by Orr Kelly
Quite apart from its strategic importance, many of the air commandos and the CIA officers, with whom they worked closely, thought their work in Laos was important because they had become great admirers of the Hmong and their fierce determination to protect themselves and their way of life from the North Vietnamese.
Ironically, even some of the Americans who worked in Laos with the Hmong didn’t really know them very well, despite the fact that they flew with them every day, participated in their ceremonies, and advised them on military strategy. American documents from that period consistently refer to the Hmong as the Meo—a name derived from a term of derision given to the Hmong generations ago, when the people lived in China before moving south into Laos to escape persecution.
There is no doubt of the Americans’ admiration for these allies. It was an admiration that did not extend to the low-landers, the Laotians. The Americans found most of them reluctant warriors, often more interested in coups and countercoups or smuggling heroin than in fighting the North Vietnamese.
Thus, while the formal American presence could be observed in the capital of Vientiane, the military focal point of the United States activity in Laos was in a compound in the hills to the north known as Long Chieng. It was also known as Lima Site 30 and 20 Alternate. The Americans commonly referred to it simply as Alternate. Although the American press, which was barred from visiting Long Chieng, came to refer to it as the “CIA’s secret headquarters,” Long Chieng was more of a military outpost and staging area. The CIA had its truly secret administrative base back in northern Thailand.
The central figure at Long Chieng was a charismatic Hmong leader named Vang Pao. Although he did not have a high-school education, Vang Pao had a natural flare for guerrilla warfare that impressed the French, with whom he fought against the Vietminh. In 1952, when he was eighteen, the French sent him to a military academy in Vientiane. He emerged as a second lieutenant in time to help lead a rescue force of Hmong resistance fighters on a forced march through the jungles when a large French garrison was trapped at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. But they arrived on the scene the day the French surrendered and turned to retrace their steps into Laos.
Vang Pao preferred to lead by example.
One American pilot watched in amusement as an American Army captain tried to explain to Vang Pao how to use firing tables and other by-the-book methods for firing artillery. Vang Pao looked down and saw an enemy truck approaching. He snipped off a blade of grass and used it to check the distance. He stuck a finger in the air to check the wind. He ordered the gun moved slightly and then gave the order to shoot. A moment later, the truck exploded.
When the bullets were flying, Vang Pao often stood exposed as though he were impervious to enemy fire. He wasn’t. On one occasion, he turned just as a bullet tore into his body, inflicting a serious injury. If he had not moved, the bullet would have struck him in the chest and probably killed him.
Although only thirty years old in 1964, he was a kind of father figure to his people.
Major Michael E. Cavanaugh, who flew as a forward air controller in Laos in the late 1960s, recalls the way Vang Pao dealt with his people:
“He was such a people person. People would come in every night and tell General Vang Pao their problems. They were screened before they got in there.… He had a little box and he would open up the box and he would take out some kip [the Laotian currency], and he would peel off some big red ones. He would give them the money.…
“He was also very strong. We had a forward air controller, one of the Lao backseaters, and he gave wrong information. Gee, talk about feeling bad, one of the Ravens [American pilots flying as forward air controllers] dropped bombs right on top of the friendlies based on what the guy in the backseat told him. General Vang Pao believed the Raven, and of course the guy was scared to death. He said, ‘The Raven is lying!’ General Vang Pao said, ‘Ravens don’t lie.’ He took him out and shot him. That’s it. That was wartime. You goof up, you die. He was upset with him, so he took him out and shot him.”
Heinie Aderholt tells a similar story:
“General Vang Pao, he found a traitor? He’d have him tied up out there, and he’d go out every morning and cut off an inch of his hide until he died. He did that so people would know that’s what would happen if you were a traitor.”
As early as 1960, the CIA arranged for very limited air support for Vang Pao. But he clearly perceived that the key to success in his war with the North Vietnamese and their Pathet Lao allies was what he called, simply, “air”—especially his own planes and pilots, ready to support his forces on the ground whenever they got in trouble.
