Notes

Ravens interviewed are listed in Acknowledgments. When the source of information is a Raven mentioned in the text, no numbered endnote has been thought necessary.

  1. Many of the documents, oral histories, and end-of-tour reports requested by the author, but not released to him, were covered by the whole gamut of the classification system: Top Secret, Secret, Confidential, Air Force Eyes Only, No Foreign Dissemination, Especially Sensitive Information, etc. A detailed, 400 page classified history of the secret war, The War in Northern Laos, 1954-1973, was written by Air Force historians, Victor B. Anthony and Richard R. Sexton, as a volume in the official history series, The Air Force in Southeast Asia. It remained secret until 2006 when the Air Force released a heavily excised version. Since then more information has become available as a result of a successful Freedom of Information appeal by the National Security Archive (the Archive first requested the manuscript in 1990!). Both the State Department and the CIA opposed the publication of the Air Force history because of its intensely critical view of their role in the war. The history reveals that a plan for U.S. military intervention in Laos as early as 1959, almost two years earlier than previously thought. During the first Laotian crisis of that year the Air Force wanted to deploy a squadron of B-47 bombers to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines to be used in possible bombing missions to cut Pathet Lao lines of communication into North Vietnam. The plan envisioned the possible use of nuclear weapons. It was rejected by President Eisenhower. The history further reveals that U.S. Special Forces began to train Laotian soldiers in the fall of 1959. This predates both the creation of the Hmong “secret army” and the already known Special Forces White Star training mission in 1960.
  2. Monopoly briefing: Col. Robert Foster, interview with author, Lompoc, Calif., January 16,1985. Only the later Ravens received this briefing.
  3. Steve Canyon’s biographical data from Milton Camff’s Steve Canyon Magazine (Kitchen Sink Comix, a division of Krupp Comic Works, Inc. 1983).
  4. USAF FAC policy in Vietnam: William M. Momyer, Airpower in Three Wars (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 266-68.
  5. USAF Project, Contemporary Historical Evaluation of Combat Ops (CHECO) reports, ‘Evolution of the ROE for South East Asia 196O-1965; 1966-1969; 1969-1972.’ Declassified by Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger at the request of Senator Barry Goldwater and placed in the Congressional Record, March 1985.
  6. Capt. D. C. Morrison, FV3176367, Journal. The first entry is made on April 18, 1969, and entries continue sporadically until April 19,1970, covering seventy-seven pages of blue-lined paper. The journal is a slim black leather book with the Vietnam FAC badge stuck to the cover -Snoopy in his First World War flying helmet holding the joystick of his shot-up kennel, with ‘Vietnam’ written underneath. Quoted with Permission.
  7. USO show at Phan Rang: Craig Morrison, interview with author, Santa Monica, Calif., December 6,1983.
  8. Welcoming speech: Capt. Karl L. Polifka, interview con-ducted by Lt. Col. Robert G. Zimmerman for the USAF Oral History Program, December 17,1974, Washington, D.C., classified Secret. Declassified on December 31, 1982.
  9. Blank on form: Col. Larry Sanborn, interview with author, San Antonio, Texas, October 18,1985.
  10. Col. Tom Shera, interview with author, Hurlburt Field AFB, Florida, March 15,1985.
  11. Hmong and Meo: Dr. Yang Dao, conversation with author, April 11,1987.
  12. Almost all of the Ravens stationed at Long Tieng interviewed by the author compared the base to Shangri-La. An invention of James Hilton in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon, the paradise was conceived as an ageless retreat of peace and prayer. However, the name has been used before by Americans with warlike intentions. Franklin D. Roosevelt called his mountain refuge in Maryland Shangri-La, and the ‘base’ from which the U.S. planes flew in the Tokyo air raid in 1942 - an aircraft carrier - was also code-named Shangri-La.
  13. Lockheed engineers: Ambassador William H. Sullivan, interview with author, Columbia University, New York, N.Y., May 21,1985.
  14. 150 tons of equipment: Ray L. Bowers, Tactical Airlift: The United States Air Force in Southeast Asia (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1983), p. 455.
  15. A garbled account of the air action was reported in the Far Eastern Economic Review and its yearbook in 1969. For a sanitized version, see William Colby, Honorable Men (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 200.
