An Interview with Colonel Larry Ropka

By Colonel Paul Harmon, USAF (Retired) Editor, Air Commando Journal

This article first appeared in print in the Air Commando Journal Vol. 10 /3

Celebrating our newest members of the Air Commando Hall of Fame, and to honor all past inductees, I thought it would be interesting to speak with Colonel Larry Ropka, USAF (Retired) who, along with 19 other Air Commandos, was inducted into the first Hall of Fame — Class of 1969. Larry enlisted in the USAF in 1952 and over time rose through the ranks, retired as a colonel and served as the former Principal Deputy to Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. Colonel Ropka participated in a wide range of Air Commando operations and deployments in Southeast Asia and elsewhere, played a significant role in planning Operation Kingpin (Son Tay Raid), as well as having a part in the creation of US Special Operations Command.

Let’s start at the beginning, where you are from and what led you to the Air Force?
I grew up near Lancaster, PA, but upfront I have to say that I describe my military career with the words providence and serendipity…either a lot of providence or a truck load of serendipity…I had little to do with it. My father was in the trucking business with two semi-trailers and a dump truck. He assembled these from parts in salvage yards with me at 12-years old cleaning the parts and handing him wrenches. Later when I was 15, dad became ill and I took over all of the maintenance.
I was a terrible student in high school, but went to college and did no better. I grew up during the war and became fascinated with airplanes. I would make models out of wooden cigar boxes using a coping saw. After the war, I hung out at a small airstrip where an instructor pilot with two Piper Cubs was providing free pilot training to veterans. He would take me for short rides if I wiped down windshields and pumped gas all day.
I mercifully dropped out of college after one year. Dad closed the trucking business, so I applied for a job at nearby Olmstead AFB. I was excited about working on “clean” airplanes rather than filthy, greasy trucks, but I was assigned to the vehicle overhaul depot working on greasy trucks.

Can you tell our readers a little bit about your early military career?
In 1952, the military draft was breathing down my neck. There were road signs promoting “Join the Air Force and See the World,” so I enlisted and went to Sampson AFB, NY, for basic training. Just before graduation the cadre asked for volunteers for flying training. I jumped at it. After a week of testing, I scored high for pilot, and ok for navigator training, but during my flight physical the doctors found a minor astigmatism in one eye and I was sent to the navigator program. I was disappointed, but after graduating basic training I visited an aunt near home whose neighbor was a Military Air Transport Service (MATS, now AMC) navigator. His tales of flying all over the world, eating great food, and seeing the sites warmed my desire for the program.

