The Big Buddha Bicycle Race Read online

  “She’s nice,” protested Tom in those innocent days before he and Zelinsky became my bungalow-mates at Ruam Chon Sawng. He had the look of a blond-haired surfer but was in fact a pioneer pothead from a small town in upstate New York called Wappinger’s Falls. “She’s an orphan and she’s only working the bars in Tijuana to save up for college.”

  Zelinsky howled with laughter. “Mom, I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Angelina. The entire Pacific Fleet wants to be her best man.”

  I had lost count at what might have been my eighth Cuba Libré; as we neared San Bernardino, I found myself wondering if Shahbazian’s Hong Kong story could be true. With his long Joe Namath sideburns and his Grand Prix race-driver mustache, anything was possible with Woody and women. It was two weeks later that he smuggled a pair of Tijuana hookers back to San Bernardino. Dashing and charming, he was waved through customs at the border and the back gate at the base without a hitch. When he was confined to quarters for a month, he told us it was a small price to pay for becoming a genuine war hero and a legend in his own lifetime. When I asked him why he brought them to the barracks instead of up to the mountains, he said, “What do we need hookers for? We’re living in a chalet.” And sure enough, a few days after his release he started dating Kristin, the foxiest civilian secretary working at AAVS headquarters. I wasn’t surprised to learn her family in Palm Springs had money. Shahbazian mentioned to her early on that his mother’s family owned mining interests in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, leaving out the part about going bankrupt.

  In the early months of 1970, of course, our only real bond at the 1361st Photo Squadron was a quiet determination to save our collective hides. The white contingent at Headquarters Squadron, Aerospace Audio Visual Service, was pathetically pimply-faced and naïve, which may have explained why the chaplain’s daughter was willing to gang-bang the entire second floor of Barracks 1247. The Bloods weren’t innocent at all, but they weren’t clueing us in, preferring to watch from a distance as the pothead draft dodgers and the beerhead lifers made each other miserable. Rick Liscomb tried to float with both the brothers and the hipsters when we were off duty, which earned him the nickname “Moonbeam” from his fellow blacks. When he stopped eating meat and got into Zen meditation the hipsters picked up on “Moonbeam” too.

  Our crowd was a fluke, crawling as it was with white, suburban dropouts; urban, upwardly mobile soul brothers; and hip, young officers who figured we could hide out in the safety of photo labs, sound stages and editing rooms in San Bernardino until the U.S. and the Vietnamese came to their senses. Nixon’s Vietnamization program meant bringing home American ground troops and turning the fighting and dying over to the ARVN—the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Even if a few of us might still be sent over to Southeast Asia, it would be to another photo squadron—on an Air Force base with bunks and a roof over our heads and, according to Shahbazian, swimming pools and air-conditioned NCO clubs. The certainty that we would never be slugging a gun through leech-infested equatorial jungle brought us all a measure of unspoken cheer. The assumption that many of us were heading for careers in Hollywood added to the warm, fuzzy vibes.

  I was especially upbeat because I’d survived a temporary overdose of naïveté, volunteering for cameraman duty and getting turned down. Like a lot of my later problems, it was Ron Cooper’s fault. I was impressed that Cooper had connections in Hollywood and had permission to drive in to Disney Studios every Friday afternoon to observe a real, live American Society of Cinematographers cameraman at work on the sound stage of the latest Disney live-action feature. It didn’t seem important at the time that he was parlaying his part-time-projectionist gig at the base theater into a film-bootlegging racket. It was his passion for cinematography that rubbed off on me to the point that I volunteered to give up my air-conditioned editing room. Fool that I was, I failed to notice that every cameraman on base except Ron Cooper was scheduled to do a tour of Nam—flying combat—or had just come back. It turned out that editors were leaving the Air Force for cushy civil-service jobs faster than the Viet Cong could kill cameramen, however. Colonel Sandstrom, AAVS Director of Production, turned down my request, confining me instead to three years of hard labor hunched over my Moviola editing semitruthful news clips. The more combat footage I looked at, the luckier I felt.

