The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (11 page)

Cornelius first heard the news of his friend’s disappearance at the embassy in Vientiane while he was writing his end of tour report before returning home. The war was over for both of them. But Cornelius could not accept that Sam was dead, convinced that he had been forced to make an emergency landing somewhere in Cambodia. One day he would show up, give his lop-sided grin and a deprecating account of yet another escape from death. Cornelius had assumed he had made a friend for life in Sam, not someone who would disappear within a few short months.

But Sam never returned and Cornelius was forced to accept the fact that his great friend was lost forever. (The tragedy was compounded when Sam’s younger brother was later killed in a midair collision in Vietnam. The general had paid a terrible price to see his sons follow in his footsteps).

In his role as go-between, Tom Richards fought the war at the front and in staff meetings at the embassy in Vientiane, and at 7/13th Air Force HQ in Udorn, Thailand. A chasm yawned between the different worlds of the Downtowners and the Air Force REMFs, and the Ravens at the edge of battle. While the Ravens’ experience of the war might be narrow and parochial, the staff officers’ was remote. Richards spent considerable time on the impossible job of bridging the gap, a frustrating and unrewarding task, but he occasionally scored a point for the men in the war.

In his position as Head Raven he sat in on staff meetings at both the embassy and Air Force HQ in Udorn, flying down to 7/13th HQ in the embassy C-47 to bring back the commander, Maj. Gen. Louis T. Seith. On the return flight to Vientiane he sat in the back of the plane briefing the general on the real picture of the war in Laos, ‘before he got to the embassy and got their version,’ Tom Richards explained. ‘Nobody seemed to understand how the enemy thought.’

Air Force intelligence was mulish and painfully slow to learn the most basic lessons. The Trail had been bombed regularly since 1965 (with great effect by the Air Commandos and their outdated aircraft; with much waste and noise by the jets and B-52s of the regular Air Force), but the enemy’s resilience continued to puzzle Air Force intelligence. At one meeting an exasperated intelligence officer wondered aloud that, as much as they bombed the fords, the enemy still kept coming.

‘I can’t believe you guys are doing that,’ Richards said, who had seen the results firsthand. ‘You’re just making gravel for them. They roll a bulldozer out of a cave and fill it in and roll the trucks down at night. When there’s a cut, coolies unload supplies and ammo from one set of trucks and carry it to the next.’

‘Impossible.’

‘You don’t understand the power of thousands of coolies. They can carry more on their backs and their bicycles than you ever thought of. If they don’t have a bulldozer they get a thousand people to carry a thousand baskets of rocks for as long as it takes to get the job done.’

Those who did learn by the end of their one-year tour were replaced by new men who began the cycle of self-delusion all over again. Throughout Vietnam, and over the whole of Indochina, the one-year tour locked the military into a perpetual cycle of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. The wheel was reinvented every twelve months.

At least in Laos there was a certain amount of continuity. Some of the contract agents with the CIA spent more than a decade in the country, and so had many of the pilots who flew with Air America. The ambassadors spent substantial periods, and Gen. Vang Pao, who was there at the very beginning, would remain long after the end.

But most people passed through, a serious flaw in the case of photo intelligence. Reconnaissance planes crisscrossed Laos daily and returned with high-definition photographic blowups of every square mile of the country. These were scrutinized by photo interpreters, none of whom had ever flown over the battle areas personally, and who might have been put on the job only the previous day. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish a truck from a burned-out hulk or wooden decoy. (On the Trail itself, photo interpreters would rediscover convoys of trucks which had been destroyed the previous year. By the end of the war some trucks had been bombed again and again.)

Richards tried to see photo recon as often as possible, pointing out the more glaring errors. He would pick up a photo which had been designated as a target and already had a set of fighter-bombers scheduled to hit it the following day, and announce, ‘This is not a target.’

‘It’s obviously a target,’ the photo interpreter would argue. ‘Symmetrical patterns along the side of a road. It must be.’

‘What that is really is some old asphalt that was piled along the road many years ago and is now overgrown by brush and vegetation.’

