The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (33 page)

It was at Hotel Lima that the Ravens got their first glimpse of their new ambassador. A chopper landed and Godley jumped out - wearing jungle boots and khaki cutoffs, sporting a three-day growth of beard, and carrying a revolver. It was the first time a senior Downtowner had ever been seen at a forward strip in the combat zone, and the word soon spread among the Ravens that the new ambassador was okay. It was a habit Godley had brought with him from the Congo, where he made a point of ‘eyeballing’ the situation for himself, convinced it was impossible to get a feel for events by sitting behind a desk and reading reports. There were risks in going to the front, but the ambassador was prepared. ‘I always carried a snub-nosed .38 in my belt -1 had no intention of being captured by the enemy.’

As About-Face continued, massive air support, delivered at a time of year when the enemy was usually invulnerable and combined with the new tactics, proved a brilliant success. The enemy were prized from their mountain fastnesses and driven from the plain itself. The offensive moved so quickly that the North Vietnamese seemed to be taken completely by surprise.

The Chinese evacuated their mission at Khang Khay in such great haste the CIA were able to fill a C-123 transport with captured documents found abandoned in their HQ. The Chinese were worried that their military advisers might be captured by the Meo - a fate that befell one colonel. To the consternation of the CIA, who were keen to interrogate the Chinese officer, his throat was cut by Meo troops before they could reach him.

Meanwhile, Meo guerrillas, dropped in by helicopter behind enemy lines, were also meeting with surprising success. Troops from Site 32 set up positions on the west side of Route 7, while Black Lion led a guerrilla unit to take the heavily fortified hilltop position on Phou Nok Kok overlooking the road where it came out of the Ban Ban valley. Another CIA Special Forces adviser had previously spent a month trying to capture the position. Black Lion took only a single day to pep up his men and storm the mountain, working in close cooperation with Raven-directed T-28 fighters and Phantom F-4s carrying two-thousand-pound bombs. As the last bombs fell on the position, Will Green led his men in a run up the mountain slope. They took the position and held it for ninety days against an average of two ground assaults a day.

With Route 7 cut off, the North Vietnamese were forced to haul supplies overland or abandon them. Enemy supply lines were cut and large amounts of supplies captured. Although pockets of cut-off North Vietnamese troops remained operational, the Plain of Jars became relatively safe, and Ravens enjoyed the occasional free hour driving around in a captured Russian truck, taking photographs of each other posing beside the stone funeral jars.

It seemed that a winning formula had at last been arrived at. Massive air, used on a less restrictive basis and followed up by aggressive ground assaults, was doing the trick. The Ravens flew so much they became punchy (the low man for the month of September flew 156 hours - the high man notched up 210). From the beginning of the operation they had two hundred Barrel Roll sorties allocated to them daily, with each U.S. plane carrying twelve bombs. In addition there was the T-28 capability - an approximate total of 350 sorties a day. It was a great many bombs if every one was to be made to count.

The Ravens alone could not control all of the fighters, which led to the utilization of the Fast FACs. Fast FACs came out of Thailand, flying high-speed jets at a great height. They did not know the territory and could neither remain over the target long enough nor fly low enough for pinpoint accuracy. The result was a number of indiscriminate bombings that later were to have far-reaching political consequences. Friendly troops had pushed so far forward so fast that an imaginary line had been drawn from east to west across the middle of the plain, and it was stipulated that no U.S. air independent of Raven control should be put in south of it. It was a line every Raven carried in his head, but Fast FACs were not so finely tuned.

Early one morning one of them spotted a helicopter pad and tents out in the open. Assuming the camp to be North Vietnamese, they attacked, and the result was the death of twenty friendly troops. (Polifka ran into the pilot after the war at Eglin Air Force Base. ‘
Absolutely
no regrets at all. Didn’t give a shit. Just Asians are Asians, and they are all enemy.’ He was sickened and infuriated to learn that certain of the Fast FACs purposely saved ammunition so they could strafe villages for fun on the way home.) In other incidents over a three-week period at the end of August into September, three hundred friendly troops were lost to errors made by Fast FACs. A village was hit and 250 women and children were killed. The Ravens could make mistakes too, but they were infrequent and never of this magnitude.

