The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (56 page)

The Ravens visited the hospital, presenting Kricker with a tiny urn full of cigarette ash, supposedly the remains of his cremated left toe. CIA man Kham Sing (Gold Lion] brought him the sight from the 12.7, which a team of his men had gone into the town to retrieve. But alone in his hospital bed, Kricker knew he had gone through a transformation. ‘I had been hosed down before - lots of times, regularly. But suddenly my mind had been changed about them never getting me.’

By May 16, 1971, the last of the government forces were defeated and driven from the plateau, giving the enemy complete control. In the meantime, Jim Hix, still ragged and unnerved by his experiences in the north, had been sent south to relax. He had extended for a second tour just before he was shot down, and had then taken a much-needed thirty-day leave. He spent the time wandering all over Europe, and on his return his hair had grown so long he looked like a hippie. But he felt like a new man after his vacation, eager as ever to fly in the war. In the meantime the war had heated up in the panhandle, and no one called it a country-club posting anymore.

Arriving back at Udorn, he heard that Kricker was in the hospital. He went over to visit his friend, who was mending nicely and able to hobble around on crutches. Hix convinced a formidable head nurse to allow him to take Kricker to dinner at the O club, and took a solemn oath that they would both behave impeccably. The two friends had a lot to talk about, and before either of them noticed it they were hopelessly drunk. At the end of the evening, Kricker, a neophyte in the art of walking with crutches, was so inebriated he might as well have been on skis. He stumbled and tripped, banged into doors, and fell down steps.

Hix flagged down the air police, who helped him load his friend into the back of their jeep. They dropped the Ravens off at the hospital, where the door was opened by the head nurse. Kricker collapsed in a heap at her feet, once again unable to master the conflicting dual nature of his crutches. The head nurse’s eye fell on Hix, whose nerve failed him entirely. He ran from the hospital and hid across the street behind a tree. I figured she was going to kill me.’

The next day he flew to Laos. The weather was awful during the first part of June 1971, and the NVA made the occidental mistake of trusting their forecasters’ predictions in their plan to launch a big push toward Pakse. They set out in the middle of the night with three Soviet tanks leading hundreds of troops down the main route into Pakse. Troops of the Royal Lao Army defending a fortified position in their path heard the ominous rumble of the approaching tanks, fired one salvo from their 105mm howitzers, and fled.

The NVA plan had been to push the attack home the following day, when the friendlies would be denied air support because of thick cloud cover. With the advance position already abandoned with scarcely a struggle, the next prize was to be a Thai artillery position - the only effective force between the enemy and Pakse itself. But the Thais held firm in a fierce firefight that continued through the night.

The next morning, June 11, broke clear as a bell, and the enemy were caught in the open. The Ravens - Jim Hix, Larry ‘Pepsi’ Ratts, and Lloyd Duncan - were in the air in their O-1s at dawn, and could see the Thai position surrounded on three sides, with enemy troops as close as fifty meters to their eastern flank. ‘The whole damn area was alive with bad guys,’ Hix said.

The battle raged throughout the day, but with the NVA in the open it was a turkey shoot. Hix alone destroyed four howitzers, eight trucks, several mortar pits, and caches of ammunition. ‘I was having a hell of a good time blowing this stuff up.’

Duncan and Ratts began to search for the tanks, which the NVA had hastily moved under cover. It had been a great day for Duncan, capped during the midafternoon when he found and destroyed a tank - every combat FAC’s dream. He looked down on the burning hulk with enormous satisfaction, and then realized he would have to return to Pakse to reload with gas and rockets. He was so excited he abandoned all caution and began a slow, lazy climb. Despite having been hammered with air strikes throughout the day, the enemy still had antiaircraft along the road - three 12.7mms on the south side and seven on the north. They bracketed the target hung invitingly above them in a continuous torrent of antiaircraft fire.

‘Dune’s going in!’ Pepsi Ratts screamed into the radio, as he saw the plane rocked by gunfire.

He took his own plane down low and pulled out his CAR-15 and M-79, which he fired through the window in an attempt to push the enemy away from the coffee plantation where his colleague’s plane had crashed. Furious and upset, he held the stick with his left hand and fired his weapons using his right, aiming behind them - reversing the technique of taking a bead on a bird. ‘Dune’s dead,’ he yelled into the radio, as he lobbed high-explosive shells from the M-79 at running NVA soldiers.

