Helluva story: Raven FACs in Laos

[Mark E]

Amazing stories - these guys suffered about 30% combat losses:

here: http://www.ravens.org/Adventures/Bobmain.htm

Extract of a flying story (Cessna U17):

The Night the Lights Went Out By: Don Moody

The more Bob and I flew together it seemed like the more chances we were willing to take. There was the time that we had been down to Vientiane for a meeting of AOC Commanders and we stayed much later than we had planned. By the time we left for the airport we knew that we would have to land after dark. LP was not equipped with runway lights. So before leaving we called our guys on the radio and told them when we arrived to park the jeeps at each end of the runway with the lights on.

On the way to the airport, we realized that we didn’t have a flashlight and the instrument lights on the U-17 were inoperative. Bob had a sure fire remedy. We would stop in town and buy a flashlight. Good idea but we couldn’t find a store that had any semblance of a flashlight. It was right at this moment that we should have realized that our black cloud was still with us and surrendered to common sense. But not these gallant warriors. We would improvise with our commando know how, after all we were airshow qualified. The answer lay in candles. We would buy candles. I would hold it and Bob would fly. The storekeeper told us to buy extra candles as they burned very quick. He was right too.
You have to visualize what is about to happen. We were going to takeoff in the dark with no lights and fly over some of the most forbidding terrain in the world. The karst and mountains in this area went up to 8,000 ft. and many were not on the map. We would be in and out of the clouds and have to use time and distance to navigate as there were no nav aids at LP. All of this in an airplane whose engine had been known to quit suddenly without warning. Sound ominous doesn’t it.

It is true what they say about God looking after children, fools, and Air Commandos. It is a good thing too. After takeoff it became apparent that we couldn’t see outside with the candle lit in the cockpit as it created a horrible glare against the windows. The wax from the candle was beginning to run down the side of the candle and was burning the hell out of my hand. I had to keep shifting hands and almost dropped it several times. Finally like it happens in the movies, we break out of the clouds and the lights of LP came into view and we were soon over the runway at 8,000 feet. Our guys in the jeeps turned on their lights and Bob made a circling descent and brought the U-17 in for a perfect landing.

[Mark E]

A sudden noise got our attention. Our little guy clicked his zippo lighter shut after lighting his cigarette. It sounded just like a round striking the aircraft. We gave him a dirty look but he didn’t have a clue about what he had done. He just kept smiling. He was in the back seat with the leaflets and he would throw them out through the rear side windows on our signal. We continued up the river, I had the map with the villages marked on it in my lap, and all was going well until we reached a “Y” in the river.

The left wing of the Y was a valley that headed up in to the hills. The right wing was the river that we needed to follow. I wasn’t being as attentive as I should have been. I hadn’t noticed the “Y” effect on the map, so when Bob asked me which way to go. I was visually looking up the valley of the left fork so without hesitating, I said left. Bad mistake, once up this valley, the ground started rising very quickly and it also started to narrow.

Bob knew at once that I had screwed him up but there was not enough room to turn around. He tried to get the airplane to climb but the leaflets had collected on the tail wheel and the drag kept the rate of climb to 100 to 200 feet per minute. We started making “Ss” back and forth across the valley.

The little guy in back was unaware of the predicament that we were in and at one point I looked at Bob and he said “do you think you can get him out the door”. I shook my head “No” but the weight loss would probably have helped us at this point. The little guy just kept smiling; he still didn’t have a clue as to what was going on.

Now the situation was deteriorating rapidly and Bob was pulling the airplane up into wifferdills along with the “Ss”. Bob was already looking for a bamboo break or a treetop to set the airplane down on. We were now down to lowering the flaps during the reversals to give us more lift and help tighten up the turns. I sensed that Bob was about to call out for a crash landing when he suddenly reached down deep inside himself and got the maximum turn from the airplane by pulling it up, dropping full flaps and headed down to the valley floor. We actually dragged the landing gear through the treetops and made it by inches.

This was the greatest feat of airmanship that I have ever witnessed. This was a maneuver that I would use myself to get away from the 57mm guns in the Beng Valley in 1969. We laughed about it afterwards but we both knew that we had been very lucky. I will always be grateful because Bob bailed me out of a bad decision, and the little guy doesn’t realize how lucky he was because if I could have got him through the door he would have been gone.

Like firing rockets into caves, we also lost our enthusiasm for dropping leaflets as the little black cloud still seemed to be following us, and besides it was time for Bob to rotate back to the states as his TDY was at an end.

[Mark E]

http://www.ravens.org/Adventures/Bobmain.htm

...For weeks Bob and I flew it around with no right brake; just didn’t have time for AA to fix it.

In order for us to turn right we would have to make a 270 degree turn to the left and lock the tail wheel when we wanted the airplane to straighten out. At one point it had so much duct tape covering up bullet holes that it flew wing low....

[md3388]

Thanks Mark for the link to these great stories. These guys really are unsung heros for what they tried to do!

[Mark E]

One point -

One thing that shines through in these stories is the great respect these guys had for (most of) their Hmong and Laotion comrades.

The second story above is perhaps a bit of an exception, in that the "little guy" in question was a propaganda man, who had them dropping "surrender" leaflets on people who were shooting at them. These were missions they were not too enthusiastic about.