complete radio silence. In my wide turn, I could see the remaining aircraft join us. When our flight of eight was complete, I called the G-IV on our secure UHF radio to tell them we were in position. No reply. I tried twice more but still had nothing in return. The plan, at that point, was to switch to a back-up frequency, so the CO changed the radio to the new channel and I called again. Still nothing. At that point the CO was contemplating aborting the mission. If the mission was compromised, the bad guys would know we were coming and be waiting for us. We would be taking eight CH-46 loads of Marines right into an ambush. Just then, we heard a call over UHF guard, the emergency frequency that everyone monitors. It was our liaison officer doing something that would never, ever have been done in combat, calling us to tell us to proceed with the mission. It seems they could not get the radios on the Command and Control G-IV to transmit in a secure mode so instead of aborting the mission, they gave up and called us in the clear—On Guard. Had the mission been real, the bad guys would have known for sure we were coming now.

Pushing the start button on the eight-day clock mounted in the helicopter’s dash, I began the countdown to “push,” the time we would leave our hold point and start on our route to the airfield where the blocking force was to go in. As I had been since takeoff, I was flying the aircraft and the CO was “navigating.” I put it in quotes because we were flying in our local area and I had flown in and out of the target airfield many, many times as a flight instructor in MHT-204. I could find it day or night by following a big set of power lines until they made a sharp left turn. At that point the airfield was 30 seconds straight ahead at 90 knots ground speed. Even so, we had planned the mission exactly like we would have, had we never seen the area before. The maps were marked just so, the timing of each leg planned exactly, all the things that must be done for a successful mission.

Had it been a real mission, we would have been flying with our lights out; but it was not real and we were in the middle of North Carolina, not some far away war zone. That said, the Special Ops aircraft were flying lights out and right down on the trees in near nap-of-the-earth flight (50 feet or less). Us regular Marines had to follow normal stateside rules, but not them. They were “Special” while we were just “Special Operations Capable.” We would go no lower than 200 feet on the NVG until we were on short final to the target airfield.

Our timing was working out just about right. I had been holding the airspeed close to what I had planned but we must have had more of a tailwind than forecast because we were approaching our final checkpoint 30 seconds ahead of plan. Our landing had to be exact to prevent the noise of our aircraft giving away the mission too soon. Just as I started to slow the 46, the CO said, “OK, I’ve got the aircraft. You take over navigation.” I was floored as he handed me the map and took the controls. As he took over, he did a slight turn that took us a little off course and at the same time he descended below 200 feet, greatly shortening how far ahead we could see. No problem, while I might be slightly disoriented from the abrupt change from pilot to navigator, I had done this run many times. There went the power line on its turn so we should just continue straight ahead and we would be there in a few seconds. Then the right hand door gunner called, “Airfield at 3 o’clock.”