I waited for navigator training for six months at Ellington AFB near Houston, TX. During that time, I was a mechanic on C-47 aircraft, finally getting what I wanted in the first place. I enjoyed it so much that I threatened to withdraw from the cadet program, but a wise chief mechanic I worked with would not allow me to quit.
I attended the first-ever 12-week preflight training program for navigators at Lackland AFB. It was hell. Our upper class were pilot trainees who were angry at being held over six weeks to train us navigators. Probably the most severe hazing in cadet history.
I finally went to navigator training at Harlingen AFB, TX, in 1953. For the year prior to graduation in 1954, there were no MATS assignments available. I mysteriously graduated first in my class and grabbed one of the two slots offered that year. I was also offered a regular commission, a prize in those days, but stupidly, I turned it down as I would for 18 more years. I was having fun and not thinking about a career.
After graduation I was assigned to a C-54 squadron at Kelly AFB, TX. At that time, MATS was being reorganized from three geographical divisions into a single Military Airlift Command. The European, North African, Pacific, and South American routes were 12 hours long at 185 knots and over the course of 3 years, I flew 3,000 hours moving quickly to instructor and then flight examiner.
In 1957, I was determined to get out again, but my squadron commander convinced me to stay. He told me he had a close friend in Misawa, Japan, who commanded an Air-Sea Rescue squadron flying the SA-16 Albatross amphibians and he needed a chief navigator. He told me I was perfect for the job and would have a lot of fun, so I went.
The week I arrived in Misawa, the Air Force deactivated the squadron. I spent a long summer splashing around the local lakes with the Albatross pilots and performed a real search or two in the Pacific, but the main activity was attending weekly going away parties; almost everyone transferred, except me. In the fall, I received orders to Kadena AB on Okinawa. At the same time, we received orders to transfer an SA-16 to Kadena. We flew it down, arriving on a Friday. I checked in to the personnel office on Monday and handed my file to a sergeant who opened it and murmured to a nearby associate, “Not another d–mn navigator!” He handed me a paper showing units that had navigators and said, “Go find a job.”
The pickings were slim, but I was attracted to a weird unit, the 322nd Troop Carrier Squadron (Medium, Special). It was a remnant of the 581st Air Resupply & Communications Wing (ARCW). During the Korean war era, the ARCWs were special operations and PSYOP wings. The squadron had two C-54s, one C-118, and the just delivered SA-16.
The unit had 10 navigators, mostly older or just out of training. The commander welcomed me and I was quickly asked by two C-118 pilots to plan missions and fly with them. The pace quickly picked up, but there was a shroud of secrecy around the missions we flew. We had controlled estimated times of arrival or ETAs that the pilots insisted be precise. We flew somewhat James Bondish landings at night into unfamiliar airports in the region, picking up or dropping off people. The security was so tight it was almost a year before I caught on we were working for the “Company.”
A few months later, an Air Force colonel arrived and flew with us to Clark Field in the Philippines where we began the process of cleaning the markings off our C-118. I was taken to a safe house nearby and given charts from Thailand to central Tibet. The colonel also had weather data from Air Force Weather Center and I was instructed to plan a route from Clark to Takhli, Thailand.
Next a Civil Air Transport (CAT) crew appeared; some pilots had over 35,000 flying hours. The plane was loaded with parachute-rigged pallets of arms, ammunition, and supplies. I prepared the flight plan and briefed the crews to take advantage of the full moon phase because the only means of navigation was visual. They refueled in Thailand and flew hours to a drop zone, deep in Tibet, over 30,000 foot mountains, with the cargo door off so the pallets could be airdropped. The crew would return for refueling and head home. This was the first of a series of missions that quickly expanded, flying several times each moon cycle during the dry season.
In 1958 or 1959, we started using new C-130As on loan from the 21st Tactical Airlift Squadron because they had better lift and range capabilities than the C-118s. I did all the flight planning. They would depart Takhli and head to Dacca, East Pakistan, (now Bangladesh). The CAT crews would then fly over the Himalayas, drop guerrillas or supplies into occupied Tibet, and return to Dacca for fuel and head home. They departed at last light and returned after sun-up the next morning. The missions were very successful.

At what point in your career did you meet Heinie Aderholt?
In 1958, a crew and I flew to Baltimore to pick up a C-118 that had been overhauled. The repair facility messed up the aircraft wiring a few days before we arrived, so we hung out in our Washington, DC, hotel for six weeks until it was fixed. While we were gone Heinie Aderholt assumed command of our unit, which had been renamed the 1045th Operational Evaluation &

