Martinez
03-18-2004, 17:05
I'm not sure of the best location for this...
Find out why he's the only Green Beret with his own statue at Ft. Bragg
By Maj. John L. Plaster, USAR (Ret.)
It was perfect timing. Dick Meadows phoned not a dozen days after I'd finished two year's work on a history of SOG. At last we could start his twice-postponed biography.
And what a tale to tell: Project White Star, SOG, the Son Tay Raid, Delta Force, the drug wars - - Meadows had lived one adventure after another, dodging bullets on three continents for 45 years. In our caricature world of hoo-yah Rambos, Dick was genuine and unassuming, the boy next door with a CAR-15, America's Otto Skorzeny or David Sterling. No matter his rank -- master sergeant, captain, major -- all of us in Special Forces knew him as Dick Meadows, a man who didn't need a rank to be who he was; Meadows was Meadows.
It would be a fabulous book.
"But I have a problem," Meadows announced, his soft voice hinting nothing special. "I'm dying, John."
A brick couldn't have hit so hard. Ten days earlier he'd been in Central America when fatigue so overwhelmed him that he came home. His doctor diagnosed leukemia, in its final, most virulent stage. That simply couldn't be. Though 64, Meadows looked two decades younger, fit, trim and vigorous.
"How long do you have?" I asked.
"A week."
True to his word, six days later Dick Meadows died.
A Self-Made Soldier
There was no one like Dick Meadows. He lived the life on which books are written -- in the plural. Born in a dirt-floor West Virginia moonshiner's cabin, in 1947 Meadows lied his age to become a 15-year-old paratrooper, then so distinguished himself in Korea that he was that war's youngest master sergeant, at age 20. The quick-learning but largely self-taught Green Beret acquired such a descriptive vocabulary and sophisticated style that it surprised people to learn he had only a ninth-grade education. The British SAS, with whom Meadows served two years on exchange in the late fifties, thought so much of him that they entrusted him with serious responsibilities. In fact, an SAS sergeant major entrusted him with his daughter, Pamela, for a bride.
In the early sixties he deployed covertly with other Green Berets to Laos where, led by Colonel Arthur 'Bull' Simons, they trained Kha Tribesmen to fight the Pathet Lao and NVA. These Project White Star men were withdrawn when Laos was declared 'neutral' at a Geneva Conference.
SOG Team Leader Extraordinaire
It was in SOG -- the top secret Studies and Observations Group, the Vietnam War's covert special operations unit -- that Meadows really shined. He spent two years in SOG, all of it running missions deep behind enemy lines in Laos and North Vietnam while leading Chinese Nung mercenaries on Recon Team Iowa.
Before each operation, Meadows built a terrain map in the dirt, then had his whole team memorize the prominent features. "Meadows did everything meticulously, everything was rehearsed," then-Major Scotty Crerar recalls. "You could have taken a film of [his] mission preparation and used it as a training film."
Like a martial arts master certain of his abilities, Meadows possessed an unegotistical confidence -- fearless but not oblivious to danger. He was a practitioner of the tactically sublime, able to assess a situation in a glance, weigh his alternatives and act in a flash.
Much of Meadows' reputation evolved from capturing prisoners, at which according to then- Colonel Jack Singlaub, Meadows proved SOG's most prolific prisoner snatcher, bringing back 13 NVA from Laos. He once arrayed Recon Team Iowa beside a trail when instead of the desired one man, five NVA strolled up and stopped right there for lunch. Meadows stepped out and announced, "Good morning, gentlemen. You are now POWs." Despite his warning, "No, no, no," three went for their AKs, so, 'yes, yes, yes,' Meadows shot them faster than you read this. The other two proved surprisingly compliant.
"Meadows is cunning," thought one of SOG's most accomplished combat leaders, then-Captain Ed Lesesne, who adds with a touch of awe, "he's a killing machine, and I mean to tell you -- Meadows is a calculating, cool guy."
Chief SOG Donald 'Headhunter' Blackburn, a highly decorated WWII guerrilla leader, so admired Meadows that he thought of him as a son.
Battlefield Commission
Meadows had a knack for making history, as in 1966 when he proved North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong a liar. Pham had been insisting not a single North Vietnamese soldier had been sent to South Vietnam, telling U.S. anti-war activist Tom Hayden such allegations were, "a myth fabricated by the U.S. imperialists to justify their war of aggression."
Pham's deceit seemed by its magnitude unbreachable. Was this a war of conquest from the North, or a popular revolt by South Vietnam's peasantry? General William Westmoreland couldn't offer Congressional doubters a 'smoking gun.'
Then Meadows helped out.
Laying beside Laotian Highway 110, his RT Iowa was watching North Vietnamese soldiers and porters pass by. Meadows pulled from his pocket a Pen-EE camera, crawled forward and snapped a whole roll of photos.
