The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (24 page)

And by the end of 1968 there was another piece of the Big Picture which could not elude them - both sides had upped their stake in the conflict, and the Meo were taking a terrible beating.

6. Air Power

The Meo had failed to take the Rock, the sacred mountain of Phou Pha Thi, and now suffered one defeat after another. Everywhere they were pushed back. Gen. Vang Pao had lost face before his people. He felt the humiliation so strongly and his depression was so profound that his CIA advisers began to fear a complete psychological disintegration. The general wandered around Long Tieng blank-eyed and without purpose, unwashed and dressed like a tramp, a man at the very end of his tether.

At the beginning of 1969 the North Vietnamese fielded the entire 316th Division, previously deployed only in small detachments on a rotating basis.
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Intelligence estimates reckoned that the combined North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao forces inside the country had increased from 51,000 to more than 110,000 - the North Vietnamese contingent comprising an estimated 34,000 combat troops, 6,000 advisers, 18,000 support troops, and more than 13,000 engineers involved in road building.
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The enemy pushed into the foothills of the Plain of Jars, bringing armored vehicles and 175mm artillery pieces capable of shelling Long Tieng itself with their range of thirty kilometers. The enemy’s scorched-earth policy denied the Meo and the Americans the invaluable asset of behind-the-lines intelligence, and there were indications that this time the North Vietnamese intended to make the most of their advantage and remain in the country during the monsoon season. The precarious seasonal swap of terrain and political control, which had been observed by both sides since the signing of the Accords seven years earlier, with neither combatant wishing to upset the balance for fear of inviting large-scale, superpower military intervention, was abandoned.
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The gloves were off and a vicious no-quarter war was about to begin. And the battlefield was to be the Plain of Jars.

The Plaine de Jarres, as the French named it, is a beautiful plateau forty miles wide, lying at an altitude of more than three thousand feet, covered with grass and small hills, and spread over an area of approximately five hundred square miles. The Americans translated the French name into the Plain of Jars, which military men shortened to the PDJ, or just the J. The great stone jars which gave the plain its name are thought to be the funeral urns of another culture, although archaeologists cannot agree which one. They appear to be over two thousand years old, made from a gray stone found nowhere in the region, and artifacts found with the jars fail to relate them to any of the known civilizations of the area. Attempts by Air America pilots - driven by some atavistic vandal urge - to lift out one of the jars, using their most powerful helicopter, proved completely unsuccessful. (There was talk of taking a jar - weighing four thousand to six thousand pounds - to CIA HQ, Langley, Virginia, to act as the Tomb of the Unknown Case Officer, but the idea was rejected.) And extraordinarily, despite the hail of bombs unleashed upon the plain, no jar was ever damaged throughout the war.

The Meo were comparative newcomers to the area, but the plain was the geographic center of the small, once autonomous kingdom of Xieng Khouang. Before the war the temperate climate of the plain supported tea plantations and cattle grazing, and every year fairs took place at the provincial capital, where the Meo sold their mountain crop of opium to European smugglers. Walking on the plain could be magical: sunflowers grew to a height of eight feet, above which fluttered great clouds of butterflies of every variety.

Since the war, the plain had become of vital strategic importance to both sides. Several airfields were situated upon it, and a number of roads crossed it: most important, Route 7, running in an east-west direction and connecting the Vietnamese border to Route 13, the north-south road linking Luang Prabang to Vientiane. On the eastern edge of the plain, at the village of Ban Ban, it meets Route 6, which winds north to the Pathet Lao capital of Sam Neua and then continues into Vietnam. The Meo fought for the plain because it was the center of their ancient kingdom; the Laotian government fought to control the plain because any invading army from the north was bound to come across it; the Vietnamese wanted it both as a passage to the south and to protect the back door to their own country. Anyone seeking military control of northern Laos needed first to control the Plain of Jars, and as a result it became a battleground.

Only the Ravens, operating out of Long Tieng to the southwest of the plain, and the air power they could bring to bear stood in the way of the enemy. Individual, haphazard, and uncoordinated strikes were the extent of government resistance at this time, but the war in the north was such that the destruction of a half-dozen trucks or two or three tanks could tip the balance. In the beginning of January, Dick Shubert was putting in an air strike on the edge of the Plain of Jars when a chance combination of sun and shadow clearly outlined a freshly dug ditch. It gave away the position of an interconnected series of ditches and trenches which the North Vietnamese had laboriously worked upon until they reached the edge of the plain itself. The network had been dug to house the big ammo for the 175mm cannons and 120mm rockets, also being brought forward on tracked vehicles. Shubert directed a bombing strike onto the ditch, and the secondary explosions were massive. The stored ammo cooked off for a day and a night at the rate of eighty explosions a minute. A single Raven had temporarily blunted the entire thrust of the enemy.

The destruction of the enemy’s ammunition cache on the edge of the Plain of Jars saved Long Tieng from direct attack. The enemy turned their attention to Site 36, Na Khang, which they surrounded. As the only TACAN (tactical air and navigation control system) in northeast Laos, since the loss of the Rock, it was high on the enemy’s list of priorities.

The situation became chronic in the spring of 1969 when bad weather closed the whole of Laos to U.S. air. Only Papa Fox managed to get off the ground from Long Tieng, spinning up among mountains and cloud in a maneuver akin to Russian roulette. He flew below the weather to Site 36 and landed. Sitting on the ground in his O-1, he heard the commander of a firebase screaming over the radio that the enemy were upon him.

