The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (20 page)

Sullivan had also experienced the strange psychological twists the mind can take in combat, and how it can brutalize the ordinary man into a callous form of behavior unimaginable in peacetime. A mine-sweeper that had taken a hit by a kamikaze pilot came alongside the ship Sullivan was on. Her skipper had suspended the martyred body of the Japanese pilot, who had been thrown from his plane when he hit, from the top yardarm of the ship’s mast as a war trophy. The skipper was bewildered when a fellow officer began to shake with disgust and anger at the sight. ‘The reactions of young men at war due to the vagrant brutalities of combat are always impossible to predict,’ Sullivan concluded.
[71]

Firsthand experience of war made him sympathetic to soldiers, and also shaped his philosophy when he went on to join the Foreign Service in 1947. America had emerged as the most powerful nation on earth, but Sullivan supported policy which sought a world order balanced on a number of cooperating centers of power, recognizing that much of American postwar paramountcy was artificial, because of the enormous destruction suffered by other nations. ‘We didn’t see the world in sharp contrasting shades of black and white, but rather in the murky shades of gray that color most human endeavors.’
[72]

Ten years in various posts around the world confirmed this view, and in 1958 he returned to Washington, D.C. to spend three years in the Department of State dealing with South-east Asia. He learned to operate despite the bureaucracy. ‘I prefer to get things done by a direct route of decision. The bureaucratic mentality is to put it all down on paper and push it through the maze of in and out boxes.’ He also consolidated friendships on Capitol Hill which would later prove invaluable. He was then assigned to Geneva to participate in the international conference on Laos.

It was Sullivan’s conviction that big-unit U.S. military had to be kept out of the country. ‘The kind of war I undertook was strictly defensive and essentially of a guerrilla nature. Because of its unorthodox structure, Washington gave me a free hand to run it as best I could without interference.’

To Gen. William C. Westmoreland, who had hoped to head a Southeast Asia Command, instead of just U.S. forces in Vietnam, the autonomy of Sullivan - and, to a lesser extent, of the U.S. ambassador to Thailand - was irksome. When the three men visited Udorn air base together and airmen swarmed around the general to take photographs, Sullivan remarked that Westmoreland seemed to have numbers of devoted followers. ‘Why would they want a picture of a general,’ Westmoreland retorted, ‘when they can snap two field marshals?’
[73]

The nickname stuck, and indeed Sullivan was field marshal of Laos. ‘As experience accumulated and as the months and years went by, I eventually carried in my head, just short of my subconscious, a working knowledge of our deployment, the terrain, the roads and the trails, the enemy dispositions, and our aircraft availability. Many a night I was wakened from a sound sleep by a telephone call, and sitting on the edge of the bed, had to decide whether to order the evacuation of an outpost under attack, to hold on, to reinforce, to call for air support, or to mount a diversionary action to relieve the pressure on the front. It was a far cry from the normal pursuit of the striped-pants set.’
[74]

It was also very different from what was expected of the mainstream military man. There was no place in Laos for the sort of officer who accepted his year’s tour in ‘Vietnam’ with reluctance. The sort of soldier needed was an individual who could think for himself in a highly unconventional theater of operations. That meant men with special-operations backgrounds.

Sullivan had a high regard for this type. ‘To be a commando in special operations you have first of all to be a volunteer; secondly, you have to be prepared to take extraordinary risks, to function outside normal chains of command, and also to be able to make individual decisions of life and death immediately. It takes a special breed.’

The proponents of strategic bombing and the captains of the big battalions needed to be kept at a distance. Specifically, this meant ensuring that Gen. William Momyer, head of the 7th Air Force, and Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of MACV, concentrated only on Vietnam. (It was reported of Sullivan that he saw his role as ‘keeping Westy’s paws off Laos.’)
[75]
Westmoreland bridled over the restrictions Sullivan forced him to observe in Laos and renamed the Ho Chi Minh Trail ‘Sullivan’s Freeway.’
[76]
Sullivan intended to rely on small, volunteer, commando-style units.

