The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (43 page)

The White House felt that Vietnamization was proceeding too slowly and that the South Vietnamese Army would not be able to bridge the gap left by the continual U.S. troop withdrawals. Air power was to bridge that gap, adding yet another political dimension to a bomber that was already employed for organizational purposes and interagency rivalry. The B-52 was to become one of the cornerstones of U.S. policy in Indochina, buying time for both Vietnamization and the Nixon Doctrine. Like Gen. Vang Pao, the White House put inordinate faith in air power without fully understanding it. (The Air Force histories for this period are entitled ‘The Administration Emphasizes Air Power’ [1969] and ‘The Role of Air Power Grows’ [1970]).

The precedence given to the political rather than the military use of the B-52 worried Defense Secretary Melvin Laird, who felt that the White House accepted uncritically every claim the Air Force or the joint chiefs made for air power, and that Nixon and Kissinger had no clear idea of what it could or could not do. He even asked an aide to produce a briefing, ‘to begin educating Dr. Kissinger.’

‘It’s a very big job,’ Col. Robert Pursley, his military assistant, remarked. ‘The president and Dr. Kissinger both believe everything 7th Air Force has told them.’
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The other issue at stake was who had power in Washington, D.C. Kissinger was involved in arm wrestling with the Pentagon, State Department, and joint chiefs. The winner was whoever had their way with the president.

After a month of bureaucratic infighting, Kissinger went to President Nixon with his request for a B-52 strike on the Plain of Jars. He told the president that the long-feared North Vietnamese offensive had finally broken and that Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma had made a formal request for B-52 strikes (an idea generated and suggested to the Laotian prime minister by the U.S. embassy in Washington). ‘I recommended that the president authorize B-52 strikes if the enemy advanced beyond Muong Soui, the farthest point of communist penetration before the government offensive of the previous summer. The president agreed.’

Ambassador Godley was told of the decision to use the B-52 by Henry Kissinger, who said he was speaking on behalf of the president. In face of such authority Godley only voiced ‘mild objections.’ The clandestine B-52 bombing of Laos was code-named Good Look - the same name that was used for the secret bombing of neighboring Cambodia. ‘We began using B-52s on a very highly classified basis,’ Godley said. ‘We never admitted using them.’

As a prelude to the February raid it was decided to evacuate all civilians from the southern rim of the plain and move them further south. It was the war’s most dramatic helicopter evacuation, when Air America and Continental Air Services aircraft lifted out more than thirteen thousand refugees from Lat Sen airfield. Pilots kept their engines running at the hot and dusty locations while the refugees boarded the transport aircraft to be flown to Vientiane.
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American reporters and photographers witnessed the exodus of the impoverished people, and accounts were published in the press.

The president had authorized the raid if and when the enemy advanced beyond Muong Soui. ‘The Communists were beyond Muong Soui within twenty-four hours,’ Kissinger records in his memoirs. ‘An attack with three B-52s was launched on the evening of February 17-18.’
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But the enemy had not taken Muong Soui by this date, as documents declassified since the publication of Kissinger’s memoirs show.
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The B-52 strike went in anyway. And the raid was not confined to a cell of three bombers, as stated by Kissinger. Thirty-six sorties of B-52s dropped a total of 1,078 tons of bombs, according to official USAF accounts.
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No one in the know in Laos thought that even such a massive raid would stop the enemy, and it didn’t - although the Air Force expressed satisfaction on the bomb damage assessment, which reported many secondary explosions and numerous casualties. (Also the precedent had been set, and from now on the B-52 would be used in thousands of sorties over northern Laos before the end of the year.)

Burr Smith was out on the plain with a handheld movie camera to film the strike. It fell considerably closer to him than planned, which suggests it was off target, and parts of the film - now buried in some archive in CIA HQ, Langley, Virginia - are very shaky due to rapid rearward crawfishing.
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CIA radio intercepts reported the enemy complaining’ of deafness after the raid, but it failed to stop them.

