The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (12 page)

The forty-five minutes that followed were an eternity. He called Cricket over the radio to request medical facilities to stand by, but there was nothing else he could do. He droned back to the base at ninety-five knots, flying the plane from the backseat, while Siegwalt lay slumped over the stick in front of him. As he touched down he saw an Air America C-l 23 waiting on the ramp with its engines running, ready to rush the pilot to hospital in Udorn. A medic ran out to the plane the moment it came to a stop, but it was too late. Siegwalt had been hit by the Golden BB, which had clipped the aorta, and there was no hope of saving him.
[24]

The word went around the Ravens that Tom Shera was plagued with bad phi, the spirits that were a part of all life for the Meo. They wondered whether he was a marked man to have had three such experiences one after the other, or extraordinarily lucky to have survived them. Shera himself felt strangely removed and unaffected by his experiences. He suffered no post-crash trauma or delayed shock, and slept like a baby. He continued to fly without incident or further misadventure.

Then one morning he walked across the ramp to his plane and found himself frozen to the spot. He had stopped by the tail of the O-1 and found it physically impossible to move around to climb into the cockpit. After several moments he walked back to the operations shack and threw his stuff into the locker.

He had succumbed to one of the occupational hazards of the Raven - combat burnout. Shera was now thrice burned. After a few days’ respite he continued to fly, but felt he was too cautious and should not be in the theater at all. It was never the same again. ‘It didn’t get worse. I just didn’t want to fly. I had to drag myself out every day.’

Siegwalt had been killed with only a week to go. It was a damned shame, his colleagues agreed, for an old Head Raven like Siegwalt to buy the farm at the very tail end of his tour. The Golden BB too! It was a bitch. The Ravens talked about luck and fate, the law of averages and mathematical probability, and fingered their Buddhas - which almost all of them wore around their necks as talismans - more than usual as they drank their beer.

Siegwalt was replaced by Charles Ballou, who arrived in Long Tieng five days after the pilot’s death. For some reason, from the very first day, everyone called him Bing. The new Raven seemed in a hurry to fight the war. He was so keen to hurt the enemy that he indulged in extracurricular after-hours missions. He would take out an O-1, together with a like-minded mechanic, and fly low over the enemy firing machine guns out of the window. He was a little too gung ho for his own good, the others thought, but he would soon settle down.

He had scarcely been in the war long enough to find his way around when he limped back to Alternate in a Bird Dog after taking small-arms fire. The engine was cutting in and out badly, as if the plane were out of gas, and he was forced to attempt a bush-pilot landing just short of the strip. Unable to raise the nose of the O-1 high enough, he crashed into the side of the mountain. The Backseater survived, but Bing was killed instantly. He had been in Laos five days.
[25]

Sam Deichelman had been replaced by Ron Rinehart. On the face of it they could not have been more different: Deichelman, with his blond hair and golden good looks, was seen among the Ravens as a surfer version of a Greek god; Rinehart had red hair and freckles and was a down-to-earth Ohio farm boy whose language was as bad as his manners. He had already completed a year’s tour in Vietnam before volunteering for the Steve Canyon Program. During the course of his Air Force career he had picked up the unfortunate sobriquet ‘Pig Fucker,’ by which he was known throughout Indochina. The embassy, which made a habit of logging nicknames in its computer, drew the line at Pig Fucker and sanitized it to Papa Fox. (The genesis of Rinehart’s nickname is a source of much speculation among Ravens even today: ‘Ron likes to go ugly early,’ is one explanation, or ‘Ron’s definition of a Perfect Ten is five Twos.’ Raven mythology apart, the name has nothing to do with Rinehart’s sexual predilections, but hails from the early days of Vietnam when fighter pilots called each other by it as a form of affectionate combat abuse. Rinehart had bought two suckling pigs, dressed them up in blue ribbons, and presented them to a group of F-105 pilots during the O club’s happy hour, bearing the Latin tag
Ad Fornicatorum Porci
- ‘To the Pig Fuckers.’ The joke boomeranged when Rinehart got stuck with the name for the rest of his Air Force career.)

