The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking (5 page)

Roger Holder relaxing at Bien Hoa Air Base, 1969.
PRIVATE COLLECTION OF JOY HOLDER

The Top Tigers tolerated Holder’s peculiarities, however, because he was an excellent crew chief—up at five a.m. each morning to prep the Hueys for battle, then cool under
fire in the field. When Holder re-upped for another six-month tour in April 1969, his stellar performance earned him a transfer to the 120th Assault Helicopter Company’s gunship platoon, the so-called Razorbacks. The Razorbacks were responsible for securing Saigon’s forested perimeter; they often operated in the dead of night, ferreting out enemy infiltrators with high-intensity searchlights. Given the high volume of Vietcong fighters that its Hueys dispatched, the unit’s motto was fitting: “Death is our business;
business is good.”

Joining the Razorbacks was an excellent career opportunity for
Holder, a chance to prove his mettle with one of the Army’s showpiece units. But as he began his stint with the 120th AHC, the nineteen-year-old was swiftly losing the ability to hold his demons at bay. The fracture of his marriage to Bullock, the separation from his daughters, the memories of his brush with death near Loc Ninh, his feelings of isolation from his comrades—all these hardships combined to chip away at his fragile psyche.

Holder was also developing an intense dislike for the Army brass. In August 1969 eight Green Berets were arrested for murdering a South Vietnamese intelligence officer whom they suspected of
spying for the North. Holder was incensed that the Army would turn on its most dedicated soldiers; were the generals really so oblivious to the nasty work of war? He likewise seethed at the military bigwigs who rarely ventured out of Saigon, yet loudly boasted that the Vietcong were running scared. He began to wonder why he was killing Vietnamese teenagers in the name of such
vain and callous men.

Holder’s fury peaked after he made a fateful error. In late September, just weeks away from wrapping up his third tour, Holder drove into Saigon to buy some marijuana. Once he secured a pack of pre-rolled joints, he foolishly decided to smoke one on the roadside before heading back to base. He didn’t realize he had entered a neighborhood that had recently been declared off-limits to American troops; the streets were teeming with military policemen looking for violators.

A moment after Holder lit the joint, an MP pulled up alongside his vehicle and placed him under arrest. Holder was escorted back to Tan Son Nhut Air Base, where he was stunned to learn of the punishment he now faced: six months in the stockade and a
demotion to private.

Unfortunately for him, Holder had been nabbed in the midst of a marijuana panic. Politicians on the home front had become alarmed by new research alleging that the drug was crippling the war effort. One study, published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
, had warned that marijuana was causing American soldiers to experience psychotic episodes in which they could easily murder
comrades or
wander into minefields. Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut cited such research in claiming that the My Lai Massacre of March 1968, in which American soldiers had slaughtered hundreds of Vietnamese villagers, had been caused by marijuana abuse. He informed the Department of Defense that he planned to conduct congressional hearings “to let our people know if our soldiers in Vietnam have suddenly become brutal storm troopers or whether, as I consider more likely, some of them have become the victims of a drug problem that has already torn asunder the
fabric of American society.”

The Army responded to this political pressure by declaring war on pot—“
the first popular war we’ve had in a long time,” quipped one Pentagon official. Drug-sniffing dogs were called in from Okinawa to
search soldiers’ footlockers; suspected farms were doused with herbicides; and those arrested were shown little legal mercy, regardless of how
faithfully they had served. Despite having earned six service stars during his twenty-three months in Vietnam, Holder was court-martialed for marijuana possession and
handed the maximum sentence.

