by Orr Kelly
“We would also drop hand grenades,” Stanford says. “We’d take hand grenades, pull the pins, and stick them in these cardboard tubes. The tubes were lashed to the floor with tie-down rings. When you opened the bomb bay, it would hold these tubes in, but all the hand grenades would fall out of the tubes. When they dropped, the spoons would fly off. These hand grenades would just saturate the area. It was like cluster bombs.
“When you were getting overrun, you would do a lot of things. We would fill a bottle with nails, tape a grenade to it, pull the pin, and drop it. Hopefully, it would go off before it hit the ground.”
Sometimes, the Butterflies became personally involved in the ordeal of the troops on the ground.
On one occasion in northern Laos, Stanford and Jones were flying out of an outpost under fierce attack by the North Vietnamese.
“You could see the enemy on the ground—huge, huge numbers, hundreds and hundreds of troops,” Stanford recalls. “It was one of the few times we could actually see the buildup. Charlie and I, we would describe the targets to the airplanes while we were still sitting on the ground pumping gas out of a fifty-five-gallon drum into the Porter. We’d get enough gas in to get airborne, put the first wave of fighters in, and then we’d flame out, have to land and pump more gas into the airplane and get back airborne. We never had enough time to get enough gas to stay on target the whole time. We’d land on this little dirt strip while it was under attack, pump gas with a hand pump, and take off again.”
In this case, the defenders had a wealth of air support. Because of bad weather over North Vietnam, planes scheduled for attacks there were diverted to Laos.
“The ABCCC was diverting all the fighters from North Vietnam,” Stanford says. “We had wave after wave: F-4s, A-4s, F-105s, AT-28s. They were coming off the carriers and out of South Vietnam and Thailand. There were flights of four, one after the other, all day. There were tankers out there waiting for them.”
Stanford, who also served in South Vietnam and Thailand, found his work as a Butterfly rewarding, despite the dangers.
“It was really a good operation,” he says. “It was different from South Vietnam, completely. South Vietnam was too big and political. Laos was not as much political; it was more military. At least at my level, you didn’t see the politics as much.”
It was Air Force politics, however, that brought an end to the Butterfly operation, although Stanford didn’t hear what had happened until years later.
The abrupt change came as the result of a meeting late in 1966 between Aderholt, who was in charge of the Butterflies as part of his Water Pump program of training Thai, Lao, and Hmong pilots, and General Momyer, commander of the Seventh Air Force. It is not a meeting Aderholt is likely to forget:
“He and I had not gotten along well, but I had lunch with him and mentioned the Butterflies. He asked about the FACs [forward air controllers] in Laos and where they came from. I said, ‘The people FAC-ing airplanes in Laos are enlisted.’ He went about six feet up and hit the ceiling. He said, ‘What do you mean? Who is flying the airplane?’ I said, ‘Air America pilots.’ He said, ‘That will cease!’”
Although several of the combat controllers had received a special secret training course in the techniques of forward air control and had been doing a good job for several months, Momyer reasoned that only a jet pilot could be trusted to direct an attack by a jet aircraft on a ground target.
The abrupt end to the Butterfly operation did not, however, end the need for effective ways to guide fast-moving fighter-bombers to their targets in Laos. Several expedients filled part of the gap, but they were not a full solution.
Working with the CIA, Vang Pao set up a number of small teams of observers to report on enemy movements. This operation came under Secord, who was running the CIA’s air operation in Laos.
By late 1967, there were some eighty teams reporting on enemy supply depots and movements of men and equipment.
Another highly effective technique, introduced later, was the use of several different types of offset bombing devices provided by the CIA and operated by the Hmong.
Clyde Howard was serving in Thailand as a combat controller when the beacons were introduced. He recalls how they were used:
“They gave us about fifty beacons, and we started training our guys. We set up a program of positioning beacons permanently in fixed positions in Laos. We were concerned with the PDJ [Plaine des Jarres], and we only needed about five locations.
