13. Attrition

The country-club posting was now using up Ravens just as the war in the north was: killing them, wounding them, or just burning them out. And as in the north, somehow the right man always seemed to materialize to fill another’s shoes. Chad Swedberg had been sent south, flying down in the back of a T-Z8 with his dog, Princess Hamburger, on his lap, and was joined by Greg Wilson, Chuck Hightower, and Al Galante. (Galante, one of the few New Yorkers in the program, had developed a taste for flying at the age of five when he sat on his uncle’s lap in the backseat of a J3 Piper Cub flown by his father, a New York City fireman who had gained his pilot’s license flying old biplanes.)

The enemy had opened a new offensive in Laos and Cambodia in December 1971, and by the beginning of 1972 the NVA and Pathet Lao had moved from the Bolovens Plateau down Route 23 and into the valley and were advancing on Pakse. The Ravens found new roads cut on the edge of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, along which convoys of trucks were moving massive amounts of supplies, including gasoline and ammunition. Wilson, Galante, and Hightower flew up to the area - a stretched ride from Pakse. They climbed high, pulling the power back so the enemy could not hear the plane engines, waiting for trucks to show up. They were destroying as many as fifteen vehicles in a single strike, with so much smoke and flame coming from the secondary explosions the sky was black with it.

‘It began to sink in that with all this activity, moving all these supplies in broad daylight, something was going to happen some place,’ Greg Wilson said. In fact the enemy were moving into position for their massive Easter offensive in South Vietnam. Wilson peered through his binoculars and thought he saw the debris of Fan Song radar - the type used to guide SAM missiles. He reported it to CIA intelligence, which passed it on to the 7th Air Force, which scoffed. The Americans did not officially recognize the presence of SAM missiles that far down the Trail until May. [225]

But the buildup of conventional antiaircraft weaponry alone made it an impossible environment for Ravens to work, and from now on Ravens flew exclusively to direct close air support for troops defending the towns at the base of the Bolovens Plateau. With the enemy so close to town there was also the constant danger of a night sapper attack on the airstrip, so a number of O-ls were always kept at a base to the north of Pakse where the CIA had a training camp and there was also a field hospital run by Filipino doctors.

As the enemy increased their presence on the Bolovens Plateau, they began to stockpile ammunition and supplies and move artillery pieces into the various small towns. One of the principal storage places was a town near Paksong, where the king had a summer palace. ‘We found out the enemy had moved into it because they knew we didn’t want to bomb the town,’ Al Galante said. ‘So we bombed the town.’

The Laotian pilots were particularly reluctant to hit towns, but the first bomb that struck set off multiple secondary explosions of enemy ammunition. Numerous flights were directed onto the town, which was so stacked with ammunition that the pillar of flame and smoke from explosions could be seen fifty miles away. Native pilots sat in the Raven hootch that night drinking heavily and weeping that Laotian towns in the panhandle were now targets in the war.

The NVA continued to creep closer and closer to Pakse. Chuck Hightower was shot down around Saravane, but managed to deadstick his airplane into a rice paddy and walked south to avoid capture.

There was a choke point where Route 23 came down off the Bolovens and the road passed between steep cliffs on either side, and as Greg Wilson flew overhead he saw the Lao troops digging a pit in front of their compound, ‘What are they doing, building a swimming pool?’ he asked the Backseater.

They build tank trap.’

Wilson chuckled. The soldiers were terrified of tanks, and it was enough for the enemy to rev their engines within a kilometer of a friendly position for the troops to turn tan. The tank trap was so obvious and the Lao troops so halfhearted it seemed ludicrous. But a week later a Raven flew over the spot and saw beneath him, neatly filling the trap, a tank turned turtle.

The boundary of land held by the friendlies was marked by a gun position known as Klick 11, because it was eleven kilometers outside of Pakse down Route 23. It was generally accepted, but unspoken, that when the enemy took Klick 11, Pakse would fall. And they were expected to make a move on the outskirts of the town at any time.

One rumor that circulated was of an enemy gun emplacement beyond Klick 11, which no one had been able to locate from the air, preparing to shell the town. Late one night after an evening spent drinking lau lao - the most potent of which was said to be laced with opium - Greg Wilson and Al Galante decided to steal a jeep and drive out into the countryside to find the gun and blow it up.

