The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (45 page)

This was not good enough for Defense Secretary Laird, who forced Kissinger to take responsibility for his blithe dismissal of Pentagon statistics on combat deaths in Laos. A letter of half-apology was wrung from him, a copy of which was sent to the president. Kissinger accepted responsibility and explained the gaffe over combat deaths thus: ‘I was under the misapprehension that this was a result of Prairie Fire and therefore adjusted the statement to take account of that.’
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It was as well that the Ravens never saw the
New York Times
at Long Tieng and knew nothing of Washington’s high-level machinations. Their reaction to the president’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, referring to their colleagues killed in combat as ‘facts stacked away in the recesses of the bureaucracy’ or to the bloody and brutal war they fought as ‘random fire’ might have been mutinous.

Perhaps they would have questioned the sacrifices they were making, and been angered into making public disclosures. But they were too busy fighting a rearguard action, and vainly attempting to prevent the Meo from being chopped to pieces, in the land where there was no war and Americans never died.

9. Long Tieng Besieged

We were expelled from paradise, but paradise was not destroyed. In a sense our expulsion from paradise was a stroke of luck, for had we not been expelled, paradise would have had to be destroyed.

Franz Kafka, ‘Paradise’

It was as if all the efforts of 1969 were in vain and its victories had not happened. Nothing seemed to slow the enemy’s advance. Numerous interdiction sorties were directed by Ravens along Route 7 in an attempt to cut off enemy supply lines; the road was seeded at night with antipersonnel mines to delay its repair; gunships of every description - AC-47, AC-119, and AC-130 - flew night attack missions against enemy trucks. Worse still, the enemy were now finally in position to threaten Long Tieng itself.

Gen. Vang Pao deployed his troops defensively along a string of hilltop positions in the vanguard of the base, and the crescent they formed around the southwest corner of the Plain of Jars became known as the Vang Pao Line. But despite everything, the enemy managed to circle to the rear of the line undetected, and troops were spotted only two miles away from the secret city itself.

The airstrip at Sam Thong came under heavy attack in the early morning of March 18. The Meo took to the hills - some 42,000 abandoning their homes - while the Americans, and the wounded from the hospital, were flown south. The North Vietnamese stormed into the town in their wake, burning down the American bungalows which had housed the HQ of U.S. AID and refugee relief. Sam Thong had fallen.

In Vientiane, Pop Buell, clothes rumpled and eyes red from lack of sleep, was interviewed by the press. He wondered pessimistically how much longer Vang Pao and his Meo could keep up the fight. Pop Buell had witnessed the punishment they had endured during the previous years, and felt that maybe they could last a couple more - but eventually they would be forced to make some accommodation with the North Vietnamese. He buried his leathery face in his hands and mumbled, ‘It’s all been running and dying, just running and dying.’
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The thick haze and smoke of the burning season screened the enemy from air attack as they moved onto Skyline Ridge above Long Tieng. The troops on the Vang Pao Line had dissolved, leaving no one to defend the secret city. Panic broke out in the town. The fall of Long Tieng itself seemed inevitable and only hours away. ‘Everybody woke up in the morning and thought, “We better get the hell out of here,”’ Craig Morrison said.

Among the first to leave were eighty bedridden Meo patients from Long Tieng hospital, evacuated in an Air America C-123. Villagers laden with belongings trudged to the ramp to board Air America planes, which were landing or taking off at the rate of one every two minutes. ‘They would come down to the end of the runway and turn around and lower the ramp and all of these refugees would run into the airplane. They’d just fill it up and off they’d go, and another would come in.’ Vang Pao’s own family were flown down to Vientiane. Many refugees, fearful that the enemy would destroy the airfield before they could get out, began to walk south. Air America dropped hundred-pound bags of rice to them from the air.

It was a heart-rending spectacle - thousands of Meo villagers with their children and whatever possessions they could carry, forced out of their homes by the war. For some of them it would be the fourth such exodus.

