7. About-Face

It was on the first day of Lee Lue’s funeral in July 1969, when Communist advances reached new levels of success, and morale had not only crumbled among the Meo but in the capital of Vientiane itself, that the new American ambassador, George McMurtrie Godley III, arrived in Laos. An array of disturbing problems faced him with no ready solutions to hand.

At the same time, in Paris, Prince Souvanna Phouma charged that there were sixty thousand Vietnamese waging war in his country, and admitted that he had authorized U.S. bombing raids on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

As a diplomat Godley was something of a peculiarity, one of a handful of the State Department’s paramilitary ambassadors who had experience working hand in glove with the CIA. Godley had cut his teeth in the Congo in the mid-1960s, first as deputy chief of mission and later as ambassador, where he had controlled a clandestine air force flown by Cuban mercenaries and commanded a covert army. He had played a critical role in crushing the Stanleyville uprising and building up President Joseph Mobutu as a pro-American military strongman.

The relationship had turned sour when Godley refused the president the use of the CIA mercenary air force to napalm the Stanleyville native quarters, a vast area of bamboo huts that would have burned like tinder. ‘There was no question that it would have killed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of women and kids,’ Godley said. ‘So I grounded his air force.’ [136]

In retaliation, Mobutu ordered Godley to leave the country before he was declared persona non grata. (The ambassador often appeared at informal parties in Vientiane wearing a garish African shirt, with facing portraits of Mobutu emblazoned across its left and right panels. He joked that the president had made up thousands of pairs of trousers, with the beaming portrait of Godley sewn into the seat, which had been distributed free throughout the Congo.)

Godley had become closely acquainted with the operation in Laos when he visited Vientiane as the head of a State Department team on a two-month inspection tour of the embassy. ‘I was very much impressed with the show that Bill Sullivan was running and the work that the Country Team was doing. I thought very highly not only of the government’s objectives but also of the way in which we were trying to achieve them.’ He returned to Washington to spend a year as deputy assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs before becoming the ambassador to Laos in July 1969.

Godley was a hawk, although his military expertise was limited. He had volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps at the end of World War II and had served briefly as a private. He joked that when the Japs heard Mac Godley was coming they gave up - but the North Vietnamese proved to be made of sterner stuff.

The Americans were resigned to an extremely pessimistic view of their military options in Laos by this time. At the beginning of August 1969, plans and policy officers of the joint staff had already come to the conclusion that only political considerations could prevent the Communists from eventually overrunning most of Laos. A gloomy State-Defense-CIA paper was sent to President Nixon. The only bright spot in the report was the observation that the enemy had difficulty reacting to surprise behind-the-lines assaults launched by Meo guerrilla units operating from helicopters and supported by fixed-wing airlift. [137]

The advent of the Nixon administration, at the beginning of the year, had brought with it a change in military strategy that had altered the nature of the war in Vietnam and upped the stakes in Laos and Cambodia. Under Johnson, military strategy was composed of a mix of three ideas: gradual escalation, highly restricted operations, and acceptance of sanctuaries. It was also stated policy that the United States did not intend to threaten the existence of the North Vietnamese regime. The goals of this strategy were to negotiate for an independent South Vietnam, while keeping China and the USSR out of the war.

Nixon favored massive and quick military action, increased bombing of the north itself, and cross-border operations into the sanctuaries. Declared policy was ominously silent as to what might happen if North Vietnam persisted. At the same time, to avoid the risk of bringing China and the USSR into the war, the president pursued a policy of detente attractive to them both. Secret peace negotiations with North Vietnam, meanwhile, were opened in 1969 by Dr. Henry Kissinger.

The war was escalating, but at the same time America began withdrawing troops, which meant strengthening the army of South Vietnam to the point where they would be able to take over the war - a policy called Vietnamization. Firepower lost by the dwindling U.S. forces was to be replaced by an ever-increasing rate of bombing.

In Laos, where there were not enough human resources to replace the Meo, Thailand was encouraged to send more ‘volunteers.’ And still more bombing was scheduled. (Before 1969 a total of 454,998 tons of bombs had been dropped on Laos - from now on more than that would be dropped each year.) [138]

Although since the departure of Ambassador Sullivan the Rules of Engagement had been relaxed to allow wider bombing of inhabited areas on the Plain of Jars, they were not abandoned completely, as critics have charged. But the increased bombing sorties, combined with the successes of Communist troops, led to a growing sea of refugees and an inevitable rise in civilian casualties - each time the war forced a move 10 percent of the refugees died. (These consequences of escalated bombing were immediately blamed on the new ambassador, who came to be called ‘Bomber’ Godley by some journalists and disaffected members of his staff. Significantly, the massive increase in bombing sorties was allocated to Laos during the interregnum when Ambassador Sullivan had returned to the United States and before Ambassador Godley arrived.)

‘Never in the history of warfare has a military element been more shackled in its operation than was the USAF in Laos,’ Godley stated. ‘The rules of engagement were voluminous, complex, and precise. It could not engage enemy ground forces unless requested by the Lao government and approved by the embassy. It could not bomb within one hundred yards of an inhabited dwelling, nor could it endanger inhabited villages. The types of ordnance it could use had to be approved, etc., etc., etc.

‘If there was the least deviation from existing rules in target selection, this had to be approved by the embassy ... reviewed ... occasionally disapproved or modified ... We were repeatedly charged with ^discriminate bombing of civilians. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Errors no doubt occurred, but I am convinced they were not wilful. In every case when we heard of an alleged mistake, the Air Force investigated it as thoroughly as possible and, in some cases, meted out severe disciplinary action.’ [139]

Inevitably, the gap between embassy policy and battlefield reality was a large one. It was impossible to monitor the rules and control the placing of every bomb in Laos, although this was the intention under Godley, as it had been under Sullivan. The embassy had no right to monitor or control where the Lao or Meo T-28s put their bombs. And all the Laotian regional military commanders had the right and the ability to attack where they wished.

