Last Man Out (36 page)

I had been hired on contract to work in the CIA’s Special Operations Group (SOG), the section that had given the American people the Bay of Pigs and the U-2 program. Most of my compatriots were former military people with Vietnam combat experience. There was an innate feeling among them that they belonged in the CIA. They exuded self-confidence.

In September 1971, after a year of intelligence and paramilitary training, I received my first assignment, as a case officer in the Lao program, the CIA’s largest covert operation.

During the late 1950s, Laos, a small, indolent, landlocked country, was on the verge of a civil war that could have brought about a confrontation between the world’s superpowers. The ragtag forces of the pro-West government of Souvanna Phouma were opposed in the countryside by the Pathet Lao, a Communist group supported by North Vietnam and the Soviet Union. In 1962, to defuse the situation, a senior U.S. State Department official, William Sullivan, helped structure the Geneva Accords, which prohibited foreign forces from fighting in Laos. The intent of the accords was to get the North Vietnamese out of the country so the Lao could determine their own fate. The North Vietnamese signed the accords but did not leave. A “tacit agreement” ensued. The North Vietnamese would remain in Laos to help the Pathet Lao; the United States would support Souvanna Phouma but would not commit ground troops. The United States subscribed to this agreement because the CIA had contact with Vang Pao, leader of the Lao hill people (Hmong), and U.S. policy makers were confident that he could carry the fight to the Communists. With CIA support, Vang Pao’s forces fought and died bravely during the mid-1960s as the war in Vietnam took shape,
and they quietly contained the North Vietnamese in the mountains, away from the Laotian capital of Vientiane. By the late 1960s, however, Vang Pao’s forces were exhausted and there was some question about their ability to continue the fight. Paid volunteers from Thailand were brought in to shore up the Hmong. In 1971, as I prepared for my Lao assignment, the North Vietnamese were deploying two divisions to destroy the CIA’s combined Hmong/Thai paramilitary force encamped on a high mountain plateau—the Plain of Jars—in an effort to move on the capital and bring Laos into the North Vietnamese sphere of influence. The future of the country was in doubt.

The rear headquarters of the CIA’s Lao program was at a U.S./Thai Air Force base in Udorn, Thailand. Brenda and I arrived there in mid-November 1971. CIA intelligence indicated that the North Vietnamese would probably launch their offensive before Christmas. I was anxious to get to the field and learn the lay of the land before the North Vietnamese attacked, but I was assigned to a desk in Udorn instead. While I was busy with paperwork and briefings, my friends were bracing the Hmong and the Thai mercenaries up-country for the battle ahead. Unhappily, I was on the sidelines as the game was being decided.

Early one morning in mid-December 1971, the first day of the smoky season, when haze from slash-and-burn farming in South China enveloped the mountains, the North Vietnamese attacked the CIA forces on the Plain of Jars with human waves of infantry supported by deadly, railroad-car-size 130mm artillery. The Hmong and Thais fell back several ridgelines before consolidating on a ridge called Skyline. The North Vietnamese pursued them and, on New Year’s Eve, 1971, started an advance up Skyline as dozens of 130mm rounds landed on the ridgeline and in the Long Tieng valley beyond, where the CIA had its up-country base camp.

The CIA forces held Skyline on New Year’s Eve and inflicted heavy casualties on the North Vietnamese. The next day the North Vietnamese attacked again, and the day after, and the day after that, but the Thais and Hmong did not break. The North Vietnamese pulled back, regrouped, and started to attack again—they had been ordered to take the ridgeline at all costs. On 14 January
1972, every newspaper in Hanoi announced that Skyline had been overrun and the CIA forces in Laos destroyed.

But the Thai mercenaries and the Hmong had not been overrun. They still held out. The North Vietnamese continued to attack Skyline, occasionally capturing Thai positions before being repulsed. The CIA forces were stretched to the limit.

The last all-out attacks before the smoky season ended were pending when I finally received a transfer up-country. I joined CIA men known by their call signs: Hog, Digger, Clean, Ringo, Zack, Hardnose, Dutch, Kayak, Tiny, Electric, Bag, Shep, Bamboo, and Greek. Hog, who had been in up-country Laos for ten years, gave me my call sign—Mule.

