Sonny Stevens, our lead guitar player at Sarge’s, took a carful of us down to UC Riverside to see what kind of hot water we could get ourselves into at the office of the Student Mobilization Committee—the SMC for short. “It’ll be a great way to meet college chicks,” promised Stevens, like Shahbazian a colonel’s son who knew how to fly under the brass’s radar. He had been spending the war in relative obscurity, a laid-back, natural-born still and motion picture camera technician at the 1361st whose only failure had been trying to retrain Shahbazian as a fellow camera tech when Woody returned from his year of lifeguarding at Danang. Stevens was having better luck upgrading Woody’s skills on rhythm guitar, but when college campuses erupted after Kent State, he saw that Woody’s greatest potential was as a hell-raiser.
A couple of the SMC leaders at UC Riverside sent us off to a place called the Movement House near the University of Redlands to see some people who wanted to start organizing GIs. With the exception of Zelinsky, who never left the base, they didn’t have much trouble molding Woody and the rest of my former Tijuana drinking buddies into the nucleus of Norton GIs for Peace, and soon we were turning out an underground newspaper, the sNorton Bird. Woody drew a cartoon for the first cover—a ruffled, cigar-chomping bald eagle wearing aviator’s goggles and giving the finger mid-flight. Working stealthily at midnight, we delivered the inaugural issue to every officer and enlisted man living on the base. The next day, to paraphrase standard Air Force terminology, the Shinola hit the fan. The brass would have summarily shipped Stevens to Vietnam, but he didn’t have the requisite year left on his enlistment, so they sent him a hundred miles up the coast to the Vandenberg Missile Test Range instead. Two of the brothers, a sound man/still photographer named Gene Blackwell and a lab tech named Lonnie Price, had orders cut the same day for opportunities to participate in what we jokingly called the Southeast Asia War Games, but it was no joke. They were heading for Nam. For Blackwell it was Detachment 13 (“The Lucky Thirteen”) of the 600th Photo Squadron at Nha Trang. For Price it was Squadron Headquarters at Tan Son Nhut. Just before they left, their orders were changed to detachments at Korat and Udorn, Thailand, respectively. We speculated that this was a hush-hush part of Nixon’s troop reduction plan that only looked like a troop reduction to the American public. Air Force units that moved two hundred miles west to Thailand appeared on paper to have gone home, yet remained within easy striking distance of any target in Southeast Asia. Our president, we had to admit, was a tricky bastard.
A few days after the others, Wheeler and his sidekick, Dave Murray, found out they were going to do tours as combat clerk-typists, but at opposite ends of the war zone. Wheeler was being sent to Photo Detachment 2 at Takhli, Thailand, just north of Bangkok, while Murray was going to be squirreled away with the photo outfit at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam. Shahbazian got orders to do a surprise second tour at Tan Son Nhut a few weeks later, which didn’t seem to make him all that unhappy now that Kristin was pressuring him to get married. Zelinsky was a strange case—he’d avoided our anti-war activities because he wanted to go back to his old unit at Ubon, Thailand. He had volunteered so he could marry his Thai girlfriend, and knowing the Air Force, Zelinsky told us, they would have punished him by not letting him go. Maybe it was because Lutz was an undersized munchkin, but he was overlooked. His orders didn’t come through till the following spring—in plenty of time for the Big Buddha Bicycle Race.
Wheeler, from his vantage point in the orderly room, was keeping an eye on First Sergeant Link for us and reported that Link had figured incorrectly that I was the mastermind behind Norton GIs for Peace. Link made sure my orders for Tan Son Nhut came through with the first batch, but I fought it tooth and nail, applying for discharge as a conscientious objector with the help of Edward Poser, Esquire, an ACLU lawyer from Hollywood, the closest bleeding-heart enclave I could find to San Berdoo. He charged me what for an L.A. lawyer was a bargain fee of $50 an hour—even though I was only making $140 a month—but he offered me an installment plan. I would send him half my paycheck every month until my bills were paid. I accepted, given that I didn’t have much choice. He didn’t succeed in getting my orders canceled, but he did get them pushed back a month at a time while I met on base with Captain Allen Shelby, a lawyer at the judge advocate’s office, and completed a long checklist of paperwork. Along the way I was evaluated by the base chaplain and base psychiatrist, at the same time requesting supporting letters and other documents from friends and family scattered across the country. It was a relief to know that my compadres from GIs for Peace were standing behind me. As Blackwell put it, “We’re all doing our part for the Revolution, brother—working in different ways, that’s all.”