  16. A Top Secret Air Force report on the incident, written in August 1968, remained classified until 1986, when it was released to Ann Holland, the widow of T. Sgt. Melvin Holland, who lost his life on the Rock. The testimony of Maj. Stanley Sliz, given in a closed hearing before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on May 8, 1970, remains classified, but was made available to the Sunday Oklahoman, which published excerpts on October 5,1986.
  17. Seesaw and change in enemy tactics during this period: Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era: U.S. Doctrine and Performance 1950 to the Present (New York: Free Press/Macmillan, 1977), pp. 158-60.
  18. The Pentagon Papers, Senator Gravel edition (Boston: Beacon, 1971-72), vol. 4, p. 595.
  19. Charlie Jones (one of the original Butterflies), interview with author, Fort Walton Beach, Fla., March 15,1985.
  20. Patrick Mahoney, interview with author, Washington, D.C., May 15,1985.
  21. Samuel M. Deichelman, missing in action, September 6, 1968.
  22. Lt. Col. Howard K. Hartley, Secret interview #K239. 0512-746, USAF Oral History Program. Declassified December 31,1984.
  23. The note, written in blue ballpoint pen on a lined sheet of paper from a yellow legal pad, was kept by Jim Baker as a memento.
  24. Marlin L. Siegwalt, killed in action, October 30,1968.
  25. Charles D. Ballou, killed in action, November 7,1968. The official explanation for his death is ‘Fuel exhaustion - crash-landed.’
  26. Don A. Schanche, Mister Pop: The Inside Story of the American Involvement in Laos (New York: McKay, 1970), p. 298.
  27. Edward E. McBride, killed in action, November 27,1968. Details of his last flight: Wayne Landen, interview with author, Fort Walton Beach, Fla., March 16,1985; and Jim Baker, interview with author, San Antonio, Texas, October 18,1986.
  28. Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Viking, 1983), p. 124; P. J. Honey, Communism in North Vietnam: Its Role in the Sino-Soviet Dispute (Cambridge, Mass.: MTT Press, 1963).
  29. No record of the Jungle John briefings exists, as Garritty did not use written notes. The reader will have to settle for the more prosaic descriptions of Laos and its history presented here.
  30. Norman Lewis, A Dragon Apparent: Travels in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (London: Jonathan Cape, 1951), p. 284. The book gives a lyrical description of Laos in the early 1950s, before it was engulfed by the brutalities of modern war.
  31. ‘The Hmong of Laos: No Place to Run,’ National Geographic, January 1974, p. 86.
  32. Quotes from Col. Roger Trinquier are from interview with author (unless noted otherwise). Vence, France, September 29,1985.
  33. G. Linwood Barney, ‘The Meo of Xieng Khouang Province,’ in Peter Kunstadter, ed., Southeast Asian Tribes, Minorities, and Nations, Vol. 1 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967), p. 292.
  34. And continues to be so today even under a puritanical, Vietnamese-controlled Communist government. For a detailed account of the history of the narcotics industry in Laos and in Southeast Asia in general, see Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). Although well documented, McCoy’s book ignores early attempts by the Air Commandos to curb the trade - see Secret oral history of Lt. Col. Howard K. Hartley, declassified December 31, 1984 - or later efforts by CIA station chief Hugh Tovar and Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley. Indeed, when the CIA promoted the use of herbicides against opium poppy fields, after a 1971 government ban, there was a furious backlash from the Meo.
  35. Gen. Vang Pao’s background: Conflict in Laos, p. 294; Don Schanche, Mister Pop, passim; National Geographic, op cit; author’s interview with Trinquier.
  36. Charges the author is guilty of promulgating in an earlier book, Air America. But in judging Vang Pao one should use the standards of his own people.
  37. Bernard Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis: The Laotian Crisis of 1960-61 (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), p. 52.
  38. Ibid. p. 53.
  39. The anthropologist was Henri Deydier, whose findings were published posthumously: Lokapala - Genies, Totems et Sorciers du Nord Laos (Paris: Plom, 1954). References to Blind Bonze, pp. 164-84; quoted by both Fall and Dommen.
