Dr. Mark Woodhull: I was stationed at Rosecrans Air Force Base in St. Joseph, Missouri, and they have Missouri Western State University there. I started going to college again. I think I was 24 or 25 years old by then. I told you my first attempt at college was a total disaster. My fault entirely. When I went back—you grow up real fast in Southeast Asia.
And that certainly happened to me. So when I went back to college, I remember the very first day I went into a classroom and I was looking around. I’m not much older than the other students that are in there, but my attitude was, God, I’m in a classroom here with a bunch of kindergartners.
Dr. Preston Jones: I hear you.
Woodhull: The maturity levels were just totally different. I struggled with that for a while. I was later diagnosed with PTSD in 1985 or 1986. Yeah, but that’s neither here nor there. I survived all that stuff.
Jones: Maybe we can segue now. That diagnosis of PTSD in 1986—was that related primarily or only to your experience in Vietnam or also to Jonestown?
Woodhull: Jonestown, primarily. There is a lot of stuff, which I can’t talk about in Laos—very frightening stuff. But Jonestown was a different thing.
Anybody in the military will tell you that they think they can deal with war and combat and blood and guts and the bunch—everything associated with that. But they can’t. I don’t know any human that can, in my retrospect. However, Jonestown was a different case in which I struggled with it personally because I could not understand it. I understand war. I did not understand this. I didn’t understand 913 people and 305 children committing suicide, mass suicide by following some idiot.1 That just didn’t ring in my head, and it was kind of a subtle thing that happened to me over time.
I think I was a little bit shocked during the whole operation in Jonestown. But it was literally a couple years later and it really started affecting me.
Jones: How so?
Woodhull: Every time somebody would ask me about it, I would get really emotional and I couldn’t really identify where that was coming from, because I’m not really an emotional person. In fact, I’ve been married four times and one of the criticisms from my three ex-wives is that I’m a block of ice, and that could be PTSD, whatever. Nothing really gets me going. However, when I talk about Jonestown and the past, I deal with it a lot better now than I did back in the eighties.
Even if I talked with my own mother about it, she would—my mother was a nurse, a psychiatric nurse, actually—help me through this a lot during that time.
Jones: Let’s go to November 18th, 1978. I believe that’s the right date.
You served in Vietnam, and then you went to Laos and you know what elements of war and combat look like. You stay in the Air Force and by November, 1978, you’re a staff sergeant.
Woodhull: Correct.
Jones: Let’s just start at the beginning. How do you find out that you’re going to South America for some reason?
Woodhull: It was the first of our rotation on Operation Volant Oak, V-O-L-A-N-T, OAK. There were two operations down there. One was Operation Volant Oak, which was the C-130 operation. And then the other one was called Coronet Cove. That was a fighter operation co-located with us. At that time, there were mainly A-7 aircraft—fighter aircraft—which were eventually used in the invasion of Panama, both Volant Oak and Coronet Cove, which I was involved in as well.
Volant Oak had an alert aircraft. The Southern Command, which at that time was located in Panama—I believe they moved it out there to Florida; it might be in Puerto Rico now. I don’t know where Southern Command is today. But back then it was in Panama, and our alert aircraft was, or our area of responsibility was, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.
And everywhere in between and anything that went on down there. Be it open operations or embassy resupply, or even secret operations, interfaces with some of the government down there—especially counterdrug operations in Columbia—we were involved in, either in direct support or in other things.
So we had an alert aircraft; we could launch that alert aircraft within an hour.
Jones: Now, was this aircraft in the states or was it in Panama?
Woodhull: It was in Panama, Howard Air Force Base.
Jones: And that’s where you were?
Woodhull: Yes. And I had cross-trained out of radar when I came back from Southeast Asia. And I went to school as a combat loadmaster on a C-130. I started my flying career when I came back. So I was a Combat Loadmaster. I was also an Army Parachute Rigger and a Combat Air Drop Load Inspector. Basically, a logistics expert also.
