Son Tay Raid

Son Tay Raider SGM Joe Murray Will Be Laid To Rest Today

Special Forces Sergeant Major Joe Murray passed away on December 23 and will be laid to rest today at the Sandhills State Veterans Cemetery in Spring Lake, NC.

SGM Murray spent 30 years in the service of the US Army, with the vast majority of it being as a Green Beret in the Special Forces. Murray served from 1962 – 1992 and at the time of his retirement was the School Sergeant Major for the USA JFK SWC (US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School).

Murray went to Korea in 1962-63 and then to West Germany where he was in the 3rd Armored Division as a 106mm Recoilless Rifle Gunner and an 81mm mortar section leader from 1964-66.

He joined Special Forces in 1966 and after graduation was assigned to the 5th Special Forces Group (5th SFG) in Vietnam. There as the Intelligence Sergeant, he assigned to the 4th Corps Mike Force as an Airboat Section Leader, Reconnaissance Team Leader, Indigenous Company Commander, and Battalion Commander.

After returning to the US in 1968, Murray joined the 6th SFG as the team sergeant of a HALO Team (High Altitude Low Opening, military free-fall parachutists) and went on several missions to the Middle East, the Far East and in Europe. It was in 1970 that Murray along with about 100 other men volunteered for a dangerous mission that they didn’t know the destination or the actual mission.

Murray was one of the 56 Special Forces soldiers that were selected, and who flew from Thailand thru one of the most heavily defended air corridors in the world at that time outside of Hanoi, North Vietnam. There they assaulted the POW camp at Son Tay. The Raiders, however, found a dry hole. An intelligence failure doomed the mission to failure.

The prisoners were moved to another camp a few miles away due to a flood in their prison compound. Murray was wounded in the action and was awarded the Silver Star. All of the Americans were able to assault the compound, neutralize about 200 Vietnamese and Chinese troops, and successfully exfil without losing a man.

In an interview with Fayetteville Observer-Times in 1990, Murray said, “We scared the hell out of the Vietnamese and taught them we could get into the highest air-defended piece of real estate the world’s ever known and get out.”

“I still remember the feelings I had as the aircraft started the final approach,” he said. “I glanced out the window and the lights of Hanoi looked like any major city at night. My stomach felt like I’d swallowed a basketball.”

“That’s what we trained for,” he added. “You have one time in your career you get a chance to do something that’s really important.”

His part of the raid was to secure the outside of the prison compound so that the assault element could safely exfil the prison compound. Two North Vietnamese soldiers had slipped behind his position and fired on him, wounding him in the back of his leg, where the blood was rushing down into his boot. He took out both soldiers and kept at it until the mission was complete.

He later served with the 1st Special Forces Group (1st SFG) and deployed to nine different countries including Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Korea. He returned to Ft. Bragg in 1974 and worked at the 18th Airborne Corps. Murray rejoined Special Forces in 1978 and served in the 7th Special Forces Group as the Company Sergeant Major in A/1/7. He trained El Salvadoran troops and took his company in 1983 to Trujillo, Honduras to set up the CREM (Regional Military Training Center).

After serving in Pennsylvania with the 28th Infantry Division, Murray returned to Ft. Bragg in 1988 where he was the School Sergeant Major at JFKSWC. Murray would assign all incoming SF cadre men to one of the myriad of schoolhouse assignments where our paths crossed again. He had spoken to my O&I (Operations and Intelligence Course) class.

I’d been told by many of my friends in SF that the new course (SFOT which later became SFAS) was where everyone coming in was being assigned. They told me “he’ll show you the big board, and talk about all the needs, but you’ll end up at Selection.” And they were so right. SGM Murray showed me the big board and was lamenting the lack of NCOs to go to the O&I Committee. I told him I was O&I qualified. His eyebrows went up and he smiled, “You are?, that is good to know for down the road, but for now we really need you out at Selection,” he said with a wink.

