The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (27 page)

The cloud ceiling was down to fifteen hundred feet, while the murky brown haze of the burning season rose to ten thousand feet above it - conditions which made it almost impossible to put in fighters accurately. Service called Cricket for air and was given Thuds (F-105s) out of Tahkli. He told the pilots the weather was so bad that all he could do was give them a bearing off the TACAN at Alternate, after which they would have to let down blind on time and distance. ‘You’ll break out of cloud at fifteen hundred feet and the target is going to be right in front of you - and the moment you break out of the clouds they are going to be shooting at you. I can guarantee that. And you can’t use bombs, only your cannon. But there won’t be any mountains in the way.’

It takes great faith and extraordinary courage for a pilot to fly time and distance in thick haze, drop out of the clouds to below fifteen hundred feet onto a target of antiaircraft guns already primed and firing. In addition, the Thuds could only use their guns to destroy the target.

They rolled out of the clouds firing their 20mm cannons, and a furious duel followed. There were two 37mm positions, at least two ZPU 14.5mm, and numerous 12.7mm, and the gunners on the ground never quit. As one crew was killed, another manned the guns, pushing the dead aside until some of the positions were piled around with the corpses of three successive teams. But the Thuds came in again and again in a series of blazing, strafing passes and finally silenced the positions. In an active and long career Don Service had never seen anything like it.
[127]

Service himself flew through clouds of flak for forty minutes, as he directed numerous strikes onto the guns. He was relieved by other Ravens who worked fighters for a further three hours, until Vang Pao and his troops could be evacuated.

An air campaign against Xieng Khouang followed. The recent death of a colleague sharpened the Ravens’ desire to carry the war finally to the enemy. ‘We were really mad,’ Don Service said. ‘We completely annihilated the area around Xieng Khouang.’ In the town some fifteen hundred buildings were flattened, and as many as two thousand more all over the Plain of Jars. The towns of Lhat Houang, Ban Ban, and Khang Khay (the town itself was some distance from the Chinese mission of the same name) were wiped from the map. By the end of the year there would not be a building left standing.

Gen. Vang Pao’s troops stormed into the smoking ruins of Xieng Khouang and seized a vast cache of enemy arms and supplies. Several of the surviving antiaircraft guns were taken back to Long Tieng, where they were cleaned up and proudly displayed as war trophies outside the general’s house.

Don Service flew into the nearby strip in an Air America Caribou. He was accompanied by the flight surgeon, who walked over to a cave entrance and discovered an entire hospital complex hidden inside. The sophistication of its medical equipment, including X-ray, far exceeded his expectations. The capture of the hospital, with its equipment and drug supplies, was to prove an even more significant haul than the tons of ammunition and military hardware. Unknown to the friendlies, they had destroyed the enemy’s medical base.
[128]

Gen. Vang Pao had now experienced something of the awesome effects of air power. The enemy had been mercilessly punished and blasted with bombs and pushed from the Plain of Jars. He began to believe that with this new tool at his disposal he had a chance of winning at last. What he did not fully understand was that although the enemy could be pushed back with bombs temporarily, it took men to go in and hold the ground. Unless the Meo could successfully defend the ground they took, the enemy would always return. Air power, unsupported by adequate battlefield forces, was the military equivalent of means without end.

Even the Ravens began to question the general’s bottomless belief in air power. ‘The
audacity
of Vang Pao at this time,’ Service said. ‘He expected air support in all weather and expected us to come in and annihilate anything that was in his way if he ran into resistance. It was ridiculous. Every day I would go back to where I had just dropped bombs and there would be somebody there. It was not the way to do it.’

The enormous effort began to seem futile, as if the Meo were chained to a treadmill of war they could never leave. They had died in their thousands, and the Ravens had died beside them, not in an attempt to win a war, but as a consequence of faulty diplomatic agreements. The new levels of intensity of the North Vietnamese attacks and the massive escalation of the U.S. bombing in response were making even such committed people as the Ravens question the fundamental policy behind it ail.

