[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
volunteering for this mission would take me to some exotic
places, but I wasn t quite prepared for the scene I encountered
my third morning in Pakse, when Buck Foster rose early and
rousted me from my sweaty cot with a mug of coffee.
It s still blowing a typhoon, I complained over the drum-
ming beat of the rain on the roof.
Just a Mekong drizzle, Buck responded.
At the airfield, the clouds hung low and heavy in the east,
but Buck seemed to have reached the conclusion that flying
up to Lima Site 38 was both possible and prudent. I stood un-
der the roof of the air ops building, staring dubiously as the
ground crew loaded the plane that would take us there. It was
a mud-spattered Swiss Pilatus Porter that looked like an
overgrown Piper Cub with its single, Pinocchio-snout, turbo-
prop engine. But this Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) aircraft
was highly regarded as a reliable Agency bush taxi and trash
hauler, capable of delivering passengers and enormous loads
to remote postage-stamp airstrips.
I certainly hoped the plane s renown was well earned, as I
watched the Thai ground crew heave wooden ammunition
crates, bulging white USAID rice sacks, and stacks of weapons
rolled like crude cigars
96 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
in ponchos through the plane s single cargo door. Once this
load was more or less lashed down with webbing, Buck turned
to the small crowd of tribal irregulars and Thai mercenaries
lounging around the building.
Time to board, Buck said. We ve got to get you assholes
to work.
I assumed two or three of us were going to clamber aboard
the plane and find places among the sacks and boxes. Instead,
a total of fourteen men, albeit some of them very small Kha
soldiers, dashed through the rain and squeezed into the narrow
confines of the cargo hold. With no seats we had to stoop with
our heads and shoulders hunched against the lightly padded
overhead. The compartment opened forward, revealing a two-
seat cockpit with wide Plexiglas windshields.
The pilot, a dapper Thai in neatly pressed khaki uniform
replete with crossed bandoleers and two pearl-handled .45
revolvers, picked his way among the puddles under the shelter
of a wide umbrella held by a barefoot lackey. His audacious
outfit crystallized the impression that had been growing for
several days that somehow I had slipped into a time warp back
to the U.S.-Mexican border skirmishes between Pancho Villa
and General Black Jack Pershing, that the Mekong was actually
the Rio Grande and Vientiane was Dodge City.
But the stout little dandy in the cockpit knew what he was
doing. In a blur of deft movements, he started the turbine en-
gine, throttled it up to a nose-itching howl, released the brakes,
and taxied smartly to the end of the strip. Then we were
slamming forward, the turbo-prop screaming as we bumped
over the rough steel-mat runway. Only seconds later, the plane
bounced from the ground and was sucked into the roiling
clouds. Climbing, the engine throttled to the max and the prop
shrieking, the stuffy cargo hold was constantly buffeted. A
skinny young Kha trooper was wedged onto rice sacks to my
left, clinging to a tie-
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 97
down strap clipped to an aluminum rib. If he pukes now, I
thought, there s no place I can hide.
Just when it seemed that the engine would rip itself apart,
the pilot throttled back, and we seemed to stop, suspended in
a jar of hot milk. The sensation was terrifying. I knew we were
falling, yet had no sense of the roller-coaster weightlessness I
should have felt. I d been seized by vertigo, which seemed to
be endless, but I didn t want to look at my watch and see we
were overdue on the scheduled forty-minute hop. There s no
way this overloaded plane can still be flying.
Then we popped out of the overcast into the glare of a
tropical morning sky. Through the side window I saw we were
climbing smoothly away from the wispy tops of the cloud
deck. But looking ahead, I felt a stab of adrenaline. We were
flying straight toward a vertical, gray limestone wall, which
disappeared into a shroud of mist a hundred feet higher than
our flight path. A beautiful creamy waterfall arched from a
mist-hidden cliff and disappeared into clouds below. That
morning, I d studied the air force navigation chart on the wall
of Buck s office, noting several ominous near-vertical humps
blandly marked karst. These were jungle-covered monoliths
eroded into free-standing towers, like so many unlit phone
booths scattered along a dark highway.
The pilot rammed the throttle forward, the engine screamed
and whistled, and the overcrowded Porter seemed to rise
straight up again, into the mist lapping down from the stony
mountaintop ahead. When will we hit? I was trying to remember
an appropriate prayer, while simultaneously wondering why
I had abandoned a perfectly safe and honorable job in the
Graphics bullpen in Washington.