Duncan had always been a casual, fatalistic type, the kind of Raven who left his survival vest hanging from the back of the seat and never wore his shoulder straps. The moment the enemy guns had opened up on him he had lost the engine, and a shell had hit the main bone in the calf of his left leg and shattered it. He had successfully managed to crashland the plane, but was unable to move as the enemy closed in. The Backseater hauled him a hundred meters from the plane and dragged him into cover. Duncan was in shock, but astute enough to tell the man to return to the plane and bring back the radio from the survival vest. He returned, carrying the vest and Duncan’s floppy hat, which was Day-Glo orange inside. Duncan turned it inside out and put it on his head.

Jim Hix had flown into the area, and he spotted the flash of color near the downed plane. ‘Hey, Pepsi,’ Hix called. ‘Dune isn’t dead - he’s over here.’

Ratts changed his tactics and began making low passes half a mile from the crashed plane to lure the enemy away from the downed Raven’s actual position. Duncan came up on the radio for the first time to say his leg seemed to be broken and he was badly hurt. Hix gave him the standard SAR spiel: move farther away from the wreckage, don’t panic, drink water -Air America is on the way.

A Lao T-28 arrived and made low passes over the area, raking the ground with its guns to keep the enemy pinned down. Once again the gunners, situated about two kilometers away, opened fire. Hix pushed his O-1 into a slip, which he would have liked to be supersonic, to avoid the gunfire. ‘It was like the Fourth of July - pretty red tracers everywhere.’

Fighter-bombers had been diverted to the area from all over Laos and South Vietnam, until Hix had them stacked in layers above him. Endless strikes silenced the three guns on the south side of the road, but those to the north were putting out so much fire the fighters were forced to pull off high. A flight of Navy A-7s loaded with Rockeye CBU came on station, and Hix ordered Lead to fake a pass and come off dry to draw their fire. ‘Two - just go for the flashes as Lead starts to pull and hit anything you see down there. Cleared in hot.’

The A-7 laid the CBU down in a football-field pattern and shut down half the remaining guns. At the same time an Air America H-34 attempted a pickup under heavy fire. The pilot complained that there was more action than made him feel comfortable, and could a Raven do something about it?

Hix diverted a set of fighters to drop bombs on the north side of the road between Duncan’s position and the guns, setting up a screen of smoke and fire. It was almost dark and difficult to see when the Air America H-34 approached the crash site along a gorge that dropped into a river. The pilot saw Duncan sitting in his orange Day-Glo hat and quickly snatched him to safety.

It was the end of the war for Lloyd Duncan.
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An athlete who had played football for the Air Force Academy, he was medevac’d back to the States, where he was told his leg was so badly damaged he would never walk again. (But within a year he was walking and back on flying status - another example of Raven willpower.)

Jim Hix and Larry Ratts flew back to Pakse, where they celebrated by making quite a night of it. Ratts, known as ‘Pepsi’ after his favorite tipple, was a music major and entertained his colleagues on the squeezebox and tuba (the natives called him ‘Songboy Kip’ because he would sing them a song for a kip). He was also a very funny man, and his inspired imitation of country holy rollers was exquisite, a required tour de force at any
baci
. He was a gentle person, had never been known to swear, and was a teetotaler, but in a rare moment of combat celebration Pepsi actually broke his own strictly held rule and drank a cold beer.

After two weeks in the hospital, Frank Kricker returned to the war, but his heart wasn’t in it any longer. ‘It was like falling off a horse. I was really afraid.’ It now became an act of will to drag himself to his plane each morning to fly in combat, and he began to wonder if he would always be equal to the mission.

The needs of the men on the ground, and the quiet peer pressure exuded by fellow Ravens and CIA men like Sword and Kham Sing, kept him in the cockpit. He flew a support mission to watch over the two CIA men as they flew in two Air America H-34s to put a road-watch team on Muong Mai, a mountaintop overlooking Route 7 where it entered the Bolovens. The main body of troops was to be flown by Air Force H-53s once the CIA and their seven-man squads had secured the landing area.

