The Ravens: The True Story of a Secret War Read Free Page B

to be a lifetime of training flights, the day arrived when the FAC took off in his spotter plane to go out and find the enemy, to kill or be killed. Suddenly it was real, the war at last, and almost always it came as a surprise. The FAC would be out with an instructor in the backseat as usual, honing his technique in some area or other, when the airborne command and control center would come up on the air to give the radio frequency of a certain ground unit and the coordinates of its location.
    The first time it happened for John Wisniewski he was sent over to a South Vietnamese Army commander who had a target of Vietcong troops. Beside him, in the right seat of the 0-2, the instructor was rubbing his hands together. ‘Got something now!’
    The SVA commander described the target over the radio. ‘I’ve got this house and it’s full of VC.’ Wisniewski checked his maps and circled the house beneath him. ‘See it?’ the commander asked. ‘You got it? I want you to kill them.’
    Wisniewski felt the breath leave him as if he were winded. ‘Now it was no longer in the jungle blowing trees away. It was people. I could see them. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. What is this? Some guy I can’t see is telling me those figures running around down there are VC. I don’t know who they are.’
    The Vietnamese commander grew impatient. ‘Bad guys. I want you to kill them! ’ he repeated.
    Wisniewski orbited and brought the plane down low, trying to take a closer look. He was operating as coolly as he knew how, but his mind was in turmoil. ‘Shit, what do I do? Live people down there. Fuck.’ An AC-47 gunship had come on station and was standing by. It was the war at last.
    The instructor was as impatient as the ground commander. ‘He was so excited he was almost jumping up and down, the son of a bitch. The instructor was yelling, “Do it! Do it! You got real guys. A real target! See where it is? Hit it with a rocket. Do it!”’
    Wisniewski took a deep breath. He was so nervous he felt he would never be able to get it right. He rolled in on the house and fired a marking rocket. It was right on target and hit directly in the center of the house. People began to run out in every direction. He hesitated for a moment before keying the radio mike and talking to the gunship. ‘Hit my smoke!’
    The AC-47 banked lazily into position. It took only seconds. The Dragonship - known by the grunts as Puff or Spooky - was equipped with three rapid-fire Gatling guns, each capable of pouring down six thousand rounds a minute. When it opened up, the tracers alone made it look as if it were hosing the earth with fire. The house dissolved. One moment Wisniewski had looked down and the house was there, the next it had disappeared as if it had never existed. ‘Thanks,’ the ground commander said over the air. ‘Bad guys all dead.’
    Wisniewski flew home feeling nauseous and very confused. It had not happened as he had imagined it would, and the enormous step of killing people for the first time had seemed so arbitrary and ordinary. Nothing had really blown up; he had seen no blood nor heard any human cries. There had also been the instructor watching the whole operation, which allowed Wisniewski to say to himself, ‘It was not quite just me.’
    Two days later, in a firefight on the banks of the Mekong, Wisniewski put in an air strike on his own. Friendly ground forces had called for air support to destroy enemy troops who had stationed themselves in a group of houses that straggled along the bank of the river for a mile or so. Wisniewski arrived and worked five sets of fighter-bombers, loaded with a variety of ordnance, onto the target. ‘The people on the ground said there was nothing there but bad guys. I smoked the houses, an easy target, working the air up and down, back and forth. I blew them all up. Everything burned. Somebody had told me it was all bad guys, but I have no idea who was in there. And when I left I