So that was my duty down there. I was a Staff Sergeant Combat Loadmaster.
Jones: When the tragedy in Jonestown went down, I believe it was early afternoon of November 18, when did you first get word that something was going down and you were going to Guyana?
Woodhull: It was late in the afternoon in an intelligence briefing. At that time, the intelligence briefing basically said, “we don’t know really what’s going on down there, but we think a congressman”—nobody knew who he was—Congressman Ryan, may have been killed. So that’s what came into us. We’re launching the Alert Bird and the payload is a combat control team and 44 Army Rangers from the 193rd; at least that’s what we were told.
Jones: And you’re on that plane?
Woodhull: Yeah. I was one of the loadmasters. The problem with that is these were not—everything I read about Jonestown, I read about medics and stuff—these were not medics on that first night. These were Army Rangers. And the idea was that the congressmen had been killed, but we really didn’t know that there were 913 dead people and that Jim Jones and his cronies were systematically killing people and had run most of these people out into the jungle. And the idea for the combat control team was to secure the dirt strip down there, which was a terrible airfield.
I think it was even less than 3000 square feet of dirt. The Army Rangers were to go out into the jungle and find these people and try to bring them back in.
Jones: I’m sorry, I was thinking you were in a rescue operation, and perhaps a combat operation as well.
Woodhull: Definitely a combat operation, because at that time, the Guyanese were more or less aligned with Cuba. We were not their friends.
Jones: Do you remember being part of the discussion then?
Woodhull: Yes.
Jones: This might actually have a Cold War tie-in.
Woodhull: In fact, we even had an escape and evasion plan in case we were stuck there.
Jones: I haven’t heard this before. So one of the—you don’t know what’s going on, but one of the possibilities is we might actually get into a fight with the Guyanese military?
Woodhull: It’s a possibility. However, we were told that in Georgetown, the embassy representatives were trying to coordinate things with the Guyanese Defense Force. And that you may or may not run into the Guyanese Defense Force down there. And our impression was that they were so disorganized that they may not know that we’re there on a humanitarian mission to try to rescue people, and it may wind up in a conflict, so be very careful. Of course, the rangers and the combat controllers were armed to the teeth.
They were loaded for bear. Anyway, there were other aircraft involved. It wasn’t just the Alert Bird. They were from, I think, Eglin Air Force Base, and an AC-130 gunship showed up as well.
Jones: When did you actually arrive? So by the latter part of the afternoon, November 18, you’ve got word that something’s going down.
Woodhull: Well, we didn’t get there directly. We actually had to go to Caracas first to pick up a CIA team, because they were kind of the CIA team that was monitoring the things. So we picked them up, and then we headed to Jonestown, which is out in the middle of nowhere.
Jones: Did you stop in Georgetown first?
Woodhull: No, we did not. In fact, I’m not even sure we had permission from the Guyanese government to enter their airspace. It was a lights-out, blacked-out, special ops kind of thing.
Jones: So you’re on the ground the next day, November 19th?
Woodhull: We actually landed in the middle of the night. It must have been, if I remember correctly, maybe 3 o’clock in the morning. We made an assault landing on the dirt strip and I thought we were going to crash. It was pretty rough. We opened up the troop door and boom, we were surrounded by the Guyanese Defense Force.
Jones: You landed on the strip that Ryan’s plane is on?
Woodhull: Correct. The Rangers couldn’t get off because of the Guyanese Defense Force. It wound up as the sort of a standoff for about an hour between, particularly, the Army Rangers and the Guyanese. And then, an American official showed up with some Guyanese official and that was the end of all that.
We dropped the Rangers off and the Combat Control Team and we bugged out and went back to Panama.
The rest of what I’ve got comes from my colleagues that I work with who were on other missions that went down there. There’s also a KC-135 aircraft and two A-7s from Coronet Cove, just in case things get hairy. The AC-130 gunship had sensors on it, and the Rangers were going to use the gunship sensors to try to locate these people in the jungle, especially with the—
Jones: Thinking that there were people in the jungle?
