The Big Buddha Bicycle Race Read online

  Altogether, according to Zelinsky, it took more than six thousand American airmen to keep the Wolf Pack flying, not to mention the hundreds of Thai nationals who cleaned our quarters, staffed the officers’ and enlisted-men’s clubs, and worked elsewhere on base. Zelinsky clued me in that Ubon was technically a Royal Thai Air Force Base with a nominal Thai commander, Thai trainees in the control tower, Thai Air Policemen and two token A-37 fighter squadrons made up of slow-moving jet trainers that had been reconfigured for combat. In reality, like pretty much everywhere else in the Southeast Asia theater, the U.S. had taken over.

  “The Thai commander has worked it out so that token Thai concessionaires run the barber shop, the tailor shop, a little jewelry store, the base laundry operation and a few snack bars. In a way the concessions are your gateway to downtown Ubon. They’ll give you a little taste of the goodies you’ll find when you get off the base, even if you only make it to the shops and restaurants clustered outside the front gate. The Thais have taken it upon themselves to provide you with all the things you don’t need or think you don’t need but will soon find you can’t live without. Life’s pretty intense for them too. Ubon used to be a sleepy little provincial capital until the Americans turned it into a boomtown. Now Issan shopkeepers and rice farmers are getting richer than they ever imagined possible. Even the restaurants and shops and theaters in the old sections of town are booming. But behind all the courtesy and warmth they lavish on us Americans, I suspect, is the fear that the gravy train will end even faster than it began.”

  “What’s that big building across from the Little Pentagon?”

  “Ah—the Base Exchange!” Zelinsky answered with another smile.

  “Why is it so huge?”

  “Because the BX has the goodies they don’t sell downtown—shoes big enough to fit American feet, electric appliances, TVs, stereo equipment and record albums, and especially American booze and cigarettes. To put it more accurately, they’ve got it downtown, but the Thai government charges very heavy duty on imports—400% is routine on things like cigarettes.”

  After checking me in at CBPO, the Consolidated Base Personnel Office, Zelinsky brought me by Payroll, Bank of America and the post office to do a little more processing in before he finally showed me to my hootch and gave me the rest of the day to sleep off my jet lag.

  I knew before I shipped out that Larry was going to be my supervisor at Ubon and that Link was going to be spreading gloom as the Detachment 3 first sergeant. What I was not expecting was the little surprise Larry sprang on me the next morning when he led me over to the ComDoc command trailer to report in. Damn if it wasn’t Tom Wheeler pecking away on an IBM Selectric in the outer office of the orderly room. We quickly exchanged low fives and agreed to meet for lunch—before Zelinsky ruined the mood, reminding me that First Sergeant Link was in his office waiting. Link growled something like “welcome aboard,” dismissed Zelinsky and picked up his direct line to Captain English, the detachment commander. “Leary’s here. Yes sir, he’s the one.” Link gave me one of his dark lifer smirks and said, “The captain’s expecting you.”

  Later, over at the chow hall, I learned that Wheeler was living off base with Zelinsky and a motion picture lab tech named Groendyke. The three of them filled me in a little more about life in Ubon. “I suppose you’ve noticed,” said Wheeler, “that a wartime fighter base is a little more intense than a place like Norton.”

  “I’ve noticed,” I replied.

  “Wait’ll you see downtown at night,” said Zelinsky.

  Wheeler jumped in. “It can be quite a scene when the combat crews are on the prowl. The officers mostly come down for a massage—a ‘scrub and rub’ they call it—and do most of their hell-raising back at the O Club. The ones you gotta watch out for are the Spectre and Jolly Green door gunners. They’re seeing a lot of combat—”

  “And none of them have been to finishing school,” laughed Zelinsky.

  “Makes ’em pretty wild when they’re off duty,” Tom warned.

  “Something else about downtown,” said Groendyke. “The girls over here have never been taught about sin and guilt. Right and wrong, maybe, but not sin and guilt, and it makes them very easy to get along with, if you know what I mean. Free enterprise at its finest, you might say.”

  “Which reminds me,” said Tom. “How much has Zelinsky told you about the BX?”

  “They’ve got stuff that’s hard to find downtown?” I offered.

