The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (53 page)

‘One guy turned around halfway through his nubie night and said, “Weird stuff - I don’t want anything to do with you guys.” We were not trying to teach him a new set of manners - we were trying to find out who he was. When all the restraints are removed, he is going to revert to his natural self. When nobody was there to give him orders, he would have to operate all by himself. And I thought about it a lot, and in the end I have to say there was a mystical side to the Raven camaraderie.’

This was not what the Air Force had hoped from Sanborn, but as hard as it tried it could never quite exert the degree of control over the Ravens it felt it needed. ‘Why did they want control?’ Sanborn said. ‘Just because they wanted it. They were singularly unsuccessful.’

By the time Sanborn left Laos he had notched up seven hundred combat missions, and had protected the program from the ravages of his superiors. The fundamental trouble with the program, the Air Force might have concluded, was that every time they sent a good officer across the river to clean it up, he became a goddam Raven.

Given the feelings of the Air Force hierarchy by mid-1971, the last person they would have chosen to return to Laos was Mike Cavanaugh. The contemporary Ravens, on the other hand, looked forward to meeting someone who had become something of a legend in FAC circles. The word went along the grapevine: ‘One of the old bunch, the wild bunch, and he’s coming back.’

Cavanaugh had been back in the States for a year, during which time he had organized the Forward Air Controllers’ International to help wives and families of POW/MIAs in California. His activities had attracted the attention of H. Ross Perot, whose interest in the POW/ MIA issue had never slackened. Cavanaugh received a call at his home from the Texas billionaire asking him to fly to Dallas and talk. ‘He had a big bulldog and a big silver telephone,’ Cavanaugh said. ‘It was nice to be around wealth.’

Perot wanted him to undertake a mission of a diplomatic nature. The Texan handed him a custom-built, gold-plated .45 revolver with a hand-tooled Western belt and two boxes of ammo, a present for Gen. Vang Pao. ‘I want to get the general’s attention,’ Perot said. ‘I’ve got a fix on some guys who are in a POW camp in Laos. See if VP knows anything about it and I’ll finance a mission to go in there and pluck some guys out.’

Cavanaugh flew into Laos two days before he was supposed to start work, and went directly up to Long Tieng to pay a courtesy call on Vang Pao. Burr Smith greeted him warmly and took him to the general, who received the gun with amused fascination. Cavanaugh pitched Perot’s idea of a POW raid to the general, and one of the case officers took a few pictures.

Cavanaugh returned to Vientiane, where he made a visit to the embassy. He was amazed at the growth in the bureaucracy. He had been assigned to Laos to work in the air attaché’s ‘Frag’ shop, the office that picked and planned targets for each of the military regions and also designated the number of planes to be sent on each mission and the type of ordnance they would carry. (It was a far cry from being a Raven, but Cavanaugh felt that with his previous experience he could do an especially good job.) ‘The whole shop used to be run by one man. Now they had four guys - a lieutenant colonel, a major, and two captains. I would have been the lowest-ranking member of the team, destined to spend a year working at a desk in a room without windows, across from this guy who had a hair transplant that looked like a rice field.’

But it was not to be. When word of Cavanaugh’s connection with billionaire civilians harboring freelance military plans, the success of which could only embarrass and humiliate the administration, reached the embassy he was given twenty-four hours to leave the country. He eventually managed to land himself a job back in Vietnam as a FAC. ‘Tame stuff,’ Cavanaugh said. ‘After the Ravens it was like being sent to a Triple A team after playing for the Yankees. It was a letdown.’

Gen. Vang Pao launched his annual monsoon offensive at the end of June 1971. Backed by Thai battalions, he took back the critical hilltop position of Ban Na, captured by NVA troops two months earlier. Using helicopters, his men leapfrogged across the Plain of Jars in a plan aimed at destroying enemy supplies. The operation was similar in essence to that of About-Face in 1969, but less ambitious, using small, helicopter-mobile units while avoiding major confrontation. The NVA fell back to hilltop positions, where they harassed Vang Pao’s troops with mortar and rocket fire, while friendlies captured thirty tons of food supplies.

