The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (13 page)

He examined the circumstances. Dressed in his Sunday best, he was stranded in the middle of the jungle without maps, a gun, a survival kit, or a radio, and only a pair of alligator shoes to get him out. The Backseater carried a handgun but nothing more. Both men emptied their pockets: a belt buckle, a watch, and a few coins - scant defenses against a battalion of North Vietnamese. They also had no food and no water.

Papa Fox could hear the enemy moving up the trail behind them, and the sound of gunfire grew louder. The two men picked their way painfully through the trees, edging toward the top of the mountain. Papa Fox caught sight of the search-and-rescue aircraft overhead - two A-1 Skyraiders and a Jolly Green rescue helicopter - but knew the Air Force would never undertake a pickup without proper radio contact to establish the authenticity of codes. Their only hope was Air America.

About a quarter of a mile from the top of the mountain the terrain changed suddenly from thick forest to open, head-high elephant grass dotted with clumps of tall bamboo. It was slow work pushing through the bush. After twenty minutes Papa Fox stopped beside a clump of bamboo which had grown to a height of thirty feet. He took off his exotic shirt and made a bamboo frame over which to stretch it. He pulled the tall bamboo cane down and attached his shirt to the end, then hoisted it like a flag on a pole. An Air America chopper was continuing to scour the mountains around the downed plane, half a mile away, while the Skyraiders droned up and down the valley.

‘See him?’ Papa Fox said to his companion. ‘He find us. No problem.’

The Meo looked at Papa Fox, now stripped to the waist to expose a creamy white torso speckled with ginger hair and freckles, and nodded without conviction. The two men took it in turns to wave the bamboo from side to side in an attempt to attract attention.

They waved their makeshift flagpole for thirty minutes without result, until at 6:00 the sun began to set. A Skyraider was still in the valley, then turned and flew by their mountaintop. Papa Fox’s spirits rose, only to slump further when the plane passed overhead without seeing them.

The planes had been searching for an hour and a half and had not found them. The sun had set and it was beginning to grow dark. Papa Fox began to accept that they would not be rescued and to formulate another plan of escape. As an old farm boy and a survivor, he told himself, he could walk the three hundred miles back to safety. Once it was truly dark he would climb to the top of the hill and keep on going, traveling by night and navigating by the stars. They could sleep in hiding during the day.

‘Don’t you worry,’ Papa Fox assured his Meo companion. ‘I’ll get us out of here.’

Just when hope was failing with the last light, the Air America chopper flew over the mountaintop on its way home. Papa Fox waved the flagpole in a final desperate effort to attract attention. The chopper banked steeply, and turned around on itself. They had been seen. The Meo was ecstatic, cured of his temporary lapse of faith in his ginger godhead, and threw himself on his savior, kissing and hugging him.

The Air America pilot hovered overhead and signaled for them to head up to the very top of the mountain. They battled through the elephant grass, which was eight feet high, wide as a man’s hand, and sharp as a knife. It was a punishing last haul. Papa Fox could see nothing, but kept climbing toward the noise of the rotors. At the top of the mountain they were rewarded by the wonderful sight of the Air America chopper dropping into the grass. The pilot brought the aircraft down slowly, the pressure from the rotor blades partially flattening the tall grass, until he hovered only a couple of feet from the ground. Papa Fox clambered aboard, hauling his Meo companion up after him.

‘Number one,’ the Meo cried with tears in his eyes, hugging Papa Fox close to him. ‘Buddha.’

The chopper lifted into the dark and headed back to Na Khang. Papa Fox drank two full canteens of water on the trip. Back at the site he prepared to hop off. ‘You okay, Raven?’ the pilot asked.

‘Yeah. Thanks.’

Papa Fox jumped down from the aircraft, accompanied by his worshipful companion. The Air America bird lifted off to fly south and had gone before Rinehart was able to ask the name of the man who had saved his life. He was never to learn it.

He hitched a lift on a plane heading back to Alternate. Once in the Raven hootch he decided he would write down every detail of his experience and sat at a table, pencil in hand. It had been quite a day, and he wondered where he should begin. Without warning, he began to shake uncontrollably. Until that moment he had felt in complete command of his actions and had been too busy to be scared. Now he could not even hold a pencil.

