Local vet honored for ’68 secret mission

[thedrifter]

Local vet honored for ’68 secret mission
Tuesday, 15 July 2008

by Bruce Strand

Staff writer

He’s a 60-year-old maintenance worker now, a father and grandfather nearing retirement.

Two-thirds of his life ago, Michael Landt of Zimmerman was involved in a top-secret, dangerous mission in Vietnam — for which he and his cohorts recently received a belated Presidential Unit Citation.

“We were called ‘The Ghost Squadron,’ because nobody knew anything about us,” said Landt. “We’d land and our own soldiers would ask, ‘Who the heck are you guys?’”

Forty years ago, Landt was an aircraft mechanic and sometimes gunner for the Navy VO-67 group whose mission was planting sensors in Viet Cong territory to help American troops track the enemy’s movement.

“The Marines at Khe Sanh later said they would have lost twice as many men as they did, if not for us,” said Landt. He referred to intense fighting during the 1968 Tet Offensive where VO-67 planes flew into heavy fire. The Marines had about 1,000 casualties.

Landt and other members of the Navy Ghost Squadron received a Presidential Unit Citation on May 14 at the U.S. Navy Memorial in Washington, D.C.

Their mission stayed top secret for 30 years, with Landt and his cohorts ordered to never discuss it with anyone, until declassification in 1998. New technology made the old sensors obsolete.

Rep. Bill Sali of Idaho heard about VO-67 after it was declassified, learned more from veteran Kerry Bignall, and pushed to have the squadron recognized. The ceremony was attended by 36 veterans.

Landt was accompanied by his wife, Ronda, their grown sons, Cody and Chad, and Chad’s wife and kids. The Landts have lived in Zimmerman for 22 years. Cody lives in Menominee, Wis., and Chad is career Air Force, stationed in Florida.

“The great thing about this was that we could have our families there to see it,” said Landt.

The Ghost Squadron had three aircraft shot down and 20 men killed during operations in 1967 and 1968, according to a Navy press release.

Flying out of a Thailand Air Force base, VO-67 crews targeted the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a complex network of trails, roads and truck routes that fed supplies through Laos to North Vietnamese units in South Vietnam.

In modified P-2VP Neptunes, a lumbering 1950s vintage aircraft built for anti-submarine patrols, the nine-man crews skimmed the treetops and dropped seismic and acoustic devices that would track enemy movements so attack aircraft could respond quickly and destroy them.

The citation from the secretary of the Navy read in part that VO-67 “successfully executed its primary mission of providing quick reaction, close air support, and combat logistics support for United States and Vietnamese military forces” while facing “extremely harsh climatic conditions at a remote operating base ... sustaining extensive operating damage and losses ...”

Landt, an Iowa native who works for Walgreens distribution center in Rogers, enlisted in the Navy in February 1967. The VO-67 program started the same month. After aircraft mechanics training, he was assigned to the stealth unit, which he joined in Thailand just after Christmas 1967.

“It was not a volunteer thing. They just put you there,” said Landt. “Why me, I couldn’t tell you.”



VO-67 lasted 16 months before its mission was deemed completed. Landt served for seven months, until late July 1968.

His main duty was tending to the aircraft at the base, but four times he accompanied the perilous flights as a gunner.

“There were trying times. We lost three aircraft, and 20 men,” said Landt. “But we were told that the top brass expected there would be 75 percent (casualties). Thank God, it was only about 25 or 30 percent.”

After VO-67, he served in San Diego, then went back to Vietnam aboard the USS Ticonderoga.

The PUC was a reunion for vets who hadn’t seen each other for 40 years.

“I recognized a few of them, but I had to ask a lot of them their names,” said Landt. “Then I remembered them.”

The war faced growing opposition by the late 1960s but Landt said VO-67 had a positive attitude.

“We loved our country, and we thought we were doing our duty,” he said. “We were doing what we were supposed to do.”


Michael Landt (left) and buddy in Thailand, 1968.

Ellie