A Warrior of Last Resort: Special Forces Soldier in the Vietnam and Cold War Eras

By Martin G. Le Blanc

Born in his grandfather's house during a blizzard, breech baby Martin George Le Blanc was not expected to survive. Instead of baptism, he received last rites. Lack of birth registration made him the ideal future "ghost warrior": a blank slate. Le Blanc enlisted in the U.S. Army as a footloose 20-year-old Canadian, during the early days of the Vietnam War. His rapid ascent to elite black-ops warrior transformed the small-town Nova Scotia kid into a clandestine force in the Vietnam and Cold War eras (1966-86). He finally became an American citizen years after retiring from military service. In his autobiography Ghost Warrior, Le Blanc sheds sharp new light on a period that foreshadowed today's geopolitics. He explores the rugged childhood and intensive military training that toughened him; the dangers and the hard-won satisfaction of defending freedom; and the damage his service inflicted on body, mind, soul, and relationships. As a U.S. Airborne Army Ranger and Special Forces Green Beret, Le Blanc had a hand in historic events, from Israel's victory in the 1967 Six Day War to the Soviet Union's failing grasp on Afghanistan in 1983. He completed 16 major missions and many operations in South and North Vietnam, Cambodia, Canada, Colombia, Egypt, Germany, Grenada, Italy, Lebanon, and along the Pacific Shelf. After each of three nearly-fatal missions, once suffering the loss of all 9 men under his command, Le Blanc broke down, withdrew, healed, and returned to battle, despite his enduring pain and trauma. A movie producer, whom Le Blanc served as a bodyguard, mined the retired warrior's life, character, and quirks to create hit man Martin Blank in the dark-comedy film Grosse Pointe Blank (1997). Ghost Warrior is the true story of one remarkable life. Martin Le Blanc will inspire, amaze, horrify, and deeply move you. "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty." - John F. Kennedy

• Language: English
• Publisher: Covenant Books, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645598534

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A Warrior of Last Resort

Special Forces Soldier in the Vietnam and Cold War Eras

Martin G. Le Blanc and Janet Gottlieb Sailian

ISBN 978-1-64559-852-7 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64559-853-4 (Digital)

Copyright © 2021 Martin G. Le Blanc and Janet Gottlieb Sailian

All rights reserved

First Edition

Soldier

Lyrics by Brian Vardigans

Reprinted with permission

This is a work of autofiction based in historical reality.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Covenant Books, Inc.

11661 Hwy 707

Murrells Inlet, SC 29576

www.covenantbooks.com

Table of Contents

The Boy from Meteghan

At the Crossroads

Young FART

Military Man

Special Forces Green Beret

History in the Making

Facing the Music: Court Martial

My Ana Maria

Under Cover

In Country

Healed and Shattered

The Need for Speed and Intel

In the Killing Fields

Finding Cape Solace

High Times

Go West, Young Man

Circling the Globe against Terror

1983: Living Dangerously

The Toll It Takes

The Lone Ranger

Free as a Bird

Fool for Love

Hellos and Goodbyes

As the Years Go By

Legacy

To all the true heroes: Warriors who did not return from battle.

Prologue: Under the Afghan Moon

Under the Afghan Moon

I stretched out prone among the craggy rocks high above a narrow pass in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush and carefully aligned my rifle in its bipod. The clear night’s chill stole over me as a half-moon rose, casting deep shadows. Tom, the spotter and my friend of 17 years, lay tucked beside a boulder 30 feet above me.

Our camouflage blended in with the gray and black rocks. We kept as still as we could and communicated with minimal hand gestures. We knew enemy eyes watched, out there in the darkness.

Tom and I were Green Berets tasked to carry out a top-secret U.S. Special Forces mission on the night of November 28, 1983, near the end of Russia’s failed, frustrated decade of trying to plant iron boots in Afghanistan.

