The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (52 page)

‘Confirm CBU-24,’ Swedberg radioed Cricket

‘CBU-24 confirmed,’ Cricket responded. There was a pause. ‘Also CBU-49 mixed in there.’

CBU-49 was a canister of time-delayed, baseball-sized bomblets that, according to the book, went off randomly over a thirty-minute period, each one blasting out 250 white-hot ball bearings. In reality they often continued to explode for as long as two hours, and now they were littered throughout the compound. The men dodged among them to reach the bunker and huddled inside. Although the structure had taken a direct hit during the raid, it was still standing. The building beside it continued to burn, and smoke began to fill the shelter. Outside the CBU bomblets continued to explode.

After an hour the Army attaché decided to make a run for one of the other buildings. It was a risk, and he knew it. He stepped outside of the bunker and one of the bomblets exploded directly in front of him. ‘Good God,’ thought Duehring, who was sitting just inside the entrance. ‘He’s gone.’

But the colonel stepped back into the bunker alive, drained of blood and shaking. When he could speak he explained he had seen the CBU lying intact at his feet the split second before it exploded. The rest was a roar of confusion. He found himself still standing and untouched after the blast, miraculously unharmed.

Directly after the Phantom raid the Meo T-28 fighters took off. They flew over their hometown, burning furiously below them from ordnance dropped by Americans, and heard over the radio of their fellow Meo’s casualties. Swedberg tried to talk to one of the pilots, but the man was crying so hard at what he saw from the cockpit of his plane that he was incoherent. Emotion ran very high among all of the Meo pilots, and a couple of them were so angry there was a moment when it seemed they might sweep over the American compound and strafe and bomb it in their fury. Things became so tense that rescue forces were put on alert in Udorn, in case it became necessary to save the Americans from their friends. It took Burr Smith, trusted and respected by the Meo, talking endlessly on the radio, to explain the mistake and implore the pilots to understand the anguish felt by everyone.

Once the time-delayed CBU had finally stopped exploding, after a period of almost two hours, the Long Tieng Ravens emerged from the bunker. By late morning things had returned to normal and the Ravens went down to the ramp to await the Meo pilots’ return. They talked to them after they landed, and although they remained visibly upset, they nodded their understanding as the Ravens explained what had happened.

The first Raven in the air over Long Tieng, once the Phantoms had departed, was Chuck Engle. He flew up from Vientiane to direct wave after wave of fighters onto the enemy position, but the NVA had already pulled back, swallowed by the jungle.

The Ravens took the undamaged Bird Dogs, with American personnel in the backseat, and flew down to Vientiane. They gathered that night at Lan Xang #9, the Raven hootch, and discussed their various experiences during the day. It had been an eventful twenty-four hours. Swedberg still felt responsible for the short round. ‘I did a terrible job. I should have said no from the beginning - or no from the middle. I just wasn’t smart at all.’ It was a feeling he would never shake off, long after the war. ‘I knew it wasn’t right but I let myself get pressured into it. It was stupid. It could never have worked. It should never have been done. But everybody was ready to fight and win the war right there.’

A later intelligence report, however, proved that the strike had had its fortunate side. The bodies of a North Vietnamese sapper team were found near the perimeter fence. The sappers had crawled there under cover of their own fire. They had been only minutes away from entering the compound and destroying the hootch when they were lolled by the wall of CBU dropped by the misguided Phantom. An accurate tally of casualties inflicted by the short round on the friendlies was never arrived at, on the orders of Gen. Vang Pao. He refused to take action against any Air Force pilot or Raven for a mistake made in the heat of battle, and blamed the enemy. (Press reports of the incident claimed that thirty soldiers had been killed and sixty wounded.)
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It was a chastened group who sat down to dinner that night. Once again they had been driven from their base, and would stage out of Vientiane and ‘commute’ back and forth to Long Tieng during the day. The base was a bomb site, the village partially destroyed, and the enemy left with the upper hand. Once more the Meo townspeople had been turned into refugees. And the trust between Americans and Meo had been strained to its limit.

