Prologue: Myth

As the war dragged on, so the myth grew. It started in the mid-1960s as a mix of gossip and bar talk among a battle-hardened elite who told stories that seemed fantastic to everyone who heard them. Apparently, there was another war even nastier than the one in Vietnam, and so secret that the location of the country in which it was being fought was classified. The cognoscenti simply referred to it as ‘the Other Theater.’ The men who chose to fight in it were handpicked volunteers, and anyone accepted for a tour seemed to disappear as if from the face of the earth.

The pilots in the Other Theater were military men, but flew into battle in civilian clothes - denim cutoffs, T-shirts, cowboy hats, and dark glasses, so people said. They fought with obsolete propeller aircraft, the discarded junk of an earlier era, and suffered the highest casualty rate of the Indochinese War - as high as 50 percent, so the story went. Every man had a price put on his head by the enemy and was protected by his own personal bodyguard. Each pilot was obliged to carry a small pill of lethal shellfish toxin, especially created by the CIA, which he had sworn to take if he ever fell into the hands of the enemy. Their job was to fly as the winged artillery of some fearsome warlord, who led an army of stone-age mercenaries in the pay of the CIA, and they operated out of a secret city hidden in the mountains of a jungle kingdom on the Red Chinese border.

It certainly sounded farfetched, yet the talk emanated from people who commanded respect. Men like the Special Forces soldiers who fought behind enemy lines, CIA case officers who lived in the field year after year, and the fighter pilots who flew over North Vietnam. The pilots spoke of colleagues who had vanished into a highly classified operation code-named the Steve Canyon Program.

When such men reappeared they had gone through a startling metamorphosis. In the military world of spit, polish, and crew-cuts, they stood apart: some sported long hair and mutton-chop whiskers or curling, waxed mustachios, and many wore heavy gold bracelets and GMT Master Rolex watches with wide gold bands. If they happened to be on the edge of a combat zone they carried a 9 mm pistol in a holster, the preferred weapon of the professional soldier of fortune. And, like a caste mark, each wore a 22-karat gold ring that had an oriental royal crest set into a red cloisonné top, with a roughly cut piece of locally procured diamond at its center.

The greatest change of all was not in their appearance, but in their manner. Self-confident to the point of arrogance and disdainful of anyone outside of their own group, they had the distant air of people inducted into a powerful and mystical secret society.

Insiders who worked with them knew these pilots as the Ravens. It was only natural that such a romantic group should generate talk. That almost all of it was true, in one form or another, was never established at the time. The secrecy of their activities, and the very fact of their actual existence, was guarded throughout the war. Even the Air Force colonels whose job it was to interview new pilots for the program had no clear idea of what the mission involved.

The secret remained closely guarded until recently. A large number of the documents and oral histories relating to the activities of the Ravens during the Indochinese war remained classified until 2006. An official history of the war in which the Ravens fought, prepared by Air Force historians with Top Secret security clearances, is still partially excised. [1]

The legend has become hazy, a half-remembered war story known only to a few veterans of Vietnam. ‘The Steve Canyon Program? Yeah, I remember. The Ravens - a weird bunch of guys who lived and fought out there in the jungle in the Other Theater somewhere. Hell, what was the name of the country?’