Lion Control, Ubon Rachthani, Thailand

Autumn decided to take the family to Omena while I was overseas since in Omena she'd have Ernestine and other kin nearby. In early October she went on ahead with the kids and found a house on a hill on the edge of town that would handle us. I closed things out at Richards Gebaur and shipped our household stuff to Omena. I had a month's leave coming before I had to depart for Southeast Asia and I arrived at Omena near the middle of October.

Leaving my family for a year overseas was different this time. Now there were six of us, and I'd be leaving Autumn to care for four kids by herself. It was a traumatic experience for both of us. ("I Have Heard Springtime").

Finally, in early December I took a commercial flight from Traverse City and headed for the west coast. This time there were no delays and I was scheduled out of Travis AFB to Clark AFB in the Philippines on a government contract Pan Am Boeing 707. I was waiting in a crowded lounge for boarding when the loudspeakers said, "Captain Russell Lewis, report to the counter." I'd had a flock of shots before I'd left Dickie Goober, but according to Air Force records I was missing a flu shot. I got stuck, went back and sat down. About ten minutes later the loudspeakers said, "Captain Russell Lewis, report to the counter." This time I was handed a holstered 45, told I was to be the courier for some classified material in the belly of the airplane, and was introduced to a sergeant with another 45 on his hip who was to be my assistant.

The advantage of being couriers was that the sarge and I got choice reserved seats next to the door. Each time we landed we also got off the airplane first, but one of us had to stand next to the aircraft's hold all the time the airplane was on the ground. In the meantime the flu shot gave me a pretty high fever that stuck with me all the way to Clark.

At Clark, 13th Air Force required us to qualify with the new M16 assault rifle* before we could go on to the Southeast Asian theater. There was a waiting list for firing, and I had to wait ten days before I was able to get on the range and qualify. We were quartered two each in several small WW II Japanese-built Quonset huts. We had nothing to do but wander the base and eat at the officers' club. I discovered Philippine cigars and Philippine beer, both of which were quite good. The O club was magnificent. The main dining room had a huge, beautiful chandelier made of shells. Downstairs, opening onto a garden, was a rathskeller where you could hang out in casual clothes.

Finally the waiting was over and another Pan Am contract flight took me to Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside Saigon where I reported to 505th Tactical Control Group headquarters. According to my original orders I was to go to Detachment 2 of the 619th Tactical Control Squadron at Ubon, Thailand, but the headquarters stalled around for a couple days trying to decide where they really wanted me to go. Eventually they decided I'd go to Det 2 after all. That night I was able to bum a ride on a C119 heading for Ubon. The weather was atrocious and we were on instruments all the way, bumping around on the edges of thunderstorms. When we got to Ubon the airfield was below minimums, so we had to return to Tan Son Nhut. A day later I was able to get a ride that actually got me there.

Det 2 of the 619th Tactical Control Squadron, call sign "Lion Control," was the only USAF operational unit on Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base. The American presence, which mostly was a caretaker operation, was limited to about 150 people, with ten officers, most of whom were assigned to Lion Control. We lived in "Bambi huts." Each officer had one end of a hut. A Bambi hut had walls that mostly were screens and were open to the elements, but it had corrugated steel flaps you could drop down over the screens if the weather became really hairy, which, in the rainy season, it often did.

The base had a Thai Air Force unit flying T28's and across the runway an Australian fighter squadron detachment. Since there were so few officers on the American side our officers' club was another Bambi hut. We were welcome in the Australian officers' mess, and we visited them often enough to get to know the Aussies pretty well. They were wonderful people. Later on, at NORAD headquarters, I worked with a lot of Canadians and a few Brits, but though the Aussies talked funny they were more like Americans than any other English-speaking people I've met.