Training Group. Heinie met us on the ramp when we landed and gave us a week off. A week later I went to the officers club to get a newspaper. Heinie came flying out the door asking, “You work for me, don’t you?” I said, “I think so.” He said come to my office. There he explained that we were given a mission and he wanted to write an operations plan. He had worked as a plans officer in Europe and knew the format and process well. He dictated from about 2:00 to 8:00PM. I almost filled a yellow tablet. Real fear grew in me that I could ever get such a document printed and I asked him when he needed it. He responded, “Just put it in the safe.” I asked, “Why did we do it?” He said, “Now there are two SOBs that know what we are going to do.” With that, unwittingly, I became his right-hand man. He tasked me with most of the provisioning for our operations from bare bases as well the mission planning. I never forgot the experience.
We were still flying the Tibet missions two weeks a month and I still didn’t know it was a Company operation. One day a guy came up to me and said I needed to go to Tokyo. I asked why and he said I’d find out when I got there. He gave me an address in the fancy part of town and when I arrived I was told I needed a higher security clearance. This was the first time I knew I was working for the Company!
About a month after we got those special missions going, Heinie went to Vientiane, Laos, to meet with Ambassador Bill Sullivan and assess the situation. The war in Southeast Asia was just beginning in Laos and the Company had elements of Air America and other contract airlines flying to support General Vang Pao from Laos.
Heinie captivated Ambassador Sullivan and General Vang Pao and he knew they needed a short takeoff and landing (STOL) airplane to work operations supporting the Hmong in northern Laos. “I wanted a plane that could fly into airfields built by natives … with shovels,” said Heinie, and in 1962 he got several U-10 Helio Couriers. He flew a demonstration for the Company and then developed leaflets with picture instructions. Whenever Vang Pao wanted to talk with his people, the U-10s would drop the instructions and the Hmong would cut out a flat, 300-foot strip, so the U-10s could land and Vang Pao would give instructions to his people and forces. This is what opened Laos.
I went to Vientiane for a time to help organize the operations and Heinie wasn’t there six months when he told the Company headquarters they needed better airlift. So they got rid of the C-46s and brought the C-123s on board. Heinie also convinced them they needed B-26s, so those were brought in as well.
Sometime later, Heine directed Ed Smith and me to go back to Laos to straighten the place out. They really had some issues: no orders, no rescue plans, no safety…nothing. So Ed, a survival expert named, Bob Weaver, and I went to Vientiane to sort things out.
While we were there, Heinie would go out to the airport and see four aircraft taking off with three of them going to the same place…he hated waste. Ed and I spoke to the customers and had a meeting every evening to issue instructions for where each of the aircraft were supposed to go with their loads. We created dispatchers and put safety processes in place. The operation was working well, and at the end of nearly three months Heinie comes in and says he is taking Ed and told me to stay there. I protested because there was so much work to do to maintain the system we’d just established. Heinie said they were going to Saigon because there was a war starting there. Ed went and started the program inserting agents into North Vietnam using the C-47s.

When did you go to Company Headquarters, and what did you do?
I got to Kadena AB in 1957 and. Heinie arrived in 1958 and by 1961, Heinie told me I was going to Washington, DC. He never asked me, but he convinced the Company to take me on board. My guess it was to help him implement his vision for special air support.
I was the Company desk officer for all of Southeast Asia, except for CAT and Air America. The head of the office was an Air Force reconnaissance officer. He was focused on larger high-tech projects and didn’t care much about my programs in Tibet, North Vietnam, and elsewhere. He gave me free rein including dealing directly with higher ups. My principal was Richard Bissell, Deputy Director of Operations. He took blame for the 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster, though it was not his fault. My job was to select drop zones and approximate safe routes for overflights. Bissell would then get approval from the White House. He reveled in detail and would challenge every change I made each month. My 15-minutes briefings often turned into an hour.
Keeping up with Heinie’s requests was almost a full-time job. They needed a heavier STOL aircraft, so I initiated the purchase of two Dornier DO-28 twin engine planes for STOL and other potential operations where they needed a mid-sized transport. One fiscal year our branch was offered a sizable sum of money. I had been following the On Mark Corporation’s conversion of B-26s to executive transports by installing a ring spar freeing the bomb bay area for either passengers or cargo. I initiated purchase of two aircraft adding terrain following radar, doppler navigation, and a rear ramp. We had them painted similar to other executive aircraft and provided decals consistent with the cover story being used.
I really enjoyed the job. I worked extensively with the ground officers, some from the World War II OSS days, and I learned a lot about cover and deception. My office had no documentation whatsoever about how clandestine or covert air operations should be run. So starting in my second year, from experience and research, I created a 12-chapter document covering most of the important features that might be used.
With all this is going on, Ed continued working the missions with the C-47s and we got word that the North Vietnamese Army was monitoring our operations. When they saw a C-47 land at Da Nang AB, South Vietnam, they knew something was up. I decided that we needed something with longer legs so we didn’t have to stop in Da Nang. The company had given the C-54s to Air America and I went to get one back. I had to buy it back for $300,000 and then I had it modified with a doppler navigation system and a roller map that helped to accurately navigate into North Vietnam. After we got the airplane all fixed and the crews trained, it took off and was never seen again.
The insertions into North Vietnam were going badly. I spent a lot of time doing the route planning for those missions and cleared them with Bissell. Unfortunately, the agents were getting rolled up very quickly after we inserted them and we weren’t getting any mileage out of them. We had a meeting at the “Farm,” and concluded we were putting people with the wrong dialects into the wrong places. I tasked them to find someone from North Vietnam and we inserted him about 20 miles from his home. He hiked to a place where he could observe his village. He saw his mother going to the river, and we cleared him to make contact. She immediately turned him in to authorities. As a result, we scrubbed all future missions.
Working with the company was great fun and I was tempted to stay there, but Heinie was hammering on me to bring the Company’s tradecraft to the Air Commandos.