  40. But British intelligence took a different view. Sir Maurice Oldfield, who became director-general of M16 between 1973 and 1978, was posted to the Far East during the period directly before the French defeat in Indochina. He took a special interest in Laos, ‘one of my favorite countries in the whole world.’ Sir Maurice, a medievalist who spoke Latin in his sleep, studied the I Ching, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the Nine Star Ki system of Chinese astrology. See Richard Deacon, ‘C: A Biography of Sir Maurice Oldfield, Head of M16 (London: Macdonald, 1985).
  41. Fall, Anatomy of a Crisis, p. 57.
  42. Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy (New York: Schocken, 1972), p. 116.
  43. For a detailed account of the Vietnamese role in the genesis of the Pathet Lao and the Vietnamese control over the Laotian Communist movement, see Paul F. Longer and Joseph J. Zasloff, North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao: Partners in the Struggle for Laos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).
  44. George Ball’s remark quoted in Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 606.
  45. General Aderholt was made the senior air adviser to the CIA in Southeast Asia on January 1, I960. Interview with author, Fort Walton Beach, Fla., March 15,1985.
  46. Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., vol. 2, p. 646.
  47. For detailed accounts of this extremely complicated period, see the hooks of Dommen, Toye, and Fall listed in the bibliography.
  48. Kennedy briefed by Eisenhower: Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., vol. 2, pp. 636-37.
  49. Domino theory: Dwight D. Eisenhower, news conference, April 7,1954.
  50. ‘Kung Fu movie’: Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 607.
  51. Highest-priority supply operation: Deputy Foreign Minister G. M. Pushkin to Averell Harriman, in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965).
  52. President Kennedy, television address, March 23,1961.
  53. Quotes from William Sullivan are from interview with author (unless noted otherwise).
  54. Kennedy view: Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, p. 368.
  55. ‘Why take risks’: Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation: The Politics of Foreign Policy in the Administration of JFK (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1967), p. 130.
  56. Quoted in Arthur Dommen, Conflict in Laos: The Politics of Neutralization, rev. ed. (New York: Praeger, 1971), p. 287.
  57. American view of king: Roger Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p. 109. King’s choice of automobile: Don Moody, AOC commander at Luang Prabang, interview with the author, Fort Worth, Texas, April 12,1985.
  58. Quoted in Dommen, Conflict in Laos, pp. 183-84.
  59. Quoted in Hilsman, To Move a Nation, p. 136.
  60. Details of the road-building project first revealed in a dispatch from the New China News Agency on January. 13,1962. The agreement with North Vietnam was signed on March 10, 1962. Arthur Dommen, Conflict in Laos, pp. 229-30. Road work expanded in 1968, ibid. p. 284.
  61. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), pp. 58-59.
  62. Revelations 13:18.
  63. Quoted in Isaacson and Thomas, Wise Men, p. 618.
  64. Editorial in Nhan Dan, official newspaper of the North Vietnamese Communist Party, on Geneva Agreement, July 24, 1962. Quoted in Gareth Porter, ed., Vietnam: A History in Documents (New York: Earl M. Coleman Enterprises, 1979), p. 232.
  65. Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, p. 157.
  66. Ralph McGehee, Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA (New York: Sheridan Square, 1983), pp. 83-84.
  67. Hague Conference: Harry G. Summers, Jr., On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War (Novate, Calif.: Presidio, 1982), pp. 106-107.
  68. Curtis E. LeMay (with MacKinley Kantor), Mission with LeMay: My Story (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1965), p. 565. The most recent biography of LeMay, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay (New York: Crown, 1986), by Thomas Coffey, claims that the general never uttered the remark, but that it somehow slipped into his ghosted biography and LeMay failed to catch the phrase in reading the manuscript. Maybe he failed to catch it because it so completely encapsulated his views on air power.
  69. Quoted in Charles A. Stevenson, The End of Nowhere: American Policy Toward Laos Since 1965 (Boston: Beacon, 1972), p. 180.
  70. William Sullivan, Obbligato: Notes on a Foreign Service Career (New York and London: Norton, 1984), p. 21.
  71. Ibid. p. 21.
  72. Ibid. p. 13.
  73. General William Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), p. 92.
  74. Sullivan, Obbligato, pp. 211-13.
  75. Stevenson, The End of Nowhere, p. 217.
  76. Westmoreland, A Soldier Reports, p. 238.
  77. Air Force desire for jets: Robert Komer, ‘Was Failure Inevitable?’ W. Scott Thompson and D. D. Frizzel, eds., in The Lessons of Vietnam (New York: Crane Russak, 1977), p. 269.
