A Pilot in Civilian Clothes: Lt Col Greg Wilson

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Lieutenant Colonel Greg Wilson. Wilson served as a Raven Pilot in a top secret program, and a Forward Air Controller in Vietnam and Laos. As a Raven, he wore civilian clothes, and was tasked with marking targets with smoke rockets and directing air strikes onto them.

Lt Col Greg Wilson:

First of all, we have to make a distinction between a fighter pilot and an attack pilot. The Navy does that quite well. If you fly an A-4, an A-6, an F/A-18, and you carry bombs, you are an attack pilot. If you fly an air-to-air role, and your job is to shoot down enemy airplanes, then you are a fighter pilot.

So, the Navy and the Marine Corps make a distinction between the fighter pilot and the attack pilot. And of course, the forward air controller works exclusively with attack pilots.

The fighter pilots are just out there flying high, going fast, and making sure that the enemy fighters don't get on our backs to allow us to go and do our jobs.

I think the relationship between an attack pilot and a forward air controller is one of mutual respect. The attack pilot probably doesn't want to be down there being a forward air controller. The forward air controller couldn't do his job without the attack pilots bringing the ordinance to the target.

We give them a hard time and tell them they're just delivery boys, please leave it where we want it. But it's a mutual admiration, I think respect for the jobs that we do, and certainly we try to be as professional as they do.

Well, probably the most difficult factor of being a forward air controller or an attack pilot for that matter, was dealing with the weather. Low ceilings would force you down from the altitude where you'd like to be working, to the altitude where you had to be to find the target. That often put you in the threat range of the weapons that were going to be employed against you. So, it was a bad thing.

If it was a high priority target, troops in contact situation, you went down there and you did it. Now, then you had to find a place to get the fighters down below the weather, and then they had to work a low show as opposed to a high show. And they didn't always have the ordinance on board to be able to effectively hit the target.

So, there were situations where FACs had nothing except the M-16 they carried in the airplane with them, and the smoke rockets that they had onboard the airplane to try to at least fend off the enemy attack long enough for the friendlies to make good their escape or dig a deeper bunker. But weather was very difficult.

In Southeast Asia, there are essentially two weather seasons. The southwest and the northeast monsoons.

The southwest monsoon is basically the summer, skies are relatively clear. It rains probably every day, but about 4:00 or five o'clock in the afternoon, you can set your watch by it, it's going to rain. But it's just a summer shower, and then it's gone.

During the northeast monsoon, the winds are coming in off the coast of Vietnam. They pile up against the Annamite Mountain Range, and the weather is abysmal.

So, you know during the summer part of the year that the weather's going to be pretty good and not too much of a challenge, but once the other monsoon, the northeast monsoon season rolls in, now you know that your work is going to be cut out for you.

In the Raven Program, we probably suffered 95% of the losses during the northeast monsoon season, anywhere from about September through April of the following year.

I mean, you can almost look at it like clockwork and say during the summer months, it's going to be pretty good. During the winter months, it's going to be absolute hell. And that's pretty much the way it turned out. And the same was true in Vietnam.

I didn't see it as being difficult. I wanted to be there. I was fairly well trained to do it. I got additional training when I got in country. Really, and I don't want it to sound trite or trivial, but it was a day at the office.

I mean, you did the things you were trained to do. You went out and got the job done and came home. Probably the most difficult thing was that there were always more targets than there were fighters available to service them. So, that's why we would keep a book of hip pocket targets for days when you had more fighters than targets. And there were some of those.

But the most difficult thing was making sure that the fighters got to the right place at the right time to service that target before it disappeared.

Well, I did all of my FACing in Southeast Asia exclusively during the daytime, because the 0-1 was a day VFR airplane. Most of the fighters and attack aircraft were day only also. So, the enemy conducted most of their activities under cover of darkness, and then we would show up during the daylight by which time they had disappeared back into the jungle. And so, it was a big cat and mouse game.

