Читать книгу The Big Buddha Bicycle Race - Terence A. Harkin - Страница 14

April-May 1971

Woodstock East

I lived on the base in a tin-roofed hootch with only a ceiling fan for air conditioning, sleeping in a squeaky bunk, keeping myself clean in hopes that Danielle still wanted a proper church wedding when my time came to go back to what black GIs called “the World” and what I still called home. I quickly settled into a mind-numbing routine at work, cutting combat film day after day, bearing witness to endless miles of South Vietnam as beautiful as the Thai countryside being laid waste with napalm, rockets and cluster bombs originating from Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base. The enemy was firing back with anti-aircraft artillery (“triple-A”)—we saw plenty on the Night Operations footage—and sending up MiG interceptors and triple-A over North Vietnam, but it had been eerie—not one plane flying out of Ubon had been shot down for ten months. Sure, we had recently lost two of our cameramen, Spinelli and Nevers, but they had been on TDY out of Danang. And it was during Lam Son 719, the screwed-up South Vietnamese attempt at invading Laos that got bogged down along Route 9. They shouldn’t have even been on the helicopter that crashed; they were supposed to be on a flight back to Ubon, but they couldn’t pass up a chance to cover the operation with Larry Burrows, the famous Life photographer who went down with them. I slipped into a kind of trance as I spliced together scenes of extraordinary violence, acquiescing in silence the way Richard Poser, Esquire, had instructed me to and wishing I could quit thinking altogether.

I couldn’t stop thinking, though, and soon understood the rules of engagement well enough to know that our light observation planes were being shot at by real snipers using real bullets and were spotting real guerillas disappearing into the hamlets and jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia when they called in air strikes, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how our pilots knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that every sampan we sank and every village we bombed and burned belonged to the enemy. I found myself wondering how many times it only took sighting a single flash from an enemy rifle down below to entice our fighter-bombers into destroying an entire village built with the calloused hands of peasants who had lived among the same patch-quilt rice paddies for a hundred generations.

Colonel Grimsley, the base commander, and Captain English, our commander at ComDoc, made it clear that those were the kinds of questions they did not want asked. At Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, at Commander’s Call and posted on bulletin boards everywhere, “loyalty” was the buzzword. “Loyalty” meant keeping your mouth shut. Lifers and apprentice lifers knew the drill. Loyal soldiers did not make waves that would keep captains and colonels from getting anything less than perfect efficiency reports and their tickets to advancement punched properly. So I did my job and kept my mouth shut and spoke only in whispers to Tom Wheeler and Larry Zelinsky.

One concession to convention at Ubon that came easy was getting myself a basic five-speed no-name aluminum road bike when Wheeler got his. The base was crawling with bicycles, which I found comforting. It reminded me of a pleasant college campus back home, except that the birds chirping in the distance at Ubon were a little bigger, noisier and more carnivorous than the pigeons that nibbled at breadcrumbs on a college green. For the entire month of March and most of April, while other guys were heading off base to go nightclubbing and visit massage parlors, drinking and doing some of the purest drugs money could buy, I rode my bicycle over to the base library and holed up reading the American Cinematographer. I wrote to Danielle every day, telling her that I missed her and how even though American foot soldiers were truly going home, things were tougher than anyone could imagine for the Vietnamese. I put it off for a few weeks, but I finally started getting ready for my discharge hearing, motivated by a hunch they would be springing it on me unexpectedly. It wasn’t long before I was reading about the brutal, tragic history of the French in Indochina in books like Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place and finding myself obsessed with how we were repeating so many of their mistakes. When I tried to figure out where Thailand fit in, I didn’t get past the Encyclopedia Britannica for the answers to be disturbing—our ally was a constitutional monarchy that had had more coups than elections since the current king’s grandfather gave up absolute power in 1932. The entire World War II era was murky, with factions overseas seeming to be pro-Ally while Thailand itself was ruled by a Franco-like character who hadn’t put up any resistance to the Japanese occupation worth writing about. Unions were illegal even though per-capita income in the Issan region that included Ubon wasn’t much more than fifty dollars a year, which might have explained the history of leftist insurgency in the Northeast. Equally disturbing to me, Thailand received plenty of U.S. aid to put it down.

Tom Wheeler and Larry Zelinsky worried about me. They weren’t readers—Wheeler pretty well stayed with Rolling Stone, and Zelinsky confessed he hadn’t touched a book since elementary school. They didn’t go in much for letter writing, either. Instead, they kept twisting my arm, telling me I needed to get off the base—to get some exercise, if nothing else, and to keep the lifers from messing with my head twenty-four hours a day—but I passed.

