10. Valentine

Chuck Engle returned to the war on crutches. Although he was hobbled by a wounded foot, the experience of being shot down had neither dimmed his enthusiasm for the war nor diminished his skill as a pilot. He had always been able to fly better than he could walk anyway. He soon abandoned the crutches and graduated to using a single cane, and his colleagues watched him limp briskly out to his O-1 with mixed feelings. No one doubted his ability or courage, but the Ravens sensed something dark inside of him, a force willing him toward increasingly hazardous combat missions. He had become reckless and displayed a blatant disregard for the laws of probability. Whenever the conversation turned to Chuck Engle, everyone agreed: death wish.

Many other pilots would have taken a bullet wound as a legitimate reason to return to the United States, but it was the last thing Chuck Engle wanted. How could he die? The bullet with his name on it had passed before his very eyes - he had cheated death itself - and now he wore the Golden BB around his neck at the end of a gold chain.

A personality in contrast to Engle was Park Bunker, a tall, reserved man who kept his distance. A senior captain in his early thirties with a receding hairline - and married, with two children - he was looked upon as ancient by his companions.

Despite his reserve on the ground, Bunker shared Engle’s indifference to enemy fire and held the current record among his group for the most bullet holes in his O-1. Just before the new year he flew out to the northern edge of the Plain of Jars, near Roadrunner Lake, to verify a reported sighting of enemy tanks. Sure enough, he spotted the front of a tank protruding from a group of trees and dropped low for a better look. A rapid-fire 14.5mm antiaircraft gun - deadly to a height of 4,500 feet - opened up at close range and nailed the engine.

Bunker put out a Mayday call before managing to deadstick the O-1 onto a flat area in the middle of a horseshoe formed by a bend in a small river. When Bunker climbed out of the cockpit he found himself in open country, empty of vegetation except for a single stunted tree. He lowered himself into the cover of a small gully choked with brush, one of hundreds scattered over the plain. Unknown to him, a large group of NVA soldiers were bivouacked along the bank of the distant treeline that followed the curve in the river. He was surrounded on three sides.

Four Ravens heard the distress call and headed toward the downed plane. Bunker said he was hiding in a gully by the side of the O-1 and was being shot at from three sides. Gunfire could be heard over the radio. It seemed to build and grow louder until Bunker announced he was going to make a run for it.

Willing their planes to fly faster, the Ravens raced toward the crash site, listening helplessly to their colleague’s desperate transmissions. When Bunker next came on the radio, he was out of breath. ‘They’re all shooting at me! I’ve been hit! I’m hit! I’ve been hit twice - God, I’ve been shot five times. I’m not going to make it. I’m as good as dead.’

By the time the first Raven reached the crash site, enemy soldiers were swarming around the plane. There was no sign of Bunker’s body. It was a point of honor among the Ravens either to declare a colleague dead - ‘negative objective’ - or get him out. The thought of a live Raven in enemy hands was unbearable.

Chuck Engle braved the guns to take his plane down to almost ground level for a closer look. He roared across the lake, with his wheels almost dipping into the water, and then hopped over the treeline running along the riverbank. This maneuver left the guns the minimum amount of tracking time, but the moment he cleared the trees his plane disappeared in a cloud of tracer. ‘There’s something under the tree all right,’ Engle screamed into the radio, ‘but I don’t know what it is.’ He pulled the O-1 up and cut away from the gunfire. ‘And fuck it - I’m not going back in there.’

Engle’s plane was so badly shot up he had to return to Long Tieng. A Skyraider pilot volunteered to take a look, but was met with the same withering fire as he took his plane low.

‘There’s a body underneath the tree,’ he yelled as he pulled off. ‘And it looks like it’s wearing a survival vest - but the back is just a mass of blood.’

The description certainly sounded like Bunker, who always flew to war in a chocolate-colored walking suit and a green survival vest, while most of the other Ravens draped theirs over their seats. The growing dark made it impossible to check, and when the Ravens returned the following morning the body had been removed.

Bunker was declared dead - no one wanted to give the Air Force the excuse to declare him MIA, the Umbo status which would leave his wife and children hanging in uncertainty for seven long years. The timing of the crash (between Christmas and New Year), the fact that Bunker had only thirty days to run before the end of his tour, and that he was married with children, depressed everyone.