Wheeler, in addition to keeping an eye on Link, was using his back-channel contacts to make sure my application didn’t get lost in the bowels of the Pentagon. Up at Vandenberg, it hadn’t taken Sonny Stevens long to see how the brass was using a divide-and-conquer strategy to destroy Norton GIs for Peace. He resisted in a small way that summer by moving back to the area following his discharge. Going underground, he holed up on a ranch out in the desert near Victorville, growing marijuana to make ends meet. We co-edited the paper, bringing in an old friend of Blackwell and Price’s, a hard-as-nails, pissed-off black Air Policeman just back from Pleiku, to give the editorial writing a little Black Panther bite. Still working out of the Movement House, we organized a GI contingent to lead a peace march on Riverside, home of March Air Force Base and the Big Ugly Friggin’ “BUF” B-52s of Link and Sandstrom’s old 22nd Bomb Wing. Maybe this was when I started to lose my mind, or maybe it was the presence of living, breathing long-haired hippie chicks from the University of Redlands and Cal State Riverside that got the better of my good judgment, but the next thing I knew we were promoting the Riverside peace march—off duty, wearing civvies—by handing out leaflets at the entrance to George Air Force Base, a fighter base situated not far from Stevens’s pot plantation, and at March Field itself. Given that March was a SAC base where Air Policemen in the perimeter guard towers shot to kill, we didn’t squawk when they confiscated our fliers and brought us in for questioning. The hippie college girls seemed impressed when I called Captain Shelby at the JAG office at Norton and arranged our release—albeit with orders to stay five hundred feet from the main gate. An Oceanside march—next door to Camp Pendleton and half the Marines in America—soon followed. On both occasions I somehow ended up making speeches in front of thousands of people. Stevens’s prediction seemed to come true when I started getting involved with one of the organizers from the Movement House who had been with me the night we were arrested, but she broke it off over some unfathomable breech of hipness at the moment of our greatest triumph—People’s Independence Day, a Fourth of July rally that filled up a park in the middle of San Bernardino.
Shahbazian, Wheeler, and Zelinsky, my old Tijuana drinking buddies, stood together in the front row cheering me on, and next to them was my lovely radical organizer. Zelinsky knew he was shipping out the following week, and Wheeler and Shahbazian would be gone by the end of summer. Our hulking Air Policeman/editorial writer and an equally imposing cohort stood behind me on the dais, out of uniform, my volunteer bodyguards. Sonny Stevens, Frank Lutz and a couple of the bigger guys from the Movement House, also ex-GIs, weren’t too far away, keeping their eyes out for any local crazies who might decide to rush the podium. I was glad to have them, because the only San Bernardino policemen I could spot were off in a distant parking lot enjoying coffee and doughnuts. The crowd was minuscule after what I had seen in Washington, but by San Bernardino County standards, several thousand people at a political rally was substantial, enough to attract an editor, a couple of reporters, and a photographer from the San Bernardino and Riverside newspapers. In the midst of introducing a lineup of agitprop folksingers, student radicals from the University of Redlands and UC Riverside, and a pair of Farmworkers Union organizers, I spotted Captain Shelby, along with Lieutenant Liscomb, Lieutenant Sherry, and a couple other young production officers, all dressed in civvies, observing the rally from the shade of a gnarly California oak. And then it was my turn to speak.
“Our objectives in Vietnam are illusory and our means of attaining them are barbaric,” I said, trying to sound presidential even though I was skinny as a toothpick and in my twenties. I caught an approving smile from my soon-to-be-ex-flame and continued. “Where is this administration taking us? Where will the escalation end? If we are pursuing a failed policy, how can we continue to ask young Americans to die? And how can we ask black and Latino