But throughout all the interviews conducted with Ravens, Air Commandos, and Air Force fighter-pilots - who in individual instances openly admitted to hitting civilians by mistake, or bombing wats (Buddhist temples) they knew to contain guns, or even field hospitals known to shelter enemy troops and caches of ammunition - no one ever conceded that civilians were deliberately targeted (unlike the French who, in Laos during the first Indochina war, regularly razed troublesome villages and dropped napalm as a matter of routine). [140] Civilian casualties were a consequence of the over-reliance on air power, not a deliberate tactic or matter of policy. [141]

But the war was becoming enormously unpopular at home and Godley’s hawklike utterances, and apparent relish for the job, alienated many journalists and the more skeptical members of his staff.

On the first day of Lee Lue’s funeral it seemed as if his death had broken Gen. Vang Pao. Yet somehow, as the elaborate mourning and drinking stretched out over the days, he seemed to draw on some hidden reserve of superhuman resilience. Perhaps he had been strengthened by the show of solidarity of the Laotian high command who had come to Long Tieng to pay their respects (and who had left greatly impressed by the Meo operation); perhaps, mulling over the possibilities of combining surprise tactics with air power, he foresaw new opportunities; perhaps he wished to avenge the great warrior of the Meo nation. Whatever the reasons, by the beginning of August 1969, Gen. Vang Pao had resolved once more to go on the offensive.

At this stage in the war, defeatism had reached a very high level of strategic thinking, and the last thing the Americans expected from Gen. Vang Pao was victory. Even the optimists dared not hope for more than the Meo doggedly holding on at Long Tieng, but the general knew that the enemy were over-extended by their victories, and their lines of communication were stretched - factors that had been intensified by an unrelieved period of terrible weather.

Gen. Vang Pao planned to turn this to his advantage in Operation About-Face. Flown in by Air America choppers, and supported by Ravens and T-28s operating out of four Lima Sites in enemy-held territory, Meo and Thai guerrilla units led by the general would disrupt supply lines in the rear, particularly Route 7 leading back into North Vietnam. At the same time, Royal Lao Government forces, supported by massive U.S. air, would reestablish their presence on the southern fringe of the Plain of Jars and press forward. But in order to launch tins ambitious offensive, with all of the necessary air support, a break in the weather was needed.

Stuck in the hootch at Alternate, the Ravens looked out on the relentless rain. The mountains surrounding them were hidden from view by dark clouds, and all the meteorological predictions for the future were dire. They had been told by the CIA that the weather was likely to remain bad for the next three months. But Operation About-Face was planned to kick off on August 15, only days away.

As the day approached, the weather grew worse. Gen. Vang Pao remained supremely confident: ‘Buddha tells .me the weather will be good.’ It seemed as if the general, in his eagerness to hit back at the enemy, had become a victim of wish fulfillment and self-delusion. In the meantime the CIA and the air attaché’s office dickered with the 7/13th Air Force about the amount of air to be allocated to the offensive. The Barrel Roll sortie rate had already fallen to half its daily quota because of the weather.

As the morning of August 15 dawned, Karl Polifka went to the window of his room and looked outside. It was clear as a bell. There was a chill in the air and a few scudding clouds fringed with gray, but otherwise it was a bright, sunny day and the sky was a brilliant blue. Folifka shook his head, scarcely able to believe the change so accurately predicted by Gen. Vang Pao. ‘This guy’s got a connection to somebody.’

The weather was to remain good enough for uninterrupted air operations for the next eight weeks, a seasonal freak. Using aircraft like artillery, a force of six thousand Lao troops and Meo guerrillas moved against the enemy. Tactical air sorties totaled 150 a day, enabling the government troops to take the hills, although the battles were bloody. [142]

Time and again it seemed as if Vang Pao was in the lap of the gods. Shortly after the launch of the operation he climbed into a helicopter, turned around in the cockpit, and announced, ‘Buddha tells me not to take this helicopter.’ He got out and took another. The first Huey took off and exploded in midair because its gas tank had been sabotaged with a grenade.

There were numerous instances of combat extrasensory perception that the Ravens experienced and accepted, but could not explain. It was as if a man grew so immersed in the details and realities of the battlefield, by flying so many hours each day, that he began to respond to its dangers subliminally, making critical decisions based on the experience of a hundred missions. ‘I certainly felt a lot of it on that tour,’ Polifka said. ‘Numerous times I would he flying along and, I swear to God, I could hear the clank of the gears on a traversing 37 - which is quite impossible. But something would make me break right or left - and I would turn off and the shells would explode in the path of where I would have been. There is no normal explanation for it.’

Operation About-Face was launched from Site 204, on the southern edge of the Plain of Jars - where the passes came out of Long Tieng - and from Site 15, on its western edge. Two mountains were attacked - one on the northwest edge of the plain, called Phou Khean, and the other on the southeast, called Phou Tham. They were tough, fierce operations with many casualties on both sides, but after two weeks the mountains were in the hands of the friendlies.

At the same time, troops from Site 32 - Boun Long - moved down in an attempt to choke off Route 7, where it came out of Ban Ban, and also take the 7/71 road junction. A small mountain just south of 7/71 was still held by North Vietnamese troops even after bombing had denuded it of all vegetation. The operation called for repeated ground assaults. Somehow, the enemy still managed to man machine guns and beat back each attack, but were finally overrun in a brutal fight.

