Download or read book WAR STORIES from an Army Pilot Flying in the CIA s Secret War in Laos written by Gerald Naekel and published by Createspace Independent Pub. This book was released on 2013-01-10 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the 12th Edition and contains a number of updates, not only from some earlier structure issues, but from feedback from a wide variety of readers, from our unit, other Mohawk units and from USAF pilots that filled in more details of missions, call signs, and threats we all faced, mostly over Laos during this "Not So Secret War." There are nearly 380 action packed pages of the true accounts from flying over 500 combat missions in Laos, North & South Vietnam in a Grumman OV-1 Mohawk, the armed, single-pilot, ejection-seat aircraft that was a key player in the secret war run by the CIA in Laos. The 20th ASTA/131st Aviation Company was the only Mohawk unit, of five in SE Asia, that flew only outside of South Vietnam until the last months of the war and was flying the machine gun and rocket equipped attack versions of the Mohawk. There are more than 25 great photos weaved through this interesting book. The book is filled with these events and is not written as a novel or narrative, but goes directly to the mission action, loses, crashes, shoot downs, missiles and MiGs faced by this truly unique Army combat unit. From a separate base in northern Thailand we, along with Air America, flew for years in the CIA's Secret War in Northern Laos. Nightly we flew our Mohawks up against the Chinese border and working on real-time night attacks of Chinese trucks and tanks moving across the north end of the Laotian Plain of Jars. We would find the targets--and attack, night after night after night. Unfortunately, our unit losses were staggering and shocking, even to us--losing more aircraft and men than all four of the other Mohawk units combined. Many of our men ended up MIA's in Laos and North Vietnam never to be seen again--even after the war. They disappeared. You get shot down in Laos, or up along the Chinese border, and you disappeared,-- forever.
Download or read book War Stories written by Gerald Naekel and published by . This book was released on 2014-07-07 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a fast-moving book of the true accounts of dozens and dozens of over 500 combat missions I flew in a sometimes armed Grumman OV-1 Mohawk. I was in Vietnam for 22-1/2 months until my timing and luck all ran out at the same time and I was medivac'd to the Philippines in 1972. Having gone to Army flight school at just 19-years old, like hundreds of other young men did, I was in-country by the time I could not vote or drink. But most of our Army pilots, gunships or slicks, were 18-24 years old with the average being only 22-years old. We lost more Mohawks and men down and lost than all the other four Mohawk units combined. Up until the final months of the war we flew missions only in Laos and North Vietnam. We flew the only armed Mohawks with rockets and machine guns.
Download or read book Mohawks Lost written by Gerald Naekel and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-05-21 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The eBook version of this book, here on Amazon, has most of the first chapter to read, while the print version preview is only a few pages long -- nothing I can control, but the eBook read is worth the couple minutes. The true stories of over 500 of my single-pilot combat flights, almost all of them in Laos and North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. I spent about 22-1/2 months flying in the only Mohawk unit with the armed OV-1 Mohawks - until my timing and luck all ran out at the same time and I was medavac'd to the Air Force hospital at Clark AFB in the Philippines and then a series of Air Force and Army hospitals. This book, or most of it, was previously published as WAR STORIES - From an Army Pilot Flying in the CIA's Secret War in Laos and was for years an Amazon great seller! Now it is has been updated, grammatically corrected with over a thousand changes, but pretty much the same 5-Star book. The 131st Aviation Company, while based near Hue in South Vietnam (I Corps, just below the DMZ), flew entirely in Laos and North Vietnam for over seven years until the last months of the war. Our secondary base for over six years was Udorn RTAFB, Thailand where we flew nightly hunter/killer teams with the Air Force and Laotian forces attacking Chinese trucks and tanks across northern Laos, near (or sometimes across) the border far to the northwest of Hanoi. This was the war in the Plain of Jars (PDJ) and much of this was run from the secret CIA airfield at Long Teign (Lima Site-20a), the most secret airfield in the world and home to much of the Air America fleet. Our two dozen Grumman OV-1 Mohawks were the only armed ones, and of the five Army Mohawk units, the other four operating only in South Vietnam, the 131st lost more aircraft and men than all the other units - combined. Nightly, from Phu Bai we flew pairs of SLAR/IR hunter/killer teams in southern Laos (Steel Tiger North and South) with the AC-130 Spectre gunships attacking the Ho Chi Minh Trail around the clock. There we faced huge amounts of flak and other heavy anti-aircraft fire that were not an issue inside of South Vietnam. We ran SLAR, IR and VR (armed visual) missions around the clock in the southern ends of North Vietnam, including 24/7 SLAR missions right along the coast up to about Vinh. There the issue was Soviet SAM missiles, and flak and the rest of the heavy machine guns. Ditto for Laos. And we never got a single man back out of Laos at the end of the war. You go down in Laos - and you are gone for good.
