Wheeler, in addition to keeping an eye on Link, was using his back-channel contacts to make sure my application didn’t get lost in the bowels of the Pentagon. Up at Vandenberg, it hadn’t taken Sonny Stevens long to see how the brass was using a divide-and-conquer strategy to destroy Norton GIs for Peace. He resisted in a small way that summer by moving back to the area following his discharge. Going underground, he holed up on a ranch out in the desert near Victorville, growing marijuana to make ends meet. We co-edited the paper, bringing in an old friend of Blackwell and Price’s, a hard-as-nails, pissed-off black Air Policeman just back from Pleiku, to give the editorial writing a little Black Panther bite. Still working out of the Movement House, we organized a GI contingent to lead a peace march on Riverside, home of March Air Force Base and the Big Ugly Friggin’ “BUF” B-52s of Link and Sandstrom’s old 22nd Bomb Wing. Maybe this was when I started to lose my mind, or maybe it was the presence of living, breathing long-haired hippie chicks from the University of Redlands and Cal State Riverside that got the better of my good judgment, but the next thing I knew we were promoting the Riverside peace march—off duty, wearing civvies—by handing out leaflets at the entrance to George Air Force Base, a fighter base situated not far from Stevens’s pot plantation, and at March Field itself. Given that March was a SAC base where Air Policemen in the perimeter guard towers shot to kill, we didn’t squawk when they confiscated our fliers and brought us in for questioning. The hippie college girls seemed impressed when I called Captain Shelby at the JAG office at Norton and arranged our release—albeit with orders to stay five hundred feet from the main gate. An Oceanside march—next door to Camp Pendleton and half the Marines in America—soon followed. On both occasions I somehow ended up making speeches in front of thousands of people. Stevens’s prediction seemed to come true when I started getting involved with one of the organizers from the Movement House who had been with me the night we were arrested, but she broke it off over some unfathomable breech of hipness at the moment of our greatest triumph—People’s Independence Day, a Fourth of July rally that filled up a park in the middle of San Bernardino.
Shahbazian, Wheeler, and Zelinsky, my old Tijuana drinking buddies, stood together in the front row cheering me on, and next to them was my lovely radical organizer. Zelinsky knew he was shipping out the following week, and Wheeler and Shahbazian would be gone by the end of summer. Our hulking Air Policeman/editorial writer and an equally imposing cohort stood behind me on the dais, out of uniform, my volunteer bodyguards. Sonny Stevens, Frank Lutz and a couple of the bigger guys from the Movement House, also ex-GIs, weren’t too far away, keeping their eyes out for any local crazies who might decide to rush the podium. I was glad to have them, because the only San Bernardino policemen I could spot were off in a distant parking lot enjoying coffee and doughnuts. The crowd was minuscule after what I had seen in Washington, but by San Bernardino County standards, several thousand people at a political rally was substantial, enough to attract an editor, a couple of reporters, and a photographer from the San Bernardino and Riverside newspapers. In the midst of introducing a lineup of agitprop folksingers, student radicals from the University of Redlands and UC Riverside, and a pair of Farmworkers Union organizers, I spotted Captain Shelby, along with Lieutenant Liscomb, Lieutenant Sherry, and a couple other young production officers, all dressed in civvies, observing the rally from the shade of a gnarly California oak. And then it was my turn to speak.
“Our objectives in Vietnam are illusory and our means of attaining them are barbaric,” I said, trying to sound presidential even though I was skinny as a toothpick and in my twenties. I caught an approving smile from my soon-to-be-ex-flame and continued. “Where is this administration taking us? Where will the escalation end? If we are pursuing a failed policy, how can we continue to ask young Americans to die? And how can we ask black and Latino GIs to shed more blood than their white counterparts when they are still fighting for their civil rights at home? Who will be the last to die in this tragic lost cause? Is there anyone in Washington who would step forward to take their place?”
I thought I noticed Liscomb standing up a little straighter, straining to hear, but he was too far away for me to be sure. I continued, questioning the wisdom of a peacetime draft, comparing it to slavery, and hoped nobody noticed too many contradictions when I compared the modern U.S. to ancient Rome and Athens and to the Spanish, French and British empires in modern times, asking if we too were in decline and about to fall. I took another glance at the girl from the Movement House and finished up with the best Jack Kennedy imitation I could muster, seeming to inspire the audience when I exhorted, “If this nation is to survive as a beacon of democracy, we must commit ourselves to ending the war now! It is we who have taken on the awesome responsibility of leading the way. We must not falter! We must have peace!”
I was still basking in warm applause when we opened up the mike and Lieutenant Barry Romo stepped out of the crowd. Almost as soon as Romo took the podium, I realized that a new day had arrived. Stateside GI speakers were no longer needed. We now had combat veterans like Romo coming back, fresh in from hand-to-hand fighting in the Ashau Valley, who were willing and able to tell it like it was and who had all the strength, intelligence and character that a Lieutenant William Calley lacked. “The valley of the shadow of death,” he called it, “a place where even the Lord’s rod and staff offered little comfort.” As instinctively as he might have taken one of those nameless hills in the Central Highlands, Romo had taken the open mike, pouring out his heart with a true soldier’s understated eloquence. “Again and again my men died to take an objective. Whether it was a hilltop or a village, it didn’t matter. We never failed. And again and again we were pulled out, giving that hard-earned ground back to the enemy…”
I could see Moonbeam Liscomb in the distance wanting to make a move for the stage. And I think it was his own privileged upbringing that held him back. He’d been raised black-upper-middle-class in Washington, DC, sensing the racism rampant in the country but never really experiencing it overtly except in its most refined forms—like the pressure of being the third black man ever to enter the Air Force Academy. Even from a hundred yards away I could see Moonbeam inching forward, away from his fellow officers and out into the hot sun. I wondered what was running through his mind, sensing that he regretted being trapped in his role as an Air Force support officer and that he realized he would never have his own war stories to tell.
I never really got a chance to talk to him about it, though. His proposal for an Air Force Now! series on black fighter pilots was fast-tracked into production in a matter of weeks. It meant he would be on the road the rest of the summer and most of the fall doing interviews, starting with World War II–era Tuskegee Airmen who went on to form the 99th Pursuit Squadron, an all-black fighter unit that had distinguished itself in North Africa and Europe. The plan called for following up with black aviators who had flown in Korea and during the Cold War. He would conclude with black pilots before and after tours of duty in Vietnam. Alas, it was going to involve months of editing. My iffy status—not knowing if I was going to be discharged or sent off to Tan Son Nhut—meant the end of my collaboration with Moonbeam. Instead, I’d be back doing puff-piece news releases while I waited out Poser’s legal dogfight with the Air Force.
Just before Zelinsky shipped out we learned that Link had requested assignment to Ubon. He joked that it was so he could personally look after Zelinsky and protect him from the rest of us bastards, Wheeler reported, but in reality he had already been stationed there the year before Zelinsky and another tour in a combat zone would give him a shot at making chief master sergeant before he retired. “He’s got to do it before the war ends,” Zelinsky quipped. “Nobody makes rank in the peacetime Air Force.” The whole unit was relieved when Link actually shipped out a few weeks later.
Over the next few months Lieutenant Liscomb was so busy with his Air Force Now! series that we scarcely saw him. I worried about my buddies who had been shipped overseas, deeply appreciating the supporting letters they had written for my discharge petition and the thanks they had offered me and Stevens for keeping Norton GIs for Peace going in their absence. Knowing they had been sent off to a war zone motivated me and Stevens to work hard, meeting with what remained of Norton GIs for Peace to plan for the fall and do more organizing
