It was one of those deals, Colonel so-and-so is having a birthday...let's all go sing to him...and have a bite of his cake. I knew him well enough; we didn't go bowling together on Thursday nights, but we were on speaking terms. He was an old guy about ready to retire...and there was cake. We all gathered in the office and sang the song and that's when I saw the cake for the first time. I was a little surprised to see Snoopy sitting on his dog house on a grown-up's cake. The lettering said, "Happy Birthday Red Baron". Air Force fliers are pretty full of themselves and often adopt glamorous nicknames so I didn't think too hard about it at first. Then an inkling of a memory nudged me in the back of my mind...a story I had read almost a year before I went to Vietnam...I was probably still in Germany. I am pretty sure it was an Argosy magazine and the story was about a forward air controller who called himself the Baron of Phan Rang.
Forward Air Controllers have a rough job. They fly really slow, for one thing, and they have to stay around where the bad guys are, and they don't have any guns. They coordinate air and artillery strikes on enemy targets...and the enemy knows this and does whatever he can to stop that. It was a job that took real courage and determination. I looked at this old grandpa-looking Colonel and asked myself if I could really see him as the magazine described him...the dashing FAC with a flair for the dramatic. It was hard.
The Baron flew his little Piper-Cub-looking O-1 Birddog lower than anyone else. He wore cut-off flight suits, a long white scarf, and a WWI style leather flying hat . He wrapped hand grenades in C-4 and embedded nails and scrap in the plastic to add a little extra punch and dropped them on top of enemy positions. He collected so many holes in his aircraft that the ground crews didn't see how it could make it back every day...sometimes three times in a day. He was flamboyant and cocky and good. The grunts on the ground loved him because they knew that when the Baron was on the job...the job got done. He became so notorious that the VC put a higher price on his head than they put on Maxwell or Westmoreland. The topper was his calling card. He had fancy cards about the size of a normal playing card; they announced to the VC (Vietnamese on one side) that they had just had their butts handed to them courtesy of the Baron von Phan Rang...then listed a paragraph extolling his talents closing with..."and aviator extraordinaire" On the other side, in English, it announced to our guys that their butts had just been saved by...and so on.
I had to wait until the crowd thinned, got my chance and asked. He smiled a little and said that yeah, he was the Baron von Phan Rang...though not too many people knew about all that anymore. I asked him what had happened to him because we never heard any more of his exploits. He told me that the article in Argosy was his downfall. The cut-off flight suits, the flying cap and scarf, the calling cards and especially the unauthorized weapons were morale builders for everyone but the HQ folks. Being so high on the VC hit list didn't help, either. So one evening he landed and was met with a set of orders and they shipped him out mos tick. I was amazed...I told him I never would have guessed and his answer was, "Good."
I think I have mentioned before that I have known real heroes in my life. The Baron was the real deal. A guy that had spent every day putting his life out there to support another group of guys with their lives out there. He had no point man, no left and right security, no fire support, no rear security...he was up there all alone...slow...low...and practically unarmed. And I got to meet him and shake his hand.