The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (42 page)

When he spoke of Platt to the other doctors, he did so in the third person, as if the patient did not exist or were stone-deaf. It was a procedure with which Platt was to grow familiar during his treatment in military hospitals. The weights were removed and he was placed in a trundle bed. The doctor remarked to his colleagues that he was amazed the patient had lived so long - twenty-four hours was surprising, seventy-two hours little short of extraordinary.

‘How bad is it?’ Platt asked.

‘With therapy you may regain the use of your hands,’ the doctor replied, addressing him personally for the first time. ‘You’ll never walk again.’

Platt was silent for a moment as the full meaning of the doctor’s words sank in. Then he recovered something of his old spirit. ‘Bullshit.’

He was wheeled into the office of the hospital commander, where he spoke over the phone to his brother, Dr. Melvin Platt, a surgeon at Massachusetts General in Boston. Then his brother spoke with the Udorn doctor. ‘Looks bad, Fred,’ he said bluntly. ‘But with therapy you’re going to make it. I’ll get them to ship you back here.’

‘Don’t tell the folks.’

Platt determined he was going to walk out of the hospital or die there, and listening to the gloomy predictions of doctors and staff around him, he concluded the odds were on the latter. He began to give away his guns, the only personal things in Laos he had to give - his 9mm pistol, his Swedish-K submachine gun, his folding-stock AK-47. He told Burr Smith, who had come down to visit, that he wanted Scar to have his M-79 grenade launcher.

At first Platt made light of his crash, turning it into a good yarn for Mr. Clean. ‘If ever they hold the hundred-meter dash for people with broken backs, handicapped by a hundred-pound Lao over one shoulder and a hundred pounds of ammo over the other, I know there is not any human being who will ever beat the record I set.’

Burr Smith smiled. There was a moment’s silence, and then Platt began to speak in earnest. ‘I can’t go home all gimped up like this. My mother could accept the fact I’m dead - but I can’t go home looking like this. I can’t handle it - it’s not the way I want to do it.’ He lowered his voice. ‘If I can’t walk out of this place, come kill me.’

Burr Smith looked away.

Therapy was slow and very painful. Platt was lifted from the trundle bed while nurses and staff manipulated his arms and legs. It made him stiff and sore, but he began to regain some feeling and felt certain he would be able to walk if only he was allowed to try. The hospital staff looked skeptical, but put him into separate back and neck braces and also strapped braces onto both legs.

Encased in this framework of metal supports, he was awkwardly lifted to his feet. Willing himself to walk, he concentrated all of his energy into taking the first step. He felt one leg inch forward, and then the walls dissolved around him as he fell headlong onto his face.

As Communist military pressure continued to build on the Plain of Jars in early 1970, the war-weary Meo proved no match for it. The success of Operation About-Face had proved ephemeral. The Meo guerrillas were formidable as helicopter-transported shock troops in small battalions, but it was beyond their ability to face a highly trained enemy of division strength.
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They could take ground in lightning attacks but had difficulty keeping it, and when the NVA fielded tanks against the airstrip at Xieng Khouang the youthful Meo panicked. Terrified at the sight of the advancing tanks, they fled - closely followed by the town’s garrison of fifteen hundred men.
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But it was imperative to delay the enemy advance. If it was not stopped it would be the first time the NVA would be in striking distance of Long Tieng at the time of the year when the weather favored them. It was clear that the Meo alone, even with increased sorties of Raven-directed U.S. air, would not be able to check the advance. Impotent in the face of enemy attack, the U.S. military now debated whether to unleash the B-52 on the Plain of Jars.

B-52s had never been used in northern Laos before, although they had bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail in the southern panhandle since 1965. CINCPAC - Commander in Chief Pacific Command - had proposed its use in the north seven months earlier, when Communist forces had threatened the royal capital of Luang Prabang, but only now did Washington consider the issue in earnest.

