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13 Project Flying Horse I                           Bennett, who had recently left his position as XO of the th Special Forces Group to set up a new team, C-, requested that Colt leave his current Cteam assignment in Pleiku and move to Saigon to join him. Colt joined Bennett as his XO in establishing the top-secret project. Bennett’s assignment, as Colt understood it, was to obtain intelligence about enemy operations inside Cambodia. Colt’s mission, code named Flying Horse, was to form, organize, and train secretly a detachment of indigenous Montagnards and Cambodians living in Vietnam that would be sent into Cambodia to collect intelligence on the placement and movement of NVA or VC units within its borders. Enemy forces were already known to move into and out of Cambodia along the border , but the mission of Flying Horse was to search for operations stationed inside Cambodia.1 When Colt was first assigned to Project Flying Horse, it had no detachment designation other than C-; it would later become Detachment B-.2 Under C-, there were other special projects, such as B- (Omega), B- (the South Vietnamese War College at Don Ba Thin), and B- (Delta Project). Some of the special projects and special operations were brought into Saigon and hidden within elements of the Command Liaison Detachment, which had maintained a presence in the capital since . They were all extremely sensitive politically and highly classified at the time. Colt would need to be very careful in how he went about establishing operations. Indigenous Khmer controlled the southern end of the Cambodian Seven Mountains region that Colt would search, more so than did the Cambodian government.3 They were the most violent and unpredictable group of fighters in Cambodia and Vietnam—ruthless radicals with their own agenda and not under anyone’s control. To operate in the assigned areas, Colt would need the cooperation of the Khmer and other ethnic groups, which would not be easy to obtain.     S     ,   a Special Forces NCO, M.Sgt. Charles E. “Snake” Hosking Jr., whom he had known for years. Snake had connections that could introduce him to the leaders of the indigenous Khmer tribes living along the Cambodian border. He took Colt to a temple in Saigon to meet its chief monk who knew the leaders . Although Colt had trained some of these indigenous at one time, he did not have such personal connections through the monks, with whom Snake had developed an unexplainable rapport that even money could not buy. Hosking was about to rotate to the United States, and he wanted Colt to carry on the relationship that he had developed with the monks. He would introduce Colt to them as his “number-one man.” If the introduction “took,” Colt would be able to succeed at his assignment. If not, he would have a very difficult time placing his men into the area of operation—it was that simple. After Colt met the monks, some of them traveled with him into Cambodia and introduced him to the indigenous Khmer leaders, who agreed to assist Colt’s men. Thanks to Snake and the monks, Colt was accepted by the indigenous and able to start operating in the Seven Mountains area at will. He returned to Saigon and continued to run his operation from there. W  ,      in Saigon for the Flying Horse unit’s headquarters and staffed the mission entirely with Americans. Keeping an operation secret from the South Vietnamese government was unprecedented. Until then, American and South Vietnamese forces had jointly conducted all operations. In addition, U.S. State Department officials had made it clear that they did not want Special Forces going into Cambodia. Diplomats had assured Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia that Americans would not cross his border. Because of the rocky history between the Khmer tribes and the Vietnamese government, the U.S. government did not want the Vietnamese to know it was working with them.4 Colt started reconnaissance operations with two teams and a single individual . At first he believed that the mission could operate all of its teams out of a city in the High Plateau region of Darlac Province in South Vietnam, but operating from there was too visible. Since people were asking too many questions, he stationed the teams in different areas of South Vietnam. One team, consisting of a major, a captain, and an NCO, went to work in the Me- [3.144.48.135] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 16:27 GMT...

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