The best time to go out and find targets was that time right at sun up when maybe they still had their cook fires going. Maybe they hadn't struck camp. Maybe they were still talking about the previous night's activities. Sometimes you could catch them with their campfires still going and actually use those to mark the target for the attack. “Guys, when they show up, I'm not going to give you a smoke. You see the smoke whispering up through the foliage?” “Roger, we have that.” “That's your target. You're cleared hot.”

But the most difficult thing was flying a day only operation when the bad guys operated mostly at night.

It was probably in December, perhaps December of ’70, January, 1971. The South Vietnamese army had made an incursion into Cambodia. They were tracking down Khmer Rouge forces in the vicinity of Chup Plantation. And it was a good target. We had found the bad guys were in the plantation. It was a Michelin rubber plantation, very well defined on the ground. And the friendly said, “The bad guys are in the plantation. There's a battalion size of bad guys in there.” I relayed that back through the Airborne Command and Control Center, and they sent me, I think, must have been every fighter that was available in Vietnam, plus some gunships.

So, I found myself in a situation where I had a great target, pretty much an area target. I had Vietnamese F-5s, I had American F-100s, I had American A-37s. I had AC-119 gunship. So, the challenge was to make sure I could use all of this ordinance. So, I put the gunship directly over the plantation, and he just held in a very tight orbit, and used his guns to work the center of the plantation. Then I worked the American forces on the east side in a north to south pattern with a right pull off. And I worked the Vietnamese on the west side with a north to south pattern with a right pull off. So, I had an AC-119 gunship, I had Vietnamese F-5s, I had American A-37s, and F-100s all working the same target at the same time, deconflicted laterally by geographic references.

So, that to me, was a challenge to get it going, but it was extremely satisfying when it was over, because I had done my job. I had found the bad guys I had employed TAC Air on them. And I had fulfilled the ground commander's objective. It doesn't get any better than that.

Well, perhaps, I made the previous incident sound like it was pre-planned, but I mean, everything was off the cuff. I mean, they say that flexibility is the key to tactical air power. And some people would say that indecision is the key to flexibility, but nothing was ever off the cuff.

But you sometimes had to scramble to put a game plan together and implement that because people were out of gas and people on the ground were in trouble.

That's a very good question. How did the enemy react to a FAC being on the scene? And one of the very important things to understand, and one of the things that worked in our advantage a lot was, especially in the 0-1, where we could hear them shooting at us, you always knew you were getting close to something that the enemy held in fairly high regard. It was an important target, or a important piece of equipment, or a supply depot. Because when you showed up, they would shoot at you. So, you knew the good news was, there's something around here that bears investigating. The bad news is they don't want me to be here.

But the other side of that coin is (and there's always two sides of a coin) once they began shooting, they compromise their position. And once they compromise their position, then we know where they are. So, it was kind of the good news and the bad news of how they reacted to us. Normally, they would be content to stay camouflaged, undercover, watches circle overhead, and then fly off. And no shots fired. However, once you put that first smoke rocket in, and they knew that you had indeed found that target area, then they would open up pretty good.

Now, I would have fighters on station, so you could use fighters against the ground fire and move it around. So, the time when you put the first smoke rocket in until the first fighter rolled in was probably a critical time when they would try to take you out. And then the next most critical time was after the fighters had expended all their ordinance and were on the way home, and you were conducting your post-strike reconnaissance. They again would try to take you out.

So, ground fire was both good news and bad news. You knew they were there, but that they also, knew you were there. And so, you just kind of played the game.

Again, I don't want to overuse the term risk management, but you don't spend any more time in the target area than you have to to get the job done. And once you get the job done, then you get out of there. So, that was the relationship between the forces on the ground and those of us in the air.

Laos is a neutral, or at that time declared themselves a neutral country. The North Vietnamese were using Laos because of its neutrality to move troops and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh trail in Laos into South Vietnam. So, in order to prevent them from doing that, then we had to come up with a way of putting forces into the country that weren't in uniform. And so, that's what the Raven Program was.

We were essentially … well, we didn't leave the Air Force, but we flew in civilian clothes, we carried embassy ID cards, and we worked basically as some people called us Forest Rangers, but we wore civilian clothes. And essentially, it was very classified subject that we had US forces conducting combat operations in the neutral kingdom of Laos. Of course, the North Vietnamese had been doing it from day one, but they denied it. And so, we also, denied it.

