The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (62 page)

To Knotts, sitting on the strip in the chopper, the wait seemed endless. Finally, he saw Jerry Daniels’s Ford Bronco drive onto the ramp. The CIA man handed Knotts a slip of paper with the location and exact time of Vang Pao’s pickup written on it. ‘Okay, Jack, off you go.’

Knotts cranked up the helicopter, nervous that the Meo might mob him. He saw small groups of refugees eyeing the helicopter inquisitively, and he was worried that they might run toward it and hang on to the skids. But he lifted off without incident and headed out of the valley bowl, circling for twenty minutes in a diversion until it was time to rendezvous with Vang Pao. At 9:45 he set down by a small pond half a mile from the town. The general stood holding a reflecting silver signal panel, accompanied by only two bodyguards.

Once the chopper was on the ground, Vang Pao boarded, loading a large heavy machine gun that scarcely fitted into the cabin. The general said nothing as they flew to Site 103. He was clearly depressed but in control of his emotions. His lack of expression was unnerving. A family of Meo were crossing one end of the small dirt strip as the helicopter landed, and they respectfully gave the general the
wai,
the traditional greeting of hands clasped together as if in prayer.

Jack Knotts flew back to Long Tieng to pick up Jerry Daniels. He set down on a predetermined spot behind the king’s house where the road widened. There was no sign of the CIA man, and Knotts waited anxiously. A group of Meo soldiers eyed him suspiciously as they trudged out of town. Eventually, Jerry Daniels turned the corner in the Bronco and drove toward the chopper.

Daniels walked unhurriedly to the rear of the vehicle and opened the back to take out a briefcase. Knotts wished he would move faster. Hog seemed to slump momentarily against the Bronco, leaning his head against it. Then he straightened himself and, with his back to the chopper, looked off into space and slowly raised his right hand in a final salute. The action brought a lump to Jack Knotts’s throat: he was watching a man bid farewell to fifteen years of dangerous work which had turned to nothing. Daniels turned and walked briskly toward the helicopter and climbed in. He said nothing, as silent and expressionless as the general.

As the chopper eased off Knotts saw two of the Meo soldiers take their M-16s from their shoulders and begin to raise them, drawing a bead on the slowly rising bird and preparing to fire. ‘Oh-oh, here it comes,’ Knotts thought.

But the men did not shoot, and Knotts flew without incident to Site 103. He picked up the general and his bodyguard and their ungainly weaponry, and flew on to the second strip, Site 113, coordinating the landing with Dave Kouba over the radio. Almost the moment he set down the Porter was raising dust at the far end of the strip.

His passengers jumped down without a word and walked toward the Porter, which was already turning. ‘There wasn’t anything to be said. I was sad as hell, but occupied my mind by concentrating on accomplishing the mission in the correct manner. This was the end.’

Jerry Daniels helped Vang Pao’s bodyguards load the heavy machine gun into the Porter. The general seemed to hesitate for a moment before climbing into the plane. Then he jumped in and closed the door. The Porter was in the air within seconds.

It was an uneventful flight. As the Porter crossed the Mekong into Thailand, Gen. Vang Pao left his mountain kingdom behind him forever. He would never return to Laos again.
[255]

With the infiltration of Communist cadres into all walks of Laotian life and their seizure of positions in the coalition government, Souvanna Phouma lost control and resigned as prime minister on November 28,1975. The king was forced to abdicate - a terrible blow to the majority of Laotians, for whom he embodied the country’s spiritual and temporal soul. The six-hundred-year-old system of village autonomy, which even the French had not tampered with, was abolished. Laos became a Communist state.
[256]

The year’s upheavals led to a massive exodus from the country that would eventually number more than 300,000.
[257]
Of those who chose to stay, at least twenty thousand ‘officials’ were sent to remote jungle camps for ‘reeducation.’
[258]
At the same time more and more Vietnamese moved into the sparsely populated regions of northern Laos (a form of colonization the Vietnamese have used many times as a prelude to actual annexation), while fifty thousand soldiers of the NVA remained scattered all over the country, which now became increasingly totalitarian.