Our shadow-patterned uniforms and black watch caps gave no hint of identity or nationality. We wore no dog tags, carried no identifiers. As warriors of last resort we ranked among the tiny percentage of Special Forces who undertook missions with no written orders. If we failed, our corpses would reveal nothing to the enemy. Our commanders would have plausible deniability of our mission—even of our existence.

We did not intend to fail. Honed into skilled, adaptable operatives and efficient killers, men such as Tom and I were called into action when collaboration, negotiation, diplomacy, and political pressure ground their gears; or when our government needed to verify critical information and act upon it quickly without the snags of red tape. Or, as on this mission, when our handlers ordered us to eliminate known enemies and leave no trace.

Tom and I knew a long night loomed ahead. As we hardened our wills against the cold, each mentally rehearsed his role. My task, and my challenge as the sniper, was to take out our targets as soon as Tom spotted them and I could make two kill shots from 2,000 feet away.

I felt confident. My custom-made Belgian 7.62–mm sniper rifle—a specialty weapon, not standard issue in any nation’s military forces—was accurate to 5,000 feet. And one of my military occupational specialties was marksmanship.

Tom trained his ocular scope on the narrow road through the pass below. His perch provided a half-mile vista of the notorious drug-smuggling route known as the Wakhan Corridor.

Chill settled in more deeply as the night crept by. I was grateful that as a Special Forces candidate 15 years before, I had endured the misery of high-altitude, frigid-weather training on the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska. To shoot with precision as I must now—at 9,000 feet of elevation, in intense cold—was no simple feat even for a crack marksman.

Shadows shifted; moon and stars slid slowly across the inky sky. My long silk underwear kept me from shivering, but joints and muscles grew stiff. I could steal a sip of water through a tube from my canteen or flex my fingers, but I didn’t dare sit up, scratch an itch, or stretch a limb. Wait. Focus. Urinate in place if necessary. Tom was in the same mode: silent, immobile, alert.

As the sky slowly paled from black to gray, I visualized the two faces in a grainy black-and-white photo from our recent mission briefing. I knew Tom conjured the same images. One Russian Colonel-General and one Afghan warlord allied with the Mujahideen, known to be traveling together. Presumed enemies, they were in fact partners in large-scale drug and arms dealing; profiteers of misery and death whose greed transcended ideology.

Finally the sky brightened to pink, and mild puffs of breeze eased the iron cold. The sun’s first rays illuminated movement in the pass below. I saw Tom’s grip tighten on the scope, his shoulders rigid.

An advance party of 20 men entered the pass on foot. Heavily armed, they pivoted 180 degrees to each side as they swept the route for any dangers ahead of the main force. With a beckoning gesture that signaled all clear, the foot soldiers stole behind a rock outcrop.

Our targets were protected by a private army brandishing weapons the Russian and the Afghani had bought or stolen from terrorists of every stripe: Irish Republican Army, German Red Brigade, Hezbollah, and Qaddafi’s Libya.

The distant rumble of motors grew louder. A convoy of eight vehicles bristling with weapons—an Oerlikon cannon and rocket-propelled grenade launchers—approached on the narrow road through the pass.

Next in the armed parade came a flatbed Toyota Land Cruiser full of heavily armed men who pointed long guns in every direction. The bosses must be near. Adrenaline cleared the stiffness from my body. My senses snapped into full alert as my heartbeat picked up pace.

An open jeep with four men aboard crested the pass. Another with the same configuration followed. Tom was rock-still, eyes locked onto the convoy below. Which vehicle held our targets?

The driver of the second jeep turned toward the man behind him in the left rear seat and spoke. Tom slowly raised four fingers on his left hand and pulled down three. Our target was in car two, man number four—in the position of Tom’s pinky.

I closed my right eye, peered through the scope, and inhaled slowly. I could see the Russian target in the left back seat, crystal clear. I had a bullet in the chamber and five in the clip. With deliberate, tiny movements, I lined up the rifle on the moving vehicle. My mental checklist factored in distance, altitude, azimuth, temperature, humidity, and wind speed.