So, we were in Laos performing as forward air controllers directing tactical error against enemy targets, and we were doing it essentially as civilians.

When I got my FAC assignment out of pilot school, a couple of my instructor pilots who had flown F-4s and F-105s over North Vietnam, pulled me aside and breaking their vow of secrecy, if you will, said, “When you get there, if you're looking for the real action, then you want to go to the Raven Program.” And they wouldn't tell me much more about that other than the fact that it was there, it was something different, it was classified, and there's a chance that I would like it because that was more, perhaps, activity going on in Laos.

Certainly, when the North Vietnam is using that as an ingress route to the South, there's going to be a lot of targets there. So, that's pretty much how I found out about the program. Of course, I committed the faux pa of volunteering for it when I first arrived in country, and after the colonel who ran the tactical air support group was finished swallowing his teeth, he allowed us how, “Well, I don't know what program you're talking about. If I did know about it, I wouldn't be at liberty to discuss it with you. And, oh, by the way, you need to have a year's experience in country before you can go any place else.”

So, conversely, I didn't have a year in Vietnam when I was selected for the Raven Program. I mentioned the monsoons in December of ‘70 through February of 1971. We lost three Ravens at Long Tieng on the Plain of Jars. And they needed 0-1 qualified forward air controllers with experience flying out of country. And they knew that I had volunteered for the program myself and my buddy, Rich Meybor.

So, we came back from a mission one day. We always had a debriefing at the end of the day to talk about where we'd been, what we'd seen, what was going to be a good area to work the next day. Lieutenants Wilson and Meybor were grounded. And I couldn't imagine why I was being grounded. Perhaps they caught me flying too low or shooting a M-16 out the window of my airplane, something like that. But I came to find out that I was grounded because Rich and I had both been selected to go to the Raven Program, and the immediate reaction was outstanding. And then the second shoe fell. What have I gotten myself into here? Because it's the old, be careful what you ask for, you just might get it. Well, I had just gotten it. And in early March, I was on my way to the Raven Program to replace three guys who had been killed in the last three months.

Well, sheep dipping is the process by which you're removed ostensibly from the military and you move over into the civilian world. You don't take any uniforms with you, you don't take any badges of rank with you. Well, actually, maybe one or two.

You buy civilian clothes, you basically cease becoming a member of the US military and become, not cover story, but we worked for the ambassador in Laos through the Office of the Air Attache, strictly civilian operation.

So, that's sheep dipping is going from being a military person to being a civilian, but still doing the military job. I've never been a sheep sheer, but I think when they're getting the sheep ready to be shorn, they dip them in a bath of some sort of chemical to remove the lice and whatnot. So, maybe that's what it is, they take the lice out before they clip the wool.

Well, it was just a cover, and we were still in the military. I was still in the Air Force. They handled my records at a base in Thailand. The operational control was through the office of the air attache. So, the mission was absolutely no different. We just wore a different suit of clothes when we went to work in Laos than we did when we went to work in Cambodia or Vietnam.

We did fly with our ID cards and were encouraged to have a badge of rank, lieutenant bars pinned underneath your collar, so that if you were shot down, you could show them your ID card and show them your rank. And the clothes we wore approximated a uniform, if you will. So, that was to enable us to perhaps survive a shoot down. But that was just a big forest because to my knowledge none of the … we had 21 Ravens killed in the program from 1968 through 1972. No Raven was ever captured alive to our knowledge. No Raven was repatriated from any prisoner of war camp after the war was over. They despised us, and if they shot one of us down, they normally killed you on the spot.

In fact, my introduction to the Raven Program is I went out with one of the Ravens who had been there in the area for a while. And they'd give us two or three area orientation flights to make sure that we could fly the airplane, because most people coming to the Raven Program hadn't flown the 0-1 before. I had a small advantage there in that I had flown it. Most FACs coming to the Raven Program had been in country for six to nine months before they volunteered for the Ravens. I had only been in country for less than six months when I went up there. So, I think I was viewed as something of a rookie when I showed up, and that I hadn't really earned my spurs in the other war.

