The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (63 page)

It was a perplexing, muddled time. ‘I used to take these long walks in the summer in Cincinnati, where it is supposed to be hot and humid, but compared to Vietnam it was lovely. I would walk around this new neighborhood on my own trying to sort my feelings out about what was going on. Inside I was in turmoil. Essentially, it was a lonely time mixed with some anger. But the anger was not directed. I didn’t know who the hell to get angry at. I was just generally pissed off.’

Gerald Greven, the Raven whose conscience had been so troubled by the secret nature of the war, testified before a Senate committee on the secret bombing raids on Cambodia and the routine targeting of hospitals. As a prospective pilot on probation with an airline, his controversial stance led to his dismissal. Some of the Ravens objected to his action, feeling that he had betrayed their mission, while others - especially those who had known him in Laos - admired his stand.
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But in the end by far the largest group of Americans were neither for nor against the war in Vietnam, merely bored by it. ‘It was not that they didn’t understand, it’s that they weren’t interested in understanding,’ Mike Cavanaugh said. ‘They were talking about their investments, their houses, and their kids, and nobody had a feel for it. I don’t blame them. It was four minutes on the evening news. Americans like something to have a lot of pizzazz if it’s going to keep them interested. If the ratings go down you are out of there. The ratings went down on the war - same old plot.’

In Morrison’s case there had been a brief report in the local paper when he had been awarded the Silver Star. ‘Most people I knew just ignored it,’ he said. ‘I got a letter from a retired colonel - “Well done, son” - which was nice. But a lot of people who saw it looked at me like I was an asshole. Most people just weren’t interested. It wasn’t going on in the streets of Cincinnati - it wasn’t
their
war.’

Suburban life seemed so unimportant. His wife would ask him about social plans for the weekend, and he was singularly unenthusiastic. ‘There were guys dying out there in the jungle - who gave a fuck where we went on Saturday night?’

Part of the problem was that the war was still going on when most of the Ravens returned home, and the lack of interest over its progress was crushing. At any party the Vietnam veteran was treated at best like a bore, and often avoided as possibly dangerous. The Ravens became defensive, aggressive, or humorless.

Ironically, the people who were most aware of what was happening in Vietnam were those most opposed to the men who fought the war. Unable to adjust to the world of detergent, Morrison went to work for Merrill Lynch as a stockbroker. As part of the training program he was sent to New York for three months, and for the first time public indifference was replaced by hostility. A great many young people lived in his building at 37th Street and Lexington Avenue, and late one night he was awakened and invited to party in a nearby apartment. A Canadian had gathered a group of antiwar people together for a discussion, and it was thought it would be interesting to bring in someone who had been in the military to broaden the argument.

‘I was half asleep and thought I was going to a party, but when I walked through the door about fifteen of them jumped on my ass. The war was immoral - people should refuse to fight it. The military were killing innocent civilians - the usual line of shit everyone back from Vietnam got.

‘I tried to tell them about Laos and about the Meo, but they were
absolutely
not interested in what I had to say. I was outnumbered, and every time I spoke somebody would scream, “Bullshit!” They
knew
it was wrong - end of debate. After that I was shunned and referred to as “the fascist down the hall.”’

* * *

The delayed effects of combat - recognized as a genuine psychological malady by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, and dubbed post-traumatic stress disorder - are more subtle and less dramatic for the pilot than for the infantryman on the ground, but no less real. The stress of working long hours over hostile enemy territory waiting to be shot at, and the fear of being killed, all take their toll. But for the flyer the business of war is somewhat antiseptic and removed - ‘like stepping on ants’ is how one Raven described it - although a difficult period of adjustment is inevitable for anyone returning from battle proper. The military did nothing to prepare its people for this, and an unsympathetic civilian population exacerbated the problem. In addition, the American corporate style of war was impersonal and demoralizing, with none of the supportive camaraderie of belonging to a regiment or squadron that traveled and fought together: a young American joined the unit in which he would serve his time in the war alone, was sent to Vietnam alone, and returned home alone.

