The Battle for Skyline Ridge lasted 108 days, involved thousands of troops from four countries, war planes from three, and is probably the least known important military engagement in recent history.
OUT OF ACTION: Above left to right, North Vietnamese tanks knocked out on north side of Skyline by anti-tank mines; when these Thai Irregulars occupied the Plain of Jars, they withstood numerous attacks by the North Vietnamese regular army, including by this tank knocked out of action and captured in the summer of 1971; Jerry Daniels, the personal case officer of Hmong commander Vang Pao, confers with the Laos chief of station for the CIA, Hugh Tovar, near Skyline Ridge during the battle. PHOTOS: COURTESY OF JAMES E. PARKER
James E ''Mule'' Parker aims to throw light on that obscurity, and is succeeding with his book, Timeline: Battle for Skyline Ridge 18 December 1971 to 4 April 1972. Parker is one of the band of CIA agents who helped direct and support the Hmong, Lao and Thai forces who defied predictions and one of Vietnam's greatest field generals to do the impossible: hold Skyline Ridge and stop Hanoi's elite divisions at a key time in the Vietnam War era.
It has been a long time since events in Laos constituted the secret war, and the CIA base Lima Site 20-Alternate at Long Tieng was, as a contemporary Bangkok Post article called it, ''the most secret place on Earth''.
It has been so long that the men who kept the secrets back in those days lamented to Parker a while back that no one had ever made public an account that tied together the discrete parts into a package. Many of them contributed personal photos, which take up an important and fascinating section of this digital volume.
There is an annual reunion in Bangkok of the Unknown Warriors who fought in the secret war. The CIA archives, complete with names of the agents, have been online for several years. Googling ''Skyline Ridge Laos'' yields several summaries of the event, but no real history or close inspection of what one online report correctly calls ''one of the most significant battles'' of the time.
''It didn't take much research to find all those elements in the Plain of Jars/Skyline battles,'' Parker wrote in an email exchange. But then, in addition to the US-Thai side, ''the names of PAVN [People's Army of Vietnam] General Nguyen Huu An and Colonel Nguyen Choung kept coming up again and again as pivotal commanders _ and our main adversaries, which made it more personal''.
Reading Timeline: Battle for Skyline Ridge 18 December 1971 to 4 April 1972 reminded me of the story of the young war photographer Tim Page. After nearly being killed twice, Page was approached on his near-death bed by a book publisher who described a book that would ''once and for all take the glamour out of war''. Page was stunned. ''You can't take the glamour out of that. It's like trying to take the glamour out of sex, trying to take the glamour out of the Rolling Stones.''
Substitute heroism for glamour, and you have Parker's description of the Skyline Ridge battle of Laos. Whatever you think about the Vietnam War era, this book is simply the description of courageous actions in a dark place where everyone respected friend and foe alike, but fought literally to the death for principle, friendship and honour.
There's not a coward or a villain here on any side. Parker has delved deeply into both official and personal records and recollections of the men _ and a few women _ who met and struggled on the slopes of Skyline Ridge and the surrounding plains, or helped direct the battle from the rear.
The setting was the Vietnam War. North Vietnam needed control of a reliable supply route to the South. The Lao army, the resident Hmong, the Thai irregulars and the CIA needed to stop them. It was, really, that simple.
In the dry season of late 1971, elite divisions of the PAVN under Dien Bien Phu veteran and Gen Nguyen Huu An swept across the Plain of Jars with relative ease. Thai forces, in particular, put up staunch resistance, only to be overwhelmed and forced to retreat.
By mid-December, there was just one more major roadblock between Gen An's ''invincible'' army and a clear shot down the Ho Chi Minh trail to Cambodia and into South Vietnam.
Washington, and in particular Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, was certain of defeat. They were wrong. For An took the offensive one ridgeline too far.
