The heart of Task Force Alpha was the “Infiltration Surveillance Center,” the purpose of which was to monitor acoustic sensors,
seismic sensors, urine sniffers, and various other sensors planted along the Ho Chi Minh Trail for the purpose of observing
the enemy. Banks of computers synthesized the sensor data and tried to form a picture of what the enemy was doing. Is that
a convoy of trucks or hundreds of men marching down the trail? Where are they likely to stop for the night? Might a supply
depot be there? Once the computers spit out the information, targeting experts decided what aircraft and what bombs or missiles
to send against the enemy.
The Ho Chi Minh Trail was a network of trails and dirt roads that formed the main route by which North Vietnamese forces operating
in South Vietnam were resupplied by cargo-carrying bicycles and small trucks. Seeding the trail with sensors had been the
idea of Defense Secretary McNamara’s R&D technocrats, and the project became known as the “McNamara Line.” The $2.5 billion
operation was a huge windfall for IBM. The technocrats convinced McNamara that if the trail were wired—as one Task Force Alpha
worker said, like a “pinball machine”—the supply chain could be broken and America could win the war. This was America’s first
electronic battlefield. It was one of the most highly classified operations of the Vietnam War.
John Boyd came to NKP as the vice commander of Task Force Alpha.
Boyd arrived at a time when something happened almost every day to demonstrate the lunacy of the war. Drugs were so pervasive
on base that when he went to the dining room he was given a knife and fork and then a plastic spoon. All the metal spoons
had been stolen to use as small containers in which drugs were heated. One of the enlisted men who worked for Boyd in the
top-secret underground chamber always wore a raincoat to work. Underneath he was naked. His job was to listen to Vietnamese
radio transmissions and the man said he could not break their codes when he was dressed.
Boyd jumped into his first command job with considerable zest. Locating the position of enemy artillery was one function of
Task
Force Alpha. The acoustic sensors could not pinpoint the gun location quickly enough. By the time attack aircraft arrived
on the scene, the gun was silent or had been relocated. Boyd developed a grid system for implanting sensors. Now, sometimes
less than five minutes after the first enemy shell was lobbed, FAC pilots were firing marking rockets and the jets were lining
up to bomb the artillery position.
Boyd was so excited about his new system that he began flying as a passenger on some night missions. He probably flew in the
OV-10, a small, 175-mph, propeller-driven aircraft used by FAC pilots. But Boyd was too valuable to be flying over enemy territory
and his boss soon ordered him to stand down.
In addition to his Task Force Alpha responsibilities, Boyd was also inspector general and equal opportunity training officer—a
job fraught with peril considering the racial turmoil in the military toward the end of the Vietnam War. But he still found
time to use EM to develop a briefing that compared the performance of the F-4 with enemy-fighter aircraft operating in the
theater. He gave the brief at Air Force bases throughout Thailand and Vietnam. Boyd also was ordered to preside over a board
of inquiry into one of several F-111 crashes. He believed the assignment was punishment for his years of criticizing the F-111.
Like every other officer arriving at NKP, Boyd went to the Thai tailor shop on base and ordered up a “party suit.” These were
often blue, but members of Task Force Alpha wore black. The garment was cut like a flight suit, with a zipper up the front.
It had numerous pockets. Party suits were worn at the Officers Club for going-away parties or for other festive events celebrated
at a combat base. No rules governed the ornaments or decorations or regalia or patches sewn onto party suits and as a result
they were some of the most colorful attire ever seen on military personnel. Boyd had his big Fighter Weapons School patch
sewn onto the breast, and unit patches were sewn onto each shoulder. One patch says,
PARTICIPANT IN SOUTHEAST ASIA WAR GAMES
. On the back is the pièce de résistance, a coiled, bright yellow garden hose and written underneath, also in bright yellow,
THE HOSER
.
