The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (47 page)

The release of 90 percent of the 421-page transcript came after a five-month dispute between the Senate subcommittee, which wanted to release it all, and the executive branch of the government, which originally wanted nothing released. The remaining 10 percent was censored by the State and Defense Departments. This included lists of personnel killed in Laos, answers to questions about Thai troops operating inside the country, and the testimony of CIA director Richard Helms.

It was finally admitted officially that two hundred Americans had been killed in Laos, with another two hundred missing or taken prisoner - contradicting not only Kissinger’s assertions that no Americans had been killed in the country, but also a later White House statement that fewer than fifty Americans had lost their lives.

Details of Project 404 and the Requirements Organization were given, and the ambassador’s role was described as that of ‘military proconsul.’ Although the senators had received detailed, classified briefings on the war in Laos since the mid-1960s they expressed very quotable shock and outrage in the public prints. ‘I have never seen a country engage in so many devious undertakings as this,’ Sen. William Fulbright said, referring only to U.S. transgressions and choosing to ignore the mirrored deception of the North Vietnamese. Sen. Stuart Symington stated: ‘The point we are trying to bring out is not only that the American people have no knowledge at all that this is true and neither does the Congress - and neither does this committee nor the Senate Armed Services Committee.’

In fact, Symington had been in Laos several times and had accompanied Sullivan on a visit to Udorn in 1966 during the bombing halt against North Vietnam, and been briefed on the 378 strikes going into Laos that day. The knowledge made his ‘apprehension about Laos worsen,’ an apprehension, however, he was able to accommodate over the years. On later visits to Laos he stayed as a house guest of Ted Shackley, CIA station chief in Vientiane at the time.

The senator’s antics were thought despicable by Sullivan. ‘Senator Symington decided that in order to be reelected he had to convert from being a hawk to a dove. This was the cheapest cheap shot he could take. Congressmen and senators were given classified briefings all the time I was in Laos, and before when Leonard Unger was there. They were certainly told about the bombing. Symington was a regular visitor to Laos. It was less than forthright statesmanship. He needed a dovish plank in order to run again, and he had been so much tarred as a hawk he was able to issue this to say that we had deceived him. Knowing full well he had not been deceived.

‘Ironically, at an earlier date I had been invited back to an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Symington, after he had been in Laos, because he was using Laos then as an example of how we could fight the war more cheaply than they were doing it in Vietnam. I tried to get that classified executive session transcript on the record, and Fulbright blocked it. He wanted the support of Symington, so he said the earlier hearings were informal, executive sessions which he controlled, and they couldn’t be put on the record. It’s the games people play on Capitol Hill.’

As a follow-up to the disclosures from the hearings, Godley was brought back to Washington and put on the witness stand for an eight-hour grilling. ‘As I sat there I felt a dagger was between my shoulder blades. That if I made one false move... Symington is the epitome of the most despicable type of politician. A former secretary of the Air Force, who was on this special committee and had all the information necessary, getting up there and pontificating, “Nobody tells me anything.”

‘I cannot get the text of those hearings. It is still classified. And strangely enough I can’t even get a classified version - the Freedom of Information Act notwithstanding. They say it’s a technical problem - they don’t have the copies.’
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One more ploy in the games people play on Capitol Hill.

Fred Platt’s threat to demand a civilian trial had stopped all court-martial proceedings in their tracks. He had no legal right, but the last thing the Air Force wanted, as the attention of Washington and the world’s press swung momentarily onto Laos, was a loquacious, opinionated Texan, who happened to be a highly decorated officer, on trial for misconduct in the secret war in which he had been badly wounded.

In one of the more pragmatic moves by the Air Force staff in the Vietnam War, they decided to reverse themselves and make Platt a war hero instead. Back in the States, Platt was awarded his three Purple Hearts, Silver Star, three DFCs, and twenty-six medals in a public ceremony, which ABC, CBS, and NBC television covered but never aired. On the very same day the Kent State killings occurred - weekend soldiers from the Ohio National Guard opened fire on fellow Americans and shot dead unarmed students on the campus of their university. The invasion of Cambodia had triggered massive antiwar sentiment and civil disorder in the United States and had eclipsed the disclosures about Laos. War heroes were not much in demand on prime-time TV by mid-1970, although the press might have been more interested in Fred Platt’s little ceremony had they known all those decorations were for acts in an ever-escalating secret war.

