The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (4 page)

A few months later she bumped into her ex-boyfriend Dennis Krummel on the campus of SWOCC, where he was also a student. Krummel was wearing an Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps uniform; he said that he had just joined up, in the hopes of becoming a pilot after earning his degree.

“Well, I’m with the Black Panthers now,” Kerkow blurted out in response, greatly exaggerating her involvement in order to maximize the shock factor. “I know they have some different ideas, but I’ve come to agree with them.” Krummel was every bit as floored
as she had hoped.

In the late summer of 1971, Kerkow received a phone call from Beth Newhouse, her close friend from the Marshfield chorus. A rebel in her own right, Newhouse had married a surfer ten years her senior shortly after graduating from high school. But that relationship had quickly disintegrated due to her husband’s alcoholism, and Newhouse
had fled to San Diego to convalesce with an older sister. Instantly smitten by the city’s perfect weather and raucous party scene, she decided to stay and reap the benefits of being a young divorcée in the era of free love. She first moved into an apartment near Ocean Beach, a hippie enclave full of head shops and health food stores, where rock bands often played impromptu shows on the sand. When the rent there became unaffordable, Newhouse found a cheaper place in El Cajon, on the city’s eastern edge, and took on a roommate.

When that roommate left without warning, Newhouse became desperate to find a replacement before the next month’s rent was due. She offered the bedroom to Kerkow, who seized the chance to escape her dead-end life in Coos Bay. She dropped out of SWOCC, packed up her Volkswagen Beetle, and struck out
for southern California.

San Diego was a revelation for Kerkow, a wonderland of sunny days and easy sex. She dated a galaxy of men who seemed fantastically exotic to a cloistered Coos Bay girl: Mexican bikers, greasy rockers, the bronzed and preppy scions of
La Jolla’s yachting elite. As she sampled San Diego’s menu of bachelors, she discovered that she was especially drawn to black men; she confessed to Newhouse that, for reasons she couldn’t fathom, she found such men “unusually attractive.” Though Kerkow loved to press her mother’s buttons, she never dared tell her about this romantic predilection during their occasional phone chats; she worried that
Patricia would be appalled.

Kerkow also concealed the seedy means by which she earned her keep in San Diego: she worked at the International Massage Parlor on 4th Avenue, in the
run-down Hillcrest neighborhood. Though she had fancied herself too worldly for Coos Bay, she was hopelessly naïve by San Diego standards; when she started at the parlor, she genuinely believed the job would entail nothing more than kneading kinks out of muscles. Kerkow was horrified when the first naked client flipped onto his back and insinuated that he would like a sexual favor; when other similarly smutty requests soon followed, it dawned on her why the manager hadn’t cared about her total lack of experience. Against
her better judgment, she satisfied her customers’ urges in exchange for tips, letting her mind wander to more pleasant thoughts as she
rubbed and tugged.

Kerkow told her mother that she worked as a receptionist
at a doctor’s office.

Right after Christmas 1971, a sleazy gangster who owned adult businesses throughout San Diego convinced Kerkow to come work for him. He offered her a job at a downtown strip club, where customers were barred from
touching the topless dancers. But she opted to remain a masseuse, moving to one of the man’s upscale parlors in
suburban Spring Valley. She and Newhouse also ran a sideline business in marijuana, peddling ounces purchased from a small-time hoodlum they knew
only as Fast Eddie.

Kerkow was adrift in this sordid world when Roger Holder came knocking in January 1972. He, too, had gone astray since their fleeting encounter at Empire Lakes some thirteen years earlier. But his troubles ran much deeper than Cathy’s, inflamed by experiences far more brutal than she could imagine.

T
HE
R
OGER
H
OLDER
who returned to Alameda with his family in the fall of 1959 was not the same boy who had left for Oregon that August. The expulsion from Coos Bay had scarred him; once a devout Christian like his father, Holder now questioned what sort of God would see fit to crush his family’s modest dreams. He channeled his melancholy into a solitary pursuit: building intricate models of trains, planes, and helicopters. The geeky hobby reminded him of the happy moments he had spent with his dad in Virginia, watching naval shipbuilders weld together the beams of aircraft carriers.