How long were you with the Company in DC?
I left DC in 1964. Heinie brought me to Hurlburt Field and put me in the Special Air Warfare Center’s (SAWC) Combat Applications Group (CAG), mainly to teach the Company’s tradecraft in accurate aerial delivery using beacons and all sorts of other gear. Heinie put me in with Joe Kittinger and we became a great team. Heinie gave us the job of redoing the capability demonstrations for senior officers and government officials. The demonstrations showed off special air operations: short field landings, aerial delivery, etc. During the day we had the planes flying up to 18 events with exact times on target; we never had a total deviation of more than 120 seconds. At night, we would take the visitors to the Eglin AFB range, land them in the dark with no lights, and then put them in stands and start the firepower demonstration, which was always fantastic.
Heinie moved me into the SAWC headquarters in the plans shop and I got involved in picking people for the military training teams (MTT) going into other countries and worked exercise plans. We had many exercises at Ft Bragg and a monster exercise in Missouri that started with a counterinsurgency and ended with a full-scale invasion, including the first dirt landing of a C-5A.

While I was in plans, General Cardenas took command of SAWC and said we had to codify what special air operations is and does. After a slow start, and struggling for six weeks, we wrote a document that described who we were and what we did, with an outline of a training program, and a personnel selection program…essentially doctrine.
During this time the wing moved to England AFB in Louisiana. The school stayed at Hurlburt, but the operational parts went to Louisiana. I moved, as well, and flew the B-26. I was put in the plans office again and told to put a plan together for taking a unit, to be called the 606th Air Commando Squadron, to Nakhon Phanom (NKP) in Thailand for a counterinsurgency mission. We built the plan and deployed.
When we arrived at NKP in late 1966, we went over to Udorn, Thailand, and spent the day with the 7/13th AF staff. The commander, General Bond, had been in charge of the big exercise we did in Missouri. When we went in to meet the general and let him know we were there, he asked, “What are you going to do?” He said no one told him we were coming or what our mission was. We had put a whole squadron together, trained, deployed, and didn’t have a mission.
General Bond told us to go back to NKP and figure out what we were going to do, and come back to tell him. Our unit had U-10s, helicopters, and other fixed-wing aircraft. So we developed a plan and a briefing and went back to see Bond. After the briefing, the general told my boss he needed to know what we were doing and wanted someone to stay at the 7/13th AF headquarters to keep him informed; that was me. At the time, 7/13th AF had nine CH-3 helicopters to support various missions, so he tasked me to schedule their operations.

