The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (4 page)

The realities of the battlefield demanded again and again that the rules be broken. FACs would find mortars dug in around fortified pagodas which had been converted into anti-aircraft bunkers, but would be refused permission to put in a strike even after they had been shot at. Some risked court-martial by concocting phony coordinates and calling in fighters anyway.

There were times when a refusal to authorize an air strike met with appalling consequences. Douglas Mitchell was flying OV-10s over Cambodia late in the war as a Rustic, the only armed FACs in Southeast Asia. The OV-10 carried two pods of high-explosive rockets - nineteen in each pod - a smaller pod carrying six flechette rockets, six Willy Pete rockets, and two thousand rounds of strafe. Vietnam was drawing most of the air support, and Rustic FACs had a capability to provide immediate air support when everything else was unavailable. Mitchell flew up to a small river town north of Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia, after a report from a ground commander that the Khmer Rouge had taken it the previous evening. When he arrived and swooped low over the town, he could see soldiers in the process of slaughtering the townspeople. Beneath him in clear view, villagers were being dragged from their houses by the Khmer Rouge and shot.

As Mitchell had already been fired upon, and taken a hit that had ricocheted off the nosewheel strut, he asked for permission to fire his own ordnance. He added a graphic description of the horror he was being forced to witness below him.

He was told to stand by. As he waited for an answer, he made a low orbit, watching the slaughter with a mounting sense of fury. Twenty minutes later permission was refused.

Disgusted and enraged, he flew back to base and immediately called a friend at Air Force HQ in Saigon who had influence over the selection and transfer of FACs into other units. The inside word on the FAC circuit was that you never had to go through this sort of thing in the Steve Canyon Program. And any program less bound by the Romeos began to seem like a very attractive alternative. ‘Goddammit, send me to the Steve Canyon Program,’ Doug Mitchell told his friend. ‘I want to go where I can fight.’

There was only one thing more galling than the Romeos, and that was the REMFs (pronounced
remfs).
They arrived in the aftermath of battle, once the enemy had slipped away and the dead and wounded had been removed, swarming out of Saigon like locusts. They vastly outnumbered the men in combat units in the field, and all too often contrived to smother any enterprise or initiative the warriors of their group might show. They were known, with a dismissive contempt that masked a burning loathing, as the REMFs - rear-echelon motherfuckers.

There had never been an American army so burdened with rear-echelon personnel as the one fielded in Vietnam. At the height of the war only 67,000 to 90,000 men were assigned to front-line units, while the remainder of the 540,000-man force formed a huge logistical tail. For every man at the front there were six to eight others behind him. Less than 20 percent of the U.S. Military Assistance Command, Vietnam, was made up of infantrymen.

There is power, as well as safety, in numbers, and this great host of REMFs inevitably came to dominate the war. The longer it continued, the stronger their influence became. Life for the REMFs, with its barbermobiles, mobile dentistry units, air-conditioned clubs, in-country rest and recreation (R&R) centers, and Saigon nightlife, was often more comfortable than back in the States. The Vietnam War was the only one the military had, and a tour in the combat zone was essential for a career officer’s advancement. Vietnam, for many ambitious officers, became just another rung on the way up the ladder.

The enemy did things differently. Their ratio of men in the field to support troops was almost the opposite to that of the U.S. Army, thus enabling them to outnumber U.S. forces with fewer men. But the American fighting man not only had to face the enemy, he also had to deal with the combination of the Romeos and the REMFs, one feeding off the other in a deadly symbiosis which was impossible to overcome or circumvent.

