A Green Beret's True Story of His Jack Lawson with Sully de Fontaine

J first
Foreword
met Sully de Fontaine in 1961 in Germany when I was an
adviser to a 10th Special Forces Group exercise being run out
of the Bad Tolz headquarters in Germany. From his first salute to
his always polite and low-key conversation, I knew without a doubt
that Sully was a quiet professional and a seasoned leader.
Little did I know at the time that as a young man in his late teens
he had been through some of the same British paratrooper schools
where I had trained in England. From balloons at Ringway near
Manchester he practiced for making night jumps into the farmlands
of France, his homeland, to use his skills and knowledge of the
French underground to rescue downed American pilots.
My first encounter with Sully came a year after he had led a
Special Forces team on a covert mission in the Congo to rescue
missionaries and civilians who were at risk of being massacred by
roving bands of militants spawned during that country’s independence
revolt.
The gallant rescue by his three-man team reminded me of the
time near the end of World War II when the Office of Strategic
Services tasked me with leading a prisoner-of-war humanitarian
team to liberate Allied POWs held by the Japanese on Hainan, a
large island in the South China Sea between China and Vietnam.
Instead of trigger-happy rebels that Sully and his team tangled
with in jungle pockets of the Congo, my team faced about 10,000
arrogant Japanese soldiers who were unaware of the atomic bombs