scaring the hell out of me in the process. “You’ve got twenty pages of poetry and speeches in here. How could you send a bunch of colonels poetry! You’re cutting into their drinking time at the O Club.”
I was feeling more than a little sheepish. Tom was completely right. I was so full of my own angst that I completely failed to consider my audience. “I thought that’s what they wanted in item 4, subsection F: ‘have you ever made public expression of your beliefs?’”
“For a bright guy, you sure can be stupid, Leary. Throw out the appendix. You can answer it in a sentence—something about going to peace marches and prayer vigils. Lie and say you’ve even started praying to God lately.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking out a pack of Blue Moon cigarettes and offering one to Tom. “So you think it’s worth resubmitting, eh?”
“Not in the shape it’s in right now. You’ve got a lot of work ahead of you.”
I pulled out my little Ronson and lit up before giving Tom a light. Taking a deep, relaxing drag on the Blue Moon, I thanked Papa-sahn that somehow, somewhere in Ubon Province one of his little elves was removing the tobacco from these commercial Thai cigarettes and replacing it with some of the old man’s very potent Khon Kaen grass.
I sleepwalked through work the next day. When I stopped by the base post office at lunch time, I found a special-delivery letter from Edward Poser, Esquire, saying he had received a copy of my CO rejection. He pointed out something that Tom and I had missed: the Air Force had called the application “opportunistic”—inferring I had simply been trying to avoid service in a war zone. He advised not trying to appeal, given that I was serving in a noncombat role and given that Air Force regs required new facts or some other substantial change to justify a second application. He was kind enough to include a bill for over a thousand dollars. My head felt spongy, but somehow that afternoon a murky thought popped up that maybe—just in case—I should look into a foreign passport. I remembered my backpacking brother telling me about reading on the bulletin board in a youth hostel in County Donegal that we qualified for an Irish passport. All we needed to trace our lineage back to the Ould Sod was our father’s and grandfather’s birth certificates, which my father said he would give me over his dead body. Back at my hootch I wrote my brother a short note asking if there was another way of proving Grandpa Leary had been born in Ireland and how long it might take. I wrote another to Danielle telling her I wouldn’t be coming home early but that I loved her and looked forward to the day we could be together.
After mailing the letters, I bicycled in a daze over to the base library and tried to read a Newsweek, an American Cinematographer and a Rolling Stone. Unable to concentrate on any of them, I nodded off for I don’t know how long and then sat up with a start, filled with a need to get downtown. I stopped off at the BX and picked out a stack of albums to bring down to Woodstock Music, where I studied Sommit carefully while he inspected my goods and I decided which albums I wanted duped back onto tape. I might not have been dealing with a hard-core black marketeer, but he was a businessman. I couldn’t say if it was inspiration or desperation, but in any case I asked him if I needed to go to Bangkok to obtain a Canadian passport or if it could be arranged around Ubon. Sommit took me to a dingy office in back of an old warehouse to meet Indian Joe, the blue-eyed Sikh who was a black marketeer and had expanded his operation effortlessly into a consortium of small businesses catering to GIs. Khun Joe told me not to sweat it if I didn’t have passport pictures and said he’d take me to arrange my spare identity the next night.
It was the same kind of little shack run by a wiry, energetic papa-sahn that many of my fellow GIs visited across the river to score dope, only this establishment was not far from Prommaraj Road, in VC town, the off-limits Vietnamese ghetto. This papa-sahn didn’t have any dope for sale, but he took a Polaroid and said he’d have my passport in two days.
11–13 September 1971
Ron Cooper Isn’t Coming, OR: The Day I Donned My Plastic Wings
I don’t know how he pulled it all together in two weeks. Perhaps he was the radical messiah that militant blacks had been waiting for. In any case it was an awesome sight watching Lieutenant Liscomb lead his Black Power Squadron, over five hundred strong, down Ubon’s main drag toward city hall on what was supposed to be a quiet Saturday morning in a backwater provincial capital. With great dignity, Brian Golson—“the Reverend”—marched in the front of the procession only a few feet from Liscomb. I could make out Sugie Bear and Ackerman walking confidently, not far behind. Mixed in with the Afro-American majority was a sprinkling of Latinos, including Perez, who had disguised himself in dark sunglasses and a Yankees cap. Further back, Price, Blackwell and Washington strode past in a festive mood, striking up a chant of “Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud!” A few potheads including Dave Murray and his friend Mole tagged along, taking up the rear.
“Fuck it,” I said to Wheeler as we locked up our bikes and joined in. “What are they gonna do—”
“Send us to Vietnam?” we mouthed derisively.
From the top of the granite stairway at the front of the provincial government building, the lieutenant gazed happily at his motley multitude and began speaking, using a bullhorn that echoed for blocks. “Eight years ago,” he extolled, “Dr. Martin Luther King told the world he had a dream, a dream of tolerance and equality and opportunity for all, a dream that even an assassin’s bullet could not kill. Today, even as the struggle for racial equality continues at home, we have a new dream here in Ubon—to stop this racist war. Fat-cat Washington politicians and the lobbyists and contractors they are in bed with have profited whether we lived or died! The Thai elite has been bought while Thai soldiers have paid in blood. But today we dream of peace. We dream of a new day when American soldiers lay down their arms and demand to be sent home so that our Thai brothers and their Vietnamese cousins can live in harmony. We have a dream that powerful White Anglo-Saxon politicians back in Washington will never again be able to put a gun to our heads and make us pawns on their global chessboard. But our struggle is just beginning. Whether we are black, white, Latino or Native American, mark my words—”
“I think he’s starting to get warmed up,” said Tom.
“As long as the military-industrial complex continues to profit—as President Eisenhower warned us—this war will continue!” The crowd gave him a few shouts of “Right on! Right on!”
“As long as the military-industrial complex continues to own our elected representatives in the U.S. Congress—” He paused this time so the crowd could join him: “this war will continue!”
“As long as the Silent Majority of American voters believe this is a fight of Freedom against Tyranny—”
“This war will continue!” chanted the crowd.
“Until we hold up the racist underbelly of this war to the light of day—”
“This war will continue!” shouted the crowd, picking up Liscomb’s cadence.
“If it is truly Communism that we are fighting, why are we fighting here among the brown-skinned people of Southeast Asia instead of against the white-skinned Communist regimes of Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Russia itself?”
“Fuck racism!” somebody shouted.
