Special Forces legend, 91
Michael D. Healy, an Army major general and highly decorated counterinsurgency expert who retired as the topranking Green Beret and a legend in the Special Forces, died April 14 at a hospital in Jacksonville. He was 91.
He suffered a heart attack, said his wife, Jacklyn Healy. He had previously undergone two bypass surgeries, and for years wore dog tags that boasted an epithet to ridicule death which he had evaded in combat during the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Gen. Healy bore scars on his neck, face, arms, legs and stomach, many of them from covert operations in which he parachuted into remote villages or trekked behind enemy lines in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The details of nearly all his operations, which took him from Cold War Germany to lucrative oil fields in the Middle East, remain shrouded in secrecy. But his brilliance as a counterinsurgency expert was evident in a career that saw him become the first Green Beret to achieve the rank of general.
"There was always one thing about Healy," the novelist and war chronicler James Jones wrote in "Viet Journal," his 1974 book about the last months of the Vietnam War. "You knew his aggressive physical courage was monumental, and that his nerves were absolute steel."
The son of a Chicago police officer, Gen. Healy enlisted in the Army at the close of World War II. He commanded a Ranger company during the Korean War and became known as "Iron Mike" for dodging enemy machine-gun fire while leading an assault on a hill.
Healy joined the Special Forces in 1953, one year after the unit was formally created, and led guerrilla attacks during the Vietnam War that made him an inspiration for John Wayne's character in a patriotic 1968 movie about the conflict, "The Green Berets."
He arrived in South Vietnam in 1963, as the United States began expanding the number of military advisers in the country, and served five tours for a total of eight years - a remarkable duration for a soldier of his rank, said Keith Nightingale, a retired Army colonel who served with airborne and Ranger units in Vietnam. "There were probably very few people who understood the war and its issues better than he," Nightingale wrote in an email.
Gen. Healy initially served as the operations officer and senior American adviser to Vietnamese Special Forces, organizing and commanding a battalionsize mercenary unit that bore his name: The Mike Force, short for mobile guerrilla strike force. Mike Forces used indigenous fighters and deployed in hot spots across Vietnam, where they were sometimes outnumbered 4 to 1 by enemy troops.
He was named commander of Special Forces in Vietnam in 1970, in the aftermath of what Time magazine described as "a Vietnam War scandal second only to the My Lai killings," when U.S. troops massacred 500 unarmed civilians.
The incident, known as the Green Beret affair, centered on the killing of an alleged Vietnamese double agent, who was taken into custody by the Green Berets and killed at sea.
The slaying became a national sensation when the Green Beret's commander, Robert B. Rheault, was arrested and charged with murder and conspiracy. The charges against Rheault and seven other Green Berets were dismissed, but resulted in Healy's taking over the Green Berets at a time when Creighton Abrams, the general overseeing U.S. military operations in Vietnam, was said to be fed up with the unit.
Healy "was able to resurrect [Special Forces] in Abrams' view," Nightingale said, and effectively brought them "back into the Army" during his nearly 20-month tenure as the unit's commander in Vietnam.