by admin » Wed Dec 06, 2017 3:23 am
Chapter 6: The Making of a Hunter-Killer
Despite Tom McKenney's contempt for the politicians who were running the war, his "the-tougher-it-gets,-it's-just-right-for-me-and- my-guys" attitude, combined with his talent for special operations, made him the perfect tool for their needs, particularly where stealth was concerned. Secrecy had long been regarded as a political necessity in Vietnam, given the nature of the enemy and the American public's likely unwillingness to support the war had they been fully informed. McKenney made it clear that he was totally committed to unorthodox ways of thwarting the enemy. It seemed the best way to frustrate their own knavish tricks. Now he was given an opportunity to prove his mettle. Within weeks of his arrival, he was recommended for promotion to lieutenant colonel by both the reserve and regular selection boards. The regular board's nomination was unusual for someone who had not been on active duty continuously for nine years. McKenney actually felt guilty about being promoted because regular classmates who did remain on active duty were being passed over.
However, nothing dampened his quiet euphoria over a new appointment as intelligence collections and operations officer for III MAF. It followed fast on the heels of his promotion. Finally, he could not only collect information but influence the action as well, particularly one aspect of it that was beginning to obsess him-the Marine who had turned on his own. His obsession had begun with the briefing on the turncoat problem. When the two CI officers told McKenney about the directive to assassinate these men-so highly classified it was never even put in writing-he knew this was the solution for Bobby Garwood. McKenney's job would include overseeing and tasking reconnaissance patrols. [1] McKenney was now acting with the authority of General Robert C. Cushman who, in June 1967, had replaced General Walt as commanding general at III MAF. Discretion was vital. There was never any interference from the commanding general's office.
He worked closely with the First Reconnaissance Battalion, the First Force Reconnaissance Company, and the Third Reconnaissance Battalion commanders. Perhaps because he was a trained Force Recon Marine, he was partial to First Force Recon, a smaller unit than the others that he considered to have the best teams and the best training. It was a kind of snobbery, but he was not above repeating what they said amongst themselves: "Marines look down on the other service branches; recon Marines look down on other Marines, and Force Recon Marines look down on other recon Marines."
First Force Recon Marines were highly skilled at a controversial kind of warfare that, like the turncoat elimination program, was so highly classified it was never put on paper. This warfare involved special hunter-killer operations, where teams, often with snipers, would be sent deep into enemy territory to assassinate selected targets- initially senior communist officers and couriers, eventually ranking politicos-whose death would seriously cripple the enemy's offensive capabilities. These kinds of operations grew out of traditional combat patrols, which hunted conventional targets of opportunity- vehicles, individuals, or groups in uniform that appeared without warning in their area of patrol. The traditional patrols, made up of a four-man reconnaissance team, were not controversial, however, as the later hunter-killer teams would be, when assassination of selected targets became part of the work. In 1965, when McKenney's friend Sam Owens, then a lieutenant, led some of the first hunter-killer patrols, the concept was a radical one. [2]
The earlier, relatively noncontroversial operations had come into their own in 1965, a critical time for III MAF, hemmed in by strict rules of engagement and lack of financial resources. By combining good intelligence with small combat units, the traditional patrols dealt effectively with targets of opportunity, but with only four men they were too small to search out and engage in combat with the enemy. At the same time it was not economically viable to have one team collect and report intelligence, when another, larger one was needed to follow up. The more practical solution was to run teams of eight to ten men. These could and often did expand to twelve men.
These expanded recon-combat patrols were at first under operational control of the Third Reconnaissance Battalion, the first Marine reconnaissance unit in Vietnam. By the time McKenney got to Vietnam, they were operationally independent of the battalion structure. Marine officers like McKenney received their orders from an alternative, "plausibly deniable" command structure made up of CIA and high-ranking politicos and military officers. Often CIA men operated in the guise of military officers. The patrols both hunted conventional targets of opportunity such as enemy units or individuals like snipers or couriers in their area of responsibility and assassinated selected individuals.
