What we're going to do this morning basically is run through really a whole presentation on air rescue in Southeast Asia. But it's going to be done a little bit differently in this case. Instead of a lot of dry history, we're going to have the actual participants tell their stories. So we have four stars that we're going to cover with the participants, the Sandy Lowe leaves and Johnny drivers, in some cases, those that were rescued.

And we're going to tell the personal stories of what we really did. And, you know, when you think about it, and I'm eternally proud to be part of the of the rescue forces from Southeast Asia, the numbers are astounding. You know, all of you, all of us that were in SA pulled over 4000 people from out of the jungle.

That's astounding. And when you think about that in terms of World War two, Korea, you know, we didn't have the capability either in technology or politically or anything else to pull people out from behind enemy lines we air and we did that. And I think that all of us that did that should be eternally proud of how we did that.

Okay. So, again, this will be kind of a running seminar where I'll move between particular stories. I'm only the moderator, and then later on in the afternoon we'll talk about Prairie Fire Max or the Ho Chi Minh Trail and some of the other things. Look again, a big thank you to hook. I hope you're watching it on stream.

He's the guy who did all the research and trying to recruit all of you to come. And I thank you very much for setting the whole thing. I got a great shot. Okay, So if we could start, please, in John Larson, I would like to have you lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance flags right behind you there.

So together you can just do it from there. John, when I pledge allegiance, go ahead. Government of the United States of America and to the republic, which is one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for. All right. Thank you. Okay. Having said that, next up, I'd like to have Daryl Whitcomb come up and he's going to give us an overview, really a big picture of the war in Southeast Asia, as well as Raven operations here.

Thank you, John. Oh, yeah. Okay. You are much better looking than better. Thank you. And I'll tell him that. Thanks, folks. It's great to be here with you all. It's been a tremendous episode so far. The last night was just great. The new exhibits, I mean, what can you say? It's just awesome to see all that history that's there and know that you're part of that.

We are all a part of that. Oh, I am not a rescue guy in Southeast Asia. I was a Force Air controller. I did not fly once. I did not fly the helicopters. I've never held a hover of this stuff. However, having been a border controller in Southeast Asia, everybody was a rescue guy because especially in the year 1972, we were dumping airplanes left and right, and there was always search and rescue going on.

And so one of the first things you learn when you get into your strike squadrons or your FAC squadrons or your gunships squadrons is how to do search and rescue the basics of how to do this. And so I'm going to hearken back to those days and show you some of the history, some of the basics that we used and applied in these missions and in later years have refined to the point.

Let me give you a data point, how good we've gotten with all of this stuff in Southeast Asia. When we left that war, we had 2400 individuals missing, unaccounted for. We're still looking for those folks. Okay. The number is now down to about 170, I think is last data. But interestingly enough, after all of these years that we've spent in Desert Storm, Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq and all those other shit stands where we send our troops these days, we have ten people within the Department of Defense.

This is as of yesterday, ten people who are missing, unaccounted for. One is a civilian, nine are contract individuals. Okay. Not one single, not a military person from all those wars is missing, unaccounted for. It's because of all we learned from Southeast Asia. And the rules of the change is that we've applied all the way from presidential guidance, all the way down to scare tactics.

But we did the heavy lifting to make it to where we are today. So the young men and women who are doing this mission today are you are standing on your shoulders the things that you did over there, the mission that you accomplished and debriefs like this. And so what I want to do, I want to give you some background terms, because the words can be important here.

We're going to look at the mission elements of a search and rescue mission. Sea rescue forces will highlight what was going on in 1972 as a backdrop to the missions you're going to debrief today. And then we need to look at the role of Laos and the Raven facts. There's, as you see, there's a number of us here.

We're having a good time. But anyway, we need to talk about Lao. So the key role it played in this thing called the Vietnam War, the geography, the situation there, and you'll see several of the stories we're going to talk about today, in fact, take place in Laos. So next slide, please. Look, I'm going to do that. So here we go.

