greybeard
03-19-04, 12:09 AM
In the early part of 1971, late Jan, early Feb, thousands of American soldiers, airmen, and US Marines began gearing up to support the ARVN in an operation called LamSon 719. Some of you know it as Dewey Canyon II. It lasted from late Jan-April, and is mostly forgotten now, questionable success, lots of losses, -just a side note in war, except to those who were there. The plan was to heli lift the equivilent of reinforced division of ARVN into Laos, cut the Ho Chi Minh trail, take Tchepone, and destroy arms, equipment and personell as the situation dictated. All aviiation support as provided by US forces. I was one of those Marines, flying as a gunner on CH-53's with HMH-463. Resupply and troop transport into "idyllic" settings such as LZ Sophia, LZ Lolo, and LZ Sophia East. It was a bloody awful mess. 106 helicopters lost outright.
Back in the states:
During the same time period Lam Son 719 kicked off, early Feb, the Vietnam Veterans against the War staged their farce called the Winter Soldier investigation in Detroit Michigan. Funded in part by Jne Fonda, & VVAW, it included a moderator, Q&A panel, the press, and Vietnam veterans from all the services, but predominantly the Army and Marines. The whole thing was later read into Congressional record by Calif Rep (D) Ron Dellums and is in the public domain. I had heard of the proceedings, but just recently read the transcript. I was absolutely floored to read what Marine Capt Rusty Sachs of HMM-362 (Ugly Angels) had to say.
MODERATOR. We're going to allow everybody to speak first and after that the press will be allowed to ask questions.
SACHS. My name is Rusty Sachs. I entered the Marine Corps in 1964 after working as a news broadcaster for a network radio station. I was a helicopter pilot. I came out as a Captain. I was in Vietnam with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 362 as a medivac pilot from August of '66 to September of '67 and my testimony concerns the leveling of villages for no valid reason, throwing Viet Cong suspects from the aircraft after binding and gagging them with copper wire, and racism in the assignment of priorities to medical evacuations where white people were given priority over nonwhite people.
MODERATOR. Mr. Sachs, you testified that there was prisoners thrown out of a helicopter. Could you elaborate upon that subject?
SACHS. This was one of the big games. Whenever any prisoners were taken, the crewmen in the helicopters were in charge also of loading, in addition to maintenance on the aircraft would blindfold the prisoners, holding the blindfold on with heavy wire, safety wire. They'd bind their hands, bind their feet and maybe bind them into a fetal position and upon landing, rather than releasing them so they could walk off the aircraft, they'd throw them out--get the grunts to mark how far they could throw them and have little contests. This was done with officers observing, at least all company grade officers. There may have been a Major present too.
The general attitude of the officers was (I was a Lt. at the time) "Well, there's somebody senior to me here and I guess if this wasn't SOP he'd be doing something to stop it," and since nobody senior ever did anything to stop it, the policy was promulgated and everybody assumed that this was what was right. We'd never had any instructions in the Geneva Convention. When we were given our Geneva Convention cards the lecture consisted of "If you're taken prisoner, all you gotta do is give 'em your name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. Here's your Geneva Convention cards. Go get 'em, Marines." We were never told anything about the way to treat prisoners if we were the capturers rather than the captee and this was very standard.
MODERATOR. Mr. Sachs, you were a helicopter pilot. Did you fly many MEDIVAC missions?
SACHS: I flew probably 500 MEDIVAC missions in the course of 13 months. I can't recall ever evacuating a Vietnamese civilian. Allied with this, there were times at night in bad weather during the monsoon season we could not launch a night MEDIVACunless it was an emergency. There were instances where a frag would come in; my co-pilot would go out to start the aircraft while I took down the numbers to get to the zone correctly and the major, the operations officer of the squadron, would say "Now hold it a minute. It's bad weather out there and you're going to get your [expletive deleted] killed and these are only ARVNSs. There aren't Americans. These are gook Marines. We don't need 'em. We're not going to risk ourselves for them." We would try to fly the mission anyway. But it was a squadron policy, unwritten, not to launch for gooks if you could possibly avoid it.
QUESTION. Mr. Sachs, you told about a prisoner being pushed from a helicopter. It wasn't clear whether or not that helicopter was on the ground or not.
