The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War by Christopher Robbins Page B

They roll a bulldozer out of a cave and fill it in and roll the trucks down at night. When there’s a cut, coolies unload supplies and ammo from one set of trucks and carry it to the next.’
    ‘Impossible.’
    ‘You don’t understand the power of thousands of coolies. They can carry more on their backs and their bicycles than you ever thought of. If they don’t have a bulldozer they get a thousand people to carry a thousand baskets of rocks for as long as it takes to get the job done.’
    Those who did learn by the end of their one-year tour were replaced by new men who began the cycle of self-delusion all over again. Throughout Vietnam, and over the whole of Indochina, the one-year tour locked the military into a perpetual cycle of repeating the same mistakes over and over again. The wheel was reinvented every twelve months.
    At least in Laos there was a certain amount of continuity. Some of the contract agents with the CIA spent more than a decade in the country, and so had many of the pilots who flew with Air America. The ambassadors spent substantial periods, and Gen. Vang Pao, who was there at the very beginning, would remain long after the end.
    But most people passed through, a serious flaw in the case of photo intelligence. Reconnaissance planes crisscrossed Laos daily and returned with high-definition photographic blowups of every square mile of the country. These were scrutinized by photo interpreters, none of whom had ever flown over the battle areas personally, and who might have been put on the job only the previous day. It was sometimes difficult to distinguish a truck from a burned-out hulk or wooden decoy. (On the Trail itself, photo interpreters would rediscover convoys of trucks which had been destroyed the previous year. By the end of the war some trucks had been bombed again and again.)
    Richards tried to see photo recon as often as possible, pointing out the more glaring errors. He would pick up a photo which had been designated as a target and already had a set of fighter-bombers scheduled to hit it the following day, and announce, ‘This is not a target.’
    ‘It’s obviously a target,’ the photo interpreter would argue. ‘Symmetrical patterns along the side of a road. It must be.’
    ‘What that is really is some old asphalt that was piled along the road many years ago and is now overgrown by brush and vegetation.’
    He was ignored. The planes would be sent in on the target. Perhaps the first set would miss, and another would be sent. The old asphalt would be destroyed, making a decent enough fire to record on yet another photo recon flight as a secondary explosion, thus justifying the whole pointless, wasteful, and expensive operation.
    The Ravens naturally provided some of the best intelligence of the war in Laos. They knew the terrain and in flying over it every day noticed the slightest change. By listening to the FACs and channeling their intelligence through Udorn, Richards managed to take the fighters off bogus targets and put them on the real thing. ‘They would have knocked the hell out of half of Laos if it hadn’t been for us.’ Meaning that it was important to knock hell out of the right half of Laos.
    One night at dinner at Vang Pao’s house, where John Mansur had gone as usual to be briefed for the following day’s missions, the general shocked the young Raven. The talk had been about the poor way the war was going, and Vang Pao was arguing for a big push, a quick victory before it was too late. Mansur had made earnest, naive assurances that the Americans could always be relied upon, whatever might happen. They would stick by the Meo through thick and thin. Vang Pao sighed and shook his head. ‘John, you don’t understand.’
    ‘What don’t I understand?’
    ‘One of these days your people - the American people - will make the American military quit helping us. And as soon as that happens the Communists are going to take my country.’
    Mansur could not believe his