Allen Cates Books and Articles

One thing I learned while writing my books is that participating in historical events does not automatically make someone a historian. On the other hand, historians do not always get the story right.

My fellow Air America pilot, Link Luckett—who probably forgot more about flying helicopters than I ever knew—once told me that the secret to being a good photographer was taking a lot of pictures and throwing away the bad ones.

The same principle applies to history. You cannot rely on a single book or a single source. You must read widely, compare accounts, and discard information that is demonstrably incorrect.

Good historians revise their conclusions when credible evidence proves them wrong. Those who refuse to do so can unintentionally damage the reputations of the people they write about.

For that reason, I continue to correct the claim that the CIA owned Air America. It did not. In many cases the mistake is innocent and no harm is intended. However, continuing to repeat the claim after the evidence has been presented creates a false impression of the company and the people who worked there.

Another persistent misconception is that Air America was not obligated to conduct search and rescue missions. Declassified documents show otherwise. The Department of State directed Air America to perform search and rescue operations and provided military aircraft for that purpose. To deny that responsibility today does a disservice to those who risked—and in many cases gave—their lives carrying out those missions.

Collectively, these misconceptions portray Air America employees as mercenaries. That characterization is simply false.

Although Air America supported military operations throughout Southeast Asia, its employees were noncombatants. They transported troops and supplies into forward areas, evacuated the wounded, flew search and rescue missions, and delivered essential cargo under extremely hazardous conditions. Yet a significant portion of Air America's mission was humanitarian.

Food drops to isolated villages and the evacuation of refugees fleeing the war accounted for much of our work in Laos. Air America worked closely with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and International Voluntary Services (IVS), not merely because we wanted to help, but because those missions were assigned to us. Humanitarian relief was as much a part of our responsibility as search and rescue.

Many of the 146 Air America employees who lost their lives died while trying to save someone else's life.

The word voluntary might suggest that USAID and IVS personnel served solely out of humanitarian idealism. Certainly, compassion motivated many of them. But I believe there was something more.

Laos was an adventure unlike any other. Nearly everyone who served there would tell you they would not trade the experience for anything.

Over the years I have tried to explain why men—and today, women—choose to place themselves in dangerous situations. Some tell that story through photographs. I was instructed not to carry a camera, and I obeyed those orders. Looking back, I'm grateful that others did not.

I have no photographs from those years. My pictures exist only in my memory. Putting them on paper has always been more difficult than taking them with a camera. Perhaps that is why I have written these stories.

Allow me to explain why I believe that.

I spent eight years in Southeast Asia, and certain events will always be indelible in my mind. In 1964, while a Marine helicopter pilot, I was on a mission to carry Montagnard soldiers into battle against what I was told was a ragtag bunch of North Vietnamese regulars south of Danang.

The Montagnards (a French word meaning mountain people) were trained by Special Forces and all carried automatic weapons. They were dressed in starched utilities with red scarves, and their attitude reflected the very essence of esprit de corps. They were ready, willing and able to fight. The North Vietnamese didn’t have a chance, or so I thought. We brought them in, but we didn't bring them out because every single one of them was killed.

I realized then that the enemy could never be approached with a cavalier attitude, and that lesson may have saved my life many times in the years that followed.

In 1967, now with Air America and flying Pilatus Porters out of Saigon, and on a day off, I went to one of the hospitals for a sinus condition and was waiting for a doctor. I could see the doctors and nurses working feverishly on wounded soldiers and felt rather silly being there with my minor complaint and left soon after that.

There was one soldier there in the room with me for perhaps the same reason, and when he saw the wounded, he slumped into his chair when he realized the wounded were from his own outfit. He looked at me and said, "I should have been there!" I told him that he might have been killed and he said, "Yeah, but that's where I belonged."

I talked to Marines who were at Khe Sanh in 1968, and I hauled several wounded out of there in my Porter. The living conditions were deplorable, and you had a better chance of dying than living, but to the man, they could hardly wait to get back. I wondered then what drove people to act this way. Were they seeking death?

At the 2017 Air America reunion in Minneapolis, I had the pleasure of meeting Gabrielle Nugent.  She was from Ireland and writing her Ph.D. thesis titled The War in Afghanistan: Success or Stalemate. Her father had written a book titled It Was an Awful Sunday about a battle in France during WW1. There were two statements in the book that I found poignant. One was that the Germans thought the British could not win a battle because they had neither the material resources nor the will to fight. He went on to write, "They were right about the material resources but wrong about the will." The other statement may be more appropriate, and it involved explaining why any sensible person would come out of a trench and charge machine gun firing Germans with just the sound of a whistle? Because he wrote, “The fear of letting their fellow men, their battalion, and their country down was greater than their fear of death.” That statement may explain the Khe Sanh Marines and the soldier I met at the hospital.

My good friend Marc Yablonka, author of Distant War and Tears Across the Mekong, often laments that he never had the opportunity to serve in Southeast Asia before the war ended. I tell him it would not have made him a better man, but my words fall on deaf ears.

You can't talk about the history of Laos from 1959 to 1975 and not talk about Air America. But, then again, you can't forget USAID and IVS either. We were intertwined and inseparable. Their story is not mine to tell. But the people who served with them are iconic giants who spent a large portion of their life to benefit someone else.

People say America lost the war in Southeast Asia. I don’t agree. The defining battle in Laos was at LS-20 Alternate, and Americans, the Hmong and the Thais sent the North Vietnamese packing back to Vietnam. We won that war. We just walked away and left our comrades in arms, the Hmong, and those who supported the war effort, dangling in an ill wind, and I think that was an error.

I want to say something about the unexploded ordnance in Laos. America came to Laos through USAID and IVS to build hospitals and assist with their agricultural needs. The Special Forces, trained to kill, came to Laos to train Laotian soldiers so they could defend themselves against those who invaded their country.

Air America supported them logistically. America did not invade Laos. The thousands of refugees fleeing the northern provinces were running from the Communists. 

It was never America’s intention to take over Laos or change Lao lifestyle. The 1962 Geneva Accords required all military units of foreign countries to leave Laos. America honored the Accords. North Vietnam didn’t.

The North Vietnamese used the eastern portion of neutral Laos to transport military materials meant to kill Americans in South Vietnam with hopes no one would know they were doing it.

America saw what was happening through photo reconnaissance. The North Vietnamese shot at the unarmed aircraft and shot some of the planes down. It was a direct violation of the Accords.

The road traffic through Laos was intense, and it had to be stopped. Thus, the bombing operation and the unexploded ordnance.

Who’s responsible, America or North Vietnam?

America brought refugees from Laos to America where they could live in a free society, attend universities, and start and own businesses.

What did the North Vietnamese do for Lao refugees? I’d like to think we saved some lives and perhaps we made life better for some of the Lao inhabitants.

If anyone tells me we came to Laos because we just wanted to help, he or she would be mistaken. After all, it was an adventure. But, if you say it was only the quest for an adrenalin rush, well, you'd be wrong there too. It was more than that, and it’s unexplainable and intangible, but those who did it will never forget, and none have regrets.

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