Holder was sent to the Long Binh Jail, or LBJ, a military prison notorious both for its overcrowding and for its tense racial climate. Originally built to house 350 inmates, LBJ’s population had soared to more than a thousand by late 1969. Over 90 percent of those inmates were black, and many complained that they had been singled out for incarceration
because of their skin. (“A white guy goes out and kills 13 gook babies and gets away with it,” a former LBJ denizen carped to a United Press International reporter. “A brother doesn’t shine his boots one day and
he gets nine months.”) The guards, by contrast, were uniformly white, a situation that exacerbated the inmates’ feelings of injustice. The year before Holder began his term at LBJ, the prison had been roiled by a two-day riot in which the facility was nearly destroyed; sixty-three guards were wounded, and an inmate was beaten to
death with a shovel.

Holder did not experience such violence while at LBJ, but the prison’s skewed demographics reminded him of the harsh lesson that he had learned in Coos Bay: achievement could never trump race.

Still, Holder was not quite ready to give up on the Army: as soon as he was granted early release from LBJ after serving twenty-nine days, he signed up for a fourth tour in Vietnam. No longer welcome in the Razorbacks, he was transferred four hundred miles north to Phu Bai, where he was assigned to the 101st Aviation Battalion’s assault helicopter unit,
the Comancheros.

But Holder lasted just three months at Phu Bai. He had mistakenly assumed that accepting another tour would exempt him from the demotion that had been part of his sentence for marijuana possession. Upon learning that he had been knocked down to the lowly E-2 pay grade, he angrily confronted a colonel whom he held responsible for giving him the shaft. The colonel took exception to Holder’s profane tirade, which he considered a sign that the twenty-year-old crew chief had become too psychologically unwound to remain in Vietnam. He ordered that Holder be shipped home immediately to finish his six-month commitment at
Fort Hood, Texas.

Holder’s long journey back to the United States began on January 30, 1970. He caught a flight to Yokota Air Base outside Tokyo, where he was supposed to switch to a plane bound for Hawaii. But instead of making the connection, he took a taxi into the heart of the city and checked into a luxury hotel that he could scarcely afford. He spent the night knocking back a bottle of whiskey and surveying Tokyo’s neon glow, deep in thought about his years at war. Self-pity, rage, and regret all boiled inside his liquor-addled mind.

When he finally reached Fort Hood a few days later, Holder knew his Army days were over. Having become accustomed to the frantic pace of Vietnam, he couldn’t handle the drudgery of fixing engines in Texas. Nor did he feel like dedicating any more of his life to an organization that he felt had treated him with blatant disrespect. So after three weeks at Fort Hood, he walked off the base one morning, never to return. He pawned his wedding band in San Antonio and bought a one-way Greyhound ticket to San Diego, where his parents had recently relocated with his twin daughters in tow. He told his
mother and father that he had received an honorable discharge; the Army, meanwhile, listed him as AWOL, though it couldn’t spare the resources to
track him down.

Holder had a difficult time readjusting to civilian life. His father got him a job working in the kitchen at the Port Hueneme Naval Base north of Los Angeles, but he didn’t last long; after flying Hueys in Vietnam, chopping onions for minimum wage struck him as demeaning. He quit and moved back to San Diego, where he used a fake Social Security number to obtain a driver’s license in the name of Linton Charles White—an alias to help him avoid detection by the Army. He used the license to open up a checking account at Southern California First National Bank; the bank also loaned him the money to buy his yellow Pontiac Firebird. When Holder started a job at Spin Physics, a manufacturer of magnetic tape recorder heads, he did so
masquerading as White.

When he wasn’t soldering wires on the assembly line, Holder devoted the bulk of his energy to making up for lost time with the ladies. Having been cuckolded while at war, he exacted a strange measure of revenge by seducing the wives of men still serving in Vietnam. He would find them at lounges near Point Loma, nursing daiquiris and looking forlorn. He became skilled at convincing them that he understood their loneliness, and at sweet-talking them into giving him loans that he never repaid. The racket made him feel dirty, though not enough to stop.

