The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (50 page)

In case the men were forced to spend another day and night on the ground, two ‘survival’ kits were prepared. Each one contained an M-16, bandoliers and clips of ammunition, hand grenades, a lined field jacket, gloves, a radio, batteries, food, and water. They were wrapped in a blanket and held together by nylon fiber packing tape. The plan was for a CIA Pilatus Porter to pre-position itself at Lima 35, and if antiaircraft fire thwarted a successful SAR, the plane would make a high-speed, low-altitude pass over the survivors at dusk the following day and kick out the bundles.

But Engle was in his O-1 at 4:30 A.M. to fly onto the plain. The same cloud deck as the previous day covered the area around the 7/71 Split, and he dived beneath the overcast to make contact with the survivors. They had suffered badly from exposure during the night, and reported that the enemy were all around them and closing in.

Two Phantoms, loaded with napalm and CBU-24, checked in at first light. Engle brought them down beneath the clouds, where they would be forced to operate in an extremely cramped arena. He told them to run parallel to the road, three hundred meters apart, and to drop their ordnance the moment he fired his smoke rocket. Their explosives fell within feet of the survivors.

Despite a barrage of antiaircraft fire from the guns, which had been moved in overnight as predicted, Engle brought another set of Phantoms down through the clouds and continued to lay an ever-widening circle of ordnance around the survivors, forcing the enemy back. When the Jolly Green went in to make the pickup it looked as if the Tigers were on a barren island surrounded by a black sea of scorched ground. Both men were snatched from the ground alive.
[202]

Chuck Engle became the toast of fighter squadrons throughout Thailand, and his reputation reached its zenith. There was no question about Engle’s courage, the Ravens agreed, but there were
limits
. The guy was crazy, people muttered, and there was more talk about his subconscious death wish. But Engle shrugged it all off, and swung the chain around his neck holding the bullet. It was simple - the enemy had taken their best shot and
missed
.

The next Raven to be shot from the sky was Jim Hix. In early February an enemy gun position in the Jungle’s Mouth was shelling the Thai artillery outpost at Ban Na, a strategically important hilltop position ten miles northeast of Long Tieng. Hix, flying a T-28 and accompanied by Tom King in an O-1, had been directing numerous sets of fighters in support of the base. After he had completed eight passes holding to the same pattern, an extremely unwise and reckless thing to do, the enemy found his range.

Hix knew he was hit by the noise - inside the cockpit it sounded as if a giant spring in a clock had burst. A shell had pierced the propeller drum so that it was over-revving, and although he managed to get the runaway prop under control by reducing the manifold pressure, he was unable to see because the engine was spewing oil over the windshield.

Tom King attempted to steer him by giving directions over the radio, a procedure which was complicated by the T-28’s rapidly pulling away from the slower Bird Dog. When he estimated that Hix was over friendly territory, King gave him the word to bail out.

With only fifteen minutes of gas left and smoke filling the cockpit, Hix was pleased to be leaving. He pulled the cord on the Yankee Extraction System, the explosive detcord blew the Plexiglas out of the canopy, and the rocket fired, hauling him into space. It was only after the explosion that he realized he had left his visor open, and slivers of Plexiglas were blown down into his face, ripping the skin off the left side.

Once the parachute opened, Hix was able to peer around to find his bearings. He knew the area intimately - well enough to know that he was nowhere near friendly territory. At first he was scared, but this feeling changed almost instantly to fury. He was enraged at King’s mistake and wanted to kill him. The idea actually made him reach for his .38, which he wore in a tie-down holster, but the gun had hit the side of the canopy rail as he punched out and had spun into space. The realization that he had no weapon with which to defend himself snapped his mood back from rage to terror.

He landed safely and immediately ran away from the parachute and crouched down among some bushes. Pilots were supposed to check their survival gear regularly, but young immortals like the Ravens rarely did so. Hix had been no exception, merely glancing at the battery level on his survival radios once a month. Both were useless, and his flares were duds too.