Since I was the ranking captain I immediately became the operations officer. Chief Warrant Officer John Bowman was the communications-electronics officer, and for some reason Johnny and I hit it off right away and became close friends. The NCO club boomed out loud music until about one-o-clock in the morning, so trying to sleep on the base at night was difficult. Until about a month before I got there, John and a friend had rented a bungalow down town, but the friend had left. He suggested we go together on a bungalow, and we did. The rent was about fifteen bucks a month from each of us. We ripped off a couple GI cots from the base and we were in business. Outside of the problem associated with learning the standard Thai plumbing, the only difficulty was that at night you had to bolt yourself into your room with your belongings or the kamoy (thieves) would steal everything. You also had to carry water from the base in a canteen because the municipal water wasn't drinkable. We managed to borrow the base commander's beat-up car and we commuted.

There wasn't enough work. From time to time we'd control a flight for the Thai or the Australians, but we had too much time on our hands. A month or so after I arrived the site commander got orders reassigning him to Saigon. He owned a 50cc Suzuki cycle which I bought. From then on, John and I commuted on the Suzuki. Of an evening we'd putt down to one or another of the local bars or Indian Joe's "bistro " (See "Indian Joe's" segment in the poem, "Ubon")," and drink Mekong whiskey and soda. Mekong was low-octane stuff, closer to wine than to whiskey. John told about a party he and his previous bungalow mate had set up. A day before the party they hauled a case of Jim Beam home from the base, but forgot to lock it in one of their rooms for the night. In the morning it was missing. Later that day the Thai police found two guys dead drunk and passed out in a ditch next to the case of Beam. If you're a Mekong drinker you should be careful switching to Beam.

We often ate at an open-fronted restaurant downtown that had been checked out by Jerry Jones, the base doctor. The main fare was water buffalo steak, which was delicious. We'd also sometimes indulge in a tasty chao phat (fried rice) concoction. One evening, Lieutenant Colonel Angus, the new base commander tried the chao phat. When it arrived he stared at it for a long time and finally said, "It's moving." It was. That ended orders for chao phat. Occasionally we'd gather the people who were off duty and wanted to go along, load everybody into a six-by, and go across the Laos border to a swimming hole on a river.

But on March first, 1965, "Operation Rolling Thunder" (Google it) began. One night a top secret frag order (Google it) came in for us at a diplomatic facility downtown and it turned out I was the only guy on the base with a top secret clearance. I was handed a pistol, went downtown, and brought back the frag order. It gave tracking information for fighter-bomber flights the next day from Korat and Takhli on their way to targets in North Vietnam. That was the beginning of an almost continuous bombing campaign. We got some temporary clearances for the controllers who had to track the aircraft, and our own crypto section started getting daily frag orders. At that point I was the only guy on base who was allowed to convert the information in the frag orders to layouts on map boards, but we got top secret applications going on an urgent basis for a couple other people.

In early March we got word that the Marines had landed on the beaches at Da Nang. The Marines could have docked and gone ashore without getting wet, but the landing was a production. News cameras were cranking as they waded ashore, and crowds of well-wishers were there to greet them. It was a hoot, but it was another indication, after the start of Rolling Thunder, that the United States was going to get into the war in a big way.

The British were constructing an airbase at Mukdahan, on the Mekong river, north of Ubon. The runways had been laid, but were still under construction. One afternoon we got a call from an F105 (super thud) who was based at Takhli and was on his way back from a strike mission in North Vietnam. The guy was shot up and leaking fuel. Our IFF** equipment was down, and there was no way to identify him among the mass gaggle that was on our radar scopes. We told him to keep heading west. Finally he called and said he had the Ubon field in sight and was setting up an approach. A bunch of people rushed out to see him land, but a minute later he called back and said he was going around (climbing back out) because the runway was full of construction equipment. We turned him south toward Ubon, but a few minutes later he flamed out and bailed out. The fighter squadron commander tried to lay the blame for the loss on us, but an investigation showed that that idea didn't hold water.

