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.
I couldn’t stop thinking, though, and soon understood the rules of engagement well enough to know that our light observation planes were being shot at by real snipers using real bullets and were spotting real guerillas disappearing into the hamlets and jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia when they called in air strikes, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how our pilots knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that every sampan we sank and every village we bombed and burned belonged to the enemy. I found myself wondering how many times it only took sighting a single flash from an enemy rifle down below to entice our fighter-bombers into destroying an entire village built with the calloused hands of peasants who had lived among the same patch-quilt rice paddies for a hundred generations.
Colonel Grimsley, the base commander, and Captain English, our commander at ComDoc, made it clear that those were the kinds of questions they did not want asked. At Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, at Commander’s Call and posted on bulletin boards everywhere, “loyalty” was the buzzword. “Loyalty” meant keeping your mouth shut. Lifers and apprentice lifers knew the drill. Loyal soldiers did not make waves that would keep captains and colonels from getting anything less than perfect efficiency reports and their tickets to advancement punched properly. So I did my job and kept my mouth shut and spoke only in whispers to Tom Wheeler and Larry Zelinsky.
One concession to convention at Ubon that came easy was getting myself a basic five-speed no-name aluminum road bike when Wheeler got his. The base was crawling with bicycles, which I found comforting. It reminded me of a pleasant college campus back home, except that the birds chirping in the distance at Ubon were a little bigger, noisier and more carnivorous than the pigeons that nibbled at breadcrumbs on a college green. For the entire month of March and most of April, while other guys were heading off base to go nightclubbing and visit massage parlors, drinking and doing some of the purest drugs money could buy, I rode my bicycle over to the base library and holed up reading the American Cinematographer. I wrote to Danielle every day, telling her that I missed her and how even though American foot soldiers were truly going home, things were tougher than anyone could imagine for the Vietnamese. I put it off for a few weeks, but I finally started getting ready for my discharge hearing, motivated by a hunch they would be springing it on me unexpectedly. It wasn’t long before I was reading about the brutal, tragic history of the French in Indochina in books like Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place and finding myself obsessed with how we were repeating so many of their mistakes. When I tried to figure out where Thailand fit in, I didn’t get past the Encyclopedia Britannica for the answers to be disturbing—our ally was a constitutional monarchy that had had more coups than elections since the current king’s grandfather gave up absolute power in 1932. The entire World War II era was murky, with factions overseas seeming to be pro-Ally while Thailand itself was ruled by a Franco-like character who hadn’t put up any resistance to the Japanese occupation worth writing about. Unions were illegal even though per-capita income in the Issan region that included Ubon wasn’t much more than fifty dollars a year, which might have explained the history of leftist insurgency in the Northeast. Equally disturbing to me, Thailand received plenty of U.S. aid to put it down.
Tom Wheeler and Larry Zelinsky worried about me. They weren’t readers—Wheeler pretty well stayed with Rolling Stone, and Zelinsky confessed he hadn’t touched a book since elementary school. They didn’t go in much for letter writing, either. Instead, they kept twisting my arm, telling me I needed to get off the base—to get some exercise, if nothing else, and to keep the lifers from messing with my head twenty-four hours a day—but I passed.
The war sucked, and the work sucked, but something miraculous was going on with the staffing at ComDoc. Almost as if the by the hand of God, cool guys from Norton kept turning up at Ubon. Two of the first came from the Soul Brother division of Norton GIs for Peace—Blackwell, the soundman/still photographer who had been stationed at Korat, and Price, the lab technician who came down from Udorn. And of course there was Wheeler, who had never even made it to his original assignment at Takhli, and his sidekick Murray. Some were cool guys I didn’t even know about like Ernie Perez, another lab tech. As a novice film editor at Norton I rarely left my editing room and rarely spoke to anyone besides the writer-producers and the directors assigned to my projects. The motion picture laboratory might as well have been on another planet. And given that Perez was from Spanish Harlem and a devotee of Tito Puente’s, he had never turned up at Sarge’s, where it was strictly country rock for the young dudes and a little rockabilly for the lifers.
It was similar with Jamal Washington, the very cool motion picture cameraman. I had hung out with Ron Cooper, but he had the single next door to my room in the barracks at Norton. Washington was in a different barracks and was more a habitué of Jerry’s Velvet Lounge, an elegant jazz and blues club on the north side of San Berdoo, than of a biker bar like Sarge’s. I did know his work, though. His footage was consistently good—as good as Ron Cooper’s—and he hadn’t gone to Bob Jones University or Disney Studios to learn it. I started bumping into him regularly once we got to Ubon and noticed that he usually had Otis Redding or Big Mama Thornton going on the tape deck he’d set up in the cameramen’s ready room at ComDoc. He seemed pleasantly amused when I told him they were two of my favorite singers.
