US-Trained Pilot Was an Agent of Hanoi Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Published Friday, April 28, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News Vietnam pilot's bombs struck a deafening blow US-trained pilot's attacks shocked U.S. forces in war's last days BY MARK MCDONALD Mercury News Vietnam Bureau HO CHI MINH CITY -- The old man was a coconut farmer by day, a Viet Cong guerrilla by night, and when the secret police caught up with him they shot him to death in front of his wife and daughter. Then they dragged his body through the rutted streets of Ben Tre and dumped it in the Mekong River. "That's when my real story started," says Nguyen Thanh Trung, 16 years old at the time, 1963, when his father was [assassinated] by South Vietnamese security agents. "My whole family was VC, so we accepted the fact the government was trying to kill us. "But my father's killing was too rough, too rough, not even human, and I simply could not accept it. That night I swore to God that some day I would refund this action." That refund came a dozen years later, after Trung had spent five years as a pilot -- and a Viet Cong mole -- in the South Vietnamese air force. On April 8, 1975, Lt. Nguyen Thanh Trung stole a U.S.-made fighter and attacked the presidential palace in Saigon, shocking the American and South Vietnamese governments. Then on April 28 -- 25 years ago today-- Trung and a small communist air squadron struck Saigon's Tan Son Nhut Airport. Two days later, the war was over. "I believe that (second) attack really stopped the war," says Trung, now 52 and a Boeing 767 pilot with Vietnam Airlines. "We dropped 20 bombs on the aircraft in the parking lot, but we left the runway intact. We knew the CIA wanted to leave via Tan Son Nhut and we wanted the Americans to be able to get out as easily as possible. That's why we didn't bomb the runway." U.S. officials were thrown into a panic. Worried about the sudden vulnerability of the airport, U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin got clearance from Washington for an immediate helicopter airlift, the final and chaotic withdrawal of Americans from Vietnam. Trung's initial defection had come when he broke formation from his squadron of F-5E fighters and dropped his entire payload on the presidential palace. Former chief CIA analyst Frank Snepp said that attack "underscored Saigon's vulnerability... (because) the government had been unable to prevent one determined pilot from going for the jugular." Trung, then 27 and the father of two young daughters, got away safely when he virtually crash-landed his plane at a remote VC-controlled airstrip. (The mountaintop runway was so short that the plane couldn't take off again. It later had to be dragged out by road, and the gray F-5E now sits in a grove of trees on the palace grounds in Ho Chi Minh City.) Viet Cong authorities hustled Trung off to the city of Danang -- in a captured American Jeep, no less -- where he immediately began teaching a group of North Vietnamese pilots how to fly some newly liberated A-37 attack bombers. Trung and these pilots would stage the airstrike on Tan Son Nhut. Trung's account of his daring escapades 25 years ago is replete with close calls and nutty intrigues, elaborate plots and secret rendezvous. And perhaps it's what he claims it was -- a patient game of cloak-and-dagger by a young man bent on avenging the death of his father. Or perhaps it was merely the treasonous act of a swaggering pilot who recognized he was going to be on the losing side when the war came to its obvious and inevitable close. "I know people might think I was just saving myself," says Trung. "But I don't worry about what others think. I never did. "I just want my name in people's hearts. I want them to see me as one guy who did one thing on one day to help stop the war. That's enough for me." Killing sparked idea To hear Trung tell it, he started plotting his revenge the day his father was killed. He had three older brothers fighting with the Viet Cong and he was often tempted to "go to the jungle and hold a weapon." But he says he was counseled by Communist Party leaders in Ben Tre province to stay in school and study hard. "We'll do something with you later," they told him. He attended Saigon Science University and took to the streets with other pro-communist students during the 1968 Tet Offensive. He returned to school when the universities reopened, and then his VC contacts told him they wanted him to join the South Vietnamese air force. He recalls his exact orders: "You have to get into bombers. Not cargo. Not helicopters. Bombers." Passing the