Unprepared for the psychological aftermath of combat, Ravens dealt with problems as they came. Emotional numbness, nervousness, depression, insomnia, and difficulty with relationships overwhelmed many. Noises bothered them excessively. They woke up in the night for no reason, and everyone had dreams. ‘I had the same nightmare every night for years and years after I left,’ Tom Shera said. ‘I am flying along a road in Laos in an O-1 and all of a sudden I look up and there is nothing but high-tension and telephone wires above me. And yet there were no such wires in Laos. I must have had that dream a thousand times, and was having it at least once a week after I quit flying - up until five years ago. A real nightmare.’

Sometimes the delayed reaction to an extended period exposed to combat was physical. Art Cornelius had been back from the war for only a week when he took his family to the Los Angeles County Fair. As they walked among the various outdoor stands a helicopter passed overhead. ‘The sound of a Huey is very similar to what you hear when you are taking heavy automatic-weapons fire -
whop, whop, whop
. That is how a 14.5 sounds through the open window of an O-1. This guy flew over, and I guess I thought I was being shot at. I acted nuts.’ In view of his family and the crowd around them, he began to pull into himself, desperately looking around for somewhere to dive under cover. His wife and children looked on helplessly, until one of them blurted, ‘What’s going on with Dad?’ It took Cornelius three years before he was entirely free of the anxiety of combat.

A problem that several Ravens took home with them was drink. In Laos it seemed the most natural thing in the world, after a day of combat, to unwind with a few stiff drinks. There was nothing else to do. The secret war was a world without women, family, outside interests, or even television, and the only diversions were two movies a week, a dartboard, and cheap booze.

The extent of the problem ranged from those who looked on their drinking as little more than an expensive habit - ‘Surprisingly, what worried me most about having to adjust to a drinking problem when I left was whether I would be able to afford it,’ Chad Swedberg said - to chronic alcoholism. ‘Once I started drinking [at that time] I wouldn’t stop until I passed out,’ one Raven said. ‘I was in conflict - part of me felt I should keep up the fight and go to Angola, and not be reading law books. The other side said it was clearly wrong to be an international outlaw, and I was just being macho. And it was a conflict I couldn’t handle. I was in the pits when I got out of law school and would be in an alcoholic haze all weekend. An endless, meaningless groping around, trying to find something.’

But mostly, the problem of readjustment was psychological. ‘The U.S.A. was like a foreign country to me,’ John Wisniewski said. ‘I was totally lost; I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I felt so different from everybody around me, in a different world. They had no idea what I was going through, and I didn’t expect them to. I would talk with ordinary people who had stayed at home and feel I had nothing in common with any of them. So I was remote, didn’t give a shit about anybody, and couldn’t care less whether they loved or hated me. I just built a wall around myself.’

Ignored or reviled by the general public, the men who returned from the war became excessively defensive, and this often expressed itself in exaggerated behavior and extremist views. They fed the popular image of the psycho Vietnam vet in order to anger and offend those who angered and offended them. ‘You played it to the hilt,’ Mike Byers said. ‘They expected you to be a napalm-dropping, baby-murdering, dope-smoking Vietnam veteran, so of course you had to do it. Fuck them if they couldn’t take a joke.’

Combat humor is callous and deliberately unfeeling, and does not translate into everyday life. Ravens burned plastic straws in bars, and looked dreamy when people complained, saying it reminded them of napalm on human flesh (in reality a gagging mixture of burned pork and gasoline). Air America chopper pilots told of dropping candy to children in villages and then banking sharply to cut the infants to ribbons with the aircraft’s tail rotor. The stories were tasteless and obnoxious, and meant to be. They were also untrue, but it is a measure of the division among Americans at the time that noncombatants almost always believed them.

Fred Platt had a business card printed, the flip side of which carried the illiberal sentiment:

The greatest happiness is to scatter your enemy and drive him before you, to see his cities reduced to ashes, to see those who love him shrouded in tears, and to gather to your bosom his wives and daughters.

