The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (15 page)

‘Where is everybody?’ Pop asked.

‘They are afraid to come here. Afraid to be with me. I have lost face with my people. I have lost face with the world.’

Pop tried to comfort Vang Pao with his usual brand of homespun philosophy and earthy optimism, but the general was beyond consolation. The best of his men were dead, he said, his army was mostly made up of twelve-year-olds. Many of his soldiers did not live long enough even to learn fear. After nine years of constant war, victory was as far away as ever. It was an age-old Meo saying that there was always another mountain, but they were running out of mountains, and Vang Pao foresaw a day when his entire people would be forced to flee the country to live as unwanted refugees.

‘I am the Meo general Vang Pao. The king of Laos believed in me. Prince Souvanna Phouma believed in me. They took me, a Meo peasant, into the king’s own council. Now I have been defeated. I am no longer the great Meo general.’ For the first time in his adult life, Gen. Vang Pao wept.

5. The Big Picture

A Raven viewed the war through the narrow windows of his airplane. Hung above the battle, he observed a larger scene than the fragmentary chaos seen by the soldier on the ground, but fundamentally shared much the same experience of it: smoke and noise, gunfire and flame, underpinned by a constant dull fear, occasionally relieved by rushes of intense excitement or moments of terror. At the end of a day of battle he was left with an overwhelming sense of universal muddle.

It was with a somewhat patronizing air that the Ravens’ ideas for improving performance, or complaints about the way things were being done, were met by those higher up the chain of command. The men at the air attaché’s office in Vientiane, the CIA planners, and the hordes of noncombatant Downtowners at the embassy all had the same answer when confronted by exasperated and exhausted Ravens: they simply did not understand the Big Picture.

It was true enough. All of the killing and being killed clouded their perspective. The endless demands of combat limited their vision so that the Ravens never did get a clear look at the Big Picture.

This was, at best, a surreal dreamlike work; at worst it was a nightmare piece in the style of Hieronymus Bosch. The Americans looked upon the Big Picture from afar - and Washington, D.C. was about as far away from the mountains and jungle of Laos as it was possible to be. There had been a period when trouble in this tiny country had moved it briefly to the center of the picture, when the superpowers clashed, but this had been resolved by the Geneva Accord of 1962, which recognized the neutrality of Laos and forbade the presence of foreign military personnel in it.

The North Vietnamese, being closer, had a different view of the Big Picture. Like the Americans, they saw it in a gallery of distorting mirrors, for they too had agreed to the terms of the document drawn up in Geneva, in which they solemnly pronounced they had no troops fighting in Laos. At a stroke, tens of thousands of their regular soldiers were turned into phantoms. The principal difference between these two adversaries was that the North Vietnamese had a very clear view of exactly what the Big Picture would look like when the mirrors were removed. They intended to fight the Americans as they had fought the French before them, across the whole of Indochina - with the ultimate aim of installing Communist regimes in South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (a goal set by Ho Chi Minh when he founded the Indochinese Communist Party in Hong Kong in 1929, and which the West had confirmed at least as early as 1952, when the French Expeditionary Corps captured secret Vietnamese Communist Party documents).
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The Ravens knew nothing of all this. In Vientiane the war was seen by foreign diplomats as a Chinese opera: often violent, somewhat amusing, and altogether mystifying. In an attempt to supplement the original sketchy briefing, new Ravens picked up what they could about Laos from colleagues, and a handful read the few works written in English about the country, a narrow shelf of books indeed.

It was in keeping with the arbitrary nature of things in Laos, however, that one or two Ravens who passed through Vientiane were given the lengthy and luxurious education of a Jungle John briefing. Jungle John was the nickname of Maj. John Garritty, one of the intelligence officers in the air attaché’s office, a member of the so-called Gray Team. (The White Team consisted of Americans officially assigned to the country; the Black Team was made up of those men who were not supposed to be in Laos at all; the Gray Team consisted of Air Force and other military personnel who ran the operations command post.) Garritty, an Air Commando who had been posted to the country as one of the original Butterfly FACs preceding the Ravens, had been in Laos for many years. Although not a pilot himself, Garritty was the onetime world record holder for an altitude parachute jump, an achievement which earned him the respect of fellow adventurers. He loved Laos and its people and felt the battle to save it from the North Vietnamese Communists to be a crusade of the righteous. The briefings he gave were off-the-cuff, impromptu talks of an informal, highly personal nature, but if he saw he had captured the imagination of his audience they could last three hours.