On the second day of the new year, 1971, Chuck Engle was flying over the Plain of Jars when he heard over the radio that a Fast FAC in a Phantom - call sign Tiger - had been shot down just east of the 7/71 Split, the spot where the main route coming onto the Plain of Jars from the east split in two. It was an area which could no longer be worked by Ravens in light aircraft because of the quantity of heavy anti-aircraft guns that the enemy had moved into it - guns powerful enough to bring down a high-flying F-4. But Engle immediately headed toward the location of the downed aircraft, dropping below the thousand-foot overcast in order to conduct a methodical search for the missing crewmen.

After several sweeps over the road junction he saw the burning fighter below him. ‘Give me Voice or give me Beeper,’ he radioed, the standard call to a downed pilot. Within minutes he had made radio contact with two survivors, who told him that enemy patrols had already moved in toward them.

The first fighters on station were the Skyraiders, and although Engle brought them down below the overcast they were forced by the low ceiling to jettison their bombs along the road, but returned to strafe the area surrounding the survivors. Both Tigers reported that all three aircraft were taking heavy ground fire on each pass, but Engle continued to direct the fighters onto the smoke of his marking rockets to buy time while a search-and-rescue could be assembled.

More A-1s arrived, carrying CBU and strafe, and relieved their colleagues until one of the planes took a hit in the engine and was forced to break off and head for home. Two Phantoms, carrying ‘snakes and nape’ - high drag bombs and napalm - arrived next. They dropped their bombs on the road, unable to use them because of the proximity of enemy patrols to the survivors, and returned to use their napalm in close support. As they prepared to make their second pass the Tigers reported an enemy patrol moving directly toward them.

The problem of how to drop the napalm without hitting the Tigers was compounded by the steep hills rising on three sides of the survivors. The only possible route for attack was to fly directly over the Tigers, a course which demanded precision marking by the Raven and split-second timing for the drop by the fighters.

Engle took the O-1 down low and flew over the heads of the Tigers to fire a marking rocket at the foot of the hill in the direction from which the enemy were approaching. The Skyraiders followed on his tail, dropping their napalm to splash uphill until the end of the flame hit the smoke. It wiped out the enemy patrol and hit so close to the Tigers that a gob of burning nape splashed onto one’s boots.

Engle continued to direct the fighters around the survivors, ringing them with burning napalm as a wall of protective fire. Only when he had fired all of his rockets and was low on fuel did he return to base. That night he heard that it had grown dark before the Tigers could be picked up.

In the Raven hootch the general opinion was that the Tigers were SOL - shit out of luck. Engle’s courage and accurate marking had bought them time, but the enemy would move in even more antiaircraft guns overnight and surround the area. Anyone returning the following morning was going to be eaten alive by flak.

In case the men were forced to spend another day and night on the ground, two ‘survival’ kits were prepared. Each one contained an M-16, bandoliers and clips of ammunition, hand grenades, a lined field jacket, gloves, a radio, batteries, food, and water. They were wrapped in a blanket and held together by nylon fiber packing tape. The plan was for a CIA Pilatus Porter to pre-position itself at Lima 35, and if antiaircraft fire thwarted a successful SAR, the plane would make a high-speed, low-altitude pass over the survivors at dusk the following day and kick out the bundles.

But Engle was in his O-1 at 4:30 A.M. to fly onto the plain. The same cloud deck as the previous day covered the area around the 7/71 Split, and he dived beneath the overcast to make contact with the survivors. They had suffered badly from exposure during the night, and reported that the enemy were all around them and closing in.

Two Phantoms, loaded with napalm and CBU-24, checked in at first light. Engle brought them down beneath the clouds, where they would be forced to operate in an extremely cramped arena. He told them to run parallel to the road, three hundred meters apart, and to drop their ordnance the moment he fired his smoke rocket. Their explosives fell within feet of the survivors.

Despite a barrage of antiaircraft fire from the guns, which had been moved in overnight as predicted, Engle brought another set of Phantoms down through the clouds and continued to lay an ever-widening circle of ordnance around the survivors, forcing the enemy back. When the Jolly Green went in to make the pickup it looked as if the Tigers were on a barren island surrounded by a black sea of scorched ground. Both men were snatched from the ground alive. [202]

Chuck Engle became the toast of fighter squadrons throughout Thailand, and his reputation reached its zenith. There was no question about Engle’s courage, the Ravens agreed, but there were limits. The guy was crazy, people muttered, and there was more talk about his subconscious death wish. But Engle shrugged it all off, and swung the chain around his neck holding the bullet. It was simple - the enemy had taken their best shot and missed.

