Solo (15 page)

Johnny and Poo were still in Japan, partying. But given the emergency, they were quietly placed back on flight status. We needed all the pilots we could muster. They caught a cargo hop to Osan. Luckily war did not come, and the tension gradually dissipated. In the hubbub, Johnny and Poo’s transgression was somehow forgotten. They heard no more about their incident. We told them we had started a war to get them out of trouble.

“L
ET’S STEAL THE
base commander’s car,” said Fireball. Several of us were sitting in the bar at Osan—not drinking, because we were on alert—listening to a radio broadcast that had just announced a fund-raising scheme for an off-base orphanage. Items could be confiscated, or a person could be voluntarily kidnapped and taken to the radio station. A ransom sum would be decided. If the owner of the item or a friend of the kidnappee called the station and pledged a ransom from a base organization, then the location of the confiscated item would be revealed or the kidnapped person would be released.

A new base commander, after a few weeks of command in mid-1969, was threatening to change the dress rules at the officer’s club. His plan was to ban flight suits in the officer’s club after 5:00 p.m. In both Japan and Korea—and on any other air base, as far as we knew—a pilot could go directly to the club in his flight suit and unwind after a flight. At any time of day.

In ten minutes we were driving in our alert truck by the base commander’s residence, which was on top of a hill in the middle of the base. Big house. And sitting placidly in his driveway, just outside of his garage, was his car—a big black sedan. We’d had to drive through a guarded gate to get to his residence, and we would have to drive back out the same way. But because we were in a U.S. Air Force alert truck and an officer was driving (the other two of us were hidden down on the back floorboard), our truck had been saluted and waved on in. We didn’t know if driving the general’s car
out
would be so easy.

I was selected to see if keys were in the ignition. I walked casually to the car and looked in the window. Yes—and the door was unlocked. I returned to our truck and told the boys. Piece of cake. Fireball and I approached the car, I got in and put the car in neutral, and then we pushed it out the driveway and into the street. I jumped in and cranked it as Fireball got on the floor in the backseat. Of course the guard at the gate knew this car. We hoped that he wouldn’t stop us.

He didn’t.

So where do you hide a general’s car? It was a nice automobile. We drove around on base for a while. It was about 10:30 p.m. We found ourselves on a dead-end road that ended in a small field with trees. We drove out onto the field. The field was wet, and toward the trees it became very muddy. We drove the car into the mud. The alert truck stood by in case the Klaxon sounded and we were called to nuclear war. The car was good and stuck.

“We shouldn’t have two sets of footprints leaving the car,” said Fireball from the backseat.

“Why?”

“Conspiracy. They’ll figure it out. It needs to seem like a one-man job.”

“How are we going to leave one set of footprints?”

“You get out. I climb on your back.”

“You just don’t want to get your damn boots muddy. I think we ought to—”

By this time I was out of the car with my back to the front door. Fireball was climbing on.

When we got back to the club, I called the radio station to let them know what was up. I told the announcer that the base commander’s car had been stolen and it seemed to me that the ransom should be very high. He agreed and then asked me what unit I was with.

“What unit?” I answered.

“Yes. What unit?”

“Why do you need to know that?”

“We’re keeping records. We just need to know.”

“Do I have to tell you?”

“Well, sure.”

“What if I don’t?”

“Then I guess you’ll have to work all this out on your own. In order to make the announcement on the air, we have to have all the information.”

“Okay. The Thirty-fifth Tac Fighter Squadron.”

“What’s the ransom amount?”

“A hundred bucks.”

I went back into the bar and sat down with my buddies.
In about five minutes we heard this announcement: “And we’ve just got this one in. The base commander’s car has been stolen by members of the Thirty-fifth Tactical Fighter Squadron . . .”

Everybody looked at me. “Why the hell did you say who we were?!” somebody said.

“. . . and the sum of the ransom we’re placing on the car can be decided by our generous commander, but our suggested amount is one hundred dollars. Hats off to members of the Thirty-fifth Tac Fighter Squadron.”

We waited for the hammer to fall, but it never did. And the new flight suit rule never went through, though our effort probably wasn’t the reason.

