ROBERT D. CURRY

Chapter 1: Six Hours to Save Thirty Thousand

Long Tieng, Laos
May 14, 1975
0600 Hours

The CIA officer threw another armload of files onto the burning pile. The smoke mixed with morning fog, drifting across the airstrip where a silver C-130 sat with engines running. Its cargo hold could fit maybe three hundred people.

Five thousand Hmong pressed against the fence.

"How many more birds incoming?" someone shouted over the prop noise.

"That's it. That's the last one."

The officer—I never learned his real name, we called him Ranger—stood there with a pistol on his hip and decades of promises burning at his feet. Behind him, Hmong soldiers still wore the uniforms we'd given them, still carried the M-16s we'd trained them to use. Their families clutched documents proving their service to the United States of America. Documents that were worthless now.

A woman pushed her baby through the fence wire. The infant's skin tore on the metal, mixing blood with tears. "Take her!" she screamed in English. "She American father! Take her!"

I know this because I was there. Not that day—I'd been gone four years by then. But I'd been there for the beginning, for the building of this betrayal. I'd flown the missions that made these people believe in us. I'd promised them we were brothers.

My name is Bob Curry. In 1969, President Nixon looked America in the eye and swore we had no troops in Laos.

He lied.

I was one of them.

The Hmong called my aircraft Tuag Nco Ntsoov—Whispering Death. We came in low and quiet, painting trucks and troops with electronic eyes, calling in the strikes that turned jungle into graveyard. Every mission, the Hmong guided us, protected us, died for us. Thirty thousand of them, fighting our secret war.

The woman with the baby kept screaming. Ranger looked at his watch. 0615.

"Close it up!" he yelled. "We're wheels up in ten!"

A Hmong colonel I'd known—Chou Vang, one of their best pilots—stood at the gate in his flight suit. He'd flown over a thousand combat missions for us. Behind him, his wife May held their daughter, the one born in a cave while B-52s pounded the mountains above.

"You promise," Chou said quietly. Not asking. Stating. "You promise no leave us behind."

Ranger couldn't look at him. None of them could.

At 0625, the last American plane lifted off from Long Tieng. I've seen the declassified photos. You can watch the Hmong running after it, still believing we'd come back. Some ran until the plane disappeared into the clouds. Then they ran into the jungle, where the communists hunted them like animals.

Fifty years later, they're still being hunted.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. To understand the betrayal, you need to understand the promise. You need to know why thirty thousand people believed America would save them.

It started for me six years earlier, when I was eighteen and stupid enough to think war was simple. When I thought the good guys always kept their word.

Let me tell you about the secret war.

Let me tell you what Nixon didn't want you to know.

Six Years Earlier

Phu Bai, South Vietnam
September 1969

The champagne tasted like aviation fuel mixed with bad decisions. My head felt like someone had parked a Mohawk on it, twin turbines still running. Through the hootch screen, I could see the flight line shimmering in the heat, and Jim standing there wondering why the hell I wasn't ready for my orientation flight.

"Curry, wake up, you're supposed to be on the flight line."

I opened one eye. The world hurt.

"Shit, Curry, you're still drunk. Can you make it?"

That's how it started. Not with heroics or patriotism, but with a hangover and a lie. "No problem," I slurred, already living the first lesson of the secret war:

Sometimes the truth is the last thing anyone wants to hear.