I thought I noticed Liscomb standing up a little straighter, straining to hear, but he was too far away for me to be sure. I continued, questioning the wisdom of a peacetime draft, comparing it to slavery, and hoped nobody noticed too many contradictions when I compared the modern U.S. to ancient Rome and Athens and to the Spanish, French and British empires in modern times, asking if we too were in decline and about to fall. I took another glance at the girl from the Movement House and finished up with the best Jack Kennedy imitation I could muster, seeming to inspire the audience when I exhorted, “If this nation is to survive as a beacon of democracy, we must commit ourselves to ending the war now! It is we who have taken on the awesome responsibility of leading the way. We must not falter! We must have peace!”
I was still basking in warm applause when we opened up the mike and Lieutenant Barry Romo stepped out of the crowd. Almost as soon as Romo took the podium, I realized that a new day had arrived. Stateside GI speakers were no longer needed. We now had combat veterans like Romo coming back, fresh in from hand-to-hand fighting in the Ashau Valley, who were willing and able to tell it like it was and who had all the strength, intelligence and character that a Lieutenant William Calley lacked. “The valley of the shadow of death,” he called it, “a place where even the Lord’s rod and staff offered little comfort.” As instinctively as he might have taken one of those nameless hills in the Central Highlands, Romo had taken the open mike, pouring out his heart with a true soldier’s understated eloquence. “Again and again my men died to take an objective. Whether it was a hilltop or a village, it didn’t matter. We never failed. And again and again we were pulled out, giving that hard-earned ground back to the enemy…”
I could see Moonbeam Liscomb in the distance wanting to make a move for the stage. And I think it was his own privileged upbringing that held him back. He’d been raised black-upper-middle-class in Washington, DC, sensing the racism rampant in the country but never really experiencing it overtly except in its most refined forms—like the pressure of being the third black man ever to enter the Air Force Academy. Even from a hundred yards away I could see Moonbeam inching forward, away from his fellow officers and out into the hot sun. I wondered what was running through his mind, sensing that he regretted being trapped in his role as an Air Force support officer and that he realized he would never have his own war stories to tell.
I never really got a chance to talk to him about it, though. His proposal for an Air Force Now! series on black fighter pilots was fast-tracked into production in a matter of weeks. It meant he would be on the road the rest of the summer and most of the fall doing interviews, starting with World War II–era Tuskegee Airmen who went on to form the 99th Pursuit Squadron, an all-black fighter unit that had distinguished itself in North Africa and Europe. The plan called for following up with black aviators who had flown in Korea and during the Cold War. He would conclude with black pilots before and after tours of duty in Vietnam. Alas, it was going to involve months of editing. My iffy status—not knowing if I was going to be discharged or sent off to Tan Son Nhut—meant the end of my collaboration with Moonbeam. Instead, I’d be back doing puff-piece news releases while I waited out Poser’s legal dogfight with the Air Force.
Just before Zelinsky shipped out we learned that Link had requested assignment to Ubon. He joked that it was so he could personally look after Zelinsky and protect him from the rest of us bastards, Wheeler reported, but in reality he had already been stationed there the year before Zelinsky and another tour in a combat zone would give him a shot at making chief master sergeant before he retired. “He’s got to do it before the war ends,” Zelinsky quipped. “Nobody makes rank in the peacetime Air Force.” The whole unit was relieved when Link actually shipped out a few weeks later.
Over the next few months Lieutenant Liscomb was so busy with his Air Force Now! series that we scarcely saw him. I worried about my buddies who had been shipped overseas, deeply appreciating the supporting letters they had written for my discharge petition and the thanks they had offered me and Stevens for keeping Norton GIs for Peace going in their absence. Knowing they had been sent off to a war zone motivated me and Stevens to work hard, meeting with what remained of Norton GIs for Peace to plan for the fall and do more organizing with the students at UC Riverside. The brass had known what they were doing, however, and when they scattered the GIs for Peace membership, they successfully knocked a lot of the wind out of our sails. Late in August when Sonny and I went by the Movement House, it was boarded up, giving us a high and dry feeling. I felt a little higher and drier when the FBI called the extension in my editing room at Norton, asking me if I recognized any of the calls made to that number with a stolen telephone company credit card. I played dumb and they didn’t call back.
I didn’t get into Sarge’s much anymore, and when I did, I never saw Liscomb. Instead, I spent most of what little free time I had at the base theater with Ron Cooper, joining him up in the projection booth. He was on a kick about how you could learn a lot from watching bad movies, which is mostly what we got. I feared that the only thing we were learning was how to make bad movies.
Lieutenant Sherry, now Captain Sherry, requested me on a couple of her news releases and kept me up to date on Moonbeam, expressing mild concern that he had entered his Quiet Period, doing long periods of Zen meditation on the carpet of his bachelor officer apartment, only breaking off occasionally to take out his guitar and play along to his favorite soft-core protest songs. I ran into him by chance one day on his way to the dubbing stage at AAVS and asked him how the Tuskegee Airmen piece was coming along. “Would you believe they got arrested trying to enter the Officers’ Club at Wright-Patterson when they got back to the States after the war?”
That was not an answer I was expecting. I cleared my throat before replying, “I think that got left out of the defeating Hitler part of our U.S. history books. Maybe you can set the record straight.” Changing the subject, I asked if the meditation he was doing was anything like what Jack Kerouac had been into.
Moonbeam just smiled. “The Beats didn’t quite get it right,” he told me. “They were trying to take an easy path into Zen without giving up sex, caffeine and alcohol.”
I didn’t get to follow up, nor did I especially want to. With Wheeler and Shahbazian exiled to Southeast Asia, I’d had to move from our chalet into a one-bedroom cabin, but a week before Labor Day something miraculous happened: Danielle Haber showed up. We had barely known each other back in Washington, DC, and yet the few hours we had spent together had lingered poignantly in both our memories. We had met by chance during the candlelight march to the White House that opened the Moratorium II weekend. I first noticed her while we were walking along Memorial Bridge, crossing the Potomac from Arlington Cemetery toward the Lincoln Memorial. It was just after sunset, and the November night was crisp but mild. The procession was solemn and dignified, so we didn’t talk much, but when we did, I was soothed by the clarity of her voice and her quiet intelligence. It wasn’t until afterward when she poured a glass of wine for me up in her apartment that I was struck by her subdued beauty. She looked at me with pure blue eyes that were unafraid to let me see deep inside her when I returned her gaze. When I tried to put my arm around her she was gentle when she pushed me away, putting her hand on my arm in a way that still kept me close. “My husband was killed last summer, just before I was supposed to start my junior year at Drexel. The Army only told us he was killed in action, but a friend wrote later that Craig’s M-16 jammed crossing a stream near a village west of Huế. My family tried to console me, but how could they? I dropped out of school and ended up moving in with a girlfriend in D.C. who knew about an opening at a gallery in Georgetown. So here I am,” she said with a sad smile.
Danielle was only supposed to crash with me in San Bernardino for the first few days of a two-week California vacation, but one day led to another and she still hadn’t left for San Francisco. On the tenth day she told me she wanted to stay. I told her it was fine with me. She had some money put aside, and we could live together for almost nothing in our little log cabin. With Danielle around, I enjoyed chopping firewood for the old stone fireplace. Whatever food we needed I got cheaply at the base commissary. Soon I was agreeing with her that going back to school in January was a good idea, and after putting in