The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (7 page)

The newcomer would accompany the senior Raven to the dinner to meet the general. The meal was friendly but almost formal, with Vang Pao seated cross-legged on the floor at the center of the table, his advisers and officers sitting next to him. In person, VP - as he was called by the Americans - did not look so formidable. His round moon face was usually lit with a smile, and his dark eyes twinkled. He was very fond of his Ravens and treated them almost like sons. Bamboo baskets full of hot sticky rice were placed at intervals along the table together with bowls of different vegetables. Meat was rare. A chicken would be a treat, pork a luxury. (Neither was necessarily a welcome sight for westerners. To Americans the local pigs seemed to have no meat on them whatsoever, only gristle. It was also the Meo custom to honor guests by offering them the chicken head - it was traditional to suck out the brains - or the gnarled ear of a prized razorback pig, or a glass of tepid blood.) The Meo did not use chopsticks but dipped their fingers into the communal baskets of sticky rice, rolling a handful into a ball which was then dipped into various spices and sauces before being popped into the mouth. The favorite vegetable was an unrecognizable leaf, a type of chewy spinach that was more stalk than leaf. The cuisine at the general’s house was known to the Ravens as ‘gristle, grass, and rice.’

After eating, the ensemble retired to an operations room in the rear of the house. (However, one major offensive was aborted before dinner was over when cooked chickens were carried to the table with their legs crossed in a manner Vang Pao interpreted as a particularly bad omen. From then on the CIA paid one of the cooks to uncross chicken feet and generally keep an eye out for any other indications of bad luck.) The general gave a nightly postprandial briefing: the location and number of enemy forces, the condition of his own men, and what was likely to happen the next day. The senior Raven would then return to the hootch and assign his half-dozen colleagues areas in which to direct air strikes the following morning.

On the way back to the hootch the senior Raven took the newcomer into the CIA bar for a drink. Just outside the entrance on the second floor, built into the side of the mountain, was a large cage that housed the spooks’ pet bears. Floyd was a seven-foot-high black Himalayan mountain bear with a striking white V on his chest; he lived with his slightly smaller mate, Mama Bear. Floyd had developed a taste for American beer, which was handed to him through the bars by well-wishers. It was possible to stand in the CIA bar, pop the cap on a can of beer, and pass it through the window to set it on top of the cage below, where Floyd hung from the bars. He had been known to consume beer by the case and on wild nights could get alarmingly drunk. Floyd suffered from these excesses with superhuman hangovers the next day, and would retreat into the dark cave at the rear of his cage in a black sulk.

Inside the bar the newcomer was awed into silence by the company. The lineup changed every night, but the flavor remained the same: Air America pilots like Art Wilson, who had flown the Hump from China into Tibet in the ‘40s, nicknamed Shower Shoes because of the thonged rubber sandals he always wore during a flying career in which he had accumulated 25,000 hours in C-46 transports; ‘Weird’ Neil Hansen, dressed in Texan boots and Stetson, who was... well, weird; Pop Buell, the lean old Indiana farmer who had made the secret war his life since the death of his wife and ran a hospital and AID operation over the hill in Sam Thong. And then there were the nameless men of the CIA, ‘the CAS guys’: Mr. Clean, Hog, Black Lion, Igor, Kayak. Some of them had the hard, lean faces of Special Forces soldiers, while others looked as if they had stepped from the golf course, complete with loud check pants, short-sleeved nylon shirts, baseball caps, and middle-aged spread. Their talk was of towns and battles and women the newcomer did not know, and he could only nurse his drink and listen.

Later, lying on the bed in his room in the hootch, the new Raven ran over the day’s impressions in his mind. It was everything he had hoped for. There had been moments when he had questioned and almost regretted volunteering for the Steve Canyon Program. Those who had stayed in Vietnam had said he was crazy to volunteer for an undefined mission - rumored to have a 50 percent casualty rate - in an unknown location. He was still apprehensive about the type of war that lay ahead, but one day in the secret city had convinced him he had made the right choice. At last he was among a different breed. He had come to the right place and found his own. Reviewing the last six months of his life in Vietnam, he was not sorry he had drawn the Chance card. And at daybreak he would fly into battle.

