SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (KEYT) – As part of Your News Channel's coverage of this year's Memorial Day events, we sat down with a man working to get the recognition he and those who served alongside him, earned during a clandestine mission over officially neutral Laos in October of 1969.
Then-Major Philip J. Conran receiving the Air Force Cross in May of 1970 for his meritorious actions the previous year in Laos.After achieving independence from France in 1953, landlocked Laos descended into a chaotic civil war that had international implications.
One of the first priorities of the incoming Kennedy Administration was to negotiate with the Soviet Union to officially designate Laos as a neutral nation. A marked change from the direct confrontation in the Korean War.
While the Kennedy Administration successfully negotiated just such an agreement with its Cold War adversary, unofficial military support for anti-Communist forces continued through the decade.
In November of 1968, Air Force pilot Philip Conran found himself assigned to the 21st Special Operations Squadron flying out of Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base in northeast Thailand, just miles away from the border with officially neutral Laos, flying secret missions in support of the Laotian fighters.
Four A-1 Skyraiders based out of Nakhon Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base and a Lockheed HC-130P Hercules refueling a Sikorsky HH-3E helicopter above the Mekong River on the border between Laos and Thailand in 1968. Image courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.On the final mission of his deployment, then-Major Conran was shot down while attempting to recover a downed helicopter with his commanding officer inside.
After crash landing his own helicopter and organizing a multi-hour defense against a far larger force, he was eventually rescued and recommended for the Congressional Medal of Honor, the highest award U.S. service members can receive.
Unfortunately, the clandestine nature of the operations and official diplomatic status of Laos meant that his heroic actions could not be enshrined by awarding him the Medal of Honor and he was instead issued an Air Force Cross for his actions.
"Then-Major Philip J. Conran’s Medal of Honor recommendation, submitted in 1969 and downgraded without explanation, was likely denied not due to a lack of valor but rather due to the policy suppression of U.S. operations in Laos, USAF [U.S. Air Force] institutional norms, and a covert context that discouraged public recognition," explained Thomas Briggs, retired CIA agent and President of non-profit group Coalition of Allied Afghan & Vietnam War Veterans in a letter to the Air Force's Personnel Center Directorate of Personnel Programs in July of 2025. "Then-Major Conran’s experience closely parallels a documented set of cases in which Medal of Honor recommendations were either downgraded or shelved due to political sensitivities and later corrected, often decades later, by presidential or congressional action."
Now, Central Coast Congressman Salud Carbajal has introduced H.R. 4580 to upgrade the Air Force Cross Colonel Conran received at the time to a Medal of Honor in order to commemorate in perpetuity the conspicuous gallantry displayed by Colonel Conran on that October day in Laos.
"Colonel Conran embodies the very best of American courage, and his extraordinary, heroic actions as a helicopter pilot during the Vietnam War demand national recognition," Congressman Carbajal shared. "I have been proud to champion legislation to help honor his incredible legacy. Phil displayed incredible bravery on the battlefield when he risked his life to save his fellow service members, and his actions are deserving of the Medal of Honor."
Colonel Conran joined Your News Channel for an exclusive interview to share what happened and what he hopes to achieve on behalf of all of those who served in the shadows of the Cold War.
The transcript below has been edited for length and clarity.
[Colonel Conran] I enrolled in the Connecticut Air National Guard in 1953.
[Your News Channel Author] And then you were commissioned through the Air Force's ROTC [Reserve Officers' Training Corps] program at Fordham University in New York in June of 1958.
[CC] 1958 Correct.
[YNC] Then you became an active duty aviator in December of 1958 and got your pilot wings in January of 1960. What platform [aircraft types] did you initially get certified on?
[CC] Well, what I wanted to do was get out of the Air Force, okay? And I wanted as many tickets as I could get. So I went to helicopter school. Then once I got into the Air Force, I enjoyed it. So I decided to stay in. And needless to say, flying helicopters in the Air Force is not the way to go, because, the Army helicopters would have more and in the Navy, they have more helicopters too. So I got back into fixed wing [aircraft], and then I ended up over in Occidental College in Los Angeles as a ROTC instructor from '65 to '68.
I was flying with the California Air National Guard, flying C-97s out of Van Nuys when I realized that my time to go to Southeast Asia was there. So I volunteered for the Air Force because, the offer transition school was right out of San San Bernardino so my family could stay right there in Los Angeles.
[But, the assignments guy, a friend of mine, said we don't need F-4 [Phantom] pilots. We desperately need helicopter pilots. So I said, okay, I'm stuck [with the requested orders to Southeast Asia]. So where do I go? And he says, I can't tell you that. And I said, well, what's the mission? He says, I can't tell you that either, but you're on it. So I went down to, Sheppard Air Force Base in Texas before transitioning into the H-3s.