Then the mist shredded, and I could see the craggy top of
the karst spreading into a flat mesa covered with mixed hard-
wood rain forest and scrub jungle. The pilot banked sharply
right, lining up with the muddy
98 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
orange scar of the landing strip that appeared suddenly from
a dense forest grove. In another blur of moving hands, the little
Thai deployed wide wing flaps and slats, throttled back, and
raised the nose toward the vertical. As I caught sight of some
bamboo huts and a sandbagged bunker beside the strip, the
Porter touched down with amazing lightness on the rutted
laterite mud and stopped within forty feet, more like a winged
helicopter than a conventional airplane.
I had arrived at Site 38, perched one thousand feet above
NVA Supply Route 92 on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Before I could absorb my surroundings, the Kha soldiers
had dragged the cargo from the hold, and the Thai pilot revved
the Porter s engine for a quick takeoff. He jolted about thirty
yards across the ruts, then lifted off like a dragonfly and disap-
peared once more into the clouds.
Welcome to Dogpatch. The resident Agency case officer
in command of the Site s strikers offered me his hand. A clean-
cut, former Special Forces captain, he looked about my age,
but had already served over five years in the Indochina war
zones. He was one of the many paramilitary men I would work
with in the coming years, some of whom I would come to know
on a close personal basis. Case officers were supposed to send
their local troops into battle and stay out of harm s way
themselves, but most ignored this policy. According to official
accounts, only five CIA officers had been killed in Laos by
1973, the end of America s paramilitary involvement in Indoch-
ina. The accuracy of those casualty figures is definitely open
for debate.
Like many of his colleagues, the officer in charge of LS 38
preferred a neutral handle (in his case, Ridge Runner )
because he spent so much of his operational life at risk of cap-
ture and did not want Hanoi to exploit him as a CIA spy in
command of foreign mercenaries. Some
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 99
covert action case officers in the more exposed Plain of Jars
went to war wearing T-shirts and Levi s. Ridge Runner, on the
other hand, favored a composite uniform more appropriate
for the jungle trails of the cloud-choked valleys below. He wore
the black-and-green, tiger-striped camouflage ARVN Ranger
shirt and olive-green, cargo-pocket GI trousers, cinched tight
with rubberband leech straps at the ankles. Instead of the fa-
miliar American jungle boot with its distinctive cleated sole,
Ridge Runner sported the standard ankle-high, canvas Bata
boots worn by many NVA units. Even if you re good in the
woods, everybody leaves footprints, he later explained, and
I don t want my people ambushed because some NVA tracker
picks up the pattern of my boot soles in the mud. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl ocenkijessi.opx.pl
volunteering for this mission would take me to some exotic
places, but I wasn t quite prepared for the scene I encountered
my third morning in Pakse, when Buck Foster rose early and
rousted me from my sweaty cot with a mug of coffee.
It s still blowing a typhoon, I complained over the drum-
ming beat of the rain on the roof.
Just a Mekong drizzle, Buck responded.
At the airfield, the clouds hung low and heavy in the east,
but Buck seemed to have reached the conclusion that flying
up to Lima Site 38 was both possible and prudent. I stood un-
der the roof of the air ops building, staring dubiously as the
ground crew loaded the plane that would take us there. It was
a mud-spattered Swiss Pilatus Porter that looked like an
overgrown Piper Cub with its single, Pinocchio-snout, turbo-
prop engine. But this Short Takeoff and Landing (STOL) aircraft
was highly regarded as a reliable Agency bush taxi and trash
hauler, capable of delivering passengers and enormous loads
to remote postage-stamp airstrips.
I certainly hoped the plane s renown was well earned, as I
watched the Thai ground crew heave wooden ammunition
crates, bulging white USAID rice sacks, and stacks of weapons
rolled like crude cigars
96 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
in ponchos through the plane s single cargo door. Once this
load was more or less lashed down with webbing, Buck turned
to the small crowd of tribal irregulars and Thai mercenaries
lounging around the building.
Time to board, Buck said. We ve got to get you assholes
to work.
I assumed two or three of us were going to clamber aboard
the plane and find places among the sacks and boxes. Instead,
a total of fourteen men, albeit some of them very small Kha
soldiers, dashed through the rain and squeezed into the narrow
confines of the cargo hold. With no seats we had to stoop with
our heads and shoulders hunched against the lightly padded
overhead. The compartment opened forward, revealing a two-
seat cockpit with wide Plexiglas windshields.
The pilot, a dapper Thai in neatly pressed khaki uniform
replete with crossed bandoleers and two pearl-handled .45
revolvers, picked his way among the puddles under the shelter
of a wide umbrella held by a barefoot lackey. His audacious
outfit crystallized the impression that had been growing for
several days that somehow I had slipped into a time warp back
to the U.S.-Mexican border skirmishes between Pancho Villa
and General Black Jack Pershing, that the Mekong was actually
the Rio Grande and Vientiane was Dodge City.
