The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (61 page)

Ron Rinehart arrived at Travis Air Force Base proud to be back in uniform after a year of flying in civilian clothes. The realities of life in the United States were explained to him by an apologetic officer: ‘We think maybe you shouldn’t wear your uniform from here down into San Francisco. Feelings run pretty high.’

This was understatement. Fred Platt was forced to fight his way through an antiwar rally in San Francisco to the persistent chant of ‘Baby killer.’ ‘I got back to the States,’ Mike Byers said, ‘and, holy shit, I’m one of the bad guys. It really amazed me. I’d been one of the good guys for quite a while - one of the
really
good guys - at least that’s what everybody in the village at Long Tieng thought.’

Bob Foster, who had returned to the States and retirement after a stint as air attaché to the U.S. embassy in Singapore, felt the country’s mood was eloquently expressed by the fact that 20 percent of all active-duty enlisted men were so badly paid under the Carter administration that they qualified for food stamps. ‘There were a few people out there who really carried the burden - the guerrillas who fought alongside us, the Ravens, the Air America guys. And I felt very sorry for the younger people who fought a damn good battle and then came home and found they were not liked.

‘And I got upset by the stories of psycho Vietnam veterans - a tiny percentage that got all the publicity. Most of the veterans were nice young men who got sold down the river by their own people. The poor guy who had to come back to the States to his wife and family, to find a job and make a new life, is the one who deserved the credit.’

Bewildered servicemen faced similar experiences in all of the large cities, and from the student population - even the black draftees who had taken the places of more fortunate white contemporaries who had been granted a privileged exemption, or simply run away. But in small-town America, where the population did not have the connections, the cunning, the money, or the inclination to organize draft avoidance for their sons, or in the south, where military service was still considered a duty, men returning from the war were more kindly treated.

Too often it seemed as if the United States needed to punish those who had been involved in the only war it had ever lost. When Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley returned, having been nominated for the post of assistant secretary of state for East Asian affairs, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at the bidding of its chairman, Senator J. W. Fulbright, rejected him. The reason given was that Godley had been ‘too closely associated with U.S. policies in Indochina,’ which he had pursued with ‘enthusiasm.’ Fulbright also tried to block William Sullivan’s nomination as ambassador to the Philippines, but failed to win adequate committee support after some strenuous lobbying by Averell Harriman.

The rejection of Godley was unprecedented, the first time a career diplomat had ever been turned down for what was a routine appointment. No one questioned Godley’s qualifications or competence, but tarred with the brush of U.S. defeat in Indochina, he became an ideal scapegoat.

But even a press that had wholeheartedly turned against the war felt the senator had gone too far. ‘To punish a career officer for faithfully executing unpopular policies established by higher authority, with which he may or may not agree, is a perversion of the “advise and consent process,” ‘ the
New York Times
stated in an editorial. The
Washington Post
agreed: ‘How could any ambassador to Laos fail to be “intimately associated with Vietnam policy”? Should a diplomat whose competence is otherwise acknowledged be penalized because he was “enthusiastic” about the policy he was obligated by his oath to carry out?’ The editorial suggested Fulbright’s spite was the result of personal bitterness, an example of McCarthyism through the looking glass.

But the knife was in, and no amount of press outrage could help Godley. His appointment was ‘indefinitely postponed.’ Newspapers in the Far East understood the significance of the action and what it heralded. ‘Study carefully the hand-writing on the Senate wall,’ the
Bangkok Post
advised its readers. America was about to turn its back on Southeast Asia as if it had never existed.
[245]

The Americans went home from Laos leaving behind them a paper agreement they called peace. But however unsatisfactory the terms, it was welcome after a quarter of a century of war. Despite immediate cease-fire violations by the Pathet Lao, the conflict was relatively minor and there was no full-scale resumption of hostilities for a time. Things returned to the placid political muddle that passed for normality in Laos.

