8 July 1971
Lieutenant Rick “Moonbeam” Liscomb
Scuttlebutt in the Air Force was funny. It could be true or false. It could come true in minutes or it could take a year. Moonbeam Liscomb could generate all kinds of the stuff, which might have explained why I felt a mixture of happiness and concern at reports circulating around the detachment that the good lieutenant was finally done with the first two installments of his black pilot series and was due to rotate in. On one hand, a glorious ray of sunshine was heading our way just as we were hunkering down for the dreary monotony of rainy season. On the other hand—if only half the rumors were true—Moonbeam was on a personal journey that would not be endearing him to the Air Force commanders who would make or break his career. Few of his friends understood. I had a hunch that I did understand, that we were both in a spiritual crisis, no longer accepting the dogma of our childhood, and I had a hunch we were in turmoil over the war for similar reasons. But I also heard the voice of Father Boyle whispering in my ear, asking if Moonbeam and I weren’t surely on a parallel road to perdition.
The monsoon rains were falling now, sometimes for a few hours and sometimes all day long, but they fell every day with no letup in sight. The roar of jet engines still filled the air, but many of the F-4 Phantoms returned with a full load of undelivered ordnance, using up the entire runway before their drag shoots could bring them to a halt. Even so, another flight of two or three F-4s would soon be rumbling down the runway, climbing out and kicking in their afterburners as they disappeared into the cloudy sky. There always seemed to be a spot someplace in Southeast Asia where the clouds thinned out enough for the Wolf Pack to hunt.
With the arrival of monsoon season I’d begun wearing a rubberized nylon rain suit with the hood pulled up, resolutely riding my bike between my hootch and ComDoc with a stripe of mud splattered down my back. At night I found it soothing to ride my bike through a light drizzle over to the chapel annex to rehearse with the band or over to the base library to do some reading. And as long as it wasn’t a heavy downpour, I didn’t mind riding downtown to see Tom, Lek, Larry and Pueng, who often rewarded me with home-style Thai cooking and Khon Kaen grass.
But now Lieutenant Rick “Moonbeam” Liscomb was rotating in. Back in California we had shared an unspoken faith that we were warming up for the day when we would make our mark on Hollywood as fresh, brash New Faces. That great rapport we once shared made it hard for me to believe that Moonbeam—with the help of Ron Cooper—would soon be responsible for getting me locked out of my cozy editing cubicle at Ubon Royal Thai Air Base and sent off to a life of abject terror.
Then again, in all fairness, I may have helped set the good lieutenant on the path that nearly landed him in Long Binh Jail. It was shocking to realize how far Moonbeam could fall from his days as an intercollegiate boxing champion and trailblazing Afro-American graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. All because somewhere along the line he had begun questioning the war. I felt a mixture of pride and concern that People’s Independence Day might have been the catalyst that set him off.
Captain Sherry and I had kept it hush-hush, but word had gotten out long ago that Moonbeam was a vegetarian. It was about the same time that he became known as the first Academy graduate to admit publicly that he practiced Zen Buddhism and was a great admirer of the poet Allen Ginsberg. By fall, though, when all my free time was devoted to Danielle, further reports of Liscomb’s worrisome descent into major flakiness kept coming in. The black fighter pilot project was getting good word-of-mouth, but off duty, where Moonbeam had once been discreet dating Lisa Sherry, he started openly, defiantly dating white women, sometimes bringing them into Sarge’s Café where he’d mess with the heads of the rednecks and the bikers sitting next to him at the bar by agreeing that integration would never work.
In the months that followed my deployment to Ubon, rumors continued to trickle in that Moonbeam had flipped out even further. At first, word had it that he had joined a cult. A few weeks later Washington and Blackwell got me especially worried when I overheard them arguing whether it was the Black Panthers that Moonbeam was running with or the Nation of Islam.
Liscomb had been on the short list for assignment to Southeast Asia for some time, but his Air Force Now! series kept taking longer than planned. In the meantime, a new rumor was circulating that he and Captain Sherry had been unwinding on the weekends at a nudist colony in Topanga Canyon. The base commander at Norton and Colonel Sandstrom at AAVS decided Lisa had been a very bad girl and disappeared her in the middle of the night to the ComDoc detachment at Danang. They couldn’t do anything with Moonbeam until Part 2 was edited, but once it was, according to Wheeler, they were relieved to find that he had long ago put in for an open billet at Ubon with the 601st.
I was over at the chapel annex putting away my drums after a band rehearsal, the last one to leave as always, and was looking forward to a free cup of coffee next door at Chaplain Kirkgartner’s House of Free Expression when behind me I heard the sound of powerful, purposeful bootsteps on the polished linoleum floor. “Nice looking set of drums.”
I looked up to see Lieutenant Rick “Moonbeam” Liscomb, in the flesh, striding through the open double door. “So Wheeler was right! Welcome to Ubon, sir!”
“Cut that ‘sir’ shit. What’s this I hear about you joining a soul band?”
“Blame it all on Hank Ballard and Bo Diddley. I’ve been hooked on rhythm and blues since eighth grade. I wanted to put a blues band together back at Norton, but history didn’t cooperate—it was a country-rock kind of town.”
“History does seem to have a mind of its own,” Liscomb replied with a warm grin. I was dying to know if any or all of the rumors about him were true, but I had no idea how to broach the subject. Instead, I studied his face carefully. Moonbeam had changed since I’d last seen him, but the changes were subtle. He didn’t have that born-again Christian lobotomized look he used to share with the well-intentioned innocents who listened to “Puff, the Magic Dragon” a few too many times. But neither was he in spaced-out Zen mode, nor did he appear to be a mad-as-hell Black Nationalist like our old editorial writer at the sNorton Bird. He just seemed cool, the way he was when we first hung out at AAVS editorial and across the street at Sarge’s.
“Come on over to the coffee house next door, Lieutenant, and I’ll buy you a coffee.” He followed me through another double door and over to a dented, not-too-sparkling coffee urn. We poured ourselves some java and found ourselves a seat.
“This is kinda nice,” said Moonbeam, looking around at walls covered with posters of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye and other present and future dead cultural icons.
“This is our junior chaplain’s bright idea after the race riots at Korat and Takhli. So far the guys at Ubon have preferred free Cokes, coffee and endless bullshitting to beating the crap out of each other.”
“Sounds good,” he replied, taking a sip from the Styrofoam cup. “Anybody come up with any answers?”
“I think everyone’s a little frustrated. The career guys want to kick some enemy butt, except the enemy’s been hiding lately. The young guys don’t want to be here at all, except they’ve discovered nightlife that beats spring break in Fort Lauderdale. I don’t know how much you’ve been shown around, Lieutenant, but for a basic briefing, we use an audiotape interview with a fed-up old-time fighter pilot called ‘It’s a Fucked-up War.’ The Rat Pack itself, though, is full of some pretty far-out dudes.”
He leaned in conspiratorially. “I of all people should know that.”
“How so?”
“You
