The Book of Honor (20 page)

On July 20, 1964, he and three Cuban pilots, all veterans of the Bay of Pigs—Jack Varela, René García, and his friend Gus Ponzoa—ferried three T-28s to Kamina Air Base in Katanga. As Merriman approached Kamina flying the lead plane, he was dumbstruck at the enormity of the base rising up in the middle of nowhere. Composed of hundreds of barracks, depots, and hangars, it was the largest air base south of the Sahara. But for a skeletal crew of mechanics and engineers from the Belgian Air Force, and the few Cuban pilots, Kamina was deserted, a ghostly expanse of runways and empty buildings stretching as far as the eye could see.

Even more haunting was its original purpose. Built at the height of the Cold War by the Belgians, it was intended to be the relocation site for the Belgian royal family, as well perhaps as the government and elements of NATO, as they rode out what appeared to be the inevitable nuclear war. Kamina was a completely self-contained redoubt, a concrete and steel colossus created to withstand the Cold War's ultimate nightmare. Not far off was an entirely different world inhabited by zebras, antelopes, elephants, and the occasional cobra sunning itself on the road.

Merriman unpacked his gear in a barrackslike structure known as the Ops Center. He had a two-room suite complete with a private bathroom—but no running water. The base boasted an enormous mess hall, but that, too, was abandoned. Instead, Merriman and his Cuban cohorts ate mostly tins of sardines and basic rations. Merriman was embraced almost instantly by the Cubans. Devoid of pretensions and the John Wayne swagger of some of his CIA predecessors, he was immediately welcomed. For his part he soon appreciated the hazards the pilots faced in the field. The Agency had made it clear to the Cuban pilots that if anything happened to them, if they crashed or were captured, the U.S. government would disavow any knowledge of them.

Nor was there any recourse to the Geneva Convention for those who were downed. Rebel tribesmen, it was said, would eat the testicles of their foes if they thought them brave, and their hearts if wise. Cuban pilot Fausto Gómez had been found literally butchered. By such a standard, Mario Genebra was luckier. His engine failed as he was taking off from Albertville and his plane flipped over into the lake at the edge of the runway. Unable to open the cockpit, he drowned in two feet of water.

Merriman was prepared for the risks, but not the disorder. “The situation here is a real bucket of worms,” he wrote his wife the day of his arrival at Kamina. “I thought it would come more clear after I arrived here but so far it hasn't.”

On July 25 Merriman returned for the day to Léopoldville for a doctor's appointment. He had been having trouble with his right eye, out of which he saw only “a blank spot.” In a moment of downtime, he wrote his wife another letter. “A lot of the work so far is frustrating as the organization is still disorganized,” he wrote. “However the one worry I don't have is the personnel. My people are a real bunch of tigers. The pilots are all veterans of the Bay of Pigs & good at their jobs. Some of them are real friends already. Some day maybe we'll visit them in some happier place.”

The next day, July 26, 1964, Merriman returned to Kamina. That afternoon he received an intelligence report from the Belgians that a convoy of rebels known as Simba, Swahili for “lion,” had been spotted on the road from Kabalo. It was a vulnerable target and Merriman was eager for combat. He approached his friend Gus Ponzoa, hoping he would join Merriman in a strike on the convoy. But Ponzoa and the other pilots had already had a full morning of combat. Besides, Ponzoa's energy was sapped from a lingering case of hepatitis. He tried to discourage Merriman, arguing that it was already 4:00 P.M., that the target was a good hour away, and that it would be dark by the time they returned. René García also opposed the idea. If they crashed at dusk in enemy territory, there would be no one to rescue them and, besides, the convoy was of little importance.

But Merriman could not be dissuaded. García and Varela reluctantly agreed to join him. Merriman suited up and climbed into Ponzoa's T-38, plane number 496. The three T-28s flew wing-to-wing, at times so close they could read the names written on each other's helmet. Finally Merriman spotted the convoy, a line of four jeeps and half a dozen trucks snaking their way across the open expanse. Jeeps often indicated someone of senior rank. Merriman pointed below, then peeled off, his twin .50-caliber machine guns blazing. Varela was close behind. The convoy was riddled with bullets, but now the T-28s themselves became a target of ground fire. García saw that there was still movement below in one of the jeeps and made a third pass, watching the gunners dropping beneath a withering fire. He came out of his strafing run and began to climb but became aware that something was wrong. As he and Varela prepared to join up with Merriman, he waved them off.