Hunter-killer patrols always worked closely with Fifth Special Forces and from 1965 to 1966 operated out of Special Forces camps. Unlike other special operations groups, Marine hunter-killer teams stayed together and functioned under one code name, which would change only if compromised. It was a cohesiveness that accounted for their success, or so the participants believed. They became very proficient, frequently getting kills when larger units returned empty handed. They were given superb endurance training. The emphasis was on total sensitivity and alertness to operational surroundings. Owens remembered later that when he was on patrol the hair on his skin would react to the slightest change in atmosphere. His vision became so focused, he could tell what an animal high up in a tree would do next by its slightest movements. Owens could sense with precision where the enemy was or had been in a certain jungle locality, no matter how carefully the tracks had been covered. McKenney thought it was part of Owens's genetic make-up, which was in good part Native American, but Owens maintained it was his Marine training along with his upbringing on a farm in Oklahoma, where money had been so tight that his ability to track a bee to its hive meant there would be something sweet to put on the dining table.
In 1965, Owens's targets generally were enemy soldiers or quasi-military forces working with the VC. This changed progressively, in response to the activities of the communist shadow government that controlled so much of the countryside in I Corps. By the fall of 1968, when McKenney became intelligence and operations officer, hunter-killer teams were already assassinating selected civilian and political targets-suspected of being VC sympathizers-outside the official frame of war, along with traditional military ones. It was the "selected targets" part of the operation that caused international controversy, even though it was common practice among all intelligence services, including those of America's allies. But allies kept these operations secret or presented a "plausible denial" if the public got wind of any of them. The British secret intelligence service, MI6, claimed it would never authorize assassinations. British spymasters held impromptu staff meetings to deny reports that an agent or a group had been licensed to kill. The message for public consumption, made by discreet leaks to select journalists, was that an intelligence service in a democracy would not license its agents to kill. This claim had nothing to do with scruples about summary justice and the dangers of executing innocents; the concern of MI6 was instead political. MI6 officers pointed to the United States as an awful example of how politicians could be provoked, by bad publicity, into placing impossible curbs on their own country's security services. In fact, British military intelligence had no scruples about killing subversives although it was a practical rule to take prisoners when vital information could be forced out of them.
As far as McKenney was concerned, American politicians had already placed impossible curbs on the war effort. He knew there were a lot of soldiers-even Marines-who thought it unfair to shoot someone who was not expecting it. It was something the CIA did, not what combat soldiers should do. For him it was a "dirty business, but you did what had to be done." Eighty percent of the fighting involved small units engaged in what General Walt, the retired commander of I Corps, described as "dangerous, tightly disciplined, meticulously planned activities, wearying and monotonous." [3] These activities were not and could not be revealed to the general public without injuring the most important part of the war effort. McKenney felt the American people would never understand or condone the need for soldiers to be involved in assassinations, because they did not know the whole story. Nor could they be told. Absolute secrecy was a must. But McKenney knew that hunter-killer teams always identified their targets very carefully. He would go quietly furious when he heard his men discussed in terms of "Murder, Inc." by those who had not the vaguest notion of what they were talking about. He remembered the men on hunter-killer teams as being "highly skilled, obedient to a strict code of honor." He knew of no better example than Marine Gunnery Sergeant Carlos (Gunny) Hathcock, a sniper who had been days away from the end of his tour of duty when he volunteered for a mission so dangerous the odds were ninety to one against his making it back.
With only his rifle, one canteen, and a K Bar knife, he had crawled at literally a snail's pace for thirty-five hours across open grassland, from the edge of a jungle where his team waited, to a Vietnamese compound near the Laotian border. He had not eaten or slept and drank water only rarely. He narrowly escaped NVA patrols guarding the area and came face to face with deadly bamboo vipers coiled in the grass. Stinging ants made his camouflaged body their home. The target had been a Vietnamese general whose assassination, right within his own headquarters, was meant to demoralize and throw his troops into confusion.
Miraculously, Hathcock succeeded in hitting the target's heart from a distance of eight hundred yards. To do this, he had to be hypersensitive to how the prevailing wind, sun, barometric pressure, and humidity affected the flight of the bullet. Calculating wind velocity required a quick and highly focused mind. All factors had to be finely tuned on a minute-by-minute basis. For this extraordinary mission of courage and self-sacrifice, Hathcock received a hero's welcome from the small band of men he worked with. That was all. No public recognition was possible. McKenney was determined that, at least on his watch, such men would not be betrayed.