So, I went out for a flight with one of the Ravens, Erik Erikson, and he was in the backseat. And the first thing they do is take you to a small operating strip, because most of the places or many of the places that we operated out of were just dirt strips, to see if you could land the airplane, get it back up in the air again. Once I'd satisfied him that I could do that, then the next thing was to find out, could you read a map? So, he gave me a list of five or six coordinates, one at a time, and said, “Go find those.”

Well, there is another of the ground truths in the forward air controller business that we carried to 1 to 100,000 maps. You can almost guarantee that a target is going to be at the intersection of those four maps. So, when you're reading contour lines and streams and everything, you basically have to fit the maps together to arrive at the right answer, kind of a puzzle. So, I found my way to five or six of those targets, and Erik said, “Okay, here's your last one.” He gave me a set of coordinates. I said, “Well, there's got to be something. There's got to be a trick here, because this coordinate is right in the middle of a map. I don't have to piece them together.”

So, I flew to those coordinates, and he said, “What do you see down there?” So, I looked down and I said, “Well, it looks like a crashed 0-1.” He said, “You're right. What else do you see down there?” I said, “Well, I can't be sure, but I'd say that it looks like skeletal remains.” And he said, “You're right again. You're his replacement.”

So, that was kind of my wakeup call that they figured I was a rookie. And they also, wanted to let me know that this was the real game, that there was threat here. And that if you were shot down in this environment, you were not going to be captured, you were not going to be a POW, you were going to be a fatality.

So, that was a very good lesson to learn early on in the program. And fortunately, Eric taught it very well and I was able to survive 14 months in the program.

I think the one thing that we all had in common is that we were loners. We had nothing in common. We probably left our own devices, wouldn't be found hanging out in a large crowd of people. We'd have very few close friends, and those were the people that we would associate with. And yet when I got there, it was like becoming a part of a family, because first of all, everyone had volunteered to be there. After a tour in Vietnam, they'd volunteered to extend their tour and go to Laos. Competent aviators, highly motivated, and you could trust any one of them with your life. And you did routinely. You never had to check your back. You knew that always somebody was back there looking out for you. If you had to land an airplane on the Plain of Jars, somebody would land right behind you, pick you up, and haul you out of there.

Of course, Air America was there at the same time, and most of the pickups were conducted by Air America. So, we had a great rescue and recovery system in place, but you had to get off the ground in the first 10, 15, 20 minutes or else likely the bad guys would find their way to you. But it was a bunch of individualists who because of the time, and the place, and the mission became a family. And they're still my family. We have reunions every year. I haven't been to one for three years, but my uncle has sent me to Southwest Asia to live in the sandbox for the last three Octobers. And he's going to give me a break this October, and I'm going to make it back for my first reunion in four years. But it's my extended family outside of this house, of course. And I'm looking forward to going back there.

Well, again, we were the conduit in the tactical air control system, we controlled the fighters that provided the air support for the Hmong and the Laotian soldiers. So, that's what we could do for them. Plus, just being there. I talked about the monsoon season and how deadly the northeast monsoon was with the low weather, and how beautiful it was flying during the Southwest monsoon when the weather was really good.

Well, the Hmong are animus. They believe that the soil, the ground has life. And when the sun shine, everything is copacetic. And they are fearless troops that will go any place and do anything. But as soon as the sun goes away and the clouds show up, and the rain starts, it's like they have been cursed. They call it bad pee. They're bad spirits. So, the battle in Laos would flow back and forth on an annual basis with the friendlies on the offensive during the southwest monsoon, and the bad guys on the offensive during the northeast monsoon, because the North Vietnamese didn't mind fighting in the mud and in the rain.

So, it was just a seesaw battle back and forth, back and forth for four, five years. But what we could do was try to find the targets, try to bring the fighters in, hit the targets. And a lot of times, just by being overhead, if they could hear a Raven on the radio and hear the sound of an engine, it was a security blanket for them. They wouldn't be quite so desperate if they could just hear the sound of that airplane or the sound of your voice.

