The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (8 page)

Sliz had abandoned all hope of survival until he saw an Air America chopper directly over him. He was hauled up into it. ‘My mind was still active in spite of everything, and then I saw a drop of blood and there was this sergeant keeling over.’ The sergeant had been shot as he was being rescued and died before the helicopter landed back at its base.

The Ravens directed air strikes all day, flying until they ran out of marking rockets or gas, when they returned to Site 36 to swap airplanes. They flew until 8:00 at night, when it was time to count the dead. Reconnaissance pictures of the site showed from between seven and nine men hanging from the mountain in web strapping, apparently having tried to lower themselves down the side. The whole operation has been so shrouded in secrecy that even today the final tally of American dead is uncertain. Only four Air Force personnel were saved, which left twelve unaccounted for, while the number of CIA paramilitary officers on the Rock remains classified. Relatives of the dead were told they had been killed ‘in Southeast Asia.’
[16]

In the face of such a reversal it only remained to knock out the radar on the Rock to deny it to the enemy. ‘They bombed that sucker for a week, trying to destroy the radar so the enemy wouldn’t have it,’ Art Cornelius said. ‘It broke my heart.’

The loss of the Rock, unremarked and unreported back in the States, was a serious setback for the Americans. One quarter of all bombing missions over North Vietnam had been directed from it. (The loss may have been a factor in President Johnson’s decision to declare a bombing halt, on March 31, 1968, of the northern two-thirds of North Vietnam, the area in which the Rock had been so effective in directing all-weather strikes.) But for the Meo the loss of the sacred mountain was more than a military reversal, it was a spiritual calamity with complex psychological consequences. As the news that Phou Pha Thi had fallen passed from village to village along the mountain grapevine, the morale of half a million Meo slumped.

It heralded the beginning of a terrible period for Gen. Vang Pao. In the five years since 1963, he had fought a seesaw war. During the dry season, December through May, when the roads were passable, the enemy took the offensive, only to fall back into a defensive position in the months of the monsoon, when the Meo usually regained lost ground. The margins of land between the opposing forces sometimes changed hands twice a year. Even during this period of comparative balance there was a creeping escalation as the enemy fielded more troops and weaponry each year and the Meo strengthened their defensive positions and launched stronger offensives backed by ever-increasing air power.

In the dry season of 1967 the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese began to build all-weather roads. This enabled them to extend the period in which they were effective, dependent as they were on wheeled vehicles to haul supplies and munitions, and to bring up heavy weapons. Perhaps provoked by the installation of radar on the Rock, they undertook a major push throughout the region of Sam Neua, involving eleven battalions of North Vietnamese reinforcements.
[17]

The effect of this new strategy and escalation by the enemy had already been felt before the attack on the Rock. Government forces defending the royal capital of Luang Prabang had been chopped to pieces, while two provincial capitals in the Laotian panhandle had come under heavy attack. Both the Royal Laotian Army and Gen. Vang Pao’s forces began to rely increasingly on U.S. air power.

The partial bombing halt over North Vietnam meant there were idle U.S. jets and a surplus of bombs available, and these were immediately switched to Laos.
[18]
But bad weather made even the increased air power ineffective. Fighters remained unable to get off the ground, friendly outposts fell one after another, and Vang Pao’s forces were swept from the province. With the loss of Site 85 at the foot of the Rock, the Ravens fell back to staging out of Site 36 at Na Khang, now their most northerly base, defended by fifteen hundred Meo.

The enemy, under the cover of the poor weather, had amassed five battalions by early May with which to challenge the Na Khang garrison. But just when things looked most bleak, the weather changed. The Ravens began a frantic effort from dawn to dusk to direct air to beat back the massed enemy army. Hundreds of sorties of U.S. jet fighter-bombers blunted the enemy thrust.

