The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (74 page)

1. Morrison, journal, April 19,1970.
   
2. Fall,
   Street Without
   Joy,
   p. 257.
   
3. Many newspapers ran editorials defending Godley and criticizing the Senate committee’s decision, including the
   New York Times
   July 21,1973; the
   Washington Post
   , July 15 and 21, 1973; the
   Baltimore Sun
   , July 15, 1973; the
   Washington Star News
   , July 17,1973; the
   Detroit News
   , July 13 and 23, 1973; the
   Oregonian
   , July 13, 1973; the
   Christian Science Monitor
   , August 3,1973;
   Nowaday,
   July 16, 1973;
   Chicago Daily News
   , July 13, 1973. Only the
   Boston Globe
   and the
   Detroit
   Free
   Press supported the action.
   
4. W. E. Garrett, ‘The Hmong of Laos - No Place to Run,’
   National Geographic
   , January 1974.
   
5. Karnow,
   Vietnam: A History
   , pp. 41,415.
   
6. Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., vol. 5, pp. 280-81. Cambodia received 200,000 tons of bombs.
   
7. John Keegan,
   The Face
   of Battle
   (New York: Viking Press, 1976), passim.
   
8. Max Hastings,
   Bomber Command
   (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1979), passim.
   
9. Fall,
   Street Without Joy
   , p. 261.
   
10. ‘Symposium on the Role of Airpower in Counter-insurgency and Unconventional Warfare: The Malayan Emergency,’ edited by A. H. Peterson, G. C. Reinhardt and E. E. Conger, Rand Corporation, 1963, p. 49.
    
11. Littauer and Uphoff,
    Air War in Indochina
    , p. 9. In Indochina, American counterinsurgency experts were against the overuse of air power - and even of artillery - from the very beginning of the war, arguing that it was militarily counterproductive in a guerrilla war; the inevitable civilian casualties alienated the local population.
    
12. Quoted by Dr. Yang Dao in ‘The Coalition Government,’ in Al Santoli,
    To Bear Any Burden
    (New York: Dutton, 1985), p. 263.
    
13. Extraction of Vang Pao from Laos: Author interviews with Harry Aderholt, Fort Walton Beach, Florida, 1985; Howard Hartley, Navarre Beach, Florida, March 18, 1985; Jack Knotts, Bangkok, Thailand, February 12,1984; Dave Kouba, Stuart, Florida, March 11, 1987. Directly after the mission, Kouba, Knotts, and Matt Hoff made an hour-long tape, which Kouba kindly lent the author.
    
14. Laos after the peace: Arthur Dommen,
    Laos: Keystone of Indochina
    (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1985), pp. 96-115.
    
15. Bangkok Post
    , November 25,1980.
    
16. MacAlister Brown and Joseph Zasloff eds.,
    Communism in Indochina: New Perspectives
    (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975), p. 103.
    
17. Yellow rain has become a controversial subject with its advocates - see Sterling Seagrave,
    Yellow Rain: Chemical Warfare - The Deadliest Arms Race
    (New York: Evans, 1981); and Jane Hamilton-Merritt, ‘Gas Warfare in Laos,’
    Reader’s Digest
    , October 1980 - and its detractors - see Matthew Meselson and Joan W. Nowicke, ‘Yellow Rain - A Palynological Analysis,’
    Nature
    , vol. 309 (May 17, 1984). The U.S. government has certainly played the issue up as propaganda. The ensuing debate over the Soviets’ possible use of biological weapons has clouded the more mundane but undisputed annihilation of the Hmong through conventional weapons.
    
18. The total number of U.S. servicemen killed in Vietnam was 57,709.
    
19. The author studied Daniels’s death certificate (No. 26/25 Local Registry Office, Pratumwan District) in Bangkok, checking the Thai original against the U.S. embassy statement by the Thai mortician who embalmed the body and reported no irregularities. A visit by the author to the deceased’s apartment block at 76/1 Soi Lung Suan confirmed that each apartment was equipped with a large, antiquated water heater, the pilot light of which was a small gas burner and could indeed cause asphyxiation. Such deaths are not unknown in Bangkok. A friend of Daniels, a Thai youth, survived the gas leak but was taken to the hospital unconscious. For a more sinister interpretation of events, see ‘Mystery in Bangkok: Yellow Rain Skeptic Found Dead,’
    Covert Action Information Bulletin
    , No. 17, Summer 1982.
    
20. Pop Buell in Bangkok: Arnold R. Isaacs, in
    Baltimore Sun
    , February 22, 1977. Pop died in the Philippines, aged seventy-two, on December 30,1985. He is buried in Edon, Ohio.
    
21. Gerald Greven’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Bombing in Cambodia, July and August 1973,pp.275-333.
    
22. New York Times
    , March 18, 1987. ‘Illegal’ Hmong are those who remained in Ban Vinai after 1983 when the camp was officially closed to new arrivals.
    
23. Hmong in Providence, R.I.: Stephen P. Morin, in
    Wall Street
    Journal,
    February 16, 1983. Hmong in West Philadelphia : Marc Kaufman, in
    Philadelphia Enquirer
    , July 1,1984.
    
24. Calvin Trillin, ‘Resettling the Yangs,’ in
    Killings
    (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984), pp. 160-78.
    
25. Tom Richards was awarded his fourth star in 1986 after commanding the Air War University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama.
    
26. Although the general is always available to give interviews on yellow rain or the plight of his people, he is still loath to speak about the CIA-run war. Endless written or telephoned requests by the author for a taped interview were politely sidestepped. ‘How you?’ the general always asked cheerfully, before announcing regretfully that he was about to leave on a three-month trip on the morning of the proposed interview.
    
27. Indian journalist Nayan Chanda interviewed one such Lao dissident in Peking in February 1982, who confirmed the existence of a training camp for anti-Vietnamese Lao resistance in south China. Nayan Chanda,
    Brother Enemy: The War After the War - A History of Indochina Since the Fall of Saigon
    (San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. 380.
    

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