The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (64 page)

He does not remember much about the next twenty-one days. Throughout this time he remained strapped to the bed, and was injected with Talwin every eight hours. He experienced occasional semi-lucid moments and remembers one incident when the chief of the orthopedic service stood at the foot of the bed, surrounded by interns and nurses, and discussed his condition in the third person: it was Udorn Air Force hospital all over again. ‘I tried to join in the conversation, but they wouldn’t listen. Maybe I was babbling through the drug. To get their attention I grabbed the full bedpan from the bed next to me and covered them with it.’

He was strapped to a litter and medevac’d to Wilford Hall Air Force Hospital in San Antonio, where he was left lying in a corridor for three hours. The neglect proved beneficial - no one administered any Talwin, so the effects of the drug began to diminish. Strapped to the litter, abandoned in the receiving hall but increasingly lucid, he stopped anyone who would listen to him. ‘What am I doing here? Please tell me where I’m at.’

He was moved to a ward. ‘Am I in the loony ward?’

‘No, you’re in the neurosurgery ward,’ a doctor told him. ‘We need to check you out and see what’s wrong. We think it’s an organic problem, but we don’t know what to do about it yet.’ The doctor examined the chart. ‘It says here that you’re allergic to Talwin.’

‘Yeah. I get an extreme hallucinogenic reaction to it.’

The doctor nodded, and it was only later that Platt discovered he had been regularly injected with the drug. He was taken off all medication for three days. ‘Can you unstrap me?’ Platt asked.

The doctor ordered the restraints to be removed, and after three days Platt was transferred to a new ward. Built to accommodate eight patients, it was jammed with a dozen and the beds almost touched one another. He was bitter that all the single or double rooms in the hospital seemed to be filled with colonels’ wives with headaches, while combat cases were crowded together.

‘The guy whose bed was directly across from me was a sergeant who was an Indian. He had brain cancer, and rather than let the poor sucker die they had scooped out half his brain so that there was this big concave dish beneath the skin of his skull. He sat there and screamed unintelligible things in some Indian language, and had no control of his body so he peed in the air and lay in his own shit. I was surrounded by people who were vegetables, except they were in extreme distress.’

He stayed in the ward for three months. His original X-rays had been mislaid, and new ones failed to reveal the hairline fractures along his spine. ‘My basic problem was Catch-22. They knew something was wrong but they couldn’t find what it was. If they can’t find out what it is there is nothing wrong. If there’s nothing wrong he must be faking it. So they sent me to the shrinks.’

An Air Force psychiatrist at Brook’s School of Aerospace Medicine, San Antonio, put him through a series of psychological tests. He asked Platt to talk about his experiences in Laos and listened attentively. He gave him paints and canvas and asked him to express himself visually. Platt daubed pictures of O-1s suspended over burning jungle.

Being attached to the Air Force, the doctor knew the type - bright, egocentric, highly motivated and opinionated, hostile to authority and individualistic to a troublesome degree: fighter-pilot material. He testified before the Air Force medical review board at the hospital that Platt was ‘as sane as any fighter pilot.’ When asked to be more specific he said, ‘I would classify him as “eccentric.”’

The pain did not go away. Platt would continue to be in and out of hospital for years, although his experience with the Air Force and Veterans Administration medical programs made him opt for expensive private care. ‘It was a horror show. I came out hating Wilford Hall so bad that for the next five years my palms would sweat when I drove past it on the highway to San Antonio.’

He has been in varying degrees of pain every day since January 12, 1970. He wore a neck and back brace for five years until in 1975 the trainer of the Houston Oiler football team designed a special exercise program, using the team’s facilities for five days a week, and eventually he was able to put the braces aside for lengthy periods. In 1977 he began to use a transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator, a type of external spinal pacemaker (a device that masks an unbearable pain with a controlled pain by shooting electrical impulses into the painful area to overload the nerve stimuli and circuits to the brain). Some days are worse than others. Platt is never heard to complain, although close friends can tell when the pain is bad, but he bears it with stoicism and a supply of Royal Ages, his favorite Scotch.

