Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Laos and found

Air Force Lt. Stephen Long was flying reconnaissance over Laos in February 1969, when he and Staff Sgt. Douglas Morrell were shot out of the sky by North Vietnamese Army ground troops.

A 37 mm antiaircraft artillery shell hit the rear of their two-engine O2A Cessna Super Skymaster, forcing pilot Long, today a Las Vegas resident, and photographer Morrell to jump into hostile territory near the Mugia Pass.

Morrell, who during World War II had escaped from a German prisoner of war camp, managed to avoid North Vietnamese patrols. Long was not so fortunate.

Breaking his leg in the parachute jump, he was quickly captured and spent the next 1,490 days in a living hell at several Laotian detainment camps and at the infamous Hanoi Hilton POW compound in North Vietnam.

Long, 54, and eight others, who were collectively known as The Laos Nine, never appeared on any prisoner of war lists and were still held captive after many POWs went home in the early 1970s.

Because the United States was not officially in conflict with Laos, the U.S. government long denied involvement in that country. American captives in Laos had little hope they would ever see their homeland again, and hundreds never did make it back.

But on Saturday, The Laos Nine -- seven military officers, a civilian pilot and a missionary -- also known as the LULUs (Lost Union of Laotian Unfortunates), will celebrate the 25th anniversary of their repatriation to the United States.

'It looked like the moon'

"I had been told in survival school not to worry because if we were shot down over Laos there would be plenty of cover in the jungle," Long said. "But our planes had bombed the area so heavily that there was not a tree in sight. It looked like the moon -- just a lot of craters."

The North Vietnamese, it seemed, wanted to know more about Long's plane than about him. They kicked and beat him when he responded in French -- the language one of his captors spoke -- with just his name, rank and serial number.

"To this day I can't figure why they let me live when I didn't tell them what they wanted to know," Long said. "They could easily have shot me, thrown my body into one of the craters and been done with it."

George Veith, whose recently released book "Code Name Bright Light" ($25, The Free Press) tells of the rescues of U.S. air crews from Laos, says it indeed was rare that any downed American pilot captured in that country lived to tell about it.

"Of the nearly 600 Americans shot down in Laos, only about 2.5 percent came home alive -- what happened to the rest of them is the great mystery of the war," said Veith, a resident of Philadelphia.

"I believe one of the reasons the LULUs survived was because they were captured by well-disciplined North Vietnamese troops (who knew the bargaining value of an American prisoner)."

Larry Greer, spokesman for the Department of Defense POW/Missing Personnel Office in Arlington, Va., said that as of late last month, 2,096 American military men were still listed as missing and unaccounted for in Vietnam -- 449 of them in Laos.

Since 1973, he said, 487 MIAs have been accounted for -- none of them alive. Of those remains, 117 were recovered from Laos.

"Of the 3 million Americans who served in Southeast Asia, 58,000 of them were killed -- the first in 1959, the last in 1975," said Greer, who served 27 years in the Air Force.

Department of Defense records show that Long officially became an MIA at 8:10 a.m. on Feb. 28, 1969. Library of Congress records say that his aircraft was downed in the Khammouan Province.

Covert operations

Long, who was born in Nebraska but grew up in Oregon, had joined the Air Force in March 1967 after graduating from Willamette University in Salem, Ore. He was trained to fly the O2A, a plane with front and rear engines, in Thailand.

After completing more than 60 missions in Vietnam, Long was assigned to Laos as a forward air controller.

His job was to mark ground targets with smoke rockets for bombers -- usually along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the North Vietnamese's key supply route -- and assist in the rescue of downed pilots.

"These were of course covert operations," Long said. "We had an excuse to be in Vietnam, but we technically had no reason to be in Laos, and neither did the North Vietnamese. Air crew members were forewarned that, in the event of being captured, U.S. participation in Laos would be denied."

Long spent the first several months of confinement at several points in Laos. After the American raid on what turned out to be the abandoned prison camp at Son Tay, on Nov. 21, 1970, Long and other captives were consolidated to Hanoi at what the enemy called the Hoa Lo prison.

Hanoi Hilton

To more easily communicate about the facility's locations, the Americans had their own English names for the prison compound they called the Hanoi Hilton.

Ironically, Long was held in the Camp Vegas section of the prison. He was confined in a building called the Golden Nugget.

It was there that Long came up with the term LULUs -- a name that could be easily remembered by other prisoners who got released, so that they could tell U.S. officials of the existence of Americans who had been captured in Laos.

Long and other Americans captured in Laos were kept separate from those taken prisoner in South Vietnam.

"I spent 18 months in solitary confinement," Long said. "I was beaten and hung on a wall. I was fed two bowls of soup a day and rice on Sundays."

The Laos Nine included Maj. Walt Stischer, an Air Force pilot, who was captured on April 13, 1968, and USAF Capt. Edward Leonard, who was captured on May 31 that same year, the Department of Defense says.

Navy Lt. Henry "Jim" Bedinger was shot down on Nov. 22, 1969.

"In one of our first conversations, Jim asked me if I knew that American astronauts had landed on the moon (on July 20, 1969)," Long said. "That was the first I had heard of it.