In addition to the Marine units he worked with, McKenney was closely involved with most of the special operations groups organized under the Military Assistance Command Special Operations Group (MACSOG). [4] These were units that "could not risk political oversight" and were highly classified. Among the most important to McKenney was Command and Control North (CCN), one of three centralized command posts [5] in different parts of the country of organized resistance activities-unconventional warfare, psychological operations, and other intelligence and operational activities. They were experts at hunter-killer operations. Their teams did the most long-range "over the fence" reconnaissance, in places like Laos or Cambodia. CC had its own chain of command, back to MACSOG headquarters, on Pasteur Street in Saigon. The rest of the Army commands resented them as they resented most special operations units, not just in the way elite units were usually resented, but because they were independent of the tactical and area commanders. But McKenney liked working with them. As a Marine he was not involved in the Army's internal politics.
To him, the special ops people really were special in every way. They were all volunteers, wanting to be the best. They were self-motivated, bright, resourceful, and unbelievably courageous. Getting in and out of enemy territory alone was a harrowing affair. Insertions were usually made by helicopter but not always. Those trained in parachute jumping and scuba diving, like Force Recon Marines, [6] often used that method. High-speed truck drop-offs were common in mountainous terrain. Some patrols swam to their destination; others went by foot-probably the most dangerous because it took the longest, and offered the enemy the most opportunities to discover them. All of this was done at night. After insertion in enemy territory, patrol leaders were on their own: every member of a team had to be able to take over the leader's job if he was killed or wounded. Every team member had to know how to control artillery and naval gunfire, call in airstrikes, and operate a radio.
After each mission, patrols returned to the command post for four days, before going out again. During this time they functioned as ordinary soldiers, working on perimeter security, local defensive patrols, and mine sweeps. They were never really "off' except for five days of rest and recreation in thirteen months. They received no extra pay, no special thanks, and no medals. Outstanding courage and bravery did not help career advancement, either. The work they did was so highly classified that it usually could not even be written up on their "report cards." Because he continued to involve himself with the actual work of Marine recon patrols, and kept himself informed about the missions of all special ops groups he was in liaison with, McKenney never doubted the integrity of what they were doing. His standards were still those he had grown up with. "Yes, we were doing violent things," he remembered, "but they were controlled, limited, and precise. There was no torture, rape, no unnecessary killing." McKenney's interrogators were not allowed to slap prisoners. Often prisoners, taken by teams he worked with, laughed at their interrogators for being so soft on them. The Vietnamese people who worked with McKenney told him Americans didn't know how to get information from POWs. On the other hand, the enemy, as McKenney soon learned from personal experience, followed a policy of ruthlessness. If they were sent to kill a village headman, they also raped and murdered his wife and children while the rest of the village was forced to watch. Torture was routine for them because the objective was to terrorize the civilian population into cooperating with the communists.
It upset McKenney that his side took many casualties "simply because we were trying to avoid killing innocent civilians . . . who were often not very innocent. Our patrols were normally sent against selected targets like senior officers, couriers, [7] and ranking politicos. They were never sent against ordinary citizens, children, or women. Only some were targeted to be killed," he said later. "Many were targeted to be snatched for interrogation. Fed false information, these would then be allowed to escape."
This restrained behavior did not characterize some of the South Vietnamese recon groups he worked with, however. The provincial reconnaissance units, commanded by ARVN officers with U.S. advisers under CIA control, and comprising Vietnamese, Nhung (Vietnamese of Chinese ancestry), and other mercenaries, did the bulk of the in-country dirty work. They also performed many necessary and courageous operations that could not have been done by Americans. But their tactics and cruelty often matched those of the VC. They were a vital part of the CIA's controversial Phoenix program. This covered the assassination of selected targets, including American deserters. McKenney was willing to carry out the full Phoenix agenda as he understood it: "to identify the infrastructure, the shadow government of the communists in the south who were terrorizing the countryside, and neutralize [kill, kidnap, or intimidate] them." From the very beginning these goals presented no moral dilemma to him; neither did the fact that Marine recon patrols were part of Phoenix assets, if not primary ones. [8]
He saw no contradiction between his enthusiasm for the program and the generally low opinion he had of the CIA bureaucrats who conceived and ran it. He could not stand what he regarded as the mysterious affectations of the CIA men he came across, or their seemingly total disregard for soldiers. In places where everyone else was in sweaty jungle dungarees, he could always recognize them in their tropical leisure suits, and with their special designer briefcases, and folding stock Swedish sub machine guns-definitely not an item of field equipment for a combat soldier. He had little direct routine contact with them. Mostly, the CIA men dealt with counterintelligence officers who would then brief McKenney, as they had on the "deserter" problem. When CIA men did deal with McKenney, he found them arrogant and cocksure. He remembered one selfimportant operative who would bring reports that he considered "hot." McKenney would send a patrol to check out these reports, risking the lives of men and using scarce assets like helicopters. In one instance, the man in the leisure suit insisted that a "major arms cache" was hidden near a certain village, and demanded action. McKenney's patrol found three rusty and obsolete bolt-action rifle barrels, probably there since the French era. That was the closest to useful information the operative ever submitted, according to McKenney, who thanked him politely and thereafter filed his reports in the "maybe someday" category. Finally, the infuriated operative personally ran to the commanding general of the First Marine Division, O. R. Simpson, to complain that McKenney had ignored "vital intelligence" and requested that he be relieved. Simpson, familiar with McKenney's work, checked things out and simply told McKenney to keep up the good work. The bumptious young operative was on his way back to the States before he knew what hit him. To McKenney this was proof that no matter how amateurish some people or institutions were, the system worked.