The 7th Air Force had also decreed that Fast FACs should hit the caves on the north side of the Ban Ban valley daily with Bullpups - air-to-ground guided missiles - despite Raven and intelligence reports that the enemy had long since abandoned them. ‘We began to get our first realization that the U.S. Air Force was not the most professional organization in the world,’ Polifka said.

Once again there were furious confrontations between the men branded as Yankee Air Pirates and the Blue Suiters of the 7th Air Force. And once again it was an argument over control. The Air Force tended to feel used in Laos, never fully in command of its own assets. The air attaché’s office issued a whole new slew of rules which led to an emotional and somewhat drunken argument at the Raven hootch when a Downtowner came up to explain them. ‘We told him flat to get screwed,’ Polifka said. ‘We were going to drop bombs where we damn well pleased to support our people, and that’s what our job was.’

‘Your job is to do what the Air Force tells you to do,’ the Downtowner argued. ‘And you work for the Air Force.’

‘The Air Force pays us, and that’s all they do.’ The Ravens listed their priorities: Gen. Vang Pao, the CIA, the ambassador - with the Air Force running a poor fourth. The Ravens trusted the men they went into battle with, and these were the OLA, paramilitary people, not the Downtowners at the air attaché’s office. Every night, during major operations, several of the Ravens spent as much as two hours going over CIA intelligence. It could be very good and very specific, down to the status and intentions of every North Vietnamese regiment in the country.

‘Christ, it was a CIA war, CIA-led and CIA-financed,’ Polifka said. ‘Our role was to support it. There were Air Force generals who forgot that. There would be generals with three months’ experience in Southeast Asia who wanted to sit down at a table with four or five Agency guys with a total of one hundred years in Southeast Asia, and they would try to tell them about the war. It was pathetic’

‘The Air Force certainly didn’t have the faintest idea what they were doing with air power there,’ Byers said, ‘and they would have been insulted if you said that air was a very mobile artillery, which is exactly what it is.’

When Gen. George Brown of the Air Force visited Long Tieng he asked CIA man Tom Clines how many Americans were in town. ‘With the Air Force and us, I guess about twenty-five.’

‘Jesus Christ, if the U.S. military was here there would be a hundred thousand people. But I’m not sure I like lieutenants and captains running their own war.’

Clines cocked his head to one side, took a draw on his cigar, and smiled broadly. ‘Well, George, that’s really too bad - they’re the only people we’ve seen from the Air Force who know what the fuck they’re doing.’

But the flagrant mistakes of Fast FACs made the Ravens’ case for them, and the Air Force was once more severely limited in its area and type of operation in Laos. Barrel Roll was broken down in geographic sectors, known as Raven boxes, which only the Ravens could work. The Fast FACs were left with route interdiction north and east of Ban Ban, diminishing the potential for damage to friendly troops and population.

The number of Ravens was growing - although there were never more than twenty-two at any one time - and the CIA and the air attaché’s office had reorganized them into more effective units. Valuable lessons were being learned during the course of About-Face. But the greatest lesson of all - the correct use of air power in Laos - was to be ignored.

A CIA case study reported more than 7,500 tons of booty captured. Rows of captured Russian tanks, which the enemy had abandoned after locking their turrets, were lined up on the plain. Beside them were whole batteries of 85mm guns, trucks with their tanks full of gasoline, and cases of Soviet sniper rifles still in their original Cosmoline.

The sudden, unexpected flight of the enemy posed some teasing questions. Why had the enemy not sabotaged the tanks, trucks, and supplies as they retreated? In the case of the captured artillery, the guns had been firing only shortly before the position was taken and boxes of Chinese hand grenades were found nearby. Ambassador Godley pondered the morale of such troops, ‘troops who couldn’t even take the time to drop a hand grenade down the barrel of any of the guns.’
[143]

Curiosities among the captured equipment included a range of musical instruments - the prize of which was an accordion looking like something out of a German polka band; a 1956 Chevrolet station wagon with Oklahoma license plates, found at Arrowhead Lake; a cave full of freshly laundered Red Chinese uniforms and boxes of Maxa Chinese toothpaste. Mike Byers, who discovered the cave while out on a ground patrol with Burr Smith and a platoon of Meo guerrillas, threw half a dozen tubes into his pack. ‘I thought, if nothing else, I’m going to brush my teeth for the rest of this tour on Chairman Mao.’ When he used it for the first time he felt he had discovered the underlying reason for enemy intransigence. ‘No wonder they’re so mean, having to brush their teeth with this stuff every morning.’ The toothpaste had the consistency of valve-grinding compound, but was useful for polishing out scratches on helmet visors.

