The Big Buddha Bicycle Race Page 4

  I never really got a chance to talk to him about it, though. His proposal for an Air Force Now! series on black fighter pilots was fast-tracked into production in a matter of weeks. It meant he would be on the road the rest of the summer and most of the fall doing interviews, starting with World War II–era Tuskegee Airmen who went on to form the 99th Pursuit Squadron, an all-black fighter unit that had distinguished itself in North Africa and Europe. The plan called for following up with black aviators who had flown in Korea and during the Cold War. He would conclude with black pilots before and after tours of duty in Vietnam. Alas, it was going to involve months of editing. My iffy status—not knowing if I was going to be discharged or sent off to Tan Son Nhut—meant the end of my collaboration with Moonbeam. Instead, I’d be back doing puff-piece news releases while I waited out Poser’s legal dogfight with the Air Force.

  Just before Zelinsky shipped out we learned that Link had requested assignment to Ubon. He joked that it was so he could personally look after Zelinsky and protect him from the rest of us bastards, Wheeler reported, but in reality he had already been stationed there the year before Zelinsky and another tour in a combat zone would give him a shot at making chief master sergeant before he retired. “He’s got to do it before the war ends,” Zelinsky quipped. “Nobody makes rank in the peacetime Air Force.” The whole unit was relieved when Link actually shipped out a few weeks later.

  Over the next few months Lieutenant Liscomb was so busy with his Air Force Now! series that we scarcely saw him. I worried about my buddies who had been shipped overseas, deeply appreciating the supporting letters they had written for my discharge petition and the thanks they had offered me and Stevens for keeping Norton GIs for Peace going in their absence. Knowing they had been sent off to a war zone motivated me and Stevens to work hard, meeting with what remained of Norton GIs for Peace to plan for the fall and do more organizing with the students at UC Riverside. The brass had known what they were doing, however, and when they scattered the GIs for Peace membership, they successfully knocked a lot of the wind out of our sails. Late in August when Sonny and I went by the Movement House, it was boarded up, giving us a high and dry feeling. I felt a little higher and drier when the FBI called the extension in my editing room at Norton, asking me if I recognized any of the calls made to that number with a stolen telephone company credit card. I played dumb and they didn’t call back.

  I didn’t get into Sarge’s much anymore, and when I did, I never saw Liscomb. Instead, I spent most of what little free time I had at the base theater with Ron Cooper, joining him up in the projection booth. He was on a kick about how you could learn a lot from watching bad movies, which is mostly what we got. I feared that the only thing we were learning was how to make bad movies.

  Lieutenant Sherry, now Captain Sherry, requested me on a couple of her news releases and kept me up to date on Moonbeam, expressing mild concern that he had entered his Quiet Period, doing long periods of Zen meditation on the carpet of his bachelor officer apartment, only breaking off occasionally to take out his guitar and play along to his favorite soft-core protest songs. I ran into him by chance one day on his way to the dubbing stage at AAVS and asked him how the Tuskegee Airmen piece was coming along. “Would you believe they got arrested trying to enter the Officers’ Club at Wright-Patterson when they got back to the States after the war?”

  That was not an answer I was expecting. I cleared my throat before replying, “I think that got left out of the defeating Hitler part of our U.S. history books. Maybe you can set the record straight.” Changing the subject, I asked if the meditation he was doing was anything like what Jack Kerouac had been into.

  Moonbeam just smiled. “The Beats didn’t quite get it right,” he told me. “They were trying to take an easy path into Zen without giving up sex, caffeine and alcohol.”

