The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (5 page)

The program itself, however, remained a mystery. Fred Platt presented himself at Bien Hoa for the final, in-country briefing. It was no more informative than any of the others, its only novel feature being an explicit statement that this was the last opportunity for anyone to change his mind. Ravens called it the ‘back-out briefing.’

Almost everyone had had second thoughts now and again. The advice of senior officers did not count for much, but there were certain FACs in South Vietnam who had earned a reputation among their peers for courage. Sy Margolis, a FAC who had flown through some of the most intense ground fire in South Vietnam and whose colleagues believed he deserved the Medal of Honor, was one of them. In a card session Platt thought to impress him by announcing that he had volunteered for the Steve Canyon Program. According to Platt, Margolis was appalled. ‘Are you nuts? This is the last time I’m ever going to see you alive. You’ve volunteered to go and die.’

It was disconcerting but thrilling too, and the challenge of a dangerous adventure always overcame good sense in a Raven. New Ravens saw the back-out briefing as yet another peculiar step on the way to wherever they were going. Once the briefing was over, Platt was sent to a hangar on the airfield at Bien Hoa, where he was met by a colonel. ‘Are you the guy who’s getting the airplanes?’

‘What airplanes?’

The colonel ignored Platt’s incomprehension, which he seemed to dismiss as an exaggerated sense of security. ‘We can’t talk about it, I know, but these are your airplanes over here.’ He pointed toward three O-1s, stripped of their unit identification markings, but still carrying tail numbers and painted with wide red stripes along the entire length of the white upper wings, to enable them to be spotted more easily by high-flying jets. ‘Do you want to sign for them?’

‘I’ll take them,’ Platt said, flowing with the tide.

‘You’ve got to give me one dollar for each airplane.’

‘It’s a deal.’ Platt was enjoying himself, happy to have joined a program so novel it sold its pilots airplanes for a dollar each. He took out three one-dollar Military Payment Certificates.

‘That won’t do. It has to be U.S. currency.’ The colonel exchanged the scrip for three dollar bills from his own pocket and recorded their serial numbers in a notebook. He then took Platt by jeep to the group HQ, where he signed a set of papers which stated that Platt had purchased the aircraft. The planes were removed from the official records of the USAF, written off as surplus equipment sold to a civilian pilot. Platt was the temporary proprietor of three airplanes.

He was told to deliver them to Detachment 1 (whatever that was) at Udorn, Thailand. HQ had mapped out an air route allowing for an overnight stop in Pleiku for a maintenance check. Two other new Ravens were to accompany him on the trip. Never a man to pass up the chance of making an eccentric and extravagant gesture, Platt hired a taxi to pick up his fellow Ravens and took them out to the flight line. The taxi pulled up in front of three O-1s.

‘Take your choice, fellas,’ Platt told his colleagues. ‘These are my airplanes. I don’t know quite how or why, but I own these airplanes and we’ve got to take them to Udorn.’

The three Ravens flew to Pleiku, where they were met on the tarmac by a full colonel. He saluted them as if greeting general officers. A bevy of mechanics fell onto the aircraft, and it seemed that the entire maintenance section of the base intended to work on them through the night. Platt noticed the O-1s were taxied to secure steel revetments usually reserved for multimillion-dollar jet aircraft. A staff car and driver took them to spacious quarters, where they were met by another respectful, saluting colonel. ‘With full colonels meeting me everywhere, and seemingly prepared to run errands, I was firmly convinced I had joined a kamikaze corps and was going out to die,’ Platt says.

Once over the border in Thailand - anywhere outside of Vietnam was ‘across the fence’ - the status continued to improve, but the secrecy remained. Udorn was the final gathering spot. Sometimes the planes carrying Ravens landed in the middle of the night and remained at the end of the runway until a jeep came out to meet them and they were driven to a house off the base in the town. Several of them thought it was carrying the cloak-and-dagger aspect of the operation a bit far.

Ravens who came in on their own, having hitched a lift on a military transport, were not so fortunate. Questions about the location of Detachment 1 were often met with blank looks and shrugs. (One Raven, desperate after a dozen fruitless inquiries, was finally given directions by a Thai waitress who worked in the officers’ club.)

