coolest move of all was when my old cabin mate, Woody Shahbazian, the Air Force’s worst camera technician, got reassigned from Tan Son Nhut to Ubon. He had become the Air Force’s worst camera technician because he had flunked out of missile school and the Air Force couldn’t think of anything better to do with the two and a half years left on his enlistment after he returned from his first stint in Vietnam. He tried to make his tour sound like a lark—lifeguarding at the Officers’ Club swimming pool and renting out inflatable rafts for the beach—except he wore that leather wristband in honor of his dead hootchmates. The wristband drove the lifers crazy, but it was legal. Much of what Woody did was legal but maddening to lifers, a legacy of his childhood as an Air Force brat. B-58 pilots like his dad had a tradition of thumbing their noses at rear-echelon types, and that tradition had been passed on to Woody even though Woody himself was a rear-echelon type. His bad eyes had prevented him from becoming a pilot, but he knew the regs better than the NCOs who tried to rein him in.
While we were still at Norton, Woody had managed to run up some serious gambling debts in Las Vegas with his new gal pal, Kristin, who had been unable to dissuade him from booking penthouse suites that cost per weekend what he was making in a month. The tab he and Kristin had amassed at Sarge’s would take a couple more months’ paychecks to clear up, and for a coup de grâce, he had managed to put an expensive ding in his restored Porsche showing off for Kristin out at the L.A. County fairgrounds trying to pretend he knew how to run time trials. Woody had made a nifty profit on his first tour shipping home a case of Johnson’s Baby Powder filled with Laotian grass that had fallen out of the back of a visiting Air America “rice supply” flight. He confessed to me later that he had gladly gotten caught passing out the sNorton Bird, knowing that the war couldn’t last forever and thinking it might be a good time for a final business trip to Southeast Asia. With a little luck he’d be able to pay Kristin back the cash she’d lent him and get taken into the family business before she caught on that his trust fund had dried up long ago.
He showed up at Ubon driving a dusty red Fiat convertible and still sported a scruffy goatee when he reported in. Speaking with the trace of a French accent, he claimed to have driven over to Thailand, which should have been impossible since it meant passing through parts of Cambodia we had invaded and abandoned less than a year earlier. When he said he had no trouble taking the ferry over from Pakse, Laos, we cringed to think he had stumbled onto a western branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail for the last leg of the trip. “The trick is to only travel by day,” he said with an insouciant grin, “and insist you are French or Canadian…or French Canadian. A forged passport helps.” Our only complaint about Woody was that he had hung out with the “Proud to Be an Okie from Muskogee” crowd over in Saigon and was more into country and western now than ever. We weren’t sure what to make of the white Grand Prix jump suit he’d had custom-made in a Saigon tailor shop.
Wheeler pricked our interest when he told us that according to his reliable source over at CBPO, the rumor was true that Moonbeam Liscomb was behind the moves. The story was especially intriguing because, according to the latest scuttlebutt, Moonbeam himself was slotted to be coming in once his black fighter pilot series was wrapped up. Rumor also had it that he had completely flipped out, joining a couple of crazy California cults for a month or two and then turning right around and getting involved with some Black Nationalist group in South Central L.A.