  I didn’t get to follow up, nor did I especially want to. With Wheeler and Shahbazian exiled to Southeast Asia, I’d had to move from our chalet into a one-bedroom cabin, but a week before Labor Day something miraculous happened: Danielle Haber showed up. We had barely known each other back in Washington, DC, and yet the few hours we had spent together had lingered poignantly in both our memories. We had met by chance during the candlelight march to the White House that opened the Moratorium II weekend. I first noticed her while we were walking along Memorial Bridge, crossing the Potomac from Arlington Cemetery toward the Lincoln Memorial. It was just after sunset, and the November night was crisp but mild. The procession was solemn and dignified, so we didn’t talk much, but when we did, I was soothed by the clarity of her voice and her quiet intelligence. It wasn’t until afterward when she poured a glass of wine for me up in her apartment that I was struck by her subdued beauty. She looked at me with pure blue eyes that were unafraid to let me see deep inside her when I returned her gaze. When I tried to put my arm around her she was gentle when she pushed me away, putting her hand on my arm in a way that still kept me close. “My husband was killed last summer, just before I was supposed to start my junior year at Drexel. The Army only told us he was killed in action, but a friend wrote later that Craig’s M-16 jammed crossing a stream near a village west of Huế. My family tried to console me, but how could they? I dropped out of school and ended up moving in with a girlfriend in D.C. who knew about an opening at a gallery in Georgetown. So here I am,” she said with a sad smile.

  Danielle was only supposed to crash with me in San Bernardino for the first few days of a two-week California vacation, but one day led to another and she still hadn’t left for San Francisco. On the tenth day she told me she wanted to stay. I told her it was fine with me. She had some money put aside, and we could live together for almost nothing in our little log cabin. With Danielle around, I enjoyed chopping firewood for the old stone fireplace. Whatever food we needed I got cheaply at the base commissary. Soon I was agreeing with her that going back to school in January was a good idea, and after putting in a call to the admissions offices at Cal Arts and the University of Redlands she was encouraged enough to give up her gallery job in D.C., unpack her suitcases and send in her applications. In the meantime, while she waited to hear back from the colleges, she started dropping me off at the base and heading over to the SDS and SMC offices at UC Riverside. She wasn’t fussy—she designed anti-war posters when that was needed but didn’t mind handing out leaflets wherever they sent her. She fell in love with our cabin in the mountains and started putting up curtains and decorating it with folksy rugs and rustic furniture we found in the antique shops around Crestline and Big Bear. She fell in love with swimming and hiking up there with me on the weekends and with coming home to cook together in our tiny kitchen. Best of all she started to fall in love with me, and I felt the same way about her.

  My original orders had been cut for Squadron Headquarters, Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Republic of Vietnam, like Price’s. My lawyer’s delays might have had something to do with it, but I suspected it had more to do with the fine print in Nixon’s troop reduction plan that my orders were changed from Tan Son Nhut to an outpost on the Laotian frontier of Thailand called Ubon. I never would have heard of the place if Zelinsky didn’t have a girlfriend there and Link hadn’t decided to return for an encore, which got me wondering if he had anything to do with my change of orders. I was slated to join them at Detachment 3 of the 601st Photo Squadron as an editor of bomb damage assessment footage—BDA for short. When I found Ubon on a map, I noticed it was smack dab in the middle of Southeast Asia, an hour by fighter-bomber from potential targets all over North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Zelinsky mentioned that he had never seen a reporter in Ubon the entire year he was there on his first tour, something we were sure the press-hating Nixon found comforting. I did not find it comforting to see that Ubon was fewer than fifty miles from either Cambodia or Laos—a two-day march for an enemy infantry unit. It was even less comforting to realize that my old nemesis, First Sergeant Link, was already there waiting for me, but it made Danielle happ
y, at least, that I wasn’t going to Vietnam.

  We fell even more deeply in love that autumn, and she decided to pass on Cal Arts, despite its great reputation, because it would mean moving two hours away. We were still in love when she started at Redlands in January. It was tricky, but we managed to juggle our schedules and get by with my aging Bug. Thank God she was still in love with me when I phoned my Hollywood ACLU lawyer one chilly Thursday in March and learned that I was shipping out the following Monday. “Sorry, I haven’t had a chance to call you,” he said in a nasally voice. “You lost the restraining order and the writ of habeas corpus, but I’ll keep working on it from this end. In the meantime, when you get over there, just follow lawful orders.”

  I would have asked about unlawful orders, except I was speechless. He’d already won a case like mine, which gave me both confidence he could win mine and doubts he’d bother to try. Danielle and I spent the next day packing and making love and putting things into storage and making love a little more. We decided to drive down to Mexico for our last weekend together and camp along the Baja coast where the cactus-filled desert ran down to the sea at San Felipe. We zipped our sleeping bags together and slept under the stars, making love with the sea breeze lapping at our faces, and in the morning we had breakfast in a little cantina on the edge of town that served fresh ceviche, warm tortillas and hot, black coffee.