On the rare occasions he ventured outside, Holder faced relentless teasing by his peers. While waiting for the Navy to complete a new housing complex in Alameda, his family lived in a predominantly black section of neighboring Oakland. The boys there ridiculed Roger for a cruelly ironic reason: they considered his behavior too white.
They mocked him for his models, his elocution, his skateboard—anything that smacked of habits favored by residents of the Bay Area’s paler precincts. Confused and stung by this rejection, Holder retreated even deeper into a world of his own.

But when he entered Encinal High School in 1964, Holder discovered that girls of all races were actually charmed by his quirks. Adept at exuding a pensive cool, the long-limbed teenager attracted the sorts of female admirers who were just beginning to hang Beatles posters on their bedroom walls. Holder capitalized on their curiosity by mastering the art of the pickup. He started riding his skateboard to the coffeehouses frequented by students from Mills College, an all-girls school in Oakland’s foothills. He convinced more than a few pretty English majors to accompany him to Leona Heights Park, where he would pretend to dig their sappy poetry before moving on
to lewder diversions.

Holder was a careless lover, a foible that led to predictable results: in the summer of 1966 he learned that one of his girlfriends, a sixteen-year-old Encinal sophomore named Betty Bullock, was pregnant by him—with twins, no less. That November, to earn money for his children’s care, he dropped out of the eleventh grade and joined the family business by enlisting in the U.S. Army; he had to lie to the recruiter about his age, since he was
still just seventeen. Holder was at basic training the following February when Bullock gave birth to his daughters,
Teresa and Torrita.

Though he lacked a high school diploma, Holder was extremely intelligent and scored well on his Armed Forces Qualification Test, the exam the Army used to determine its recruits’ assignments. In March 1967 Holder was sent to Bad Hersfeld, West Germany, home of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, to take a course in tank warfare. That October he received the inevitable order to join the 11th
ACR’s contingent in Vietnam. On his way to Southeast Asia, Holder made a quick stop in California to marry Bullock and bid farewell
to his infant daughters.

When Holder arrived in Vietnam, the 11th ACR was in the midst
of an extended operation to pacify Long Khanh, a province northwest of Saigon that teemed with Vietcong fighters. The guerrillas launched daily ambushes on vehicles traveling the region’s muddy roads, battering their prey with rockets before melting back into the jungle. The primary mission of the 11th ACR, better known as the Blackhorse Regiment, was to plow its armored vehicles through Long Khanh’s dense wilderness in search of
the elusive enemy.

The Blackhorse Regiment’s mainstay was the M113 armored personnel carrier, a trapezoidal twelve-ton beast with the power to obliterate all foliage in its path. Holder manned one such vehicle’s M60 machine gun, shielded by a steel plate stenciled with the regiment’s unofficial motto:
FIND THE BASTARDS THEN PILE ON
. In the thick of the jungle, Holder and his crewmates would try to detect signs of Vietcong activity—the camouflaged hatches of underground lairs, the suspiciously neat piles of leaves that concealed grenades. But with visibility often limited to ten feet or less, their first inkling of the enemy’s presence was typically a
hail of AK-47 fire.

Holder grew enamored of this perilous search-and-destroy work. He relished the adrenaline of combat, the glee of blindly pumping hundreds of .308-caliber rounds into the jungle after surviving yet another Vietcong onslaught. And he loved tinkering with the M113’s mechanical systems, much as he had once loved building model trains in the dim light of his bedroom. While his comrades counted down their days to freedom on homemade calendars shaped like
Playboy
models, Holder intended to stay in Vietnam for
as long as possible.

But Holder’s passion for combat did not make him immune to the war’s psychological toll. The Vietcong were masters at fomenting paranoia, littering the jungle with clever booby traps that made the Americans question their every footstep. Ordinary objects like soda cans and rice bowls were rigged with explosives powerful enough to kill; 11 percent of American deaths in Vietnam were due to
such improvised devices. And nightly Vietcong mortar attacks deprived the troops of much-needed sleep, jangling their frayed nerves even further. So as the Blackhorse Regiment pushed toward the Cambodian border in the
waning days of 1967, Holder began to suffer from spells of overwhelming anxiety. He self-medicated with copious amounts of marijuana, purchased from peasants for
ten cents a joint. The drug numbed him to the fear that his next foray into the bush could be his last.

