The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (35 page)

If the Ravens were becoming a little ragged and brutalized, both physically and psychologically, it might have been the unspoken, subconscious stress brought on by a sustained period of combat without a mortality. It could not last, and secretly each of the Ravens eyed one another and wondered who would be next.

When Craig Morrison first arrived in Laos he felt he had achieved his life’s dream. He came from a family of fliers, where even his mother had a pilot’s license, and passed the years of his adolescence, before he was old enough to fly, jumping freight cars and riding them across country, a disreputable hobby which horrified his upper middle class family. After graduating from Sewanee, the prestigious university of the South - modeled on Oxford - he felt life could begin. ‘I had three goals - chase fast women, drive fast cars, and fly fast airplanes.’ The T-28 was not fast, but it was a fighter.

As the months went by, and Ravens seemed to survive against all the odds, he grew increasingly uneasy. Three Phantoms and an F-105 had already been shot down during December, but the Ravens had escaped. Bill Kozma had nearly been nailed by a couple of antiaircraft guns on December 17, and Morrison had the same experience the following day. ‘All the shit that was happening to us, and for three months nobody had been killed. We were taking bunches of hits - how often can you get an airplane shot up and take it home? It seemed like we were living charmed lives.’

Every day the Ravens came back with their aircraft peppered with bullet holes. Sometimes a plane would have taken as many as fifty separate hits, and still have survived without anything sensitive being touched. It was a run of extraordinary luck that would inevitably have to end.

I felt it was getting tense,’ Morrison said. ‘The weather was dogshit and we were losing the PDJ and were really on the retreat. When you’re moving forward you feel you’ve got the momentum behind you, but when you’re backing up ... I just felt it couldn’t go on much longer before somebody busted his ass. I just couldn’t believe it hadn’t happened already.’

It was a period of particularly bad weather, when the procedure for leaving Long Tieng was to take off blind into the clouds, fly for fifteen seconds, push the nose of the O-1 over, and turn hard right to avoid a nine-thousand-foot mountain. With a little luck, a Raven found himself lined up to fly onto the Plain of Jars. There was an opening in the mountains, shaped like a saddle, which led onto the plain, and if a pilot could see between the cloud base and the mountain he could make it out.

The presence of a single T-28 on days of really bad weather would often deter the enemy, who used its cover to move troops and mount assaults without fear of air attack. Five days before Christmas 1969, Morrison took a T-28 out of Long Tieng on a day thick with cloud, and flew toward the North Vietnamese border, where a friendly outpost was being attacked by the enemy. The weather was so bad that Skyraiders were unable to get into the valley, and the North Vietnamese were able to press their attack with impunity. Morrison was able to work a set of A-1s, trapped above the clouds, by popping up beside them and then leading them down and onto the target.

It worked well, and the Skyraiders had been able to clear the enemy off a mountaintop and relieve the pressure on the friendly position. Morrison climbed back into the clouds to rendezvous with a second set of fighters and lead them down onto the target. He rolled in and fired a rocket, and was pulling off to the right when an antiaircraft gun on a nearby hill opened up. The gunners had held their fire during his first pass and had waited patiently until they were offered the belly of the T-28 as a target. They had calculated the pilot would pull to the right and opened fife before Morrison had actually begun the maneuver. Once committed to the roll there was nothing he could do but fly directly into the gunfire. ‘I flew right through the tracers and had it been night I could have read a newspaper by the flashes around the cockpit.’

Morrison gritted his teeth and waited for the plane to disintegrate. Somehow, he emerged from the tunnel of flak, but a shell had entered the engine and exploded, bending but not breaking a push rod and blowing the head off one of the cylinders. Miraculously, the piston continued to move inside the cylinder, and as Morrison pulled off the engine was still running.

Oil flew over the canopy, and with the power pulled back the T-28 did not have enough RPM to fly. The plane dropped lower and lower, into an area so filled with enemy that Morrison despaired of surviving even if he was able to bail out. ‘I was pretty tense when I got to the point of adding power. I wasn’t sure if the engine was going to come apart.’

He added power and the plane picked up a little speed, just enough to struggle back toward Long Tieng. The Skyraiders stayed on his wing, and it was comforting to see the monstrous old planes beside him. Halfway back to base he was called by Cricket, who wanted to know why Raven 49 was heading home when there was another set of fighters coming in. ‘A little engine trouble,’ Morrison replied.

He banged the damaged plane down onto the strip at Long Tieng, and when he came to a halt on the ramp a mechanic ran out and whistled admiringly through his teeth. ‘Sure messed up this plane.’ He put a finger on the bent push rod and it snapped.

On an impulse, Morrison collected his maps out of the cockpit of the T-28, walked across the ramp, and climbed into an idle O-1. Airborne again, he called Cricket. ‘Hi, it’s me again - Raven 49. Give me those fighters, rendezvous same position over PDJ.’

