The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (6 page)

Ravens were sent to each of the Military Regions, but the posting everyone considered to be the plum, carrying with it equal amounts of glamour and dread, was Long Tieng - Gen. Vang Pao’s top-secret base in MR II.

The new Raven also understood, after his first day in Vientiane, that he was at the end of an extremely convoluted command structure.

Ravens were issued orders in Vietnam which put them under the formal command of the 56th Special Operations Wing based at Nakhon Phanom, Thailand, and their records and pay were taken care of by Detachment 1 of this wing at Udorn. All U.S. air in Thailand came under 7/13th Air Force - a hybrid of 7th Air Force, Vietnam, and 13th Air Force, the Philippines - both controlled by CINCPAC, Hawaii. But they had been loaned to the air attaché in Vientiane, Laos, who became their operational Air Force commander. Out in the field they were, for all practical purposes, under the command of the CIA and native generals. At the same time, overall command of all U.S. forces in the country came under the ambassador.

The endless tug-of-war for control between the various agencies, old head Ravens explained, worked in their favor: the beauty of the arrangement was that so many people owned them, no one was really in charge.

In the early days of the program, after a full day of in-processing, the Ravens were housed overnight in two old French chalets: Ice House One and Ice House Two, so called because they were situated on either side of a building the French had used to store ice. Later, more elaborate accommodation was provided at Lan Xiang 9, an architecturally eclectic structure. In both places Ravens briefly rubbed shoulders with administration officers from the air attaché’s office and various State Department officials working in the embassy.

The new man was taken out on the town in a tradition known as ‘nubie night.’ This was an extended period of debauchery which included heavy drinking at the Purple Porpoise, an Air America hangout run by a genial Australian alcoholic named Monty Banks; more drinking at the White Rose, a favorite girlie bar; and a final round of drinking at the Les Rendezvous des Amis, an establishment specializing in warm beer and oral sex, and presided over by the distinguished Madame Lulu, famous throughout the Far East.

Mercifully, the stopover in the drowsy capital was brief for Ravens eager to be in the thick of things. After only a day and a night, the new Raven was taken back to Wattay airport, where he was met by a CIA case officer. For most it was their first encounter with the clandestine, and they relished the aura of the secret agent on a dangerous mission into the unknown. The moment was ruined for Karl Folifka by an American schoolteacher waiting for a plane to go south. She explained that she was flying to Bangkok to get her teeth fixed. Polifka said nothing and attempted to look mysterious. The teacher looked him up and down. ‘You must be a new Raven going to Long Tieng, huh?’

The planes arrived and they went their separate ways. The schoolteacher flew south to keep her dental appointment, while the Raven boarded a C-123 transport plane to take him north to the war.

3. The Secret City

He came from the right place, he was one of us.

Joseph Conrad,
Lord Jim

The new Raven flew to war over terrain unlike anything he had ever seen before. Mountains erupted out of a sea of green jungle, some shaped like cones with sharp jagged edges, others thin as knife blades. Towers of limestone stood sentinel on the banks of rivers which twisted between them. From the air the countryside took on the shapes of fantastical animals. No one could fail to recognize that this was a place of very great beauty.

During the monsoon season, in the biting cold of the first light of dawn, the valleys swirled with wisps of white fog and every mountain seemed wrapped in its own ominous black cloud. In the dry season the valleys filled with a milky froth in the early mornings, which the French, when they had fought in this country, had called
crachin
- spittle. Crouched in the back passenger seat of an O-1 spotter plane, snaking along a river valley, or straining to climb a mountain ridge, the new Raven looked upon the landscape in awe, as if flying into an exquisite Chinese scroll painting, backdrop to a dream.

There seemed very little of anything resembling civilization below. Occasionally the plane flew over a small village perched on a mountaintop, connected to the valley beneath it by a path so sheer it looked like a hanging thread. It was a sobering thought that the months ahead would be spent searching for enemies hidden in the endless emptiness of this unfamiliar landscape.

The new Raven’s unknown destination was the secret city of Long Tieng. This was the hub and nerve center of the clandestine war in the Other Theater. It appeared on no maps but had grown to be the largest city in the country after the capital. Insiders never referred to it by name, but further shrouded the town in mystery by calling it Alternate. (Towns and villages all over the country had been numbered, each one indicating a landing strip - a Lima Site. Lima Site 20 was Sam Thong, the U.S. Agency for International Development [AID] showcase with its hospital and school, and lay twenty kilometers over the zigzag mountain road to the northwest. Long Tieng, which dwarfed it, was 20 Alternate. The idea was that any visiting dignitary, or prying journalist, would naturally assume that Site 20 was the bigger operation, and Alternate merely a secondary emergency landing strip.) Outsiders who had never visited Long Tieng but had heard of its existence called it Spook Heaven because of the number of CIA agents who lived there. For a period in history it was the most secret spot on earth.

Long Tieng had been built in a valley which lay in a perfect bowl. It was surrounded by mountains on three sides, while a gently rolling hill fell away on a fourth. A runway had been built in the valley, which made it look as if an aircraft carrier had been beached more than three thousand feet up in the mountains after some cataclysmic flood. A traditional thatched village was dotted over the foothills, while on the other side of the runway the corrugated iron roofs of thousands of new buildings glittered in the sun.

Once upon the ground the new Raven climbed from the plane, stood on the ramp, and looked around at his new home. The first impressions of arrival would never be forgotten. Certain images, so strange and new, entered the memory forever: a tiny child, barefoot and in black pajamas, smiling broadly as he skips across the runway, a high-explosive rocket perched on his shoulder; a native fighter pilot, slight as a jockey, pulling back the canopy of his cockpit; a burly American dressed as if for a game of golf in a yellow cap and polyester slacks, yawning in a doorway; two red sacks of strangers’ mail leaning against the side of a building.

