The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (66 page)

It is chic among the Ravens to arrive in a T-shirt expressing some sentiment designed to outrage or depress the civilian population. One wears a shirt with the picture of a T-28 in a dive with its guns blazing, and the logo ‘Fly the Friendly Skies of Laos’; others say things like ‘Shot at and Missed - Shit at and Hit’ or ‘Fuck You, the Horse You Rode in on, and the Colonel Who Sent You.’

Many of the Ravens make extraordinary efforts to return to the reunion each year. ‘It’s important to get the batteries recharged and wipe the bullshit off the windscreen,’ Greg Wilson said. As they gather, the simple act of getting together generates an atmosphere of extraordinary energy and camaraderie that is affecting even to outsiders. The hallmarks of every reunion are noise, bad behavior, and alcoholic acrobatics, yet behind the sophomoric high spirits, the fraternity food fights, and obligatory rowdiness, there is a genuine bond that is very real and very deep. The Raven reunion is not just some Top Gun club or fellowship of the Right Stuff, but a gathering of men who went through a tragedy together and emerged forever changed.

Ravens who never encountered one another in the war meet at reunions for the first time and form lifelong friendships, made possible by a shared experience known only to the few. ‘It’s a pleasant memory of good guys who were not afraid,’ Frank Kricker said. The reunions are festive weekends when the Ravens are able to relive the intensity of their time in Laos. ‘The other eleven months of the year you go out and deal with all the assholes and REMFs and all that sort of shit,’ John Wisniewski explained, ‘and once a year you get back.’

The Ravens have been holding reunions since 1972, when there were still FACs on active duty in Laos. ‘They came in and hadn’t seen each other for a long time,’ Bob Foster said. ‘They actually went up to one another and started touching each other - the face, the hair. Like a mother seeing her first-born child. It was really something to see - very moving.’

The reunions have since settled into an annual ritual. Friday evening, throughout which the Ravens continue to flock, is spent at the O club disco. On Saturday morning there is a late hungover brunch at Leon’s Mexican Restaurant, across the road from the Carriage Inn. It is Mike Cavanaugh s life’s ambition to be the last surviving Raven, and to brunch alone on
huevos rancheros
in melancholy triumph.

After brunch and beer, the Ravens make their way to a room in the O club for their annual business meeting. For years the Ravens - who in Texas are obliged to operate under the name of the Edgar Allan Poe Literary Society, the state’s founder, Sam Houston, having monopolized his nickname of Raven - have raised and contributed significant sums of money for a refugee fund, which helps Hmong families settle in the States, or buys food and medicine for the refugee camp of Ban Vinai in Thailand.

The greatest success story is the help given to one family that settled in Atlanta, Georgia. The husband had been sent to a reeducation camp by the Communist regime and never returned, so the family swam the Mekong, pushing their belongings before them on homemade rafts. Unable to speak English, the mother brought her daughter and two sons to the United States, where the boys found jobs as bricklayers’ assistants. In less than two years the family has been able to put down the deposit and take up a mortgage on a sixty-thousand-dollar house. Several Ravens have lent houses to Hmong families, and all have offered to act as sponsors, although the proud Hmong prefer to sponsor their own.

Various points of order are discussed at the business meeting, such as the yearly attempt to preserve a bottle of
lau
lao
in a teak box as the Last Man Bottle (presumably to be enjoyed by Cavanaugh with his
huevos rancheros
). Somehow, at some time during each reunion someone manages to drink at least half of the bottle. Each year efforts are made to obtain a new bottle of
lau lao
to put back in the box.

There are a number of Ravens who do not like to attend the reunions. They find the spectacle of men fast approaching middle age behaving like young combat fighter pilots fatuous. There is also a generation gap - the last Ravens were in Laos eight years after the first - and a cultural gap - the soldier-of-fortune faction tends to dominate and outnumber the blue-suit brigade. (Perhaps the true decadence of the Ravens can be dated from the arrival in Laos of Fred Platt, a personality who automatically leaned toward the CIA and away from the Air Force hierarchy, and who adopted the sartorial affectations of Air America.) ‘You can’t please everyone,’ Craig Morrison said philosophically. ‘No rank is recognized at any reunion. And no Raven has ever allowed another to finish a sentence or take himself too seriously.’

The Raven banquet is held on Saturday night. Three long tables are set for dinner and grouped facing a podium upon which stands a raven perched upon a skull, the flag of the Royal Lao Government, an American Legion memorial flag, and other memorabilia. To the left of the podium a makeshift stone fireplace has been constructed. Carafes of wine and bottles of White Horse whisky are dotted along each of the tables.

The Ravens begin to drift in to their banquet and stand at the bar where Moss, a black mess sergeant dressed in a Raven T-shirt, will serve drinks to the early hours of the morning. When the group is complete the barman begins to open bottles of champagne, and each Raven takes a glass for the memorial toast. The room falls silent. ‘We’re all thinking the same thoughts but we don’t say it,’ Jack Shaw said. ‘The toast is a tender moment.’

In earlier reunions individual Ravens toasted personal friends killed in action, but this cast such a maudlin pall over the group that the mood was difficult to shake. Then at one reunion a poem was shoved into Craig Morrison’s hand, and it has become a ritual ever since to read it in memory of the Ravens who never returned. The poem was written by Art Cornelius after the death of his friend Sam Deichehnan. Unashamedly emotional, and written immediately after the loss, the knowledge that it is not the work of a poet but the heartfelt tribute of a warrior to a fallen comrade gives its words a poignant authenticity:

In my memory I carry

The twinkle of your eye, the delight of your laugh,

And the courage that was life, as we expected every day to die.