Then he and his assistant team leader, Chuck Kearns, crawled back beyond enemy earshot and Meadows decided on an even more dangerous gambit; in Kearns' rucksack was an 8mm motion picture camera, which he'd brought along on a lark. Meadows took it, crept perilously close to the trail and began rolling, shooting a few frames of each NVA that came into his viewfinder, footage of such perfect exposure that it came out like mugshots. For an hour Meadows laid there and recorded nearly a whole battalion -- hundreds of heavily armed North Vietnamese -- marching alongside porters toting loads of military supplies.
Chief SOG had Meadows personally brief his findings to Gen. Westmoreland, who couldn't help but praise Meadows and SOG. Meadows' film was rushed to Washington and presented in a closed-door briefing of select Congressmen who nodded convinced that Hanoi was lying.
A few months later Meadows penetrated an NVA Laotian cache which contained Russian-made artillery pieces. The Howitzers were too big to carry back, even for Meadows, so he photographed them and brought out their sights.
Again Chief SOG had Meadows brief Westmoreland, who almost hugged the intense Green Beret master sergeant when he presented a souvenir: A Soviet-made artillery sight. Westmoreland noted, it was exactly such evidence "which finally prompted the State Department to relax its restrictions on firing into the DMZ."
Deeply impressed by the sincere, quiet-spoken Green Beret, Westmoreland gave Meadows a direct commission to captain -- the Vietnam War's first battlefield commission -- and cited him by name in his memoires.
In October, 1966, Chief SOG Jack Singlaub chose Meadows to lead SOG's first American-led operation into the heartland of North Vietnam, to rescue a downed U.S. Navy fighter pilot.
Lieutenant Deane Woods had parachuted onto a heavily jungled ridgeline halfway between Vinh and Hanoi, 30 miles inland, where for several days he'd been evading NVA searchers.
Launching by Navy helicopter off the carrier Intrepid, Meadows took in a 13-man team that made it within 500 yards of Lt. Woods when the NVA captured him.
"A cautious soldier would have taken his men to the nearest extraction point and departed enemy territory," Chief SOG Singlaub says. "But Meadows was not overly cautious."
Coming upon a major trail, Meadows set up an ambush to capture a prisoner. Momentarily, an NVA officer and three soldiers walked up, alert, still searching for Woods, apparently unaware he'd been captured.
To the NVA soldiers' astonishment Meadows stepped from the dense foliage, leveled his AK-47, and called a friendly, "Good morning." As one, all four NVA went for their guns, but Meadows shot first, killing them all in one blur. While his men searched the bodies, Meadows radioed for an exfil and soon they were on their way out.
After the war, Meadows met Lt. Woods, who'd spent six years as a POW, and presented him with the Tokarev pistol he'd taken off the dead NVA officer.
Find out why he's the only Green Beret with his own statue at Ft. Bragg
By Maj. John L. Plaster, USAR (Ret.)
It was perfect timing. Dick Meadows phoned not a dozen days after I'd finished two year's work on a history of SOG. At last we could start his twice-postponed biography.
And what a tale to tell: Project White Star, SOG, the Son Tay Raid, Delta Force, the drug wars - - Meadows had lived one adventure after another, dodging bullets on three continents for 45 years. In our caricature world of hoo-yah Rambos, Dick was genuine and unassuming, the boy next door with a CAR-15, America's Otto Skorzeny or David Sterling. No matter his rank -- master sergeant, captain, major -- all of us in Special Forces knew him as Dick Meadows, a man who didn't need a rank to be who he was; Meadows was Meadows.
It would be a fabulous book.
"But I have a problem," Meadows announced, his soft voice hinting nothing special. "I'm dying, John."
A brick couldn't have hit so hard. Ten days earlier he'd been in Central America when fatigue so overwhelmed him that he came home. His doctor diagnosed leukemia, in its final, most virulent stage. That simply couldn't be. Though 64, Meadows looked two decades younger, fit, trim and vigorous.
"How long do you have?" I asked.
"A week."
True to his word, six days later Dick Meadows died.
A Self-Made Soldier
There was no one like Dick Meadows. He lived the life on which books are written -- in the plural. Born in a dirt-floor West Virginia moonshiner's cabin, in 1947 Meadows lied his age to become a 15-year-old paratrooper, then so distinguished himself in Korea that he was that war's youngest master sergeant, at age 20. The quick-learning but largely self-taught Green Beret acquired such a descriptive vocabulary and sophisticated style that it surprised people to learn he had only a ninth-grade education. The British SAS, with whom Meadows served two years on exchange in the late fifties, thought so much of him that they entrusted him with serious responsibilities. In fact, an SAS sergeant major entrusted him with his daughter, Pamela, for a bride.
In the early sixties he deployed covertly with other Green Berets to Laos where, led by Colonel Arthur 'Bull' Simons, they trained Kha Tribesmen to fight the Pathet Lao and NVA. These Project White Star men were withdrawn when Laos was declared 'neutral' at a Geneva Conference.
SOG Team Leader Extraordinaire
It was in SOG -- the top secret Studies and Observations Group, the Vietnam War's covert special operations unit -- that Meadows really shined. He spent two years in SOG, all of it running missions deep behind enemy lines in Laos and North Vietnam while leading Chinese Nung mercenaries on Recon Team Iowa.
