James Stanton

The Secret Vietnam War

I have a different kind of Vietnam War story to tell. The kind of war story you may not have heard before. The tale of the secret war. The war behind the curtain. The war whose soldiers were sworn to silence.

It is not a “blood and guts” war story. There were no Rambos in this mysterious outfit. It is a story of brains not brawn. Smart young men… linguists who rode their typewriters into battle. Radio wizards who fought wearing headsets not steel pots. Intelligence analysts who teased secrets out of mountains of raw data. Young GI’s dragged unwillingly from civilian jobs, college campuses, or fresh from high school, to fight a strange shadow war in a remote outpost 300 miles northeast of Bangkok known as Ramasun Station. A signal intelligence spy base so secret few had “the need to know” that it even existed.

An exterior shot of a single story building under a blue sky. Sign reads: Ramasun Station, 7th RRFS.

Our cover was doing “radio research”, which sounds very scientific. The ‘science’ was electronic eavesdropping. On who? On everybody. On our enemies the communists of North Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Red China… but that wasn’t all.

There were puzzling neutrals as well…Prince Sihanouk’s Cambodia. The hermit police state riddle then called Burma. Various well-armed factions running around in the remote mountains of Laos who were neither quite friend nor foe, and sometimes changed sides. And our allies, the Kingdoms of Thailand and Laos, who trusted us as little as we trusted them.

The air waves were full of radio communications. We had the equipment to suck them all in. And we had the people to “process” what we sucked in. Translator/Interpreters, ‘lingies’ in the jargon of Ramasun… Thai, Lao, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Burmese, Chinese, Russian. Radio operators, ‘dittyboppers’ at Ramasun, and ‘TA’s, traffic analysts to keep track of who was sending what to who. Not to mention all the various breeds of techies to keep all the eavesdropping equipment humming. Our “product” was sent off to the National Security Agency at Ft. Meade, MD… AKA ”The Puzzle Palace”.

The overeducated troops of Ramasun were sloppy on the parade ground and hopeless in drills, but when it came to the mission nothing could beat them. They always got the job done.

What was life like at Ramasun Station? The troops were a wild, wacky, rambunctious lot. Never was a military unit short of the M*A*S*H 4077th less military. Not a ‘by the book’ operation and any officer or NCO who tried to make it one was in for trouble.

The ‘chain of command’ was irrelevant due to the mixture of Army, Air Force, Marine and civilians who staffed the place and whose respect for authority was limited to those who could demonstrate that they knew their specific trade regardless of rank. Clueless Colonels were ignored while Spec 5’s who knew their stuff were listened to. All ‘lifers’ started with two strikes against them. The overeducated troops of Ramasun were sloppy on the parade ground and hopeless in drills, but when it came to the mission nothing could beat them. They always got the job done.

How do I know this? I was one of them from 1968 to 1972. Forty years later I started writing down my “Tales of Ramasun”. Didn’t stop until I had three books full of them. You can find them if you look hard enough. They’re not under my real name though, once a spy always a spy.

I am Jim Stanton, a proud graduate of New Ulm High School (Class of ’63) and not so proud dropout of the U of M in 1967 (though I did complete a degree six years later). And what did I learn from my spook and spy experiences? That wars, all wars, no matter how high-minded in their conception, are bloody brutish tragic enterprises. That they often settle nothing. That they are maddeningly complex. That trying to sort out the “good guys” from the “bad guys” is a pointless exercise. That ill-conceived wars like Vietnam should be avoided at all cost. That getting out of wars is always harder than getting into them. That the last war America won was WWII. No victory parades since 1945. That in these chaotic times it may not even be possible to “win” a war.

Still there will continue to be wars. Knowing what you are getting into will help prevent some of them. The unsung heroes of Ramasun Station provided the kind of information that could have kept us out of Vietnam, but alas it came too late. We were already emgaged in battle before we could find out why we were going to lose… and once started wars develop a twisted logic of their own.