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8 July 1971

Lieutenant Rick “Moonbeam” Liscomb

Scuttlebutt in the Air Force was funny. It could be true or false. It could come true in minutes or it could take a year. Moonbeam Liscomb could generate all kinds of the stuff, which might have explained why I felt a mixture of happiness and concern at reports circulating around the detachment that the good lieutenant was finally done with the first two installments of his black pilot series and was due to rotate in. On one hand, a glorious ray of sunshine was heading our way just as we were hunkering down for the dreary monotony of rainy season. On the other hand—if only half the rumors were true—Moonbeam was on a personal journey that would not be endearing him to the Air Force commanders who would make or break his career. Few of his friends understood. I had a hunch that I did understand, that we were both in a spiritual crisis, no longer accepting the dogma of our childhood, and I had a hunch we were in turmoil over the war for similar reasons. But I also heard the voice of Father Boyle whispering in my ear, asking if Moonbeam and I weren’t surely on a parallel road to perdition.

The monsoon rains were falling now, sometimes for a few hours and sometimes all day long, but they fell every day with no letup in sight. The roar of jet engines still filled the air, but many of the F-4 Phantoms returned with a full load of undelivered ordnance, using up the entire runway before their drag shoots could bring them to a halt. Even so, another flight of two or three F-4s would soon be rumbling down the runway, climbing out and kicking in their afterburners as they disappeared into the cloudy sky. There always seemed to be a spot someplace in Southeast Asia where the clouds thinned out enough for the Wolf Pack to hunt.

With the arrival of monsoon season I’d begun wearing a rubberized nylon rain suit with the hood pulled up, resolutely riding my bike between my hootch and ComDoc with a stripe of mud splattered down my back. At night I found it soothing to ride my bike through a light drizzle over to the chapel annex to rehearse with the band or over to the base library to do some reading. And as long as it wasn’t a heavy downpour, I didn’t mind riding downtown to see Tom, Lek, Larry and Pueng, who often rewarded me with home-style Thai cooking and Khon Kaen grass.

But now Lieutenant Rick “Moonbeam” Liscomb was rotating in. Back in California we had shared an unspoken faith that we were warming up for the day when we would make our mark on Hollywood as fresh, brash New Faces. That great rapport we once shared made it hard for me to believe that Moonbeam—with the help of Ron Cooper—would soon be responsible for getting me locked out of my cozy editing cubicle at Ubon Royal Thai Air Base and sent off to a life of abject terror.

Then again, in all fairness, I may have helped set the good lieutenant on the path that nearly landed him in Long Binh Jail. It was shocking to realize how far Moonbeam could fall from his days as an intercollegiate boxing champion and trailblazing Afro-American graduate of the United States Air Force Academy. All because somewhere along the line he had begun questioning the war. I felt a mixture of pride and concern that People’s Independence Day might have been the catalyst that set him off.

Captain Sherry and I had kept it hush-hush, but word had gotten out long ago that Moonbeam was a vegetarian. It was about the same time that he became known as the first Academy graduate to admit publicly that he practiced Zen Buddhism and was a great admirer of the poet Allen Ginsberg. By fall, though, when all my free time was devoted to Danielle, further reports of Liscomb’s worrisome descent into major flakiness kept coming in. The black fighter pilot project was getting good word-of-mouth, but off duty, where Moonbeam had once been discreet dating Lisa Sherry, he started openly, defiantly dating white women, sometimes bringing them into Sarge’s Café where he’d mess with the heads of the rednecks and the bikers sitting next to him at the bar by agreeing that integration would never work.

In the months that followed my deployment to Ubon, rumors continued to trickle in that Moonbeam had flipped out even further. At first, word had it that he had joined a cult. A few weeks later Washington and Blackwell got me especially worried when I overheard them arguing whether it was the Black Panthers that Moonbeam was running with or the Nation of Islam.

Liscomb had been on the short list for assignment to Southeast Asia for some time, but his Air Force Now! series kept taking longer than planned. In the meantime, a new rumor was circulating that he and Captain Sherry had been unwinding on the weekends at a nudist colony in Topanga Canyon. The base commander at Norton and Colonel Sandstrom at AAVS decided Lisa had been a very bad girl and disappeared her in the middle of the night to the ComDoc detachment at Danang. They couldn’t do anything with Moonbeam until Part 2 was edited, but once it was, according to Wheeler, they were relieved to find that he had long ago put in for an open billet at Ubon with the 601st.

I was over at the chapel annex putting away my drums after a band rehearsal, the last one to leave as always, and was looking forward to a free cup of coffee next door at Chaplain Kirkgartner’s House of Free Expression when behind me I heard the sound of powerful, purposeful bootsteps on the polished linoleum floor. “Nice looking set of drums.”