  78. Sullivan’s Air Force organized at Nakhon Phanom airport, Thailand, April 8, 1967. Redesignated as Special Operations Wing, August 1,1968.
  79. Roger Trinquier, Les Maquis d’Indochine 1952-1954 (Paris: Sociéte de Production Littéraire, 1976), pp. 180.
  80. The 316th was among the first five 10,000-man divisions created in 1950 from small guerrilla groups that had already evolved into battalions and regiments. (The 312th, also used in Laos, was another.) It was to the political commissars of the 316th that General Giap, a French history professor and member of the Indochinese Communist Party since 1930, presented his plan to defeat the French. ‘The enemy will pass slowly from the offensive to the defensive. The Blitzkrieg will transform itself into a war of long duration. Thus, the enemy will be caught in a dilemma: he has to drag out the war in order to win it and does not possess, on the other hand, the psychological and political means to fight a long drawn-out war.’ Exactly the same political and military philosophy was employed against the Americans. Fall, Street Without Joy, p. 34.
  81. Project 404: Secret Air Commando briefing, declassified December 31,1980.
  82. U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on U.S. Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Kingdom of Laos, Hearings, October 1969.
  83. United States Air Force, Search and Rescue in Southeast Asia (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, 1980), p. 48.
  84. Official History of the United States Air Force in Southeast Asia (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977), p. 121.
  85. USAF, Search and Rescue in Southeast Asia, pp. 48-49.
  86. The Washington Post, June 14,1964.
  87. Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., vol. 3, p. 264.
  88. Ibid. vol. 3, pp. 253-54.
  89. Senate Armed Services Committee Hearings, July 22, 1971, p. 4289.
  90. Symington’s outrage: Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (New York: Knopf, 1979), pp. 178-79.
  91. Ibid. p. 163.
  92. Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA, p. 202.
  93. David Atlee Phillips, The Night Watch (New York: Atheneum, 1976), p. 37.
  94. Col. Robert Tyrrell, USAF Oral History Program, inter-view of Tyrrell by Lt. Col. Robert G. Zimmerman, May 12, 1975, Seattle, Washington, p. 58.
  95. Blaufarb’s liberalism: William P. Bundy in preface to Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era.
  96. Douglas Blaufarb, letter to author, September 1985.
  97. Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, p. xvi.
  98. Anthony Posepny, conversation with author, Bangkok, Thailand, February 1984. Talking to Poe was like being in the presence of a large grizzly bear who might pull off one’s head at any moment - especially as he had just slammed the author’s previous book, Air America, down onto the bar after looking himself up in the index: ‘That’s all goddam classified!’ Despite his fearsome reputation, which includes a much-advertised detestation of writers, Tony Poe proved to be amusing and rather endearing. He even signed the author’s book.
  99. The author was beginning to consider the stories of pickled heads to be Tony Poe folklore - very effective propaganda among primitive tribesmen and enemy troops - when Raven James Baker, who had served with Poe in 1968, said he had actually seen them.
  100. Tony Pradith, Thai Special Forces commando and subsequent Air America pilot, conversation with author, Bangkok, Thailand, February 1984.
  101. Theodore Shackley, The Third Option: An American View of Counterinsurgency (New York: Reader’s Digest Press), p. xiii.
  102. Ibid. p. 72.
  103. Harry B. Rothblatt, ‘Why the Army Tried to Railroad the Green Berets,’ True, March 1970. Rothblatt defended the officers when they were charged with murder, but all charges were dropped by the Secretary of the Army a few days after the lawyer threatened to call Richard Helms as a witness in the case. Quoted in Powers, Man Who Kept the Secrets, p. 334.
  104. Frank Snepp, Decent Interval’ An Insider’s Account of Saigon’s Indecent End Toid by the CIA’s Chief Strategy Analyst in Vietnam (New York: Random House, 1977), p. 13.
  105. Shackley as Western Hemisphere chief: Joseph Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior (New York: Putnam, 1976), pp. 11-13.