But the stout little dandy in the cockpit knew what he was
doing. In a blur of deft movements, he started the turbine en-
gine, throttled it up to a nose-itching howl, released the brakes,
and taxied smartly to the end of the strip. Then we were
slamming forward, the turbo-prop screaming as we bumped
over the rough steel-mat runway. Only seconds later, the plane
bounced from the ground and was sucked into the roiling
clouds. Climbing, the engine throttled to the max and the prop
shrieking, the stuffy cargo hold was constantly buffeted. A
skinny young Kha trooper was wedged onto rice sacks to my
left, clinging to a tie-
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 97
down strap clipped to an aluminum rib. If he pukes now, I
thought, there s no place I can hide.
Just when it seemed that the engine would rip itself apart,
the pilot throttled back, and we seemed to stop, suspended in
a jar of hot milk. The sensation was terrifying. I knew we were
falling, yet had no sense of the roller-coaster weightlessness I
should have felt. I d been seized by vertigo, which seemed to
be endless, but I didn t want to look at my watch and see we
were overdue on the scheduled forty-minute hop. There s no
way this overloaded plane can still be flying.
Then we popped out of the overcast into the glare of a
tropical morning sky. Through the side window I saw we were
climbing smoothly away from the wispy tops of the cloud
deck. But looking ahead, I felt a stab of adrenaline. We were
flying straight toward a vertical, gray limestone wall, which
disappeared into a shroud of mist a hundred feet higher than
our flight path. A beautiful creamy waterfall arched from a
mist-hidden cliff and disappeared into clouds below. That
morning, I d studied the air force navigation chart on the wall
of Buck s office, noting several ominous near-vertical humps
blandly marked karst. These were jungle-covered monoliths
eroded into free-standing towers, like so many unlit phone
booths scattered along a dark highway.
The pilot rammed the throttle forward, the engine screamed
and whistled, and the overcrowded Porter seemed to rise
straight up again, into the mist lapping down from the stony
mountaintop ahead. When will we hit? I was trying to remember
an appropriate prayer, while simultaneously wondering why
I had abandoned a perfectly safe and honorable job in the
Graphics bullpen in Washington.
Then the mist shredded, and I could see the craggy top of
the karst spreading into a flat mesa covered with mixed hard-
wood rain forest and scrub jungle. The pilot banked sharply
right, lining up with the muddy
98 / ANTONIO J. MENDEZWITH MALCOLM MCCONNELL
orange scar of the landing strip that appeared suddenly from
a dense forest grove. In another blur of moving hands, the little
Thai deployed wide wing flaps and slats, throttled back, and
raised the nose toward the vertical. As I caught sight of some
bamboo huts and a sandbagged bunker beside the strip, the
Porter touched down with amazing lightness on the rutted
laterite mud and stopped within forty feet, more like a winged
helicopter than a conventional airplane.
I had arrived at Site 38, perched one thousand feet above
NVA Supply Route 92 on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Before I could absorb my surroundings, the Kha soldiers
had dragged the cargo from the hold, and the Thai pilot revved
the Porter s engine for a quick takeoff. He jolted about thirty
yards across the ruts, then lifted off like a dragonfly and disap-
peared once more into the clouds.
Welcome to Dogpatch. The resident Agency case officer
in command of the Site s strikers offered me his hand. A clean-
cut, former Special Forces captain, he looked about my age,
but had already served over five years in the Indochina war
zones. He was one of the many paramilitary men I would work
with in the coming years, some of whom I would come to know
on a close personal basis. Case officers were supposed to send
their local troops into battle and stay out of harm s way
themselves, but most ignored this policy. According to official
accounts, only five CIA officers had been killed in Laos by
1973, the end of America s paramilitary involvement in Indoch-
ina. The accuracy of those casualty figures is definitely open
for debate.
Like many of his colleagues, the officer in charge of LS 38
preferred a neutral handle (in his case, Ridge Runner )
because he spent so much of his operational life at risk of cap-
ture and did not want Hanoi to exploit him as a CIA spy in
command of foreign mercenaries. Some
THE MASTER OF DISGUISE / 99
covert action case officers in the more exposed Plain of Jars
went to war wearing T-shirts and Levi s. Ridge Runner, on the
other hand, favored a composite uniform more appropriate
for the jungle trails of the cloud-choked valleys below. He wore
the black-and-green, tiger-striped camouflage ARVN Ranger
shirt and olive-green, cargo-pocket GI trousers, cinched tight
with rubberband leech straps at the ankles. Instead of the fa-
miliar American jungle boot with its distinctive cleated sole,
Ridge Runner sported the standard ankle-high, canvas Bata
boots worn by many NVA units. Even if you re good in the
woods, everybody leaves footprints, he later explained, and
I don t want my people ambushed because some NVA tracker
picks up the pattern of my boot soles in the mud. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]