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. [13]

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. [14]

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. [15]

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.

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.

He arrived at Long Tieng during the height of the new push, trudging up the road from the airstrip to be met by Art Cornelius at the door of the Raven hootch. Deichelman was deeply tanned and had a shock of blond hair bleached white by the sun and tied at the back into a nineteenth-century sailor’s pigtail. He wore a Waikiki Beach surf shop T-shirt, faded Levi’s, and sandals, and carried a beat-up alligator bag with a tennis racket sticking out of it. A surf bum had stepped into the middle of the jungle war. ‘What have they sent us?’ Cornelius asked himself, as he first regarded the apparition with the deepest skepticism. ‘What have they sent us?’

But the moment Sam Deichelman took to the air he proved himself a highly effective FAC, and the Ravens were a pragmatic enough group not to bother about his surfer style. He always wore a big lopsided grin, and there was something so open and honest in his blue eyes that people soon found themselves won over. He had a personal magic which charmed everyone. Women loved him because he was gentle, sensitive, and good-looking without vanity; men loved him because he could be trusted with the most intimate confidences, and seemed to be without fear.

Deichelman was an Air Force brat. His father was a general, and while Sam was in high school the family had been posted to the Air War University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama. The general had wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and go to the Air Force Academy, but Sam rebelled. He packed a bag and left home and spent a happy period in the late ‘50s living a hobo life in Cuba. Later he worked his passage on a schooner bound for the South Pacific, sailing through the Panama Canal and across to Hawaii. Honolulu suited him; he left ship and became a first-rate surfer. He also enrolled in the university, where he took a degree in philosophy.

But a yearning to fly was in his blood, and after a period climbing mountains in New Zealand, he returned to the States to join the Air Force and go through pilot training. His father, the general, must have been gratified, for his younger son, Sam’s brother, had gone to the Air Force Academy. Both of them ended up in Vietnam. Sam became a Blindbat pilot, flying a C-130 gunship at night, which used a starlight scope to spot trucks going down the Trail. As soon as he had accumulated thirty days’ leave he used it to train and check out as a FAC. If ever there was a man destined for the Steve Canyon Program it was Sam Deichelman.

He was very happy in Laos. It was as if, deep in the jungle and in the midst of war, he had at last found home. He grew to adore the Meo, who looked upon him as a friendly and amusing god. He flew long hours, always thrusting himself into the white-hot center of battle. On his return to base he would trudge up to the orphanage with a bag of candy and spend his evenings playing with the kids. There was something good and innocent about Sam Deichelman, everyone agreed, and yet he was a fierce and fearless warrior.

If there was one thing Long Tieng abounded in, it was orphaned children. When one of Vang Pao’s soldiers was killed in battle the general became directly responsible for the man’s surviving wife and children, who were relatively well cared for in the circumstances. The children had to be very young indeed not to be drafted into the army in one way or another. Six-year-olds humped rockets and pumped gasoline for the armorers and maintenance men, while their older brothers fought the war.

By early 1968 the war had already decimated the Meo. Pop Buell described it graphically: ‘A short time ago we rounded up three hundred fresh recruits. Thirty percent were fourteen years old or less, and ten of them were only ten years old. Another thirty percent were fifteen or sixteen. The remaining forty percent were forty-five or over. Where were the ages in between? I’ll tell you - they’re all dead.’

The children of the town liked the Ravens and ran after them for small change and chewing gum. Despite the war they were delightful, happy children who were always smiling. The shy little girls attempted to teach the Ravens how to flick their hand-painted wooden tops - without much success - while the boys noisily jostled for attention. The U.S. AID school built for the Meo was down the road from the Raven hootch, and the children waved and shouted in the mornings on their way to school. One four-year-old in particular began to stop by the hootch when school was over. Both parents had been killed in the war, and he was one of numerous waifs fed and haphazardly cared for by Vang Pao.

When the little boy discovered the Ravens screened films in the evenings, he attended regularly, sitting on the floor between their chairs to watch wide-eyed what was, for him, the extraordinary vision of Hollywood. He would watch until he grew sleepy, then doze quietly on the floor under the couch. When it grew late one of the general’s people would come to fetch him and take him back to the compound. The child came back night after night until it became such a routine that the general, knowing he was safe, stopped sending for him.

Without planning or intent, the Ravens had adopted a son. At a loss for a name, they called him Oddjob. He attached himself in particular to Larry Clausen, the radio operator, and a small bunk bed was built for him. It was eventually discovered that his Meo name was Lor Lu, so he was formally known as Lor ‘Oddjob’ Lu. In a world of war, the orphaned child became the focus of the Ravens’ gentler side. Everyone mentioned the chirpy four-year-old in letters home. John Mansur wrote to his wife: ‘He is hell on wheels, but what a neat little guy. In a couple of months his emotions have developed to where he can really relate to the guys.’

Ravens recounted Oddjob anecdotes in their letters like fathers doting on their firstborn, mentioned his size - about two-thirds the height of an M-16 and the fact that he had no clothes. As a result, when one of the Ravens returned from Udorn on the next mail run, his O-1 was crammed with care packages. Unused to children, they made the mistake of giving the four-year-old everything at once.

The next morning the Ravens left the hootch to fly as usual. When they returned Lor Lu was dressed in a neatly pressed pair of tiny jeans, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and a pair of thongs. He was asked where the rest of his considerable wardrobe had gone.

Lor Lu smiled from ear to ear and produced a small box stuffed with kip currency notes. He had taken the clothes down to the market and sold them. The houseboy counted the money in Lor Lu’s box and nodded appreciatively - the child was a natural trader and had done well.

The Ravens were hopelessly overworked by the war. The Air Force insisted that an O-1 should return to Udorn for maintenance every hundred hours, which was often less than ten days. In the meantime, bullet holes were patched with 100 mph typhoon tape, a strong fabric which was simply slapped over the holes. Spare parts were slow to arrive, meaning that sometimes planes were forced to sit on the ramp when they were desperately needed at the front. Fuel on the mountain and jungle sites was often contaminated by dirt and rust. Maintenance was sloppy, and it was not unusual for planes to return from Udorn with water in the gas tanks. It became so bad that the Ravens felt they were fighting on two fronts - one against the enemy in the north, and the other against the air attaché’s office and the embassy in the south.

‘Not one time while I was a Raven did any of the embassy staff come up to Alternate,’ Tom Shera said. ‘They were afraid to come up. They had no feel at all for the conditions we were flying under. They had no appreciation for our daily life at all. We lived in a house on stilts; our bunks were on the porch. Up there in the mountains it went below freezing in the winter. There was no heating, except log fires. It was cool even in the summer. We had open hall latrines. Our showers consisted of four fifty-five-gallon barrels on a platform with immersion heaters in them. You broke the ice on them in the morning and started the heater up. We bought our own food, did our own cooking, and washed our own dishes.’

The radios used were obsolete and often went on the blink.

FACs in Vietnam had the most up-to-date radio equipment, but in Laos the Ravens were expected to cope with antiquated, clumsy sets, which greatly complicated an already difficult situation. Radio contact with everyone involved in an air strike was vital for a FAC to be effective. He needed UHF, VHF, and FM radios: UHF to talk to the fighters, VHF to talk to Cricket and to Air America, and FM to talk to troops on the ground. The UHF was a multichannel radio, but the four-channel VHF receiver had to be tuned manually. The FM radio was an Army backpack type that was strapped into the O-1’s rear seat. To talk to the troops on the ground a Raven had to swivel in his seat to reach the hand-held cup phone behind him. In addition, the VHF antenna was on the bottom of the airplane, which meant that when a Raven needed to talk to Cricket he had to gain altitude, turn the airplane around, and drop the wing in order to position the antenna toward orbiting airborne command. In combat, when a Raven might need to talk to several sets of fighters, another FAC, and the troops on the ground as well as Cricket, this maneuver was not always convenient.

Support for the Ravens often relied on a conspiracy of the like-minded. The chronic lack of radios came to the attention of an unorthodox senior NCO, Patrick Mahoney, who worked in the Combat Command Center in Blue Chip, 7th Air Force HQ at Tan Son Nhut airbase in Vietnam. Senior Master Sergeant Mahoney - a veteran of the Korean War, in which he had won three Bronze Stars - had a penchant for people involved in special operations and unconventional warfare. It was his conviction that they received short shrift in the war in Vietnam, and he had set himself the task of equalizing the situation.

He had arrived in Vietnam as a volunteer in 1966 and had flown 250 medevac helicopter missions before being shot down four days before Christmas the same year. As a little extra duty on the side he liked to accompany Green Beret teams on operations thirty miles behind enemy lines, and had been awarded a Combat Infantryman’s Badge at a Special Forces camp - a highly unusual distinction for an airman.

Mahoney was moved to Combat Command Center, where he was given the job of noncommissioned officer in charge of combat operations for the 7th Air Force. He was also the top-secret control officer for the out-country war in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. The general in charge had picked Mahoney because of his experience with unconventional warfare, and gave him his first briefing on Laos: ‘Now you are really going to find out where the unconventional war is.’