Among the mail handed out to the Ravens over dinner were several Valentine cards. The irony did not go unremarked. The incident became known among the Ravens, and the men of the secret war, as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

11. Wasteland

The fear, as in the previous year, was that the enemy would take Long Tieng and push on down to the capital, Vientiane. This meant the Vietnamese would have to battle their way through the resettlement area of Ban Son, where the Meo - ninety thousand of them wedged into a forty-mile-long dead-end valley sixty-seven miles north of the capital - would be forced to make a final bloody and hopeless stand. The refugees formed a human buffer between the government forces and the enemy, and neither side seemed inclined to go to any great lengths to avoid what would inevitably be a massacre.

There was a Pathet Lao raid on the American-run refugee relief center in early March, when guerrillas blew up warehouses and vehicles, but the attack was isolated and Ban Son was quickly back in operation.
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As in the previous year, the enemy did not push their advantage and once again seemed to have achieved their strategic end. They were content to shell Long Tieng without moving into it. Two days after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, between five thousand and eight thousand friendly reinforcements were moved into the base, now almost empty of civilians. Even Vang Pao’s own family had been moved to a guarded compound in Vientiane.

After Grant Uhls’s death, the Ravens began to take Chuck Engle’s death wish very seriously. He continued to fly low and take unnecessary risks. ‘People were beginning to feel Chuck was hanging it out
too
much,’ Swedberg said. ‘Everybody began to believe he was going to die.’

Engle, nearing the end of his tour anyway, was confined to flying in the area directly around the capital and kept away from the combat zone. The embassy was particularly anxious that he leave the country alive so he could attend a planned award ceremony in Washington, D.C., where he was to be presented with the Air Force Cross. Engle pottered about Vientiane, buying gold, ordering jewelry from Villay Phone, and collecting the usual last-minute souvenir bric-a-brac.

Restricted from combat operations, he limited himself to some risky rat-racing with fellow Ravens, a slightly absurd pastime in the underpowered O-1. It was a fighter pilot’s game, and skill coupled with nerve always won out. Engle had a maneuver that never failed - the Split S. The maneuver requires the pilot to take the airplane onto its back, then pull the nose down through the vertical to level again - a half-roll followed by an inverted half-loop. The result is a reversal in the direction of flight at the price of a rapid loss of altitude -and the possible loss of both wings.

Bob Foster, the Head Raven, had resigned himself to the young Ravens’ dogfighting, but ordered them not to play around below fifteen hundred feet, ‘because if you stall the stupid thing you can recover at that height.’ Naturally, Chuck Engle liked to fly in the face of authority and good sense and not only dogfight, but pull a Split-S at five hundred feet.

He was sent up to Alternate with Tom King to pick up two O-1s and ferry them back to Udorn for major maintenance, stopping off at Vientiane on the way down - a milk run with plenty of opportunity for a little rat-racing. Tom King immediately got on Engle’s tail; Engle jinked the plane but could not shake him. He judged his moment, and as the two planes approached a small hill Engle dived to push his plane through the tall elephant grass on its crest and began to execute a Split-S, with less than five hundred feet between himself and the ground.

He cleared the hill and the plane completed the first half of the maneuver, but grass had jammed the elevator full up, so that the O-1 stalled and fell back on itself. For a moment it seemed frozen motionless in midair, then it dropped like a stone into a clump of trees at the bottom of the hill and burst into flames.

Craig Duehring, also approaching his DEROS date, had been spending his last days in Vientiane writing up awards and decorations citations for deserving people in Project 404. He had driven out to Wattay airport in a jeep with a stack of papers he needed to coordinate with Engle. Waiting for his colleague to come in, he heard that a Raven was down.

Almost immediately, King landed and explained what had happened: Chuck had crashed and burned, and there was not a chance he had survived. ‘I was stunned,’ Duehring said. He thought he had hardened himself against death, which he had seen so much of in his tour, including that of two Ravens. ‘But this was more than I could take.’ He walked out to the revetments to be alone and wept.