The commander of Na Khang was Lt. Col. U Va Lee, a close relative of Vang Pao, one of his most trusted field officers and a very tough soldier indeed. Known among the Americans as ‘the Indian,’ thirty-five-year-old U Va Lee had spent most of his life fighting, and he carried an M-16 about with him as a businessman might carry a briefcase. He had an intimate knowledge of the area, and when he was not fighting on the ground he flew in the backseat with a Raven to validate targets. (Vang Pao had provided a whole squad of men, known as Backseaters or Robins, who could advise the Ravens on the terrain and differentiate between friendly and enemy areas. This was the only targeting authority the Ravens had to consult in the area of northern Laos. All other targets in Laos had to go through the embassy and were cleared by the ambassador himself.)

John Mansur had heard all the stories about the Indian, and was pleased to have him as his Backseater on his first strike mission in the country. ‘I had heard he was the John Wayne of the Meo and that if he told you to hit a target - hit the target.’

They flew north to a valley that seemed as empty as it was peaceful. U Va Lee jerked his thumb downward. ‘That’s where we drop bombs.’

‘Why, what’s there?’

‘Just drop bombs.’

It was Mansur’s first solo strike mission in Laos, and, wanting to be sure, he made a couple of low passes through the valley, but could see nothing. He needed reassurance and once more asked, ‘What’s there?’

‘Just drop bombs.’

Having been told by the CIA he could trust U Va Lee without reservation, Mansur proceeded to direct a set of U.S. jet fighters which dropped deadly antipersonnel cluster bomb units (CBU) in the valley. When they landed back at the strip, Mansur wanted to know what they had bombed. ‘Okay, I did what you told me, now you tell me why.’

The Indian laughed, and slapped Mansur on the back. ‘All my life I have fought here,’ he explained. ‘When we fought the Vietminh they would push us south and we would plant there in that valley. When we would push them north we would harvest. Now we fight the Pathet Lao Communists and when they pushed us south they planted. Today they harvested.’

Mansur was routinely flying six to eight missions a day. ‘My all-time record for being in the air in one day was eleven hours and forty-five minutes. That’s a long time in an O-1.’ The enemy were only two miles from Na Khang, so a Raven spent almost all of the time he was airborne over the target area, constantly exposed to ground fire. ‘You get to the point when you are flying that much that it’s no longer like flying an airplane but just an extension of your body. You never look at the airspeed indicator, but judge the speed by the sound of the wind in the wires.’

War was a vocation for U Va Lee, and he had dedicated his life to it, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Now, with the Meo stretched to breaking point, regional commanders were under enormous strain. Their men had taken a terrible beating, after eight years of unrelenting combat against the NVA and Pathet Lao, and the natives were abandoning their villages in droves to escape the war. Some soldiers, exhausted and outdistanced by the enemy, had gone over to the other side. Among such a tight and clannish society as the Meo, a betrayal of this sort was considered the worst sort of crime. And to a man like U Va Lee, who considered hatred of the enemy a given and battling him a constant, a Meo defector was a creature who had automatically forfeited all rights.

The Indian dealt with such men ruthlessly, as Mansur witnessed one afternoon. Walking toward U Va Lee’s bunker, he saw a small Meo soldier come tumbling head over heels out of the entrance, closely pursued by the Indian himself.

The Meo soldier lay on the ground, his hands over his head and his legs drawn up into his groin. He made no movement and no sound. U Va Lee stood over him, his eyes bulging with fury and hate. ‘This man is enemy,’ the Indian explained.
‘A Meo who is enemy
.’ The Indian took his revolver from its holster and handed it to Mansur. ‘You shoot him.’

‘Not me.’

U Va Lee waved aside the objection. ‘Okay. He enemy.’

‘No, I can’t do that.’

U Va Lee was genuinely confused. ‘You drop bombs on them all day.’

‘That’s different.’

‘But he
enemy
.’

‘Look, I can’t just shoot a guy lying there like that.’

U Va Lee nodded. He barked a command at the prostrate figure. The soldier dragged himself to his feet and stood with head bowed. U Va Lee looked expectantly at Mansur, who dangled the revolver idly at his side.

