I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors in Their Own Words, and partnership with the

Honor Project, we've brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs

these stories more than ever. Warriors, in their own words, is our attempt to present an

unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation.

Thank you for listening, and by doing so honoring those who have served.

Today, in the first of a two-part episode, we'll hear from Colonel Daryl Whitcomb.

Whitcomb served in the United States Air Force as an OV10 forward air controller.

He joined the classified Steve Canyon program Project 404, also known as the Ravens,

which operated in secret in Laos.

He flew missions over South and North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.

Well, I had flown a previous tour in South Vietnam of the cargo pilot,

and at the end of that tour, I requested reassignment back to the war as an OB-10 forward air controller.

The OB-10 was a lot like flying a fighter, but you did more than just that type of work.

You also worked directly with what was going on on the ground.

You had a much larger knowledge about what aerial war was all about

in that you had to have a good feeling for what was going on in the ground.

In 1972, when I arrived at NKP, to Kompanam, Thailand with a 23rd task, our area of operation was the Ho Chi Minh Trail,

and the North Vietnamese by that point had developed an extensive aerial defense system along the trail.

They called it their meat grinder.

And by that stage of the war, they had everything from guys with rifles all the way up to SA2 surface-to-air missiles, integrated, coordinated.

There were whole areas of the Ho Chi-Men Trail where we could not even fly because of the threat.

On my first mission, up against along the Ho Chi-Mint Trail, we went up to the Banerai Pass,

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