Hunting the Jackal

Billy Waugh,Tim Keown

• Éditeur: William Morrow
• Année: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780062133571
• Sujet: History
• Sous-sujet: Military Biographies

Spanning more than five decades, here is a riveting true account of fighting America's enemies around the world—told by the soldier/operative who was there

I am not a hero.

Billy Waugh has lurked in the shadows and on the periphery of many of the most significant events of the past half-century on active duty with U.S. Army Special Forces and the CIA fighting enemies of the United States. In Hunting the Jackal, this legendary warrior reveals the extraordinary events of his life and career, offering a point-by-point eyewitness account of the historical events in which he participated.

Serving in Korea and Vietnam, Waugh was among the first Green Berets in 1963. He has helped train Libyan commandos in the Sahara Desert, while spying on Russian missile sites in Benghazi, and has worked against Caribbean drug runners. He was the first CIA operative to watch Osama Bin Laden in Khartoum "from a spot close enough to kill him had I been allowed, " and tracked him over the course of two years. In 1994 he found the notorious Carlos the Jackal in Sudan, and tailed him until he was captured—a story that until now has never been told. And, just last year, at age 72, Waugh was on the ground in Afghanistan with a joint SpecForces/CIA unit.

This is his remarkable true story.

CHAPTER 1

As I waited to die in a rice paddy in Bong Son, South Vietnam, on June 18, 1965, with green North Vietnamese Army (NVA) tracers searing past my naked, immobile body, my mind was not occupied by fear or regret. No, I drifted in and out of consciousness, my body perforated with gunshot wounds, leeches feasting on every open wound, with one thought jabbing at my semilucid brain: Damn, my military career is finished. I’ll never see combat again.

Through eleven years in Special Forces and twenty-seven months in Southeast Asia, I had never been bashful when it came to combat. I lived for it, studied it, and understood it. I knew the risks and did not fear death. Still, I had never come close to being in a spot like this—flat on my back, shot to hell, lying behind a meager bamboo stand that provided pathetic protection. I was out of ammunition and gear. I had taken bullets to my knees, an arm, an ankle, a foot, and my forehead. The bones of my right foot and ankle sat there fully exposed, doing me absolutely no good while causing a breathtaking amount of pain. The force of one of the bullets had driven the sole of my right jungle boot through my foot and ankle and into my tibia. I could not crawl, let alone walk. The enemy had already gotten to me, stripping me and leaving me for dead. In this state, I apparently was not deemed worthy of the extra bullet that would have clinched my death. I was all alone, not a friendly in sight. There was no assurance that I would ever leave this bloody field or see the world from an upright position again.

And still the NVA kept firing. We had pissed the bastards off something fierce, and they weren’t going to stop until every last one of us was as dead as I appeared to be. Their infernal green tracers were whizzing over my head, mocking my defenselessness, popping like cannon fire around my head as they broke the sound barrier. The kerosene smell and blast-furnace heat of the napalm blanketed that rice paddy, brought there by the Air Force F-4C Phantom and Navy F-8 jets screaming above.

When I took stock of my own dire predicament, peering through the now-crusted blood from the wound that had torn open my forehead, comprehending my utter nakedness, wondering how and why I continued to live, I began to ask myself a different question: When all this is over, how in the hell am I ever going to con my way back to the battlefield?

Getting into the battlefield was all that ever mattered to me. From the moment I joined the U.S. Army as an eighteen-year-old, I have never been content to sit back and hear of others’ exploits. My desire to be among the troops at the point of attack struck me first in early 1951, when we were at war in Korea and I was stuck in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I had had more than enough of the 82nd Abn. Div. and was tired of stateside duty, so in April 1951 I reenlisted for combat in Korea, which means I signed on for another three years of service just to get my ass out of the United States and into the war zone.

I didn’t like the Army at all until I got a taste of combat in Korea. I advanced from a private first class to an infantry platoon sergeant while in Korea. More important, I learned what made men tick, and what combat was all about. For the first time in my military life, I felt completely at home. I could have asked for a more forgiving landscape than Korea, which was like no other place. We’d climb a hill, with great expectations of meeting the enemy, only to arrive at the top to see another, slightly larger hill looming. All the trees were stripped for firewood, and cold penetrated my bones. I was only twenty-one years old, so I handled the cold much better than later in life, but we Texans and Floridians in Korea were continuously cold. As far as wars go, Vietnam, with its insufferable humidity and constant heat, was much more to my liking.

