“That’s where our targeting came from. And then the pilots themselves would just get together in the morning and decide who’s going where, and they’d all leap off and go out and see what they could find. Basically it was like trolling around and see what you could come up with.”

Cavanaugh was a Raven in 1969. He recalled in Orr Kelly’s book From a Dark Sky: The Story of U.S. Air Force Special Operations that the intensity of action over Laos caused them to become extraordinarily adept at spotting signs of enemy presence. “One time,” he recalled, “I saw bushes which came to a 90-degree angle. The clever devil that I am, I know that bushes don’t grow in 90-degree angles. That’s all I had to go on; I hit it with a set of fighters. I uncovered pallet after pallet of 122 mm rockets. … [W]e had secondary explosions for two solid days.”

“The guys would fly two, three, four missions every day sometimes. They’d run their airplanes out of gas, come back, refuel, and take off again.”

Though Ravens operated throughout Laos, their major base was at Long Chieng. Located southwest of the Plaine des Jarres in Xiangkhouang Province in the north central highlands of Laos, Long Chieng (usually referred to as Lima Site 20 Alternate, or just “20 Alternate”) was located in a mountainous valley at an elevation of 3,100 feet. The Hmong are mountain dwellers, and Vang Pao made Long Chieng his headquarters, eventually gathering 30,000 troops into his guerrilla army. At its peak of operations, Long Chieng had a population of more than 40,000, and its airfield conducted about 400 flights a day, making it one of the busiest in the world. Long Chieng gained a reputation of being “the most secret place in the world,” because despite its size (it was the second-largest city in Laos after the capital, Vientiane, and had the world’s largest Hmong population), it never appeared on any map.

Compared to the air war over Vietnam, the forces available in Laos were negligible – the number of Ravens in Laos at any one time was always small, and Vang Pao’s de facto air arm often numbered fewer than a dozen serviceable aircraft. Even at the height of the war, there were never more than 22 Ravens at any one time, according to Christopher Robbins’ excellent book The Ravens.

“Typically on a site we would have four O-1s, one U-17, and no T-28s,” Poe said. “We had one T-28 at 20 Alternate and one down an Vientiane. The guys would fly two, three, four missions every day sometimes. They’d run their airplanes out of gas, come back, refuel, and take off again.”

Even so, they were not alone in the skies. Raven FACs, who also flew a grueling schedule, became expert in calling in Air Force assets when needed, whether it was to aid Hmong ground troops in danger of being overrun or taking out a target of opportunity.

One Raven’s routine was to do a dawn patrol scouting flight before breakfast, looking for such signs of enemy activity as smoke from cook fires that might indicate an enemy bivouac, or trails where the early morning dew had been brushed away by troop traffic. Upon returning for breakfast, he’d have a checklist of locations to investigate later that morning.