1Q   CIA’S PHOENIX PROGRAM

As I was finishing these memoirs, it was becoming clearer that those first three months in Vietnam got spent unwittingly as a gopher for the CIA’s Phoenix Program. The ten-man counterinsurgency unit that I was with was undoubtedly a ruse to confuse the communists about our participation in the program. Everything we did in the French Fort centered around Brigadier General Black, a mystical soldier who may have never existed in or out of the Army. Our daily trips to the CIA compound, plus my weekly visits to the B-32, 5th Special Forces camp, only helped to fuel my inquisitive nature. Still, it was undoubtedly the secrecy amongst my fellow team members that would haunt me for the next 52 years. We were all ordered not to discuss amongst ourselves what we were doing in the French Fort. Being good soldiers, we followed orders and never talked about our various jobs or why we were living in an old fort surrounded by Vietnamese Special Forces, Popular Forces, and Civilian Irregular Defense Forces. The CIA could not have picked a better location to operate the Phoenix Program in Tay Ninh Province. Unfortunately, the South Vietnamese military was permeated with agents, and it was not long before the Viet Cong produced a plan to blow up the ammo dump and take out part of the Phoenix Program at the same time.