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  The Big Buddha Bicycle Race

  THE BIG BUDDHA BICYCLE RACE

  TERENCE A. HARKIN

  Swallow Press / Ohio University Press

  Athens, OH

  Ohio University Press, Athens, OH 45701

  ohioswallow.com

  © 2017 by Terence A. Harkin

  First published in 2017 by Silkworm Books

  104/5 M. 7, Chiang Mai–Hot Road, T. Suthep

  Chiang Mai 50200 Thailand

  All rights reserved

  To obtain permission to quote, reprint, or otherwise reproduce or distribute material from Ohio University Press publications, please contact our rights and permissions department at (740) 593-1154 or (740) 593-4536 (fax).

  First published in North America in 2018 by Ohio University Press

  Printed in the United States of America

  Ohio University Press books are printed on acid-free paper ™

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Harkin, Terence A., author.

  Title: The Big Buddha Bicycle Race : a novel / Terence A. Harkin.

  Description: Athens, Ohio : Swallow Press, 2018.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017058742| ISBN 9780804011990 (hardback) | ISBN 9780804012003 (pb) | ISBN 9780804040907 (pdf)

  Subjects: LCSH: Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Psychological aspects—Fiction. | Vietnam War, 1961-1975—Aerial operations, American—Fiction. | War—Moral and ethical aspects—Fiction. | Americans—Thailand—Fiction. | Soldiers—Thailand—Fiction. | War stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3608.A7426 B54 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058742

  Dedication

  To Captain Kenneth Little, a pioneering African American graduate of the Air Force Academy (Class of 1969). Like far too many veterans of Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, he spent the rest of his life in self-imposed solitude, Missing in America;

  To Phil Hawkshead, who flew more than 150 combat missions at night over the Ho Chi Minh Trail and to his fellow Air Force cameramen, twelve of whom died in combat in Southeast Asia;

  And to the people of Laos, who were caught in a crossfire of Western ideologies that proved that war didn’t need to be nuclear to be catastrophic.

  From defilement can come much wisdom.

  –Ajahn Po

  From defilement can come much defilement.

  –TSgt Harley Baker

  Prologue

  When you’ve been to the mountaintop

  the valleys seem tame

  When you’ve flown through lightning

  Death’s just a game

  When you’ve kissed Carly Simon

  other women seem plain

  When you’ve been to Mexico

  you can’t come home again

  When your back was aching

  she washed away the pain

  When the storm was raging

  she knew what song to sing

  Lost in the desert

  she brought you the sea

  When your mind was sinking

  she fed you tea

  When you’ve been to the mountaintop

  the world seems flat

  When you’ve fought in Cambodia

  peace feels like a trap

  When the full moon breaks through the clouds

  the light bursts like flak

  When you’ve flown through the Mu Gia Pass

  you know you can’t come back

  The waters taste bitter

  when you’ve sipped on champagne

  Your throat becomes scratchy

  despite monsoon rain

  Your ears fill with silence

  when the sweet sparrow sings

  When you’ve been to the mountaintop

  you can’t come home again

  Contents

  Falling Backwards

  Mexico

  Chain of Command

  Klong Airlines

  Woodstock East

  The Ghetto

  “Mai Pen Rai,” OR: The Show Must Go On

  Lieutenant Rick “Moonbeam” Liscomb

  The Black Power Squadron

  Hearing in Wonderland

  “Insufficient Documentation”

  Ron Cooper Isn’t Coming, OR: The Day I Donned My Plastic Wings

  Cherry Popping Time

  Gunship (OR: “Ghost Riders in the Sky”)

  Perfect Lady

  Everybody Comes to Niko’s

  Moving on Down

  Missing Lek, OR: Grounded

  Red Rock Candy Mountain

  No Mistaking “Rookie”

  Dailies, ComDoc-style

  Kaeng Sapue Rapids and Tadtohn Falls

  “Cadillac” Gunships, Blue Movies and a Bicycle Race

  Red Lighted

  Plan B, OR: Back to the Drawing Board

  Navy Exchange

  Triumph of the Will

  Tora! Tora! Tora! (OR: The Element of Surprise...)

  The Age of Sagittarius

  A Turn for the Worse

  Saint Dave’s Dispensary

  House Call

  Last Supper, Maybe

  The Accidental Tii-rahk

  The Little Pentagon

  Now She Comes!