They drove out along Route 23, drunkenly harmonizing the obscene duets for which they had become famous around the hootch piano. Somewhere along the road they came upon a bamboo barricade, but a sleepy Laotian soldier raised it and waved them through. They were too drunk to know they had passed through Klick 11, and they must have been ten kilometers down the road when they hit a command-detonated C-4 charge, which blew up directly under the jeep’s gearbox. The transmission took the full force of the mine’s blast, but the Ravens were thrown into the air, and their eardrums were ruptured, temporarily rendering them stone-deaf.

They crawled back to the jeep to collect GAR-158 and bandoliers of grenades. The vehicle’s canvas top had been blown open and the tires were flat, but somehow the headlights were still shining. It was only when they were back on the far side of the road, lying in a culvert with their weapons at the ready and grenades heaped beside them, that the mortars opened up.

The men could see the shells exploding around the jeep, but neither could hear a thing. They watched the world erupt in front of them, a war movie without a soundtrack. When the shelling stopped, a squad of NVA soldiers came out of the treeline, and the Ravens saw the flashes of their guns as they sprayed the jeep.

The NVA dropped back into the treeline and never crossed the road. Wilson and Galante lay where they were until sunup, and then made their way slowly across country back to Klick 11. A bus was waiting beside the barricade, where locals carrying live chickens and loaded with enormous bundles were boarding for the journey into the market at Pakse. The Ravens boarded the bus and rode back into town.

They reported to Dick Green, the Head Raven in Pakse, that they had misplaced a jeep. The ruptured eardrums meant there would be no more flying for a while, and there was the usual talk at the air attaché’s office of court-martial, but Green quickly kicked them out of the country before worse punishment could be meted out.

Although the enemy did not attack Pakse directly, the war in the panhandle continued to intensify, and the CIA now concentrated air power there. The military objectives in Laos were now reduced to interdicting the enemy’s progress along the Trail and tying up as many of their combat troops as possible (according to CIA estimates, between six and ten divisions were involved in the war in Laos).

In September 1972, a CIA-planned operation was launched - Black Lion IV - that involved moving two thousand men into the field around Saravane. The USAF was to supply H-53 helicopters, but pulled out of the operation on the first day, claiming the landing zone was too hot. Air America filled the gap, and paid the price when a chopper was lost and a CIA adviser was killed.

The men put into the Saravane operation were tribal irregulars and Thai mercenaries led by CIA case officers, and they moved their position each night as the enemy lobbed a thousand rounds of artillery shells into their camp. In between firefights the guerrillas seeded the roads with mines. By October the friendlies had pushed the NVA from the town, taken the airstrip, and established a defensive perimeter. Ravens were able to fly in to refuel and rearm, in order to direct close air support in the areas surrounding the town throughout the hours of daylight.

Each Raven was flying up to two hundred hours a month, an exhausting and punishing routine. The NVA made a concerted effort to retake Saravane one night in November and pushed the defending troops out to the south of the town and recaptured the airstrip. The enemy then moved onto the friendlies’ eastern flank, driving them into the mountains to pin them against the Trail. Although the NVA attack was a success, many of the mercenaries slipped through their lines and escaped.

As the enemy hunted down the Thai mercenaries they began to maneuver in daylight. They were spotted spread out along a creek bed by Ravens Mike Stearns and John Rhodes, who called for air. Because of bad weather in South Vietnam they were sent a total of fifty sets of fighters, which they directed onto the enemy throughout the day. ‘With all the flying I was too exhausted and too crazy to consider the loss of human life,’ Stearns said. ‘My attitude was, “Man, I got them! That’ll teach them to come down here with their rifles on their shoulders.”’

The next day when he returned to assess the damage inflicted he ran into a cloud made up of hundreds of black buzzards, some with five-foot wingspans, which had gathered to feed off the corpses. The impact of the bombs had blasted the soldiers and thrown their body parts into the trees, where they hung like so many bloody rags. ‘You could smell the dead bodies from a thousand feet.’

Ravens were getting wounded at such a rate that Lew Hatch, who was only a lieutenant, kept finding himself the senior Raven. Knife, one of the mercenary Thai forward air guides, had been killed when he threw himself onto an enemy grenade to save three other men squatting in a foxhole with him. He had seen the grenade come in and scrambled to reach it in the mud, but when he knew it was impossible he threw himself upon it. Such clear-cut heroics would have earned an American the Medal of Honor, but Knife received nothing.

