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 it wasn’t comfortable. In rebuking our government we were in some way rebuking our fathers who had served unquestioningly in World War II.
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 GIs to shed more blood than their white counterparts when they are still fighting for their civil rights at home? Who will be the last to die in this tragic lost cause? Is there anyone in Washington who would step forward to take their place?”
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 a call to the admissions offices at Cal Arts and the University of Redlands she was encouraged enough to give up her gallery job in D.C., unpack her suitcases and send in her applications. In the meantime, while she waited to hear back from the colleges, she started dropping me off at the base and heading over to the SDS and SMC offices at UC Riverside. She wasn’t fussy—she designed anti-war posters when that was needed but didn’t mind handing out leaflets wherever they sent her. She fell in love with our cabin in the mountains and started putting up curtains and decorating it with folksy rugs and rustic furniture we found in the antique shops around Crestline and Big Bear. She fell in love with swimming and hiking up there with me on the weekends and with coming home to cook together in our tiny kitchen. Best of all she started to fall in love with me, and I felt the same way about her.
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.