W
E DID HEAR WORDS
from the base commander on another occasion, a month or so later.

Near a side door to the officer’s club at Osan were two parking spaces marked
ALERT VEHICLE.
I’d never seen any vehicle except ours parked in these spaces. One night, as we approached the officer’s club, I noticed a car in one of the reserved spaces. An alert truck would have to park elsewhere. I was thinking, Who the hell is that? A closer inspection told me: it was the same car we’d kidnapped. Rather than do the brave thing—find the general and ask him to move his car—I phoned the air police and told them about the unauthorized car in an alert-vehicle parking place at the officer’s club. They asked for my name. I thought, I don’t have a damn thing to hide; I am so
right
on this and he is so blatantly wrong.

Next day, a meeting was called. I remember that Major Newsome, one of our senior officers, was in charge of the meeting. He said word had come down that a lieutenant in our squadron had reported the base commander for illegal parking and that the base commander had met with our squadron commander and operations officers and, by golly, so-and-so and so-and-so. I remember only one phrase from the speech: the base commander had said that he had “slept under enough wings” in his time not to be called to task about where he parked his car. After that meeting, my front-seater, Sean, was called in and told to have a meeting with me, the culprit, and lay down the law. Sean told me about all this with a smile—at the bar—and said, “We’ve had our meeting. And next time don’t say who you are, dummy.”

M
AJOR
D
ODGE, THE COMMANDER
of the air police squadron on base at Osan, was coming to know several of us by name. Incidents of loud noise and rowdiness had brought us together.

I was rooming with Johnny Hobbs in the Osan Air Base BOQ, and on the night in question I had decided to stay in our room, alone, because I was on crutches from a motorcycle accident. (Two of us owned dirt bikes and I’d flipped mine.) I was talking into my portable tape recorder at about eleven o’clock when a group of nine tipsy pilots, including Johnny, Jake Brooks (with a guitar), Ted Graham, and Fireball Kelly walked into the room. They had just placed an Army officer’s motorcycle in the
third-floor hallway. (In Korea we shared a three-story barracks with Army officers.)

The boys made themselves comfortable and we started singing “Long, Tall Texan,” a popular song of the time. I pressed the record button on my handheld tape recorder. A box of brownies that had come by mail that day was passed around. Someone threw one. Another. Several more. More singing. Giggling. Peanut shells littered the floor. Someone stood, stepped on a brownie, then another. Fireball
stomped
a brownie. Funniest thing.

A knock on the door.

On the tape you hear the door creak open and then, “Staff Sergeant Cheek, sir. Air police. Major Dodge has authorized me to place you under house arrest until further notice.”

Whoops.

I stayed on my bed, and the tape recorder picked up pieces of the conversation. Members of our group argued with Sergeant Cheek, laughing the whole time.

“We can’t
leave
the
room?
We can’t go to our
own rooms?
”

“No, sir. Those are my orders.”

Jake Brooks had a piece of paper and a pencil. “What’s your name, sergeant?”

“Cheek, sir.”

“How do you spell that? Is it C-h-e-e-k or C-h-e-a-k?”

Sergeant Cheek didn’t see the humor.

“Two
e
’s, sir.”

“Can I make a phone call?” asked Johnny. (There was
a pay phone in the hall.)

“No, sir.”

“Wait a minute! We’re allowed one phone call.”

“You have to stay in the room, sir.”

“Oh, my God, we’re under house arrest.”

We settled back into the room and started singing again: “Well, I’m a long, tall Texan. I ride a big white horse.”

On the recorder you hear talking, laughing, more singing, then another knock on the door. The singing continues. The door creaks open.

It was Major Dodge. He stepped in. An unlit cigarette hung from his lips, and a pair of pants that Johnny had thrown on a whim at someone else clipped the unlit cigarette in his mouth, so that the broken half dangled from the half still in his lips. We kept singing as if Major Dodge didn’t exist. “Yes, I’m a long, tall Texan . . .” I think I was the only one looking at him. He seemed startled, as if he had forgotten what he was going to say. He glanced around the room at nine singing pilots, then stepped back outside and closed the door. It was a scene for the movies—and I had only a tape recorder.