I looked up to see Lieutenant Rick “Moonbeam” Liscomb, in the flesh, striding through the open double door. “So Wheeler was right! Welcome to Ubon, sir!”

“Cut that ‘sir’ shit. What’s this I hear about you joining a soul band?”

“Blame it all on Hank Ballard and Bo Diddley. I’ve been hooked on rhythm and blues since eighth grade. I wanted to put a blues band together back at Norton, but history didn’t cooperate—it was a country-rock kind of town.”

“History does seem to have a mind of its own,” Liscomb replied with a warm grin. I was dying to know if any or all of the rumors about him were true, but I had no idea how to broach the subject. Instead, I studied his face carefully. Moonbeam had changed since I’d last seen him, but the changes were subtle. He didn’t have that born-again Christian lobotomized look he used to share with the well-intentioned innocents who listened to “Puff, the Magic Dragon” a few too many times. But neither was he in spaced-out Zen mode, nor did he appear to be a mad-as-hell Black Nationalist like our old editorial writer at the sNorton Bird. He just seemed cool, the way he was when we first hung out at AAVS editorial and across the street at Sarge’s.

“Come on over to the coffee house next door, Lieutenant, and I’ll buy you a coffee.” He followed me through another double door and over to a dented, not-too-sparkling coffee urn. We poured ourselves some java and found ourselves a seat.

“This is kinda nice,” said Moonbeam, looking around at walls covered with posters of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Marvin Gaye and other present and future dead cultural icons.

“This is our junior chaplain’s bright idea after the race riots at Korat and Takhli. So far the guys at Ubon have preferred free Cokes, coffee and endless bullshitting to beating the crap out of each other.”

“Sounds good,” he replied, taking a sip from the Styrofoam cup. “Anybody come up with any answers?”

“I think everyone’s a little frustrated. The career guys want to kick some enemy butt, except the enemy’s been hiding lately. The young guys don’t want to be here at all, except they’ve discovered nightlife that beats spring break in Fort Lauderdale. I don’t know how much you’ve been shown around, Lieutenant, but for a basic briefing, we use an audiotape interview with a fed-up old-time fighter pilot called ‘It’s a Fucked-up War.’ The Rat Pack itself, though, is full of some pretty far-out dudes.”

He leaned in conspiratorially. “I of all people should know that.”

“How so?”

“You don’t think an Air Force Academy graduate is going to get stuck for a year in the boondocks of Southeast Asia without hand-picking some of the coolest guys in the entire Aerospace Audio-Visual Service to suffer along with him, do you?”

“You mean—“

“I kinda picture our own little sub-unit here at the 601st. How does Bitchin’ Guys Productions sound? Code name: Bravo Golf Papa. I’ll need a couple of you for the last segment of the black fighter pilot series—interviews with the dudes flying over here now. Once that’s in the can, we start slipping in some boondoggle projects in Bangkok, Chiang Mai and Pattaya Beach.”

“I just hope I’m one of the Bitchin’ Guys—“

“One of the bitchingest!” he answered with a smile and a wink. “About my only disappointment was not being able to get your old buddy Lutz over here full-time. Captain Sherry wanted to keep him at Danang, so we compromised and put him at Tan Son Nhut. We get first dibs when we need a sound guy up here on temporary duty, and it looks like I’m going to use him right away when I hop around Vietnam finishing up those interviews.”

“You’re not responsible for Shahbazian, are you? He breaks more cameras than he fixes.”

“We’ve got crates of spare cameras down in Saigon. What I really wanted was a personal driver who can play a little rhythm guitar and who’s also had experience lifeguarding, bingo-calling and generally raising hell. Woody’s our man. It keeps our options open. It was Woody’s idea, by the way, to do an Air Force Now! special on surfing Southeast Asia. It’ll give us a chance to visit China Beach over in Nam and the new R&R center down in Pattaya. If we play it right, we might even be able to swing through Okinawa, the Philippines and the Great Barrier Reef.”

Liscomb continued, “Rounding up the Bitchin’ Guys gives us one other possibility—I thought we might be able to stir up some political action like the old days back at Norton.”

I nearly spit out a mouthful of coffee. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think you’ll be able to do much political hell-raising around here. Take a look outside—there’s a war going on, and our old crew from Norton is keeping its collective head down.”

“Relax, Leary, I was just playing with you. I’ve still got plenty to do on that final segment for my Air Force Now! series. I’m heading out tomorrow to do some interviews at Bien Hoa. I’ll be meeting Lutz and a crazy Polack from Boston you might have heard of named Sliviak. Sherry is sending him down from Danang to do the camerawork. I wish I could get you in on the editing, but I’ve got to send all the footage back to Norton on this one.” He started to get up.