“Open up!” said Merriman over the radio, calling for them to widen the formation. “I might explode.” They could see a trail of vapor streaming from Merriman's plane. “I am losing oil,” he said.

It had been two hours since they left Kamina. They were deep in enemy territory, and there was no ejection seat in the plane. Merriman's only hope was to find a place to land. At the rate that he was losing oil, he would fall out of the sky like a rock long before Kamina. And still, Merriman appeared his usual calm self as he lit up a cigarette.

García remembered a four-thousand-foot landing strip in Kabongo, still an hour from Kamina, but wide and open enough that Merriman might have a chance to bring his plane down—if the oil lasted that long. García took the lead and dropped down to search for barrels or drums beside the runway, any sign of the enemy's presence. It looked clear. He gave Merriman the go-ahead to land.

Merriman's T-28 descended slowly. He seemed confused. He was making a teardrop approach coming into the wind, a quarter mile from the runway. There would be no time to make another approach. Now it was clear to García that he had taken a hit in the oil return line between the propeller and the tank. He was about to lose his propeller. Still Merriman was coming in perfectly level and straight when suddenly, at eight hundred to one thousand feet, he lost all power.

The plane plummeted. A huge red cloud rose into the air.

“My God,” thought García, “he's exploded.” But it was only the red dusty earth of the fields. When it cleared, Varela and García could see Merriman's propeller fifty yards from the rest of the plane, spinning absurdly. And they could make out the mangled remains of the plane. The wings were twisted crazily, the fuselage crumbled. They could see Merriman's head, motionless, in the cockpit. Varela wanted to land but García talked him out of it. There was no way, he said, that Merriman could have survived such a crash. What good would it do to lose two men and two planes?

Back at Kamina, Ponzoa had begun to worry and had taken to the control tower waiting for some word. García radioed the tower. “Kamina tower, this is Tango flight. We have lost one of our airplanes.”

Ponzoa recognized García's voice and called him by the Spanish word for “Baldy.” “Calvo, is that you?” Then García broke the news that it was Merriman who had gone down. Ponzoa shook his head in disbelief. Merriman, his mentor and ace of aces, was too good to have been shot down.

When García and Valera landed, there were few words spoken. They had lost their commander, an American whom in such short time they had come to call a friend. He was not even supposed to engage in combat. In his logbook Ponzoa scribbled in Spanish,
“Tumbaron a Merriman”
(They shot down Merriman).

The next morning there was a stir at the entrance to Kamina. A beat-up old truck, driven by two locals, had something in the back they wanted to unload. It was Merriman. He had somehow survived the crash and been discovered by these two men who pried him out of the crumpled cockpit. Suspecting he had come from Kamina, they were determined to return him before the rebels found him.

Passing in and out of consciousness, Merriman was carried to the base hospital. But it was a hospital in name only. There were no doctors, no nurses, only two local nurse's aides. There was not so much as an aspirin to ease Merriman's pain. Merriman was placed on a bed, the blood wiped off with a clean, damp cloth. His eyes were bloodshot, his face lacerated. His shoulder bone, both ankles, and three vertebrae were broken. His chest and legs were covered with contusions. The force of the crash had been so great that the harness strap had cut a quarter inch into his flesh. Even the bezel of his Rolex watch had popped out on impact.

García, the son of a doctor, was deeply concerned. He remembered his father's patients, how they could sometimes be up and about the very day they were operated on and then suddenly develop a clot and die. What García noticed was that Merriman's skin had taken on a bluish tint. García understood that as miraculous as it was that Merriman had not died in the crash, his survival now depended on getting him back to the States or Europe where he could receive proper care. Immediately the Cuban pilots notified the embassy in Léopoldville asking someone to come and medevac Merriman.

Each time Merriman regained consciousness, he would plead with Ponzoa: “Gus, please send me home. I want to see my family. You can run the operation here yourself. I am feeling very bad. Please, Gus.” Even his flier's pride was wounded. “You guys fly so long and nothing happens to you,” he would say to the Cuban pilots clustered around his bed. “I go on the first mission and . . .”

