The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (29 page)

The first Raven chosen to present himself at Udorn to fly a T-28 up to Long Tieng was Mike Cavanaugh, a volatile and emotional man whom even the Ravens considered wild. He had grown up in Oakland, California, where he lived next door to the number three man in the Hell’s Angels, and rode with the motorbike outlaws at the age of fifteen, to the dismay of his parents and teachers at high school. Cavanaugh liked to describe himself as a ‘Rejectionist’: ‘A guy who takes nothing at face value, acts independently, and has a lot of disregard for authority.’

Unaware of these views, the air attaché’s office sent him down to Udorn to check out in the T-28. The fighters were the property of the Air Commando Waterpump program - set up to train native pilots - and the man in charge of their maintenance was Lt. Col. George Vogel. He kept his airplanes as immaculately as his uniforms, and on the wall behind his desk hung the threat ‘If the Props Do Not Rotate the Personnel Will.’

The colonel explained with military precision that the plane had to be flown within strict time limits and brought back to Udorn in twenty-eight days for its one-hundred-hour phase inspection. He circled the date on a calendar behind his desk when the plane had to be returned, and emphasized that the one hundred hours of flying time should be spread evenly over the coming four-week period. ‘I understand,’ Cavanaugh said. ‘Or it turns into a pumpkin.’

He returned to Udorn with the plane out of time ten days later. The colonel could not believe his eyes, especially when he saw the appalling condition in which the plane had been returned. Meo observers had vomited repeatedly in the back seat, a shell had blown a hole in the cockpit, and the wings were haphazardly patched with typhoon tape to cover a variety of bullet holes.

‘You son of a bitch, who do you think you are?’ the colonel exploded. ‘I’m going to put that airplane in the back of the dock for three weeks and I’m not going to touch it, because that’s when it’s scheduled.’

Cavanaugh stayed overnight in Udorn and returned to the Waterpump flight line very early the next morning. The only people on duty were two Thai mechanics. ‘I’m here to get my airplane,’ he told them, nodding toward a gleaming T-28. ‘I’m taking this one right here - the one with the rockets on it.’

Cavanaugh flew the plane up to Long Tieng, where it was used in nonstop combat for four days. The silence from Udorn was deafening. Every night when he returned to base he expected some terrible retribution to be exacted, but he heard nothing. There was a simple explanation - no one had missed it.

Only on the morning of the fourth day the T-28 was discovered missing. A hectic search ensued. There was a ramp check at Udorn, followed by radio inquiries to all the places T-28s were usually kept: Korat, Ubon, Savannakhet, Pakse, and Luang Prabang. On the morning of the fifth day an inquiry, of what seemed to be a routine nature, was sent through to the Raven radio operator. He met Cavanaugh as he returned to the strip in the T-28 at the end of the day. The plane had lost its earlier gleam: It had six holes in the wing, one of the guns had burned up, the canopy had been hit and was off its rollers, and the cowl flaps were not working properly. ‘They’re looking for airplane number 479.’

‘I cannot tell a lie,’ Cavanaugh said. ‘Tell them I have the plane.’

The following morning Cavanaugh returned the plane and presented himself to the colonel. ‘Do you have another one ready for me? I use them like Kleenex.’

Before the colonel could explode again, Cavanaugh launched into an enthusiastic spiel on behalf of the Raven program. It was all very nice to restrict the use of a T-28 to one hundred hours a month in a training outfit like Water-pump, but there was a lot of war up at Alternate. The restrictions weren’t realistic. Ravens flew ten-hour combat days, and the bullet holes they picked up were put there by the enemy. Cavanaugh was lyrical about the war in the north, about fighting alongside the Meo, who were so brave and had paid such a high price already. He had a lunatic charm and a zest for the fray that was infectious.

Colonel Vogel was not an Air Commando for nothing. ‘Okay, goddammit, I am going to back you up. I know you’re fighting a war up there. I am going to give you an airplane. Just let me know what’s going on and I will help you out.’

From then on Vogel became one of the Ravens’ staunchest supporters, and they came to refer to him as Uncle George. He was judged to be a ‘tough, fair, stand-up guy,’ which in Raven parlance meant he was prepared to break every rule in the Air Force book to help men in combat.