McKenney reserved his real scorn for the CIA executives; the ones who made the decisions, but were never seen in the field and never put themselves in danger. Their kind of lifestyle and attitude was later conveyed unwittingly by William Colby, who was then deputy to the CIA station chief in Vietnam: "With the ultimate luxury of being able to call for a helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft to take me where I wanted to go, I could put in a full working Saturday at headquarters, leave in the late afternoon, have dinner and the evening with some province or district advisory team, examine local activities in the morning, and be brought back to Saigon by late afternoon for a swim and dinner, ready for work at headquarters on Monday morning-having happily missed the Saigon Saturday night festivities .... There were also shorter daytime visits to the area near Saigon or in the Delta, more carefully arranged field visits by various Washington officials, regional conferences of the provincial advisers attended by Saigon staff, and attendance at assemblies of the military officials." [9]
McKenney could sense the opinion held by men like Colby of the work he and his men were doing: "The American and Vietnamese military could, of course, and did sally forth at day break in search of the major communist units they hoped to find and destroy. Generally, the searches were fruitless." [10] The condescending dismissiveness became apparent early on, and engraved in McKenney's mind a deep dislike and distrust of men so detached from the dirty work they supervised.
And yet he could not see the irony of accepting intelligence and taking instruction on matters like the targeting of alleged military deserters from such men. Admittedly this came through the CI officers he respected. He was confusing the integrity of these messengers with the message they brought. Later he said it was also because he was so totally focused on his immediate special-operations community: really a separate little world, doing things largely unknown to others, much of it not kosher, out-of-country, "we-don't-know-you- if-you're-caught" jobs. Outstanding Army officers moved back and forth between "normal" Special Forces units [11] and the much more secret and what some called the "dirty" groups of MACSOG. Recon Marines could be found working in both as well. McKenney got very emotional about these guys: he loved them. They were not always guys either. One of his very best "agents" was a gutsy little Vietnamese nun, Sister Mary. With her, McKenney did not really function in the normal sense of an agent handler because she came and went as she wished. She was self-motivated and a staunch anticommunist who would bring information on her own, which McKenney would have evaluated and then act on. Sister Mary was particularly effective in drawing his attention to those North Vietnamese or VC who were willing to help the Americans, but who did not want to deal with South Vietnamese intermediaries for fear of being betrayed.
McKenney could block moral questions about who was doing the targeting for Phoenix, or why, because the people who carried out the actual work, like Sister Mary, acted with integrity and honor. He had his own ways of finding out whether they were feeding false information or not. He went "beyond the call of duty" in these highly adventurous special operations. He hated headquarters and spent as much time as possible in the boonies, managing to operate "down-and- dirty," traveling all over the country, walking, flying, in patrol boats and landing craft. Whenever he could, he would participate in one of his pet projects-dropping sensors, called ADSIDs (airdropped- seismic-intrusion devices), in enemy territory. They were in the shape of darts, weighted on the bottom to make them hit with the point down. The tops were plastic, molded in the shape of local plants found in the area where they were to be dropped. Stuck in the ground, they became part of the jungle vegetation. The shock of impact activated the sensor devices, which picked up any movement nearby, transmitting electronic signals back to Hill 327, the First Marine Division command post. Under McKenney's direction, this highly classified project deposited sensors across all the approaches vital to Da Nang. The mission reminded him of World War I flyers hand-dropping little bombs. He was on a sensor dropping mission in Elephant Valley when significant readings came into Hill 327, unrelated to his unauthorized presence. His companions were still merrily but blindly dropping sensors, unwittingly scattering them among NVA soldiers below. American artillery began to bombard the area as the sensor-droppers left. Later they drank to NVA soldiers who must have been going mad wondering how the Americans knew where they were, in heavy bush, at night.
