The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (60 page)

Despite dwindling support, Vang Pao continued to launch attack operations. The last major combat assault using USAF helicopters took place on January 20,1973, when seven CH-53s and two Air America Chinooks flew in a thousand men to reopen the Vientiane-Luang Prabang highway. Four choppers were hit, but the road was successfully reopened prior to the cease-fire.
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The enemy, meanwhile, kept up the pressure in the panhandle, while the United States piled on the last of its air power. From the end of January until the cease-fire, sorties flown in Laos averaged 350 a day and totaled 8,900.
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With the war over in South Vietnam - for the Americans, at least -massive air support now became available for use over Laos during the last days of the war there. Hillsboro, the orbiting command post in the panhandle, called Jack Shaw and asked if he had a target. Shaw said he had seen a truck in a river, but was not sure if it was stalled there or had been previously destroyed.

‘Okay, you got air.’

‘Wait a minute,’ Shaw argued. ‘I don’t know if this truck is any good.’

‘You’ve got air,’ Hillsboro insisted. ‘You’ve got the only target in the war.’

The entire afternoon launch from a carrier arrived in relay, and Shaw directed the mixed bag of twenty-five fighters onto the truck, stacking them up and putting them onto the target as fast as possible. It was a hectic period of furious activity which was nothing more than battlefield make-work. 1 can’t remember if we got the truck,’ Shaw said. ‘It was probably dead anyway.’

On the last official day of the war in Laos, February 22, 1973, Gen. Vang Pao received an unsigned, typed communication at his HQ in Long Hang, part of which read:

‘1. In accord with the terms of the ceasefire agreement between the Royal Lao Government and the Neo Lao Hak Sat (Pathet Lao) that established 1200 22 February as the time armed action between those forces would cease, the United States is honoring this agreement.

‘2. As we discussed previously, USAF air support would cease as of 1200 22 February ... USAF were under instructions to clear Lao air space by 1200 this date.’
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One of the outposts defending Long Tieng duly fell at 2:30 that afternoon, while others were being heavily shelled in preparation for direct attack. Vang Pao shook his head and told reporter Arnold Isaacs of the
Baltimore Sun
, who was standing beside him, that he did not see how his positions could be held without American support. ‘We are not like South Vietnam. South Vietnam, the Americans have given all means, thousands of tanks, trucks, airplanes...’
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He left the sentence unfinished; Laos was to be abandoned with scarcely anything to defend it

The Ravens were ordered to be back on the ground by midday, and were threatened with the most dire consequences if they were not. The objectives of the war in the previous couple of months had changed, from tying up NVA troops and interdicting traffic on the Trail to a frantic last-minute scramble for territory before the cease-fire went into effect. On the day before the cease-fire, friendly troops were told to hoist Royal Laotian flags, specially made up and dropped by the CIA, to mark their positions.

The final morning of the war was fought in dismal weather. In the north, H. Ownby, Darrel Whitcomb, and Craig Dunn flew three missions apiece in support of a surrounded enclave of Meo battling for their lives. ‘I had taken off before dawn,’ Ownby said, ‘and worked some U.S. air and Laotian T-28s. Then, starting about ten o’clock, it was like the world quit. The planes started disappearing and it got real quiet on the radio. It was eerie.’

He put in his last set of fighters and turned the plane around to head for home by the noon deadline. The battle still raged on the ground, and as he flew away he felt he was ignoring every instinct in his being. ‘I felt like a coward. If I’d had more guts I would have said screw the diplomats, screw my boss, and screw the president - I’ll do what I know needs to be done. But I was young and believed that somebody knew more about it than I did.’

The war on the Bolovens Plateau was furious, and Jack Shaw kept begging Hillsboro, ‘Send us air, send us air.’ He had flown out of Pakse with CIA case officer Sword sitting illegally in his backseat. They fired M-16s and M-79 grenade launchers from the windows of the plane. The enemy had opened up on Paksong with mortars and had the town under siege, and seemed to be on the move everywhere. ‘No more air after the next ten minutes,’ Hillsboro radioed. ‘Everybody has to be out of Laos and west of the Mekong by noon. That’s it, buddy.’

The last fighters dropped their bombs at 11:50, and Shaw turned the plane around and flew home during what he knew to be the height of the battle. Paksong fell at 12:30.

