In the early autumn of 1969, I was a hot mess.
Not yet twenty-six years old, I was finishing up my second one-year tour in Vietnam. I had been at war for two and a half years altogether at that point, and I had no idea what I was going to do in the future.
I knew exactly what the problem was: there was a girl, Omie, who I should have married and didn’t, and that was the whole story at that point.
She was smart, meltingly lovely, strong, and she had a fierce belief in the possibility of occasional magic. I could have married her, and I didn’t, and that was it.
I had no idea what to do. I’d come back on active duty to spend a second year in Vietnam. I told myself it was out of a sense of duty, but, looking back, it was more because I hadn’t found a place for myself in a very changed America when I went home after the first tour. And here I was at the end of the second year and still didn’t know what to do.
Now, this sad tale is not just about me, this is about my mother as well. We raised one another; we practically grew up together. She was a girl when I was born, and then we raised my two younger brothers.
This is a woman who supported me all my life, but when she heard that Omie had married another man, she said, “You stupid boy! You stupid, STUPID boy!,” and didn’t talk to me for several weeks.
I was a pretty pathetic figure, but this hopelessness, I just had to hold it in, because I couldn’t show it to the world. I led the Kontum MIKE Force, comprised of some six hundred Montagnard tribesmen and seventeen Green Berets, and our job was to be the cavalry when Special Forces camps along the border areas came under siege. And so they expected me to be steady, to be serious, and I presented as steely and as hard-faced as I could to the world. I guess I was probably off-putting enough that nobody in the gang noticed when I got a letter.
Some of you may not know what a letter is—it’s what we did before Snapchat and Twitter and e-mail and so forth—and it came on paper. I got a letter from the girl, Omie.
She said, “I’m divorced.”
Period.
Bang.
She said, “I thought I would be traveling, perhaps, in Southeast Asia, probably at the end of October.”
Well, that happened to be just when my tour ended, and I sorted it out that she had been talking to my mother.
Well, I went into military precision mode: I started by getting a car and driver in Bangkok, where we were going to meet.
The way she put it, “Why not, let’s just meet in Bangkok,” as if, you know, two people who knew each other vaguely would go to the Oriental Hotel on the other side of the world to have some tea.
But I knew this was serious for her, and so I wanted to make everything just right. The timing was the crucial element, because this was a woman who hadn’t had, in the years I had known her, ten dollars in her purse. And I knew if she managed somehow to buy this ticket to Bangkok, she was gonna arrive broke, and so I had to be there.
So planning the timing was meticulous. I figured out how long it would take, I added one day for every movement—every time I had to change planes, every time I had to walk across the street—I added a day. I was gonna get there four days early as my target, and then I threw in another three days.
Look, I’m playing for my life here.
And then very quickly we get to the middle of October, and the fellow who’s relieving me has reported for duty. I’ve signed over the equipment and the weapons to him, we’ve shaken hands, it’s essentially done. But I don’t get out the door quite fast enough when a message comes in and says one of our posts on the Laotian border has come under siege and we have to go do our part to save them.
I could have left, but in truth none of my guys expected me to, because the new guy didn’t even know everyone’s names yet. You can’t expect him to march off to war when he’s just in these “hey, you” sorts of relationships with his men.
So I put down my packed bags and went back to the war. We went up to the camp. It was an ugly bit of business—they were being shelled by heavy mortars and artillery, and we pushed back the forward observers, the eyes and ears of the artillery, and then we went after the guns themselves, and eventually it was all over.
And I had a day left.
But I rushed to an airplane without being on the manifest, against the rules, and got down to Saigon, and I had one day to find a way to Bangkok.
It was five days till the next commercial flights went across, and three days until the embassy courier flight went to Bangkok.
At the end of a long and very frustrating day, arguably the darkest day of my life, a guy said, “Captain, you can’t get there by the twenty-eighth, even if you hijack an airplane.”
I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I felt like I’d somehow been hit with something, and so I went to the Special Forces club. The bar there was open seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, for eight years all in all, and I went there, and I had a lot of money in my jeans. So I drank good scotch, and after three scotches, generously poured, it came to me. I could fix this.
I was going to drink myself to death in that bar.
I told myself, You’re not leaving here until they carry you out dead. And just as I had started into that mode, in through the door came Maggie Raye, the patron saint of the Green Berets.
Now, some of you may not know who Martha Raye is, or was. She was born in 1916. By 1921, when she was only five, she already was a headliner in vaudeville. She made her first movie in 1934, then made twenty-five more of them, three times with Bob Hope. But in my favorite movie, Monsieur Verdoux, she played with Charlie Chaplin; she acted him right off the screen throughout the entire movie, and he was the director and the producer!
Maggie and I had known each other since the beginning of that second tour of mine, and we had a good relationship. We had shared common interests—we liked good coffee and vodka and movies—and we had spent a lot of time talking.
Well, she walked in, surveyed her domain there. Maggie had been in Vietnam six months a year for seven years, and it wasn’t to do shows, and it wasn’t to promote herself or her career or anything. She came and largely just hung around with the guys, with the Green Berets. She was our cheerleader, she was our confidante.
Well, she walked in, and then she looked at me, and she sat down and ordered a drink and gave me a huge stage frown, tapped my hand, and said, “Larry, what’s wrong?”