Like every other boy of his generation in the Ohio farm belt, Rinehart always dreamed of becoming a soldier. He liked to play the countryboy role to the hilt, but behind it there was a shrewd intelligence and a sensitivity he was careful not to show. Papa Fox had more in common with the man he followed than appearances indicated. Among other things, he was fearless.

Apart from Papa Fox’s warlike qualities, he could also cook like a dream. Instead of downing their indigestible diet of greasy hamburgers, or the gristle, grass, and rice dinners at the general’s house, the Ravens now began to feast on lobsters, homemade spring or cabbage rolls, wonderful baked pies, and lavish Chinese dinners - all supplemented with delicacies stolen from the CIA kitchen. Although Papa Fox flew combat all day, he never shirked cooking dinner - on the single condition that he not be expected to do dishes. The Ravens considered this an excellent arrangement, happily donning the washing-up apron on a rotating basis. (Papa Fox also excelled at combat fire-starting. This consisted of filling a mail sack with wood stolen from Air America, spilling liberal amounts of aviation fuel - av gas - onto it, and then lighting the explosive combination with a match thrown from four feet. The shutters of the windows would shake and the door fly open, and people would pour into the street thinking the hootch had exploded. ‘It impressed the Thai pilots.’

Papa Fox had arrived at the beginning of Gen. Vang Pao’s new push to retake the mountain of Phbu Pha Thi. The general felt that the entire future of the Meo depended on the recapture of the mountain, and he intended to commit more than half his army to the task. His closest counselor, Pop Buell, advised him against such a course, arguing that Ins soldiers were bone-tired and their morale was so low ‘a dog couldn’t sniff it.’

But the general remained adamant. ‘I must have a big victory to stop the Vietminh now, before they take everything. My people need a victory. The Rock is important to them.’
[26]

Dick Shubert was now FAC commander at Long Tieng, and Rinehart joined John Mansur and Paul Merrick to make the fourth Raven. After a single day’s flight around the surrounding countryside, he was let loose with a Backseater. The push to retake Phou Pha Thi became his responsibility and was code-named Operation Pig Fat.

The Meo staged out of Na Khang (Site 36) and moved into attack positions on three sides of the mountain. Jets pounded the enemy with endless sorties and vast amounts of bombs, but they did not budge. The Meo attempted to move artillery into firing positions and prepared for a coordinated air mobile and Special Guerrilla Unit ground assault, but came under heavy mortar attack. There were no more than three hundred enemy soldiers on the mountain, but while bombing kept their heads down momentarily, they would emerge from their bunkers and machine-gun pits after every raid to drive back wave after wave of Meo infantry.

Rinehart put in more than a thousand air sorties of U.S., Lao, and Meo air in a month, logging 280 combat hours. Some days he spent as much as fourteen hours in the cockpit. Fighters came on station in waves, and would be stacked above him in a holding pattern six layers high. The windows on both sides of the Bird Dog were covered in grease pencil where he had tried to keep track of the ceaseless strikes, fighter call signs, and bomb damage. Back at Na Khang, between missions, he helped pump his own gas and load rockets.

The North Vietnamese held on. Meo casualties were appalling. Air losses seemed to be concentrated into black days: in one four-hour period a Phantom flew straight into the mountain in a screaming forty-five-degree-angle dive, a Skyraider was hit by antiaircraft fire, and a helicopter attempting to rescue it was shot down. On another day two Thuds (F-105s) and a helicopter were lost to enemy action.

Rinehart himself was forced to stay overlong on station to direct the stacked fighters until he almost ran out of gas. He nursed the spluttering O-1 back to Na Khang, while U Va Lee cursed him from the backseat. Rinehart had waited until the last moment to return, and as he touched down on the runway the engine quit. The men were forced to push the plane off the runway and into the gas pit.

It was the third time a plane had stalled on Rinehart when U Va Lee was in the backseat, and the Indian had had enough. He refused to go up the following day. ‘I no fly with you. You try kill me.’

Rinehart began to work with another Backseater nicknamed Scar - so called because of the long, jagged scar down his neck. Scar had a deep voice and a throaty chuckle. Together they worked an area to the east of Long Tieng, where Lee Lue liked to fly, and the trio became a close team. But however much they flew, and however many air strikes were put in, the Meo made no headway.