* * *

In a world without women, or any of the emotional comforts of family life, some of the Ravens lavished affection on pets. (Cavanaugh even took an interest in the country’s extraordinary bug population: ‘In the latrine were some of the strangest insects that have ever been seen by anyone. Their variety amazed me. They were really strange.’) Ravens tended to pick up the occasional stray running loose around the village, until there was a collection of dogs and civet cats attached to the hootch.

Fred Platt favored the exotic. The local children first brought him the cub of a Himalayan black bear - the same breed as the CIA bears. He was black, about a foot tall, and had a white V-marking on his chest, which made him look as if he were wearing a college crew-neck sweater. Platt named him Ho Chi Bear. He used to take the bear flying with him on occasion, an experience the animal seemed to enjoy more than many of the Backseaters.

Platt’s attachment to Ho Chi Bear was known among the Ravens, so when he went away on leave and the bear escaped and was killed by local dogs, nobody wanted to give him the bad news. When he asked one of the mechanics where Ho Chi was, the man looked crestfallen. ‘The bear is dead.’

Local children who had heard the news of Ho Chi Bear’s death brought a fierce tiger cub to the hootch. Platt adopted him and put the cat in a cage next to the kitchen. Efforts to tame him, so that he too could fly in combat, proved futile. Platt was attacked again and again, and scratched from head to foot. ‘I figured any animal who wanted his freedom that much didn’t deserve to be in a cage. I took him in a jeep out into the jungle and let him go.’

The children next brought in the ‘Critter.’ This was a strange beast that looked like a cross between a sloth and an armadillo. It was a foot long, covered in armor plating, and had a long tail and pointed nose. It seemed able to hang from anything and was very affectionate. A deal was struck. Platt handed over a fistful of
kip
, chocolate bars, and several cans of Coca-Cola. ‘For twenty-five cents I had a prehistoric beast nobody had ever seen in his life. The Critter wrapped himself around my arm with his tail in his mouth and I would walk around with him hanging on to me. I don’t know if that dumb an animal can feel affection, but it seemed like I was Daddy. Nuzzled my ear with his little wet nose.’

Clamped to Platt’s right arm, Critter bravely weathered the most fierce firefights, impervious to both airsickness and antiaircraft fire. At the Raven hootch he was fed leftovers and enjoyed the occasional sip of beer in the evening. ‘A fat little critter,’ Fred Platt said, not without pride. Then, after a particularly hard day when the Ravens were unwinding over a round of martinis, one of the drinks was knocked over onto the coffee table. The Critter waddled across to it, took three laps and began to shake from head to tail. Critter rolled onto his back, his legs kicked in the air, and he was dead. ‘Stiffer than anything you ever saw.’

Absurd as the circumstances were, Platt was inconsolable over his pet’s death. ‘I was heartbroken. I lived with death all the time, saw it all day long, but the death of Critter was more shocking and moving to me than the death of a strange human I didn’t know. Critter was my friend. I was horribly upset. I didn’t know what to do about it.’

He realized he had never known to which species Critter belonged. An empty gallon jar of mayonnaise was filled with vodka, gin, and white rum and Critter was lowered gently into it. A picture was taken and sent to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., with an accompanying note asking for information. Baffled, the Smithsonian staff replied that they had never seen a creature to match the photograph. Someone suggested asking the French, who had spent a long time in Laos. Platt sent a photo and letter to the sub-bureau of natural history at the Sorbonne. French scholarship was also seemingly dumbfounded by the photograph of the strange creature floating in the mayonnaise jar, for there was no reply. (The Ravens, Francophobes to a man, all agreed that was about what you could expect from the Frogs.)

‘I began to believe that I would become famous and have a whole species of Critter named after me - Critter Laotian Plattotian.’ The mystery of the Critter remained unsolved, until Platt went into the Vientiane post office to buy a complete set of postage stamps for a collector friend in Houston.