‘The most pitiful sight I have ever seen were the refugees,’ Morrison later wrote in his journal.
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‘It made tears come to my eyes to see the little boys and girls about five or six years old carrying packs on their backs looking so goddamned helpless - and mothers with crying babies - old men and wounded soldiers all looking for a way out.’

Morrison was soon to go home, but the plight of the Meo moved him deeply on this day and made him want to stay. ‘It was awful. They were such nice people. I didn’t care so much about the defeat - “By golly, they took our flag” - as what was going to happen to the Meo. It made me want to stay. Just give me an airplane and some bombs and I’ll blow the shit out of these bastards all day and all night. Forever. Until they just went away. Go back to North Vietnam, kill your own people if you want to, go fight the Chinese if you want, but leave these people alone.’

CIA men began to bring armfuls of classified documents - secret intelligence reports and battle plans - from the operations room, dumping them in empty gas cans and setting them on fire. Ravens were encouraged to burn personal letters in case they fell into enemy hands (the North Vietnamese built up dossiers on U.S. pilots whenever they could, using personal data during interrogation if they were captured).

Inside the operations room itself, CIA men, certain the NVA would soon take the town, hung up Red Chinese Air Force recruitment posters, suitably amended to read ‘Fuck Communism’ and ‘Shove It up Your Ass, Ho Chi Minh.’ Tom Palmer wrote the Backseaters’ favorite slogan on a piece of paper and stuck it on the hootch door - ‘We Go Home Now.’ A large quantity of frozen shrimp was discovered in the general cleanup, which the Ravens feasted on throughout a North Vietnamese mortar attack.

And throughout everything the Ravens continued to put in air strikes to hold back the enemy. While the population fled and an air armada moved everything out, still more planes brought in reinforcements. Three hundred crewcut Thai troops, loaded with full field gear, steel helmets and wearing uniforms without insignia, stepped smartly from unmarked transport aircraft. They appeared, marching in military parade formation through the mist, in sharp contrast to the bedraggled, exhausted, long-haired Meo guerrillas scattered through the town. Another five hundred Laotian irregulars were airlifted in from other military regions, including one battalion that had marched all night to reach the boarding strip. Once in Long Tieng they were repositioned to hill and defensive positions by Air America and Air Force helicopters.

It was decided that the only Americans who would stay overnight would be one CIA man, the air operations center commander, and two Ravens. An enemy attack was considered imminent, and expected the following morning. The Ravens would be needed to direct air at first light. Brian Wages and ‘Weird’ Harold Mesaris were picked to stay (Mesaris, a large man with red hair and a large red walrus mustache, had been dubbed ‘Weird’ by one of the maintenance men, and the name stuck - not to be confused with ‘Weird’ Neil Hansen of Air America. The Meo were convinced that all red-heads were possessed of the devil, but believed Mesaris could work bad magic on the enemy.) The CIA were still burning documents when the Ravens went to bed, exhausted after a twelve-hour combat day. They slept fitfully, eaten alive by mosquitoes, only to be awakened at 2:00 A.M. The enemy were about to attack, they were told, and they might have to shoot it out on the ground.

They stayed awake for the remainder of the chill early hours of the morning, watching an endless procession of people with flashlights and burning torches climb the hillside behind them. As it grew light they discovered that everybody in front of them had moved back in preparation for the coming attack, and they alone formed the frontal defense unit.

The other Ravens had flown down to Vientiane and were scattered throughout the town in whatever lodgings they could find. Late in the night, Bob Foster, the Head Raven, received a call from the Company. Long Tieng was being hit hard and the Ravens would be needed at first light to begin putting in air strikes. His dilemma was how to contact the dispersed Ravens.

Foster jumped in a jeep and spent the night driving around, tracking down Ravens. He left signed notes on each of their pillows: ‘Be at the flight line at 4:00 in the morning.’