There were times at NKP when officers found little to celebrate. In the early summer of 1972, race relations at NKP took a
dangerous turn. One of the senior officers on base was devoutly religious, very
conservative, and was becoming unwrapped by the war. He found solace in American booze and Thai women. The guilt he must have
felt, he visited upon his troops. After a fight between black and white enlisted men, the commander ordered the black troops
onto a helicopter, and they were flown under armed guard to an army jail near Bangkok. Pretrial detention rarely is practiced
in the military, and because white participants in the incident were not treated the same way, the base seethed in racial
tension. Feelings ran so high that white pilots were afraid to walk near the barracks where black security police were housed.
Numerous racial fights broke out.
The commander ignored what was going on around him and sought refuge in more booze and more women. That was when Boyd stepped
in. As equal opportunity training (EOT) officer, he took his responsibility seriously. Although several layers of command
existed between Boyd and the commander, Boyd ordered up a helicopter and told the senior lawyer on base to go to Bangkok and
interview the black prisoners. “Find out what happened,” he said in effect. “If those guys were not involved or if they did
not start the fight, get ’em out of jail. If they started it, leave them there.”
Arnold Persky, then a major in the office of the judge advocate general, was the lawyer Boyd ordered to Bangkok. Persky interviewed
the prisoners and ordered one, identified as the provocateur, to remain incarcerated until his trial. The others not only
were released but flew back to NKP aboard Persky’s helicopter. When they returned Boyd sat down with all the black troops
on base and told them it did not matter what had happened before, that now he was the EOT officer and things were different.
The racial situation on base was defused. “The difference was night and day,” said Persky. “Colonel Boyd turned it around.”
Because this was Boyd’s first operational command, he was evaluated by his superiors two months after he arrived. The letter
of evaluation said Boyd “has a seemingly unlimited ability and stamina to effectively cope with stressed operational procedures.”
He “prevented a possible major problem” by “exercising unusually sound judgment” in a racially charged situation. But most
important of all it said, “He is fully qualified for Command.” Air Force generals in Southeast Asia must have agreed, because
the commander who had caused the incident was relieved of duty and shipped back to the
States, while Boyd was pulled out of Task Force Alpha and given command of the 56th Combat Support Group, a job that included,
among other things, being base commander.
On August 10, Boyd wrote Mary that he was working out, eating lightly, and trying to lower his weight to 170 pounds. He said
he had been doing much thinking and felt he was “on the verge of a fantastic breakthrough on the thinking processes and how
they can be taught to others.” He said he had arrived at an “expansion and distillation” of what he had begun thinking about
while still at the Pentagon. “Don’t speak about it to others because as usual they’ll think it’s cracked,” he said.
What Boyd was obsessing about—and that is not too strong a word—was trying to understand the nature of creativity. This had
actually begun several years earlier as he wondered how he came up with the E-M Theory. E-M is at heart such a simple thing;
why had no one else discovered it? What was there about his thinking that enabled him to be the first? His search ranged far
afield. From the base library he checked out every available book on philosophy and physics and math and economics and science
and Taoism and a half dozen other disciplines. He was all over the map, searching but not quite knowing for what. He hints
at what he is working on when, in a letter dated September 28, he again writes Mary that he is on the “verge of a fantastic
breakthrough” in the thinking process and how it applies to life.
On October 15 he writes, “I’ve expanded on the thought processes in directions that frankly amaze even me.” He says if his
theory is workable, “I may be on the trail of a
theory of learning
quite different and—it appears now—more powerful than methods or theories currently in use.” He says he is not sure where
the ideas will ultimately lead and that before he goes much farther he wants to discuss it with Pierre Sprey. Boyd says he
has “a new direction to my life” and that if his theory holds true, “I think it will bring us closer together and provide
an enrichment toward living that has eluded us in the past.”
It was when Boyd left Task Force Alpha to become commander of the 56th Combat Support Group that he received his first ER
in Southeast Asia. The first page is fire walled, with the exception of the box dealing with “skills in human relations,”
which doubtless meant that he sometimes was more frank than his superiors liked. Nevertheless,
the all-important first sentence on the second page reads, “Colonel Boyd is the most dedicated officer with whom I have ever
served.” The reviewing officer says he had personal knowledge that Boyd’s briefing comparing F-4 performance with enemy aircraft
“not only saved one of our aircraft from destruction, but also the user was credited with a victory.” Once again the efficacy
of Boyd’s outside-roll maneuver was proven in combat.