One of the sets was of indigenous Laotian animals, and among them was Critter:
Panis auritas
.
[131]

The monsoon of 1969 broke in June, but the enemy did not go home. The weather was so bad it was impossible to fly, while the North Vietnamese were hampered on the ground by deep mud. ‘The opposition were reading dirty Vietnamese books in their foxholes and we were sitting in Long Tieng going nuts,’ Mike Byers said.

He had arrived on a day of gray fog and wet green karst and was taken out in pelting rain on an area checkout. ‘Jesus Christ, I couldn’t see anything,’ he remembered. Taking off out of Alternate was unnerving enough, with the mountains spiraling around and almost seeming to move in the shifting rain, and advice given on the checkout did little to bolster confidence: ‘If you get absolutely lost and you know you are going to die, ask for help from Air America. Those old cats have been flying around these mountains since Shep was a pup and they’ll take you home.’

On his second day Byers flew out alone. The weather was impossible, but he took comfort in the thought that the enemy probably could not see through the rain clouds to shoot. The rain grew steadily worse, and Byers turned around, intending to head back to Long Tieng. He wandered aimlessly, unable to see through the driving rain, and brought the aircraft down low in an attempt to get a bearing from the ground.

He began to worry that he would soon run out of gas and looked around for landing strips. Below him was a site scarcely larger than a chopper pad, but a Continental Porter was taking off from it. Byers got on the common frequency and asked, in as cool a manner as he could summon, ‘Say, you wouldn’t happen to be going to Long Tieng, would you?’

‘I’m going there now.’ The Porter was piloted by Al Adolph, a Continental veteran who knew Laos blindfolded.

‘Slow down a bit, I’d like to slip in behind you.’ And Byers flew back to Long Tieng.

Weather was a deadly enemy in Laos. During the five months of the monsoon season - which lasted approximately from June through October - a disoriented pilot would often be forced to drop low into a canyon to wait for a hole in the clouds, or to search for a certain rock formation or even a familiar tree, in order to find his way home. There were only minimal navigational aids throughout the country, and the O-1 carried no radar. Conditions were made worse by the altitude, high winds, and quirky air currents around mountaintops, some of which were strong enough to uproot oaks.

It was not enemy fire that was the greatest danger in the monsoon season, but the constant risk of plowing into the side of a mountain - the sudden impact with a ‘rock-filled cloud.’ It was a finely balanced argument whether Ravens faced the most risk in the dry or monsoon season: in the dry season the enemy was on the move and FAGs had to contend with the murk of a thousand fires lit by slash-and-burn farmers; during the monsoon there were terrible rainstorms, thick clouds, and appalling runway conditions.

The war was pursued on isolated days of good weather during the monsoon. Gen. Vang Pao had launched diversionary attacks on Routes 6 and 7 in an attempt to force the enemy to withdraw from Routes 4 and 5 to the south and east of Muong Soui. Enormous additional U.S. air support had been planned, but bad weather interfered with the bombing of 150 targets and the Special Guerrilla Units met with stiff resistance from fresh enemy forces sent across from Sam Neua.
[132]
Despite the weather, the Ravens occasionally man-aged to get through to direct U.S. air in support of beleaguered outposts, but with the guerrillas bogged down it was essential the Neutralist troops move out of their HQ at Muong Soui and engage the enemy. (There were three types of Neutralists in Laos: those who fought for the government, described as Rightist Neutralists; those who fought for the Communists, who called themselves Patriotic Neutralists; and a small band who did their best never to fight at all, also called Neutralists. To make matters even more complicated, the three factions had changed allegiances over the years, depending on the political situation. However, the main body of Neutralists was fighting alongside government troops and Meo at this time.)

Karl Polifka flew into the base for a briefing on the coming operation from the Neutralist commander. He was an immaculate figure dressed in starched fatigues, and he gave a Leavenworth Command and Staff School-style briefing on an acetate-covered map. Polifka was impressed by the textbook planning, but a brief conversation with the U.S. Army adviser dampened his initial enthusiasm. The Neutralists were so reluctant to face the North Vietnamese that the U.S. adviser was obliged to resort to shaming the troops into moving a mere eight kilometers to the east of Muong Soui. The commander, significantly, remained at the base.