No Fallen Comrade Left Behind

By Greg Walker

In past March, LTC (ret) Lucius “Gus” Taylor shared the below account of the death of SFC Greg Fronius, one of his teammates, on his Facebook page. Taylor identifies Ana Montes as one of two American citizens who acted as intelligence gathers for the FMLN in El Salvador and who he assigns responsibility for the attack on El Paraiso that saw SFC Greg Fronius killed in action. The other was Jennifer Casolo –
In the summer of 1998, at the largest awards and decorations ceremony since the Vietnam war, the 7th Special Forces Group presented combat awards and decorations to the veterans of our war in El Salvador. Greg Fronius’ son stepped forward to accept his father’s posthumous Silver Star during the event.

A warrior’s recollection

“For the last 36 years this day, March 31st, has haunted me. There are a lot of imaginative stories about SFC Greg Fronius and me that night in March 1987 at the El Paraiso compound, HQ of El Salvador’s 4th Brigade .Here is the truth as I witnessed it, and while I still remember it clearly.

“Greg showed up around halfway through my one-year tour in El Sal, replacing Baldemar “Ram” Ramirez around the first of the year, in January 1987. Creepy even for someone like me, Greg told me upon his arrival he had taken out a $1M life insurance policy, because he was sure he would not leave El Salvador alive.”

“In early March, Ana Montes, then a senior official at DIA, visited our compound. She is a traitor and the principal murderer of Greg Fronius. She was in prison for treason until recently. She now lives comfortably in Puerto Rico. On about Friday, March 27, 1987, our two U.S. Intel guys, flew back to Panama on a supply run. I never quite got my head around their coincidental and timely absence from the assault on the El Paraiso compound that would occur just days later. The last week in March, we had the perimeter lightly manned with one Infantry Company on refit and reinforced with about thirty lightly wounded Return-to Duty soldiers.

“We experienced a lot of enemy action in the following months. However, during March 1987, Chalatenango Province, which was largely under FMLN control, was unusually quiet. At our compound in El Paraiso, the place was mostly empty. Of the 3,600-man Infantry Brigade, we had only a few hundred back in the compound, mostly hospitalized wounded. The compound at El Paraiso had about five kilometers of perimeter fence. And not just any fence. The first barrier was Cyclone wire with tangle-foot barbed wire taped at the bottom and concertina coils at the top. That barrier was then followed by ten meters of tripwire mines and other landmines. Finally, the inner fence was identical to the outer, with Cyclone wire with tangle-foot barbed-taped at the bottom and concertina coils at the top.

“At the time and during several weeks prior, Greg and I were re-establishing the El Salvadoran national sniper capability, training 36 selected sniper candidates in a formal curriculum we had developed from the original sniper POI was used by C-3/7 SFG(A) on Empire Range in Panama to train the original 150 El Sal Snipers in 1984.

Note: The first 150 snipers professionally selected and trained by ODA 13, C-Co, 3/7th Special Forces Group, was conducted at Empire Range in Panama. It was a five-week course that included classes and ranges covering the broad spectrum of sniper operations. M21 sniper systems with ART scopes were selected for the students as the M21 was the dominant sniper system at 3/7 during this period. An article on the course was published in Gung-Ho magazine in 1987.

“The rest of the 4th Brigade was deployed out into the mountains. About 1500 hours on Monday, 30 March, 1987, USMILGP El Salvador notified me that my wife, Becky, was going into labor in Panama. My MILGP Commander, Colonel John Ellerson, sent a Huey up to El Paraiso to pick me up at about 1700 hours. The Huey took me back to San Salvador. I was to fly out on the Channel Flight from Ilopango Air Base back to Howard AFB Panama the next day.

“The next morning, at about 4:00AM, Tuesday, 31 March 1987, USMILGP Ops Advisor LTC Gil Tijerina called me at the Commo House, a safe house in San Salvador where I was staying to await the Channel Flight. He told me El Paraiso had been overrun at about 0300 on that morning, and that Greg was KIA. I told him I needed to get back up there, and he replied that I should go to the San Salvador Soccer Stadium for pick-up by a Huey. I got to the stadium around 5:30AM. I was met by SFC Thornton, an SF Medic, LTC Lou Rodriguez, and an Air Force Major whose name I have purged from memory for what he would do later. I’ll refer to him hereinafter as “Major Douche”.

Note: The US Intelligence Community, led by the after action reports made Major Douche and a guy named (omitted) covered their collective asses in ways so reprehensible it begs the imagination. They claimed the IC had warned us of an impending attack. True, but worthless. The IC warned us of impending attacks about every week during my tour there. If they were so convinced of the attack at the end of March 1987, why did they leave Greg in there? That question was never answered.

