The Big Buddha Bicycle Race. Terence A. Harkin

to meet Indian Joe, the blue-eyed Sikh who was a black marketeer and had expanded his operation effortlessly into a consortium of small businesses catering to GIs. Khun Joe told me not to sweat it if I didn’t have passport pictures and said he’d take me to arrange my spare identity the next night.

      It was the same kind of little shack run by a wiry, energetic papa-sahn that many of my fellow GIs visited across the river to score dope, only this establishment was not far from Prommaraj Road, in VC town, the off-limits Vietnamese ghetto. This papa-sahn didn’t have any dope for sale, but he took a Polaroid and said he’d have my passport in two days.

       11–13 September 1971

       Ron Cooper Isn’t Coming, OR: The Day I Donned My Plastic Wings

      I don’t know how he pulled it all together in two weeks. Perhaps he was the radical messiah that militant blacks had been waiting for. In any case it was an awesome sight watching Lieutenant Liscomb lead his Black Power Squadron, over five hundred strong, down Ubon’s main drag toward city hall on what was supposed to be a quiet Saturday morning in a backwater provincial capital. With great dignity, Brian Golson—“the Reverend”—marched in the front of the procession only a few feet from Liscomb. I could make out Sugie Bear and Ackerman walking confidently, not far behind. Mixed in with the Afro-American majority was a sprinkling of Latinos, including Perez, who had disguised himself in dark sunglasses and a Yankees cap. Further back, Price, Blackwell and Washington strode past in a festive mood, striking up a chant of “Say it loud! I’m black and I’m proud!” A few potheads including Dave Murray and his friend Mole tagged along, taking up the rear.

      “Fuck it,” I said to Wheeler as we locked up our bikes and joined in. “What are they gonna do—”

      “Send us to Vietnam?” we mouthed derisively.

      From the top of the granite stairway at the front of the provincial government building, the lieutenant gazed happily at his motley multitude and began speaking, using a bullhorn that echoed for blocks. “Eight years ago,” he extolled, “Dr. Martin Luther King told the world he had a dream, a dream of tolerance and equality and opportunity for all, a dream that even an assassin’s bullet could not kill. Today, even as the struggle for racial equality continues at home, we have a new dream here in Ubon—to stop this racist war. Fat-cat Washington politicians and the lobbyists and contractors they are in bed with have profited whether we lived or died! The Thai elite has been bought while Thai soldiers have paid in blood. But today we dream of peace. We dream of a new day when American soldiers lay down their arms and demand to be sent home so that our Thai brothers and their Vietnamese cousins can live in harmony. We have a dream that powerful White Anglo-Saxon politicians back in Washington will never again be able to put a gun to our heads and make us pawns on their global chessboard. But our struggle is just beginning. Whether we are black, white, Latino or Native American, mark my words—”

      “I think he’s starting to get warmed up,” said Tom.

      “As long as the military-industrial complex continues to profit—as President Eisenhower warned us—this war will continue!” The crowd gave him a few shouts of “Right on! Right on!”

      “As long as the military-industrial complex continues to own our elected representatives in the U.S. Congress—” He paused this time so the crowd could join him: “this war will continue!”

      “As long as the Silent Majority of American voters believe this is a fight of Freedom against Tyranny—”

      “This war will continue!” chanted the crowd.

      “Until we hold up the racist underbelly of this war to the light of day—”

      “This war will continue!” shouted the crowd, picking up Liscomb’s cadence.

      “If it is truly Communism that we are fighting, why are we fighting here among the brown-skinned people of Southeast Asia instead of against the white-skinned Communist regimes of Hungary, Czechoslovakia or Russia itself?”

      “Fuck racism!” somebody shouted.