McKenney irritated a lot of his superiors with all this personal involvement. They did not consider it appropriate for someone of his rank. He had strong support, however, from those in the field. Sam Owens an instructor at the Special Forces School at Fort Bragg more than ten years after McKenney was there, and who as a captain took command of the First Force Reconnaissance Company in the spring of 1969, said "Tom was simply doing aggressive staff work; taking necessary risks, getting information impossible to get through normal procedures." Owens felt that McKenney's behavior, which he admitted sometimes bordered on recklessness, also made him a more effective intelligence officer. "It was not in the category of craziness among the bad apples in various secret units; thugs aspiring to be superthugs, glory seekers, and lovers of violence." Owens knew that special ops, especially the dirtiest special ops, could sometimes create weirdos. McKenney was slowly and subtly being drawn into this manic neighborhood, far removed from ordinary military morality. Assassination orders came from "outside," from institutions he did not respect, outflanking the chain of command. It was becoming a world where every ethically questionable action could be justified as a necessary risk on patriotic grounds.
McKenney became obsessed with Garwood, but he was very much aware that the issue of deserters went far beyond one Marine Corps traitor. Later he estimated there were one hundred men on the CI list of targets-largely in a different category from Bobby Garwood. Most were "the dopers who didn't want any more combat and hid out in the villages with whores, thinking they could just stay high, and report back in when their tours were up and go home." These men were generally rounded up by the military police and taken to the brig. It was commonly said that some were killed. McKenney knew this unreported killing to be a fact even though he had no professional relationship with military police. He did have a long-standing friendship, going all the way back to Test Unit I days, with Lieutenant Colonel Bill Gorsky, the military police battalion commander. Gorsky had to conduct periodic sweeps in the villes, [12] searching for these guys. "If they put up a fight, ---." The sentence was never finished. Gorsky spoke of this with regret when he sat chatting with McKenney over a glass of beer. McKenney, on the other hand, would never, not even in later years when other regrets almost overwhelmed him, feel sorry that these deserters had been eliminated.
The most sensitive category of target was the one Bobby Garwood fell into -- the political defector. Without seeing any real evidence, McKenney held the belief, common in his small circle, that most of the men in this group were African Americans, convinced by communist propaganda that the United States was waging "a white man's war against their brothers." The presumption was that Caucasian defectors like Garwood had been ideologically radicalized by Vietnamese communist sympathizers to believe the U.S. was exploiting Vietnam and had simply "gone over" to work with the VC and / or NVA. They disappeared from their military units like the dopers. Then U.S. intelligence apparently tracked them into communist territory. Others were reported to have been taken prisoner and "turned." They might have been tortured and otherwise mistreated, but that did not change McKenney's harsh view. You did not turn against your own, particularly if you were a Marine. He remembered the superior record of Marine POWs in Korea and the tough, magnificent standard they had followed. [13]
The very idea of what Bobby Garwood did rankled him. Here was a man, the CI officers told him, who had not deserted from the battlefield, but from a very cushy job in the motor pool. They claimed he had last been seen in the vicinity of a brothel. Some of his fellow Marines were reported as saying he frequented it. Other "evidence" accumulated by the fall of 1968, the CI officers told McKenney, included propaganda statements he had written, asking American Marines to follow his example and join the enemy. Garwood had been seen "leading NVA soldiers and personally turning his weapon against his own former fellow Marines." Added to all this injury was the insult that Garwood was the only Marine to have ever defected. The briefing McKenney got was sparse, as befitted the sensitivity of the subject, and the strict standard of giving out information on a "need-to-know" basis only. It left no room for challenge, allowed no questions about the sources, tolerated no doubts. And it was all McKenney needed to act. He decided, he said later, that "Bobby Garwood was a traitor, a blot on the honor of the nation and the Marine Corps; and that he was to be killed, not captured, and buried where he fell." This, McKenney felt, would protect Garwood's family and nation from shame.
Because he knew how explosive the scandal would be if even a whisper of the assassination of Americans by Americans reached the wrong ears, there would only be two entries concerning these targets in his daily journal. One, written soon after he got his promotion, read: "Recon team sighted a group of NVA/VC with a Caucasian traitor. Unfortunately they did not get him. May have been Bobby Garwood."