  106. Snepp, Decent Interval, p. 13.
  107. The extraordinary story of Ed Wilson is told in two books, The Death Merchant: The Rise and Fall of Edwin P. Wilson (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984) by Joseph C. Goulden and Alexander W. Raffio, and Manhunt: The Incredible Pursuit of a CIA Agent Turned Terrorist (New York: Random House, 1986) by Peter Maas. Details of the Iran-contra affair have been published in the Tower report. For an idea of the complexity of the CIA’s international network of CIA ‘cover’ companies, see the author’s book Air America, The Story of the CIA’s Secret Airlines, which indicates that the revelations of Iranscam that continued to surface during the Iran-contra Hearings in session the time of writing, is little more than business as usual.
  108. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (New York and London: Norton, 1978), p. 136.
  109. Church Committee, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (New York: Norton, 1976), p. 21. Devlin goes under the alias ‘Victor Hedgman’ in the report. Powers, Man Who Kept the Secrets, p. 340, n. 40.
  110. CIA killers: Alleged Assassination Plots, p. 51.
  111. Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, p. 237.
  112. Ibid. p. 105.
  113. Alleged Assassination Plots, p. 51.
  114. For this view see Senate Judiciary Committee reports: Refugee and Civilian War Casualty Problems in Indo-china. Staff report. September 1970; War-Related Civilian Problems in Indochina. Pt. 2, ‘Laos and Cambodia,’ April 1971; War Victims in Indochina. May 1972; Relief and Rehabilitation of War Victims in Indochina. Pt. 3. ‘North Vietnam and Laos,’ July 1973.
  115. See Schanche, Mister Pop, passim, Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, pp. 128-68.
  116. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 299.
  117. U.S. Military Assistance Command; Vietnam, Office of the Assistant Chief of Staff J-2, ‘Current Summary of Enemy Order of Battle in Laos,’ December 15, 1967 (declassified February 17, 1982), August 15, 1968 (declassified February 12,1982).
  118. Langer and Zasloff, North Vietnam and the Pathet Lao, p. 91.
  119. Rinehart was awarded the Silver Star for this mission.
  120. Conversations between Pop Buell and Vang Pao: Schanche, Mister Pop, pp. 305-07.
  121. ONCPACAF message, February 15,1969.
  122. Mike Heenan was shot down on February 18, 1969. Details from USAF accident report and Heenan and Rinehart interviews with author. Heenan received a Purple Heart. Rinehart was awarded the Silver Star, his second. The aircraft commander of the Jolly Green and the airman who was lowered into the gunfire were also awarded the Silver Star.
  123. Quoted in John Clark Pratt, Vietnam Voices: Perspectives on the War Years, 1941-1982 (New York: Viking/-Penguin, 1984), p. 284.
  124. Official History of the USAF in Southeast Asia, p. 127.
  125. Sullivan’s views at this time are quoted in Bowers, Tactical Airlift, p. 458.
  126. John J. Bach, Jr., killed in action, April 20,1969.
  127. Don Service recommended the Thud pilots for the Silver Star.
  128. Significance of capture of medical supplies: G. McMurtrie Godley, Interview #452, Project Corona Harvest, Oral History, Air Force, Eyes Only, January 27, 1970. Declassified.
  129. Schanche, Mister Pop, p. 309.
  130. This was not a problem peculiar to Americans in Vietnam. British fighter pilots in World War II were ordered to shoot down German rescue seaplanes - and these were clearly painted white and marked with eight large red crosses. Some pilots refused to obey these specific orders as a matter of conscience. Len Deighton, Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), p. 178.
  131. Neither the author, nor researchers attached to the Biological and Medical Library at UCLA, could find any reference to Panis Auritas in any zoological encyclopedia or reference work.
  132. Official History of the USAF in Southeast Asia, p. 127.
  133. Polifka was awarded the Silver Star for these missions.
  134. Mike Cavanaugh was awarded the Silver Star for this mission. He lobbied to get Moonface an award for saving his life, but the Backseater was given nothing. He was killed in 1971 while flying in the backseat of an O-1 with a Raven.