The war sucked, and the work sucked, but something miraculous was going on with the staffing at ComDoc. Almost as if the by the hand of God, cool guys from Norton kept turning up at Ubon. Two of the first came from the Soul Brother division of Norton GIs for Peace—Blackwell, the soundman/still photographer who had been stationed at Korat, and Price, the lab technician who came down from Udorn. And of course there was Wheeler, who had never even made it to his original assignment at Takhli, and his sidekick Murray. Some were cool guys I didn’t even know about like Ernie Perez, another lab tech. As a novice film editor at Norton I rarely left my editing room and rarely spoke to anyone besides the writer-producers and the directors assigned to my projects. The motion picture laboratory might as well have been on another planet. And given that Perez was from Spanish Harlem and a devotee of Tito Puente’s, he had never turned up at Sarge’s, where it was strictly country rock for the young dudes and a little rockabilly for the lifers.

It was similar with Jamal Washington, the very cool motion picture cameraman. I had hung out with Ron Cooper, but he had the single next door to my room in the barracks at Norton. Washington was in a different barracks and was more a habitué of Jerry’s Velvet Lounge, an elegant jazz and blues club on the north side of San Berdoo, than of a biker bar like Sarge’s. I did know his work, though. His footage was consistently good—as good as Ron Cooper’s—and he hadn’t gone to Bob Jones University or Disney Studios to learn it. I started bumping into him regularly once we got to Ubon and noticed that he usually had Otis Redding or Big Mama Thornton going on the tape deck he’d set up in the cameramen’s ready room at ComDoc. He seemed pleasantly amused when I told him they were two of my favorite singers.

Maybe the strangest, coolest move of all was when my old cabin mate, Woody Shahbazian, the Air Force’s worst camera technician, got reassigned from Tan Son Nhut to Ubon. He had become the Air Force’s worst camera technician because he had flunked out of missile school and the Air Force couldn’t think of anything better to do with the two and a half years left on his enlistment after he returned from his first stint in Vietnam. He tried to make his tour sound like a lark—lifeguarding at the Officers’ Club swimming pool and renting out inflatable rafts for the beach—except he wore that leather wristband in honor of his dead hootchmates. The wristband drove the lifers crazy, but it was legal. Much of what Woody did was legal but maddening to lifers, a legacy of his childhood as an Air Force brat. B-58 pilots like his dad had a tradition of thumbing their noses at rear-echelon types, and that tradition had been passed on to Woody even though Woody himself was a rear-echelon type. His bad eyes had prevented him from becoming a pilot, but he knew the regs better than the NCOs who tried to rein him in.

While we were still at Norton, Woody had managed to run up some serious gambling debts in Las Vegas with his new gal pal, Kristin, who had been unable to dissuade him from booking penthouse suites that cost per weekend what he was making in a month. The tab he and Kristin had amassed at Sarge’s would take a couple more months’ paychecks to clear up, and for a coup de grâce, he had managed to put an expensive ding in his restored Porsche showing off for Kristin out at the L.A. County fairgrounds trying to pretend he knew how to run time trials. Woody had made a nifty profit on his first tour shipping home a case of Johnson’s Baby Powder filled with Laotian grass that had fallen out of the back of a visiting Air America “rice supply” flight. He confessed to me later that he had gladly gotten caught passing out the sNorton Bird, knowing that the war couldn’t last forever and thinking it might be a good time for a final business trip to Southeast Asia. With a little luck he’d be able to pay Kristin back the cash she’d lent him and get taken into the family business before she caught on that his trust fund had dried up long ago.

He showed up at Ubon driving a dusty red Fiat convertible and still sported a scruffy goatee when he reported in. Speaking with the trace of a French accent, he claimed to have driven over to Thailand, which should have been impossible since it meant passing through parts of Cambodia we had invaded and abandoned less than a year earlier. When he said he had no trouble taking the ferry over from Pakse, Laos, we cringed to think he had stumbled onto a western branch of the Ho Chi Minh Trail for the last leg of the trip. “The trick is to only travel by day,” he said with an insouciant grin, “and insist you are French or Canadian…or French Canadian. A forged passport helps.” Our only complaint about Woody was that he had hung out with the “Proud to Be an Okie from Muskogee” crowd over in Saigon and was more into country and western now than ever. We weren’t sure what to make of the white Grand Prix jump suit he’d had custom-made in a Saigon tailor shop.

Wheeler pricked our interest when he told us that according to his reliable source over at CBPO, the rumor was true that Moonbeam Liscomb was behind the moves. The story was especially intriguing because, according to the latest scuttlebutt, Moonbeam himself was slotted to be coming in once his black fighter pilot series was wrapped up. Rumor also had it that he had completely flipped out, joining a couple of crazy California cults for a month or two and then turning right around and getting involved with some Black Nationalist group in South Central L.A.

