The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (30 page)

The Neutralists reached a horseshoe-shaped ridge and dug in. They held the center of the U of the shoe, while the North Vietnamese advanced along both prongs, using a force of battalion strength. It was all the U.S. Army advisers could do to keep their men in position, but they adamantly refused to advance. It was hoped that a large U.S. air attack might dislodge the enemy and encourage the Neutralists to move in on them.

Polifka put in the first sorties, and then waited for the troops to advance. They sat tight. He flew back to Muong Soui and talked to the commander. ‘I am going to put in a lot of air in the next hour. When I give you the word, your people had better charge. We can’t take ground for you.’ He flew back to the ridge and directed strike upon strike of fighter-bombers, and before an hour and a half was over thirty-eight tons of bombs had been dropped on the enemy. The prongs of the ridge along which they had been advancing were denuded of vegetation, and a great many North Vietnamese had been killed. However, a good number survived by retreating into tunnels and foxholes.

The Neutralists continued to sit tight. Polifka ranted over the radio that the infantry now had to move to clear the enemy from the ridge - repeatedly stressing that air could not take ground - but still the troops did not move. Disgusted, Polifka returned to Muong Soui, where he told the commander that all of his U.S. Air Force support was cut off.

The commander resorted to imploring Vang Pao to send in his Meo T-28s or all would be lost. The town of Muong Soui was the gateway from the Plain of Jars to the major road connecting the royal capital of Luang Prabang with Vientiane. Its fall would imperil Long Tieng.

Gen. Vang Pao directed Lee Lue to lead the eight T-28s at his disposal in full support of the Neutralists. During the next five days they flew continuous bombing missions against the enemy. At the end of this infernal bombardment, after the smoke had blown away and the surviving troops emerged from their foxholes, the Neutralists retreated.

In the meantime Polifka had been flying farther north to help relieve Meo guerrilla units cut off by the enemy in positions close to the Pathet Lao HQ of Sam Neua. He flew twenty feet off the ground for thirty minutes, directing F-4s onto an enemy company by rocking the wings of his plane in an exaggerated manner. His work saved one squad of Meo and a large number of undefended civilians, but at the end of it Polifka was completely out of gas.
[133]
Unable to reach Alternate, he decided to make a detour down to Muong Soui. The place was eerie. There was no one on the airfield, and the town itself seemed unnaturally quiet. Polifka tipped over numerous empty drums, unscrewed their tops, and managed to milk a couple of gallons into an oil can, the bare minimum needed to get him back to Long Tieng.

Back at Alternate he radioed Vientiane asking why no gas was available at Muong Soui. The air attaché’s office replied that as the town was in immediate danger of being overrun by the enemy, gasoline shipments had been cut off three days earlier, once Lee Lue and his pilots had completed, their bombing campaign. No one had thought to notify the Ravens.

Sporadic fighting continued around Muong Soui, but it was not until ten days later that the North Vietnamese launched a major offensive. Their orders were the same as those issued in the case of Na Khang - the town had to be taken at any cost.

On paper, the Neutralists were in good shape. Intelligence reports indicated they outnumbered the North Vietnamese three to one. There were four thousand infantry defending the town, strengthened by a three-hundred-man Thai artillery battalion. Unlimited air would become available to stave off a full-scale attack. By all classical military standards, the enemy needed a reverse ratio to succeed.

At dawn on June 24, the North Vietnamese launched a tank-led attack. It was the first time they had used their Soviet PT-76 tanks as offensive weapons, rather than as mobile artillery pieces. Air strikes directed by Ravens destroyed three and damaged more, but failed to stop them. The enemy pressed on and captured three 155mm and five 105mm guns, and parts of the nearby dirt strip, Lima Site 108.

At the same time the enemy moved on Muong Soui itself and tightened the noose around each of the far-flung Meo hilltop positions. The only lifeline left to the friendlies was from the sky, and Air America planes droned through curtains of cloud and rain to drop rice, ammunition, and the occasional pig. Mike Cavanaugh battled through the weather to keep the enemy pinned down and prevent them from launching direct frontal attacks on the positions.