The town of Long Tieng itself took longer to assimilate. In the monsoon season it was thick with sticky red mud, and the craggy limestone rock known as karst was covered with moss and green slime. Everything was wet and shrouded in gray fog. Trees somehow grew from the cracks in the limestone, clinging to the mountainside like gnarled old hands. The landscape was primeval, a million years out of its time, the setting for a pterodactyl to come flapping out of the dripping rocks.

After the monsoon the whole area blossomed. A thousand different kinds of wild flowers carpeted the valley. There were giant yellow daisies as tall as a man, and acre upon acre of white and red poppies. Whatever the season, Long Tieng resembled nowhere on earth as much as the mythical paradise of Shangri-La.
[12]

It was a curious city, a contradictory mixture of ancient and modern. Dirt streets lined with native huts, built in the style traditional since people had first inhabited these mountains, were hung across with a web of cables. Naked toddlers played outside of front doors and pigs rooted in the gutters, while in the background the antennae of sophisticated telecommunications equipment rose like stands of spruce. There were no paved streets of any kind, no sewers, no private cars, and yet planes and helicopters landed and took off without pause. Meo women in traditional dress - a black costume brightened with highly colored sashes and headdresses, and adorned with beautifully crafted silver jewelry - thronged the market. Military jeeps and trucks and small buses crammed with people criss-crossed the base.

Walking from the runway to the Raven hootch, the newcomer had various landmarks pointed out to him. The great mountain which rose vertically at the end of the runway was known as the Vertical Speed Brake (for reasons which would become obvious); two moundlike hills beside it were known as Titty-karst; the range to the northwest was Skyline Ridge. The house on the slope that looked like a suburban bungalow - except it was surrounded with sandbags instead of hedges, and had the burned-out hulk of a T-28 fighter at the bottom of the garden - was the king’s palace (which he had used only once). The somewhat garish modern concrete construction with the captured enemy antiaircraft guns in front of it and the 12.7mm on the roof was the home of the warlord himself, Gen. Vang Pao. The compound which housed the CIA men was discreetly pointed out, together with the barracks they shared with pilots of their proprietary airline, Air America. (Nobody ever referred to the CIA by name, the preferred euphemism being CAS - Controlled American Source - a term the Agency used to apply to assets or agents.)

In the field, operations were run by the CIA. Most of the war was actually being fought by the Meo, who were under the command of Vang Pao, who was officially under the command of the chief of staff of the Royal Lao Army. For the Ravens, the CIA and Gen. Vang Pao added the final convolutions to their eccentric command relationship, to the point that it defied analysis.

Everywhere was the furious activity of war, an endless traffic of men and aircraft. Pilots walked back and forth from the ramp to the operations shack. Troops milled around at the edge of the runway waiting to board helicopters. Mechanics checked airplane engines, and armorers loaded bombs. Soldiers came and went, carrying their wounded and their dead.

There seemed to be a great many children everywhere. Tiny imps, no more than six years old, ran errands for armorers, hanging loads on the wings of fighters of the Royal Lao Air Force. The ten-year-old males wore combat fatigues, carried grenades looped in their belts, and were dwarfed by the antiquated American carbines, M-16s, and captured enemy AK-47s they carried.

Every day just before dusk, Long Tieng went through the combat equivalent of rush hour. Planes and choppers began to come in every few seconds, making their final landing of the day before dark. Large, silent, unsmiling Americans in fatigues led files of small, exhausted men from the runway. The native fighter pilots, stiff with cramp after ten hours of combat in the cockpit, were lifted gently from their planes by helpers. Interspersed in the traffic were the Ravens’ O-1 spotter planes, known as Bird Dogs, returning from all points of the compass.

If Steve Canyon could step from his cartoon strip, accompanied by Terry and the Pirates, this would surely be their home. ‘It was such an exotic place,’ Fred Platt said. ‘It really had the feel of some pirate hideaway, with guys with tattoos and daggers clutched between their teeth. I felt the moment I set foot there that I had found home.’

At the bar of the Raven hootch the newcomer was introduced to the men he would be working with. Nobody made much of a fuss - a welcoming grunt, a quick handshake, maybe a half-smile. But it was a wonderful moment. Almost always there was an instant empathy, the first experience of the mystical bond of fellowship the Ravens shared. ‘It’s difficult to explain, but after all the crap and bureaucracy of the military it was magic,’ Craig Morrison said. ‘The guys! Even though you didn’t know the individuals you were instantly one of the troops. I had never met any of them but felt I knew all of them. It was almost
déjà vu
.’
(The six-month tour meant a rapid turnover as Ravens completed their duty and returned home, or were wounded and killed before their time. Some extended their tours, but for most the war in Laos was a flood of impressions condensed into a brief period. The narrative of this book is punctuated, sometimes with an abruptness that is jarring, by their arrivals and departures. Quite simply, this was the way it was. While the author has avoided logging each and every Raven in and out of the country, he has imposed an order and continuity on events that were often experienced at the time as an incomprehensible chaos of incident. An overview of the war is provided by a chronology of events at the back of the book.)

Things were done differently at Long Tieng. There seemed to be no overt recognition of rank and no military bureaucracy whatsoever. War planning for the whole military region was decided each evening over dinner with Gen. Vang Pao. Various Meo military officers, CIA case officers, intelligence people, and the senior Raven went to the general’s house every night to dine off the local food, washed down with shots of White Horse whisky.