The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (14 page)

The air attaché’s office also responded to Papa Fox’s emotional plea by imposing more rules. Combat-fatigued Ravens who shouted down generals were a rude shock to the tranquillity of life behind the lines, so new limits were set on the hours they were allowed to fly. No Raven was to be permitted to fly more than 180 hours a month (although this was considerably more than the standard 80 hours a month permitted by the Air Force for pilots outside of Laos; a pilot was allowed to fly 110 hours with a waiver, as long as he did not exceed 240 in a quarter). The rule was more or less ignored from the very first day until the end of the war.

After the Udom meeting, Papa Fox reported to the air attaché’s office in Vientiane on his way back to Alternate. ‘Listen, we’ve been doing some thinking,’ he was told by Gus Sonnenberg. ‘You’re a little bit tired and we’re going to switch you around. Why don’t you go on up and get your stuff and come back down and we’ll decide what to do with you.’ Fuck it, Papa Fox thought to himself, I’m fired. He flew to Alternate, arriving at the base at 5:00 in the evening. He figured he just had time for one last mission. He took an O-1 out to the east, where he found two trucks and a bulldozer. He called Cricket for air, only to be told that nothing was available. ‘I’ll see you at first light,’ Papa Fox said. ‘Have two sets of fighters ready and waiting.’

The next morning the mission went like clockwork. Papa Fox put four sets of fighters on the target and destroyed the trucks and bulldozer. Cricket fed the bomb damage assessment through to the air attaché’s office, and within minutes the wires began to burn. ‘Tell Raven 44 he is to land
immediately
. He is to report to this station
immediately
.’

Papa Fox returned to Alternate and closed down the O-1 and did not fly again. That night he was guest of honor at dinner with Gen. Vang Pao, who sat him on his right in recognition of destroying the bulldozer. Papa Fox pointed out the irony of the honor to the general, telling him that he had been called back to Vientiane. ‘Because of what happened they make me go down now. Fly for you no more. They take me away.’

‘Aah, Raven 44 - you worry too much,’ the general said jovially. ‘You go down. I take care of you.’

‘I don’t think it’s going to work, sir.’

‘No problem. You go down. Enjoy little bit. I take care of you.’

The general sliced off the ear of the pig and handed it to Papa Fox as guest of honor. He spent the entire dinner cutting off small pieces and nibbling them for several minutes before subtly disgorging them into his napkin. (‘The more you chew on a pig’s ear, the bigger it gets.’)

The next day he returned to Vientiane and went to stay in the Ice House. He was largely ignored by the Downtowners who gathered for dinner. No one seemed interested in the war, and the conversation was about promotion possibilities, laced with mildly bitchy gossip about colleagues. Papa Fox, who had been flying for twelve hours a day and whose only subject of conversation was the war, said nothing. The Downtowners suffered his company, and charged him seven dollars a day for bed and board. At dinner on the third day Sonnenberg turned to him and said, ‘We’ve been thinking about all this. We’re going to send you back to Alternate.’

The general had his way, and Papa Fox returned to Long Tieng.

By Thanksgiving of 1968, despite all of Vang Pao’s most confident predictions, the Meo had still not taken Phou Pha Thi or even managed to scale the lower reaches of the mountain. The plan itself was a disastrous departure from the type of war they excelled in. Instead of damaging the North Vietnamese in hit-and-run guerrilla operations, they had become conventional infantry, attempting to attack well-fortified and heavily defended positions. They proved unequal to the task, and casualties were high.

On Thanksgiving Day itself, Papa Fox returned to Alternate, after flying only six hours of combat, in order to prepare dinner. He had already baked homemade pumpkin and mince pies, and now set to work cooking the turkeys, which had been sent up from the commissary in Vientiane and would be served with mashed potatoes, scalloped corn, and gravy. The Air Commandos had sent up two Jeroboams of champagne with which to wash the feast down. Bob Tyrrell, the air attaché, flew up to join the Ravens, expecting a meager battlefront lunch, only to find himself feasting as if he were at home in the States.

