We are in Holy Week, the name Christians give to the time between Palm Sunday and Easter.
Your New Favorite Writer was going to expound on holiness but found he is not yet grown-up enough to write on that subject in a sensible way.
So, maybe next year. I’ll be 79 then.
But now, for Something Completely Different:
Meeting Steve Canyon
We turn a page from the sacred to the profane.
I have just read Meeting Steve Canyon . . . and Flying With the CIA in Laos, by Karl L. Polifka. It’s a memoir of a particular time and place in the Vietnam War.
Thinking men, in war, may notice a discrepancy between facts and ideals. So it was with Polifka. A U.S. Air Force pilot, he was assigned as a forward air controller, or FAC, in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969.
Polifka’s job was to scout enemy assets and troop formations from a slow-moving, propeller-driven aircraft—an O-1, a U-17, or a T-28—to mark enemy positions with phosphorus-tipped rockets, and to direct fighter/bombers to attack the places marked by his rockets.
Sounds simple, right? In reality it was a severe task, which called for technical skills, sharp reflexes, steel nerves, and iron resolve in the face of physical and psychic trauma.
Polifka believed in the cause. He appears never to have suffered the deep doubts developed by some fighters in the long Southeast Asian war.
But the job required mental toughness and gave many opportunities for an intelligent observer—which Polifka clearly was—to question the utility, even the sanity, of operational tactics.
Flying out of Gia Nghia, in the Central Highlands, Polifka ran afoul of “pre-plans,” operations concocted by shadowy experts at Seventh Air Force headquarters. He often felt the pre-plans were not informed by good knowledge of actual conditions on the ground.
When Polifka grew tired of the routine at Gia Nghia, someone suggested he tell his supervisor he was “interested in Steve Canyon.” Uncertain what the phrase might imply, he did what was suggested. His supervisor frowned but in due course of time a transfer came through. “Steve Canyon” turned out to be an unofficial cover name for a clandestine project in Laos.
If the name doesn’t ring an immediate bell for you, Steve Canyon was the hero of an Air Force-themed adventure comic strip drawn by writer-artist Milton Caniff from 1947 to 1988. Steve Canyon the action hero was very well-known, but the program in Laos that bore his name was hush-hush.
A Fine Mess
The Kingdom of Laos, officially neutral, was used by North Vietnam as a conduit for troops, arms, and provisions bound for South Vietnam, where the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and its allies the Viet Cong fought the South Vietnamese Army and its allies including the United States. Other players in Laos included Communist Pathet Lao guerilla forces interested in overthrowing the royal government, plus both left-neutralist and right-neutralist armies.
It was a mess created by a major power vacuum in close proximity to a hot war.
Because of the theoretical neutrality of Laos and the desire to appear righteous on the world stage, U.S. operations in the kingdom, though undertaken to support our official and public Vietnam war effort, were partly dissociated from regular military channels.
Polifka and the other Steve Canyon controllers, known as Ravens, got their targeting priorities from CIA case officers on the ground and from General Vang Pao, an ethnic Hmong in the Royal Lao Army leading his people against the Communists.
Officers at U.S. Seventh Air Force resented these arrangements. A conference had to be called to allocate air strikes in Laos. The conferees decreed that sixty percent of ordnance dropped would be directed by Ravens and the remaining forty percent by Seventh Air Force controllers.
The Nitty Gritty
These matters of protocol and bureaucratic infighting are only the background. Most of Polifka’s book is a retail account of dozens of deadly fights in the hills and valleys of Laos, centered on the plateau known as the Plain of Jars—Plaines des Jarres in French, abbreviated PDJ.
On one level, Polifka’s narrative is a persistent justification of the tactics developed by the Ravens, the CIA, and the Hmong fighters and their work as a successful team defending the Hmongs’ lands and villages, as well as a condemnation of unsuccessful and ham-handed operations undertaken by higher headquarters.
More basically, it is a tale of merciless slaughter. The telling is cumbered with a heavy load of jargon—CBU-24s and PTs and T-76s and 12.7s in bewildering variety—which the reader must struggle through to get the story. It’s a tough go, even for a reader with a military background.
But the reward for coping with all the acronyms and terms of art is a story that is steeped in authenticity. There can be no doubt that with minimal exaggerations and simplifications, this narrative presents the day-by-day reality that the Ravens and their comrades-in-arms lived. Getting that story is a fairly grim reward, yet it’s an important story, told by a combatant who had both a bird’s-eye and a worm’s eye view.
Memories Triggered
These events interest me because during this period, 1968 and 1969, I was immersed in the same war—mercifully for me, at a greater level of abtraction.
While Karl Polifka and his cohorts felt the heat of anti-aircraft and mortar fire zoomed through at tree-top level, I and other members of my squadron soared blissfully overhead in RC-130 and 135 spy aircraft, intercepting radio signals at altitudes of 30,000 to 39,000 feet.
We flew some missions from Cam Ranh Bay up and down the Mekong River for several hundreds of miles. Where Polifka and his fellow Ravens kept constant lookout for 12.7mm, 14.5 mm, and 37 mm anti-aircraft fire, we had no worries except the remote chance that the NVA might bring in 85mm or 100mm cannons somewhere along our route. Even the 57mm artillery they did have spotted along the Mekong could only reach 28,000 feet.
So Polifka’s war and mine were the same war. But the nature of my mission and the organizations that oversaw it placed me in a different context than his. My role was the bland gathering of intelligence, little of it related to immediate action, most of it valued for long-term analysis of enemy capabilities and intentions.
Polifka mentions with admiration F-4E pilots out of Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base who could shred ground targets with great finesse. There were times I flew out of Korat on EC-121 airborne control platforms, and when near the flight line I saw fully-loaded F-4s screaming off with a great bang of their afterburners. Some of these must have been the same guys Polifka worked with over the Plain of Jars.
As Close As I Care to Get
Sometimes I did glimpse the grim realities of the war.
One night after dark, riding at 30,000 feet back to Cam Ranh Bay from one of our Mekong River flights, white flashes splashed into our compartment from outside. Crowding the side window, we saw what looked like an intense thunderstorm over central Laos. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of white flashes, closely spaced, at intervals less than a second.
“Those are ARC LIGHT sorties,” said our pilot. “Buffs dropping their payloads. Each flash is a 500- or 750-pound bomb exploding on impact.”
How could anyone, or anything at all, live under such a heavy rain?
At Kadena Air Base, Okinawa, we used to watch B-52 Stratofortress bombers—“buffs,” in Air Force slang. They were something beautiful to see—ungainly yet graceful at the same time—slipping down over the ocean, crossing the shore on final approach.
Each buff carried fifty or more bombs. “Between June 1965 and August 1973, the Strategic Air Command scheduled 126,663 Stratofortress combat sorties, of which 126,615 were actually launched. The number of aircraft reaching the target area was 125,479 with 124,532 successfully releasing their bombs on the targets.” (https://media.defense.gov/2017/Mar/28/2001722969/-1/-1/0/04-ILL_HIST_CH08-CH10_(PAGES149-200).PDF, Ch. VII, “B-52 Arc Light Operations,” p. 167.)
It’s enough to give an old airman pause.
#
Hoping for better times and the joy of Easter,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