Before each operation, Meadows built a terrain map in the dirt, then had his whole team memorize the prominent features. "Meadows did everything meticulously, everything was rehearsed," then-Major Scotty Crerar recalls. "You could have taken a film of [his] mission preparation and used it as a training film."
Like a martial arts master certain of his abilities, Meadows possessed an unegotistical confidence -- fearless but not oblivious to danger. He was a practitioner of the tactically sublime, able to assess a situation in a glance, weigh his alternatives and act in a flash.
Much of Meadows' reputation evolved from capturing prisoners, at which according to then- Colonel Jack Singlaub, Meadows proved SOG's most prolific prisoner snatcher, bringing back 13 NVA from Laos. He once arrayed Recon Team Iowa beside a trail when instead of the desired one man, five NVA strolled up and stopped right there for lunch. Meadows stepped out and announced, "Good morning, gentlemen. You are now POWs." Despite his warning, "No, no, no," three went for their AKs, so, 'yes, yes, yes,' Meadows shot them faster than you read this. The other two proved surprisingly compliant.
"Meadows is cunning," thought one of SOG's most accomplished combat leaders, then-Captain Ed Lesesne, who adds with a touch of awe, "he's a killing machine, and I mean to tell you -- Meadows is a calculating, cool guy."
Chief SOG Donald 'Headhunter' Blackburn, a highly decorated WWII guerrilla leader, so admired Meadows that he thought of him as a son.
Battlefield Commission
Meadows had a knack for making history, as in 1966 when he proved North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong a liar. Pham had been insisting not a single North Vietnamese soldier had been sent to South Vietnam, telling U.S. anti-war activist Tom Hayden such allegations were, "a myth fabricated by the U.S. imperialists to justify their war of aggression."
Pham's deceit seemed by its magnitude unbreachable. Was this a war of conquest from the North, or a popular revolt by South Vietnam's peasantry? General William Westmoreland couldn't offer Congressional doubters a 'smoking gun.'
Then Meadows helped out.
Laying beside Laotian Highway 110, his RT Iowa was watching North Vietnamese soldiers and porters pass by. Meadows pulled from his pocket a Pen-EE camera, crawled forward and snapped a whole roll of photos.
Then he and his assistant team leader, Chuck Kearns, crawled back beyond enemy earshot and Meadows decided on an even more dangerous gambit; in Kearns' rucksack was an 8mm motion picture camera, which he'd brought along on a lark. Meadows took it, crept perilously close to the trail and began rolling, shooting a few frames of each NVA that came into his viewfinder, footage of such perfect exposure that it came out like mugshots. For an hour Meadows laid there and recorded nearly a whole battalion -- hundreds of heavily armed North Vietnamese -- marching alongside porters toting loads of military supplies.
Chief SOG had Meadows personally brief his findings to Gen. Westmoreland, who couldn't help but praise Meadows and SOG. Meadows' film was rushed to Washington and presented in a closed-door briefing of select Congressmen who nodded convinced that Hanoi was lying.
A few months later Meadows penetrated an NVA Laotian cache which contained Russian-made artillery pieces. The Howitzers were too big to carry back, even for Meadows, so he photographed them and brought out their sights.
Again Chief SOG had Meadows brief Westmoreland, who almost hugged the intense Green Beret master sergeant when he presented a souvenir: A Soviet-made artillery sight. Westmoreland noted, it was exactly such evidence "which finally prompted the State Department to relax its restrictions on firing into the DMZ."
Deeply impressed by the sincere, quiet-spoken Green Beret, Westmoreland gave Meadows a direct commission to captain -- the Vietnam War's first battlefield commission -- and cited him by name in his memoires.
In October, 1966, Chief SOG Jack Singlaub chose Meadows to lead SOG's first American-led operation into the heartland of North Vietnam, to rescue a downed U.S. Navy fighter pilot.
Lieutenant Deane Woods had parachuted onto a heavily jungled ridgeline halfway between Vinh and Hanoi, 30 miles inland, where for several days he'd been evading NVA searchers.
Launching by Navy helicopter off the carrier Intrepid, Meadows took in a 13-man team that made it within 500 yards of Lt. Woods when the NVA captured him.
"A cautious soldier would have taken his men to the nearest extraction point and departed enemy territory," Chief SOG Singlaub says. "But Meadows was not overly cautious."
Coming upon a major trail, Meadows set up an ambush to capture a prisoner. Momentarily, an NVA officer and three soldiers walked up, alert, still searching for Woods, apparently unaware he'd been captured.
To the NVA soldiers' astonishment Meadows stepped from the dense foliage, leveled his AK-47, and called a friendly, "Good morning." As one, all four NVA went for their guns, but Meadows shot first, killing them all in one blur. While his men searched the bodies, Meadows radioed for an exfil and soon they were on their way out.
After the war, Meadows met Lt. Woods, who'd spent six years as a POW, and presented him with the Tokarev pistol he'd taken off the dead NVA officer.