The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (3 page)

Wisniewski orbited and brought the plane down low, trying to take a closer look. He was operating as coolly as he knew how, but his mind was in turmoil. ‘Shit, what do I do? Live people down there. Fuck.’ An AC-47 gunship had come on station and was standing by. It was the war at last.

The instructor was as impatient as the ground commander. ‘He was so excited he was almost jumping up and down, the son of a bitch. The instructor was yelling, “Do it! Do it! You got real guys. A real target! See where it is? Hit it with a rocket. Do it!”’

Wisniewski took a deep breath. He was so nervous he felt he would never be able to get it right. He rolled in on the house and fired a marking rocket. It was right on target and hit directly in the center of the house. People began to run out in every direction. He hesitated for a moment before keying the radio mike and talking to the gunship. ‘Hit my smoke!’

The AC-47 banked lazily into position. It took only seconds. The Dragonship - known by the grunts as Puff or Spooky - was equipped with three rapid-fire Gatling guns, each capable of pouring down six thousand rounds a minute. When it opened up, the tracers alone made it look as if it were hosing the earth with fire. The house dissolved. One moment Wisniewski had looked down and the house was there, the next it had disappeared as if it had never existed. ‘Thanks,’ the ground commander said over the air. ‘Bad guys all dead.’

Wisniewski flew home feeling nauseous and very confused. It had not happened as he had imagined it would, and the enormous step of killing people for the first time had seemed so arbitrary and ordinary. Nothing had really blown up; he had seen no blood nor heard any human cries. There had also been the instructor watching the whole operation, which allowed Wisniewski to say to himself, ‘It was
not quite
just me.’

Two days later, in a firefight on the banks of the Mekong, Wisniewski put in an air strike on his own. Friendly ground forces had called for air support to destroy enemy troops who had stationed themselves in a group of houses that straggled along the bank of the river for a mile or so. Wisniewski arrived and worked five sets of fighter-bombers, loaded with a variety of ordnance, onto the target. ‘The people on the ground said there was nothing there but bad guys. I smoked the houses, an easy target, working the air up and down, back and forth. I blew them all up. Everything burned. Somebody had told me it was all bad guys, but I have no idea who was in there. And when I left I looked back into the sunset - everything was burning. And that was when I really got sick - I felt fucking terrible about that shit.’

Back on the ground the moral question became very simple - either one did it, or one didn’t do it. It was not a job that permitted fence-sitting, and no one who had struggled for so long through the pilot hierarchy to arrive at some point of combat respectability was going to quit. ‘I was in a situation where if I didn’t like what I was doing I could quit. That decision took about thirty seconds. I wasn’t going to quit. And if I wasn’t going to quit I was going to do it right.’

* * *

There is no training in the world that quite prepares a soldier for the realities of the battlefield. The moral question for a FAC soon receded into the background as friends and colleagues were routinely killed by an enemy who had demonstrated a willingness to shoot them out of the sky without any qualms at all.

A word the FACs used a lot when talking about their initial stint on the job was ‘tense.’ Contemplating the hidden mysteries of an imminent combat mission made them tense; getting shot at made them tense; taking the plane down low to look under the trees for anti-aircraft guns made them tense. In conversation over a beer, safely back at the hootch, FACs would swap stories about the day’s tense moments. Nobody spoke of being ‘scared’ - except in the sense that somebody had made them jump: ‘Got down there under the trees and that goddam 37-mike-mike AA gun opened up right in front of me - scared me shitless.’ The FAC would laugh and chug his beer. Combat has its own etiquette, and a soldier does not have the poor taste to talk about fear. Fear followed its own immutable logic, and once it was admitted, disintegration was bound to follow: a FAC began to fly too high to be effective, or became so cautious he was a hazard to himself.

Death was the same, a taboo subject too serious for serious discussion. If a FAC was good and was killed, his friends said he had the worst sort of luck. It was a damn shame. But if he had made a mistake, or had never really had what it took in the first place, then he had fucked up or was a damn fool. Either way, none of the survivors, drinking beer around the bar, was going to have luck that bad or be so dumb as to fuck up.

