Area 51 Vets

[Ninurta]

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I felt as far as doing some governments bidding in a faraway land those days were over for me. I got out in 7/77 after refusing an offer to go down south and fly fixed and rotary wing aircraft for uncle sugar's black project ( I assume Iran Contra) and never looked back. I wasn't bitter I just knew better after watching all the government's broken promises to those who helped and worked for us in Vietnam and my many friends that were dying from agent Orange exposure.. 

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It wasn't Iran-Contra. That didn't start until he early 1980's, after Nicaragua fell to the communists and we re-infiltrated to support some of the guerrillas that were fighting against Daniel Ortega's "workers paradise"., mostly Miskito (Sumo and Rama) Indians. They can best be compared to the Montagnards in Vietnam.

Somoza's Nicaragua didn't collapse until late July, 1979, almost exactly 46 years ago today. It's impossible to pin it down to a single date, since different parts of the country fell on different days, starting with Esteli as I recall. Or maybe it was Chinandega. Anyhow,, Managua fell on 19 July, 1979 and then the collapse spread out into the hinterlands over the next few days.

When Ortega took over and started killing and exiling his former comrades, he also started cracking down on the campesinos, stealing their land and creating "collective" farms from it, forcing them to work lands that they formerly owned, which created a bit of trouble. Then he went and started "relocating" the Miskitos, who took exception to being relocated away from their home villages. The Miskitos were "second-class citizens" in Nicaragua, and looked down on much like the Montagnards were in Vietnam.

Rather than be "relocated" under government control, many of the Miskitos elected to relocate themselves, and fled across the Rio Coco (AKA River Wanks) into Honduras, where they formed new camps that the Sandinistas could not legally touch, being in a foreign nation. It was in those camps (notably "Campo Cerro" - Csmp Zero - and Camp X-ray) where the CIA found them and started forming the "Contra" counterguerrilla forces in 1980 or '81.

The rest, as they say, is history.

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It's my opinion that, if the government is going to run these so-called "deniable" black ops, then anyone going into them should have some required training beforehand into the fact that they WILL be crapped on afterwards, and left for dead, whether they ever have to be officially "denied" or not. They should go in with full, express knowledge that they can expect nothing at all from Uncle Sugar beyond their paycheck, and not even that if they get caught or otherwise compromised.

I'm sue you're familiar with the case of Gene Hasenpfuss. He was probably doing the same sort of thing you would have been called on to do if you had accepted the offer - flying in "deniable" Romanian AK's for the Contras, and flying out cocaine imported from Columbia to Nicaraguan airstrips..

On a side note, the AK's we gave to the Afghan mujahideen were "deniable" Egyptian Maadi AKs. The US government really likes their "deniable" foreign-made weapons to arm folks they don't care to be associated with officially.

On another slight tangent, I was in Departmeno Zelaya in Eastern Nicaragua during the Sandinista War (before the Contra War), which the Sadninstas renamed to "Regio Autonomo Atlantico del Norte", or RAAN after they took power. I noticed, on some satellite maps a few years later, that a new 7,000 foot jungle airstrip had been built in that area, just south of La Rosita, sometime during the 1980's, and have often wondered if that mystery airstrip was built for the Iran-Contra affair. Who else needs a 7,000 foot air strip in the middle of nowhere? La Rosita has an open-pit copper mine which had operated for decades successfully before the airstrip, so I have severe doubts it was built for that.

The air strip is still there to this day. You can probably see it in Google Earth.

I declined an offer to join the Contra party. I'd had just about e-damn-nough of Nicaragua before it started. Instead, I went to the Peshawar-Khyber-Tora Bora-Jalalabad area, with occasional forays farther afield. Another fine mess, but at least one we "won" that time.

I have a friend who was caught up in the Contra mess. He's still alive, but disabled now due to it. Wasn't even an enemy bullet that disabled him. He caught a "flesh eating" bug in the jungle that infiltrated his leg through a scratch. He damn near lost the entire leg, and did loose a good bit of the muscle mass in it. Took over a year in hospital for him to "rehabilitate" after we found him, with no help from the government. We found him living under a bridge, here in the states, homeless, with a leg that was gangrenous from the bug. When the bug started eating him, the government just threw him away, disposable, so they could deny knowing him. With nowhere to go, he took up the homeless life, and damn near died under that bridge, forgotten by the government.

He is an American, former Special Forces. He got "fired" from the Special Forces so that they could throw him into the Contra mess with plausible deniability... then he was left for dead when his usefulness was over.

After he recovered, and was disabled, the government then entrapped him on a trumped-up "weapons charge" here in the US, so that they could hold that over his head to make insure he'd never talk. Better than getting suicided, I reckon. To this day, he lives under the shadow and threat of having that weapons charge resurrected if he says anything, which is why I'm not giving his name, or current location.

There are some dirty bastards in our loving government.

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