Okay. Back in our day, we called everything SA and here's the Bible right here. This book right here, Earl Tilford, Road Search and Rescue in Southeast Asia. If you want to do any research on Southeast Asia rescue, you have to start with this is the Bible. Okay? But we found in the later years that a lot of these missions that we flew were, in fact, big fights.

They were battles. Some of them were air campaign that we had to wage to get our guys out. So we realized that since a lot of them involve combat, there really is something called combat search and rescue. And that's the terminology that we've used now since about the late 1980s to differentiate between rescuing some guy off of a boat floundering in the sea and a guy who shot dead behind enemy lines.

And you have to fight a battle wage, a battle to get them out, combat search and rescue. And today now, after all these years of studying and analyzing, we've rolled all that together. And we and we realized that the training we do with with our rescue forces has to be coordinated. But with the training that we give to our people when they go through survival, evasion school, when they learn how to use their survival radios, the tactics that are Sandy aircraft today, the A-10s use, all of that has to be tied together, coordinated.

And so now we call that personnel recovery. That's a large overarching term within personnel recovery. Each of the various services will perform certain tactical missions to perform that requirement. Okay. In the Air Force, we do SAR, we do combat search and rescue. Our special forces do what we call unconventional assisted recovery. You air the Marines do trap teams like Scott O'Grady, tactical recovery of aircraft and personnel.

The Army does down aircraft, aircrew recovery teams, dart sea. Everybody's into this, but they've all got their own pieces. But today we call all of this personnel recovery. Okay, Next slide. Okay, I'm trainable. Don't worry. Okay. Southeast Asia, here we go. And again, if you if you want to get deep into this stuff, there's a joint publication called Three Dash 50 that has all of this rich knowledge that we've pushed forward from Southeast Asia.

You can read it till your eyes bleed to you. But it's great stuff because it was all learned the hard way. Okay? When we have a mission, there has to be some record that somebody is down. How do we do that? Well, generally back in our days we used to radio frequency that we had to be in the radio call to 43 zero hour frequency, and it was not unusual.

We'd have an aircraft go down somewhere and how do we get the word to our rescue centers and such that somebody is down? Generally, we were doing we would do it through guard, the king birds flying around in their C-130 so they would hear that other aircraft would hear of that, they would repeat it, they would port reported along.

It's very important that we get in that initial reports. We can begin to marshal our forces to go in and do that recovery. That's where it all starts. Number two, the first, the next thing you do, you got to locate the survivor. Well, what does the location really mean? Well, he's down in Laos. Well, that's nice. Okay. We're in Los Angeles near the Monkey Pass.

Okay, that's good. That gives is focusing there. Now, we need to know that he's on the west side of the of the Mujeres pass. And these are his general coordinates. Now, as we know down on this, we get the specific information that we need. So we can bring in our intel guys, We can marshal our forces, get them in.

They're prepared to fight that particular fight to get that individual out. It's the same stuff we have to go through today. But what does precision really mean? Ultimately, location for us means that we've got to physically see that person. Okay, because what are we trying to do? We're trying to get a hold of his ass and put him on a helicopter, right?

So we got to physically see him. So there we have to make sure that our survivors are prepared to help us find them. And there's lots of different ways to do that. You can use flash meters, you can use survival radio, which will give the aircraft ADF sectors, the radios we have today. You can shoot up your lat longs and stuff it.

Of course, every time we go through another iteration of technology here, it would create a whole bunch of new problems for us and I could regalia for days on various stories that have happened later on in Desert Storm, in Bosnia, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, where we learned all of this stuff literally the hard way. Every possible mistake that could be made has been made and will be made again.

But somehow we work through it and we rescue our people. We got to locate and we got to know where they are. And then while they're down there, as we're marshaling our forces, we've got to be able to support them. We need part of our support, of course, is the training that we do beforehand, SERE training, squadron level training, so people understand the process of rescue and how it all works and how we work through this and go in and get these guys out to another issue that we have today, very interestingly enough working on is that in this day of instant communications, it's not unusual.