Timeline details the 1971 version of a coalition of the willing. At the top, it included the CIA's chief of station Hugh Tovar, a man of considerable courage. Gen Vang Pao, possibly the most underrated military commander in Asian history, assembled his Hmong warriors, alongside a new CIA case officer, Jerry ''Hog'' Daniels. Under a secret, new US-Thai diplomatic agreement, Lt Col (later Gen) Vitoon Yasawatdi raised irregular, volunteer forces, to whom he was known as ''Dhep 333'' _ Angel 333, the number adopted from the unit designation of his Udon Thani headquarters.
Fighters and bombers flown by Vietnamese, Lao, Hmong and US pilots were an important part of the battle. So were the big guns of the artillery.
But the deciding factor at Skyline Ridge was the infantryman, the soldier with a rifle, loyalty and grit. In the end, Thai and Hmong soldiers defeated the Vietnamese soldiers in a great battle.
While the general outline of the Thai contribution to the Laos war has never been secret, Timeline finally makes it crystal clear. Regular troops and irregular volunteers were the difference in stopping North Vietnam's best troops in their tracks.
The eye-opening irony of the Battle for Skyline Ridge is that in almost all ways, Vietnam was the hidebound regular army, and the Lao-Hmong-Thai forces, with their US case officers, were the guerrillas.
Every time Gen An marshalled his troops for another attack, Vang Pao and Dhep 333 were disrupting, interrupting, cutting off. And Vietnam committed virtually every sin of the big army combatting the guerrilla in his own backyard. Overall, the Vietnamese failed to establish a supply line, so they ran out of water, food and ammunition. At the end, troops were so weak from thirst they could barely fight.
But while Timeline is the most ambitious project so far to assemble the facts and figures behind the secret war, its success is to reveal the human stories of men at war. The dry facts of Gen An are easily accessible. But it took Parker to unearth the diaries and classified Vietnamese army reports of, say, Gen An - who died a national hero in April, 1995 - and write:
''North Vietnamese General Nguyen Huu An stood hidden near a hilltop east of the Plaine des Jarres in the Lao northeast, looking at the swaying savannah grass in the 250 square mile [650 sq km] plateau below. Some 4,000 Thai irregulars and Hmong guerrilla in the US Central Intelligence Agency army under overall command of Gen Vang Pao defended the high mountain plain to his front ...''
Clearly, Thailand deserves to know more of ''Dhep''. Politically, Gen Vitoon was no angel, and his poor decision making in the 1973 revolution and the 1976 coup put a stain on his legacy. But as a field commander and a leader of men in combat, Thailand has had few equals.
And of course everyone in this book, from US President Nixon to the men of the CIA who have never before been named, let alone presented in contemporary photos, their fate was never to be honoured for their amazing sacrifice and heroism in the Vietnam-era war.
The quality of the warriors at Skyline Ridge, and its few supporters in Washington, Bangkok and Vientiane, made a difference. If Mr Kissinger had prevailed, the US would have been a powder monkey at Skyline. If the Thai government had turned ''neutral'' and kept Dhep 333 at home, a much different and more dangerous end would have been written to the Vietnam War.
Journalists have referred to the war as ''a national mistake'' _ a phrase used as fact, not opinion. Even if that is true, demeaning or even ignoring the considerable sacrifice and achievement of the men from Skyline Ridge is grossly unfair, and even spiteful.
Timeline, more than just a fascinating read about a pivotal battle, is also a vindication of the men who directed and decided the outcome of the 108-day Battle for Skyline Ridge.
Parker lived in Udon Thani with his wife Brenda and two adopted Thai children, and mostly commuted to the war daily. Before Timeline, he fought the CIA censors for the right to publish three books about his experience, Last Man Out, Codename Mule and Covert Ops: The CIA's Secret War In Laos.
'Timeline: Battle for Skyline Ridge 18 December 1971 to 4 April 1972', by James E Parker, 2013, can be purchased as an ebook for US$7.85 (254 baht) from Amazon.com; through the author's website, www.muleorations.com, opening on Sunday, or direct, via email to the author at skylinebattletimeline@yahoo.com.
BATTLE ZONE: Below, Skyline Ridge, a hill too far for the North Vietnamese army in one of the most important and least known battles of the Vietnam War era. In the middle foreground is Lima Site 20-Alternate, more commonly known as Long Tieng.