Most of those in the small world of special operations who were party to the kill-Garwood directive in 1968-69 did not know the precise origin of the assassination order. This seemed to be of no concern to them because of the "need-to-know" policy. Sam Owens, whose First Force Reconnaissance Company ran the greatest number of hunter-killer missions, said later, "It was just something that was understood." Men who were part of the actual hunter-killer teams would remember, long afterward, that they often thought privately the hunt for Garwood, as distinct from other targets, was initiated by the Marine Corps. Not so McKenney. It was his clear understanding, according to the information he got from counterintelligence, that direction in the Garwood case originated with the CIA and bypassed normal operational and administrative command channels, going to the special operations units who were to do the job14 either directly or, as in his case, via counterintelligence. Outside the closed world of special operations, nothing was known about assassination programs. It was and continues to be McKenney's belief that even General Cushman, the commander of III MAF and his boss while he was there, was not aware of the assassination programs because "he didn't need to know."
But not all who were party to the directive on American deserters were briefed quite as discreetly as McKenney, or within the strict confines of a small CI office. Army Captain Bobby G. Evans, an intelligence officer at CCN, which was known to have close ties with the CIA, independently confirmed SOG's obsession with hunting traitors. Around the time McKenney received his briefing, photographs of three Marine deserters were shown at a weekly military intelligence briefing for XXIV Army Corps, General Joseph Stillwell Jr.'s command, which was subordinate to III MAF. The briefing came from "major headquarters" and was attended by Evans and staff officers from the First and Third Marine Divisions, but McKenney does not recall attending any meeting where photos were shown. Asked if major headquarters meant CIA, Evans steadfastly maintained that he could not answer that. Some of his friends and fellow veterans of Special Forces laughingly interjected that this was a standard reply from those who were affiliated with the Agency.
Evans's job was to make sure his recon teams had all the intelligence they needed to work in their assigned operational areas. For him, as for McKenney, there was no question that the instructions regarding deserters came from "major headquarters." They were to be treated "as the enemy." Evans remembered that specific "kill orders" would have come not from him but from the intelligence operations officer, who had the CC equivalent to McKenney's new job. In CCN's case, there was one such officer for every fifteen recon teams.
McKenney's new position gave him the authority to translate the directive to treat deserters like the enemy into specific kill orders. He quickly sent instructions to First Force Recon Company that every patrol, in addition to their other assignments, should look for Bobby Garwood and kill him if they found him. He began reading each team's "after action" reports and studied every bit of intelligence that might lead to Garwood's whereabouts.
McKenney's relationship with other special operations units was excellent, especially with CCN, [15] where Bobby Evans worked as intelligence officer, and with Fifth Special Forces, because he had graduated from their school and was well versed in their way of planning and operating. This made it easy for him to request that their patrols include the same kill-Garwood requirement as the Marine recon patrols. The requests were always made verbally. McKenney would say something like, "I'd appreciate it if you would .... " This was not a big deal, he said, because by the fall of 1968, there was already an understanding among all special operations groups that Garwood was to be eliminated. Some of the men who were aware of this, Evans included, thought Garwood had become the generic term for all traitors.
"There might be a real Garwood, but his name had become the symbol for all those who deserted to the enemy and were helping to terrorize American soldiers," said Evans. McKenney, on the other hand, was always totally convinced Garwood was a real person, not a symbol, and that he was the first and only Marine deserter. There were briefings of the kind Evans attended, where more than one Marine deserter was discussed, but by the time this information reached CI and then McKenney, whatever number there had been was amalgamated into one-Bobby Garwood. Evans and a number of hunter-killer team members remembered that African-American deserters were amalgamated in the same way, but more crudely. They were called Pepper. Evans and ten of the special ops team veterans recalled thinking of Bobby Garwood and one nameless "big black American" as Salt and Pepper. The scuttlebutt was that Salt and Pepper often worked together.
It was the understanding of other special operations groups that Garwood was of particular importance to the Marine Corps because he had been one of their own. Unlike McKenney, they knew there were other Marine Corps deserters-a fact that was presumed to be highly embarrassing to the proud Corps. They believed it was for this reason the kill-Garwood order was so important to men like McKenney. Evans, who had himself enlisted as a Marine during the Korean War, did not have McKenney's devotion to the Corps. He even had some sympathy for alleged deserters. He wasn't sure they had all gone over voluntarily: if they had deserted, it was probably because the enlisted Marine "was treated like a dog ... nothing more than cannon fodder."