He set fire to a small bush to mark his position, blowing furiously at the meager flames for them to catch. The burning bush gave off a thin pillar of smoke, but it was enough to guide in Air America. It also marked his position for the enemy, and as the chopper wheeled to hover over the downed Raven it took ground fire. He was hauled into the cabin and landed in a heap as the bird banked steeply. ‘I kissed the floor of that helicopter.’

After a brief stop at Long Tieng he was flown down to Vientiane, gulping whisky and talking endlessly as the adrenaline coursed through him. He was picked up at the airport by Chuck Engle and on the way into town insisted on stopping the jeep at a store to buy a Buddha. Engle was skeptical. ‘You’re not supposed to buy one,’ he said. ‘You’re supposed to be given one.’ ‘What the hell - some protection is better than none.’ After a shower and a change of clothes, Hix went out on the town in Vientiane. It was very good - quite extraordinary, really - to be alive, and he celebrated by drinking until dawn.

The gun that had nailed Jim Hix was a part of the main force of the NVA 312th Division, moving rapidly across the Plain of Jars. Its intention was to hit the Thai artillery position at Ban Na and then move on Long Tieng. Two heavy field pieces - thought to be an 85mm gun and a 122mm howitzer - began a night-long shelling of the position and inflicted heavy casualties.

Two days after Hix had been shot down, the Ravens were still out searching for the gun that had done the job. Grant Uhls flew up to the area around Ban Na, where he noticed an unusual amount of fresh truck activity. As he circled, a 12.7mm machine gun fired several bursts at his aircraft. He pulled off abruptly and began to climb, radioing the coordinates of the gun, together with several other likely looking antiaircraft locations, to three other Ravens flying into the area.

It was Jim Hix’s first day in the air since he had been shot down, and he felt an extraordinary sensitivity and connection to the airplane he was flying. It was as if he could hear every turn of the propeller and each time the spark plugs fired. He had also been careful to stock up with fresh flares, and had checked the batteries of his survival radios more often than was necessary. He kept one eye perpetually cocked for the best spot on which to crashland or to bail out over, should the need arise.

He flew up to the Plain of Jars alongside Chuck Engle, and they worked together around Muong Soui. Over the radio Hix displayed a brittle sense of bravado, and his conversation with Engle would have struck any of his colleagues as more than a little ironic. The two men boasted to each other how they had cheated death, and how ready they were for any eventuality. Both had to agree - they were damned good.

As they spoke they heard Grant Uhls report that he had taken fire, and immediately headed toward Ban Na. In the meantime, Uhls had flown away from the gun in a wide semi-circle and then doubled back into the area from another direction.

As he scouted the area for the original gun that had fired at him, another more powerful machine gun - a ZPU-2 - had opened up on him. Flying at three thousand feet, he was beyond the reach of the 12.7mm, but in comfortable range of the ZPU. He immediately broadcast a warning to the approaching Ravens and attempted to pull out of the range of the powerful weapon. His voice sounded as if he were taken completely by surprise that ground fire was actually threatening his plane. ‘Damn, I can’t get away from it.’

Then there was silence. Hix could see the aircraft in the distance trailing a thin spume of smoke, and he watched it make a large, slow circle. ‘Don’t go so low,’ he yelled into the radio. There was no response. The plane began to circle in an ever-decreasing radius, and each circuit brought it closer to the ground. At the very end it seemed to veer, possibly the last attempt of a badly wounded pilot to save himself. Somehow the futile action disturbed Hix deeply.

As the plane crashed into the ground it was as if the horror were enacted before Hix’s eyes in slow motion. The right wing folded over the fuselage, and he saw the aircraft splinter and disintegrate for a brief moment before it exploded into a fireball. As he watched, something in him snapped. ‘It was as if my system flipped over inside. It really screwed me up.’

He sat in his O-1 and began to direct the Thai artillery from Ban Na onto the area he suspected the gun to be in, working in a daze like an automaton. Chuck Engle’s voice came over the radio. ‘Why don’t you guys get down there and help him out?’

‘There’s no way,’ Hix replied.

