Ronald E. Whitley

Sword of Phoenix Ronald E. Whitley

Due to a personnel error, a young Army Staff Sergeant is assigned to Vietnam as an Intelligence Annalist and immediately assigned to a combat unit where he led a POW Contact Team responsible for evaluating enemy prisoners. Knowing that if he determined the POWs were of no intelligence value, they would be turned over to the local South Vietnamese Commander, and would probably be executed. During this assignment he was involved in an ambush which left two of his team wounded. Then went on a covert assignment into Cambodia to find a downed pilot. When the MACV(Military Assistance Command Vietnam) Unit he was assigned to was reorganized the was mistakenly assigned to the 1st Air Cavalry Division just a day prior to the largest combat air lift in the Vietnam war. Within a six hour period an entire combat brigade including artillery was airlifted to within 4 miles of the besieged Marines at Khe Sanh. When MACV Headquarters located their missing Sergeant, he received orders reassigning from the 1st Air Cavalry back to MACV where he was assigned to a Phoenix Program assassination team made up of former Foreign Legionnaires that stayed in Vietnam after the French left. Recommended for this assignment by his old nemesis Jack Roark. Roark is allegedly a Cultural Attaché with the Embassy, but is in fact a C. I. A. case officer, and it is not the first time he has involved himself with the young Sergeant's career.