Download or read book The Ravens written by Christopher Robbins and published by Crown Publishing Group (NY). This book was released on 1987 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes the secret aerial missions flown by American pilots over Laos during the Vietnam War.
Download or read book Covert Ops written by James E. Parker and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1997-11-15 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the same time the Vietnam War was being broadcast into the living rooms of Americans across the country the CIA was conducting a large-scale secret war in northeastern Laos that few heard about. Agency case officer Jim Parker's five years of combat and immersion in Southeast Asian culture had a lasting influence on him and his family. His dramatic, provocative reminiscence of those years is the first account by a participant to portray America's involvement in Laos.
Download or read book Flying Through Midnight written by John T. Halliday and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2007-02-06 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compelling account, Halliday takes readers inside a top-secret air base and into the cockpit of an antiquated plane that was a lifeline for special forces on the ground in 1970 Laos during the Vietnam War.
Download or read book The Ravens written by Christopher Robbins and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Firefly written by Richard E. Diller and published by Dog Ear Publishing. This book was released on 2017-04-19 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once everything is set up, I roll in. Control stick hard left into a sharp left turn and let the nose drop quickly but smoothly to 40° down. Down. My heart is pumping hard. I'm in a sharp dive. I have to do it right and fast. Line up the target in the sight. It's getting bigger as I get closer to the ground. Airspeed is increasing! Quick! Right there! Pickle at 8,000 feet, only 2,000 feet from roll-in altitude. Not much time. NOW! Pull out! Pull hard, but don't over G! All the remaining ordnance is trying to pull the airplane toward the ground. Smoothly pull to four Gs. Watch the artificial horizon. It's the only visual reference I can count on. Pull! Get the nose up! Don't go below 7,000 feet because rocks can be anywhere below seven. There's level. Bring it on up. Twenty-five degrees nose high. I have plenty of speed, so keep the nose up. Here comes 8,000 feet. Then 9,000. I can let the nose down a little now and look around to see if anyone is shooting. It is 1969 and Dick Diller is on his way to flying warplanes in the Vietnam conflict. He is commissioned to fly A-1 Skyraiders in sometimes harrowing nighttime missions over Laos-surviving not only the danger of the missions he flew, but also the bureaucracy of the air force, from fitness testing to additional duties assigned, to attacking impossible-to-find targets in the dead of night-with minimal fuel supplies. At once entertaining and riveting, as well as thought-provoking, Firefly is the story of one man's journey in a world at war, and a day-to-day description of the fighting force that was flying A-1 Skyraiders in combat. Firefly contains actual transcriptions of dialogue of pilots locating a target and making a strike in northern Laos.
Download or read book Air America written by Bill Collier and published by . This book was released on 2019-09-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this second edition of his memoir, previously titled "CIA Super Pilot Spills the Beans," former H-34 and Bell Huey pilot Capt. Bill Collier tells of his experiences flying helicopters in Laos for Air America, during the CIA's secret war waged into the 1970s. It was the war correspondent Anne Darling who described the pilots of Air America as "CIA Super Pilots," and as Collier tells of flying in challenging weather and combat conditions with his best Vietnam helicopter pilot buddy, Gary, the pair shared enough adventure to make any novel seem lame. Making fabulous money and having airline benefits allowed them to live an exotic lifestyle, to travel the world on their monthly R&Rs, and to chase and catch more than a few stewardesses from several different airlines.Air America operated an entire fleet of aircraft out of the "secret CIA air base" at Long Tieng. For years it ranked as one of the busiest airports in the world as the CIA supported the Laotian Army in its efforts to repel the army of North Vietnam intent on conquering all of Laos.
Download or read book A Great Place to Have a War written by Joshua Kurlantzick and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold story of how America’s secret war in Laos in the 1960s transformed the CIA from a loose collection of spies into a military operation and a key player in American foreign policy. January, 1961: Laos, a tiny nation few Americans have heard of, is at risk of falling to communism and triggering a domino effect throughout Southeast Asia. This is what President Eisenhower believed when he approved the CIA’s Operation Momentum, creating an army of ethnic Hmong to fight communist forces there. Largely hidden from the American public—and most of Congress—Momentum became the largest CIA paramilitary operation in the history of the United States. The brutal war lasted more than a decade, left the ground littered with thousands of unexploded bombs, and changed the nature of the CIA forever. With “revelatory reporting” and “lucid prose” (The Economist), Kurlantzick provides the definitive account of the Laos war, focusing on the four key people who led the operation: the CIA operative whose idea it was, the Hmong general who led the proxy army in the field, the paramilitary specialist who trained the Hmong forces, and the State Department careerist who took control over the war as it grew. Using recently declassified records and extensive interviews, Kurlantzick shows for the first time how the CIA’s clandestine adventures in one small, Southeast Asian country became the template for how the United States has conducted war ever since—all the way to today’s war on terrorism.