Woodhull: Right. When we had one of our other crews come back a couple hours later, we had another aircraft that went in there eventually, but not into Georgetown.
We were the only aircraft that went into Jonestown on that first assault landing. All the other aircraft went to Georgetown. And the reason for that is that the strip down there was just too dangerous, particularly if it rained. It got real slick and we didn’t want to crash any of our C-130s on a short strip down there.
So that started the helicopter operation. I was deeply involved in that. That’s, in fact, where most of my work occurred—in helicopters.
Jones: Just so I understand, you dropped the Special Forces off and went back to Panama?
Woodhull: Correct.
Jones: And then go back to Georgetown?
Woodhull: Then it was a big logistics operation after that. That went on for 9, 10, 12 days. It was a long time.
Jones: Let me ask about that, about when you first land. So it’s dark. In the morning, were you there long enough to get a sense of what had happened on the airstrip? Did you see the plane that Ryan and the others wanted to get on?
Woodhull: We saw the plane, but I didn’t see any bodies or anything of the sort. So I can only assume that the Guyanese, who obviously were there by then, by the time we got there, had recovered at least Congressman Ryan and the others.
Jones: When you took off, how long were you on the ground there on the airstrip?
Woodhull: About an hour and a half.
Jones: In that hour and a half, had you gained a better sense of what was going on, or did you still think there were no potential conflicts in the rescue operation?
Woodhull: No. We had thought that the Rangers were out there looking for people when we left for Panama.
Jones: How long were you back in Panama?
Woodhull: I was there for several weeks after that. Like I said, it turned into a huge, and I mean, a huge logistic operation by the US military. It was. Probably my first experience at a major push by the military to do something.
Jones: So do you return to Guyana?
Woodhull: One other time. It was on a mission to drop off body bags and some fuel bladders. We had these pallets of fuel bladders that had aviation fuel on them for the helicopters.
Jones: You’ve mentioned this logistics operation. Just describe—when you say that you have mental images, what are the mental images you have?
Woodhull: I was what they called the Ramp Tramp down at Howard Air Force Base, and I was responsible for getting all these C-130s and C-141s and other types of aircraft all loaded up with equipment, aluminum shipping caskets, body bags, and MREs to support the people who are in-country.
Jones: That’s the food for the meals, right?
Woodhull: Yeah. What else did we send down there? Tents, forensic stuff—the FBI had some stuff we sent down there for them—um, water, because you couldn’t; there was no potable water down there. And the medics—we eventually sent a bunch of army medics from the 193rd down there when it turned into a body recovery.
The 193rd Battalion was—I think they were called battalion—was the Panama-located Army Airborne Unit. They’re a combination of just about everything, from medics to rangers to some Green Berets. What you saw down there was a combination of medics and airborne troops that were sent down there basically to bag bodies.
If you look at any of the pictures that some people took while they were down there, you’ll see army guys with green caps, and you’ll see little jump wings on their caps. Those are either the rangers or the airborne folks. But then you also see people with little medical emblems. Those are the people from the medical unit.
We took personnel, but it was mainly—the big fiasco was the helicopters. That was absolutely ridiculous. The Army Aviation Branch of the 193rd down there had UH-1 helicopters, which really turned out not to be very effective because you can’t really load too many bodies on that one.
Jones: That’s an old Huey, right?
Woodhull: The Huey, right. That’s what we traditionally think of as a Vietnam helicopter. So I remember that we were supposed to load the first two helicopters and they had to be broken down because we had to fit them into the C-130s. Our original intent was to break them down, fly them to Georgetown, reassemble them, and then start making shuttles back and forth between Georgetown and Jonestown. And the main reason for that is getting the bodies back to the states. We could not bring C-141s directly into Jonestown. It was hard enough just to get that one C-130 in there. So everything operated out of Georgetown after that.