Once the bases of Long Tieng and Sam Thong were finally overrun, following the flight of Vang Pao, approximately sixty thousand Hmong fled to the heights of Phou Bia massif, south of the Plain of Jars, where they established new mountaintop settlements fortified against attack. Another group headed south on a journey in which thousands died, but 25,000 survived to cross the Mekong into Thailand and begin the sad life of the refugee, confined to a camp that was to grow to the size of a city, surrounded by barbed wire.

Then in 1977 Phou Bia massif was besieged by Vietnamese troops and shelled by 130mm artillery. When the Vietnamese found themselves unable to penetrate the defenses from the ground, napalm, gas, and - possibly - poisons such as yellow rain (trichothecane mycotoxins) were dropped;
[259]
In the month of December 1977, one group of 2,500 Hmong refugees reached Thailand, the remnants of a band originally numbering eight thousand, culled by the rigors of the journey, which included capture or death at the hands of the Pathet Lao. By the end of 1979 the exodus reached its peak when three thousand Hmong were crossing into Thailand each month.

The fate of the Hmong is nothing less than tragic. The years of war, and the numerous dislocations throughout it, followed by an active policy of extermination and genocide by the new Communist government, have virtually destroyed them as a significant ethnic group in Laos. No one knows the precise number of Hmong who have died, but a figure around 100,000 is probable - an equivalent of 48,000,000 Americans killed, with most of the remaining U.S. population being forced to flee across the border to Mexico.
[260]

Back in the United States, no one paid much attention to the fate of a scarcely known hill tribe in a distant country that had never succeeded in capturing the attention of the American public for long. Refugees brought news from Laos to the Ravens, who felt a profound sense of shame coupled with anger. ‘We packed our bags and went home,’ Greg Wilson said, ‘and for the next ten years we read stories about the people we fought
with
- not
for
- being massacred. And we weren’t doing a damn thing about it.

‘We gave them our word. I gave them my word. We betrayed them, and I felt betrayed too. Our government, our leaders, our country, said we had done this long enough - it’s not working out. Let’s just sell them out. And so we did.

‘It made me a hell of a cynic. I was going to wrap up all of the DFCs, Purple Hearts, and Air Medals and mail them back to the Air Force and say, “Keep these. People who lose a war should not be decorated for it.”’

‘The Hmong believed that we would stay with them - go to the end with the last man,’ Frank Kricker said. ‘They figured if there was one Hmong left there would be an American there at his side. We really let them down - a low, awful thing.’

‘We turned them out like lambs to the slaughter,’ H. Ownby said. ‘It has cost us a lot since then. Nobody will trust us anymore. And rightfully so.’

‘We did our thing and went back to the States,’ Mike Byers said. ‘The Hmong had to stay and fight until they were dead. And that always bothered me. The U.S.A. abandoned them. Our politicians said, “Nobody likes the war in Southeast Asia - and we want to get reelected. Okay, the war is over.” So fuck you, Hmong.’

It was left to a tiny minority of individual Americans to continue active support for the abandoned peoples of the region. Larry ‘Pepsi’ Ratts returned to Laos after the Communist government took over, supporting himself by running a combination travel agency and bicycle shop in Luang Prabang. He walked a fine line, careful not to provoke the new regime, while secretly running a one-man escape center for Hmong refugees and other Laotians destined for the reeducation camps. He remained until an American reporter, who was begged not to write of his activities, filed a story that ran in U.S. newspapers and triggered an expulsion order.