‘We knew damn well the North Vietnamese would not recognize the cease-fire,’ Lew Hatch said. ‘As we left, the tanks started rolling. In four days they overran four positions on the Bolovens. The thousand-man Thai artillery post was cut off and they had to walk out through the enemy lines. And we had to sit there and watch the Lao fly.’

Back on the ground the Ravens went through the ritual that all combat pilots who had completed a tour in Southeast Asia experienced: a bottle of champagne was opened, and the pilot was hosed down with cold water while a photograph was taken of him beside his plane. But on the last day of the war in Laos it was an empty ritual acted out with an absolute lack of spirit. Shamefully, they handed their planes over to Lao FACs, who turned them around and flew into battle to direct the hopelessly inadequate squadrons of T-28s.

Their frustration mounted as they watched their old allies return to the war without them. ‘We’ve got to help those guys,’ Shaw said to an officer from the air attaché’s office. ‘Those fuckers on the ground are getting their shit blown away.’

‘The war’s over, lieutenant - and that’s official.’

The Ravens stationed in Vientiane went out for dinner that night at Chez Hélène and tried to celebrate. ‘Everybody felt shitty,’ Ownby said. ‘We had a real good dinner and we all still felt shitty. The life had gone out of everybody.’

In the panhandle the Ravens went out drinking with Air America and CIA personnel and suffered a similar dispirited evening. Doug Mitchell, the last Raven to be sent to Laos, stayed at home in the hootch in Savannakhet. After three years of flying combat in Southeast Asia, the sudden release from tension was overwhelming. ‘I got a case of the total shakes. Total, uncontrollable shaking, and I felt cold as ice. And I was shaking like that for an hour.’

Enemy activity after the cease-fire was so blatant that the prime minister, Souvanna Phouma, was forced to accept the cynicism of the Communists. The next morning he told reporters that instead of honoring the cease-fire, the Communists had planned all along to wait until the skies were clear of American bombers to mount a general offensive to grab more land. Dejected and emotionally distraught, Souvanna Phouma stated, ‘We had faith in this agreement and we have been tricked. Our faith has been violated.’
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He declared that unless the Communist attacks stopped he would request further air strikes from the Americans. Almost indifferent to the threat, the Pathet Lao spokesman said accurately that they had successfully withstood American bombing until then, and would continue to do so. That night the Americans reacted to the request and nine B-52s struck near Paksong.

But the post-ceasefire conflict continued. ‘The goddam International Control Commission in Pakse was living in a downtown hotel which they never left, logging every T-28 that took off as a cease-fire violation,’ Lew Hatch said. He appealed to the Canadian delegate, offering to fly him and his colleagues around the panhandle to see exactly what the situation was. ‘The Canadian wanted to do it but he was perpetually outvoted by the Polish and Indian delegates. A large part of the country which we controlled was overrun after the cease-fire.’

The war went on, but there was less of it. Government weekly casualties dropped to a quarter their previous number.
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Serious violations that could not be overlooked brought the B-52 back in April 1973, when the final strike of nine years of USAF bombing was put in south of the Plain of Jars.
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It is symbolic that the last raid of the war, made by one of the most awesome weapon systems on earth, was nothing more than an empty and impotent gesture.

A contingent of Ravens remained stationed in Vientiane, supposedly to act as a reminder to the Communist Pathet Lao that USAF personnel were on hand to resume air operations if the necessity occurred. The enemy saw this for what it was - an empty bluff. The countermeasures threatened if they broke the agreement were nullified when the power of the U.S. president, the chief executive of the administration, was frozen by the inquiry into the Watergate break-in. The Ravens were not allowed to fly or even move out of Vientiane. ‘Sadly, we were there doing absolutely nothing,’ Chad Swedberg said.

