User:Alcarillo/scratchpad

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	Air Force Distinguished Service Medal
	Silver Star, for shooting down five Me-109s in one day,[1] with one oak leaf cluster
	Legion of Merit with one oak leaf cluster
	Distinguished Flying Cross, for an Me-262 kill,[2] with two oak leaf clusters, including first to break the sound barrier
	Bronze Star Medal, for helping rescue a fellow airman from Occupied France,[3] with “V” device
	Purple Heart
	Air Medal with 10 oak leaf clusters
	Distinguished Unit Citation Emblem with oak leaf cluster
	Air Force Outstanding Unit Award
	Air Force Commendation Medal
	American Defense Service Medal
	American Defense Service Medal
	American Campaign Medal
	European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal (8 battle stars)
	World War II Victory Medal
	Presidential Medal of Freedom

[edit] Billy Waugh

At the time, Billy didn't really think of himself as a covert operator, though in March of 1965, Waugh was asked to form an "A" team and to set up an operational base from which to run the northeast section of the Binh Dinh Province in South Vietnam. Billy's mission was to recruit and train up an army of mercenaries--a Civilian Irregular Defense Group, or CIDG--to disrupt the NVA's movements within enemy-controlled territory. The CIA's Combined Studies Division would supply the funding, and the Special Forces would do the legwork.

Billy and his team built a rudimentary fort along the An Lao River and an airstrip using the labor of about a hundred mercenaries recruited from the lowlands. Once set up, his team was to coordinate efforts to harass the enemy in a twenty-kilometer circle around their base. The North Vietnamese Army had full knowledge of the base but did not try to overrun it. Unlike the Jedburghs, who would work inside cities or out on farms in occupied France, the Americans were running a covert war from fixed military bases.

On June 18, 1965, Billy, a small team of three SF, and eighty-six South Vietnamese mercenaries left their roughly hewn A-team fort and hiked along a trail that followed the An Lao River on a seventeen-kilometer recce to a small NVA camp. They planned a stealthy brutal attack in darkness to convince the Vietcong that the area was too dangerous for a base camp. Billy and his group had killed over one hundred sixty sleeping soldiers when they heard a bugle sound a call to arms for the approximately four thousand NVA troops who had just landed the day prior.

Nearly all of the Vietnamese mercenaries were gunned down as they fled across a rice paddy. As Billy ran, a bullet shattered his right knee and another destroyed his right foot. A third bullet penetrated Billy's left wrist, knocking his watch off. Waugh lay on the ground, soaked in blood, his leg bones glistening white through his ripped uniform, left for dead. It should have been the end of Billy Waugh. He remembers counting how long the green tracers of bullets glowed as he tried to judge the distance of NVA troops, and smelling and feeling the heat of kerosene from napalm dropped by American reinforcements, until a final bullet clipped him in the head and knocked him out cold.

Thirty-five-year-old Master Sergeant Billy Waugh awoke a few hours later to find himself stripped naked by the enemy. The sun burned down on his exposed body, crusting his blood in sticky patches, as the pain from his wounds exploded in his head. Around him the fighting continued. A helicopter arrived under fire to lift him out, but the soldier who tried to carry Billy in was shot twice through the heart and lungs. Waugh crawled the final few feet and was helped onto the helo. As Billy lay there on the floor of the slick, he looked up in time to see a bullet hit the helicopter gunner's arm, almost severing it. Billy made it to a hospital in a heap of the dead. When the battle stopped raging, the enemy had lost six hundred men, and out of Billy's eighty-six mercenaries, only fifteen had escaped. One American from the A-team had been killed, and three, including Billy, had made it out alive.

For the next few months, Waugh lived in a hazy painkiller-numbed world. It would take over a year for his wounds to begin to heal. At the other end of this dark tunnel, he realized his ultimate calling: Waugh wanted to get back into not just what he calls the "vanilla" SF, but the "blackside" SF who worked directly with the CIA. He had already died once and so had no fear of death. His injuries meant he might never again function in normal special operations, but Billy wasn't about to let injury end his lifelong dream of being a soldier. Most soldiers would accept that they had used up their luck, but Billy wanted back in, demonstrating a tenacious pit-bull approach that would be the hallmark of his combat career and scare off others whenever Billy asked for volunteers on missions. It is no surprise that in the future, Billy would take great pride in working alone.

Despite being barely able to walk, he talked his way into being assigned to a CIA-funded group called Military Assistance Command Vietnam-Special Observation Group (MACV-SOG), and by doing so took the journey from the overt "white" side of military operations to the "black" side of warfare--deniable TOP SECRET-level covert and clandestine operations that were never intended to be revealed to the American public. His knowledge of Special Forces and his eagerness to go into combat got him accepted with friends who put him up in an aircraft to do forward air controlling, observation, and rescue. When the pus stopped oozing out of his legs and they began to mend, he started working on the ground