Once the mountains on the ridge of the plain were taken the troops moved onto the plain itself, and the Ravens began to operate out of three strips - one to the south of the plain, one in the middle (Hotel Lima), and the Xieng Khouang strip - landing on the grass, where Air America refueled from drums of gas flown in by helicopter. (Most of the strips were pockmarked with bombs where the US AF had attempted to destroy them when in the enemy’s hands - a wasted effort, as the enemy had no planes.) The native T-28 pilots excelled them-selves, except they suffered from an unusual problem that led to a number of aborted takeoffs: eager to supplement their poor diets, the pilots were overloading their aircraft by stuffing the small baggage compartment with meat from water buffalo slaughtered in combat.

It was at Hotel Lima that the Ravens got their first glimpse of their new ambassador. A chopper landed and Godley jumped out - wearing jungle boots and khaki cutoffs, sporting a three-day growth of beard, and carrying a revolver. It was the first time a senior Downtowner had ever been seen at a forward strip in the combat zone, and the word soon spread among the Ravens that the new ambassador was okay. It was a habit Godley had brought with him from the Congo, where he made a point of ‘eyeballing’ the situation for himself, convinced it was impossible to get a feel for events by sitting behind a desk and reading reports. There were risks in going to the front, but the ambassador was prepared. ‘I always carried a snub-nosed .38 in my belt -1 had no intention of being captured by the enemy.’

As About-Face continued, massive air support, delivered at a time of year when the enemy was usually invulnerable and combined with the new tactics, proved a brilliant success. The enemy were prized from their mountain fastnesses and driven from the plain itself. The offensive moved so quickly that the North Vietnamese seemed to be taken completely by surprise.

The Chinese evacuated their mission at Khang Khay in such great haste the CIA were able to fill a C-123 transport with captured documents found abandoned in their HQ. The Chinese were worried that their military advisers might be captured by the Meo - a fate that befell one colonel. To the consternation of the CIA, who were keen to interrogate the Chinese officer, his throat was cut by Meo troops before they could reach him.

Meanwhile, Meo guerrillas, dropped in by helicopter behind enemy lines, were also meeting with surprising success. Troops from Site 32 set up positions on the west side of Route 7, while Black Lion led a guerrilla unit to take the heavily fortified hilltop position on Phou Nok Kok overlooking the road where it came out of the Ban Ban valley. Another CIA Special Forces adviser had previously spent a month trying to capture the position. Black Lion took only a single day to pep up his men and storm the mountain, working in close cooperation with Raven-directed T-28 fighters and Phantom F-4s carrying two-thousand-pound bombs. As the last bombs fell on the position, Will Green led his men in a run up the mountain slope. They took the position and held it for ninety days against an average of two ground assaults a day.

With Route 7 cut off, the North Vietnamese were forced to haul supplies overland or abandon them. Enemy supply lines were cut and large amounts of supplies captured. Although pockets of cut-off North Vietnamese troops remained operational, the Plain of Jars became relatively safe, and Ravens enjoyed the occasional free hour driving around in a captured Russian truck, taking photographs of each other posing beside the stone funeral jars.

It seemed that a winning formula had at last been arrived at. Massive air, used on a less restrictive basis and followed up by aggressive ground assaults, was doing the trick. The Ravens flew so much they became punchy (the low man for the month of September flew 156 hours - the high man notched up 210). From the beginning of the operation they had two hundred Barrel Roll sorties allocated to them daily, with each U.S. plane carrying twelve bombs. In addition there was the T-28 capability - an approximate total of 350 sorties a day. It was a great many bombs if every one was to be made to count.

The Ravens alone could not control all of the fighters, which led to the utilization of the Fast FACs. Fast FACs came out of Thailand, flying high-speed jets at a great height. They did not know the territory and could neither remain over the target long enough nor fly low enough for pinpoint accuracy. The result was a number of indiscriminate bombings that later were to have far-reaching political consequences. Friendly troops had pushed so far forward so fast that an imaginary line had been drawn from east to west across the middle of the plain, and it was stipulated that no U.S. air independent of Raven control should be put in south of it. It was a line every Raven carried in his head, but Fast FACs were not so finely tuned.

Early one morning one of them spotted a helicopter pad and tents out in the open. Assuming the camp to be North Vietnamese, they attacked, and the result was the death of twenty friendly troops. (Polifka ran into the pilot after the war at Eglin Air Force Base. ‘Absolutely no regrets at all. Didn’t give a shit. Just Asians are Asians, and they are all enemy.’ He was sickened and infuriated to learn that certain of the Fast FACs purposely saved ammunition so they could strafe villages for fun on the way home.) In other incidents over a three-week period at the end of August into September, three hundred friendly troops were lost to errors made by Fast FACs. A village was hit and 250 women and children were killed. The Ravens could make mistakes too, but they were infrequent and never of this magnitude.

The 7th Air Force had also decreed that Fast FACs should bit the caves on the north side of the Ban Ban valley daily with Bullpups - air-to-ground guided missiles - despite Raven and intelligence reports that the enemy had long since abandoned them. ‘We began to get our first realization that the U.S. Air Force was not the most professional organization in the world,’ Polifka said.

Once again there were furious confrontations between the men branded as Yankee Air Pirates and the Blue Suiters of the 7th Air Force. And once again it was an argument over control. The Air Force tended to feel used in Laos, never fully in command of its own assets. The air attaché’s office issued a whole new slew of rules which led to an emotional and somewhat drunken argument at the Raven hootch when a Downtowner came up to explain them. ‘We told him flat to get screwed,’ Polifka said. ‘We were going to drop bombs where we damn well pleased to support our people, and that’s what our job was.’

‘Your job is to do what the Air Force tells you to do,’ the Downtowner argued. ‘And you work for the Air Force.’