  April 1970–March 1971

  Chain of Command

  We were coasting, biding our time. And then, late in that fateful April of 1970, Commander in Chief Nixon, on the advice of his field marshal, Henry Kissinger, ordered the invasion of Cambodia, and everything changed. If you were a grunt in Vietnam, it made perfect sense. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the North Vietnamese Army’s main supply route into South Vietnam, and its southern branches ran through the hills and jungles of northeastern Cambodia. To make things worse, enemy troops often hid there with impunity between forays into South Vietnam. Unfortunately, nobody had explained that to the GIs in a stateside photo unit. We may have had Top Secret security clearances, but we didn’t have a “need-to-know.” And nobody explained it very well to the American public. To millions of Americans, Cambodia was a neutral country we were invading without a Congressional declaration of war and without informing its pro-American prime minister.

  On April 30, Nixon went on national television, pointed to Cambodia on a map of Southeast Asia and announced, “This is not an invasion.” He played it down as “an attack on enemy outposts,” but college kids didn’t buy it. The next day hundreds of campuses erupted—even apathetic USC, home of the film school I dreamed of attending. Eleven students were shot by police at Jackson State. Two died. The inept Ohio National Guard killed an ROTC cadet and three other students at Kent State, wounding nine more in the process. I had stumbled into the GI anti-war movement back in Washington, DC, when the My Lai story broke, but this was new—this wasn’t a rogue unit gone bad, it was an entire administration going mad. We had been lulled into believing American troops would be coming home, not invading another country. Nixon’s deceit pushed me over the edge, turning me—an active-duty GI—into a full-blown radical. I wasn’t alone, but it wasn’t comfortable. In rebuking our government we were in some way rebuking our fathers who had served unquestioningly in World War II.

  Sonny Stevens, our lead guitar player at Sarge’s, took a carful of us down to UC Riverside to see what kind of hot water we could get ourselves into at the office of the Student Mobilization Committee—the SMC for short. “It’ll be a great way to meet college chicks,” promised Stevens, like Shahbazian a colonel’s son who knew how to fly under the brass’s radar. He had been spending the war in relative obscurity, a laid-back, natural-born still and motion picture camera technician at the 1361st whose only failure had been trying to retrain Shahbazian as a fellow camera tech when Woody returned from his year of lifeguarding at Danang. Stevens was having better luck upgrading Woody’s skills on rhythm guitar, but when college campuses erupted after Kent State, he saw that Woody’s greatest potential was as a hell-raiser.

  A couple of the SMC leaders at UC Riverside sent us off to a place called the Movement House near the University of Redlands to see some people who wanted to start organizing GIs. With the exception of Zelinsky, who never left the base, they didn’t have much trouble molding Woody and the rest of my former Tijuana drinking buddies into the nucleus of Norton GIs for Peace, and soon we were turning out an underground newspaper, the sNorton Bird. Woody drew a cartoon for the first cover—a ruffled, cigar-chomping bald eagle wearing aviator’s goggles and giving the finger mid-flight. Working stealthily at midnight, we delivered the inaugural issue to every officer and enlisted man living on the base. The next day, to paraphrase standard Air Force terminology, the Shinola hit the fan. The brass would have summarily shipped Stevens to Vietnam, but he didn’t have the requisite year left on his enlistment, so they sent him a hundred miles up the coast to the Vandenberg Missile Test Range instead. Two of the brothers, a sound man/still photographer named Gene Blackwell and a lab tech named Lonnie
Price, had orders cut the same day for opportunities to participate in what we jokingly called the Southeast Asia War Games, but it was no joke. They were heading for Nam. For Blackwell it was Detachment 13 (“The Lucky Thirteen”) of the 600th Photo Squadron at Nha Trang. For Price it was Squadron Headquarters at Tan Son Nhut. Just before they left, their orders were changed to detachments at Korat and Udorn, Thailand, respectively. We speculated that this was a hush-hush part of Nixon’s troop reduction plan that only looked like a troop reduction to the American public. Air Force units that moved two hundred miles west to Thailand appeared on paper to have gone home, yet remained within easy striking distance of any target in Southeast Asia. Our president, we had to admit, was a tricky bastard.