I fixed my eyes on the Russian’s second jacket button, exhaled in a short puff, and then held my breath. Gently I squeezed the trigger under my index finger. In two seconds I saw the button vanish. No gush of blood appeared; the bullet had stopped his heart cold.

The Russian slumped to his right onto the other back-seat passenger. Our second target recoiled, shoved his dead compatriot away, and suddenly toppled forward himself. He never heard the bullet that took his life.

I had taken two shots and made two kills from over 1,850 feet away. There was no time to revel in mission success—the occupants of the first jeep had a bead on our position. Bullets zinged around us. We had to get out of the hot zone.

I crouched to grab the radio from my backpack. This is Bravo Alpha X-ray Niner X-ray. We are headed to landing zone number two, one and one-half kilometers distant, taking heavy fire. I backed out of my night-long hiding spot and shoved my gear into the backpack.

Within 20 seconds I heard a sound more beautiful than any symphony: the rotor throb of the Aérospatiale Super Puma support helicopter that had waited nearby. The big bird peppered the pass below with cover fire so we could dash toward our designated LZ.

As Tom scrambled down from his perch, a slash of red suddenly bloomed on his chest. Without uttering a sound he faltered, then slid slowly down the rocks. My partner struggled to stand, clutching his bloody chest with a bewildered expression. I leapt to my feet and dragged him into the shadow of the rock outcrop. My heart raced and my mind shouted, No, Tom! No!

I flashed back to the nightmare mission behind enemy lines in Cambodia ten years before, where I had lost nine Special Forces compatriots to hellacious firepower in a Khmer Rouge ambush. Captured and tortured, I had nearly lost my own life.

I shook my head to dislodge the memory. I couldn’t lose another brother in arms. I had to focus on this moment, push through, and get Tom to safety.

I slung Tom’s arm around my shoulders and hauled him toward the LZ. Adrenaline and fear spurred me on as rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s rained fury all around us. The ground shuddered, clouds of dust swirled, and bullets pinged off the rocks. I bulled ahead through the mayhem.

Then the world blew up. A concussive blast ripped Tom from my grip and hurled me so high into the air I braced myself to die on impact. I crashed down on my back, blinded by the shattering blow and a thick cloud of dirt. My ears rang as pressure waves reverberated through my head. I fought not to fade out.

My rifle had landed next to my left arm. I grabbed it and levered to my feet as pain jolted up my lower back and the world did a slow tilt. I turned to see the dust-filled crater where a mortar had landed not ten feet behind me.

Tom lay motionless, facedown a few feet away. I hobbled to his side and rolled him over. His dirt-caked face was ashen, eyes half-closed; his breath came in ragged gasps.

I hoisted Tom over my left shoulder. Right leg numb, back ablaze, I used my rifle as a crutch and shuffled as fast as I could in the direction of the pick-up zone. Our cover chopper circled, methodically mowing down the enemy.

Tom was limp and heavy. I couldn’t stop to assess his condition or my injuries. I didn’t want to know. Needed to get him home. On nothing but battle energy and determination, I lurched into a clearing and saw the rescue chopper, its blades pulsing in the dusty air.

Introduction: Born in the Storm

Born in the Storm

I was born during a howling snowstorm on February 21, 1946, in a second-floor bedroom of my maternal grandfather’s house, just off the main road in Meteghan, Nova Scotia.

My five siblings were all birthed in hospital, but Mom just couldn’t make it through that blizzard in time. I was a breech baby, born gasping and purple in a house perched above the seashore in a small Acadian fishing village on Canada’s Maritime coast.

Madame, I can’t promise you this little one will survive, the midwife whispered in French as she tucked me into my mother’s arms. I received Last Rites on my second day of life and a sprinkle of water on my head as baptism. Uncertain about my fate, the local Catholic priest neglected to register my birth.

This lack of records of my existence proved an advantage when I became a member of U.S. Special Forces 22 years later. Officially, I had never been born. The Vietnam-era military needed a certain number of ghosts—operatives of untraceable origin—and I was an ideal blank slate.