And many times we carried interpreters in the backseat because all the ground commanders out there didn't speak any English. So, we'd have to sort of relay through the interpreter what our intent was and find out what the intent of the ground commander was. But that was very interesting.

In Cambodia, in South Vietnam, the normal weapon was a AK-47 51 caliber machine gun. Perhaps a 23-millimeter would be the largest that you'd see, although that in itself is a fairly high threat. In Laos, it was a 37-millimeter, 57-millimeter that could easily reach you at any altitude. So, the threat was the weapons that they had to use against us. And there were a lot of them.

In Vietnam and in Cambodia, we were generally flying against the Khmer Rouge and the Viet Cong. A bit less organized, perhaps a bit less aggressive towards shooting down airplanes. But in Laos, we were right up against the North Vietnamese army, and they were highly motivated, and highly aggressive, highly skilled, and they didn't mind shooting at you.

So, that was the threat, was the fact that we were contesting neutral terrain, us in the north Vietnamese. And they didn't like us being there, and our job was to make sure that they weren't. And somewhere in between those two extremes was where we lived.

The Golden BB is the one that has your name on it. You could be doing everything right, flying at the right altitude, not flying close to where you know there are great concentrations of enemy forces, but one soldier on one hilltop fires one rifle bullet, and it's got your name on it, and that's the Golden BB. The one that by all odds shouldn't have hit you but through some cork of fate did. And that's the Golden BB. Everybody knows it is out there. But you never believe that it's got your name on it. If you believe that, I don't think you could go do the job. Conversely, when one of your friends that does catch the Golden BB, that in itself too is a pretty demotivating experience.

I pulled my senior FAC off of a Air America helicopter after he had caught the Golden BB. And that was a real bad day at BlackRock seeing a friend dead and knowing that it could have been you, and also, knowing deep down inside that thank God it wasn't me. And there's a great dichotomy there between the loss of a friend and knowing that you're still alive. So, that's probably the most stressful situation that I've ever been in.

Well, for the most part, you didn't believe that the Golden BB would have your name on it as I said. There were times when you just couldn't go out and do it anymore. I know when I first arrived, for the first three or four months, I'd fly 120, 125, 150 a month. We were only allowed to log 125 hours, so we'd log the 125 and then keep on flying, because that's what the job was. But after being there for a certain amount of time, the stress would build up, and some days you'd find out that you just couldn't get up and go do it today.

So, one of the guys would say, “Well, I'll take your go this morning, and you can make it up to me later in the week.” We had a thing called CTO compensatory time off or combat time off. After 10, or 12, or 14 days up in country, they’d give us a week to go someplace and relax and recuperate and sort of get the stress level down a little bit. But after you've been there for a while, the stress would build up. So, some days you were better than others, some months you were better than others. But you always had your friends, your family there to back you up and look out for you. And then when you were feeling good and they were not having a good day, then you'd pick up the slack for them. And that was the great thing about the program is you always knew that someone would be there for you. And someone always was.

One of the advantages of being in a place where nobody knows where you are is you have a lot more latitude to do your job. You don't have the constant surveillance of your activities. Not that we would ever indulge in any illegal or illicit activities, but the rules of engagement were significantly relaxed in Laos. Our latitude in finding and hitting targets were left entirely to us. So long as there were no friendlies in the vicinity of the target, and there usually weren't, then we could hit it on our own volition. We would advise the Airborne Command and Control Center that we needed fighters, and we would put the strike in. And when it was over, we would pass the coordinates and we would go on about our job. I mean, it was just a wide open, full tilt, do the best you can against the North Vietnamese. So, we all thought it was great. That's what we signed up to do.

One of the big problems in Vietnam and in Cambodia were the rules of engagement. I mean, you had to be a barracks lawyer to know when you could and could not put in an airstrike. And after you did, three or four phone calls were going to arrive asking, “Well, who authorized you to do that? And was it a valid target?” We had none of that. So, all the limitations were stripped away, and we were given essentially license to go out there and find them, fix them, and dispatch them.