Impressive though the raid was, it neither bolstered Meo courage sufficiently to make them hold fast nor broke the enemy’s will. The B-52 failed to put a dent in the enemy’s offensive, and they moved on to take Muong Soui unopposed by ground forces late in the afternoon of February 24. At the first glimpse of the approaching enemy the town’s meager 120-man defending force abandoned their positions and fled.

The bombs of the B-52 had been absorbed by Laos without protest as simply more of the same, but they would find their mark in Washington, D.C.

A mixture of superhuman will and Texan cussedness enabled Fred Platt to take a few steps across his hospital room. The staff, who were perpetually picking him up from the floor, considered him a difficult patient. Slowly, he reached the point where he could cross the room from the bed to the door, tottering precariously in leg braces. Within two weeks he could take the same journey without the leg braces, using crutches. It was a painful and heartbreaking business, but he achieved what the medical profession had declared to be impossible.

Platt was the only person on his floor hospitalized by combat injuries. One patient had broken a leg playing softball, another’s foot had turned septic after stepping on a nail, while two others were incapacitated with virulent cases of gonorrhea. Surprisingly little sympathy was extended to the single patient who not only had been wounded, but had also emerged from the brutalizing, psychologically warping business of war. The staff’s patience was tried by a man who loudly declared he had little faith in their recipes for recovery and was intent on curing himself despite medical advice. Worst of all, Fred Platt did not do what he was told. One evening, as dinner was being served along the corridor, he was pointedly ignored.

‘Where’s my supper?’

‘If you insist on getting out of bed,’ the nurse replied primly, ‘the ambulatory patients go to the dining hall and get their own meals.’

‘Fine,’ Platt said, containing his anger. ‘Thank you.’

Dressed in his hospital gown, he stumbled on his crutches to the front of the building, where he flagged down a passing jeep. The driver dropped him off at the O club. His entrance was dramatic, and word of his arrival spread through the club: ‘Old Magnet Ass is out of the hospital.’

He was propped up against a table and whisky was poured down him. The fighter pilots gathered around and an impromptu party began, until it was interrupted by a commotion at the front door of the club. Platt had been reported by the hospital authorities as AWOL, and the air police had arrived to pick him up.

An uproar of booing and hissing broke out, while fighter pilots formed a phalanx to block off the sky cops. A young captain walked over to General Petit, commander of the 7/13th Air Force, who happened to be in the club. ‘The club officer wants you to know the air police are here, sir. There’s an officer AWOL from the hospital and they have a report he’s here in the club. They’ve come to arrest him and take him back.’

The general still harbored strong reservations concerning the Ravens, but they did not extend to disciplining a man shot down in the combat zone who left the hospital for a drink with comrades-in-arms. He told the captain to inform the air police that they needed the presence of both the squadron and the base commanders to effect an arrest in the O club. While the sky cops spoke into their walkie-talkie radios, Platt slipped out the back door, where the general’s staff car was available to drive him back to the hospital.

He hobbled back to his room, where he was greeted in icy triumph by the nurse. ‘They arrested you, didn’t they? That will teach you to run away.’

‘You told me to go eat - I’m just through eating dinner,’ Platt said, reeking of whisky. ‘Nobody arrested me. I got a lift back from the general.’

A letter was sent by the hospital commander to the air attaché’s office, Vientiane, reporting the incident. Platt was duly sent a formal reprimand, which stated that his lack of officer qualities reflected badly on the program as a whole. Enclosed with the reprimand was the paperwork on his third Purple Heart.

Doc Elliott came down from Long Tieng. ‘The treatment you’re getting here is horrible,’ he pronounced. ‘I’m going to move you out.’

A hospital room was set up in the Charoen Hotel, where Elliott oversaw Platt’s treatment. ‘I trusted him and he did a hell of a good job on me. Everything hurt, but I was beginning to get feeling back. I could move my hand. I would be standing holding a pencil and it would fall out of my hand and I would never know that it was gone. I would fall down and never know that my legs weren’t there anymore. It was a question of opening up new circuits and learning how to walk and move my arms again.’