  135. Bowers, Tactical Airlift, p. 458.
  136. Quotes from G. McMurtrie Godley are from interview with the author (unless marked otherwise), Morris, N. Y., May 22,1985.
  137. Background paper J-5 Joint Staff, ‘The Situation in Laos,’ August 2, 1969. State/Defense/CIA Coordinated Response, ‘Military Options in Laos,’ August 19,1969.
  138. House Judiciary Committee, ‘Bombing of Cambodia,’ Book n, Statement of Information and Hearings, Presidential Impeachment Investigation, 1974.
  139. G. McMurtrie Godley, unpublished manuscript. Quoted by permission.
  140. Fall, Street Without Joy, p. 282. The French dropped napalm - restricted by the Americans against structures - in Ban Ban village in May 1954. Fall, p. 110.
  141. As opposed to the Allies in World War II when Lord Portal, onetime commander in chief of RAF Bomber Command, propounded the outright killing of 900,000 German civilians, the injury of a million more with 25 million made homeless. The aim was to turn Germany into a nation of refugees.
  142. Senior CAS (CIA) official, interview, March, 17,1970, by Ken Sams and Lt. Col. J Schlight. The official, unidentified in the report, was CIA station chief Larry Devlin.
  143. Ibid.
  144. Security Agreement Hearings, 1979, p. 784.
  145. Capt. Karl L. Polifka, interview, classified Secret, USAF Oral History Program, December 17,1974, Washington, D.C. Declassified December 31,1982.
  146. Raphael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, The Air War in Indochina (Boston: Beacon, 1972), p. 79.
  147. Meo outrun own intelligence: John Clark Pratt, interview with author, Fort Collins, Colo., November 29,1984.
  148. A-ls help Black Lion: Maj. Albert E. Preyss, transcript of tape recording sent home to his family, quoted in Pratt, Vietnam Voices, pp. 414-18.
  149. Although nothing was said to Morrison at the time, he was later awarded the Silver Star for his day’s work.
  150. Craig Morrison, journal, December 20,1969.
  151. Details of Perot’s Christmas trip: H. Ross Perot, letter to author May 15,1985.
  152. Mahoney passed one rifle on to General Brown, and today it is in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
  153. Official History of the USAF in Southeast Asia, p. 131.
  154. The 21st Helicopter Squadron was flown to Long Tieng on January 4,1970. Bowers, Tactical Airlift, p. 458.
  155. In November 1968 there were 200 guns inside Laos; by the end of 1969 the figure had passed the 650 mark. Briefing notes, HQ 7th Air Force, Saigon, January 15, 1970. Declassified May 6,1982. Ravens consider these ‘official’ assessments very low.
  156. Blaufarb, Counterinsurgency Era, p. 162.
  157. Official History of the USAF in Southeast Asia, p. 131.
  158. Henry Kissinger, The White House Years (Boston: Little Brown, 1979), p. 451.
  159. Assessment of Laird: Bruce Palmer, Jr., The 25-Year War: America’s Military Role in Vietnam (Lexington, Ky.: University Press of Kentucky, 1984), p. 107.
  160. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 452.
  161. Detailed memoranda were kept on the daily ‘Vietnamization’ meetings held between Secretary Laird and his Pentagon staff. For Laird’s view on Kissinger’s military illiteracy, see William Shawcross, Sideshow: Kissinger, Nixon and the Destruction of Cambodia (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), pp. 212-13.
  162. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 452.
  163. Shawcross, Sideshow, p. 213.
  164. Bowers, Tactical Airlift, p. 458.
  165. Kissinger, White House Years, pp. 452-53.
  166. DOCO contribution to Commander’s End of Tour Report, HQ 7/13 AF, Udorn, RTAFB, Thailand. Col. Edward Kenny. March 1,1970. Declassified 1982.
  167. Official History of the USAF in Southeast Asia, p. 131.
  168. The film was seen by Karl Polifka.
  169. New York Times, February 19,1970.
  170. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 453.
  171. New York Times, February 25,1970.
  172. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 451.
  173. Ibid. p. 451.
  174. Ibid. p. 455.
  175. Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the White House (New York: Summit, 1983), p. 171.
  176. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 456.
