Free Groom Lake by Bryan O Page A

instilled in the soldiers, and it taught Owens to think less of a person by not concerning himself with feelings.
    Owens’ first kill came one week after stepping off the rear ramp of a C-130 Hercules transport plane into the Rung Sat Special Zone. A Viet Cong courier paddling his sampan through a swampy region, forty miles southeast of Saigon, never knew what hit him. From the dense mangrove saplings and vines at the water’s edge, Owens ambushed him with automatic gunfire. Four days later, he dropped grenades into a narrow tunnel entrance after seeing two Viet Cong soldiers enter. The tunnel led to a small underground cavern where his unit searched for intelligence documents. Besides the soldiers, they discovered two young women in the demolished remains, “casualties of war,” Owens told his troops without remorse.
    Shadow killings left Owens with no stories of chivalry to brag about, but his low-key approach achieved the desired results and kept him alive. His technique and mental tolerance for situations that could drive many men to insanity made him stand out.
    After a successful first tour of duty, Owens was placed on TAD (Temporary Additional Duty) and the Navy loaned his services to the Phoenix Program, a clandestine CIA operation intended to undermine the political forces controlling the North Vietnamese Army and Viet Cong by conducting search and destroy missions behind enemy lines. Political constraints ultimately limited the Phoenix Program’s actions, and Owens learned first hand that involving politics in military operations inhibited the results.
    Owens never returned to the Navy after the Phoenix Program. The Central Intelligence Agency wanted him, and had the power to make such a move happen. Anonymity, power and clandestine operations—he couldn’t have imagined a better job.
    The CIA first assigned him to Information Management. Boring, he thought, but soon learned, in the black world, names were deceiving. Summer of 1968, Owens returned to Vietnam disguised as a NILO (Naval Intelligence Liaison Officer) stationed at the Binh Thuy Air Base. The CIA wanted him to investigate reports made by American troops throughout Vietnam of unidentifiable lights in the sky. He anticipated spending most of his time looking for more work to do. However, reports of strange flying lights began pouring in nightly from demilitarized zone outposts along the Ben Hai River. Soldiers in remote radar outposts first reported the sightings, but additional incidents and subsequent rumors and paranoia started spreading across the region.
    The situation reminded Owens of World War II stories he had studied about Foo Fighters: mysterious balls of red and green light that American pilots sometimes claimed had chased them. Since the Foo Fighters never attacked, the assumption was made that they were some type of enemy reconnaissance drone. After the war, military intelligence learned Japanese and German pilots had reported the same sightings and attributed them to advanced technology used by American and allied forces. The phenomenon was never officially explained.
    Owens knew from the Foo Fighter reports that offering an explanation, any explanation, helped the troops deal with the situation. He reported that communist helicopters were shining the strange lights as a scare tactic. Although the North Vietnamese Army didn’t possess helicopters, the propaganda offered the troops a logical explanation and led them to believe they could conquer the strange lights in hostile situations.
    Owens’ ability to control a situation—and people—using perceptive manipulation scored more points for him with his superiors. He had proven his physical and psychological abilities in the jungle, and now had exposed his intuitive mental aptitude.
    For fourteen months after Vietnam, he worked various assignments with the CIA. Unbeknownst to Owens, each was a further test of his abilities. In 1970, Owens met the family he never had: the team