Genghis Khan 1226

Fred Platt 1969

Platt enjoyed handing them out to people and waiting patiently for their reaction. (He did not know it, but the joke was on him: the Vietnamese are one of the few nations ever to defeat the Mongols on the field of battle, and routed Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis, in 1278.)

‘If people asked what I thought of the war, I’d say I thought I had a damn good time,’ Platt said. Some people, on learning he had crashed eleven airplanes, argued that his good time had cost a great many dollars of American taxpayers’ money. ‘To have a ready answer I looked up the figure going around which said the U.S. spent half a million to kill a single North Vietnamese. I was flying fifteen-thousand-dollar planes upgraded to forty thousand - so even if I had written off all eleven it would be less than half a million at the very outside.’ Platt enjoyed this argument and carefully led fellow drinkers and cost-conscious citizens in Texas bars into his trap. When they complained about his profligate use of tax money to subsidize his fun, he would trot out the figures. ‘You bastards owe me a couple of billion dollars,’ he would conclude triumphantly, banging his fist on the bar. ‘And I want my fucking money!’

Fred Platt had paid a higher price in the war than could be accounted for in tax dollars. After leaving Udorn he had bought a round-the-world ticket on Pan Am and returned to the States via Katmandu, Penang, and Hong Kong. He had been on a heavy dosage of morphine in pill and injection form in the Air Force hospital, but on the journey home attempted to endure the constant pain without narcotics. ‘I could stand it because I really believed I was going to heal.’

On his return to the States he slowly began to regain the use of his legs and felt progress was being made, despite nonstop pain. A drug had been introduced onto the market called Talwin, a synthetic morphine touted as a non-addictive painkiller. He was given a phial of tablets and told to use them when the pain became unbearable.

He was at home, lying on the couch watching television, when he first felt the need to take one of the tablets. He was surrounded by war mementos, including enemy weapons and a collection of hats he had placed on wig stands on top of the bookshelf. One had belonged to a Chinese artillery officer working on the Chinese road in Laos, another to a North Vietnamese engineering officer stationed on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, one to a Pathet Lao tank driver, and another to a NVA infantry captain - souvenir booty from men killed in battle.

As he lay on the couch, he began to feel horribly uncomfortable. The television blurred and the voices of the people on the screen became distorted and unintelligible - it was as if they were talking Vietnamese. The wooden wig stands with the enemy caps on them became human forms and began to talk. When arms sprouted from the babbling faces and reached to grab him, Platt rose from the couch, grabbed a loaded 9mm pistol, and emptied a full clip at the figures on the bookshelf. The wig stands splintered, the hats flew off and fell to the ground, and the enemy retreated. Platt fell back onto the couch exhausted.

He had suffered an extreme hallucinogenic reaction to the drug, a side effect he had not been warned about. The following morning, when he saw what he had done, he threw the remaining tablets away and decided to face the pain without them.

Although he was not fit to fly, either physically or psychologically, he managed to outrun his own records and confuse the authorities sufficiently to be put back on flying status. Incredibly, he managed to bluff his way through an Air Force physical. But after initial improvement, he was regressing and beginning to stiffen. It was necessary for airmen to lift him in and out of the cockpit of the T-33 jet trainer he was flying on the Inspector General team. The procedure was witnessed one morning by the surgeon general of the Military Airlift Command. Waiting on the run-up pad, the general watched speechless as a pilot was carried to a plane and lifted into the cockpit. As a result there was an investigation into Platt’s records, which revealed he should have been under permanent medical supervision. ‘They put me back into the medical system, and I never got out.’

He was readmitted to hospital, where it was noted on his admission record that he was allergic to Talwin. In an attempt to relax the severe muscle spasms he was experiencing he was put on a daily dosage of eighty milligrams of Valium. Despite this high dose, and perhaps as a result of a combination, of drugs, Platt became manic. He thrashed about in his bed and raved. Hospital staff strapped him down and gave him a shot - a large dose of Talwin.