![]() Soon, however, word began to filter out to pilots in Vietnam and Thailand that there was "another theater," one where there was no higher echelon, no rank, and few rules. For us, the country was a bomb dump, a place to go when the weather was too bad for attacks over North Vietnam. Nowadays, the CIA and the Ravens are long gone, but the Hmong are still there.ĭuring the Vietnam War, operations in Laos were a rumor, a legend. ![]() A tiny settlement, it became, in the 1970s, the mountain stronghold of the Hmong, their CIA bosses, and the Ravens. Long Tieng is in the north central highlands of Laos, a remote, ominous territory, where the tribal Hmong scrape a living from the steep slopes and jungle ravines. From August 1966 to February 1967, I must have flown over the base at Long Tieng a hundred times without ever seeing it. Air Force F-4D dropped cluster bombs on the base by mistake.ĭuring my first tour, I was at Ubon, Thailand, flying combat missions in F-4 Phantoms. Another is the CIA operations shack that burned in 1971 when a U.S. One is the home and headquarters of the Laotian Hmong leader, General Vang Pao. ![]() One of those shacks is the hooch where the forward air controllers known as Ravens drank every night. It all shows in the grainy photograph-the short landing strip, the limestone karst jutting up at one end, the mountains and ridges rimming the base, and the shacks and buildings scattered along both sides of the runway.
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