‘Bullshit!’ Engle took his plane down to ground level, and the enemy opened fire on him. He flew over the crash site and then pulled off. ‘Ain’t no way anybody could live through that.’

Hix called Cricket. ‘Negative objective,’ he said, giving the code that meant the pilot was dead and no SAR would be needed.
[203]
He flew back to Alternate and walked into the operations shack, where he sat saying nothing, his eyes filled with tears. He had been close friends with Grant Uhls at the Air Force Academy, and their time together in the Raven program had sealed that friendship. Finally, Hix stood up. ‘Screw it,’ he said, and slammed out of the shack.

He flew down to Vientiane, drove back to the Raven hootch, and got drunk. Two new Ravens, Jim Roper and Ernie Anderson - replacements for the dead - met Hix for the first time at dinner that night. It was a grim welcome. Hix, whose face was still a torn mess of bruises and scabs, had drunk so much he had moved into a tortured world of his own, and sat in a corner muttering to himself ‘This is bullshit! Cannon fodder. Just a bunch of cannon fodder.’

The new Ravens exchanged glances and rapidly swallowed a few drinks themselves.

Hix was still sleeping off his hangover late the following morning when he was awakened by the houseboy shaking him. A message had come over the phone that the Ravens in Long Tieng were under attack. The NVA had crossed the southern ridge and were shelling the airfield, the town, and the compound.

Earlier in the month, Gen. Vang Pao had announced, ‘We shall defend Long Tieng to the last man.’
[204]
Now it looked as if the enemy would force him to keep his word.

Ban Na had been under nonstop, round-the-clock attack, and the Ravens had been busy directing ton upon ton of ordnance around the area of the camp. The enemy had pushed their way across the Plain of Jars and were on the ridges to the north of Long Tieng, where there were a series of firefights. Natives living in the area, including most of the population of Alternate, had been evacuated yet again. Altogether some fifty thousand Meo dependents had been moved into the already overcrowded Ban Son resettlement area south of Long Tieng. (By the middle of 1971, U.S. AID estimated, 150,000 hill tribe refugees, the majority of which were Meo, had been resettled.)
[205]

There was always a complement of Ravens living at Long Tieng during this period, and the quality of life had been improved beyond measure by the acquisition of a pool table. They had become settled to the point of having pets again, the star of which was Princess Hamburger. The princess was the runt of the latest litter of pups belonging to Squirrely, a mongrel concupiscent as a rabbit and known among the Ravens as ‘the Queen of the Whores.’ ‘Hamburger’ was the vogue word among the Ravens at the time to denote a swaggering, boastful John Wayne type. Fat Danny, an Air America mechanic blessed with the genius of the kasbah, had developed a strong sideline out of Squirrely’s offspring, selling them as rare Meo temple dogs - at thirty dollars a clip - to gullible Air Force helicopter pilots who visited Long Tieng on evacuation flights. But no one believed Princess Hamburger, an oddly colored individual tending toward the ugly, was a rare temple dog. Fat Danny made a present of her to Chad Swedberg. The Princess’s low whine in the face of enemy shelling acted as the hootch alarm system.

Oddjob, the original Raven orphan, was long gone - officially adopted by an Air Force mechanic and taken back to the States - but the Ravens still had a soft spot for the local children. A favorite was a cheerful little girl with a withered leg. A native shaman had begun imitating the American medical magic of seemingly curing all ills with a single injection - penicillin worked wonders among the Meo, who had built up no resistance to the drug. Usually the shaman’s shots were harmless enough, consisting as they did of various colored liquids, but in the case of the little girl he had struck a main nerve and crippled her. An Air Force flight surgeon examined her at Udorn and determined that nothing could be done. One of the CIA men made a crutch for her, which he replaced as she grew taller. The Ravens saw her every day, dragging her useless limb behind her.

The NVA had slowly been closing in on Long Tieng, and the base had come under rocket attack on three successive nights. ‘After a while my reflexes became so attuned to the crackling of supersonic rockets flying overhead that I was able to roll out of bed and under it before I even woke up,’ Craig Duehring said.