An F-4 Phantom II. Image courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.[CC continued] And then I ended up at Nakhon Phanom in Thailand, which is right on the Laotian border.
Nakhom Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base under construction in May of 1963. Image courtesy of the U.S. Navy Seabee Museum.[CC continued] And it was an amazing unit because it was all prop airplanes, C-47s, T-28s, A-1s, O-1s, O-2s, and OV-10s. But they were all props and it was sort of like a well, it was totally classified. So nobody knew what was taking place.
[CC continued] But our mission was to neutralize Laos to a certain degree. The treaties stated that we didn't have any forces in Laos, whereas the North Vietnamese didn't abide by that, even though they signed the treaty and they had tremendous number of ground forces trying to take the neutral country of Laos. So we were the air arm for the Laotian freedom fighters on the ground, and we worked with the CIA and put in sensors, transported personnel.
And that's where I finished up my tour. I had my orders to go to Hawaii, and I had one last mission, and it was supposed to be a cream puff [mission]. You know, like they said, it's a walk in the park. They knew we were at year end because, we would be going from [Nakhom Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base] to a secure CIA Laotian base and pick up 125 Laotian soldiers and bring them to another totally secure CIA base.
Map of the Ho Chi Minh Trail during the Vietnam War. Image courtesy of the Encyclopedia Britannica.On the mission, there was the CIA Chief flying a porter aircraft, two A-1 fighters, five H-3 helicopters, and one H-1 rescue helicopter. We took off, went down to the classified base, picked up the [Laotian fighters]. I had 25 Laotian soldiers in my aircraft. And we took off and flew up, about 85 miles up, right close to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which was the most heavily defended, area in Southeast Asia because, the North Vietnamese were using it as their supply line, coming down to South Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos.
{The attached map shows the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos and Cambodia as well as the location of Nakhon Phanom, the air base that Colonel Conran was stationed, in northeast Thailand}
[CC continued] So we went in. I was in trail. I was number two under formation. My commanding officer was in number one, and he went into a hover and he got shot down immediately. So I took, the rest of the group to the southeast and we proceeded to loiter there while the A-1s went in and sanitized the area.
Needless to say, they [the attack aircraft] didn't realize what was there. There were about 2000 North Vietnamese troops setting up an ambush force, and they were very successful in getting to first one. So when the, aircraft commander, Claret Taylor, said it looked a little bit less violent down there.
They told me that and I asked the rescue helicopter to go in and pick up the four Americans that were shot down, and he said it's too dangerous and I'm low on fuel. I'm not going to do it. So I told them to RTB, return to the base, if he wasn't going to do it.
And then I was forced to make a decision, and I decided that they [the downed crew] couldn't last unless I did something. So I had 25 troops on my aircraft and I decided to go in.
"[I]f he [then-Major Conran] had not made this spontaneous decision, we would have probably lost those on the ground plus those on board the emergency resource," shared Major Peter Costa, Colonel Conran's co-pilot on the mission, in a letter to the Secretary of the Air Force in May of 2018. "[P]hotos were sent to me soon after the event, which indicates that on that day we flew into an ambush. Finally, what is most important is that everyone involved had their recommended decorations downgraded for political purposes because Laos was 'The secret war' and remained classified for years after."
Interview continues below
[CC continued] They literally came out of the ground. It was it was amazing seeing the guys. I could see them right in front of me coming up, firing. And they knocked out my servos, which for a civilian, it's like power steering. You're going down the road at 100 miles an hour and your power steering goes out. It takes a little bit of manpower to control.
[YNCA] More than a bit, quite a bit.
[CC] Thats right. So I could still control it. So I continued instead of aborting and landed, offloaded the 25 troops, got the four Americans, and was just in the process of taking off when they shot out my transmission.
They continued to force us to evacuate the aircraft, which we did. And then when I got up and out, I wasn't the senior officer, but nobody was doing anything. So I took charge of the operation for the next six hours.
[I] controlled the situation, set up a perimeter, and then I had to go to my aircraft, run about 50 feet or 50 yards and get all the equipment off of ours [helicopter]. I found that the number one [aircraft in the convoy], the helicopter still had its M60s [machine guns] on their aircraft, and they never took them off.
So I with a Laotian individual ran to theirs [machine guns still attached to the downed helicopter]. And each time we ran out, the enemy saw us. So, they tried to kill us. And fortunately, I got in the helicopter, and it was, it was surreal in a way because they were firing and it was going into the helicopter. And the bullets were [motions all around himself] and I wasn't hit at all. So it was it was great.
