The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (48 page)

The plane had lost all power, glided into some trees, and exploded. Diebolt flew over the wreckage and saw the great gaping hole in the right wing made by the shell. It had been yet another of those deadly Old Head-FNG checkout rides, where the combination of over-confidence and inexperience had proved fatal.

Foster had still been on leave in Singapore when the crash occurred, and the loss of the men grieved him. It was another mistake, and one which he had foreseen and tried to prevent.

John Fuller was the next Raven to be shot down. Again, Diebolt heard the Mayday call and caught up with the damaged T-28 halfway across the Plain of Jars. Fuller was cruising at three thousand feet, trailing smoke, and so much flame was curling over the right wing that it was cooking off the .5 caliber ammunition. He was close enough to see that there was no hope the pilot might nurse the fighter back into Alternate. ‘Punch out!’ he yelled into the radio. ‘Get out of that thing!’

The later T-28s were fitted with ejection seats known as the Yankee Extraction System. (This was not technically an ejection seat at all, because the pilot was literally extracted from the plane when a rocket attached to the seat shot into the air, pulling the pilot after it. The nasty thing about the T-28 was that when the canopy was pulled back it exposed a metal bar across the front. Anyone trying to go out with the canopy open was certain to be cut in half. So for ejection purposes the pilot was punched through the canopy. A pilot about to bail out pulled the detcord which was supposed to blow most of the Plexiglas out of the canopy, clamped his helmet visor down and hoped things would not be too painful.)

Diebolt saw the rocket of the Yankee seat shoot through the canopy of Fuller’s T-28, but there was no pilot attached to it. Somehow the rocket had become detached from the seat, leaving the pilot behind. The shattered open canopy now became a furnace, sucking the fire in from the wing. It shot across Fuller’s legs and moved up his crotch to his head. He should have opened the canopy at this stage, but the axiom of always keeping it closed to bail out had been drummed into him too often to disregard. He used his bare fist to smash the remaining jagged Plexiglas.

The plane had already gone into a spiral and fallen to less than a thousand feet when Fuller, who was now badly burned, crawled through the canopy and jumped clear. He hit one knee on the rudder as he fell, which spun him into a position that delayed the opening of the parachute. He found himself falling upside down and much too fast as he yanked repeatedly at the cord. It seemed only seconds after the parachute finally opened that he swung into the side of a mountain and broke his back. But he was alive.

He had fallen directly into the center of enemy-occupied territory, and his survival depended on a rapid pickup. Within ten minutes an Air America chopper was on the ground, and the crew pulled Fuller aboard. Enemy troops were so close that the helicopter took hits from small-arms fire as it lifted off.

Back on the ground in Vientiane the doctor gave Fuller shots to relieve the pain and calm him down. Bob Foster was out at the airport to meet the chopper as it came in, and the young Raven stared up at him from his stretcher. ‘Mr. Foster, I have died three times today. Once out on the PDJ when they first hit me, then when the parachute didn’t work, then when I hit the mountain. What else happened to me?’
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Diebolt landed his T-28 directly behind the Air America chopper. ‘Doc, how is he?’

‘Burns. A broken back.’

‘Get him in the hospital, get him the fuck out of here -1 gotta go fly,’ Diebolt said, and walked back to his plane.

Bob Foster now thought he saw all the signs of combat exhaustion in Mark Diebolt. He had lost his sense of fear, become reckless, and complained endlessly of boredom. Although he showed little emotion outwardly, the death of four young Ravens in quick succession had left the more experienced thirty-seven-year-old Diebolt feeling somehow responsible.

Madame Lulu also seemed to sense the danger surrounding him. The two were good friends, partly because Diebolt was old enough to share her nostalgia over the Edith Piaf records she played endlessly. When the ruined old madame had been ill, Diebolt had tended bar and tucked her up in bed with aspirins, hot milk, and whisky. He went to the
Rendezvous des Amis
just after the second set of Ravens had been killed. ‘I am very sorry,’ Lulu said simply before Diebolt had even opened his mouth.

‘About what?’

‘The death of the two Ravens.’