  Tom smiled. “There’s way more to it than that. It’s the GI’s bargaining chip. A first-term enlistee can virtually double his one- or two-hundred-dollar-a-month salary by buying his electronic toys carefully—it’s 50 to 70% cheaper than in the States.”

  “Maybe even more important,” added Groendyke, “he can deliver goods to the people of Ubon that cost four to ten times more on the outside. Seems to make it a lot easier to find a girlfriend—except Zelinsky, of course, who has done it with animal magnetism.”

  Zelinsky grinned. “The locals who work at the BX and know how to game the system have risen fast in Ubon society.”

  Last but not least, they brought me up to date on the latest AAVS scuttlebutt, which Tom had a talent for cultivating through his contacts at CBPO. He had gotten word that the inscrutable Moonbeam Liscomb had something to do with the switcheroos that brought us to Ubon. Wheeler’s old buddy Dave Murray was due in the following week from Cam Ranh Bay, and a few others—all cool guys like Blackwell and Price—had already rotated in. Link was pissed at first, then a little mystified, but now seemed to be getting a perverse joy from having his old problem children from Norton working under his watchful eye, never catching on that he was working under the watchful eye of Tom Wheeler.

  Once I finished reporting in it was eight hours a day, five days a week editing gun-camera footage that the Wolf Pack’s F-4s and B-57s brought back from all over Southeast Asia. I may not have understood the tactics or rules of engagement yet, but those planes had definitely been to war and I knew from the first reel I looked at that the war was far nastier than anyone could have ever imagined from watching the evening news at home. I watched cluster bomb after cluster bomb cutting through the jungle, butchering any enemy soldiers trying to hide there. Along the rivers, sampan after sampan was strafed and sunk. Napalm engulfed village after village in flame, forcing me to ponder how the Air Force could do in seconds with a single canister from Dow Chemical what it took Calley’s platoon a full day to accomplish. Rockets were generally saved for bridges, larger buildings, and once a week or so, to shoot down a MiG up around Hanoi. Clearly the civil war between the North and South Vietnamese was still raging, which made me happier by the day that my orders had been changed from Tan Son Nhut to Ubon and that I had been taken under the wing of an old friend like Staff Sergeant Larry Zelinsky, who was blessed with a special kind of glibness that allowed him to look at bomb damage assessment footage as flat strips of 16mm celluloid, just pigment on acetate, not the three-dimensional depiction of devastation that my eyes took in.

  It only took me a few weeks to confirm that Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base and Det 3 of the 601st Photo Squadron were indeed a stealthy part of Nixon’s Vietnamization program. American foot soldiers were going home. By reducing American casualties, Nixon won over enough American hearts and minds to keep the war going. He may have talked about downsizing, but like every American president before him he was damned if he was going to be the first to lose a war. The U.S. Air Force was sticking around at full strength, moving to Ubon, several other locations in Northeast Thailand and, according to Wheeler and Zelinsky, a couple of secret bases in Laos where Air America may or may not have been operating. It was about this time that a lean, ramrod-straight stranger with dark, piercing eyes showed up and spent a week working quietly with Zelinsky in the corner editing cubicle. I guessed from his military bearing that his civilian clothes were a cover and that he worked for the CIA. From what I gathered, you could only get to his secret base by helicopter and then mul
e train, and it could have been located in Northern Thailand, the Burmese Shan States, the mountains of northwest Laos, or even South China, seeing as how the private thousand-man army he was training hailed from all those regions. Clearly Nixon wasn’t limiting his stealth to Thailand, but Zelinsky refused to talk much about the project other than to show off the flintlock musket the CIA man had given him as a little thank-you. The musket looked like something out of the Revolutionary War, but a Hmong militiaman had only turned it in a week earlier in exchange for an M-16.

  When Colonel Grimsley, the base commander, announced proudly at my first monthly Commander’s Call that the U.S. Air Force had now dropped more tonnage of bombs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail than the Allies had dropped on all of Germany in World War II, I realized from the loud applause that I was deep in the heart of lifer territory. With my application for discharge still rumbling around somewhere in the labyrinthine USAF bureaucracy, I was glad to know Wheeler again had my back, keeping tabs on my case the way he had at Norton. It seemed like a good time to take Poser, Esquire’s advice and maintain a low profile following lawful orders while I waited for my hearing.