The next Raven to be shot from the sky was Jim Hix. In early February an enemy gun position in the Jungle’s Mouth was shelling the Thai artillery outpost at Ban Na, a strategically important hilltop position ten miles northeast of Long Tieng. Hix, flying a T-28 and accompanied by Tom King in an O-1, had been directing numerous sets of fighters in support of the base. After he had completed eight passes holding to the same pattern, an extremely unwise and reckless thing to do, the enemy found his range.

Hix knew he was hit by the noise - inside the cockpit it sounded as if a giant spring in a clock had burst. A shell had pierced the propeller drum so that it was over-revving, and although he managed to get the runaway prop under control by reducing the manifold pressure, he was unable to see because the engine was spewing oil over the windshield.

Tom King attempted to steer him by giving directions over the radio, a procedure which was complicated by the T-28’s rapidly pulling away from the slower Bird Dog. When he estimated that Hix was over friendly territory, King gave him the word to bail out.

With only fifteen minutes of gas left and smoke filling the cockpit, Hix was pleased to be leaving. He pulled the cord on the Yankee Extraction System, the explosive detcord blew the Plexiglas out of the canopy, and the rocket fired, hauling him into space. It was only after the explosion that he realized he had left his visor open, and slivers of Plexiglas were blown down into his face, ripping the skin off the left side.

Once the parachute opened, Hix was able to peer around to find his bearings. He knew the area intimately - well enough to know that he was nowhere near friendly territory. At first he was scared, but this feeling changed almost instantly to fury. He was enraged at King’s mistake and wanted to kill him. The idea actually made him reach for his .38, which he wore in a tie-down holster, but the gun had hit the side of the canopy rail as he punched out and had spun into space. The realization that he had no weapon with which to defend himself snapped his mood back from rage to terror.

He landed safely and immediately ran away from the parachute and crouched down among some bushes. Pilots were supposed to check their survival gear regularly, but young immortals like the Ravens rarely did so. Hix had been no exception, merely glancing at the battery level on his survival radios once a month. Both were useless, and his flares were duds too.

He set fire to a small bush to mark his position, blowing furiously at the meager flames for them to catch. The burning bush gave off a thin pillar of smoke, but it was enough to guide in Air America. It also marked his position for the enemy, and as the chopper wheeled to hover over the downed Raven it took ground fire. He was hauled into the cabin and landed in a heap as the bird banked steeply. ‘I kissed the floor of that helicopter.’

After a brief stop at Long Tieng he was flown down to Vientiane, gulping whisky and talking endlessly as the adrenaline coursed through him. He was picked up at the airport by Chuck Engle and on the way into town insisted on stopping the jeep at a store to buy a Buddha. Engle was skeptical. ‘You’re not supposed to buy one,’ he said. ‘You’re supposed to be given one.’ ‘What the hell - some protection is better than none.’ After a shower and a change of clothes, Hix went out on the town in Vientiane. It was very good - quite extraordinary, really - to be alive, and he celebrated by drinking until dawn.

The gun that had nailed Jim Hix was a part of the main force of the NVA 312th Division, moving rapidly across the Plain of Jars. Its intention was to hit the Thai artillery position at Ban Na and then move on Long Tieng. Two heavy field pieces - thought to be an 85mm gun and a 122mm howitzer - began a night-long shelling of the position and inflicted heavy casualties.

Two days after Hix had been shot down, the Ravens were still out searching for the gun that had done the job. Grant Uhls flew up to the area around Ban Na, where he noticed an unusual amount of fresh truck activity. As he circled, a 12.7mm machine gun fired several bursts at his aircraft. He pulled off abruptly and began to climb, radioing the coordinates of the gun, together with several other likely looking antiaircraft locations, to three other Ravens flying into the area.

It was Jim Hix’s first day in the air since he had been shot down, and he felt an extraordinary sensitivity and connection to the airplane he was flying. It was as if he could hear every turn of the propeller and each time the spark plugs fired. He had also been careful to stock up with fresh flares, and had checked the batteries of his survival radios more often than was necessary. He kept one eye perpetually cocked for the best spot on which to crashland or to bail out over, should the need arise.

He flew up to the Plain of Jars alongside Chuck Engle, and they worked together around Muong Soui. Over the radio Hix displayed a brittle sense of bravado, and his conversation with Engle would have struck any of his colleagues as more than a little ironic. The two men boasted to each other how they had cheated death, and how ready they were for any eventuality. Both had to agree - they were damned good.

