the fighting and dying over to the ARVN—the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Even if a few of us might still be sent over to Southeast Asia, it would be to another photo squadron—on an Air Force base with bunks and a roof over our heads and, according to Shahbazian, swimming pools and air-conditioned NCO clubs. The certainty that we would never be slugging a gun through leech-infested equatorial jungle brought us all a measure of unspoken cheer. The assumption that many of us were heading for careers in Hollywood added to the warm, fuzzy vibes.
I was especially upbeat because I’d survived a temporary overdose of naïveté, volunteering for cameraman duty and getting turned down. Like a lot of my later problems, it was Ron Cooper’s fault. I was impressed that Cooper had connections in Hollywood and had permission to drive in to Disney Studios every Friday afternoon to observe a real, live American Society of Cinematographers cameraman at work on the sound stage of the latest Disney live-action feature. It didn’t seem important at the time that he was parlaying his part-time-projectionist gig at the base theater into a film-bootlegging racket. It was his passion for cinematography that rubbed off on me to the point that I volunteered to give up my air-conditioned editing room. Fool that I was, I failed to notice that every cameraman on base except Ron Cooper was scheduled to do a tour of Nam—flying combat—or had just come back. It turned out that editors were leaving the Air Force for cushy civil-service jobs faster than the Viet Cong could kill cameramen, however. Colonel Sandstrom, AAVS Director of Production, turned down my request, confining me instead to three years of hard labor hunched over my Moviola editing semitruthful news clips. The more combat footage I looked at, the luckier I felt.
April 1970–March 1971
Chain of Command
We were coasting, biding our time. And then, late in that fateful April of 1970, Commander in Chief Nixon, on the advice of his field marshal, Henry Kissinger, ordered the invasion of Cambodia, and everything changed. If you were a grunt in Vietnam, it made perfect sense. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the North Vietnamese Army’s main supply route into South Vietnam, and its southern branches ran through the hills and jungles of northeastern Cambodia. To make things worse, enemy troops often hid there with impunity between forays into South Vietnam. Unfortunately, nobody had explained that to the GIs in a stateside photo unit. We may have had Top Secret security clearances, but we didn’t have a “need-to-know.” And nobody explained it very well to the American public. To millions of Americans, Cambodia was a neutral country we were invading without a Congressional declaration of war and without informing its pro-American prime minister.
On April 30, Nixon went on national television, pointed to Cambodia on a map of Southeast Asia and announced, “This is not an invasion.” He played it down as “an attack on enemy outposts,” but college kids didn’t buy it. The next day hundreds of campuses erupted—even apathetic USC, home of the film school I dreamed of attending. Eleven students were shot by police at Jackson State. Two died. The inept Ohio National Guard killed an ROTC cadet and three other students at Kent State, wounding nine more in the process. I had stumbled into the GI anti-war movement back in Washington, DC, when the My Lai story broke, but this was new—this wasn’t a rogue unit gone bad, it was an entire administration going mad. We had been lulled into believing American troops would be coming home, not invading another country. Nixon’s deceit pushed me over the edge, turning me—an active-duty GI—into a full-blown radical. I wasn’t alone, but it wasn’t comfortable. In rebuking our government we were in some way rebuking our fathers who had served unquestioningly in World War II.
Sonny Stevens, our lead guitar player at Sarge’s, took a carful of us down to UC Riverside to see what kind of hot water we could get ourselves into at the office of the Student Mobilization Committee—the SMC for short. “It’ll be a great way to meet college chicks,” promised Stevens, like Shahbazian a colonel’s son who knew how to fly under the brass’s radar. He had been spending the war in relative obscurity, a laid-back, natural-born still and motion picture camera technician at the 1361st whose only failure had been trying to retrain Shahbazian as a fellow camera tech when Woody returned from his year of lifeguarding at Danang. Stevens was having better luck upgrading Woody’s skills on rhythm guitar, but when college campuses erupted after Kent State, he saw that Woody’s greatest potential was as a hell-raiser.
A couple of the SMC leaders at UC Riverside sent us off to a place called the Movement House near the University of Redlands to see some people who wanted to start organizing GIs. With the exception of Zelinsky, who never left the base, they didn’t have much trouble molding Woody and the rest of my former Tijuana drinking buddies into the nucleus of Norton GIs for Peace, and soon we were turning out an underground newspaper, the sNorton Bird. Woody drew a cartoon for the first cover—a ruffled, cigar-chomping bald eagle wearing aviator’s goggles and giving the finger mid-flight. Working stealthily at midnight, we delivered the inaugural issue to every officer and enlisted man living on the base. The next day, to paraphrase standard Air Force terminology, the Shinola hit the fan. The brass would have summarily shipped Stevens to Vietnam, but he didn’t have the requisite year left on his enlistment, so they sent him a hundred miles up the coast to the Vandenberg Missile Test Range instead. Two of the brothers, a sound man/still photographer named Gene Blackwell and a lab tech named Lonnie Price, had orders cut the same day for opportunities to participate in what we jokingly called the Southeast Asia War Games, but it was no joke. They were heading for Nam. For Blackwell it was Detachment 13 (“The Lucky Thirteen”) of the 600th Photo Squadron at Nha Trang. For Price it was Squadron Headquarters at Tan Son Nhut. Just before they left, their orders were changed to detachments at Korat and Udorn, Thailand, respectively. We speculated that this was a hush-hush part of Nixon’s troop reduction plan that only looked like a troop reduction to the American public. Air Force units that moved two hundred miles west to Thailand appeared on paper to have gone home, yet remained within easy striking distance of any target in Southeast Asia. Our president, we had to admit, was a tricky bastard.
A few days after the others, Wheeler and his sidekick, Dave Murray, found out they were going to do tours as combat clerk-typists, but at opposite ends of the war zone. Wheeler was being sent to Photo Detachment 2 at Takhli, Thailand, just north of Bangkok, while Murray was going to be squirreled away with the photo outfit at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. Shahbazian got orders to do a surprise second tour at Tan Son Nhut a few weeks later, which didn’t seem to make him all that unhappy now that Kristin was pressuring him to get married. Zelinsky was a strange case—he’d avoided our anti-war activities because he wanted to go back to his old unit at Ubon, Thailand. He had volunteered so he could marry his Thai girlfriend, and knowing the Air Force, Zelinsky told us, they would have punished him by not letting him go. Maybe it was because Lutz was an undersized munchkin, but he was overlooked. His orders didn’t come through till the following spring—in plenty of time for the Big Buddha Bicycle Race.
Wheeler, from his vantage point in the orderly room, was keeping an eye on First Sergeant Link for us and reported that Link had figured incorrectly that I was the mastermind behind Norton GIs for Peace. Link made sure my orders for Tan Son Nhut came through with the first batch, but I fought it tooth and nail, applying for discharge as a conscientious objector with the help of Edward Poser, Esquire, an ACLU lawyer from Hollywood, the closest bleeding-heart enclave I could find to San Berdoo. He charged me what for an L.A. lawyer was a bargain fee of $50 an hour—even though I was only making $140 a month—but he offered me an installment plan. I would send him half my paycheck every month until my bills were paid. I accepted, given that I didn’t have much choice. He didn’t succeed in getting my orders canceled, but he did get them pushed back a month at a time while I met on base with Captain Allen Shelby, a lawyer at the judge advocate’s office, and completed a long checklist of paperwork. Along the way I was evaluated by the base chaplain and base psychiatrist, at the same time requesting supporting letters and other documents from friends and family scattered across the country. It was a relief to know that my compadres from GIs for Peace were standing behind me. As Blackwell put it, “We’re all