We saw him occasionally because the Selection course was new and everyone wanted to check it out, but unfortunately, I didn’t know him as well as some of the other older guys did, and that was lamentable as he’s one of the pioneers of what became the Joint Special Operations Command.

In his interview with the Fayetteville paper at the reunion of the Son Tay Raiders in 2016, he summed up what it’s like to be in Special Forces. “When you join Special Forces, you join a family,” he said. “There’s not an organization like it. You got a family of your own, but you adopt the soldiers under you.”

RIP Sergeant Major.

Operation Ivory Coast, November 21, 1970, The Raid on Son Tay Prison

By November of 1970, there were 450 known American POWs in Vietnam and more than double that amount who were missing. Reports were surfacing of brutal conditions, torture, and starvation of American POWs.

Operation Ivory Coast was the mission by US Army Green Berets flown in by Air Force Commandos to rescue the POWs at a small prisoner of war camp at Son Tay, 23 miles west of Hanoi. The raid was conducted by Colonel Arthur “Bull” Simons and 56 specially selected Green Berets who trained for the mission. The mission failed despite it being a tactical success. Unknown to the raiders, rains had flooded the prison just prior to the raid, forcing the Vietnamese guards to move them to another location. The prisoners who were moved just a few miles down the road, watched the raid unfold.

However the raid was viewed as a success, they killed over 50 guards and took the compound while suffering two very minor casualties. And the Air Force was able to fly them in and out of one of the most heavily guarded air spaces on earth at that time.

Identification of the Camp: In May of 1970, the Pentagon learned of the camp when an SR-71 at 80,000 feet, streaked over the camp and took aerial photographs that showed at least 55 American POWs. The catch? There were 12,000 North Vietnamese troops stationed just 5.0 miles away from the compound.

Planning began in earnest in early August. Simons was named the commander of the raid force and he selected the raiders from over 500 volunteers from the 6th and 7th Special Forces Groups at Ft. Bragg, NC.

The training facility chosen for the raiders was Duke Field at Eglin AFB, Florida.USAF planners selected key Air Force commanders, who then picked personnel for their crews. Helicopter and A-1 Skyraider crews were put together from instructors at Eglin and personnel returned from combat tours in Southeast Asia. Two crews for C-130E(I) Combat Talons were assembled from squadrons in Germany and North Carolina.

The men were not briefed on their mission and were only told that it was hazardous.

A total of 219 men were selected, 103 Army and 116 Air Force personnel would serve as raiders, flight crew, support personnel, and planning. The Task Force was known as the “Joint Contingency Task Group” (JCTG).

The staff set up a plan for a nighttime raid, the key points of which were: clear weather and a quarter moon at 35 degrees above the horizon for optimum visibility during low-level flight. From these mission planning parameters, two mission “windows” were identified, 18–25 October and 18–25 November.

Training under Simons, who was already a legend in Special Forces proceeded on Range C-2 at Eglin. Simons had taken part in a prisoner rescue during World War II with the 6th Ranger Bn. The Rangers rescued 500 POWs who had survived the Bataan Death March by raiding the Japanese POW camp at Cabanatuan in the Philippines. The Raiders used an exact but crudely made replica of the prison compound for rehearsals and a superbly detailed five-foot-by-five-foot scale table model (codenamed “Barbara”) that was built by the CIA for familiarization.

The Air Force pilots flew over 1050 hours in C-130 Combat Talon, and HH-3 aircraft to practice their formations and using the Forward Looking Infrared Radar (FLIR), to fully acquaint themselves with the mission.

The Special Forces side of the training began on 9 September, advancing to night training on 17 September and joint training with aircrews on 28 September that included six rehearsals a day, three of them under night conditions. By 6 October, 170 practice sessions of all or partial phases of the mission were performed on the mockup by the Special Forces operators, using live fire.

The Ground Force Commander was LTC Bud Syndor and the assault element leader that would purposely crash land in the prison compound would be led by another SF legend CPT Richard “Dick” Meadows.