  The Gong Show

  Red Alert

  The Best Night in the Sweet, Short Life of Tukada Maneewatana

  Stairway to Heaven

  Train Ride to Surin, OR: Going Nowhere Slowly

  The Malaysian Princess

  The End of the Universe, Part II

  “Thank Congress” (only 54 more days...)

  “Only Fifty-Three More Days!”

  Lek’s Cat

  Some New Year

  AUA

  “Smart” Bombs and Thai Iced Tea

  Training Day (only 25 more days...)

  Deep Doo-Doo

  Counting Down

  Dave’s Farewell (two more days!)

  “Only Twenty-Four More Hours...”

  Papa-sahn’s

  The Start/Finish Line

  Across the River—the Rooster Crows

  The Gun

  Glossary

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  31 December 1985 (The Present)

  Falling Backwards

  It must have been a hallucination. Sitting in a mountain cave along the winding road that led northwest to Luang Prabang, I could smell the incense floating in the air—pure, not burned to hide some weekend hippie’s marijuana cigarette—a dusky smoke perfume that had burned in Asia for a thousand centuries. The light was golden, an aura unseen in America since brigantines stopped bringing whale oil back from the Pacific…

  How can I trust dream-visions that keep floating up from the murky depths? Hasn’t my memory been obliterated by drink and drugs and the passage of time? Why am I afraid to ask, afraid of being mistaken for a rambling derelict on an L.A. street corner?

  Alone on New Year’s Eve in a bungalow atop Mount Washington, I snort cocaine and chase it down with Jack Daniels when I run out of stale champagne. Mesmerized by blurry car lights floating in the distance up and down the Pasadena Freeway, I can hear the voice of Ajahn Po—my first true teacher—calling to me, but I’m not sure I understand his words.

  Would anyone believe that I was once a Buddhist monk who sat in Noble Silence on the rock floor of that cave, cushioned only by a thin straw mat? Deep in meditation, I recollected the painful days of my Irish Catholic youth when my heart wanted to love Jesus while my mind warred with Pope Pius and Martin Luther, with Saint Thomas Aquinas and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and would give me no peace. When did my fa
ther, my aviator hero, become my oppressor? Why was he angered by questions about race and politics and faith? Why did he offer to help me with drums or flying lessons, but not with both? Was it a test? Did he already know the answer? Why did he never talk about his days in Florida, already a man at age eighteen, who turned English farm boys into the pilots who drove back the mighty Luftwaffe?

  While candles and incense were burning on the cave’s stone altar I went into a trance so deep that the graceful bronze image of a Sukhothai Buddha, sitting in eternal serenity and wisdom, transformed into a television that droned with an endless loop of John F. Kennedy—young and handsome—giving his inaugural speech with unblinking, granite-chiseled confidence that made me eager to pay any price and bear any burden he asked of us. Deep in dreams and memories, I forgot I was a holy man and drifted in a cloud to those tragic days from high school to college when I lost my innocence but tried to cling to my ideals. I would pay any price and bear any burden to go to film school—that was how I would do my part to save the world now that JFK was gone. But when I meditated even deeper I had a troubling vision within my vision: Harley Baker was burning on a funeral pyre, his outlaw-bluesman’s heart and mind blown away with amphetamines, his hard, white body and redneck soul wasted with opium-tainted grass and BX booze.

  I didn’t meet Harley until I stood toe to toe with Death. A warrior, an Air Commando, he taught me how to laugh at it and fear it and quash it away and never quite ignore it. Nothing in my Boston childhood had equipped me for the realities of Southeast Asia—the smooth, cool pages of National Geographic magazines stacked in our attic in the outskirts of Boston made Indochina look like Eden. It was Harley who prepared me for combat, accidentally preparing me for monkhood along the way. But in my vision I knew that Tech Sergeant Baker was as doomed as President Kennedy. And I could see my own soul, lost in the void, lost along the sidelines of the Big Buddha Bicycle Race.

