Replies

This is some more of Baghdad Peter's lies:

A despicable bastard.

How US attacked 'traitor' GIs with nerve gas

America's anti-Vietnam protests were at their height with tens of
thousands of body bags already shipped home. The Nixon administration
was clutching at straws. Special forces were sent on a covert mission
into Laos to hunt down and kill US defectors. But for 28 years, the
special weapon they used remained secret. It was sarin, the lethal gas
developed by the Nazis

By April Oliver and Peter Arnett

London Observer Sunday June 14, 1998

September 1970. Sixty miles inside Laos, a battered and exhausted US
Special Forces commando unit was in deep trouble. Not only were they
not officially meant to be there, but nearly all of the Americans, and
many of the Montagnard tribesmen fighting with them, had been wounded.
They had just wiped out a village base camp, killing about 100 people,
including women, children and a group of GIs believed to have defected
to the Vietnamese.

Now their unit was under attack by a superior force of North
Vietnamese and Communist Pathet Lao soldiers which had appeared
suddenly on a nearby ridge and were about to block the Americans'
escape to a paddyfield, where rescue helicopters could land to
evacuate the GIs back to their base in Vietnam.

"The enemy was coming at us. We were out of ammo," recalls platoon
leader Robert Van Buskirk, then a 26-year-old lieutenant. His only
recourse was to call for help from the air. He radioed an Air Force
controller to call in two waiting A-1 Skyraiders to drop the "bad of
the bad".

Within seconds, the Skyraiders swooped over the advancing enemy,
dropping gas canisters. The GIs heard the canisters exploding and saw
a wet fog envelop the Vietnamese soldiers as they dropped to the
ground, vomiting and convulsing.

As the helicopters lifted his unit out, Van Buskirk manned a machine
gun, scanning the elephant grass for targets. "All I see is bodies,"
he recalls. "They are not fighting any more. They are just lying, some
on their sides, some on their backs. They are no longer combatants."

Now, after an eight-month investigation, military officials with
knowledge of the mission say that the gas dropped 28 years ago in Laos
was nerve gas, specifically sarin, the lethal agent used in the 1995
terrorist attack in a Tokyo subway that killed a dozen people.
Although the nerve gas, called GB by the military, had been in the US
arsenal for years and the US had not yet ratified the Geneva Protocol
banning its use, the policy of the Nixon administration was "no first
use" of lethal nerve gas in combat.

A Pentagon official said the Army "has found no documentary evidence
to support CNN's claims that nerve gas of any type was used on
Operation Tailwind". But a retired US Navy admiral, Thomas Moorer, who
was Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1970, and other top
military officials have confirmed the use of sarin in the Laotian
operation and in missions to rescue downed US airmen during the
Vietnam War.

Moorer argues that the use of the gas was justified. "I would be
willing to use any weapon and any tactic to save the lives of American
soldiers," he said. In addition to using the nerve gas to evacuate the
Americans after their raid, though, veteran Special Forces officers
claim that sarin was used the previous night to 'prepare' the village
for the next morning's attack. This would indicate that civilians as
well as combatants were victims of poison gas.

Just as surprising as the use of the gas is the reason for the raid:
the targeted village was believed to be harbouring a large group of
GIs who had defected to the enemy. The Special Forces unit had been
sent in to kill them.

Based in Kontum, South Vietnam, the men involved in Operation Tailwind
were known as an SOG team, standing innocuously for Studies and
Observations Group. Officially, SOG units did not exist, but they were
America's fiercest soldiers, conducting classified 'black operations'
with unconventional weapons and unusual targets. They did little
studying and a lot of fighting. SOG veterans say they had no rules of
engagement: anything was permissible as long as it was deniable.

Their motto, according to Van Buskirk: "Kill them all, and let God
sort it out." During its pre-raid briefing at Kontum, the SOG 'hatchet
force' was told to kill anyone it encountered. "My orders were, if
it's alive, if it breathes oxygen, if it urinates, if it defecates,
kill it," Van Buskirk says.

In keeping with the extreme dividing up of information necessary to
protect top-secret missions, only a few of the SOG officers knew the
precise target. And very few knew the exact type of gas available for
their mission, although the unit was promised anything in the
non-nuclear US arsenal it might need to complete the mission. The
teaam understood there was an agent known as 'sleeping gas' available
for last-resort situations; they were aware that the gas caused
respiratory distress, sudden vomiting, diarrhoea, convulsions and
often death.

The unit leaders were advised to equip their soldiers with bulky but
effective M-17 gas masks before the raid. Several days before the
operation began, a small reconnaissance force was dropped into a lush
Laotian valley near the town of Chavan. As Jay Graves, a SOG
reconnaissance team leader, put it: "We went in, snooped and pooped,
moved around." Through a special field telescope, Graves's men spotted
several 'round eyes', Americans, in the village.

The team radioed back its report and was told to 'groundhog' - remain
silent and in hiding until the hatchet force arrived. The sighting of
defectors is confirmed today by Air Force commando Jim Cathey. "I
believed that these were American defectors because there was no sign
of any restraint," he says. "They walked around as though they were a
part of the bunch."

On 11 September the 16 SOG team members and about 140 Montagnard
tribesmen, who had been hired to fight the Communists, were loaded
aboard four Marine helicopters at Dak To, near the border with Laos.