I enlisted in the U.S. Army in February 1966 as a Canadian citizen and U.S. legal alien who had lived Stateside for just five years. My origins and citizenship proved no obstacle. The fledgling Vietnam War required a massive infusion of naïve young men, and I had a strong pulse.

In less than two years I rocketed up through the military—from enlisted soldier and Advanced Individual Trainee to Airborne Army Ranger. Then I earned the right to wear the coveted Green Beret of Army Special Forces.

During my 20 years of U.S. military service as a ghost warrior, I never encountered another elite Special Forces operative who was not an American citizen—though some may have existed. Green Berets operated in small, ever-shifting teams and did not hang around any clubhouse together.

From 1967 to 1986 I served in scores of off the books missions, to protect the fledgling State of Israel against its enemies and to battle the Vietcong, North Vietnamese Army, Khmer Rouge, Irish Republican Army, Hezbollah, Bader-Meinhof Gang, Red Brigade, Shining Path, Colombian drug lords, Sikh terrorists, a Soviet-backed dictator in Grenada, Russian oligarchs in Afghanistan, and Pol Pot in Cambodia.

I survived uncounted injuries and sewed some of them up myself, alone behind enemy lines. In three missions I was near-mortally wounded.

The worst nightmare unfolded in 1973, when I commanded nine Special Forces on an intel-gathering foray near Preay Vang, Cambodia—territory officially forbidden to the U.S. military. My team walked into an ambush that became a massacre in the rice fields. Nearly 200 of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge overran us, killed all of my compatriots, then captured and tortured me. Two loyal Montagnard guides saved my life.

That devastating experience opened a gaping fault line that split my life into Before and After. I can gaze back across the breach but I can never close it.

For decades I didn’t speak of this black op except in the chain of command and to my Army psychiatrists. I spent two years recuperating from the physical and psychic devastation. I will forever carry the guilt of the lone survivor.

To regroup and mend, bewildered by my own role in the cruelty and pathos of combat, I stumbled back to ancestral lands on the southwest Nova Scotia seashore. I listened to waves rumble onto the shore and gulls cry overhead while I recited the Army Ranger and Special Forces mottos: Follow Me. Free the Oppressed. The words rang hollow, but I had nothing else to hang my soul on.

Twelve years post-retirement, in 1998, a former military handler invited me on a stealth operation to witness the death of my nemesis—the tyrant and mass murderer, Pol Pot. As soon as I returned from that secretive trip to Cambodia, I applied for the U.S. citizenship that my handlers—including Bill Colby, who became Director of the CIA—had offered me decades before.

At age 52 I put my hand over my heart and swore an oath of allegiance before the American flag in a small Connecticut town. At last, I felt, I am home.

*****

During my military career I served with many brave, talented Army Special Forces as well as operatives from the Marines, Navy, and Air Force. In the intense camaraderie of warfare and secret operations—bonds unparalleled in any other sphere—we stood ready to die to protect each other.

Most of my Commanding Officers were men of courage and vision; a few were rogues or egomaniacs. Good, bad, or middling, we all had a hand in shaping today’s world.

To reveal how and why warriors of last resort functioned in the Vietnam and Cold War eras is one of my goals in writing this book. Just as important, I also aim to peel away the military armor to show the human being within, and the price a warrior pays.

I trace from childhood the experiences and qualities that led me into Special Forces, and how this path I embarked upon so blithely altered my life, my perspective, and my soul.

Nonstop shoot-’em-up action is not the crux of this book. My military career spanned 20 years of a now 75-year life. I explore those 20 crucial years in some detail, but they’re not the full measure of a man. This book also delves into family, love, loss, betrayal, a still-burning zest for life. And the ongoing quest to figure out who I am.

Aspects of my character have played out on the big screen in the persona of Martin Blank, hired gun. In 1994 a Hollywood producer for whom I provided personal security was intrigued by my tales of a previous life in black ops. Donald Ambrose brought me together with screenwriters in Los Angeles to help form the kernel of a movie, released in 1997, that became a minor cult classic.