  A few days after the others, Wheeler and his sidekick, Dave Murray, found out they were going to do tours as combat clerk-typists, but at opposite ends of the war zone. Wheeler was being sent to Photo Detachment 2 at Takhli, Thailand, just north of Bangkok, while Murray was going to be squirreled away with the photo outfit at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. Shahbazian got orders to do a surprise second tour at Tan Son Nhut a few weeks later, which didn’t seem to make him all that unhappy now that Kristin was pressuring him to get married. Zelinsky was a strange case—he’d avoided our anti-war activities because he wanted to go back to his old unit at Ubon, Thailand. He had volunteered so he could marry his Thai girlfriend, and knowing the Air Force, Zelinsky told us, they would have punished him by not letting him go. Maybe it was because Lutz was an undersized munchkin, but he was overlooked. His orders didn’t come through till the following spring—in plenty of time for the Big Buddha Bicycle Race.

  Wheeler, from his vantage point in the orderly room, was keeping an eye on First Sergeant Link for us and reported that Link had figured incorrectly that I was the mastermind behind Norton GIs for Peace. Link made sure my orders for Tan Son Nhut came through with the first batch, but I fought it tooth and nail, applying for discharge as a conscientious objector with the help of Edward Poser, Esquire, an ACLU lawyer from Hollywood, the closest bleeding-heart enclave I could find to San Berdoo. He charged me what for an L.A. lawyer was a bargain fee of $50 an hour—even though I was only making $140 a month—but he offered me an installment plan. I would send him half my paycheck every month until my bills were paid. I accepted, given that I didn’t have much choice. He didn’t succeed in getting my orders canceled, but he did get them pushed back a month at a time while I met on base with Captain Allen Shelby, a lawyer at the judge advocate’s office, and completed a long checklist of paperwork. Along the way I was evaluated by the base chaplain and base psychiatrist, at the same time requesting supporting letters and other documents from friends and family scattered across the country. It was a relief to know that my compadres from GIs for Peace were standing behind me. As Blackwell put it, “We’re all doing our part for the Revolution, brother—working in different ways, that’s all.”

  Wheeler, in addition to keeping an eye on Link, was using his back-channel contacts to make sure my application didn’t get lost in the bowels of the Pentagon. Up at Vandenberg, it hadn’t taken Sonny Stevens long to see how the brass was using a divide-and-conquer strategy to destroy Norton GIs for Peace. He resisted in a small way that summer by moving back to the area following his discharge. Going underground, he holed up on a ranch out in the desert near Victorville, growing marijuana to make ends meet. We co-edited the paper, bringing in an old friend of Blackwell and Price’s, a hard-as-nails, pissed-off black Air Policeman just back from Pleiku, to give the editorial writing a little Black Panther bite. Still working out of the Movement House, we organized a GI contingent to lead a peace march on Riverside, home of March Air Force Base and the Big Ugly Friggin’ “BUF” B-52s of Link and Sandstrom’s old 22nd Bomb Wing. Maybe this was when I started to lose my mind, or maybe it was the presence of living, breathing long-haired hippie chicks from the University of Redlands and Cal State Riverside that got the better of my good judgment, but the next thing I knew we were promoting the Riverside peace march—off duty, wearing civvies—by handing out leaflets at the entrance to George Air Force Base, a fighter base situated not far from Stevens’s pot plantation, and at March Field itself. Given that March was a SAC base where Air Policemen in the perimeter guard towers shot to kill, we didn’t squawk when they confiscated our fliers and brought us in for questioning. The hippie college girls seemed impressed when I called Captain Shelby at the JAG office at Norton and arranged our release—albeit with orders to stay five hundred feet from the main gate. An Oceanside march—next door to Camp Pendleton and half the Marines in America—soon followed. On both occasions I somehow ended up making speeches in front of thousands of people. Stevens’s prediction seemed to come true when I started getting involved with one of the organizers from the Movement House who had been with me the night we were arrested, but she broke it off over some unfathomable breech of hipness at the moment of our greatest triumph—People’s Independence Day, a Fourth of July rally that filled up a park in the middle of San Bernardino.