‘Why not?
Enemy!
’

‘He’s just standing there.’

U Va Lee barked another order at the soldier, who began to run. ‘Now okay?’

Mansur shook his head. U Va Lee snatched back the revolver, raised it toward the fleeing figure of the soldier, and shot him dead. He turned to look questioningly at Mansur, whose scruples were incomprehensible to him. Shaking his head, U Va Lee holstered the revolver and walked back toward the bunker.

The control of air power in Laos had evolved on a trial-and-error basis without much planning. In the early days of the war it was managed by half a dozen sheep-dipped
(Sheep-dipped: A complex process in which someone serving in the military seemingly went through all the official motions of resigning from the service. The man’s records would be pulled from the personnel files and transferred to a special Top Secret intelligence file. A cover story would be concocted to explain the resignation, and the man would become a civilian. At the same time, his ghostly paper existence within the intelligence file would continue to pursue his Air Force career: when his contemporaries were promoted, he would be promoted, and so on. Sheep-dipped personnel posed extremely tricky problems when they were killed or captured. There would be all sorts of pension and insurance problems, which was one of the reasons the CIA found it necessary to set up its own insurance company.)
nonrated Air Commandos, who flew with Air America pilots in Pilatus Porters and marked their targets with smoke canisters dropped out of the window. Often they did not mark the targets at all, but talked fighters onto the target by describing the scenery: ‘Drop your bombs two hundred yards north of that gnarled tree.’
[19]

This small group was given the radio call sign Butterfly (rapidly changed from Wetback, which was not considered a good code name for men who were illegal aliens operating in the black across the Mekong). The program had proved remarkably effective, but its existence had been abruptly terminated by Gen. William M. Momyer, a commander of the 7th Air Force in Vietnam and deputy commander of U.S. Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV). An officer in the Prussian mold, he was not predisposed to the unconventional methods of the Air Commandos. Momyer wanted an ultramodern, all-jet Air Force. When he heard his precious high-tech jets were being controlled by ruffians who were neither pilots nor officers, he reportedly threw one of the more impressive temper tantrums of the war.

The result was the creation of the Ravens in 1966. The new FACs were rated Air Force officers with at least six months of experience in Vietnam. It was a breed he might have strangled at birth if he could have envisioned its maverick future. The general was an old World War II fighter pilot, an ace (he shot down eight enemy aircraft over North Africa) and a brave man (he was awarded three Silver Stars for his courage), but he was unsympathetic to counterinsurgency dogma in general and the Air Commandos in particular. He considered Laos a dubious backwater operation.

Ambassador Sullivan and General Momyer conducted a long duel through numerous jovial telegrams (Sullivan signing his ‘Sopwith Camel Company,’ Momyer signing his ‘20th Century Avionics’) which masked a more serious difference of opinion.

The Ravens, like the Butterflies before them, sided with Sullivan - which was not what the general had intended when he created them. The air attaché’s office in Vientiane also supported the ambassador, answering to him directly in the chain of command, although they were careful to pirouette gracefully on behalf of the Air Force from time to time in the interests of diplomacy.

The period of 1967, and early 1968, was one in which the Ravens suffered uncomfortable growing pains. There were never enough men or aircraft to manage the ever-increasing use of U.S. air. (There had been only four Butterflies to control the whole of Laos up to 1966, and even by 1968 there were only half a dozen Ravens. This number slowly grew, but even at the height of the war there were never more than twenty-two Ravens at any one time.)

In the early days of the Ravens’ evolution its pilots were still essentially in the military mold. That is to say, while they bucked the system of conspicuous waste in Vietnam and were more than willing to take it on themselves to break the Rules of Engagement when they felt the situation justified it, they still lived, behaved, and thought like soldiers. The era of the swashbuckling air pirate, hung with gold jewelry and eccentrically garbed - an image largely borrowed from their Air America colleagues - was still to come. But Sam Deichelman was ahead of his time.