After a little more than one month in Vietnam, and after being on a front-line base during a period of great enemy activity, Craig Morrison - another FAC who would become a Raven - visited a rear-echelon HQ in Nha Trang. On his return to the front he wrote in his journal: ‘Jesus but I am so glad to be here and not down there. All the BS experts and useless strap-hangers are all there shuffling papers etc. They never come up here, for this is easily the hottest place in II Corps. This war grows on you, and I’d sure hate to get pulled out and have to go down there. I would
so
much rather put up with mortars and rockets than headquarters. Mortars and rockets are exciting and can only kill you, but those guys can frustrate and bore you to death, which is a damned sight worse. The home of the useless regulations!!!’
[6]

It is the first reference in the journal to a frustration which was to become unbearable within a few short months. At Pleiku, Morrison slept under his bed clutching an M-16, a flak jacket tossed over him as a blanket, and surrounded by empty ammo boxes full of sand for protection. He was often awakened by enemy attacks so close he could hear the mortar shells coming out of the tubes. In such circumstances he was entirely safe from REMFs. But once the enemy offensive was over they arrived in force.

One colonel lectured FACs and fighter pilots on the length of their hair, their slack dress code, and their ungentlemanly behavior in the officers’ club. The colonel then cleared his throat, as he came to the important part of his talk. It had come to his attention, he said, that the proper respect was not being accorded to rank. He had noticed that officers did not salute his staff car when it passed them. It did not matter whether he was in it or not, there was a principle involved, and the pennant of his rank flew clearly from the fender. There was a moment’s incredulous silence, broken by an exasperated stage whisper from the back of the hall: ‘I’m not saluting a fucking empty car!’

The more REMFs and combat personnel came into contact, the worse the atmosphere of mutual suspicion and incomprehension became. They lived in different worlds, used different vocabularies, and measured the progress of the war in different ways. Front-line troops wanted to hurt the enemy; REMFs wanted to keep U. S. casualties and loss of equipment to a minimum.

Such fundamental differences led to serious disagreements, and confrontation was inevitable. The conflict was symbolized at Phan Rang at a USO show. The original intention of these shows - to reduce the awful tension of combat - had become lost in a welter of petty regulations governing their conduct.

A bespectacled Army warrant officer, who flew ‘Dustoff’ helicopter medical evacuation missions, took his seat in the front row. (Dustoff pilots, who spent their lives in the midst of the worst battles, were considered to be a combat elite.) A Filipino stripper on the stage danced up to the pilot, playfully snatched his glasses, and draped them across her small breasts. She wiggled her hips provocatively, moved the spectacles to her panties, and gyrated her hips directly in front of the chopper pilot. Egged on by the audience, the young man removed the glasses with his teeth and then whipped the girl’s panties down. There was a roar of approval.

Unfortunately, the Army pilot was not fully conversant with the nuances of USO show regulations. In the Army, strippers were allowed to remove their panties, but at an Air Force show this was forbidden. The officer in charge, outraged at this breach of the rules, climbed over the tables and chairs to reach the offending Army pilot. To an uproar of boos and abuse he publicly reprimanded the man and ordered him from the club.

The pilot left, and the show went on. It was interrupted some time later when the screen door at the rear of the club was flipped open. Slowly, the doorway was filled with the gun barrel of a 155mm howitzer, carefully backed into position by a jeep. The attention of every man in the audience shifted from the stage at the front of the club to the massive cannon commanding the rear, and an expectant silence fell over the room. Two Army colonels jumped from the jeep, accompanied by the Dustoff pilot. One stood by the gun, while the other marched through the club until he found the officer in charge, a lieutenant colonel he outranked.

‘Colonel, our friend here flies a rescue helicopter and he was sitting in the front row. You are going to give him his seat back and you are going to apologize to this entire group or my friend, the colonel over there, is going to pull the string and blow the top off the whole of this fucking officers’ club.’

