11. Wasteland

The fear, as in the previous year, was that the enemy would take Long Tieng and push on down to the capital, Vientiane. This meant the Vietnamese would have to battle their way through the resettlement area of Ban Son, where the Meo - ninety thousand of them wedged into a forty-mile-long dead-end valley sixty-seven miles north of the capital - would be forced to make a final bloody and hopeless stand. The refugees formed a human buffer between the government forces and the enemy, and neither side seemed inclined to go to any great lengths to avoid what would inevitably be a massacre.

There was a Pathet Lao raid on the American-run refugee relief center in early March, when guerrillas blew up warehouses and vehicles, but the attack was isolated and Ban Son was quickly back in operation. [208] As in the previous year, the enemy did not push their advantage and once again seemed to have achieved their strategic end. They were content to shell Long Tieng without moving into it. Two days after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, between five thousand and eight thousand friendly reinforcements were moved into the base, now almost empty of civilians. Even Vang Pao’s own family had been moved to a guarded compound in Vientiane.

After Grant Uhls’s death, the Ravens began to take Chuck Eagle’s death wish very seriously. He continued to fly low and take unnecessary risks. ‘People were beginning to feel Chuck was hanging it out too much,’ Swedberg said. ‘Everybody began to believe he was going to die.’

Engle, nearing the end of his tour anyway, was confined to flying in the area directly around the capital and kept away from the combat zone. The embassy was particularly anxious that he leave the country alive so he could attend a planned award ceremony in Washington, D.C., where he was to be presented with the Air Force Cross. Engle pottered about Vientiane, buying gold, ordering jewelry from Villay Phone, and collecting the usual last-minute souvenir bric-a-brac.

Restricted from combat operations, he limited himself to some risky rat-racing with fellow Ravens, a slightly absurd pastime in the underpowered O-1. It was a fighter pilot’s game, and skill coupled with nerve always won out. Engle had a maneuver that never failed - the Split S. The maneuver requires the pilot to take the airplane onto its back, then pull the nose down through the vertical to level again - a half-roll followed by an inverted half-loop. The result is a reversal in the direction of flight at the price of a rapid loss of altitude -and the possible loss of both wings.

Bob Foster, the Head Raven, had resigned himself to the young Ravens’ dogfighting, but ordered them not to play around below fifteen hundred feet, ‘because if you stall the stupid thing you can recover at that height.’ Naturally, Chuck Engle liked to fly in the face of authority and good sense and not only dogfight, but pull a Split-S at five hundred feet.

He was sent up to Alternate with Tom King to pick up two O-ls and ferry them back to Udorn for major maintenance, stopping off at Vientiane on the way down - a milk run with plenty of opportunity for a little rat-racing. Tom King immediately got on Engle’s tail; Engle jinked the plane but could not shake him. He judged his moment, and as the two planes approached a small hill Engle dived to push his plane through the tall elephant grass on its crest and began to execute a Split-S, with less than five hundred feet between himself and the ground.

He cleared the hill and the plane completed the first half of the maneuver, but grass had jammed the elevator full up, so that the O-1 stalled and fell back on itself. For a moment it seemed frozen motionless in midair, then it dropped like a stone into a clump of trees at the bottom of the hill and burst into flames.

Craig Duehring, also approaching his DEROS date, had been spending his last days in Vientiane writing up awards and decorations citations for deserving people in Project 404. He had driven out to Wattay airport in a jeep with a stack of papers he needed to coordinate with Engle. Waiting for his colleague to come in, he heard that a Raven was down.

Almost immediately, King landed and explained what had happened: Chuck had crashed and burned, and there was not a chance he had survived. ‘I was stunned,’ Duehring said. He thought he had hardened himself against death, which he had seen so much of in his tour, including that of two Ravens. ‘But this was more than I could take.’ He walked out to the revetments to be alone and wept.

The death of Chuck Engle, the first Raven to be allowed the Air Force Cross, was a terrible blow to everyone in the program. At the hootch in Vientiane the cook’s wife was inconsolable, and could be heard weeping in her room throughout the night. Chuck Engle had survived so much, only to kill himself in a silly stunt. It had not been an enemy bullet that had claimed him, but the last thing a man like Engle could have expected - pilot error.

Duehring volunteered to accompany his friend’s body back to the United States. ‘But my offer was refused. So some unknown individual did the honors and laid Chuck to rest.’