Garritty conducted the briefings in his own way and at his own pace, his feet up on his desk and a cigarette in his mouth. Once he began, the only other sound in the room was the rattle of the air conditioning. As the briefing progressed through the hot afternoon, sunlight filtered through the shuttered blinds at such an angle that it threw beams of dust particles across the room - a setting which might have been especially designed to enthrall young romantics. However jaundiced a pilot might have become through his experience in Vietnam, by the time he left Jungle John’s office he wanted to put on a Laotian uniform and go to war.

‘Welcome, gentlemen, to the Kingdom of Lan Xang - the Land of a Million Elephants,’ Major Garritty began. ‘You have stepped through the looking glass into a magical place inhabited by a gentle race sadly trapped in a life-and-death struggle not of your making. Imagine, if you will, a comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, with splashes of blood.’ What came next was a lyrical description of the country and its people, a capsule version of Laotian history, and an honest attempt to explain the convoluted, mad-hatter politics of the place.
[29]

It was the misfortune of weak, landlocked, peaceful Laos to lie between powerful, perpetually warring neighbors. It holds a key position in Indochina - a Yale key, Ravens thought, looking at it on the map. In the north its borders are merely the work of a cartographer, for its wild mountain terrain is not policed and its people wander across the international borders with Burma and China unaware of their existence. To the south is Cambodia, to the west Thailand, and to the east the country shares a 1,324-mile-long border with Vietnam.

The border with Thailand is largely drawn by the Mekong, which flows from the high Tibetan plateau in China down through deep gorges and into the plains. It is here that more than half the population live, the lowland Lao or Lao Loum, who are ethnically indistinguishable from the population of northeast Thailand and who also follow the same gentle teachings of Theravada Buddhism. The remainder of Laos’s population is made up of a variety of tribes who are animists.

The war the Ravens were about to join was the latest chapter in a story of conflict spanning a thousand years. It was a case in which a superpower, ideological conflict had become imposed on an historical one. The battle, beneath all the complex and tortured politics, was over land. Indochina was locked into a continual struggle between the Indian-influenced kingdoms to the south and west of the Annamite mountains and the sinicized Vietnamese. The tolerant, gentler people exposed to Hindu culture were forced to resist the austere, expansionist Vietnamese who had forever been pressing forward from the overcrowded delta of Tonkin in search of new lands. Driven by the needs of a large population and the logic of geography, the Vietnamese clamored ceaselessly for living space. They were resisted by neighbors who feared domination and possible extinction. After thirty generations the enmity was set.

Laos became a political entity in the ninth century and reached its apogee in the eighteenth century, when the kingdom of Lan Xang included regions of Yunnan (China), the Shan States (Burma), parts of the Vietnamese and Cambodian plateau, and large stretches of modern northeastern Thailand. But in less than a century, feudal rivalries, fed by the outside, split the country into three kingdoms: Luang Prabang in the north, the country around Vientiane, and Champassac, in the southern panhandle.

The mountain chains and jungle of Vietnam shielded Laos for a while from her expansionist neighbor, already pushing westward, however. But the open plains of the Mekong valley were an open invitation to the attackers from the growing Siamese state, which also wanted control over Laos to defend itself against Vietnam. The Siamese destroyed the kingdom of Vientiane in 1828, and soon afterward the whole of Laos was split between Siamese and Vietnamese spheres of influence. By the middle of the nineteenth century the peoples of Vietnam and Siam faced each other across the territory that is now Laos and Cambodia. The old Meo mountain states, such as Xieng Khouang, maintained a subject independence by paying tribute to both of their mighty neighbors.