Just to enter the office of the Combat Command Center a man needed Top Secret security clearances - sometimes Special Intelligence clearances as well - and no ‘foreigners’ were allowed in the area (foreigners in this case meaning non-Americans). ‘I began hearing about VP and the Raven forward air controllers - and then I heard they were short of radio equipment,’ Mahoney recalled.

Mahoney’s methods of procuring equipment were as unconventional as the war to which it was destined to be sent. He had once dressed up as a lieutenant colonel and taken a team of men to a downtown Saigon hotel, used primarily by State Department people, where he told the staff on the desk that he was there to check the air conditioning, because some of the striped-pants set had complained of unacceptable stuffiness in their rooms. He walked out of the hotel with fifteen units, which were loaded on a plane and were on their way to a Special Forces camp later the same day.

Grateful Green Berets reciprocated with gifts of captured Russian war supplies, which Mahoney in turn took down to the docks in Saigon where he traded for food with war-souvenir-hungry, rear echelon supply personnel. It took several cases of A3 steaks - each one containing 150 one-inch-thick filet mignons - to procure the radios, which were sent up to the Ravens at Long Tieng.

After the radios arrived the word spread throughout Laos that if you wanted something done behind people’s backs, and you wanted it done expediently, Patrick was the man. He was given a clearance to visit the secret base to see firsthand what was needed.

Mahoney was appalled by the Meo guerrillas’ equipment. The young soldiers looked a ragged bunch and had only antiquated carbines with which to go up against an enemy armed with AK-47 automatic weapons, B-40 rockets, and heavy artillery. Mahoney began to run guns and uniforms to the base, a back-channel supply line of equipment pilfered from the overstocked warehouses of Vietnam.

Tiger fatigues began to arrive in Long Tieng by the hundred, and the occasional planeload of unconventional weapons (Mahoney was almost caught loading up a T-39 with British Sten guns fitted with silencers, M-16s, and 9mm pistols destined for Laos). The Mahoney back-channel supply line even ran to artillery. ‘I had found a sergeant running a reclamation artillery yard. I told him the sort of food I could get and his eyes bugged out. He delivered ten pieces in good working order in four days.’

Mahoney slowly developed an alternative supply system. ‘It was taking care of people, and others saw it. When they started talking to some of the Ravens who had walked in the valley of the shadow of death, then they began to understand themselves. The Ravens were the best. Selfless. They were an inspiration.

‘And people who met them said, “To hell with the bureaucrats over us - we’ll take care of people like that.” We were building a system that worked.’ [20]

In the meantime the Ravens flew ten-hour combat days, uncertain in bad weather if they would be able to get back in or be forced to divert to another strip. Unreliable aircraft were a final, unacceptable hazard. Properly maintained airplanes are not only necessary equipment for a pilot, but part of his psychic confidence, the central prop of his courage. A single error can be fatal to a pilot flying a small airplane over dangerous mountain terrain in bad weather, and he reaches out instinctively for anything that increases his chance of survival. He can control the risk much of the time, and even manage the fear unlocked by sudden explosions of gunfire, but faulty equipment saps this vital confidence.

The pilot of a single-engine plane is always alone, with only his skill and resolution to fall back on. Once airborne he can rely on no general to lead him, no colleagues to give him advice, and there are no comrades-in-arms to help bolster his courage in critical moments. In battle he has only his airplane to rely on.

It is bad enough to fly into combat, prepared to be shot at, without having to cope with the constant subconscious fear that the engine might quit. So the message which went down to the embassy in Vientiane, in a hundred different forms, was always the same in essence: Give us some support or we are going to kill ourselves.

It was ignored, and the Ravens awaited the inevitable. It happened at Na Khang, when the enemy were almost drawn up to the perimeter of the airfield. Tom Shera had just taken off in a U-17, a Cessna 185 modified by the Air Force to carry rockets. Pilot and passenger sat side by side, which made it a difficult plane to FAC out of. Shera had a Thai mercenary in the passenger seat and intended to fly north. He began to lose power almost immediately after takeoff, because of fuel contamination, and knew that he would never make it over the ridgeline.

The strip at Na Khang was in a bowl, and Shera tried to bring the plane around full circle to land but didn’t make it. The plane stalled, the left wing tip touched the ground, and the U-17 crashed into a minefield, snapping off both wings and the tail. Miraculously, swamp vegetation eight feet deep absorbed the shock of the crash and the plane hit no mines. The Thai became hysterical and Shera had trouble making him understand they could not move a single step from the plane.

The minefield into which they had crashed had originally been laid by the French in the 1930s, reseeded by the Japanese in the ‘40s, mined again by the French in the ‘50s, and mined yet again by the Americans in the ‘60s. The pattern was entirely haphazard, and no one knew where early mines had been laid, except when an occasional drunken villager strayed from the path and set one off. Shera waited, bruised and shaken, until an Air America helicopter came to pull them out.

He was given the next day off, which he spent resting quietly in the hootch at Alternate. Meanwhile, maintenance crews were instructed to run every drop of gasoline through chamois in an attempt to sieve out the dirt and rust. The usual complaints were made to the embassy and 7/13th Air Force at Udorn.

The next day Shera was back in the air. This time he took a single round through the cowling, which went into the engine and knocked a lead off a spark plug. The engine began to vibrate, the plane lost altitude, and Shera was forced to make a crash landing. He was shot at all the way down, but managed to slam the aircraft onto a seven-hundred-foot strip scratched onto the top of a ridgeline.

It was a short, rocky downhill strip, meant only for the use of Air America’s fleet of STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft. The landing had been difficult; takeoff would be well-nigh impossible. An Air America helicopter flew in with a flight mechanic, who fixed the damage done to the O-1’s engine. All loose parts, including the radios, were stripped from the plane to make it lighter. Shera pointed the aircraft downhill and had Meo soldiers hold on to the struts and tail until he had revved the engine to full power. He signaled to the Meo to let go, roared down the strip until he had run out of runway, lowered the flaps, and staggered off across the trees under enemy small-arms fire.

In World War I the saying was that a man twice burned was finished. In the Raven program, Shera was given a week off. This was considered just long enough for a pilot to pull himself together - any longer might result in a permanent loss of nerve. Shera, understandably shaken after two bad crashes in as many days, went down to Bangkok to recuperate.

* * *

The crashes had brought the Ravens’ dissatisfaction to a head, and they were in open rebellion against the ‘Downtowners,’ as they contemptuously called the embassy staff. The air attaché’s office was forced to act. They created a new position - Head Raven - in the hope of bridging the ever-widening gap growing between embassy staff and policy, on the one hand, and the Ravens and the war on the other. It was hoped that a Raven with a staff position would know the realities of the job and also command the respect of the FACs.

The man picked for the job was Tom Richards, who had joined the Air Force to keep warm. Originally a ground-pounding grunt in the Army, he had fought in some of the worst campaigns of the Korean War and worked his way up to first sergeant. One day, sitting in a freezing foxhole waiting to storm a position across the valley, he watched the planes roll in on their target. The sun was beginning to come up, but it did nothing to relieve the aching cold Richards had felt in his bones for months. ‘If those guys get killed, at least they’re warm,’ he thought. ‘They’re going to go back to Japan, they’re going to drink a martini, sleep in a comfortable bed tonight, and fly back to the war tomorrow. If I get killed my body will be frozen solid in some dirty hole.’ He decided right there and then to go back to college and join the Air Force. A passion for flying developed later.

Richards looked like Steve Canyon. Tall, trim, and handsome, he radiated command presence and led by example. He had cut his teeth as a Raven during a six-month period in Pakse, in the Laotian panhandle in the south. Pakse had the reputation of being a country club, a quiet area where the corrupt and ineffective Royal Lao Army and Air Force allowed the enemy easy pickings. Richards, using the cover of a civilian engineer, joined one other FAC and three mechanics in civilian clothes. The first thing he did was to write to a friend, Dale Richardson, stationed in Vietnam as a FAC with the 101st Airborne, to volunteer for the program and join him in Laos. Together they worked at taking the war to the enemy.

Richards found the situation in Military Region IV ‘loose.’ The Royal Lao Air Force had a wing of T-28 fighters on the base, but the major in charge flew only when he felt like it. Richards would plan a mission and lead the fighters to a target, only to watch them bomb miles away if they even suspected the presence of anti-aircraft guns. Sometimes he would arrive on the flight line in the morning to find that no one had shown up. When the commander finally arose from his bed at 10:00 he explained that one of his pilots had come to him the previous night and related a dream. Buddha had told the pilot in the dream that the following day was particularly unlucky for flying. The mission commander had thanked the pilot and given the order: ‘No fly today.’

The Lao preferred to use the most expensive ordnance, ordering CBU-25 canister bombs as often as possible. It was a weapon which needed to be delivered in a low-altitude dive, but the Lao pilots dropped it from a great height and brought the empty canisters back to sell the aluminum, having already snipped off the umbilical cords to sell the wire. With uncommitted commanders and lazy fighter pilots, it was only natural that the local Backseaters were equally ineffective. It was exactly the opposite to the situation in MR II, where the Meo fought so hard.