As they spoke they heard Grant Uhls report that he had taken fire, and immediately headed toward Ban Na. In the meantime, Uhls had flown away from the gun in a wide semi-circle and then doubled back into the area from another direction.

As he scouted the area for the original gun that had fired at him, another more powerful machine gun - a ZPU-2 - had opened up on him. Flying at three thousand feet, he was beyond the reach of the 12.7mm, but in comfortable range of the ZPU. He immediately broadcast a warning to the approaching Ravens and attempted to pull out of the range of the powerful weapon. His voice sounded as if he were taken completely by surprise that ground fire was actually threatening his plane. ‘Damn, I can’t get away from it.’

Then there was silence. Hix could see the aircraft in the distance trailing a thin spume of smoke, and he watched it make a large, slow circle. ‘Don’t go so low,’ he yelled into the radio. There was no response. The plane began to circle in an ever-decreasing radius, and each circuit brought it closer to the ground. At the very end it seemed to veer, possibly the last attempt of a badly wounded pilot to save himself. Somehow the futile action disturbed Hix deeply.

As the plane crashed into the ground it was as if the horror were enacted before Hix’s eyes in slow motion. The right wing folded over the fuselage, and he saw the aircraft splinter and disintegrate for a brief moment before it exploded into a fireball. As he watched, something in him snapped. ‘It was as if my system flipped over inside. It really screwed me up.’

He sat in his O-1 and began to direct the Thai artillery from Ban Na onto the area he suspected the gun to be in, working in a daze like an automaton. Chuck Engle’s voice came over the radio. ‘Why don’t you guys get down there and help him out?’

‘There’s no way,’ Hix replied.

‘Bullshit!’ Engle took his plane down to ground level, and the enemy opened fire on him. He flew over the crash site and then pulled off. ‘Ain’t no way anybody could live through that.’

Hix called Cricket. ‘Negative objective,’ he said, giving the code that meant the pilot was dead and no SAR would be needed. [203] He flew back to Alternate and walked into the operations shack, where he sat saying nothing, his eyes filled with tears. He had been close friends with Grant Uhls at the Air Force Academy, and their time together in the Raven program had sealed that friendship. Finally, Hix stood up. ‘Screw it,’ he said, and slammed out of the shack.

He flew down to Vientiane, drove back to the Raven hootch, and got drunk. Two new Ravens, Jim Roper and Ernie Anderson - replacements for the dead - met Hix for the first time at dinner that night. It was a grim welcome. Hix, whose face was still a torn mess of bruises and scabs, had drunk so much he had moved into a tortured world of his own, and sat in a corner muttering to himself ‘This is bullshit! Cannon fodder. Just a bunch of cannon fodder.’

The new Ravens exchanged glances and rapidly swallowed a few drinks themselves.

Hix was still sleeping off his hangover late the following morning when he was awakened by the houseboy shaking him. A message had come over the phone that the Ravens in Long Tieng were under attack. The NVA had crossed the southern ridge and were shelling the airfield, the town, and the compound.

Earlier in the month, Gen. Vang Pao had announced, ‘We shall defend Long Tieng to the last man.’ [204] Now it looked as if the enemy would force him to keep his word.

Ban Na had been under nonstop, round-the-clock attack, and the Ravens had been busy directing ton upon ton of ordnance around the area of the camp. The enemy had pushed their way across the Plain of Jars and were on the ridges to the north of Long Tieng, where there were a series of firefights. Natives living in the area, including most of the population of Alternate, had been evacuated yet again. Altogether some fifty thousand Meo dependents had been moved into the already overcrowded Ban Son resettlement area south of Long Tieng. (By the middle of 1971, U.S. AID estimated, 150,000 hill tribe refugees, the majority of which were Meo, had been resettled.) [205]

There was always a complement of Ravens living at Long Tieng during this period, and the quality of life had been improved beyond measure by the acquisition of a pool table. They had become settled to the point of having pets again, the star of which was Princess Hamburger. The princess was the runt of the latest litter of pups belonging to Squirrely, a mongrel concupiscent as a rabbit and known among the Ravens as ‘the Queen of the Whores.’ ‘Hamburger’ was the vogue word among the Ravens at the time to denote a swaggering, boastful John Wayne type. Fat Danny, an Air America mechanic blessed with the genius of the kasbah, had developed a strong sideline out of Squirrely’s offspring, selling them as rare Meo temple dogs - at thirty dollars a clip - to gullible Air Force helicopter pilots who visited Long Tieng on evacuation flights. But no one believed Princess Hamburger, an oddly colored individual tending toward the ugly, was a rare temple dog. Fat Danny made a present of her to Chad Swedberg. The Princess’s low whine in the face of enemy shelling acted as the hootch alarm system.

