The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (31 page)

He let the throttle out fully, released the brakes, and kept imagining the spot in the darkness that the bomb had illuminated as the end of the runway. He waited until the engine sounded right for takeoff and roared into the dark, lifting into the storm. Once airborne he headed in the direction of Luang Prabang. The weather that had almost killed him now shielded him from enemy fire.

Cavanaugh had never been to Luang Prabang before and had difficulty finding it. Even when he was over the town he had no idea what the airfield would be like, and there were no landing lights to guide him. Don Moody, the commander of the air operations center at Luang Prabang, had already shepherded in two Ravens unable to make it back to Long Tieng, and when he heard the drone of an O-1 overhead he drove out to the end of the runway in a jeep and parked with the lights on. Cavanaugh came staggering in over the dim light thrown by the twin beams.

It was a rough landing. Having escaped an overrun enemy airfield, he now nearly smacked up his aircraft on a cement strip in friendly territory. When the plane came to a stop he sat Slumped in the cockpit, trembling from the cold in soaked clothes, and utterly exhausted.

The Ravens, who had been drinking beer for several hours, drove out to the plane to collect him. They lifted him out of the cockpit and helped him into the jeep. One of them remarked on the ripe smell emanating from Moonface. ‘Had a little accident,’ Cavanaugh explained. ‘We both had a little accident. I’d be dead if I’d been alone.’
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Back at the hootch, Cavanaugh took a drink and fell into a deep sleep. The Skyraider pilots had seen him land but had missed his takeoff, and had subsequently listed him as MIA. Nobody at Luang Prabang was in the mood to make a radio report, so he kept the status overnight. The next morning the message was sent out: ‘Raven 48 at our location.’

The reply was immediate: Raven 48 should get airborne ASAP and get back in the war. He was needed at Alternate.

The initial thrust of the North Vietnamese attack had exhausted itself. The fighting had died down and remained sporadic for three days (the period in which Cavanaugh had landed at Muong Soui). But the Neutralists were in complete disarray. The tanks had terrified them and they had failed to repulse the weaker force. The Thai artillerymen, aware that their infantry support could not be relied upon, also began to abandon their positions.

The Americans began to evacuate the dispirited and routed troops by air. A helicopter task force twenty-three strong - made up of thirteen Air Force and ten Air America craft - was assembled at Long Tieng, and on the afternoon of June 27 the evacuation began. It took only two hours to lift out the 350 men of the Thai unit, after which the evacuation of the remaining Neutralist troops, still huddled in a defensive position on the northern end of the runway, got underway. Time after time the helicopter crews flew back to enemy-controlled territory, at minimum speed and altitudes in terrible weather, and staggered out overloaded with their human cargo. One of the Air Force CH-3s was shot down, but the crew and passengers held off the enemy with rifles and grenades until an Air America H-34 flew in to rescue them. The entire Neutralist force, including two hundred families who lived in the town, was carried back to Long Tieng.
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The downed chopper was later destroyed by an air strike, and Ravens directed numerous sorties against abandoned supplies, guns, trucks, and ammo (the final tally included nineteen 105mm artillery pieces and eighty-four trucks). ‘We got great BDA’ - bomb damage assessment - ‘out of Muong Soui,’ Karl Folifka said. ‘Unfortunately it was all-our own stuff.’

The loss of Muong Soui was a blow felt by the Royal Lao Government in Vientiane. An outnumbered, outgunned enemy with no air power of its own, fighting in the worst conditions, had overrun the strategic Plain of Jars. Once again morale plunged. Only Gen. Vang Pao and his men stood between the enemy and the capital itself.

Keeping faith with air power, the general again took the offensive on July 1. The enemy at Muong Soui were pounded by U.S. air, directed by Ravens, and the Meo T-28s. Lee Lue excelled even his extravagant standards, flying as many as ten combat missions a day.

Crouched in their foxholes, the enemy offered little resistance until Meo guerrilla units and a thousand Neutralist troops reached the town itself. Appalling weather hampered air operations, so that on July 8 only six sorties could be flown. Neutralist troops failed to move as planned, and the government advance slowed to a standstill.