None of this seemed to make much difference at first. Despite the colorful new cast of characters that was reporting in, I continued to live a monk-like existence, holing up in my editing cubicle by day and the library by night before climbing into my lumpy bunk for a bad night’s sleep. Sainthood began to get a lot more difficult, however, when I heard from Ernie Perez about Talent Night, held every Monday at the Ubon Hotel. I had left my drums with Danielle, never imagining they had rock bands in a war zone. Ernie told me about a place downtown on Prommaraj Road not too far from the Noy Market called Woodstock Music where I was able to pick out a pair of drumsticks. I drove the guys in the hootch crazy while I practiced on a couple of coffee cans and a pretzel tin I was able to scrounge from the base dumpsters, but when Talent Night came I was able to do a pretty decent drum solo, given that I was playing a cappella on the house drum set without a band or a song for context other than humming “Topsy, Part II” in my head. Perez, Wheeler, Zelinsky and a few other guys from the detachment were there to egg me on, buying me a few rounds of Mekhong whiskey and soda, and it even looked for a while like I might win. My hopes were dashed, though, when Woody Shahbazian, who used to torment me back at Norton with country music, showed up with his battered guitar case, pulled out his vintage Martin D-28, and tormented me once again with “Your Cheatin’ Heart” to win the twenty-dollar first prize. He sewed it up with a yodeling finale that drove the lifer contingent wild and forced Zelinsky to howl along in agony. But in the end it worked out fine because Brother Brian Golson, lead singer for the Band of Brothers, and Sugie Bear Suggs, his bass player, introduced themselves and told me that their drummer was rotating back to the World.
That Saturday night I hopped on my five-speed and headed downtown to sit in for a couple of numbers at the Soul Sister, located just across a potholed street from the Club Miami and not far from an iffy part of town that was full of Vietnamese refugees and Off Limits. They seemed to like my rimshots on “Knock on Wood” and when they “gave the drummer some” on a James Brown number, they must have kept on liking what they heard. I was in and accepted a chance to buy the old drummer’s made-in-Japan drum kit cheap. I also agreed to a Monday rehearsal at the base chapel annex, a large multi-purpose room where we stored our equipment. Did I know any guitar players? They were still looking for a lead guitar to take the pressure off “the Reverend,” as they affectionately called Golson, so he could play rhythm and concentrate on his vocals. I briefly thought of Shahbazian but didn’t think a Merle Haggard sound was what they were looking for.
The day after my audition, I rode my bike downtown again, this time back to Woodstock Music. I was trying to decide between some Ludwig and Slingerland drumsticks when I struck up a conversation with Sommit and Vrisnei, the friendly young brother and sister who ran the music part of Yoon On Store for their eternally middle-aged Thai-Chinese parents. Sommit, the brother, wore casual Western clothes, spoke exceptionally good English and was crazy about American music. In a hushed voice, he promised top dollar for any jazz or rock albums I could bring him from the BX. It sounded good to me—a chance to make some spare change for doing musical missionary work. Vrisnei was a year or two younger than her brother. Wearing little makeup and keeping her hair pulled back simply under a bandanna, she was wholesomely attractive. It was while she was ringing up my purchase that Harley Baker came in looking for guitar strings. Sommit introduced us and told me, “Khun Harley play guitar very good!”
Baker was a twenty-three-year-old lifer in training, a hatchet-faced gunner with the 16th Special Operations Squadron, but it didn’t take much chatting to learn that he also played a mean, bluesy Les Paul guitar. And it didn’t take much more chatting to find out he was game to come to the Monday rehearsal and take a crack at joining the Band of Brothers. He was hired on the spot. And so it was that within two days a couple of jive white dudes joined an otherwise all-black soul band.
Wheeler and Zelinsky were finally able to talk me into dropping by their off-base bungalow once I started performing downtown with the band, enticing me at first with an invitation to join their merry crew for Thai food. Whether it was home-cooked or from a street vendor, it was a big improvement over chow-hall grub. Khaopaht gung, a simple, mildly spicy shrimp fried rice, cost twenty-five cents from a mama-sahn on the street and was more delicious than anything I had ever eaten in Boston, with the possible exception of Lobster Newberg. Soon I was spending a lot of my free evenings with Wheeler, Groendyke, Zelinsky and his fiancée, Pueng, hoping Lek, Wheeler’s new girlfriend, would show up with fresh fruit for dessert.
Before long, I was also stopping by to smoke a little weed, which didn’t seem to be anywhere near as dangerous to our bodies or souls as Sister Susan, Father Boyle, and the federal government had warned us. It wasn’t much later that Baker stopped in with me one night after a gig. When they heard he was from Fresno, Zelinsky and Wheeler, stoned, started