  My mind skids past fading memories I want to recall and lands in catastrophe on days past I have forgotten just as vividly as days I never lived at all. It must have been the whiskey. Or the red-rock heroin. How did we survive the plane crash? It seemed so real when the North Vietnamese took us prisoner. Why do I still dream of fire and fear a candle burning in the night? Who was Tukada? Baker survived two crashes, but didn’t he kill himself shooting up speed? Why aren’t I certain? What has happened to my mind?

  I too walked away from the burning wreckage. I too survived a SAM missile’s direct hit—or was it a Strela? Harley looked off a thousand yards into the tree line when he talked to you, often rambling and unable to make sense. I needed someone to tell me that I had escaped the thousand-yard stare, but how did you translate that into Laotian? Had I survived the crash or was I a ghost trapped in my own nightmare, unable to escape even to the Buddhist samsara of endless rebirths, never-ending cycles of worldly suffering and delusion? Was I living in hell or purgatory or just the twentieth century?

  Sitting in that cave in Laos, I could not erase my memory-visions of Colonel Strbik and Captain Rooker—the best damned pilots in the unit. I could see them burning, their faces serene like the face of Saint Polycarp, except there would be no miracle—streams of their own blood would not put out the flames. My visions were seared by burning wreckage and smoldering villages and I could no longer distinguish the mangled corpses of war heroes from beauty queens, of Asians from barbarian invaders, of friends from enemies. I was haunted by grunts like Pigpen Sachs, the door gunner, and Jeff Spitzer, my fellow cameraman, who dreamed of being held in the arms of college girls as they died—and called out for their mothers. Reporters said that bodies were being stacked like cordwood in Vietnam, but in Laos nobody was going to that much trouble. Human beings were being chopped down like the weeds the hill-tribe Hmong dried out by the side of the dirt road to make into hand brooms. Only nothing could be made from something so useless as a dead human being. Cremation was merciful in the jungle.

  In the distant days between college and monkhood, in the days when I failed as a draft-dodger and failed as a soldier, I would have been satisfied waking up in the boondocks of Thailand with day lilies filling the vase that sat on the rickety rattan table next to my bed at Bungalow Ruam Chon Sawng. I would have been content with flowers that lived a single day, even though waking up with a tiny bar girl’s hand on my chest, whispers of “lovely, so lovely” alighting like soft petals, was what I really needed to put my mind at ease. In the boondocks of Thailand along the Lao frontier, Baker, Washington, Wheeler and Shahbazian usually got to the Corsair Club before me and I often went home from the bars alone because even in my days as a lover of whores I maintained certain standards. I had to know her name and where she was from and if her dad was a rice farmer or a sailor in the Royal Thai Navy, because whores were people too, just like GIs.

  Vietnamese villagers prayed for us every September, wrapping the sculpted Buddhas that sat inside their pagodas with saffron to appease the souls of the unburied dead—the wandering restless souls of beggars, soldiers and prostitutes. But I fear those prayers were not enough. So many nights on the Lao frontier it was not until the first pink glow of dawn that I finally fell asleep, and even then it was not peace that came but my own private samsara. To this very day I ask: Will I wake up ten thousand times without awakening? Or will these cycles of rebirth become the path to my redemption?

  January–April 1970

  Mexico

  I hadn’t gone crazy yet when I first went out to California, although I sometimes fear my madness started the day I was born. Sure, I’d been thrown out of the Pentagon. Something about my involvement with the GI contingent that walked at the head of a 250,000-person anti-war march on Washington called the Second Vietnam Moratorium. It might have cost me an automatic promotion from airman first class to sergeant, but it had been part of a plan. It got me assigned at last where my recruiter had guaranteed I’d be assigned all along—the 1361st Photo Squadron at Norton Air Force Base, California, headquarters of the Aerospace Audio-Visual Service, acronym AAVS (and pronounced “AVIS” in Air Force speak).

  A year earlier I had been teaching English to Portuguese immigrants at a high school in Bristol, Rhode Island. It kept me out of the draft, but I was miserable. I could have blamed the fact I had no textbooks. Or I could have blamed my students—the boys had barely avoided being sent off to fight colonial wars in Angola and Mozambique only to discover when they got to America that they would be drafted to fight in Vietnam if they learned English. In the end, though, I had to blame myself—a dedicated career teacher or even a dedicated draft dodger would have made it work. Instead, my heart was three thousand miles away. I had been accepted for a master’s program in film production at the University of Southern California. I was ready to go, except Congress changed the rules for the Class of ’68 and eliminated draft deferments for grad school. Some of my friends talked bravely about Canada and Sweden, and I gave it some thought, but I couldn’t help noticing that none of them left. The head of the AV department at Bristol High had been a Marine cameraman in Korea. When he got wind of my story, he suggested I pay a visit to an Air Force recruiter he knew—Tech Sergeant Gallipeau.