At the opening of the operation, the general and his CIA advisers had planned no more than hit-and-run, spoiling tactics, and had no intention of digging in. But after the reoccupation of Muong Soui in September they became convinced that the Plain of Jars was defensible and the NVA should be made to pay a high price to retake it. Five Thai artillery positions were dug in and supplied, forming the backbone of the defense plan, while the Meo positioned themselves for the inevitable NVA counterattack.

B-52s were now used routinely on the plain against enemy base camps and dumps, but nothing could stop the North Vietnamese - and even Gen. Vang Pao was forced to accept the limits of air power. The general had exacted a price from the enemy in men and supplies, but it was one they were prepared to pay.

The Plain of Jars now looked like a desert. John Wisniewski was flown up there for the first time toward the end of 1971 on his checkout ride in the backseat of an O-1 piloted by Mike Butler. As they flew in a zigzag pattern over trails and mountains, slowly climbing toward the plain, Wisniewski was struck by the extraordinary beauty of the country.

‘Look ahead, John,’ Butler said. ‘There it is - that’s the Plain of Jars.’

Wisniewski had heard so many stories of the fabled plain he expected symphonic music to well up as they flew onto it. ‘It was so dramatic, the most dramatic moment I had in flying there.’ At first glance it seemed that the plain was shaped like a human heart, but as he grew closer he was exposed to a different sight.

‘Everything was bombed out.
Everything
was worked over with bombs. I couldn’t believe it! Anyplace you would go on the PDJ would be pockmarked with bomb craters. There were burnt-out C-47s, abandoned tanks, destroyed trucks - the hulks of years of war, just left lying around.’

The first time Wisniewski flew over Xieng Khouang on his own he thought it looked like a miniature postwar, bombed-out Berlin. ‘Jesus,’ he said to his Backseater, ‘that place is all beat to hell.’

‘Yes,’ the Backseater said flatly, pointing a finger at himself. ‘I live there one time. Me Xieng Khouang boy.’

By December the enemy were threatening Long Tieng again. Although the Ravens were sleeping there once more, they now lived in ramshackle quarters patched together from the leftover debris the previous year. They still flew long combat days, and landed back at the base grateful to have survived, but any thought of victory had long since receded.

‘We knew we couldn’t win,’ Terry Murphy said. ‘All the career majors and lieutenant colonels who had never made it to the war were coming over to Vietnam to fill a square in their career development sheet. They didn’t give a damn. It had made me very disgruntled, very cynical, to see that. If they had let the lieutenants run the war it would have been over in a hurry. But they don’t let the lieutenants run the war - except in the Ravens, which was a real morale booster. Even if we couldn’t win, we couldn’t just let these guys go to the wall.’

A warning came through the CIA that the NVA planned to send suicide sapper squads onto the ramp to blow up aircraft. ‘Don’t get too drunk tonight, guys,’ the senior Raven, Marv Keller, said. ‘There may be NVA coming across the fence.’

He told the Ravens to split the six O-1s up and move three to another part of the ramp. Wisniewski moved his and then went back to the operations shack. A Meo soldier was sitting on the steps, no more than thirteen years old. He had attached a bayonet to his M-16, making the rifle taller than he was. It amused Wisniewski, and he grinned at him. The boy flashed back a warm, open smile.

Wisniewski returned to the hootch, ate dinner, and sat around afterward drinking Singha beer. The movie that night was The Dirty Dozen - an unfortunate choice in the circumstances. It could not help but remind the Ravens of the suicide sapper squad, a Vietnamese dirty dozen, somewhere out there beyond the base perimeter, hidden in the jungle and the night.

Wisniewski drank another Singha beer and went to bed in the narrow, miserable room he shared with fellow Raven Bill Kozma. At 3:00 in the morning he was awakened by a series of booming explosions somewhere nearby in the valley. ‘Koz, are you there?’ he called out in the dark. ‘Koz?’

Kozma had opened all the windows and was standing beside one with a CAR-16, looking toward the runway.

‘What’s going on, man?’ Wisniewski asked.

‘I think we’re being invaded.’

‘Oh shit,’ Wisniewski said, climbing out of bed. ‘I don’t want to be invaded.’

