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Old 10-10-2004, 12:07   #12
rwt_bkk
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Thailand
Posts: 104
A footnote

Just a footnote to the above. Col Larry Trapp was the Chief of Airborne Opns for SOG. He said Billy bugged him for a couple years to get the Halo missions approved.
There were other HALO inserts of agents in NVN. These were Vietnamese, not American, agents.

One of the two missions my team turned down at CCN would have been the first low-level insert in Feb 70. (it was one of those the guy with the briefcase stapped to his arm deals). The "PLAN" was to have a Phantom shoot a homing beacon into a hill in Laos and then we would do a night jump on the beacon.

There were several things wrong with the "PLAN".
One we were jumping in triple canopy with no decenders. I asked so how do we get down? Answer lower your reserve. I said great so we are still 100 ft from the ground then what? No answer.
Second was assembly. I said ok now we jump in triple canopy and we get on the ground - how do we assemble? If you have ever been in triple canopy you know what I mean. 50 meters away you can't see or hear anything. You have to remember that the Bru didn't use radios - thought there were ghosts captured by us and kept in a metal box.... I asked if we were going to use the "crickets" like they used in WWII... NO Answer.
Last I said I had jumped small LZs at Bragg with experienced jumpers and it was a total mess even without someone shooting at you. They expected us to take our team and train for 5 days and then run the mission. My 10 and I declined

I talked with Capt Robb 2 years ago at SOAR. He actually ran the first airborne op. By then they had worked on the things we had brought up. Their LZ was flat without trees, but they now had decenders in case of tree landing. And they had a small transistor radio that homed in on a transmitter carried by Robb. Only problem they had was that one of the radio didn't work and one of the indig was seperated from the team (picked up on extraction). They landed, assembled called a lot of air, smoked a lot of enemy and got out without loss. Very successful operation.
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