"We got no news other than what the North Vietnamese wanted to tell us. Naturally, they told us all about the student protests back home and how that was a sign that our country did not care about us."

Air Force Maj. Nobert Gotner, Lt. Jack Butcher and Capt. Charles Reese were shot down in Laos in 1971 and '72.

"Butcher's story is quite incredible," said Veith, who in his book tells how Butcher escaped while being transported to Hanoi.

"For 10 days, the most massive manhunt of the war took place along the Ho Chi Minh until he was recaptured," Veith said.

Perhaps the most noted of the LULUs was Ernest "Ernie" Brace, a Korean War Marine pilot who flew as a civilian in Laos. He was shot down May 21, 1965, while delivering supplies at Boum Lao.

It is believed that Brace was the longest held civilian POW of the Vietnam War. He spent seven years and 10 months in captivity -- 4 1/2 of them in solitary confinement. Much of that time was spent in a cramped bamboo cage.

The final member of The Laos Nine was American missionary Sam Mattix. A 10th prisoner from Laos, Canadian missionary Lloyd Oppel, was held with the LULUs.

'The Snake Pit'

Long and the others were denied care packages from the United States. At home, their families were simply told that they were missing in action. For all anyone knew, they were dead.

The LULUs, however, were able to get the names of Stischer, Leonard, Long and Bedinger to other prisoners, who knew only that those men and others were isolated in what was called "the snake pit" behind Camp Vegas.

In 1972, the American prisoners endured with their captors the saturation bombing of Hanoi. The North Vietnamese even gave them picks and shovels so they could dig foxholes inside the building where they were held.

The intense bombing, if it did nothing else, convinced the North Vietnamese to go to the bargaining table.

At the Paris Peace Accords, prisoner lists were exchanged. But the names of the LULUs did not appear on any of the lists that were submitted to U.S. diplomats.

"We watched from behind high walls the release of other prisoners -- it was the worst feeling being left behind," Long said. "It was like a ghost town. There was no telling how long they would keep us."

Homebound U.S. prisoners, however, told military officials of the existence of men who were captured in Laos and secretly held in Hanoi.

"Our diplomats told the North Vietnamese our names and said they wanted ALL prisoners back or the bombing of Hanoi would be resumed," Long said. "They must have decided to release us because we were not worth that risk."

The Laos Nine returned home to a hero's welcome. They had dinner at the White House as a guest of then-President Richard Nixon.

Post-war kudos

On April 20, at the Nixon Library in California, the LULUs and other Vietnam POWS will be honored with a dinner to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Operation Homecoming, the period between January and April 1973 when nearly 600 American POWs were released.

After the war, Long returned home and was decorated with the Purple Heart, Distinguished Flying Cross, the Bronze Star and, when it was issued in the late 1980s, the POW medal.

He married Katherine Celotto. The Longs have two children, a son Shannon, who is grown and lives in Henderson, and a daughter, Katie, who attends grade school in Las Vegas.

Long retired from the Air Force at the rank of major in 1987 and answered an ad to come to Las Vegas to work on a project involving a new airplane.

"They told me I could have the job but they wouldn't tell me anything other than it was a secret," Long said.

That secret involved Long going to Nellis Air Force Base every Monday, flying to Tonopah, and flying home every Thursday.

In Tonopah, he trained pilots to fly what was then the military's biggest secret weapon, the F-117A Stealth Fighter -- a non-radar detectable jet that was used effectively in the Persian Gulf War.

"I was not even allowed to tell my wife what I was working on," Long said. "My cover story was that I was working on a project at Nellis."

'I love America'

Long says that except for the contempt he has for the enemy soldiers who mistreated him, he has few bitter feelings about the war. He says the U.S. government did all it could to get him home and that the American people treated him real well in the years after the conflict.

However, Long says he understands why some Vietnam era veterans have complaints about how they were treated.

He has no desire to ever again set foot in Vietnam.

"I love America and there are a million places I have yet to see in this country," Long said. "I would visit all of them before I would ever go back to Vietnam.

"I see photos on the Internet of ex-POWs as tourists standing in the places where they were held prisoner. That's just not for me."

Long does, however, keep in touch with several members of The Laos Nine.

Stischer today is retired and living in Texas. Leonard, Gotner and Butcher all live in Washington state, where Leonard is a lawyer. Bedinger is an accountant in San Diego.

After the war, Brace accepted civilian assignments for the U.S. military in Mexico, Africa, China, Russia and Kuwait.

Today, he is retired and living in Oregon. His book "A Code To Keep" ($15 St. Martin's Press) chronicles the plight of the LULUs. His Internet website, "Ernie's Web," is at http://www.cvc.net/cvcmem/ -ernieb/index.html.

Long, who does not know the whereabouts of Reese, Mattix or Oppel, does keep in close touch with Sgt. Morrell.

After he was shot down and rescued, Morrell never flew another mission. Instead, he spent the balance of the war lecturing to American troops at survival school.

"I call him every year on the anniversary of the day we were shot down," Long said.

"I have nothing special planned for the 25th anniversary of my release. I guess I'll just call a few of the guys and say hello."

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