  177. Ibid. p. 455.
  178. Ibid. p. 456.
  179. Ibid. p. 456.
  180. Ibid. p. 455.
  181. FBI wiretap: Hersh, Price of Power, p. 194.
  182. Henry Kissinger, letter to Mel Laird, March 9, 1970, in Kissinger, White House Years, p. 456.
  183. Quoted in ‘The Pendulum of the War Swings Wider,’ Hugh D.S. Greenway, Life, April 3,1970.
  184. Morrison, journal, entry for March 21,1970.
  185. John Clark Pratt, The Laotian Fragments (New York: Viking, 1974).
  186. Pratt, interview with author.
  187. Quoted in Sams, Schlight, and Pratt, Air Operations in Northern Laos, November 1, 1969 - April 1970 (HQ PACAF, Project CHECO, May 3, 1971), pp. 79-80.
  188. Lt. Henry C. Allen, and Capt. Richard G. Elzinga, missing in action, March 26,1970.
  189. Morrison, journal, entry for April 1,1970.
  190. Dommen, Conflict in Laos, p. 305.
  191. Sullivan, interview with author.
  192. A series written by Jacques Decomoy was published in Le Monde, July 3-9,1968.
  193. T. D. Allman, quoted from interview with author (unless noted otherwise), Brooklyn, N.Y. December 5,1985.
  194. Daniel Southerland, ‘What U.S. Bombing Feels Like to Laotians,’ Christian Science Monitor, March 14, 1970; ‘The Laotians Caught in the Cross Fire,’ Guardian, March 14, 1970; ‘Laotian Refugees Want a Sanctuary,’ Washington Post, March 26, 1970; Robert Shaplen, ‘Our Involvement in Laos,’ Foreign Affairs, April 1970, pp. 488-89.
  195. T. D. Allman, ‘Long Tieng Yields Its Secrets,’ Bangkok Post, February 25,1970.
  196. Story compiled from wire-service coverage of Associated Press and Reuters, April 21,1970.
  197. Godley, interview with author.
  198. O-1 Altitude record held by Chuck Engle, confirmed by Craig Duehring in interview with author, London, July 5, 1985.
  199. The citation for Chuck Eagle’s Air Force Cross, June 20, 1970, was written by Craig Duehring, based on sworn eyewitness accounts by himself and Ray Dearrigunaga. Dearrigunaga received the Silver Star for his part in directing the SAR.
  200. John Fuller, Jr., wounded in action, May 25,1970. He was medevac’d to the Philippines, and only returned to flying status after lengthy hospitalization in the United States. It would be ten years, after repeated exertions by Bob Foster, before he was awarded his end-of-tour DFC from Laos.
  201. Air Commando colonel: Col. Roland K. McCoskrie, Oral History, Washington, D.C., July 14,1975. Unclassified.
  202. Chuck Engle was awarded the Silver Star for this mission of January 2-3,1971.
  203. 1st Lt. Grant Uhls, killed in action, February 11,1971.
  204. Bangkok Post, February 8,1971.
  205. Ban Son resettlement figures: U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on the Judiciary, War-Related Civilian Problems in Indochina, Part II: Laos and Cambodia, 92nd Congress, 1st sess., 1971, p. 48.
  206. The Meo soldier was hit in the back of the head by a white-hot ball bearing and was to suffer blinding headaches for years. Later, as a refugee in Minnesota, he told welfare workers he had suffered his ‘industrial accident’ as an employee of the CIA. The CIA disclaimed all responsibility, claiming that the Meo had technically worked for the USAF. The USAF also refused to do anything. The Meo was finally given an operation through the good offices of the State of Minnesota, and the headaches went away. Karl Polifka, letter to author, December 22,1986.
  207. Bangkok Post, February 16,1971.
  208. Pathet Lao attack: Far Eastern Economic Review Yearbook, 1972.
  209. Quoted in Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets, p. 177.
  210. Ivan Delbyk, quoted in Michael Maclear, The Ten Thousand Day War (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981), p. 182.
  211. Details on Igloo White Program: Paul Dickson, The Electronic Battlefield (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), passim.
  212. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 992.
  213. Kissinger’s power: Palmer, 25-Year War, p. 107.
  214. T. D. Allman, interview with author.
  215. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1002.