It also seemed in the first moments of peace that the Meo had finally earned their rightful place in Lao society as a result of the war. They could no longer be ignored and looked down upon by the lowland Lao; they had proved their worth and would have to be treated as equals. The Meo now demanded to be known as Hmong. ‘We have made more progress in fourteen years of war than we have in fifty years of peace,’ said Dr. Yang Dao, the first of his people to earn a Ph.D. Even Gen. Vang Pao believed early in 1974 that an accommodation with the Pathet Lao was possible.
[246]

At least the bombing had stopped - although such a massive tonnage had been dropped it was said that there was enough unexploded ordnance in northern Laos and on the Trail to fuel another war. In excess of 6,300,000 tons of bombs rained down on Indochina, more than all the explosives dropped in both the European and Pacific theaters in World War II. Less than a tenth (about 600,000 tons) of the total tonnage dropped in Southeast Asia fell on North Vietnam, and despite both press reports and USAF claims that the country had been devastated by the bombing, visiting journalists found Hanoi and Haiphong almost completely unscathed after the war, and the surrounding countryside barely touched. The bombing of North Vietnam was mostly concentrated around the area directly above the 17th parallel, where troops and supplies were massed to move south.
[247]
It is one of the supreme ironies of the war that it was South Vietnam, the allied country being defended, that bore the brunt of the U.S. bombing - a staggering 3,900,000 tons.

Laos took second place. More than 1,100,000 tons of bombs were dropped on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, with a further 500,000 tons in northern Laos (which means that a considerably greater tonnage was dropped on Laos than on Germany - which was devastated by 1,360,000 tons in World War II]. The 1,600,000 tons of bombs dropped on Laos would have amounted to seventeen tons every square mile - had the tonnage been spread evenly across the country - or was equal to six-tenths of a ton of bombs for every man, woman, and child.
[248]

Such figures are almost impossible to imagine and need to be put in perspective. The devastating cannonade fired by Napoleon’s eighty-gun Grand Battery in the Battle of Water-loo would not have exceeded
20,000 rounds
. The 21,000 tons of shells fired during the Battle of the Somme took 50,000 gunners, working around the clock, seven days to discharge.
[249]
A total of only 543 tons of explosives was dropped from the air by the British during the whole of World War I, while in World War II it was estimated that a British bomber would deliver 40 tons of bombs during its lifetime.
[250]
In the first Indo-china war the French dropped only 834 tons of bombs during the whole of 1949 - although this figure climbed to 12,800 tons during the last seven months of the war during the battle of Dien Bien Phu.
[251]
In the ten-year war the British waged in Malaya they dropped only 33,000 tons of bombs.
[252]
Even in the Korean War the United States dropped only 1,000,000 tons of bombs.
[253]

There would be no more bombing, but the killing was to continue unabated. The peace agreement soon proved to be as illusory as the previous international arrangements made in regard to Laos, and the temporary lack of hostilities merely a respite before the final bloodbath. When U.S. reconnaissance flights over Laos - monitoring preparations for the Communist offensive - halted on June 4, 1974, the North Vietnamese enjoyed the unimpeded use of the Trail for the first time. Large numbers of their troops moved in and out of Laos at will. None of the landmarks called for in the peace protocol, to show the division of control between forces, had been put in place. Pathet Lao troops placed flags forward of their own positions along Route 7 on the PDJ, and when Vang Pao’s soldiers removed them the Communists charged him with violating the cease-fire, but refused the International Commission for Supervision and Control permission to investigate. ‘War is difficult, peace is hell,’ Vang Pao concluded.

In Vientiane the Communists coiled themselves around the machinery of government in preparation for a takeover. They also made military preparations, in concert with the North Vietnamese, for the Communist conquest of Indochina. On March 27, 1975, after the NVA had launched their offensive in South Vietnam, the Pathet Lao attacked Vang Pao’s forces. Prime Minister Souvanna Phouma ordered the general to defend himself as best he could, but refused to authorize air strikes against the enemy.

On May 9, the Pathet Lao openly declared their future intentions toward the Hmong for the first time when they published an article in their newspaper: it was necessary to exterminate the hill tribesmen ‘to the last root,’ and Vang Pao’s Military Region would be taken by force.
[254]
Without air support, U.S. advisers, or Thai reinforcements, Vang Pao was cornered at last. His ragtag children’s army did not even have sufficient ammunition or supplies.