The B-52 Stratofortress was the backbone of the Strategic Air Command, the bomber built to deliver nuclear weapons. The Air Force had hurriedly trained crews in the delivery of conventional weapons, and since June 1965 it had been used in Indochina on a daily basis. Its white belly - so painted to deflect the glare of a nuclear explosion - had been painted over, and the bomb bay had first been adapted to carry more than fifty 750-pound iron bombs, while later models carried more than a hundred 500-pound bombs. The B-52 could neither be seen nor heard from the ground, and released its bomb load at forty thousand feet, at which height the bombardier had to allow for the curvature of the earth in targeting calculations. A sortie usually consisted of a cell of three B-52s, and the damage inflicted was awesome.

The Ravens were asked their opinion regarding the potential use of the bomber in the war in Laos. An Air Force officer gathered a group of them together and questioned them in particular on the pros and cons of using the B-52 on the Plain of Jars. Their answer was surprising - unanimous condemnation of such a move. Sitting in on the meeting was Craig Morrison, and he noticed that just as his colleagues were about to applaud the use of extra firepower against the enemy they all seemed to have immediate second thoughts. ‘You could see them about to mouth the words, “Sure! Great - pile it on the bastards,” and then the thought changed.’ Not a single Raven polled favored the use of the B-52, either on the Plain of Jars specifically, or the Trail, or anywhere else in Laos.

‘We said forget it. It won’t work,’ Morrison said. ‘B-52s are great - they blow up lots of territory. But that’s not our problem. On downtown Hanoi it would be pretty devastating - but up in northern Laos it was the wrong weapon. Overkill. We needed more T-28s and A-1s carrying the right ordnance at the right time. And even if you kill the enemy, without troops to hold the territory you’re just spinning your wheels. You’ll be playing your last trump card, and the enemy will find out it’s no good. You’d be better served holding on to the trump as a threat.’ The Ravens rejected the use of the B-52 in northern Laos on practical, military grounds and were merely expressing in their own words an accepted military axiom: the precision of any lethal weapon system’s use can never be made equal to its destructive power.

In addition, the ambassador was convinced it would prove to be a political mistake. ‘I was certainly opposed to the use of the B-52,’ Godley said. ‘It was just another escalation. I just felt that if we could hold our own without using them, why use them?

‘The B-52 was portrayed as the answer to everything, which is rubbish. It’s all a lot of luck, let’s face it. An air raid is just as good as your targeting. If you happened to have troops in the open or dumps, it’s damned effective. On the other hand if your targeting is no good you are just cutting grass.’

Back in July 1969, when Godley had just arrived to take up his position as ambassador to Laos, he had given a briefing on die military situation in the country to President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who were passing through Bangkok, Thailand. During the briefing Godley made the unfortunate remark ‘Some idiots want to use the B-52 in northern Laos,’ an idea he contemptuously dismissed. Afterward, he was taken aside by Kissinger. One of the ‘idiots,’ Kissinger said, was the president of the United States. Another, of course, was Kissinger.

Both the military advice of the Ravens, on the edge of the war, and the political advice of the ambassador, who actually ran the war, were studiously ignored in Washington, where the debate over the bomber’s use boiled down to a power struggle between Defense Secretary Melvin Laird and the Pentagon on the one hand, and Henry Kissinger, head of the National Security Council, and the White House, on the other.

‘A stately bureaucratic minuet’ is how Kissinger describes the high-level wrangling over the decision to use the B-52 on the Plain of Jars.
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In his memoirs, Kissinger writes that the request was generated by Ambassador Godley on January 23, asking that the B-52 strikes be used against a concentration of four thousand Vietnamese troops massed on the plain. In fact, Godley was instructed by Washington to ask for B-52 strikes. Armed with the request, Kissinger set about polling those in the chain of command in Washington on the wisdom of such a move.

Secretary of State William Rogers stated flatly that he was against the use of B-52s in northern Laos. According to Kissinger, Mel Laird told him privately that he favored using B-52s against the target, but did not want it discussed at an interagency forum for fear of leaks. He wanted it approved through the same channels as the secret strikes in Cambodia, so that the Pentagon would go on the record as opposing the strike, despite Laird’s personal view. (Both Rogers and Laird had previously opposed the use of the B-52 in secret raids on Cambodia, even after Nixon and Kissinger had decided to launch such an attack.)

