A Knavish Piece of Work - a novel of the Mayaguez Incident

by Ejner Fulsang

On May 12, 1975, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia captured a U.S.-registered container ship, the SS Mayaguez, en route to Sattahip, Thailand on a routine supply mission. With the election a year and a half away and his approval rating sagging, then president Gerald Ford called for an immediate rescue of the crew, alleged to be held on Koh Tang, a minute island in the Gulf of Siam. A last-minute mission was thrown together in which a battalion of Marines would be airlifted from U Tapao, Thailand to Koh Tang by Air Force helicopters with local area support from the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea and three Navy destroyers. The mission was a disaster with eighteen men killed in the assault and only three of the original fifteen helicopters still flyable at the end of the day. The bodies of the dead were left to lie where they fell for the next twenty years. To this day, eight bodies have yet to be recovered. And the Mayaguez crew? They were released by the Cambodians early in the morning of 15 May, not from Koh Tang, but from Rong Sam Lem, another island twenty-two miles away. Moreover, Ford knew the crew was not on Koh Tang, and he knew it some twenty hours before the assault began! Why would a president go through with an assault on an island that held no captives? "One of the men who died on Koh Tang was my friend, Richard Van de Geer, copilot of KNIFE 31, and nominally, the last man to die in the Vietnam War. Richard and the other spirits have quite a story to tell." -Ejner Fulsang

One DayToo Long

by Timothy Castle

One of the Vietnam War's most closely guarded secrets -- a highly classified U.S. radar base in the mountains of neutral Laos -- led to the disappearance of a small group of elite military personnel, a loss never fully acknowledged by the American government. Now, thirty years later, one book recounts the harrowing story -- and offers some measure of closure on this decades-old mystery.Because of the covert nature of the mission at Lima Site 85 -- providing bombing instructions to U.S. Air Force tactical aircraft from the "safe harbor" of a nation that was supposedly neutral -- the wives of the eleven servicemen were warned in no uncertain terms never to discuss the truth about their husbands. But one wife, Ann Holland, refused to remain silent. Timothy Castle draws on her personal records and recollections as well as upon a wealth of interviews with surviving servicemen and recently declassified information to tell the full story.The result is a tale worthy of Tom Clancy but told by a scholar with meticulous attention to historical accuracy. More than just an account of government deception, "One Day Too Long" is the story of the courageous men who agreed to put their lives in danger to perform a critical mission in which they could not be officially acknowledged. Indeed the personnel at Site 85 agreed to be "sheep-dipped" -- removed from their military status and technically placed in the employ of a civilian company. Castle reveals how the program, code-named "Heavy Green," was conceived and approved at the highest levels of the U.S. government. In spine tingling detail, he describes the selection of the men and the construction and operation of the radar facility on amile-high cliff in neutral Laos, even as the North Vietnamese Army began encircling the mountain. He chronicles the communist air attack on Site 85, the only such aerial bombing of the entire Vietnam War. A saga of courage, cover-up, and intrigue "One Day Too Long" tells how, in a shocking betrayal of trust, for thirty years the U.S. government has sought to hide the facts and now seeks to acquiesce to perfidious Vietnamese explanations for the disappearance of eleven good men.