The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (58 page)

Two months after the attack on Saravane, a thousand Thai mercenaries were air-assaulted onto the Bolovens Plateau, where they set up an artillery firebase. The assault threatened vital NVA supply lines, and the enemy responded by fielding more and more troops until it was estimated they had three divisions committed to the regions around Saravane and Paksong. The new offensive meant the Ravens had to direct air support for three separate areas of operation in the panhandle alone. There were not enough airplanes, and certainly not enough men. ‘We had opened a three-front war,’ Lew Hatch said. ‘We started it and we were fixing to get our asses kicked.’

During the second air assault on Paksong, Mike Stearns crashed his plane on the edge of the Bolovens when the engine quit A badly cut foot meant he was unable to fly, and he was sent home. Hal Mischler, who was soon to leave and had already sent his personal belongings home, was sent to Pakse as a replacement - the fourth senior Raven Lew Hatch had served under.

Jack Shaw arrived in Vientiane on December 10, 1972, flown up from Udorn by Skip Jackson, and then moved down to Pakse two days before Christmas. H. Ownby, Terry Pfaff, and Ed Chun had already been sent south from Long Tieng and Luang Prabang as Christmas help.

Most of the Ravens’ rooms were basic but Shaw, who had a reputation as a ladies’ man, immediately set about converting his into a bachelor’s seduction pad, complete with heavy curtains, black satin sheets, and light dimmers. He had been intrigued by the Ravens for more than six months, since he first met Al Galante in the bar of the O club at Ubon. ‘A big guy, a really cocky son of a bitch in civilian clothes acting as if all these fighter pilots were scum. His attitude was that if you were gracious enough he would talk to you - and that you were extremely lucky to be allowed to talk to him. I can’t say I was favorably impressed, but I was impressed.’

The decision to transfer to the Ravens was finally made after Shaw had been grounded by his commander as a punishment for losing an airplane - he had been shot down in an OV-10 by a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile. His best friend, Hal Mischler - who had been his roommate back at the Air Commando base in Florida and also at Nakhon Phanom, where they were both Nail FACs working the Trail - had joined the Ravens a month ahead of him.

When Shaw left Nakhon Phanom to become a Raven he was presented with two Buddhas by Nupal, the O club’s Thai bartender. They had been blessed by monks in a temple for seven days, and the Thai wanted Shaw and Mischler to have one each (Mischler’s parting gift to Nupal had been more temporal - his ten-speed bike). Nupal explained the nature of the Buddhas’ power. ‘This Buddha only good for stopping you get shot. No good for fights or against knives. Only getting shot.’

‘How does Buddha know about guns?’ Shaw teased. ‘They weren’t around when Buddha was.’

Nupal lowered his voice: ‘Buddha knows all.’

Shaw threw the presents in his briefcase and gave Mischler his Buddha the moment he joined up with him in Pakse. Mischler smiled, touched that the barman should have thought of him. He told Shaw that he would have the Buddha put on a gold chain and wear it around his neck. Shaw said he was taking no chances, and attached it to a gold bracelet he wore around his wrist so that he would have the Buddha’s protection against antiaircraft fire on his first day in combat over Laos.

A massive air campaign had been launched against North Vietnam - the so-called Christmas bombing - with the result that there was no air available for the Ravens by December 23. Heavy air strikes against military targets in Hanoi and Haiphong had been launched on December 18 after the North Vietnamese had broken off the peace talks in Paris, and the entire U.S. air effort was now temporarily concentrated against the north. ‘Great,’ Lew Hatch told the CIA. ‘We don’t have to fly today.’

‘No, you still have to fly.’

‘Why?’

‘We need to know how many trucks they’re running down the Trail without U.S. air to interdict them.’

‘I can tell you that,’ Hatch said. ‘Take their normal daily average and multiply it by four - and that’s how many trucks they’ll move down.’

On the morning of December 23, the Bolovens Plateau was held by friendly forces, but the enemy had Saravane under siege. It was decided that Mischler would direct Laotian T-28s against the forces attacking Saravane while Lew Hatch, who had been in the area longer and knew the countryside better, would take Jack Shaw out for a check ride.