He was ignored. The planes would be sent in on the target. Perhaps the first set would miss, and another would be sent. The old asphalt would be destroyed, making a decent enough fire to record on yet another photo recon flight as a secondary explosion, thus justifying the whole pointless, wasteful, and expensive operation.

The Ravens naturally provided some of the best intelligence of the war in Laos. They knew the terrain and in flying over it every day noticed the slightest change. By listening to the FACs and channeling their intelligence through Udorn, Richards managed to take the fighters off bogus targets and put them on the real thing. ‘They would have knocked the hell out of half of Laos if it hadn’t been for us.’ Meaning that it was important to knock hell out of the right half of Laos.

One night at dinner at Vang Pao’s house, where John Mansur had gone as usual to be briefed for the following day’s missions, the general shocked the young Raven. The talk had been about the poor way the war was going, and Vang Pao was arguing for a big push, a quick victory before it was too late. Mansur had made earnest, naive assurances that the Americans could always be relied upon, whatever might happen. They would stick by the Meo through thick and thin. Vang Pao sighed and shook his head. ‘John, you don’t understand.’

‘What don’t I understand?’

‘One of these days your people - the American people - will make the American military quit helping us. And as soon as that happens the Communists are going to take my country.’

Mansur could not believe his ears. ‘General,’ he said emotionally, ‘we will
never
do that.’

Vang Pao smiled. ‘You do not understand, John.’

The leadership of the Lao military were lazy and corrupt, and as a result their men were useless in the field. Traditionally, the lowland Lao looked upon the Meo as their social and cultural inferiors, which created a strain in communications between them. No lowland Lao was going to die defending a Meo village; no Meo was going to trust his life in the hands of a lowland Lao.

Thai pilots, hired as mercenaries, were reluctant to press in on a target, precisely because they were mercenaries. Ethnically they were of the same stock as the lowland Lao - even speaking the same language if they were from northeast Thailand - but the motivation of money took them only so far. A soldier can be bribed with gold to go to battle, but he cannot be made to fight.

For all of these reasons Vang Pao wanted his own Meo fighter pilots to fly a squadron of T-28s. This was a tall order. Technologically, the Meo were in the stone age. Because of the rocky mountain terrain they were a people who had never developed the wheel, and did not even have iron tips on their wooden plows. When the Americans had first built landing strips in the country in the early 1960s, villagers had peered under the fuselages of the planes, anxious to discover their sex. In one remote province, near the Chinese border, so many man-eating tigers roamed the strip at night that Special Forces people were flown in to kill them, using chickens stuffed with grenades as bait.

A certain number of promising young men, handpicked by Vang Pao himself, were sent to Udorn to be trained in a program, known as Waterpump, which the Air Commandos had set up to teach Thai, Lao, and Meo to fly. In the case of many of the Meo they were taken from the backs of water buffalo one day and placed in the cockpit of a fighter the next. The commando instructors were sensitive and pragmatic when faced with native idiosyncrasies, and regularly used a local
bonze
(Buddhist monk), at $7.62 a session, to exorcise aircraft possessed of bad
phi
(spirits) - the cost included such items as herbs and powder for the ceremony, plus cigarettes, toothpaste, and soap for the monk. Similarly, the Meo’s grasp of western medicine was scant - opium served as their only powerful medication. (As the Meo had built up no resistance to drugs, up-country medics found that antibiotics cleared up a multitude of ills so quickly it seemed like magic.) But despite the enormous cultural and technological gaps, the Meo proved amazingly adaptable, and Vang Pao had his first batch of fighter pilots within six months.

The attrition rate was high. The first two weeks a new pilot was exposed to combat flying were the most critical. It was a period in which many died. Those who survived were expected to fly combat mission after combat mission, until they became among the most experienced fighter pilots in the world. There was no ‘tour’ to complete, no rest and recreation in Hong Kong or Australia, no end in sight to the war. ‘Fly till you die,’ the Meo pilots said cheerfully.