McKenney might have had great empathy for the "muddy, sweaty kids facing the target, nose to nose, using the knife," but in a way he was as far removed from what these soldiers went through as the CIA types he was so contemptuous of. Terrible memories would later seriously disturb those "kids" who killed fellow Americans without having been given any justification to do so because it was felt they did not "need to know" the reason.
One Special Forces veteran who had been a sniper remembered how he rationalized the orders "to off any white people you see" by thinking of them all as Russians. Because of this sniper's short height, he was often sent on missions dressed in Vietnamese camouflage -- black pyjamas, skin and hair dyed-to ferret out VC guerrillas. He would kill them on his own, or call for the help of his teammates, hidden nearby, if he lost the element of surprise. He volunteered for Special Forces because he had idolized President Kennedy, who called the green beret worn by these men "a badge of courage, a symbol of excellence, and a mark of distinction in the fight for freedom." The sniper said later, "I always thought I was lucky because I never saw any black Russians!"
But for others, the memories would become almost unbearable when, long after the war, some of those who made up the target lists for Phoenix would admit that a lot of Vietnamese were killed who shouldn't have been. [16] No one ever publicly admitted Americans had been targets.
McKenney, in the field, suffered from no doubts. Whatever criticism he had about the men who ran Phoenix, he never stopped trusting their decisions on targets. He was first and foremost a Marine; he trusted the system. He continued to believe his country was fighting this war for the best and most unselfish of reasons. He believed in the guilt of Bobby Garwood and terminal justice. He said later, "We had to get him."
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Notes:
1. Tasking meant translating III MAF's overall intelligence goals into specific orders and passing these orders to the units involved. Each order normally contained sufficient detailed instructions to enable recon teams to accomplish their missions as smoothly and successfully as possible.
2. To men like McKenney and Owens these teams had a legendary history. The precursors of the First Force Recon (hunter-killer) teams were the Scout-Sniper platoons and the Raider Battalion (an elite group that conducted commando raids) of World War II and Korea. Both were under the control of military intelligence, not dissimilar to the way they were being directed in Vietnam. Both the earlier, World War II units and the new hunter-killer teams included reconnaissance as an essential part of their work. The difference between World War II and Vietnam was in the way these units were used. During World War II intelligence gathering and direction for such units was under military control. In Vietnam they were an asset that the CIA's Phoenix program could and did use. McKenney was officially informed that the directive to assassinate Garwood came from the CIA. This did not mean that hunter-killer teams were under the command of the CIA. Rather, they got their orders from McKenney and other Marines like him, who transmitted the directives they received from above and saw to the operative details of each mission.
3. Lewis W. Walt, Strange War; Strange Strategy: A General's Report on Vietnam. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1970.
4. MACSOG was formally established in January 1964 as a Joint Unconventional Warfare Task Force assigned on paper to Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV). In reality, it was an independent organization that answered to a top-secret section of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This section was headed by the special assistant for counterinsurgency and special activities. In its first year, this was USMC General Victor H. Krulak. Special operations group (SOG) missions were submitted seven days in advance to be considered by the secretaries of State and Defense and the National Security Council, which advised the president, although some latitude was given to SOG commanders in the early years of the war. The use of sophisticated satellite communications equipment allowed special operations units to maintain a rapid communications link with Washington. This became a severe disadvantage to the men on the ground because it was often used by President Johnson to cancel or modify upcoming missions whose effectiveness could by their very nature be appraised only by men who were on the spot. Few military commanders were allowed details on SOG operations but these activities were usually reported to MACV headquarters, which, however, had no authority to approve or veto them. As the war progressed and Washington became more confused and ambiguous about its support for unconventional warfare, an administrative vacuum seemed, to the men on the ground, to be created. This was progressively filled by the CIA, which already had an administrative "special" relationship with the Army's Special Forces and Command and Control outposts. SOG personnel were handpicked, crack U.S. special operations experts from all branches of the armed forces and civilian intelligence agencies who believed in fighting guerrillas with counterguerrilla warfare. It also included South Vietnamese Special Forces soldiers, ethnic Chinese-Vietnamese civilians, and other mercenaries. They engaged in missions against the entire NVA command structure and logistical network, but it was the territories directly across South Vietnamese borders that were of most interest to SOG reconnaissance teams. Cross-border operations were regularly conducted to disrupt the Vietcong, Khmer Rouge, Pathet Lao, and NVA in their own territories; keeping track of all missing Americans and conducting raids to assist and free them; training and dispatching agents into North Vietnam to run resistance movements; "black" psychological operations such as establishing false broadcasting stations inside North Vietnam; and the retrieval of sensitive allied documents and equipment lost or captured during combat with enemy forces. (Summarized from Harve Saal, SOG: MACV Studies and Observation Group. Volume 1: Historical Evolution. Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers.)
