Richard Nixon didn't want you to know about Marcel Morneau of Springfield Township.

        It was 31 years ago this summer when the 37th president of the United States, locked in a battle with Congress over his plan to expand an increasingly unpopular war in Southeast Asia, ordered young Staff Sgt. Morneau and hundreds of his Air Force buddies to launch a dangerous air campaign aimed at helping anti-communist forces in Cambodia.

Marcel Morneau of Springfield Township with a portrait of him as one of the Rustics, (Craig Ruttle photo) | ZOOM |

        It was an air campaign by a group of men who called themselves “The Rustics.”

        The top-secret operation stayed hidden from the public for decades until it was declassified four years ago.

        “Tricky Dick said we didn't exist,” Mr. Morneau said, smiling, as he sat in the living room of his Springfield Township home, near a framed oil painting of himself in 1972 as a young “Rustic.”

        “But we did exist. Boy, did we exist.”
       

Call for French speakers

        Mr. Morneau was 28 when he joined the Rustic operation in July 1971.

        The Air Force sergeant was there for a simple reason: He was a Quebec native who had become an American citizen and who spoke fluent French.

        In early 1971, the Air Force command put out a worldwide call for French-speaking volunteers for a new, classified operation.

        It was an operation aimed at preventing the officially neutral nation of Cambodia, South Vietnam's neighbor, from being overrun by the communist Khmer Rouge.

An OV-10 reconnaissance plane like the one in which Mr. Morneau was a “back-seater.” | ZOOM |

        But it was not a good time to be expanding the war in Southeast Asia. At least not publicly.

        Congress had passed the Cooper-Church Amendment the previous year, banning further troop commitments and, specifically, air campaigns in Cambodia.

        The incursion of ground troops ordered by Mr. Nixon in the spring of 1970 nearly tore America apart, sparking massive protests on college campuses nationwide — including Kent State in Ohio, where four young people were shot and killed by National Guardsmen.

        So the Nixon administration decided the air campaign in Cambodia had to be completely secret.

        The Air Force had plenty of pilots for the ungainly-looking, two-man OV-10 reconnaissance planes it planned to fly over Cambodia. But it needed French-speaking “back-seaters” to fly the missions and communicate with the anti-communist Cambodian commanders on the ground.

        “They told us this was completely voluntary, but they said that if we decided not to do it, we had never heard about it and were to keep our mouths shut,” Mr. Morneau said.

        But the young sergeant liked the challenge and wanted more than anything to fly. So he signed up for an intense training course in air flight control, evading the enemy and jungle survival.

        Not even his then-fiancee Denise, who also was from Quebec, knew what he was doing. They later married.

        “I had no idea, until a couple of years ago, when we went to the first Rustic reunion,” Mrs. Morneau said. “I'm sort of glad I didn't.”
       

A "Rustic' back-seater

        Soon after the training, Mr. Morneau was flying in the back of an OV-10 as it swooped low over the Cambodian countryside, looking for Khmer Rouge and reporting to troops on the ground.

        Often, the flights were made through a hail of anti-aircraft fire from the ground.

        “We tried to stay over 3,000 feet to keep from getting hit,” he said. “But sometimes you had to drop right into the middle of it.”

        The Rustic “back-seater” sat in a bubble at the rear of the plane that gave him a 270-degree field of vision.

        “I could usually see much more than what the pilot could,” Mr. Morneau said.

        Sometimes, Mr. Morneau said, he spotted Khmer Rouge mortar installations on the ground and he called the air command. It sent in fighters from aircraft carriers or bombers from Southeast Asia air bases to take out the enemy positions.

        “Our main mission was to help the Cambodian troops on the ground, who were trying to keep the provincial capitals from falling to the communists,” Mr. Morneau said. “We knew that if the provincial capitals fell, it would just be a matter of time until Phnom Penh (the national capital) fell.”

        Eventually, that is exactly what happened.
       

Pol Pot death toll: 1.7 million

        The U.S. air support in Cambodia continued until August 1973 — seven months after U.S. combat had come to a halt in Vietnam.

        In 1975, with the Rustics and the U.S. Air Force long gone, Cambodia fell under the communist control of the brutal dictator Pol Pot.

        After four years of genocidal slaughter by the Pol Pot regime, 1.7 million Cambodians were dead.

        “Essentially, a whole generation of people was lost in that country,” Mr. Morneau said. “I often wonder if it would have happened that way had the U.S. not pulled out of Southeast Asia. It's hard to say.”

        Most Rustics, Mr. Morneau said, feel the same way. It is one reason their national association supports an orphanage in Cambodia.

        Until recently, Mr. Morneau and his fellow Rustics could not talk about their mission in the early 1970s. Many were awarded service medals but they could not talk about what they did to get them while the operation was still classified.

        After leaving the Air Force in 1984 as a master sergeant, Mr. Morneau moved his family to Cincinnati and went to work for General Electric.

        Mr. Morneau had been recommended for a Distinguished Flying Cross for his Rustic work, but did not receive it until recently when fellow Rustic Don Mercer of Virginia Beach, Va., organized a campaign to get Mr. Morneau and other “back-seaters” the recognition they were due.

        “I remember coming home in '72 through the airport in San Francisco and having people throw rotten eggs and tomatoes at us just because we were in uniform,” Mr. Morneau said.

        “But we were just young men doing our job. Just like there are young soldiers and sailors doing their jobs today.”
       

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