Udon Thani, Thailand

 

In early January, 1973, I volunteered to go to Saigon to command the 505th Tactical Control Group. But on January 27th we and the North Vietnamese signed a cease fire agreement and our people began leaving South Vietnam. By the time my orders arrived in March, we were out of Vietnam, and the 505th group had been reduced to our three remaining radar sites in Thailand, a logistics operation in Bangkok, and a classified mission carried over from Monkey Mountain in Vietnam. For diplomatic reasons the remaining elements were organized under the 621st Tactical Control Squadron (TCS), and the 505th group ceased to exist. I now was to command the 621st TCS at Udon Thani (Udorn), Thailand.

I was due at Udorn on April 15th. On the morning of April 9th, Fr. Boyer picked me up, and drove me to the Colorado Springs airport — in a snowstorm. My flight got off okay, and after a landing at San Francisco International and a pickup by an Air Force car I was at Travis AFB again, ready to head for Asia for the third time in my life.

I had become a "senior officer," and travel was a bit easier now. At Travis I was given a suite in the BOQ. The next morning I was driven to the absurdly titled distinguished visitor (DV) lounge at the terminal. When it came time to board, a couple other colonels and I were driven out to a contract commercial flight (I think it was Northwest Orient Airlines) and we were able to board and pick our seats. We made the usual middle-of-the-night stop in Oahu, then on to Clark in the Philippines, where we landed late in the afternoon. This time, instead of bunking in a WW II Japanese Quonset hut, I had another suite in the BOQ.

I spent most of the following two days in intelligence briefings on current operations in Cambodia, where Pol Pot's fighters were advancing on Phnom Penh, on the uncertain situation in Vietnam, and on Air America's operations in Laos, which by now were minimal. Early Sunday morning I boarded a C141 heading for Bangkok. The guy sitting next to me was Colonel Ken Harrison who was to be the base commander at Udorn. Ken wasn't much of a conversationalist, but he wasn't as difficult a guy as I made him out to be in my short stories.

When we landed in Bangkok we were whisked to the DV lounge, and after a short delay put aboard a C130 for Udorn. It was afternoon when we landed. A two-striper walked me off the airplane and into the base terminal. It must have been over 100 degrees that day, a sharp change from the snowstorm in which I'd left Colorado Springs six days earlier. The airman asked me where I wanted to go, and I explained that I was the new 621st commander. The kid was surprised no one was there from my unit. I got on the phone and called 621st headquarters, but it was Sunday afternoon and the offices were closed. "Brigham," one of the three radar sites in my new command was on base, so I called Brigham ops. The site had two emergencies in progress, so I hung up and got a military car to drive me to the billeting office.

The Thai billeting clerk told me I was assigned to a trailer in the senior officers' area, but the air conditioner in the empty room was broken. He wanted to send me to the transient BOQ until the air conditioner was fixed, but I made him give me my key to the trailer. The driver helped me find the place and helped me drag my stuff inside.

It wasn't long after I dumped my stuff in the end room with the dead air conditioner, that Lt. Cols Charlie Cates, deputy for operations and Mike McKenzie, the plans officer popped in. Charlie apologized for not having somebody at the passenger terminal to pick me up, but according to the message they'd received I wasn't supposed to arrive until the next day. That night Charlie and Mike took me to the club, where I met most of the officers from the headquarters and from Brigham. We had dinner before we went into the bar, but the activity in the bar in my "Udorn" story is a fairly accurate description of what happened. I ended up that night drenched in beer, an initiation I actually welcomed.

The next few days were taken up with in-processing. Fortunately, I didn't have to wander around the base filling out forms in various offices. The office people came to me with their forms. I was offered a blue sedan as my car, but my predecessor had had a jeep, and I preferred that to the closed car.

Since the 621st was a squadron, administratively it was under the 432nd Tactical Fighter Wing, the main operational unit on the base at Udorn. But both the wing commander and I worked for Brigadier General Hildreth, the guy who wrote my effectiveness report. Hildreth was commander of 7/13th Advon (advanced echelon), which combined functions of 7th Air Force, the combat command, and 13th Air Force, the support command. It was the same, slightly absurd arrangement I'd dealt with nine years earlier at Can Tho.

As a squadron commander rather than group commander I was keeper of my troops, and if somebody in 621st headquarters or the local radar site got in trouble I was the guy who had to deal with it. That kind of thing took time away from dealing with the operational requirements of the radar sites: "Brigham" at Udorn, "Lion" at Ubon, and "Invert" at Nakhon Phanom, on the Mekong river (known familiarly as "Naked Fannom"). Fortunately, I had a fine first sergeant ("the Shirt"), and the officers who'd dumped beer on me that first night in the bar were knowledgeable, competent, first-class people.