Upon returning from Korea in December 1952, I entered Officers’ Candidate School in Fort Benning. During the twelfth or thirteenth week, I contracted malaria and spent a week in the hospital. To return to OCS, I would have had to revert back to the eighth week, since my class was too far advanced for me to catch up with it. I refused this move and was sent to Germany as a sergeant first class and assigned to the 5th Infantry Division as a platoon sergeant. It was during my stay in Germany, sometime in 1953, that I read about Special Forces moving a unit to Bad Tolz, Germany. I began politicking for a transfer to SF, and I made a trip to Bad Tolz to see for myself. Once I learned what these fine men—the fittest and most committed group I had ever seen—were to become, I knew it was the only place for me. I immediately cranked an intertheater transfer and had it granted, to the 10th Special Forces in Bad Tolz. From the moment I joined those fine and fit men, I knew I was there to stay. It was, by far, the best move I ever made in my life. I might leave Special Forces, but Special Forces would never leave me.

So as I lay on the ground in the Bong Son rice paddy, I was forced to imagine my life without the Special Forces, without combat, without an enemy to fight. I didn’t like the thoughts that raced through my head, so I shoved them out of my mind and went to work thinking about what it would take to get my body back together and back where it belonged, on the field of combat.

My journey to this unenviable position, with my body shot up in so many different areas, began in Okinawa at the beginning of March 1965. I was asked by Lieutenant Colonel Elmer Monger, the commander of Company C, 1st Special Forces Division, to assemble an A team—consisting of the toughest jungle fighters—to disrupt the enemy’s movements in the Bong Son area, in the northeast section of Binh Dinh Province, along the South China Sea. At this time, Binh Dinh Province was completely controlled by the enemy, so I knew plenty of action would be coming our way. Captain Paris Davis, our excellent team leader, was assigned by group headquarters, and I was the man with the most combat experience. Our mission was to enter the area secretly, live there, build a Special Forces fighting A-Camp, and train locals to take the action to the NVA in his home. When Lieutenant Colonel Monger asked me to assemble this team, I accepted the mission with a crisp salute and the words “Roger that, sir.” I have always believed this type of mission was my reason for being on this earth.

After we prepared for the mission in Okinawa, we traveled as a team to the Republic of Vietnam on a C-124 to Qui Nhon, the capital of Binh Dinh Province. There we picked up two unmarked U.S. Army trucks, painted jet black with no military markings whatsoever, for the eighty-kilometer trip north to Bong Son.^*

Intelligence reports had alerted us to the heavy NVA presence in Bong Son, our new home away from home. One hallmark of a Special Forces A Team is its ability to get behind enemy lines and build a working camp from the ground up, using a bare minimum of supplies. So for us, this was nothing new. We chose a spot along the An Lao River (clear and fast-flowing at this time of year) that included a clearing that could be used as a landing strip. Our supply list began and ended with the following: one roll of concertina wire, a bunch of shovels, and a stack of sandbags. We started digging, working our asses off day and night. It was great work, and rewarding. We dug until we established smaller holes for individual fighting positions and foxholes, and several larger holes for our communications position and a headquarters bunker. We didn’t know how long we would stay in the area, but we knew there was enough NVA activity to keep us busy.

We had a lot of work to do and not much time to do it. We would be receiving newly recruited mercenaries very soon. Our job was to train these men for combat versus the enemy, then conduct combat against the NVA that infiltrated our district area. Our plan was to engage the NVA in every direction for at least twenty kilometers surrounding our base.

Bong Son was strategically important; the NVA was using the port along the South China Sea to drop off soldiers from the north. They would land at night, in an area that was not a port but simply an available boat landing site, about eighteen kilometers to the east of Bong Son. They arrived by the hundreds in small motorized boats—wooden, flat-bottomed, bargelike boats that could maneuver through the sandbars. Despite the small size of these boats, the NVA piled as many as four hundred soldiers into each one, giving them the look of refugee boats. We didn’t have satellites at that time so we had to rely on human intelligence to let us know what was happening.

Gathering intelligence is what my old friend Master Sergeant Anthony Duarte of Special Forces Delta Project did especially well. After leading a reconnaissance mission in the area, he confirmed the reports. He also told me, “These aren’t local hire VCs. They’re well organized and equipped NVA regulars with some Chinese among them.” I passed this information along to Team Leader Davis and our control unit, an SF B team in Qui Nhon.

We sent a native Vietnamese speaker out to recruit mercenaries to aid our cause. In the official vernacular of the U.S. military, these mercenaries were called a Civilian Irregular Defense Group (CIDG). Staff Sergeant David Morgan, who had completed three tours in Vietnam, traveled with the recruiters, using money provided by a section of the CIA called Combined Studies Division. Morgan and the native speaker found the recruiting of raw, eager young South Vietnamese men pretty easy. We also went to the Bong Son district chief in an attempt to recruit. Of course, he was on the payroll also, an absolute must if we wanted to keep him on our side. I don’t know if these mercenaries believed in our cause, but they would do the work as long as the pay was right. They were willing to train and had no trouble with the living arrangements. Most of them bounced around from one camp to another and did pretty well for themselves financially. They knew the risk, and they knew what was expected of them. That was good enough for us.