Once Jerry Daniels had resettled Gen. Vang Pao in Missoula, Montana, he too returned to work in Bangkok, Thailand, attached to the State Department’s refugee program. His work earned him the department’s Superior Honor Award. He continued his efforts until his death on April 29, 1982, when he was asphyxiated by gas from the extinguished pilot light of the bathroom water heater in his apartment. Conspiracy theorists linked Daniels’s death to his supposed skepticism over reports of yellow-rain attacks on the Hmong, but there is no evidence to support the claim. Lengthy investigations in Thailand by journalists confirm he died as reported, possibly after an evening of drinking.
[261]

Pop Buell also stayed in Laos until the last minute when the Rev. Luke Bouchard and other friends persuaded him to leave. He was flown out by Les Strouse of Continental Air Services on May 10, 1975, on the last Porter flight from Vientiane to Bangkok. Strouse dared not look at the old man or say anything, but stared straight ahead, certain that if he made eye contact he would break down. Pop set up base in a cramped one-and-a-half-room apartment in Bangkok, spending half of his meager pension to help refugees emigrate. ‘We didn’t carry through, that’s all,’ he said. ‘Had we won, it would have been one of the greatest things we ever accomplished against communism, but the way it panned out, it would’ve been a hell of a lot better if we’d never fired a shot.’

He never returned to live in the United States. ‘We have got an obligation to these people,’ he said, meaning the U.S. government had an obligation. ‘There’s no question we used them. How in the goddam hell can you use people and then one day tell them, “Goodbye, it’s been nice knowing you”? The least goddam thing somebody could do is to come back and say, “I’m sorry.’”
[262]

To those pilots still jagged from combat, the peacetime Air Force was not much of a place - an organization dominated by REMFs that seemed to offer a future only to those aspiring to be bureaucrats. ‘One day you were there in the jungle being shot at,’ Mike Cavanaugh said, ‘and the next you are in San Francisco being told to clean up your act by some REMF. It happened so quickly it was devastating.’

Various promises had been made along the line, vaguely worded and ill-defined, that Ravens would be given choice assignments as a reward for volunteering for hazardous duty. The opposite was often the case. They were offered the backseats of fighters, a pilot slot in a transport, or worse, an office job.

‘I ended up in a shitty job behind a desk,’ John Wisniewski said. ‘I was in the command post at Andrews Air Force Base answering the phone. I was totally disillusioned and depressed. It was the worst year of my life. I came to the conclusion that in peacetime the military really doesn’t need people who are skilled in combat. They get in the way of a smooth operation.’

Greg Wilson asked for a fighter assignment on his return. He was told over the phone by the officer in charge of military personnel control, ‘We’re trying to purge the Vietnam FAC experience from the fighter corps because we have moved into an era of air combat where the low-threat, low-speed, close air support you did in Southeast Asia is no longer valid. And we don’t want these habits or these memories in our fighter force.’

Whatever the problems of adapting to the peacetime Air Force, they were nowhere near as complex as those of grappling with peace itself - settling back into civilian life. The difficulties almost always came as a surprise. ‘I just thought, I’m going to get out of the service, go back and pick up my life where I left off,’ Craig Morrison said, ‘and that everything was going to be great and I was going to jump right back into being a civilian.’

But there was a recession, the airlines had a surfeit of pilots and were not hiring, so Ravens were forced to take any job they could. Morrison went to work for Procter and Gamble, selling soap powder. ‘It was kind of tough, after being a Raven and flying in combat, to have to worry suddenly about how many feet of shelf space you had in the supermarket. Selling soap - the ultimate bad deal. It was awful. Really awful.’

Worse still, everyone thought the returning Vietnam veteran should be happy to be back from the war. Morrison moved through his new life as if in a dream, disconnected from everyone around him. His wife was expecting a new baby and was anxious to forget about the war and move on. ‘I didn’t know what the problem was - how could she know?’ Morrison said. ‘She wanted to put it behind her, sweep it under the rug - just like the rest of the civilians. It didn’t happen, did it? Now you’re an executive like everybody else on the block.’

He had bought a house in Terrace Park, a pleasant, unspectacular suburb of Cincinnati, and went to work every morning in a three-piece suit, carrying an attaché case. Sooner or later he would be promoted to vice-president of the department, join the local country club, and play golf on weekends. ‘I hated it.
Hated it!
I was going crazy.’