“LTC Rodriguez was a formidable Warrior, a Bay-of-Pigs POW, and a distinguished Vietnam Vet. SFC Thornton was well known among 3/7 medics as a true professional. Maj Douche was working not for MILGP, but for the Defense Attaché. As we strapped into our seats in the Huey, LTC Rodriguez, SFC Thornton, and I loaded up our CAR-15’s. Maj Douche, armed with a wimpy-assed MP-5, asked if we had another CAR-15 he could borrow. We just smiled.

“High winds kept us from taking off until around 0600 hours. We lifted off as part of a large helo formation, just behind several gunships coming up from Ilopango Air Base. When we arrived on-station at El Paraiso compound, our MILGP Huey held back about 500m south of the compound while the Huey gunships repeatedly strafed the compound with HV 40mm and .50 cal mini-gun fire, driving the guerillas out of the compound to the north. With aerial firing still going hot north of the compound, our USMILGP Huey landed on the south El Paraiso LZ. LTC Lou Rodrigues, SFC Thornton, and I moved to the center of the compound. Maj Douche, with a clipboard, continued out to the perimeter to interview perimeter guard survivors.

“The office that Greg and I worked from was destroyed by explosions and fire. I recovered the burned cash and crypto from my office safe. Our shoeshine boy, Hector, survived the attack. He took me and SFC Thornton to Greg’s remains, on a covered stretcher. When I pulled back the cover, Greg was smiling. Hector then took us to a small set of concrete steps where Greg had died. The steps were cracked by explosive force. Hector told me that when the attack started, Greg ran out of his room and was quickly wounded in the left arm. Greg bandaged his own arm. He then ran past a deep underground bunker, ignoring shouts by the El Salvadorans to come into the safety of the bunker. Instead, Greg single-handedly maneuvered on an assault force moving from the northwest toward the Comandancia. Greg singlehandedly faced off the enemy assault force from the cover of the stairs and put down a heavy base of fire with his CAR-15, delaying them for long enough that COL Rubio and most of his Brigade Staff could take cover or escape. However, Greg was mortally wounded by small arms fire in the exchange.

“For some reason, while at the shattered stairs, I looked upward to the tree cover above the site and imagined that I saw cuts on the branches that suggested the fins of a mortar round passing through the tree and landing on Greg. That was to be one of the worst interpretations I ever made in my life. At that point, I imagined that Greg had been fighting on the steps, when hit by a mortar round, and that is what I reported.

“What happened was far, far different. I would learn much later the FMLN had a subgroup called the FES, Fuerzas Especiales Salvadoreñas. the FES had been training and rehearsing for this attack for over 2 years, to include sending their indirect fires team to Cuba for mortar gunnery and their assault team to Vietnam for training by Russian Spetsnatz. They used seven giant, 6-man carry Claymores to breach the perimeter defenses. We only knew this because one of the seven did not go off, and we recovered it, still standing on its timber tripod. The device that we recovered was about six’ high X 3’ wide by eight” deep. It had six carry handles on the sides, about 200 lbs of cut-up ¼ rebar in pieces, each about three” long, backed by conveyor-belt rubber and a bottom layer of about two” of Semtex plastic explosive. Not exactly a charge you would expect to see in a remote Central American guerrilla war.

“Many years later, I would learn that so great was the anger and frustration of the FES assault force that when they closed with Fronius, gravely wounded by multiple 5.56 rounds, on the steps, they placed a heavy explosive charge underneath of him. Greg was killed by small arms fire, and his dead (or dying) body destroyed by the explosive device. His courage had kept the FES sappers from completing their mission which was to attack the now secured command bunker and kill all those inside.

Note: Upon breaching the perimeter and occupying the ESAF compound, the guerrillas entered the base hospital and bayoneted the wounded Salvadoran soldiers there.

“Major Douche went out to the perimeter and questioned the soldiers about what had happened. As I mentioned earlier, we had very, very few soldiers on the perimeter, many of them recovering wounded, with many more in the hospital. For some reason, Douche focused on questions about the commissioned officers, and whether they were present on the perimeter. Of course, any Army guy knows that the Sergeant of the Guard is the Main Mug for guard forces, and O’s are generally not expected or wanted around for guard duty, but Douche emphasized questions about the absence of commissioned Salvadoran officers on the perimeter. This is a crucial point regarding what would transpire in the coming days, when the Intelligence Community (IC) would conduct a second attack on the brave men at El Paraiso.

“As SFC Thornton and I carried Greg’s remains on a stretcher to the LZ, we halted for a moment as the 4th Brigade Commander, COL Rubio, addressed his surviving men, most of whom were lightly wounded and covered with dirt, blood, and brain matter. He told them, in his elegant Spanish, “The Enemy has screwed us. Now we will be screwed by our own. For you officers and NCOs, get cleaned up, and get into your best clean uniforms. The next attack will come from our own higher command.”While I deeply respected COL Rubio, this would be a poor decision, which would a few hours later only reinforce the notion that the 4th Brigade officers and NCOs were absent from the fight.

“Nothing was further from the truth.