The black comedy Grosse Pointe Blank took fragments from my life—a high school reunion and the John Cusack character’s marksmanship skills—and spun them into an elaborate Hollywood fable. The moviemakers used a variant of my name and borrowed some anecdotes and quirks. But the movie couldn’t expose what it’s like to be a warrior of last resort or the toll it takes. I hope this book will.

The lengthy interviews for Grosse Pointe Blank were the first time I disclosed many special-ops tales. Exposing these missions, long past, will not affect current geopolitics or military operations. And I feel compelled to share highlights of my story, to the best of my fading memory’s ability, before my time runs out.

One line in Grosse Pointe Blank that I’ve spoken more than once is: Chances are, if I show up on your doorstep, you’ve done something to bring me there.

My targets were not random or chosen on a whim. They were known enemies who brought their fate upon themselves. I used my training and skills to take them out. Blameless people sometimes got caught in their deadly orbit.

The only way I can ease my conscience for killing other human beings is to ponder those who started out as ordinary bad guys and swelled into mass murderers. What if Hitler never rose to power, and Stalin had been eliminated early on? Or Pol Pot? Millions of vanished people could have fulfilled their hopes, talents, and dreams. Instead we lost a wealth of humanity to despots—dozens of millions of lives in the 20th Century alone.

In recent history, Saddam Hussein himself was a weapon of mass destruction. He and his henchman, Chemical Ali, gassed to death 385,000 of their own Iraqi citizens. That massacre could have been prevented in 1991 if President George H.W. Bush had ordered a surgical strike to take Saddam out.

As if to compensate for his father’s failure, 12 years later President George W. Bush sent U.S. troops to wage a futile war in Iraq that cost thousands of lives and left the country mired in still-reverberating chaos.

U.S. allies in the Middle East offered Osama bin Laden as a prisoner to President Bill Clinton in 1995. To avoid antagonizing the Muslim world, Clinton declined the opportunity. Could the murder on U.S. soil of 3,000 civilians in the terrorist attacks of 9/11—and later, mass killings in London, Madrid, Mumbai, Paris, Cairo, San Bernardino, Brussels, Nice, Orlando, Berlin, Istanbul, and more—have been prevented if warriors of last resort had eradicated bin Laden 16 years before the U.S. trumpeted triumph in his 2011 death?

Osama bin Laden’s legacy of hatred carries on through Al Qaeda, ISIL, Boko Haram, militant Islamist groups and radicalized individuals. The killing train rolls along with no end in view.

There were clear, early signs that certain grandiose tyrants and terrorist groups ached to be killers on a huge scale, long before they carried out massacres. Could someone have stopped them? If so, how would our world be different today?

These questions haunt me and I don’t have any pat answers. I only hope the story of one old warrior, and his life and times, helps fill in some gaping blanks.

Chapter 1

The Boy from Meteghan

I am the child

Who lived next door

Who skinned his knees

While playing war

Sure you remember me

I climbed your apple trees

Afraid of honeybees and wasps

But now I’m a soldier in your war

I am a soldier in your war

You say you want to join the Navy, Le Blanc, because being a sea captain runs in your family. The pasty, middle-aged recruiter at Florida’s Jacksonville Naval Training Centre twirled a pen as he looked me over, deadpan, a tinge of sarcasm in his voice.

Before you can enlist, you’ll need a physical. If you pass that, and you do look plenty fit, you’ll take the Armed Services Vocational Test. He bared his gray teeth in what might pass for a smile. If that pans out, we’ll see if we can find you a suitable ship.

I sat in a folding chair at a dented metal table, pen clutched in sweaty hand, took a deep breath, scribbled the date—February 11, 1966—on the first of the sheaf of pages, and plunged into paperwork. The military machine hummed quietly outside the exam room, keen for new human fodder.

Le Blanc, you claim you’re proficient in the French language, a skinny young examiner said three hours later, squinting from the completed papers to me. Yet you barely passed the French test today. The documents show you’re a Canadian citizen and you’ve lived for five years as a legal resident alien in New Jersey and upstate New York. Where did this supposed French-language ability come from?