‘It was hand to mouth, day to day,’ Service said. ‘Winning the war was a preposterous concept. We were just holding the line. Which was ridiculous to begin with - you don’t win a football game by saying we are not going to let them get over the fifty-yard line. You have to score to win. It began to puzzle me. What are we here for?’

Pop Buell had witnessed the effects of the bombing with similar misgivings. It had created a new flood of refugees who would have to be cared for, and he thought his friend the general had become captive to a strategy which was an illusion. ‘We say we help them fight their wars,’ he told a friend at this time, ‘we use them only to fight our wars - wars we start.’
[129]

* * *

The new level of bombing and the devastation left in its wake led to some serious soulsearching among certain of the Ravens. They were warriors, in daily combat, but did not accept the war blindly. Most of them enjoyed the clandestine nature of the program - it appealed to their romantic natures - but there were also those who felt instinctively it was somehow un-American.

The Raven whose conscience was most disturbed by the nature of the war was Gerry Greven, a Californian, who had grown up in a liberal environment in Palo Alto. Handsome, unconventional, bright and witty, he flew into battle shirtless, with wide bell-bottom jeans flapping around his legs. As a FAC he was a tiger, graded by his peers as a first-rate and courageous pilot, but his conscience was burdened.

‘I grew up naive and idealistic in suburbia - the war was a dose of reality. Suddenly you were given the ability to pick and choose what to destroy - dictate what village got bit and who died. VP’s view was, “If it’s not us - destroy it!” It was an awesome responsibility, and one which in the end came down to each of us individually.’

Greven was disturbed by two things - the brutality of the war in Vietnam, and the secrecy of the war in Laos. He agonized over both on a regular basis, putting himself through mental torture almost every evening. As a history major, he felt the United States was involved in the war in Vietnam for the wrong reasons, and possibly even on the wrong side. As a FAC in Vietnam he had carried out the recon on the first secret B-52 raid on Cambodia, and when he complained that the bombers had struck across the border he was told his maps were wrong. He had also been ordered to drop napalm on fields flanked by huts, outside of a provincial capital in Vietnam. He had refused and been threatened with court-martial.

Another thing that preyed on Greven’s mind was the routine targeting of Vietcong hospitals. Army intelligence had provided the coordinates of suspected Vietcong hospitals three or possibly six times, to Greven’s knowledge. The way the NVA operated meant that there was no separation between corps HQ, ammo dumps, and hospitals. The hospitals were camouflaged and were not marked with red crosses or flags. One of the certain ways for a FAC to spot an enemy concentration was to watch where troops dragged their wounded. Greven rejected this rationale, and thought it was simply wrong.
[130]

‘I’ve hit a few,’ Mike Byers admitted in conversation with Greven. ‘I don’t see a hell of a lot of difference between a wounded soldier and a healthy one.’

‘It’s against the Geneva Convention,’ Greven said.

‘No shit. So’s skinning people, and you know the enemy have done that,’ Byers argued. ‘The Geneva Convention specifically prohibits shotguns, and nobody observes that. There is no humane way to conduct a war. If you’re going to have a war - which is a pretty stupid way to resolve your problems - kill them as quick as you can and get it done. But yeah, I blew up a hospital. So you’re a wounded Communist - now you’re a dead Communist. What do you mean it’s wrong? The whole goddam thing is wrong.’

‘America’s going to have a guilty conscience about the Vietnam war for a long time,’ Greven said.

One thing everybody agreed upon was fighting for the Meo. ‘In Vietnam I would rather have been on the side of Ho Chi Minh whipping up on LBJ,’ Mike Byers said. ‘Morally it would have felt better. But I have no doubts I’m on the right side here in Laos.

‘This is more like a real war,’ Greven agreed, ‘not the guerrilla activity of Vietnam. Also the people here are so wonder-fully warm, so nice and innocent - I’ve got a real affection for them I never had for the Vietnamese.’

There was more agreement on the secret nature of the war. Greven felt that the American people should be told the truth. ‘The bad guys know about it. How come the American people don’t?’