Kissinger had met his match with Laird, described by colleagues as a wily bureaucrat with highly developed political instincts, a truly formidable adversary in any Washington power struggle.
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Miffed at the defense secretary’s nimble evasion, Kissinger writes, ‘The president would take the heat for the decision.’
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Not Kissinger.

His account of conversations with Laird glosses over a much more heated disagreement over the issue. The joint chiefs had already expressed the wish to withdraw B-52s not currently required in Southeast Asia, but the request was refused by the White House on the grounds that they should remain in the theater for ‘contingency purposes.’ Later, the Pentagon suggested a more flexible use of sorties, geared to enemy activity - a piece of military common sense the men fighting the war in Vietnam had always asked for. Kissinger refused, insisting that the number of tactical air strikes and B-52 sorties that had already been approved for the next financial year be flown regardless of the military situation. ‘Anyone that addresses the problem starting with a set number of sorties doesn’t understand the problem and isn’t qualified to discuss it,’ Melvin Laird responded angrily.
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But Kissinger knew what Laird did not, that the ‘contingency’ was already mooted - an invasion of Cambodia. Even so, the faith the White House put in the B-52 strategic bomber flew directly in the face of the evidence. Reports specifically commissioned on the subject emphasized the military ineffectiveness of the B-52: it had failed to interdict supplies and troops on the Trail and failed completely on the bombing of base camps, while the number of enemy soldiers killed in strikes was a question for debate. Tactical air used to support ground troops - exactly the business the Ravens were involved in - was, on the other hand, much more effective.

Lacking support for his plan to use the B-52 on the Plain of Jars, Kissinger then asked Gen. Earle Wheeler, chairman of the joint chiefs, whether the target could be attacked with tactical aircraft rather than B-52s. (‘For some reason, tactical air strikes seemed to provoke less of an outcry than B-52s,’ Kissinger mused vaguely.
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Good reason, actually. Tactical aircraft can be controlled and diverted onto a target by FACs, are more accurate, and can be called off at the last minute if necessary. The chances of civilian casualties are greatly reduced by using tactical air. A B-52 strike is planned days in advance and its bombs are released at such an altitude that they are considered to be accurate if they land within thirty meters of the target. Perhaps the American public, and worldwide opinion, instinctively understood this, for to those opposed to the war the B-52 bomber had become the symbol of remote, cold-blooded killing, the modern American way of war at its most unacceptable.)

Wheeler told Kissinger that the enemy on the Plain of Jars were being attacked by tactical aircraft (they had, of course, been bombed by tactical aircraft for the last six years), but this was proving ineffective, and in the circumstances he favored the use of the B-52. Kissinger went back to Laird and attempted to persuade him that a concentration of four thousand North Vietnamese troops presented a target worthy of a B-52 strike. Laird replied - perhaps ironically - that, indeed, the massing of so many troops presented the best target since he had become secretary of defense, but stressed they would soon disperse.

But there was no such target. Kissinger was quoting an inaccurate press report in an attempt to win Laird around, rather than the intelligence reports of the CIA, DIA, and Air Force - to which he had instant access. These put the real figure at four hundred. The mistaken press report was the result of a misunderstanding when a military briefing officer told news agency reporters that four thousand enemy soldiers were involved in the offensive on the plain. This was taken to mean that an enemy force four thousand strong was attacking a command post on an airfield. It is inconceivable that the NVA would have risked concentrating four thousand men in open country.

The upshot of Kissinger’s various conversations over using the B-52 on the Plain of Jars was that he had no consensus whatsoever, and that he had received direct advice against it. It is disingenuous of Kissinger to suggest that the world’s most powerful men in the world’s most powerful nation would exert their collective energy over a single classified B-52 strike. The ‘stately bureaucratic minuet’ was a game. Larger issues were at stake.