In the bars around Houston, Platt likes to joke about being certified ‘eccentric’ and to tell people that he had a ‘damn fine time’ in the war, but he does not mention the sixteen years of pain with no remission in sight. Could it possibly be worth the price he paid? It is not as easy a question as it sounds, and one he finds very difficult to answer directly.

‘I never expected to come back until the war was over. And I expected that to mean we won. We chickened out, we lost the war. So in a sense I was short-changed. In addition, I fully accepted that if the war went on too long, something was going to kill me. Being injured and coming home crippled was never an alternative that entered my mind. I thought it would be black and white - I forgot about gray.

‘And if I could do it all over again? I would do it all again except for the last flight.’ It is only a part answer, but the evasion comes out of the genuine difficulty Platt has in deciding for himself whether he would trade in his year in Laos for his health. To an outsider this seems extraordinary, but it gives an idea of the intensity of the Raven experience. ‘Its hard to say. I’ve had sixteen years now to learn to live with the pain. And to accept the fact I’m medically unfit and can’t get a license to fly. I’ve also accepted that I can’t jump in parachutes. Getting on a horse to ride one hundred feet is so painful I’ve only put myself through it once. I can’t ride motorcycles. A lot of the things I like to do I can’t do.

‘Would I trade that experience to be able to have all the other experiences? It’s a tough question for me to answer, because I was very much committed to what I did. Give me the infirmities... but let me have one more year there, maybe two. I think the answer is - I wish we had won.’

Today some 52,000 Hmong are in refugee camps in Thailand, the majority living in Ban Vinai, a tantalisingly short distance from the Mekong and the border with Laos. Groups of young guerrillas periodically cross the river to continue waging the hopeless battle against an enemy that is strong and settled, and backed by the might of the Soviet Union. For some, even life in the refugee camp is to be envied. Before dawn on Sunday morning, March 15,1987, Thai security forces raided the Ban Vinai refugee camp detaining ‘illegal’ Hmong, who were then forcibly repatriated to Laos. Vang Tong Khai, who had fought for Gen. Vang Pao in the war and as an anti-communist guerrilla since, told a reporter, ‘If they send me back, I am dead.’
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Many thousands of Hmong have begun new lives in strange lands. Two thousand are scattered throughout Canada, Australia, Argentina, and French Guyana; six thousand are in France; the largest number, over fifty thousand, are in the United States. Those who arrived in America came without either practical or psychological preparation. A people who had always farmed with hand tools, who still maintained a belief in the presence of spirits in all things, and who had developed a written language only in recent memory, some of the Hmong brought hoes and crossbows with them. American city dwellers were alarmed to see Orientals with crossbows trudging through the mean streets, hunting pigeons for their supper.

The complexity of the new life has been daunting. In the mountains of Laos a generation of Hmong endured almost perpetual war, but rules and regulations were at a minimum, the land was free, they paid no taxes, and there was virtually no crime. Each of the twenty-four Hmong clans enjoyed a strong social structure, and it was a point of honor that no one was without work or a place to live. No Hmong ever begged. Life was simple despite the war.

In America they hoped to live together, but the authorities had other ideas. The Hmong - most of whom had never visited a real town, let alone a modern city - were scattered throughout the United States and dumped into some of the country’s toughest urban neighborhoods. ‘They were spread like a thin layer of butter throughout the country so they’d disappear,’ an officer for Refugee Resettlement said.

They traded their mountain villages for yet another war zone, the stark landscape of America’s urban poor: ramshackle tenements, pothole streets littered with stripped automobiles, burned-out buildings. ‘It was a kind of hell they landed into,’ Eugene Douglas, the president’s special ambassador to the refugees, said. ‘Really, it couldn’t have been done much worse.’

For the Hmong, ignorant of modern technology, city life, or even the language, the battle with the problems of daily existence replaced the war. A number of new Hmong proverbs came into being, one of which is ‘If you think it’s easy, you don’t know America.’

They are not adapting well, and federal officials who work with the Hmong say no other group of refugees has had more difficulty. Since they are isolated from their clan and its leaders, cut off from cultural and spiritual traditions, this is no surprise. One official described them as ‘emerging from the mists of time,’ adding, ‘Whether they make it or not is anybody’s guess.’