But in 1832 Xieng Khouang was annexed by the Vietnamese when an armed force seized the king and took him back to Hue, where he was publicly executed. The Utile kingdom became a prefecture of the Empire of Annam, and its people were even forced to wear Vietnamese dress. Its rule was so harsh that there was a revolt in which the Vietnamese governor was killed. Order was soon restored, but hatred of the Vietnamese lingered.

The French conquest of Indochina brought an uneasy peace to the area, at a price. The Laotians greeted the new rulers with relief, and the imposition of French rule in 1887 guaranteed the country’s continued existence. Largely through ignorance, the French accepted the Mekong as the international boundary, with the result that the most fertile part of the country became a permanent part of Thailand. French colonial rule did little for the economic development or education of the country outside of the cities, but it was largely benign. There were only six hundred Frenchmen in Laos by 1940, and the single action on their part that fomented rebellion was the collection of taxes. Laos was allowed, for a brief spell in its troubled history, to enjoy the drowsy, unworldly torpor of peace its people seemed created for. Laos was poor - but it was a country where poverty, not wealth, was admired. (The accumulation of wealth for selfish ends results in a
loss
of prestige in Laos, so that it is not the millionaire who is respected but the austere, spiritual man who willingly embraces the most abject form of poverty.)

French colonial administrators sent to Laos felt they had been posted to an earthly paradise. The tolerant, easy habits of the native people and the slow, casual way they lived their lives had a charm impossible to find anywhere else. The most commonly used phrase in the language,
Bo pen nhang
, meaning ‘It doesn’t matter,’ was spoken with conviction as an article of faith. The women were beautiful, warm, and uninhibited. In the hot summer months the whole country sank into a siesta that lasted from after the midday meal until 5:00 in the evening. Frenchmen who became immersed in Laotian life became a recognizable type. Their quiet, undemonstrative voices, calm manner, and gentle, rapt expressions reminded one visiting writer of the victims of successful lobotomy operations - untroubled and mildly libidinous.
[30]

French rule was interrupted by World War II, when - from the Laotian point of view - the Japanese merely took the place of the French for an interlude in which they were similarly benign in their treatment of the subject nation. The defeat of Japan brought back French colonial rule and also created a power vacuum they were unable to fill, while the Vietnamese, more aggressive and ambitious than ever, and doubled in number, once more became the danger.

In 1951 a new service was created by Marshal Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, the best commander in chief of French forces in Indochina, who planned to turn the Vietminh’s skill in fighting behind the lines against the Vietminh themselves by implanting anticommunist guerrillas deep inside enemy territory.

During a 1921 uprising of the Meo, which the French crushed, one of the chiefs told a missionary: ‘They say we are a people who like to fight, a cruel people, enemy of everybody, always changing our region and being happy nowhere. If you want to know the truth about our people, ask the bear who is hurt why he defends himself, ask the dog who is kicked why he barks, ask the deer who is chased why he changes mountains.’
[31]

The French began to understand that the best way to control the Meo was to leave them alone, or to help them actively defend themselves from their enemies. The French accurately saw the Meo as a kind of
maquis
, the French resistance movement that fought the Germans in occupied France in World War II. ‘A
maquisard
is an inhabitant who takes up arms in the region he lives to defend himself, his family, and his property,’ explained Colonel Roger Trinquier, the man chosen to recruit and lead these native movements.
[32]

Although the
maquisards
were recruited from a variety of hill tribesmen, the greatest warriors were the Meo, a Mongolian race originating from China. They are the most mysterious of the twelve principal races of Indochina, because they have the least written about them and the least reliable history. Depending on an oral storytelling tradition - since they had no written language until recently - the Meo are content to propagate legends such as that they are a people who came out of China on a flying carpet. Other folk stories of eternal snows and arctic nights suggest they are of Eskimo origin. They have also been happy to allow outsiders to believe that they are werewolves, or can turn into tigers at will, and that they eat the livers of their slain enemies.