The Secret War in Laos | No Man Left Behind

When I joined the CIA and had the opportunity, I was able to get into the Special Operations Division. I went through six months of intensive paramilitary training, and shortly thereafter, I was assigned to the operation in Laos. There was a war going on, but it was basically a guerilla war. In 1962, the Geneva Accords had been signed, and that required all foreign troops to leave Laos. The U.S. complied; they took out 500 enlisted men who had been working with the hill tribes in Laos.

The problem was that the North Vietnamese did not pull their military personnel out. So, whoever made the policy decided to continue the U.S. presence there, but in the form of just two paramilitary officers. We weren't in the country legally; we didn’t go through the antenna and a passport. No, we were flowing in black, as it is called. The whole idea at that time was to harass and slow down the Vietnamese eventual march towards the west from Vietnam.

We did a lot. We blew up boats on the river—supply boats of the North Vietnamese. We ambushed the North Vietnamese truck convoys. Some were not traditional methods because we didn't always have the weapons. At one point, we dropped large rocks out of a bottle in the aircraft onto a truck convoy, because they were right out in the open, and they thought nothing could stop them. But we had harassed them that way.

The Pathet Lao were an indigenous group in Laos, and they were a communist force that had been formed some years before. They were basically trained for the most part by the North Vietnamese, just as we were supplying advisors to the Hmong tribe. The North Vietnamese were supplying units to train the Pathet Lao throughout that region. The Pathet Lao were mainly just village-type people that they turned into sometimes should-be soldiers.

But I would say that I would much rather have been captured by the North Vietnamese than the Pathet Lao, because I think the difference would be being captured by a Washington D.C. neighborhood gang than, may say, an organized terrorist organization, if that makes any sense. The organized folks would try to make use of your propaganda value, whereas the thugs were just going to, you know, they were going to beat the hell out of you, and that would be it.

There were Air America pilots who were shot down, and we do know that they retreated very, very badly. They never came out alive.