‘The Lao Air Force used military aircraft to ferry passengers and refugees for money, to haul gold and opium,’ Richards said. ‘I just had no respect for them at all. I did my own thing. I was not there to help that establishment. I felt a lot of sympathy and compassion for the people, especially the Meo in the mountains battling against unbelievable odds.’

Richards recognized a situation where the rules made no sense, and did not hesitate to break them. ‘Theoretically you were supposed to have a Laotian in the backseat to validate targets. They were a pain in the ass. If you went low they panicked. If you got shot at they went absolutely crazy. So I never took one. I got to know the country better than they did anyway.’

Ravens were absolutely forbidden to fly the T-28 in combat, but with the Royal Lao Air Force in bed at worst and ineffective at best, Richards broke that rule too. He would find a target in the O-1 Bird Dog only to have the Lao refuse to hit it. He would then return to base, climb into the T-28, and fly out to bomb it himself.

The enemy were everywhere and were used to passing through Military Region IV with impunity. Richards found whole truck convoys on the edge of the Trail, and boats loaded with supplies on the rivers. Targets he hit would blow for half a day. Later he would return in an O-1 to make a bomb damage assessment. ‘I ran the air war in southern Laos. I could do almost anything I wanted to. The CIA took good care of us. Anything you asked for, they would provide. Ordnance came out of the embassy, shipped in by Air America. After Vietnam the freedom was unbelievable.’

Once Richards became Head Raven he went wherever the action demanded, flying support in battle and filling in for anyone on leave. Things began to change. As a result of lobbying the air attaché’s office constantly, maintenance began to improve and more planes were promised. The Ravens began to believe they had someone batting for them.

The CIA personnel could be very good but suffered from an excessive leaning toward the clandestine. As close as Richards worked with them, they rarely confided in him, and it seemed that intelligence was a one-way street. They received information without ever giving any back. At the office in Fakse - a big operation run by Dave Morales, a hard-drinking paramilitary officer with a taste for pornography, whose boast was that he had been present during the assassination of Che Guevara - CIA personnel covered all the papers on their desks every time Richards walked in. ‘It’s nothing personal - just policy,’ a CIA officer explained.

Richards put up with it for two months before his patience ran out. ‘The next time you do that - cover a paper on the desk when I come into this office - I’m through working for you.’

One of two things happened to Ravens, as they logged an increasing number of combat missions and took their share of groundfire: they became either overcautious or reckless. The first merely made them ineffective, but the second risked their lives. The inclination to duel with a gun in a fixed position, or settle a score after their aircraft had been peppered with ground fire, led them to take risk after risk. Sam Deichelman became one of the worst offenders. Richards thought he was becoming too blasé and had reached the point where he believed himself immortal. Ironically, Deichelman’s first intimation of mortality came when he was behaving himself and flying at what was considered a safe altitude.

It was just one of those things. His plane took the Golden BB. Pilots knew from experience that it was possible to fly directly through a cloud of flak or a hail of small-arms fire at point-blank range and come out unscathed, and also possible to be cruising far from the enemy at five thousand feet and be killed by a single stray round - which they called the Golden BB. It was part of their folklore and contributed to their fatalism. They might not have respected the Lao who refused to fly on a certain day for superstitious reasons, but they understood him.

Deichelman had flown his C-130 out of Vietnam over the Trail at night as a Blindbat pilot at ridiculously low altitudes and never taken a hit. Then, flying over Route 4, southeast of the Plain of Jars, accompanied by Vong Chou - yet another close relative of Vang Pao - they took a single round. The shell ripped through the skin of the plane, hit Vong Chou in the arm, and came out of his chest, slamming into the bulkhead and missing Deichelman’s head by a hairbreadth. Vong Chou was critically wounded, and losing blood fast. Deichelman immediately turned the plane around and raced home.

The single shell had left two terrible wounds in Vong Chou’s arm and chest, and his chances of survival seemed negligible. But he survived the trip, and for the next three days Deichelman was at his side, willing him to live. The Back-seater, perhaps sensing his friend’s anguish, pulled through against all odds.

Deichelman was shattered by the experience. He somehow felt that he should have taken the round, as commander of the aircraft, and he suffered agonies of guilt. All attempts to reassure him were futile.

He now entered a highly dangerous phase. He had cheated death and dodged the Golden BB, but it had wounded his friend, and he felt honor-bound to embark upon a course of reckless revenge. He was still badly shaken, but undeterred in his resolve to fly in combat as soon as possible.

In the circumstances, the air attaché’s office thought it wise to remove him temporarily from the picture. The Air Force had agreed to give the program another O-1, and Deichelman was chosen to return to South Vietnam and ferry it to Laos. In September he left for Bien Hoa, where his younger brother was stationed. He planned to spend a few days of leave with him and then bring the O-1 back.

Deichelman reached Vietnam without incident, and the brothers enjoyed a pleasant reunion. He mentioned a desire to see the great Cambodian lake of Tonle Sap, an illegal but easy detour on the journey back. He boarded the new Bird Dog and took off from Bien Hoa and beaded back toward Laos. He was never seen again. [21]

Sam Deichelman’s disappearance was deeply mourned at Long Tieng and cast a pall over everyone who knew him. Among those it affected most was Art Cornelius, who had regarded the blond surfer with such skepticism when they had met. That first impression had soon changed, and an easy, respectful friendship had followed.

Cornelius admired the man as a first-rate pilot and FAC, but especially for his humanity. He had seen his friend’s genuine compassion as he played with the village children, and his anguish as he sat with Vong Chou, the wounded Backseater. It was difficult not to be attracted to Deichelman’s obvious honesty, good-hearted openness, and warmth.

Cornelius first heard the news of his friend’s disappearance at the embassy in Vientiane while he was writing his end of tour report before returning home. The war was over for both of them. But Cornelius could not accept that Sam was dead, convinced that he had been forced to make an emergency landing somewhere in Cambodia. One day he would show up, give his lop-sided grin and a deprecating account of yet another escape from death. Cornelius had assumed he had made a friend for life in Sam, not someone who would disappear within a few short months.

But Sam never returned and Cornelius was forced to accept the fact that his great friend was lost forever. (The tragedy was compounded when Sam’s younger brother was later killed in a midair collision in Vietnam. The general had paid a terrible price to see his sons follow in his footsteps).

In his role as go-between, Tom Richards fought the war at the front and in staff meetings at the embassy in Vientiane, and at 7/13th Air Force HQ in Udorn, Thailand. A chasm yawned between the different worlds of the Downtowners and the Air Force REMFs, and the Ravens at the edge of battle. While the Ravens’ experience of the war might be narrow and parochial, the staff officers’ was remote. Richards spent considerable time on the impossible job of bridging the gap, a frustrating and unrewarding task, but he occasionally scored a point for the men in the war.

In his position as Head Raven he sat in on staff meetings at both the embassy and Air Force HQ in Udorn, flying down to 7/13th HQ in the embassy C-47 to bring back the commander, Maj. Gen. Louis T. Seith. On the return flight to Vientiane he sat in the back of the plane briefing the general on the real picture of the war in Laos, ‘before he got to the embassy and got their version,’ Tom Richards explained. ‘Nobody seemed to understand how the enemy thought.’

Air Force intelligence was mulish and painfully slow to learn the most basic lessons. The Trail had been bombed regularly since 1965 (with great effect by the Air Commandos and their outdated aircraft; with much waste and noise by the jets and B-52s of the regular Air Force), but the enemy’s resilience continued to puzzle Air Force intelligence. At one meeting an exasperated intelligence officer wondered aloud that, as much as they bombed the fords, the enemy still kept coming.

‘I can’t believe you guys are doing that,’ Richards said, who had seen the results firsthand. ‘You’re just making gravel for them. They roll a bulldozer out of a cave and fill it in and roll the trucks down at night. When there’s a cut, coolies unload supplies and ammo from one set of trucks and carry it to the next.’

‘Impossible.’

‘You don’t understand the power of thousands of coolies. They can carry more on their backs and their bicycles than you ever thought of. If they don’t have a bulldozer they get a thousand people to carry a thousand baskets of rocks for as long as it takes to get the job done.’

Those who did learn by the end of their one-year tour were replaced by new men who began the cycle of self-delusion all over again. Throughout Vietnam, and over the whole of Indochina, the one-year tour locked the military into a perpetual cycle of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. The wheel was reinvented every twelve months.

At least in Laos there was a certain amount of continuity. Some of the contract agents with the CIA spent more than a decade in the country, and so had many of the pilots who flew with Air America. The ambassadors spent substantial periods, and Gen. Vang Pao, who was there at the very beginning, would remain long after the end.

But most people passed through, a serious flaw in the case of photo intelligence. Reconnaissance planes crisscrossed Laos daily and returned with high-definition photographic blowups of every square mile of the country. These were scrutinized by photo interpreters, none of whom had ever flown over the battle areas personally, and who might have been put on the job only the previous day. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish a truck from a burned-out hulk or wooden decoy. (On the Trail itself, photo interpreters would rediscover convoys of trucks which had been destroyed the previous year. By the end of the war some trucks had been bombed again and again.)

