Harold and I were on a communications installation mission to Pakse in the southern part of Laos. Things were not going well. We would go sit outside the Air America Air Operations shack enclosed in corrugated metal watching the top of the mountain normally obscured by clouds and heavy fog. Our mission was to alert the Air America helicopter pilot standing by to fly us up to the mountain to replace a malfunctioning radio relay set. This was our second day there. Two or three times the clouds sufficiently cleared, and we started for the mountaintop only to turn back when clouds again obscured our destination atop the mountain.
We broke project protocol that second night and found a bar where we had a few beers and met an interesting operative we came to know as Paladin.1 We spent a couple of hours there drinking and talking with Paladin. I have no recollection of what we talked about. That was normal protocol throughout Project 404. Very seldom and only accidentally was mission information ever discussed in casual conversation.
We never learned Paladin’s type of work, but we surmised he was involved in some type of clandestine operation. Likewise, Paladin never knew Harold's and my type of work. Paladin (the only name I knew him by) smoked cigarillos, was about 6' 2", slim, always wore black clothes with a black hat like Paladin from the western weekly "Have Gun - Will Travel". Paladin had once told me he wore the Paladin hat to protect his bald head which he kept shaved.
After having served an Army tour in the communications field, he went back to college under the G.I. Bill. The “Agency” (as he called it) recruited him right after graduating from Ball State University in Indiana. Harold and I shared many beers with Paladin during our support missions to Pakse, but we never really discussed what he or we did. We never asked. I would not have told.
I last saw Paladin in Pakse amongst a column of Thai or Laotian soldiers headed towards the wooded area. Harold and I were sitting outside the Air America tower in Pakse waiting for the mountaintop to clear of the clouds. This was our third day sitting at the airstrip waiting for an opening in the cloud cover.
Even from a distance, I picked out Paladin in the column headed to the boondocks. He was wearing black and much taller than his Thai and Laotian soldiers. When I inquired about him on a return support trip, I learned he had never returned from that mission. I asked if he had been recovered. Those who would know would not say. Perhaps Paladin rotted away and decomposed in some unknown coordinates while on a super classified mission.
Some forty plus years later, I still felt a need to go back there and inquire if anyone there knew about Paladin or ever heard of his return. In September 2007, while on my first Get-Well Tour to Laos and Vietnam, I landed in Bangkok on 3 Oct 2007. I made my way to the Laotian border but was unable to coordinate a driver and translator to accompany me to Pakse in the search for Paladin’s final chapter. My biggest hindrance was not having my passport in hand. I had left my passport with a travel agency in Bangkok to process my visitor visa to Vietnam. Using a Thai-notarized copy of my passport, I could legally travel only some fifteen kilometers (about nine miles) into Laos.
On the north wall of the lobby in the original CIA headquarters building, there are 129 stars carved into the white Alabama marble wall, each one representing an employee who died in the line of service. I'm thinking my friend Paladin to be one of those stars. Thirty-eight of those stars are unnamed. The CIA protects their identity even after death. In a twist of fate, Lee Harvey Oswald's star was quietly added in June 2014.2
The search for Paladin now occupies a smaller measure of my mind. Perhaps time has eroded the need to search for him or perhaps my sincere but failed attempt satisfied that need. There is no longer a burning desire to return.
2 https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/cia-rdp80r01731r001300030015-3
http://www.duffelblog.com/2013/11/lee-harvey-oswald-quietly-added-cia-memorial-wall/#ixzz35OTp6UMW
. . . On Dying Covertly.
For CIA operatives killed or wounded in action, the information about it would probably almost never come out to the U.S. public, if not for years." - Joshua Kurlantzick, author of "A Great Place To Have A War."
©Copyright texan@atudemi.com - January 2022