We recruited around one hundred or so Viets from the lowlands, then moved them into our area and began the work of supplying them with clothing and weapons and training them to fight. Meanwhile, construction of the camp, supervised by Morgan and carried out by a civilian Vietnamese work crew, continued. Every Special Forces man was working twenty hours a day, and the work was not without risk. The NVA sent their love to us often, in the form of small-arms and high-angled harassment via 82 mm mortar fire, plus an occasional B-40 rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) directed into our new positions.

We knew the NVA monitored our movements, but we didn’t give a good goddamn. We had a mission. Our local intelligence kept us informed of activities that might appear to be a concentrated attack on the fledgling SF camp, but we received no threats of imminent overrun. We also sent out short-range patrols nightly, to keep tabs on enemy movement.

One week before the proposed raid, five of us set out on a reconnaissance mission. In the early predawn light, we moved approximately fifteen kilometers to the east, toward the coastline of the South China Sea. Once there, we stood in a cemetery on a bluff about three hundred meters from an enemy camp and watched about fifteen NVA soldiers bullshitting and walking around. We could see three bamboo sleeping hooches behind the milling soldiers. As we watched I told Morgan and Staff Sergeant Ronald Wingo, “These guys look a little too comfortable. We’ve got to raid this fucking place, take out those huts, and stir these bastards up.” We chose the high ground of the cemetery as our rallying point after the raid. Our small recon group was spotted by a few of the NVA soldiers, who promptly opened fire. We returned their fire but ended up on the deck of that cemetery, lying on top of one another above the graves of dead Vietnamese farmers.

Wingo and I used one of the gravestones as cover against the oncoming fire. Lying prone on the deck, we called in a few air strikes to let the enemy know we meant business. In the meantime, the NVA machine gun chipped away at the headstone. Between ricochets, I said to Wingo, “Ronnie, I know exactly what the fucker in this grave is thinking.”

Wingo was not amused by our predicament and wasn’t interested in my using this moment to theorize on the thoughts of some dead Viet.

“Goddamnit, Billy, I don’t care what the fuck he’s thinking. Fuck him. We’re in some deep shit here.”

The headstone was getting smaller and smaller.

“Well, Ronnie,” I said, “this fucker is saying to himself, ‘I’m sure glad I’m down here and those two dumb asses are up there getting their asses kicked.’”

I laughed, but Wingo didn’t see the humor of the moment until later, after we made it out of the mess intact. That’s one of my rules of combat: Sometimes you have to laugh in the face of horrible situations. Soldiers without a sense of humor were eaten up from the inside; those who could laugh were more likely to retain their sanity.

Our reconnaissance confirmed the enemy was obviously prevalent and not too concerned with our presence. We decided then and there, by God, to plan the raid for the following week. We would change their attitudes about us by returning with our team and newly trained troops to kick their asses.

This raid was well considered. We had scouted it. We had intelligence on the enemy camp. We were strong and confident. We would attack with the Special Forces hallmarks—speed, secrecy, and surprise. As it turned out, despite our considered planning we were still sadly unprepared for what the NVA had in store for us.

We marched through the night and early morning of June 18, 1965. By 0430 it was 85 degrees and clear—combat weather—as I led the formation through the thick air along the An Lao River. There were ninety of us—four U.S. Special Forces and eighty-six of our native South Vietnamese mercenaries. We had left our camp at 2300 the previous day to walk the seventeen kilometers through the trails along the river to the spot we knew the NVA lay sleeping in their bamboo hooches.

The other three Special Forces men on the mission were Captain Paris Davis, Staff Sergeant David Morgan, and our medic, Sergeant Robert Brown. Davis was the commander of the team, but since this was his first combat mission, I was put in charge of leading the raid. Nobody is ever completely combat-ready on their first mission, but that changed for both Brown and Davis over the course of June 18. Brown was a tough kid with a quick smile and an All-American look about him. Davis, from Washington, D.C., was a blue-eyed black man with a confident air and a good mind for combat. Morgan was battle tested and savvy, a hardened veteran unafraid of fierce combat or hard work. Very few people in the world could build a Special Forces camp from the dirt up the way David Morgan could. I handpicked these men for this battle, choosing those I felt were best prepared to think quickly and intelligently if the situation turned nasty. In Special Forces, nasty is a way of life.

The rookies may have been scared, they may have been nervous, but thi...