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.
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.
