“We’d fly around at 1,000 feet or less and we’d have binoculars – after a while you’re trained to know what looks like it’s really something or what’s just fake,” Poe said. “Ordinarily we’d fly around and we would not get shot at at all. They didn’t want to give away their position, because they knew the minute they shot at a Raven, all hell was going break loose. So we pretty well could fly around wherever we wanted to, with some exceptions, and then once a Raven would spot something with binoculars or whatever, you’d fly away from it for a little bit and call the airborne command post.” Strike aircraft were marshaled down to a rendezvous with the Raven, who then took them in to the target and indicated it for them. “You’d kind of stay out of the area and then at the last minute you’d go and fire a Willy Pete [white phosphorous] rocket right in to where your target was. Then the fighters would come in and drop the bombs on that area,” Poe said.

The grind of the operations took its toll on the Ravens. Several flights a day over almost universally hostile territory, with little hope of rescue if downed, led to burnout in some pilots or a dangerous recklessness in others, which was one of the reasons for the six-month tours. It allowed evaluation of the pilots’ mental states before things went too far. The sheer bomb tonnage controlled by Raven FACs is astounding. More than 1,600,000 tons of bombs were dropped on Laos, more than on Germany during World War II.

There are many lessons, both good and bad, to be gleaned from the secret air war in Laos. One of the good ones, and an important one, might be how to conduct a successful low-intensity air war on a shoestring.

“The way the Ravens worked, you went for a six-month tour, and at the end of six months, the Air Force said, ‘We’ll give you 30 days paid leave, and you can go anyplace in the world that you would like to go and we’ll buy you a ticket to go there,” said Poe. “So if you wanted to go to Geneva you could do it; or you could go to Paris, you could go to the States, or whatever. That was only if you had come back for the second tour; so if you’d done one tour, and wanted to go the second one, then they gave you this 30 days vacation. I went down to Sydney and stayed down there for a week or so. But after the second tour, only a very few were allowed to go on to a third six-month period, because they were getting to the point of becoming self-destructive. We’d have to send most of them home at that point, and say, ‘We really appreciate everything that you’ve done, but we just can’t use you up here now.’”

By 1969, Raven-guided air operations had become so deadly and successful that Vang Pao was able to switch from guerrilla to conventional war and launch an offensive that wrested control of the Plaine des Jarres from the Pathet Lao.

Ultimately, though, the fight against the North Vietnamese and Pathet Lao was doomed to failure. The United States would pull out of Southeast Asia, and with the loss of U.S. aid, Laos had no hope of continuing to hold off its enemies. “We had led him down the garden path,” Godley said of Prince Phoumo in The Ravens. “Let’s face it, we were cutting and running. We pulled the rug out from under him. Once we were out of Vietnam the only way we could have protected Laos was with an Army corps. It was totally out of the question and we knew it. We were licked. There was nothing to be done.”

The Ravens fought until the very end, until they were ordered to stop flying and to leave the country. There are many lessons, both good and bad, to be gleaned from the secret air war in Laos. One of the good ones, and an important one, might be how to conduct a successful low-intensity air war on a shoestring. The record of the Ravens’ accomplishment demonstrated that when the time came, a handful of highly skilled, dedicated, resourceful, and courageous men could accomplish a mission others regarded as impossible.

This article was first published in The Year in Special Operations: 2015-2016 Edition.