‘I will never leave my people,’ the general declared as his advisers tried to persuade him to pull out. But as the enemy encircled Long Tieng, he finally agreed reluctantly to a CIA plan to extract him from the base with as many of his followers as a hastily put-together airlift could manage. After disastrous defeats in March and April of 1975, the general was forced to accept that further armed resistance was futile, and the CIA argued that he would be more effective as his people’s leader in exile than as a martyr on the battlefield.

The task of organizing the airlift fell on Gen. Heinie Aderholt, the last remaining general officer in Southeast Asia. As it was not possible to use official Air Force assets, the general looked around him for old Air America-type pilots to undertake what would in effect be the last mission of the war. Almost everyone had gone home, and the single C-130 pilot left in Southeast Asia was on his way to Bangkok airport on the very morning the airlift was mooted. Aderholt sent an Air Commando aide to try to stop him. ‘The son of a bitch is about to leave the country and we need him to fly one mission,’ Aderholt said.

Matt Hoff was standing in line with his wife, about to check in his luggage for the flight home to Houston, when the breathless Air Commando found him. Hoff was eager to go home and was psychologically finished with the war. He was extremely reluctant to fly yet another mission, which struck him as unnatural and unlucky. But he was persuaded to telephone the general, who was a hard man to turn down.

‘How much are you going to pay me?’ Hoff growled.

‘Hell, Matt, name your price. I don’t really care. Make it good. It’s the last one - the last U.S. mission of the war.’

A fee of five thousand dollars was agreed upon, and Hoff loaded his bags into a taxi and drove back into Bangkok. Three former Air America pilots and a Continental Air Services captain were contacted in Vientiane, and the airlift was complete - Les Strouse and Al Rich would fly C-46 transports as backup to the C-130 in the refugee airlift, Dave Kouba would fly a STOL Pilatus Porter, and Jack ‘90’ Knotts would fly a helicopter in the operation to extract Gen. Vang Pao.

The Porter and the helicopter left Vientiane to arrive in Long Tieng at 6:30 A.M. on the morning of May 14, 1975. ‘Long Tieng was a sea of refugees - thousands of them,’ Jack Knotts said. He set down his chopper by the unmanned tower and waited for Kouba, who parked his Porter on the ramp on the other side of the runway. Together the men went up to the old CAS operations shack, where they met Jerry ‘Hog’ Daniels, Gen. Vang Pao’s CIA case officer.

Daniels began to outline how he felt the evacuation should be handled, and also told them how Gen. Vang Pao was to be taken out. If Vang Pao was seen to leave from the airfield it would cause untold panic and anarchy among those who would be left behind; the general could not be accompanied by Daniels, either, for this too would arouse suspicions. The plan was for Vang Pao to be picked up by Knotts, once the refugees were being loaded into the transport planes, and taken to a nearby deserted strip. Knotts would then return for Daniels, fly back to the strip, pick up the general, and fly on to a third strip, where he would rendezvous with the Porter.

As the men discussed the details of the plan, Gen. Vang Pao entered the room. The men were silent for a moment, but the general ignored them and sat down without saying anything. He stared ahead of him, expressionless and without life. When the plan was explained to him he contributed nothing, merely nodding indifferently.

Jack Knotts returned to the strip and sat waiting in his chopper for the go-ahead. The C-130 came in and landed, and Matt Hoff waved to him from the cockpit. The C-46, flown by Les Strouse, followed close behind. Refugees swarmed the planes. ‘It was a chaotic scene, absolutely chaotic,’ Jack Knotts said. ‘The planes couldn’t even taxi to the parking area. It was just a mass of thousands of Meo all fighting to get in.’ The transports were to fly half a dozen trips in and out of Long Tieng, fired at continuously by enemy on the surrounding ridgelines. Thousands of refugees, packed so tightly into the planes they had to stand, were flown to Nam Phang, a remote airstrip south of Udorn Thailand.