A large part of the therapy was provided by the professional masseuses from the local bathhouse. They came in relays and worked around the clock, gently massaging the feeling back into Platt’s body.

Soon he was strong enough to get around to the various Udorn bars. He ran into Dave Anckerberg, the Air America pilot who had picked him up, and tried again to give him the gold bar. Embarrassed, Anckerberg again turned it down. It became a game whenever the two men met. Platt ordered a thousand-dollar bill through the bank and went to the Air America Club and offered it to the chopper pilot. ‘I owe it to you for saving my life, and if you don’t take it I’m going to burn it.’

Anckerberg laughed, thinking the bill was funny money. But a thousand-dollar bill attracted attention among the mercenaries of Air America, and a crowd gathered. Platt pulled out a cigar, lit it with the bill, and then let the burning money drop to the floor. Everyone began to stamp on it - ‘It was like an African stop-the-rain dance.’ Anckerberg never did receive the money, although no one admitted retrieving the bill.

Platt now believed he was well enough to fly, even though he was still encased in neck and back braces. The idea was firmly rejected by the embassy, which gave him a date for shipping out. It really did look as if the war was finally over for him, so he decided to throw a party.

Two representatives from every fighter squadron in Vietnam and the Other Theater were sent invitations, as well as every colonel on the base at Udorn, the Thai generals, and all the flotsam and jetsam of the secret war. The Charoen Hotel was rented for the night, together with two bands. There was Thai food, free drink, ten rooms for the overtired, twenty-five prepaid hookers and another twenty-five freelance. Platt had his tailor, the Sikh Amarjit, whose shop was opposite the base’s main gate, make him a tuxedo out of camouflage material - destined to become the high-fashion garment of the war. He stood in the door, immaculate in his combat tuxedo despite the neck and back braces, leaning on a pair of canes, cigar clamped between his teeth. Amarjit stood beside him, handing out business cards (he received 250 orders for combat tuxedos in the following week). Had the Vietnamese had the ability to launch a sap-per attack on the Charoen Hotel on the night of Fred Platt’s party, the USAF would have been fighter-pilot impoverished for a generation. It seemed that every fighter jock from the war was present, together with an extraordinary ragbag of spies and mercenaries. ‘The most bodacious party God and man have ever known,’ Platt declared afterward.

It distressed Platt that the Air America chopper crews had never been given any recognition for their bravery in picking up downed pilots in Laos, something they were not obliged to do. One evening, sitting in the colonels’ section of the O club with Gus Sonnenberg - now operations officer for the 7/13th Air Force - he brought the subject up. He would like to see someone like Dave Anckerberg get the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he said, not just for himself but for all the Air America guys. ‘It’s something we ought to do.’

Sonnenberg replied that with Air America’s connections - owned lock, stock, and barrel by the CIA - nobody was likely to be given anything. The less publicity the better.

‘Forget that they have their share of thieves, crooks, and outlaws,’ Platt insisted. ‘When it comes down to conscious acts of bravery they deserve the big medal. When a Raven’s down, there isn’t one of them who wouldn’t fly into the most horrendous fire to pick up a guy.’

Sonnenberg said that when he got back to the office he would work on it, find out what the requirements were and what was needed for a submission, but that the spooks were sure to squash it. He finished his drink and left.

Unfortunately, a Jolly Green colonel, sitting at a nearby table with two lieutenant colonels, had heard the conversation, and it rubbed him the wrong way. He began to speak in a loud voice for the benefit of Platt, who was dressed in civilian clothes and did not have the regulation crewcut. ‘Goddam Air America pilots - run around with all them goddam long-haired hippies. We go through all this fire, our buddies get shot down, and all we get is regulation Air Force pay. Here they’re trying to give Medals of Freedom from the president to these mercenaries who get fifty thousand dollars every time they pick somebody up.’