The answer was Project Water Pump. As it seemed to do routinely when something secret and unusual needed doing, the Air Force called on Aderholt. He set up Project Water Pump at a royal Thai air base at Udorn in March of 1964.
“It was the start,” says Aderholt, “of a whole Air Force department that did all kinds of crazy things.”
Providing air power for Vang Pao was not the number one priority when Water Pump was set up. Instead, the original motive was to make it easier to rescue American pilots shot down over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Because American military people were not supposed to be operating in Laos, the United States arranged for civilian helicopter crews hired by Air America—the CIA front—to fly the rescue missions. But the helicopter pilots were understandably reluctant to go without fighter escort into areas where an airplane had already been shot down.
Thus, the original goal of Water Pump was to teach Thai and Laotian pilots to fly the AT-28 converted trainer—the same plane used by the American Farmgate pilots in Vietnam—and to train them in tactics for suppressing enemy gunfire during a helicopter rescue operation. The Laotians could openly take part in rescue missions. The Thais, as foreigners, temporarily gave up their royal Thai commissions and flew on a kind of pay-per-mission basis.
Vang Pao prevailed on his American friends to include some of his men in the training program, not so they could participate in rescue missions but so they could return and provide air support for his guerrilla forces. But it took a frustratingly long time—three years—before the Hmong volunteers were trained and ready to go into combat.
A major problem was that no one was quite sure how to go about making pilots out of men from the mountains of central Laos. They didn’t speak English. Most of them had never driven a car. They were so small so that the Americans had to wire chunks of two-by-four to the rudder pedals so the Hmong could reach them. When they reported to the flight line, the would-be pilots brought their helmets, parachutes—and pillows to raise them up enough to see out of the cockpit.
Despite these handicaps, most of them turned out to be superb pilots. On the day the first class graduated, Aderholt arranged a show for Vang Pao, the United States ambassador, and other dignitaries. The pilots roared down the runway in their AT-28s, tucked up their wheels, did a barrel roll, zoomed up, and did another roll before leveling off and returning to land in front of their audience. To be on the safe side, Aderholt had hidden an instructor pilot in the backseat of each of the planes. But the Hmong pilots carried off their flashy show without any need for assistance.
When they returned to their homeland, they called themselves Chaophakaow!, which translates as “Lord White Buddha.” It was at the same time a radio call sign and a prayer.
In the cockpit as on the ground, the Hmong proved to be fierce and dedicated warriors. They were also daring, seemingly fearless pilots.
Clyde Howard, who was a young sergeant and one of a small group of enlisted combat controllers, recalls the kind of rough-and-ready combat missions flown by the Hmong.
“Some of them had many, many missions. They flew like cowboys. They’d still have their gear up ten feet from the runway. At the last second, they’d drop their gear. I was hollering at them: ‘Check gear down!’ They’d do it on purpose just to get me excited. They’d laugh about it. They’d fly all day long—ten missions a day.”
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br /> One pilot stands out in the memories of Americans involved in that secret war. He was a schoolteacher named Ly Leu who was one of the first to volunteer for pilot training. He would fly from dawn until dusk. When he returned from a mission, he would jump from the plane and help load bombs, in a hurry to get back in the air. Some evenings, when he landed after his last mission, he was so exhausted he had to be helped from the cockpit.
Although he was only a captain, Ly Leu actually served as a general, commanding Vang Pao’s small air force. The Americans were fascinated by him. In his off-duty hours, he would play the guitar and entertain them with dirty songs. When he stopped overnight in various cities, he had a wife waiting in each place.
Unlike the Americans, who put in a tour of duty broken by recreational trips to Hawaii, Bangkok, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, or Australia and then went home, the Hmong pilots flew without a break—usually until they died.
