The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War

www.apostrophebooks.com

For the Ravens who never flew home,

and the Hmong who can never return.

And in memory of my father.

Prologue: Myth

As the war dragged on, so the myth grew. It started in the mid-1960s as a mix of gossip and bar talk among a battle-hardened elite who told stories that seemed fantastic to everyone who heard them. Apparently, there was another war even nastier than the one in Vietnam, and so secret that the location of the country in which it was being fought was classified. The cognoscenti simply referred to it as ‘the Other Theater.’ The men who chose to fight in it were handpicked volunteers, and anyone accepted for a tour seemed to disappear as if from the face of the earth.

The pilots in the Other Theater were military men, but flew into battle in civilian clothes - denim cutoffs, T-shirts, cowboy hats, and dark glasses, so people said. They fought with obsolete propeller aircraft, the discarded junk of an earlier era, and suffered the highest casualty rate of the Indochinese War - as high as 50 percent, so the story went. Every man had a price put on his head by the enemy and was protected by his own personal bodyguard. Each pilot was obliged to carry a small pill of lethal shellfish toxin, especially created by the CIA, which he had sworn to take if he ever fell into the hands of the enemy. Their job was to fly as the winged artillery of some fearsome warlord, who led an army of stone-age mercenaries in the pay of the CIA, and they operated out of a secret city hidden in the mountains of a jungle kingdom on the Red Chinese border.

It certainly sounded farfetched, yet the talk emanated from people who commanded respect. Men like the Special Forces soldiers who fought behind enemy lines, CIA case officers who lived in the field year after year, and the fighter pilots who flew over North Vietnam. The pilots spoke of colleagues who had vanished into a highly classified operation code-named the Steve Canyon Program.

When such men reappeared they had gone through a startling metamorphosis. In the military world of spit, polish, and crew-cuts, they stood apart: some sported long hair and mutton-chop whiskers or curling, waxed mustachios, and many wore heavy gold bracelets and GMT Master Rolex watches with wide gold bands. If they happened to be on the edge of a combat zone they carried a 9 mm pistol in a holster, the preferred weapon of the professional soldier of fortune. And, like a caste mark, each wore a 22-karat gold ring that had an oriental royal crest set into a red cloisonné top, with a roughly cut piece of locally procured diamond at its center.

The greatest change of all was not in their appearance, but in their manner. Self-confident to the point of arrogance and disdainful of anyone outside of their own group, they had the distant air of people inducted into a powerful and mystical secret society.

Insiders who worked with them knew these pilots as the Ravens. It was only natural that such a romantic group should generate talk. That almost all of it was true, in one form or another, was never established at the time. The secrecy of their activities, and the very fact of their actual existence, was guarded throughout the war. Even the Air Force colonels whose job it was to interview new pilots for the program had no clear idea of what the mission involved.

The secret remained closely guarded until recently. A large number of the documents and oral histories relating to the activities of the Ravens during the Indochinese war remained classified until 2006. An official history of the war in which the Ravens fought, prepared by Air Force historians with Top Secret security clearances, is still partially excised.
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The legend has become hazy, a half-remembered war story known only to a few veterans of Vietnam. ‘The Steve Canyon Program? Yeah, I remember. The Ravens - a weird bunch of guys who lived and fought out there in the jungle in the Other Theater somewhere. Hell, what was the name of the country?’

1. Chance

‘Want to take a chance?’

The men who found themselves in the secret war had first chosen to draw the Chance card in Vietnam. Later it would all seem part of the peculiar nature of things that their very first experience of war should be the board of a Monopoly-style game.

It was the brainchild of an enterprising officer who briefed newly arrived young pilots assigned to Vietnam as forward air controllers (FACs), whose job was to direct fighter-bombers onto targets from small, vulnerable spotter planes. He had organized an elaborate and complex briefing into a more readily remembered game patterned on Monopoly. Laid out on the board for the newcomer was his year’s tour. A small model plane was moved square by square around the board, while the briefing officer explained what to expect in the months ahead. Instead of moving from Broadway to Boardwalk, the FAC was taken from Day One to DEROS (date of eligible return from overseas).
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The first moves on the board covered such dull stuff as aircraft maintenance, radio procedures, and the Rules of Engagement. The briefing officer attempted to enliven his description of the first few weeks of technical drudgery with a spirited talk on the art of living in a war zone, as the model plane was moved onto squares marked ‘Life on Base’ and ‘Indigenous Population.’ The Monopoly briefing took newcomers through the gradual process where an FNG (fucking new guy) developed into an ‘old head.’ Instead of acquiring houses or hotels, the players won experience, promotion, and medals. Jail represented the perils of court-martial for those who might be found guilty of conduct unbecoming to an officer, or who violated the Rules of Engagement.