You were there six months, where did you go from there?
I went back to Hurlburt, but six months later I got orders to the Pentagon. I was assigned to Special Plans and Policy working for Brig Gen Jim Allen on the Air Staff. The office was responsible for virtually all special operations matters including all support to the Company. There was no coherent special operations documentation in DOD at that time; nothing but fragments from past wars. The vacuum precipitated conflicts between the Services that generated many issues, such as roles and missions that had to be resolved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Action officers in the Services were given issues to research and to produce a “package” containing everything that could be found on the issue. These were often an inch thick and would be reduced to about 20 pages containing possible and recommended courses of action. These were further reduced to 2-3 page “talking papers.” Action officers personally briefed the issues up the chain of command to their Service’s Chief of Staff. The process could be slow and arduous. I had been through the process more than a dozen times and I got to see General Allen regularly and then the POW rescue mission came along.

Can you give us some first-hand insight into the initial concept and planning for the Son Tay Raid?
This was early 1970 and there were some high-level discussions about POWs. General Allen told me, a major at the time, to go see General Blackburn and tell him what I thought. Blackburn was the Chairman’s Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities (SACSA). I went to see him and he introduced his intelligence people who were tracking the POWs. They gave me and a few others briefings and when it was done General Blackburn said, “Your job is to get some of these POWs out…and I pledge that there is nothing in this building, nothing in this Department of Defense, nothing in this country that I won’t get for you and support you to do it.” That was Friday and he told us to go and think about it and come back Monday and tell him where to start.
I went back to see General Allen and explained what Blackburn wanted to do. I said, “I’m afraid of it.” I knew it had to be helicopters and it was a long way over rugged mountains. General Allen looked at me, gave me a pat on the shoulder, and said, “Larry, go down there and give it a few weeks and if you come back and tell me it is a No-Go, I’ll support you.”
So I did. I went down to General Blackburn’s office and he said, “Okay, what are we going to do?” CRICKETS! Warner Britton, an Air Force helicopter pilot, was there, some intel people, three Army guys, and Ted Grabowsky, a Navy SEAL. I said the first thing we needed to do was get out of the building because there were always leaks. Blackburn found us space at Ft Myer, near the Pentagon, and the next day we started with only five or six weeks before the first briefing to the JCS to show a proof of concept.
We got to work and within two days we had the general scheme thanks to Britton and Grabowsky. Warner had such gravitas that he would tell you something and you knew he was right. We set a time of 60 seconds to get control of the compound, but after some wargaming we realized we needed a creative, inside-out, solution. Finally, Grabowsky said, “Just land in the f-ing compound.” I wanted to use the fast rope system that had recently been developed. Grabowsky had had two helicopters shot down on top of him, so he said absolutely not and that opened the door to other planning.
I didn’t think there was enough room to land a helicopter in the compound because we had pictures and it looked small. We asked the intel guys to figure out the actual size of the compound and discovered landing would work. This was really making me anxious and I asked Warner if the helicopter could fly that far and land in the compound? He said, “Yes.”
One last point about General Blackburn. After we got to Ft Myer, he never checked in on us. The day of the first briefing to the Chairman and the Chiefs of Staff, Blackburn shows up about 20 minutes before we were supposed to start. All we had was a pile of yellow tablet pages and a couple of hand-drawn transparencies for an overhead projector. Blackburn comes in a says, “Are we ready to go?” We gave him a very quick update and then we went to the Chairman’s briefing room. He trusted us completely and I never forgot that.