So how are you going to get the bodies that distance? Well, helicopters. And so in Panama, the army, trying to load these helicopters on C-130s and C-141s, broke the windshields out of the first two Hueys. And so it slowed down the operation so much, having to disassemble these aircraft and then reassemble them down there, that whoever the Head Shed was decided that’s not going to work. And so they brought down Air Force HH-53 Jolly Green Giant Aircraft, which are much larger and can carry a lot of caskets. I forget how many we could put in there, but it was a lot.
Jones: They brought those down from the states?
Woodhull: Yes. I believe it was the 39th Air Rescue Wing—the 53rd or the 54th, I can’t remember. But I think they were out of Patrick Air Force Base. It was a lot easier to—they’re air refuelable and so they flew those down to Georgetown and they refueled in the air.
They were the workhorse. We eventually got some Hueys over to Georgetown, but they were used mainly for logistics, bringing in food and people and that kind of stuff. Whereas the HH-53 was the workhorse of moving the bodies. I forgot how many runs they made, but it was probably around 30 or 40 runs back and forth before they got all the 913 bodies over to Georgetown.
From there, the aluminum shipping caskets were put on C-140s and taken up to the military mortuary at Dover Air Force Base. My logistics participation was making sure that the operation in Georgetown and Jonestown had what they needed to do their jobs. And what they needed primarily was sustainability—food, water, transportation, aluminum shipping caskets, body bags, and banana oil. We sent a lot of banana oil down there.
Jones: What was that for?
Woodhull: Well, they would take a scarf, put it around their face, put a little bit of banana oil in the scarf and it would cover up the stench from the bodies. My understanding from the Rangers whom I talked to when they came back and also our own Air Force fellow crew members that would pick stuff up is that they didn’t get to bag the bodies for quite a while. The FBI was down there. Obviously when a congressman is killed, it’s a big deal and they were conducting an investigation and didn’t want any of the bodies bagged or moved until their investigation was done.
My understanding from talking to my colleagues was that that was a good nine days—eight or nine days.
Jones: You’ve got intense heat and intense humidity.
Woodhull: Yeah. It’s typically over a hundred degrees down there in the shade in Guyana and it has high humidity. And the bodies were becoming very bloated or were bloating up. One of the rangers told me that they pulled a gentleman off of the pile when they got permission to bag the bodies and all of the flesh on his arm came off of the bone. It was a mess. We had one of our aircraft that brought the Rangers back when the whole operation was over and the crew had them—I remember Colonel Butrin was the aircraft commander on that one. He told me that they had the crew stripped down right on the airstrip and they wound up burning all their uniforms and had to put fresh uniforms on. Still the stench of death got into the air conditioning on the C-130. I think the tail number was 0 3 0.
And for literally years after that, when I flew on that aircraft on a hot day and you had the air conditioning running, you could smell death for years. That aircraft was eventually given to Honduras, I believe. They crashed it.
Jones: So most of your involvement then—you go into the airstrip outside Jonestown that first evening and drop off the Special Forces guys. But since we’re here, how would you describe the interaction with the Guyanese? You said there was a little bit of a standoff. What happens in that hour and a half there on the air?
Woodhull: The Guyanese were not going to allow anybody off the aircraft. First of all, they were not expecting us. And it was a shock to them, as it was probably a shock to us to see they were there. We knew that there might be people there. But, we came in and landed on the airstrip with the lights out. They probably had no idea what was going on, and it probably scared them.
There are these Americans with guns and knives and, yeah, looking pretty mean, showing up in Guyana. But eventually, their officials let them know that it’s okay. We were never allowed off the aircraft until the American officials showed up. And then the Rangers left; the combat control team left. We had a Jeep and a trailer with a bunch of CCT equipment on it. Radios and that kind of stuff. We left, and that was that. The combat control team was there to set up the airfield and control it. Eventually some of that team also went over to Georgetown to control the airfield at Georgetown.