‘How’s it going today?’ he would ask cheerfully over the radio as he flew over some besieged hilltop.

‘Not so good,’ a Meo would reply mournfully.

‘How about some TAC air?’

‘Please.’

Scar, in the backseat, talked endlessly on the radio to all the forward air guides operating from different mountaintop positions, trying to assess who needed air support most. The enemy were everywhere. ‘We have en-em-ee to the south, en-em-ee to the north,’ Scar reported. ‘We have en-em-ee to the east, en-em-ee to the west. Man-ee, man-ee en-em-ee.’

‘Shit, can’t you be a little more specific?’ Cavanaugh asked. ‘Where’s the best place to put some bombs?’

‘Anywhere.’

The entire Meo resistance was in danger of collapse, and Cavanaugh worked as hard as possible to help the troops hold on. It was often difficult to convey the urgency of the situation to U.S. fighter pilots fresh out of comfortable quarters in Thailand or South Vietnam. For them the
real
war was in North Vietnam, and they had a tendency to see Laos as little more than a place to dump bombs when a mission could not make it through.

Cavanaugh always worked hard to sell his small war to the pilots who came on station. The moment he heard the distinctive heavy breathing over the radio - the sound made by jet pilots inhaling oxygen through their face masks - he began his rapid patter, sounding more like a tobacco auctioneer from the deep south than a forward air controller.

‘Gentlemen, I want you to be as interested in this war as I am. I have a terrific target for you today. I know it’s not North Vietnam and it is not Hanoi, but we have an exciting war going on down here. You don’t read about it in
Stars and Stripes
, but it’s one hell of a war. Some of my troops are in trouble - enemy in the open ... Here we go, boys -
my people need your bombs
!’

On the day after the fail of Muong Soui, Cavanaugh had worked ten flights of fighters on a target close to the border of North Vietnam. Halfway through directing the last flight, Cricket came on the radio. ‘Raven 48, can you take some more fighters?’

‘Negative that. I only have enough fuel to get home.’

‘Get home?’ There was a pause. ‘Raven 48 - we got word that Long Tieng is socked in.’

‘You’ve got to be shitting me!’

Cricket had been working Cavanaugh nonstop because he was the only Raven in the area, and had failed to calculate that he was weathered out of his home base. He was left over enemy territory with half an hour of gas and nowhere to go. Cavanaugh forgot about the enemy and directed his venom at the crew of the orbiting command center. He turned the O-1 around and immediately headed back in the direction of the Plain of Jars. Long Tieng was his only chance. ‘I
will
get in,’ he told Moonface, his terrified Backseater. ‘The Big Weatherman is going to let me make it.’

Cricket gave him details of the dismal weather front. There were buildups of cloud from ground level to a height of forty thousand feet with no sign of lifting. Before Cavanaugh reached the front he could see the weather, and the plane began to be rocked by squalls of rain and high winds, while bolts of lightning assured worse thunderstorms ahead. The lightning lit up a solid black wall stretching across the horizon from east to west and rising from the ground into a limitless sky.

Cavanaugh flew directly into the storm, attempting to penetrate it with the feeble power of the Bird Dog, but his plane was batted about by its great force and thrown back. It was impossible to fly under the weather or to climb over or around it. The only alternative, the airstrip at Luang Frabang, was more than an hour away and there was not enough gas for the journey. He was left with the unappealing options of crash-landing on the Plain of Jars, now fully controlled by the enemy, or attempting a landing at Muong Soui, where they held the southern end of the strip.

He called Cricket, asking for a search-and-rescue operation to be launched. ‘I’m going down. Probably the PDJ. And if I live through this I’m going to get every one of you bastards on that 130 and break your coffee cups - and after that I’ll murder every goddam one of you.
If
I live. But before you go, I’d like some SAR,
please
.’

Jerry Hare, another Raven beaten back by the weather and heading for Luang Prabang, came up on the radio and asked if he could help. ‘Jerry, I am hurting,’ Cavanaugh said. ‘I’m out of gas and going to try making it into Muong Soui.’