It was a small outpost just a few miles north of Na Khang, certain to be overrun without air support. The weather was so bad that the Lao T-28s based in Vientiane were inoperable. Papa Fox loaded his O-1 with high-explosive and Willy Pete (white phosphorous) rockets, commandeered a Backseater, and flew out to the firebase. Talking to the commander through the Backseater, he told him to position his troops behind a certain line and tell them to keep their heads down. He was going to attempt to drive off the attack on his own.

Once Papa Fox had spotted the firebase he had to pull up into the low clouds in order to gain sufficient altitude to enable him to dive and fire his rockets at the enemy. It was a tricky maneuver but seemed to work. Fifteen times he returned to Site 36 to reload with rockets and gas. On each run he dropped out of the clouds, flying directly over the heads of the friendlies into a hail of ground fire as he pounded the North Vietnamese with rockets. Finally the enemy broke and pulled back, dragging their wounded with them and leaving fifteen dead in the wire surrounding the base.
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The outpost was saved for the time being, but the enemy were everywhere, and in force. Their vulnerability lay in extended supply lines. The CIA now planned a counterattack intended to cut them off, split the advance guard from the forces in the rear, and push the entire force back to the north of Site 36. Code-named Nighty-Night, the operation was to stage out of Lima Site 108, the Neutralist HQ of Muong Soui, situated to the west of the Plain of Jars. The U.S. Army had a uniformed adviser on the site working with Kong Le’s Neutralist forces - Joe Bush, a Ranger captain with the official title Assistant Military Attaché to the U.S. Embassy. The base also housed a large fixed artillery position manned by the Thai. In preparation for the attack, two large barrack-style tents were erected to house the fifty American radio operators, mechanics, and armorers who were flown in, and Air America planes began to ferry ammunition, and a large bomb dump was built up.

The plan was for the Neutralist troops to move out from Site 108 and, in a coordinated push with Vang Pao’s guerrillas in the south, advance onto the Plain of Jars and force the North Vietnamese back. Air support would be provided exclusively by Lao, Meo, and Thai pilots flying T-28 fighters from the strip at Muong Soui itself, rather than staging out of Vientiane.

The Raven assigned to the mission was Fred Platt, who had arrived in Laos the previous month, and he found the program suited him so well that sometimes he thought he had died and gone to Valhalla. As a child, he had devoured the improbable aerial adventures of a fictional World War II ace in a series of books,
Red Randall’s
One-Man War
, and while other children crawled around in the dirt with stick guns, Platt flew over them in an imaginary plane. ‘Even as a small child I realized that the Air Force were a much cleaner lot.’ At the age of seventeen he met a Texas barnstormer who flew him from Austin to Houston in an antiquated biplane with an open cockpit at ten dollars a trip. ‘I took a couple of rides with this guy and knew from then on I had to fly airplanes.’

The moment the Downtowners clapped eyes on him they sensed trouble. His cowboy boots and Texas drawl immediately earned him the nickname Cowboy, duly logged in the embassy computer. He won no friends when he used a senior army officer’s bed on his first night in Vientiane to romp with one of the local girls. An outraged embassy TWIX preceded his arrival at Long Tieng: ‘Reference Cowboy. Is not to RON [remain overnight] in Vientiane under any circumstances. If duties require his presence in Vientiane he will arrive and depart during daylight hours.’

Platt leaned naturally toward the unconventional paramilitary CIA men rather than his own Air Force hierarchy, and he adored the cloak-and-dagger aspect of the operation. After his first classified briefing from Burr Smith - Mr. Clean - he asked for poison capsules. ‘I’m not going to be taken alive, and I’d like to use my bullets to shoot at them. What do you have?’ He was given a belt buckle which concealed a knife and had a small wheel at its center which was a compass. The needle, which could be unscrewed, was smeared with a quick-acting shellfish toxin which the CIA had spent three million dollars to develop.

It was also as well that Platt had arrived in Laos with three new airplanes, for he would need them. He exhibited an uncanny propensity for crashing. Between engine failures, emergency landings, and being shot down, he would crash a total of eleven airplanes - a dubious achievement that is an uncontested Raven record, and possibly an Indochina one.

The planes he did not crash were brought back with a large number of bullet holes and sometimes had great gashes gouged out of the fuselage by exploding flak. It seemed to the mechanics, as they went through reel after reel of typhoon tape, that he came back from every mission with an excessive number of bullet holes. After a month they started calling him Magnet Ass, and the name replaced Cowboy in the embassy computer.

On Fred Platt’s very first crash he was accompanied by Joe Bush, the U.S. Army attaché. Neither U.S. air nor the Lao T-28s were able to fly because of bad weather, so the two men had gone out onto the Plain of Jars in an O-1, hauling along their own homemade ordnance - fifty-pound 155mm howitzer shells wrapped around with primer cord and fuse igniters, which Bush dropped by hand as an airburst weapon. The crash was unspectacular by Platt’s standards; he brought the plane down in friendly territory and the two men were able to walk to safety without incident.

It occurred to both of them, however, that with Operation Nighty-Night about to be launched, and the necessity of Platt flying in and out of the base in battle, a spare plane might be needed. The Thai artillery battalion owned an O-1 Bird Dog, ostensibly for use as a FAC plane, but it was never used and the commander was happy to hand it over to Platt for one hundred dollars.

A word with Stan Wilson the following day resulted in a Filipino Air America mechanic flying up from Vientiane to overhaul the plane, on the understanding he would be flown from the base at the end of the day. ‘I don’t stay up-country at night,’ the mechanic insisted.

Platt promised to fly him back if he would stay, and waited in Joe Bush’s house for the man to finish his work. Bush cooked steaks for the assembled group: a black American sergeant, the CIA ‘Customer’ - as Air America referred to its employer - who lived in the house next door, and a Royal Lao Army colonel. It was dark by the time the man knocked on the door and was ready to be flown back to Long Tieng.