At the end of March, John headed home and I moved back into my Bambi hut. In early April the 45th Tactical Fighter Squadron arrived on base and started flying daily combat missions into North Vietnam. The base wasn't ready for the fighter squadron, and frantic construction got under way to correct the problem. We'd become used to laid back lunches in the mess hall. Now, the mess had to operate around the clock to take care of the base population. Those of us who'd been living in Bambi huts were kicked off the base, given a small housing allowance, and told to find our own quarters. Eight of us went together and rented a big house in a neighborhood called Silly Sin. I got a comfortable room upstairs. The change let us hire some local people, like Beck, a friendly kid not much older than Clint. Beck was a great salesman and a truly inspired shoe-shiner. We also needed housecleaning and laundry service. We were able to hire some housegirls to come in during the day and do the job.

At one point the base engineers needed to remove a tree from a spot where a new building was to go up. Unfortunately, a spirit lived in the tree, and removing the tree while the spirit was resident would bring down all sorts of problems upon the base. The base had to hire a specialist whose chants and offerings could persuade the spirit to relocate. After several days, and a fair amount of expense, the spiritualist assured us that the spirit had moved on. The tree came down and the building went up.

Reporters started showing up on the base wanting to know what was going on. Since Rolling Thunder still was a classified operation the fighter squadron told them the airplanes were going to a bombing range up north. Since an occasional airplane would come back with what obviously was combat damage, there was a flap in the newspapers, and eventually the Johnson administration was forced to tell the truth.

I'd had difficulty plotting routes from the top secret frag orders without compromising security, so one of the first urgent construction projects was an operations office that was completely enclosed and secure. Of course, a closed room in Thailand would quickly become unbearably hot, so, as it turned out, I had the only air conditioned workroom on the base.

Paddy Control, Can Tho, Vietnam

Finally, in late June I got orders to go to Can Tho in the Vietnam delta to command the radar site at detachment 3, callsign "Paddy." I had to be there within three days. I sold my bike to Jim Farrell who was going to take my place as operations officer, packed my stuff to be shipped, and bummed a ride in a gooney bird to Saigon. From there I got a ride on a Delta Aviation Battalion chopper to Can Tho.

Home at Can Tho was commercial space at Ben Xe Mai, a district about halfway between the city of Can Tho, and the Can Tho airport. Some of the NCO's lived in the vertical apartment just to the right of the Ba-Nhut-Tran restaurant in this picture of Ben Xe Mai. Officers lived in the one just to the right of that. We had a couple more vertical apartments in the block across the street to the right where the airmen lived. Our communications people had rigged up a system that in an emergency would let us talk to each other with the click of a button. Our living room was plush, and though my own quarters lacked the polish of the Silly Sin mansion, it worked. Al Guarino, my operations officer, bunked in the bay next to me. I had a large collection of Richard Tucker's arias on tape which I'd sometimes play in the evening. Al always complained because Tucker wasn't pronouncing Italian correctly. If you stepped out onto the porch you could get a good look at the other buildings around you, and you could watch the constant activity in the square below. We always were a bit afraid to eat anything at the Ba-Nhut-Tran restaurant next door, but occasionally we'd buy some ba mi ba (33) beer. It wasn't too bad, but it was loaded with formaldehyde.

The radar site was on the Can Tho airport about five miles up the road from Ben Xe Mai. The site consisted of an operations tent enclosed in a bunker made of perforated steel planking (PSP) and sandbags with the radome on a tower that rose above it, an office tent, a couple maintenance tents, and a bank of generators to power the place.

Down the road was a large Special Forces camp. Our relationship with Special Forces was great. They had no reliable way to generate steady electrical power, so my predecessor had run a cable to the camp and we had become their power company. Actually, it was a good deal for us too because we needed to keep our diesel generators under load to keep them in good condition. Occasionally, at night, the Viet Cong (VC) would start to mortar the radar site, but Special Forces would start shooting back, ending the attack almost immediately. We had no latrine at paddy. You could stand outside and go through the fence, though sometimes some guy across the pond who was winging it might take a shot at you, but if you had more serious business on your mind you needed to go down the road to the Special Forces' coed latrine.