The death of Chuck Engle, the first Raven to be allowed the Air Force Cross, was a terrible blow to everyone in the program. At the hootch in Vientiane the cook’s wife was inconsolable, and could be heard weeping in her room throughout the night. Chuck Engle had survived so much, only to kill himself in a silly stunt. It had not been an enemy bullet that had claimed him, but the last thing a man like Engle could have expected - pilot error.

Duehring volunteered to accompany his friend’s body back to the United States. ‘But my offer was refused. So some unknown individual did the honors and laid Chuck to rest.’

Craig Duehring worked out a few statistics relating to his six-month tour: 90 percent of the Ravens had been hit by ground fire, 60 percent had spent time on the ground as a result of enemy action, and 30 percent had been killed. This was unacceptable by any standards - particularly those of the Air Force, which considered a 2 percent casualty rate among its pilots too high.

In the eyes of the Air Force hierarchy, the Ravens were still nothing more than renegade Yankee Air Pirates, and their cheerful embrace of the image of Mexican
banditos
stuck in the craw of senior, rear-echelon officers. The recent run of deaths was seen as nothing more than a lack of proper Air Force procedures, and another concerted effort was launched to ‘put some structure in the program.’

The Air Force had already attempted to inject more of a mainstream Air Force flavor into Project 404 by introducing a large number of Academy graduates - Zoomies - into the Ravens. This had not worked. The moment they had taken to the air in Laos they had turned into Yankee Air Pirates.

The Air Force decided to gain control by choosing a young, highly responsible, clean-cut officer from outside the program to go up to Long Tieng and take over as the Head Raven. Larry Sanborn was picked for the job. ‘I was more of a Downtowner personality than a renegade, a Blue Suiter rather than a soldier of fortune. I never did wear a beard.’

Sanborn was briefed that the Mexican
bandito
era was over; the war was changing and the Air Force wanted to exert direct control over the Ravens. Sanborn arrived in Laos expecting to find a pretty ragged crew, but as he was checked out in the various military regions he saw that the Ravens were doing an exceptionally good job with very few men. He also understood why they interpreted orders rather than following them blindly. ‘They had the savvy - the trail-riders knowing what the trail was all about. You couldn’t get that Downtown.’

Sanborn tried to make the Ravens explain exactly what they were doing. One, sitting at the bar of the hootch, spoke for them all: ‘We’re kicking ass and taking names.’

Sanborn nodded. ‘Carry on.’

He discovered the Ravens regularly worked eighteen-hour days - including time on the ground. ‘I was really concerned about the troops. Periodically I would have to send a couple of them out of country - just to get them off the line. Guys were logging twelve hours in the saddle a day. You didn’t have to worry about motivation. A six-month tour, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, in a combat environment, getting shot at every day - I spent my time worrying about how to keep them from burning themselves out.’

In answer to the complaint that the Ravens were flying too much, Sanborn demanded more men. The number of FACs working out of Long Tieng increased from seven to eleven. Instead of controlling the program, Sanborn unknowingly followed historical precedent and became the buffer between the Downtowners, forever expanding the regulations, and the Ravens, increasingly hard pressed in a losing battle.

The Air Force also felt that the tradition of the ‘nubie night’ - when a new Raven was taken out drinking and whoring - was several notches below the conduct becoming an officer, but Sanborn saw it as a fascinating psychological test of newcomers. ‘The Ravens operated a blackball system. Which meant that you could be a Raven up to a point on the official level, but the final decision was really with the other Ravens. It was important to know what a new guy was really like, and nubie night helped figure out the sort of stuff the other guy was made of. Was he belligerent when drunk? Was he concerned for his soul when he found himself in a whorehouse? The plain fact of the matter was, we had to depend on each other. If there was something about a fellow that made you real nervous, you needed to face that up front.