Shaw flew the plane and Hatch sat in the backseat. Flying out toward the Trail, they suddenly heard a transmission from Hillsboro, the panhandle’s orbiting command post: ‘Stand by - a Raven’s down.’ There was a pause, and then Hillsboro came back up on the air. ‘Raven 40 - Saravane.’

Raven 40 was Hal Mischler. Shaw turned the O-1 around and headed toward Saravane, some fifty miles to the east of them. As it was his first day on the job, he handed the FM radio to Lew Hatch, who was used to working with Lao troops on the ground. Hatch asked the ground commander in the area what had happened to the downed Raven and was told that Mischler had been trolling for guns with the intention of directing artillery onto them when he was nailed. Khammane, his Backseater, shared his fellow countrymen’s terrible fear of fire, and as smoke seeped into the cockpit he threw himself from the plane at two hundred feet and was cut in half when he hit a jagged brick wall. There was no report on Raven 40, but the commander said he intended to send out a platoon of commandos to bring him in.

It took the Ravens some time to find the wreckage of the plane. The moment they spotted it they immediately launched a SAR operation. With an American airman down, U.S. fighters were diverted as a priority, and Shaw directed them on the suspected gun emplacements. Antiaircraft fire was fierce - the NVA had moved two 37mm, one 23mm, a 14.5mm quad ZPU, and at least five 12.7mm guns into the area. Shaw took the O-1 lower and lower, trying to get below the 37mm so he could work the crash site.

He was unused to the O-1 and being shot at, and thought the sound he heard outside the cockpit - as if people were snapping their fingers - was the noise the plane made when the engine backfired. But when the Lao ground commander screamed into the radio that they were taking a massive concentration of ground fire he realized it was the sound of spent bullets.

‘Yeah,’ Hatch said calmly, ‘I can hear them.’

A couple of the rounds found their mark, and as Shaw put the power up to maneuver the plane there was suddenly no response from the engine. The choice now was whether to crash the plane halfway home or put it down on an unused airstrip in disputed territory. Shaw began a slow spiral to earth, putting out a Mayday call as he went down.

Ed Chun flew onto the scene and took over the SAR, redirecting the Air America choppers already in flight to stand by and pick up the Ravens about to crashland in enemy territory.

‘Lew, you’ve had more time in this thing,’ Shaw said. ‘You land it.’

‘I got it,’ Hatch said, taking over the controls. The problem with landing from the back was that it was like sitting in a bucket and the pilot could see nothing. The runway on which he was about to land was a grass strip built by the Japanese in World War II, and had been used occasionally by the Ravens as a forward base when in friendly hands. Now it was littered with crates and engine parts, and pockmarked with holes made by mortar and artillery shells. One end of the runway had been bombed, while a burned-out T-28 lay at the other.

Lew Hatch, unable to see over the nose of the airplane, lowered full flaps and came down blind in the middle of the runway. ‘Let me know where the debris is.’

Shaw yelled directions from the front. A pile of abandoned crates lay on the runway directly across the path of the plane, and Hatch punched the rudder to veer around them. The O-1 left the strip and hurtled through undergrowth. ‘A stack of boxes the size of a desk went under the right wing,’ Shaw said. ‘This was not good. All I could see in front of us was a wall of elephant grass.’

Hatch had lost control of the plane, which had blown a tire somewhere on landing; he kept punching the rudder but it refused to turn. Both men simultaneously stabbed their feet at the brakes, and the plane ground-looped and spun to a halt thirty feet from a lake.

Shaw grabbed his CAR-15 and scouted around the plane to see if there were any enemy in the vicinity. There was no apparent movement, and he returned to help Hatch haul himself out of the backseat. They gathered up their weapons, maps, and code sheets and waited for the Air America chopper, which was only five minutes behind them, to come in. Hatch had already radioed the chopper’s pilot, Mel Cooper, where he was going to land, but because of the ground loop he had ended up on the opposite side of the runway.

‘Waiting for that chopper seemed to be like a lifetime,’ he said. ‘Everything seemed to be in slow motion.’ He could hear shooting from what he took to be a position five hundred yards away, but circling above them Ed Chun could see that the enemy were much closer and moving from every direction through the bushes toward the crashed plane.