On the 6th, the first full-scale dress rehearsal, using a UH-1H as the assault helicopter, was conducted at night and included a 5.5-hour, 687 miles (1,106 km) flight of all aircraft, replicating the timing, speeds, altitudes, and turns in the mission plan. The rehearsal indicated that the UH-1 helicopter was unsuitable for this mission. The smaller passenger compartment resulted in leg cramps to the SF raiders that completely disrupted the timing of their assault. Simons and his raiders opted for the HH-3E. Two further full night rehearsals and a total of 31 practice landings by the HH-3E in the courtyard of the mockup followed.

The primary October window was chosen, but a White House briefing, President Nixon was out of the city and couldn’t be briefed properly in time, so Henry Kissinger moved back the raid to the November time window. That month delay unknown to anyone at the time would doom the mission to failure.

Between 10 and 18 November, all of the pieces of the raiding force arrived in Thailand, which was the jumping off point for the raid. The piecemeal deployment was to not attract attention. There the force was whittled down from the 100 men who trained for the mission to the 56 that would be going. It was heartbreak for the 44 men who had to stay behind in Thailand.

The Raiding Force: The Special Forces were organized into three platoons: a 14-man assault group codenamed Blueboy Element led by Meadows, which would crash-land within the prison compound. A 22-man support group, Greenleaf, which would provide immediate support for the assault team, and a 20-man security group, Redwine, to protect the prison area from any NVA reaction forces and provide backup support if needed for either of the other two groups. Simons (using the call sign Axle) accompanied the Greenleaf group, while the ground force commander, LTC Elliott P. “Bud” Sydnor, Jr. (Wildroot), was with the Redwine group.

The 56 raiders were heavily armed, carrying 48 CAR-15 carbines, two M16 rifles, four M79 grenade launchers, two shotguns, and four M60 machine guns. They carried 15 Claymore mines, 11 demolition charges, and 213 hand grenades and were equipped with a mix of wire cutters, bolt cutters, axes, chainsaws, crowbars, ropes, bullhorns, lights, and other equipment to execute the mission.The ground force was also equipped for voice communications with 58 UHF-AM and 34 VHF-FM radios, including a survival radio for each individual soldier.

Five hours before takeoff, Simons addressed the men: “We are going to rescue 70 POWs from a camp called Son Tay. This is something American prisoners have a right to expect from their fellow soldiers. The camp is located 23 miles west of Hanoi.”

It was said that the troops stood and cheered. Simons put his own indelible mark on the operation with his final instructions.

“You are to let nothing, nothing interfere with the operation. We’re here to rescue prisoners not take prisoners. And if we walk into a trap,… don’t dream about walking out of Vietnam unless you’ve got wings on your feet. It is 100 miles to Laos….I want to keep this force together. We will back up to the Song Con River and by Christ let them come across the goddamn open ground. We’ll make them pay for every foot across the sonuvabitch.”

Airlift Into North Vietnam Undetected: The raid force began taking off at 2200 hours from airfields in Thailand and South Vietnam. The formation flew across the Plain of Jars in Laos before turning northeast. There were twelve separate legs of the flight plan. They flew on undetected by North Vietnamese radar, possibly because of diversionary bombing missions going on in the area.

The assault force arrived at Son Tay at 0219 hours. The helicopter that was to crash land purposely in the compound was to encounter trees thought to be 40-feet tall. The were in actuality close to 150 feet tall. However, the pilot chopped thru it like a huge lawn mower and the aircraft thudded into the ground. One man, an Air Force crew chief suffered a broken ankle when a fire extinguisher broke free and smashed into his leg.

Meadows used a bullhorn and announced, “We’re American. Keep your heads down. We’re Americans. We’ll be in your cells in a minute.” Meadows group cut down any of the guards in the compound, including several trying to escape through the east wall. But as his men methodically advanced thru the compound, they found no prisoners in the cells.