Richards tried to see photo recon as often as possible, pointing out the more glaring errors. He would pick up a photo which had been designated as a target and already had a set of fighter-bombers scheduled to hit it the following day, and announce, ‘This is not a target.’

‘It’s obviously a target,’ the photo interpreter would argue. ‘Symmetrical patterns along the side of a road. It must be.’

‘What that is really is some old asphalt that was piled along the road many years ago and is now overgrown by brush and vegetation.’

He was ignored. The planes would be sent in on the target. Perhaps the first set would miss, and another would be sent. The old asphalt would be destroyed, making a decent enough fire to record on yet another photo recon flight as a secondary explosion, thus justifying the whole pointless, wasteful, and expensive operation.

The Ravens naturally provided some of the best intelligence of the war in Laos. They knew the terrain and in flying over it every day noticed the slightest change. By listening to the FACs and channeling their intelligence through Udorn, Richards managed to take the fighters off bogus targets and put them on the real thing. ‘They would have knocked the hell out of half of Laos if it hadn’t been for us.’ Meaning that it was important to knock hell out of the right half of Laos.

One night at dinner at Vang Pao’s house, where John Mansur had gone as usual to be briefed for the following day’s missions, the general shocked the young Raven. The talk had been about the poor way the war was going, and Vang Pao was arguing for a big push, a quick victory before it was too late. Mansur had made earnest, naive assurances that the Americans could always be relied upon, whatever might happen. They would stick by the Meo through thick and thin. Vang Pao sighed and shook his head. ‘John, you don’t understand.’

‘What don’t I understand?’

‘One of these days your people - the American people - will make the American military quit helping us. And as soon as that happens the Communists are going to take my country.’

Mansur could not believe his ears. ‘General,’ he said emotionally, ‘we will never do that.’

Vang Pao smiled. ‘You do not understand, John.’

The leadership of the Lao military were lazy and corrupt, and as a result their men were useless in the field. Traditionally, the lowland Lao looked upon the Meo as their social and cultural inferiors, which created a strain in communications between them. No lowland Lao was going to die defending a Meo village; no Meo was going to trust his life in the hands of a lowland Lao.

Thai pilots, hired as mercenaries, were reluctant to press in on a target, precisely because they were mercenaries. Ethnically they were of the same stock as the lowland Lao - even speaking the same language if they were from northeast Thailand - but the motivation of money took them only so far. A soldier can be bribed with gold to go to battle, but he cannot be made to fight.

For all of these reasons Vang Pao wanted his own Meo fighter pilots to fly a squadron of T-28s. This was a tall order. Technologically, the Meo were in the stone age. Because of the rocky mountain terrain they were a people who had never developed the wheel, and did not even have iron tips on their wooden plows. When the Americans had first built landing strips in the country in the early 1960s, villagers had peered under the fuselages of the planes, anxious to discover their sex. In one remote province, near the Chinese border, so many man-eating tigers roamed the strip at night that Special Forces people were flown in to kill them, using chickens stuffed with grenades as bait.

A certain number of promising young men, handpicked by Vang Pao himself, were sent to Udorn to be trained in a program, known as Waterpump, which the Air Commandos had set up to teach Thai, Lao, and Meo to fly. In the case of many of the Meo they were taken from the backs of water buffalo one day and placed in the cockpit of a fighter the next. The commando instructors were sensitive and pragmatic when faced with native idiosyncrasies, and regularly used a local bonze (Buddhist monk), at $7.62 a session, to exorcise aircraft possessed of bad phi (spirits) - the cost included such items as herbs and powder for the ceremony, plus cigarettes, toothpaste, and soap for the monk. Similarly, the Meo’s grasp of western medicine was scant - opium served as their only powerful medication. (As the Meo had built up no resistance to drugs, up-country medics found that antibiotics cleared up a multitude of ills so quickly it seemed like magic.) But despite the enormous cultural and technological gaps, the Meo proved amazingly adaptable, and Vang Pao had his first batch of fighter pilots within six months.

The attrition rate was high. The first two weeks a new pilot was exposed to combat flying were the most critical. It was a period in which many died. Those who survived were expected to fly combat mission after combat mission, until they became among the most experienced fighter pilots in the world. There was no ‘tour’ to complete, no rest and recreation in Hong Kong or Australia, no end in sight to the war. ‘Fly till you die,’ the Meo pilots said cheerfully.

One man stood out among all the others. Lee Lue, a cousin of Vang Pao, had originally been a schoolteacher to the Meo children in Long Tieng. He became the first Meo fighter pilot, and his instructor at Waterpump declared him to be a natural. Experience had made him superb. ‘He was the best fighter-bomber pilot I have ever encountered,’ John Mansur said. ‘That includes Americans or anybody.’

Lee Lue was a quiet but immensely personable man, with the definite strut of the fighter pilot. No mission was too dangerous for him, no weather too bad. ‘He was one of the bravest men I’ve ever known,’ said Howard Hartley, a lieutenant colonel with the Air Commandos. ‘He was a splendid pilot, excellent - so vastly exceptional to all the Lao pilots who came before him there was no comparison. He was very bold, very reckless, extremely courageous. He became squadron commander at Vientiane, and the younger Lao pilots resented the fact at first that a Meo was their commander. He would go anywhere against all odds, and most of them would follow for fear of losing face.’ [22] His example forced his pilot colleagues to extraordinary levels of achievement which sometimes put even American pilots to shame.

‘The first time I worked Lee Lue he came right down the chute with two seven-hundred-and-fifty-pound bombs -which most of the Lao would not carry,’ Art Cornelius said. ‘And he got down so low that he was never going to miss by far. But this was unbelievable - just spot on target.’ Cornelius was so impressed he made a special flight down to Vientiane to meet the man himself.

Lee Lue flew so low in attack missions on enemy troops in the open that maintenance men sometimes found blood on his plane’s propeller. When he was shot down on the Plain of Jars and an Air America H-34 helicopter could not land because of the terrain, he clung to the wheel strut until the pilot found a place it could. He took it in his stride and scarcely mentioned it, except in a handwritten note to Raven Jim Baker, asking for a replacement parachute. ‘MR. BAKER. PLEASE. YOU HAVE FOR ME ONE NEW PARACHUTE. BECAUSE I HAVE NOT MORE. LEE LUE.’ [23]

Ravens loved to work with him, even more than American Air Force colleagues. John Mansur had found a small gun emplacement and was attempting unsuccessfully to knock it out with a set of Phantom F-4s when Lee Lue flew into the area. The gun had made the Phantoms exceedingly cautious, and they were dropping from such an altitude that Mansur could hardly see them. The F-4s had already made several passes and dropped their entire bomb load. Lee Lue circled the gun site in his T-28 and watched the sorry spectacle for several minutes before calling Mansur on the radio. ‘What you have for target?’

‘A twenty-three position.’ Mansur had no intention of putting a lone, slow-flying T-28 prop plane onto a 23mm antiaircraft gun emplacement, but Lee Lue was insistent. ‘Let me bomb. No problem.’

Figuring Lee Lue was going to do it anyway, Mansur gave him the go-ahead. He called the lead Phantom. Hold high and dry. Watch a real fighter pilot.’

Lee Lue positioned himself for a run against the gun emplacement. He dropped down in a vertical dive, pickled off a single five-hundred-pound bomb, and blew the gun out of existence. It was as impressive a display of aeronautical skill as anyone could ever hope to witness. The job done, Lee Lue banked his fighter and flew off in search of other prey.

The lead Phantom keyed the microphone to his radio. ‘Say, Raven, who was that masked man?’

After his second crash, Tom Shera had been sent up to the royal capital of Luang Prabang, a comparatively quiet posting. He was to replace Marlin Siegwalt, who knew the area well but had only a week to go. The two men flew north to where Route 19 came out of Dien Bien Phu. Shera was in the backseat while Siegwalt, whom Shera had met only three days earlier, piloted the plane. They were flying over a ridgeline, high in the mountains, when a single bullet entered the plane. It came through the right side, hit Siegwalt in his right arm, and traveled through to his chest. As he was hit he pulled back on the stick, and the plane went straight up into the air and almost stalled.

In the backseat Shera realized his colleague was unable to fly the airplane. A second control stick was stored in the rear of the O-1, and he fought to connect it while the plane sputtered and coughed. He jiggled the stick into position and regained control of the plane, pushed the nose over, and headed back to Luang Frabang.

The forty-five minutes that followed were an eternity. He called Cricket over the radio to request medical facilities to stand by, but there was nothing else he could do. He droned back to the base at ninety-five knots, flying the plane from the backseat, while Siegwalt lay slumped over the stick in front of him. As he touched down he saw an Air America C-l 23 waiting on the ramp with its engines running, ready to rush the pilot to hospital in Udorn. A medic ran out to the plane the moment it came to a stop, but it was too late. Siegwalt had been hit by the Golden BB, which had clipped the aorta, and there was no hope of saving him. [24]

The word went around the Ravens that Tom Shera was plagued with bad phi, the spirits that were a part of all life for the Meo. They wondered whether he was a marked man to have had three such experiences one after the other, or extraordinarily lucky to have survived them. Shera himself felt strangely removed and unaffected by his experiences. He suffered no post-crash trauma or delayed shock, and slept like a baby. He continued to fly without incident or further misadventure.