Back on the ground, base commander U Va Lee was at his most unforgiving. A young Meo commander, no more than twelve years old, staggered into Na Khang from the field, leading a dozen of his surviving troops, who were even younger than he was. He had lost his outpost during the night, and U Va Lee berated him in a furious tirade which made the boy cringe. Two Pathet Lao prisoners were interrogated and then summarily executed.

Rinehart continued to fly. During one flight a bullet came through the floor of the plane, directly in front of the stick and between his legs: ‘It got my attention.’ It was a close call, but he continued to zig-zag through small-arms fire at three hundred feet, impervious to danger, a habit which made Backseaters extremely reluctant to fly with him. Only Scar would accompany him, chuckling to himself amid the bullets and smoke of battle, which seemed to appeal to some dark sense of fun.

At the end of the month, Papa Fox was given two days off and flew down to Udorn to relax. Ravens never had to buy a drink at the O club, and the F-4 jocks threw a party for him. Papa Fox’s dress for the evening was exotic: alligator shoes, sharkskin pants, and an embroidered
Farang
Tagalog
Filipino dress shirt. ‘A nice outfit.’

Drink followed drink, until Rinehart was linking arms with the Phantom jocks to make a MiG sweep along the bar. This consisted of yelling ‘MiG sweep’ very loudly, charging along the face of the bar, and running over anyone who stood in the way. A colonel who was slow to move was trampled under-foot. He did not appreciate being knocked to the ground by a drunken red-headed civilian dressed like a Filipino pimp. The colonel wanted Rinehart thrown out of the club, until someone muttered in his ear, ‘He’s a Raven, sir.’ The colonel grunted and let the matter drop. Exceptions were made for people whose behavior was warped by a solid month of twelve-hour days in the combat zone.

The following morning Papa Fox was on his way to reintroduce himself to the Thai girls who worked in his favorite bathhouse when there was an urgent call for him to return to Alternate. A new Bird Dog, earmarked for the Ravens, was sitting on the ramp at Udorn and was needed at the front. Papa Fox was ordered to ferry it back immediately. Still dressed in his fashionable attire, he boarded the O-1 and flew up to Long Tieng, only to find the base weathered in. He made a detour and landed at Na Khang to pick up a Backseater. Scar was unavailable, and those who knew Papa Fox were in hiding. U Va Lee refused to go himself, but provided an unsuspecting and smiling innocent who clambered into the plane.

They flew up to an area in northwest Laos, near the Chinese border, where they were fired upon. Papa Fox spent the morning putting in strikes on the gun. On the way home he took the plane over a mountain ridge where a single shell ripped into the engine. It stopped dead. The Backseater began to moan quietly to himself in terror. Papa Fox looked below him for somewhere to crash-land and spotted two small rice paddies at the end of a valley. He began to spiral down toward them, while the procedures learned at the various survival schools clicked into place. He immediately called Cricket, giving his position and where he intended to put the plane down. Then he called Air America and gave them the same information.

The Backseater had become absolutely quiet, resigned to his fate, convinced that when a plane crashed life ended. He had abandoned hope the moment the engine quit. Papa Fox concentrated on the landing and slammed the Bird Dog into the paddy. It was too short; the landing gear hit the dike and the nose lifted high into the air. Rinehart’s legs flew up and hit the instrument panel, cutting him in several places.

The plane settled back into the paddy. Both men were alive. The Backseater was rapturous and now looked upon Papa Fox as a man before whom Death itself had retreated. He threw his arms around Rinehart and began to hug and kiss him. ‘You number one. You Buddha.’

The excitement was shortlived. A large number of enemy troops opened fire from a treeline only a quarter of a mile away. Papa Fox grabbed hold of the Backseater and together they ran into the jungle, where they fought their way through the undergrowth.

After running wildly for several minutes, Papa Fox took hold of his companion by the shoulders and made him sit down. They were both breathing heavily and adrenaline was pumping through their bodies. It was important to calm down and form a plan. In the distance they could hear the enemy shooting, but Papa Fox knew they were firing blindly.