“Can I ask you something before you take off?”

He sat back down and said, “Shoot, Leary.”

“What were you up to back in California after I left? We’ve been hearing all kinds of rumors.”

“Such as?”

“Heard you’d joined a couple of cults. Then it was the Panthers.”

He cocked his head back and thought a moment before asking me, “What were you doing with all that anti-war stuff?”

“I was trying to make peace with my conscience—make some noise while I still had a platform. Everything I believed in was being turned upside down.”

“Well?” he asked, giving me one of his dumb-like-a-fox-smiles.

“Well what? What’s with this cult business?”

“I guess I was on some sort of spiritual quest. Someone at the Los Angeles Zen Center said I should check out the Theosophy library near Griffith Park if I was really interested in world peace and racial harmony, but they were a little too much into ESP and séances for my tastes. But that led me to Krishnamurti, who had been selected as a child over in India to be the prophet-guru for the entire Theosophy movement until he abdicated and retired to the hills outside Ojai. He was brilliant, but Ojai is a four-hour haul from San Bernardino. I had to fly commercial up to San Francisco at one point and ended up sitting next to a very foxy producer from Argentina. She told me that if I was interested in world peace and harmony with a little meditation thrown in, I should check out the gardens and meditation centers built throughout California in the Twenties by an Indian guru named Yogananda. She was right about the temples and gardens being lovely, and I liked their belief that Christianity and Hinduism could coexist, but the Hindu part of the program had too many gods and gurus for me to keep track of. One of her friends invited me to a Baha’i service, and they seemed like lovely people believing as they did in world peace and equality for men and women, but they met in private homes and I was on the road too much to follow up. It was almost like I was wearing a sign saying ‘recruit me,’ because I was invited to check out a bunch of other groups like Science of Mind and Nichiren Shoshu and Scientology and even a group that believed Jesus was coming to pick us up in a space ship in the year 2000. At which point I said, ‘Whoa! Why don’t I stay focused on a single path and work on inner peace before I try to save the whole world?’ The ritual at the Zen Center was complicated, but the meditation itself was something I could do the rest of my life.

“Unfortunately, I had trouble applying my spiritual practice to the racism I kept hearing about putting the Tuskegee Airmen piece together. I think I told you about how they were denied admission to the Officers’ Club at Wright-Pat when they got back from Germany. The court-martial that followed played a major role in Truman’s decision to integrate the entire armed forces and gave the story a happy ending, but they never would have left Alabama if Eleanor Roosevelt hadn’t interceded for them. They were getting busted on the way to flight training because redneck MPs couldn’t believe Negroes were capable of flying airplanes. And so on.

“And then, while I was back in California editing that segment, I got a strange request to drive in to L.A. to interview some Vietnam infantry veterans. They had gotten wind of the project and wanted to clue me in that they had all been sent out on highly dangerous LRRP missions doing long-range reconnaissance in the mountains and jungles along the Laotian border after committing minor infractions with their home units along the coast of Vietnam. They took terrible casualties and promised each other they’d meet up again as members of a Black Panther assassination squad when they got ‘back to the World.’ I couldn’t use the material, but they clued me in that the Panthers really did have a bunch of Vietnam combat veterans in their ranks. It sounded impressive—except what they were talking about was suicidal. One of them turned me on to a Black Muslim minister who was very convincing talking to me about Black Pride and the need for black men to step up, but he lost me with stuff about white men being blue-eyed devils and how their prophet Elijah Muhammad never died, how he’s flying around the earth in some kind of spaceship called the Mother Wheel. Another former LRRP turned me on to traditional Islam and the absence of racism in the teachings of Muhammad, but the world peace part seemed to be missing when I looked through the Koran he gave me. Long story short, I returned to my Zen meditation practice. And then it was time for me to go back out on the road for the Korean and Cold War segment of the series.

“The more active-duty black pilots I talked to, the more I was bugged about lingering discrimination in the military, but I began losing interest in black nationalism when I started investigating Martin Luther King’s perspective—seeing the Vietnam War as a distraction from solving social problems at home and seeing passive resistance as a way to elevate black and white Americans the way Gandhi liberated India and Britain by waging peace instead of war. Is there anything else you wanted to ask about?” he asked.

“Was there any truth to the stories about you and Captain Sherry at Elysium?”

“We checked it out. But the base commander was a lot more upset when we tried to get an integrated bowling league going off-base. ‘Blacks don’t bowl in San Bernardino,’ he told me.”