Arthur D. Simons

Arthur Simons was a journalism graduate from Missouri who went to war in 1941 with a pack-mule artillery battalion and ended it with the 6th Ranger Battalion in the Philippines, seizing islands in Leyte Gulf. He had a voice like gravel and a physical presence that produced the nickname Bull, and he spent the next three decades in the parts of the army that do not get parades: Laos in 1961, training twelve Special Forces teams to raise a Laotian army; the Son Tay raid; Vietnam.

On the night of 20 November 1970, fifty-six volunteers he had trained for months on a full-scale mock-up in Florida flew three hundred and sixty kilometres into North Vietnam and deliberately crash-landed a helicopter inside the courtyard of the Son Tay prison camp, twenty-three miles from Hanoi. They were on the ground twenty-seven minutes, killed the guards, lost nobody — and found the cells empty. The prisoners had been moved months earlier.

As a rescue it failed; as an operation it was flawless, and it changed everything that followed. The prisoners in other camps heard about it and their treatment improved almost overnight. In Washington the raid became the argument for a permanent joint special operations command — an argument that was finally won after Desert One, a decade later.

In 1979 Simons was sixty, retired and raising hogs in Florida when Ross Perot telephoned. Two Electronic Data Systems executives were in Gasr prison in Tehran, the revolution was under way, and the American government could do nothing. Simons flew in with a handful of company volunteers, waited for the mob that stormed the prison in the chaos, got his men out in the confusion and drove them to Turkey.

He died of heart failure a few months later, in May 1979, aged sixty. The Special Forces training area at Fort Bragg carries his name, and so does the annual award for the best special operations soldier in the United States.

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