The red mud stuck

To our boots and tires, the dust to our bodies,

And silver wraiths of mist swirled over and around

Green mountains.

Smaller men stood taller and larger than our size,

But you towered over us all, your grin, your tears,

Every orphan was your child, every life a part of yours.

When Chou held on to the thread of his life,

You’d have bled for him, breathed for him,

You’d have given your life for him, if you could.

We lived each day in fire and air,

And every dawn life’s croupier spun the wheel again,

And I’d have been a better friend, but I trusted time.

There never was a man more strong, more peaceful,

More fierce, more fair,

And we were all proud to love you.

Perhaps one day when the fire is out,

Green mountains will show a flash of gold,

I’ll see the twinkle of your eye

And smile again

The Ravens listen to the poem staring, directly in front of them with unfocused eyes, or look down at the floor. When it is finished Morrison reads the honor roll of ‘Everlasting’ Ravens, which seems to go on for a very long time. It also includes those men closely identified with the Ravens who lost their lives: Lee Lue and Pop Buell; and the CAS guys: Will Green - Black Lion - who died of a liver fluke in 1972; George Bacon - Kayak - who died in action in Angola in 1976; Frank Odum - the Bag - who died in Zaire; Burr Smith - Mr. Clean - who died on his return to the United States. A toast is drunk, and Craig Morrison, having drained his glass, walks halfway across the room and hurls it into the makeshift fireplace. This is a ritual enacted ever since Park Bunker was killed after Christmas in 1970 and the Long Tieng Ravens drank to his memory. The other Ravens follow suit, and glasses arc across the room and shatter on the stone.

The Ravens take their places at the tables, and Al Galante stands to say grace. He folds his hands before him and bows his head: ‘The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away - if that’s not a square deal I’ll kiss your ass.’ A china bedpan - once belonging to H. Ownby’s grandmother - is filled to the brim with White Horse whisky and passed up and down the tables throughout dinner.

The president, Craig Morrison, seated at the top table beside the visiting speaker, amuses the guest of honor by eating his wineglass. (The trick is to take a clean bite, and grind the glass between molars until it is very fine and can be swallowed without danger - finely ground glass, despite the conventions of numerous murder mystery writers, is nothing more than sand. Both Morrison’s doctor and his dentist have declared his odd habit unwise but harmless.)

The waiters at the banquet have developed their service into an art, having learned the hard lessons of previous experience. The secret is to get all of the food onto the table fast and run like hell for the kitchen before somebody throws something. Dinner is eaten in a general murmur of conversation, interrupted by the occasional Raven rising to risk a toast.

There is usually a guest speaker, who at this stage in the proceedings has turned a pale shade of gray. Sometimes the Air Force sends an officer to talk on the current MIA/POW situation, a subject guaranteed to raise blood pressure. It is a hapless task for the unfortunate speaker to try to convince the Ravens that either the Air Force or the U.S. government is doing all it can to ensure the return of Americans who might still be held captive in Vietnam or Laos. Whether such men still survive today or not, the Ravens believe the government has withheld vital information and been less than forthright in its dealings - a view shared by many veterans.

But expressions of outrage are restricted by making the Ravens who take the floor to speak plunge one hand into a bucket of melting ice cubes and water - it is beyond human endurance to talk for long.

There is one guest speaker, however, who is treated with reverential respect - Gen. Vang Pao. A small, unremarkable, round-faced oriental in a well-cut gray suit, he is perfectly at ease among the Ravens and beams at even their most excessive behavior, for he has seen it all before at
bacis
in Long Tieng.

Since his departure from Laos in 1975 he lived briefly in exile in Thailand and then moved to Missoula, Montana, where the mountain landscape bears some resemblance to his native land, accompanied by his CIA case officer, Jerry Daniels, whose home was in Missoula. He divorced five of his six wives and settled down with his twenty-six children to a life of farming, together with the first group of Hmong refugees to arrive in America. Today, as the acknowledged leader of the Hmong in exile, he is based in Santa Ana, California, and spends most of his time traveling around the United States to various Hmong refugee settlements.

He is accompanied to the reunion by his son Vang Chong, an earnest, bespectacled, and Americanized thirty-year-old whose education at West Point was interrupted by the collapse of his people’s military resistance. The CIA kept the general under wraps for many years after the war, and meetings with him took on a clandestine and melodramatic nature, and had to be arranged from Montana phone booths at remote crossroads.
[268]

The Ravens listen to the general’s short speech in broken English with great attention. There is more than a smattering of propaganda in it, and his heartfelt invitation to join him in an uprising to free Laos is more emotional than feasible. But whatever life holds for the Hmong in the United States, the general makes it plain that his people mostly desire to return to their mountaintops in Laos. He knows this is an unrealistic dream at present, although sporadic guerrilla fighting still continues in the interior of Laos. But he is patient, and his will matches that of his enemy. Perhaps in ten years, he says, or twenty - or even a hundred - the Hmong will have another chance to regain their mountains and live among them without interference. Perhaps the Russians will tire of supporting their difficult and expensive client, the Vietnamese; perhaps the Chinese, who have already set up a training camp for Lao dissidents and actively begun supporting anti-Vietnamese guerrilla movements, will make a move into Laos to stem the expansion of an age-old and traditional enemy who will have a population of 90 million by the year 2000.
[269]
Who knows what the future has in store? But when the time comes and the opportunity arises, the Hmong will make yet another effort to win back what was theirs.

When the general sits down the Ravens give him a standing ovation, a reaction no one else is likely to receive from this irreverent and skeptical group. The waiters return to clear the tables. They place them end to end, remove the tablecloths, and cover them with crushed ice. Lighted candles are placed along their edges.