‘How do you know about that, Lulu?’

‘Everybody knows.’

‘You’re not supposed to know that’

Lulu shrugged. She handed Diebolt the figure of Buddha, his hands over his eyes, on a gold chain. ‘It will save you from harm.’

‘Lulu, I thought you were a Catholic,’ Diebolt said, smiling, taking the Buddha and hanging it around his neck.

‘I have lived in this country a long time.’

The next day Diebolt went out to the Plain of Jars together with Jeff Thompson. Both men were flying O-1s and searched for the 37mm antiaircraft guns the NVA had moved onto the road near Xieng Khouang. They circled the area at seven thousand feet, scouring the ground with binoculars, while Weird Harold Mesaris flew high-speed passes over the area in a T-28. ‘The idea was that they would shoot at me and give away the position,’ Mesaris said, ‘because they were so well camouflaged we couldn’t find them.’

Mesaris traversed the whole area, crisscrossing it at low level, but the NVA gunners maintained fire discipline and resisted the temptation to shoot. (A T-28 flying low and fast was a difficult target.) Frustrated at not being shot at, Mesaris headed farther north to support a mountain site under attack.

Deibolt stayed on and was circling, with his feet on the rudder and peering through binoculars, when the 3 7mm opened up on him. He took a round through the bottom of the engine cowl. It exited right in front of the windshield, leaving a gaping hole two and a half inches wide with the metal around it peeled back. It had also knocked one of the magnetos as it passed through the plane, but the shell failed to detonate.

Mesaris heard Diebolt talking to Cricket on the radio, and could tell from the shaky quality in the voice that he was in trouble. ‘The only time I ever heard that man shaken about anything.’

Diebolt staggered back to Long Tieng in his wrecked O-1 and banged it onto the runway. That night he went to the Rendezvous des Amis and told Madame Lulu the story. He was convinced the gift of the Buddha had saved him. ‘I told you it would work,’ Lulu said, crossing herself.

Not content with fighting the enemy, Diebolt also did battle with the CIA and Air Force intelligence. At this stage in the war, after the outcry over Americans killed in combat in Laos, CIA case officers were flying into sites in the morning and leaving before dark. ‘The CIA guys were getting up at meetings saying that sites were secure, and I would say it was abandoned at four the previous day - right after they had flown home. How could they advise an army without having advisers out there at the critical times, the time when the witches came out - at night?’ Air Force intelligence coming from satellites and fast-moving reconnaissance birds gave a false picture of events. Diebolt wanted to take the few colonels and generals who visited Laos (he was convinced they only made the trip to buy cheap gold) out in the backseat of his O-1 to see what things were really like. ‘Let’s go check it at first light when the dew is still on the grass. We’ll see the footprints - where the elephants have walked, where the deer and bears have walked. You can’t see that from a goddam satellite.’

His outspokenness endeared him to neither group. One morning when he came down for breakfast he was met by Bob Foster. ‘Don’t go to work today. They don’t want you up there anymore.’

Privately, Foster was relieved to have an excuse to remove Diebolt from danger. He was a man he both trusted and liked, and he largely sympathized with his views on both the CIA and Air Force intelligence, but he felt Diebolt needed a break from the war. ‘He gave me a plane and told me to take it any direction but north,’ Diebolt said.

The new CIA policy, ordering case officers back to base before dark, was very disturbing to the best of them. Black Lion now flew to and from his hillside positions as if working office hours. Life had never been so safe for Will Green, and he hated it. Every time he left his men to fly back to Long Tieng he felt he was abandoning them.

One evening, safely back at Alternate, he received a visit from an old friend, a CIA paramilitary case officer in charge of operations on the Bolovens Plateau in the panhandle. He had flown up especially to see Will Green, worried that his friend might learn of what he had to say through some hastily tapped-out embassy cable. But face to face with the man, he wished he were somewhere else, for he brought terrible news. Will Green’s wife and child had been killed in an auto accident on the New Jersey Turnpike when their car had skidded off the road in bad weather and hit a telephone pole.