Then one morning he walked across the ramp to his plane and found himself frozen to the spot. He had stopped by the tail of the O-1 and found it physically impossible to move around to climb into the cockpit. After several moments he walked back to the operations shack and threw his stuff into the locker.

He had succumbed to one of the occupational hazards of the Raven - combat burnout. Shera was now thrice burned. After a few days’ respite he continued to fly, but felt he was too cautious and should not be in the theater at all. It was never the same again. ‘It didn’t get worse. I just didn’t want to fly. I had to drag myself out every day.’

Siegwalt had been killed with only a week to go. It was a damned shame, his colleagues agreed, for an old Head Raven like Siegwalt to buy the farm at the very tail end of his tour. The Golden BB too! It was a bitch. The Ravens talked about luck and fate, the law of averages and mathematical probability, and fingered their Buddhas - which almost all of them wore around their necks as talismans - more than usual as they drank their beer.

Siegwalt was replaced by Charles Ballou, who arrived in Long Tieng five days after the pilot’s death. For some reason, from the very first day, everyone called him Bing. The new Raven seemed in a hurry to fight the war. He was so keen to hurt the enemy that he indulged in extracurricular after-hours missions. He would take out an O-1, together with a like-minded mechanic, and fly low over the enemy firing machine guns out of the window. He was a little too gung ho for his own good, the others thought, but he would soon settle down.

He had scarcely been in the war long enough to find his way around when he limped back to Alternate in a Bird Dog after taking small-arms fire. The engine was cutting in and out badly, as if the plane were out of gas, and he was forced to attempt a bush-pilot landing just short of the strip. Unable to raise the nose of the O-1 high enough, he crashed into the side of the mountain. The Backseater survived, but Bing was killed instantly. He had been in Laos five days. [25]

Sam Deichelman had been replaced by Ron Rinehart. On the face of it they could not have been more different: Deichelman, with his blond hair and golden good looks, was seen among the Ravens as a surfer version of a Greek god; Rinehart had red hair and freckles and was a down-to-earth Ohio farm boy whose language was as bad as his manners. He had already completed a year’s tour in Vietnam before volunteering for the Steve Canyon Program. During the course of his Air Force career he had picked up the unfortunate sobriquet ‘Pig Fucker,’ by which he was known throughout Indochina. The embassy, which made a habit of logging nicknames in its computer, drew the line at Pig Fucker and sanitized it to Papa Fox. (The genesis of Rinehart’s nickname is a source of much speculation among Ravens even today: ‘Ron likes to go ugly early,’ is one explanation, or ‘Ron’s definition of a Perfect Ten is five Twos.’ Raven mythology apart, the name has nothing to do with Rinehart’s sexual predilections, but hails from the early days of Vietnam when fighter pilots called each other by it as a form of affectionate combat abuse. Rinehart had bought two suckling pigs, dressed them up in blue ribbons, and presented them to a group of F-105 pilots during the O club’s happy hour, bearing the Latin tag Ad Fornicatorum Porci - ‘To the Pig Fuckers.’ The joke boomeranged when Rinehart got stuck with the name for the rest of his Air Force career.)

Like every other boy of his generation in the Ohio farm belt, Rinehart always dreamed of becoming a soldier. He liked to play the countryboy role to the hilt, but behind it there was a shrewd intelligence and a sensitivity he was careful not to show. Papa Fox had more in common with the man he followed than appearances indicated. Among other things, he was fearless.

Apart from Papa Fox’s warlike qualities, he could also cook like a dream. Instead of downing their indigestible diet of greasy hamburgers, or the gristle, grass, and rice dinners at the general’s house, the Ravens now began to feast on lobsters, homemade spring or cabbage rolls, wonderful baked pies, and lavish Chinese dinners - all supplemented with delicacies stolen from the CIA kitchen. Although Papa Fox flew combat all day, he never shirked cooking dinner - on the single condition that he not be expected to do dishes. The Ravens considered this an excellent arrangement, happily donning the washing-up apron on a rotating basis. (Papa Fox also excelled at combat fire-starting. This consisted of filling a mail sack with wood stolen from Air America, spilling liberal amounts of aviation fuel - av gas - onto it, and then lighting the explosive combination with a match thrown from four feet. The shutters of the windows would shake and the door fly open, and people would pour into the street thinking the hootch had exploded. ‘It impressed the Thai pilots.’

Papa Fox had arrived at the beginning of Gen. Vang Pao’s new push to retake the mountain of Phbu Pha Thi. The general felt that the entire future of the Meo depended on the recapture of the mountain, and he intended to commit more than half his army to the task. His closest counselor, Pop Buell, advised him against such a course, arguing that Ins soldiers were bone-tired and their morale was so low ‘a dog couldn’t sniff it.’

But the general remained adamant. ‘I must have a big victory to stop the Vietminh now, before they take everything. My people need a victory. The Rock is important to them.’ [26]

Dick Shubert was now FAC commander at Long Tieng, and Rinehart joined John Mansur and Paul Merrick to make the fourth Raven. After a single day’s flight around the surrounding countryside, he was let loose with a Backseater. The push to retake Phou Pha Thi became his responsibility and was code-named Operation Pig Fat.

The Meo staged out of Na Khang (Site 36) and moved into attack positions on three sides of the mountain. Jets pounded the enemy with endless sorties and vast amounts of bombs, but they did not budge. The Meo attempted to move artillery into firing positions and prepared for a coordinated air mobile and Special Guerrilla Unit ground assault, but came under heavy mortar attack. There were no more than three hundred enemy soldiers on the mountain, but while bombing kept their heads down momentarily, they would emerge from their bunkers and machine-gun pits after every raid to drive back wave after wave of Meo infantry.

Rinehart put in more than a thousand air sorties of U.S., Lao, and Meo air in a month, logging 280 combat hours. Some days he spent as much as fourteen hours in the cockpit. Fighters came on station in waves, and would be stacked above him in a holding pattern six layers high. The windows on both sides of the Bird Dog were covered in grease pencil where he had tried to keep track of the ceaseless strikes, fighter call signs, and bomb damage. Back at Na Khang, between missions, he helped pump his own gas and load rockets.

The North Vietnamese held on. Meo casualties were appalling. Air losses seemed to be concentrated into black days: in one four-hour period a Phantom flew straight into the mountain in a screaming forty-five-degree-angle dive, a Skyraider was hit by antiaircraft fire, and a helicopter attempting to rescue it was shot down. On another day two Thuds (F-105s) and a helicopter were lost to enemy action.

Rinehart himself was forced to stay overlong on station to direct the stacked fighters until he almost ran out of gas. He nursed the spluttering O-1 back to Na Khang, while U Va Lee cursed him from the backseat. Rinehart had waited until the last moment to return, and as he touched down on the runway the engine quit. The men were forced to push the plane off the runway and into the gas pit.

It was the third time a plane had stalled on Rinehart when U Va Lee was in the backseat, and the Indian had had enough. He refused to go up the following day. ‘I no fly with you. You try kill me.’

Rinehart began to work with another Backseater nicknamed Scar - so called because of the long, jagged scar down his neck. Scar had a deep voice and a throaty chuckle. Together they worked an area to the east of Long Tieng, where Lee Lue liked to fly, and the trio became a close team. But however much they flew, and however many air strikes were put in, the Meo made no headway.

Back on the ground, base commander U Va Lee was at his most unforgiving. A young Meo commander, no more than twelve years old, staggered into Na Khang from the field, leading a dozen of his surviving troops, who were even younger than he was. He had lost his outpost during the night, and U Va Lee berated him in a furious tirade which made the boy cringe. Two Pathet Lao prisoners were interrogated and then summarily executed.

Rinehart continued to fly. During one flight a bullet came through the floor of the plane, directly in front of the stick and between his legs: ‘It got my attention.’ It was a close call, but he continued to zig-zag through small-arms fire at three hundred feet, impervious to danger, a habit which made Backseaters extremely reluctant to fly with him. Only Scar would accompany him, chuckling to himself amid the bullets and smoke of battle, which seemed to appeal to some dark sense of fun.

At the end of the month, Papa Fox was given two days off and flew down to Udorn to relax. Ravens never had to buy a drink at the O club, and the F-4 jocks threw a party for him. Papa Fox’s dress for the evening was exotic: alligator shoes, sharkskin pants, and an embroidered Farang Tagalog Filipino dress shirt. ‘A nice outfit.’

Drink followed drink, until Rinehart was linking arms with the Phantom jocks to make a MiG sweep along the bar. This consisted of yelling ‘MiG sweep’ very loudly, charging along the face of the bar, and running over anyone who stood in the way. A colonel who was slow to move was trampled under-foot. He did not appreciate being knocked to the ground by a drunken red-headed civilian dressed like a Filipino pimp. The colonel wanted Rinehart thrown out of the club, until someone muttered in his ear, ‘He’s a Raven, sir.’ The colonel grunted and let the matter drop. Exceptions were made for people whose behavior was warped by a solid month of twelve-hour days in the combat zone.

