Norton Air Force Base I remained hallucination-free even when we smoked the very fine Laotian dope Woody Shahbazian had brought back from Danang Air Base, Republic of Vietnam. It was early in 1970, and we were certain it was the world that was coming unglued, not our minds. The U.S. had metastasized into a giant dysfunctional family, full of barely controlled chaos, ruled with as much terror and amnesia and charm as Dad and Grandpa Leary had employed to mold our own clan into their image of what a proper Irish-American family should look like. I wasn’t crazy, just inquisitive. With a bad habit of trying to ferret out the truth from only the flimsiest of evidence—about Grandpa Leary’s drinking and Grandma Shepler’s “nervous breakdowns” and about why the U.S. government was really sending us to Vietnam. Wanting to be seen and heard was a bad habit when you were a Leary child or an Air Force enlisted man.
No question about it, I was still a bit touchy when I landed in California. Five years going on ten of bad mood. The Revolution was coming, and I hadn’t wanted to be caught dead with the squares in D.C. who were going to be standing trial in front of Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. Deep down inside, though, under my olive-drab fatigues, I was more a Flower Child than a revolutionary. A rock drummer since high school, I wanted to take my band, Stonehenge Circus, to India to find a guru of our own and a good electric-sitar player. With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, I no longer had to be embarrassed by my secret passion to save the world nor tortured by my aching dream of being made love to by a harem of California poster girls. I no longer had to be trapped by the battle that had raged for years deep in my soul between the nuns at Holy Family and the centerfolds in Playboy magazine. In the Age of Peace and Love, I no longer feared Grandpa Leary’s drunken tirades. Our main fear as GIs was that the Age of Aquarius would be over by the time we were given our discharge papers.
In the meantime, we tried to be as hip as possible while sporting GI buzz cuts, searching out other hipsters in the ranks who were testing the regs by wearing John Lennon-style granny glasses, prescription sunglasses, wristbands, mustaches, long sideburns, or long hair slicked down with Groom and Clean. At Norton, I soon discovered that mixed in with the GI hipsters were musicians like Sonny Stevens and Woody Shahbazian. Stevens sported long sideburns and hid his long slick hair under his fatigue cap, day and night, indoors and out. Shahbazian, with the nonchalance of a soldier of fortune, did a full-court press on the regs with sideburns bordering on muttonchops, a bushy mustache, and long, styled hair that he hated to mess up wearing regulation headgear. He did wear regulation aviator sunglasses—despite not being an aviator—and got by on a single contact lens, always managing to misplace the other. His leather wristband commanded a lot of respect from his fellow enlisted men, wearing it as he did in honor of his hootch-mates at Danang who had died from a lucky shot with a shoulder-mounted rocket that had hit his quarters while he was off shaving or shitting, the details changing to fit his audience.
We pursued the hippie lifestyle as best we could by jamming in our barracks and later at the base theater, which finally led to a paying gig at Sarge’s, the biker bar across the street from the east gate. At Sarge’s, from my perspective behind the drums on the bandstand, I noticed several of the young AAVS production officers pursuing the hipster lifestyle themselves once they were off base and out of uniform. Two in particular stood out—Lieutenant Lisa Sherry and Lieutenant Rick Liscomb. She was statuesque with olive skin and deep, piercing eyes. He was a light-skinned black man, built like a linebacker, with a warm smile and a bone-crushing handshake. It was hard to tell at first if they were an interracial couple keeping it low-key or just good friends. It turned out that they had been both. She was the daughter of a French farm girl and an American fighter pilot who abandoned them soon after they got to the States, leaving her mother distraught and leaving Lisa to eventually scrape her way through the University of Maryland on scholarship. Liscomb had grown up in a comfortable middle-class section of Washington, DC, the son of the principal of a private school for children of diplomats. He had been one of the first black graduates of the Air Force Academy, where we found it easy to believe he had once been the light-heavyweight boxing champion.