‘The Air Force pays us, and that’s all they do.’ The Ravens listed their priorities: Gen. Vang Pao, the CIA, the ambassador - with the Air Force running a poor fourth. The Ravens trusted the men they went into battle with, and these were the OLA, paramilitary people, not the Downtowners at the air attaché’s office. Every night, during major operations, several of the Ravens spent as much as two hours going over CIA intelligence. It could be very good and very specific, down to the status and intentions of every North Vietnamese regiment in the country.

‘Christ, it was a CIA war, CIA-led and CIA-financed,’ Polifka said. ‘Our role was to support it. There were Air Force generals who forgot that. There would be generals with three months’ experience in Southeast Asia who wanted to sit down at a table with four or five Agency guys with a total of one hundred years in Southeast Asia, and they would try to tell them about the war. It was pathetic’

‘The Air Force certainly didn’t have the faintest idea what they were doing with air power there,’ Byers said, ‘and they would have been insulted if you said that air was a very mobile artillery, which is exactly what it is.’

When Gen. George Brown of the Air Force visited Long Tieng he asked CIA man Tom Clines how many Americans were in town. ‘With the Air Force and us, I guess about twenty-five.’

‘Jesus Christ, if the U.S. military was here there would be a hundred thousand people. But I’m not sure I like lieutenants and captains running their own war.’

Clines cocked his head to one side, took a draw on his cigar, and smiled broadly. ‘Well, George, that’s really too bad - they’re the only people we’ve seen from the Air Force who know what the fuck they’re doing.’

But the flagrant mistakes of Fast FACs made the Ravens’ case for them, and the Air Force was once more severely limited in its area and type of operation in Laos. Barrel Roll was broken down in geographic sectors, known as Raven boxes, which only the Ravens could work. The Fast FACs were left with route interdiction north and east of Ban Ban, diminishing the potential for damage to friendly troops and population.

The number of Ravens was growing - although there were never more than twenty-two at any one time - and the CIA and the air attaché’s office had reorganized them into more effective units. Valuable lessons were being learned during the course of About-Face. But the greatest lesson of all - the correct use of air power in Laos - was to be ignored.

A CIA case study reported more than 7,500 tons of booty captured. Rows of captured Russian tanks, which the enemy had abandoned after locking their turrets, were lined up on the plain. Beside them were whole batteries of 85mm guns, trucks with their tanks full of gasoline, and cases of Soviet sniper rifles still in their original Cosmoline.

The sudden, unexpected flight of the enemy posed some teasing questions. Why had the enemy not sabotaged the tanks, trucks, and supplies as they retreated? In the case of the captured artillery, the guns had been firing only shortly before the position was taken and boxes of Chinese hand grenades were found nearby. Ambassador Godley pondered the morale of such troops, ‘troops who couldn’t even take the time to drop a hand grenade down the barrel of any of the guns.’ [143]

Curiosities among the captured equipment included a range of musical instruments - the prize of which was an accordion looking like something out of a German polka band; a 1956 Chevrolet station wagon with Oklahoma license plates, found at Arrowhead Lake; a cave full of freshly laundered Red Chinese uniforms and boxes of Maxa Chinese toothpaste. Mike Byers, who discovered the cave while out on a ground patrol with Burr Smith and a platoon of Meo guerrillas, threw half a dozen tubes into his pack. ‘I thought, if nothing else, I’m going to brush my teeth for the rest of this tour on Chairman Mao.’ When he used it for the first time he felt he had discovered the underlying reason for enemy intransigence. ‘No wonder they’re so mean, having to brush their teeth with this stuff every morning.’ The toothpaste had the consistency of valve-grinding compound, but was useful for polishing out scratches on helmet visors.

To celebrate the stunning victories of About-Face, Gen. Vang Fao threw a large party on the roof of his house. There was unlimited beer, lau lao, and White Horse whisky, and excellent food for a change. ‘I don’t know where he got the abalone from,’ Byers said, ‘but it was outstanding.’ Village children formed a band and played on the captured instruments, which added to the familiar accordion-like wheezing of the khene, the stone-age gourd pipes of Laos. The Ravens also contributed musically. ‘Raven 47,’ Vang Pao said, ‘un chanson, s’il vous plaît.’ Byers stood up and sang an approximation of Josh White’s ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.’ The gathering responded to this American cultural gem with polite applause.

It was good to be celebrating victory again after such a long period of defeat, and Meo morale soared. It was the first time they had taken and controlled the PDJ since 1964. [144] Gen. Vang Pao pursued the success of About-Face with follow-up operations and continued to push the enemy back. Operation West Wind concentrated on the area to the east of the plain, toward the Vietnamese border, while Operation North Wind hit at enemy concentrations to the north of the royal capital of Luang Prabang, toward the Chinese border.

The 316th Division of the NVA had been badly mauled. Operation West Wind was launched to destroy the supplies being propositioned on Route 7, inside the buffer zone on the border with Vietnam, for the 312th Division as it came into Laos to relieve exhausted comrades. The new Vietnamese soldiers, unused to conditions in Laos, were ripped apart. They had been taught that they could shoot down F-4s with rifles - true, if they were low enough - and continually gave away their positions by blazing away at jets flying overhead at twelve thousand feet. Casualties were terrible. In the first two months they were in Laos, three battalions disappeared off the face of the earth and were never heard of again, while in another case only three survivors of a five-hundred-man battalion managed to struggle back to their regimental command post. [145]

Toward the middle of October 1969, the joint chiefs at the Pentagon announced that the buffer zone, previously ten miles wide, would be pushed back five miles. Gen. Vang Pao held a briefing where he told Ravens that everything within the new five-mile band counted as enemy and could be attacked. For three days the Air Force provided an extra eighty sorties a day, and the enemy were caught off-guard. ‘It was fantastic,’ Polifka said. ‘I have never seen so many secondary explosions. Every time you dropped a bomb, something would go off. I had one Thud roll in on a fifty-two-structure complex, drop four five-hundred-pounders, and fifty-two buildings disappeared in a blinding flash at least fifteen hundred feet in diameter. It almost blew me out of the air. The whole thing was gone in ten seconds. The Thud’s wingman was halfway down the chute and had to abort the run because there was nothing left... just the outlines of fifty-two foundations where the hootches had been. The fireball was like an atom bomb. It just disappeared. I thought I had dreamed the whole thing.’