So I got the M60s off the helicopter and we continued to fire until sunset. And fortunately, the on scene commander, Colonel Tripp, said they're never going to last. So he brought in four A-1s which had gas, CBU-19 cylinders with nauseating gas. You've been through, training.
An empty SUU-13 CS gas-loaded submunition attached to an A-1 flown by Medal-of-Honor-recipient Major Bernie Fisher during the rescue of a downed pilot in the A Shau Valley in March 1966. Image courtesy of the National Museum of the Air Force.{Author's Note: Your News Channel author went through U.S. Navy basic training at Naval Station Great Lakes in 2014. A training exercise for service members going through basic training requires them to enter a sealed chamber after donning standard issue gas masks and then removing them once inside and the chamber is filled with oleoresin capsicum "OC" gas to demonstrate the effectiveness of their protective gear and dispersal tools. Recruits are then asked to try and respond to questions or recite something. Colonel Conran was making reference to the effectiveness of area denial munitions of which Your News Channel author experienced.}
[YNCA] Its how you know that your gas mask works, and when you take it off and you're spitting up and your vision is obscured, you know for sure they work, especially in confined spaces. It was certainly tough to say the Sailor's Creed.
[CC] Right. It worked here when two [A-1 fighters] came north to south dropping it east to west, two came east to west dropping north and south.
So we were totally surrounded with the gas and it was affecting everybody needless to say. And then the H-3 [helicopter] came in and the first one came in, landed and all of the Laotians went fast to the back end of the helicopter. And when we finally got there, because [Colonel] Ted Silve, our commander, was injured, he was shot and I was shot, I had a bullet in the leg, and we when we got there, we couldn't get on board.
So I said, let's go around to the [other] side thinking it was an H-3 type opening. It wasn't. It was an H-53 and it had Dutch doors and the bottom of the Dutch door was locked and closed, and they had a minigun on the top that they were using and just a small entrance.
So a couple of our crew were able to leap up and get in. But, Colonel Silva, our commander, who was really severely injured in the back, he couldn't, couldn't get up. So I got down on my hands and knees and he used me as a stepping stone. And then we were able to push him in. And then I got in and we were able to get out of there.
So six hours on-the-ground fighting the enemy. And we got 46 Laotians out and the eight of us. And it was a successful mission. We got back to [Nakhom Phanom Royal Thai Air Force Base], went into the hospital, and they looked at my leg and it was kind of interesting.
The leg, the bullet went in, hit the femur and went in just a little and then bounced back out and around 180 degrees to the other side. So the doc said, we can do it one of two ways. We can open up your leg on the inside and now you're going to have two wounds, or we'll fill you with penicillin and we will see how it works. And so I said, let's go to penicillin.
So we did. And it it worked. So I got out of the hospital and it was my last mission. I had my orders to another hardship tour in Hawaii.
[YNCA] Right. The hardest stop on our 11 month deployment was the end when we went to Hawaii. It was the was the hardest portion of the 11 months, absolutely.
[CC] That's right. Yeah, the hardest one.
But anyways, I went to Hawaii, and I found out later on that my commanding officer had recommended me for the Medal of Honor and the application went up and, this was in February. And then in May, they came and had an award ceremony, and they, gave me the Air Force Cross, which is the top up ribbon there [Colonel Conran points to the Air Force Cross ribbon on his uniform]. And my commanding officer, General Clay, who was presiding at the ceremony, said that the Medal of Honor was approved but then downgraded because President Nixon said we weren't in Laos and no awards were being presented for the Medal of Honor for action in Laos [in accordance with] his foreign policy during his administration.
"I think it was a travesty that politics preventing Col. Conran from receiving the Medal of Honor soon after the mission," Colonel Claret Taylor wrote in his letter to the Secretary of the Air Force on June 6, 2017, recommending that Colonel Conran receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions in 1969. "We were In a place we should not have been, doing what our country asked us to do, yet we were treated different from those in open combat when it came to recognizing our accomplishments. In war some secret missions can't be discussed until enough time has passed so as not to embarrass the nation. In this case, there is no excuse not to bestow this honor on a deserving warrior that was willing to give his life for his comrades."
"I know I lived the see another day because [Colonel] Conran risked his life to save me and my crew," added the now-retired Colonel Taylor.
Interview continues below
[YNCA] You staid in the Air Force until 1988?