So the FAC moved inexorably through the first six months of his tour, coping with each experience as it came. Two stood out: being shot at, especially for the first time (although a real hosing was always a nasty surprise), and trolling for ground fire.

‘Trolling’ involved flying over an area known to be infested by the enemy, and then deliberately taking the plane down low to draw ground fire. Circling as if he had found something and was waiting for fighters, the FAC tempted the enemy to break fire discipline and give away their position. It was an act which went against every instinct of survival and all of a pilot’s training.

But real as the war in Vietnam was, it proved to be something of a disappointment. Sometimes it seemed as if it was spread so thin there wasn’t enough to go around. Seasonal, sporadic, and scattered all over the country, it erupted in one area for a brief spurt of furious action before relapsing into long periods of inactivity. Having geared themselves up for combat, many FACs were disappointed to find themselves flying only fifteen days a month. The free time led to intense boredom and end-less opportunities for getting into trouble with senior officers, military policemen, and downtown bar girls.

There were plenty of FACs who were very pleased to be reducing the arithmetical risk by flying so little; they further minimized it by finessing their way into quiet areas where they flew high or at night, and were careful not to look too hard for the enemy. There were others, who called themselves ‘the Shooters’ who felt that every day out of the war was a waste of time.

It soon became clear to the more aggressive pilots that Vietnam was a war in which the Shooters were out of place. They were forced to operate under extraordinary restraints, and praise and promotion were more likely to be awarded to those among the horde of rear echelon types. Although the sky was dense with the machinery of war, often the most dangerous part of any mission was getting back into the traffic pattern. FACs and fighter pilots both bemoaned the fact that the greatest risk in the war in South Vietnam was not enemy action but a mid-air collision.

Too much free time, endless stretches of boredom spent in the hootch drinking beer instead of flying in the war, led to flights of subversive fancy. Most of the FACs had gone to Vietnam willingly enough - jumped at the opportunity, almost - and accepted their role as a duty demanded of them by their country. But after a few months all sorts of questions began to arise about the quality of leadership, the motives of the politicians, the way the war was being conducted - ‘fought’ was dismissed as too strong a word - and the South Vietnamese themselves. Anyone with eyes to see could not help noticing that while all the young Americans in the country were in uniforms of one sort or another, a great many of the young Vietnamese were riding around on mopeds with stereos blaring western rock hitched to their shoulders. By definition a FAC is a hawk - and the Shooters were the most hawklike of them all - but even they had second thoughts about the war in Vietnam.

From his very first day in-country the FAC came up against the Romeos - the Rules of Engagement.
[5]
They had become enormously complex and almost incomprehensible as the war progressed, elaborated upon and changed at will by political decisions made in Washington, until they had become an end in themselves. There were rules for every part of the country, all of them different and forever changing. There were rules to cover every type of activity, and different sets of rules for every service - the Army, the Marines, the Navy, and especially the Air Force. One of the commanders of the 7th Air Force, Gen. John D. Lavelle, gave a graphic description of their bulk: ‘We finally found out why there are two crew members in the F-4. One is to fly the airplane and one is to carry the briefcase full of the Rules of Engagement.’

Rules to cover FAC activity were legion, and each new pilot spent the first two days of the war in Vietnam learning them. Every month afterward a FAC had to take a multi-question written exam - the Romeo exam - for each of the political areas he worked. The bailiwick of Lew Hatch, who would become a Raven to escape the rules, was spread over three military areas, and he spent a significant amount of his time preparing for exams. ‘I would go in to the intel folks a couple of days before the exam and get the ROE out and study them. You had to know everything - the start and end coordinates of free-fire zones, which LOCs (lines of communication) we could hit without political clearance. In Cambodia we couldn’t hit within a thousand meters of a pagoda - in HI Corps, in South Vietnam, it was five hundred meters. If you didn’t pass the written test you were decertified and couldn’t go out on air strikes, and would have to be in the intel shop studying for several days. Some of the rules were asinine. I ended up taking a Romeo exam on three sets of ROE every month. I spent all my time sweating the exams.’

