beers of my own, her logic seemed incontrovertible—in the Age of Aquarius, two people could care about each other deeply without chaining each other down. It didn’t bother me at all that an old captain friend from Tan Son Nhut would be coming in TDY in the next few days. Our relationship was going to be chain-free.
Shahbazian had been worried that I had run off to get married that weekend, but any thoughts I might have had of marriage, open or otherwise, vaporized in the hot San Bernardino sun. I didn’t hear a word from Lisa the entire week her captain was in town. The cabin seemed empty when I got home from work, and sitting alone out on the deck, I polished off two bottles of bootleg Tequila, one shot at a time, licking the salt off the back of my hand and biting down hard on the lemon chaser. And then the icing on the cake: I was diagnosed with non-specific urethritis. The doctors were concerned it might be one of the nasty new strains coming out of Vietnam, so they shot me full of antibiotics and ordered me to stay off sex and booze for a month. I spent much of my convalescence in a melancholy mood, nursing a broken heart while deprived of alcohol, a substance more precious to the Leary bloodline than oxygen. For four weekends at Sarge’s I flailed dutifully at my drums, the only person in the joint who was sober. I swore off women for life and then drove myself crazy watching a parade of tanned San Bernardino townies in tank tops undulating before me on the dance floor. Liscomb sat down next to me at the bar one night while I was on break and noticed that I was sipping a ginger ale. “What’s this, Brendan? You aren’t in training, are you?”
“I’m afraid I’ve been burned by our friend, Lieutenant Sherry.”
“Lieutenant Sherry,” he smiled. “She’s great as a friend, even better as a drinking buddy, but when we tried to get serious once upon a time I just couldn’t get used to her ideas about free love. Sounded good on paper, but the first time her old captain friend came in TDY from Tan Son Nhut, she had me crawling the walls. Our apartments at the Bachelor Officer Quarters are right across the hall from each other.”
“Ah yes, her captain from Tan Son Nhut. I live up in the mountains and she still had me crawling the walls.”
Before I went back on stage we clinked our glasses nostalgically to Lisa and free love.
Doing on-the-job training as a film editor in the AAVS postproduction department meant Zelinsky had pretty much left me alone to teach myself. I had a hunch work was going to get a lot more interesting when Lieutenant Liscomb asked for me on one of his projects, and, sure enough, he quickly became my favorite production officer, continually coming up with new and crazy ways to make an Air Force documentary while encouraging me to experiment with flashy editing techniques and cut to the beat of the heaviest-metal rock and funkiest funk we could dig up. We drove the civil-service types nuts over in the animation department, throwing new projects at them daily, depriving them of the down time they usually spent counting the hours until they could start collecting their pensions. He brought in a couple of experimental films he did when the Air Force sent him to the University of Rochester, and they turned out to be the only flicks I had ever seen weirder than the stuff my classmates at Rhode Island School of Design used to dream up. The weirdest of all was about a sculptress who had not created anything except genitalia of various shapes and sizes for over two years. Not something we’d be doing for Air Force Now! or for a congressional briefing film.
I had gone out of my way to avoid the big, brawling border towns at Mexicali, Tecate and Tijuana in my travels with Lieutenant Sherry. I had heard too many horror tales about barroom blowjobs and hard-to-imagine debauchery involving smiling young señioritas and their pet donkeys. Naturally, the night I was pronounced cured, Tijuana was precisely where Woody Shahbazian, Tom Wheeler, Frank Lutz and Larry Zelinsky decided to take me, or more precisely, where I would take us since I was the one with the ’64 V-Dub.
It’s unlikely that Shahbazian, a flamboyant Air Force brat, and Zelinsky, a blue-collar wise guy from Detroit, would have ever crossed paths in civilian life, but in the Air Force they shared a powerful unspoken bond—they had already done a tour of Southeast Asia and felt right at home across the border showing us new guys the Third World ropes in case, despite Nixon’s promised troop reductions, we too were shipped out. Zelinsky, in fact, had been so at home during the year he spent in Thailand that he had volunteered to go back so he could marry his Thai girlfriend. As he and Woody predicted, we had a roaring, rowdy good time of it that night, starting out at the Long Bar, Shahbazian’s favorite, spending Yanqui dollars like visiting royalty while he told us about the time on R&R in Hong Kong he’d had a dozen girls sent to his room. “Sounds like love at first sight to me,” said Lutz, the elf-like techie who worked on the dubbing stage recording sound.
We wound up at a back-alley hole-in-the-wall called Hernando’s and decided around midnight that we had better hit the road while we were all accounted for. We had lost Wheeler for an hour until Zelinsky stumbled upon him sitting in a dark corner booth with a small-but-voluptuous young Mexican girl snuggled in his lap, smooching hungrily and sipping from the salty rim of the same margarita glass. We chattered all the way home, lamenting the night’s near misses and bragging about old conquests—real, embellished and imagined—as we rolled down the open highway. Everyone, that is, except Wheeler, who pretended to sleep in the back seat. “Has everybody heard that Wheeler’s in love?” asked Zelinsky. His uniforms may have been rumpled and he may have talked with a flat midwestern twang, but there was a shrewd intelligence behind the Cheshire Cat smile that lit up his pudgy face.
“She’s nice,” protested Tom in those innocent days before he and Zelinsky became my bungalow-mates at Ruam Chon Sawng. He had the look of a blond-haired surfer but was in fact a pioneer pothead from a small town in upstate New York called Wappinger’s Falls. “She’s an orphan and she’s only working the bars in Tijuana to save up for college.”
Zelinsky howled with laughter. “Mom, I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Angelina. The entire Pacific Fleet wants to be her best man.”
I had lost count at what might have been my eighth Cuba Libré; as we neared San Bernardino, I found myself wondering if Shahbazian’s Hong Kong story could be true. With his long Joe Namath sideburns and his Grand Prix race-driver mustache, anything was possible with Woody and women. It was two weeks later that he smuggled a pair of Tijuana hookers back to San Bernardino. Dashing and charming, he was waved through customs at the border and the back gate at the base without a hitch. When he was confined to quarters for a month, he told us it was a small price to pay for becoming a genuine war hero and a legend in his own lifetime. When I asked him why he brought them to the barracks instead of up to the mountains, he said, “What do we need hookers for? We’re living in a chalet.” And sure enough, a few days after his release he started dating Kristin, the foxiest civilian secretary working at AAVS headquarters. I wasn’t surprised to learn her family in Palm Springs had money. Shahbazian mentioned to her early on that his mother’s family owned mining interests in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, leaving out the part about going bankrupt.
In the early months of 1970, of course, our only real bond at the 1361st Photo Squadron was a quiet determination to save our collective hides. The white contingent at Headquarters Squadron, Aerospace Audio Visual Service, was pathetically pimply-faced and naïve, which may have explained why the chaplain’s daughter was willing to gang-bang the entire second floor of Barracks 1247. The Bloods weren’t innocent at all, but they weren’t clueing us in, preferring to watch from a distance as the pothead draft dodgers and the beerhead lifers made each other miserable. Rick Liscomb tried to float with both the brothers and the hipsters when we were off duty, which earned him the nickname “Moonbeam” from his fellow blacks. When he stopped eating meat and got into Zen meditation the hipsters picked up on “Moonbeam” too.
Our crowd was a fluke, crawling as it was with white, suburban dropouts; urban, upwardly mobile soul brothers; and hip, young officers who figured we could hide out in the safety of photo labs, sound stages and editing rooms in San Bernardino until the U.S. and the Vietnamese