Oddjob, the original Raven orphan, was long gone - officially adopted by an Air Force mechanic and taken back to the States - but the Ravens still had a soft spot for the local children. A favorite was a cheerful little girl with a withered leg. A native shaman had begun imitating the American medical magic of seemingly curing all ills with a single injection - penicillin worked wonders among the Meo, who had built up no resistance to the drug. Usually the shaman’s shots were harmless enough, consisting as they did of various colored liquids, but in the case of the little girl he had struck a main nerve and crippled her. An Air Force flight surgeon examined her at Udorn and determined that nothing could be done. One of the CIA men made a crutch for her, which he replaced as she grew taller. The Ravens saw her every day, dragging her useless limb behind her.

The NVA had slowly been closing in on Long Tieng, and the base had come under rocket attack on three successive nights. ‘After a while my reflexes became so attuned to the crackling of supersonic rockets flying overhead that I was able to roll out of bed and under it before I even woke up,’ Craig Duehring said.

None of the rockets hit the Raven hootch, but a number found their mark in the village and on the runway. Civilian and military casualties were treated in the local hospital. On a visit to the doctor, Duehring saw a portly Thai artillery captain lying on his back on a table. The entire side of his left cheek had been torn away by shrapnel. The gaping hole bared an uneven row of gold teeth set in a ghastly butcher-shop grin like that of an animal’s skinned head. The Thai captain seemed quite comfortable, and Duehring was surprised at the almost complete absence of blood in the case of such a terrible wound.

The persistent enemy rocket attacks moved the American maintenance personnel to build a fortified bunker between the old wooden house that served as the Raven HQ and the more recently built two-story concrete-block building that housed the bedrooms. A half-decent bunker was constructed, using sandbags and pierced steel planking. It was intended to have only one entrance, with a zigzag turn in it, but it was left with an opening at each end when work was interrupted by enemy action.

A friendly 105mm field artillery piece, set up by the king’s house south of the runway, kept up a steady fire at the rate of a shell a minute, day and night, to harass the enemy. The Ravens slept through its steady, explosive boom as if it were nothing more than the familiar loud tick of a large clock.

At 3:00 A.M. on the morning of February 14 - St. Valentine’s Day - an ominous silence fell on the valley when the big gun suddenly stopped firing. Craig Duehring, who slept soundly through rocket attacks and artillery fire, was awakened by the sudden change in the rhythm of the war, startled by the unnatural silence. There was an eerie moment of total calm, and then the boom of the 105 was replaced by a series of explosions, accompanied by small-arms and automatic-weapons fire.

Duehring looked out of the bedroom window and saw the flash of various explosions in the distance and pinpricks of flame from the muzzles of numerous weapons. He thought perhaps the friendlies were engaged in a skirmish with an enemy patrol that had infiltrated the valley.

He reached for his movie camera and began to film the flashes of fire in the dark. Suddenly he heard a yell from one of the other bedrooms: ‘Incoming!’ He dropped to the floor. A large artillery round, probably from a DK 82mm recoilless rifle, hit the side of the building. Duehring grabbed his M-16 and pistol belt and ran from the room.

The first time Chad Swedberg knew about the attack was when an Army attaché and a couple of Ravens burst into his room and yanked his bed away from the window so they could look out of it. Swedberg was not unduly alarmed at the sound of gunfire, as firefights had raged on the ridgelines for several nights, and he had even slept soundly through the explosion of the shell hitting the hootch. Violently awakened from a deep sleep, he was further angered when he saw that a crate of grenades had been stashed under his bed without his knowledge, in preparation for an enemy attack.

The Army attaché began firing his M-16 out the window, a pointless exercise as the enemy artillery was more than a mile away, and dangerous, because the ammunition contained tracer and allowed the NVA to pinpoint the Raven position. Swedberg wished they would all go away so he could get back to sleep. ‘This is my goddam bedroom,’ he yelled. ‘Cut it out!’

It was only as more shells exploded around the compound that he fully understood the seriousness of the position. In the corridor a horde of people crammed themselves down the stairs and ran toward the newly constructed bunker. Swedberg was swept along with the crowd. Halfway down the stairs he remembered Princess Hamburger and tried to return, but he was pushed forward by the panicking, stampeding horde.