4. The Sacred Mountain

The mountain of Phou Pha Thi was a sacred place for all of the Meo, revered even by those who had never visited it but only heard the stories told by village elders and holy men. It was also of vital strategic importance to the Americans, who called it the Rock and considered it one of their most closely kept secrets. This powerful combination of sanctity and secrecy attracted the attention of the enemy, and led to one of the most curious battles of the war.

A natural fortress, the Rock was a razorback ridge 5,600 feet high, sheer on one side and heavily fortified on the other. A dirt landing strip seven hundred feet long had been cleared in the valley below, designated on aerial maps as Lima Site 85. The Rock held a number of secrets: three hundred Thai mercenaries and Meo guarded it, while Americans ‘in the black’ - that is, on a clandestine posting - from the USAF and Lockheed Aircraft Systems manned highly sophisticated navigational equipment which not only guided American bombers in northern Laos, but led them directly to downtown Hanoi.
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On paper it looked like the ideal spot. It was higher than anything around it and only 160 miles west of Hanoi. Although deep in enemy territory and only twenty-five miles from the Communist Pathet Lao capital of Sam Neua, it was considered impregnable to anything except a massed helicopter assault, which was beyond the enemy’s capabilities.

The Air Force had first installed a tactical air navigation system on top of the Rock in 1966, despite the objections of Ambassador William Sullivan, who thought the installation extremely unwise - an invitation to disaster. The men manning the site were in a location where they could not possibly be rescued if they were overrun, while the Rock’s proximity to the Vietnam border, combined with its role in directing bombing raids on the capital itself, was a constant provocation, possibly even a justification, for an overt North Vietnamese invasion.

In 1967 the Air Force upgraded the original navigational equipment with a much more elaborate system using the latest radar that enabled U.S. aircraft to bomb at night and in all weather; 150 tons of equipment was airlifted in by a top-secret Air Force helicopter unit based in Udorn and code-named Pony Express.
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The contingent guarding the Rock was strengthened. The site now needed a weekly resupply of three tons of petroleum products, spare parts, and food and water. The increased activity on the peak provoked the enemy and tipped the balance. They began to feel that the Rock had become important enough to risk an attack.

On January 12,1968, in one of the most peculiar air actions of the war, the North Vietnamese Air Force launched an attack on the site using Soviet-manufactured single-engine, fabric-covered biplanes. These were Antonov AN-2 Colts, which had enclosed cabins and wooden scimitar propellers. The planes dived at the Rock, while the crews fired machine guns out the window and dropped mortar shells as bombs. The outdated, lumbering aircraft were so vulnerable that an Air America chopper took them on. The crew chief fired an Uzi machine gun out the door and shot one down, and the chopper then chased a second until it forced it down eighteen miles north of the site. A third plane crashed into the mountain, brought down by either gunfire or pilot error. (A piece of the wreckage bearing the tail number of the plane, 665, was later recovered and hung in the Air America bar in Long Tieng as a war trophy.)

The downing of three Russian biplanes flown by North Vietnamese was too good to keep quiet and was released to the press, although the location was given as Luang Prabang - a story CIA director William Colby stayed with in his 1978 memoirs.
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Despite the failed aerial attack it became clear that the North Vietnamese intended to take the Rock regardless of the cost in men or effort. And despite a stream of reliable intelligence over three months reporting enemy plans to attack, the work at the installations was deemed so important, it was decided to leave U.S. personnel in place until the Rock was in immediate danger of being overrun.

With deliberate and deadly intent, the enemy began to build a road from the Communist Pathet Lao capital of Sam Neua toward the base of the mountain. Their actions were interpreted as a plan to knock out the airstrip on completion of the road, bring in artillery, and bombard the mountain in preparation for a massed attack. Raven FAC Art Cornelius first spotted the construction from the air and logged its inexorable progress. CIA ground teams reported thousands of coolies pushing the road toward Phou Pha Thi at the rate of a kilometer a night.

Bombing proved ineffective. The coolies worked at night and merely mended the road where it had been cratered, and day after day the road kept advancing. Marching down with it were three battalions of the 766th Regiment of the North Vietnamese regular army.