Lessons learned from the Washington war games had convinced Sullivan of the limited effectiveness of jet bombers in a guerrilla war. ‘A high-performance jet flying at eight hundred knots and carrying bombs as its ordnance was not the most effective instrument to use against truck convoys that were moving at a snail’s pace down the muddy Ho Chi Minh Trail under triple-canopy tree cover. They could not linger long enough to identify their targets, and they could not aim accurately enough to destroy them. What we needed was something that was slow-moving, could see a target, and could zero in on it and stay with it until it had destroyed it with Gatling guns or cannon.’

This flew directly in the face of current Air Force doctrine and the view of General Momyer, who wanted an all-jet Air Force and was committed to employing state-of-the-art aircraft in Vietnam. There had been an acrimonious inter-agency debate over whether propeller or jet planes should be used in Vietnam, with the Air Force arguing that jets were better for close air support than slower, prop-driven aircraft. This was nonsense, and the Air Force knew it was nonsense, but did not want to end up after what was expected to be a short, guerrilla war with an inventory of prop planes. In the long run the Air Force would need jets to match the Russians, so it fought for their use in the Vietnam War.
[77]

Sullivan had different ideas for Laos, and set about cobbling together a force of so-called obsolete propeller aircraft suited for the war there. His earlier job in Washington had given him easy access to Robert McNamara, whom he persuaded to assign a number of A-26s (a World War II light bomber), a clutch of A-1 Skyraiders (an old propeller-driven Navy plane), and some modified T-28 Navy training planes from Pensacola, Florida. The units already in existence with experience with this type of airplane and special warfare operations were the Air Commandos from Hurlburt Field, Florida - some of whom had seconding arrangements with the CIA. ‘The gang that tumbled into Nakhon Phanom was a pretty wild bunch,’ Sullivan remembers fondly.

This odd mixture of men and machinery grew to become an entire wing, officially designated as the 56th Air Commando Wing; unofficially, this motley outfit was called Sullivan’s Air Force.
[78]

In the spring of 1964, Col. Roger Trinquier, who had retired from the French Army after a stint in Algeria, was approached by the United States to return to Laos to run the clandestine Meo army. He met in Paris with Stephen Enke, assistant to the president, but his earlier disillusionment made him refuse the offer. ‘When we created our
maquisards
, he wrote later, ‘we were absolutely sincere. We were certain that France - our France - would never abandon them, that we would fight with them and for them, against communism and for their liberty. The bonds of friendship we had forged appeared indissoluble. But the complete confidence they had invested in us we then betrayed when we abandoned them ... It would be impossible to return to face the Meo without feeling a profound sense of guilt, and why not say the word, shame. I am certain that, whatever the result of the war, they will be newly abandoned.’
[79]
But at the time this bleak prediction was dismissed as little more than the bitter view of a defeated French colonialist.

The Meo were crucial to the U.S. effort in Laos. They could be relied upon because they were paid in cash directly by the CIA, which meant they received money regularly without the slamming operation in which the Royal Lao Army officers indulged, and, most important, they were capable of forcing the sort of war on the North Vietnamese that they in turn were pursuing so successfully in South Vietnam.

Every year at the beginning of the dry season the historic North Vietnamese 316th Division
[80]
marched across Route 7 to the west and attacked the Meo outposts. The Meo fell back, ambushing and harassing the advancing army as they did so, leaving behind friendly civilian populations in the villages, among whom were spies able to pass on accurate information on enemy numbers and movements.

The Lao strategy was to wait until the enemy forces were stretched out on a long line of communication, with their forces scattered in small units. The most vulnerable of these would be attacked with helicopter-borne Meo troops, sup-ported by propeller-driven lighters. Then, when the rains started, large blocking forces would be flown by helicopter to the east of Route 7 to cut off the 316th as it withdrew to Vietnam. The Meo ambushed them time and time again, with U.S. air support, killing hundreds at each encounter.