The last man out of the building, Air Commando Jim Rostermundt, saw the dog whimpering beneath a bed, scooped her up into his arms, and ran with her to the bunker. (Immensely grateful, Swedberg wrote him up for a DFC - never awarded - for ‘saving the life of an indigenous friendly under fire.’)

As people crowded into the bunker, artillery rounds were coming in at the rate of one every six seconds. Various buildings in the compound were hit in the barrage, which was to continue for the next two hours until dawn. An NVA unit had worked its way around to the south of the base and launched an attack on the men firing the 105mm artillery piece. Taken by surprise, the friendlies were overcome after a brief fight. A member of the Thai artillery crew had the presence of mind to toss a thermite grenade down the gun’s barrel. Had the enemy captured the gun intact and trained it on the compound containing the Americans, the battle would have been over.

But even without the big gun, by using the weapons they had brought in with them, the enemy were able to direct a fearsome barrage directly into the compound. By counting the muzzle flashes the men in the bunker calculated the number of guns firing at them - a mixture of six 60mm mortars and 82mm DK-82 recoilless rifles.

As shells continued to land in the compound it became clear that the NVA were after the Americans. Although armed to the teeth and accompanied by some tough Meo, the Ravens felt horribly unsure of themselves as front-line troops on the ground. ‘We were terrified,’ Craig Duehring said. ‘I recall very vividly the feeling of absolute panic and the almost uncontrollable urge to throw down my M-16 and run. I had nowhere to go, but I thought I was going to die. And I did not want to die.’

Shep, one of the CIA men, was caught outside in a shell blast and pulled into the Company blockhouse with a badly cut leg. Burr Smith called the bunker, excitedly demanding to know where the doctor was.

‘Is the doc here?’ the radio operator asked.

‘Yeah,’ came the reply, out of the dark.

The radio operator swung his flashlight toward the doctor, a short, squat man with gray hair. The Americans were used to seeing kindly Dr. Venedict Osetensky working in the hospital, but as the flashlight fell on him it lit a figure transformed: an M-16 lay across his legs, he wore a combat helmet, and a bandolier of ammo was strapped across his zippered flak vest. The doc had become a front-line grunt. ‘It’s Shep, doc,’ the radio operator repeated as another enemy shell sent a shower of earth and stones across the steel-and-sand roof of the bunker. ‘He’s been hit with shrapnel.’

‘So?’ the doc asked. ‘What the hell am I supposed to do about it?’ The sight of the doctor laden down with combat equipment and his laconic answer somehow combined to relieve the fear every man in the bunker felt, and they broke out in spontaneous laughter.

Crouched in their jerry-built bunker, the Americans soon realized they were ‘blind’ and needed to set up an observation post in the Raven hootch. Several made a run for it back to the two-story barracks. The general feeling of the group was that an air strike should be directed onto the enemy position, an idea Chad Swedberg was against. He felt it too risky with the enemy so close - a short round might hit the Raven hootch or the town. A squabble of a nonmilitary nature ensued, there was some name-calling and macho posturing, and Swedberg felt himself pushed toward a decision that went against his better judgment. ‘There were some real hard feelings that night.’

The Ravens set up watch in the doctor’s corner room. It was somewhat larger than the others, although packed with medicine chests, and its two windows gave good visibility over the valley. Fat Albert, the Air Force intelligence officer, took up a defensive position in the latrine, pointing his M-16 through the window. The Ravens peered into the night across the concertina wire at the perimeter of the compound, beyond the village and toward the muzzle flashes of the enemy guns. The ground in front of them sloped gradually for half a mile to the bottom of a small valley. Beyond, the main valley, covered with trees, shrubs, and grass, climbed steeply for a thousand feet. It was on this hillside that the enemy were hidden, blocking the only reasonable escape route out.

The Company blockhouse, located at the end of the compound to the left, had a. 30 caliber machine gun set up beside it, while a .50 caliber machine gun, capable of reaching the enemy, was set up in the corner of the Raven compound to the right.

Burr Smith was able to radio an SOS message to Alleycat - the nighttime airborne command post - which sent a Laotian AC-47 gunship. In spite of repeated directions, the gunship stood off and fired its entire load of ammunition into the mountainside more than two miles away from the target. Swedberg and Duehring watched the worthless exercise from the doc’s bedroom window. Hurrying home to sell the empty brass shell casings, Duehring thought as he saw the gunship pull off. It then dawned on him, as reality for the first time, that nobody was going to make it out alive.

