At Koh Tang Island, the action continued. The Marines were pinned down by the intense fire from the Khmer Rouge automatic-weapons fire, and only two-thirds of the first wave of Marines had gotten ashore. With one Sea Stallion CH-53 helicopter shot down, and a second CH-53 badly damaged by the heavy fire from machine guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, the second wave of CH-53 helicopter transports was driven off and had to return to Utapao to refuel and regroup. At 0730, only 109 of the planned 180 Marines were on the island, and they were scattered among three different locations. At 1130, 100 more Marines were landed. The plan called for 250 troops, but only four helicopter transports were available.
Before the additional marines could be lifted into the landing zones on Koh Tang, word was received that the Mayaguez had been recovered and that the civilian crew had been rescued. After consulting with the commander in chief of the Pacific Command via the Joint Staff, an exchange that took only minutes with the dedicated command communications, I recommended to the president that the Marines be pulled off the island as soon as tactically feasible. President Ford agreed, and the reverse airlift was completed by 2030 that evening.
The most important fallout from the Mayaguez incident was that, for the rest of the Ford administration, I was always acting chairman when George Brown was out of town. President Ford did not like the idea of rotating the position of acting chairman and having to deal with whoever happened to be around when the chairman was not available. So I needed to adapt my personal schedule so that I would always be in town and available for acting JCS duties whenever Brown was away. This amounted to about 20 percent of my time during the rest of the administration.
Perhaps the longer-term significance of this episode was that it was a forerunner to the provisions in the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, which required the establishment of the position of vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in order to provide the desired operational continuity that had been missing with the acting chairman system.
OPERATION PAUL BUNYAN
On 18 August 1976, Washington, D.C., was preoccupied with political matters. President Gerald Ford, together with Henry Kissinger, secretary of state and national security advisor, was departing for Kansas City to attend the National Republican Convention. Ford was expected to be nominated as the Republican Party’s candidate in the upcoming presidential elections. The secretary of defense, Don Rumsfeld, was in Michigan recovering from a thyroid operation. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. George Brown, was in Europe attending one of the frequent and mandatory meetings of NATO. As chief of naval operations, I was acting chairman in the absence of George Brown.
Late that afternoon, the routine of the Pentagon, and subsequently all of official Washington, was shattered by a flash precedence message from Gen. Dick Stillwell, the commander, U.S. Forces in Korea and the commander in chief, United Nations Command, Korea. Stillwell reported that two U.S. Army officers had been brutally murdered by North Korean soldiers in the Demilitarized Zone in plain view of hundreds of troops on both sides. The intentions of the North Koreans in aggressively attacking a combined U.S. Army and South Korean (ROK) patrol without provocation were unknown. Stillwell had put all of his forces in South Korea on full alert. He was reporting this incident to Washington with the warning of a potential crisis that could widen to the dimensions of a full-scale attack on all UN forces in South Korea. At this point, Stillwell’s intelligence people had not been able to judge the purpose of the attack or forecast the intentions of the North Koreans.
The full story of the incident came through quickly. The UN forces responsible for the surveillance of the DMZ had been concerned with the heavy growth of foliage that was obscuring their full view of the zone from the observation points on its southern boundary. The truce agreement that governed the DMZ clearly specified that both sides were to have unobstructed observation of all areas within the zone and consequently the right to remove any obstructions to this surveillance. In this particular case, a large poplar tree had grown to the extent that its branches were blocking the view of a sizable segment of the DMZ from two UN observation posts. As a matter of routine, the U.S. commander in Korea had deployed a force of engineers to chop down the offending tree to allow unobstructed observation. The North Korean representatives at Panmunjom had been properly advised as required that the U.S. would be sending out a patrol for this purpose that day and that the patrol would be unarmed. The soldiers would be provided only with axes and chain saws to do the necessary work. When the party of nine South Koreans, two U.S. officers, and four U.S. MPs walked out to cut down the tree, the DMZ was calm. A North Korean lieutenant and seven men entered the DMZ from their side and walked up to the two U.S. officers, who were lieutenants in the Army Corps of Engineers, and suddenly, without any explanation, demanded that work be halted. When the Americans said no, a North Korean guard trotted across the northern boundary into the North Korean side of the DMZ and returned with a truckload of troops. A North Korean officer suddenly shouted, “Kill them,” and his soldiers jumped on the two U.S. officers and beat them to death. The remaining U.S. and South Korean members of the working party were shocked by the sudden attack and overwhelmed by the numbers of North Koreans. After a brief attempt to defend themselves they ran to the southern boundary and escaped through a gate in the fence. The U.S. Army routinely covered operations in the DMZ with combat photography and was able to get a complete film of the officers’ skulls being crushed by the North Koreans with the very axes that they had carried.
When the details of the incident reached Washington, President Ford and Secretary Kissinger had already left town, and the only communications available to the president were nonsecure phone lines. A full discussion of the available intelligence and the U.S. options was not possible until a secure telephone could be gotten to the president. This was not an easy task, as the president was fulfilling a complex schedule of meetings and open sessions in Kansas City. Based upon what we could tell him in an unclassified phone conversation, President Ford directed Deputy Secretary of Defense William Clements to call a meeting of the Washington Special Action Group (WSAG) and to keep the president and Secretary Kissinger informed.
The WSAG was convened by the director of the CIA, then George H. W. Bush, and its principals consisted of Secretary Bill Clements for the DoD; myself as acting chairman of the JCS; Gen. Brent Scowcroft, Kissinger’s deputy for the National Security Council; and Ambassador Philip Habib for the State Department.
Before heading for the WSAG, I had called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the JCS Secure Conference Room and briefed them of the situation. I also directed that the level of military readiness for war, the DefCon, be increased from the peacetime level of 5 to 3 in the Pacific Command and DefCon 4 worldwide. (On the DefCon scale, 1 is war and 5 is the normal peace time posture of the military.) I also asked that the JCS, through the Joint Staff, earmark all available forces that could be moved to Korea for a show of strength and be committed to the conflict if shooting started. No action was to be taken other than identifying and alerting units, until the National Command Authority (NCA) issued the execute orders.
The WSAG deliberated until late in the afternoon on the eighteenth without any decision being reached as to the probable intentions of the North Koreans. In the absence of a secure means of communication, the WSAG dispatched a White House aide to brief the president on the current situation and planned another meeting in the morning of the nineteenth.