Retired AF doctor’s story declassified
Hondo sends us a link about Col. (Dr.) James Ruffer’s mission prior to Operation Just Cause. According to the article in The Army Times, Col. Ruffer spent time as a Marine pilot in Vietnam, a Navy flight surgeon and an Air Force doctor during his thirty years of service. But he earned a Bronze Star with a “V” for his work in Panama;
I worked with Delta Force as I planned the rescue of Kurt Muse from my vantage point within the prison. (The regime had been forced by President George H. W. Bush to allow an American doctor to provide care for the hostage.) … [I] was to know where Muse was being held and where his intended assassin was located; for Muse was “promised” death by the regime. With my help, Delta Force would be looking for the intended assassin’s location upon entering the prison on the night of 19/20 December 1989. … Kurt Muse was rescued without the loss of an American life.
During the Modelo Prison mission I was always at some risk of being detained either upon my approach to the prison within Panama City’s squalorous Chorillo District or within the prison during the visit or upon my departure. A gun was directed to my head, during one departure, along with the voiced declaration of the guard, “I’d like to blow your head off.”
Yeah, I know Carcel Modelo pretty well, but my stay there was measured in days rather than months. I was there for kidnapping, but when the Canal Zone Provost Marshall told the Panamanians that the person who I supposedly kidnapped was in custody in the CZ, they let me go. But, it’s not a very friendly place. My toilet was a quart-sized milk carton, my bed was a couple of sheets of newspaper spread out on the concrete floor. Breakfast was a small roll and a cup of warm brown-colored water that they called coffee. Lunch was usually fish head soup, with real a fish head to prove it. So I have a sense of the conditions that Colonel Ruffer confronted. It was pretty scary and I wasn’t an undercover spy or anything.
So congratulations on your award, Col. Ruffer.
Category: Real Soldiers
Balls, 2 ea, industrial sized.
They let you have a toilet?
El médico con cojones muy grandes.
Congratulations, Col. Ruffer. Well done indeed.
Funny story about Kurt Muse: he and his wife Annie lived in our small apartment complex when we were attending Texas El Paso back in 69-71. Kurt was an outspoken campus leader of Young Americans for Freedom, a small, conservative, Republican group. All the rest of the married students living in the complex were typical college-age liberals. As an older Vietnam vet, I was a bit more attuned to his views but still considered him a bit of a right-winger. When we partied, poor Kurt was always getting pasted for his unpopular conservative views but he handled it with good humor. He was jokingly accused of being a campus spy for the feds. Since there were a lot of Iranian students in our circle of friends, many of them highly critical of the Shah, that made some sense to me.
In the mid-eighties, I actually saw Kurt and Annie briefly in Panama. I was there on business and took them out to dinner. A few years later, while sitting on a Delta flight out of Pensacola, I opened a Newsweek and lo and behold, there is my old fellow student, Kurt Muse, in an article relating his rescue by Delta operators. So he was indeed an operative with the CIA and a brave, heroic one at that. I later met one of the Delta guys who had been involved in the rescue operation, at a conference at Ft. Bragg, and he had high praise for Kurt’s valor.
Sometimes this world seems so incredibly small.
My thought on this is that if stuff from Just Cause is being declassified, why are all our Secret Squirrels’ records from Vietnam still classified? Unless they’re just making stuff up? Surely not?