The Support Element landed in the wrong compound, which was known as the Secondary School and found it contained 100-200 Chinese soldiers who were there as advisors for new missile defense weapons being emplaced . After a brief but intense firefight. The Special Forces troops using a mixture of automatic fire and grenades eliminated the Chinese.

The Security Element (Redwine) approached the south wall and using the helicopter’s miniguns, wiped out the guard towers and landed inside the compound. There they blew a utility pole and set up a roadblock, 100 meters from the LZ. They then encountered guards who were quickly trying to react to the raid. The Raiders cut down several as a firefight raged.

Simons leaped into a trench as the fighting raged on around him. A second later an enemy soldier, roused from his sleep and wearing only his underwear, jumped in beside Simons not realizing who was in there. Simons emptied his .357 revolver into the soldier’s chest killing him.

Meadows radioed to Syndor, “Negative items.” No POWs were present. The entire raid took just 17 minutes. The assault force was preparing to leave when one of the members decided to leave the Vietnamese a message on who was responsible for the raid. MSG Joe Lupyak took a Green Beret with a 5th SFG flash and nailed it to the flagpole in the compound.

The extraction helicopters began arriving at 0239 hrs, the last aircraft departed at 0245 and the entire raid took just 27 minutes. The formation cleared North Vietnamese airspace by 0315 and arrived back in Thailand by 0438 hrs.

Intelligence Failure: The lack of good intelligence hampered the operation from the start. It was later learned that due to flooding of the river, the prisoners were moved. And the heavy rains in the area obscured the view that the satellites would have of the area. The prisoners were moved to a place they named “Camp Faith about 15 miles closer to Hanoi.

The impact of the raid was a tremendous boost in morale of the prisoners. They knew right away that they had not been forgotten. The North Vietnamese realized that had the operation had been successful, the sight of the prisoners in their current state of health would have been disastrous.

As a result, food and medical care improved for the prisoners and the Vietnamese consolidated the POWs and for the first time many of them were surprised to learn that instead of solitary confinement, they were housed together.

List of the Son Tay Raid Personnel:

US Army Personnel

Support Element

COL Arthur D Simons
CPT Eric J Nelson
CPT Glenn R Rouse
CPT Udo H Walther
SFC Earl Bleacher
SFC Leroy N Carlson
SFC John Jakovenko
SFC Jack G Joplin
SFC Daniel Jurich
SFC David A Lawhon Jr
SFC Salvador M Suarez
SFC Donald Taapken
SFC Richard W Valentine
SSG Walter L Miller
SSG Robert L Nelson
SSG David S Nickerson
SSG Thomas E Powell
SSG John E Rodriquez
SGT Gary D Keel
SGT Keith R Medenski
SGT Franklin D Roe
SGT Marshall A Thomas

Assault Element

CPT Richard J Meadows
CPT Thomas W Jaeger
CPT Dan H McKinney
1LT George W Petrie
MSG Thomas J Kemmer
MSG Billy K Moore
MSG Galen C Kittleson
SFC Anthony Dodge
SFC Lorenzo O Robbins
SFC William L Tapley
SFC Donald R Wingrove
SSG Charles G Erickson
SSG Kenneth E McMullin
SGT Patrick St Clair

Command Element – Security

LTC Elliot P Sydnor
LTC Joseph R Cataldo
CPT James W McClam
CPT Daniel D Turner
MSG Joseph J Lupyak
MSG Herman Spencer
SFC Tyrone J Adderly
SFC Donald D Blackard
SFC Freddie Doss
SFC Jerry W Hill
SFC Marion S Howell
SFC Billy R Martin
SFC Gregory T McGuire
SFC Charles A Masten Jr
SFC Joseph M Murray
SFC Noe Quezada
SFC Ronnie Strahan
SSG Paul S Poole
SSG Lawrence Young
SGT Terry L Buckler

