The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (65 page)

The Yangs had attempted a family suicide. The parents had intended to hang the children too young to hang themselves, and then put their own heads in the noose. At the last minute Yi Li had changed her mind and cut everyone down, but it had been too late to save So. Theng Pao’s reasons for his actions were contradictory and bordered on the hallucinogenic: his dead sister had asked him to join her; Jesus had given him orders; one of his children had broken the church tape recorder and they were afraid they would no longer be loved by their patrons; a death threat had been delivered from other refugees belonging to the lowland Lao.

The county attorney did not know what to believe, or whether Theng Pao and Yi Li should be prosecuted at all - the irony of a felony conviction being that it would bring automatic deportation. In the course of his investigation he studied a paper by a psychologist on ‘trauma syndrome,’ which cited cases of stress suffered by refugees throughout the world. The county attorney emphasized this in his presentation of the case to the grand jury, which returned no indictment. The Yangs were resettled with other Hmong elsewhere in the state.

A number of down-to-earth citizens of Fairfield, Iowa, understandably thought the Yangs got off lightly, and wondered what might have happened had it been an American couple who had attempted to hang their children. ‘Trauma syndrome’ sounded too big-city slick for some, who felt that merely giving a fancy title to an unfathomable act did not adequately explain the motivation of a man who set about the calculated killing of his children.
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But there is evidence of other, equally mysterious deaths throughout the Hmong refugee community in America. Thirty-four of them have died from unknown causes in recent years, mostly in their sleep. Each case defies western logic, and has left doctors, psychologists, and police investigators baffled. The federal Centers for Disease Control, responsible for investigating such deaths, say they have not ruled out ‘emotional triggers’ caused by stress, and it has been suggested that the unfortunate Hmong have succumbed to severe cultural shock, an extreme form of the psychologist’s ‘trauma syndrome.’ Which is all to say, no one knows why the Hmong are dying.

As animists, the Hmong - who believe everything contains a spirit - were connected to their mountain world by a thousand invisible threads, and followed an elaborate calendar of ritual to propitiate the spirits. Daily reality edged into dream. But how to propitiate the alien spirits of modern America?

Who can imagine how painful, disturbing, and unhappy are the dreams of the Hmong, confounded and made miserable by daily life? In the Far East, death from nightmare is known and accepted (the Filipinos even have a word for it:
bangungot
). Perhaps some of the Hmong suffer from a homesickness so profound, generated by living in a modern world to which they are unable to adapt, that in the lonely and desolate small hours before dawn dream and reality merge to overwhelm the spirit. In a simpler age it would have been said that the Hmong are dying of a broken heart.

As time has passed the Ravens have adjusted to life back in the United States. Many decided to stay in the Air Force, with varying degrees of success: several retired as majors - fighter pilots defeated by paperwork - but a good number are now reaching the rank of full colonel, while Tom Richards - the Steve Canyon look-alike - has gone to the very top of his profession and is a four-star general.
[267]

A good number of ex-Ravens fly for the airlines; others fly in small bush outfits or pilot private jets. Most have worked out the early problems and let go of their initial bitterness. But sparks can still fly, especially, it seems, when veterans meet up with antiwar protesters at high school reunions.

Karl Polifka went to his twenty-fifth high school reunion in Hawaii, fifteen years after the war, when he met up again with a classmate who had been an active antiwar protester. The woman remarked how strange it was that they had taken such different paths - Polifka had gone to Southeast Asia and the war, and she had stayed at home to protest it. ‘But all is forgiven and forgotten.’

Polifka remembered the comrades who had died, and the Hmong who had been destroyed as a people and who had lost their country. ‘Don’t ever make that mistake again,’ he said harshly. ‘It is certainly not forgiven and will never be forgotten.’

The Ravens who died in Laos are not forgotten. But as their deaths were classified and went unremarked, it fell to colleagues who served beside them to honor their memory and keep it alive. Refused permission to travel back to the United States with his friend Chuck Engle’s body, Craig Duehring made a special journey to Lynn, Indiana, Engle’s hometown. ‘The grave was well tended,’ Duehring said. ‘I have visited it twice now and will go again whenever I travel the east-west interstate.’