After my introduction to Southeast Asia nine years earlier, what I saw at Udorn was astonishing. The base was immense. The officers' club was larger than most o' clubs in the States. The base exchange (BX) was at least the equivalent of most of its counterparts at home. There was a huge swimming pool where female Caucasian dependents hung out in Bikinis. When I'd been at Ubon in the sixties, if you brought a family member over in tourist status and got caught you lost credit for your unaccompanied tour. Now, when I'd eat lunch in the o' club dining room there'd be Caucasian women with kids at some of the tables. It was a slap in the face to the troops who couldn't afford to bring their dependents along on this "unaccompanied" tour, and it didn't help morale. As one troop said, "It's only an unaccompanied tour for junior grade airmen." It also had a sad, slightly comic side. One Brigham controller brought in his wife. She got involved with a Thai officer and the result was one of the problems I had to deal with.

In spite of all this stateside-like splendor the Cambodian war was going full-throttle. The 432nd Wing, as well as the other flying units scattered around Thailand were flying combat missions throughout the day and sometimes the night. The 621st didn't have enough controllers, so they were on very long shifts and sometimes slept on cots next to their scopes. The normal work week for the headquarters was six and a half days. We closed on Sunday afternoon but we were on duty the rest of the week and on call Sunday afternoon. The only relief from this was an occasional day or two of bad weather when the fighters couldn't fly.

In the midst of this a directive came down from the Pentagon requiring that everybody go to a week of antidiscrimination training. The training was provided by a black master sergeant who was the officers' club steward. He brought in a couple of militant friends to help teach the course. Because of the time crunch caused by combat requirements and the quality and content of the instruction, by the time people finished their training they'd become far more prejudiced than they'd been before they took the class.

Once I'd settled in, Charlie and two other officers took me on a tour of the command. When I was ops officer at Ubon I'd once taken a flight up to Nakhon Phanom in a C130 loaded with huge neoprene bladders full of gasoline. In those days besides the radar site there was a small flight of rescue choppers at Nakhon Phanom and there was no reasonable way to get fuel to them by road, so gasoline was flown in. The Invert radar site was primitive in the extreme and the Pathet Lao Communists were directly across the river. But when 7th Air Force left Saigon the whole headquarters moved to Nakhon Phanom. Now there was a huge airfield and a crowded Pentagon-like installation, with people going around in dress blues. Invert had expanded. The Bambi hut that had been the officers' club during my 1965 visit now was a storage shed.

Ubon was shocking. When I got off the airplane, instead of the small base I'd left nine years earlier I was presented with a massive airfield where dozens of trucks plied the ramps and taxiways. Instead of an officers' club in a Bambi hut we had lunch in an officers' club at least the equivalent of any I'd seen in the States. The transient BOQ was full so we were billeted downtown in the Ubon Hotel, which was nine stories high. When I'd left for Can Tho in 1965 the largest building in town had been the three-story New Hotel.

Major Jim Sink, the Lion site commander gave us a tour of the town. I told Jim I'd like to see Indian Joe's where we used to hang out nine years earlier, but he explained that Indian Joe had been selling drugs and his bistro was off limits. I was disappointed but not surprised. I knew Joe would sell anything he could lay hands on. Nine years earlier there was a rumor Joe was selling a Chinese virgin. Instead of heading for Joe's we found some samblaos* and went to the Sam Pan, which turned out to be what I'd known as the Kingstar, a real Thai nightclub. Now the place was aimed toward Americans and we were mobbed by business girls as we came through the door.

The next morning Jim showed us around the site, which was much more advanced technically than the one I'd left in 1965. Jim briefed us on operations while his operations officer stood by. We went to the radar equipment room and Jim briefed us on communications and electronics while his C&E officer stood by. After lunch Jim and I sat down in his office where he proceeded to gave me a rundown on the personnel situation at Lion. Clearly he was trying to impress me with how busy he was and how much he was on top of everything. Unfortunately Jim had swallowed the idea, gaining more and more currency in the Air Force at the time, that in order to do his job properly he had to be an all-seeing, all-dancing dog. It was an attitude that had cost my sometime boss at Air Defense Command his star. I told him, "Jim, your job is to organize things so your people can do their jobs. If you can't cut out sometimes in the afternoon and play tennis without anybody noticing you're gone you haven't done that." Next time I came to visit, Jim was laid back, his people were doing their jobs, and everything was well organized.

We went on to Bangkok and met Chief Master Sergeant Gary Weiss who was in charge of our logistics operation. Gary was facing problems with the shortage of Military Assistance Program (MAP) funds. The Thai radar sites were designed for air defense and didn't require the same level of perfection we depended on for our piggybacked, specialized tactical control equipment. But U.S. help for Thai maintenance had to come through the Military Assistance Program. It was a problem that would bug us for the next three months until Congress's Case Church amendment shut down our air operations and abandoned the Cambodians to Pol Pot's mercies. If we lost a single airplane because of a failure in radar assistance for things like mid-air refueling the cost to the U.S. would be many times what was being held back in MAP, but that logic seemed too complicated for Congress to grasp.

