The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (59 page)

‘No, they said we didn’t make as much money as they did today.’ Hatch took the top off one of the bottles and poured two large drinks. Together, the men drank to the memory of Hal Mischler. They did not move from the table until they had finished the bottle.

‘The other bottle was Hal’s,’ Jack Shaw said. ‘And every time we started thinking about Hal we took it down and drank some of it. It didn’t last long.’ After the men had finished the first bottle they fell into bed, asking colleagues to wake them at 6:00 the following morning. Lew Hatch was scheduled to fly the dawn patrol, while Shaw had to fly to Udorn to pick up a replacement O-1.

On Christmas Eve, Jack Shaw was sitting on his own at the bar of the Air America club at Udorn. A man drinking next to him struck up a conversation and asked him what he did. Shaw said he was a Raven.

‘Sorry to hear you lost a guy today.’

‘Yesterday. Over Saravane.’

‘Yeah, yesterday over Saravane,’ the man said uncomfortably. ‘And today. Over the PDJ.’

Skip Jackson, who had flown Shaw into Laos when he first arrived, had been run over by a Navy jet. He had been directing a set of A-7s over the Plain of Jars when one of the fighters had clipped a strut under the wing of the O-1. It plummeted to the ground and pancaked. The pilot of the A-7 remembered a flash, then suddenly his plane became unstable and he punched out - only to be captured and imprisoned by the enemy.

Jack Shaw returned to Pakse after Christmas. The casualty officer was in the hootch going through Mischler’s property (a discretion the Air Force afforded a pilot who had been killed so nothing offensive would be returned to his wife or family). Laid out on the dining-room table was a small collection of worthless but painfully intimate possessions: shaving cream, razor blades, toothpaste, aftershave lotion.

‘This is Mischler’s stuff,’ the casualty officer said. ‘Want any of it?’

‘Throw it away!’ Shaw said in a voice that was quiet but deadly. He turned and walked from the room.

Later he explained: ‘You were so hurt you just buried your feelings. The guys at the hootch never talked about it. And I couldn’t talk about it for years and years. I had flown with the Nails for ten months, and guys got shot down but no one was killed. Everybody got picked up. It was humorous almost - you earned the right to tell your own war story. I’d been in Laos just a couple of days and all of a sudden everybody seemed to be dying. I thought it wasn’t a joke anymore - this is war.’

14. Peace

They made a wasteland and called it peace.

- Tacitus (c. A.D. 55-120)

The Paris Agreement on Vietnam was signed on January 27, 1973. Laos had not been a negotiating party at the peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam - excluded along with South Vietnam and Cambodia - at which the United States had quickly dropped its demand for a truce encompassing the whole of Indochina. The Royal Lao Government had wanted the United States to conclude a Laotian cease-fire as part of the Vietnam settlement but was rebuffed.

One of the issues during negotiations was the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from Laos. Hanoi continued to maintain the fiction that it had no soldiers in the country, but did confirm in writing that North Vietnamese would be considered ‘foreign’ troops in respect to the agreement’s call for the withdrawal of such forces.

Souvanna Phouma chose to interpret this as a defeat for the North Vietnamese, and believed that he would at last be able to work out a political settlement with the Pathet Lao that would be a nationalistic, Laotian solution free of foreign interests. In reality it was Hanoi that stood to gain from an early cease-fire in Laos, one of the terms of which included the cessation of all U.S. air support.

It was as if America had learned nothing from its previous negotiations over Laos. The mistakes of earlier agreements - 1954 and 1962 - were not only repeated but compounded. Laos and Cambodia were disposed of in the Paris Agreement by Article 20, a paragraph of 185 words of diplomatic waffle in which the United States and North Vietnam agreed to respect Laotian and Cambodian neutrality and to end military intervention. But there was no deadline laid down for any such intervention to cease, and no means to enforce it.

The North Vietnamese Communists had blatantly violated the two previous agreements, and it took optimism on the level of an act of faith to believe that they would now abandon the ambitions and struggles of thirty years because of a clumsily drafted afterthought in a document they had no intention of honoring anyway.

