The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (49 page)

‘Craig, what was that poem you wrote the other day about Arrowhead Lake?’ Engle asked.

Duehring had concocted a verse of doggerel a few days earlier expressing his feelings about the antiaircraft guns around Roadrunner Lake and Khang Khay, the Chinese Cultural Mission on the Plain of Jars, and had assailed fellow Ravens with it over the radio. He quickly recited it again.

‘Arrowhead, Arrowhead, you’re such a pretty lake,

I wish that all the guns by you were nothing but a fake.

I wish that all the rounds that go up into the sky,

Would fall back into your waters so all your fish would die.’

There was silence over the air after Duehring finished the recitation. ‘Chuck, do you want me to recite it again?’

After a pause Engle’s voice came over the radio. ‘No, please don’t.’ He explained that when he had first heard the rhyme he did not have his tape recorder in the plane, but now he had captured its genuine awfulness on cassette. Moments later he began to complain of nausea.

Ten minutes out of Long Tieng an Air America Huey intercepted them and took over the job of escort. Duehring circled overhead while Engle made his approach. The pain in his ankle was now excruciating, and he was dizzy from lack of blood. As he touched down he felt the plane roll gently toward the right, and realized he had lost control and was about to run off the edge of the strip. Mustering his last ounce of strength and steeling himself against the pain, he mashed the bloody, useless limb against the left rudder pedal and pulled the mixture to idle/cutoff. The Bird Dog slewed around, ground-looping in a great arc, but when it came to a halt it was still on the runway.

The last thing Engle did before he was pulled from the plane was retrieve the bullet rolling around the floor of the cockpit. He was helped into a waiting Air America Volpar and flown immediately to hospital in Udorn, where the wound was found to be a clean one - the bullet had gone through the leg bone immediately above the ankle itself. Later, as he grew stronger, he enjoyed watching his Raven visitors turn green as he pulled the gauze from the hole. He asked that no notice of his injury be sent home to his family and also that he be allowed to stay with the group until his leg had time to heal and he could return to fly. In the meantime he had Mr. Han, the owner of the Vientiane jewelry store Villay Phone, mount the bullet on a gold base and attach it to a solid gold necklace.

He intended to wear it, hanging alongside his Buddha, when he returned to the war.

Gen. Vang Pao continued to push forward, his Special Guerrilla Units leading in helicopters, while Royal Lab Army and Neutralist troops followed in his wake in order to hold the ground already taken. There was a big push to retake Muong Soui, the Neutralist HQ, in what became a three-month operation. Again and again air power proved no substitute for intestinal fortitude on the part of the troops. ‘There was one mountain there that I swear we lowered fifty feet by bombing,’ Chad Swedberg said. ‘They had to have it because it overlooked the runway, and I can remember watching the friendlies storm it at last. Then one of the enemy, with his last dying breath, fired a shot and the whole Neutralist army turned tail and ran back down the mountain. So we lowered it a couple more feet and they went back.’

Vang Pao kept on going, determined this time to reach the Pathet Lao HQ of Sam Neua. But his advisers, and the American embassy, had different ideas. Alarmed by the boomerang effect of the general’s success in the previous year when the enemy came back so strongly, they wanted to keep him in check. Vang Pao ignored them and continued to push forward.

He was issued with an ultimatum by his own CIA advisers - the United States would not support him if he moved any farther. He called their bluff and crossed to the far side of the Ban Ban valley, where Route 7 came out of North Vietnam. The United States immediately cut off all U.S. air power, as well as Air America rice and ammo drops to his men. The Ravens, as demoralized as the general himself, began to ask themselves, ‘What are we doing here?’

They still flew every day, but with no air to direct they could not give the general much help; ‘We were up there doing acrobatics and stuff like that to keep the troops entertained,’ Jim Hix said. ‘For several days I went up there and did loops and rolls to keep morale up.’

Vang Pao had no alternative but to fall back and begin a slow retreat.