Christmas is the worst time of all for the survivors of the Ravens who were in Laos at the very end of the war. Three Ravens were killed over the Christmas period in 1972 just before the end of the war, and those who had been kept in Southeast Asia held the first annual ‘Dead Raven Drunk’ at the Udorn O club the following year. ‘Since then I do it every year,’ H. Ownby said. ‘I had known Hal for a year over in Laos. I had roomed next to Skip at the Academy, and we were both involved in the boxing program. Tom Carroll left a wife and two little boys, Skip Jackson a widowed mother, Hal Mischler’s folks were Kansas farm people. Tom’s wife didn’t want to talk to anybody after the war, she was just mad at the world. Christmas is a very melancholy time for me.’

Just before Christmas, on December 23 every year, Jack Shaw and Lew Hatch get drunk on Johnnie Walker Black Label and remember Hal Mischler. They get drunk over the telephone if they are unable to meet in person. When Shaw returned from the war he flew to Upton, Kansas, to see his friend’s parents. They had been told of their son’s death on Christmas Eve, and in a macabre coincidence Hal’s belongings, which had been shipped home a month earlier, arrived by truck thirty minutes later. The combination made the news more terrible still.

Shaw visited Hal’s grave and stayed with his parents for three days. ‘His mom was a big old farm lady, and his dad was this little old wispy guy. Hal was their only son. They were devastated.’ The couple adopted Shaw as their own, and still send him boxes of homemade candy and fudge on his birthday and at Christmas. When he left at the end of his first visit, Hal’s father presented him with his son’s boyhood .22 rifle. ‘Hal’s old rabbit gun - he don’t need it anymore.’

Ron Rinehart had been back in the States for three years and gone into the U-2 program, where the camaraderie among the pilots was equal to that among the Ravens. He had put the war behind him and was at home in Tucson, Arizona, when he received a telephone call at 8:00 in the evening from an officer with Graves Registration at the Pentagon. He said that the MIA status of Cookie 2, the F-105 Thud pilot who had crashed into the mountain back in 1969, remained unresolved. The wife and father of the pilot would like to talk to the FAC who directed him, the officer said, if it would not make Rinehart uncomfortable.

Papa Fox understood that the family wanted more than the government version of events and needed to speak to someone who had seen it happen. He called them immediately and described the terrain in Laos and what he remembered of the mission. The pilot’s father and wife listened in silence as Papa Fox spoke. Finally the pilot’s father asked if Papa Fox was 100 percent sure that his son was dead.

‘Personally, I think he went in with the airplane and there is no way that he is alive today. I watched it happen.’

There was a moment’s silence on the end of the line. ‘Thank you very much,’ the father said. ‘It takes a burden off my mind.’

Papa Fox put the phone down. He had been out of the war for four years, but the brief call had taken him back. ‘It really hit me. It was a little bit moving. It takes you right down in that low area - the feeling in the stomach area.’ For a moment he felt like having a damn good cry, but poured himself a large drink instead and toasted the Thud jock he never knew, who had gone to his death in the secret war the United States had lost in Laos.

Epilogue: Reunion

Here’s to us.

Who’s like us?

Damned few –

And they’re all dead.

- Toast of the Highland regiments

It is Saturday night and there is a formal dining-in at the officers’ club at Randolph Air Force Base outside San Antonio, Texas. An honor guard of Air Force military police in highly polished boots, gleaming helmets, and white gloves and puttees present arms as senior officers in dress uniforms emerge from a line of staff cars. They salute smartly and enter the club. Inside, the atmosphere is subdued, as groups of bemedaled men make polite, almost hushed small talk and club servants move deferentially among them with trays of drinks. Later there will be an elaborate dinner with speeches by generals, and loyal toasts to the president and the flag - this is the United States Air Force at its most formal and self-satisfied.

On the same night as the dining-in, the club is also host to the annual Raven reunion - possibly the USAF at its most informal. Before the officers retire to the main dining room, and the Ravens plunge down into their subterranean bunker known fondly as the Augur (sic) Inn, there is a brief mingling of the two groups. The result is a scene which might have been taken from a Marx Brothers’ movie.

