A Salute To Billy Waugh

“He was just one of those guys who wanted to be on the edge of the empire, as far as he could get, living large and defending his country.”

— Cofer Black, CIA, describing the legendary Special Forces and CIA paramilitary operator Billy Waugh

Brian H passed along the news that a legend has gone up the trail. Billy Waugh entered the feast hall in Valhalla on April 4, at the age of 93. Brian described Waugh as “a 20th Century Frontier Partisan to the core” — and he’s right in the x-ring. Hell, the man’s very name is a Mountain Man’s expression of admiration and surprise. Waugh!

It’s somehow fitting that as the horseman passes by, the skyline of Khartoum is shrouded in the smoke of internecine combat.

Billy Waugh hunted the notorious Carlos the Jackal there, tailing him until he was nailed. He also tracked a then-little-known terrorist named Osama bin Laden in Khartoum “from a spot close enough to kill him had I been allowed.”

His book Hunting the Jackal should be in every Frontier Partisans read pile.

Waugh was one of the early Green Berets, and he lived on the edge of the knife in the Southeast Asian conflicts where they made their reputation.

From the New York Times obituary:

Over parts of a decade in Southeast Asia, he helped train counterinsurgency forces in South Vietnam and Laos. He participated in parachute drops to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which required jumping from aircraft at altitudes of 20,000 feet or more, he said, free-falling in the nighttime to the lowest possible height before popping the chute, to avoid enemy detection.

And he served with the innocuously named Studies and Observations Group of the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, a clandestine unit that ran reconnaissance and rescue missions in South and North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.

“There was no rest at SOG, only war recon, rescue, sleep,” Mr. Waugh told Annie Jacobsen in her 2019 book, “Surprise, Kill, Vanish: The Secret History of C.I.A. Paramilitary Armies, Operators and Assassins.”

In June 1965, Mr. Waugh, then a master sergeant, was nearly killed when his team was overwhelmed by North Vietnamese forces in Binh Dinh Province, along the South Vietnam coast. He was shot in the knee, foot, ankle and forehead in a rice paddy. Thinking he was dead, North Vietnamese forces stripped him naked.

“I drifted in and out of consciousness, my body perforated with gunshot wounds, leeches feasting on every open wound with one thought jabbing at my semi-lucid brain,” he wrote in his 2005 autobiography, “Hunting the Jackal.” “Damn, my military career is finished. I’ll never see combat again.”

He was saved by two soldiers, one of them his commander, Capt. Paris Davis. Despite his own gunshot wounds, to an arm and a leg, Captain Davis helped Mr. Waugh crawl to a helicopter.

Those actions by Captain Davis earned him the Medal of Honor, which was belatedly presented to him by President Biden this year. Mr. Waugh received the Silver Star.

He led a colorful life as a contractor for the CIA. Again, NYT:

In Sudan in 1991 and ’92, he watched and photographed bin Laden, who, long before he masterminded the 9/11 attacks, was already on the agency’s radar as the founder of Al Qaeda. Mr. Waugh sometimes jogged past bin Laden’s compound.

“At the time,” he wrote, “bin Laden was not considered an especially high-level assignment, and Khartoum was so completely saturated with miscreants and no-good bastards that my hunting wasn’t limited to this one tall Saudi exile.”

Still, as he told the MacDill Air Force Base website in 2011, he came within 30 meters of bin Laden. “I could have killed him with a rock,” he said.

He also tracked down and monitored Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, taking photographs of him at his apartment in Sudan before French intelligence agents captured him in 1994.

Mr. Waugh boasted that he could have killed Carlos as well. Mr. Black, who was the C.I.A. station chief in Khartoum, didn’t think he was serious.

“Billy was larger than life,” Mr. Black said in the phone interview. “I remember him stating that. ‘Yes, fine, Billy, that’s not your job.’ Sometimes he went off the reservation. He could be a force multiplier, but he could also be a force pain in the ass.”

Now THAT is a fine description of many a Frontier Partisan across history.

At the age of 71, Waugh talked Black into sending him to Afghanistan in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda.

During two months on Team Romeo, a combined Special Forces and C.I.A. unit whose mission was to root out Taliban soldiers and Al Qaeda terrorists, Mr. Waugh acted as a liaison between the soldiers and the C.I.A. operatives, advised Afghan troops and patrolled defenses.

“I was cold, filthy and stinky,” he wrote about his final days with the team, “but I was one of roughly 150 men who can say they conducted combat on the ground in Afghanistan during the initial — and pivotal — phase of Operation Enduring Freedom.”

An incredible life lived in the darkness on the edge of the American Empire — 20th Century Frontier Partisan to the core.