The weather had broken sufficiently to allow the Skyraiders to find their way into the valley, and Morrison put them in on the enemy. By the time he returned to base he had destroyed two guns, silenced an 82mm mortar position, set off a secondary explosion of ammo and fuel, and killed a score of enemy troops.

Back at the hootch that night he relaxed over a beer and worked on his correspondence law course. Together with Moose Carroll he pinned up plastic sheeting over the screened area of his bedroom - temperatures had fallen to forty degrees at night. Joe Bauer, the intelligence officer, wanted to know how he should write up the crippled T-28. ‘Battle damage?’

‘Yeah,’ Morrison said. ‘I guess you could say that.’
[149]
The day’s events were recorded in a half-page entry in his journal. ‘Got the shit shot out of my plane today and but for a small piece of steel would probably be a POW right now.’ The arbitrary nature of life and death was beginning to obsess him. ‘As a matter of prophecy, it won’t be long before they get one of us - Smokey [Greene], Moose [Carroll], Koz [Bill Kozma], and myself have all had very close calls and the law of averages is bound to catch up. ‘
[150]

Just before Christmas, Craig Morrison landed at Wattay and was amazed to see a lime-green Boeing 707 parked at the end of the runway. Cut off by the war, he had never seen a commercial aircraft painted such a frivolous color. He asked who owned it, and was told, ‘Some wealthy Texas dude - he’s brought over a load of POW wives and widows and a planeful of Christmas presents he wants to take up to Hanoi and give the POWs.’

Craig Morrison shook his head. ‘Bullshit.’

The ‘wealthy Texas dude’ was H. Ross Perot, the Dallas billionaire. The embassy had organized a party for him and his entourage, and certain members of the Ravens were asked to attend. The intention was that they could give Perot a firsthand account of the war, and generally sympathize with the POW wives. The Ravens were unenthusiastic. Weeping women and a fat cat in a lime-green airplane full of Christmas presents did not add up to the sort of party the Ravens enjoyed. (‘Ask not for whom the women weep,’ was the callous Raven quip at the time, ‘they weep for you.’) Only a couple of Ravens showed up for the party, and beside the military demeanor and severe crewcut of Ross Perot they looked like hippies. But as they listened to the man they warmed to him.

They learned that Perot had been asked by Henry Kissinger to persuade the North Vietnamese to change their harsh treatment of the POWs, and he was using his own money to work to that end. ‘It had been estimated that Vietnamization would take three years,’ Perot said. ‘The intelligence community had predicted that half the prisoners would die of brutality and neglect during the period. The Christmas trip and all of the other activities were staged to embarrass the Vietnamese in the eyes of the world to the point where they would change the treatment of the prisoners.’
[151]

As the Ravens listened to the passionate ideas put forward by Perot, and enjoyed his undiplomatic remarks expressing his low opinion of Defense and State Department employees in both Vientiane and Saigon, they were won over. Here was a man who was spending his own money to cut through all the red tape and bureaucracy to help captured Americans, who often seemed to have been forgotten.

‘How much money does this guy have?’ one of the Ravens asked.

‘
Billions
.’

‘Maybe the U.S. should put the whole damn war out to contract to him - we can cleanup and go home.’

Christmas itself was a festive affair. Patrick Mahoney had developed an informal relationship with several Pan Am operatives by scrounging equipment for their quarters in Saigon and Cam Ranh Bay they were unable to get themselves. Through them he sent the word back to San Francisco that he was looking for fresh turkeys (rolled turkeys were not acceptable). He began to receive phone calls from Pan Am people all over the States - who knew him by his code name, Clipper Patrick - with offers of turkeys. One place would have a couple, another four or five, and so on, until Mahoney was overwhelmed with turkeys. A large shipment was rerouted to Gen. Vang Pao at Long Tieng, after being flown directly from the United States by Pan Am. The general presented Mahoney with three of the captured Soviet sniper rifles as a token of appreciation.
[152]
All the general’s family, his senior officers, and the Americans at Alternate sat down to lashings of roast turkey. Floyd and his wife, the CIA bears, enjoyed a turkey to themselves. The Meo seemed bewildered by the soft, flaky meat that melted in the mouth, but enjoyed the gravy very much, pouring it over rice.

Spirits were high during the Christmas of 1969 at Long Tieng. A sustained period of victory had been enjoyed for the first time, and despite the setbacks of the past couple of months, it had been a good year. The Meo had regained their confidence, and Gen. Vang Pao was his old self.

PICTURES

Gen. Vang Pao, who first saw combat with the French at the age of thirteen, led the CIA-trained and -financed Meo guerrillas throughout the war until the end.
(Pic: Private collection of David Kouba)