  The first weekend after I arrived, Zelinsky took me on a tour of Ubon proper. With it came a great riddle: as much as the war turned out to be far worse than I imagined, Thailand turned out to be just the opposite. It didn’t matter that I was still a little woozy with jet lag—I was immediately intrigued by the lively Third World economy that swirled around us downtown—in the bustling shops of the business district and a few blocks away along the river at the open-air Noy Market. There, bartering playfully was as routine as it would have been unimaginable in a Boston supermarket or department store. When Zelinsky led me into air-conditioned Raja Tailors (“just to window shop,” he told me), the smiling salesgirl handed us each an ice-cold Coca-Cola, and before I knew what hit me, a tailor in a turban had taken measurements for two silk shirts and a pair of dress bell-bottoms, to be ready in three days. Zelinsky had a good laugh, as usual, and sipped his Coke while I was left scratching my head.

  Stepping back outside, I smiled, soothed by the buzz of activity that drowned out the sounds of fighter-bombers taking off and landing just a few miles away. About the only thing that didn’t win me over that day was the stench of stagnant sewers and canals (what the Thais called klongs) mixed with the pungent aroma of pork, chicken, river fish and dried squid that were hanging in the market stalls.

  A little before noon Zelinsky suggested we break for lunch. It was hot season, and it had been hours since the blistering sun had burned off the morning haze. He led me to a noodle shop that looked out across the Noy Market. Like noodle shops throughout Thailand, it had an open front, a steel grate that was shut at night when they closed and a shiny cement floor that was at the same time depressing and spotlessly clean. The tables were well-worn Formica, the stools an almost elegant hand-lacquered bentwood. In front of me was a glass and steel pantry displaying the day’s menu and next to it several charcoal braziers that kept an array of woks sizzling. In the rear was an industrial-grade, glass-fronted refrigerator chock-full of frosty Cokes, Fantas, Green Spot sodas, bean-curd milk and Thai beer.

  Zelinsky was grinning when we stepped inside. “I know you won’t believe me,” he said, “but you’ll be used to the fragrance of klong water and dried squid by the time you come back tomorrow. Amazing organism, the human body.”

  “Speak for yourself. I’m sticking with sorry-assed chow-hall food.”

  A petite young woman in her early twenties wearing aviator sunglasses, a faded, loose-fitting navy work shirt and torn bell-bottom jeans was making her way out of the noodle shop carrying two plastic satchels full of the morning’s groceries. I hadn’t noticed her until I pulled out my chair to sit down and managed to put it directly in her path, nearly jarring loose one of her shopping bags. She recovered gracefully and gave me the special condescendingly friendly smile that Thais trotted out for clumsy farang. I only caught a glimpse of her before she disappeared into the steamy late-morning sunlight, but as a serious student of photography she struck me as a particularly photogenic representative of a country noted for an abundance of beautiful women. Zelinsky snapped his fingers, bringing me out of my momentary trance.

  “Maybe you’re right after all about that human-body-being-an-amazing-organism stuff,” I muttered.

  “I was talking about your nose adjusting to the smell of dried squid,” replied Larry with a twinkle in his eye.

  The waiter, an old friend of Zelinsky’s, picked up on the subject of our conversation. “Pu-ying suay mahk, Sergeant Lar-ry. She very beautiful.”

  Zelinsky exchanged a few Thai pleasantries before ordering us two Singha beers and some mildly spicy duck soup. The soup was delicious, and the beers did such a fine job washing away the dryness in our throats that we decided to have one more for dessert. Outside, we shook hands, soul-brother style, and Zelinsky headed home to spend the afternoon with Pueng, his reason for returning to Thailand. Given that this was my first trip downtown, I wanted to stay and take some pictures.

  I meandered along Prommahtehp Road as it followed the Mun River toward the Warin Bridge. A block from the bridge I saw her again. Among hundreds of people thronging from jewelry shop to tailor shop to dry goods store to stationer, the lovely stranger in the teardrop sunglasses and oversized denim shirt somehow stood out by radiating just a tiny bit more grace and sensuality than the many other attractive young people around her. Her hair was just a fraction longer and silkier as it bounced to the cadence of her gentle footsteps. Her golden skin glistened ever so slightly brighter in the midday sun. Intrigued, I put on the longest telephoto lens I could successfully hand-hold and stole a few shots of this lovely stranger, mixed in with pictures of the shops and the many exotic products they sold. Even the cheap notebooks in the windows of the stationery stores captivated me, bound as they were in various patterns of silk landscapes.