The following morning Papa Fox was on his way to reintroduce himself to the Thai girls who worked in his favorite bathhouse when there was an urgent call for him to return to Alternate. A new Bird Dog, earmarked for the Ravens, was sitting on the ramp at Udorn and was needed at the front. Papa Fox was ordered to ferry it back immediately. Still dressed in his fashionable attire, he boarded the O-1 and flew up to Long Tieng, only to find the base weathered in. He made a detour and landed at Na Khang to pick up a Backseater. Scar was unavailable, and those who knew Papa Fox were in hiding. U Va Lee refused to go himself, but provided an unsuspecting and smiling innocent who clambered into the plane.

They flew up to an area in northwest Laos, near the Chinese border, where they were fired upon. Papa Fox spent the morning putting in strikes on the gun. On the way home he took the plane over a mountain ridge where a single shell ripped into the engine. It stopped dead. The Backseater began to moan quietly to himself in terror. Papa Fox looked below him for somewhere to crash-land and spotted two small rice paddies at the end of a valley. He began to spiral down toward them, while the procedures learned at the various survival schools clicked into place. He immediately called Cricket, giving his position and where he intended to put the plane down. Then he called Air America and gave them the same information.

The Backseater had become absolutely quiet, resigned to his fate, convinced that when a plane crashed life ended. He had abandoned hope the moment the engine quit. Papa Fox concentrated on the landing and slammed the Bird Dog into the paddy. It was too short; the landing gear hit the dike and the nose lifted high into the air. Rinehart’s legs flew up and hit the instrument panel, cutting him in several places.

The plane settled back into the paddy. Both men were alive. The Backseater was rapturous and now looked upon Papa Fox as a man before whom Death itself had retreated. He threw his arms around Rinehart and began to hug and kiss him. ‘You number one. You Buddha.’

The excitement was shortlived. A large number of enemy troops opened fire from a treeline only a quarter of a mile away. Papa Fox grabbed hold of the Backseater and together they ran into the jungle, where they fought their way through the undergrowth.

After running wildly for several minutes, Papa Fox took hold of his companion by the shoulders and made him sit down. They were both breathing heavily and adrenaline was pumping through their bodies. It was important to calm down and form a plan. In the distance they could hear the enemy shooting, but Papa Fox knew they were firing blindly.

He examined the circumstances. Dressed in his Sunday best, he was stranded in the middle of the jungle without maps, a gun, a survival kit, or a radio, and only a pair of alligator shoes to get him out. The Backseater carried a handgun but nothing more. Both men emptied their pockets: a belt buckle, a watch, and a few coins - scant defenses against a battalion of North Vietnamese. They also had no food and no water.

Papa Fox could hear the enemy moving up the trail behind them, and the sound of gunfire grew louder. The two men picked their way painfully through the trees, edging toward the top of the mountain. Papa Fox caught sight of the search-and-rescue aircraft overhead - two A-l Skyraiders and a Jolly Green rescue helicopter - but knew the Air Force would never undertake a pickup without proper radio contact to establish the authenticity of codes. Their only hope was Air America.

About a quarter of a mile from the top of the mountain the terrain changed suddenly from thick forest to open, head-high elephant grass dotted with clumps of tall bamboo. It was slow work pushing through the bush. After twenty minutes Papa Fox stopped beside a clump of bamboo which had grown to a height of thirty feet. He took off his exotic shirt and made a bamboo frame over which to stretch it. He pulled the tall bamboo cane down and attached his shirt to the end, then hoisted it like a flag on a pole. An Air America chopper was continuing to scour the mountains around the downed plane, half a mile away, while the Skyraiders droned up and down the valley.

‘See him?’ Papa Fox said to his companion. ‘He find us. No problem.’

The Meo looked at Papa Fox, now stripped to the waist to expose a creamy white torso speckled with ginger hair and freckles, and nodded without conviction. The two men took it in turns to wave the bamboo from side to side in an attempt to attract attention.

They waved their makeshift flagpole for thirty minutes without result, until at 6:00 the sun began to set. A Skyraider was still in the valley, then turned and flew by their mountaintop. Papa Fox’s spirits rose, only to slump further when the plane passed overhead without seeing them.

The planes had been searching for an hour and a half and had not found them. The sun had set and it was beginning to grow dark. Papa Fox began to accept that they would not be rescued and to formulate another plan of escape. As an old farm boy and a survivor, he told himself, he could walk the three hundred miles back to safety. Once it was truly dark he would climb to the top of the hill and keep on going, traveling by night and navigating by the stars. They could sleep in hiding during the day.

‘Don’t you worry,’ Papa Fox assured his Meo companion. ‘I’ll get us out of here.’

Just when hope was failing with the last light, the Air America chopper flew over the mountaintop on its way home. Papa Fox waved the flagpole in a final desperate effort to attract attention. The chopper banked steeply, and turned around on itself. They had been seen. The Meo was ecstatic, cured of his temporary lapse of faith in his ginger godhead, and threw himself on his savior, kissing and hugging him.

The Air America pilot hovered overhead and signaled for them to head up to the very top of the mountain. They battled through the elephant grass, which was eight feet high, wide as a man’s hand, and sharp as a knife. It was a punishing last haul. Papa Fox could see nothing, but kept climbing toward the noise of the rotors. At the top of the mountain they were rewarded by the wonderful sight of the Air America chopper dropping into the grass. The pilot brought the aircraft down slowly, the pressure from the rotor blades partially flattening the tall grass, until he hovered only a couple of feet from the ground. Papa Fox clambered aboard, hauling his Meo companion up after him.

‘Number one,’ the Meo cried with tears in his eyes, hugging Papa Fox close to him. ‘Buddha.’

The chopper lifted into the dark and headed back to Na Khang. Papa Fox drank two full canteens of water on the trip. Back at the site he prepared to hop off. ‘You okay, Raven?’ the pilot asked.

‘Yeah. Thanks.’

Papa Fox jumped down from the aircraft, accompanied by his worshipful companion. The Air America bird lifted off to fly south and had gone before Rinehart was able to ask the name of the man who had saved his life. He was never to learn it.

He hitched a lift on a plane heading back to Alternate. Once in the Raven hootch he decided he would write down every detail of his experience and sat at a table, pencil in hand. It had been quite a day, and he wondered where he should begin. Without warning, he began to shake uncontrollably. Until that moment he had felt in complete command of his actions and had been too busy to be scared. Now he could not even hold a pencil.

He got up and went to the bar, where he poured himself a stiff whisky. Two Ravens sitting by the fire, unaware of what had happened, wondered why dinner was behind schedule. ‘It’s kind of late. Aren’t you going to cook?’

‘I guess so,’ Papa Fox said, and went into the kitchen to prepare supper.

At the beginning of Operation Pig Fat, President Johnson had announced that as of November 1, 1968, ‘all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam’ would be stopped. The partial bombing halt in March had already made more sorties available for Laos, but now U.S. airplanes arrived in swarms.

There was no lack of targets, but with only four Ravens to cover the whole of northeast Laos it was impossible to control the number of airplanes. ‘They had all that capacity in Thailand, so they put it to use in Laos,’ Tom Shera said. It was as if a business decision had been made to use idle assets. ‘There were plenty of targets, but we didn’t have enough FACs to use that much air. Many times we got so much air we couldn’t handle it at all. Even before the bombing halt there were times when the weather was so bad over North Vietnam that they would come back in waves. They were damn near out of gas and they wanted to make one pass and get rid of their bombs. You would try and pre-position yourself, but often you ended up doing saturation bombing in the area you happened to be at the time the first flight got in. Because you might not have had time to get to where you really wanted to be.

‘It seemed like there was always a conflict for the air. When the ground forces were moving and we needed air to support them often we didn’t get it.’

On one occasion Shera put in forty-eight sorties on one marking rocket. The instructions from Cricket had been explicit. ‘Launch Raven, the weather’s bad and we’ve gotta dump this stuff. We gotta get it in someplace.’

Shera headed north to a place he thought really needed it, but the fighters came on station before he arrived. He ended up putting strike after strike every five hundred meters along a ridgeline dotted with enemy reinforcements. ‘I could really have used those fighters if I had been in position and wrought havoc. I was completely out of position. The alternative was that those guys would go and dump those bombs on the range in Thailand.’

The few Ravens available to control the air war were further hampered by not having enough planes. If an O-1 was down from battle damage or in for maintenance, Ravens flew as copilots in Air America or Continental Air Services aircraft, a procedure so illegal it would have given the Downtowners conniptions.

Maintenance and support were still only mediocre at best. Papa Fox, who by now had become Chief Raven at Long Tieng, attempted to continue the work begun by Tom Richards (who had left the country on completion of his tour) in gaining increased recognition and support for the program. But where Richards had used his comparatively high rank, combined with a sophisticated, diplomatic approach, Papa Fox resorted to nose-to-nose confrontation and the raised voice.