Support Personnel

LTC Bill L Robinson
LTC Gerald Kilburn
CPT Randel L Smith
SGM Minor B Pylant
MSG Jesse A Black
MSG Edgar C Britt
MSG Bernard L Rauscher
SFC Franklin Abramski
SFC James A Bass
SFC Archie Batrez Jr
SFC Robert L Dodd
SFC Charles M Erwin
SFC James A Green
SFC Bobby R Hansley
SFC Roswell D Henderson
SFC Frederick L Hubel
SFC Bruce M Hughes
SFC John R Jourdan
SFC Ernest R Pounder
SFC Aaron L Tolson Jr
SFC Burley W Turner
SFC Grady C Vines
SSG Elmer D Adams
SSG Rodger D Gross
SSG Larry G Stroklund
SSG David L Wilson
SGT Brian J Budy
SGT Michael G Green
SGT Robert R Hobdy
SGT John J Lippert
SGT Arlin L Olson
SP5 William F Dezurik
SP5 Lawrence C Elliot
SP5 Gary R Griffin
SP4 Christopher Casey
SP4 Frank J Closen

UH-1 Crew Members

1LT George W Williams
CW2 Ronald J Exely
CW2 Jackie H Keely
CW2 John J Ward
SP6 Larry C Boots
SP4 Alan H Wood

Photos: US Army

Remembering Bull Simons, A True Legend in the Special Forces Community

On May 21, 1979, Special Forces had one its true legends take from it prematurely. Arthur “Bull” Simons died at the age of 60 and was buried in Barrancas National Cemetery in Pensacola, Florida. He was one of the best SF commanders to have ever served but never made it to General Officer rank because he lacked the prerequisite education he and that held him back.

Simons rose to the rank of Colonel and although he was involved in three famous rescue missions that have been very well documented, precious little has been written about Simons who was quintessential “Quiet Professional” in his long military career. So who was “Bull” Simons?

Early Life and Career: Simons was born in New York City in 1918 but at an early age he moved to Missouri and attended the University of Missouri – Columbia and graduated with a degree in Journalism which is interesting because later in life, he’d develop a healthy disdain for journalists who he felt had done a great disservice to the American fighting men.

He joined ROTC and graduated in 1941. He also met his wife Lucille in college and they remained married for 37 years until her death from cancer in 1978. His first assignment was with the 98^th Field Artillery Battalion as a 2LT. The 98^th was a unit that was towed by pack mules and Simons was an unhappy camper there. When his unit was dissolved, it became a part of the 6^th Ranger Bn, commanded by LTC Henry Mucci.

Simons became the Commander of B Company and later the Bn XO. One of his first mission in the Rangers was to blow up a Japanese radio station. The story of the mission was told by H. Ross Perot to John Gresham for a piece in “The Year in Special Operations 2010 – 2011.

“They sent him along with a team of Rangers over to an island to destroy a Japanese radio tower,” Perot said. “They went over by submarine at night, surfaced, and went ashore in rubber rafts. They then stored the rafts in a triple-canopy jungle, and then in classic Simons style, he did a lot of reconnaissance on the radio station himself, and kept his men in the jungle. He had a total of 16 people up at the base camp, with one man on duty all the time. He never told his men they had to eat whatever they could find in the jungle, and they were there for over 30 days, while he waited for the right conditions to make the attack.
“Finally, they had a monsoon-like rain one night. Simons knew from his observations that the guard never looked down the cliff. So he climbed the cliff with explosives on his back and a knife during the storm, caught the guard totally by surprise, took him out with the knife, and took the guard’s rifle, went into the Japanese barracks and shot the other 15 Japanese soldiers in their sleep.
“He told me this story in front of a nice lady who responded, ‘… He shot them in their sleep?’ He told the woman, ‘Lady, when you’re in combat, you don’t wake your enemy up and say, “Let’s fight!”’ Once all the Japanese in the barracks were dead, he went back outside, personally blew up the radio tower, and needed to send one more signal to his troops that the job was done, so he lighted his cigar! He was a big cigar man! Bull then walked down the face of the mountain, where his men met him in the jungle, they having walked completely around the mountain. They then called the submarine back in, and took the rubber rafts back to the submarine to go home.”