Detachment 1 was set apart from the main section of the base and housed in an upstairs office to one side, where Air America, the CIA airline, operated. The colonel in charge kept his welcoming speech short. ‘I am supposed to be your commander. Your records will be kept here and our admin people will try and take care of you. I don’t really know what the hell is going on and I don’t have control over you. Goodbye.’
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When Mike Cavanaugh first arrived in Thailand, after living in Vietnam in a filthy hut without windows, he was most impressed by the luxury of the base. He sat in the cool, comfortable office of an Air Commando colonel, who asked him, ‘What do you think of coming over to this dangerous business?’

‘Pretty good so far,’ Cavanaugh replied, a cold beer in his hand. ‘Looks like an air-conditioned war to me.’

The colonel laughed, but as he bade Cavanaugh farewell and wished him luck, he looked grave. ‘Air-conditioned war, huh? Not where you’re going, son.’

The Ravens soon discovered they were not going to be working in Udorn at all. Special orders were issued to them assigning them to temporary duty (TDY) at a classified location. All uniforms and military ID were handed over to a staff sergeant, who stored them in a large Container Express (CONEX). They were given various shots, issued with blood-chits, and told that all their records would be kept at Udorn, which was also where they would draw their pay.

But no one was able to tell them what to expect from the job. ‘We don’t really know what you guys do. We’re just your front’ said the sergeant who asked them to sign for a weapon, a helmet, and a survival vest. The final formality was a blank on the form for an address in the States: ‘Wherever you want your body shipped.’
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It came as no surprise that the next stage in the process should be an informal approach by a mysterious civilian. ‘Lets go over to the club,’ the latest stranger said to Craig Morrison. He expected to go to the O club - the officers’ club - but found himself in the Air America club, a very different establishment run on highly informal lines. The clientele was exotic and somewhat rowdy.

Morrison was taken over what had become familiar ground. ‘What do you know about this program?’

‘Very little.’

When the waitress brought drinks the civilian fell silent. He took the clandestine nature of his calling seriously and stopped talking every time somebody passed by the table. Morrison was still naive enough about his new covert status to look puzzled when the stranger shut up in the middle of a sentence. The secrecy of it all was beginning to get on his nerves. The stranger kept talking about the need to ‘maintain a low profile.’ Morrison nodded. The man leaned forward, his mouth against Morrison’s ear.

‘You’re going up-country.’

‘Oh.’ Up to which country, Morrison wondered - Burma, India, Cambodia, Laos?

‘Until you know what’s going on, until you get your feet on the ground, don’t say anything to anybody about anything. Tomorrow come out here and get on an airplane.’

‘I probably shouldn’t ask what kind of airplane.’

‘Just come out here.’

The stranger dissolved into the crowd, leaving Morrison to nurse his drink. He began to feel uncomfortable. They had taken everything from him: personal belongings, uniforms, dog tags, and even his Air Force ID card. The loss of the ID card made him feel especially vulnerable. It was the open sesame to military life in Southeast Asia, necessary to get on and off U.S. bases, and was checked a hundred times in the course of a week. He wondered if they would serve him a drink in the O club in civilian clothes without ID. It was early, so he decided to give it a try.

At the club he was in luck. A friend he had known in Vietnam had brought a plane into the base for maintenance and was staying overnight. The friend took him into the club and bought him a drink. The first thing Morrison noticed was four men in their flight suits sitting on the bar. It seemed incongruous in the semiformal atmosphere of the officers’ club.

His friend explained: it was combat prestige, yet another gradation in the fine shading of fighter-pilot superiority. Transport pilots, navigators, and administration and maintenance officers were obliged to stand at the bar like ordinary mortals, but fighter pilots sat on it.

Morrison was introduced as the newest Raven. He felt awkward and out of place standing in civilian clothes amid a combat elite. At the word ‘Raven’ the fighter pilots immediately jumped down and grabbed Morrison underneath the arms and hoisted him up to sit alongside them. ‘You don’t know it yet,’ he was told, ‘but this is where you belong.’

The next morning at 7:00 A.M. he presented himself at Air America operations, a one-room building which was little more than a shack with a desk and counter. The people who worked in it were men of few words. Morrison wore a T-shirt, jeans, and flying boots, and had a duffel bag slung over his shoulder containing overnight gear. He carried his precious 9mm Browning, wrapped in newspaper, under his arm. ‘Hi. I’m supposed to be the new Raven.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘Morrison.’

‘Okay, wait there.’ He joined two other men seated on a bench. No one spoke.