We've got some kid that's in trouble in Afghanistan, and within 20 minutes, his daughter is calling the secretary of the Army saying, hey, I just got this text from so myself, from my youth, my father's unit, and what are you doing about rescuing him in Afghanistan? So we have to now have the ability to reach out to the families and support them as we're going through this process.

It's a lot to us. Support means a lot of things. And of course, at the tactical level, generally we want to have somebody over the top of the survivor. It could be a fact, it could be a strike, you know, some support there to protect him or her until we get our rescue forces marshal to come in and and take him out.

So there's a lot to that. And then lastly, we have to recover them. Okay. Normally, usually generally, we do that with one of our beautiful helicopters. But there's a problem places in this world where helicopters can't go that maybe because of terrain, it may be because of weather, it might may be because we have a vengeful enemy there that knows what that helicopter represents.

And they're going to do everything they can to blow that helicopter away. And you all seen that that that, too. One episode, Johnny six seven killed with six guys. There's places where helicopters can't go and no role no amount of moral imperative and desire to rescue that survivor is going to override immutable laws of physics by which those helicopters have to operate.

That's why we have to protect it. That's why we put gunners on it. And that's why we've developed over the years all of these tactics to do this. But they are not the only assets that we can use as recovery vehicles. If we're in a maritime environment, the Navy can use submarines. They did it in World War Two.

They did it initially in Vietnam. If you've got two guys down in the water and the shower, go over, pick them up. We've done this. We've done all of these things. Okay. On the ground. Sometimes it makes most sense. You've got an army element in the area, a ground task force, a mechanized task force. They can move over, pick up those survivors.

We've got these wonderful guys. They're special forces that have all kinds of capabilities. In many cases, we have to call upon them because of the extremis of that situation, that helicopter was not going to be our vehicle to bring those guys out. We have those capabilities and we've used them all. And you'll see some of that play out today in some of these various rescues.

Okay. Another thing that we can do, our enemy knows we're going to do this. They know generally how we're going to do this. We could use that against them by using our rescue forces as a deception force while we're marshaling our Johnny Greaves over here. In other A-10s today and all that kind of stuff, when in reality, what we're really going to do is we've got this little farmer over here and he's got a little wagon and he's going to come around the back door and he's going to tap on that survivor and say, Why don't you come with me if he gets out of Dodge while the enemy's watching these guys, we can do

that. And we have done that. Okay? Most of the times you're not going to know it, but suffice it to say, we have those capabilities. So recovery, that's the ultimate step. Now let's look at Southeast Asia. A lot on the map. 1972, command and control. We've got command centers here. GRC sees it, Saigon. They were our theater masters.

They're talking to the guys out on the boats, the Navy Rescue Center. We had two operating locations out of which we ran our sailors. These guys initially were here, Dawn, and they moved over and now for the comfort of later in the year. And then we had Monkey Mountain up here just north of Danang, and they would run the ops here primarily in south in South Vietnam, in the southern part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

And these guys here, they had everything up north. Like I say last night, a rescue forces had to cover that. The entire theater, 1.1 million miles over there, lots of folks. And when we'd have a SA, the C-130 king burns down here. They Presley's here with us today. They would come in, they would be our airborne mission commanders.

They would be doing all the setup, marshaling of forces, getting everybody together. And initially one guy would go down. Normally, the initial on scene commander would be either a flight lead maybe, or maybe a FAC officer working with the fact something like that. They'd get the initial word, they'd pass it back. We'd what? We'd launch our rescue forces, primarily the jollies that were initially at the camp and arm in Danang, but they could fly all over for Wells, all over the country to reduce response time.