Pandemonium broke out. Combat people separated from REMFs as oil from water. While the former yelled ‘Pull the string, fellas,’ REMFs climbed under tables and looked for places to hide. The lieutenant colonel apologized stumblingly to the chopper pilot and gave him back his seat, although there was no act in the show which could possibly compete with such excitement. The colonels turned on their heels, hopped in their jeep, and drove off into the night with their howitzer.
[7]

But such moments of combat justice were rare, and mostly it was the REMFs who triumphed. It was not unusual for a senior officer, whose experience might have been in transports, to be put in command of a large group of junior combat FACs. The senior officer naturally held the keys to the young men’s advancement, and promotion depended on the Effectiveness Reports (ERs) he wrote on them. Men at the front, who were superb in combat, might be given a poor ER by the REMF commander for unruly behavior in the officers’ club as they unwound after battle, while deskbound officers far to the rear, who were in no danger and under no pressure, routinely earned exemplary ERs. This meant that a combat FAC often came out of the war with a worse record and less chance of promotion than the lowliest and safest of the REMFs. It was a situation as intolerable as it was absurd, and it sapped morale.

The REMFs and the Romeos brought a petty, nagging quality to life in Vietnam. It was to avoid this, rather than a lust for glory, which motivated most of the men who eventually became Ravens. The absurdities of military life in Vietnam combined to tempt them to take the Chance card first heard of in the Monopoly briefing.

Somehow the word always seemed to reach the right people. ‘The reason I joined the Ravens was because there appeared to be some awfully good flying,’ Mike Byers said. ‘I didn’t know a goddam thing about it.’

‘I heard it was on the other side of the fence with none of the Vietnam bullshit,’ Terry Murphy said. ‘That guys got shot down a lot, but it was a lot of fun.’ His group commander tried to talk him out of it, saying that he understood there was an unacceptably high loss rate. ‘When your buddy says there’s less bullshit, it’s more attractive than your commander saying it’s high-risk.’ One of Craig Morrison’s FAC friends had volunteered for the program ahead of him and sent letters postmarked Udorn, Thailand. In essence they said, ‘Come on over, it’s dangerous as hell but NO REMFS!’

Everybody had a different reason, but one by one, from units all over South Vietnam and throughout the war, FACs found themselves inexorably drawn to the mysterious mission they had heard all the rumors about - the Steve Canyon Program.

Raven was the radio call sign which identified the fliers of the Steve Canyon Program. As a symbol of intelligence-gathering and aerial control of ground combat, no name could have been more fitting for the men of the secret war. The raven is the bird of the gods. In Nordic mythology, two ravens, Huyin (Thought) and Munin (Meaning), perch upon the shoulders of Odin, lord of gods. Each day they fly to the ends of the earth and return to their master at night to whisper in his ears the world’s news. The Vikings believed that the excited birds soaring above a battle were the gods in the guise of ravens.

On the practical side, the raven is extremely clever and brave, the bird with the highest mental development, with more than thirty distinct calls with which to convey information to its fellows. With its four-foot wingspan and deadly three-inch beak, it is magnificent, and flies for the sheer delight of its mastery of the air, soaring to great heights, and tumbling earthward in extraordinary displays of prowess.

To certain American tribes the raven could do anything simply by willing it; it created sun, earth, moon, and stars, and also the people of the earth. Indians admire the raven’s sagacity, but fear its ruthless opportunism and wily trickery. Men of many cultures have attributed a conflicting duality of nature to the raven, and its harsh cawing has for centuries been interpreted as the harbinger of death. All of which was very apt for the job in store.

In the early days, when the program was haphazard in its methods, a standard form of recruitment was for a Raven already in the program to approach a like-minded colleague still in Vietnam. Later, things became more structured, but the type recruited never really altered. They were always men who enjoyed a maximum of flying and a minimum of administration, and they tended to be the very best pilots. By definition this meant that most of the Ravens were mavericks, never really comfortable in a conventional military organization, and considered too wild by the mainstream military establishment. The sort of men, in short, needed in a war.

2. Across the Fence

Curiouser and curiouser!

- Lewis Carroll,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Once a volunteer was accepted into the Steve Canyon Program he immediately began to notice a change in his status. Even in Vietnam, waiting to cross the border, there was a marked difference in the way he was treated by senior officers. It was the first indication that the Ravens seemed to enjoy a unique position of some power and importance.