background check was the toughest test. The son of an executed Viet Cong guerrilla was hardly "Top Gun" material. Luckily for him, all the records in his Mekong delta hamlet had been destroyed, and his home village was now so heavily controlled by the Viet Cong -- this was 1969 -- that no Saigon bureaucrat would dare venture down there. Trung told the interviewing officer that his father was a Japanese man who abandoned his mother in 1946 when she became pregnant. "He told me I was a good boy and he accepted me. A new page was opened." Trung was accepted as a flight cadet and spent nearly two years in flight training in the United States, principally at Kessler AFB in Biloxi, Miss. He returned to Vietnam in November of 1971 and started flying missions all across South Vietnam. The targets: his alleged Viet Cong brethren. "My first mission bombing the countryside, I thought why not send these bombs back to Saigon?" he says. "But the organization convinced me not to do anything yet. I gained more and more experience. I often missed the targets on purpose." In the early months of 1975, the pressure was building on Trung. He knew he might have to eventually steal a plane and that he'd probably have to land it on a makeshift runway. He began practicing short landings with the F-5E, crippling three in the process. The burned-out brakes and broken landing gear cost him a promotion to captain. Finally, his Viet Cong handlers got word to him: He was to take a plane any time between April 1 and 10. He would drop two bombs on the presidential palace, then two more on the U.S. Embassy. A remote, newly cleared airstrip would be waiting for him. If he couldn't land, he should eject. April 8 arrived hot and clear in Saigon, and when another pilot was late for an 8 a.m. mission, Trung took his place. "But it wasn't easy to go," he says. "I thought about my wife and my children. The sweat began pouring off me. I closed the canopy over me. Things were coming, coming. Then I thought about my father and how he was killed, and I forgot everything else. I shouted to myself, o! Go!' " Trung lagged behind the other two planes, then dropped two of his four 500-pound bombs on the presidential palace -- and missed. The bombs landed in a garden. He made another pass and released the remaining bombs, this time scoring direct hits, although one bomb was a dud. (The roof of the palace today is painted with two large red circles where those bombs struck.) The palace's central staircase was destroyed, but President Nguyen Van Thieu was in a basement bomb shelter and only one official was injured. Trung made it to the tiny VC airstrip 75 miles to the north and landed on the mountaintop runway with just 50 feet to spare. The whole mission had taken 25 minutes. Family imprisoned When word got out about Trung's defection, his wife and daughters -- left strangely unprotected by communist operatives -- were arrested and thrown into prison. On May 2, three days after Saigon fell, the family was reunited. Trung was acclaimed a hero of the revolution, although for the next year he still had to attend what he calls "Communist Party school" to make sure he knew his Marxism from his Leninism. "It was a difficult life after the war, even for someone like me," he says. "We often went hungry." Trung was assigned to help put together a new Vietnamese Air Force, mostly using planes left behind by the Americans. In 1980, when spare parts for the U.S. aircraft ran out, the Vietnamese fliers began using Soviet aircraft. Trung made colonel, then retired from the military in 1990 to begin commercial flying for the government. In addition to his regular duties with state-run Vietnam Airlines, he flies the country's top leaders and diplomats all over the world. But there's no statue of him in Ho Chi Minh City, no bridge and no boulevard, no Nguyen Thanh Trung Park. Just his old F-5E parked under some sycamore trees, where kids have jammed Coke cans into the plane's exhaust jets. And now, a quarter-century gone, how would Trung answer his former fellow officers and pilots, his flight instructors in the U.S. Air Force, his old buddies in the South Vietnamese military? How would he answer those who would call him a turncoat and a traitor? "I love my old colleagues, but I don't care what most of those guys think," he says. "The war had to be stopped. It was so bad and so many people died. If I could help to stop it, I had to try. My only obligation was to the fatherland, to Vietnam. I think I did my best. I did what I could." (c) 2000 San Jose Mercury News ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytas-04.29.00-01:38:46-25651