“SFC Thornton and I put Greg’s stretcher on the MILGP Huey and flew his remains back to Ilopango. One of the MILGP staff was waiting there with an American flag. We put the flag-draped stretcher on the C-130 and flew Greg aback to Howard AFB Panama. When we got there, I stayed only a few days. I climbed back on the C-130 early the following week. When I got back to San Salvador, the USMILGP Commander, COL Ellerson, called me to his office. He said, “You are not going back to El Paraiso.”

“I said, “Sir, you are now going to sit there in your chair and decide whether we win in El Salvador or not. If the ESAF and the enemy see that the Americans have one combat casualty, and then turn tail and run, this war is over.” I then outlined what I had planned.

“Afterward COL Ellerson asked, ‘How will you survive. We estimate that 4th Brigade has about 15% Infiltrators.’

“I told him, ‘I will go to the safest of all places for us. I’ll take the surviving snipers we trained up into the mountains. We will hunt down the FES. I’ll be totally safe.’

“COL Ellerson, with a bravery most will not understand, said, ‘Go down to the soccer field and catch your Huey.’

“So, we hunted the FES down. That is another story.”

LTC (ret) Lucius Taylor
USA Special Forces

Postscript

I served with Gus Taylor at 3/7 in Panama. We later became good friends. What occurred at the 4th Brigade in March 1987 haunted Gus for decades. The other U.S. advisers at El Paraiso had gone to San Salvador for a brief respite in the training cycle. Taylor had planned to stay back with Greg. The call letting him know he was about to become a father changed that – and he would later tell me that Greg urged him to get back to Panama and that Fronius would be fine.

When CBS 60 Minutes brought a number of us to Washington, DC, for three days of interviews regarding the reality of the war in El Salvador, Gus contacted me. We met in the hotel lobby, off in a corner, and he shared what had happened. Taylor provided photos of Greg’s recovered remains beneath an American flag. He described looking up into one of the trees and seeing, then collecting bits of flesh that had been blown up into the surrounding foliage when the FES detonated their satchel charge beneath Greg’s body. In all, only 17 pounds of his remains were recovered for autopsy and burial.

Greg’s older brother, Steve Fronius, was there to be interviewed by Ed Bradley and that evening he and Gus met for the first time. They sat alone and talked. Gus later told me it was one of the most difficult moments of his life. Steve consoled him during their meeting and thanked him for taking care of his younger brother.

By a stroke of good fortune, I submitted a FOIA for Greg’s autopsy and in record time it was provided, en toto. The thick document countered the USGOV lie about Greg having been struck by a mortar while asleep in his bunk. Autopsy diagrams showed multiple small arms fire wounds and the devastation inflicted on his body by the explosive device. Further, no fewer than three General Officers signed off on no mention of combat being made. The posthumous Silver Star that Taylor had submitted for Fronius was downgraded to a peacetime Meritorious Service Medal. In a final insult the Army attempted to recover a $260 bill from the Fronius family for additional charges in transporting his remains and casket home.

In 1993, I met and interviewed Gilberto Osorio in San Francisco, California, where he was living. Osorio, a Salvadoran and American citizen, had fought with the PRTC in El Salvador for nearly eleven years. He rose to the rank of commander and was the Operations Chief for the PRTC. Trained in Cuba as a demolitions expert it was Osorio who built the remote control detonated bomb that killed Colonel Domingo Monterosa in October 1984.

Osorio possessed first-hand information on the training of the FES for the attack on El Paraiso, to include being told by one FES sapper that Fronius was still alive when they found him. His red hair and U.S. uniform clearly identified him as an American adviser/ “Green Beret”. So enraged by his single-handed defense of the staircase leading down to the base’s command center the sappers used one of the charges meant for the center to end Greg’s life.

Gus and I linked up again in September 1995. He had retired and was living in Panama. I was assigned for three weeks to work at SOC-SOUTH in support of Task Force BLACK. During a dive trip at Fort Sherman Taylor described, in part, the 30-day operation he, SFC Thornton, and a handful of Salvadoran snipers undertook against the FES.

For Gus it w as a mission. A retribution. And a reckoning. Taylor never shared with me how many guerrillas they hunted down and killed. But the message he promised Colonel Ellerson at its onset was delivered to the FES and to the FMLN in spades.

Gus passed peacefully on June 11, 2024. 

“On Tuesday, June 11, 2024 we lost Lucius Agustus Taylor, IV who was better known simply as Gus. That short name might have been the only simple thing about this man who had more facets than any jewel he ever set – and that’s saying something as Gus was a jeweler and gemologist. He was also, among other things: a scholar warrior who craved and worked for peace; treasure hunter and adventurer; mystic and scientist; thinker, maker, doer; father, husband, brother, and friend.”

All of us who were privileged to know and serve with him cannot express the true depths of our shared grief. He was the best of us. “De Oppresso Liber!”