One morning back at Udorn Charlie brought in Captain John Duane, our operations training officer, to brief me on the status of the classified mission we'd inherited from Monkey Mountain. The mission required we man a secure operations room in the headquarters building 24/7. The operation also involved a massive amount of very expensive communications equipment. Everybody who worked there had to have a clearance above top secret. I'd had to wait a couple weeks after I'd arrived before my own extended clearance came through. John convinced me that since we were out of Vietnam the operation no longer made much operational sense. In addition, occasionally one of the young troops with an extended clearance would go down town and shack up. Once his new family status was discovered he'd lose his clearance. Unlike our current situation where the Obama Office of Personnel Management seems pretty casual about security clearances, in those days the background investigation for a top secret or above clearance was very thorough and very expensive, so clearing replacements was costing a bundle. John convinced me we ought to close the operation, but that would require approval from General Vogt, 7th Air Force commander.

Charlie arranged an Audience with General Vogt, and two weeks after John's briefing we got on the Klong** and flew to Naked Fannom. We were ushered into a room where Vogt sat behind a huge desk. There were a couple major generals in the room and a bunch of other headquarters staffers. John gave a flawless briefing. He explained why we didn't need the classified operation any longer and gave a rough estimate of how much money we'd save if we shut it down. General Vogt agreed we could eliminate it. After the briefing we were gathered in the corridor when the two major generals who'd been in the briefing came up, and General Slay said to the other general, "Who gets the captain?" After John's splendid performance I knew he wasn't kidding, and when we got back to Udorn I told John I'd help him go to 7th Air Force if he wanted to do that. Happily for me he declined.

On August 15th, a Wednesday, the Case Church amendment shut down our flying operations in Cambodia and our participation in the war ended. At first the fighter wings laid on a training schedule almost as intense as the combat operations they'd just shut down, but the Thai put the kibosh on that idea. They wanted their airspace back for their own use. Training flights were reduced to a reasonable, even relaxed schedule. Suddenly, instead of having our hands full our hands were pretty empty.

For the first few months I'd had an executive officer who was an effective bureaucrat. He kept our reports in order and 13th Air Force off our back, but Bernie wasn't much of a people person so the Shirt didn't get much help from him on personnel problems. Near the end of combat operations Bernie rotated back to the States and I got a new exec: a first lieutenant named Ellen Gruner***. Ellen was the first military woman on base, and it wasn't long before we discovered the base wasn't really set up to handle women. One of the minor problems was that our headquarters building didn't have separate "Men" and "Women" facilities. We got a guy from maintenance to put a lock on the latrine door so Ellen could have privacy. That solved one problem, but there were others. Ellen went to base supply to get two pairs of fatigues, which in Thailand were standard issue. Supply didn't have any girl fatigues. They told her to go across the street to a tailor shop and have some made. She told them that wasn't satisfactory. I let supply know I agreed with her. They put girl fatigues on order but until they arrived Ellen went around in baggy fatigues with sleeves and pantlegs rolled up.

There was a cluster of tailor shops directly across Freedom highway from the main gate. "Brother Amarjit," a Sikh, owned the shop named The Maharaja. In our leisure moments most of us wore "safari suits" made at Amarjit's shop. Amarjit had contracted with women all over town to sew for him. If you went to his shop in the morning and got measured for something he usually could have it ready for you to pick up by afternoon. The stuff Amarjit made was inexpensive, and a "party suit" tradition had been established on the base. Each squadron had a silly-looking party suit its officers would wear to gatherings in the o' club. The 621st didn't have a party suit, so I designed one. You can't see the black stripes down the pant legs in this picture, but they're there. I also had Amarjit make me a poolside party suit which I still have.

About two months into my stay at Udorn the base got an Episcopal chaplain. I'd passed up the non-sectarian Sunday services but Chaplain Cox started doing an Episcopal service after his non-sectarian one, and I started going to church again. A couple times Cox asked me to do a prayer service on Sundays when he was away, even though I wasn't confirmed as an Episcopalian. He wanted me to go to Bangkok and be confirmed by the Bishop of Bangkok. I thought that would be fun but our schedules never quite meshed, and it never happened.

During the Vietnam war Bangkok had been the main destination for people on Rest and Recuperation (R&R) leave. Nearly everybody from the 505th Tactical Control Group had spent their R&R's at the Nana hotel in Bangkok. Now that the 505th had disappeared the Nana's owner wanted to make sure the 621st TCS would continue to be loyal to the Nana. He invited me and two of my officers to visit. We'd be paying guests at the normal rate but he planned to take us on a klong (canal) tour to see old Bangkok. Three of us went. The klong tour was fascinating. We went to an area well away from the city, and what we saw must have been Thailand as it was a couple hundred years earlier: scenes right out of South Pacific tales.