5. Command and Control North Was based at Da Nang, Command and Control Center (CCC) at Ban Me Thout, and Command and Control South (CCS) at Kontum. In addition to their reconnaissance teams, made up of U.S. and indigenous members, each had a battalion-sized indigenous force under American Command.
6. Force Recon units were single companies, intended for control by a force, i.e. III MAF. In Vietnam, III MAF gave up direct control of the Force Reconnaissance companies and attached them to the reconnaissance battalions. There was a reconnaissance battalion in each division, which was given the same number as the division, i.e. First Reconnaissance Battalion, First Marine Division. A battalion contained three or four companies.
7. Couriers were a primary target. They often carried information about imminent attacks, prison camps where Americans were held, and U.S. tactics and planning that could seriously compromise American plans if they reached their destination.
8. Primary assets were the provincial Reconnaissance units, the Navy Special Operations Group (Seals), operating mostly in the far south (Mekong Delta), and the MACSOG patrols, operating out-of-country patrols in adjacent Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam, for the most part.
9. William Colby with James McCargar, Lost Victory: A Firsthand Account of America's Sixteen-Year Involvement in Vietnam. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1986.
10. Ibid.
11. Perhaps the best explanation of what normal Special Forces activities should be has been given by Army Lieutenant General William P. Yarborough. He said such a force should "assist in the development of a resistance mechanism which can operate alone or which will supplement, complement, or precede military operations by uniformed conventional military forces, thus bringing to bear against an enemy aggressor the total physical, political, and psychological resources of a friendly state." (From Ian D.W. Sutherland, Special Forces of the United States Army 1952/1982. San Jose: R. James Bender Publishing.)
12. Slang for local villages or hamlets.
13. A U.S. Senate report on the issue of prisoner of war conduct in Korea had stated: "The United States Malines Corps, the Turkish troops, and the Colombians as groups did not succumb to the pressures exerted upon them by the communists and did not collaborate with the enemy. For this they deserve the greatest admiration." One Marine, during that war, a colonel, former First Marine Air Wing chief of staff with an impeccable World War II record, did succumb. In 1954, a Court of Inquiry determined that he had made a confession only after he "had resisted to the limit of his ability." Nevertheless, Marine Corps standards were so tough, the Court also judged "his usefulness as a Marine officer had been seriously impaired." (From J. Robert Moskin, The U.S. Marine Corps Story. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992.)
14. The Central Intelligence Agency's connection with reconnaissance and special operations units, especially with Fifth Special Forces (Snake Eaters), has often been referred to as "an incestuous marriage." Until 1964, the CIA had run and funded all Special Forces programs. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, military operations were officially turned over to the Army, but a complicated funding arrangement allowed Department of Defense monies to be transferred to the CIA so that various programs could operate under more flexible CIA rules. Intelligence gathering, McKenney's official job, was the only openly discussed connection between recon and special operations units and the CIA. In fact, these units, including Marine reconnaissance battalions, despite McKenney's argument that they were "organic" to the USMC, were assets of and took orders from the CIA-especially on the most controversial matters like targeting and assassinations. In 1966, Special Forces had rewritten its charter to place the director of CIA in its chain of command. Members of Fifth Special Forces Group were responsible to their own offices and nobody in the CIA except those at the very top had the authority to give any Green Beret or other military man any orders. It was McKenney's assumption that "the very top" is where the Garwood directive came from.
15. A special clearance was required for contact and cooperation with CCN or any SOG. Anyone who had worked with these groups was required to be debriefed by them before leaving Vietnam and was again sworn to secrecy. All CCN patrol reports came to McKenney daily while he was at III MAF. It is interesting that in CCN patrol reports, names were never used. Each team member was referred to by a number.
16. Former CIA agent Frank Snepp said, "I was in charge of lists of targets. A lot of people who shouldn't have been hit, were hit ... and it was a sin." (From the BBC program Phoenix Rising; also broadcast on the program Witness to History, CBC Canada, December 12, 1993.)
