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