The HQ of the Communist Neutralists - the so-called Patriotic Neutralists led by Col. Deuan Sunnalath - now came inside the target area, no longer protected by the buffer zone. The camp had always been clearly marked on maps by the CIA, but had been strictly off-limits. Mike Byers had longed to bomb it. ‘In a World War II context, not being allowed to get him would not have made any sense. Here is Hitler in his HQ, and you can fly over it every day but you can’t bomb it.’

On October 13, a clear and beautiful day, Byers took a T-28 loaded with Willy Pete rockets and flew up to Deuan’s HQ, arriving at 6:00 in the morning. A flag flapped on a pole out-side the staff tent, and no one on the ground seemed perturbed at the sight of the fighter. Two sets of F-4s arrived on station, but Byers could not use them as they only carried napalm, the use of which was restricted against structures. While Byers waited for more fighters to arrive he took the T-28 on a pass over the HQ and fired one of his rockets, setting off a large secondary explosion. He must have hit a cache of rocket motors, for they whirled into the air like giant fireworks. A second set of F-4s arrived and successfully bombed and strafed the HQ, which burned and blew for twenty-four hours. By the time Byers returned to base, Deuan’s HQ no longer existed. CIA intercepts later confirmed that the entire Communist Neutralist staff had been killed, except for Deuan himself, who had been in Vietnam.

It was during this period that U.S. air in Laos finally peaked. It had already been increased 100 percent in June, and was again being increased significantly. The Laotian air war now involved up to three hundred fighter-bomber sorties a day - a rate equal to that flown at the height of the air campaign against North Vietnam. [146] Ravens were directing an average of 120 sorties a day, and on some occasions there were only three of them available to do so. Each Raven had to manage forty sorties, flying as many as six combat missions a day, and often returning to base in just over an hour because they had fired all their marking rockets. ‘It was like taxi cabs in Times Square, with fighters coming in from every direction,’ Polifka said. ‘And when you are working from five minutes after takeoff until five minutes before landing, you get damned tired.’

It was an irony that U.S. air activity over Laos was reaching its peak at the very moment the ‘secret’ nature of the war was being disclosed. Ambassador Sullivan, together with air attaché Robert Tyrrell, had been summoned before a Senate committee back in Washington to give an account of the war in Laos at a closed hearing. The hearing, which lasted for three days, often took the form of an interrogation. The substance of the hearing would remain classified for several months, but Sen. J. William Fulbright stated in an interview on October 28 that U.S. involvement in Laos was a ‘major operation’ run by the CIA and approved by the past three administrations.

One of the results of the hearing before the Senate was that a bevy of high-ranking Air Force officers started to take an interest in the war in Laos and began to arrive at Long Tieng. Visitors included the head of the 7th Air Force, Gen. George Brown, and the head of the 7/13th Air Force, Gen. Robert L. Petit. The Air Force, as ever, was anxious to exert more control over the ‘major operation’ so many of their assets were being used in.

It seemed to the Ravens that while the Air Force had given them so many more sorties to handle, it was somehow trying to trick them into breaking the Romeos. Napalm was not allowed to be used against structures, yet endless flights of Phantoms arrived on station carrying nothing else. They would be followed by RF-4 reconnaissance planes, which made passes after every Air Force strike to photograph the results.

In the vanguard of their first sustained tactical success, Ravens became blatant in their disregard for the rules. Polifka talked F-4 pilots reluctant to go against the rules into making a strike. ‘Look, nobody’s going to know if you drop nape. You have got to go on the ground and see if nape is dropped. I don’t think 7th Air Force is going to do that.’ Byers simply logged false coordinates, recording the genuine ones for himself in parentheses. ‘I did it a lot.’

And then two weeks after West Wind had been launched, reports began to come in that the targets hit behind the buffer zone were not all enemy, although Ravens who flew in the vicinity saw only large amounts of propositioned enemy supplies and found the absolute lack of visible civilian population eerie. The Meo advance had been so rapid they had outrun their own intelligence, and the area Vang Pao had designated as a free-fire zone contained large pockets of friendlies. [147] At a CIA staff meeting Byers asked the general about it.

‘Ooooh, very bad,’ Vang Pao said, wincing.

A terrible miscalculation had been made, and the general knew it. ‘I think we made a horrible mistake there,’ Byers said, ‘the only one that happened while I was there.’

By December 1969, the North Vietnamese had built up their forces. The new troops in the 312th Division had become rapidly experienced by necessity and began to put intense pressure on the forward, mountaintop positions. Black Lion’s fastness of Phou Nok Kok seemed to take the worst beating of all.

The enemy pounded the hill with half a dozen large 85mm mortars and had placed two 37mm antiaircraft guns on a mountaintop level with the position and only a kilometer away. Black Lion’s troops were shot at all day, every day. It seemed to the A-l pilots who flew up from Nakhon Phanom to help out that the whole mountaintop was on fire. ‘It was a fantastic sight,’ Maj. Al Preyss, one of the pilots, said, ‘where you could almost have said it was pretty if you weren’t aware of the havoc it was bringing and the destruction ... It must take just a fraction of a second for that 37mm to fire its seven-round dip, and they have a beautiful red tracer to them.’ The guns were putting the shells directly onto Black Lion’s position. It must have taken some sort of fantastic courage, Preyss thought, to stay there day after day.