Now that combat had ceased, all sorts of asinine things started happening. A group of agitators decided the base Armed Forces Radio station should arrange its schedule to serve all races and ethnicities proportionally. The station was able to find enough African American music but it turned out that the song, "Eres Tu," was the only Spanish music available, so until more Spanish music arrived "Eres Tu" was played about once an hour. There actually was a formal investigation by the Equal Opportunity and Treatment (EOT) office over the fact that the station didn't have more Spanish music. A directive came down from Washington that once a month each commander was to conduct a "rap session" where African Americans could lay out their complaints to their commander. I began to hear how oppressed my black troops were. That was strange because they claimed the guy oppressing them was the Shirt, and the Shirt was black. At one of those sessions I suggested that since I was a Christian, historically my people had suffered greatly too. I was informed that that wasn't the same thing. The morning after one of my Caucasian officers joined a rap session he said, "I made the walls in all three latrine stalls today."

One Sunday there was a ballgame on TV that practically every officer on base wanted to watch. Everybody was in the o' club, where a lot of booze was being consumed. I had no interest in the game and I was in my office catching up on paperwork. Unfortunately, the base package liquor store was in the back of the club. I'd suggested to the base commander that it be moved since any enlisted man wanting to buy booze (and there were a lot of them), had to traipse through the front of the club to get to the store. During the ballgame a young troop came in with his hat on. A tipsy Major accosted him, snatched his hat, and when the kid talked back, swatted him.

The next day, I was surprised when the wing commander visited my office. There'd been a complaint to the Staff Judge Advocate, and there had to be an article 32 investigation — the equivalent of a civilian grand jury investigation. I was the only senior officer on base who hadn't been in the club when the thing happened. The wing commander asked me to do the investigation and I agreed. Over a period of a couple weeks I interviewed a bunch of people who'd been in the club that day and finally submitted an extensive report that included transcripts of the interviews. Months later, on my way home, I had dinner in the Clark AFB o' club with a guy I'd been chatting with in the bar. Turned out he was the 13th AF Staff Judge Advocate. I told him about the article 32 investigation I'd done. He said, "Oh. Did you do that one? We've been using that as an example of how to do an article 32 investigation."

It was time to go home and one afternoon I got my orders. So much for "guarantees" from generals. Instead of returning as Director of NORAD Ops Plans, I was to be Director of Combat Operations at 29th NORAD Region in Great Falls.

My officers and troops put together a wonderful sawadee (goodbye) party. I found out later that two of the guys who'd worked hardest on it were airmen I'd given Article 15's (Google it).

But the morning after the party I got some terrible news. Jim Sink left Lion Control at Ubon about a month after my second visit. His successor let things slide, and the site failed an evaluation. I fired the new commander. His replacement was Major Grady Cook, one of the finest men I've met. I knew Grady had come up from Ubon for my party, and I'd wondered why he hadn't made it to the festivities. I found out he'd been downtown and had taken a samblao back to the base. The samblao driver had a contract to take out somebody, and he mistakenly thought Grady was the guy. He and two other samblao drivers took machetes to Grady. The cops intervened and Grady survived, but he was in the hospital in bad condition. I visited him that morning, and it was an experience I'll never get over. I kept track of Grady for several years, and I know he recovered to a considerable degree, but he ended up partially handicapped.

Finally, it was time to head for Clark on the C141 "Super Klong." The Shirt drove me to the passenger terminal where there was a gathering of people with Champagne and leis. I wasn't sorry to leave Thailand but I was sorry to leave a lot of the fine people who had done such a great job for me.

 

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* Most writers on Thailand render the name of the three-wheeled bicycle taxicab as "samlor." What I always heard was "samblao."

 

** There were two flights we called "Klongs." Every day two C130s would fly across Thailand, stopping at each base with a U.S. presence. One C130 "Klong" ran west to east, and the other went east to west. There also was a C141 "Super Klong" from Clark AFB in the Philippines that stopped only at bases requiring a pickup or delivery. As I recall, one day the Super Klong would go from east to west, and the following day from west to east back to Clark. If somebody was due to go to Clark, the west to east Super Klong would stop for the pickup

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*** By the time she went home, Ellen’s husband had decided he didn’t like living without a wife for a year at a time and they divorced. Ellen and an OSI lieutenant she’d become friendly with in Thailand – friendly only, I have no doubt, since I knew the OSI lieutenant quite well – came to visit me one evening when I was stationed in Texas. They seemed a great couple and both were single then. I’ve always hoped they made a life together.