Their exile has also given them new songs, a favorite of which is the bittersweet ‘Remember Long Tieng.’ Phang Vang, a former lieutenant in Gen. Vang Pao’s Backseater Corps, walked hundreds of miles to cross the Mekong, braving Communist bullets and famine on the way. He was the first Hmong to be settled in Providence, Rhode Island - where the Hmong community now numbers some 2,500. When he saw snow for the first time, he thought with dread of his grandfather’s warning ‘Snow means death.’ He was too frightened at first to leave his apartment, a bare third-floor walk-up without heating, hot water, or furniture, and was almost as scared to remain indoors, where he could not understand the incomprehensible, ominous banging of radiator pipes he mistook for evil spirits - bad phi. ‘Nobody knows inside our hearts and minds how much we hurt.’

Teng Thao, a Backseater who flew fifteen hundred missions with Ravens during the war, found himself being dunned for bills he could not pay. ‘I have never been so frightened.’ Moua Tong, who joined Gen. Vang Pao’s forces in 1970 at the age of fifteen, finally fled the country on foot in 1976. After years in a refugee camp he was resettled in West Philadelphia: ‘I was so unhappy, so afraid in the city. I never knew how to do things, where to go. The people don’t seem nice. I was so worried that all of America was like this.’ Maj. Wang Seng Khan, a former battalion commander now living in Providence, is forced to rely on his wife’s earnings and on his children to translate English for him. ‘We have become children in this country.’

But many Hmong have managed to regroup, sometimes travelling thousands of miles to join with clan members. There are more than 10,000 in St. Paul, Minnesota, and another 27,000 scattered throughout California, with increasing numbers finding their way to the rural Central Valley area.

‘For many years, right from the start, I tell the American government that we need a little bit of land where we can grow vegetables and build houses, like in Laos,’ Gen. Vang Pao said. ‘I tell them it does not have to be the best land where we can live … maybe like your Indians.’

Instead of being given a piece of land to work, the Hmong have been given welfare - another baffling part of their new life. Many have become victims of the welfare trap - discovering they receive more money for not working, often receiving twice as much as they could earn at a minimum-wage job. Those who took up farm work found they lost their welfare checks if they worked more than a hundred hours a month, however little money they earned. This means that any Hmong working the land - which is what most of them do best - automatically loses his welfare payment, his principal source of income.

‘All this money,’ Vang Pao says of the welfare payments made to his people, ‘this could buy us the land. Now it is just wasted - it gives us bad morale. Give us money for the land and in three years the Hmong will be off welfare.’

They have also become the easy victims of crime, a bewildering experience they find difficult to understand. Their apartments have been burgled and their cars stolen, and Hmong children are often beaten on their way home from school. They do not go to the police because they think of themselves as ‘guests’ in America.
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Arrests of the Hmong for crime are almost nonexistent, but the exceptions have been harrowing. Theng Pao Yang settled with his wife and children in a small bungalow provided as a temporary home by members of the First Baptist Church of Fairfield, Iowa, a small community that went out of its way to be friendly and helpful to the bewildered refugees. But Theng Pao was miserable and homesick, and often sobbed.

Volunteer church workers tried to comfort the Yangs, but could not hope to reach the core of such a deeply felt misery. People dropped in on them all the time to try and cheer them up. One day in January 1980 one of the members of the Baptist congregation drove over to the Yangs’ bungalow to drop off a load of laundry his wife had washed for the family.

When he entered the house he found Yi Li, the wife, hysterical. Theng Pao and his six-year-old daughter, Bay, were suffering from serious injuries and groaning in the bathroom. Lying on the living-room sofa was the eight-year-old son, So, and he was dead; at first it was unclear what had happened, but later Yi Li took the Baptist visitor’s wife into the basement of the bungalow. The paraphernalia of some sort of ritual was littered about the floor, including a shattered Hmong flute, a knife with a broken blade, and five one-dollar bills that had been shredded with scissors. Hanging from a pipe were six nooses.