He got up and went to the bar, where he poured himself a stiff whisky. Two Ravens sitting by the fire, unaware of what had happened, wondered why dinner was behind schedule. ‘It’s kind of late. Aren’t you going to cook?’

‘I guess so,’ Papa Fox said, and went into the kitchen to prepare supper.

At the beginning of Operation Pig Fat, President Johnson had announced that as of November 1, 1968, ‘all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam’ would be stopped. The partial bombing halt in March had already made more sorties available for Laos, but now U.S. airplanes arrived in swarms.

There was no lack of targets, but with only four Ravens to cover the whole of northeast Laos it was impossible to control the number of airplanes. ‘They had all that capacity in Thailand, so they put it to use in Laos,’ Tom Shera said. It was as if a business decision had been made to use idle assets. ‘There were plenty of targets, but we didn’t have enough FACs to use that much air. Many times we got so much air we couldn’t handle it at all. Even before the bombing halt there were times when the weather was so bad over North Vietnam that they would come back in waves. They were damn near out of gas and they wanted to make one pass and get rid of their bombs. You would try and pre-position yourself, but often you ended up doing saturation bombing in the area you happened to be at the time the first flight got in. Because you might not have had time to get to where you really wanted to be.

‘It seemed like there was always a conflict for the air. When the ground forces were moving and we needed air to support them often we didn’t get it.’

On one occasion Shera put in forty-eight sorties on one marking rocket. The instructions from Cricket had been explicit. ‘Launch Raven, the weather’s bad and we’ve gotta dump this stuff. We gotta get it in someplace.’

Shera headed north to a place he thought really needed it, but the fighters came on station before he arrived. He ended up putting strike after strike every five hundred meters along a ridgeline dotted with enemy reinforcements. ‘I could really have used those fighters if I had been in position and wrought havoc. I was completely out of position. The alternative was that those guys would go and dump those bombs on the range in Thailand.’

The few Ravens available to control the air war were further hampered by not having enough planes. If an O-1 was down from battle damage or in for maintenance, Ravens flew as copilots in Air America or Continental Air Services aircraft, a procedure so illegal it would have given the Downtowners conniptions.

Maintenance and support were still only mediocre at best. Papa Fox, who by now had become Chief Raven at Long Tieng, attempted to continue the work begun by Tom Richards (who had left the country on completion of his tour) in gaining increased recognition and support for the program. But where Richards had used his comparatively high rank, combined with a sophisticated, diplomatic approach, Papa Fox resorted to nose-to-nose confrontation and the raised voice.

Persistent engine failures had continued to undermine Raven confidence. Almost every day there was a story of some pilot coaxing a plane back into a remote strip. Papa Fox’s patience finally ran out when he had four engine failures in a week. ‘We had a U-17 that every time you turned around you were horsing into another field. It would run and then quit, run a little bit more, and so on. And the O-1s, some of which were almost twenty years old, were doing the same thing.’ The mechanics who worked on them were passing them after a ground check inspection - instead of a test flight, which involved a certain amount of risk. The corner-cutting resulted in further engine failures.

‘That’s it,’ he announced furiously. ‘I’m grounding the airplanes.’

In effect, the Ravens were on strike and the air war in Laos came to an abrupt halt. Papa Fox went back to the hootch and spent the rest of the afternoon reading. The next morning the Ravens would have been in the air by 6:00, but Papa Fox advised his colleagues to sleep late and enjoy the sumptuous breakfast he intended to prepare. Late in the morning a message came through from the embassy demanding to know why the Ravens were not in the air.

‘Be advised airplanes grounded,’ Papa Fox replied.

A terse message came back from the assistant air attaché, Lt. Col. Gus Sonnenberg - the air attaché himself was still unaware of the problem at this stage - that Rinehart did not have the authority to ground the airplanes. ‘If I don’t have the authority to ground the airplanes, why aren’t they flying?’ Rinehart replied.