  After battling so hard to avoid being shipped overseas, I wondered that day why fate was turning out to be so kind, and I smiled to myself at how much I was enjoying my first day off. On a lark, I continued following my accidental model from the opposite side of the street even though I couldn’t frame her closer than a waist shot. As attractive as she might have appeared in close-up through my lens, this was a comfortable distance. I expected to marry Danielle when my tour was up and didn’t need any complications. Besides, I was fundamentally shy; without being able to speak Thai, it would have been hard to accomplish anything other than to scare her away if I had moved closer.

  And so I kept following her, taking pictures from across the bustling thanon. A couple of times I lost her and was surprised to find myself feeling sad, for Christ’s sake! And then I’d spot her again. I’d feel a little surge of joy and have to laugh at myself. I followed her around the traffic circle that fed the bridge to Warin and the depot for the Bangkok train. Before I realized it we were at a dead end on the outskirts of town among rat-infested shacks that clung to the muddy embankment of the Mun River. The denim work shirt and bell-bottom jeans that belonged on a San Francisco hippie-panhandler suddenly looked like the silk robes of royalty when she was surrounded by a horde of tiny street urchins dressed in rags. Patiently she gave each one of them a piece of fruit and let them reach their tiny hands into a bamboo tube of sticky rice and scoop out enough to form into a riceball. When she opened a can of tuna, they eagerly dipped in their little balls of rice and ate voraciously. When the tuna was gone she passed out at least twenty more unopened cans until her shopping bag was empty.

  As the children started to drift back down the embankment into the maze of hovels built out of sheet metal and packing crates salvaged from the base garbage dump, I noticed I had attracted a throng of my own. They seemed to have never seen a 35mm Pentax camera before, so I bent over to let the ragtag leader take a look through the eyepiece. In an instant I was swarmed with tiny dirt-encrusted hands and found myself staring into the large, dull eyes of children who
had eaten too little too long. The camera was being torn from my neck and I had to brace myself with my left hand on the rough, broken sidewalk to keep from being pulled over and trampled. Barely able to hang on to the camera with my right hand, I took a deep breath, grunted, and broke free, staggering to my feet, stunned at how many kids had appeared out of thin air and how these scrawny, underfed waifs could so easily take down a six-foot American. Hugging my camera tightly to my body, I dug deep into my front pocket with my free hand and pulled out a handful of coins, flinging them as far as I could toward the shacks at the side of the river. As quickly as it had appeared, the miniature mob dispersed in a cacophony of chatter. Choking a little in the hot, dusty air, I looked around and finally caught a glimpse of my mystery woman as she disappeared up See Tong Street into some sort of hospital compound.

  April-May 1971

  Woodstock East

  I lived on the base in a tin-roofed hootch with only a ceiling fan for air conditioning, sleeping in a squeaky bunk, keeping myself clean in hopes that Danielle still wanted a proper church wedding when my time came to go back to what black GIs called “the World” and what I still called home. I quickly settled into a mind-numbing routine at work, cutting combat film day after day, bearing witness to endless miles of South Vietnam as beautiful as the Thai countryside being laid waste with napalm, rockets and cluster bombs originating from Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base. The enemy was firing back with anti-aircraft artillery (“triple-A”)—we saw plenty on the Night Operations footage—and sending up MiG interceptors and triple-A over North Vietnam, but it had been eerie—not one plane flying out of Ubon had been shot down for ten months. Sure, we had recently lost two of our cameramen, Spinelli and Nevers, but they had been on TDY out of Danang. And it was during Lam Son 719, the screwed-up South Vietnamese attempt at invading Laos that got bogged down along Route 9. They shouldn’t have even been on the helicopter that crashed; they were supposed to be on a flight back to Ubon, but they couldn’t pass up a chance to cover the operation with Larry Burrows, the famous Life photographer who went down with them. I slipped into a kind of trance as I spliced together scenes of extraordinary violence, acquiescing in silence the way Richard Poser, Esquire, had instructed me to and wishing I could quit thinking altogether.