Craig Duehring worked out a few statistics relating to his six-month tour: 90 percent of the Ravens had been hit by ground fire, 60 percent had spent time on the ground as a result of enemy action, and 30 percent had been killed. This was unacceptable by any standards - particularly those of the Air Force, which considered a 2 percent casualty rate among its pilots too high.

In the eyes of the Air Force hierarchy, the Ravens were still nothing more than renegade Yankee Air Pirates, and their cheerful embrace of the image of Mexican banditos stuck in the craw of senior, rear-echelon officers. The recent run of deaths was seen as nothing more than a lack of proper Air Force procedures, and another concerted effort was launched to ‘put some structure in the program.’

The Air Force had already attempted to inject more of a mainstream Air Force flavor into Project 404 by introducing a large number of Academy graduates - Zoomies - into the Ravens. This had not worked. The moment they had taken to the air in Laos they had turned into Yankee Air Pirates.

The Air Force decided to gain control by choosing a young, highly responsible, clean-cut officer from outside the program to go up to Long Tieng and take over as the Head Raven. Larry Sanborn was picked for the job. ‘I was more of a Downtowner personality than a renegade, a Blue Suiter rather than a soldier of fortune. I never did wear a beard.’

Sanborn was briefed that the Mexican bandito era was over; the war was changing and the Air Force wanted to exert direct control over the Ravens. Sanborn arrived in Laos expecting to find a pretty ragged crew, but as he was checked out in the various military regions he saw that the Ravens were doing an exceptionally good job with very few men. He also understood why they interpreted orders rather than following them blindly. ‘They had the savvy - the trail-riders knowing what the trail was all about. You couldn’t get that Downtown.’

Sanborn tried to make the Ravens explain exactly what they were doing. One, sitting at the bar of the hootch, spoke for them all: ‘We’re kicking ass and taking names.’

Sanborn nodded. ‘Carry on.’

He discovered the Ravens regularly worked eighteen-hour days - including time on the ground. ‘I was really concerned about the troops. Periodically I would have to send a couple of them out of country - just to get them off the line. Guys were logging twelve hours in the saddle a day. You didn’t have to worry about motivation. A six-month tour, twelve hours a day, seven days a week, in a combat environment, getting shot at every day -1 spent my time worrying about how to keep them from burning themselves out.’

In answer to the complaint that the Ravens were flying too much, Sanborn demanded more men. The number of FACs working out of Long Tieng increased from seven to eleven. Instead of controlling the program, Sanborn unknowingly followed historical precedent and became the buffer between the Downtowners, forever expanding the regulations, and the Ravens, increasingly hard pressed in a losing battle.

The Air Force also felt that the tradition of the ‘nubie night’ - when a new Raven was taken out drinking and whoring - was several notches below the conduct becoming an officer, but Sanborn saw it as a fascinating psychological test of newcomers. ‘The Ravens operated a blackball system. Which meant that you could be a Raven up to a point on the official level, but the final decision was really with the other Ravens. It was important to know what a new guy was really like, and nubie night helped figure out the sort of stuff the other guy was made of. Was he belligerent when drunk? Was he concerned for his soul when he found himself in a whorehouse? The plain fact of the matter was, we had to depend on each other. If there was something about a fellow that made you real nervous, you needed to face that up front.

‘One guy turned around halfway through his nubie night and said, “Weird stuff - 1 don’t want anything to do with you guys.” We were not trying to teach him a new set of manners - we were trying to find out who he was. When all the restraints are removed, he is going to revert to his natural self. When nobody was there to give him orders, he would have to operate all by himself. And I thought about it a lot, and in the end I have to say there was a mystical side to the Raven camaraderie.’

This was not what the Air Force had hoped from Sanborn, but as hard as it tried it could never quite exert the degree of control over the Ravens it felt it needed. ‘Why did they want control?’ Sanborn said. ‘Just because they wanted it. They were singularly unsuccessful.’

By the time Sanborn left Laos he had notched up seven hundred combat missions, and had protected the program from the ravages of his superiors. The fundamental trouble with the program, the Air Force might have concluded, was that every time they sent a good officer across the river to clean it up, he became a goddam Raven.