The briefing officer moved the model plane around the board, explaining the various jobs which might be assigned. At one base a FAC would be working with American troops in the field - a very high priority; at another he might be working with Vietnamese or Korean troops, and adapt accordingly. There were FACs who flew over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, others who only worked at night. From time to time a FAC would be called in to oversee a search-and-rescue (SAR) mission for a downed fighter or helicopter pilot.

The pilots were not actually asked to throw dice, but half-way around the board at the point representing the six-month mark of the tour, they were invited to take a chance. The briefing officer took on a mischievous, secretive look. The plane had been moved onto a square marked ‘Chance.’ He looked up at his audience, pausing for dramatic effect. ‘Anyone want to take a chance?’

The group’s reaction was always interesting. A couple of the new FACs frowned, uncertain how to take this unmilitary levity; others shrugged or grinned sheepishly, waiting for the briefing officer to take back the initiative and explain the next move; but occasionally there would be someone who would answer the question almost before it had been asked. Want to take a chance? ‘Sure!’

The briefing officer picked up the Chance card, the only one lying on the board, and held it up for everyone to see. It read: ‘Steve Canyon Program.’

The pilots waited to hear what the officer had to say about the Steve Canyon Program, but he just kept grinning at them crookedly and cultivating the look of mischief and mystery, until someone inevitably asked, ‘Well, what is it?’

It seemed for a moment as if the officer was going to say nothing at all. ‘I can’t tell you much about it,’ he allowed finally, enjoying the intrigue, ‘but if you are on the adventure-some side and something like this might interest you, we can have
certain people
talk to you.
After
you’ve been here six months.’

‘Yeah, but what is it?’

The briefing officer stopped smiling. ‘When you’ve been here six months, come and talk to us again,
if
you’re still interested.’ The card was placed back on the board and the model plane moved into the squares denoting the second six-month segment of the tour, until finally it reached the safety of home. (There was, of course, a missing Chance card the briefing officer failed to mention which the pilots joked about among themselves - Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200. It was marked KIA - killed in action.)

In a long and complex briefing, even one so cunningly fashioned as this, the small joke of the Chance card and the single tantalizing mention of the Steve Canyon Program did its work. Everyone was fascinated, but to men who had just arrived fresh in Vietnam there seemed to be plenty of war to go around without volunteering for some comic-strip mission no one was going to say anything about for six months. Within days they would be shot at for the first time, and six months seemed like eternity. The general consensus after the briefing when the pilots discussed it with one another was: ‘Bullshit - I’m not volunteering for anything named Steve Canyon.’

Everyone in America had heard of Steve Canyon, the comic-strip flyboy created by Milton Caniff. The strip was syndicated to more than two hundred newspapers throughout the country and had a readership of thirty million people a day. Canyon was a Gary Cooper type, with a shock of slicked-back blond hair and a pipe clamped in his jutting jaw. He dressed in flying coveralls, always carried a .45 automatic in a shoulder holster open to sight, and traveled the world undertaking ‘any assignment as long as it’s perilous, exciting, and decent.’

Steve Canyon came into being, significantly, in 1947 - the same year that the Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency were created. The fictional hero was a product of Middle America. A college football player on the team of Ohio State University in 1941, his red-blooded patriotic instincts overrode his academic ambitions and made him volunteer unhesitatingly to fly in the war. ‘I stopped some enemy ordnance (nothing compared to what happened to some of the guys),’ Canyon wrote in a supposed letter to a friend about his war experiences, ‘but it gave me the chance to... say to the officer passing out medals, “Just give me some aspirin - I already have a Purple Heart!”’

On his return from the war, Steve Canyon set up a one-plane air taxi service, Horizons Unlimited, adopting a Navajo double-eagle design as its symbol. He flew everywhere, had friends in all the right places, and was dedicated to bachelorhood, with a girl in every airport. He was always broke and often slept in his cubbyhole office, which was equipped with blankets stored in the filing cabinet - the files were kept in his pocket. Adventure followed adventure, year after year, in one exotic locale after another, as Steve Canyon enjoyed a nonstop life of action and excitement. But then, in the 1950s, he turned his back on this carefree, adventurous existence and settled permanently in the Orient - to be on guard against the new ‘invader from the north.’ He opted for responsibility and re-enlisted in the military. But above all else, whether as freelance adventurer or committed military volunteer, Steve Canyon was a man who could keep a secret.
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