Hamfist Over the Trail (14 page)

I laughed politely, but, honestly, my sense of humor had faded after what I'd been through the past week. But it was sure nice to have Fish back.

“Hey, Fish,” I asked, “what's the deal with Buzz? He said he finished his tour a while ago and he's still here.”

“Oh, that sonofabitch is crazy! He's on loan to the Rangers to do some special ops stuff, then he's going off to be a Raven. Did he tell you he carries a grease gun with him when he flies?”

“A what?”

“A grease gun – you know, a .45 caliber machine gun. He also carries a model 1911 pistol, and a metal ammo can with 500 rounds. Says he can use the ammo for either gun. He's planning on carrying out a pitched battle if he ever gets shot down.”

“Where did he get that kind of hardware?” I asked.

“Oh, he went to the Freedom Hill BX and bought a couple bottles of Johnny Walker and bartered with some marines. You know, the marines can't buy liquor at the BX. So they trade stuff for booze. They write off the weapons as a combat loss, and then they get new stuff.”

“How did he get the name Buzz?” I asked, “Did he buzz the tower or something?”

“No,” Fish answered, “Did you see The War Lover, that Steve McQueen movie a few years ago?”

I nodded.

“Well, the Steve McQueen character in the movie, the guy who was the war lover, was named Buzz something. It seemed to fit for Watson the minute he showed up at the squadron. If there was ever a war lover over here it's Buzz.”

33

April 27, 1969

I was asleep at 0800 when I was awakened by a loud explosion and what felt like someone hitting me in the chest. I thought the base was under attack, and I rolled out of bed onto the floor. I landed on broken glass.

The fluorescent light fixture in the ceiling had come down, and there was broken glass everywhere.

There was another, even louder, explosion, and then the base siren started sounding. Again, I felt like someone had hit me in the chest, and I realized that it was the over-pressure from the concussion of the blast. I figured these rockets must be really close.

But they weren't rockets, and the explosions continued. For a long, long time. After a few minutes, I could hear people milling out in the hallway, so I got up and went out of my room.

“What the fuck is going on?” I asked no one in particular.

Balls emerged from his room, carrying his camera, and ran to the exit. “The ammo dump is blowing up. I gotta get some pictures of this!”

I followed him outside, and saw a huge fireball, perhaps 500 feet high, on the other side of the base. After five or six seconds, we heard the explosion and felt the concussion. I ran back to my room and grabbed my camera.

I ran around to the ladder on the north side of the hooch, climbed up onto the roof, and joined the thirty-odd people already there.

It was a sight to behold. Every minute or so there was a huge explosion. Some of the fireballs probably went up 1000 feet or more. After each fireball, there was a small mushroom cloud, looking just like the pictures from atomic bomb tests I watched on our black-and-white television as a kid. And there were people on every rooftop.

The siren was sounding continuously. It occurred to me that if the gomers were smart, they would launch a rocket attack. We would all probably have assumed it was the explosions from the ammo dump. They could have killed a lot of us that day. I guess their bureaucracy was as bad as ours.

The explosions continued for another 23 hours. The air conditioner got knocked out of our window, and every light bulb on base was broken. At one point, some type of anti-personnel gas that had been stored in the ammo dump was set off, and we all had trouble breathing, and it made our eyes burn. There were smoke goggles and masks at the squadron, but not at the hooch. Fortunately, the wind shifted, and the self-induced gas attack didn't last too long.

The story came out that the whole thing started when some troops had been burning the high grass outside the Marine ammo dump, to make sure no sappers could sneak up without being seen. Well, apparently there was a 2.75-inch rocket in the grass. Nobody knew how it got there, but it cooked off and went right into the mouth of the ammo dump, setting off a chain reaction of explosions of historical proportions.

The concussions were so bad that they set off the bombs in the Air Force ammo dump, several miles away, on our side of the base. The shanty town off the north end of the runways was flattened, and the Freedom Hill BX was so badly damaged that it stayed closed for over a month. The sky-cops were stationed in a perimeter around the BX to shoot any looters that tried to take advantage of the situation.

Finally, it was over. All of our missions had been cancelled, of course, and when we ultimately resumed flying, several days later, we only carried four rockets per plane. I thought we had it bad, until I worked a target with a flight of four Gunfighters the next week. Each F-4 was carrying one Mark 81 bomb.

The Mark 81 was a small bomb. Some people called them lady-fingers, like the thin cookies. They were half the size and weight of the standard 500-pound Mark 82.

When I got back from my mission, I asked Major Walters why the Gunfighters didn't just send one F-4 with four bombs, instead of four F-4s with one bomb each.

“Gotta keep up the sortie rate,” he said. “McNamara wants a sortie rate.”

34

May 22, 1969

I was really looking forward to meeting up with Emily in Honolulu for R&R. I had already been eligible several months earlier. The rules were that a pilot had to be in-country at least four months before taking R&R. So I could have gone earlier, but Emily had arranged for vacation in June, so that's what I requested.

R&R was an official military program. It was either five or seven days, depending on the location. Air transportation to the R&R location was provided, but R&R expenses were not. There were a lot of selections: Honolulu, Sydney, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Kuala Lampur, Manila, Tokyo, Singapore and Taipei. Although R&R stood for Rest and Recreation, some pilots referred to it as I&I – Intoxication and Intercourse.

I went to the MARS station to see if I could get a call through to Emily. I wanted to make sure she had plane tickets and to tell her I had reserved a nice room in the Hale Koa, the new military hotel right on Waikiki Beach. We were going to have a great time. And I had a nice surprise to spring on Emily.

When I called her at the D.O.'s office, another receptionist answered, and said that Emily was not available. Strangely, she didn't have any information about when she would be back. I tried her home phone, but there was no answer. I was getting concerned.