Given the feelings of the Air Force hierarchy by mid-1971, the last person they would have chosen to return to Laos was Mike Cavanaugh. The contemporary Ravens, on the other hand, looked forward to meeting someone who had become something of a legend in FAC circles. The word went along the grapevine: ‘One of the old bunch, the wild bunch, and he’s coming back.’

Cavanaugh had been back in the States for a year, during which time he had organized the Forward Air Controllers’ International to help Wives and families of POW/MIAs in California. His activities had attracted the attention of H. Ross Perot, whose interest in the POW/ MIA issue had never slackened. Cavanaugh received a call at his home from the Texas billionaire asking him to fly to Dallas and talk. ‘He had a big bulldog and a big silver telephone,’ Cavanaugh said. ‘It was nice to be around wealth.’

Perot wanted him to undertake a mission of a diplomatic nature. The Texan handed him a custom-built, gold-plated .45 revolver with a hand-tooled Western belt and two boxes of ammo, a present for Gen. Vang Pao. ‘I want to get the general’s attention,’ Perot said. ‘I’ve got a fix on some guys who are in a POW camp in Laos. See if VP knows anything about it and I’ll finance a mission to go in there and pluck some guys out.’

Cavanaugh flew into Laos two days before he was supposed to start work, and went directly up to Long Tieng to pay a courtesy call on Vang Pao. Burr Smith greeted him warmly and took him to the general, who received the gun with amused fascination. Cavanaugh pitched Perot’s idea of a POW raid to the general, and one of the case officers took a few pictures.

Cavanaugh returned to Vientiane, where he made a visit to the embassy. He was amazed at the growth in the bureaucracy. He had been assigned to Laos to work in the air attaché’s ‘Frag’ shop, the office that picked and planned targets for each of the military regions and also designated the number of planes to be sent on each mission and the type of ordnance they would carry. (It was a far cry from being a Raven, but Cavanaugh felt that with his previous experience he could do an especially good job.) ‘The whole shop used to be run by one man. Now they had four guys - a lieutenant colonel, a major, and two captains. I would have been the lowest-ranking member of the team, destined to spend a year working at a desk in a room without windows, across from this guy who had a hair transplant that looked like a rice field.’

But it was not to be. When word of Cavanaugh’s connection with billionaire civilians harboring freelance military plans, the success of which could only embarrass and humiliate the administration, reached the embassy he was given twenty-four hours to leave the country. He eventually managed to land himself a job back in Vietnam as a FAC. ‘Tame stuff,’ Cavanaugh said. ‘After the Ravens it was like being sent to a Triple A team after playing for the Yankees. It was a letdown.’

Gen. Vang Pao launched his annual monsoon offensive at the end of June 1971. Backed by Thai battalions, he took back the critical hilltop position of Ban Na, captured by NVA troops two months earlier. Using helicopters, his men leapfrogged across the Plain of Jars in a plan aimed at destroying enemy supplies. The operation was similar in essence to that of About-Face in 1969, but less ambitious, using small, helicopter-mobile units while avoiding major confrontation. The NVA fell back to hilltop positions, where they harassed Vang Pao’s troops with mortar and rocket fire, while friendlies captured thirty tons of food supplies.

At the opening of the operation, the general and his CIA advisers had planned no more than hit-and-run, spoiling tactics, and had no intention of digging in. But after the reoccupation of Muong Soui in September they became convinced that the Plain of Jars was defensible and the NVA should be made to pay a high price to retake it. Five Thai artillery positions were dug in and supplied, forming the backbone of the defense plan, while the Meo positioned themselves for the inevitable NVA counterattack.

B-52s were now used routinely on the plain against enemy base camps and dumps, but nothing could stop the North Vietnamese - and even Gen. Vang Pao was forced to accept the limits of air power. The general had exacted a price from the enemy in men and supplies, but it was one they were prepared to pay.

The Plain of Jars now looked like a desert. John Wisniewski was flown up there for the first time toward the end of 1971 on his checkout ride in the backseat of an O-1 piloted by Mike Butler. As they flew in a zigzag pattern over trails and mountains, slowly climbing toward the plain, Wisniewski was struck by the extraordinary beauty of the country.

‘Look ahead, John,’ Butler said. ‘There it is - that’s the Plain of Jars.’

