“Which reminds me,” said Tom. “How much has Zelinsky told you about the BX?”
“They’ve got stuff that’s hard to find downtown?” I offered.
Tom smiled. “There’s way more to it than that. It’s the GI’s bargaining chip. A first-term enlistee can virtually double his one- or two-hundred-dollar-a-month salary by buying his electronic toys carefully—it’s 50 to 70% cheaper than in the States.”
“Maybe even more important,” added Groendyke, “he can deliver goods to the people of Ubon that cost four to ten times more on the outside. Seems to make it a lot easier to find a girlfriend—except Zelinsky, of course, who has done it with animal magnetism.”
Zelinsky grinned. “The locals who work at the BX and know how to game the system have risen fast in Ubon society.”
Last but not least, they brought me up to date on the latest AAVS scuttlebutt, which Tom had a talent for cultivating through his contacts at CBPO. He had gotten word that the inscrutable Moonbeam Liscomb had something to do with the switcheroos that brought us to Ubon. Wheeler’s old buddy Dave Murray was due in the following week from Cam Ranh Bay, and a few others—all cool guys like Blackwell and Price—had already rotated in. Link was pissed at first, then a little mystified, but now seemed to be getting a perverse joy from having his old problem children from Norton working under his watchful eye, never catching on that he was working under the watchful eye of Tom Wheeler.
Once I finished reporting in it was eight hours a day, five days a week editing gun-camera footage that the Wolf Pack’s F-4s and B-57s brought back from all over Southeast Asia. I may not have understood the tactics or rules of engagement yet, but those planes had definitely been to war and I knew from the first reel I looked at that the war was far nastier than anyone could have ever imagined from watching the evening news at home. I watched cluster bomb after cluster bomb cutting through the jungle, butchering any enemy soldiers trying to hide there. Along the rivers, sampan after sampan was strafed and sunk. Napalm engulfed village after village in flame, forcing me to ponder how the Air Force could do in seconds with a single canister from Dow Chemical what it took Calley’s platoon a full day to accomplish. Rockets were generally saved for bridges, larger buildings, and once a week or so, to shoot down a MiG up around Hanoi. Clearly the civil war between the North and South Vietnamese was still raging, which made me happier by the day that my orders had been changed from Tan Son Nhut to Ubon and that I had been taken under the wing of an old friend like Staff Sergeant Larry Zelinsky, who was blessed with a special kind of glibness that allowed him to look at bomb damage assessment footage as flat strips of 16mm celluloid, just pigment on acetate, not the three-dimensional depiction of devastation that my eyes took in.
It only took me a few weeks to confirm that Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base and Det 3 of the 601st Photo Squadron were indeed a stealthy part of Nixon’s Vietnamization program. American foot soldiers were going home. By reducing American casualties, Nixon won over enough American hearts and minds to keep the war going. He may have talked about downsizing, but like every American president before him he was damned if he was going to be the first to lose a war. The U.S. Air Force was sticking around at full strength, moving to Ubon, several other locations in Northeast Thailand and, according to Wheeler and Zelinsky, a couple of secret bases in Laos where Air America may or may not have been operating. It was about this time that a lean, ramrod-straight stranger with dark, piercing eyes showed up and spent a week working quietly with Zelinsky in the corner editing cubicle. I guessed from his military bearing that his civilian clothes were a cover and that he worked for the CIA. From what I gathered, you could only get to his secret base by helicopter and then mule train, and it could have been located in Northern Thailand, the Burmese Shan States, the mountains of northwest Laos, or even South China, seeing as how the private thousand-man army he was training hailed from all those regions. Clearly Nixon wasn’t limiting his stealth to Thailand, but Zelinsky refused to talk much about the project other than to show off the flintlock musket the CIA man had given him as a little thank-you. The musket looked like something out of the Revolutionary War, but a Hmong militiaman had only turned it in a week earlier in exchange for an M-16.
When Colonel Grimsley, the base commander, announced proudly at my first monthly Commander’s Call that the U.S. Air Force had now dropped more tonnage of bombs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail than the Allies had dropped on all of Germany in World War II, I realized from the loud applause that I was deep in the heart of lifer territory. With my application for discharge still rumbling around somewhere in the labyrinthine USAF bureaucracy, I was glad to know Wheeler again had my back, keeping tabs on my case the way he had at Norton. It seemed like a good time to take Poser, Esquire’s advice and maintain a low profile following lawful orders while I waited for my hearing.
The first weekend after I arrived, Zelinsky took me on a tour of Ubon proper. With it came a great riddle: as much as the war turned out to be far worse than I imagined, Thailand turned out to be just the opposite. It didn’t matter that I was still a little woozy with jet lag—I was immediately intrigued by the lively Third World economy that swirled around us downtown—in the bustling shops of the business district and a few blocks away along the river at the open-air Noy Market. There, bartering playfully was as routine as it would have been unimaginable in a Boston supermarket or department store. When Zelinsky led me into air-conditioned Raja Tailors (“just to window shop,” he told me), the smiling salesgirl handed us each an ice-cold Coca-Cola, and before I knew what hit me, a tailor in a turban had taken measurements for two silk shirts and a pair of dress bell-bottoms, to be ready in three days. Zelinsky had a good laugh, as usual, and sipped his Coke while I was left scratching my head.
Stepping back outside, I smiled, soothed by the buzz of activity that drowned out the sounds of fighter-bombers taking off and landing just a few miles away. About the only thing that didn’t win me over that day was the stench of stagnant sewers and canals (what the Thais called klongs) mixed with the pungent aroma of pork, chicken, river fish and dried squid that were hanging in the market stalls.
A little before noon Zelinsky suggested we break for lunch. It was hot season, and it had been hours since the blistering sun had burned off the morning haze. He led me to a noodle shop that looked out across the Noy Market. Like noodle shops throughout Thailand, it had an open front, a steel grate that was shut at night when they closed and a shiny cement floor that was at the same time depressing and spotlessly clean. The tables were well-worn Formica, the stools an almost elegant hand-lacquered bentwood. In front of me was a glass and steel pantry displaying the day’s menu and next to it several charcoal braziers that kept an array of woks sizzling. In the rear was an industrial-grade, glass-fronted refrigerator chock-full of frosty Cokes, Fantas, Green Spot sodas, bean-curd milk and Thai beer.
Zelinsky was grinning when we stepped inside. “I know you won’t believe me,” he said, “but you’ll be used to the fragrance of klong water and dried squid by the time you come back tomorrow. Amazing organism, the human body.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m sticking with sorry-assed chow-hall food.”
A petite young woman in her early twenties wearing aviator sunglasses, a faded, loose-fitting navy work shirt and torn bell-bottom jeans was making her way out of the noodle shop carrying two plastic satchels full of the morning’s groceries. I hadn’t noticed her until I pulled out my chair to sit down and managed to put it directly in her path, nearly jarring loose one of her shopping bags. She recovered gracefully and gave me the special condescendingly friendly smile that Thais trotted out for clumsy farang. I only caught a glimpse of her before she disappeared into the steamy late-morning sunlight, but as a serious student of photography she struck me as a particularly photogenic representative of a country noted for an abundance of beautiful women. Zelinsky snapped his fingers, bringing me out of my momentary trance.
“Maybe you’re right after all about that human-body-being-an-amazing-organism stuff,” I muttered.
“I was talking about your nose adjusting to the smell of dried squid,” replied Larry with a twinkle in his eye.