They heard a lone T-28, manned by a Meo pilot, start up on the ramp and take off into a black sky filled with invisible mountains. The pilot attempted to make a pass over the enemy, but his bombs missed the guns and the antiaircraft fire was so intense he was forced to retreat and fly south to recover.

The single O-1 that came under Laotian command - used by Gen. Vang Pao - also took off into the night. The Ravens learned it carried the general and Jerry Daniels, his CIA case officer. There was silence as the significance of this news sank in. In a quiet, matter-of-fact voice someone said, ‘That’s it, then.’

Dawn broke on a day murky with brown haze. The argument over calling in an air strike had been resolved when Chad Swedberg agreed to direct fighters at first light. He stood in the window of the doc’s room, with Craig Duehring beside him, and talked to Cricket via his hand-held survival radio. Two Phantoms out of Udorn, ominously named Killer flight, would be on station within minutes. Lead carried CBU, while Two was loaded with wall-to-wall five-hundred-pound bombs. Both Ravens worried aloud that the fighters, flying into the brown haze in the half-light, would not be able to see a damned thing.

The moment Swedberg picked up Killer flight on his radio he began to describe the target on the hillside among the trees and said he was going to mark it using the .50 caliber machine gun, firing tracer. ‘Tracers are going into the hillside and ricocheting - do you see tracer?’

‘Roger.’

‘Cleared in hot.’

Lead made a pass but lost sight of the tracer halfway down the chute and pulled off. Suddenly, Duehring experienced a deep feeling of dread - something was wrong. ‘Chad, I don’t trust them,’ he said. ‘Put Two south of the target about a kilometer and work him in. A big column of smoke would make a hell of a good marker.’

Swedberg cleared in the second Phantom, which dropped its bombs and pulled off. They were wildly inaccurate, at least a kilometer off target. ‘Thank God we moved him out,’ Duehring said, ‘or it would have been down our throats.’

It had grown lighter, but Swedberg realized the Phantoms were still hampered by poor visibility because of the haze. ‘If I had been smart I would have called off the air strike right then,’ he said, ‘but I wasn’t smart.’

The exploded bombs at least provided a pillar of smoke as a mark to direct the fighters from. Swedberg also reoriented Lead from the .50 caliber tracer, and repeated a visual description of the target. ‘You see the smoke - the village -where the tracer ricochets?’

‘I see it. Am I cleared?’

‘We don’t see you,’ Swedberg said, ‘but if you see every-thing we’re talking about you’re cleared.’

The F-4 went in, but instead of returning to make multiple passes the pilot took the lazy course and pickled off his entire load of six CBU canisters at once. Shep, his leg hastily bandaged, was outside with Burr Smith and a platoon of Meo guerrillas when the plane screamed over. Shep looked up and saw the CBU pods come off the aircraft, and then watched in horrified fascination as the clamshells flew apart and the bomblets were spewed out. He yelled to his companions and hit the ground. When he raised his head, after the CBU had passed beyond him, Burr Smith, himself, and a single Meo survived. [206]

The exploding CBU tore through the village like a hurricane. Huts, trees, and telephone poles disintegrated before the Ravens’ eyes. ‘You’re dropping on the friendlies!’ Swedberg yelled into his radio. ‘You’re dropping on the friendlies!’

A wall of destructive flame raced toward the Raven hootch. ‘You sorry-assed son of a bitch,’ Duehring shouted, and dived for the floor.

It was even worse than Swedberg feared. The pilot had misunderstood his instructions regarding the tracer and exactly reversed them - he had not dropped the deadly load where the tracers were ricocheting, but on the friendly machine gun itself.

Those in the hootch had hit the floor and were squirming on their bellies to get under the bed or behind some sort of cover. The CBU broke over the building, peeling back the roof. It set the operations shack on fire, along with the Company sleeping quarters, the Air America hostel, and the Raven dining room, blasting the pool table into fragments. The CIA bar took a direct hit and burned to the ground. But the wily bears survived the holocaust by pressing themselves against the rock wall at the rear of their cage, which was built out from a cave.

It was obvious that the F-4 had dropped CBU, and from a great enough height for it to have a large pattern. (Clamshell CBU explodes in a doughnut pattern, creating a circle of fire around a hollow. What looked to the Ravens like a solid wall of fire approaching them was actually a circle surrounding them - and the .50 caliber machine gun was directly in the center of it.)