They were so aggressive that it scared the Americans just to watch them. One American forward air controller described how they would swoop in at twenty feet off the ground. He said Ly Leu’s idea of strafing was to stick a .50-caliber gun in the enemy’s ear and pull the trigger. Ly Leu dubbed one of the Americans “the astronaut” because he refused to fly as low as the Hmong did.
Ly Leu was rated by his admirers as the best pilot in Laos, regardless of nationality. He flew as though he were indestructible, but he knew he wasn’t. He worried about being hit and trapped in a burning plane. The AT-28s flown by the Hmong at that time did not have ejection seats. In late 1968, he was hit and managed to roll over and drop out of the cockpit just before the plane exploded. He was back in the air the next day with a new plane. But his days were numbered.
Ly Leu was shot down attacking a North Vietnamese bunker while Vang Pao, who was his father-in-law, was controlling the attack by radio from a nearby hill. Cavanaugh vividly recalls the shoot-down and the funeral that followed:
“It was straight north of Long Chieng, south of Muong Soui.… There was a pocket of NVA in that area, and we had them. We had them by the short hair. And Ly Leu was on his tenth combat mission of the day. It was nothing for him to fly thirty-minute missions. He would land at Muong Soui, put the bombs on the airplane, and go fly. The target was three miles away. He would drop his bombs, go back and land, and do it again.”
On what became his final flight, Ly Leu was targeted by a 12.7mm antiaircraft gun. He always flew low, and, this day, he was right down on the treetops. As he pulled away from the target, struggling for altitude, the enemy gunner followed him up.
“He was pulling off from south to north, and he was real slow, and that gunner was on him. Just rode him to death,” Cavanaugh says.
With Ly Leu was a student pilot, being checked out in the plane on a combat mission—what Cavanaugh describes as “one hell of a checkout.”
Both Ly Leu and the student pilot were killed, and Cavanaugh and the other Americans went to the Buddhist-style funeral. They saw the two caskets there, surrounded with pictures of the two dead men, family streamers, and flowers.
Following the example of the Hmong, the Americans crawled up to the caskets on their knees, carrying sticks of incense, which they placed in a vase, and then said a prayer.
General Vang Pao, who was devastated by the loss of Ly Leu, was deeply impressed by the way the Americans participated in what, for them, was an unfamiliar and alien ceremony.
Water Pump quickly grew to include more than seventy planes. In addition to training Lao, Hmong, and Thai pilots, the air commandos also became involved directly in the war.
Howard recalls how they would move planes, people, fuel, bombs, everything they needed, early in the morning and set up operations for the day like a traveling road show. Their main base for these operations was Nakom Phanom (NKP), a base in Thailand about eight miles south of the Mekong River, which forms the border between Laos and Thailand.
“We’d move forward early in the morning. I’d fly in a helicopter and scope out a stretch of road that was suitable for forward operations—fifty or sixty miles inside Laos, near the North Vietnamese border. Once we selected a section of road that was suitable and in friendly territory, we would land.
“I would take a fuels guy, an aircraft mechanic, a bomb loader, and a munitions person. There would be four or five of us there at the break of dawn.
“We’d check the surface, put up markers, bring in the C-7s or C-123s with bombs and off-load them. Then they would launch the AT-28s out of NKP. They would go hit the targets. The targets might be ten miles from where I’m setting up operations. They would drop their bombs, then come back to me, and I would land them on the road.
“I’d control the aircraft in, get them parked over to the side. The others guys would load bombs on them. We had fifty-five-gallon drums of gas, so we’d pump gas into them.
“They had only five or ten miles to go to deliver another load of bombs. We’d do that all day long. We’d turn them as fast as we could turn them. All day long. It was a constant stream. With four airplanes, you really stay busy.”
As the air commandos continued to learn their way around, they played a major role, much of it behind the scenes, not only in the secret war in Laos but also in Thailand and, later, in Cambodia.
CHAPTER 18
Butterflies and Ravens
In the beginning were the Butterflies.