What did you do after the fanfare of the Raid died down?
Around 1973, I was still on the Air Staff and Dick Secord was on the Company’s Southeast Asia desk. Dick was working with a guy named Erich Von Marbod, a civilian and a comptroller in the Defense Security Assistance Agency. Von Marbod asked Secord for help in getting an Air Commando assigned as his special assistant. Col Johnny Johnson, an AC-47 guy, was selected.
The Southeast Asia team was watching messages go back and forth and saw that nothing was being done to help the Cambodians. Dick said we can help them and he mentioned it to Von Marbod. Dick nominated me to go to Cambodia to see if and how the US could help. As a result, Jerry Klingaman, Johnny Johnson, and I went to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to make an assessment. Our report went to Von Marbod, who gave it to Secretary of Defense (SECDEF) James Schlesinger. He took it to the Chairman and one day, SECDEF tells Von Marbod to execute the recommendations in our report. They pulled me out of my Air Staff job and I was on my way back to Cambodia.
Five months go by and I got a call from Von Marbod to come home. Schlesinger had picked Von Marbod to be his Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary. Senator John Stennis told Schlesinger he was tired of yahoos from DOD giving him disconnected stories about where we were in Vietnam. He demanded that one person tell the story or he wouldn’t support further funding. Schlesinger selected Von Marbod and Erich chose me to be his deputy. Von Marbod established a small office of four, led by me, to research and prepare all of his testimony on the Hill. Von Marbod would go visit the field units to gather information, but he couldn’t get anything out of the Navy. So he told me to go out there and don’t come home until I had information. I demanded we get access to the Navy bases in Saigon and elsewhere in Vietnam.
When we got over there the Navy gave us a car and driver. The escort told me everything I wanted to know about the Navy. That guy was Richard Armitage. He was a Naval Academy graduate with three tours in Vietnam as a riverine advisor. He wanted to extend, but the Navy wouldn’t let him, and so he resigned from the Navy, went ashore, and worked on the Phoenix program as a civilian. Rich spoke flawless Vietnamese and was greatly respected by his Vietnamese Navy counterparts. I went home singing his praises and the next time Von Marbod traveled to Vietnam he hired Armitage on the spot.
At the same time, Dick Secord was telling Erich stories about Heine, who was now retired, so Erich wanted to meet him. Erich went to Florida and met Heinie, and it was a love affair. Erich was one of the most powerful bureaucrats in Washington and his weapon was people. I spent a lot of time finding people to come work for Von Marbod. Sure enough, Erich pulled some strings and got Heinie recalled back to active duty as a colonel and sent him to Thailand as the Deputy Chief of the Military Advisory & Assistance Group (MAAG). We were all there, in Thailand or offshore South Vietnam in April 1975 when Saigon fell and the war ended.

Okay, now the war is over and you’ve been involved with it from the beginning. What was your next job?
After we did all that and returned home, Erich decided that he was tired of the Pentagon and found a position in Iran. He said I was going with him. I worked with the State Department to get him an office and household, and I joined him in Iran.
Erich spent a year in Iran and was ready to come home. The Shah had a very secret signals intelligence program for C-130s and he wanted two or three Boeing 707s with similar capabilities. It was a multi-billion-dollar program. The Company’s technical support division only had engineers, unfamiliar with operational work, so Erich asked me to go there and be the deputy. The job was at the Company headquarters. I helped negotiate hundred-million-dollar contracts for air integration of the system with air and ground capabilities, but as the Shah’s troubles mounted, the Company shut down its support.
On 1 January 1979, President Carter officially recognized Communist China in Beijing and severed official diplomatic ties with the Republic of China in Taipei. The US created the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) to replace the US MAAG in Taipei. Dick Secord told me an individual had already turned the new job down and asked me to find someone with east Asian experience willing to go. I went home and told my wife to pack our bags. I retired from the Air Force in 1979 and went to Taiwan as a civilian. I worked all the issues of a traditional MAAG. The MAAG had had nearly 1,000 people who all went away overnight. So we worked all the Taiwanese equipment, airplanes, and associated defense requirements under the auspices of the AIT.
When we came back from Taiwan in 1983, we bought a boat and went cruising. We sailed the west coast of Florida and the Bahamas for a while and things were going along pretty well for three years. We were six weeks from finishing building our home in Florida when Rich Armitage, now an Assistant Secretary of Defense-International Security Affairs (ISA), calls me and asks me to come back and work for him. I said no.
Rich was persistent and he called me three times asking to please talk with him. I finally said okay and went up to DC. I got a call at the hotel saying that he couldn’t make our 0800 meeting and that I should go have breakfast with Jim Kelly, who had worked with us years before. Jim was now in the White House on the National Security Council. Rich said to meet with him for breakfast in the White House. When I got to the gate they said, “Welcome Mr. Ropka,” and took me in. That was an excellent psychological operation.
After breakfast I went to Rich’s office where he made his pitch. The “SOF Mafia,” a group of respected generals and civilians, was very upset about Desert One, Grenada, and other screw ups and had formed a group to fix US special operations. Rich wanted me to be his new Deputy Secretary for Special Operations. I agreed and six weeks later I was back.
When I arrived, he told me he failed to get the new position, but his Principal Deputy had just left and told me I would fill that position in the plush office across the hall. I was stunned. The other deputies had degrees from Yale and all the big schools and I barely had a high school diploma. He said the SOF Mafia wanted to take special operations out of the Services and create a national special operations agency.