  We got back late Sunday night, exhausted. The next morning I gave Danielle the keys to the V-Dub and she drove me and my duffle bag to the base passenger terminal. She cried hard and I forgot for a moment about being afraid and alone, kissing her and comforting her and promising that I’d write to her every day and that a year would go by in no time. Walking down the aisle of the chartered 707, I didn’t see a single face I recognized, not a soul to warn me that I was going to get to be a combat cameraman after all.

  March 1971

  Klong Airlines

  I spent my first night in Thailand just outside Bangkok at a small hotel near the Don Muang International Airport / Royal Thai Air Force Base. There, within an hour after disembarking from that cramped Continental Airlines charter, I was greeted warmly at the hotel bar by a “tour guide” who guaranteed the young virgins in the picture albums he showed me were eager to meet GIs. My roommate, an aspiring American goodwill ambassador, succumbed, but I stayed behind, choosing to remain faithful to Danielle. Although we weren’t officially engaged, our intentions were clear. My biggest concern was how I’d break it to my parents that I was marrying an Episcopalian.

  Early the next morning I boarded a C-130 trash-hauler flown by a branch of the Military Airlift Command affectionately known as Klong Airlines and headed up-country. To a large degree, Vietnam was supposed to be a conventional guerilla war, which made it a bit puzzling to me why we even had air bases in Thailand. Thanks to the Air Force’s “need-to-know” policy, I hadn’t been told a damn thing to clear that up, only that Ubon was “up-country” along the Laotian frontier. Thanks to the horror stories that had been filtering back to us from Vietnam, I took my virgin flight full of apprehension about jeeps with bombs rigged to their ignition switches, shoeshine boys with hand grenades, and base barbers who traded in their straight razors at night for handheld shoulder-launched rockets like the one that hit Shahbazian’s barracks.

  The moment my boots hit the tarmac at Ubon, I knew something big was up, something way bigger than shoeshine boys with hand grenades. Two F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers were taking off in tandem just beyond the flight line, rumbling down the runway and then shaking me to my depths when their afterburners kicked in and their noses shot straight up like a couple of rockets. The smell of JP-4 fumes filled the air, mixed with a lot of testosterone. Holy shit! I thought. Larry Zelinsky, my sponsor and official tour guide, was there to meet me, grinning and shouting, “Brendan Leary! Welcome to the Rat Pack!”

  He shook my hand and snatched up my garment bag. “Follow me!”

  I slung my duffle bag over my shoulder and followed him into the Ubon aeroport terminal. Zelinsky didn’t waste a moment diving into my orientation. “The 8th Tactical Fighter Wing runs the show here. They call themselves the Wolf Pack and they’re the largest, MiG-killingest fighter wing in all of Southeast Asia.”

  “Why have I never heard of them?”

  “Because you didn’t have a ‘need-to-know.’ Now you do. We call our little sixty-man photo detachment the Rat Pack, but even if we’re small, we play an active role here. We do awards ceremonies and passport photos and the usual bullshit, but our main mission is combat documentation—ComDoc—in real time and with after-action reconnaissance. We do a lot of it using gun cameras and camera pods installed on select aircraft. They record 16mm motion picture footage whenever the F-4 jocks squeeze their trigger finger. Our technicians mount the camera systems and service them and reload film between sorties. The rest is done by living, breathing motion picture cameramen and still photographers.”

  “I imagine that could get a little intense,” I replied as we stepped outside. My head was already starting to spin.

  Four F-4s were taking off, two flights of two—a lead and a wingman each—that rattled our bones and momentarily drowned out Zelinsky’s briefing. Finally he continued, “Everything in Ubon is intense. There’s an official war and a couple of secret wars going on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, although we try to cut back on Sundays.”