And of course, the ones would do the same things. We'd get a rescue package up, they'd come up the the the on scene commander would be passed the job to Sandy lead and we're on with a rescue. All of our rescue units belonged to the third rescue group, and we had four sledders there that were that were part of that.

We also had our first S.O.S. with the Sandy's. They were directly supporting this. We had fighters, gunships, tankers, anybody could get involved in this. And many times they would. We also had the United States Navy. It's very important that when you're fighting in a joint and coalition environment, you can call upon assets from other services, certainly because quite honestly, the person you may be trying to pick up might be a Navy bomber or some Army guys or some special forces guys.

It didn't make any difference. Allied forces, we would all pitch in to do these missions. Our Navy had seven and they were out here on the boats. Very interesting squadron. They were actually they were physically assigned at Imperial Beach, San Diego. But all of their personnel and all of their helicopters were forward and they were on the ships of Joint of Task Force 77 out here.

And interestingly enough, these ships are constantly rotating in and out. So those guys, those helicopter guys learned to live out of their boxes because they were constantly changing from ship to ship to ship. In fact, they had no real form, if you will. They call them the nomads of the Pacific. If you want to read some interesting stories, look at Navy rescue during this war.

And they they wouldn't hesitate to come in and get our guys, you know, would we hesitate to go get their guys? The only patch that matched that that mattered on their flight suit was that one over here. And it was red, white and blue. That was the patch that mattered. Okay. We also had in South Vietnam here what I like to call Army rescue units.

Now, that's not an official thing, but they had these little Army Cav units down there. Right. Cavalry, if true for the eighth Cavalry f troop of the fourth Cavalry. And these guys are flying around in these little teams where they've got a Loach that's he's the Airbus II on scene commander and he's got a couple of slicks with him, i.e. recovery helicopters and he's got some Cobra gunships with him.

I support Sandy type rule and they would fly around doing their reconnaissance mission and in their A0, they knew that like the back of their hand, they knew the intel, they knew where the friendlies and the enemy were, and they were perfect for doing those rescues. Force. And how would an f105 guy coming out of North Vietnam with his hair on fire and this aircraft coming apart?

How does he make contact with these guys? 243 zero. That was the magic number. That was the frequency that they used to to tie all of this together. So these guys and again, there's some great, tremendous stories. Another thing that made them so valuable was that they were just there. We call that presence. We have assets immediately in the field available in the area because we understood that when you have a survivor down on the ground, the enemy knows what that is.

He wants that Bubba and he's going to come to get that guy as quickly as he can. So we had to move quickly and sometimes waiting two or 3 hours for the job was just too much. So we would use local assets like those army buffers that were down there to do that Quick snatch. And we also had an equivalent to that in Laos.

Over here in Air America. They were a civilian company. They were a cool airline and they were providing under contract to our State Department. They were providing direct support to the Laotian forces in Laos. And those guys were always around up there, always flying around, always available. And there was never a time when we Ravens would call for Air America's support that they wouldn't show up.

Presence made all the difference in the world. And of course, we had our back. We saw guys, they were out there. They could help us in some of these more complex and difficult stories when we couldn't get the helicopters in there. And there's a lot of great stories about how they do that. I think we're going to hear some Microsoft talk this afternoon when we talk more about Laos, and that's going to be an interesting presentation.

But again, it gave us theater presence. We had a whole amalgamated rescue force available to us throughout the theater. That was all dedicated to one thing right here, what we call the moral imperative in 1972, where they're we understand that our nation is trying to get out of the war. None of us wanted to be the last guy left behind, shot down or whatever.

And so if you went down, we were going to try to come in and we were going to do now what we could to get out again, there were places where we could not be successful, but that didn't keep us from trying. And that's one of the essence values of our rescue forces. We say to our young men and women, We're going to send you out to be tough things, tough missions and everything in service to your nation.

