The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (25 page)

A night landing at Alternate was against all the rules and always an unpleasant experience, but Platt flew in over the jeep lights marking the end of the runway and landed safely. Nighty-Night was to be launched the next day and Platt needed to be in the air at first light. He left a message with the radio operator to call him at 4:00 the following morning.

The wake-up call came earlier than expected. The radio operator burst into Platt’s room at 2:00 A.M.: ‘Muong Soui is under attack.’ Platt took off in the dark and headed for Site 108. A frenzied babble of conflicting reports came over the radio and it was difficult to glean any hard information. Sappers had infiltrated the camp, that much was certain, and it seemed Joe Bush had been wounded.

At the first report of the attack, Cricket had diverted A-1 Skyraiders to drop flares over the base in an attempt to mark the retreating sappers. Meanwhile, Air America flew in and out to evacuate the American personnel. Now Platt worked air on the base perimeter in the artificial light of the flares.

As dawn broke he landed on the runway at Muong Soui. North Vietnamese sappers had come onto the base in the early hours of the morning and sabotaged the massive bomb dump. The black sergeant had been shot and left for dead, but despite a heavy loss of blood, he had hauled himself to safety. The Customer, who had returned to the neighboring house, had rolled off his bed and pulled the mattress over him. In the dark the sappers had entered the building, but quickly moved on, thinking the man had run out.

Joe Bush had been asleep when the first rockets hit the far end of his house. He burst out of the front door firing his Swedish-K submachine gun, and ran around to the rear. Two sappers were trying to break in through the back door, and Bush killed them with a grenade. A fierce firefight ensued, in which he wounded two more sappers, before running across to the house where the Customer lived. There, on the steps to the front door, he ran straight into AK-47 fire, which cut him in half.

The Neutralist troops had fled, without either sounding the alarm or firing their weapons, the moment they had seen sappers laying gasoline-filled bottles with burning wicks at the base of their guard towers. The American personnel in their tents, under strict orders not to engage in combat, had sat tight waiting for Air America.

Platt watched the bomb dump burn from the landing strip. He walked across to Joe Bush’s house and entered the burned-out building. The whole of one end had been destroyed, and Platt picked his way through the rubble to look at the radio operator’s room, where he was to have spent the night on a cot. It had been demolished by a direct hit from the first of the B-40 rockets. The sappers had known exactly where to strike. Their intelligence had been so accurate it seemed obvious that only a traitor inside the camp itself could have supplied

the information. Platt felt in his bones that the culprit was the Lao Army colonel with whom he had dined the previous night.

He flew out of Muong Soui in the late morning with murder in his heart. The Pathet Lao were broadcasting the names over the radio of Bush, the black sergeant, and himself - clearly a boast of the Americans killed in the sapper attack. And further evidence that the enemy had detailed information from the inside.

Platt and Bush had homed in on the Communist radio station before and knew it to be somewhere on the plain. They had never been able to locate it, as the station always went off the air before being pinpointed. But this time the moment Platt picked up the frequency he used his radio direction finder. When he had the needle steady he could actually make out the antenna itself less than half a mile in front of him.

According to the Rules of Engagement, it was off limits. The embassy based its rules on old French maps, where every dot represented a village or structure of some kind. The radio station was such a dot, and therefore unable to be targeted. Platt buzzed it and saw a 37mm in a camouflaged hut. He decided to ignore the rules and called Cricket for air.

‘Coming your way.’

Within minutes two F-4 Phantoms were on station. Despite intense ground fire from antiaircraft guns, they went ahead and destroyed the radio station and its gun position. It was some small satisfaction on a bad day.

Operation Nighty-Night was called off. The reaction of the Neutralists to enemy attack illustrated once again to the Americans the abysmal performance of Laotian troops in battle (and the Neutralists were considered marginally
better
than the soldiers of the Royal Lao Army). The absolute futility of basing any ambitious military operations on them was driven home. Only the Meo forces could be relied upon, and even they were being cut to ribbons in the face of the North Vietnamese onslaught.