To celebrate the stunning victories of About-Face, Gen. Vang Fao threw a large party on the roof of his house. There was unlimited beer,
lau lao,
and White Horse whisky, and excellent food for a change. ‘I don’t know where he got the abalone from,’ Byers said, ‘but it was outstanding.’ Village children formed a band and played on the captured instruments, which added to the familiar accordion-like wheezing of the
khene
, the stone-age gourd pipes of Laos. The Ravens also contributed musically. ‘Raven 47,’ Vang Pao said, ‘un chanson,
s’il vous plaît
.’ Byers stood up and sang an approximation of Josh White’s ‘Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.’ The gathering responded to this American cultural gem with polite applause.

It was good to be celebrating victory again after such a long period of defeat, and Meo morale soared. It was the first time they had taken and controlled the PDJ since 1964.
[144]
Gen. Vang Pao pursued the success of About-Face with follow-up operations and continued to push the enemy back. Operation West Wind concentrated on the area to the east of the plain, toward the Vietnamese border, while Operation North Wind hit at enemy concentrations to the north of the royal capital of Luang Prabang, toward the Chinese border.

The 316th Division of the NVA had been badly mauled. Operation West Wind was launched to destroy the supplies being propositioned on Route 7, inside the buffer zone on the border with Vietnam, for the 312th Division as it came into Laos to relieve exhausted comrades. The new Vietnamese soldiers, unused to conditions in Laos, were ripped apart. They had been taught that they could shoot down F-4s with rifles - true, if they were low enough - and continually gave away their positions by blazing away at jets flying overhead at twelve thousand feet. Casualties were terrible. In the first two months they were in Laos, three battalions disappeared off the face of the earth and were never heard of again, while in another case only three survivors of a five-hundred-man battalion managed to struggle back to their regimental command post.
[145]

Toward the middle of October 1969, the joint chiefs at the Pentagon announced that the buffer zone, previously ten miles wide, would be pushed back five miles. Gen. Vang Pao held a briefing where he told Ravens that everything within the new five-mile band counted as enemy and could be attacked. For three days the Air Force provided an extra eighty sorties a day, and the enemy were caught off-guard. ‘It was fantastic,’ Polifka said. ‘I have never seen so many secondary explosions. Every time you dropped a bomb, something would go off. I had one Thud roll in on a fifty-two-structure complex, drop four five-hundred-pounders, and fifty-two buildings disappeared in a blinding flash at least fifteen hundred feet in diameter. It almost blew me out of the air. The whole thing was gone in ten seconds. The Thud’s wingman was halfway down the chute and had to abort the run because there was nothing left... just the outlines of fifty-two foundations where the hootches had been. The fireball was like an atom bomb. It just disappeared. I thought I had dreamed the whole thing.’

The HQ of the Communist Neutralists - the so-called Patriotic Neutralists led by Col. Deuan Sunnalath - now came inside the target area, no longer protected by the buffer zone. The camp had always been clearly marked on maps by the CIA, but had been strictly off-limits. Mike Byers had longed to bomb it. ‘In a World War II context, not being allowed to get him would not have made any sense. Here is Hitler in his HQ, and you can fly over it every day but you can’t bomb it.’

On October 13, a clear and beautiful day, Byers took a T-28 loaded with Willy Pete rockets and flew up to Deuan’s HQ, arriving at 6:00 in the morning. A flag flapped on a pole out-side the staff tent, and no one on the ground seemed perturbed at the sight of the fighter. Two sets of F-4s arrived on station, but Byers could not use them as they only carried napalm, the use of which was restricted against structures. While Byers waited for more fighters to arrive he took the T-28 on a pass over the HQ and fired one of his rockets, setting off a large secondary explosion. He must have hit a cache of rocket motors, for they whirled into the air like giant fireworks. A second set of F-4s arrived and successfully bombed and strafed the HQ, which burned and blew for twenty-four hours. By the time Byers returned to base, Deuan’s HQ no longer existed. CIA intercepts later confirmed that the entire Communist Neutralist staff had been killed, except for Deuan himself, who had been in Vietnam.