Jones: I’ve had the privilege of talking with some of those guys. So then most of your involvement there is in Panama. But you said you did go back to Guyana one more time and that was—
Woodhull: It was to Georgetown. I can’t remember what day it was. It was when they were bagging the bodies and they had a lot of the bodies already over in Georgetown. And we were dropping off fuel bladders and some aluminum shipping caskets. It was probably 9 or 10 days later.
Jones: I’m imagining the smell was pretty—
Woodhull: Yeah, it was pretty—you could smell it in Georgetown, even in the aluminum shipping caskets. The reason why they were putting them in the caskets is because the body bags were not totally sealed. They leak, especially if you have mushy, fleshy, fluidy bodies in them. And that’s where most of the smells come from. So you put them in shipping containers to try to tamp down some of that and to make them stackable.
When you put it on a C-141, the body bags are basically bags. Right? And they’re kind of hard to deal with. Put them in the aluminum shipping container; you can stack them—rack them and stack them, as you say.
Jones: How long were you on the ground in Georgetown?
Woodhull: Combat offload of the pallets because they didn’t really have any MHE equipment there. And then we were gone. We probably weren’t on there more than 30 minutes.
Jones: You’ve got these Special Forces guys who come back who have to burn their uniforms. You’re very much involved in this massive logistics operation. By this time you’re well aware of what Peoples Temple is and Jim Jones and all that stuff?
Woodhull: No, actually we were not. We knew who Jim Jones was from the intelligence brief because we got daily intelligence briefings. We very quickly found out that there were few people alive.
One of our crews actually took some of the survivors from Georgetown. I guess it was up to —I think they took him to Roosevelt Roads in Puerto Rico. I’m not sure.
We really didn’t know deeply who Jim Jones was and his background. We knew he was some kind of crazy preacher that had taken a bunch of people from California basically to this godawful place. It wasn’t until later that we got information about his interaction with the Cubans and the Russians and the other more political kind of things. So we were really kind of ignorant and that’s really a product of the compartmentalization of intelligence. We had the intelligence that we needed to know to do our jobs. But the deeper political kind of stuff, we didn’t get until much, much later.
Jones: So that raises another question then. I was heading to ask you one question, which I’ll come back to. These days, if somebody hears the phrase, like “don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” it’s unlikely they’ll know where that came from. Many of my students have never heard of Jonestown.
What is it like for you when you hear that phrase? Or when you see—I mean, I forget what it was, but something recently going on in the news—there was just a passing reference to Jim Jones. And for the overwhelming majority of people, even those of us who know, who know what that is, that’s an abstraction, because it’s just an idea. It’s something we’ve seen in documentaries, and we’ve read books.
When you hear a reference to Jim Jones, when you hear that phrase, “don’t drink the Kool-Aid,” does it take your mind any place?
Woodhull: Yeah. It does. You have some very good students there because mine don’t have a clue. You ask about Jonestown, and they have no idea, right? But somebody like myself and some of my colleagues, most of whom are now retired, when we hear that kind of stuff, it just brings sadness to me personally. Just bad memories of how stupid humans can be. It’s more that kind of feeling than, “oh my God, I’m going to faint.” It’s more of a sort of an internal uneasiness about the cruelty of humanity and how cruel it can be.
Jones: I don’t want to pry too much, but let’s just say you’re in a meeting and who knows what you’re talking about. Something, whatever is being talked about in the meeting, and then someone just sort of in a joking way, just off the cuff, says, “don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” And of course, no offense meant, it’s just a popular phrase now. But does your demeanor change somewhat at that point? Or what? what happens at that?
Woodhull: No, it kind of rolls off me. I’m probably the only one in the meeting that knows what the phrase means. I’m able to talk about a lot of things that I couldn’t talk about when I was younger. I don’t know if that’s with age or time, distance, or what. But when I hear stuff like that, it gets me thinking back like—that was a bad deal. Got to hope we never do that again.
