The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (51 page)

None of the rockets hit the Raven hootch, but a number found their mark in the village and on the runway. Civilian and military casualties were treated in the local hospital. On a visit to the doctor, Duehring saw a portly Thai artillery captain lying on his back on a table. The entire side of his left cheek had been torn away by shrapnel. The gaping hole bared an uneven row of gold teeth set in a ghastly butcher-shop grin like that of an animal’s skinned head. The Thai captain seemed quite comfortable, and Duehring was surprised at the almost complete absence of blood in the case of such a terrible wound.

The persistent enemy rocket attacks moved the American maintenance personnel to build a fortified bunker between the old wooden house that served as the Raven HQ and the more recently built two-story concrete-block building that housed the bedrooms. A half-decent bunker was constructed, using sandbags and pierced steel planking. It was intended to have only one entrance, with a zigzag turn in it, but it was left with an opening at each end when work was interrupted by enemy action.

A friendly 105mm field artillery piece, set up by the king’s house south of the runway, kept up a steady fire at the rate of a shell a minute, day and night, to harass the enemy. The Ravens slept through its steady, explosive boom as if it were nothing more than the familiar loud tick of a large clock.

At 3:00 A.M. on the morning of February 14 - St. Valentine’s Day - an ominous silence fell on the valley when the big gun suddenly stopped firing. Craig Duehring, who slept soundly through rocket attacks and artillery fire, was awakened by the sudden change in the rhythm of the war, startled by the unnatural silence. There was an eerie moment of total calm, and then the boom of the 105 was replaced by a series of explosions, accompanied by small-arms and automatic-weapons fire.

Duehring looked out of the bedroom window and saw the flash of various explosions in the distance and pinpricks of flame from the muzzles of numerous weapons. He thought perhaps the friendlies were engaged in a skirmish with an enemy patrol that had infiltrated the valley.

He reached for his movie camera and began to film the flashes of fire in the dark. Suddenly he heard a yell from one of the other bedrooms: ‘Incoming!’ He dropped to the floor. A large artillery round, probably from a DK 82mm recoilless rifle, hit the side of the building. Duehring grabbed his M-16 and pistol belt and ran from the room.

The first time Chad Swedberg knew about the attack was when an Army attaché and a couple of Ravens burst into his room and yanked his bed away from the window so they could look out of it. Swedberg was not unduly alarmed at the sound of gunfire, as firefights had raged on the ridgelines for several nights, and he had even slept soundly through the explosion of the shell hitting the hootch. Violently awakened from a deep sleep, he was further angered when he saw that a crate of grenades had been stashed under his bed without his knowledge, in preparation for an enemy attack.

The Army attaché began firing his M-16 out the window, a pointless exercise as the enemy artillery was more than a mile away, and dangerous, because the ammunition contained tracer and allowed the NVA to pinpoint the Raven position. Swedberg wished they would all go away so he could get back to sleep. ‘This is my goddam bedroom,’ he yelled. ‘Cut it out!’

It was only as more shells exploded around the compound that he fully understood the seriousness of the position. In the corridor a horde of people crammed themselves down the stairs and ran toward the newly constructed bunker. Swedberg was swept along with the crowd. Halfway down the stairs he remembered Princess Hamburger and tried to return, but he was pushed forward by the panicking, stampeding horde.

The last man out of the building, Air Commando Jim Rostermundt, saw the dog whimpering beneath a bed, scooped her up into his arms, and ran with her to the bunker. (Immensely grateful, Swedberg wrote him up for a DFC - never awarded - for ‘saving the life of an indigenous friendly under fire.’)

As people crowded into the bunker, artillery rounds were coming in at the rate of one every six seconds. Various buildings in the compound were hit in the barrage, which was to continue for the next two hours until dawn. An NVA unit had worked its way around to the south of the base and launched an attack on the men firing the 105mm artillery piece. Taken by surprise, the friendlies were overcome after a brief fight. A member of the Thai artillery crew had the presence of mind to toss a thermite grenade down the gun’s barrel. Had the enemy captured the gun intact and trained it on the compound containing the Americans, the battle would have been over.