It was awful to see the tall, courageous man sag beneath the impact of the news. Black Lion returned briefly to the States to attend his wife and child’s funeral, before returning once more to the war. He had nowhere else to go.

Undeterred by the reversals of the war, Gen. Vang Pao launched yet another offensive - Operation Leapfrog - on August 18, 1970. As the name suggests, helicopter-borne assault troops were the vital element in the attack, and five hundred guerrillas were flown to the rim of the Plain of Jars in Air America and Air Force choppers. Now that the friendly troops had seen the awesome power of the B-52 and other U.S. air, they often refused to move unless a suspected enemy position was first softened by multiple air raids. It was as if the purpose of air power were to bolster morale rather than hurt the enemy.

The quantities of U.S. air demanded by Vang Pao, and delivered in part by the Americans, became both ludicrous and grotesque at the same time. The general had become an early and zealous convert to air power, and his opinions were backed up by CIA advisers who were often no more versed in military doctrine than a competent sergeant. At the other extreme, the use of air had become the official policy of the U.S. government, a major plank of Vietnamization. Ambassador Godley put the realist’s view: ‘We had nothing else.’

But the Ravens, who were always in the forefront of the air war, had become extremely skeptical about air power’s limits. The more they piled it on, the harder the enemy hit back.

‘The Company kept telling VP that the Air Force owed him more missions,’ Bob Foster said. ‘We wanted less of everything. The problem was to get the right load of weapons to the right target. More missions meant dropping more bombs, and whether it did any good or not wasn’t important.’

The CIA argued that Vang Pao was a very unsophisticated man who had been promised a level of support by the Air Force which he simply was not getting. The general counted the airplanes, the CIA said, and he was disappointed. The Agency even went as far as trying to make Foster sign a legal contract to guarantee a certain number of missions and to deliver an agreed tonnage of ordnance. He refused, saying that he was unable to guarantee what they requested - and that he wouldn’t do it even if he could. ‘The Company did not even care about body count, or targets destroyed - they just wanted mass.’

Bob Foster had to fight to put a stop to the indiscriminate dropping of Dragonseed mines out of C-130s in the north. The Dragonseed was a tiny mine the size of a silver dollar, designed to deny an area to the enemy - it could blow the tire off a truck, or the foot off a soldier. It had been used extensively on the Trail, with mixed results (one Air Commando colonel used to back his staff car over the stuff to demonstrate how many duds it contained, while CIA intelligence reported the NVA throwing it at each other as a joke).
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‘In Laos there were too many nice smiling people running around who were not all combatants,’ Foster said. ‘I really felt you couldn’t control something like that. You didn’t know who was going to pass through a seeded area - people wouldn’t know we had put it in there. If a guy is a combatant you should shoot him, but if he’s not a combatant you shouldn’t. Dragon-seed was designed for maiming, not killing. I’m a soldier. I don’t maim people.’

Arguments over policy apart, the Ravens continued to work long days out on the Plain of Jars, supporting Vang Pao’s new offensive. Chuck Engle and Craig Duehring often flew together, and while they were cruising along an often-used road Duehring noted his companion increase the jinking motion of his aircraft, and then heard him swear suddenly over the radio. ‘Taking a little ground fire?’ Duehring asked facetiously.

‘I’ve been hit!’ Engle yelled. Small-arms fire from an AK-47 had peppered the aircraft. Engle had been flying with one window of the cockpit open, and a round had entered to the left of his head, shattering Plexiglas into his face, and the bullet had slowed down to the point where he actually saw it pass in front of his eyes. At the same moment he felt a sharp pain in his left ankle.

The two Ravens climbed and headed back toward Long Tieng, while Duehring put out a distress call to Air America and other FACs in the area. Engle described his wound: he was not in great pain, but his left leg was growing numb and he was losing a lot of blood. He did not have a tourniquet on hand, so Duehring suggested he retie his flying boot as tight as he could.

There was still thirty minutes flying time to Long Tieng, and on the way Engle complained that the numbness in his leg was beginning to wear off and the pain was increasing. Duehring began a patter of combat small talk to prevent his colleague from losing consciousness.