The Ravens are not in dress uniforms but sport irreverent party suits made up by the Sikh tailor Amarjit in Udorn, Thailand. These are based on the standard flight suit but come in a variety of colors, from jet black through jungle green to powder blue. They are embroidered with an array of fighter squadron patches from Vietnam and the peacetime Air Force. These make many of the party suits look like quilts, and each one follows its own pattern, but all include ‘Yankee Air Pirate,’ ‘Air Commando,’ and, of course, ‘Raven,’ whose patch consists of the bird perched on a bleeding skull, against a background of the legend ‘Nevermore,’ although another version is a drunk raven collapsed in a martini glass. Some of the Ravens have the word ‘Mister,’ stitched in a delicate shade of pink, in place of an officer’s shoulder bars.

There are those among the group in dress uniform who smile indulgently at the presence of the Ravens - old fighter pilots, mostly, who had been stationed in Thailand or Vietnam - but there are also those who are not at all amused. The latter glower at the ragged, semi-intoxicated rabble that have infiltrated their ranks. They clutch their glasses defensively, set their lips in a line, and adopt a ramrod-rigid posture as they stare fixedly into the middle distance.

To make matters worse, some of the Ravens could be fairly described as of a nonmilitary demeanor - or even as dressed for Halloween. Greg Wilson, known as ‘the Growth,’ a muscle-bound figure almost bursting out of his party suit, sports a waxed handlebar mustache and shining shaved head; J. Fred Guffin wears a solid gold bracelet weighing three pounds, each individual link of which is the size of a half dollar; Jack Shaw is wearing a Zorro hat and cape, while Ed Gunter sports a gorilla mask. H. Ownby is mincing through the room in a woman’s wig, and Col. Mike Cavanaugh, a popular and well-known figure from his time as protocol officer at Randolph, lies on the floor in a state of advanced inebriation, hands folded over his chest clasping a lily.

The Air Force certified eccentric, Fred Platt, is leaning on a silver-topped cane and chewing on a cigar, the bands of which have his name printed on them. His party suit has ‘Magnet Ass’ printed across the top right-hand pocket and a portrait of Mao Zedong stitched into its seat. He has a thick black beard, and around his neck hangs a Buddha in a gold setting, alongside the Star of David. Before he moves on to chat to another group he hands out his Genghis Khan visiting cards. One of the officers looks at it - ‘Capt. Fred Platt, Legend Lane, Houston, Texas’ - and mutters to a companion, ‘Either that’s the
oldest
captain in the Air Force, or with that beard he’s a goddam
sea
captain!’

As the dining-in is announced and the officers begin to file into dinner, leaving the ragtag collection of strangely dressed mavericks behind them, one colonel cannot contain himself. ‘Good God,’ he explodes, ‘are these men really officers in the United States Air Force?’

‘Ravens,’ an old fighter pilot says with a grin, as if that were explanation enough.

The Raven reunion is held every year in mid-October, when varying numbers of Ravens, under the auspices of the Edgar Allan Poe Literary Society, turn up at the Carriage Inn outside of San Antonio for a get-together. ‘War,’ jokes Fred Platt, ‘is the only adult activity which spawns alumni associations.’ The motel is a modest, no-frills establishment backing onto the Santa Fe railroad, along which mile-long freight trains rattle and strain throughout the night. But the place is opposite Randolph Air Force Base, and the management is tolerant, blocking off a wing of rooms for its rowdy guests each year.

On Friday afternoon the first Ravens begin to arrive - in campers, pickup trucks, personal and rented cars, and taxis from the airport. They not only come from all over the United States, but from as far afield as Korea, Hawaii, Great Britain, West Germany, and Saudi Arabia. There is no bar at the Carriage Inn, so the Ravens wander in and out of each other’s rooms and congregate in the motel parking lot, where they pop the tops off cans of beer from an endless supply of six-packs. The empties are crushed underfoot and tossed into a corner, and by the end of the weekend will form a mountain. ‘We thought of staying in a nice hotel somewhere,’ Craig Morrison said. ‘Then we thought, perhaps not.’