But even without the big gun, by using the weapons they had brought in with them, the enemy were able to direct a fearsome barrage directly into the compound. By counting the muzzle flashes the men in the bunker calculated the number of guns firing at them - a mixture of six 60mm mortars and 82mm DK-82 recoilless rifles.

As shells continued to land in the compound it became clear that the NVA were after the Americans. Although armed to the teeth and accompanied by some tough Meo, the Ravens felt horribly unsure of themselves as front-line troops on the ground. ‘We were terrified,’ Craig Duehring said. ‘I recall very vividly the feeling of absolute panic and the almost uncontrollable urge to throw down my M-16 and run. I had nowhere to go, but I thought I was going to die. And I did not want to die.’

Shep, one of the CIA men, was caught outside in a shell blast and pulled into the Company blockhouse with a badly cut leg. Burr Smith called the bunker, excitedly demanding to know where the doctor was.

‘Is the doc here?’ the radio operator asked.

‘Yeah,’ came the reply, out of the dark.

The radio operator swung his flashlight toward the doctor, a short, squat man with gray hair. The Americans were used to seeing kindly Dr. Venedict Osetensky working in the hospital, but as the flashlight fell on him it lit a figure transformed: an M-16 lay across his legs, he wore a combat helmet, and a bandolier of ammo was strapped across his zippered flak vest. The doc had become a front-line grunt. ‘It’s Shep, doc,’ the radio operator repeated as another enemy shell sent a shower of earth and stones across the steel-and-sand roof of the bunker. ‘He’s been hit with shrapnel.’

‘So?’ the doc asked. ‘What the hell am I supposed to do about it?’ The sight of the doctor laden down with combat equipment and his laconic answer somehow combined to relieve the fear every man in the bunker felt, and they broke out in spontaneous laughter.

Crouched in their jerry-built bunker, the Americans soon realized they were ‘blind’ and needed to set up an observation post in the Raven hootch. Several made a run for it back to the two-story barracks. The general feeling of the group was that an air strike should be directed onto the enemy position, an idea Chad Swedberg was against. He felt it too risky with the enemy so close - a short round might hit the Raven hootch or the town. A squabble of a nonmilitary nature ensued, there was some name-calling and macho posturing, and Swedberg felt himself pushed toward a decision that went against his better judgment. ‘There were some real hard feelings that night.’

The Ravens set up watch in the doctor’s corner room. It was somewhat larger than the others, although packed with medicine chests, and its two windows gave good visibility over the valley. Fat Albert, the Air Force intelligence officer, took up a defensive position in the latrine, pointing his M-16 through the window. The Ravens peered into the night across the concertina wire at the perimeter of the compound, beyond the village and toward the muzzle flashes of the enemy guns. The ground in front of them sloped gradually for half a mile to the bottom of a small valley. Beyond, the main valley, covered with trees, shrubs, and grass, climbed steeply for a thousand feet. It was on this hillside that the enemy were hidden, blocking the only reasonable escape route out.

The Company blockhouse, located at the end of the compound to the left, had a. 30 caliber machine gun set up beside it, while a .50 caliber machine gun, capable of reaching the enemy, was set up in the corner of the Raven compound to the right.

Burr Smith was able to radio an SOS message to Alleycat - the nighttime airborne command post - which sent a Laotian AC-47 gunship. In spite of repeated directions, the gunship stood off and fired its entire load of ammunition into the mountainside more than two miles away from the target. Swedberg and Duehring watched the worthless exercise from the doc’s bedroom window. Hurrying home to sell the empty brass shell casings, Duehring thought as he saw the gunship pull off. It then dawned on him, as reality for the first time, that nobody was going to make it out alive.

They heard a lone T-28, manned by a Meo pilot, start up on the ramp and take off into a black sky filled with invisible mountains. The pilot attempted to make a pass over the enemy, but his bombs missed the guns and the antiaircraft fire was so intense he was forced to retreat and fly south to recover.

The single O-1 that came under Laotian command - used by Gen. Vang Pao - also took off into the night. The Ravens learned it carried the general and Jerry Daniels, his CIA case officer. There was silence as the significance of this news sank in. In a quiet, matter-of-fact voice someone said, ‘That’s it, then.’