Our messing facilities were at a Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV) compound in the city of Can Tho. NCO's and airmen could eat in the mess hall or the NCO club. Officers had a choice. You could eat in the mess hall or you could join the officers' mess for fifty bucks and pay a small amount for slightly better food and a less crowded environment. When you left you got your fifty bucks back. Fifty dollars in 1965 was the equivalent of about $399 today (2018), but it was worth it. The French had taught the Vietnamese to make real (wonderful) French bread, and it always was available. In addition to the food at the O club, Bunn, our housegirl, kept us supplied with split coconut and some fruit in the refrigerator.

We had a close relationship with the Army's Delta Aviation Battalion, which flew the UH-1 (Huey) gunship. In the evenings some of us would hang out at Delta Villa, the Battalion's headquarters and main residence. As my first month at Can Tho progressed I found that the Delta guys liked to play poker. Many evenings I'd join the game, and on weekends I spent many hours at the poker table. We played dollar limit, three-raise limit. In 1965 a dollar was the equivalent of a bit more than $7.70 in 2016. By the time I came home I'd won enough to buy a car with the winnings.

George Coutoumonos, the Delta communications-electronics officer and I hit it off right away. One day we sat down and worked out a plan to put a Delta communications van next to Paddy, put a radar scope in it, and make the van's radios accessible from Paddy's operations room. Delta's boss signed off on the plan and we did it. We always tracked fighter-bombers on the way to and from their targets. From then on, if somebody had to bail out in the delta we usually could have a chopper waiting for him before he touched the ground.

George had been assigned a jeep, which was too small to haul his people to the MACV compound for meals. I had a blue crew-cab pickup that was bigger than it needed to be to get my folks to MACV. So we traded. George started hauling his Army guys around in a blue truck that said U.S. Air Force on its sides and I was driving around in an Army jeep that now, thanks to my troops and the Special Forces shop said, "Paddy Control — Eyes and Ears of the Mekong."

In late June we saw our first Arclight drop, off in the distance. In the Arc Light operation a cell of three B52's at very high altitude would drop about fifty 750 lb bombs each on a small area thought to harbor a Viet Cong operation. It was pattern bombing, and reconnaissance showed it wasn't very effective, but it certainly was spectacular, and General Westmoreland, the genius who measured the success of his operations by body counts, wanted it continued.

Not everything was sweetness and light. My first sergeant was spending too much time at Clark in the Philippines being cured of social diseases. After his second trip I fired him. His replacement, Master Sergeant Fitzpatrick, turned out to be one of the finest men I've met in the service. He made my job a whole lot easier. Nine years later, when I commanded the rest of the radar sites in Southeast Asia, he'd been promoted to chief master sergeant and was first sergeant at Lion control.

One day I was at my desk when I got a call to go over to the control room. A pilot on the radio wanted to talk to me. I went over and found that the guy on the horn was a Lt. Colonel I'd gotten to know quite well at Richards Gebaur. He'd had a desk across the aisle from Bill Dunn and me. He'd retired from the Air Force and had gone to work for Air America (Google it). That day he was flying in with a C45 and he offered to buy me lunch in the airport snack bar. From then on he'd come by about every other week and we'd have lunch. Nine years later, when I was at Udorn, where Air America had its headquarters, I tried to track him down. An Air America guy told me he'd been over Laos in the right seat of a C130 when he'd been killed by what we used to call the "golden bb." Some guy on the ground with a rifle had gotten lucky.

We were hassled with a multitude of tedious, sometime silly, requirements laid on by headquarters staff people who hadn't a clue what actually went on in the field. But I had an advantage. We'd get requirements from Thirteenth Air Force in the Philippines, which was our administrative headquarters, and we'd get requirements from Seventh Air Force in Saigon, which was our combat headquarters. The requirements often clashed, so to a large extent I could do what I wanted and point to a regulation to back me up.

