“I just hope I’m one of the Bitchin’ Guys—“
“One of the bitchingest!” he answered with a smile and a wink. “About my only disappointment was not being able to get your old buddy Lutz over here full-time. Captain Sherry wanted to keep him at Danang, so we compromised and put him at Tan Son Nhut. We get first dibs when we need a sound guy up here on temporary duty, and it looks like I’m going to use him right away when I hop around Vietnam finishing up those interviews.”
“You’re not responsible for Shahbazian, are you? He breaks more cameras than he fixes.”
“We’ve got crates of spare cameras down in Saigon. What I really wanted was a personal driver who can play a little rhythm guitar and who’s also had experience lifeguarding, bingo-calling and generally raising hell. Woody’s our man. It keeps our options open. It was Woody’s idea, by the way, to do an Air Force Now! special on surfing Southeast Asia. It’ll give us a chance to visit China Beach over in Nam and the new R&R center down in Pattaya. If we play it right, we might even be able to swing through Okinawa, the Philippines and the Great Barrier Reef.”
Liscomb continued, “Rounding up the Bitchin’ Guys gives us one other possibility—I thought we might be able to stir up some political action like the old days back at Norton.”
I nearly spit out a mouthful of coffee. “With all due respect, sir, I don’t think you’ll be able to do much political hell-raising around here. Take a look outside—there’s a war going on, and our old crew from Norton is keeping its collective head down.”
“Relax, Leary, I was just playing with you. I’ve still got plenty to do on that final segment for my Air Force Now! series. I’m heading out tomorrow to do some interviews at Bien Hoa. I’ll be meeting Lutz and a crazy Polack from Boston you might have heard of named Sliviak. Sherry is sending him down from Danang to do the camerawork. I wish I could get you in on the editing, but I’ve got to send all the footage back to Norton on this one.” He started to get up.
“Can I ask you something before you take off?”
He sat back down and said, “Shoot, Leary.”
“What were you up to back in California after I left? We’ve been hearing all kinds of rumors.”
“Such as?”
“Heard you’d joined a couple of cults. Then it was the Panthers.”
He cocked his head back and thought a moment before asking me, “What were you doing with all that anti-war stuff?”
“I was trying to make peace with my conscience—make some noise while I still had a platform. Everything I believed in was being turned upside down.”
“Well?” he asked, giving me one of his dumb-like-a-fox-smiles.
“Well what? What’s with this cult business?”
“I guess I was on some sort of spiritual quest. Someone at the Los Angeles Zen Center said I should check out the Theosophy library near Griffith Park if I was really interested in world peace and racial harmony, but they were a little too much into ESP and séances for my tastes. But that led me to Krishnamurti, who had been selected as a child over in India to be the prophet-guru for the entire Theosophy movement until he abdicated and retired to the hills outside Ojai. He was brilliant, but Ojai is a four-hour haul from San Bernardino. I had to fly commercial up to San Francisco at one point and ended up sitting next to a very foxy producer from Argentina. She told me that if I was interested in world peace and harmony with a little meditation thrown in, I should check out the gardens and meditation centers built throughout California in the Twenties by an Indian guru named Yogananda. She was right about the temples and gardens being lovely, and I liked their belief that Christianity and Hinduism could coexist, but the Hindu part of the program had too many gods and gurus for me to keep track of. One of her friends invited me to a Baha’i service, and they seemed like lovely people believing as they did in world peace and equality for men and women, but they met in private homes and I was on the road too much to follow up. It was almost like I was wearing a sign saying ‘recruit me,’ because I was invited to check out a bunch of other groups like Science of Mind and Nichiren Shoshu and Scientology and even a group that believed Jesus was coming to pick us up in a space ship in the year 2000. At which point I said, ‘Whoa! Why don’t I stay focused on a single path and work on inner peace before I try to save the whole world?’ The ritual at the Zen Center was complicated, but the meditation itself was something I could do the rest of my life.
“Unfortunately, I had trouble applying my spiritual practice to the racism I kept hearing about putting the Tuskegee Airmen piece together. I think I told you about how they were denied admission to the Officers’ Club at Wright-Pat when they got back from Germany. The court-martial that followed played a major role in Truman’s decision to integrate the entire armed forces and gave the story a happy ending, but they never would have left Alabama if Eleanor Roosevelt hadn’t interceded for them. They were getting busted on the way to flight training because redneck MPs couldn’t believe Negroes were capable of flying airplanes. And so on.
“And then, while I was back in California editing that segment, I got a strange request to drive in to L.A. to interview some Vietnam infantry veterans. They had gotten wind of the project and wanted to clue me in that they had all been sent out on highly dangerous LRRP missions doing long-range reconnaissance in the mountains and jungles along the Laotian border after committing minor infractions with their home units along the coast of Vietnam. They took terrible casualties and promised each other they’d meet up again as members of a Black Panther assassination squad when they got ‘back to the World.’ I couldn’t use the material, but they clued me in that the Panthers really did have a bunch of Vietnam combat veterans in their ranks. It sounded impressive—except what they were talking about was suicidal. One of them turned me on to a Black Muslim minister who was very convincing talking to me about Black Pride and the need for black men to step up, but he lost me with stuff about white men being blue-eyed devils and how their prophet Elijah Muhammad never died, how he’s flying around the earth in some kind of spaceship called the Mother Wheel. Another former LRRP turned me on to traditional Islam and the absence of racism in the teachings of Muhammad, but the world peace part seemed to be missing when I looked through the Koran he gave me. Long story short, I returned to my Zen meditation practice. And then it was time for me to go back out on the road for the Korean and Cold War segment of the series.
“The more active-duty black pilots I talked to, the more I was bugged about lingering discrimination in the military, but I began losing interest in black nationalism when I started investigating Martin Luther King’s perspective—seeing the Vietnam War as a distraction from solving social problems at home and seeing passive resistance as a way to elevate black and white Americans the way Gandhi liberated India and Britain by waging peace instead of war. Is there anything else you wanted to ask about?” he asked.
“Was there any truth to the stories about you and Captain Sherry at Elysium?”
“We checked it out. But the base commander was a lot more upset when we tried to get an integrated bowling league going off-base. ‘Blacks don’t bowl in San Bernardino,’ he told me.”
25 August 1971
The Black Power Squadron
I worried how Moonbeam would handle the culture shock of exotic Ubon, where killing and partying seemed to go hand in hand, but he had no sooner unpacked his bags than he took off for location shoots over in Vietnam. Reports we got over the next two weeks, however, hinted that his metamorphosing wasn’t letting up. After only a few days in Nam, Bitchin’ Guys Productions was put on the back burner. We knew Moonbeam was going through some major changes when he swapped out Sliviak and Lutz, his hand-picked Vietnam-based crew, for Washington and Blackwell, his hand-picked Afro-American crew, even though