Less than a week later, H. Ownby and Chuck ‘Buddha’ Hines were in the O club at Udorn having lunch. Ownby had long hair, and both men were in dirty, casual clothes, so the Thai waitress, a dumpy, homely woman, immediately spotted them as Ravens. She went across to their table.

‘You know Knife?’

‘Yeah, works with Mule,’ Ownby said.

Great tears appeared in the waitress’s eyes, and she tried clumsily to wipe them away with the order pad she held in her hand. ‘Knife - him die, him dead.’

‘Yeah,’ Chuck Hines said. ‘Got it up on the ridge at night.’

The waitress said that Knife was her husband, and his death had left her alone with three young children. Ownby mumbled his regrets. The waitress stood with red eyes, waiting to take their order.

‘Hamburger, fries, and a Coke,’ Hines said.

‘BLT and a 7-Up,’ Ownby said. And that was the extent of Knife’s memorial service, except for the twenty-dollar tips the Ravens always left on the table when the dumpy Thai waitress was on duty.

In early November the CIA called in Lew Hatch to say they had intercepted some disturbing enemy plans. ‘I don’t want to spread panic and alarm,’ the CIA officer told him, ‘but the enemy are sending some assassins into town to get you guys.’

A radio intercept had revealed that the enemy had assigned six assassins - one for each of the four Ravens, and one for each of the Laotian flight leads. The CIA told Hatch that the NVA had an official USAF photograph of him, which must have come from the Soviets who built up dossiers on all U.S. military officers. Hatch was impressed: ‘I was just a fucking lieutenant!’

While the CIA attempted to discover who might be used for the assassination attempt, each of the Ravens was told to carry a handgun at all times and was assigned a Lao bodyguard. In less than a week after the warning the first assassination attempt was made. Lew Hatch was at the wheel of the jeep driving into downtown Pakse, with Mike Stearns and Jay Johnson as passengers, when he ran into what seemed to be a riot outside the Chinese theater. The road was blocked off and Hatch found himself being funneled into side streets which would take him out of town. A brick came through the windshield and there were shots, and Hatch quickly turned the jeep around in the middle of the road and headed for the safety of the Thai officers’ club. Later, in a separate incident, a hand grenade was rolled next to the Raven hootch, but no one was hurt. But for the next fortnight the Ravens returned from a full day of combat to the fear of personal assassination.

Two months after the attack on Saravane, a thousand Thai mercenaries were air-assaulted onto the Bolovens Plateau, where they set up an artillery firebase. The assault threatened vital NVA supply lines, and the enemy responded by fielding more and more troops until it was estimated they had three divisions committed to the regions around Saravane and Paksong. The new offensive meant the Ravens had to direct air support for three separate areas of operation in the panhandle alone. There were not enough airplanes, and certainly not enough men. ‘We had opened a three-front war,’ Lew Hatch said. ‘We started it and we were fixing to get our asses kicked.’

During the second air assault on Paksong, Mike Stearns crashed his plane on the edge of the Bolovens when the engine quit A badly cut foot meant he was unable to fly, and he was sent home. Hal Mischler, who was soon to leave and had already sent his personal belongings home, was sent to Pakse as a replacement - the fourth senior Raven Lew Hatch had served under.

Jack Shaw arrived in Vientiane on December 10, 1972, flown up from Udorn by Skip Jackson, and then moved down to Pakse two days before Christmas. H. Ownby, Terry Pfaff, and Ed Chun had already been sent south from Long Tieng and Luang Prabang as Christmas help.

Most of the Ravens’ rooms were basic but Shaw, who had a reputation as a ladies’ man, immediately set about converting his into a bachelor’s seduction pad, complete with heavy curtains, black satin sheets, and light dimmers. He had been intrigued by the Ravens for more than six months, since he first met Al Galante in the bar of the O club at Ubon. ‘A big guy, a really cocky son of a bitch in civilian clothes acting as if all these fighter pilots were scum. His attitude was that if you were gracious enough he would talk to you - and that you were extremely lucky to be allowed to talk to him. I can’t say I was favorably impressed, but I was impressed.’

The decision to transfer to the Ravens was finally made after Shaw had been grounded by his commander as a punishment for losing an airplane - he had been shot down in an OV-10 by a shoulder-fired heat-seeking missile. His best friend, Hal Mischler - who had been his roommate back at the Air Commando base in Florida and also at Nakhon Phanom, where they were both Nail FACs working the Trail - had joined the Ravens a month ahead of him.