Later, after the invasion of the Philippines, on the island of Luzon, he was involved in the raid on the Prisoner of War camp at Cabanatuan. The 6^th Ranger Bn freed nearly 500 POWs and 33 civilians that had been held by the Japanese since the fall of Bataan. The Rangers, Alamo Scouts, and Philippine guerrillas killed 523 Japanese soldiers with the loss of just 2 Rangers and one POW who died of a heart attack during the raid. He was awarded the Silver Star for heroism for that operation.

Simons was separated from the Army after World War II and had a five-year break in service. But he was recalled to the Army during the Korean War. He was assigned to train Rangers at Eglin AFB in jungle and amphibious warfare. After a brief stint as a PAO (Public Affairs Officer) at Ft. Bragg, NC he joined Special Forces in 1957.

He was assigned to the 77^th Special Forces Group, later renamed the 7^th. In 1961, Simons was promoted to lieutenant colonel and with the conflict in Southeast Asia on the horizon went to Laos to command a 107-man Mobile Training Team as part of Operation White Star.

Returning from Laos, Simons was named as the Commander of the new 8^th Special Forces Group in Panama. He commanded the unit there from 1962 to 1964. Then it was back to Southeast Asia. In Vietnam, Simons was assigned to the Military Assistance Command’s Studies and Observation Group (MACV-SOG), the joint unit that was responsible for many of the cross-border intelligence gathering and special operations missions of the Vietnam war.

In 1970 Simons was tasked to lead Operation Ivory Coast, the rescue of American POWs at Son Tay Prison just a few miles outside of Hanoi. The hand-picked unit of Army Special Forces and Air Force pilots trained in Eglin, AFB before launching the mission in November.

Blue Boy Element, Son Tay Raid. Dick Meadows in the front. (US Army)

Because of an intelligence snafu, flooding from the swollen river had caused the Vietnamese to move the prisoners a few miles down the road. The raid, however, went extremely well, the SF operators eliminated the guards in the camp and only suffered one minor injury. Although no prisoners were freed, it sent shockwaves thru the Vietnamese high command as American Special Forces were able to penetrate their defenses so close to Hanoi and raid a POW compound and escape without any loss to themselves.

As a result, the prisoners were brought together in larger groups instead of the solitary confinement they’d been subjected to. Their treatment improved markedly and as they watched the raid unfold, they knew that they’d not been forgotten. Their morale increased.

Simons was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by President Nixon at the White House after returning to the states. An interesting footnote to the Son Tay raid was the Assault Force element (Blue Boy) commander CPT Richard Meadows would be heavily involved in the formation of the Army’s Delta Force and would later be involved in the Iran Hostage Rescue attempt in 1980.

Simons retired from the Army in 1971 and bought a pig farm in Red Bay, Florida and was enjoying retirement until his wife’s passing from cancer in 1978. But his career of prisoner rescues was not over. Following the Iranian Revolution, members of H. Ross Perot’s Electronic Data Systems company (EDS), who were working in Iran were arrested by the revolutionaries.

Perot contacted Simons, having remembered him from the Son Tay raid. Paying for the entire operation out of his own pocket, Perot recruited Simons to send a team into Iran, free his employees and bring all of the people back to the United States. The mission was successful and Perot’s employees, as well as all of Simons’ men, returned safely.

But he wasn’t able to enjoy retirement for long. Shortly after returning from Iran, Simons suffered a heart attack and subsequent surgery couldn’t save him and he died on May 21, 1979. He’s buried in Barrancas National Cemetery in Pensacola, Florida not far from Pensacola Naval Air Station. His close friend, Meadows who died in 1995, is buried close by.

The Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) commissioned a statue of Simons, next to the Special Forces Museum at Fort Bragg (called “Simons Hall”), and it is a continuing tribute to his memory and legacy in the special warfare community. USSOCOM bestows a yearly award bearing his name to the top special warfare professional.

Photo courtesy of US Army