Gen. Vang Pao stayed at the front. He had originally resisted moving six thousand refugees of his own people, afraid that if his soldiers saw the evacuation they would interpret it as acceptance of defeat. Now, although still speaking of victory, he asked Pop Buell to go ahead.

The war was going badly, and morale among the Meo was low. The Ravens began to believe that skill counted for little in the face of the endless hours they were obliged to fly. They were in the power of sheer, blind luck. Each flight was another exhausted spin of war’s wheel of fortune, and every extra day shortened the odds of survival.

The endless combat flying was taking its toll on one Raven after another. It was usual to send a pilot suffering from burnout south. After months of hard flying at Alternate, Ed McBride, known as ‘Hoss’ because of his huge, lumbering, Mississippi country-boy frame, had retired to Savannakhet, a quiet provincial capital situated on the Mekong, just across from the Thai border.

It was thought he needed an extended period of comparative calm to wind down. After Alternate, Savannakhet was the next best thing to R&R the program had to offer. Although the Royal Lao Air Force was headquartered in the town, there was not much war to speak of. Ravens stationed there never went as far east as the Trail. The Royal Lao Army and their Pathet Lao enemy seemed to acknowledge an unwritten gentlemen’s stand-off.

Hoss, who wore a ten-gallon hat and carried a guitar, was a favorite among the locals, not least because of his famed ‘candy’ runs. Flying over a village, he would bring his plane down low and buzz the main street, tossing candy and gum out the window to the kids. Bored patrols of friendly troops, meticulously avoiding the enemy, had their day brightened by one of Hoss’s candy runs.

To the east of the city there was a large collapsed bridge that had once spanned the river and carried a major north-south highway. Traffic now forded low-water crossings on either side of the bridge, and Hoss often flew out there, together with a Backseater, to check for possible enemy truck tracks. Close to the bridge he saw a large column of troops crossing a field. The fact that they were in the open and did not scatter at the sight of a plane strongly suggested they were friendly. Hoss flew by and waved, and, sure enough, the troops waved back. He picked up the large sack of chocolate, hard candy, and gum and placed it on his lap so he could throw candy out the window by the fistful. He was perfectly positioned for a run, which would take him directly over the soldiers’ heads.

It all happened so quickly that perhaps Hoss McBride never realized the troops below him were North Vietnamese regulars. Droning a few feet above them, one hand in the bag of candy, he was a sitting target. The soldiers opened fire and a single round of .30 caliber hit Hoss in the armpit and traveled through to his chest. The plane crashed upside down in a nearby river. Hoss’s death, the Ravens agreed, was sheer bad luck.
[27]

Luck follows no logic, a circumstance which creates faith or anxiety. There were Ravens who flew through clouds of flak unscathed, and who walked away unharmed from the burning hulks of crashed planes. Other men, flying high in a quiet area, were killed by a single bullet. Some were reckless to the point of absurdity and never took a hit; others were killed while religiously following all of the rules. Experienced old heads got killed in their last week; FNGs got killed in their first. Luck began to seem as mysterious as the spark of life itself.

John Mansur had become almost punch-drunk from flying combat missions out of Alternate and had begun to feel impervious to danger, but some hidden fear suddenly made him decide to wear his helmet. Ravens never wore the armored helmets they were provided with, partly because they were awkward and heavy, but mostly because it was impossible to hear ground fire in one. But Mansur, who had never worn one before, arbitrarily decided that for this particular mission he would wear the helmet.

He flew to Roadrunner Lake to check out the Chinese Cultural Mission at Khang Khay. The CIA had received ground team reports that the enemy had moved large, heavy artillery pieces into town as a prelude to moving them into position under cover of darkness, and wanted the intelligence checked. The high-level recon planes that flew out of Udom were not available, so Mansur decided to go in low and have a look himself. It was a foolhardy decision, but he knew the positions of the various 37mm antiaircraft guns and calculated he could fly so low that the gunners would be unable to depress their weapons sufficiently to shoot at him. He rolled the plane up to the edge of the town, and as he banked and peered down, he felt a terrific blow to the helmet. He had forgotten the most obvious thing in his foxy calculations - he was so low a soldier with a pistol could hit him.

