base hobby shop.”
“Leary here won’ be needin’ one.” Harley turned to me with jaundiced eyes. “I don’ think you have a clue how lucky you are to be a shupport troop here in Thailand.”
“I have a clue, Baker. I wouldn’t want to be your shoes for a minute flying combat.”
“Only shometimes Fate does the deshiding for you. When I firs’ got to Nam we were flying night opsh with AC-47s—friggin’ Puffs. Flyin’ at much lower altitudes wi’ nowhere near the kind of instruments we have on AC-130s. And one night it wush really bad—real rainy, cloudy—but we were TIC—Troops in Contact. A company of Marines wush surrounded and gettin’ itsh ass kicked, so we hadda go out. And damn if we didn’ get hit by the Puff that wush comin’ in to relieve us. I woke up lyin’ in the mud with a massive headache and looked up and what little ish lef’ of the plane ish on fire. Gasholine an’ ammo burnin’ ash far ash you could see acrosh the rice paddies. Everybody dead excep’ me. That wush fuckin’ Fate,” said Harley, slowly standing.
“I’m makin’ you two wristbands,” Woody called as Harley and I made our way to the elevator.
Ubon may have been the capital of the largest province in Thailand, but the first thing we heard when Harley and I stepped outside was the crowing of a neighborhood rooster. We found a sleepy cabby willing to take one more fare and headed home. Along the way I wondered if a ComDoc cameraman had been on board the flight with Booty Simms. “What’ll happen now?” I asked.
Harley was staring at the back of the cab driver’s head. “There will be payback. You can count of that.”
Back at my hootch I undressed in the dark and climbed wearily into my bunk—not surprised this time when I bumped into the Harley’s vintage Les Paul. I slid the case under the bunk and settled in, but I couldn’t sleep, lying there instead with my eyes wide open, staring at the sagging springs above me. I started thinking about the uncomfortable intensity of life at Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base that Zelinsky and Wheeler had warned me about and how simple things had been in my mountain cabin with Danielle. It seemed as if ten years were being pressed into one. The war wasn’t turning out at all like I expected. It was worse. On one hand, it seemed like an absolute massacre. Indochina was being laid waste while North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units were taking staggering losses. But when fifteen American airmen go down at once, the enemy’s ability to inflict random, instant death hit close to home. I began to toss and turn and was surprised to find myself pitying the next North Vietnamese convoys that tried to make it down the Trail—tonight and tomorrow night and the night after that. Spectre would be shooting to kill. The North Vietnamese would be shooting back. My mind was racing. I shivered at the thought of the next Spectre bird shot out of the sky by North Vietnamese triple-A. I didn’t see it ever ending, and I wanted out. I tossed and turned some more and wondered why my case was taking so damned long. At last, trying to figure out how much of this to tell Danielle, I drifted off to sleep.
Monday at lunch in the chow hall Tom Wheeler asked me if I had heard what had been coming down in Washington the last few weeks.
“Nixon and Kissinger have decided to suit up and come fight the war?”
“Not quite. But they might have to the way things are going in the Senate. Stennis and the Armed Services Committee will always say the military’s doing a great job, but people like Fulbright and Church are pushing to investigate Laos and Cambodia. They want to know why we’ve got spooks operating there and how the CIA got involved in drug-running. They’re cutting night ops over the Ho Chi Minh Trail a little slack—probably because there’s so much intelligence verifying North Vietnamese truck kills. As far as Cambodia, though, we were supposed to go a few miles in last year, kick some butt, and get out. The word around Saigon is that there is still a lot of Air Force activity there, what Nixon is calling ‘armed reconnaissance’ and ‘protective reaction strikes’—firing only when fired upon. That might apply to F-4 and Spectre sorties. But what do you call fuckin’ B-52s out of Guam and U-Tapao, Thailand, saturation-bombing the jungle? A group of senators want to cut off the funding altogether, but Nixon’s stonewalling them and keeping a tight leash on the Pentagon and the State Department. Commanders may be filing false reports—saying they’re operating in Vietnam when in reality they’re going anywhere in Southeast Asia that they’re sent.”
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph…. What’s to keep a president who goes off the deep end from bombing anywhere he pleases—anywhere in the world?”
“Eventually we’d run out of money, I suppose. Or have the whole damn world turn against us.”
“Holy shit.”
“There’s another inquiry you’d be especially interested in, Leary—about why the Pentagon is foot-dragging on CO applications. Turns out they’re swamped with new requests and too understaffed to catch up. So you’re not alone. Which ties into the latest really big development: a bunch of combat veterans threw away their medals on the Capitol steps. There were so many it took ’em a whole day.”
“I wouldn’t mention that to Harley any time soon. That coulda shoulda been him that bought the farm Friday night.”
“But it’s connected in a weird sort of way,” Tom said. “Some of the guys in D.C. had been up at the DMZ within a few miles of North Vietnam and Laos—take your pick—during a secret invasion of Laos early in ’69 called Dewey Canyon. A few of them have just left units that were involved with something recent called Dewey Canyon II—the operation the South Vietnamese called Lam Son 719. This time no GIs went in, they just babysat the South Vietnamese Army right up to the border and then let them get slaughtered on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Trouble is, they took a bunch of our choppers down with them.”
He had caught my interest. “And that fiasco is what Larry Burrows was photographing when Spinelli and Nevers went down for the count.”
“You’re a smart boy.”
“And that’s probably where the Spectre bird got hit before it vaporized on Friday. You gotta figure that by the time the NVA got done wiping the ARVN’s ass, that part of the Trail was more heavily defended than ever.”
“Pretty good chance,” said Tom.
“This is reminding me of a term paper I did in high school for Modern History. Seems the Air Force did a big study after World War II and found that short of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, bombing seemed to increase a people’s will to resist—be it England, Germany or even Madrid during the Spanish Civil War. Bombing a ball-bearing factory might hurt an enemy’s capacity to hurt us—”
“’Cept there ain’t no ball bearing factories in Laos,” said Tom, taking a pregnant pause.
“Yes?” I asked.
“Remember your old buddy, Lieutenant Barry Romo, the dude just back from the Ashau Valley who spoke at our Fourth of July rally in San Bernardino? He was the leader of the California medal-tossing contingent.”
“What a mess,” I replied. “Combat veterans throwing away medals. Barry Romo’s supposed to be going to law school on the GI Bill. You sure Lewis Carroll didn’t write this?”
“Not even Lewis Carroll could think this shit up. And Washington’s not the only capital under siege—a Buddhist monk and nun just set themselves on fire over in Saigon, and that’s got students taking to the streets in Bangkok protesting American troops in Thailand! Compared to the Vietnam War, I’m afraid Alice in Wonderland
