Thud Ridge (20 page)

Max was no spring chicken and he worked so hard that he finally collapsed with pneumonia. We were all most concerned and made certain that the flight surgeon had him properly doped up and put to bed in his trailer. However, a day later Max, the walking-pneumonia case, was right back on the job, refusing to be put down, refusing to quit.

Usually there is a running battle between the fighter pilots and the civil engineers—no matter how good things are the pilots don't feel the engineers are supporting them well enough. This was not the case at Takhli, and I have never seen a bunch of fighter drivers so sold on a support manager as they were on Max. Everybody on the base sweated like mad when the old man had to go over to Clark Air Base in the Philippines for an operation, with the possibility of malignancy hanging in the background. You would have thought that each of our pilots had bagged his twenty-fifth Mig when word came back that all was well. He infected his own troops with such enthusiasm that long after he left the base they were still carrying on as they knew he wanted them to.

The original hot and overcrowded hootches that Max had inherited were now obsolete. He had replaced them with a vastly expanded complex of clean, airy attractive quarters that blended the native Thai talent and teakwood with American know-how on rain protection, drainage and sanitation. Each of our aircrews flying combat had a spot in an air-conditioned building, and the pilot who flight-planned, briefed and flew to Hanoi from two in the morning until two in the afternoon could now collapse under a cooler and sleep in the afternoon heat before rising to start the cycle again. He built a command center where we could think and move with some semblance of order, and we had an air base that looked like an air base should. He provided the facilities we needed to do the combat job better.

He also gave us a most adequate building known as the officers' club. This was the only place for the officers to eat and as we were on a 24-hour-a-day schedule, the kitchen was always open. We also had a bar and game room and this was the off-duty rendezvous for both the Americans and our Thai military friends in the area. Colonel Rachain, the local Thai military commander, actually owned all the real estate we occupied and practically owned all the Thai labor we employed. He was most cooperative and pleasant, a fine gentleman without whose help we could never have progressed as we did. He got us the best help available to run this all-day operation and they turned out to be quite a snappy crew. The challenge of taking a fifteen-year-old girl out of the rice paddies and putting a white shirt, black skirt and shoes on her is one thing, but making her an English-speaking waitress is another. The Thais are the happiest and most industrious group I have observed in the Asian area and progress was rapid.

We kept the menu on the number system. One was sliced pineapple, bananas and papaya, which was delicious; number thirty-nine was the closest thing to steak available for the day; number forty-one was some form of chicken; number sixty-two was orange ice cream—I have never seen the like of it any place else in the world. It only took a short time to learn the menu by heart and ordering was a numerical recitation. We tried to break it up with Thai food prepared in our kitchen on a few occasions, and invited Colonel Rachain over to sample our first attempt. He was most polite, but allowed that Thai food American style—or American food Thai style —was a bit short on the hot peppers for his taste. We had him back for the second attempt and he attended, but gracefully indicated that he preferred to stick with old number thirty-nine.

The Thais identified themselves very personally with all of our efforts. From force of habit we each tended to eat in one section of the dining area most of the time, and the little girls could usually out-guess us on our meal order. They brought us flowers from home, they brought us Thai gifts when they went off on trips or visits to their relatives, they cried when their officers went back to the States and they cried when their pilots did not come back from Hanoi.

The housegirls, houseboys, barbers and the like were much the same. Most of them lived in the Thai military complex on the other side of the runway from our area, and they were almost exclusively Thai military dependents in one form or another. Colonel Rachain called them "my family," and he controlled their employment and welfare in the firm Asian manner. He was the boss, everyone knew it, and there was no monkey business. The girl who cleaned my place up and did my laundry was named Boonaling, although we never got far enough through the language barrier to figure out how that should be spelled in English. Her husband was a Thai Air Force sergeant, and in Asian fashion her mother stayed home and cared for her five children while she and her husband worked. Like all the rest of the Thais, she could hardly wait for the annual spring water festival. This three-day affair signals the end of the dry season and the start of the rainy season. The name of the game is to douse everyone you see with a water pistol, a bucket or a push into the swamp, as a token of luck. My boss lived next door to me and Boonaling caught him in a grumpy mood, coming out of his front door with a clean uniform on, and let him have it right in the face. He was furious for days, and there was little doubt in anyone's mind about that. It failed to dampen Boonaling's spirits and she broke through the language barrier far enough to refer to him as Colonel God Damn from then on.