I’ve been in all kinds of operations from the Vietnam War all the way to the first Gulf War, Haiti, and Panama. Believe it or not, we actually helped the British in the Falklands War. That was an interesting logistics operation too. Of course the first Gulf War was the mother of all logistics operations in my Air Force career.
So I’ve had a lot. I was at the Pentagon from 1991 through 1993, and I was selected because I’m bilingual. I grew up in Cali, Colombia. I was a logistics expert and had a radar expert background, and so I was picked to build two counter-drug sites in Colombia, one in Leticia, Colombia, and one in Arauca in an area they call La Meta.
So I’ve done a lot of things in my 27 some-year Air Force career. This was just one of them. But it was probably the most tragic. In my mind when I think back on it, when people die in war—I’ve had some of my comrades die in war and I’ve had them die in aircraft crashes, and that’s an expectation as part of the job. I still get bothered today when I think back about Jonestown because it didn’t have to happen. It was, to me, an anomaly in human behavior. I am definitely against cults today. I can tell you that because I consider this to be, in retrospect, a cult.
What disturbs me the most is how seemingly intelligent, cognizant people can get drawn in by some charismatic person like Jim Jones. Maybe I’m just different from other humans, but if somebody came up and told me, “hey, we don’t like the situation here. Drink this poison Kool-Aid and kill yourself.” No. My rational brain’s going to say, hell no. You’re going to have to shoot me first. That probably happened in Jonestown too. Who knows?
Jones: One of the things that puzzles me the most is that—you mentioned the hundreds of kids down there—but 900 plus, let’s say maybe 500 would’ve been physically capable of kicking over that one vat. And we only need one person out of 500, roughly 500 people capable of doing it. And that, to me, is just one of the enduring mysteries of this thing.
Woodhull: The compliance of people going to their death. I just don’t understand that. I’m not a psychologist, but I can think back to if people are under the influence of somebody—I’ve actually had this happen in my own family, years later. One of my brother’s daughters fell in with a drug gang in Kansas City. And she was 15 and kept running away from home. She was basically under the influence of these folks, and I helped my brother and another gentleman basically kidnap her from the drug gang on three separate occasions.
Long story short, so you’re not worried about humanity. She eventually turned out great, but during that influential part of her life when she was 15 years old, she was very susceptible to suggestion.
Jones: And as you were involved in these rescue operations, did you—even if this wasn’t at the center of your thinking, was it part of your thinking—the experience in Jonestown? I mean, in addition to the fact that we have a family member here who needs to be rescued, I also have a pretty good personal sense of what can happen if people let themselves be dominated in this way.
Woodhull: I do know the crush for me—the psychological crush for me was when we found out, a day or maybe two days later, that there essentially were few survivors; you could probably count them on one hand. That is what we were told back in Panama. That really was kind of devastating personally to me. It really kind of drove me because now it was a whole different kind of operation. It’s less of a rescue operation now; it’s a humanitarian recovery operation. And the whole mood of not only me but also my colleagues and the entire military shifted almost overnight because a rescue and a recovery are two different things, right?
Jones: You did receive the Humanitarian Service Medal?
Woodhull: I did. I did, along with all my colleagues. It was something that is kind of a sweet and sour kind of thing for me. I have some pride that I was involved in this humanitarian operation, but then when I think about it, there were no winners. In war, you have winners and losers most of the time. Not always. In this kind of thing, there were really no winners.
Jones: Let me ask you this. I’ve got just a couple more questions for you, and then we’ll let you go. I really appreciate you taking the time. I pitched this question to combat veterans and you’ve experienced combat. I mean, your experiences are incredible. You’ve mentioned the Falcons, the Gulf War, Haiti, Panama, Vietnam, and Laos, and now we’re talking about Jonestown. I’ll change the scenario a bit from what I often will pitch to vets. Here’s the pitch. I have a potion that I can give to you, and if you drink this potion, you keep every memory you have of your military service. You keep the Vietnam memories, the Laos memories, the Gulf War memories, et cetera.