I said, “Maggie, I’ve screwed up my whole life. There’s one girl, she’s gonna be in Bangkok, I’m not gonna be able to get there, I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I just ruined everything, I’ve just completely fouled this whole thing up.
“She’s gonna arrive in Bangkok, she’s gonna be broke, she’s gonna wait a day, maybe two, and then she’s gonna have to go home.”
And Maggie thought about it, and she said, “Larry, are you sure that this girl is that important? Because there are an awful lot of ways to have fun in this world without, you know, just inventing yourself all over again.”
I said, “No, Maggie, she’s absolutely the girl I want, the girl I need, the girl I want to marry. This is everything, she’s it.”
And she gave me another pause, and then she said, “We’ll fix this. We’re going to go tomorrow and see the head of the Seventh Air Force”—that’s a four-star general—“and we’ll get you a ride to get into Bangkok on time.”
And so I went to my room and slept a little bit. I woke up, and ten minutes later the adrenaline in me had burned off all the hangover, and I was ready for the day.
I marched out to meet Maggie, and off we went to see the head of the Seventh Air Force. We walked into the building at Tan Son Nhut Air Base that said HEADQUARTERS, SEVENTH AIR FORCE, went through the door, and there were signs that said EXECUTIVE SUITES THIS DIRECTION. We went in the opposite direction. Maggie understood that the real head of the Seventh Air Force was not the four-star general who got in the pictures, it was the senior noncommissioned officer who really ran the place: Command Master Sergeant Francis Patrick Mahoney.
Mahoney operated in a huge bay of busy people doing busy and important work in a sort of Plexiglas cube; that was his office, so he could see in every direction. I was left to sit outside.
Maggie is received like royalty.
Her gesticulations get wilder and wilder, and she’s pointing over her shoulder at me. But Mahoney’s head is slowly turning this way, and what was a smile has turned to an Oh, my God.
And the issue is in real doubt, I can tell, because Maggie cries.
(Maggie only cried on cue—she was pulling out all the stops.)
This goes on for some time. I’m fidgeting, trying to look professional, and I’m finally called in.
He looks at me like I was something the dog dragged in and says, “Captain, we’d be glad to give you a hand with this problem. Be at Marker 102 at midnight tonight, and we’ll get you to Bangkok on time.”
Well, I must have given him six thank-you-very-muches.
I ran out to see Marker 102. (A marker’s just a circle on the ground with a number painted on it; it’s a meeting place.)
I rushed back to my room, packed my bag, and with a flashlight I went onto a very dark, very dimly lit, eerily quiet air force base. I was having some questions about which way to turn when I got to the headquarters, but then I saw there was a light shining, and it seemed to be in about the right direction, so I walked to the light.
That light was right over Marker 102. It’s in a war zone, we’re on an air base, it’s dark everywhere except where I’m standing.
I felt like Bogart in Casablanca.
But along comes a major right at the crack of midnight, grabs my arm, and says, “You’re Kerr?”
I say, “Yes, sir.”
And we go to the general’s Learjet. Eh!? There’s a lieutenant colonel flying, the general’s personal pilot, this major is a copilot, and there’s a senior enlisted guy in the back who’s a crew chief and an occasional steward.
Moments later we’re moving toward altitude in the general’s plane, I’m leaning back drinking some of the general’s booze. Now, the surreal is part of the actual fabric of war, and I was at the end of any ability to generate any disbelief about anything. But this was strange even for Vietnam, and Maggie’s mojo was sensational.
So I landed, got my way to Bangkok. I had enough time for a few hours’ sleep, to get nice and clean and spiffy, and go to the airport to meet this woman. It was a big green room, cement blocks. It’s a palace now, that airport, but back then it was very basic. The gates emptied into the hall from a distance, and all of us waiting to see people were kept behind the lines at some distance off.
So I’m peering very carefully to see her, and for reasons that she’s never been able to justify, she’s about the last person off the plane.
I look for her, and finally there she is.
She can’t see me yet, but I can see her. Her eyes are shining, her face is shining, she’s ready for adventure, she’s thrilled to be there.
She’s thrilled about making a new life with me.
A year later I married her. (Not as dumb as I look.)
And forty-six years later, when I go to pick her up at a ferry stop or a train or an airport, I run through a mental catalog of my visions of her, and it always stops—bang—on that picture of her back in Bangkok in 1969, and the face I look for and the face I find is that same 1969 face.
Dark eyes glistening, face shining, ready for an adventure.
LARRY KERR served in the US Army from 1964 to 1974. After graduation from Infantry Officer Candidate School, he served two tours in Vietnam, the first as an infantry platoon leader with the 101st Airborne Division, the second as an A-team leader with the 5th Special Forces Group. In 2004 Larry retired from a twenty-five-year career in the US Department of State as a Foreign Service officer. He and his wife, Omie, also a Foreign Service officer, had diplomatic postings to Mexico, Singapore, Guatemala, Chile, and the Republic of Georgia. They now live on Bainbridge Island, a ferry ride from Seattle. Daughter Margo also lives on Bainbridge, while daughter Katie and grandchildren Juliet and Luke live in Raleigh, North Carolina. Larry is the author of Captain Billy and the Lunatic, a book of poems drawn largely from his Vietnam experience. His current project is a history of the Mobile Strike Force Command in Vietnam.
This story was told on October 13, 2016, at the Players Club in New York City. The theme was 19 Years and 180 Days. Director: Jenifer Hixson.
