Papa Bear^® 

A True Saga of  Vietnam Heroism

As part of a Special Forces Team, on October 31, 1972, at 11:30 pm, under the code name Papa Bear^®,  I, Tony Hasboun,  parachuted into the North Vietnamese jungle.   I spent  three years there playing a deadly, cat and mouse game with the Viet Cong.   

Of the dozens of special forces troopers sent behind enemy lines for extended duty, I am the only one who survived and returned to talk about it.   My memories were so terrible that for over twenty-five years, my story remained buried in my mind.   Only because of the compassion and understanding of my personal friend, Robert, was I able to bring it to the surface and allow myself to talk about it.  This is a true Vietnam story I'll guarantee you've never heard before.  

When the 60’s came, I wasn’t a green-haired hippie.   I was a real wise-cracking, hard-assed misfit -- a tough guy by choice -- at least at the time, I thought it was by choice.   I walked around being pissed that Mother Nature for short-changing me in the body department.   Because I’m five-foot-four and weigh only 125 pounds, I had an attitude and it certainly wasn’t one of gratitude.   I got onto the wrong side of what passes for law and order so many times that a mother-fucking, government, bureaucrat somewhere put my name on  “The expendable” list.   In other words, I became, in their eyes, a walking dead man.  

At that time I was still unaware of the government policy used to get rid of rife raff.   Instead of putting them in jail, they put them in the military and sent them off to somewhere where they would very likely get killed.   When I got on the “get-rid-of-them” list, the Vietnam war was in full swing, so you can quickly guess where I ended up.  

No!  You guessed wrong.  Not South Vietnam.   Well OK…  you’re half right.   The Vietnam part is right.   The south part is wrong.   As part of a Special Forces team, on October 31, 1972, at 11:30 pm, I parachute into the North Vietnamese jungle.   I spent three years there rescuing or eliminating downed pilots and avoiding being killed by the Viet Cong.   That’s 937 days.    I was also there 937 nights.   The nights were the worst.  

It was three weeks before it dawned on me that it was Halloween night that I dropped into this hell hole,

Like many Vietnam vets, when the horror was over, I buried my past  ---  at least, I tried to.   For eighteen years I semi-succeeded.   Then one peaceful evening in sunny southern California, my facade came crashing down.   My code name was Papa Bear, and this is my story. 

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