An Air America C-123 landed on the runway and taxied up to the building. It turned around and waited with one engine running. The man at the counter jerked a thumb toward it. ‘Get in.’

The three new Ravens trooped across the tarmac to the plane. It took off, flew for twenty minutes, and landed. Again, no one spoke. During the trip the landscape beneath them did not change, except for a wide, slow river which came into view on final approach. (One Raven was flown up in an Air America plane that stopped off at various sites all along the way. Throughout the circuitous trip he thought he was heading directly north, and calculated with increasing unease that he must be deep in Red China.)
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But as Morrison landed he finally knew where he was. After weeks of intrigue and mystery, he had arrived to fly combat in a country he knew nothing about. He was now a part of the secret war in Laos.

He walked over to the Air America shack, where he picked up a jeep lift into Vientiane, the country’s capital. On the way, various landmarks were pointed out to him in the sleepy riverside town. The river the road followed, which he had seen from the air, was the Mekong. Except for numerous wooden pagodas and a monument in the style of the Arc de Triomphe built from diverted U.S. AID cement meant for a runway, there was not much else to see. After the long, exciting buildup, the final moment of arrival was anticlimactic. The place was a peaceful backwater, seemingly untouched and untroubled by the ravages of war.

It gave Morrison a strange feeling to see the embassies of the Chinese, Russians, and North Vietnamese open for business as if the war next door did not exist. The American embassy was among the largest buildings in town, situated only a few hundred yards from the legation of the enemy, the Communist Pathet Lao. (In the monsoon season the Americans and Pathet Lao joined in a work detail to clear shared drains blocked by leaves.)

The Ravens reported to the air attaché’s office, where they had their photographs taken and were issued with a U.S. AID card and a Laotian driver’s license. (It was the second time that day their photographs had been taken. Communist Chinese agents, using high-powered telephoto lenses, routinely took pictures of all newly arriving westerners from the raised ground near the runway at Wattay airport.) They were given their cover stories, which were extremely weak: officially, they were forest rangers attached to U.S. AID - the Agency for International Development.

Nobody was ever to refer to anyone by rank. However, for reasons of discipline, lower-ranking officers were told to call their seniors Mister, while the seniors called their juniors by their first names. Special blanket orders were issued to allow unrestricted access in and out of Thailand. They were given strict instructions not to indicate their whereabouts in letters home - all mail was to be sent out of Udorn, Thailand, and was to be received there.

During the day’s cursory briefing the new Raven learned there were almost as many different wars in Laos as there were Military Regions. In Military Region V (MR V), the neutral zone around Vientiane, the war was pursued in the abstract from the embassy compound, far from the noise and heat of battle; in Military Regions III and IV, in the Laotian panhandle, the Royal Lao Army attempted to keep the conflict to a minimum by avoiding contact with the enemy, except for periods when the North Vietnamese Army was especially active in maintaining the flow of arms and supplies for their operations in South Vietnam. These were transported down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which drove through the edge of both regions and was the target of a massive U.S. bombing campaign.

In MR I the Royal Lao Army battled the North Vietnamese who infiltrated troops into the region via Communist China, threatening the royal capital of Luang Prabang; but the real battleground was in MR II, where the Special Guerrilla Units of Gen. Vang Pao’s Meo slugged it out with large forces of NVA coming in from North Vietnam itself for the annual seasonal offensive across the strategic Plain of Jars.
(This proud, mountain, warrior people have always called themselves Hmong, meaning ‘Mankind’ in their own language, which is of the Tibato-Bunnan group. However, until the mid-seventies they were always known by the non-Hmong inside Laos, and by all foreigners, as Meo. This is a contraction of the Chinese Miao, which means ‘Barbarian.’ Neither the French, nor the Americans who came after them, were aware of this ancient slur. It was only after 1972, when Dr. Yang Oao, the first Hmong to gain a PhD from a French university, returned to Laos and began to insist on the universal use of the term, that the name Hmong was used by other than his own people. The Ravens and other Americans who worked with the Hmong, including sympathetic journalists and writers, used the term Meo in complete ignorance of any derogatory connotation. Dr. Yang Dao agrees with the author that in the historical context of this book, when Meo was the only word used (even by Gen. Vang Pao himself when in conversation with non-Hmong), the term Hmong would be anachronistic. The term Meo is therefore used throughout, until it began to be replaced in general use by Hmong.
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