Like Hog, the CIA people tended to stay around in the mountains of Laos for years. They had good rapport with the Hmong and Thai mercenaries; they knew the territory; and, although they looked like weathered, backwater cowboys, they were effective. It was a closed society. Hog, the senior case officer, was the unquestioned leader. He had a keen, woodsy intelligence—he set the tone, he was our soul. Over a beer some night he might say, “Need to have all you girl singers on the dreaded ramp ’fore sunup. Bring a little hang.”

“Girl singers” was a Hogism for prissy men, and he used “dreaded” somewhere in every other sentence. “Hang” was courage. Hog had hang and he expected each of us to demonstrate the same virtue.

I also met two stalwart groups of pilots, the mighty Air America men and the fighting Ravens. Air America was the CIA airline. Its fleet of helicopters moved case officers, troops, and supplies from mountain to mountain. There were also fixed-wing, STOL aircraft, mostly Porters that could land on extremely short, dirt runways. Air America also had large fixed-wing planes for airdrops and for moving troops forward from rear bases. No roads led into the area where we operated, and everything had to be flown in. The Air America flying machines were the lifelines to the fighting units.

Probably no other profession was as dangerous nor could any other organization attract such stout hearts as did Air America. Compared to the ten dollars a day GIs were making in Vietnam, the pilots and the kickers were reasonably well-paid, but they
were not there for the money. It was the adventure. They were not sentimentalists. In fact, Air America people showed little emotion; every pilot had lost dozens of friends in that war. Their employer’s reason for being there did not matter to them. They simply wanted the action of combat flying for the CIA, and they wanted to be on the winning team. All of them had been in Vietnam, with its complicated rules of engagement, distracting media kibitzers, and lack of purpose. In Long Tieng, Laos, there was no politics. Air America did its job, and we were successful in Laos. We held the line. We did not lose. Air America helped make the difference. The U.S. government has rarely employed such irreverent, hard-living, competent patriots as the Air America pilots.

Although my CIA training and all the stories I had heard prepared me for the case officer corps and Air America, I had to go back to my military days, to the U.S. Air Force forward observers, to find people comparable to the Ravens.

U.S. ground troops were prohibited from fighting in Laos, but U.S. warplanes were not. Flying unarmored, light 0-1 observation planes called Birddogs, the Ravens challenged death every day to lead U.S. warplanes in on targets. If an Air America pilot knew an enemy position was on a ridgeline, he avoided it; the Raven went looking for it, in the hope of drawing fire. As military officers, the Ravens put great value on comradeship and each accepted his own death as the possible consequence of a mission. They were, it seemed, more willing to die than the Air America pilots and CIA case officers. God, were they impressive. Coming in from a reconnaissance, their little planes shot up, they coolly got out and walked proudly across the ramp. That day the rounds might have missed them by feet. Tomorrow it might be by inches, but they would still get out of their planes at the end of the day and calmly walk away, heads up, apparently unfazed. They looked like lawyers or preachers, but they were cool, committed killers, a breed apart, extraordinary risk takers.

As were the Thai volunteers. Most came from humble, rural backgrounds in Thailand. They had tattoos, criminal records, and disrespect for authority, but put them on top of a mountain in Laos, surrounded by North Vietnamese, and they would fight and they would die. Every day we sent body bags to Thailand.
Every day we received replacements. When they arrived, CIA case officers moved among those tough men to prepare them for deployment. They also smiled at the danger. Between attacks we sent them up to Skyline and, sometimes within hours, put what was left of them in body bags and sent them south on planes that had just brought in more replacements.

Six battalions of Hmong worked out of Long Tieng. After ten years of fighting they were happy to see the Thais taking the brunt of the attacks, so that they could act as guerrillas, the maneuver elements in our little war. Many of the Hmong soldiers were young, but they all had hang. Recalcitrant, unorthodox, dirty, tenacious, they were defending their homeland, and they were good soldiers.

What army in the world could beat people like Hog and Air America and the Ravens and the Thais and the Hmong?

Not the North Vietnamese in Laos. They never took Skyline.