When Shaw left Nakhon Phanom to become a Raven he was presented with two Buddhas by Nupal, the O club’s Thai bartender. They had been blessed by monks in a temple for seven days, and the Thai wanted Shaw and Mischler to have one each (Mischler’s parting gift to Nupal had been more temporal - his ten-speed bike). Nupal explained the nature of the Buddhas’ power. ‘This Buddha only good for stopping you get shot. No good for fights or against knives. Only getting shot.’

‘How does Buddha know about guns?’ Shaw teased. ‘They weren’t around when Buddha was.’

Nupal lowered his voice: ‘Buddha knows all.’

Shaw threw the presents in his briefcase and gave Mischler his Buddha the moment he joined up with him in Pakse. Mischler smiled, touched that the barman should have thought of him. He told Shaw that he would have the Buddha put on a gold chain and wear it around his neck. Shaw said he was taking no chances, and attached it to a gold bracelet he wore around his wrist so that he would have the Buddha’s protection against antiaircraft fire on his first day in combat over Laos.

A massive air campaign had been launched against North Vietnam - the so-called Christmas bombing - with the result that there was no air available for the Ravens by December 23. Heavy air strikes against military targets in Hanoi and Haiphong had been launched on December 18 after the North Vietnamese had broken off the peace talks in Paris, and the entire U.S. air effort was now temporarily concentrated against the north. ‘Great,’ Lew Hatch told the CIA. ‘We don’t have to fly today.’

‘No, you still have to fly.’

‘Why?’

‘We need to know how many trucks they’re running down the Trail without U.S. air to interdict them.’

‘I can tell you that,’ Hatch said. ‘Take their normal daily average and multiply it by four - and that’s how many trucks they’ll move down.’

On the morning of December 23, the Bolovens Plateau was held by friendly forces, but the enemy had Saravane under siege. It was decided that Mischler would direct Laotian T-28s against the forces attacking Saravane while Lew Hatch, who had been in the area longer and knew the countryside better, would take Jack Shaw out for a check ride.

Shaw flew the plane and Hatch sat in the backseat. Flying out toward the Trail, they suddenly heard a transmission from Hillsboro, the panhandle’s orbiting command post: ‘Stand by - a Raven’s down.’ There was a pause, and then Hillsboro came back up on the air. ‘Raven 40 - Saravane.’

Raven 40 was Hal Mischler. Shaw turned the O-1 around and headed toward Saravane, some fifty miles to the east of them. As it was his first day on the job, he handed the FM radio to Lew Hatch, who was used to working with Lao troops on the ground. Hatch asked the ground commander in the area what had happened to the downed Raven and was told that Mischler had been trolling for guns with the intention of directing artillery onto them when he was nailed. Khammane, his Backseater, shared his fellow countrymen’s terrible fear of fire, and as smoke seeped into the cockpit he threw himself from the plane at two hundred feet and was cut in half when he hit a jagged brick wall. There was no report on Raven 40, but the commander said he intended to send out a platoon of commandos to bring him in.

It took the Ravens some time to find the wreckage of the plane. The moment they spotted it they immediately launched a SAR operation. With an American airman down, U.S. fighters were diverted as a priority, and Shaw directed them on the suspected gun emplacements. Antiaircraft fire was fierce - the NVA had moved two 37mm, one 23mm, a 14.5mm quad ZPU, and at least five 12.7mm guns into the area. Shaw took the O-1 lower and lower, trying to get below the 37mm so he could work the crash site.

He was unused to the O-1 and being shot at, and thought the sound he heard outside the cockpit - as if people were snapping their fingers - was the noise the plane made when the engine backfired. But when the Lao ground commander screamed into the radio that they were taking a massive concentration of ground fire he realized it was the sound of spent bullets.

‘Yeah,’ Hatch said calmly, 1 can hear them.’

A couple of the rounds found their mark, and as Shaw put the power up to maneuver the plane there was suddenly no response from the engine. The choice now was whether to crash the plane halfway home or put it down on an unused airstrip in disputed territory. Shaw began a slow spiral to earth, putting out a Mayday call as he went down.