In December of 1971, I went home on leave. They gave us 30 days leave. I went back and tried unsuccessfully to get a follow-on fighter assignment back to the war. They wouldn't let us have those. But I went home to see mom and dad, tell them that I loved them, tell them what I'd been doing. I know it was a breach of security, but they needed to know that.

And then I went back and for the first part of the tour, I was flying out of Long Tieng on the Plain of Jars. When I went back, they assigned me to Pakse, and we were flying on the Bolaven Plateau really in the heart of the Ho Chi Minh trail, where it comes down, parallels the Vietnamese border and then ducks into it. And in January, February of ‘71, we noticed a marked increase in enemy activity. I said before that they conducted most of their operations under cover of darkness. In broad daylight I could look up the valley called the Tumblong Valley, and see rooster tails of dirt and dust being kicked up by truck convoys coming down the trail through Laos and into South Vietnam. It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

I called up the ABCCC, and they sent me some flights of navy fighters off the carrier. I waited until they got into my area of operation and then we went to work blowing these trucks up. One fighter inadvertently dropped a stick of bombs short of the intended target, and they, as luck would have it, landed in a huge truck park and it was like the 4th of July.

So, I worked that for the rest of the day until I was out of gas, out of ammo, out of daylight. And went back home. There was really too much smoke to be able to do any bomb damage assessment. So, I went back the next day with the binoculars and tried to see what it was that they were carrying. Well, weapons and fuel, because the secondary explosions from the day before were still going off.

But I found one piece of equipment that was being towed by a truck. And I went back when I landed after that mission and got out the target identification books to look through and see what it was. And to me, it looked like a Fan Song radar van. Now, this was a radar van that they used to direct SA-2 missiles that were almost, well, at that time, exclusively used in North Vietnam against our fighters when they went into Hanoi or Hai Phong.

So, I went back and put in the intelligence report that we had destroyed a suspected Fan Song radar at these coordinates on their way south into South Vietnam. Well, you'd have thought that I'd have told the greatest lie in the universe. They said, “You guys must be smoking your socks. You're trying to inflate the BDA. Everybody knows that there's no SA-2s going down into south Vietnam.” In April of that year, an OV-1 mohawk was shot down by an SA-2 in the A Shau Valley in the northern I Corps of South Vietnam. And shortly thereafter came the invasion of South Vietnam.

So, it was a great target, it was a target rich environment. But the thing I remember most about that was I told them that in my humble opinion, they are going to have radar threats in the vicinity. They blew me off and three months later, there were SA-2s flying in the A Shau Valley. And then I left the Raven Program shortly after that and went back to the States. So, I didn't finish up my tour on a real high note but that's how I finished up my tour.

Well, in 1975, the Khmer Rouge captured the SS Mayaguez. I don't know the full story, but apparently it lost power. And while it was drifting in international waters, the Khmers went out and captured the crew and towed the boat into an island off the coast of Cambodia. President Ford directed the commander of Seventh Air Force, who at that time was at the Nakhon Phanom in Thailand where we were located also, to put together a force to go down there and get the boat back in and get back the crew. The initial intelligence estimates of Khmers on the island of Koh Tang were about a dozen. They initially sent a force of about 50 Air Force security policemen down there to secure the island. However, one of the helicopters crashed on the way down and killed about 24 or 25 of those. So, they put that operation on hold, and they got some marines in from the Philippines and from Okinawa to go be the ground support force. Helicopters from NKP put the Marines on the island at Koh Tang. And during the infill operation, they found out that there were many more forces on the island than they had originally anticipated. Two of the helicopters were shut down right off the beach. The marines that got ashore, had to swim ashore under a pretty heavy ground fire. It was a real bad situation.