It was a seesaw war, with both sides winning a seasonal upper hand but never making any permanent territorial gains. Although Hanoi was prevented from making any lasting conquest, it was able to send fresh troops to battle each year, while the Meo were being constantly bled. In an attempt to restore the balance, the Americans resorted to ever-increasing air power.

To the men who ran the air war from the hideous concrete bunker in Vientiane, the Big Picture was simply an enormous map of Indochina on the wall of their operations room. The building they worked in, a separate structure which stood apart from the embassy itself, had no windows.

‘Embassy people - what a bunch they were!’ Raven Mike Cavanaugh said. ‘Hundreds of people, big compound, restaurants - a big operation. Bureaucrats. Their whole existence was spent in this sleepy old colonial town, a neutral, protectorate zone. The difference between what was going on there and a few miles away was pretty devastating. None of them ever got killed or saw anybody die. They never even heard the bombs dropping.’

The air war had developed from small beginnings. When the North Vietnamese had refused to leave the country in 1962, Prince Souvanna Phouma had asked the United States for aircraft and supplies for the Royal Lao Air Force, and a number of old T-28 fighter-bombers were delivered. The problem remained that there were not enough Lao pilots to fly them effectively in combat.

The gap was filled with a program code-named Glass A, which involved American pilots flying T-28 fighters on combat missions out of Udorn, Thailand - just forty-five miles across the border from Vientiane. It was a small, highly classified operation involving a half-dozen pilots from the CIA airline Air America. ‘When you came out of the barracks you had your gloves on so nobody could see the color of your skin and question your nationality, and you had to wear your helmet with a dark glass visor down so nobody could see who you were and maybe identify you later,’ one pilot said. ‘You crawled into an unmarked T-28 and launched.’

The political consequences of an American being shot down in an unmarked combat fighter were incalculable. Hence the Waterpump program, aimed at training Lao and Thai pilots to fly and maintain the T-28. It opened for business at Udorn in April 1964, with forty-one personnel from the Special Air Warfare Center (later renamed the Special Operations Force), along with four aircraft.

Waterpump was part of a larger program code-named Project 404, of which the Ravens were an integral element. This eventually supported air operations centers (AOCs) in each of the five military regions in Laos, where Air Commandos in the black, consisting of a commander, line chief, communications specialist, and doctor or medic, were attached to a native fighter squadron. It also provided Air Force and CIA personnel in various capacities to help support friendly troops in battle, including forward air guides. Project 404 also provided an adviser to the Royal Lao Air Force’s AC-47 gunship program. The death or capture of such a man carried enormous political risk, and from early 1965 Waterpump began training English-speaking Lao and Meo to replace them.
[81]
Laotian ground forces were trained and equipped through another secret American group called the Requirements Organization, operating out of Thailand and run by the CIA using U.S. ADD as cover.
[82]

In the spring of 1964, Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese forces launched attacks against Neutralist forces on the Plain of Jars, prompting their commander, Gen. (previously Capt.) Kong Le to warn the Royal Lao Government that without air support the situation was hopeless, mostly because the troops of the Royal Lao Army had fled. (Neutralist, in the military sense, refers to the soldiers who followed Kong Le, who sought to remove foreign influence and foreigners from the country. Earlier circumstances had forced him into an alliance with the Communist Pathet Lao, but he broke with them when he came to understand they were serving their Vietnamese masters in the way that the Royal Lao Army was serving the United States. Later his troops fought against the Communists - but just to complicate things, a splinter group of leftist Neutralists fought with the Communists.)

In the United Nations, the United States charged the Pathet Lao with ‘an outright attempt to destroy by violence what the whole structure of the Geneva Accords was intended to preserve.’ There was ample evidence to back the claim. Navy and Air Force reconnaissance planes had come back with photos showing the Plain of Jars bristling with newly installed antiaircraft guns - sixteen sites in all, on or around the plain, housing guns capable of firing 150 rounds a minute, effective to a ceiling of fifteen thousand feet.
[83]