Holder also had to deal with a more searing form of guilt. He was haunted by visions of the carnage that he had witnessed in Vietnam: his M113 crewmate’s brains seeping into the grass, the bullet-riddled corpses of Vietcong contorted into unnatural shapes. Seeking to liberate his mind from these memories, Holder experimented with LSD; he spent long hours driving up and down Interstate 5 while enraptured by hallucinations of
dancing Hueys.

In August 1971 Spin Physics laid Holder off. Rather than look for new work, he decided to make ends meet by writing bad checks in the
name of Linton Charles White. In a four-month span, he bounced eighty-eight checks worth $1,801 as he whiled away the days at Ocean Beach, working his pickup artistry on
sweet young things.

Three days before the dawn of 1972, police pulled Holder over while he was driving to his parents’ house to see his daughters. There was a warrant out for the arrest of Linton Charles White on eight counts of fraud. Holder was taken into custody, fingerprinted, and released on his own recognizance, though he was instructed to show up for a March court date. He knew that that hearing could only end in disaster—he would either be jailed under his alias or handed over to the Army if he
admitted his true identity.

Desperate for guidance on how to right his troubled life, Holder immersed himself in the literature of astrology. As he tore through stacks of books and scrolls, he came to believe that the adversities he faced were actually signs that an extraordinary destiny was at hand: the universe had selected him to be a figure of far greater importance than his current circumstances suggested.

Holder looked everywhere for omens that would instruct him how to fulfill this cosmic calling. He was convinced that the counsel he sought would be encoded in a subtle clue—an image from a vivid dream, or sage words proffered by a stranger. But by bringing Cathy Kerkow back into his life, the universe had tricked him—instead of being sly with its wisdom, it had given him a sign that no man could miss. By Holder’s occult logic, there was only one possible reason that fate had arranged for him to reunite with the salamander catcher from Coos Bay: the two of them were meant to do something special together—
something spectacular.

P
RIOR TO THE
spring of 1961, there had never been a hijacking in American airspace. A handful of incidents had occurred in other parts of the world, typically involving defectors from the Communist bloc. In 1949 a dozen Poles strong-armed a LOT Airlines crew into flying them to Copenhagen, where they were granted political asylum. A year later Czech soldiers from an elite aviation unit seized three planes bound for Prague simultaneously; the men had heard rumors that they were about to be swept up in a purge. At West Berlin’s Tempelhof Airport, American officials greeted the Czechs and carefully referred to them as “escapees” rather than the pejorative “hijackers,” a word that Prohibition-era tabloids had coined to
describe truck thieves.
^*

The American government later applied this same euphemism to the numerous Cubans who hijacked planes to Florida throughout 1960, the year after Fidel Castro overthrew the pro-American dictator Fulgencio Batista. Whenever one of these purloined aircraft arrived in Miami or Key West, a square-jawed advertising executive named Erwin Harris would instantly lay claim to it, arguing that Cuba still
owed him $429,000 for a tourism campaign that Batista had commissioned. Eager to irritate Castro in any way possible, the United States let Harris auction off eleven of
these Cuban planes.
^†

The notion that American planes could be hijacked, too, was considered too far-fetched to be worthy of contemplation. The Cold War’s flow of refugees was assumed to point in only one direction, from the repressive Soviet sphere to the open and prosperous West. Even when travel between the United States and Cuba became largely forbidden in January 1961, no one imagined that Americans eager to join Castro’s revolutionary experiment might resort to desperate measures.

That Americans might hijack a plane to a destination other than Cuba seemed an even more absurd proposition. American citizens were free to travel to every other country within easy flying distance of the United States, so there appeared to be no good reason for someone to hijack a flight when they could simply buy a ticket. A few distant nations might be willing to harbor an American hijacker—North Korea, for example—but getting there would require a herculean, multistop effort; the range of the Boeing 707, then the world’s mightiest passenger jet, topped out at 5,400 miles.
^‡
And no American criminal could possibly be foolish enough to try and hijack a plane to a domestic airport—police would have the aircraft surrounded before it even rolled to a stop.