The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War (9 page)

He arrived at Long Tieng during the height of the new push, trudging up the road from the airstrip to be met by Art Cornelius at the door of the Raven hootch. Deichelman was deeply tanned and had a shock of blond hair bleached white by the sun and tied at the back into a nineteenth-century sailor’s pigtail. He wore a Waikiki Beach surf shop T-shirt, faded Levi’s, and sandals, and carried a beat-up alligator bag with a tennis racket sticking out of it. A surf bum had stepped into the middle of the jungle war. ‘What have they sent us?’ Cornelius asked himself, as he first regarded the apparition with the deepest skepticism. ‘What
have
they sent us?’

But the moment Sam Deichelman took to the air he proved himself a highly effective FAC, and the Ravens were a pragmatic enough group not to bother about his surfer style. He always wore a big lopsided grin, and there was something so open and honest in his blue eyes that people soon found themselves won over. He had a personal magic which charmed everyone. Women loved him because he was gentle, sensitive, and good-looking without vanity; men loved him because he could be trusted with the most intimate confidences, and seemed to be without fear.

Deichelman was an Air Force brat. His father was a general, and while Sam was in high school the family had been posted to the Air War University at Maxwell Air Force Base, Montgomery, Alabama. The general had wanted his son to follow in his footsteps and go to the Air Force Academy, but Sam rebelled. He packed a bag and left home and spent a happy period in the late ‘50s living a hobo life in Cuba. Later he worked his passage on a schooner bound for the South Pacific, sailing through the Panama Canal and across to Hawaii. Honolulu suited him; he left ship and became a first-rate surfer. He also enrolled in the university, where he took a degree in philosophy.

But a yearning to fly was in his blood, and after a period climbing mountains in New Zealand, he returned to the States to join the Air Force and go through pilot training. His father, the general, must have been gratified, for his younger son, Sam’s brother, had gone to the Air Force Academy. Both of them ended up in Vietnam. Sam became a Blindbat pilot, flying a C-130 gunship at night, which used a starlight scope to spot trucks going down the Trail. As soon as he had accumulated thirty days’ leave he used it to train and check out as a FAC. If ever there was a man destined for the Steve Canyon Program it was Sam Deichelman.

He was very happy in Laos. It was as if, deep in the jungle and in the midst of war, he had at last found home. He grew to adore the Meo, who looked upon him as a friendly and amusing god. He flew long hours, always thrusting himself into the white-hot center of battle. On his return to base he would trudge up to the orphanage with a bag of candy and spend his evenings playing with the kids. There was something good and innocent about Sam Deichelman, everyone agreed, and yet he was a fierce and fearless warrior.

If there was one thing Long Tieng abounded in, it was orphaned children. When one of Vang Pao’s soldiers was killed in battle the general became directly responsible for the man’s surviving wife and children, who were relatively well cared for in the circumstances. The children had to be very young indeed not to be drafted into the army in one way or another. Six-year-olds humped rockets and pumped gasoline for the armorers and maintenance men, while their older brothers fought the war.

By early 1968 the war had already decimated the Meo. Pop Buell described it graphically: ‘A short time ago we rounded up three hundred fresh recruits. Thirty percent were fourteen years old or less, and ten of them were only ten years old. Another thirty percent were fifteen or sixteen. The remaining forty percent were forty-five or over. Where were the ages in between? I’ll tell you - they’re all dead.’

The children of the town liked the Ravens and ran after them for small change and chewing gum. Despite the war they were delightful, happy children who were always smiling. The shy little girls attempted to teach the Ravens how to flick their hand-painted wooden tops - without much success - while the boys noisily jostled for attention. The U.S. AID school built for the Meo was down the road from the Raven hootch, and the children waved and shouted in the mornings on their way to school. One four-year-old in particular began to stop by the hootch when school was over. Both parents had been killed in the war, and he was one of numerous waifs fed and haphazardly cared for by Vang Pao.

When the little boy discovered the Ravens screened films in the evenings, he attended regularly, sitting on the floor between their chairs to watch wide-eyed what was, for him, the extraordinary vision of Hollywood. He would watch until he grew sleepy, then doze quietly on the floor under the couch. When it grew late one of the general’s people would come to fetch him and take him back to the compound. The child came back night after night until it became such a routine that the general, knowing he was safe, stopped sending for him.