Dawn broke on a day murky with brown haze. The argument over calling in an air strike had been resolved when Chad Swedberg agreed to direct fighters at first light. He stood in the window of the doc’s room, with Craig Duehring beside him, and talked to Cricket via his hand-held survival radio. Two Phantoms out of Udorn, ominously named Killer flight, would be on station within minutes. Lead carried CBU, while Two was loaded with wall-to-wall five-hundred-pound bombs. Both Ravens worried aloud that the fighters, flying into the brown haze in the half-light, would not be able to see a damned thing.

The moment Swedberg picked up Killer flight on his radio he began to describe the target on the hillside among the trees and said he was going to mark it using the .50 caliber machine gun, firing tracer. ‘Tracers are going into the hillside and ricocheting - do you see tracer?’

‘Roger.’

‘Cleared in hot.’

Lead made a pass but lost sight of the tracer halfway down the chute and pulled off. Suddenly, Duehring experienced a deep feeling of dread - something was wrong. ‘Chad, I don’t trust them,’ he said. ‘Put Two south of the target about a kilometer and work him in. A big column of smoke would make a hell of a good marker.’

Swedberg cleared in the second Phantom, which dropped its bombs and pulled off. They were wildly inaccurate, at least a kilometer off target. ‘Thank God we moved him out,’ Duehring said, ‘or it would have been down our throats.’

It had grown lighter, but Swedberg realized the Phantoms were still hampered by poor visibility because of the haze. ‘If I had been smart I would have called off the air strike right then,’ he said, ‘but I wasn’t smart.’

The exploded bombs at least provided a pillar of smoke as a mark to direct the fighters from. Swedberg also reoriented Lead from the .50 caliber tracer, and repeated a visual description of the target. ‘You see the smoke - the village -where the tracer ricochets?’

‘I see it. Am I cleared?’

‘We don’t see you,’ Swedberg said, ‘but if you see every-thing we’re talking about you’re cleared.’

The F-4 went in, but instead of returning to make multiple passes the pilot took the lazy course and pickled off his entire load of six CBU canisters at once. Shep, his leg hastily bandaged, was outside with Burr Smith and a platoon of Meo guerrillas when the plane screamed over. Shep looked up and saw the CBU pods come off the aircraft, and then watched in horrified fascination as the clamshells flew apart and the bomblets were spewed out. He yelled to his companions and hit the ground. When he raised his head, after the CBU had passed beyond him, Burr Smith, himself, and a single Meo survived.
[206]

The exploding CBU tore through the village like a hurricane. Huts, trees, and telephone poles disintegrated before the Ravens’ eyes. ‘You’re dropping on the friendlies!’ Swedberg yelled into his radio. ‘You’re dropping on the friendlies!’

A wall of destructive flame raced toward the Raven hootch. ‘You sorry-assed son of a bitch,’ Duehring shouted, and dived for the floor.

It was even worse than Swedberg feared. The pilot had misunderstood his instructions regarding the tracer and exactly reversed them - he had not dropped the deadly load where the tracers were ricocheting, but on the friendly machine gun itself.

Those in the hootch had hit the floor and were squirming on their bellies to get under the bed or behind some sort of cover. The CBU broke over the building, peeling back the roof. It set the operations shack on fire, along with the Company sleeping quarters, the Air America hostel, and the Raven dining room, blasting the pool table into fragments. The CIA bar took a direct hit and burned to the ground. But the wily bears survived the holocaust by pressing themselves against the rock wall at the rear of their cage, which was built out from a cave.

It was obvious that the F-4 had dropped CBU, and from a great enough height for it to have a large pattern. (Clamshell CBU explodes in a doughnut pattern, creating a circle of fire around a hollow. What looked to the Ravens like a solid wall of fire approaching them was actually a circle surrounding them - and the .50 caliber machine gun was directly in the center of it.)

With the building burning down around their ears, the Americans prepared to move back to the bunker, where a series of sporadic explosions made them think they were under renewed attack. It then dawned on them that the continuing explosions were their own ordnance. ‘Christ,’ somebody groaned, ‘some of that shit is time-delayed.’