‘I agree one hundred percent,’ Byers said. ‘I could sell this war to the American people - we’re on the right side. Our politicians are so stupid they won’t even tell people the truth. The truth is we’re doing good for folks. Here we are, a small group of American volunteers fighting side by side with a bunch of oppressed hill tribesmen who have the gall to take on the might of the North Vietnamese Army. I’d have every grandma in the world sending me her life savings to buy ammo.

‘We’re on the right side - let’s blow the buggers up, but don’t let’s lie to the people who are really in charge of the decisions - the people of the United States. Let’s tell them what we are doing. And if they don’t want us to do it, then we’ll quit. But let’s not lie.’

‘If you’re going to tell the American public, then you might as well go home,’ Craig Morrison said. ‘It’s just going to turn into another Vietnam, and they’re not going to let you win the war - especially with the growth of the antiwar movement.

‘I guess it’s a question of what your duties are. I think that when you live in a country like America you owe something. And the country is not going to be right all the time - any more than we are - but you still owe something.’

But the feelings men go through in war are confusing and contradictory. Greven and Morrison returned from an afternoon mission when they had destroyed seventeen trucks between them in an hour and a half. As they flew home they could see great plumes of smoke billowing up from the burning vehicles. Both men were elated. ‘Son of a bitch, that’s the way to do it!’

‘Yeah, we’ve earned a beer.’

Greven also had no qualms in bombing any site or village which shot at him, but flying along the Ban Ban valley Greven spotted piles of rice. It was usual to burn rice or kill water buffalo in enemy territory to deny the troops the food. Crouched beside one pile was an old farmer. He did not attempt to hide, but seemed to be kneeling beside his crop challenging anyone who intended to destroy it to kill him. It was a foolhardy, almost suicidal, act of courage. Greven had the rice pile in his sights and was about to fire a high-explosive rocket into it when he saw the man. He pulled off and flew home. Somehow the image of the old farmer kneeling beside his meager crop, more than all the smoke and noise of bombing, made Greven hate war very much.

Returning from a full day’s flying to cook the evening meal was beginning to tax even Papa Fox’s reservoir of energy. The men had to prepare their own breakfast and lunch as it was, while numerous requests to the embassy for a cook had produced no results. Papa Fox decided to find one and steal him.

He flew down to the base at Nakhon Phanom in Thailand with the intention of testing the delights of the chow hall, and if it passed muster, stealing the Air Commandos’ cook. He enjoyed his meal, although there was definite room for improvement, and asked to see whoever it was who ran the canteen. Papa Fox’s presence - grubby, casual clothes, unkempt ginger beard, hair sticking out all over the place - had attracted some attention in the mess hall. Certain of the diners had noticed the 9mm sidearm he wore, and by the time the message reached the kitchen it took the form that a contract killer was in the hall with his sidearm laid out on the table, threatening to shoot the cook. S. Sgt. Manuel Espinosa came out of the kitchen with some reluctance. ‘Is everything okay?’

‘Yeah, okay,’ Papa Fox said, picking his teeth. ‘How about a little adventure?’

Papa Fox explained about the secret program up in the combat zone, and the Ravens’ need for a cook. There were not many of them, so it would not be too much work. Espinosa was intrigued. Actually, he told Papa Fox, he was bored by life in Nakhon Phanom, and he could do with a change, but he doubted whether the authorities would agree to a transfer.

‘Pack your bag,’ Papa Fox said. ‘I’m transferring you.’ In less than an hour Staff Sergeant Espinosa was in the back of an O-1 flying up to Long Tieng.

The authorities displayed some consternation over the kidnapping of the Air Commandos’ cook. The Air Force pondered its options: court-martial of Rinehart for abducting the sergeant; court-martial of the sergeant for going AWOL; court-martial of both for all of the above or a host of minor infringements in between. But common sense prevailed. The Raven program was growing, and it did need a cook. Espinosa was allowed to stay.

His role in the Raven kitchen was that of permanent sous-chef, for he did not embrace the high culinary standards of Papa Fox. (‘He didn’t know shit about cooking.’) The limit of Espy’s - as he became known - expertise seemed to be eggs, but he became more accomplished cooking alongside Papa Fox each night, and developed a way with pork chops.