Without planning or intent, the Ravens had adopted a son. At a loss for a name, they called him Oddjob. He attached himself in particular to Larry Clausen, the radio operator, and a small bunk bed was built for him. It was eventually discovered that his Meo name was Lor Lu, so he was formally known as Lor ‘Oddjob’ Lu. In a world of war, the orphaned child became the focus of the Ravens’ gentler side. Everyone mentioned the chirpy four-year-old in letters home. John Mansur wrote to his wife: ‘He is hell on wheels, but what a neat little guy. In a couple of months his emotions have developed to where he can really relate to the guys.’

Ravens recounted Oddjob anecdotes in their letters like fathers doting on their firstborn, mentioned his size - about two-thirds the height of an M-16 and the fact that he had no clothes. As a result, when one of the Ravens returned from Udorn on the next mail run, his O-1 was crammed with care packages. Unused to children, they made the mistake of giving the four-year-old everything at once.

The next morning the Ravens left the hootch to fly as usual. When they returned Lor Lu was dressed in a neatly pressed pair of tiny jeans, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and a pair of thongs. He was asked where the rest of his considerable wardrobe had gone.

Lor Lu smiled from ear to ear and produced a small box stuffed with kip currency notes. He had taken the clothes down to the market and sold them. The houseboy counted the money in Lor Lu’s box and nodded appreciatively - the child was a natural trader and had done well.

The Ravens were hopelessly overworked by the war. The Air Force insisted that an O-1 should return to Udorn for maintenance every hundred hours, which was often less than ten days. In the meantime, bullet holes were patched with 100 mph typhoon tape, a strong fabric which was simply slapped over the holes. Spare parts were slow to arrive, meaning that sometimes planes were forced to sit on the ramp when they were desperately needed at the front. Fuel on the mountain and jungle sites was often contaminated by dirt and rust. Maintenance was sloppy, and it was not unusual for planes to return from Udorn with water in the gas tanks. It became so bad that the Ravens felt they were fighting on two fronts - one against the enemy in the north, and the other against the air attaché’s office and the embassy in the south.

‘Not one time while I was a Raven did any of the embassy staff come up to Alternate,’ Tom Shera said. ‘They were afraid to come up. They had no feel at all for the conditions we were flying under. They had no appreciation for our daily life at all. We lived in a house on stilts; our bunks were on the porch. Up there in the mountains it went below freezing in the winter. There was no heating, except log fires. It was cool even in the summer. We had open hall latrines. Our showers consisted of four fifty-five-gallon barrels on a platform with immersion heaters in them. You broke the ice on them in the morning and started the heater up. We bought our own food, did our own cooking, and washed our own dishes.’

The radios used were obsolete and often went on the blink.

FACs in Vietnam had the most up-to-date radio equipment, but in Laos the Ravens were expected to cope with antiquated, clumsy sets, which greatly complicated an already difficult situation. Radio contact with everyone involved in an air strike was vital for a FAC to be effective. He needed UHF, VHF, and FM radios: UHF to talk to the fighters, VHF to talk to Cricket and to Air America, and FM to talk to troops on the ground. The UHF was a multichannel radio, but the four-channel VHF receiver had to be tuned manually. The FM radio was an Army backpack type that was strapped into the O-1’s rear seat. To talk to the troops on the ground a Raven had to swivel in his seat to reach the hand-held cup phone behind him. In addition, the VHF antenna was on the bottom of the airplane, which meant that when a Raven needed to talk to Cricket he had to gain altitude, turn the airplane around, and drop the wing in order to position the antenna toward orbiting airborne command. In combat, when a Raven might need to talk to several sets of fighters, another FAC, and the troops on the ground as well as Cricket, this maneuver was not always convenient.