It was growing dark, visibility was about two miles, and the presence of antiaircraft guns meant the A-l pilots could not operate with their lights on, so were unable to see one another. But despite the poor conditions the pilots felt Black Lion was in such trouble they would try to help somehow. ‘You could just hear in his voice the pressure of the moment,’ Preyss said. ‘He was really being hammered... He was literally pleading for us to come over there.’

The Skyraiders flew over to the hilltop with their load of napalm, CBU-14 (small packaged hand grenades), and bombs. They attacked the guns, using the burning nape on the ground as a reference, and were shot at continuously. ‘We kept expending ordnance,’ Preyss said, ‘and Black Lion kept calling us to drop more, drop more, expend everything, and we told him we were doing our best and how tough our situation was. And he just kept pleading, and I really mean pleading.’’

The A-ls stayed on station for over an hour before climbing back into the clouds, having dropped all of their ordnance. Black Lion continued to plead for help. They still had 20mm ammunition for their guns and decided to drop flares through the clouds, then ask Black Lion if he could see where the guns were in relation to them.

‘So he gave us directions and we rolled in from about ten thousand feet,’ Preyss said, ‘pointed straight at the ground, and fired our 20mm and actually pulled off going through the clouds. It lit up inside of the cloud like a Christmas tree and the flashes were so bright that I had to put my head down in the cockpit and fly instruments on the pull-up.’ [148] Black Lion’s position had survived another day, but could not last.

Gen. Vang Pao gave a tremendous baci the night before Karl Polifka, Bob Dunbar, and Al Daines left Laos. Just before the festivities began, Mike Byers returned to the hootch to find a young man dressed in Air Force tans and wearing 1505s (the Air Force’s tropical uniform) with second lieutenant’s bars, accompanied by an older, stocky man in a sports jacket - possibly the only one in Long Tieng. Byers eyed the Air Force officer with suspicion. If uniformed REMFs were going to be regular visitors to the secret base he figured it was time to move on.

Unaware that the short man in the sports jacket was none other than General Petit of the 7/13th Air Force, and the officer his aide, Byers merely grunted at the two strangers and poured himself a large drink on his way to his room, where he changed before going on to the baci.

The party proved to be a wild and emotional occasion. The general was losing three good men and he knew it, and toasts in White Horse and lau lao followed one upon another in rapid succession. When it came time for Vang Pao to toast the departing Ravens he produced a bottle of exquisite old French cognac - although the level of intoxication was such they would have equally enjoyed a beaker of rubbing alcohol. By the time the American contingent staggered from the house, with strings tied from their wrists to their elbows, everyone - except Dames, a teetotal Mormon - was extremely drunk. The CIA men returned to their bar to carry on with the party, and it was there that an unfortunate incident occurred, related with relish ever after throughout the Indochina theater.

General Petit, still dressed in civilian clothes, stood at the bar, accompanied by the aide in his starched summer uniform. The young aide was anxious to please, and attempted to engage those around him in conversation. A CIA paramilitary officer, called Igor, took a deep, instinctive dislike to him. The young aide compounded the situation by breaking one of the cardinal rules of the Other Theater - never ask a CAS guy a direct question. The lieutenant thought he was making innocent conversation when he introduced himself and asked Igor who he was and what he did. Igor growled into his drink.

He was a large man, with a reputation for having a short temper, and he became violent when drunk. Without saying a word, Igor grabbed the young aide by the scruff of the neck and thrust him through the bar’s large plate-glass window onto the top of the bear cage. Floyd, who had been drinking heavily along with the group, seemed to sense that the human sprawled above him was an unwanted interloper. He began to make savage swipes with his claws through the bars, while the aide’s dancing feet beat a tattoo on the bars of the cage, a performance much enjoyed by the assembled partygoers.

General Petit was assaulted in a friendly manner by Stan Wilson, who was the worse for wear after a week’s binge in which he had failed to take a shower. ‘How the fuck are you?’ Clean Stanley asked cheerfully, as he applied a hammerlock to the general. ‘You stupid old son of a bitch.’ As more and more drink was consumed, things continued their rowdy, downhill course. At 3:00 in the morning Dunbar decided to get back to the Raven hootch by walking across the roofs. Drunken CIA men threw darts at him through the bar’s broken window as he tottered along his way. He tried to clamber into the room shared by Terry ‘Moose’ Carroll and Mike Byers, who fought him off with a board.

Byers had gone to bed early, and relatively sober, in order to take a T-28 on the dawn patrol. He rose at 5:30, took a shower and shaved, and was drinking a cup of coffee in front of the map that covered one wall of the hootch when General Petit entered. Byers used the map as a meditation aid to help him concentrate his thoughts on the coming day. He hardly looked up at the stranger.

He was still unaware of ‘the little dude’s’ identity, vaguely imagining him to be a new CIA case officer. General Petit looked about him with scarcely concealed disgust. Manuel Espinosa had gone home, leaving the Ravens without a cook once again, and the hootch had degenerated into bachelor squalor.

‘Good morning, young man,’ the general said stiffly. ‘And what are you going to do today?’

Byers nodded toward the map. ‘Right up here on Route 7 there’s sixteen - maybe eighteen - trucks and I’m going up there to blow them up.’

‘Have you got any photos of them?’

‘Oh boy, I wish I could get that. I can’t get a thing off a goddam Air Force recce. They can’t take a picture for sour owl shit. But I know they’re there and we’ll blow them up.’ Byers winked. ‘You bet.’

The stranger in the sports jacket did not seem to like the course the conversation had taken. ‘I don’t think they are there,’ he said in a voice that was stern and commanding. ‘I think you drop those bombs anywhere.’