With the building burning down around their ears, the Americans prepared to move back to the bunker, where a series of sporadic explosions made them think they were under renewed attack. It then dawned on them that the continuing explosions were their own ordnance. ‘Christ,’ somebody groaned, ‘some of that shit is time-delayed.’

‘Confirm CBU-24,’ Swedberg radioed Cricket

‘CBU-24 confirmed,’ Cricket responded. There was a pause. ‘Also CBU-49 mixed in there.’

CBU-49 was a canister of time-delayed, baseball-sized bomblets that, according to the book, went off randomly over a thirty-minute period, each one blasting out 250 white-hot ball bearings. In reality they often continued to explode for as long as two hours, and now they were littered throughout the compound. The men dodged among them to reach the bunker and huddled inside. Although the structure had taken a direct hit during the raid, it was still standing. The building beside it continued to burn, and smoke began to fill the shelter. Outside the CBU bomblets continued to explode.

After an hour the Army attaché decided to make a run for one of the other buildings. It was a risk, and he knew it. He stepped outside of the bunker and one of the bomblets exploded directly in front of him. ‘Good God,’ thought Duehring, who was sitting just inside the entrance. ‘He’s gone.’

But the colonel stepped back into the bunker alive, drained of blood and shaking. When he could speak he explained he had seen the CBU lying intact at his feet the split second before it exploded. The rest was a roar of confusion. He found himself still standing and untouched after the blast, miraculously unharmed.

Directly after the Phantom raid the Meo T-28 fighters took off. They flew over their hometown, burning furiously below them from ordnance dropped by Americans, and heard over the radio of their fellow Meo’s casualties. Swedberg tried to talk to one of the pilots, but the man was crying so hard at what he saw from the cockpit of his plane that he was incoherent. Emotion ran very high among all of the Meo pilots, and a couple of them were so angry there was a moment when it seemed they might sweep over the American compound and strafe and bomb it in their fury. Things became so tense that rescue forces were put on alert in Udorn, in case it became necessary to save the Americans from their friends. It took Burr Smith, trusted and respected by the Meo, talking endlessly on the radio, to explain the mistake and implore the pilots to understand the anguish felt by everyone.

Once the time-delayed CBU had finally stopped exploding, after a period of almost two hours, the Long Tieng Ravens emerged from the bunker. By late morning things had returned to normal and the Ravens went down to the ramp to await the Meo pilots’ return. They talked to them after they landed, and although they remained visibly upset, they nodded their understanding as the Ravens explained what had happened.

The first Raven in the air over Long Tieng, once the Phantoms had departed, was Chuck Engle. He flew up from Vientiane to direct wave after wave of fighters onto the enemy position, but the NVA had already pulled back, swallowed by the jungle.

The Ravens took the undamaged Bird Dogs, with American personnel in the backseat, and flew down to Vientiane. They gathered that night at Lan Xang #9, the Raven hootch, and discussed their various experiences during the day. It had been an eventful twenty-four hours. Swedberg still felt responsible for the short round. ‘I did a terrible job. I should have said no from the beginning - or no from the middle. I just wasn’t smart at all.’ It was a feeling he would never shake off, long after the war. ‘I knew it wasn’t right but I let myself get pressured into it. It was stupid. It could never have worked. It should never have been done. But everybody was ready to fight and win the war right there.’

A later intelligence report, however, proved that the strike had had its fortunate side. The bodies of a North Vietnamese sapper team were found near the perimeter fence. The sappers had crawled there under cover of their own fire. They had been only minutes away from entering the compound and destroying the hootch when they were lolled by the wall of CBU dropped by the misguided Phantom. An accurate tally of casualties inflicted by the short round on the friendlies was never arrived at, on the orders of Gen. Vang Pao. He refused to take action against any Air Force pilot or Raven for a mistake made in the heat of battle, and blamed the enemy. (Press reports of the incident claimed that thirty soldiers had been killed and sixty wounded.) [207]

It was a chastened group who sat down to dinner that night. Once again they had been driven from their base, and would stage out of Vientiane and ‘commute’ back and forth to Long Tieng during the day. The base was a bomb site, the village partially destroyed, and the enemy left with the upper hand. Once more the Meo townspeople had been turned into refugees. And the trust between Americans and Meo had been strained to its limit.

Among the mail handed out to the Ravens over dinner were several Valentine cards. The irony did not go unremarked. The incident became known among the Ravens, and the men of the secret war, as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.