The attack began at 6:15 P.M on March 10, 1968. Sappers took the airstrip in the valley while artillery opened up on the southeast side of the Rock, where Thai mercenaries and Meo guerrillas prepared for a long night of bombardment. They were dug in well enough to withstand the heaviest artillery barrage and could easily hold out until daybreak, when T-28 fighters and Raven-directed U.S. aircraft could bomb and strafe the artillery positions. On the peak of the mountain the Air Force personnel crouched in a trench as rockets slammed into the ground around them.

But the enemy did not intend to wait until daybreak. They launched a frontal assault, fighting their way up the defended slopes in hand-to-hand combat. Meanwhile, North Vietnamese commandos attempted the impossible - to scale the sheer side of the mountain and swarm the peak. And somehow they pulled it off.

The Americans were taken by surprise from their undefended rear. Most of them managed to drop down the side of the mountain, lowering themselves on ropes and taking refuge in one of the many grottos which pockmarked the karst. Maj. Stanley Sliz, together with two of his men, slept fitfully in the mouth of one of the grottos. At about 4:15 A.M. they were awakened by gunfire and exploding grenades, and heard strange voices above them.

Sliz and the two airmen crept fifteen yards farther into the grotto, where two more Air Force personnel were already hiding. A sergeant, armed with an M-16 and grenades, kept watch at the entrance. Suddenly he saw six enemy soldiers above him.

‘Wait until they get close enough and shoot them,’ Sliz said. The sergeant opened fire, giving away their position. From then on the group was relentlessly bombarded with hand grenades. As technicians, the men had only the most rudimentary training in combat. With the death of the second airman and the sight of a North Vietnamese soldier atop a rock firing into the position, Sliz resigned himself to death.

‘The boy on my right died almost instantly,’ Sliz said. ‘The boy on my left had a broken leg from a bullet.’ He died in the major’s arms a short time later. ‘There were at least half a dozen grenades tossed in through a small cavernous hole... We had no way of defending against it except when the grenades came bouncing on in they would land in my proximity and I could just grab them and throw them down the hill. Each time they fired into that grotto the bullet shattered and the rock shattered, so we were taking constant gashes and hits from this stuff.’

A group of Meo, led by Huey Marlow, a partially deaf former Green Beret seconded to the CIA, counterattacked. Armed with an automatic shotgun and with a score of grenades strapped around his waist, Marlow battled his way up the mountainside together with a handful of Meo. A machine-gun nest, which had been set up by the North Vietnamese the moment they took the peak, was destroyed. Marlow shot-gunned the crew and managed to rescue an American forward air guide who had been in hiding on the mountaintop. They retreated back down the hill in the face of brutal hand-to-hand combat. (Marlow was awarded the Intelligence Cross, the CIA’s highest award, for his night’s work.)

The battle continued through the night. Back at Long Tieng the Ravens heard the news over the radio and rose from their beds at 4:00 in the morning to take off in the dark and fly up to Lima Site 36, at nearby Na Khang. At daybreak they were on station at the Rock, ready to direct a combination of Laotian T-28 fighters and U.S. jets against the enemy, while Air America helicopters flew in to lift out the surviving Thai mercenaries and Meo guards. ‘The Air America guys were going in and landing and taking off in single-pilot helicopters,’ said Art Cornelius, who was directing air from a Bird Dog, ‘while these armed, two-pilot Jolly Greens were extremely reluctant to go in. They stood there, hovering on station, and even though they could see what was going on their HQ kept holding them back.’

It was exactly as Ambassador Sullivan had feared. The Air Force, which had been quick to commit men to the Rock over all objections, was proving extremely reluctant to commit its own rescue helicopters to get them out. The political consequences of a USAF Jolly Green shot down over Laos, a country in which U.S. military forces were absolutely forbidden to operate by international treaty, would be enormous. So the Jolly Green, manned by crews reputed to be among the bravest of the war, was ordered to hover timidly beyond the range of the guns. The rescue relied on the raw courage of the Air America pilots, sneered at by the unknowing among the military as overpaid mercenaries.