It’s unlikely that Shahbazian, a flamboyant Air Force brat, and Zelinsky, a blue-collar wise guy from Detroit, would have ever crossed paths in civilian life, but in the Air Force they shared a powerful unspoken bond—they had already done a tour of Southeast Asia and felt right at home across the border showing us new guys the Third World ropes in case, despite Nixon’s promised troop reductions, we too were shipped out. Zelinsky, in fact, had been so at home during the year he spent in Thailand that he had volunteered to go back so he could marry his Thai girlfriend. As he and Woody predicted, we had a roaring, rowdy good time of it that night, starting out at the Long Bar, Shahbazian’s favorite, spending Yanqui dollars like visiting royalty while he told us about the time on R&R in Hong Kong he’d had a dozen girls sent to his room. “Sounds like love at first sight to me,” said Lutz, the elf-like techie who worked on the dubbing stage recording sound.
We wound up at a back-alley hole-in-the-wall called Hernando’s and decided around midnight that we had better hit the road while we were all accounted for. We had lost Wheeler for an hour until Zelinsky stumbled upon him sitting in a dark corner booth with a small-but-voluptuous young Mexican girl snuggled in his lap, smooching hungrily and sipping from the salty rim of the same margarita glass. We chattered all the way home, lamenting the night’s near misses and bragging about old conquests—real, embellished and imagined—as we rolled down the open highway. Everyone, that is, except Wheeler, who pretended to sleep in the back seat. “Has everybody heard that Wheeler’s in love?” asked Zelinsky. His uniforms may have been rumpled and he may have talked with a flat midwestern twang, but there was a shrewd intelligence behind the Cheshire Cat smile that lit up his pudgy face.
“She’s nice,” protested Tom in those innocent days before he and Zelinsky became my bungalow-mates at Ruam Chon Sawng. He had the look of a blond-haired surfer but was in fact a pioneer pothead from a small town in upstate New York called Wappinger’s Falls. “She’s an orphan and she’s only working the bars in Tijuana to save up for college.”
Zelinsky howled with laughter. “Mom, I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Angelina. The entire Pacific Fleet wants to be her best man.”
I had lost count at what might have been my eighth Cuba Libré; as we neared San Bernardino, I found myself wondering if Shahbazian’s Hong Kong story could be true. With his long Joe Namath sideburns and his Grand Prix race-driver mustache, anything was possible with Woody and women. It was two weeks later that he smuggled a pair of Tijuana hookers back to San Bernardino. Dashing and charming, he was waved through customs at the border and the back gate at the base without a hitch. When he was confined to quarters for a month, he told us it was a small price to pay for becoming a genuine war hero and a legend in his own lifetime. When I asked him why he brought them to the barracks instead of up to the mountains, he said, “What do we need hookers for? We’re living in a chalet.” And sure enough, a few days after his release he started dating Kristin, the foxiest civilian secretary working at AAVS headquarters. I wasn’t surprised to learn her family in Palm Springs had money. Shahbazian mentioned to her early on that his mother’s family owned mining interests in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, leaving out the part about going bankrupt.
In the early months of 1970, of course, our only real bond at the 1361st Photo Squadron was a quiet determination to save our collective hides. The white contingent at Headquarters Squadron, Aerospace Audio Visual Service, was pathetically pimply-faced and naïve, which may have explained why the chaplain’s daughter was willing to gang-bang the entire second floor of Barracks 1247. The Bloods weren’t innocent at all, but they weren’t clueing us in, preferring to watch from a distance as the pothead draft dodgers and the beerhead lifers made each other miserable. Rick Liscomb tried to float with both the brothers and the hipsters when we were off duty, which earned him the nickname “Moonbeam” from his fellow blacks. When he stopped eating meat and got into Zen meditation the hipsters picked up on “Moonbeam” too.
Our crowd was a fluke, crawling as it was with white, suburban dropouts; urban, upwardly mobile soul brothers; and hip, young officers who figured we could hide out in the safety of photo labs, sound stages and editing rooms in San Bernardino until the U.S. and the Vietnamese came to their senses. Nixon’s Vietnamization program meant bringing home American ground troops and turning the fighting and dying over to the ARVN—the Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Even if a few of us might still be sent over to Southeast Asia, it would be to another photo squadron—on an Air Force base with bunks and a roof over our heads and, according to Shahbazian, swimming pools and air-conditioned NCO clubs. The certainty that we would never be slugging a gun through leech-infested equatorial jungle brought us all a measure of unspoken cheer. The assumption that many of us were heading for careers in Hollywood added to the warm, fuzzy vibes.
I was especially upbeat because I’d survived a temporary overdose of naïveté, volunteering for cameraman duty and getting turned down. Like a lot of my later problems, it was Ron Cooper’s fault. I was impressed that Cooper had connections in Hollywood and had permission to drive in to Disney Studios every Friday afternoon to observe a real, live American Society of Cinematographers cameraman at work on the sound stage of the latest Disney live-action feature. It didn’t seem important at the time that he was parlaying his part-time-projectionist gig at the base theater into a film-bootlegging racket. It was his passion for cinematography that rubbed off on me to the point that I volunteered to give up my air-conditioned editing room. Fool that I was, I failed to notice that every cameraman on base except Ron Cooper was scheduled to do a tour of Nam—flying combat—or had just come back. It turned out that editors were leaving the Air Force for cushy civil-service jobs faster than the Viet Cong could kill cameramen, however. Colonel Sandstrom, AAVS Director of Production, turned down my request, confining me instead to three years of hard labor hunched over my Moviola editing semitruthful news clips. The more combat footage I looked at, the luckier I felt.
April 1970–March 1971
Chain of Command
We were coasting, biding our time. And then, late in that fateful April of 1970, Commander in Chief Nixon, on the advice of his field marshal, Henry Kissinger, ordered the invasion of Cambodia, and everything changed. If you were a grunt in Vietnam, it made perfect sense. The Ho Chi Minh Trail was the North Vietnamese Army’s main supply route into South Vietnam, and its southern branches ran through the hills and jungles of northeastern Cambodia. To make things worse, enemy troops often hid there with impunity between forays into South Vietnam. Unfortunately, nobody had explained that to the GIs in a stateside photo unit. We may have had Top Secret security clearances, but we didn’t have a “need-to-know.” And nobody explained it very well to the American public. To millions of Americans, Cambodia was a neutral country we were invading without a Congressional declaration of war and without informing its pro-American prime minister.
On April 30, Nixon went on national television, pointed to Cambodia on a map of Southeast Asia and announced, “This is not an invasion.” He played it down as “an attack on enemy outposts,” but college kids didn’t buy it. The next day hundreds of campuses erupted—even apathetic USC, home of the film school I dreamed of attending. Eleven students were shot by police at Jackson State. Two died. The inept Ohio National Guard killed an ROTC cadet and three other students at Kent State, wounding nine more in the process. I had stumbled into the GI anti-war movement back in Washington, DC, when the My Lai story broke, but this was new—this wasn’t a rogue unit gone bad, it was an entire administration going mad. We had been lulled into believing American troops would be coming home, not invading another country. Nixon’s deceit pushed me over the edge, turning me—an active-duty GI—into a full-blown radical. I wasn’t alone, but