My original orders had been cut for Squadron Headquarters, Tan Son Nhut Air Base, Republic of Vietnam, like Price’s. My lawyer’s delays might have had something to do with it, but I suspected it had more to do with the fine print in Nixon’s troop reduction plan that my orders were changed from Tan Son Nhut to an outpost on the Laotian frontier of Thailand called Ubon. I never would have heard of the place if Zelinsky didn’t have a girlfriend there and Link hadn’t decided to return for an encore, which got me wondering if he had anything to do with my change of orders. I was slated to join them at Detachment 3 of the 601st Photo Squadron as an editor of bomb damage assessment footage—BDA for short. When I found Ubon on a map, I noticed it was smack dab in the middle of Southeast Asia, an hour by fighter-bomber from potential targets all over North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Zelinsky mentioned that he had never seen a reporter in Ubon the entire year he was there on his first tour, something we were sure the press-hating Nixon found comforting. I did not find it comforting to see that Ubon was fewer than fifty miles from either Cambodia or Laos—a two-day march for an enemy infantry unit. It was even less comforting to realize that my old nemesis, First Sergeant Link, was already there waiting for me, but it made Danielle happy, at least, that I wasn’t going to Vietnam.
We fell even more deeply in love that autumn, and she decided to pass on Cal Arts, despite its great reputation, because it would mean moving two hours away. We were still in love when she started at Redlands in January. It was tricky, but we managed to juggle our schedules and get by with my aging Bug. Thank God she was still in love with me when I phoned my Hollywood ACLU lawyer one chilly Thursday in March and learned that I was shipping out the following Monday. “Sorry, I haven’t had a chance to call you,” he said in a nasally voice. “You lost the restraining order and the writ of habeas corpus, but I’ll keep working on it from this end. In the meantime, when you get over there, just follow lawful orders.”
I would have asked about unlawful orders, except I was speechless. He’d already won a case like mine, which gave me both confidence he could win mine and doubts he’d bother to try. Danielle and I spent the next day packing and making love and putting things into storage and making love a little more. We decided to drive down to Mexico for our last weekend together and camp along the Baja coast where the cactus-filled desert ran down to the sea at San Felipe. We zipped our sleeping bags together and slept under the stars, making love with the sea breeze lapping at our faces, and in the morning we had breakfast in a little cantina on the edge of town that served fresh ceviche, warm tortillas and hot, black coffee.
We got back late Sunday night, exhausted. The next morning I gave Danielle the keys to the V-Dub and she drove me and my duffle bag to the base passenger terminal. She cried hard and I forgot for a moment about being afraid and alone, kissing her and comforting her and promising that I’d write to her every day and that a year would go by in no time. Walking down the aisle of the chartered 707, I didn’t see a single face I recognized, not a soul to warn me that I was going to get to be a combat cameraman after all.
March 1971
Klong Airlines
I spent my first night in Thailand just outside Bangkok at a small hotel near the Don Muang International Airport / Royal Thai Air Force Base. There, within an hour after disembarking from that cramped Continental Airlines charter, I was greeted warmly at the hotel bar by a “tour guide” who guaranteed the young virgins in the picture albums he showed me were eager to meet GIs. My roommate, an aspiring American goodwill ambassador, succumbed, but I stayed behind, choosing to remain faithful to Danielle. Although we weren’t officially engaged, our intentions were clear. My biggest concern was how I’d break it to my parents that I was marrying an Episcopalian.
Early the next morning I boarded a C-130 trash-hauler flown by a branch of the Military Airlift Command affectionately known as Klong Airlines and headed up-country. To a large degree, Vietnam was supposed to be a conventional guerilla war, which made it a bit puzzling to me why we even had air bases in Thailand. Thanks to the Air Force’s “need-to-know” policy, I hadn’t been told a damn thing to clear that up, only that Ubon was “up-country” along the Laotian frontier. Thanks to the horror stories that had been filtering back to us from Vietnam, I took my virgin flight full of apprehension about jeeps with bombs rigged to their ignition switches, shoeshine boys with hand grenades, and base barbers who traded in their straight razors at night for handheld shoulder-launched rockets like the one that hit Shahbazian’s barracks.
The moment my boots hit the tarmac at Ubon, I knew something big was up, something way bigger than shoeshine boys with hand grenades. Two F-4 Phantom fighter-bombers were taking off in tandem just beyond the flight line, rumbling down the runway and then shaking me to my depths when their afterburners kicked in and their noses shot straight up like a couple of rockets. The smell of JP-4 fumes filled the air, mixed with a lot of testosterone. Holy shit! I thought. Larry Zelinsky, my sponsor and official tour guide, was there to meet me, grinning and shouting, “Brendan Leary! Welcome to the Rat Pack!”
He shook my hand and snatched up my garment bag. “Follow me!”
I slung my duffle bag over my shoulder and followed him into the Ubon aeroport terminal. Zelinsky didn’t waste a moment diving into my orientation. “The 8th Tactical Fighter Wing runs the show here. They call themselves the Wolf Pack and they’re the largest, MiG-killingest fighter wing in all of Southeast Asia.”
“Why have I never heard of them?”
“Because you didn’t have a ‘need-to-know.’ Now you do. We call our little sixty-man photo detachment the Rat Pack, but even if we’re small, we play an active role here. We do awards ceremonies and passport photos and the usual bullshit, but our main mission is combat documentation—ComDoc—in real time and with after-action reconnaissance. We do a lot of it using gun cameras and camera pods installed on select aircraft. They record 16mm motion picture footage whenever the F-4 jocks squeeze their trigger finger. Our technicians mount the camera systems and service them and reload film between sorties. The rest is done by living, breathing motion picture cameramen and still photographers.”
“I imagine that could get a little intense,” I replied as we stepped outside. My head was already starting to spin.
Four F-4s were taking off, two flights of two—a lead and a wingman each—that rattled our bones and momentarily drowned out Zelinsky’s briefing. Finally he continued, “Everything in Ubon is intense. There’s an official war and a couple of secret wars going on twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, although we try to cut back on Sundays.”
He led me to a jeep with the Det 3 mascot painted on the door—a rat dressed in fatigues with a question mark over its head staring in confusion through a tripod handle. The motto read: “We kill ’em with fillum.” We threw my bags in back and climbed in. As we pulled out, he handed me a little pamphlet, Welcome to the Wolf Pack. “Don’t worry about remembering everything I’m telling you—this booklet’s pretty good. It’s got a little bit on Thai culture and some stuff on the history of American operations here. These days the 8th Tactical Fighter Wing is made up of four fighter squadrons totaling more than eighty F-4 Phantoms and ten B-57 Canberra light bombers.”
“And that’s just one base?”
“That’s not all. The wing also includes a special operations squadron that’s