Gen. Vang Pao was dispirited by the news from the battlefront and seemed to have lost the will to victory. He spoke endlessly of defeat and threatened his CIA advisers that he would pull all of his troops out of northeast Laos and concentrate them in the northwest, where he would make a defensive stand. Nothing the CIA could say seemed to change his mind.

Pop Buell, the Indiana farmer who ran the AID mission in Sam Thong, was persuaded to talk to him. One night Pop visited the general and the two men sat together on logs before an open fire drinking
lau lao.
The old man drew a deep breath and plunged into some straight talk.

‘It’s time somebody shook you up. You’re like a little boy sulking because he’s lost a game. If you could look at yourself right now, you’d see what I mean. Your face looks weak. You’re dressed like a bum, worse than me even. You’ve let your people down. Now you’re letting your whole army down. Who do you suppose is running the army while you sit around feeling sorry for yourself? Nobody, that’s who. And nobody will, until you crawl out of your tent and start acting like a man again.’

Instead of being angered, the general was moved almost to tears. ‘What can I do?’ he said brokenly. ‘Tell me. What can I do?’

Pop Buell told him to clean himself up, put on a fresh uniform, and get back in the field. No one else would have dared speak so bluntly. Vang Pao was silent. He drank another glass of
lau
lao
and then rose. Formally and without warmth, he bade Pop a stiff good night, leaving the old man to wonder about the effect of his words.

The general was on the strip at dawn, washed, shaved, and wearing battle fatigues. By the time he returned to the base at nightfall he had visited eighteen Meo villages and military camps by helicopter. But in his conversation with Pop over dinner he remained deeply pessimistic. ‘Last night you told me what I had to hear. Now we must face the future. I think we will mostly have bad times. Many people will die.’

It would be difficult not only to go forward, but even to hold what they had. ‘Someday, probably soon, the Americans will leave Laos, no matter what happens,’ the general said. He needed to act quickly.
[120]

The abortion of Operation Nighty-Night allowed the enemy to continue to strengthen their position on the Plain of Jars. All of the most northerly friendly positions were now behind enemy lines. Na Khang, in particular, came under terrible pressure. Ravens flew continuously to support holding actions where beleaguered outposts on remote mountaintops fought to beat off enemy attacks. Even with Gen. Vang Pao back in form, it would be some time before it was possible to launch a new offensive.

There was a limit to how many dead and wounded the Meo could sustain, and Vang Pao intimated it had already been reached. The Meo’s tired force of children and old men, who received a maximum of three months’ training, were no match for the North Vietnamese soldiers, trained for a year and rotated annually.

The general began to make demands on the Americans. If the United States expected the Meo to continue the fight, he wanted a massive increase in air support in return. He also wanted the Rules of Engagement relaxed to allow Ravens to use U.S. air to bomb the enemy who had moved into the towns and villages of the Plain of Jars, which they had turned into strongholds. And he wanted his Meo pilots based at Long Tieng, under his personal command, instead of at Vientiane, where they were under the nominal control of the Royal Lao Air Force.

It was the first of many requests for increased airpower over Laos, and while the Americans had little choice but to comply, the escalation made the policymakers nervous. They continued to issue misleading statements to the press designed to conceal the extent of U.S. military activity in country. A story filed by United Press International early in 1969, and carried in many newspapers throughout the world, reported that Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma had admitted U.S. planes were bombing North Vietnamese troop concentrations and infiltration routes in Laos. The American embassy quickly pointed out that the prime minister had actually said ‘our’ - meaning the aircraft of the Royal Lao Air Force, not the United States.