[CC] I retired down in Florida, and we went through three hurricanes. In seven years. Nice home. What have you. And fortunately, I had a son living in Santa Barbara. One up in Oakland, one in Boston. And my daughter lived in South Florida where all the old people lived. So where to where would you go? Well, you already know my family live in here in Santa Barbara. So I came out here in 2000. And I've been living here since then, enjoying life. And I work as a volunteer at the many different organizations.
[YNCA] You had been participating in some pretty extensive Cold War responses with the Cuban missile Crisis, the Mercury Program, your service in Thailand and Laos, but the the official status, of course, in Laos was a form of negotiated neutrality started during the Kennedy Administration. We officially were not serving there. But you are a physical example that that wasn't necessarily the case. Today, we talk about covert operations as kind of something we'll never know about or not anytime soon, but it takes a long time to actually find out what exactly happened through official disclosure. How restricted were you and are you still on what you can discuss?
[CC] From our activities over there, the mission was classified. We I was first brought over there for Igloo White, which was, under the direct instruction of Secretary of Defense, Secretary of War now, McNamara and he had sensors being dropped along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Exhibit showing sensors used during Operation Igloo White at the Southeast Asia War Gallery at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio courtesy of the U.S. Air Force.[CC continued] We would go in and drop five sensors along the trail, which would pick up enemy forces coming down from the north. And then we would, go in there and hopefully, take care of.
[YNCA] And that's the key part. Nowadays, people think it's much more convoluted, but my studies of history show that it's just as convoluted back then. The rules of the United States military regarding official and unofficial international peace efforts and international access to maritime trade, that's the key part here of your service. It was not necessarily buried, but you didn't get the due respect of the entire mission. A crucial part of that level of disclosure was this official stance that the United States, that it was not participating in the conflict there directly, especially in Laos, after the negotiated neutrality. But since with 1940s, insurgency groups in Southeast Asia have been fighting the Japanese invasion. When French and Chinese Nationalist forces had taken over after the Second World War, you saw also guerrilla forces, in particular, communist forces using Cambodia and Laos for, not just supplying but stationing soldiers and supplies. We like to think of borders as definitive lines like we see on a map. But often, like you experienced, they're not.
[CC] I believe Tom Briggs [President of the non-profit group Coalition of Allied Afghan & Vietnam War Veterans], who is a retired CIA employee. He was over there in 70 to 72, and he was handling the Laotian ground forces. Those are the people that were dedicated to our cause. The Hmong up north and the Laotian soldiers down south. They never got the recognition. And the, rewards, if you want to call it rewards, but they never got the recognition that they should have gotten from our government. When we left, we left them. And I feel that that was not appropriate for us to do that way.
Tom Briggs is still working on that [through the CAVWV group], hoping that we will eventually get that recognition. And let's face it, a lot of them came to the United States, and there is a large contingent in Fresno, California and, Minnesota in Minneapolis, they are fine, outstanding citizens now, and we need, they're probably the children and grandchildren of the people that I fought with, but throughout the time, the Special Forces were extremely beneficial and helpful to the U.S. armed forces.
I also dropped a lot of my heroes, the Special Forces guys, the Army guys. I would bring them up north, drop them off at a certain spot and location, and plan on picking them up a week later. And usually we would be back in an emergency exfil to get them out because they were under fire at the time.
But those those are the guys that I look up to because they did a fantastic job and they never got the recognition either that they deserved. And so present day, you will get your recognition. It might be 50 years later, but hopefully, it will be within your lifetime. We have the finest Air Force and Army and Navy and Marine Corps and I'm proud to be associated with them.
[YNCA] I mean, it's obvious the kind of terminology that's used for these types of commendations, for the Congressional Medal of Honor, were matched by your actions in 1969. What would it mean to you if you did receive the award? What would you hope to accomplish going forward?
[CC] If I receive the Medal of Honor, I would receive it for the benefit of those that were never written up, even though they did far more than I did, and far more than a lot of people did who have the Medal of Honor. Because, let's face it, you do an act. You may be doing that act by yourself or with a group that you may save, but if someone doesn't recognize that you have done that act, it will never be written up, and you will never receive the recognition that you really should receive. So I feel that if I were fortunate enough to receive the Medal of Honor, I would dedicate it to the men and women that did far more than I did and never received any recognition at all.
End of Interview
More than any point in our conversation together, Colonel Conran was the happiest when talking about his family.
I decided that the ultimate Memorial Day recognition, regardless of recognition by the outside world of his service in the shadows of the Cold War, would be to share the life that Colonel Conran has built as a civilian.
Colonel Conran has been married to his wife, Margaret, for 67 years and they have four children, Shane, Patrick, Kelly and Michael, eight grandchildren and one great grandchild.
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