Ed Chun flew onto the scene and took over the SAR, redirecting the Air America choppers already in flight to stand by and pick up the Ravens about to crashland in enemy territory.

‘Lew, you’ve had more time in this thing,’ Shaw said. ‘You land it.’

‘I got it,’ Hatch said, taking over the controls. The problem with landing from the back was that it was like sitting in a bucket and the pilot could see nothing. The runway on which he was about to land was a grass strip built by the Japanese in World War II, and had been used occasionally by the Ravens as a forward base when in friendly hands. Now it was littered with crates and engine parts, and pockmarked with holes made by mortar and artillery shells. One end of the runway had been bombed, while a burned-out T-28 lay at the other.

Lew Hatch, unable to see over the nose of the airplane, lowered full flaps and came down blind in the middle of the runway. ‘Let me know where the debris is.’

Shaw yelled directions from the front. A pile of abandoned crates lay on the runway directly across the path of the plane, and Hatch punched the rubber to veer around them. The O-1 left the strip and hurtled through undergrowth. ‘A stack of boxes the size of a desk went under the right wing,’ Shaw said. ‘This was not good. All I could see in front of us was a wall of elephant grass.’

Hatch had lost control of the plane, which had blown a tire somewhere on landing; he kept punching the rudder but it refused to turn. Both men simultaneously stabbed their feet at the brakes, and the plane ground-looped and spun to a halt thirty feet from a lake.

Shaw grabbed his CAR-15 and scouted around the plane to see if there were any enemy in the vicinity. There was no apparent movement, and he returned to help Hatch haul himself out of the backseat. They gathered up their weapons, maps, and code sheets and waited for the Air America chopper, which was only five minutes behind them, to come in. Hatch had already radioed the chopper’s pilot, Mel Cooper, where he was going to land, but because of the ground loop he had ended up on the opposite side of the runway.

‘Waiting for that chopper seemed to be like a lifetime,’ he said. ‘Everything seemed to be in slow motion.’ He could hear shooting from what he took to be a position five hundred yards away, but circling above them Ed Chun could see that the enemy were much closer and moving from every direction through the bushes toward the crashed plane.

The chopper landed some distance away, kicking up a small dust storm. Hatch and Shaw gathered up their stuff and began walking toward it, unaware of the immediate danger. Ed Chun spoke to Mel Cooper over the radio: ‘They’re walking! Just like on a picnic. They’re just walking!’

Cooper was furious, and began shouting at the Ravens to hurry. They clambered aboard, and as the chopper lifted off they began to take fire. Hatch and the crew chief knelt at the door and fired into the elephant grass. Once in the air, Shaw lit up the first cigarette from the pack he would smoke over the next hour.

The crew chief yelled over the roar of the rotors into Hatch’s ear that the pilot wanted to talk to him, and he handed the Raven a helmet with earphones. Cooper wanted to know if he should stop off at a nearby landing zone for a pickup. There were some wounded there, the pilot said - and the body of the downed Raven. Hatch looked across at Shaw, but he had heard nothing. ‘Let’s go in and get the body.’

When they landed at the firebase, four of the Thai walking wounded, swathed in bandages, climbed aboard the helicopter. The dead body of the Raven, wrapped in white parachute material because of a lack of body bags, was carried aboard. As the chopper lifted off, a soldier ran toward it and clung to the skids. Cooper hovered six feet off the ground while the crew chief shouted at the man to let go. But he hung on, prepared to ride the skids for as long as it took to get away from tike firebase. The crew chief unholstered his .45, chambered a round, and waved the gun toward the soldier, gesturing to him to let go. The man scowled before dropping in a heap to the ground.

The ride to Pakse took thirty minutes. Hatch spoke on the headset to the Customer in the operations shack to tell him that they were bringing in the body of a Raven and that he wanted an American flag to cover it. Officially, the clandestine nature of the Ravens’ activity in Laos forbade them this traditional dignity, but the CIA officer said he would find one somewhere. Shaw could hear nothing of the conversation over the noise of the engine, and sat mute in the back of the chopper smoking cigarette after cigarette, unaware of the identity of the body lying in front of him.