‘You’re right,’ Byers said, picking up his gear to go out and fly. ‘I just drop them and those dumb motherfuckers drive underneath them.’

It was not until he returned at midday that he learned how much he had angered the general in command of the 7/13th Air Force. The general’s morning had been as disturbing as his night, and he had been infuriated by one final incident before he left Long Tieng in disgust. In the corner of the operations shack was a body bag containing the remains of an F-105 pilot, which had been brought in by a CIA case officer.

No one seemed to give it a second thought as they went about their business, and the callous indifference shown to a fellow Air Force officer killed in combat made the general’s blood run cold.

‘What is that?’ he asked a Raven, indicating the body bag.

‘Some Thud jock one of the CAS guys bagged and brought back - sitting over there till we can get him on a flight to Udorn for positive ID.’

‘I meant what is it doing dumped in a corner like that?’

The Raven looked over toward the body bag as if he were inspecting it, and there was a long pause while he pondered the question. ‘Not a whole goddam lot.’

General Petit returned to Udorn with a nightmare version of the Air Force operation up at Long Tieng. The Ravens were undisciplined, ill-dressed, and insubordinate, lived like animals in filthy quarters, and spent their time in drunken native revels. His aide had been brutalized by drink-crazed CIA men who had jammed him into a cage with two savage drunken bears. The general himself had been similarly insulted by a filthy, drunken CIA mechanic. Worst of all, they displayed a monstrous lack of respect for fellow Air Force officers killed in combat. He could only assume that the excellent bomb damage assessment the Ravens always seemed to report was manufactured and, in reality, nothing more than gross exaggeration: ‘The Raven FACs at Long Tieng are nothing but a ragged band of Mexican bandits.’

The Ravens rather liked that Joe Bauer, a newly arrived intelligence officer, sent off for posters of Zapata and Pancho Villa, which were stuck up on the walls of the hootch. With Christmas only days away the Ravens posed for a group photograph, variously hung about with bandoliers of T-28 ammo, marking rockets, and Meo muskets. One or two clamped knives between their teeth. They signed it and sent it down to Udorn as the Raven Christmas card: ‘With love to General Petit - from the Mexican banditos.’

If the Ravens were becoming a little ragged and brutalized, both physically and psychologically, it might have been the unspoken, subconscious stress brought on by a sustained period of combat without a mortality. It could not last, and secretly each of the Ravens eyed one another and wondered who would be next.

When Craig Morrison first arrived in Laos he felt he had achieved his life’s dream. He came from a family of fliers, where even his mother had a pilot’s license, and passed the years of his adolescence, before he was old enough to fly, jumping freight cars and riding them across country, a disreputable hobby which horrified his upper middle class family. After graduating from Sewanee, the prestigious university of the South - modeled on Oxford - he felt life could begin. ‘I had three goals - chase fast women, drive fast cars, and fly fast airplanes.’ The T-28 was not fast, but it was a fighter.

As the months went by, and Ravens seemed to survive against all the odds, he grew increasingly uneasy. Three Phantoms and an F-105 had already been shot down during December, but the Ravens had escaped. Bill Kozma had nearly been nailed by a couple of antiaircraft guns on December 17, and Morrison had the same experience the following day. ‘All the shit that was happening to us, and for three months nobody had been killed. We were taking bunches of hits - how often can you get an airplane shot up and take it home? It seemed like we were living charmed lives.’

Every day the Ravens came back with their aircraft peppered with bullet holes. Sometimes a plane would have taken as many as fifty separate hits, and still have survived without anything sensitive being touched. It was a run of extraordinary luck that would inevitably have to end.

1 felt it was getting tense,’ Morrison said. ‘The weather was dogshit and we were losing the PDJ and were really on the retreat. When you’re moving forward you feel you’ve got the momentum behind you, but when you’re backing up ... I just felt it couldn’t go on much longer before somebody busted his ass. I just couldn’t believe it hadn’t happened already.’

It was a period of particularly bad weather, when the procedure for leaving Long Tieng was to take off blind into the clouds, fly for fifteen seconds, push the nose of the O-l over, and turn hard right to avoid a nine-thousand-foot mountain. With a little luck, a Raven found himself lined up to fly onto the Plain of Jars. There was an opening in the mountains, shaped like a saddle, which led onto the plain, and if a pilot could see between the cloud base and the mountain he could make it out.

The presence of a single T-28 on days of really bad weather would often deter the enemy, who used its cover to move troops and mount assaults without fear of air attack. Five days before Christmas 1969, Morrison took a T-28 out of Long Tieng on a day thick with cloud, and flew toward the North Vietnamese border, where a friendly outpost was being attacked by the enemy. The weather was so bad that Skyraiders were unable to get into the valley, and the North Vietnamese were able to press their attack with impunity. Morrison was able to work a set of A-ls, trapped above the clouds, by popping up beside them and then leading them down and onto the target.

It worked well, and the Skyraiders had been able to clear the enemy off a mountaintop and relieve the pressure on the friendly position. Morrison climbed back into the clouds to rendezvous with a second set of fighters and lead them down onto the target. He rolled in and fired a rocket, and was pulling off to the right when an antiaircraft gun on a nearby hill opened up. The gunners had held their fire during his first pass and had waited patiently until they were offered the belly of the T-28 as a target. They had calculated the pilot would pull to the right and opened fife before Morrison had actually begun the maneuver. Once committed to the roll there was nothing he could do but fly directly into the gunfire. ‘I flew right through the tracers and had it been night I could have read a newspaper by the flashes around the cockpit.’