Download or read book Whispering Death tuag Nco Ntsoov written by Robert Curry and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2004 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whispering Death is a shattering account of an eighteen-year-old aviator from the streets of America to Vietnam, into the Macomb world of a Secret War run by the CIA, fought with clandestine forces, the Hmong hill people, and a vast and varied air armada. "I highly recommend this book to be read for knowledge of how the Secret War in Laos was fought and why we owe the Hmong so much." Brigadier General Harry C. Aderholt, USAF, Ret. "A superb tale of aviation adventure in the combat skies of Southeast Asia woven with extraordinary skill. This is a gripping, personal story from a new perspective. A must-read for fans of military aviation during the Vietnam War era." Larry Sanborn-Raven FAC-call sign: Sandy "Whispering Death is one of the most comprehensive and fascinating books ever written about America's most covert war. It embodies the desperate fight for freedom these Americans and Hmong faced together, bound as eternal brothers and sisters. And in the end how an American government left my people to die alone." Yang Chee, President, Lao-Hmong American Coalition
Download or read book Honor Denied written by Allen Cates and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2011-11-11 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Air America flight crews, hired as civilians, but castigated as mercenaries, malcontents, and psychopaths, operated military aircraft and performed yeoman service for twenty-five years until the war in Southeast Asia ended on a rooftop in downtown Saigon. They have never been recognized for their sacrifices. Author and former Air America pilot Allen Cates cuts through the myths and subterfuge surrounding this elite stealth Air Force used by the United States to fight a secret war in Honor Denied. The culmination of Catess years as a pilot and his in-depth research into Air Americas murky past, this intense study follows his escape from rural, small-town America to the US Marines, as well as his time as an officer and pilot flying combat operations in Vietnam and rescue missions for Air America. Peppering the narrative with vivid personal details, Cates describes the background and purpose of this unique organization and then discloses the startling casualtiesboth those killed in action and those wounded and injured with permanent disability. He shines the light on their cause, long hidden from the general public, and reveals how these brave men and women were denied recognition and benefits by those who knew the truth, including the US President, secretaries of state and defense, and even the director of the CIA. Proud, yet never boastful, Honor Denied tells a story that needs to be toldand heard.
Download or read book Special Air Warfare and the Secret War in Laos written by Air University Press and published by . This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 516 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of special air warfare and the Air Commandos who served for the ambassadors in Laos from 1964 to 1975 is captured through extensive research and veteran interviews. The author has meticulously put together a comprehensive overview of the involvement of USAF Air Commandos who served in Laos as trainers, advisors, and clandestine combat forces to prevent the communist takeover of the Royal Lao Government. This book includes pictures of those operations, unveils what had been a US government secret war, and adds a substantial contribution to understanding the wider war in Southeast Asia.
Download or read book Here There are Tigers written by Reginald Hathorn and published by Stackpole Books. This book was released on 2008-01-24 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In-the-cockpit perspective on aerial warfare during the Vietnam War. Many never-before-heard stories--some of them tragic, others humorous.
Download or read book CIA Super Pilot Spills the Beans written by Bill Collier and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Death-defying adventure, big money, world travel, sex, booze - this true tale has it all. War Correspondent Anne Darling described the pilots of Air AMERICA as "CIA Super Pilots." Captain Collier was one of those "Super Pilots". This is his story. Captain Collier teamed up with his best Vietnam helicopter pilot buddy, Gary, and the two rascals shared enough adventure to make any novel seem lame. Flying combat in mountainous and weather-hostile Laos was some of the most challenging ever experienced by any pilot, any time, any war. Making fabulous money and having airline benefits allowed them to live an exotic lifestyle, to travel the world on their monthly R&Rs, and to chase and catch more than a few stewardesses from several different airlines. Air America operated an entire fleet of aircraft out of the "secret CIA air base" at Long Tieng. For years it ranked as one of the busiest airports in the world as the CIA supported the Laotian Army in its efforts to repel the army of North Vietnam intent on conquering all of Laos.
Download or read book Usaf Air Commando Secret Wars from Laos to Latin America written by Eugene D. Rossel and published by Xlibris Corporation. This book was released on 2016-07-15 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Air Commando secret wars happened mostly during the Vietnam War time frame and was a global effort involving USAF volunteer personnel who were given official military orders that did not necessarily specify the country they served in, and civilian clothes were many times authorized. Later they had great difficulty proving that they served in many of these countries, which affected their future VA care. These operations were used to strengthen normally a poor country with little military resources and training with secret warriors frequently being there doing some of their legwork behind the scenes. All the operations were tight-lipped, frequently forbidden to tell families where you were and what you were doing. As an example; Capt. Bob Simpsons death, the first fighter pilot KIA in Vietnam in August 1962, became a total fabrication of where, why, and how and took a number of years before the government came clean because of my efforts. Secret wars have a long history, and they will continue because of the interest of more-powerful nations with their less fortunate brethren.
Download or read book My Secret War written by Richard S. Drury and published by Tab Books. This book was released on 1979 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
