and when they scattered the GIs for Peace membership, they successfully knocked a lot of the wind out of our sails. Late in August when Sonny and I went by the Movement House, it was boarded up, giving us a high and dry feeling. I felt a little higher and drier when the FBI called the extension in my editing room at Norton, asking me if I recognized any of the calls made to that number with a stolen telephone company credit card. I played dumb and they didn’t call back.
I didn’t get into Sarge’s much anymore, and when I did, I never saw Liscomb. Instead, I spent most of what little free time I had at the base theater with Ron Cooper, joining him up in the projection booth. He was on a kick about how you could learn a lot from watching bad movies, which is mostly what we got. I feared that the only thing we were learning was how to make bad movies.
Lieutenant Sherry, now Captain Sherry, requested me on a couple of her news releases and kept me up to date on Moonbeam, expressing mild concern that he had entered his Quiet Period, doing long periods of Zen meditation on the carpet of his bachelor officer apartment, only breaking off occasionally to take out his guitar and play along to his favorite soft-core protest songs. I ran into him by chance one day on his way to the dubbing stage at AAVS and asked him how the Tuskegee Airmen piece was coming along. “Would you believe they got arrested trying to enter the Officers’ Club at Wright-Patterson when they got back to the States after the war?”
That was not an answer I was expecting. I cleared my throat before replying, “I think that got left out of the defeating Hitler part of our U.S. history books. Maybe you can set the record straight.” Changing the subject, I asked if the meditation he was doing was anything like what Jack Kerouac had been into.
Moonbeam just smiled. “The Beats didn’t quite get it right,” he told me. “They were trying to take an easy path into Zen without giving up sex, caffeine and alcohol.”
I didn’t get to follow up, nor did I especially want to. With Wheeler and Shahbazian exiled to Southeast Asia, I’d had to move from our chalet into a one-bedroom cabin, but a week before Labor Day something miraculous happened: Danielle Haber showed up. We had barely known each other back in Washington, DC, and yet the few hours we had spent together had lingered poignantly in both our memories. We had met by chance during the candlelight march to the White House that opened the Moratorium II weekend. I first noticed her while we were walking along Memorial Bridge, crossing the Potomac from Arlington Cemetery toward the Lincoln Memorial. It was just after sunset, and the November night was crisp but mild. The procession was solemn and dignified, so we didn’t talk much, but when we did, I was soothed by the clarity of her voice and her quiet intelligence. It wasn’t until afterward when she poured a glass of wine for me up in her apartment that I was struck by her subdued beauty. She looked at me with pure blue eyes that were unafraid to let me see deep inside her when I returned her gaze. When I tried to put my arm around her she was gentle when she pushed me away, putting her hand on my arm in a way that still kept me close. “My husband was killed last summer, just before I was supposed to start my junior year at Drexel. The Army only told us he was killed in action, but a friend wrote later that Craig’s M-16 jammed crossing a stream near a village west of Huế. My family tried to console me, but how could they? I dropped out of school and ended up moving in with a girlfriend in D.C. who knew about an opening at a gallery in Georgetown. So here I am,” she said with a sad smile.
Danielle was only supposed to crash with me in San Bernardino for the first few days of a two-week California vacation, but one day led to another and she still hadn’t left for San Francisco. On the tenth day she told me she wanted to stay. I told her it was fine with me. She had some money put aside, and we could live together for almost nothing in our little log cabin. With Danielle around, I enjoyed chopping firewood for the old stone fireplace. Whatever food we needed I got cheaply at the base commissary. Soon I was agreeing with her that going back to school in January was a good idea, and after putting in a call to the admissions offices at Cal Arts and the University of Redlands she was encouraged enough to give up her gallery job in D.C., unpack her suitcases and send in her applications. In the meantime, while she waited to hear back from the colleges, she started dropping me off at the base and heading over to the SDS and SMC offices at UC Riverside. She wasn’t fussy—she designed anti-war posters when that was needed but didn’t mind handing out leaflets wherever they sent her. She fell in love with our cabin in the mountains and started putting up curtains and decorating it with folksy rugs and rustic furniture we found in the antique shops around Crestline and Big Bear. She fell in love with swimming and hiking up there with me on the weekends and with coming home to cook together in our tiny kitchen. Best of all she started to fall in love with me, and I felt the same way about her.
My original orders had been cut for Squadron Headquarters, Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Republic of Vietnam, like Price’s. My lawyer’s delays might have had something to do with it, but I suspected it had more to do with the fine print in Nixon’s troop reduction plan that my orders were changed from Tan Son Nhut to an outpost on the Laotian frontier of Thailand called Ubon. I never would have heard of the place if Zelinsky didn’t have a girlfriend there and Link hadn’t decided to return for an encore, which got me wondering if he had anything to do with my change of orders. I was slated to join them at Detachment 3 of the 601st Photo Squadron as an editor of bomb damage assessment footage—BDA for short. When I found Ubon on a map, I noticed it was smack dab in the middle of Southeast Asia, an hour by fighter-bomber from potential targets all over North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Zelinsky mentioned that he had never seen a reporter in Ubon the entire year he was there on his first tour, something we were sure the press-hating Nixon found comforting. I did not find it comforting to see that Ubon was fewer than fifty miles from either Cambodia or Laos—a two-day march for an enemy infantry unit. It was even less comforting to realize that my old nemesis, First Sergeant Link, was already there waiting for me, but it made Danielle happy, at least, that I wasn’t going to Vietnam.
We fell even more deeply in love that autumn, and she decided to pass on Cal Arts, despite its great reputation, because it would mean moving two hours away. We were still in love when she started at Redlands in January. It was tricky, but we managed to juggle our schedules and get by with my aging Bug. Thank God she was still in love with me when I phoned my Hollywood ACLU lawyer one chilly Thursday in March and learned that I was shipping out the following Monday. “Sorry, I haven’t had a chance to call you,” he said in a nasally voice. “You lost the restraining order and the writ of habeas corpus, but I’ll keep working on it from this end. In the meantime, when you get over there, just follow lawful orders.”
I would have asked about unlawful orders, except I was speechless. He’d already won a case like mine, which gave me both confidence he could win mine and doubts he’d bother to try. Danielle and I spent the next day packing and making love and putting things into storage and making love a little more. We decided to drive down to Mexico for our last weekend together and camp along the Baja coast where the cactus-filled desert ran down to the sea at San Felipe. We zipped our sleeping bags together and slept under the stars, making love with the sea breeze lapping at our faces, and in the morning we had breakfast in a little cantina on the edge of town that served fresh ceviche, warm tortillas and hot, black coffee.
We got back late Sunday night, exhausted. The next morning I gave Danielle the keys to the V-Dub and she drove me and my duffle bag to the base passenger terminal. She cried hard and I forgot for a moment about being afraid and alone, kissing her and comforting her and promising that I’d write to her every day and that a year would go by in no time. Walking down the aisle of the chartered 707, I didn’t see a single face I recognized, not a soul to warn me that I was going to get to be a combat cameraman after all.
March 1971
Klong Airlines
I spent my first night in Thailand just outside Bangkok at a small