Butterflies—small winged creatures flitting through Laos’s misty valleys and over the mysteries of the Plaine des Jarres. The name was fitting—but only up to a point.
Butterfly was the name given to members of a small group of Air Force combat controllers assigned in mid-1966 to guide attacks by American bombers in support of Vang Pao and his Hmong forces resisting the North Vietnamese on the ground.
The combat controllers, who have since become a vital and integral part of Air Force special operations, were a special breed of warriors: smart, adaptable, willing and able to go anywhere, do anything. They were trained to jump out of airplanes, fight with the infantry, tend wounds, and operate an airport. Direct descendants of the pathfinders who guided the aerial invasions of World War II, the combat controllers still have the main job of going in with Army Rangers to seize an enemy airfield and then to set up an air-traffic control system under combat conditions.
The air commando combat controllers arrived in Southeast Asia early in 1966 as part of Project Lucky Tiger, whose job was to prepare for the introduction of A-26 attack planes into Thailand. But they found themselves called upon to do a seemingly endless number and variety of jobs that no one else could or would do. Acting as Butterflies was only one of these jobs.
Jim Stanford, who now lives in Gravel Ridge, Arkansas, recalls how he and Charles Jones, now a minister in Navarre, Florida, were assigned in mid-1966 to direct air strikes in various parts of Laos.
At the time, Stanford was a technical sergeant and Jones a master sergeant. But for this assignment, they were “sheep dipped,” dressed in civilian clothes and stripped of military identification. At first, they were assigned to Vang Pao’s headquarters at Long Chieng, later to an even more remote guerilla outpost in northern Laos.
Although the secret war in Laos is often referred to as a CIA operation, it was also very much of an air commando operation. The CIA air operation, involving civilian crews flying for Air America and Continental Air, was run by Richard Secord. A West Point graduate and one of the early Farmgate pilots, he was on loan to the CIA. Water Pump, which supplied indigenous aircrews and the Butterflies, was run by air commandos. And in Laos, the secret air war was managed by Project 404/Palace Dog, also manned by air commandos. Operating behind the scenes in Vientiane, Project 404 had air operations centers at five locations in Laos.
When Stanford and Jones were assigned as Butterflies, they pretty much ran their own operation.
“We’d have meetings with General Vang Pao,” Stanford explains. “He’d tell us where he needed fire support. Charlie and I would go up to
these areas with an interpreter. We’d go to sites, recon the targets, call in the ABCCC [an airborne command and control plane—in that era a C-47]. If they were getting overrun, we would try to get all the fighters we could get.
“We also had a squadron of Thai pilots flying AT-28s from Vientiane every day, morning, and afternoon. We had plenty of targets: truck parks, bridges, supply depots, and hordes of troops. It was a daily operation.”
Stanford and Jones were not pilots themselves, so they flew with civilian pilots hired by the CIA, flying as employees of Air America or Continental Air. Normally, they flew in an extremely adaptive plane called the Porter Pilatus—a craft almost as maneuverable as a helicopter, able to get in and out of tiny fields roughly hacked out of the jungle or cut on a mountainside. The Porter was also big enough to carry an interpreter familiar with the situation on the ground.
When they reached an area under attack, Stanford or Jones drew a picture of the area on the plane’s side window with an erasable marker. The interpreter then marked the friendly and enemy positions, and the Butterfly used this information to guide the fighter-bombers on their attack.
Since the pilots were civilians, they were not supposed to fire any weapons—not even a marking rocket. This meant the Butterfly had to give the fighter pilots precise directions using landmarks on the ground. In the remote areas of Laos where they were operating, however, there were no referees to enforce rules written by politicians half a world away.
The Porter had a bomb bay designed to drop cargo and food. The Americans scrounged hundred-pound bombs—either high explosive or white phosphorous—and loaded them into the bomb bay to drop if they ran out of fighters to direct against targets on the ground.