“We’d charge the batteries at Udorn and shuttle them up. It was a logistical nightmare, but we made it happen. Guys on the ground did not talk to the airplane. They just kept the beacon on the air. We had all the F-111s. They would take off from Takhli. Everyone going to the war zone would check in with us. If we had any targets, we would divert them to our targets. Eighty percent of the time we had targets.”
The F-111s had a sophisticated electronic system that permitted the pilot to punch into his computer the distance and direction to the target from the beacon. Then he flipped an offset switch and aimed at the beacon. The system automatically dropped the bombs on the target. If the pilot forgot to flip the offset switch, the bombs fell on the beacon.
Sometimes Howard or other combat controllers would fly in an airborne control plane to guide the bombers. Other times, they would operate from the ground.
“We’d sit on the mountains under the clouds,” Howard recalls. “You could see the troops scuttling across the valley because, with the weather, they knew the airplanes couldn’t get them. But with this system, they didn’t even hear them. The planes were up at fifteen to twenty thousand feet. All of a sudden, the bombs would fall through the clouds, and the world would come to an end. The enemy called it Silent Death.”
Once they got the wrinkles out, the system proved extremely accurate. One night, Howard was flying in a C-130 serving as the airborne control plane when he received a report that Long Chieng was under artillery attack.
“It had to be a 130 mike mike,” Howard says, using the phonetic alphabet for millimeters. “It was the only thing that would reach that far. One of the [Hmong] forward air guides reported a gun and gave me the coordinates. The next F-111 that came through, I diverted him to that target. When he called bomb release, I told the forward air guide: ‘Look toward your target and tell me what you see.’ All of a sudden, the bombs blow, and he says, ‘You hit the target. You got secondary explosions.’ I called Long Chieng and said, ‘Are you still taking incoming?’ They said, ‘No, it just stopped.’”
Each of the F-111s carried twenty-four five-hundred-pound bombs. Normally, they would drop twelve on the first pass and the remainder on the next pass, crisscrossing the target from two directions.
The offset bombing system was later used in the highflying B-52s but could not be used with fighter-bombers except for the F-111 because the others did not have the required sophisticated electronics. On some missions, however, A-7 fighters flew alongside and just behind the F-111s and dropped their bombs as soon as the pilot saw the bombs emerge from the F-111.
Despite the success of this system, an effective air campaign to support the Hmong guerilla fighters still required skilled forward air controllers. Early in 1967, Aderholt was back in Florida, assigned to train jet pilots for the air controller job—and back at war with the conventional Air Force.
The basic plane for the forward-air-control job was a single-engine, high-winged plane not dramatically different from the little planes used in Burma more than twenty years before. It was the Cessna 0-1 Bird Dog, a plane that had first entered service as an Army observation plane in 1950.
“The Air Force immediately started sending me jet fighter pilots to train as FACs, and they immediately started ground-looping those 0-1s,” Aderholt recalls. “Every time they ground-looped, I got a message: I was going to get fired.
“We didn’t know what to do to stop ground-looping those 0-1s. So we got this great acrobatic pilot. He was the best. Were going to get him to t
rain these thirty or forty jet pilots to fly the 0-1s. He came in, and he had a football. He threw the football up, and it came down and rolled over and bounced up under a desk.
“He said, ‘I just demonstrated to you the landing of an 0-1. Nobody knows where that mother is going to bounce when you make a bad landing. If you think you’re going to stop ground-looping these things, you’d better stop flying them.’”
At the time, the Tactical Air Command was commanded by a general who had come from the Strategic Air Command. He treated an 0-1 damaged in a ground loop just as seriously as he would have treated a B-52 that hit a mountain. At best, somebody got grounded.
“They got hard-nosed about it,” Aderholt recalls. “They’d take these pilots, and they’d ground them. Take a hot jet pilot, bring him down here. He washes out a plane that costs fifteen to twenty thousand dollars then, maybe a couple of thousand to repair it. They wash out a guy that cost a million dollars to train. So I said, ‘They can’t do that to my boys. I can’t live with this.’”