SACHS. The incident I was talking about when they were making to see who could throw the gooks farther? It was done on the ground because it's hard to mark them from 3,000 feet. However, it was an official policy that after every mission you fly, you have to fill out an After-Mission Report to show them all the good stuff you did during the day. Like, how many pounds of rice you carried, and how many Americans and how many gooks you carried. Well, we were given very specific oral orders from the Colonel on down: When you are carrying VCS, Viet Cong Suspects, you don't count them when you get in the airplane, you count them when they get out of the airplane because the numbers don't always jibe. And if one of them happens to get scared of heights and decides to get out, or something like that, or if he looks like maybe he's going to try and raise some pooh in the belly of the aircraft and the crewman has to kick him out, that's none of your business; it didn't really happen because you counted the men when they got off.
QUESTION. Did you ever witness anyone being thrown from a helicopter in the air?
SACHS. I'm a pilot and they're below you and behind you and you can't see.
He was not the only Marine there, but was the only Marine aviator I've read of.
In it's entirety:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html
1stMarDiv participants:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_03_1Marine.html
Even as I was flying my last missions related to Dewey Canyon II, Kerry, Fonda, Sachs, and all the rest met in our nation's capitol in April 71 as part of a mass protest they dubbed Dewey Canyon III. You've all read of it by now, and seen some of the pictures on the web. There are also many pics in Kerry's book-The New Soldier'. There, near the steps of Congress, Rusty Sachs threw his medals over the fence, just as Kerry said he did. I feel I was abandoned by one of my own-a USMC Vietnam Helicopter veteran. This bothers me much more so than anything Kerry or Hanoi Jane could ever do.
"A few days before I was to travel with Kerry in Massachusetts, I found an ancient copy of "The New Soldier" -- which Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War put together in 1971 to record their week in Washington protesting the war. I handed it to him upon squeezing into his minivan, and he began leafing through it.
"There's Robert Muller," Kerry says, pointing at scrapbook photos in the back of the book showing a high-school era Muller pole vaulting before he went abroad and lost the use of his legs. "Gold Star Mothers," he says, pointing to a photo of an older woman wrapped in a flag, clutching the medals that are all that's left of her son. "There's Rusty Sachs," Kerry says. "Look at his face. Sachs is throwing one of his medals back on the steps of Congress; he's fighting back tears."
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/08/10/kerry/index2.html
Photo of the deed, from Kerry's book-The New Soldier
I'm mad, disgusted and can just imagine what those who served so honorably in HMM-362 may feel & think.
Back in the states:
During the same time period Lam Son 719 kicked off, early Feb, the Vietnam Veterans against the War staged their farce called the Winter Soldier investigation in Detroit Michigan. Funded in part by Jne Fonda, & VVAW, it included a moderator, Q&A panel, the press, and Vietnam veterans from all the services, but predominantly the Army and Marines. The whole thing was later read into Congressional record by Calif Rep (D) Ron Dellums and is in the public domain. I had heard of the proceedings, but just recently read the transcript. I was absolutely floored to read what Marine Capt Rusty Sachs of HMM-362 (Ugly Angels) had to say.
MODERATOR. We're going to allow everybody to speak first and after that the press will be allowed to ask questions.
SACHS. My name is Rusty Sachs. I entered the Marine Corps in 1964 after working as a news broadcaster for a network radio station. I was a helicopter pilot. I came out as a Captain. I was in Vietnam with Marine Medium Helicopter Squadron 362 as a medivac pilot from August of '66 to September of '67 and my testimony concerns the leveling of villages for no valid reason, throwing Viet Cong suspects from the aircraft after binding and gagging them with copper wire, and racism in the assignment of priorities to medical evacuations where white people were given priority over nonwhite people.
MODERATOR. Mr. Sachs, you testified that there was prisoners thrown out of a helicopter. Could you elaborate upon that subject?
SACHS. This was one of the big games. Whenever any prisoners were taken, the crewmen in the helicopters were in charge also of loading, in addition to maintenance on the aircraft would blindfold the prisoners, holding the blindfold on with heavy wire, safety wire. They'd bind their hands, bind their feet and maybe bind them into a fetal position and upon landing, rather than releasing them so they could walk off the aircraft, they'd throw them out--get the grunts to mark how far they could throw them and have little contests. This was done with officers observing, at least all company grade officers. There may have been a Major present too.