Norton Air Force Base turned out to be my first assignment where they actually had airplanes. The flying part of the base was run by the Military Airlift Command (MAC) and was busy seven days a week operating a steady stream of flights full of troops and supplies headed for Vietnam. Every C-141 long-range transport in the MAC inventory was flying, and they still needed to bring in charters from Braniff, Continental, TWA and Seaboard World. Our third of the base was converted from what had recently been a Strategic Air Command operation assembling and storing intercontinental ballistic missiles. When the Pentagon assigned AAVS primary responsibility for documenting the war in Southeast Asia, the 1361st quickly became a major source of television news footage seen by the American public and the main source of briefing films shown to the Congressional Armed Services Committees responsible for funding the war. They also did plenty of in-house Air Force training films, Air Force Now! (the movie newsmagazine shown at monthly commanders’ calls worldwide), and a vast amount of still photography. Now that AAVS had consolidated its operations from Orlando, Florida; Wright-Patterson, Ohio; and Lookout Mountain in the Hollywood Hills, its labs were processing more feet of film a day than any movie studio in the world.
I was assigned to the editorial department, with a wisecracking young film editor named Larry Zelinsky as my immediate supervisor. Once he showed me how to thread up a Moviola, I was on my own. The 16mm synchronizer, viewer and splicer were pretty much the same as the 8mm equipment I had used at the Rhode Island School of Design. I felt lucky then that an English major from Brown was able to take film classes next door at RISD. I felt even luckier now to find myself in a spanking-new editing room as spacious and comfortable as anything in Hollywood.
Shahbazian talked me and Tom Wheeler, one of the unit clerk-typists, into going in with him on a mountain chalet in a pine forest high above San Berdoo. First Sergeant Link—“Missing Link,” Zelinsky used to call him—was the Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge of all enlisted men in the 1361st. He split a gut when he found out we weren’t stuck in the drafty barracks on base with the rest of the guys, but Shahbazian was a retired colonel’s son and knew Link couldn’t make us move back. Link blamed me, figuring as a college graduate I had to have been the brains behind the operation, but in those days I laughed it off, foolishly assuming his glowers were harmless. No one else seemed to mind, however, and soon hipster enlisted men and hipster officers were dropping by regularly, especially on the weekends. Liscomb was learning to play the guitar and was into Peter, Paul and Mary at the time. Woody wasn’t a whole lot better on his acoustic guitar, but we enjoyed the change of pace singing folk songs after the din of the blues and Southern rock we were churning out at Sarge’s. Somehow the lovely Lieutenant Sherry—Lisa when we were alone—began fraternizing with me after hours, volunteering to help me pack up my drums at Sarge’s at the end of the evening and get them home safely. Woody, a firm believer in fraternizing with female officers, gave me his seal of approval, breaking into his Hank Williams imitation and singing, “If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time,” whenever he saw me around the cabin.
Lieutenant Sherry might have been a little out of her mind dating an enlisted man, but I was sure my brain was firing on all cylinders when she let me take the wheel of her dazzling white MG convertible and we crossed the border into Mexico for the first time. Maybe we couldn’t get to Woodstock, but we could enjoy this little caesura of pleasure and apparent sanity by camping out on a deserted beach on the Gulf of California. It was March, the end of the California rainy season. The rains had been kind that year, and the dusty chaparral and mesquite that covered the hills running south from San Bernardino and Escondido into Baja California had transformed into an emerald veil dotted with poppies, lupine and larkspur in full bloom. We sought out a simple fishing village she had heard of on the mainland side of the Gulf called Puerto Peñasco where we could sleep on the beach under the stars and where the food and drink in the nearby cantinas was plentiful and cheap. I was completely new to sleeping under the stars—the Boy Scouts had always used tents—but after quenching our thirst with cold, dark Mexican beer it seemed to work out fine.
Drinking some more of that cold, dark beer with dinner
