The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (57 page)

Jim Hix had only a month to go and now flew into battle each day exercising the utmost caution. ‘I had a pistol, a sackful of grenades, a sackful of smoke cans, and three radios, which I checked every other day. And I had my Buddha with me too.’ As he was flying back across the Bolovens at one hundred feet beneath cloud, the engine of his O-1 quit. His Backseater, Pontee, pointed toward a big rice paddy, and Hix nodded. He slowly lowered the flaps, and as he came across the edge of the jungle and began to set the plane down, the engine caught. With the flaps down to almost sixty degrees he had no maneuverability - ‘like having a barn door hanging there’ - and no option but to chop the throttle. The plane went skidding across the top of the paddy and into the jungle on the far side.

Apart from a badly bent prop and a hole in the windshield, there was little damage done to the airplane. Hix had been wearing his shoulder straps and was unhurt, and so was Pontee. He climbed out of the plane and looked around. There was no sign of the enemy. This time both of his radios were working, and the flares were good. He called in an Air America chopper and was back in Pakse within half an hour.

But caution had truly become the better part of valor for Jim Hix, who now felt he had experienced enough adventure for one war. He had already decided he was not going to extend again, and he lived every day of the final weeks with the nervous expectancy of a man walking across thin ice. He hardly dared hope that his luck would hold, but Buddha was watching over him, and he made it through to the end without mishap. On his last day he bought two cases of Hennessy cognac for the Loa fighter pilots and gave a party. He then hopped an Air America flight and flew to Udorn. ‘I was damn glad to be going home.’

13. Attrition

The country-club posting was now using up Ravens just as the war in the north was: killing them, wounding them, or just burning them out. And as in the north, somehow the right man always seemed to materialize to fill another’s shoes. Chad Swedberg had been sent south, flying down in the back of a T-28 with his dog, Princess Hamburger, on his lap, and was joined by Greg Wilson, Chuck Hightower, and Al Galante. (Galante, one of the few New Yorkers in the program, had developed a taste for flying at the age of five when he sat on his uncle’s lap in the backseat of a J3 Piper Cub flown by his father, a New York City fireman who had gained his pilot’s license flying old biplanes.)

The enemy had opened a new offensive in Laos and Cambodia in December 1971, and by the beginning of 1972 the NVA and Pathet Lao had moved from the Bolovens Plateau down Route 23 and into the valley and were advancing on Pakse. The Ravens found new roads cut on the edge of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, along which convoys of trucks were moving massive amounts of supplies, including gasoline and ammunition. Wilson, Galante, and Hightower flew up to the area - a stretched ride from Pakse. They climbed high, pulling the power back so the enemy could not hear the plane engines, waiting for trucks to show up. They were destroying as many as fifteen vehicles in a single strike, with so much smoke and flame coming from the secondary explosions the sky was black with it.

‘It began to sink in that with all this activity, moving all these supplies in broad daylight, something was going to happen some place,’ Greg Wilson said. In fact the enemy were moving into position for their massive Easter offensive in South Vietnam. Wilson peered through his binoculars and thought he saw the debris of Fan Song radar - the type used to guide SAM missiles. He reported it to CIA intelligence, which passed it on to the 7th Air Force, which scoffed. The Americans did not officially recognize the presence of SAM missiles that far down the Trail until May.
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But the buildup of conventional antiaircraft weaponry alone made it an impossible environment for Ravens to work, and from now on Ravens flew exclusively to direct close air support for troops defending the towns at the base of the Bolovens Plateau. With the enemy so close to town there was also the constant danger of a night sapper attack on the airstrip, so a number of O-1s were always kept at a base to the north of Pakse where the CIA had a training camp and there was also a field hospital run by Filipino doctors.

As the enemy increased their presence on the Bolovens Plateau, they began to stockpile ammunition and supplies and move artillery pieces into the various small towns. One of the principal storage places was a town near Paksong, where the king had a summer palace. ‘We found out the enemy had moved into it because they knew we didn’t want to bomb the town,’ Al Galante said. ‘So we bombed the town.’