Sure enough, almost all of the Ravens reported for duty at dawn. Those who failed to show up had never received a note. Foster had been accompanied the previous night by Maj. John Clark Pratt, an Air Force historian who had been sent up to Laos the previous year to record the events of About-Face, and who had since made the secret war his specialty. He was astounded at the Ravens’ turnout. ‘I can’t believe an operation where you can’t call the guys on the phone, you can’t get them on the radio, you leave a note on their pillow and they come.’ (He was impressed to the point that it sowed the seed for what was later to become a controversial novel.)
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The Ravens launched at first light and directed T-28s and U.S. air onto the enemy all day. But although the North Vietnamese continued to shell the town and had launched sapper attacks during the night, they made no effort to assault it directly. (In one of the sapper infiltrations, where a team had attempted to set up a mortar inside the town’s perimeter, the bodies of seven Vietnamese female troops were discovered.)
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John Clark Pratt flew into Long Tieng on March 21. ‘Prior to landing, all we could see in the Long Tieng valley were murky mountain peaks obscured by the haze and occasionally blotted out by thick columns of brown smoke from ground fires. Often, black burnt particles, some as large as pieces of carbon paper, flew by the aircraft. Visibility was about one mile or less with the air-to-air visibility effectively zero. Aircraft appeared from all sides.’
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Heavy rain fell on March 23, clearing away the cloud cover and improving visibility. Air strikes now found their targets and disrupted Communist resupply movements from the Plain of Jars to the battlefront.

The Ravens continued to live down in Vientiane - in new quarters nicknamed Silver City - but flew up to Long Tieng, which they used to stage out of. They called the daily flight there and back, in which they snaked along a river valley, the ‘commute.’

Hank Allen, an exceptional pilot with eyes like a hawk, took off with Dick Elzinga in the front seat of his O-1. Allen was ‘short,’ soon to return home after a tour in which he had notched up four hundred combat missions, and he planned to return directly to the States and marry his fiancée within a fortnight. Elzinga had only just arrived in Laos, and it was his first trip up to the secret city. Allen intended to use the ‘com-mute’ as a checkout ride. It was a cloudy day. He took off and reported over the radio to Cricket that the O-1 was airborne. It was the last thing ever heard from them. Neither of the pilots, nor the plane, was ever seen again.
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They had disappeared. Each of the Ravens spent at least two hours, on top of their usual day’s flying, searching for the wreckage. No Mayday call had been heard, nor had a beeper signal been picked up from the survival radio, and no clue to the airplane’s whereabouts was discovered. The disappearance was a complete mystery.

Weird Harold Mesaris was appointed the missing pilots’ summary court officer, with the responsibility of collecting their personal belongings and writing to the next of kin. Mesaris wrote a suitable note of condolence to Hank Allen’s father, his only surviving parent.

‘Somehow between Vientiane and Bangkok they managed to lose Hank’s things. We’re not talking about much, but it would have meant a lot to his pa to get them back. We lost his son, now we lost his personal effects. I had to write another letter telling his father he wasn’t going to get anything. It made me feel terrible.’

Later, Mesaris received three letters written to Hank by his fiancée. Even though she had already been notified of his death, she could not accept it and wrote in the absolute conviction that he was alive. Mesaris found the love letters sent to a dead man unbearably moving.

The enemy never did take Long Tieng, despite an eleven-day assault and bombardment by mortars, artillery, and 122mm rockets. Everyone, from the Ravens through the CIA to Henry Kissinger, speculated on the reasons. (Henry Kissinger felt it was the introduction of the Thai troops that had tipped the balance, a decision he had pushed in the face of almost unanimous opposition in Washington. The Thais had always been in Laos, of course, but on a limited basis, and they had previously been deniable ‘volunteers.’ The Thai battalions that arrived in Long Tieng were the first regulars used in Laos in a policy - linked with B-52 bombing - intended to bridge the gap left by the depopulated Meo. The Thai presence in Laos would grow to a strength of seventeen thousand before the end of the war.) The Ravens felt the enemy did not want to ‘dig in’ a position like Long Tieng because they would have been vulnerable to air attack - a point they were to prove in the coming months at Sam Thong. Gen. Vang Pao claimed that an enemy of greatly superior numbers had suffered a disastrous defeat, and that but for the help of the Ravens and U.S. air, ‘an NVA general would now be living in my house.’