It is not supposed to rain on the first day of the festival, and that was the time for Colonel Rachain to entertain all of "his family" and his friends. He invited us to all of his functions and they were most enjoyable. Thai food, Thai style, is exotic and the results can be wild. The morning after his first exposure to one of Colonel Rachain's spreads, my buddy Sam decided that the experience must resemble that of having a baby. The monsoon got twelve hours ahead of schedule for this particular party and we arrived in the midst of a monstrous thunderstorm. Nobody even slowed down and it is a wonder that we were not electrocuted from the makeshift extension cord network that threaded its way through the wet grass and puddles to the light bulbs hanging from the trees around Colonel Rachain's house. The rain went on, the ceremonial dances with their fabulous costumes went on, and then as guests of honor some of us got to dance with some of the Thai ladies. This is something else, and since the man leads by progressing in snake dance style around the dance floor to the rhythm of an oriental beat, and the woman follows behind, I never did know how close I came to doing it properly, but we all had a great time, Thai style. When we got ready to leave we found out that someone had stolen Colonel God Damn's raincoat.

Max and I had one project that we never did complete—a go-cart track. You might think that the middle of the jungle is a pretty crazy place for a go-cart track, but we had a real problem to divise things for our folks to do when they had a little time off duty. Max and I figured that we could get together and scrounge enough equipment, materials and money to make this thing a going concern. We struck out on this one because it did not meet the approval of some of the folks up the line.

At the end of his normal one-year tour things were not complete and Max had not polished his base to his satisfaction. It was still head and shoulders above everything else but it wasn't good enough for Max, so he extended his tour. At the end of his first extension he was still not quite satisfied. It was better than ever, but not quite what he wanted, and he wanted to stay until everything he had started was complete and in number one order. Max put in another extension and would have stayed to manicure and polish the fine installation he had established, except for our command structure. I was forced to justify his extension, which is a reasonable requirement, so I submitted the justification to one of our three headquarters. Max proceeded, as we all did, under the assumption that the request would be approved and that we would have the opportunity to utilize his talents for many more months. As the date for his departure approached, we fired an inquiry to yet another one of our headquarters where we thought the paper work would be by that time, even with slow action, and found that they knew nothing about it. We traced back down the line to our next headquarters and lo and behold, the formal request of this terrific gentleman had been sitting in an uninterested commander's personal in-basket, without action, for three months.

This was a heartbreaker to Max. The thought that the system had so little regard for what he had done and for his desire to follow his base through to completion was hard for him to accept.

But talent like that is hard to hide and Max got a call from the number one civil engineer in Washington and was offered a good spot that the big boss had picked out for him. Max came to me seeking advice; should he fight to stay or should he go on. I advised him to go, and I'm sure he is doing a bang-up job in the new spot. Before he left he said, "You know, Colonel, I think it is about time you and I got out of here." I think he was right. I didn't hang around too much longer either.

7. Fifteen Sams for Geeno

As we took the belated and hesitant step of pressing the attack against North Vietnam's symbolic experiment in industrialization, the Thai Nguyen steel complex, my buddy Geeno was notified that his next assignment in the States would take him back into research, back to the big puzzle palace. Although Geeno was one of our more aggressive leaders and gave it all he had every time, he had already gone the advanced education route to the big degree that led him to a strictly support position. Only the real-life facts of the Vietnamese operation—the Defense Department does not like to call it a pilot shortage in so many words—had allowed him to escape to the fighter pilot's primary job of driving a machine in combat. Now, as the war heated up, he was not too pleased with the prospect of heading back into the administrative jungle. How much that thought pressed him to ov-erextend himself while he had the chance I shall never know, but he sure pulled it all out.