Wisniewski had heard so many stories of the fabled plain he expected symphonic music to well up as they flew onto it. ‘It was so dramatic, the most dramatic moment I had in flying there.’ At first glance it seemed that the plain was shaped like a human heart, but as he grew closer he was exposed to a different sight.

‘Everything was bombed out. Everything was worked over with bombs. I couldn’t believe it! Anyplace you would go on the PDJ would be pockmarked with bomb craters. There were burnt-out C-47s, abandoned tanks, destroyed trucks - the hulks of years of war, just left lying around.’

The first time Wisniewski flew over Xieng Khouang on his own he thought it looked like a miniature postwar, bombed-out Berlin. ‘Jesus/ he said to his Backseater, ‘that place is all beat to hell.’

‘Yes,’ the Backseater said flatly, pointing a finger at himself. ‘I live there one time. Me Xieng Khouang boy.’

By December the enemy were threatening Long Tieng again. Although the Ravens were sleeping there once more, they now lived in ramshackle quarters patched together from the leftover debris the previous year. They still flew long combat days, and landed back at the base grateful to have survived, but any thought of victory had long since receded.

‘We knew we couldn’t win,’ Terry Murphy said. ‘All the career majors and lieutenant colonels who had never made it to the war were coming over to Vietnam to fill a square in their career development sheet. They didn’t give a damn. It had made me very disgruntled, very cynical, to see that. If they had let the lieutenants run the war it would have been over in a hurry. But they don’t let the lieutenants run the war - except in the Ravens, which was a real morale booster. Even if we couldn’t win, we couldn’t just let these guys go to the wall.’

A warning came through the CIA that the NVA planned to send suicide sapper squads onto the ramp to blow up aircraft. ‘Don’t get too drunk tonight, guys,’ the senior Raven, Marv Keller, said. ‘There may be NVA coming across the fence.’

He told the Ravens to split the six O-ls up and move three to another part of the ramp. Wisniewski moved his and then went back to the operations shack. A Meo soldier was sitting on the steps, no more than thirteen years old. He had attached a bayonet to his M-16, making the rifle taller than he was. It amused Wisniewski, and he grinned at him. The boy flashed back a warm, open smile.

Wisniewski returned to the hootch, ate dinner, and sat around afterward drinking Singha beer. The movie that night was The Dirty Dozen - an unfortunate choice in the circumstances. It could not help but remind the Ravens of the suicide sapper squad, a Vietnamese dirty dozen, somewhere out there beyond the base perimeter, hidden in the jungle and the night.

Wisniewski drank another Singha beer and went to bed in the narrow, miserable room he shared with fellow Raven Bill Kozma. At 3:00 in the morning he was awakened by a series of booming explosions somewhere nearby in the valley. ‘Koz, are you there?’ he called out in the dark. ‘Koz?’

Kozma had opened all the windows and was standing beside one with a CAR-16, looking toward the runway.

‘What’s going on, man?’ Wisniewski asked.

‘I think we’re being invaded.’

‘Oh shit,’ Wisniewski said, climbing out of bed. ‘I don’t want to be invaded.’

Both men felt powerless as incoming shells exploded somewhere in the valley. It was impossible to know from which direction the fire was coming, or where to go to escape it. They stood by the window, waiting.

The incoming soon stopped, and at first light they went down to the ramp. The sappers had made their way onto the strip as warned, and the first, loud explosions had been of satchel charges blowing up aircraft. The artillery fire that followed was supposed to cover the team’s exit, but Meo soldiers had caught them and been merciless.

Burr Smith had hurried to join the Meo guards in the dark and found they had not only killed the sappers but cut their hearts out. A soldier handed one to the CIA man - to hold the beating heart of your enemy was good phi, a way to ingest his courage.

Wisniewski saw the hulks of several aircraft on the ramp and walked over to the operations shack to find out the extent of the damage. The enemy had destroyed the three O-ls the Ravens had been at such pains to move. The other three were untouched. A filled body bag lay on the ground outside the building.

‘Who’s in the bag?’ Wisniewski asked.

He was told it was the soldier he had seen the previous day. The boy had been on guard duty on the ramp when the sappers had come across, and they had cut his throat on their way. Wisniewski stood looking at the body bag. ‘Shit. He was dead. He was in a body bag. Thirteen fucking years old! Smaller than his rifle and there he was. I remembered looking at him and smiling, and him just smiling back. I couldn’t understand it. What was going on? How could he be a soldier? He was thirteen years old, for Christ’s sake.’