Time passed slowly in a city where, without the war, there was nothing to do. The Ravens rose at 10:00 and passed the mornings taking language classes from a local who came to the house. The afternoons seemed endless. In the evening there was dinner and a movie, after which everyone went down to Charlie’s to drink beer and play darts until the early hours of the morning. The Purple Porpoise had closed after its owner, Monty Banks, suffered a stroke and returned to Australia. Madame Lulu too closed up shop and returned to Paris after spending the greater part of a lifetime in the Far East.
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Half of the Ravens were duly sent home.
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Chad Swedberg left, after a specially chartered Air America plane had flown down to Pakse to pick up Princess Hamburger. The mongrel returned with him to America, her regal title enabling her to be listed on the airplane’s manifold as ‘Priority Passenger - Do Not Bump.’ One by one the Ravens were sent from the country, until by the end of September 1973 only H. Ownby was left. ‘I was housemother, so it was my job to close up the hootch. The saddest part was figuring out what to do with Mr. Van and Mr. Tung - the cook and the housekeeper.’ Van was someone who would always fall on his feet, and he left for Bangkok; Tung was a less adaptable character, and the Americans remaining in Vientiane collected two thousand dollars to enable him to take his family and settle across the Mekong in Thailand.

‘The house was closed as a typical military operation. I went through it with the property officer, checking off an inventory. It was eerie - a great big empty house. I turned out the lights, locked up, and walked away.’

The last of the O-1s had been flown out of Vientiane in a four-ship. They took off from Vientiane and executed the traditional ‘missing man’ formation, usually done as a fly-past at a military funeral when one plane pulls up and out of the formation in a symbolic act of remembrance. ‘It was a tribute,’ Jack Shaw said. ‘To Hal, and the Ravens who had died. To the Lao we left behind, and the Meo we abandoned and betrayed. To the American POWs left in the country. It was our way of saying we might have been made to go, but we would never forget.’

15. After The War

Well, the tragedy is over. The failure is complete. I turn my head and go away. I took my share in this fight for the impossible.

- Albert Camus,
Notebooks: 1942-1951

‘See you next war, baby.’ This was the traditional sign-off radioed to Cricket after a Raven’s final combat mission, and there was no one who did not feel some relief as he spoke the closing three words of his last radio transmission, ‘Alpha, Mike, Foxtrot’ (Adios, motherfucker).

A Raven left the war after a round of quiet handshakes around the breakfast table, and then a jeep ride out to the airport through the sleepy streets of Vientiane, skirting the muddy brown Mekong. A brief flight took the retiring Raven across the river and into Thailand, and suddenly the war was over.

In Udorn the civilian-clad FAC was handed back his Air Force uniforms, ID tags, and private belongings and then took a taxi out to the terminal to board a C-130 for Bangkok. Most flew on to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, where they transferred to another Air Force transport and flew across the Pacific to Hawaii. And then, after an overnight stay, they flew on to Travis Air Force Base outside San Francisco - and set foot safely on the American mainland.

Returning to American soil with the war left behind was a moving experience for everyone. One of the first things Jack Shaw did on his return was to go into a McDonald’s and order a hamburger, a milkshake, and fries. Standing in line for a Big Mac, he was so overcome by emotion to be home and among fellow Americans he found himself unable to speak.

On the flight from Travis Air Force Base to his home in Ohio, Craig Morrison had a few mementoes from the war in his bags: a Chinese SK bolt-action rifle with a foldout bayonet attached to it, some individual photographs of enemy soldiers (so young they looked like girls), and an enemy helmet, the inside headband of which was inscribed in Vietnamese lettering with the haunting prophesy, ‘Born in Vietnam - Die in Laos.’ He penned the last entry for the war in his journal: ‘So! It’s over! And now no more war zone. Leaving FL 290 [Flight Level 29,000 feet] with 130-knot tail wind with the sierras off the right wing all covered with snow.
Good God is it good to be back in America!
I couldn’t put it into words how I feel now if I were to write all the way to Chicago so I won’t try, but I guess I’ll admit I’ve got a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes, and I’m glad to be home, so damn glad.’
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But the euphoria was to prove short-lived. America had been so deeply divided over the war, so shaken by its lack of success and disturbed by the endless bloodletting, that the country had turned in on itself. The men who returned from battle - American soldiers, sailors, and airmen - were shunned as if they were members of a despised occupying army. Men in uniform were shouted at, spat upon, and even physically assaulted. (French soldiers returning from an earlier, equally unpopular Indochina war faced an even worse reception: hospital trains carrying the wounded were stoned by French Communists as they stopped to unload men in their hometowns.)
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