It is hard to accept that the U.S. negotiators were not cynical in regard to Laos, ignoring the fate of a small, irrelevant power in their anxiety for a quick exit from an unpopular war. But it is a charge that is denied by William Sullivan, who as a deputy assistant secretary and head of the State Department’s Vietnam Working Group acted as Kissinger’s deputy in the peace negotiations: ‘We were skeptical but not cynical. In retrospect we had hypnotized ourselves with our own mythology on this, because this is what we had been attempting to do from the very beginning - to contain the North Vietnamese back in the area that had been allocated them in the 1954 agreements. The underlying assumption was that we had pushed them into a position where they would have to truncate their ambitions. Maybe we were kidding ourselves.’
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Ambassador Godley is more severe. He feels that Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma was treated shabbily. ‘He was a great man,’ he said. ‘I respected him tremendously - his honesty, consistency, and personal courage. He was never consulted. We led him down the garden path. Let’s face it, we were cutting and running. We pulled the rug from under him. But once we were out of Vietnam the only way we could have protected Laos was with an Army corps. It was totally out of the question and we knew it. We were licked. There was nothing to be done.’
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Dr. Henry Kissinger arrived in Vientiane on his way to Hanoi thirteen days after the Paris agreement was signed. He dined with Souvanna Phouma at the prime minister’s villa, which struck Kissinger as so modest he recorded its simplicity in his memoirs: ‘It looked like the residence of a French junior minister, without the trappings usually associated with presidential palaces.’

After dinner Souvanna Phouma made a moving appeal to Kissinger: ‘The very survival of Laos rests on your shoulders. But your shoulders are broad. We are counting on you to make our neighbors understand that all we want is peace. We are a very small country; we do not represent a danger to anybody. We count on you to make them know that the Lao people are pacific by tradition and by religion. We want only to be sovereign and independent. We ask that they let us live in peace on this little piece of ground that is left to us of our ancient kingdom.

‘If pressure is kept on the North Vietnamese to understand the risk they run from violating the Agreement, then perhaps they will respect the Agreement... Therefore we must count on our great friends the Americans to help us survive. We hope, we dream, that this wish will be granted.’

‘What a touching hope,’ Kissinger wrote, and publicly responded in kind. ‘We have not come all this way in order to betray our friends.’
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But behind closed doors the Americans were exerting enormous pressure on Souvanna Phouma to sign, telling him bluntly that unless he accepted whatever settlement was being offered he stood to lose everything.

According to the prime minister’s son, Prince Mangkhra Phouma, who filled the position of director of the cabinet in the Ministry of Defense at the time, his father was presented with a
fait accompli.
‘We had to sign the agreement because of the menace from Mr. [sic] Kissinger. He threatened to cut off all aid to Laos if my father refused. He signed, so that the Americans would continue to help Laos. But as soon as we signed the help stopped.’
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This view is supported by Maj. Gen. Oudone Sananikone, the Army chief of staff who said that John Gunther Dean, the U.S. chargé d’affaires involved in the Laotian peace negotiations, made thinly veiled threats to the Royal Lao Government in order to obtain concessions for the enemy. The pressure became so intense that the Communist Pathet Lao believed Souvanna Phouma ‘would agree to anything’ and considered the Americans so keen on a peace settlement that they were, ‘in effect, in their [the enemy’s] corner.’ The pressure exerted by the Americans was not subtle. ‘We would find that the weekly shipments of American-supplied rice for the army would not arrive,’ Sananikone said, ‘or that the American-supplied money to pay the army would be delayed, or that only part of the fuel needed to run the army’s vehicles would be delivered.’
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On the day Kissinger was in Vientiane, the official news agency, Lao Presse, issued a dignified, heartfelt editorial that was pathetic in the circumstances. ‘America ... has ended its suffering, but it cannot forget that in international morality, peace has the same value for all people, small or large.’
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This small, gentle voice went unheeded in the hard world of international realpolitik. To power brokers with the muscle of Henry Kissinger, Laos was very small beer indeed. Critics have suggested that a better cease-fire agreement might have been negotiated over Vietnam, giving the allies a greater chance of survival, had a permanent, senior negotiator been given the job, rather than relying almost exclusively on the overextended skills of Kissinger, who was committed to an exhausting round of worldwide shuttle diplomacy. (During the extended Vietnam talks, Kissinger was also involved in negotiations regarding Salt 1; the Four Power Agreement on Berlin; the India-Pakistan war; the treaty between the two Germanys; various treaties with Chile, Cuba, and countries of the Middle East; opening contact with China; secret talks with President Sadat over his plans to expel the Soviets from Egypt; and the beginnings of the Panama Canal Treaty.)
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Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma had written to his half brother Prince Souphanouvong in July, proposing yet another new effort at negotiating a peace agreement between the warring Laotian factions. Peace negotiation between the Royal Lao Government and the Pathet Lao had opened in Vientiane on October 17,1972.

