Colt Terry, Green Beret

7. Welcome to Vietnam

7 Welcome to Vietnam C      Command Vietnam (MACV) Headquarters in Ban Me Thuot in October, .1 The commander, Colonel “Green,” did not care for Special Forces because they were under the CIA’s control rather than under his command.2 Colt advised the colonel, “Sir, we’ve got a wounded Special Forces sergeant , about fifty clicks [kilometers] from here. If we don’t get ’im to a hospital quickly, he’s gonna die.” Green said, “Well, captain, where is he?” Colt answered, “Buon Mi Ga.” The commander was surprised. “That can’t be. That’s VC country.” “Yes, sir,” Colt agreed. “That’s a VC-controlled area, but it’s also where my men and four hundred of our Montagnard troops live.” That was news to Colonel Green. He thought for a moment and then acquiesced . “We only have one rundown helicopter, one of those banana jobs, an H-, but you can use it. They’re good on airstrips but not small LZs [landing zones]. See my warrant officer.”3 Colt raced off to see the warrant officer in charge of the helicopter. To his surprise and relief, he discovered CWO Alvin “Mississippi” Woods, nicknamed for his home state, who Colt had known in Germany in the th Special Forces Group. He told the pilot about the wounded sergeant and showed him a map of the location, then asked, “Can you fly out there and pick ’im up?” Mississippi Woods volunteered. “Yes, sir, if we get an LZ lit up out there.” An illuminated LZ would help him find the camp from the air in the dark and was necessary for him to land. Colt asked, “D’ya want me to go along?” Woods responded: “No, sir. Stay here, get on the radio, and make sure they’re lit up.” After the chopper took off, Colt returned to the headquarters office and located a five-band voice radio provided by the CIA. He contacted S.Sgt. Tru-    man Foy, a Texan, at the team’s camp and instructed him to light up his LZ with potted lights (tin cans filled with fuel soaked sand) set in an L shape. The chopper would come in over the short leg of the L. That night Mississippi Woods flew what might have been the first helicopter medevac (medical evacuation) of the Vietnamese “conflict.” He airlifted the wounded NCO, S.Sgt. Donald L. Jones, from Detachment A- under the command of Captain Abernathy, to a Vietnamese hospital in Ban Me Thuot. Colt had not slept for more than twenty hours when he met the helicopter at the hospital. A few minutes later he helped put Jones on the operating table. The sergeant’s wounded arm hung only by a few strands of muscle, ligaments, and veins. He watched as a Vietnamese doctor worked on the arm. As soon as Jones was stable, Woods had him airlifted on a fixed-wing aircraft to Saigon; from there he was flown to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines . Colt continued his work under the CIA. W          the Montagnard tribes, he worked for the CIA under a case officer known as Jack Bennefield (possibly not his real name).4 Colt thought that Jack was a good man—for a civilian. Working for the CIA was different from working for the regular army—no mail, no nice mess halls, no chaplain, no nothing . The CIA was unorthodox in many ways. For being so loosely run, it was oddly formal about some things. For example, whenever agency people spent the government’s money—and they spent plenty of it—they had to get receipts , tape each one to an ½ ×  inch piece of bond paper, and submit the receipts to the accounting department. Colt was a team leader under Bennefield, who operated from Saigon and only occasionally traveled the three hundred miles north to visit Colt’s camp. His trips were usually to issue money, deliver orders, or to make sure that his Special Forces units were carrying out their mission of training the Montagnards and forming them into combat troops. The Montagnards could fight, but they were not organized; Colt and his A-team were training them to be soldiers. And Bennefield let everyone know that the CIA was running the show. He was an “in-charge” case officer. Colt had two radio operators on his team—Sgt. Harold R. Haney and Sgt. Phillip D. Wilson. All radio contacts with Special Forces headquarters were encrypted...