A telegram fired off by CINCPAC - Commander in Chief, Pacific Command - to the air attaché’s office in Vientiane reaffirmed official Defense Department policy: ‘The preferable response to questions about air operations in Laos is NO COMMENT. If pressed you are authorized to state, “At the request of the Royal Laotian Government, the United States has since 1964 been conducting reconnaissance flights over Laos escorted by armed aircraft. By agreement with the Laos government, the escort fighter aircraft may return fire if fired upon.”’
[121]

In fact, U.S. fighter-bombers flew attack missions inside Laos as a daily routine. A set of Phantom F-4s arrived on station on the rim of the Plain of Jars - three days after the CINCPAC telegram to the air attaché’s office - to hit a target marked by Papa Fox.

The Raven watched the first fighter enter its run and saw the bombs drops, but just as the Phantom was beginning to pull off it started to come apart. It was incomprehensible. There had been no ground fire, or even reports of antiaircraft guns capable of taking a jet out of the sky at 3,500 feet, but the plane had turned into a ball of smoke.

Inside the cockpit of the F-4, Mike Heenan, the copilot, had got on the stick the moment he sensed something was wrong. He heard the pilot grunt, as if he were also fighting to get the aircraft under control. They were diving fast, but an aerodynamic nose rise made it seem as if the plane might be recovering. Not until they were very low did it become apparent that the F-4 was going to dive straight into the ground.

At the same moment that Heenan went for the handles to eject he heard the pilot cry, ‘Get out, Mike - get out!’ In the split second between hearing his colleague call to him and being blown out of the plane, Heenan accepted his death. ‘I know I was going to die. It was a very warm feeling - it surprised me how comfortable it was - how easy it was to accept.’

Heenan blacked out on ejection, and when he came around he was hanging from his parachute, which had caught in a tree. He had smashed through its branches and slammed into the trunk and was bleeding profusely. A small, sharp branch stuck through one of his hands like a dagger, and his helmet had been ripped off laying bare a part of his skull, but he felt no pain. He hung helplessly from the tree, badly confused and in shock, while around him everything seemed deathly quiet. ‘I could not believe I was alive!’

A moment of panic followed. He fired his flares and began to shout for help into the handheld survival radio. Papa Fox, identified over the air as Raven 44, came up on the radio and told the downed pilot to keep calm - and to get to the ground. Heenan unbuckled himself from the parachute and allowed himself to fall, hitting the ground hard at an awkward angle and spraining his ankle so badly he thought he had broken it.

He felt swallowed by the silence. The chute was draped over the tree like a tent, a beacon that stood out in a plain mostly made up of bushes and dotted with only a few tall trees. He began to crawl through the elephant grass away

from the chute, but looked back to see that he was leaving a clear trail not only of crushed grass, but of blood as well. He began to worry excessively that the smell of blood would attract tigers. He felt terrible thirsty and searched for his water bottle, but it had fallen from the pocket of his flight suit on ejection. Most of all he was scared.

Papa Fox came back on the radio. According to all the training manuals, a pilot was supposed to keep his composure, reserve his flares, and observe correct radio procedures. Papa Fox knew the reality was different, and remembered that the first thing he had done when shot down was to run wildly into the forest.

He explained patiently that a fully-fledged search-and-rescue (SAR) operation was going to take time to mount, but they would have him out soon enough. He urged Heenan to move in a northeasterly direction to a better pick up spot. ‘I had no clue which way northeast was,’ Heenan said. ‘I had a compass in the top left-hand pocket of my survival vest, but I had forgotten it was there. Rather than call me a dumb shit, Raven 44 flew over to show me the direction.’ He scrambled three hundred yards to the northeast and backed into a bush, painstakingly covering himself with foliage.

There were Jolly Greens - HH-3E super rescue helicopters - on alert only twenty-two miles from where the Phantom had disintegrated, which meant Heenan could have been picked up within ten minutes of the crash. But cumbersome Air Force procedures dictated that the choppers could not take off until A-1 Skyraiders had been scrambled from Nakhon Phanom, in Thailand, and successfully suppressed all ground fire in the area. When the A-1s did arrive, one almost flew straight into Papa Fox, missing him by less than a hundred feet.