Lee Lue continued to fly support. The enemy were so close that a mission never lasted more than thirty minutes, and it sometimes seemed as if he were always on the ramp at Long Tieng loading bombs. At the end of a ten-hour day Lee Lue would land in his fighter, taxi to the ramp, and shut down. A small group of Meo always gathered around the plane, while the fighter pilot sat slumped in the cockpit, paralyzed with fatigue. One of the Meo would climb up on the wing and begin to massage his neck and shoulders. Others would gently lift him out of the cockpit and help him down to the ground, where they walked him around to revive the circulation in his cramped legs.

The Americans who witnessed this ceremony each evening - conducted with all the dignity of a religious ritual - found it an intensely moving sight. The tenderness and care with which Lee Lue was treated and the enormous respect he received from the entire Meo nation could not fail to impress. He had become a symbol of Meo resistance, a mythical figure of untold value and power, and one of the central props of his people’s morale.

The legend of Lee Lue had spread throughout the American fighter squadrons of Southeast Asia, and while his political significance was not always understood, the stories of his reckless heroics went the rounds. Here was this little guy from some mountain village, who had been a teacher before the CIA taught him to fly at the advanced age of twenty-seven, flying the hell out of a junk propeller airplane and receiving the unqualified admiration of American fighter pilots in the latest jets. An American who had flown one hundred missions over North Vietnam earned the awe of the O club and wore a special patch on his flight suit. Lee Lue was flying an average of 120 combat missions a month - month after month after month without respite. It was estimated he had flown more than five thousand combat missions, all of them over enemy territory, and a great many of them only a few feet off the ground.

As one group of Ravens was replaced by another, they all learned to love Lee Lue and marveled at his absolute fearlessness and total disregard of the law of averages. He was living proof of the credo secretly held by every Raven - it always happened to the other guy.

Older heads worried about Lee Lue. His symbolic value, over and beyond his prowess as a fighter pilot, carried such importance that the thought of his death sent a chill through the policymakers at the embassy. The CIA suggested to Vang Pao that he use his single greatest war asset more sparingly.

The wing commander of the Air Commandos, Col. Heinie Aderholt, suggested taking Lee Lue out of the combat zone altogether. He wanted him assigned to Waterpump, at Udorn, where he could teach and inspire new Meo pilots. There was a move in Vientiane by the prime minister’s son, Prince Mangkhra Phouma, to have the pilot declared a national hero. But Gen. Vang Pao said he could not spare him, and besides, Lee Lue did not want to go.

Vang Pao shared the pilot’s innate fatalism and sense of invincibility, and pushed him even harder, committing him to more and more missions in support of his men. Even when Lee Lue was physically sick - and the Meo were wracked by malaria, hepatitis, amoebic dysentery, and a variety of exotic tropical illnesses on a more or less permanent basis - he always managed to stagger to his plane.

‘They’ll never get me,’ he said, grinning broadly. ‘Never get me. I’m too good.’

The Ravens laughed and tended to agree, although it took extreme insensitivity for a fellow pilot not to register the toll that fatigue was taking. But maybe, the Ravens argued, there really were guys who were just beyond the reach of death’s envelope - perhaps every once in a while Buddha smiled upon a fighter pilot and kept a protective eye on him.

And then it happened. ‘The blackest of black days yesterday,’ Burr Smith wrote to his wife, Mary Jane, on July 12. ‘Lee Lue, the last and the best of the Meo pilots - and incidentally the bravest human being I have ever known - was shot down and killed before my eyes. VP was with me and he broke down immediately in sadness and despair. Lee Lue was his cousin, but in the Meo custom was also his son (and my brother). The plane passed over our heads, on fire, and crashed a few hundred yards from our position.’ Only two days earlier Burr Smith had chided the pilot for flying too low - on one pass he was so close to the ground that when he dropped his bombs they failed to explode. On the day he was shot down he had been bombing and strafing the enemy at Muong Soui, flying low as usual, and was pulling off a run in his habitual slow and casual manner when a 12.7mm antiaircraft gun opened up and raked the plane down one side. Burr Smith, who had been in contact with him over the radio, screamed that his plane was on fire and Lee Lue should bail out, but there was no answer.