But if you get in trouble, we're going to try to get you out. So that's why ship can't be a blank check. But it is a moral imperative. Okay. Except. Okay. Now, you talked a little bit about lapse. I want to focus this on if you look at the geography of Southeast Asia and we call it the Vietnam War, and over here, most of our guys at Fort Lee were right in here.

But in reality, the war was raging across the breadth and depth of this entire field. Why? Because the North Vietnamese, their objective was to unite the Vietnamese under their control and also establish hegemony over this entire region. They were very heavily involved in what was going on in Laos and their in their allies, the part that Lao, they were very involved in Cambodia with their Kashmir insurgency forces and of course the Vietcong in the south.

But their objective always and I'm talking about the North Vietnamese leadership now, their objective always was to control this entire region. Thailand was going to be a tougher problem for them because there's big ethnic differences between the Thais and the Laotians and the and the Vietnamese. But that was always their objective. So it was always just the of war, always was.

But they tricked us with our help, I think, into focusing on the fact that it was an insurgency in South Vietnam. It was so much more than that. And we Ravenswood, we were there, we were fighting basically two wars in the north. We were fighting off the North Vietnamese invasion into north into northern Laos up here where they were going for the war, for one, which is right there, the royal capital of Vientiane, which was the administrative capital.

So a lot of our battles took place right there, a place called the Plain of Jars. Okay. In the South, everything was about this whole human struggle. We're going to talk more about that in a few minutes. But we fought a whole big war over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and our primary weapon there was air power. And I don't think air power was the right weapon as good as we did.

We dropped 2 million tons of bombs on Laos and we were not able to successfully close the ocean. And through an I argue that is because we used the wrong weapon. And we're going to talk about that for a few minutes. Okay? Okay. And this is a very busy chart. I apologize, but I need to throw a lot of numbers and stuff at you here to basically show you how we got into this mess.

In Lao Sook, 1959, the North Vietnamese made their big, big decisions on what was going to happen in this war. As you can see there, they wanted to go in to Laos. They had to use it. President Kennedy sees the threat and he initially, based on guidance from President Eisenhower, thought that our efforts in Southeast Asia had to be in Laos.

And at one point he sent a huge task force 116 Army brigade, Marines, f 100 squadrons into Thailand in 1962, preparatory to going into a house. But instead, our political leaders decided to solve the problem politically. And we passed. But we did. A treaty did declared that Laos would be neutral. Problem solved, right? We pulled our forces out of North Vietnamese did not.

We realized that we needed to retain a small force of cover type individuals project four or four, and from 1962 to 75, we had a continuous war in the country of Laos, plotted with the North Vietnamese Laotian government allied with us. Interestingly enough, in Laos we did not have an overall Airbus. The ambassador was in charge of all of that and he held a very tight rein.

He ran our war in Laos and he could not have any openly military forces. So we had a covert force there, and part of that was the raids and other things going on to this. And they built the Ho Chi Minh Trail into its strategic supply network, which gave them the ability to move throughout the entire theater of operations.

There. But remember, it's okay. Laughs is neutral right? Project 404 Initially, we sent in what we call the butterfly effect. So these were Air Force combat controllers. This guy on the left, they were funny hats. Name's Charlie Jones. He was one of the very first. These guys were all air commandos from Pearl River, and they did great work.

And therefore, they would fly with the Air America guys. And basically we started bombing in Laos before we started bombing in North Vietnam in 1964, I believe. And they would direct those airstrikes. They were the key link. That's what facts do. They are the key link between air power and ground power. And and that worked well for a couple of years.

And then we have this commander of seventh Air Force called General McGuire, and he discovered that enlisted guys were controlling his fighter aircraft and he could not have that. That was blast. So he decreed that we would have Air Force officers in there as air controllers, and they would be called rate effects. And this is Terry Pfaff, one of our better looking guys there.

He needs a haircut, but that's part of the deal. But now this is a very interesting photograph because you can see, first of all, he's flying in civilian clothes. Secondly, he's flying in an aircraft. The leadership markings are that was part of our covert cover that we were up there. He was supposed to be some kind of a fire ranger or something looking for forest fires.