The Laotian pilots were particularly reluctant to hit towns, but the first bomb that struck set off multiple secondary explosions of enemy ammunition. Numerous flights were directed onto the town, which was so stacked with ammunition that the pillar of flame and smoke from explosions could be seen fifty miles away. Native pilots sat in the Raven hootch that night drinking heavily and weeping that Laotian towns in the panhandle were now targets in the war.

The NVA continued to creep closer and closer to Pakse. Chuck Hightower was shot down around Saravane, but managed to deadstick his airplane into a rice paddy and walked south to avoid capture.

There was a choke point where Route 23 came down off the Bolovens and the road passed between steep cliffs on either side, and as Greg Wilson flew overhead he saw the Lao troops digging a pit in front of their compound, ‘What are they doing, building a swimming pool?’ he asked the Backseater.

They build tank trap.’

Wilson chuckled. The soldiers were terrified of tanks, and it was enough for the enemy to rev their engines within a kilometer of a friendly position for the troops to turn tan. The tank trap was so obvious and the Lao troops so halfhearted it seemed ludicrous. But a week later a Raven flew over the spot and saw beneath him, neatly filling the trap, a tank turned turtle.

The boundary of land held by the friendlies was marked by a gun position known as Klick 11, because it was eleven kilometers outside of Pakse down Route 23. It was generally accepted, but unspoken, that when the enemy took Klick 11, Pakse would fall. And they were expected to make a move on the outskirts of the town at any time.

One rumor that circulated was of an enemy gun emplacement beyond Klick 11, which no one had been able to locate from the air, preparing to shell the town. Late one night after an evening spent drinking
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- the most potent of which was said to be laced with opium - Greg Wilson and Al Galante decided to steal a jeep and drive out into the countryside to find the gun and blow it up.

They drove out along Route 23, drunkenly harmonizing the obscene duets for which they had become famous around the hootch piano. Somewhere along the road they came upon a bamboo barricade, but a sleepy Laotian soldier raised it and waved them through. They were too drunk to know they had passed through Klick 11, and they must have been ten kilometers down the road when they hit a command-detonated C-4 charge, which blew up directly under the jeep’s gearbox. The transmission took the full force of the mine’s blast, but the Ravens were thrown into the air, and their eardrums were ruptured, temporarily rendering them stone-deaf.

They crawled back to the jeep to collect CAR-15s and bandoliers of grenades. The vehicle’s canvas top had been blown open and the tires were flat, but somehow the headlights were still shining. It was only when they were back on the far side of the road, lying in a culvert with their weapons at the ready and grenades heaped beside them, that the mortars opened up.

The men could see the shells exploding around the jeep, but neither could hear a thing. They watched the world erupt in front of them, a war movie without a soundtrack. When the shelling stopped, a squad of NVA soldiers came out of the treeline, and the Ravens saw the flashes of their guns as they sprayed the jeep.

The NVA dropped back into the treeline and never crossed the road. Wilson and Galante lay where they were until sunup, and then made their way slowly across country back to Klick 11. A bus was waiting beside the barricade, where locals carrying live chickens and loaded with enormous bundles were boarding for the journey into the market at Pakse. The Ravens boarded the bus and rode back into town.

They reported to Dick Green, the Head Raven in Pakse, that they had misplaced a jeep. The ruptured eardrums meant there would be no more flying for a while, and there was the usual talk at the air attaché’s office of court-martial, but Green quickly kicked them out of the country before worse punishment could be meted out.

Although the enemy did not attack Pakse directly, the war in the panhandle continued to intensify, and the CIA now concentrated air power there. The military objectives in Laos were now reduced to interdicting the enemy’s progress along the Trail and tying up as many of their combat troops as possible (according to CIA estimates, between six and ten divisions were involved in the war in Laos).

In September 1972, a CIA-planned operation was launched - Black Lion IV - that involved moving two thousand men into the field around Saravane. The USAF was to supply H-53 helicopters, but pulled out of the operation on the first day, claiming the landing zone was too hot. Air America filled the gap, and paid the price when a chopper was lost and a CIA adviser was killed.

The men put into the Saravane operation were tribal irregulars and Thai mercenaries led by CIA case officers, and they moved their position each night as the enemy lobbed a thousand rounds of artillery shells into their camp. In between firefights the guerrillas seeded the roads with mines. By October the friendlies had pushed the NVA from the town, taken the airstrip, and established a defensive perimeter. Ravens were able to fly in to refuel and rearm, in order to direct close air support in the areas surrounding the town throughout the hours of daylight.