What did you do?
I went over to Capitol Hill and met Senators Sam Nunn and Bill Cohen, but I worked mainly with their assistants. Jim Locher was Nunn’s special assistant and Lynn Rylander was my deputy and leader for the Air Force part.

The SOF Mafia was a determine bunch; about a dozen generals. One day I got a call and was asked to attend a meeting in Rosslyn VA. I went and there were four generals, a four-star, two three-stars, and a two-star, the conversation was ugly and they made strong threats, in various forms, on my life. My work with Senators Cohen and Nunn was getting in the way of their grand scheme to take special operations out of the Services and create its own agency, similar to the CIA. My assessment was that it was an unworkable solution. Considering just the support infrastructure needed for a new, independent agency was an exorbitant cost and the Services were already providing it.
When the Nunn-Cohen legislation was passed in 1986, Armitage was tasked with the implementation. He immediately assigned the responsibility to me and my eight-person staff. I hired an additional eight well-experienced special operators, and we began the process of translating the spirit and intent of Nunn-Cohen into the organization and structure of USSOCOM and the supporting elements. We did this in brainstorming sessions with everyone contributing ideas and we adopted the best.
In special operations we say it’s all about the people. You need a large pyramid of good special operators, not unlike the super case officers, the Heinie Aderholts, and the others who I worked with over the years. These individuals make up about three percent of the people in the five Services. You need to create that pyramid of top people to sift through and find the others to fill in the ranks. I saw all sorts of problems with the SOF Mafia’s approach and in the end, the SECDEF agreed to the Nunn-Cohen Amendment that gave us USSOCOM, AFSOC, and all the rest of what we now know today as US SOF.
One last point, additional to working the legislation, I kept up with the ISA staff activities and covered for Rich in his absences. He also made me the DOD representative on the Interagency Counterterrorism Task Force. This was a very active period with scheduled, weekly meetings and full-time attendance during multiple incidents around the world where special operations played a roll. I felt my experience came in handy during many of these crises. I worked it all and was Armitage’s deputy in every sense of the word.

When did you finally retire?
I retired in 1989 and my wife and I came back to Florida to live in the house we built. We took an old 42-foot lobster boat, just the hull, and spent six years outfitting it making real nice and comfortable. We spent five summers cruising from here up to the Chesapeake and up near Canada. It was wonderful.

Listening to you talk about your career was fascinating. If you wrote a book about your career, what would the title be?
My Thirty-Year Journey in the Shadow of Special Operations Giants. Heinie Aderholt, Richard Bissell, Richard Armitage, Jim Allen, and Don Blackburn were just a few of those giants.

Finally, do you have any thoughts that you’d like to pass on to the next generation of Air Commandos?
I firmly believe that the best, if not only hope, we have of thwarting China and Russia’s obvious intentions to split off friendly weak states around the world is to give those states a reason to stick with us. And I believe that can be done affordably, but only with an imaginative, flexible, and responsive blend of innovative people who use the aircraft they have in ways unexpected by the adversaries, and lead by courageous leaders who trust their people and manage the risk inherent in special operations. That spells SOF.

Thank you, Larry, for sharing your story with our Air Commando Journal readers.

To read Colonel Ropka’s full account, purchase his book from Air Commando Press

Consider donating to the Air Commando Association to support our war fighters. Every donation counts!