Zelinsky exchanged a few Thai pleasantries before ordering us two Singha beers and some mildly spicy duck soup. The soup was delicious, and the beers did such a fine job washing away the dryness in our throats that we decided to have one more for dessert. Outside, we shook hands, soul-brother style, and Zelinsky headed home to spend the afternoon with Pueng, his reason for returning to Thailand. Given that this was my first trip downtown, I wanted to stay and take some pictures.
I meandered along Prommahtehp Road as it followed the Mun River toward the Warin Bridge. A block from the bridge I saw her again. Among hundreds of people thronging from jewelry shop to tailor shop to dry goods store to stationer, the lovely stranger in the teardrop sunglasses and oversized denim shirt somehow stood out by radiating just a tiny bit more grace and sensuality than the many other attractive young people around her. Her hair was just a fraction longer and silkier as it bounced to the cadence of her gentle footsteps. Her golden skin glistened ever so slightly brighter in the midday sun. Intrigued, I put on the longest telephoto lens I could successfully hand-hold and stole a few shots of this lovely stranger, mixed in with pictures of the shops and the many exotic products they sold. Even the cheap notebooks in the windows of the stationery stores captivated me, bound as they were in various patterns of silk landscapes.
After battling so hard to avoid being shipped overseas, I wondered that day why fate was turning out to be so kind, and I smiled to myself at how much I was enjoying my first day off. On a lark, I continued following my accidental model from the opposite side of the street even though I couldn’t frame her closer than a waist shot. As attractive as she might have appeared in close-up through my lens, this was a comfortable distance. I expected to marry Danielle when my tour was up and didn’t need any complications. Besides, I was fundamentally shy; without being able to speak Thai, it would have been hard to accomplish anything other than to scare her away if I had moved closer.
And so I kept following her, taking pictures from across the bustling thanon. A couple of times I lost her and was surprised to find myself feeling sad, for Christ’s sake! And then I’d spot her again. I’d feel a little surge of joy and have to laugh at myself. I followed her around the traffic circle that fed the bridge to Warin and the depot for the Bangkok train. Before I realized it we were at a dead end on the outskirts of town among rat-infested shacks that clung to the muddy embankment of the Mun River. The denim work shirt and bell-bottom jeans that belonged on a San Francisco hippie-panhandler suddenly looked like the silk robes of royalty when she was surrounded by a horde of tiny street urchins dressed in rags. Patiently she gave each one of them a piece of fruit and let them reach their tiny hands into a bamboo tube of sticky rice and scoop out enough to form into a riceball. When she opened a can of tuna, they eagerly dipped in their little balls of rice and ate voraciously. When the tuna was gone she passed out at least twenty more unopened cans until her shopping bag was empty.
As the children started to drift back down the embankment into the maze of hovels built out of sheet metal and packing crates salvaged from the base garbage dump, I noticed I had attracted a throng of my own. They seemed to have never seen a 35mm Pentax camera before, so I bent over to let the ragtag leader take a look through the eyepiece. In an instant I was swarmed with tiny dirt-encrusted hands and found myself staring into the large, dull eyes of children who had eaten too little too long. The camera was being torn from my neck and I had to brace myself with my left hand on the rough, broken sidewalk to keep from being pulled over and trampled. Barely able to hang on to the camera with my right hand, I took a deep breath, grunted, and broke free, staggering to my feet, stunned at how many kids had appeared out of thin air and how these scrawny, underfed waifs could so easily take down a six-foot American. Hugging my camera tightly to my body, I dug deep into my front pocket with my free hand and pulled out a handful of coins, flinging them as far as I could toward the shacks at the side of the river. As quickly as it had appeared, the miniature mob dispersed in a cacophony of chatter. Choking a little in the hot, dusty air, I looked around and finally caught a glimpse of my mystery woman as she disappeared up See Tong Street into some sort of hospital compound.
April-May 1971
Woodstock East
I lived on the base in a tin-roofed hootch with only a ceiling fan for air conditioning, sleeping in a squeaky bunk, keeping myself clean in hopes that Danielle still wanted a proper church wedding when my time came to go back to what black GIs called “the World” and what I still called home. I quickly settled into a mind-numbing routine at work, cutting combat film day after day, bearing witness to endless miles of South Vietnam as beautiful as the Thai countryside being laid waste with napalm, rockets and cluster bombs originating from Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base. The enemy was firing back with anti-aircraft artillery (“triple-A”)—we saw plenty on the Night Operations footage—and sending up MiG interceptors and triple-A over North Vietnam, but it had been eerie—not one plane flying out of Ubon had been shot down for ten months. Sure, we had recently lost two of our cameramen, Spinelli and Nevers, but they had been on TDY out of Danang. And it was during Lam Son 719, the screwed-up South Vietnamese attempt at invading Laos that got bogged down along Route 9. They shouldn’t have even been on the helicopter that crashed; they were supposed to be on a flight back to Ubon, but they couldn’t pass up a chance to cover the operation with Larry Burrows, the famous Life photographer who went down with them. I slipped into a kind of trance as I spliced together scenes of extraordinary violence, acquiescing in silence the way Richard Poser, Esquire, had instructed me to and wishing I could quit thinking altogether.
I couldn’t stop thinking, though, and soon understood the rules of engagement well enough to know that our light observation planes were being shot at by real snipers using real bullets and were spotting real guerillas disappearing into the hamlets and jungles of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia when they called in air strikes, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how our pilots knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that every sampan we sank and every village we bombed and burned belonged to the enemy. I found myself wondering how many times it only took sighting a single flash from an enemy rifle down below to entice our fighter-bombers into destroying an entire village built with the calloused hands of peasants who had lived among the same patch-quilt rice paddies for a hundred generations.
Colonel Grimsley, the base commander, and Captain English, our commander at ComDoc, made it clear that those were the kinds of questions they did not want asked. At Ubon Royal Thai Air Force Base, at Commander’s Call and posted on bulletin boards everywhere, “loyalty” was the buzzword. “Loyalty” meant keeping your mouth shut. Lifers and apprentice lifers knew the drill. Loyal soldiers did not make waves that would keep captains and colonels from getting anything less than perfect efficiency reports and their tickets to advancement punched properly. So I did my job and kept my mouth shut and spoke only in whispers to Tom Wheeler and Larry Zelinsky.
One concession to convention at Ubon that came easy was getting myself a basic five-speed no-name aluminum road bike when Wheeler got his. The base was crawling with bicycles, which I found comforting. It reminded me of a pleasant college campus back home, except that the birds chirping in the distance at Ubon were a little bigger, noisier and more carnivorous than the pigeons that nibbled at breadcrumbs on a college green. For the entire month of March and most of April, while other guys were heading off base to go nightclubbing and visit massage parlors, drinking and doing some of the purest drugs money could buy, I rode my bicycle over to the base library and holed up reading the American Cinematographer. I wrote to Danielle every day, telling her that I missed her and how even though American foot soldiers were truly going home, things were tougher than anyone could imagine for the Vietnamese. I put it off for a few weeks, but I finally started getting ready for my discharge hearing, motivated by a hunch they would be springing it on me unexpectedly. It wasn’t long before I was reading about the brutal, tragic history of the French in Indochina in books like Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place and finding myself obsessed with how we were repeating so many of their mistakes. When I tried to figure out where Thailand fit in, I didn’t get past the Encyclopedia