Each Raven was flying up to two hundred hours a month, an exhausting and punishing routine. The NVA made a concerted effort to retake Saravane one night in November and pushed the defending troops out to the south of the town and recaptured the airstrip. The enemy then moved onto the friendlies’ eastern flank, driving them into the mountains to pin them against the Trail. Although the NVA attack was a success, many of the mercenaries slipped through their lines and escaped.

As the enemy hunted down the Thai mercenaries they began to maneuver in daylight. They were spotted spread out along a creek bed by Ravens Mike Stearns and John Rhodes, who called for air. Because of bad weather in South Vietnam they were sent a total of fifty sets of fighters, which they directed onto the enemy throughout the day. ‘With all the flying I was too exhausted and too crazy to consider the loss of human life,’ Stearns said. ‘My attitude was, “Man, I got them! That’ll teach them to come down here with their rifles on their shoulders.”’

The next day when he returned to assess the damage inflicted he ran into a cloud made up of hundreds of black buzzards, some with five-foot wingspans, which had gathered to feed off the corpses. The impact of the bombs had blasted the soldiers and thrown their body parts into the trees, where they hung like so many bloody rags. ‘You could smell the dead bodies from a thousand feet.’

Ravens were getting wounded at such a rate that Lew Hatch, who was only a lieutenant, kept finding himself the senior Raven. Knife, one of the mercenary Thai forward air guides, had been killed when he threw himself onto an enemy grenade to save three other men squatting in a foxhole with him. He had seen the grenade come in and scrambled to reach it in the mud, but when he knew it was impossible he threw himself upon it. Such clear-cut heroics would have earned an American the Medal of Honor, but Knife received nothing.

Less than a week later, H. Ownby and Chuck ‘Buddha’ Hines were in the O club at Udorn having lunch. Ownby had long hair, and both men were in dirty, casual clothes, so the Thai waitress, a dumpy, homely woman, immediately spotted them as Ravens. She went across to their table.

‘You know Knife?’

‘Yeah, works with Mule,’ Ownby said.

Great tears appeared in the waitress’s eyes, and she tried clumsily to wipe them away with the order pad she held in her hand. ‘Knife - him die, him dead.’

‘Yeah,’ Chuck Hines said. ‘Got it up on the ridge at night.’

The waitress said that Knife was her husband, and his death had left her alone with three young children. Ownby mumbled his regrets. The waitress stood with red eyes, waiting to take their order.

‘Hamburger, fries, and a Coke,’ Hines said.

‘BLT and a 7-Up,’ Ownby said. And that was the extent of Knife’s memorial service, except for the twenty-dollar tips the Ravens always left on the table when the dumpy Thai waitress was on duty.

In early November the CIA called in Lew Hatch to say they had intercepted some disturbing enemy plans. ‘I don’t want to spread panic and alarm,’ the CIA officer told him, ‘but the enemy are sending some assassins into town to get you guys.’

A radio intercept had revealed that the enemy had assigned six assassins - one for each of the four Ravens, and one for each of the Laotian flight leads. The CIA told Hatch that the NVA had an official USAF photograph of him, which must have come from the Soviets who built up dossiers on all U.S. military officers. Hatch was impressed: ‘I was just a fucking lieutenant!’

While the CIA attempted to discover who might be used for the assassination attempt, each of the Ravens was told to carry a handgun at all times and was assigned a Lao bodyguard. In less than a week after the warning the first assassination attempt was made. Lew Hatch was at the wheel of the jeep driving into downtown Pakse, with Mike Stearns and Jay Johnson as passengers, when he ran into what seemed to be a riot outside the Chinese theater. The road was blocked off and Hatch found himself being funneled into side streets which would take him out of town. A brick came through the windshield and there were shots, and Hatch quickly turned the jeep around in the middle of the road and headed for the safety of the Thai officers’ club. Later, in a separate incident, a hand grenade was rolled next to the Raven hootch, but no one was hurt. But for the next fortnight the Ravens returned from a full day of combat to the fear of personal assassination.