None of this seemed to make much difference at first. Despite the colorful new cast of characters that was reporting in, I continued to live a monk-like existence, holing up in my editing cubicle by day and the library by night before climbing into my lumpy bunk for a bad night’s sleep. Sainthood began to get a lot more difficult, however, when I heard from Ernie Perez about Talent Night, held every Monday at the Ubon Hotel. I had left my drums with Danielle, never imagining they had rock bands in a war zone. Ernie told me about a place downtown on Prommaraj Road not too far from the Noy Market called Woodstock Music where I was able to pick out a pair of drumsticks. I drove the guys in the hootch crazy while I practiced on a couple of coffee cans and a pretzel tin I was able to scrounge from the base dumpsters, but when Talent Night came I was able to do a pretty decent drum solo, given that I was playing a cappella on the house drum set without a band or a song for context other than humming “Topsy, Part II” in my head. Perez, Wheeler, Zelinsky and a few other guys from the detachment were there to egg me on, buying me a few rounds of Mekhong whiskey and soda, and it even looked for a while like I might win. My hopes were dashed, though, when Woody Shahbazian, who used to torment me back at Norton with country music, showed up with his battered guitar case, pulled out his vintage Martin D-28, and tormented me once again with “Your Cheatin’ Heart” to win the twenty-dollar first prize. He sewed it up with a yodeling finale that drove the lifer contingent wild and forced Zelinsky to howl along in agony. But in the end it worked out fine because Brother Brian Golson, lead singer for the Band of Brothers, and Sugie Bear Suggs, his bass player, introduced themselves and told me that their drummer was rotating back to the World.

That Saturday night I hopped on my five-speed and headed downtown to sit in for a couple of numbers at the Soul Sister, located just across a potholed street from the Club Miami and not far from an iffy part of town that was full of Vietnamese refugees and Off Limits. They seemed to like my rimshots on “Knock on Wood” and when they “gave the drummer some” on a James Brown number, they must have kept on liking what they heard. I was in and accepted a chance to buy the old drummer’s made-in-Japan drum kit cheap. I also agreed to a Monday rehearsal at the base chapel annex, a large multi-purpose room where we stored our equipment. Did I know any guitar players? They were still looking for a lead guitar to take the pressure off “the Reverend,” as they affectionately called Golson, so he could play rhythm and concentrate on his vocals. I briefly thought of Shahbazian but didn’t think a Merle Haggard sound was what they were looking for.

The day after my audition, I rode my bike downtown again, this time back to Woodstock Music. I was trying to decide between some Ludwig and Slingerland drumsticks when I struck up a conversation with Sommit and Vrisnei, the friendly young brother and sister who ran the music part of Yoon On Store for their eternally middle-aged Thai-Chinese parents. Sommit, the brother, wore casual Western clothes, spoke exceptionally good English and was crazy about American music. In a hushed voice, he promised top dollar for any jazz or rock albums I could bring him from the BX. It sounded good to me—a chance to make some spare change for doing musical missionary work. Vrisnei was a year or two younger than her brother. Wearing little makeup and keeping her hair pulled back simply under a bandanna, she was wholesomely attractive. It was while she was ringing up my purchase that Harley Baker came in looking for guitar strings. Sommit introduced us and told me, “Khun Harley play guitar very good!”

Baker was a twenty-three-year-old lifer in training, a hatchet-faced gunner with the 16th Special Operations Squadron, but it didn’t take much chatting to learn that he also played a mean, bluesy Les Paul guitar. And it didn’t take much more chatting to find out he was game to come to the Monday rehearsal and take a crack at joining the Band of Brothers. He was hired on the spot. And so it was that within two days a couple of jive white dudes joined an otherwise all-black soul band.

Wheeler and Zelinsky were finally able to talk me into dropping by their off-base bungalow once I started performing downtown with the band, enticing me at first with an invitation to join their merry crew for Thai food. Whether it was home-cooked or from a street vendor, it was a big improvement over chow-hall grub. Khaopaht gung, a simple, mildly spicy shrimp fried rice, cost twenty-five cents from a mama-sahn on the street and was more delicious than anything I had ever eaten in Boston, with the possible exception of Lobster Newberg. Soon I was spending a lot of my free evenings with Wheeler, Groendyke, Zelinsky and his fiancée, Pueng, hoping Lek, Wheeler’s new girlfriend, would show up with fresh fruit for dessert.

Before long, I was also stopping by to smoke a little weed, which didn’t seem to be anywhere near as dangerous to our bodies or souls as Sister Susan, Father Boyle, and the federal government had warned us. It wasn’t much later that Baker stopped in with me one night after a gig. When they heard he was from Fresno, Zelinsky and Wheeler, stoned, started reminiscing about California, which led to Norton GIs for Peace and the sNorton Bird.

“So you guys are fuckin’ Peaceniks?” The mellow mood was over for Harley. “Let me explain something just once: our main job here at Ubon is to stop convoys coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Fuck the Geneva Accords and fuck politics—American or Vietnamese. If we don’t kill trucks, American soldiers get killed.”

Tom, the mellowest of the mellow, calmed things down. “Why don’t we call a truce?” And with that he lit up his bong, passed it over to Harley, and put on some Johnny Winters.

Late that night, lying on my bunk back at my hootch, it hit me—I was halfway around the world from everything I had ever known. Even on a base crawling with six thousand American airmen, I was lonely as hell without Danielle.