The non-Meo friendly forces proved as unreliable as ever. In the middle of the night, the Ravens heard that Muong Soui, only recently retaken at great cost and now held by Neutralists, was under attack, including a frontal assault by tanks. The Neutralists made it sound as if they were engaged in one of the biggest battles of the war, but when the Ravens flew to the town at first light they discovered that the Neutralist forces had simply abandoned their HQ when they heard from the Pathet Lao that an attack was about to be launched. The Neutralists suffered no casualties and allowed the enemy to walk into Muong Soui unopposed.

The fall of Muong Soui meant the loss of the Plain of Jars, with scattered friendly outposts cut off to the north. The enemy now made a concerted effort to take Site 15, Ban Na, on the southwest corner of the plain - ten miles northeast of Long Tieng. Known as the Jungle’s Mouth, it held a large Thai artillery position and was one of the plain’s crucial ‘hold’ points.

Air power, Thai reinforcements, the relentless stamina of Gen. Vang Pao and the Meo seemed to be all in vain. The balance of the seesaw war had tipped in favor of the North Vietnamese and would never again be righted.

10. Valentine

Chuck Engle returned to the war on crutches. Although he was hobbled by a wounded foot, the experience of being shot down had neither dimmed his enthusiasm for the war nor diminished his skill as a pilot. He had always been able to fly better than he could walk anyway. He soon abandoned the crutches and graduated to using a single cane, and his colleagues watched him limp briskly out to his O-1 with mixed feelings. No one doubted his ability or courage, but the Ravens sensed something dark inside of him, a force willing him toward increasingly hazardous combat missions. He had become reckless and displayed a blatant disregard for the laws of probability. Whenever the conversation turned to Chuck Engle, everyone agreed: death wish.

Many other pilots would have taken a bullet wound as a legitimate reason to return to the United States, but it was the last thing Chuck Engle wanted. How
could
he die? The bullet with his name on it had passed before his very eyes - he had cheated death itself - and now he wore the Golden BB around his neck at the end of a gold chain.

A personality in contrast to Engle was Park Bunker, a tall, reserved man who kept his distance. A senior captain in his early thirties with a receding hairline - and married, with two children - he was looked upon as ancient by his companions.

Despite his reserve on the ground, Bunker shared Engle’s indifference to enemy fire and held the current record among his group for the most bullet holes in his O-1. Just before the new year he flew out to the northern edge of the Plain of Jars, near Roadrunner Lake, to verify a reported sighting of enemy tanks. Sure enough, he spotted the front of a tank protruding from a group of trees and dropped low for a better look. A rapid-fire 14.5mm antiaircraft gun - deadly to a height of 4,500 feet - opened up at close range and nailed the engine.

Bunker put out a Mayday call before managing to deadstick the O-1 onto a flat area in the middle of a horseshoe formed by a bend in a small river. When Bunker climbed out of the cockpit he found himself in open country, empty of vegetation except for a single stunted tree. He lowered himself into the cover of a small gully choked with brush, one of hundreds scattered over the plain. Unknown to him, a large group of NVA soldiers were bivouacked along the bank of the distant treeline that followed the curve in the river. He was surrounded on three sides.

Four Ravens heard the distress call and headed toward the downed plane. Bunker said he was hiding in a gully by the side of the O-1 and was being shot at from three sides. Gunfire could be heard over the radio. It seemed to build and grow louder until Bunker announced he was going to make a run for it.

Willing their planes to fly faster, the Ravens raced toward the crash site, listening helplessly to their colleague’s desperate transmissions. When Bunker next came on the radio, he was out of breath. ‘They’re all shooting at me! I’ve been hit! I’m hit! I’ve been hit twice - God, I’ve been shot five times. I’m not going to make it. I’m as good as dead.’

By the time the first Raven reached the crash site, enemy soldiers were swarming around the plane. There was no sign of Bunker’s body. It was a point of honor among the Ravens either to declare a colleague dead - ‘negative objective’ - or get him out. The thought of a live Raven in enemy hands was unbearable.