  Gallipeau seemed harmless enough, with a Pillsbury Doughboy body stuffed into his dress blues and a crooked grin that reminded me ever so slightly of Gomer Pyle’s. He enticed me into giving up my teaching gig by promising with great sincerity that I would be spending four years with a motion picture unit an hour from L.A. The son of a bitch had lied, of course. Thanks to something in the fine print about “Needs of the Air Force,” I ended up in a converted broom closet in Washington, DC, cranking out certificates of graduation for each and every attendee of DODCOCS, a semi-boondoggle Department of Defense computer school for field-grade officers. Thanks to its prototype 1937 Xerox machine, I got to singe my fingers in a pint-sized oven, baking the toner on each and every diploma. I shared one other job at DODCOCS with two fellow low-level enlisted men—keeping the massive urns in the officers’ lo
unge filled with enough coffee to make sure the majors and colonels didn’t snore during the lectures. I never wanted to see or smell coffee grounds again.

  The experience was suffocating—pasting on a phony smile day after day for the powerful, blindly ambitious careerists who surrounded me. At the same time, my mind was being buffeted by what I could only describe as powerful forces of history. It was the summer of 1969 and Richard Milhous Nixon occupied the Oval Office. He promised in June to start bringing troops home, but more than two hundred a week were still coming home in body bags. Even more unsettling, stories started appearing in the GI underground press about an Army lieutenant named Calley being charged with the massacre of hundreds of unarmed women, children and old men in an obscure hamlet called My Lai.

  I had never been able to sort out exactly what I believed about the war as a college student, even after the Tet Offensive in January of ’68 showed that the Johnson administration had been dead wrong about there being “light at the end of the tunnel.” In the spring of ’68 we learned at campus teachins how General Navarre, the French commander in Vietnam, had said exactly the same thing in 1950—four years before the Vietnamese crushed the Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu. As a college senior, however, large anti-war protests had left me cold. I had been put off by fellow students who came across as spoiled rich kids who couldn’t be bothered with the sacrifices our fathers had taken for granted during World War II. I was downright disgusted when these same children of privilege turned into angry mobs shouting nursery rhyme chants like “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the Viet Cong are gonna win.” Now though, I was being sucked into the anti-war movement by fellow servicemen who found My Lai repugnant and by returning combat veterans who were fed up with the senselessness of the whole enterprise, a quagmire that by June had cost 35,000 American lives. I tried to discuss the situation with my father that summer, but when you begin your aviation career as a World War II flight instructor, you don’t question authority any more than you want your own authority questioned. It was right about then that we stopped talking.

  DODCOCS was supposed to be a plum joint-command assignment, but I was just as miserable as when I left Rhode Island. All I had accomplished was trading bedlam for solitary confinement, and I was still three thousand miles from California. Major Elton Toliver III, our Marine personnel officer, sported a throw-back old-school flat-top haircut like my dad used to wear. It reminded me so much of a miniature aircraft carrier that I half-expected to see little fighter-bombers taking off whenever I ran into him, which was often. He seemed to enjoy calling me into his office and telling me with a smirk how poorly I was fitting in, never missing a chance to point out infractions only visible to a gung-ho career military man—a mustache hair that had grown an eighth of an inch too long or a runaway sideburn that decided to graze my ear. My freshly shined shoes never seemed to make it to work without getting scuffed, and my belt buckle was forever wanting to slip out of alignment. Colonel Manketude, the Air Force liaison officer, started checking up on me too and was soon harrumphing at the pictures of Woodstock hanging on my broom-closet bulletin board and harrumphing again when he found a GI underground newspaper lying on my desk. A few weeks later he went positively apoplectic when I turned down a slot as a navigator/bombardier at OTS (Air Force shorthand for Officer Training School), pretty much echoing my father’s sentiments about wasting a good education when I could be earning my wings.