‘I could see the back of the head, which looked gray, and the hair was singed,’ Shaw said. ‘I sat there thinking, “This poor sucker’s dead -1 wonder what happened to him? I made it - this poor sucker didn’t.” ‘

The chopper flew nose down, and a large flow of blood ran from the body and collected in a pool against the bulkhead. It made the wounded soldiers uncomfortable, and they moved to huddle together in the rear of the cabin away from the blood. The pool deepened, until a stream trickled to the side of the helicopter and out through the open door into the slipstream. ‘I wonder who this guy is,’ Shaw thought, ‘spilling his blood over Laos?’

The chopper landed briefly at a site to let off the wounded to be treated at the hospital there, and then flew on to Pakse. The Customer was there to meet them, accompanied by a small group of Americans, and in one hand he clutched the folded square of a flag. The body was lifted down and laid on a stretcher and carefully covered with the Stars and Stripes.

‘What the hell is this?’ Jack Shaw asked, turning to Lew Hatch. ‘Some CAS guy get blown away on the firebase out there? Who is this?’

‘Jack, that’s Hal,’ Hatch answered awkwardly.

Jack Shaw tried to take the information in. Hal. He’s dead. That’s his body. ‘I’d been thinking all these philosophical thoughts about this poor fucker who died in the war - about him not making it and me being alive - and it was my goddam roommate. I was just stunned.’

Two men picked up the stretcher on which Hal Mischler lay covered with the flag and loaded it onto another helicopter, a Chinook bound for Udorn. Jack Shaw walked toward it and stood at the base of the ramp underneath the rotors, staring up at the body lying before him. Tears ran down his face. ‘Nobody said a word to me. I think they knew what was going on. The sun was going down, and it was dim inside that chopper. The lights were on and they had put down the stretcher crosswise with the American flag on it. There was nothing else inside. Then a guy walked over there and stood looking at me across Hal’s body. I heard the engine crank up, the ramp close, and it just took off. And I stood there and I watched that chopper until it had gone over the horizon. Until the sun went down.’

When Jack Shaw returned to the hootch he found Lew Hatch sitting at a table with two bottles of Johnny Walker Black Label in front of him sent over by the Air America helicopter crew. ‘We’re supposed to buy them Scotch,’ Shaw said. ‘They saved our lives.’

‘No, they said we didn’t make as much money as they did today.’ Hatch took the top off one of the bottles and poured two large drinks. Together, the men drank to the memory of Hal Mischler. They did not move from the table until they had finished the bottle.

‘The other bottle was Hal’s,’ Jack Shaw said. ‘And every time we started thinking about Hal we took it down and drank some of it. It didn’t last long.’ After the men had finished the first bottle they fell into bed, asking colleagues to wake them at 6:00 the following morning. Lew Hatch was scheduled to fly the dawn patrol, while Shaw had to fly to Udorn to pick up a replacement O-1.

On Christmas Eve, Jack Shaw was sitting on his own at the bar of the Air America club at Udorn. A man drinking next to him struck up a conversation and asked him what he did. Shaw said he was a Raven.

‘Sorry to hear you lost a guy today.’

‘Yesterday. Over Saravane.’

‘Yeah, yesterday over Saravane,’ the man said uncomfortably. ‘And today. Over the PDJ.’

Skip Jackson, who had flown Shaw into Laos when he first arrived, had been run over by a Navy jet. He had been directing a set of A-7s over the Plain of Jars when one of the fighters had clipped a strut under the wing of the O-1. It plummeted to the ground and pancaked. The pilot of the A-7 remembered a flash, then suddenly his plane became unstable and he punched out - only to be captured and imprisoned by the enemy.

Jack Shaw returned to Pakse after Christmas. The casualty officer was in the hootch going through Mischler’s property (a discretion the Air Force afforded a pilot who had been killed so nothing offensive would be returned to his wife or family). Laid out on the dining-room table was a small collection of worthless but painfully intimate possessions: shaving cream, razor blades, toothpaste, aftershave lotion.

‘This is Mischler’s stuff,’ the casualty officer said. ‘Want any of it?’

‘Throw it away!’ Shaw said in a voice that was quiet but deadly. He turned and walked from the room.

Later he explained: ‘You were so hurt you just buried your feelings. The guys at the hootch never talked about it. And I couldn’t talk about it for years and years. I had flown with the Nails for ten months, and guys got shot down but no one was killed. Everybody got picked up. It was humorous almost - you earned the right to tell your own war story. I’d been in Laos just a couple of days and all of a sudden everybody seemed to be dying. I thought it wasn’t a joke anymore - this is war.’