  216. Palmer, 25-Year War, p. 115.
  217. Official History of the USAF in Southeast Asia, p. 116.
  218. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), p. 498. Kissinger is quoted as saying this by Nixon, but does not record the remark in his own memoirs.
  219. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 1010. Kissinger goes to some trouble in his memoirs to apportion blame on the U.S. military and the South Vietnamese, but does not share in it himself.
  220. Nixon, UN, p. 499.
  221. Sullivan and Godley, interviews with author.
  222. Lloyd Duncan, wounded in action, June 11,1971.
  223. Frank Kricker was awarded the Silver Star for this mission.
  224. The Bolovens Campaign, July 28, 1971. Prepared by Project CHECO, 7th Air Force. Classified Secret May 8, 1974. Declassified December 31,1982.
  225. Earl H. Tilford, Jr., Search and Rescue in Southeast Asia, 1961-1975 (Washington, D.C.: Office of Air Force History, USAF, 1980).
  226. Sullivan, interview with author.
  227. Godley, interview with author.
  228. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little Brown, 1982).
  229. Prince Mangkhra Phouma, interview with author, Paris, October 12,1985.
  230. Oudone Sananikone, The Royal Lao Army and U.S. Army Advice and Support (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Center of Military History, 1981), pp. 149-50.
  231. Lao Presse editorial quoted in Arnold Isaacs, Without Honor; Defeat in Vietnam and Cambodia (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), p. 153.
  232. Kissinger’s critics: Palmer, 25-Year War, pp. 186-87.
  233. Kissinger, Years of Upheaval, pp. 22-23.
  234. Bowers, Tactical Airlift, p. 462.
  235. Congressional Record, May 9,1973, p. 14991.
  236. Quoted in Isaacs, Without Honor, p. 179.
  237. Quoted in ibid., p. 179.
  238. Quoted in ibid., p. 179.
  239. Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam: April 1973. Staff report. June 11,1973, p. 12.
  240. Official History of the USAF in Southeast Asia, p. 135.
  241. Madame Lulu died in Paris in 1985.
  242. The last time the Ravens were ever in Vientiane as a group was when they were cleared for an overnight visit from Udorn for the wedding of Carl Goembel to his fiancée, Margaret. Briggs Diuguid, Davy Dreier, Al Galante, Doug Mitchell, H. Ownby, Jim Roper, and Chad Swedberg duly arrived in town. In the hours before the ceremony they bought gold - Galante and Guff in were vying to own the largest Raven ID bracelet - and visited old haunts. During the wedding reception the groom was divested of his attire. The following morning the Ravens left via the windows of the Vientiane Hotel when a Pathet Lao patrol made a spot check for passports, which Ravens never carried.
  243. Morrison, journal, April 19,1970.
  244. Fall, Street Without Joy, p. 257.
  245. 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.
  246. W. E. Garrett, ‘The Hmong of Laos - No Place to Run,’ National Geographic, January 1974.
  247. Karnow, Vietnam: A History, pp. 41,415.
  248. Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., vol. 5, pp. 280-81. Cambodia received 200,000 tons of bombs.
  249. John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1976), passim.
  250. Max Hastings, Bomber Command (London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1979), passim.
  251. Fall, Street Without Joy, p. 261.
  252. ‘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.
  253. 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.
  254. Quoted by Dr. Yang Dao in ‘The Coalition Government,’ in Al Santoli, To Bear Any Burden (New York: Dutton, 1985), p. 263.
  255. 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.
  256. Laos after the peace: Arthur Dommen, Laos: Keystone of Indochina (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1985), pp. 96-115.
  257. Bangkok Post, November 25,1980.
  258. MacAlister Brown and Joseph Zasloff eds., Communism in Indochina: New Perspectives (Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1975), p. 103.
  259. 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.
  260. The total number of U.S. servicemen killed in Vietnam was 57,709.
  261. 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.
  262. 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.
  263. Gerald Greven’s testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Bombing in Cambodia, July and August 1973,pp.275-333.
  264. 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.
  265. 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.
  266. Calvin Trillin, ‘Resettling the Yangs,’ in Killings (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1984), pp. 160-78.
  267. Tom Richards was awarded his fourth star in 1986 after commanding the Air War University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama.
  268. 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.
  269. 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.