A single bullet had come through the open window of the cockpit and entered Mansur’s helmet. Suddenly he couldn’t see, and his first thought was that he had been shot in the eyes. He raised the visor of his helmet and felt blood pour down his face. ‘Oh my God, I’m blind.’

Instinct alone had kept him from losing control of the plane in the first seconds of his blindness and crashing into the ground in what was known among pilots as a graveyard spiral. He rolled out and began to climb, making himself an even easier target for the enemy, whom he could now hear shooting at him. Fighting off panic, and deathly afraid, he called Air America and said he had been hit and could not see. Almost immediately the pilot of a Pilatus Porter came up on the frequency. He was calm and soothing, and his voice amid the gunfire was balm to Mansur’s shot nerves. ‘Well, hello, Raven - looks like you’ve got yourself a real problem.’

The Porter was only a mile away and flew toward Mansur until the plane was on his tail. Then with a casual, almost jovial sangfroid, the pilot talked him away from the danger of the enemy guns and put him on a course for Alternate. Turn right - little bit more - stick forward - easy, easy - that’s it.’

On the approach to the strip at Alternate, Mansur could dimly make out shapes from one eye, although the pain was as if they had both been scoured with fine sand. The Porter pilot talked him down, and he made a good landing. His crew chief and the radio operator who had monitored his flight back were on the strip to meet him in a jeep. They dragged him from the plane, thinking he had been shot and wounded in the torso, and raced to a Jolly Green helicopter that was waiting at the end of the runway with its engine cranked, ready to medevac him to Udorn. Throughout the short trip a medic continually bathed his eyes with water.

On arrival he was rushed to hospital, where he was placed in a dentist’s chair and a doctor picked splintered glass from his eyes for an hour. He could scarcely see and was in great pain, but knew he was not blind.

During his recuperation the various fighter squadrons on the base treated him like a hero, and pilots volunteered to act as guide dogs and lead him around. The bullet had entered the helmet, traveled around the inside of the visor, shaving glass fragments into both his eyes, and come out the other side. The concussion of the bullet hitting the helmet had blacked both his eyes.

The helmet was brought down and presented to him as a war trophy. When he placed it on his head a pencil could be passed through one bullet hole to the other so that it touched the hair on the bridge of his nose. Had he leaned forward one thousandth of an inch during the moment the bullet hit it would have taken his nose off; any more and he would have been killed outright. But, as the other Ravens never tired of telling him, if he had not been wearing the damned silly helmet in the first place, everybody would have been saved an awful lot of trouble.

The patches remained on his eyes for a week. After a second week he reported to Vientiane for duty. The staffers in the air attaché’s office were sympathetic. ‘Do you want to go back north or do you think you’ve used up your luck up there?’

‘I guess I’ve used up my luck.’

The Meo attack on Phou Pha Thi, despite the massive bombing campaign to support it, finally floundered and failed. Bombing had destroyed the guns defending the airstrip at the base of the mountain, which the Meo subsequently recaptured, but after three weeks of constant fighting only one company had managed to gain a foothold on the middle slopes. They lasted a day and withdrew under withering fire from the stone bunkers at the crest of the mountain.

The six thousand refugees had already been evacuated, a considerable feat in itself, but Gen. Vang Pao stubbornly continued to launch wave after wave of his men against the Rock. He still spoke of victory, but now admitted it would take time.

On Christmas Day, 1968, three fresh Communist battalions launched a counterattack and the Meo fell back to Na Khang. Vang Pao had gambled so heavily on winning back the sacred mountain, staked so many of his men’s lives, and his own reputation as a leader and general, on victory, that the defeat was devastating. Its effect on the morale of the Meo and the Ravens was terrible enough, but on the general himself it was catastrophic.

Pop Buell drove over the mountain from Sam Thong to Alternate to join Vang Pao for dinner. Instead of the usual great gathering of officers and elders in the large dining room, Pop found the general quite alone. He was dressed like a derelict in rumpled clothes.