The rules were impossible to memorize in their entirety, and sometimes even to understand, and were open to different interpretations. Huge sanctuary areas were granted to the enemy. A fighter pilot could not attack a North Vietnamese MiG sitting on a runway until it was in flight, identified, and showing hostile intentions (the possible peaceful intentions of an enemy MiG were left undefined). In some regions enemy trucks could avoid attack by simply driving off the road. SAM missile sites could not be struck while under construction, but only after they became operational. Limited extensions of target areas would be arbitrarily declared, only to be unexpectedly canceled and withdrawn later.

The Romeos were classified as Top Secret throughout the war - right up until 1985 - but the enemy gained a close and detailed knowledge of them, which they used to their great advantage. The Americans ruled that pagodas were not to be struck: the enemy stored ammunition, sheltered troops, and set up anti-aircraft guns in them. Field hospitals were not to be struck: the enemy moved its casualties onto ammo dumps and supply caches and called them hospitals. And after every major action the enemy could always slip back into clearly defined sanctuaries where their safety was assured.

The FACs fully understood the need to control bombing in a war without front lines, but the rules governing forward air control missions severely hampered them from doing an effective job. The Air Force demanded that a FAC fly at a minimum altitude of fifteen hundred feet, putting him out of the range of small-arms fire. It was also often too high to be able to spot the enemy. To get the job done there were times when fifteen hundred feet was too low, or five hundred feet too high - what a FAC really needed was to be allowed to make a judgment based on experience and the actualities of the battlefield, rather than follow a rigid set of rules. Any FAC who broke the rules, in whatever circumstances and however effective the results, was liable to court-martial. So FACs ended up either doing a really poor job or breaking the rules.

Flying at fifteen hundred feet, they would find a target, peering with difficulty through binoculars. The next step was to call it into the direct air support center (DASC) or the orbiting airborne control and command center (ABGCC) for approval. Each target took between ten and fifteen minutes to approve if the system was working smoothly, although there could be a wait of a half hour or more.

The frustration of being unable to operate freely enough to take the war to the enemy mounted daily among the FACs, and the bureaucratic illogic of the Romeos was reflected in their clashes with rear echelon administrative officers.

‘Major, can I ask you something?’ Fred Platt, a FAC destined to become a Raven, asked one such officer after being refused permission to put in an air strike on Vietcong who had been shooting at him in the open country.

‘Go right ahead, captain.’

‘We’re over here to fight a war. Fighting a war means killing the enemy before he kills you. I can find the enemy okay, and he’s sure as hell trying to kill me. Why can’t I kill him?’

‘You have to wait for permission.’

‘If he’s shooting at me can I shoot back - because then I’m sure he’s a bad guy?’

The major sighed. ‘No. You have to wait for permission.’

‘What if he shoots and hits me?’

The major smiled in quiet triumph. ‘You’d be violating the Rules of Engagement by flying too close to him.’

So Fred Platt adjusted the rules. ‘I said, fuck it, shot them wherever I saw them and just didn’t report it.’ Instead of protecting the lives of innocent civilians, the Romeos turned honest men into liars. ‘Don’t get the wrong impression - I wouldn’t go out and get some peasant walking with his buffalo. But I can tell between VC firing AK-47s at me and some old peasant with a water buffalo.’

While the rules often forbade a FAC to act in the face of the enemy, the system similarly demanded action when there was clearly no hostile activity whatsoever. FACs who flew the OV-10 over the Ho Chi Minh Trail usually operated at ten thousand feet, one hand on the stick and the other holding binoculars. In the wet season, which was six months of the year, they could often see nothing. A FAC walled in by solid undercast was obliged to stay on station hour after hour, regardless of being unable to put in air strikes. The only enemy was boredom. ‘I used to do spins - spin the plane just to stay awake,’ Terry Murphy said. ‘Take the airplane up, kick the rudder and stall it, spin it for a couple of thousand feet, and then recover it. Hour after hour.’