But Ponzoa's appeals to Léopoldville went largely ignored. There was nothing they could do for Merriman but try to make him comfortable. Sometimes lucid, sometimes delirious, he would pass out for five or six hours. Ponzoa and the others could not understand why the Americans had not yet come for him.

But if the U.S. Embassy and CIA were concerned with Merriman's well-being, they were at least as committed to concealing the fact that he, an American, had taken part in combat and crashed. On July 25, 1964, the day before his crash, U.S. Ambassador McMurtrie Godley had sent a telegram to Secretary of State Dean Rusk advising that “we should indulge in no, repeat no, covert operations here that do not have Tshombe's [Moise Tshombe, the Congo's premier] and/or [Congo President Joseph] Kasavubu's blessing.”

Adding to sensitivities was a State Department cable sent the day after Merriman's crash. It reported that rebels under Communist influence were now convinced that Americans had taken a direct hand in the conflict. They vowed to punish any and all whites found in the region. Thirty rebels had been killed and eighty wounded in one such attack in which Americans had allegedly participated.

A day later a military attaché in the U.S. Embassy referred to a Congo Army report that a “T-28 on its third mission made a forced landing 300 yards short of runway at Kabango [sic],” and that helicopters from Kamina were attempting to salvage the parts. “Pilot not badly injured,” the embassy erroneously concluded.

“We are concerned,” cabled U.S. Ambassador Godley, “about increasing number of reports that if T-28 or mercenaries used by GOC [government of Congo] against rebel-held areas in eastern Congo, rebels will retaliate by killing whites in areas under their control.” That was July 28. Two days later Godley reiterated his concerns and expressed his growing opposition to the CIA's reliance on an air campaign. “While we here unable to completely evaluate contribution which T-28's may be making to security situation Katanga, own present impression is that aircraft alone cannot contain continuing rebel advance unless there are armed men on ground willing to stand and fight. This is not now the case in Katanga. Therefore suggest consideration be given halting T-28 operations temporarily until more dependable ground forces materialize.”

Merriman, from a diplomatic and security viewpoint, was an embarrassment and a liability. On July 30 Ambassador Godley, in a cable classified “Secret,” reported that the pilot of the downed T-28 was “Merriman, a U.S. citizen,” but instead of expressing concern for Merriman's condition, he expressed relief that Reuters was reporting the pilot was Cuban. That miscue was courtesy of the Belgian consul general who was covering for the United States—for which Ambassador Godley later expressed his appreciation. Any further inquiries into the crash were to be referred to the Congo Air Force, which the United States had advised to “stick to Reuters story.”

Ambassador Godley simply wanted the Merriman situation to quietly fade away. “Should pilot's nationality be revealed we will continue refer inquiries to CAF [Congo Air Force] but if pressed will emphasize non operational character of mission. Would hope that nothing be said by USG [United States government] officials.” That message was passed on to the White House at 6:50 A.M. on July 30.

From the U.S. vantage point, Merriman's misfortune could not have occurred at a more inopportune moment, potentially inflaming as it did rebel passions against whites in the area and threatening to discredit U.S. denials of direct military involvement in the region. At that very moment the Congo seemed to be imploding. The very day the White House learned of Merriman's crash, a second cable, more dire than the first, arrived in Washington. “Security situation North Katanga continues to deteriorate . . . ANC [Congolese forces] and ex-gendarmes have fled . . . ANC troops deserting Kabongo . . . Fall of Kongolo will be further psychological shock. Defection of troops at Kabongo opens way for advance on Kamina . . .”

While the diplomats and covert planners fretted over the situation and continued their debate, Merriman lay in a hospital bed at Kamina, his condition worsening.

It was not until at least July 31—five interminable days of anguish—that a DC-4 was finally dispatched from Léopoldville to airlift Merriman out. But it was not to take Merriman home or even to Europe, but rather to a dismal and backward hospital in Léopoldville. So sensitive was the situation that Merriman was admitted into the hospital under the pseudonym of Mario Carlos in an effort to preserve the ruse that he was Cuban.