Yeah, but that's Terry. And that was the little airplane that we flew. Not a lot to it when I went to the program, I had to downgrade from the only ten into this thing. You'd see 90 knots on a good day. They tell you, Hey, factory over there, talk to this guy. No, you don't hurry. And no one just took more.

And interestingly enough, from a four year control perspective, it's a very interesting airplane to use because you fly around with the windows open in air, in, in. And not only do you see what's going on down below, but you can hear it, you can feel it, and sometimes you can even smell it. And I hate to say this, but there was more than once when I came home with blood on my wings because we were down that low.

But that's what we did. The Ravens, that that's the part of the war that we fought. That was our main base in the North long chin. At one time I was told it was one of the busiest airports in the world. You landed that way and you took off this way. And the cast at the end, we called that the arresting barrier for obvious reasons.

I never had to use that. But I was in and out of that place many times, one time without an injury, an extreme Iraqi part there of the rocket pit on the left there. That was our main base of the north. That's the plane of Jaws. Quick little pit photograph that I took right here. If you notice the there's this dust there.

It's a B-52 strike that just went in at that time. I just happened to catch that just right now. And this is one of our main targets. We were doing an action up there, too, in the the the North Vietnamese were very good at hiding their trucks. Okay. But they never seemed to notice that they couldn't hide their trucks.

So we just had a fall on something down in there and we put a pile of rockets, you know, we got a couple of trucks boarded up right there. And so we did our business. And this is a very interesting photograph. If you look down here, you'll see a lot of little white puffs down there. That's 23 millimeter fire.

Coming up. I was taking a picture of an eight seven that was rolling in as you went by. I saw the most of the shell flashing. So I took that picture and you just barely see them. That's what the 23 millimeter would look like. It was a high rate of fire weapon, 23 millimeter round air explosive, extremely dangerous to slow moving aircraft.

So my next move, as soon as I took the picture was to go that way. Yeah, bad stuff. It was our boss down there. I worked for a warlord when I was a raven. Yeah, I had the ambassador in the air attache and all that kind of stuff. But that guy was my boss, General Vang Pao. He commanded the Hmong forces up there and we were up here discussing it.

Yeah, You may think this guy's relieving himself here at the time. Well, here's some of his. This is some of his Hmong pilots. He had. He had about eight or so Hmong t 28 pilots. They all flew till he died. He used them up. He made them go out five, six, seven, eight times a day and drop bombs for us.

And so we did the best that we could to train them and support them, make sure that they had good targets for what we were utilizing them for. But it was a tough war and this is what we worked with every day that each 30 four's This is America Bird, and these are the kind of forces that we worked with.

Those are the kind of locations we were in, their forward bases. And a lot of times one of our primary aircrafts supporting up there would be the world from the first S.O.S.. In fact, there used to be their primary mission was supporting directly the ambassador in Aleppo. So that's why we had the ones there. And there's one beautiful letter.

Notice the scarf hanging out here. And Tommy's issue, he going to, you know, shoot jerks like you. Jimmy, how about you? Is how you last night you could have been right. Good stuff. But anyway, again, we use these in Laos is one of our primary aircraft and of course two also in the sandy role, the ones, the ubiquitous ones.

And like I teach them all the time that oil seeker, that oil seeking missile was was going to be a developed man. They were going to be in big trouble. And we did a lot of this. We went after the North Vietnamese guns. That was a big thing. Those of you who at last night were in the display, if we went over the of display, saw that big brass shell in there, that was from a 130 millimeter field gun.

And that was the primary weapon that our allies really worried about. And so when we found those guns, we killed them. That's that guy right there, asshole. That guy. Your primary target. Okay, another shot of Laos. Just to make a couple of quick points here, it was divided into five military regions. Here's one, two, five, three, and then four.