The personnel mill seemed to be constantly out of rig, not sending enough qualified pilots down the pipeline, or once in a great while sending too many; and there is a never-ending flow of people like Geeno who are unhappy with the friendly personnel officer and their new assignments. Some of the reasons why it works like this make sense of a sort. Others don't.

You can't have the same younger people fighting the battle interminably or they run out of longevity. Even if they don't, you can only put a guy in the way of getting killed so many times before he loses his enthusiasm for the role. And besides, you get just plain tired. So you replace them with older men pulled in from some remote installation who once flew fighters or maybe never did but wear the set of feathers on the chest anyway. Now, even the most single-minded fighter pilot will admit that someone has to fill these vacated spots, but that is a lot less easy to accept when it applies to you as an individual. The real catch, however, is that it takes a different breed of cat to drive a fighter properly. For years we have shuffled our pilots into jobs that have little or nothing to do with combat, but they aren't standardized components and they don't convert back from a desk or a transport simply because a computer spits out a set of orders. Conversion or retraining takes time; often, it doesn't work. Aging, too, is a factor that should not be ignored where it means that the pilot has been forced to lose the razor-edge of frequent and demanding single-seat flight. If some of our best people are lots older than they were back in Korea and still going strong, it's usually because they have been close enough to the machines to keep their hand in, growing and aging with the machinery, learning to use to perfection every assist the system affords.

All of this is by way of trying to give you some idea of how Geeno, and too many others like him, felt as he neared the end of his tour. When I got to the base, he was the operations officer of one of the squadrons and, in conjunction with his strong and feisty squadron commander, ran about as tight a ship as can be run. Trying to get that pair to bend gracefully to a decision that offered assistance to anyone other than themselves was like ramming your head into the wall. To say they were strong-willed would be to water down the facts. They were just plain stubborn, but fortunately, they were quite often correct. One of the challenges that a combat commander faces is that of recognizing strong people and blending their smarts and their drive into a successful operation. I was able to do this in the case of Geeno and his boss quite easily, perhaps because I too have been accused by some of the learned ones of being of a somewhat hardheaded nature. Naturally I deny this, you know; we all know someone who is this way but naturally it is not us. Besides that, I made out their efficiency reports. '

It is a big kick to me to see how people evaluate others on the efficiency report (ER) system that we use as a report card on our folks. If you read between the lines you can often get a fair overview of the person. If you read only the written words, you are bound to get a phony picture as the ER has become the most abused weapon in the history of military warfare. It is the manna of the promotion system, and bastardized descriptions of the performance of officers, as the promotion pendulum swings from extreme to extreme, are something to behold. If we had people who were as good and as bad as they are described in the hallowed ER files of the Pentagon, we would have no trouble winning the war with Ho Chi Minh. We could well afford to take all those who show up so badly and arm them with sticks to become a sacrifice force to walk through Laos to the North Vietnamese border. While these worthless souls paid the supreme price for failure to please their rater with their social grace, or their overcledication to some facet of their mission, the other group could walk up the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin and sway the land of Ho and perhaps that of Mao with their documented abilities to "get along well with peer, subordinate and supervisor alike under even the most demanding situations" or their "clearly superior ability to see the big picture that allows him without fail to solve any problem in the most cost effective and timely manner." If you think that I consider this system to be a farce you are correct. The only nice thing I can say about it is that I do not have a better system up my sleeve. The problems associated with ranking such a huge group as the Air Force into a neatly catalogued mass of tickey-tackey defies true solution. The ability to hire, fire, pay, train and reward those who work directly for any given supervisor has been so completely withdrawn into the bowels of the system that if you accept the career you must accept the rating system. You don't have to like it but you must accept it—it is all-powerful, something like James Michener's Oro, the red god of Bora Bora.