With the one exception of Jonestown, all of those memories go. You can get rid of all those memories if you drink the potion. Would you drink the potion?
Woodhull: No, I would not.
Jones: So this is an interesting thing because, with one exception, that’s the answer I get every time, to the extent it’s possible to explain that.
Woodhull: After 27 years in the military and being involved in all kinds of operations and stuff, you kind of harden your brain to many things and you become very comfortable and very confident in yourself. We also are very good at analyzing situations very quickly, and so I would say, okay, why does this guy want me to drink this potion? What’s his agenda and what’s the endgame? We always think about the end game. And so we’re kind of skeptical about things that come out of the blue and we have to analyze them and assess them before we act. We can do that very quickly. And that ability that I honed over 27 years actually came in very handy in my later corporate life. And, very handy in my life in academia. In fact, my colleagues go, “the sky is falling, the sky is falling,” and I go, “no, it’s not.”
Relax. There’s a solution to everything, right? And, Jonestown certainly helped with that, but it was many other things that I experienced in my military career that really brought that ability to assess something and quickly develop a solution to it. The problem with Jonestown was it’s kind of hard to envision a solution to that kind of tragedy.
We can clean up the mess. And we did very effectively. I don’t think any other entity on the planet could have cleaned up Jonestown other than the US military. That’s my assessment. We were the only entity that had the logistics capability, the trained personnel, and the equipment in order to conduct an operation like that. So it very definitely was a military operation. But we’re not into drinking potions.
Jones: I hear you. I think I have two more questions. This is a question that I was going to ask a little bit earlier. It’s referring back to these Special forces guys who show up; they’ve got the stench of death in their uniforms and they burn the uniforms. Obviously you’re talking to these guys; you’re interacting with these guys. These are tough guys; you’re a tough guy.
Looking back, what was your sense of the effect that that whole thing had on these Special Forces guys?
Woodhull: I talked to a couple of them and I have no idea who they are or where they’re at today. It was probably near the end of our oak, and when these guys came back, it seemed their response was that it was awful. Particularly the stench.They had essentially the same kind of attitude that I had developed in that why did this happen and why did these people commit suicide?
You see that even if a family member or a friend commits suicide, you always ask yourself—but he was so stable, why? Why did he commit suicide? I’ve had some of my military friends commit suicide over the years, and I always go back to my brain going, “why didn’t I pick up the cues?”
It’s the same kind of thinking. Particularly with the Rangers, who did a lot of the body bagging and the medics, they didn’t quite understand, A, why this happened and B, they were shocked by the extent. The tragedy: 913 people is a lot of people and a lot of kids.
And probably the only other tragedy that I can think of in my lifetime was probably 9/11, where you have that type of quantity of people. But what I noted, personally, from talking to these people is that they were most shocked by the children. We understand people dying, adults dying. They make their own choices, but 300 some children dead? That still kind of shakes me a little bit today when I think about it too hard. But I know it affected everybody that I knew involved, and it was basically, why the children? Why the children?
Jones: Yeah. I think this is my last question here and it may be a terrible one. So let’s just put together a scenario. You’re in a restaurant or someplace, and then next to you is a woman who’s about the same age—maybe a little bit older—and she’s in the same spot. I guess she’d probably be about 10 years older. You get to chatting, and she discovers that you were part of this operation. You discover that she lost three children down there. When you find that out, or let’s say you find that out before she knows you were part of the operation, what do you suppose you would say to her?
Woodhull: Oh boy, that’s a good question. I could only speculate my response if you don’t mind. And that would be—I’m kind of an empathetic person in one sense. And in other senses I’m not very empathetic. All depends on what the situation is. Situational awareness, right? In this case, you have a tragedy where a woman has lost two or three children, and now I discover it. I find out about it; I’m part of that operation. I would be honest and always be honest to tell her that I was part of that operation and that I am so sorry about your loss. Try to be as empathetic as possible—don’t get into any political discussions, because there was a lot of politics that surrounded this whole thing too.