Back in Laos, the Ravens continued to fly twelve-hour combat days. Ravens arrived in Laos, flew their tours, and went home. Many of the pilots were so exceptional it sometimes seemed impossible that they could be replaced, and yet some-how another extraordinary individual always seemed to materialize. Chuck Engle was one of the finest natural pilots ever to join the program, even judged by the rigorous standards of the Ravens, and enjoyed barrel-rolling the O-1 - an extremely difficult and dangerous aeronautical stunt. He had been brought up on an Indian reservation and had the dark complexion of a Cherokee. Just before graduating pilot school he received the news that his father had committed suicide. It disturbed him deeply and he often spoke of it to fellow Ravens, until one or two of them wondered if Chuck Engle didn’t have something of a death wish himself.

His idea of fun could be breathtaking. He liked to meet up with Skyraiders on their own level at twelve thousand feet, buzzing them as they came on station by dropping down out of the clouds. At a contact point on the Plain of Jars one set of A-1s impatiently asked for a mark, having been startled when Engle jumped them.

‘Wait a minute,’ Engle said. He pulled the nose of his O-1 up into a stall and plummeted earthward in an endless spin. Down and down, around and around, he fell until at fifteen hundred feet he recovered control, took the plane out of the spin, pushed the nose over, and fired a rocket accurately at the target. The wild maneuver was carried out as a smooth, fluid series of coordinated actions, and the A-1 jocks watched the show in awe.

Engle also held the Raven O-1 altitude record. The Bird Dog became temperamental over heights of ten thousand feet, and extremely difficult to control, but it was Engle’s goal to take it to twenty thousand feet. To nurse the O-1 to any height at all demands the patience to overcome repeated stalling - which can result in the plane falling thousands of feet - and great pilot skills and stamina. Engle climbed for what seemed like eternity, on the edge of a perpetual stall, and suffered intense cold and almost passed out from lack of oxygen, while the small, engine of the O-1 strained to its limit. Eventually, at 19,720 feet, Engle gave in and let back down.
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One way or another Chuck Engle established very early in his tour that he was a Raven who would leave his mark.

In late June the NVA and Pathet Lao opened an uncharacteristic offensive in the north. Sometimes FACs in OV-l0s, with the call sign Nail, came over from Vietnam to lend a hand, with varying results. One Nail, bored by a slow day out on the Plain of Jars, hooked up with an RF-4 recon bird, and the two pilots began taking pictures of each other. It was a day of poor weather, with banks of dark cloud broken up by sunny patches, and somewhere among the clouds the two pilots lost sight of each other and collided. The pilot of the OV-10 bailed out, while the RF-4, which was less badly damaged, limped home.

One Raven picked up a weak transmission in which the Nail said he was all right and under cover, while another sighted the discarded parachute on the southern rim of the plain. Chuck Engle was the first Raven to arrive in the area and dropped to twenty-five feet to make a series of passes in an attempt to pinpoint the pilot’s location. Engle found him in a clump of trees to the north of his abandoned parachute.

Automatic gunfire, located only twenty-five meters to the north of the survivor, raked Engle’s plane. Heedless of his own safety, Engle attacked the enemy position with Willy Pete rockets, simultaneously giving instructions to the Skyraiders stacked overhead to obliterate the area north of his mark.

As the fighters struck and strafed the enemy position, the Nail radioed nervously to say that the ordnance was dropping awfully close to him, and that there was heavy ground fire directed at all aircraft. An Air America H-34 flew in to attempt a pickup, but a hail of gunfire forced it to pull off and return battle-damaged to base. The Skyraiders saturated the area with strafe, allowing a second Air America helicopter to attempt a pickup. As it hovered directly above the Nail an automatic weapons position only forty meters away opened fire. The pilot screamed into the radio he had taken a serious hit in the fuel tank, and he began to break away.