  Shahbazian, Wheeler, and Zelinsky, my old Tijuana drinking buddies, stood together in the front row cheering me on, and next to them was my lovely radical organizer. Zelinsky knew he was shipping out the following week, and Wheeler and Shahbazian would be gone by the end of summer. Our hulking Air Policeman/editorial writer and an equally imposing cohort stood behind me on the dais, out of uniform, my volunteer bodyguards. Sonny Stevens, Frank Lutz and a couple of the bigger guys from the Movement House, also ex-GIs, weren’t too far away, keeping their eyes out for any local crazies who might decide to rush the podium. I was glad to have them, because the only San Bernardino policemen I could spot were off in a distant parking lot enjoying coffee and doughnuts. The crowd was minuscule after what I had seen in Washington, but by San Bernardino County standards, several thousand people at a political rally was substantial, enough to attract an editor, a couple of reporters, and a photographer from the San Bernardino and Riverside newspapers. In the midst of introducing a lineup of agitprop folksingers, student radicals from the University of Redlands and UC Riverside, and a pair of Farmworkers Union organizers, I spotted Captain Shelby, along with Lieutenant Liscomb, Lieutenant Sherry, and a couple other young production officers, all dressed in civvies, observing the rally from the shade of a gnarly California oak. And then it was my turn to speak.

  “Our objectives in Vietnam are illusory and our means of attaining them are barbaric,” I said, trying to sound presidential even though I was skinny as a toothpick and in my twenties. I caught an approving smile from my soon-to-be-ex-flame and continued. “Where is this administration taking us? Where will the escalation end? If we are pursuing a failed policy, how can we continue to ask young Americans to die? And how can we ask black and Latino GIs to shed more blood than their white counterparts when they are still fighting for their civil rights at home? Who will be the last to die in this tragic lost cause? Is there anyone in Washington who would step forward to take their place?”

  I thought I noticed Liscomb standing up a little straighter, straining to hear, but he was too far away for me to be sure. I continued, questioning the wisdom of a peacetime draft, comparing it to slavery, and hoped nobody noticed too many contradictions when I compared the modern U.S. to ancient Rome and Athens and to the Spanish, French and British empires in modern times, asking if we too were in decline and about to fall. I took another glance at the girl from the Movement House and finished up with the best Jack Kennedy imitation I could muster, seeming to inspire the audience when I exhorted, “If this nation is to survive as a beacon of democracy, we must commit ourselves to ending the war now! It is we who have taken on the awesome responsibility of leading the way. We must not falter! We must have peace!”

  I was still basking in warm applause when we opened up the mike and Lieutenant Barry Romo stepped out of the crowd. Almost as soon as Romo took the podium, I realized that a new day had arrived. Stateside GI speakers were no longer needed. We n
ow had combat veterans like Romo coming back, fresh in from hand-to-hand fighting in the Ashau Valley, who were willing and able to tell it like it was and who had all the strength, intelligence and character that a Lieutenant William Calley lacked. “The valley of the shadow of death,” he called it, “a place where even the Lord’s rod and staff offered little comfort.” As instinctively as he might have taken one of those nameless hills in the Central Highlands, Romo had taken the open mike, pouring out his heart with a true soldier’s understated eloquence. “Again and again my men died to take an objective. Whether it was a hilltop or a village, it didn’t matter. We never failed. And again and again we were pulled out, giving that hard-earned ground back to the enemy…”

  I could see Moonbeam Liscomb in the distance wanting to make a move for the stage. And I think it was his own privileged upbringing that held him back. He’d been raised black-upper-middle-class in Washington, DC, sensing the racism rampant in the country but never really experiencing it overtly except in its most refined forms—like the pressure of being the third black man ever to enter the Air Force Academy. Even from a hundred yards away I could see Moonbeam inching forward, away from his fellow officers and out into the hot sun. I wondered what was running through his mind, sensing that he regretted being trapped in his role as an Air Force support officer and that he realized he would never have his own war stories to tell.