On the first of September I was able to put on my golden leaves and become a major. To the Vietnamese, instead of a "dai wee," I now was a "teo ta."

At one point we found we were running out of flannel to clean the plotting board, so supply ordered a bolt of flannel. A couple weeks later a forklift came rumbling down the road from the airport with a big box, which it dumped in the center of the compound. Thirteenth Air Force had shipped us a case of flannel. Everybody wanted flannel. We traded the stuff to MACV for various goodies, and we traded it to special forces for things like Thompson submachine guns which they'd picked up from the VC. It was a bonanza. We also traded flannel for an outhouse which we plunked down next to the fence.

The old airport at Can Tho, where Paddy was located, didn't have a runway that could handle large aircraft, so the United States was building a new base down the road a few miles to the northwest at Binh Thuy. We knew Paddy would be moved to Binh Thuy once the base was operational, so I went down to Binh Thuy for a look at the buildings that were to house our people. I discovered they'd been built with glass jalousie windows. Obviously some brilliant mind in the Pentagon had decided: "Duh… Vietnam hot. Make windows open easy." A mortar round going off near one of those buildings would have shattered the windows and turned them to shrapnel. I wrote a complaint and sent it up to Saigon, but I never found out what finally happened.

At this point the Binh Thuy base belonged to the Americans during the day, but the VC owned most of it at night. From time to time they'd plant mines in the perimeter road that ran outside the runway. Each morning the base EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) people would check the road and remove anything dangerous before work started. Once in a while staff people would fly down from Saigon to check on us. They'd always want to go out to Binh Thuy, so I'd take them out in my (George's?) jeep. On the way I'd tell them about the problems with mines in the road. (I'd have checked with the base first to make sure the EOD sweep was complete.) When we'd get there I'd drive around the perimeter. Usually somebody would take a shot at us on the way around, but by that time of day the VC were far enough away from the Vietnamese Army guys guarding the construction that the shooting was more show than serious intent. When we'd get back to Paddy the visitors usually would go straight down to the airport, get into their airplane and fly back to Saigon.

In early November I got orders to join the staff at Air Defense Command headquarters in Colorado Springs. Ray Blake and Del Pichon had made sure that would happen (See Beausejour and Kansas City).

The vertical "apartments" we lived in had a ground floor, an upstairs where you'd sleep, and a stairway from upstairs that went on up to the roof. The stairway was blocked by a door made of a steel frame covered with grenade wire. Normally, and especially at night, we kept the door locked. But shortly before I left Can Tho a couple of my guys in one of the buildings across the street to the right in the Ben Xe Mai picture left the door open and somebody bounced a grenade down the stairs. It landed inside their room and went off. Fortunately, both of them were out on the porch drinking beer. The concrete wall between the room and the porch kept them from getting hurt, though most of their belongings were toast. This kind of thing was very unusual. Can Tho was a rest and recuperation (R&R) center for the VC, so ordinarily they kept the violence down to a dull roar.

Finally the time came to leave, and both my own people and the Delta guys gave me a grand going away party. Delta presented me with a captured VC rifle with a brass plate on the stock that said, "To Five Card Stud Lewis from Delta Aviation Battalion." Paul has that rifle now. I packed my stuff, bummed a ride to Saigon in a Huey and was on my way home.

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* The M16 is a real assault rifle, meaning you can fire it on full automatic. In other words, the M16 is a machine gun. I keep hearing baloney from politicians talking about prohibiting assault rifles that will fire only one shot per trigger pull. It's obvious they haven't a clue what an assault rifle really is.

 

**I explained what IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) is in "Rapid City and Great Falls," but you can Google it and get a much more extensive explanation if you need one.

 

There are many more pictures of the Ubon experience HERE and more pictures of the Can Tho experience HERE.