Just try to be as empathetic as possible. I’ve done this before in other situations where I’ve been part of an operation where somebody has died and I run into their family members. And in some cases, it’s an open subject. In other cases it’s highly classified, and you can show the same empathy; don’t tell me we’re part of the operation. I have the same thing going on with most of my students have no interest in Jonestown. None whatsoever. I’ve only been invited once to talk to a university group about Jonestown and that was years and years ago.
What they want to know is, “what did you do—did you know Pablo Escobar?” They’ve all been watching all these Netflix shows about the counterdrug operations. They are in tune with that. But Jonestown is fading from their memory. That’s why I really appreciate what you folks are doing.
This is so important because this—this is a tragedy that cannot be repeated. Humans are just too smart to be doing this kind of stupid stuff, right? The whole thing, if I could sum it up in just one word, is senseless. This was the one senseless thing in my life.
There was one, I mean, it wasn’t all sad and tears. There were a couple of humorous things that went on in that whole operation too. I remember one of them. The military is sometimes very bureaucratic. And I remember being the ramp tramp down there in Panama. It was a mission going down to Georgetown with an entire aircraft full of fuel bladders. We couldn’t get enough fuel for the helicopters there fast enough, and so they were actually fueling these round bladders. And we had five of them, each on a pallet. And they had to fuel them, and it takes time to put fuel in these huge bladders. And so the Army was busy doing that. And I’m sitting there waiting on these fuel bladders to load them on this aircraft and I remember the aircraft commander for that mission was a friend of mine, Don—but he’s retired as a colonel—and I think he was a major at that time and I was a staff sergeant. But we were pretty good friends and he came out from base ops to say, “we have a takeoff time in 30 minutes. And we’re not loaded yet. What’s going on?” I go, “well, the Army’s still filling the field bladders.” I can’t load what I don’t have. He said, “well, we’re probably going to have to log a late takeoff, and the command post is not going to like that,” because their ratings are based on on-time takeoffs.
So there was this O-6 Colonel, an Air Force Colonel, who was in charge of the entire ramp logistics operation, and he comes out running. I see him coming across a ramp on his bicycle, like the Wicked Witch of the West. And I know he’s going to come out here wanting to know why the aircraft’s not loaded. He’s going to ask me the same question that Major Butrin just asked me. And so this guy gets out here and he goes, “why are these fuel bladders not in his aircraft?” By that time it was like 15 minutes to take off time. And no airplane ready. I go, “well, sir, the Army is still feeling the bladders. I can’t load what I can’t have.” He said, “Well, we’re going to have a late takeoff?” He said, “where’s your aircraft commander?” I said, “he went back into base operations.” “What’s his name?” I said, “Colonel Don Butrin.”
And he goes, “if he comes out here, you tell him I want the crew in the aircraft, I want you to take off, and I want you to fly out and do low approaches for training from the VOR. And then when the fuel bladders show up, that way we can log on-time takeoff. And when the fuel bladders show up, land will zip them on there and you can take off for Georgetown.”
He goes running off. Who am I to tell an O-6? So Colonel Butrin comes back out to the aircraft and I go, “Colonel, we, we got a problem,” or “Major, we got a problem.” There was this colonel who just came out here and wants you to get in the aircraft and go fly training approaches until the fuel better shows up so they can log an on-time takeoff.
And, he looked at me, he kind of smiled, and, pardon my language for this, he said, “we’re not fucking doing that.” And he turned around and walked back into base ops and confronted this colonel, and they never did that. So things got dealt with there. The humor of the bureaucracy sometimes was thickening the air.
Jones: The humor shows up later, but in the immediate term it’s just sort of there. Mark Woodhull, I really appreciate you taking the time to do this.
Contextual Notes