I made an appointment at the MARS station to place another call in a few more hours, picked up my mail, and went back to my room.

I had a letter from Emily, and there was something different about it. At first, I couldn't put my finger on it, and then it hit me.

She almost always had a faint imprint of her lipstick, and the annotation “SWAK” on the flap side of the envelope. Although I hadn't asked her to do it, I had become accustomed to each of her letters being Sealed With A Kiss. This one wasn't.

I had a really bad feeling as I opened the envelope.

“Dear Hamilton -

You probably think it's unfair of me to tell you this in a letter, but I think it would be unfair to keep it from you once I've made a decision.

I've loved you since the first time we met. And I think I still love you, but now it's different. I'll admit, I'm not as strong as you. I can't take the constant worrying about you, not knowing if or when you'll ever come home. You said the mission of the Air Force is to fly and fight. Maybe that's what you want, but it's not what I want.

I want a stable life, with someone who puts me ahead of his job. Someone who will be home every night. Someone I won't have to worry about all the time. I met someone like that, and I think you'd like him if you met him under different circumstances.

He's a Lieutenant, like you, but he's a Personnel Officer. We're going to get married in two more months.

I discussed this with Colonel Ryan, and he said I'm making a big mistake. So I felt it would be best if I got a different position on base.

Please don't try to call me and talk me out of this. It's not you, it's me. I'm sorry I'm so weak. I guess I wouldn't have made a good fighter pilot's wife after all.

I hope you understand. I still pray for you every night.

Emily”

I felt totally drained and empty inside. I hadn't realized there were tears streaming down my face as I read the letter. My whole world was falling apart

I slid open the top drawer of my desk and looked at the small velvet box I had placed there two days earlier. I opened it and looked at the diamond ring I had planned to put on Emily's finger when we were together again in Hawaii. I had special-ordered the ring at the BX, because they normally didn't carry 2-carat diamond rings.

And then I started laughing. It hit me - I could have gotten a bigger diamond, at cost, from Tom! What could I have been thinking, ordering it from the BX? Well, at least now I could return it without being humiliated in front of a friend.

And, Tom really was a friend. He'd been writing to me more than once a week, and genuinely wanted for me to somehow make it to Tokyo. Okay, Tom, that's what I'm going to do.

I walked down to the squadron and cancelled my R&R request for Honolulu. I instead requested Tokyo, and requested a later date, in August.

As my last item of business at the squadron, I completed my volunteer form for the Steve Canyon Program, which contained an automatic six-month tour exte
nsion, and submitted it to the A
dmin clerk.

Then I went back to the hooch and looked for someone to get drunk with. I couldn't find anyone who was awake, so I went to the O'Club, and walked into the DOOM Club bar, wearing my flight cap.

There were three ways a pilot could get hit with a big bar bill at the Club, even with drinks as cheap as they were at the DOOM Club.

One way was to walk into the bar wearing a hat. Another way was to ring the bell that hung over the bar. It was traditional that a pilot would ring the bell after his last flight, right before his DEROS.

The third way was to walk into the bar and yell “Dead Bug”. As soon as anyone yelled that, everyone would immediately lie down on their backs on the floor, waving their hands and legs in the air, like a bug that was dying. The last guy to make it to the Dead Bug position had to buy a round of drinks for everyone in the bar.

I walked up to the bell hanging over the bar, wearing my hat, pulled the chain to ring the bell, and yelled, “Dead bug!”. Everyone looked my way and scrambled to get on their backs, as I stood there. This was going to cost me a small fortune. I didn't give a shit.

35

May 23, 1969

There are many types of drunks. Some are happy drunks, who tell jokes and laugh a lot. Some are nasty drunks, who try to start fights with anyone and everyone. Some are sad drunks, who sit around and cry. Some are quiet drun
ks, who just sit around and vegetate
.

I was told I was a happy drunk. I had to go by what my friends told me, since I had no recollection of the previous day after about thirty minutes at the club.

Apparently, I was also the type of drunk who blacks out. I didn't pass out, I stayed conscious, made conversation, told some great jokes, and was apparently an all-around fun guy. But I had absolutely no recollection of any of it.

I woke up on my bed, still in my flight suit, the next morning. My head was spinning, and my mouth felt like it had cotton in it. I sat up slowly and reached for a bottle of water. It was empty.

I stood up and steadied myself against the wall, and stumbled out into the hallway. I felt like I was choking, and needed to get to the sink in the latrine for some water.

Fish was just coming out of one of the stalls. “Oh, you're finally awake! How're you feeling?”

“Like shit. I need some water, right now.”

“I gotta tell you,” Fish said, “you really know how to throw a pity party. That idea about the chow hall was brilliant.”

“What idea was that?”

“Don't you remember?” he asked.

“Not a thing.”

“Well, you got it in your head around three in the morning that you ought to treat everyone to breakfast. I don't mean everyone at the bar. I mean
everyone
.”

“What did I do?”

“Well, you went to the O'Club cashier and bought a couple rolls of quarters and pennies, then you went to the chow hall and insisted I come along. You handed me the rolls of pennies, and you held onto the rolls of quarters. Every time somebody came in, you took a quarter out of your roll and I took two pennies out of mine, and you treated them to breakfast. Everybody, other than one tight-assed Colonel, thought it was pretty cool. The last thing you did was tell the Colonel to fuck off.”

“Holy shit! I did that?”

“Yeah, but don't worry, he doesn't know who you are.” Fish reached into his pocket and pulled out my velcro name tag, which he had thankfully removed from my flight suit at some point or other. “Besides,” he said, “the Colonel was a fucking ground-pounder.”