Support for the Ravens often relied on a conspiracy of the like-minded. The chronic lack of radios came to the attention of an unorthodox senior NCO, Patrick Mahoney, who worked in the Combat Command Center in Blue Chip, 7th Air Force HQ at Tan Son Nhut airbase in Vietnam. Senior Master Sergeant Mahoney - a veteran of the Korean War, in which he had won three Bronze Stars - had a penchant for people involved in special operations and unconventional warfare. It was his conviction that they received short shrift in the war in Vietnam, and he had set himself the task of equalizing the situation.

He had arrived in Vietnam as a volunteer in 1966 and had flown 250 medevac helicopter missions before being shot down four days before Christmas the same year. As a little extra duty on the side he liked to accompany Green Beret teams on operations thirty miles behind enemy lines, and had been awarded a Combat Infantryman’s Badge at a Special Forces camp - a highly unusual distinction for an airman.

Mahoney was moved to Combat Command Center, where he was given the job of noncommissioned officer in charge of combat operations for the 7th Air Force. He was also the top-secret control officer for the out-country war in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. The general in charge had picked Mahoney because of his experience with unconventional warfare, and gave him his first briefing on Laos: ‘Now you are
really
going to find out where the unconventional war is.’

Just to enter the office of the Combat Command Center a man needed Top Secret security clearances - sometimes Special Intelligence clearances as well - and no ‘foreigners’ were allowed in the area (foreigners in this case meaning non-Americans). ‘I began hearing about VP and the Raven forward air controllers - and then I heard they were short of radio equipment,’ Mahoney recalled.

Mahoney’s methods of procuring equipment were as unconventional as the war to which it was destined to be sent. He had once dressed up as a lieutenant colonel and taken a team of men to a downtown Saigon hotel, used primarily by State Department people, where he told the staff on the desk that he was there to check the air conditioning, because some of the striped-pants set had complained of unacceptable stuffiness in their rooms. He walked out of the hotel with fifteen units, which were loaded on a plane and were on their way to a Special Forces camp later the same day.

Grateful Green Berets reciprocated with gifts of captured Russian war supplies, which Mahoney in turn took down to the docks in Saigon where he traded for food with war-souvenir-hungry, rear echelon supply personnel. It took several cases of A3 steaks - each one containing 150 one-inch-thick filet mignons - to procure the radios, which were sent up to the Ravens at Long Tieng.

After the radios arrived the word spread throughout Laos that if you wanted something done behind people’s backs, and you wanted it done expediently, Patrick was the man. He was given a clearance to visit the secret base to see firsthand what was needed.

Mahoney was appalled by the Meo guerrillas’ equipment. The young soldiers looked a ragged bunch and had only antiquated carbines with which to go up against an enemy armed with AK-47 automatic weapons, B-40 rockets, and heavy artillery. Mahoney began to run guns and uniforms to the base, a back-channel supply line of equipment pilfered from the overstocked warehouses of Vietnam.

Tiger fatigues began to arrive in Long Tieng by the hundred, and the occasional planeload of unconventional weapons (Mahoney was almost caught loading up a T-39 with British Sten guns fitted with silencers, M-16s, and 9mm pistols destined for Laos). The Mahoney back-channel supply line even ran to artillery. ‘I had found a sergeant running a reclamation artillery yard. I told him the sort of food I could get and his eyes bugged out. He delivered ten pieces in good working order in four days.’

Mahoney slowly developed an alternative supply system. ‘It was taking care of people, and others saw it. When they started talking to some of the Ravens who had walked in the valley of the shadow of death, then they began to understand themselves. The Ravens were the best. Selfless. They were an inspiration.

‘And people who met them said, “To hell with the bureaucrats over us - we’ll take care of people like that.” We were building a system that
worked
.’
[20]

In the meantime the Ravens flew ten-hour combat days, uncertain in bad weather if they would be able to get back in or be forced to divert to another strip. Unreliable aircraft were a final, unacceptable hazard. Properly maintained airplanes are not only necessary equipment for a pilot, but part of his psychic confidence, the central prop of his courage. A single error can be fatal to a pilot flying a small airplane over dangerous mountain terrain in bad weather, and he reaches out instinctively for anything that increases his chance of survival. He can control the risk much of the time, and even manage the fear unlocked by sudden explosions of gunfire, but faulty equipment saps this vital confidence.