I cleared my throat. I’m an Acadian, I said. Ours is a very different dialect than Parisian or Québecois French. What I saw on this test is not the way we speak. The examiner’s skeptical stare told me I’d have to explain, but he didn’t appear eager for a history lesson. I gave him the Reader’s Digest version.

My ancestors from France landed on the shores of Nova Scotia in 1604 and came to be called Acadians. They were farmers and fishermen in what’s now Maine, New Hampshire, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. We still speak their dialects all across the Maritimes, and my schooling was in Acadian French. When my family moved to the U.S. in 1961 I was 15, and I studied in English for the first time.

I didn’t add that Acadians had farmed peaceably and profitably for over 150 years—until the British rolled in on a black tide from 1755 to 1763 to steal their rich lands, burn villages, and slaughter thousands.

In the Great Expulsion, Brits tore surviving parents from children and shipped them separately to the Carolinas or the swamps of Louisiana (at that time a mostly unpopulated French territory). In the southern lands they came to be known as Cajuns.

To escape the genocide, my ancestors fled into the Nova Scotia woods. They returned to their land in the mid-1760s when the British moved on to other battles.

The Acadian motto was burned into our DNA: "On est venue pour rester. We came to stay." Many Acadians live today on their ancestral territory and coexist harmoniously with descendants of the British.

The examiner narrowed his eyes. French-speaking ability is in demand these days, Le Blanc, in certain regions where the Army is active: Southeast Asia and the Middle East. But not so much in the Navy. If you’re interested, we’ll send you to Fort Benning, Georgia, for more tests. If you pass muster, you’ll enter Army Basic Training.

I swallowed and nodded. I had to process this decision by myself. I didn’t dare tell my parents about my impulsive move to a new life. What if I washed out?

My urge to join the military was not motivated by grand ambition or patriotism; it was born of desperation and a lack of other options.

My older brother Franklin had enlisted two years before. He told me Vietnam was a miserable, dangerous place for a front-line soldier. If I joined the Navy I should be able to stay far from the burgeoning war. But now the path veered away from my hopes and expectations. I would be not a sailor but a soldier.

I lay face-up on the swaybacked bed in a budget motel where the Army had stashed me, my stomach in knots. Two days until transport to Fort Benning. An aimless life of petty juvenile crime and menial jobs was suddenly behind me.

What lay ahead? It had to beat the dead-end road I’d traveled for the past two years. My mind roamed back to childhood as I tried to relax into sleep.

*****

At age four I’m with Dad in his woodworking shop above Grandpa’s barn. Across the narrow road that runs through Meteghan, down a pine-dotted slope, lie the sparkling blue waters of the Bay of Fundy. Sunlight slants in through tall windows and turns motes of sawdust into gold. The warm scent of wood shavings fills me with comfort.

Dad lets me bring him tools and sweep up corners of the shop with a whisk broom and dustpan. I like to be his helper. He can do magic with wood. Whistling, he turns it deftly in his huge hands with precise motions. Dad chuckles a lot and never seems to hurry.

He cuts perfect circles that he fastens onto little carved blocks to make toy cars for me. Years later I realize it’s not wizardry but a common hole saw that creates those wonderfully symmetrical wheels.

Dad’s father Elizé, my grandpère, was a sea captain of pure Acadian stock traced back to the early 1600s. He sailed a 125-foot schooner from Nova Scotia to the West Indies and back for three decades, the ancient way: with a compass, sextant, and hand-copied charts. Grandpère called this celestial navigation. Southbound he carried hardwood and dried cod. He returned with rum, cane sugar, and spices.

Elizé sired nine kids. His six sons all made their living for a time on boats and the sea.

Mom’s father, Franklin Cottreau, was an Acadian engineer, watchmaker, and optometrist; an educated man. He met my Irish-Canadian grandma, red-haired Anastasia MacKinnon, when he set up a communications system among