Persistent engine failures had continued to undermine Raven confidence. Almost every day there was a story of some pilot coaxing a plane back into a remote strip. Papa Fox’s patience finally ran out when he had four engine failures in a week. ‘We had a U-17 that every time you turned around you were horsing into another field. It would run and then quit, run a little bit more, and so on. And the O-1s, some of which were almost twenty years old, were doing the same thing.’ The mechanics who worked on them were passing them after a ground check inspection - instead of a test flight, which involved a certain amount of risk. The corner-cutting resulted in further engine failures.

‘That’s it,’ he announced furiously. ‘I’m grounding the airplanes.’

In effect, the Ravens were on strike and the air war in Laos came to an abrupt halt. Papa Fox went back to the hootch and spent the rest of the afternoon reading. The next morning the Ravens would have been in the air by 6:00, but Papa Fox advised his colleagues to sleep late and enjoy the sumptuous breakfast he intended to prepare. Late in the morning a message came through from the embassy demanding to know why the Ravens were not in the air.

‘Be advised airplanes grounded,’ Papa Fox replied.

A terse message came back from the assistant air attaché, Lt. Col. Gus Sonnenberg - the air attaché himself was still unaware of the problem at this stage - that Rinehart did not have the authority to ground the airplanes. ‘If I don’t have the authority to ground the airplanes, why aren’t they flying?’ Rinehart replied.

There was no more cable traffic. Things became very quiet. The Ravens stayed in their hootch throwing darts and reading magazines. That night Papa Fox spoke to Vang Pao and explained what was happening: the indifference of the embassy, the negligence of the Air Force in Udorn, and the poor maintenance provided by Air America were going to result in getting Ravens killed. Therefore, the airplanes were grounded until the Ravens received the support they needed. The general listened and nodded.

To Papa Fox’s amazement he was supported in his action by the air attaché himself, Col. Robert Tyrrell, who ordered him to attend a meeting in Udorn to present his case. It was an intimidating group to face: twenty high-ranking officers, including two generals, were seated around the table.

Papa Fox listed the twenty-six engine failures which had occurred in the previous three months, and explained what he felt was needed to correct the haphazard maintenance. He complained of a complete lack of logistical support from the embassy.

The assistant air attaché, Sonnenberg, interrupted to assure everyone that the air attaché’s office in Vientiane gave every assistance in its power to the program at all times. His speech was cut short by an emotional Papa Fox: ‘You’re full of shit!’

A general raised his voice to suggest that there was nothing wrong with the airplanes, and that Air America maintained them just fine - it was the way these cowboy FAGs flew the damn things.

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Papa Fox exploded. ‘You want to come up and fly with us sometime and see how we do things. We are in enemy territory ninety-nine percent of the time that we are airborne. You can’t expect people to fly around in that environment with airplanes that are cutting in and out all the goddam time.’

People began to shout, including the Air America maintenance manager imprudently defending the record of his mechanics. Papa Fox continued to dominate the meeting by shouting louder than anyone else. As the battle raged, Colonel Tyrrell sat quietly to one side, saying nothing. By the time the meeting closed, Papa Fox had made his point - and annoyed a great many senior officers.

* * *

Improvements were made in the program. All of the Raven airplanes were rotated through Udorn and properly over-hauled. Many of the O-1s had come from the Army, where they had been out in the field for years accumulating dirt in the fuel tanks. Some planes had two cups of mud extracted from each of their wing tanks. New filters and chamois strainers were put on the fuel buggies out in the field.

Most important of all, one of Air America’s very best mechanics was permanently assigned to Long Tieng. Stan Wilson was a man after the Ravens’ own heart - a mechanical whiz, with a wicked chuckle and a dry sense of humor. His idea of an afternoon off was to fly in the backseat of a T-28 on a combat mission. The Ravens called him ‘Clean’ Stanley because he always seemed to be covered from head to foot in black grease. It was said of Stan Wilson that given a data plate, a set of knitting needles, and a ball of steel wool, he could knit an airplane.

He was working as Air America’s chief mechanic at Savannakhet, in southern Laos, maintaining every type of airplane, when he received the call from Udorn to drop everything and join the Raven program. ‘We’ll have a Volpar pick you up - you’re going to Long Tieng to maintain O-1s.’

‘O-1s - what the hell for?’ It seemed to Wilson that the O-1 could not possibly pose any special maintenance problems calling on his canny skills. But he flew up to Long Tieng and within hours had isolated the problem. Every one of the spotter planes had been tuned to fly out of Udorn – just above sea level - while in northern Laos they operated out of strips three thousand to four thousand feet high. Although a pilot could adjust the mixture manually to some extent, a further carburetor adjustment was needed. It was a simple enough procedure. Wilson also found out that the mechanics who had been assigned to work on the Raven Bird Dogs had previously maintained B-52 bombers.

It took Clean Stanley an afternoon to overhaul the nine planes used by the Long Tieng Ravens, and when he was finished he took each one up for a test flight. The program never had to worry about faulty maintenance again. If Stan Wilson signed his name in the log book, he was prepared to fly the plane. The team of mechanics eventually gathered to work on the Ravens’ planes was first rate. (Frank Shaw, a twenty-year-old Air Force enlisted man in the ‘black,’ became ‘line chief.’ He was discovered on several occasions by the Ravens, as they went to their planes at dawn, asleep uncovered on the gravel beneath the wing of an O-1 to be there at takeoff to check that all the birds were ready to go. He worked for a year straight with no time off, refusing all offers of R&R, and saved at least one Raven’s life when he disarmed a sabotaged T-28.) Superb maintenance gave the Ravens back their confidence.

The air attaché’s office also responded to Papa Fox’s emotional plea by imposing more rules. Combat-fatigued Ravens who shouted down generals were a rude shock to the tranquillity of life behind the lines, so new limits were set on the hours they were allowed to fly. No Raven was to be permitted to fly more than 180 hours a month (although this was considerably more than the standard 80 hours a month permitted by the Air Force for pilots outside of Laos; a pilot was allowed to fly 110 hours with a waiver, as long as he did not exceed 240 in a quarter). The rule was more or less ignored from the very first day until the end of the war.

After the Udom meeting, Papa Fox reported to the air attaché’s office in Vientiane on his way back to Alternate. ‘Listen, we’ve been doing some thinking,’ he was told by Gus Sonnenberg. ‘You’re a little bit tired and we’re going to switch you around. Why don’t you go on up and get your stuff and come back down and we’ll decide what to do with you.’ Fuck it, Papa Fox thought to himself, I’m fired. He flew to Alternate, arriving at the base at 5:00 in the evening. He figured he just had time for one last mission. He took an O-1 out to the east, where he found two trucks and a bulldozer. He called Cricket for air, only to be told that nothing was available. ‘I’ll see you at first light,’ Papa Fox said. ‘Have two sets of fighters ready and waiting.’

The next morning the mission went like clockwork. Papa Fox put four sets of fighters on the target and destroyed the trucks and bulldozer. Cricket fed the bomb damage assessment through to the air attaché’s office, and within minutes the wires began to burn. ‘Tell Raven 44 he is to land immediately. He is to report to this station immediately.’

Papa Fox returned to Alternate and closed down the O-1 and did not fly again. That night he was guest of honor at dinner with Gen. Vang Pao, who sat him on his right in recognition of destroying the bulldozer. Papa Fox pointed out the irony of the honor to the general, telling him that he had been called back to Vientiane. ‘Because of what happened they make me go down now. Fly for you no more. They take me away.’

‘Aah, Raven 44 - you worry too much,’ the general said jovially. ‘You go down. I take care of you.’

‘I don’t think it’s going to work, sir.’

‘No problem. You go down. Enjoy little bit. I take care of you.’

The general sliced off the ear of the pig and handed it to Papa Fox as guest of honor. He spent the entire dinner cutting off small pieces and nibbling them for several minutes before subtly disgorging them into his napkin. (‘The more you chew on a pig’s ear, the bigger it gets.’)

The next day he returned to Vientiane and went to stay in the Ice House. He was largely ignored by the Downtowners who gathered for dinner. No one seemed interested in the war, and the conversation was about promotion possibilities, laced with mildly bitchy gossip about colleagues. Papa Fox, who had been flying for twelve hours a day and whose only subject of conversation was the war, said nothing. The Downtowners suffered his company, and charged him seven dollars a day for bed and board. At dinner on the third day Sonnenberg turned to him and said, ‘We’ve been thinking about all this. We’re going to send you back to Alternate.’

The general had his way, and Papa Fox returned to Long Tieng.

By Thanksgiving of 1968, despite all of Vang Pao’s most confident predictions, the Meo had still not taken Phou Pha Thi or even managed to scale the lower reaches of the mountain. The plan itself was a disastrous departure from the type of war they excelled in. Instead of damaging the North Vietnamese in hit-and-run guerrilla operations, they had become conventional infantry, attempting to attack well-fortified and heavily defended positions. They proved unequal to the task, and casualties were high.

On Thanksgiving Day itself, Papa Fox returned to Alternate, after flying only six hours of combat, in order to prepare dinner. He had already baked homemade pumpkin and mince pies, and now set to work cooking the turkeys, which had been sent up from the commissary in Vientiane and would be served with mashed potatoes, scalloped corn, and gravy. The Air Commandos had sent up two Jeroboams of champagne with which to wash the feast down. Bob Tyrrell, the air attaché, flew up to join the Ravens, expecting a meager battlefront lunch, only to find himself feasting as if he were at home in the States.