Engle dived his O-1 between the enemy and the chopper, giving the Air America pilot time to escape. An AK-47 round entered the Bird Dog in the root of the left wing, spun through the cockpit over Engle’s head, and severed a fuel line feeding from the auxiliary tank. Gasoline began to stream down the left side of the aircraft, both outside the fuselage and inside the cockpit, and drenched Engle.

The enemy had now moved so close to the Nail that Engle dared not leave despite the condition of his aircraft. Gasoline continued to spray over him, so he shut off the radios to reduce the risk of fire, directing the fighters over his hand-held survival radio. He also armed a rocket on the right wing, away from the flowing gasoline, and fired it accurately at the target. He circled the Nail until he could clear the fighters in to strafe the area, and only when the enemy gunfire was silenced and he was certain the downed pilot was no longer in immediate danger did he tell anyone of the serious hit he had taken.

He nursed the O-1 back toward Long Tieng, but just as he was on final approach, the engine quit. It took all of Engle’s exceptional piloting skills to glide the powerless plane over the karst peaks at the end of the runway and dead-stick it onto the strip. Safely back on the ground, he jumped out of the useless O-1 and immediately ran to another. He climbed in, his clothes still soaked and reeking of gasoline, and flew back.

Again he dropped to treetop level and continued to mark troop concentrations, as well as a 12.7mm machine gun which opened fire on him from a hilltop. Only when the area was saturated with CBU and a wall of smoke from burning Willy Pete rockets was laid down did the Jolly Greens manage to go in and pick up the downed pilot.

Engle returned to the hootch, changed out of his gasoline-soaked clothing, and took a shower. He sat down to dinner after an exceptional day’s work - he had risked his life in a display of extraordinary courage on three separate occasions in a single afternoon. It was to earn him an Air Force Cross - an award he was never to receive.
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Volunteer Ravens presented a problem opposite that facing most military commanders - they needed to be held back, not egged on. It was the Head Raven’s job to spot the signs of combat exhaustion among his men before it killed them. Bob Foster, who was twenty years older than most of the Ravens, had a sharp eye for all the obvious signs.

‘People cracked, but not in the manner you would think,’ Foster said. ‘It wasn’t someone who suddenly couldn’t fly anymore or refused to get out of bed one morning. They simply started to make mistakes. Didn’t change the fuel tank. Didn’t think about it until they were damned near in the ground. How could an experienced combat pilot do such a dumb thing? I looked for mistakes, and then made them take a rest or moved them south.’ (Some Death Wish cases were easy to spot. One new Raven arrived on station dressed entirely in black -black cowboy hat, black shirt and jeans, and black boots. He told Bob Foster that his reason for volunteering for the program was that Laos seemed to be a good place to die. Foster sent him home.)

One of the Ravens he felt needed to be watched was Jim Cross. Just before Foster went on leave he ordered Cross to stay out of the combat zone and restricted his flying to checking out new pilots. Cross moved down to Vientiane and busied himself buying stereo gear and bamboo furniture to ship back to the States.

One of the newcomers Cross was supposed to check out was Dave Reese, an amiable young man distinguished by a scar across his nose. Cross had been instructed to check out the new Raven in the Vientiane area and then fly on up to Alternate. On the way Cross thought he would take Reese out onto the Plain of Jars, as they were flying in the long-range U-l 7, and keep on going until they reached the Ban Ban valley.

Mark Diebolt was out on the Plain of Jars in a T-28 when he heard Cross’s Mayday distress signal. Unknown to the pilot, the NVA had moved a mobile 37mm antiaircraft gun into the Ban Ban valley - always a potential flak trap because of the number of guns positioned there - and the U-17 had taken three hits. One shell had blown a massive hole in the wing. ‘I’ve got full trim - everything’s jettisoned,’ Cross said over the radio. Moments later he made his final transmission: ‘I can’t hold it - it’s going down.’