The plane flew a few hundred yards and crashed into the ground in a ball of fire. As it exploded the Vietnamese gunners fired red victory rockets from their positions, celebrating the death of one of their most feared enemies. There was never any mistaking Lee Lue’s style of flying, and the gunners always worked extra hard to hit him.

Gen. Vang Pao headed immediately for his waiting helicopter, and together with Burr Smith flew back to Long Tieng, sobbing openly as he chanted the Meo song of the dead. ‘It was heartbreaking,’ Burr Smith wrote. ‘We were all crying like babies - rather odd when you think of the hundreds of Meos killed here every year. Now he is gone forever, who was such a good and faithful comrade.

‘Of course he was doomed from the first day he stepped into an airplane - he was extravagantly courageous, and took terrible chances each time he flew against the enemy. Times without number he flew close support missions, alone, when no other aircraft would face the weather - time after time he was the deciding factor in battles with the enemy.

‘The other members of his flight are in near shock - each blaming the other side for not covering his attack. But in reality nobody could cover Lee Lue - he was a loner from the day he was born, and never waited for his wingman to be in position when he had a target. He was not afraid - 1 feel certain he died with a smile on his face. He knew he would get it eventually, and he died as he lived - courageously. I feel terrible - his death has brought home most forcefully the great sadness of this war.

‘Tomorrow I will write of different subjects, but today I can think of nothing but my friend and comrade-in-arms who is gone forever. I mourn with all the Meo - and especially my heart goes out to his family and to VP - both of whom have lost their greatest strength.’

A three-day funeral began in honor of the memory of one of the Meo’s most valued sons. The grief of the Meo nation was awful to see, and all of the Americans who lived and fought with them were deeply moved. Battle-hardened CIA paramilitary men wept openly. The Ravens mourned the dead pilot more than if he had been one of their own. Gen. Vang Pao’s face became purple and bloated with grief. No one flew combat, and the Meo were too stunned to fight.

Burr Smith took a helicopter out to the crash site the morning after Lee Lue’s death in search of his remains. The plane had exploded and been scattered over a large area, and the pilot’s body with it. Only a few fragments of his helmet and several pieces of bloody cloth could be found. These were carried back to Long Tieng like holy relics, where they were placed in an elaborate coffin.

The enemy, as exhilarated by the death as the Meo were crushed, launched a new offensive against the troops surrounding Muong Soui. Taking advantage of the lull in air support and the total dejection of the government forces, they easily overran them, inflicting heavy casualties.

The burial of Lee Lue took on the proportions of a state funeral. The ceremony was a mixture of the Buddhist and animist religions to which the Meo subscribed, although it was the Meo’s custom to bury their dead. Every important general officer in the Royal Lao Army attended, and for many of them it was their first visit to the fabled secret city of Long Tieng. Their presence was something of a diplomatic coup for air attaché Col. Bob Tyrrell, who had worked hard to ensure the attendance of the important Lao military figures. Their presence acknowledged a public acceptance of Gen. Vang Pao and the Meo, and showed a respect long overdue.

The general presented a somber, dignified presence at the funeral. A large crowd marched to the graveyard to pay homage to Lee Lue. A photograph of the pilot, hung about with colorful paper streamers and flowers from his family, was laid upon a pillow resting on the ornate carved coffin. The Meo folded their hands in prayer, holding three sticks of burning incense between their fingers, then marched on their knees to the coffin, where they placed their offering in a vase and prayed. One after another, those closest to Lee Lue paid their respects, and then the Ravens followed suit. ‘I considered him my brother,’ Mike Cavanaugh said. ‘Lee Lue was one of only two people I have shed tears over in my Air Force career,’ Karl Polifka said.

Colonel Tyrrell stepped forward and pinned the American DFC on the pillow, and read aloud a simple speech. The Lao generals, bemedaled like the heroes of a Chinese opera, also made appropriate speeches about a shared loss and solidarity in the face of a common enemy. It was yet another irony of the war that it took the death of one of the Meo’s greatest warriors to bring the armchair generals of the Royal Lao Army to the front.