Aderholt called an Army general at Fort Rucker, where the Army also flew 0-1s, and got him to send down ten planes that had been wrecked.
“We got these spare parts and stored them. And every time one of those 0-1s ground-looped, we’d run another one in. So we were cheating.”
Aderholt almost got caught when a team from the TAC inspector general’s office showed up to count his airplanes. He turned out two planes short. Aderholt asked the inspector to double-check his count in the morning. By the time morning arrived, there were two extra planes on the field. The inspector general threw up his hands and went home.
Many of the pilots who survived Aderholt’s FAC school soon found themselves involved in the strange secret war on the other side of the mountain. Theoretically, volunteers for service in Laos were chosen from among pilots who had put in six months as forward air controllers in Vietnam, although that rule was often ignored.
Like the Butterflies before them, the pilots went through the sheep-dip process, shedding their commissions, their formal connection with the United States Air Force, and their uniforms. In the case of the Butterflies, the sheep-dip process was fairly casual because it was no problem to lose a few enlisted men in the paperwork. But the commissioned pilots went through a much more rigorous process that not only severed their connections with the American military but made them feel like some sort of secret agents.
Normally, they flew to Bangkok, up to one of the royal Thai bases used by the Americans and then across the border into Laos. There, they simply slipped into the system without going through Lao customs or immigration checks, without even carrying passports.
They called themselves Ravens. Their Hmong counterparts, trained in Water Pump, chose an even more colorful name, Nokateng—Swooping Bird.
The number of Ravens built up gradually until eventually a total of 191 served as forward air controllers in Laos in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Of that number, thirty-one died in action—a measure both of the danger of their job and their dedication to getting it done.
Colonel Robert L. F. Tyrrell, who served for a number of years as the air attaché at the embassy in Vientiane, told what he thought about the Ravens:
“You know the biggest problem we had with the Ravens, and God, I used to talk to them quite frequently about not going out there and killing themselves. Because it was my opinion that we could do an effective job without going too gung ho. We had one fellow that had three children, I think it was, that just pressed so hard, and he was right down there where they just knocked him out of the air—where he shouldn’t have been—and could’ve been doing the same thing from a little more altitude. They had a tendency to do that; they were just so motivated to do a good job that they just overextended themselves.
“That was a great bunch. There were a few oddballs along the line, but, for the most part, I really took my hat off to those boys. They did a fantastic job. Because, Jesus, they were out there flying over the ground fire all the time, every day. They realized that it wasn’t their war; they were exposing themselves, and they were getting killed, and still they would do this. They just did an outstanding job.”
Major Mike Cavanaugh, who flew as a Raven in 1969, was asked if there were rules of engagement governing the operations of the Ravens.
“Absolutely not,” he said. “They had the rules, and we had our war. They didn’t know, nobody had the guts to go up there and find out exactly what we were up to, what we were doing, and we did the best we could with what we had.”
The early Ravens flew the little 0-1s that had given Aderholt so much trouble. Later, a number of them checked out in the AT-28, and often they would alternate, flying part of the day in an 0-1, the rest of the day in an AT-28.
Whichever plane they flew, they took a Hmong along in the rear seat to help spot targets and communicate with troops on the ground. Several of the Ravens had such a reputation for aggressive flying that the Hmong were reluctant to fly with them. When one Raven in particular approached the building where the backseaters waited for assignment, they would actually hide while he overturned the furniture looking for them.
As they gained experience, the Ravens themselves became expert at spotting signs of the enemy’s presence. One Raven liked to take off at first light on a kind of dawn patrol. He would look for the smoke from cook fires that might mark a troop bivouac. Trails where the early morning dew had been brushed off the grass were another sign of human presence. When he returned for breakfast, he had his own list of potentially lucrative targets for the day.