Chuck Engle braved the guns to take his plane down to almost ground level for a closer look. He roared across the lake, with his wheels almost dipping into the water, and then hopped over the treeline running along the riverbank. This maneuver left the guns the minimum amount of tracking time, but the moment he cleared the trees his plane disappeared in a cloud of tracer. ‘There’s something under the tree all right,’ Engle screamed into the radio, ‘but I don’t know what it is.’ He pulled the O-1 up and cut away from the gunfire. ‘And fuck it - I’m not going back in there.’

Engle’s plane was so badly shot up he had to return to Long Tieng. A Skyraider pilot volunteered to take a look, but was met with the same withering fire as he took his plane low.

‘There’s a body underneath the tree,’ he yelled as he pulled off. ‘And it looks like it’s wearing a survival vest - but the back is just a mass of blood.’

The description certainly sounded like Bunker, who always flew to war in a chocolate-colored walking suit and a green survival vest, while most of the other Ravens draped theirs over their seats. The growing dark made it impossible to check, and when the Ravens returned the following morning the body had been removed.

Bunker was declared dead - no one wanted to give the Air Force the excuse to declare him MIA, the Umbo status which would leave his wife and children hanging in uncertainty for seven long years. The timing of the crash (between Christmas and New Year), the fact that Bunker had only thirty days to run before the end of his tour, and that he was married with children, depressed everyone.

On the second day of the new year, 1971, Chuck Engle was flying over the Plain of Jars when he heard over the radio that a Fast FAC in a Phantom - call sign Tiger - had been shot down just east of the 7/71 Split, the spot where the main route coming onto the Plain of Jars from the east split in two. It was an area which could no longer be worked by Ravens in light aircraft because of the quantity of heavy anti-aircraft guns that the enemy had moved into it - guns powerful enough to bring down a high-flying F-4. But Engle immediately headed toward the location of the downed aircraft, dropping below the thousand-foot overcast in order to conduct a methodical search for the missing crewmen.

After several sweeps over the road junction he saw the burning fighter below him. ‘Give me Voice or give me Beeper,’ he radioed, the standard call to a downed pilot. Within minutes he had made radio contact with two survivors, who told him that enemy patrols had already moved in toward them.

The first fighters on station were the Skyraiders, and although Engle brought them down below the overcast they were forced by the low ceiling to jettison their bombs along the road, but returned to strafe the area surrounding the survivors. Both Tigers reported that all three aircraft were taking heavy ground fire on each pass, but Engle continued to direct the fighters onto the smoke of his marking rockets to buy time while a search-and-rescue could be assembled.

More A-1s arrived, carrying CBU and strafe, and relieved their colleagues until one of the planes took a hit in the engine and was forced to break off and head for home. Two Phantoms, carrying ‘snakes and nape’ - high drag bombs and napalm - arrived next. They dropped their bombs on the road, unable to use them because of the proximity of enemy patrols to the survivors, and returned to use their napalm in close support. As they prepared to make their second pass the Tigers reported an enemy patrol moving directly toward them.

The problem of how to drop the napalm without hitting the Tigers was compounded by the steep hills rising on three sides of the survivors. The only possible route for attack was to fly directly over the Tigers, a course which demanded precision marking by the Raven and split-second timing for the drop by the fighters.

Engle took the O-1 down low and flew over the heads of the Tigers to fire a marking rocket at the foot of the hill in the direction from which the enemy were approaching. The Skyraiders followed on his tail, dropping their napalm to splash uphill until the end of the flame hit the smoke. It wiped out the enemy patrol and hit so close to the Tigers that a gob of burning nape splashed onto one’s boots.

Engle continued to direct the fighters around the survivors, ringing them with burning napalm as a wall of protective fire. Only when he had fired all of his rockets and was low on fuel did he return to base. That night he heard that it had grown dark before the Tigers could be picked up.

In the Raven hootch the general opinion was that the Tigers were SOL - shit out of luck. Engle’s courage and accurate marking had bought them time, but the enemy would move in even more antiaircraft guns overnight and surround the area. Anyone returning the following morning was going to be eaten alive by flak.