And no matter Boyd’s feelings about the F-111, he obviously did a good job of investigating the crash. The reviewing officer
says Boyd’s report of that incident was “thorough” and “well-received.” The ER dwelled on the racial incident Boyd defused
and said, “Since that time we have not had even a minor incident of a racial nature in this unit.” The indorsing officer,
a major general, says Boyd’s performance was “absolutely superior” and that “Colonel Boyd is a highly intelligent and dedicated
officer who generates enthusiasm and instills confidence in those with whom he works and supervises.”
It was as base commander, a job that made Boyd master of all he surveyed, that his creative flair for solving problems soon
burst into bloom. Boyd was responsible for all civil-engineering projects on base, transportation, security, and just about
everything else, from supervising the dining rooms to making sure religious services were available for all. The previous
commander had ignored many of the housekeeping activities around NKP.
In his new job, Boyd saw problems that needed immediate attention everywhere he looked. But 7th Air Force sent down paperwork
daily that took hours to answer. Boyd thought Air Force bureaucracy was keeping him from the job at hand. His solution was
to respond but to add material that caused 7th Air Force more paperwork than 7th Air Force caused him. “Pain goes both ways,”
he said. In only a few weeks the time-consuming requests from 7th Air Force shrank to almost nothing.
One of the most immediate and most serious problems Boyd had to deal with was that a number of the wild dogs on base had become
rabid. Boyd’s solution was immediate, effective, and simple: every dog was shot on sight—no exceptions. He later said that
security police, acting on his orders, even shot a dog being walked on a leash by an Air Force officer. Boyd’s reasoning was
that while a dog did not show any symptoms of rabies, he might have been bitten and soon
would manifest the disease. An Air Force combat base simply did not have the leisure of placing dogs in quarantine and then
waiting to see if they were infected.
When Boyd made a base inspection, he found more of the legacy of laxness left by the former commander: latrines used by enlisted
men were covered with scatological graffiti. Boyd called in the senior sergeants from all units on base and said he wanted
the latrines repainted and that there would be no more graffiti. They told him that repainting the latrines would only present
a new canvas for updated obscenities. Boys will be boys, the sergeants said.
Boyd put on his hard face and wagged a long forefinger at the sergeants. “Here’s what I’m gonna do,” he said he told the sergeants.
“First, I’m going to have the latrines repainted. Then I’m going to dig a trench off base, out in front of the main gate.
And the first goddamn time I see any more obscenity on the walls I’m going to padlock every enlisted latrine on this base.
If somebody wants to piss or shit—day or night, rain or shine—he’s going to have to do it in that trench. In front of every
Thai person passing by.” He paused to let his message sink in. He knew what the sergeants were thinking. The busiest street
in town led straight to the base. A trench dug in front of the main gate would be in sight of hundreds of people. Thais were
notoriously finicky about personal cleanliness and privacy. Any Americans seen using the trench would be subjected to considerable
disdain. Plus, it was the rainy season, a miserable time in Southeast Asia.
The sergeants were not alarmed. They had their own latrines. If this crazy colonel wanted to dig a trench for the enlisted
men, it would not affect them. “That includes you sergeants,” Boyd added. “I’ll padlock your latrines, too. So by God you
better make sure your troops get the message. Now get out of here and have those latrines repainted.”
It is said that from November 1972 until the base was closed, NKP had the cleanest enlisted latrines in all of Southeast Asia.
Then there was the story of the junior officer who was having an affair with a Thai woman. There was nothing unusual about
this.
Thai women are extraordinarily beautiful and many American officers formed close relationships with them. But this particular
officer was married and soon was overcome with guilt. He broke off the relationship. The woman in question was the daughter
of an influential
village official who felt his family lost face when his daughter was spurned. He was about to charge the young officer with
rape.