Hamfist Over the Trail (5 page)

It was a classy card on thick, bamboo-like stock. One side read:

Thomas Marcos

All-American Import/Export

Shirasaki Building

5-2-20, Akasaka, Minato-ku

Tokyo, Japan

81-3-3311-8222

The back side had what looked like chicken scratches, but I recognized the same numbers.

“Is this Japanese writing?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” he responded, “To do business in Japan, you need to use both languages.”

“You mean you can read and speak Japanese?” I asked in astonishment.

“Well, it goes with the territory,” he replied nonchalantly. “I'm sure it's no harder than flying an airplane. And it helps to have a Japanese wife.”

“Wow. Your wife is Japanese?”

“Yeah,” he said, pulling a photo out of his wallet, “I really struck gold.”

I looked at the picture. Tom looked younger in the photo, and he was sitting next to a beautiful Japanese woman, and holding a young girl.

“Is that your wife and daughter?”

He nodded.

“They are both so good looking,” I said, and I wasn't just being polite. They were absolutely stunning.

“I lucked out. And, I have to admit, my daughter is a real knockout. You'll probably see Eurasian kids when you get to Vietnam. Almost invariably, they're really good-looking. I'm not that great to look at,” he waved me off as I was about to politely disagree, “but fortunately Samantha got Miyako’s looks. When she was a child, she did some modeling for some Japanese magazines. The media really love
gaijin
in Japan.”

“They love what?”

“
Gaijin
. Foreigners. You hungry?”

Actually, I suddenly found myself very hungry.

Tom could see it in my face, and pressed the intercom button to talk to the driver. “Johnny, take us to the Mark.”

People like me can't just walk into the restaurant at the top of the Mark Hopkins Hotel and get seated without a reservation. Especially on Christmas afternoon. But Tom could.

We had an awesome wraparound view of San Francisco as we ate the most incredible meal I've ever had. Now
this
was the way to get sent off to combat!

We had a great, leisurely two-hour meal, and talked about everything under the sun. About how Tom ended up in Japan and got into the import-export business. About how I got into the Academy. About Emily. About how I loved flying. About my current assignment, and how I wished I could've gotten a fighter, but this would have to do. It didn't occur to me until afterwards that I had been doing most of the talking.

“You know, Ham,” he said, “I know you're going to do great at anything you try. We can't always see the big picture, but there's a cosmic power bigger than any of us that's in control. I don't know what religion you are, but I know that you were put in that alley today for a reason. I pray to that power every night, and I'll be praying for you every night from now on, for your safe return.”

We talked on for a while, then it was time to go. You wouldn't believe the looks I got from my Hurlburt classmates when I pulled up to the Travis Passenger Terminal in a blacked-out limousine.

As I got out of the limo, Tom grasped my hand in both of his. “Ham, you have to promise me, you'll keep my
meishi.
Write to me with your mailing address, so we can stay in touch,
and call me if you ever get to Tokyo. Have a safe journey.” I saw his eyes start to well up as he closed the door. Then he was gone.

And I was on my way to Vietnam.

15

December 26, 1968

The Seaboard World Airways military contract flight to Vietnam had been horrible. I was stuck in a middle seat on a totally full plane, a DC-8. When we stopped for refueling at Hickam Air Force Base, Hawaii, we all deplaned and stretched our legs.

The waiting area was out in the open, and there was the smell of pineapple in the air. I'd been to Hawaii before, during one of my all-too-short summer vacations from the Academy, and the sweet smell brought back memories of a great vacation, a beautiful girl, and a night alone with her on the beach. After about an hour, we were mustered back into the plane.

Most of the people in the plane were young kids. Really young. Maybe eighteen or nineteen. I suspected that most of them were draftees. Almost all of them were Marines.

They were engaging in the kind of horseplay that high school kids do, probably trying to burn off nervous energy as they headed to combat. I wondered how these same kids would be acting when they returned home in a year. I wondered how many would be returning home at all.

The whole trip took about 18 hours, counting the refueling stop. By the time I got to Ton Son Nhut Air Base in Saigon, I felt totally drained.

All of us who finished O-2 training together were on the same flight. Some of the guys would be assigned to Saigon, in the south, some to Pleiku, in the Central Highlands, and some to DaNang, in the northern part of the country. Before we headed out to our final assignments, we had to in-process into Vietnam through Saigon, then we'd receive additional in-country training at Phan Rang Air Base, in the Central Highlands.

In-processing started with standing on the tarmac with our luggage, while the “white mice”, the local Vietnamese police, went through our luggage to look for contraband. It was probably only about ten in the morning, but it was already swelteringly hot on the ramp. I was exhausted, dehydrated, and really needed to use a latrine.

We were all standing in a long line with our luggage, and the baggage screener was examining the luggage of the guy at least ten people ahead of me. John Mitchell, another Lieutenant who had gone through training in my class, was right ahead of me. He had been my room-mate at the Visiting Officer Quarters in Hurlburt. He was a good guy, and I knew I could trust him.

“Hey, Mitch, will you watch my stuff? I really need to find a head.”

He replied, “Sure. No problem,” and I left the line to look for some indication of where there might be some facilities.

One of the local police ran up to me, shouting, “No leave, no leave. You stay.” He was pointing back to the line, and his right hand was menacingly resting on the gun on his hip.

“I have to use bathroom. Me want latrine.” It's funny how we Americans instinctively use “Pidgin” English as soon as we start talking to foreigners.

“No. No can do. You back in line.”

I could see I wasn't going to make any headway with this guy. Then I spotted an American Army Sergeant walking alongside the line of guys waiting to have their bags searched. He had the look of a supervisor.