When the singing finally stopped, someone in the room shouted, “Sergeant Cheek!”

“Yes, sir” (from the hall).

“Can we come out now?”

“No, sir, you’re still under house arrest.”

Ted Graham stood, walked over to the window by my bed, where I was propped up on pillows, and opened it,
and when he climbed through, stepping out onto the ground, I started a running commentary into the tape recorder: “There are now only eight of us in the room. Graham just left through the—whoops, now there are seven of us . . . six.”

In the background you hear singing, talking, and laughing, though it’s losing force.

Jake was sitting in a chair, playing guitar and singing, Johnny was on his bed, singing, and I was sitting on my bed, counting into the recorder mic. “Four . . . three. There are only three of us left in the room.”

If I hadn’t played the tape several times after the event, I’m sure I wouldn’t remember what happened next; nor would I remember the details of the foregoing. (Sadly, the tape is now long lost.)

Johnny went to sleep, or passed out, and in the quiet you hear Jake say faintly, “Well, I guess we’d better clean up.”

He and I got down on the floor and began cleaning up peanut hulls and brownies, putting them in a trash can between us. The recorder was on the floor near him. He started a commentary, pretending he was our spokesperson, testifying before a military judge. His speech was slightly slurred, but spirited. “These men are here today, Your Honor, not proud, but contrite.” (Long pause.) “They were unaware that their somewhat raucous—though innocent—social behavior would have any, even one single solitary, unsavory consequence. These are
good
men, Your Honor, and I can only hope that you will recognize that they are the backbone of our American armed forces and that you will—”

The door creaks open: our commander, Colonel Bennington. He walks over.

I remember looking up at him standing there. From my perspective down on the floor, he looked tall, even though he was a short man. He asks a question, but his voice is so quiet you can’t make it out on the tape.

Jake responds: “Brownies, sir.”

O
UR LITTLE BLUES BAND’S
main audience for the afternoon and night music sessions was two bachelors who lived with us in BOQ 16: Johnny Hobbs and Rob Stedman. Johnny liked the music of Mose Allison (especially his rendition of “One Room Country Shack”) and any number of tunes from Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

Rob, a shy midwesterner with a crew cut, the only jazz aficionado among us, enjoyed talking about any kind of music and owned a more extensive collection of tapes and records than any of us. He had a kind of swaying, bow-legged walk and was slightly pigeon toed, and when he handled things, his elbows stuck out and his index fingers always seemed to be held up and curved somehow—the mannerisms of a left-handed baseball pitcher. You would not have been surprised to see him go into a stretch at any moment, check first base, and then try the pickoff. His demeanor and spirit were those of a gentle uncle.

Rob lived on the first floor of BOQ 16 in the middle of
the party zone. But he didn’t party much because of his devotion to Linda, who was waiting for him at home in Florida.

We bought Rob a bottle of champagne to help us all celebrate as soon as he landed from his last F-4 flight. We planned to meet him at the airplane. We didn’t always go to this much trouble, but this was not only Rob’s last flight in the F-4, but his last flight in the Air Force. He wasn’t just going home; he was going home to marry Linda. She’d visited Rob in Yokota and we all liked her a lot.

That last mission was to be a simulated bombing mission, involving a pop-up bombing maneuver. Four aircraft, in single file, would fly at low level toward a mountain and then at the last minute pop up to bomb a target on the other side of the mountain. The target, I assume, was straight ahead, unlike most targets, which were usually approached from a ninety-degree angle high above the target. The problem was to make the transition from a climbing attitude straight at the target (over the mountain) to a dive. The flight leader briefed a kind of barrel-roll roll-in on the target. Had I been in the flight, I would have been surprised because I’d never heard of such a thing, much less practiced it.

Rob and Davie Long, Rob’s front-seater, were number two. Apparently the lead’s aircraft got very slow on the maneuver, and before Davie initiated the same maneuver, he had to reduce speed to keep adequate distance behind the lead aircraft. Apparently the combination of a strange maneuver and being too slow caused Rob’s F-4 to stall at low altitude, perhaps while inverted, and then to crash, killing both pilots.