The chopper landed some distance away, kicking up a small dust storm. Hatch and Shaw gathered up their stuff and began walking toward it, unaware of the immediate danger. Ed Chun spoke to Mel Cooper over the radio: ‘They’re walking! Just like on a picnic. They’re just walking!’

Cooper was furious, and began shouting at the Ravens to hurry. They clambered aboard, and as the chopper lifted off they began to take fire. Hatch and the crew chief knelt at the door and fired into the elephant grass. Once in the air, Shaw lit up the first cigarette from the pack he would smoke over the next hour.

The crew chief yelled over the roar of the rotors into Hatch’s ear that the pilot wanted to talk to him, and he handed the Raven a helmet with earphones. Cooper wanted to know if he should stop off at a nearby landing zone for a pickup. There were some wounded there, the pilot said - and the body of the downed Raven. Hatch looked across at Shaw, but he had heard nothing. ‘Let’s go in and get the body.’

When they landed at the firebase, four of the Thai walking wounded, swathed in bandages, climbed aboard the helicopter. The dead body of the Raven, wrapped in white parachute material because of a lack of body bags, was carried aboard. As the chopper lifted off, a soldier ran toward it and clung to the skids. Cooper hovered six feet off the ground while the crew chief shouted at the man to let go. But he hung on, prepared to ride the skids for as long as it took to get away from tike firebase. The crew chief unholstered his .45, chambered a round, and waved the gun toward the soldier, gesturing to him to let go. The man scowled before dropping in a heap to the ground.

The ride to Pakse took thirty minutes. Hatch spoke on the headset to the Customer in the operations shack to tell him that they were bringing in the body of a Raven and that he wanted an American flag to cover it. Officially, the clandestine nature of the Ravens’ activity in Laos forbade them this traditional dignity, but the CIA officer said he would find one somewhere. Shaw could hear nothing of the conversation over the noise of the engine, and sat mute in the back of the chopper smoking cigarette after cigarette, unaware of the identity of the body lying in front of him.

‘I could see the back of the head, which looked gray, and the hair was singed,’ Shaw said. ‘I sat there thinking, “This poor sucker’s dead - I wonder what happened to him? I made it - this poor sucker didn’t.”’

The chopper flew nose down, and a large flow of blood ran from the body and collected in a pool against the bulkhead. It made the wounded soldiers uncomfortable, and they moved to huddle together in the rear of the cabin away from the blood. The pool deepened, until a stream trickled to the side of the helicopter and out through the open door into the slipstream. ‘I wonder who this guy is,’ Shaw thought, ‘spilling his blood over Laos?’

The chopper landed briefly at a site to let off the wounded to be treated at the hospital there, and then flew on to Pakse. The Customer was there to meet them, accompanied by a small group of Americans, and in one hand he clutched the folded square of a flag. The body was lifted down and laid on a stretcher and carefully covered with the Stars and Stripes.

‘What the hell is this?’ Jack Shaw asked, turning to Lew Hatch. ‘Some CAS guy get blown away on the firebase out there? Who is this?’

‘Jack, that’s Hal,’ Hatch answered awkwardly.

Jack Shaw tried to take the information in. Hal. He’s dead. That’s his body. ‘I’d been thinking all these philosophical thoughts about this poor fucker who died in the war - about him not making it and me being alive - and it was my goddam roommate. I was just stunned.’

Two men picked up the stretcher on which Hal Mischler lay covered with the flag and loaded it onto another helicopter, a Chinook bound for Udorn. Jack Shaw walked toward it and stood at the base of the ramp underneath the rotors, staring up at the body lying before him. Tears ran down his face. ‘Nobody said a word to me. I think they knew what was going on. The sun was going down, and it was dim inside that chopper. The lights were on and they had put down the stretcher crosswise with the American flag on it. There was nothing else inside. Then a guy walked over there and stood looking at me across Hal’s body. I heard the engine crank up, the ramp close, and it just took off. And I stood there and I watched that chopper until it had gone over the horizon. Until the sun went down.’

When Jack Shaw returned to the hootch he found Lew Hatch sitting at a table with two bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label in front of him sent over by the Air America helicopter crew. ‘We’re supposed to buy them Scotch,’ Shaw said. ‘They saved our lives.’