I caught his eye. “Sarge, can you help me? I really need to use the head.”

“Sure, Lieutenant. Follow me.” He went up to the Vietnamese policeman who had ordered me back into the line and spoke a few words in Vietnamese. The policeman sheepishly nodded, and the Sergeant and I went off to a small nondescript building at the edge of the ramp. “Right in there, Lieutenant. Take your time. I'll wait for you out here.”

When I finished my business, the Sergeant escorted me back to the line. The baggage screeners hadn't yet made it to Mitch, the guy in front of me.

“Thanks again, Sergeant.”

“No problem, sir. We're all in this together. Welcome to Vietnam!” And he was off.

The screening seemed to take forever. The white mice went through every item I had. When they found the hunting knife Emily had given me, they insisted that I couldn't bring it into their country.

“No,” I objected, “This was a present for me. I need.”

“No bring weapon into Vietnam. Against law.”

“It not weapon,” I responded, “It survival equipment.” There was that Pidgin English again.

It was obvious I wasn't going to win this one. Here I was, coming to help these people fight a war, and they were telling me I couldn't have a weapon! If I hadn't been so tired and hot, I might have put up more of a fight, but I just wanted to get out of the relentless sun and off the ramp that was now so hot I could feel the heat through the soles of my shoes.

The policeman took my knife, seemed satisfied, and went to the next guy in line. I got the impression he was done inspecting my bag once he had found something to take from me.

As we finished clearing our bags, we were marshaled into a large hangar to complete the paperwork associated with in-processing. Although it wasn't air conditioned, we were thankfully out of the sun. It was easily twenty degrees cooler inside the hangar.

The paperwork took at least two hours to complete. We filled out dozens of forms. We had our dog-tags checked to make sure we were who we said we were. We had our shot records checked to make sure our immunizations were up-to-date. And, of course, we completed “In Case of Emergency” contact forms.

I had no way of knowing it at the time, but it would be necessary to use that information for one of us within a week.

16

December 28, 1968

Phan Rang Air Base was a real step up from the misery of Ton Son Nhut. There was a great Base Exchange – BX – and a brand new movie theater. In addition, the Officers Club was being remodeled.

The really ridiculous part was that the U.S. Air Force presence on the base was disappearing. We were going to turn the base completely over to the Vietnamese in another few months, and we had just completed a massive base beautification project. This was my first exposure to the reality that things in the military did not necessarily always make sense.

We – my classmates from Hurlburt and I – had been on base two days already, and were anxious to start pulling our own weight. The flight from Saigon had been thankfully uneventful. We'd all heard stories of cargo planes being shot up by small arms fire while carrying troops, and the C-47 “Gooney Bird” that was transporting us was slow enough to make a really great target.

The seats in the C-47 were center-facing canvas web seats lining the sides of the fuselage. We had heard a story – maybe true, maybe not – about a GI sitting in a C-47 seat when a small arms round came up through the empty seat next to him. He immediately unfastened his seat belt, the story goes, and reseated himself in the seat that had just been hit. His operating theory, apparently, was that there was NO WAY another bullet could go through the same hole! At the time, it made sense. That was before I bought in to the other operating theory that made more sense to me, “when your number's up, your number's up”

We were at Phan Rang to attend our post-graduate training at Forward Air Controller University, otherwise known as FAC-U. Here we would learn to apply, in a real combat environment, what we'd learned at Hurlburt in peacetime.

Phan Rang was an ideal location for an in-country schoolhouse. We would be conducting our training missions over a hostile area, but it was actually considered a low-threat environment. There would be the ever-present small-arms fire, of course, but there were no surface-to-air-missiles, called SAMs, no anti-aircraft artillery, called triple-A, and there were very few actual targets to conduct airstrikes against. Most of the time we would be locating a potential target on the ground, plotting its position, determining it's elevation, and then pretending to conduct an airstrike against it. And, to make it interesting, we would be constantly targeted by small arms fire.

We were issued the standard equipment before every flight. The survival vest contained a URC-64 emergency transceiver, two day/night flares, first aid kit, signaling mirror, survival knife (bigger than the one the white mice had taken from me), matches, compass and blood chit.

The blood chit was a silk scarf with Vietnamese writing on it, advising anyone who found a downed airman that they would receive a reward if they would help him return to friendly forces. It was a holdover from World War II, when the aviators of the Flying Tigers would have their blood chits sewn into their flight jackets. Back then, the writing was in Chinese.

Next, we received the standard Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver and 18 rounds of ammunition. The service weapon was accurate, and the .38 was a good self-defense round, but I wasn't really a fan of having only six rounds before needing to reload. And reloading a revolver in the dark, or when injured, would be a real challenge. We also received an AR-15 automatic rifle. It was similar to the M-16, but had a telescoping stock, which made it much more compact. It fired the same round as the M-16, the deadly high velocity .223, took the same magazine, and had the same blistering high rate of fire in automatic mode.

Finally, we had our back-pack parachutes. This would be my first exposure to flying the O-2 wearing a parachute, and my instructor took extra time to explain the bailout procedure and the process for jettisoning the right entry door in an emergency. He even went into great detail on how to, hopefully, avoid hitting the rear propeller after bailing out. The procedure, he admitted, probably wouldn't always work as advertised.

Some of the exercises we performed were pretty easy, some not so much. Flying the airplane was really a piece of cake. With both engines in line with the fuselage, called centerline thrust, engine-out maneuvering was really easy. And the airplane flew so slow, basically 120 knots, it was easy to project ahead. I had pretty much mastered the aircraft by the time I left Hurlburt, so the flying part was no big deal.