The sight of the assault force, which included 12 Cobra helicopter
gunships and two back-up Marine choppers, alerted Jack Tucker, one of
the Marine pilots, that trouble lay ahead. "I saw them walking across
the tarmac, loaded down with those grenade clips," he says. "And there
were these little-bitty Montagnards humping so much stuff. I just went
'Oh, man' and knew we were in for some real deep shit."

Tucker and the other pilots had also been equipped with special gas
masks to protect against chemical warfare. As soon as the helicopters
approached the landing zone near Chavan, they came under heavy fire.
"It was a hairy situation from the time we got there," recalls Jimmy
Lucas, a squad leader. "Ground fire on insertion is something you are
not supposed to get."

The SOG team landed several miles from the targeted base camp and
spent the next three days fighting its way towards it. "I feel like in
them three days I just cheated death," Lucas says. "We never expected
to come out."

On the third night the commandos waited near the village as the Air
Force A-1s 'prepped' the target. In the morning the SOG forces
attacked. Van Buskirk's platoon led the charge. "I went right up the
middle. I was on the offensive," he says. Tossing grenades into the
hootches in the village and spraying machine-gun fire ahead, the
attack force met little resistance.

"It was minimal, nothing like you would expect for the amount of
people there," says Craig Schmidt, a member of Van Buskirk's platoon.
"It was very unusual, kind of eerie."

Van Buskirk spotted two 'longshadows', tall Caucasians. One was
sliding down a 'spider hole' into the underground tunnel system
beneath the camp. The other was running towards it. "Early twenties.
Blond hair. Looks like he was running off a beach in California," he
recalls. "Needs a haircut. This is a GI. Boots on. Not a prisoner. No
shackles. Nothing." The lieutenant gave chase, but just missed the
blond man as he slipped into the tunnel. He shouted down the hole,
identifying himself and offering to take the man home. According to
Van Buskirk, the man replied "Fuck you", and so he dropped in a white
phosphorus grenade, presumably killing both longshadows.

The village raid lasted no more than 10 minutes. The number killed,
according to Captain Eugene McCarley, the officer in charge, was
"upwards of 100".

Sergeant Mike Hagen says: "The majority of the people there were not
combat personnel. The few infantry people they had we overran
immediately. We basically destroyed everything there."

The Montagnards searched the camp for documents and booty. They
reported to Hagen and Van Buskirk that there were "beaucoup round
eyes" dead in the hootches. Van Buskirk says: "A dozen, 15, maybe 20."
But the SOG team says no bodies were identified or recovered. With the
camp destroyed, spotter planes overhead ordered the SOGs to the
paddyfield where the rescue helicopters would land.

As the enemy closed in, the commandos were told to don their 'funny
faces', the M-17 gas masks. Then came the canister explosions. "To me
it was more of a very, very light, light fog. It was tasteless,
odourless, you could barely see it," Hagen says.

The gas spread towards the Americans, even though the moving
helicopter blades were blowing it away. Some of the gas masks had been
damaged in the four-day battle, some had been discarded, and some were
too big for the diminutive Montagnards.

"Everything got sticky," squad leader Craig Schmidt says. "We turned
our sleeves down to cover ourselves as much as possible. It doesn't
surprise me in the slightest bit that it was nerve gas. It worked too
well." Some of the Special Forces troops began vomiting violently.

Hagen now suffers from creeping paralysis in his extremities, which
his doctor blames on nerve gas damage. "Nerve gas," Hagen says. "The
government don't want it called that. They want to call it
incapacitating agent or some other form. But it was nerve gas." As
many as 60 of the Montagnards died in Operation Tailwind, but all 16
Americans survived, although every one of them suffered some wounds.

Van Buskirk and McCarley were awarded the Silver Star for valour. Van
Buskirk briefed General Creighton Abrams, the US commander in Vietnam,
on the mission. But when the lieutenant wrote his after-action report,
a superior officer, now dead, advised him to delete the part about
dropping the white phosphorus grenade - a 'willy pete' - on the
Americans in the tunnel.

Confirming the use of sarin, Moorer says the gas was "by and large
available" for high-risk search-and-rescue missions. Sources say nerve
gas was employed in more than 20 missions to rescue downed pilots in
Laos and North Vietnam. Moorer says: "This is a much bigger operation
than you realise."

Melvin Laird, Secretary of Defence at the time of Operation Tailwind,
says he has no specific recollection of sarin being used, but adds: "I
do not dispute what Admiral Moorer has to say on this matter."

Moorer points out that any use of sarin would have had approval from
President Nixon's national security team in Washington. Henry
Kissinger, National Security Adviser at the time, declined to comment.

As for the defectors and the policy of killing them, retired
Major-General John Singlaub, a former SOG commander, confirms what was
the unwritten SOG doctrine in effect at the time: "It may be more
important to your survival to kill the defector than to kill the
Vietnamese or Russian."

The defectors' knowledge of US communications and tactics "can be
damaging", he says. "There were more defectors than people realise,"
says a SOG veteran at Fort Bragg. No definitive number of Americans
who went over to the enemy is available, but Moorer says there were
scores. Another SOG veteran said there were close to 300. The Pentagon
said there were only two known military defectors during the Vietnam
War.

April Oliver is a producer for NewsStand and Peter Arnett is a CNN
international correspondent.