Morrison gritted his teeth and waited for the plane to disintegrate. Somehow, he emerged from the tunnel of flak, but a shell had entered the engine and exploded, bending but not breaking a push rod and blowing the head off one of the cylinders. Miraculously, the piston continued to move inside the cylinder, and as Morrison pulled off the engine was still running.

Oil flew over the canopy, and with the power pulled back the T-28 did not have enough RPM to fly. The plane dropped lower and lower, into an area so filled with enemy that Morrison despaired of surviving even if he was able to bail out. ‘I was pretty tense when I got to the point of adding power. I wasn’t sure if the engine was going to come apart.’

He added power and the plane picked up a little speed, just enough to struggle back toward Long Tieng. The Skyraiders stayed on his wing, and it was comforting to see the monstrous old planes beside him. Halfway back to base he was called by Cricket, who wanted to know why Raven 49 was heading home when there was another set of fighters coming in. ‘A little engine trouble,’ Morrison replied.

He banged the damaged plane down onto the strip at Long Tieng, and when he came to a halt on the ramp a mechanic ran out and whistled admiringly through his teeth. ‘Sure messed up this plane.’ He put a finger on the bent push rod and it snapped.

On an impulse, Morrison collected his maps out of the cockpit of the T-28, walked across the ramp, and climbed into an idle O-1. Airborne again, he called Cricket. ‘Hi, it’s me again - Raven 49. Give me those fighters, rendezvous same position over PDJ.’

The weather had broken sufficiently to allow the Skyraiders to find their way into the valley, and Morrison put them in on the enemy. By the time he returned to base he had destroyed two guns, silenced an 82mm mortar position, set off a secondary explosion of ammo and fuel, and killed a score of enemy troops.

Back at the hootch that night he relaxed over a beer and worked on his correspondence law course. Together with Moose Carroll he pinned up plastic sheeting over the screened area of his bedroom - temperatures had fallen to forty degrees at night. Joe Bauer, the intelligence officer, wanted to know how he should write up the crippled T-28. ‘Battle damage?’

‘Yeah,’ Morrison said. ‘I guess you could say that.’ [149] The day’s events were recorded in a half-page entry in his journal. ‘Got the shit shot out of my plane today and but for a small piece of steel would probably be a POW right now.’ The arbitrary nature of life and death was beginning to obsess him. ‘As a matter of prophecy, it won’t be long before they get one of us - Smokey [Greene], Moose [Carroll], Koz [Bill Kozma], and myself have all had very close calls and the law of averages is bound to catch up. ‘ [150]

Just before Christmas, Craig Morrison landed at Wattay and was amazed to see a lime-green Boeing 707 parked at the end of the runway. Cut off by the war, he had never seen a commercial aircraft painted such a frivolous color. He asked who owned it, and was told, ‘Some wealthy Texas dude - he’s brought over a load of POW wives and widows and a planeful of Christmas presents he wants to take up to Hanoi and give the POWs.’

Craig Morrison shook his head. ‘Bullshit.’

The ‘wealthy Texas dude’ was H. Ross Perot, the Dallas billionaire. The embassy had organized a party for him and his entourage, and certain members of the Ravens were asked to attend. The intention was that they could give Perot a firsthand account of the war, and generally sympathize with the POW wives. The Ravens were unenthusiastic. Weeping women and a fat cat in a lime-green airplane full of Christmas presents did not add up to the sort of party the Ravens enjoyed. (‘Ask not for whom the women weep,’ was the callous Raven quip at the time, ‘they weep for you.’) Only a couple of Ravens showed up for the party, and beside the military demeanor and severe crewcut of Ross Perot they looked like hippies. But as they listened to the man they warmed to him.

They learned that Perot had been asked by Henry Kissinger to persuade the North Vietnamese to change their harsh treatment of the POWs, and he was using his own money to work to that end. ‘It had been estimated that Vietnamization would take three years,’ Perot said. ‘The intelligence community had predicted that half the prisoners would die of brutality and neglect during the period. The Christmas trip and all of the other activities were staged to embarrass the Vietnamese in the eyes of the world to the point where they would change the treatment of the prisoners.’ [151]

As the Ravens listened to the passionate ideas put forward by Perot, and enjoyed his undiplomatic remarks expressing his low opinion of Defense and State Department employees in both Vientiane and Saigon, they were won over. Here was a man who was spending his own money to cut through all the red tape and bureaucracy to help captured Americans, who often seemed to have been forgotten.

‘How much money does this guy have?’ one of the Ravens asked.

‘Billions.’

‘Maybe the U.S. should put the whole damn war out to contract to him - we can cleanup and go home.’

Christmas itself was a festive affair. Patrick Mahoney had developed an informal relationship with several Pan Am operatives by scrounging equipment for their quarters in Saigon and Cam Ranh Bay they were unable to get themselves. Through them he sent the word back to San Francisco that he was looking for fresh turkeys (rolled turkeys were not acceptable). He began to receive phone calls from Pan Am people all over the States - who knew him by his code name, Clipper Patrick - with offers of turkeys. One place would have a couple, another four or five, and so on, until Mahoney was overwhelmed with turkeys. A large shipment was rerouted to Gen. Vang Pao at Long Tieng, after being flown directly from the United States by Pan Am. The general presented Mahoney with three of the captured Soviet sniper rifles as a token of appreciation. [152] All the general’s family, his senior officers, and the Americans at Alternate sat down to lashings of roast turkey. Floyd and his wife, the CIA bears, enjoyed a turkey to themselves. The Meo seemed bewildered by the soft, flaky meat that melted in the mouth, but enjoyed the gravy very much, pouring it over rice.

Spirits were high during the Christmas of 1969 at Long Tieng. A sustained period of victory had been enjoyed for the first time, and despite the setbacks of the past couple of months, it had been a good year. The Meo had regained their confidence, and Gen. Vang Pao was his old self.