Gen. Vang Pao stayed at the front. He had originally resisted moving six thousand refugees of his own people, afraid that if his soldiers saw the evacuation they would interpret it as acceptance of defeat. Now, although still speaking of victory, he asked Pop Buell to go ahead.

The war was going badly, and morale among the Meo was low. The Ravens began to believe that skill counted for little in the face of the endless hours they were obliged to fly. They were in the power of sheer, blind luck. Each flight was another exhausted spin of war’s wheel of fortune, and every extra day shortened the odds of survival.

The endless combat flying was taking its toll on one Raven after another. It was usual to send a pilot suffering from burnout south. After months of hard flying at Alternate, Ed McBride, known as ‘Hoss’ because of his huge, lumbering, Mississippi country-boy frame, had retired to Savannakhet, a quiet provincial capital situated on the Mekong, just across from the Thai border.

It was thought he needed an extended period of comparative calm to wind down. After Alternate, Savannakhet was the next best thing to R&R the program had to offer. Although the Royal Lao Air Force was headquartered in the town, there was not much war to speak of. Ravens stationed there never went as far east as the Trail. The Royal Lao Army and their Pathet Lao enemy seemed to acknowledge an unwritten gentlemen’s stand-off.

Hoss, who wore a ten-gallon hat and carried a guitar, was a favorite among the locals, not least because of his famed ‘candy’ runs. Flying over a village, he would bring his plane down low and buzz the main street, tossing candy and gum out the window to the kids. Bored patrols of friendly troops, meticulously avoiding the enemy, had their day brightened by one of Hoss’s candy runs.

To the east of the city there was a large collapsed bridge that had once spanned the river and carried a major north-south highway. Traffic now forded low-water crossings on either side of the bridge, and Hoss often flew out there, together with a Backseater, to check for possible enemy truck tracks. Close to the bridge he saw a large column of troops crossing a field. The fact that they were in the open and did not scatter at the sight of a plane strongly suggested they were friendly. Hoss flew by and waved, and, sure enough, the troops waved back. He picked up the large sack of chocolate, hard candy, and gum and placed it on his lap so he could throw candy out the window by the fistful. He was perfectly positioned for a run, which would take him directly over the soldiers’ heads.

It all happened so quickly that perhaps Hoss McBride never realized the troops below him were North Vietnamese regulars. Droning a few feet above them, one hand in the bag of candy, he was a sitting target. The soldiers opened fire and a single round of .30 caliber hit Hoss in the armpit and traveled through to his chest. The plane crashed upside down in a nearby river. Hoss’s death, the Ravens agreed, was sheer bad luck. [27]

Luck follows no logic, a circumstance which creates faith or anxiety. There were Ravens who flew through clouds of flak unscathed, and who walked away unharmed from the burning hulks of crashed planes. Other men, flying high in a quiet area, were killed by a single bullet. Some were reckless to the point of absurdity and never took a hit; others were killed while religiously following all of the rules. Experienced old heads got killed in their last week; FNGs got killed in their first. Luck began to seem as mysterious as the spark of life itself.

John Mansur had become almost punch-drunk from flying combat missions out of Alternate and had begun to feel impervious to danger, but some hidden fear suddenly made him decide to wear his helmet. Ravens never wore the armored helmets they were provided with, partly because they were awkward and heavy, but mostly because it was impossible to hear ground fire in one. But Mansur, who had never worn one before, arbitrarily decided that for this particular mission he would wear the helmet.

He flew to Roadrunner Lake to check out the Chinese Cultural Mission at Khang Khay. The CIA had received ground team reports that the enemy had moved large, heavy artillery pieces into town as a prelude to moving them into position under cover of darkness, and wanted the intelligence checked. The high-level recon planes that flew out of Udom were not available, so Mansur decided to go in low and have a look himself. It was a foolhardy decision, but he knew the positions of the various 37mm antiaircraft guns and calculated he could fly so low that the gunners would be unable to depress their weapons sufficiently to shoot at him. He rolled the plane up to the edge of the town, and as he banked and peered down, he felt a terrific blow to the helmet. He had forgotten the most obvious thing in his foxy calculations - he was so low a soldier with a pistol could hit him.

A single bullet had come through the open window of the cockpit and entered Mansur’s helmet. Suddenly he couldn’t see, and his first thought was that he had been shot in the eyes. He raised the visor of his helmet and felt blood pour down his face. ‘Oh my God, I’m blind.’

Instinct alone had kept him from losing control of the plane in the first seconds of his blindness and crashing into the ground in what was known among pilots as a graveyard spiral. He rolled out and began to climb, making himself an even easier target for the enemy, whom he could now hear shooting at him. Fighting off panic, and deathly afraid, he called Air America and said he had been hit and could not see. Almost immediately the pilot of a Pilatus Porter came up on the frequency. He was calm and soothing, and his voice amid the gunfire was balm to Mansur’s shot nerves. ‘Well, hello, Raven - looks like you’ve got yourself a real problem.’

The Porter was only a mile away and flew toward Mansur until the plane was on his tail. Then with a casual, almost jovial sangfroid, the pilot talked him away from the danger of the enemy guns and put him on a course for Alternate. Turn right - little bit more - stick forward - easy, easy - that’s it.’

On the approach to the strip at Alternate, Mansur could dimly make out shapes from one eye, although the pain was as if they had both been scoured with fine sand. The Porter pilot talked him down, and he made a good landing. His crew chief and the radio operator who had monitored his flight back were on the strip to meet him in a jeep. They dragged him from the plane, thinking he had been shot and wounded in the torso, and raced to a Jolly Green helicopter that was waiting at the end of the runway with its engine cranked, ready to medevac him to Udorn. Throughout the short trip a medic continually bathed his eyes with water.

On arrival he was rushed to hospital, where he was placed in a dentist’s chair and a doctor picked splintered glass from his eyes for an hour. He could scarcely see and was in great pain, but knew he was not blind.

During his recuperation the various fighter squadrons on the base treated him like a hero, and pilots volunteered to act as guide dogs and lead him around. The bullet had entered the helmet, traveled around the inside of the visor, shaving glass fragments into both his eyes, and come out the other side. The concussion of the bullet hitting the helmet had blacked both his eyes.

The helmet was brought down and presented to him as a war trophy. When he placed it on his head a pencil could be passed through one bullet hole to the other so that it touched the hair on the bridge of his nose. Had he leaned forward one thousandth of an inch during the moment the bullet hit it would have taken his nose off; any more and he would have been killed outright. But, as the other Ravens never tired of telling him, if he had not been wearing the damned silly helmet in the first place, everybody would have been saved an awful lot of trouble.

The patches remained on his eyes for a week. After a second week he reported to Vientiane for duty. The staffers in the air attaché’s office were sympathetic. ‘Do you want to go back north or do you think you’ve used up your luck up there?’

‘I guess I’ve used up my luck.’

The Meo attack on Phou Pha Thi, despite the massive bombing campaign to support it, finally floundered and failed. Bombing had destroyed the guns defending the airstrip at the base of the mountain, which the Meo subsequently recaptured, but after three weeks of constant fighting only one company had managed to gain a foothold on the middle slopes. They lasted a day and withdrew under withering fire from the stone bunkers at the crest of the mountain.

The six thousand refugees had already been evacuated, a considerable feat in itself, but Gen. Vang Pao stubbornly continued to launch wave after wave of his men against the Rock. He still spoke of victory, but now admitted it would take time.

On Christmas Day, 1968, three fresh Communist battalions launched a counterattack and the Meo fell back to Na Khang. Vang Pao had gambled so heavily on winning back the sacred mountain, staked so many of his men’s lives, and his own reputation as a leader and general, on victory, that the defeat was devastating. Its effect on the morale of the Meo and the Ravens was terrible enough, but on the general himself it was catastrophic.

Pop Buell drove over the mountain from Sam Thong to Alternate to join Vang Pao for dinner. Instead of the usual great gathering of officers and elders in the large dining room, Pop found the general quite alone. He was dressed like a derelict in rumpled clothes.

‘Where is everybody?’ Pop asked.

‘They are afraid to come here. Afraid to be with me. I have lost face with my people. I have lost face with the world.’

Pop tried to comfort Vang Pao with his usual brand of homespun philosophy and earthy optimism, but the general was beyond consolation. The best of his men were dead, he said, his army was mostly made up of twelve-year-olds. Many of his soldiers did not live long enough even to learn fear. After nine years of constant war, victory was as far away as ever. It was an age-old Meo saying that there was always another mountain, but they were running out of mountains, and Vang Pao foresaw a day when his entire people would be forced to flee the country to live as unwanted refugees.

‘I am the Meo general Vang Pao. The king of Laos believed in me. Prince Souvanna Phouma believed in me. They took me, a Meo peasant, into the king’s own council. Now I have been defeated. I am no longer the great Meo general.’ For the first time in his adult life, Gen. Vang Pao wept.