The general attitude of the officers was (I was a Lt. at the time) "Well, there's somebody senior to me here and I guess if this wasn't SOP he'd be doing something to stop it," and since nobody senior ever did anything to stop it, the policy was promulgated and everybody assumed that this was what was right. We'd never had any instructions in the Geneva Convention. When we were given our Geneva Convention cards the lecture consisted of "If you're taken prisoner, all you gotta do is give 'em your name, rank, serial number, and date of birth. Here's your Geneva Convention cards. Go get 'em, Marines." We were never told anything about the way to treat prisoners if we were the capturers rather than the captee and this was very standard.
MODERATOR. Mr. Sachs, you were a helicopter pilot. Did you fly many MEDIVAC missions?
SACHS: I flew probably 500 MEDIVAC missions in the course of 13 months. I can't recall ever evacuating a Vietnamese civilian. Allied with this, there were times at night in bad weather during the monsoon season we could not launch a night MEDIVACunless it was an emergency. There were instances where a frag would come in; my co-pilot would go out to start the aircraft while I took down the numbers to get to the zone correctly and the major, the operations officer of the squadron, would say "Now hold it a minute. It's bad weather out there and you're going to get your [expletive deleted] killed and these are only ARVNSs. There aren't Americans. These are gook Marines. We don't need 'em. We're not going to risk ourselves for them." We would try to fly the mission anyway. But it was a squadron policy, unwritten, not to launch for gooks if you could possibly avoid it.
QUESTION. Mr. Sachs, you told about a prisoner being pushed from a helicopter. It wasn't clear whether or not that helicopter was on the ground or not.
SACHS. The incident I was talking about when they were making to see who could throw the gooks farther? It was done on the ground because it's hard to mark them from 3,000 feet. However, it was an official policy that after every mission you fly, you have to fill out an After-Mission Report to show them all the good stuff you did during the day. Like, how many pounds of rice you carried, and how many Americans and how many gooks you carried. Well, we were given very specific oral orders from the Colonel on down: When you are carrying VCS, Viet Cong Suspects, you don't count them when you get in the airplane, you count them when they get out of the airplane because the numbers don't always jibe. And if one of them happens to get scared of heights and decides to get out, or something like that, or if he looks like maybe he's going to try and raise some pooh in the belly of the aircraft and the crewman has to kick him out, that's none of your business; it didn't really happen because you counted the men when they got off.
QUESTION. Did you ever witness anyone being thrown from a helicopter in the air?
SACHS. I'm a pilot and they're below you and behind you and you can't see.
He was not the only Marine there, but was the only Marine aviator I've read of.
In it's entirety:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_entry.html
1stMarDiv participants:
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Resources/Primary/Winter_Soldier/WS_03_1Marine.html
Even as I was flying my last missions related to Dewey Canyon II, Kerry, Fonda, Sachs, and all the rest met in our nation's capitol in April 71 as part of a mass protest they dubbed Dewey Canyon III. You've all read of it by now, and seen some of the pictures on the web. There are also many pics in Kerry's book-The New Soldier'. There, near the steps of Congress, Rusty Sachs threw his medals over the fence, just as Kerry said he did. I feel I was abandoned by one of my own-a USMC Vietnam Helicopter veteran. This bothers me much more so than anything Kerry or Hanoi Jane could ever do.
"A few days before I was to travel with Kerry in Massachusetts, I found an ancient copy of "The New Soldier" -- which Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War put together in 1971 to record their week in Washington protesting the war. I handed it to him upon squeezing into his minivan, and he began leafing through it.
"There's Robert Muller," Kerry says, pointing at scrapbook photos in the back of the book showing a high-school era Muller pole vaulting before he went abroad and lost the use of his legs. "Gold Star Mothers," he says, pointing to a photo of an older woman wrapped in a flag, clutching the medals that are all that's left of her son. "There's Rusty Sachs," Kerry says. "Look at his face. Sachs is throwing one of his medals back on the steps of Congress; he's fighting back tears."
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/08/10/kerry/index2.html
Photo of the deed, from Kerry's book-The New Soldier
I'm mad, disgusted and can just imagine what those who served so honorably in HMM-362 may feel & think.