And we had ravens at one time working at all of those military regions. And their callsign would be based upon the military region. So military reach to we were the 20 series Ravens and that's why you see the guys with the name tags on they'll have the different numbers but I think the most we ever had in country was about 22 and one time, and that was like in 68, 69.

And then it came down from there and I was in the last shift of guys that were over there, 72, 73. Okay. So human trail, like I say, was built by North Vietnamese group five, five nine, a primary target for us both for us right in in the male facts so that I flew with we worked these areas a lot.

This is one of the 40 points you can see how we go in there when we would bomb And this and this raises a very interesting point, folks. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, it's very hard to destroy a dirt road. Now, think about that. But what we were trying to do, we bombed this into dust, okay? And within minutes, the North Vietnamese would be in there with shovels digging out the dirt.

In fact, I remember one day I put in a strike and put in a £2,000 laser guided bomb, blew out half the side of a mountain, and it all cascaded down on the road and the truck trail was blocked and everything. And the dust is rising. And I look down here and I see guys down there with shovels so much.

And so I roll. They had fired a couple of rockets. And as I'm pulling up, they're all gone. Certain things are international. But think about that. It's very hard to destroy a dirt road. Hold that thought. We'll get back to that in just a minute. And more light. Have a look. Just like that. Just massive, massive trails and coming down and in you see we've that we bombed we bombed this forward point here but they were probably doing crossings up in here somewhere.

They were very good at camouflage. Very, very good. And this picture was given to me by a person who I honestly believe probably took this himself. Get in, because we had people would go out and do this kind of stuff. And he assured me this was a picture of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. So I'll take it. For what it's worth, notice the camouflage over the top.

They let the trees grow over the top in. This is part of the the trail. Obviously, we hadn't got to yet with air power, but I take him at his word. Okay. So let's talk a little bit about a board about Laos and what this really means to the war. Again, look at the geographical location of them. Well, reference to the other countries.

And if you draw a line from to Saigon, where does it go? Right through there. Official in Laos. And the halfway point is a little place called should pass, depending on your favorite garden spot. Right? It's the Valley of Death, man. That was the main knuckle for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And interestingly enough, our commanders in the field or during that time that they understood the importance of this region, they understood what the North Vietnamese were doing here, and they were constantly petitioning Washington, saying we need to go into Laos.

We've got to go in the last. It's the key terrain of the sea. We've got to control that area. And our politicians were saying, no, we would be widening the war. No, but you are the enemy worst. Okay. But they had sold us on this idea that the war is all about killing guerrillas in South Vietnam. So it was a feel to Southeast Asia war and Japan was right in the middle of it.

Now, I mentioned that it's very hard to destroy a dirt road. Okay. But we had over there the perfect instrument to do that. The cold infantry battalions, They're called armored battalions, they're called engineering task forces. And all that kind of stuff that they can do. And we had them over here in spades. In fact, General Westmoreland in January of 1968 was prepared to go to Washington and say, Mr. President, I would like to have 200,000 more troops under an operation called Operation El Paso.

You can look it up. I would like to send that force in Dallas. We're going to cut the trail and we're going to build a wall right there. We're going to separate North Vietnam from South Vietnam like we did the Koreas. And we're going to stop this war. And interestingly enough, what the North Vietnamese, that's what they expected.

That's what they thought we were going to do. And they knew that if we cut the food chain and trail the war was over because we got them here, we bought them in Cambodia, they weren't going to come down with air power. And the only way for them to get their stuff was down that trip. But we did it.

Politicians would not do it. The trail stayed open. We tried to cut it with air power. Air power failed. And I hate to say that I'm an airman, but if you look at this in a medically, it was not the right instrument. Now, we knew how to do interdiction. We had done it in Italy, we had done it in Korea.

But the key to it all was you have to tie your air operations together with your ground operations. And there's no evidence anywhere that our leaders ever successfully did that in Southeast Asia. We had that disconnect. We had this arrogance that we're going to win because which is so bad ass, we've got so much stuff, we'll drop enough bombs that will prevail.

