Six months later I was a graduate student on the University of Michigan campus. I walked across the quad, the sun shining through the leaves on the tall trees. I wasn’t yet used to miniskirts. Nor was I used to the large numbers of antiwar protesters who were evident on campus. Groups were selling peace pins and antiwar buttons on every corner of the quad. The Air Force had instructed those of us attending school on civilian campuses to avoid drawing attention to ourselves. We didn’t have to wear our uniforms once a week as had been the practice in the old days.
President Johnson, who had sent me to Vietnam, had announced he was through with Vietnam. I agreed with his decision. After flying up and down the coast of South Vietnam, after landing at just about every field large enough to accommodate a C-130, I had come to the same conclusion. Winning and losing a war had never been more to me than an abstract concept while I was in Vietnam; the only activity that had mattered to me was the challenge of trying to fly my airplane well and not break anything or anybody on board. Through luck and the remarkable resiliency of the aircraft, I had been more or less successful.
About five o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon in late September, fifteen or twenty of us Air Force students gathered for our monthly meeting. We were sitting in a room on the second floor of the building which housed the campus ROTC program, in wooden class chairs, the kind with a little bit of desk on the right side. Outside the sunlight slanted through leaves slowly starting to change color. We were being told the usual stuff about watching ourselves around the antiwar types, keep on those haircuts, keep up with administrative paperwork, get our education plans updated.
I was about to return to the small apartment where my pregnant wife and I were living when the class leader, the senior Air Force student on campus, a major, walked down the aisle where I was sitting. “I think these are yours,” he said, handing me a large manila envelope, and passed by. I sorted through the items and found, lying in among other papers, two items that appeared to be certificates of some kind. One of them was an award for the second and third oak leaf clusters to my Air Medal. Another said I had been awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross.
A few days later I opened the Air Force Times to read that Captain David Risher had died in the line of duty, flying his C-130 in South Vietnam. His C-130 had encountered a hill near Bao Loc in bad weather. Everyone on board had been killed.
Dave. Spunky, aggressive Dave. He had probably been checked out as an IP some time in February. He had died on September 6, 1968, after spending over six months as an IP. How much of that time had he spent flying the in-country shuttle, I wondered. And Bao Loc, where he had led the way into the fog, laughing at Denny and me in our reluctance, Bao Loc with its strangely humped runway, had reached up and taken him.
Time passed, and I completed my Air Force education and my Air Force career. During those years there were new assignments, new tasks to be undertaken, new information to be absorbed. Occasionally, in the process of looking for something else, personnel files, class notes, old tax forms, I would come across those stiff certificates and other pieces of paper collected during those amazing months, and I would slip back in time, as through a narrow door into the past, and recall the experiences that had defined me more than any other in my life.
What I realized only vaguely then, but have come to realize more fully since, is that after flying into Phan Thiet, Bao Loc, An Khe Golf Course, An Hoa, Kham Duc, Dak To, and Khe Sanh, the world could never be quite the same for me again. Those experiences changed me in ways I didn’t understand then and don’t fully appreciate yet. Those awful, terrible, wonderful weeks on the shuttle gave me enduring visions of runways that no one but those who flew to them could ever really know.