As I was getting into my first job up-country, locating, organizing, and training the Hmong village militia north and east of the fighting on Skyline, the North Vietnamese pulled back. They had suffered heavy casualties in unsuccessful efforts to rout the CIA men. As the North Vietnamese retreated, the Ravens pursued them every step of the way. The North Vietnamese were a shattered, defeated force when they reached the Plain of Jars.

On Christmas Day, during a break in the fighting up-country, Brenda and I visited the Catholic orphanage in Udorn and in a second’s time, she fell in love with a runty, sickly, ugly little two-year-old Thai boy who was recovering from an operation and had been left out of the Christmas party. I saw it all happen.

We had brought some fruit as a token gift and were being escorted to the back play area of the orphanage by one of the Catholic sisters when we passed the nursery. This kid—the only child in the room—was standing up in his bassinet and rocking from side to side, looking mean and sad. Brenda and he made eye contact and something happened. She walked on a couple of steps, leaned back into the doorway, and saw the boy leaning to the side to see her. They were at crazy angles—he and she—like yin and yang, and Brenda straightened up and asked the nun if she could bring that lonely little boy out back. The nun extended
her arms out as if he were hers for the taking, so Brenda went into the nursery and picked him up and joined me outside. As we sat on the edge of a picnic table, she bounced him on her knees. She got him to laugh and she looked at me, that woman I loved so much, and her eyes were twinkling and her smile was radiant and she looked back at the boy—the nun said his name was Joseph—and he smiled again and she hugged him so hard he cried out.

There were so many other kids there that after a while Brenda began to feel guilty about focusing so much attention on one, so she tried to set Joseph to the side and he cried out in a lonely, desperate wail. Forever bonding their relationship, he then reached out his hands to her. Brenda picked him up and he stopped crying, snuggling into her arms.

We adopted Joseph two months later.

Two days after that a man appeared on the doorsteps of our house on the outskirts of Udorn and asked if we’d consider adopting an American-Asian girl. We followed the man back to his home—he was leaving for the States soon and was not able to bring Mim, his foster daughter, with him. He was looking for a good home for her. Mim was escorted into the room and I was smitten—she was so beautiful a child that she was startling. She had been the center of attention all her brief life and did not take my adulation as anything out of the ordinary.

A week later Mim was adopted and our family was complete. We were so proud of our children. They held such promise. There was so much more to life with them around.

Because of the fighting up-country, I was not able to spend much time at home in Udorn. My family had grown considerably since February so we decided to move to Vientiane. Brenda rented a house; hired a cook, a maid, and a gardener; and settled in. She was comfortable in her surroundings and was not afraid of things that went bump in the night.

Up in the mountains, I expanded my contacts with village militia north of Long Tieng and had positioned Hmong irregulars on a mountaintop in preparation for a move into a village previously held by the North Vietnamese. After training that group, my Hmong ops (operations) assistant/interpreter, Va Xiong, and
I were resupplying them when the plane he was on hit a mine as it took off. Va barely escaped with his life. My parents were visiting us in Vientiane and Va went back with them to the States.

In late summer 1972, I received a Hmong battalion, GM 22. With Digger’s GM 21, we came down out of the mountains for training and refitting prior to what would be our dry season offensive against the North Vietnamese dug in on the Plain of Jars.

We returned to Long Tieng in September to launch our attacks. A fellow case officer was killed in the first week of the offensive. We eventually established positions in a crescent south, southwest, and west of the plain. Digger’s GM to the west, my GM in the middle, and Kayak’s GM to the south. The other Hmong battalions and the Thais were in reserve. Digger’s forces were hit first and pulled back. Kayak’s forces were hit and held.

My forces were hit and fell back one ridgeline as we pounded the North Vietnamese with artillery. Air Force fast movers came in to help us, and the Hmong’s prop-driven T-28s flew through the smoke and haze of the battle to deliver treetop support. The converted trainers were equipped to carry bombs and .50-caliber machine guns. Flown by the heroes of the Hmong nations, committed only on Vang Pao’s order and often directed to targets by the Ravens, they were a very effective fighting element. My GM eventually pulled back to a staging area some distance from the plain, but we returned later.