And it didn't happen. The Ho Chi Minh Trail. CHOW The North Vietnamese in their histories claim that they won the war. That's why this was so important. This is why we're out here fighting. And this is why Neil, 41, got shot down on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Now, in the north, the catcher's mitt. You're going to hear about that in a few minutes.

A key part of the war. And we lost this battle. So when people say we never lost a battle in the war, I say, well, I don't think so. I think we lost this one. Okay. I might also add to and later on, we're going to hear about this. But night we had the Ravens in there. We had great Air Force in there.

We also had our Army Mac. We saw guys in there and they were doing great stuff for us. They were calling targets to us. Many of our forward air controllers worked directly with those guys, too, to do those missions. And I mean, there's just tremendous stories. And I think that presentation this afternoon is going to be very interesting to hear their side of the story.

But to the North Vietnamese, it was their key to victory in 1974 and 75 when we were long gone. And I'll let you read this. I think this says it all. This is from a North Vietnamese history, the Trunk Song Road, that's what they called it, provided us with a strategic vantage ground from which to fight and defeat the enemy, the Trunk song road joints north and south and unites the country.

And that was their objective. Interesting is even in worrying about proper pronouns today. Okay, Raven, for Rescues, let's talk a little bit about that. And I'm just about done here. We did them all time because we were getting airplanes shot down all time. But this is a classic picture. Here's the deejay. We've got a hobo down over here.

e needs to be rescued. Tom, is that you? Don't Jimmy. You remember that. Anyway, so again, presence. We have assets in the area. We were talking to Air America all the time. They were talking to us. We had off comms with them. We were using fox mikes and always if they. So a guy goes down, obviously, and we're out here on the plane of jars.

We've got the the Laotian t 28 so up here giving us support. Those are our trusty raven up there with the windows open doing this thing, coordinating all this probably the on scene commander initially he shoot at the bad guys who are right over there dumber nerve to be out in the open like that but that's what you get and incomes here America Bubba and picks up this guy and you know you don't ever turn down a ride do you know you don't want to do that?

No. I'm waiting for the jolly greens. I'm sorry. Once you get out of here, going to have it right. And so anyway, this is how we did it. And again, the key factor when you look at this historically was this idea of presence, just having the assets available. They don't have to be fine tuned. They just need to be quickly available.

And this is something we applied later on in Iraq and Afghanistan saved a lot of soldiers, sailors and marines this way. So see where we are. Okay, here's your trusty Ravens up there. This is the last shift they're in in military region to the last day. There's my ID card. When I went through the door in process to go to the Ravens, I gave up all of my military stuff and I got one of these.

That was my embassy card and it's only now gone, unfortunately. There's Terry Pfaff again. He's some kind of rock star or something. He is Craig Gun and myself and Chuck Hines, and unfortunately, he's gone. Oh, I love these. These are my brothers, great guys. And we spent that time together until the 27th February 73, when they when our politicians shut down, shut us down in that war.

You know, we we do what our politicians tell us. That's that's the foundational of the American military. But I really think we made some wrong calls in laws and everything. So I think that's my last slide, actually. Yes, sir. We have a question. Yeah. You know, 73. Well, you do a lot of base rescue, right? Yeah, sure. Yeah.

We kept the 40 threes with those who were initially our recovery aircraft. And you deal with it. Yes, that's true. And I think that you can talk about that today. Yeah. Dale School was going to talk about. Now we have forgotten you guys. Absolutely. And if you want to see if you love that or not. Yeah. Yeah. But you know, if they didn't do that.

Yes you're absolutely right in if we had the time we go through all that work right now, we're kind of focusing on 72 because of the rescues today. I'll be help 72. But you're absolutely right. Those are our initial efforts at age 43. Got in there early in the morning and Dale touched on this last night is good.