Somewhere in the operation, one of the staff at Seventh Air Force made the recommendation that we send some forward air controllers down to see what the situation is. And initially, that was met with the disagreement. we had the A7 F-4 fighters, and they thought they could go down there and take care of business. Ultimately, the OV-10s were sent down to talk to the people on the ground, find out what the threat situation was, where are the bad guys located, and then bring the tack air in and work airstrikes to thin out the Khmer forces on the island and get some helicopters back in to pull the Marines off the island. You asked earlier if I had recalled any missions where I was caught by surprise, and not given enough time to plan. I got to NKP on my second tour in December of 1973. The Mayaguez operation happened in March, I believe it was, of 1975. We were a peace time operation. We weren't controlling airstrikes. We didn't anticipate any combat operations. I walked into the squadron one day and found out that the Mayaguez had been captured, and that we were sending some OV-10s down there to try to sort things out.

And before anybody could decide who was and was not going, I was out the door with three other guys and off we went. So, we didn't have a lot of intelligence. What intelligence I had was wrong. I had a photo of the map with a location of the helicopters that were in the water. They ended up being not on the west side of the beach, as I was told, but on the east side. So, I wasn't the first guy there. A guy by the name of Bob Andoff was the first guy on scene, and he really sorted things out, organized the helicopters, and then got them in to pull the Marines off the island.

My part in it was Bob ran out of fuel and had to return to base (RTB). That left me there as the on-scene commander, and the sun was going down. And I told you before that all of our operations were conducted during the daylight. And now, I found myself over this island with friendly still on the beach and it's getting dark. Fortunately, I had a AC-130 specter gunship on station, and he was equipped with flares. So, he was able to put some parachute flares in the air so we could see what was going on on the island. And he also, was extremely accurate in being able to put down fire on the ground in close proximity to the Marines.

So, between the fighters, and the FACs, and the gun ship, and the helicopters, we were able to get in there, get the Marines off the island. And so, it was, I think, probably a footnote in history. But it was probably the last combat action that any US forces undertook in Southeast Asia.

I was the last FAC on stations. So, when I ran out of gas and my right engine was starting to lose oil pressure, so I turned for home after asking the helicopter crews to confirm that we had gotten everybody off the island. And they said yes, we had. And so, we all headed for home. And that was that was the end of US combat involvement in Southeast Asia. And we did have some Marines killed, left behind on the island, but at least we got them out.

Without trying to be trite or use cliches, they were the best and the worst times I've ever had. It was the ultimate competition, you against the other guys. And if you do your job better, you win. And I mean, survival, I guess, is a measure of winning. At the same time, I saw a lot of friends die, and that wasn't good. There was nothing I could do about it. It's just that was the way that it was. And again, it's the inner turmoil of being thankful that you didn't catch the Golden BB. And then knowing that it was one of your friends who did.

So, it was tough. It was exhilarating, it was exciting, it was wide open. But the threat was incredible and the losses were high. And all in all, I'm thankful to have been there, but more thankful to have made it through.

Well, in September of this year, we're going to dedicate a FAC memorial down at Herbert Field where all of us went through training. There are going to be 217 names of forward air controllers who were killed in Southeast Asia. 21 of those will be Ravens.

Now, the 217 names began in 1962 and ran through in 1973. The Ravens experienced 21 casualties from 1968 through 1972. So, at any given time in the beginning of the program, there were probably a maximum of 8 or 10 ravens in the country. By the time I got there we had a maximum of 20 or 21.

So, in that four-year period a full compliment of Ravens died. Pretty high loss rate. And like I said, there were no POWs, everybody that was shot down and couldn't get out expeditiously didn't get out at all.

Well, as I approach the end of my military flying career, and of course I'm both an attack pilot and a qualified forward air controller once again. So, I feel like I've come full circle from 32 years ago. But I think being a FAC, especially in Southeast Asia, early on in my career was probably the greatest thing that I've ever done. You understand that I was a lieutenant in an 0-1, and the guy in the fighter or the attack airplane that was showing up on target may have been the wing commander for a fighter wing, but he worked for me and I worked for the ground commander.

So, that gave me a sense and appreciation for command and control and the ability to exercise initiative, make decisions, and put together a game plan and make it work. So, I think the responsibility and the challenge of the job is just — I mean, I loved it and I still love it. And I'm not going to be able to do it too much longer, but I'll never forget it.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Signalman 2nd Class Don Carter.

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