On January 14, 1968, Holder awoke at dawn with a scorching fever—he had contracted a bad case of malaria. There was no time for medical treatment, though: the Vietcong’s Tet Offensive was in full swing, and Holder’s unit had orders to root out enemy fighters in the rubber groves by Loc Ninh. Holder chain-smoked a few joints, a ritual he referred to as “the breakfast of champions,” then hopped aboard his M113.

Holder and his crew ventured down a dirt trail that dead-ended at a crumbling Buddhist tomb. Worried that the bushes around the gravesite might conceal booby traps, the M113’s driver reversed into a patch of tall grass. The stoned and malarial Holder turned his head to check for incoming fire as the vehicle backed up.

Then Holder’s eardrums shattered, and his world went white. The next thing he knew, he was lying in the middle of the road, his shirt and helmet gone. He instinctively stumbled back to the M113, which a land mine had turned into a heap of twisted steel. One of his crewmates had been torn clean in half by the blast; another had clumps of brain leaking out from behind his right ear.

Holder heard the whirr of a helicopter and looked up at the sky. As he did so, he collapsed onto his back and fell unconscious; his spine had nearly been severed. He would spend the next six weeks recuperating at a hospital near Saigon, where his back healed but his mind did not: Holder could not stop envisioning the explosion’s aftermath, nor
shake his survivor’s guilt.

There was more tragedy to come for Holder once he returned to action. On May 19 he lost his closest friend in the Blackhorse Regiment, a private from Los Angeles named Stanley Schroeder who shared Holder’s love of model trains. The eighteen-year-old Schroeder was killed by a booby trap that sheared off both his arms, leaving him to bleed to death in a thicket of bomb-scorched trees. The death
weighed heavily on Holder, who felt that Schroeder was the Blackhorse soldier who best understood his idiosyncrasies. But he dared not mourn, for fear that open tears would be regarded as
a sign of weakness. He instead hid his emotions behind a warrior’s countenance: decked out in black Ray-Ban sunglasses and a radio-equipped crash helmet, his worn khaki shirt unbuttoned to reveal his sinewy torso, Holder cut an imposing figure
atop his M113 perch.

When his yearlong tour was finished in October 1968, Holder did not hesitate to sign up for another six months in Vietnam. The Army rewarded him with a trip back to California to visit his wife and their twin daughters. On his second night in Alameda, a drunken Holder stumbled into Bullock’s apartment, expecting to find her waiting for him. Instead, he surprised her in bed with one of his high school classmates, whom he stomped into a pulp. Holder soon learned that Bullock had been sleeping with numerous men, allegedly for pay. Heartbroken by this revelation, he cut short his leave and returned to war, though only after his parents promised to take charge of
raising his daughters. Holder knew his marriage was over, yet he continued to wear his gold wedding band; he didn’t want his Army comrades to have any inkling of
Bullock’s betrayal.

Back in Vietnam, Holder was promoted to the rank of Specialist Fourth Class and allowed to choose his next assignment. He decided to ditch the Blackhorse Regiment in favor of one of the Army’s most glamorous and demanding gigs: flying with the 68th Assault Helicopter Company, stationed at Bien Hoa Air Base
just east of Saigon.

Nicknamed the Top Tigers, the 68th AHC was charged with airlifting South Vietnamese troops into the war’s hairiest combat zones. The unit’s single-engine Huey helicopters would alight in clearings to disgorge a dozen soldiers each, then dodge Vietcong rockets as they whooshed away
with guns blazing. In his role as a crew chief, Holder was responsible for maintaining the Hueys in flight as well as firing the mounted M60s that hung from their doors. Unlike his experience in the jungles of Long Khanh, Holder could now see his targets clearly—men who scattered through the elephant grass upon hearing
the hum of the Top Tigers’ blades. Holder dutifully mowed these fleeing figures down, their skulls distorting into scarlet blobs as his
bullets found their marks.

But the transition from ground to air did not alleviate Holder’s mounting sense of dread, which he tried to suppress with ever-vaster amounts of marijuana. His behavior grew more eccentric, to the puzzlement of his fellow Top Tigers. They thought it odd, for instance, that he liked to address everyone as “nigger,” regardless of their race. And they took note of the fact that he never ventured down to the Paradise Bar to purchase the affections of slinky hostesses and guzzle cans of Carling Black Label. He preferred to spend his off-duty hours at the Bien Hoa barracks, listening to jazz and reading the works of James Baldwin and
Frantz Fanon.