“Once you get a forward air controller’s eyes, you begin to be able to see things.…” Cavanaugh says. “You can smell where supplies are. One time, I saw bushes which came to a ninety-degree angle. The clever devil that I am, I know that bushes don’t grow in ninety-degree angles. That’s all I had to go on; I hit it with a set of fighters. I uncovered pallet after pallet of 122mm rockets. They were headed south. They were just stored there, and this was just north of the Plaine des Jarres. I will never forget that, and I learned always to follow my hunch. My hunches were good hunches. I hit that one little area, and we had secondary explosions for two solid days. It was cooking off all during the night, and, the next day, it was still cooking off. All of the rockets were cooking off one at a time and shooting all over the place. It was a very rewarding sight, to be able to catch something like that.”
Another time, Capt. Karl L. Polifka zeroed in on what looked like a little lump in the ground out in the middle of the Plaine des Jarres. Intelligence reports indicated it was the entrance to a cave where the enemy had stored five hundred barrels of fuel. Polifka marked the cave entrance and called in a fighter to put a guided bomb into the cave. The intelligence report was right: the bomb set off an explosion that created a fireball a thousand feet in diameter, so hot it drew a rain cloud to the scene.
The job of the Ravens, literally, was to look for trouble. And they often found it, not only in the form of enemy troops and supplies but in the form of barrages of bullets—fired by everything from rifles to high-powered antiaircraft weapons.
Jerome “Jerry” Klingaman, who served with Project 404/ Palace Dog, providing target information for the Ravens, tells of his relationship with the Ravens:
“I had problems sending Ravens out to do things I wouldn’t do myself,” he says. “It helped settle my mind and it kept me aware of what was going on by flying missions with them. I flew with them in the backseat.”
Klingaman particularly recalls one Raven, John Mansur, with whom he lived in an old farmhouse. During his tour in Laos, Mansur flew a number of very difficult missions, earning the Silver Star three times.
“On one mission, John was shot right through the helmet. He was up on the PDJ FAC-ing some A-1Es when he was shot through the helmet and blinded. The bullet went in one side of his visor and out the other, right in front of his eyes.
“The A-1Es saw what had happened and started giving him
instructions: ‘Right wing up. Level. Okay.’ That sort of thing. The A-1Es flew him off the PDJ, got him away from the guns, and put him in orbit out there. Anyway, his eyes cleared up, and he was able to make a landing.”
Gunners on the ground were not the only worry for the Ravens. They also lived in fear of the jet fighter-bombers diving from twelve thousand feet and streaking through their air space at four or five hundred miles an hour.
Once, when a jet purposely came so close that it forced him down into the weeds, Polifka fired a hundred rounds of .50-caliber bullets across his nose and warned that, the next time, he would shoot him down.
“You know, that sounds stupid now, but I would have had no compunction about shooting one of those guys down if I could have hit him,” Polifka said later.
Midair near-collisions occurred several times a week. Most worrisome to the Ravens were the F-105 fighter-bombers. Once committed to a bombing attack, the plane went where it was aimed. If anything got in the way of that “lead sled,” as the Ravens called F-105s, that was too bad.
“Once he is coming at you, you can’t get out of the way in an 0-1, and he can’t turn,” Polifka explains. “It would just scare the living hell out of you.”
With all the danger from enemy gunners and “friendly” jets, the Ravens were caught short on occasion when they got in trouble because of something as mundane as bad weather.
Cavanaugh used to warn other pilots to make sure they always had enough gas to get to one of the big airfields in Thailand. But he broke his own rule once in the summer of 1969 and almost paid with his life and that of his backseater, a Hmong called Moonface.
He kept calling in fighters on a lucrative target down below until he had only enough gas to get home to Long Chieng. But as he approached the base, he was confronted by a solid wall of clouds, rising to forty thousand feet, boiling with rain and lightning. He thought about landing and spending the night on the Plaine des Jarres but feared he would be captured.
Another pilot suggested landing at Muong Soui, on the edge of the storm north of Long Chieng. The only problem was that the North Vietnamese were in the process of overrunning the field.