  He led me to a jeep with the Det 3 mascot painted on the door—a rat dressed in fatigues with a question mark over its head staring in confusion through a tripod handle. The motto read: “We kill ’em with fillum.” We threw my bags in back and climbed in. As we pulled out, he handed me a little pamphlet, Welcome to the Wolf Pack. “Don’t worry about remembering everything I’m telling you—this booklet’s pretty good. It’s got a little bit on Thai culture and some stuff on the history of American operations here. These days the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing is made up of four fighter squadrons totaling more than eighty F-4 Phantoms and ten B-57 Canberra light bombers.”

  “And that’s just one base?”

  “That’s not all. The wing also includes a special operations squadron that’s expanding this year from twelve to eighteen Spectre gunships—C-130 transports all tricked up for night operations. And of course there’s a detachment of Jolly Green search-and-rescue helicopters to pick up downed air crews.”

  Jesus Christ, I thought. “How often do they go out?”

  “We’ve been lucky. Haven’t lost a plane in almost a year. The main thing you’ll be interested in right now is the map—kind of a screwed-up map to confuse spies, I think—but good enough that you’ll be able to find your way around after we finish your tour of the base.”

  “Thanks,” I said, trying to hold onto my hat as we roared past a mile of barbed-wire fencing and some serious-looking guard towers.

  When we reached the main part of the base Larry pulled to a halt. “How about a cup of coffee at our twenty-four-hour-a-day chow hall? You must be beat.”

  “Sounds fine by me.” I was beat from all the traveling. Inside, it felt good to sit down for a moment on something that wasn’t moving and have enough room to stretch out my legs. It didn’t matter that it was a hard bench.

  Zelinsky continued his briefing, switching now to the history and geopolitics of the region. “Bangkok Thais think of Northeast Thailand—the Issan—the way Russians think of Siberia and Americans think of North Dakota. The American government, however, likes it just fine. South Vietnam’s a mess—and the enemy’s main supply route in is the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It runs through Cambodia and Laos, which have Communist revolutions of their own going on. We’re supposed to stay out of Laos because Kennedy signed the Geneva Accords banning military operations there. The North Vietnamese signed the accords too, but the ink hadn’t dried when they started building the Trail. We need to stop them, but since we actually care about world opinion, we have to run a secret war and make the guns we’re shipping to the Hmong counterrevolutionaries look
like humanitarian aid. We know what the American public thinks about sending troops into Cambodia, so once again it’s secret-war time. It’s starting to look like the American public is getting pretty sick of the whole damn war effort—and that’s where Ubon comes in. Nixon figured out that from here the Air Force can operate all over Indochina without the press or the public having a clue. All that and no Arctic blizzards.”

  “Should I really be hearing all of this? They really did talk a lot about ‘need-to-know’ back at Norton.”

  “That’s the great thing about having a Top Secret security clearance and editing Battle Damage Assessment footage from all over Southeast Asia. We ‘need to know’ a lot to put together briefing clips that make sense when they’re sent back to the Pentagon and the Armed Services committees and sometimes even the White House.”

  “How can you be so into this? I thought you hated the war like the rest of us—”

  “Like I said, the war’s a mess, but this is a free trip back to be with the woman I love. When you meet Pueng, you’ll understand.”

  “For someone who really didn’t want to be here, I have to admit you’ve made it sound pretty exciting. Intense, as you say.”

  “Well, you’re here,” Zelinsky said with a smile. “Might as well make the best of it.”

  He continued talking as we finished our java and walked out to the jeep. “Part of the intensity around here might be pure logistics—everything that every man on this base needs is squeezed into a few square miles. Let me show you around.”

  We drove off, and soon Zelinsky was pointing out revetments where long rows of fighter-bombers were parked between missions, maintenance sheds and hangars, the motor pool, engine test areas, Quonset huts housing squadron operations, and finally the control tower. Then came the fun stuff—the post office, storefront branches of Bank of America and Chase Manhattan, the Officers’ Club, the NCO and Airmen’s Club-Casino complex, the swimming pool and patio, the bowling alley, the hobby shop (and music-pirating club), the movie theater, the library and the gym. The un-fun chapel, hospital, and Wing Headquarters—what the men called the Little Pentagon—were also nearby.