The raid by the sappers was seen as the overture for a concerted NVA attack, and yet another evacuation of the base was organized. A few CIA case officers were to remain with a skeleton force of the Meo, and there was a feeling among those chosen to stay behind that they were dead men. The Ravens who no longer had planes to fly boarded the last Air America transport of the day, mostly reserved for case officers.

John Wisniewski, who had been in Long Tieng only a week, was delighted to be leaving and took his seat on the Air America transport. He was disturbed by the sight outside the window, witnessed by the Ravens for the past two years in Long Tieng, as Meo refugees clamored around the plane. ‘It was like the movies where the Germans are invading France and you see the people in Paris getting on these trains. It was the same thing around these airplanes, because they knew the Vietnamese were coming. They were trying to get on and get out - but there was no room.’

George Bacon - Kayak - was accompanied by the young wife and child of a Meo lieutenant, ordered to remain and defend the base. One of the senior CIA officers boarded and began counting heads. ‘George, this airplane is for case officers and Americans only,’ he said. ‘She has to get off.’

‘I told her husband I’d get her out,’ Kayak said.

‘George, she has to get off,’ the CIA man insisted. ‘Get her off!’

‘If she gets off, I get off.’

‘Okay - get off!’

George Bacon stood up and left the plane. Wisniewski had watched the exchange in awe. ‘Holy shit, he’s going to die,’ he thought to himself, deeply impressed. As the plane took off he looked out the window and saw Kayak trudging away from the runway, followed by the woman and child.

Long Tieng became a hell over the next few days. The base was shelled repeatedly by the long-range 130mm artillery pieces the Vietnamese had brought into the country. These had an effective range up to thirty kilometers, and the enemy fired them at night, pushing the guns back into caves during the day to conceal them. As more and more troops massed on Skyline Ridge, a B-52 Arclight strike was put in on them, the first time the bomber had been used in such close vicinity to Alternate itself.

The Arclight was given the credit of saving Long Tieng, although as before, the enemy might never have planned to take it. They had achieved their objective by rendering it inoperable. The Ravens no longer even staged out of Alternate, as the enemy offensive grew stronger; they flew out of Lima Site 272, twenty miles to the southwest.

By March 1972, the NVA had seven divisions in Laos, and for the first time in a decade they moved down Route 13 toward Vientiane. Another 130,000 refugees had been created, and the Laotian government did not want them either in Vientiane or anywhere on the plain surrounding the capital. They were forced into the horribly overcrowded Ban Son settlement.

In April there was another battle for Skyline Ridge when enemy tanks were spotted in the area for the first time. The enemy 130mm artillery pieces continued their long-distance work, and a U.S. TV film crew were allowed into Long Tieng for the first time to film the action. (Stateside Ravens were disgusted, when they saw the film, to hear one of their colleagues call the reporter ‘sir.’)

And as the situation deteriorated the air attaché’s office responded by saddling the Ravens with a flurry of new rules and regulations. It was getting to be like the old days in Vietnam. Terry Murphy had friendly troops under attack in his area and desperately needed antipersonnel ordnance to help them out. At the same time and in the same area, a colleague had a set of fighters under his control preplanned to hit a nearby bridge. The fighters showed up carrying CBU, useless against a hard target.

‘I can’t use it - give it to Terry,’ the fellow Raven reported to Cricket, the orbiting command post.

The change in plan was refused. The ordnance was dropped on the bridge, which remained standing and intact, while the troops were left to fend for themselves without air support. Furious, Murphy flipped out the code wheel provided to the Ravens to enable them to encode coordinates before passing them over the air. They rarely used it, as they could usually validate their own targets, so when Murphy got through to Cricket with a coded coordinate and a request for both target validation and special ordnance, it was unusual enough to attract attention throughout the chain of command.

Cricket passed the encoded information through to the computer at Blue Chip, the Air Force HQ in Saigon, and also to the embassy in Vientiane. In the radio room of the air attaché’s office an excited operator called over an assistant air attaché: a Raven had logged a coded request for highly unusual ordnance to be used on a controversial target which would need to be cleared with the ambassador himself - maybe even the president. The request was rapidly decoded: Murphy had asked for permission to hit the U.S. embassy in Vientiane with a nuclear weapon.