Both men felt powerless as incoming shells exploded somewhere in the valley. It was impossible to know from which direction the fire was coming, or where to go to escape it. They stood by the window, waiting.

The incoming soon stopped, and at first light they went down to the ramp. The sappers had made their way onto the strip as warned, and the first, loud explosions had been of satchel charges blowing up aircraft. The artillery fire that followed was supposed to cover the team’s exit, but Meo soldiers had caught them and been merciless.

Burr Smith had hurried to join the Meo guards in the dark and found they had not only killed the sappers but cut their hearts out. A soldier handed one to the CIA man - to hold the beating heart of your enemy was good phi, a way to ingest his courage.

Wisniewski saw the hulks of several aircraft on the ramp and walked over to the operations shack to find out the extent of the damage. The enemy had destroyed the three O-1s the Ravens had been at such pains to move. The other three were untouched. A filled body bag lay on the ground outside the building.

‘Who’s in the bag?’ Wisniewski asked.

He was told it was the soldier he had seen the previous day. The boy had been on guard duty on the ramp when the sappers had come across, and they had cut his throat on their way. Wisniewski stood looking at the body bag. ‘Shit. He was dead. He was in a body bag. Thirteen fucking years old! Smaller than his rifle and there he was. I remembered looking at him and smiling, and him just smiling back. I couldn’t understand it. What was going on? How could he be a soldier? He was thirteen years old, for Christ’s sake.’

The raid by the sappers was seen as the overture for a concerted NVA attack, and yet another evacuation of the base was organized. A few CIA case officers were to remain with a skeleton force of the Meo, and there was a feeling among those chosen to stay behind that they were dead men. The Ravens who no longer had planes to fly boarded the last Air America transport of the day, mostly reserved for case officers.

John Wisniewski, who had been in Long Tieng only a week, was delighted to be leaving and took his seat on the Air America transport. He was disturbed by the sight outside the window, witnessed by the Ravens for the past two years in Long Tieng, as Meo refugees clamored around the plane. ‘It was like the movies where the Germans are invading France and you see the people in Paris getting on these trains. It was the same thing around these airplanes, because they knew the Vietnamese were coming. They were trying to get on and get out - but there was no room.’

George Bacon - Kayak - was accompanied by the young wife and child of a Meo lieutenant, ordered to remain and defend the base. One of the senior CIA officers boarded and began counting heads. ‘George, this airplane is for case officers and Americans only,’ he said. ‘She has to get off.’

‘I told her husband I’d get her out,’ Kayak said.

‘George, she has to get off,’ the CIA man insisted. ‘Get her off!’

‘If she gets off, I get off.’

‘Okay - get off!’

George Bacon stood up and left the plane. Wisniewski had watched the exchange in awe. ‘Holy shit, he’s going to die,’ he thought to himself, deeply impressed. As the plane took off he looked out the window and saw Kayak trudging away from the runway, followed by the woman and child.

Long Tieng became a hell over the next few days. The base was shelled repeatedly by the long-range 130mm artillery pieces the Vietnamese had brought into the country. These had an effective range up to thirty kilometers, and the enemy fired them at night, pushing the guns back into caves during the day to conceal them. As more and more troops massed on Skyline Ridge, a B-52 Arclight strike was put in on them, the first time the bomber had been used in such close vicinity to Alternate itself.

The Arclight was given the credit of saving Long Tieng, although as before, the enemy might never have planned to take it. They had achieved their objective by rendering it inoperable. The Ravens no longer even staged out of Alternate, as the enemy offensive grew stronger; they flew out of Lima Site 272, twenty miles to the southwest.

By March 1972, the NVA had seven divisions in Laos, and for the first time in a decade they moved down Route 13 toward Vientiane. Another 130,000 refugees had been created, and the Laotian government did not want them either in Vientiane or anywhere on the plain surrounding the capital. They were forced into the horribly overcrowded Ban Son settlement.

In April there was another battle for Skyline Ridge when enemy tanks were spotted in the area for the first time. The enemy 130mm artillery pieces continued their long-distance work, and a U.S. TV film crew were allowed into Long Tieng for the first time to film the action. (Stateside Ravens were disgusted, when they saw the film, to hear one of their colleagues call the reporter ‘sir.’)