Souvanna Phouma genuinely sought conciliation, hoping nationalist interests would bring the two sides together, but there was a desperate edge in his search for peace once he understood the U.S. position that any agreement was better than none. In principle, both sides agreed on neutralization, a coalition government, and an end to foreign intervention. In reality, the talks in Laos were tied to the coattails of events in Vietnam.

The subsequent Vientiane Agreement between the Pathet Lao and the Royal Lao Government bowed to almost every demand made by the Communists. In his desperation to reach an understanding that would avoid further bloodshed, Souvanna Phouma made even more concessions than those favored by Washington.

The Pathet Lao retained complete control of their own zone, while gaining a half-share in the national government. Worst of all, the North Vietnamese were allowed to remain for sixty days after the formation of a new coalition government, while U.S. air support was to be closed down within twenty-four hours of signing the truce. The Royal Lao Government received the news of the agreement with profound dismay. ‘This is the worst defeat we have suffered,’ Sisouk Na Champassak, Lao defense minister, said.

The Pathet Lao were naturally delighted with the terms of the agreement. But these are now only of interest to students of Laotian history, for events were soon to prove that even the most generous agreement was seen by the Communists as nothing more than a stopgap to the total takeover of the country. Laotian sovereignty was violated everywhere by the North Vietnamese. On the other hand, the removal of U.S. and Thai military elements and the disbanding of the CIA irregulars was to go ahead according to the letter of the agreement. The ineffective International Commission for Supervision and Control, a body that had proved a complete failure in its oversight of the previous agreements, was brought back into being.

The same miscalculation made by Averell Harriman in 1962, when he underestimated Hanoi’s independence of Moscow and Peking as well as its territorial ambitions, was repeated by Kissinger. It was a major strategic mistake. ‘I cannot, even today, recall Souvanna Phouma’s wistful plea without a pang of shame that America was unable to fulfill his hopes for our steadfast support against a voracious enemy,’ Kissinger wrote in his memoirs.
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It is a shame that is not out of place.

The Ravens would be required to fight to the last minute of American involvement in Laos. They too had learned of the terms of the peace agreement with shame, and could not share in the euphoria that was sweeping America at the news of the end of the war. The general public in the United States, who knew little about the war in Laos and cared even less, could have no knowledge of the terrible sacrifice the Meo had made on America’s behalf and the tragic fate to which they had been abandoned. But for the few Americans intimately involved, the end of the war was no cause for celebration.

Gen. Vang Pao’s 1972 monsoon offensive northeast of the Plain of Jars had kicked off in August with the understanding that USAF helicopter support was crucial. The plan was to insert a 2,400-man force in the northern plain to the enemy’s rear, but it faltered because of bad weather, and restrictive Air Force rules limited the use of CH-53 helicopters without escort. Only half the intended assault group was deployed, and the force was no match for enemy artillery and tanks. Survivors were split up and forced to make their way overland through enemy lines, a ragged retreat that went on for several weeks.