The mountain was thought to be sterile - the quaint military term for free of enemy - and Kricker flew behind the Air America chopper expecting a milk run. As the first chopper approached the landing area it was hit by a remote-controlled rocket, which sprayed the copilot with shrapnel. Kham Sing and his men jumped down into withering fire, while the chopper managed to lift off despite a damaged gearbox. Kricker escorted it safely to a nearby road, where it made an emergency landing, but the copilot was to die of his wounds.

The Air Force helicopters, which had been monitoring the operation over the radio, heard that the helicopters had been driven off. Thinking the mission had been aborted, they wheeled around and flew back toward Udorn. The team left on the ground had secured the landing area but could not hope to hold it without the support of the main body of troops.

Kricker got on the radio to the Air Force choppers. ‘Listen, the guys are on the ground - the mission’s on. Nothing’s changed. Turn around and come back.’

The choppers turned and headed for the mountain, while the team on the ground held on as best they could. They would certainly have been destroyed if Kricker had not taken his O-1 down between them and the enemy to direct air support from T-28s and A-7s. The second team landed under heavy fire but beat the company of NVA back to the edge of the mountain.
[223]

Kricker had averted disaster, but he felt his courage was now a dwindling asset. He could imagine the day when he had nothing left to draw upon, and he would no longer be able to face the ground fire. And he dreaded the consequences that such hesitation might invite. ‘I wasn’t worth a shit after I got shot. I recognized that I wasn’t doing them any good and I wasn’t doing me any good. I was afraid and I was tired and I didn’t want to do it anymore. I wanted to go home.’

The Lao Government fought to regain control of the plateau throughout the second half of 1971 - The Bolovens Campaign - but failed.
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After a punishing six months, Dick Defer, who had been Head Raven in Pakse during most of this time, had gone on thirty days’ leave. Almost immediately after his return he went up to Alternate for a day to fill in. Taking Scar as his Backseater, he flew out to the Plain of Jars to check an area the CIA needed intelligence on. Diving low, he flew into a hail of small-arms fire. He was too badly wounded to fly the plane; it was left to Scar to crashland the O-1 from the backseat. Defer was thrown forward against the instrument console and knocked out.

Air America was at the scene within moments, but by the time the helicopter landed back at Alternate, Dick Defer was dead. Raven Greg Wilson gently lifted his motionless body from the chopper. ‘It was the very first person I knew, face to face, who I had seen die. We all felt immortal, but when you take a friend off a helicopter it brings it home to you.’

The atmosphere at the Raven hootch that night was dismal. ‘It got so that you really didn’t want to get too close to people,’ Frank Kricker said. ‘You tried not to get too friendly. But it was impossible. Those circumstances make for the closest of comrades. And when a guy got killed, it was devastating - really devastating. It would tear you up.’

The Ravens sat around the dining-room table, and unthinkingly the maid laid a place for the missing man. Nobody ate. The Ravens said nothing, unsuccessfully fighting back tears. ‘We just sat there and cried,’ Kricker said. ‘Five grown men in tears.’

It was decided to send Frank Kricker back to the States as a returning hero, rather than keep him on as a liability. Dr. Robert C. Seamans, the secretary of the Air Force, was visiting Laos, and Ambassador Godley invited Kricker - as an Air Force pilot with 2,700 hours of combat, the Silver Star, and the Purple Heart - to dinner at the embassy. ‘They wanted some dusty, dirty Raven - a field specimen - to look at,’ Kricker said. He put on his best jeans and flew up to Vientiane. He expected the ambassador to be a pompous, formal figure, but was immediately put at his ease when Godley appeared wearing his garish Mobutu shirt and spectacles held together with tape. The ambassador seemed to favor the warriors in Laos, rather than his own State Department people, which also endeared him to Kricker.

Steak was served at dinner, accompanied by what Kricker took to be a curious lily-pad soup. ‘It was a damned finger bowl.’ The secretary of the Air Force suggested that instead of flying home in some dirty troop transport, Kricker should accompany him on Air Force Two. ‘Tom will meet you in Bangkok and see to everything,’ the secretary said. Tom turned out to be an Army full colonel who picked up Kricker at the Bangkok airport in a large black staff car and obligingly drove him to the Siam Hotel downtown. The following day Kricker was aboard Air Force Two, sitting alongside the secretary of the Air Force as they headed back to Andrews Air Force Base, lunching on lobster and contemplating the peculiarities of modern war.