One man stood out among all the others. Lee Lue, a cousin of Vang Pao, had originally been a schoolteacher to the Meo children in Long Tieng. He became the first Meo fighter pilot, and his instructor at Waterpump declared him to be a natural. Experience had made him superb. ‘He was the best fighter-bomber pilot I have ever encountered,’ John Mansur said. ‘That includes Americans or anybody.’

Lee Lue was a quiet but immensely personable man, with the definite strut of the fighter pilot. No mission was too dangerous for him, no weather too bad. ‘He was one of the bravest men I’ve ever known,’ said Howard Hartley, a lieutenant colonel with the Air Commandos. ‘He was a splendid pilot, excellent - so vastly exceptional to all the Lao pilots who came before him there was no comparison. He was very bold, very reckless, extremely courageous. He became squadron commander at Vientiane, and the younger Lao pilots resented the fact at first that a Meo was their commander. He would go anywhere against all odds, and most of them would follow for fear of losing face.’
[22]
His example forced his pilot colleagues to extraordinary levels of achievement which sometimes put even American pilots to shame.

‘The first time I worked Lee Lue he came right down the chute with two seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs -which most of the Lao would not carry,’ Art Cornelius said. ‘And he got down so low that he was never going to miss by far. But this was unbelievable - just spot on target.’ Cornelius was so impressed he made a special flight down to Vientiane to meet the man himself.

Lee Lue flew so low in attack missions on enemy troops in the open that maintenance men sometimes found blood on his plane’s propeller. When he was shot down on the Plain of Jars and an Air America H-34 helicopter could not land because of the terrain, he clung to the wheel strut until the pilot found a place it could. He took it in his stride and scarcely mentioned it, except in a handwritten note to Raven Jim Baker, asking for a replacement parachute. ‘MR. BAKER. PLEASE. YOU HAVE FOR ME ONE NEW PARACHUTE. BECAUSE I HAVE NOT MORE. LEE LUE.’
[23]

Ravens loved to work with him, even more than American Air Force colleagues. John Mansur had found a small gun emplacement and was attempting unsuccessfully to knock it out with a set of Phantom F-4s when Lee Lue flew into the area. The gun had made the Phantoms exceedingly cautious, and they were dropping from such an altitude that Mansur could hardly see them. The F-4s had already made several passes and dropped their entire bomb load. Lee Lue circled the gun site in his T-28 and watched the sorry spectacle for several minutes before calling Mansur on the radio. ‘What you have for target?’

‘A twenty-three position.’ Mansur had no intention of putting a lone, slow-flying T-28 prop plane onto a 23mm antiaircraft gun emplacement, but Lee Lue was insistent. ‘Let me bomb. No problem.’

Figuring Lee Lue was going to do it anyway, Mansur gave him the go-ahead. He called the lead Phantom. Hold high and dry. Watch a real fighter pilot.’

Lee Lue positioned himself for a run against the gun emplacement. He dropped down in a vertical dive, pickled off a single five-hundred-pound bomb, and blew the gun out of existence. It was as impressive a display of aeronautical skill as anyone could ever hope to witness. The job done, Lee Lue banked his fighter and flew off in search of other prey.

The lead Phantom keyed the microphone to his radio. ‘Say, Raven, who was that masked man?’

After his second crash, Tom Shera had been sent up to the royal capital of Luang Prabang, a comparatively quiet posting. He was to replace Marlin Siegwalt, who knew the area well but had only a week to go. The two men flew north to where Route 19 came out of Dien Bien Phu. Shera was in the backseat while Siegwalt, whom Shera had met only three days earlier, piloted the plane. They were flying over a ridgeline, high in the mountains, when a single bullet entered the plane. It came through the right side, hit Siegwalt in his right arm, and traveled through to his chest. As he was hit he pulled back on the stick, and the plane went straight up into the air and almost stalled.

In the backseat Shera realized his colleague was unable to fly the airplane. A second control stick was stored in the rear of the O-1, and he fought to connect it while the plane sputtered and coughed. He jiggled the stick into position and regained control of the plane, pushed the nose over, and headed back to Luang Frabang.