‘They have some gas hidden there,’ Jerry Hare said. ‘Down on the east side of the runway.’

It was some small comfort, although Cavanaugh still had to face the North Vietnamese sitting on the south end of the runway with their guns in place. It was getting dark and Cricket had been replaced by Alley Cat, the nighttime airborne command post. Cavanaugh called them on a hunch. ‘I want Zorro 50,’ he said.

If there was one pilot Cavanaugh had faith in to get him out of a hole it was Dale Brink, who flew a Skyraider out of Nakhon Phanom under the call sign Zorro 50. Alley Cat said they would see what they could do, and passed on the information that the Army attache had confirmed that there were two fifty-five-gallon drums of gasoline in a bunker close to the strip. By the time Dale Brink came on station, accompanied by another A-1 flown by Rich Rose, Cavanaugh was ready to attempt a landing.

He lined the O-1 up for an approach, with both Skyraiders directly behind him, but the moment he neared the strip the North Vietnamese began firing. The empty left gas tank of the plane was riddled with bullet holes, but through sheer luck neither burned nor exploded. Cavanaugh immediately pulled off, while the A-1s strafed the field and took out a gun site on a small hill on the northwest side of the runway with five-hundred-pound bombs.

As the Skyraiders continued to bomb the buildings where the gunfire was coming from, Cavanaugh brought the plane in and shut down right in the middle of the airfield. He had entered into a state he had experienced several times before when he became possessed by a complete calm that he described to himself as a ‘combat daze.’ It was not a condition shared by Moonface, who was sobbing in terror and had defecated in his pants.

Rain was lashing diagonally across the dark airfield as Cavanaugh ran to the side of the runway where he had spotted drums of gasoline. He moved from one to another, tipping them over wildly, but they were all empty. Off to the side was a yellow handpump the Ravens used for refueling. Moonface dragged it back to the plane, while Cavanaugh moved farther afield in search of the hidden cache of gas.

He found it at the far end of the runway, almost a thousand feet away in a bunker behind a rickety door, the most precious and beautiful barrels of gas he had ever seen. In a feat of strength which he could never have undertaken in normal circumstances, he rolled one of the barrels up the grass incline onto the runway and back to the plane. The enemy were so close that troops on the south side of the airfield were shooting across the left wingtip of the O-1. He could hear the clatter from fragments of exploding mortar shells as they rained onto the empty gas barrels at the side of the runway. Only the constant strafing runs of the Skyraiders kept the enemy pinned down.

‘No, no, no, we die,’ Moonface chanted miserably.

‘We are not going to die. We can make it.’

They now had gas and a pump, but no means of opening the drum. Cavanaugh took out his .38 and began hammering the top of the drum with the butt of the gun. Inspired, he broke off the wooden pieces of the gun butt and discovered that the stripped metal handle exactly fitted the wedged cap of the barrel. He unscrewed the top, climbed onto the left wing of the plane, and put the nozzle of the gas hose into the tank, while Moonface manned the pump. Bullets whistled about them as Cavanaugh yelled at the Meo to work faster. He pumped for a minute at such a rate Cavanaugh could not see his arms move. ‘Enough?’

‘No, not enough - more.
Pump, pump
.’

The storm had now moved directly over them. It was so dark, and the rain was falling so heavily, it was almost impossible to see. When he figured there was enough gas in the tank to get them out, Cavanaugh jumped down from the wing scarcely able to believe they were still alive. He climbed back into the cockpit to find that a bullet had hit the battery, and acid was bubbling up from it and pouring down the side. ‘I had no electrics whatsoever. The most deadest feeling I ever had was sitting in that airplane. It looked quiet, it sounded quiet. As I hit the start switch, I thought, “Nothing is going to happen.”’

The A-1s had never given up on him, despite having lost all contact, and continued to bomb and strafe the southern end of the airfield. A fragmentation bomb exploded, momentarily lighting up the runway, and Cavanaugh tried to fix in his mind the point in the darkness where he needed to aim the plane on takeoff. He cranked the start switch, sick with dread, but it fired immediately. He had an engine at least - but no windows, no radio, and no lights.