There was no more cable traffic. Things became very quiet. The Ravens stayed in their hootch throwing darts and reading magazines. That night Papa Fox spoke to Vang Pao and explained what was happening: the indifference of the embassy, the negligence of the Air Force in Udorn, and the poor maintenance provided by Air America were going to result in getting Ravens killed. Therefore, the airplanes were grounded until the Ravens received the support they needed. The general listened and nodded.

To Papa Fox’s amazement he was supported in his action by the air attaché himself, Col. Robert Tyrrell, who ordered him to attend a meeting in Udorn to present his case. It was an intimidating group to face: twenty high-ranking officers, including two generals, were seated around the table.

Papa Fox listed the twenty-six engine failures which had occurred in the previous three months, and explained what he felt was needed to correct the haphazard maintenance. He complained of a complete lack of logistical support from the embassy.

The assistant air attaché, Sonnenberg, interrupted to assure everyone that the air attaché’s office in Vientiane gave every assistance in its power to the program at all times. His speech was cut short by an emotional Papa Fox: ‘You’re full of shit!’

A general raised his voice to suggest that there was nothing wrong with the airplanes, and that Air America maintained them just fine - it was the way these cowboy FACs flew the damn things.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Papa Fox exploded. ‘You want to come up and fly with us sometime and see how we do things. We are in enemy territory ninety-nine percent of the time that we are airborne. You can’t expect people to fly around in that environment with airplanes that are cutting in and out all the goddam time.’

People began to shout, including the Air America maintenance manager imprudently defending the record of his mechanics. Papa Fox continued to dominate the meeting by shouting louder than anyone else. As the battle raged, Colonel Tyrrell sat quietly to one side, saying nothing. By the time the meeting closed, Papa Fox had made his point - and annoyed a great many senior officers.

* * *

Improvements were made in the program. All of the Raven airplanes were rotated through Udorn and properly over-hauled. Many of the O-1s had come from the Army, where they had been out in the field for years accumulating dirt in the fuel tanks. Some planes had two cups of mud extracted from each of their wing tanks. New filters and chamois strainers were put on the fuel buggies out in the field.

Most important of all, one of Air America’s very best mechanics was permanently assigned to Long Tieng. Stan Wilson was a man after the Ravens’ own heart - a mechanical whiz, with a wicked chuckle and a dry sense of humor. His idea of an afternoon off was to fly in the backseat of a T-28 on a combat mission. The Ravens called him ‘Clean’ Stanley because he always seemed to be covered from head to foot in black grease. It was said of Stan Wilson that given a data plate, a set of knitting needles, and a ball of steel wool, he could knit an airplane.

He was working as Air America’s chief mechanic at Savannakhet, in southern Laos, maintaining every type of airplane, when he received the call from Udorn to drop everything and join the Raven program. ‘We’ll have a Volpar pick you up - you’re going to Long Tieng to maintain O-1s.’

‘O-1s - what the hell for?’ It seemed to Wilson that the O-1 could not possibly pose any special maintenance problems calling on his canny skills. But he flew up to Long Tieng and within hours had isolated the problem. Every one of the spotter planes had been tuned to fly out of Udorn – just above sea level - while in northern Laos they operated out of strips three thousand to four thousand feet high. Although a pilot could adjust the mixture manually to some extent, a further carburetor adjustment was needed. It was a simple enough procedure. Wilson also found out that the mechanics who had been assigned to work on the Raven Bird Dogs had previously maintained B-52 bombers.

It took Clean Stanley an afternoon to overhaul the nine planes used by the Long Tieng Ravens, and when he was finished he took each one up for a test flight. The program never had to worry about faulty maintenance again. If Stan Wilson signed his name in the log book, he was prepared to fly the plane. The team of mechanics eventually gathered to work on the Ravens’ planes was first rate. (Frank Shaw, a twenty-year-old Air Force enlisted man in the ‘black,’ became ‘line chief.’ He was discovered on several occasions by the Ravens, as they went to their planes at dawn, asleep uncovered on the gravel beneath the wing of an O-1 to be there at takeoff to check that all the birds were ready to go. He worked for a year straight with no time off, refusing all offers of R&R, and saved at least one Raven’s life when he disarmed a sabotaged T-28.) Superb maintenance gave the Ravens back their confidence.