Copyright . Capt Brian Settles. All rights reserved.
FORWARD ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There is a distant place, just beyond the invisible mind’s eye, where disbelief lives. It is the place where the memories of our most extraordinary encounters with life reside, encounters we can’t revisit because time has moved on and our current minds cannot fathom we actually lived through our pasts. I experience the occasional flash of awareness that I actually survived twenty thousand hours piloting jet airplanes and survived a year being shot at in military combat in service to my country. Indeed, what a strange ride it has been. Certain life events are unforgettable and change us forever. Our personal philosophy of life determines whether those experiences become positives or negatives. As former United States Senator Max Cleland of Georgia suggested in the title for his book, Strong at the Broken Places, about his body-shattering ordeal of surviving Vietnam, we must always seek to identify the blessings in our lives although they may be draped in the trauma of crisis. CHAPTER 1 The Second Beginning The dark gray Philippine sky had thick clouds that hung over the land like a dirty blanket, convincing the drenched populace living below that the sun no longer shone. Lieutenant Bill Smoyer and I bounced along the rain-soaked streets in the U.S. Air Force standard dark blue bus that jerked and swerved from side to side, attempting to avoid the pothole-studded streets. It was Monday morning, September 2, 1968 and we had just completed Air Force Jungle Survival School the day before. We had gone through F-4 fighter training together six months earlier. Spiffy in our beige Khaki(1505) summer uniforms with open collars and straight-cut trousers held up by navy blue belts, we sat across the aisle of the bus from each other, two young officers, both twenty-four years old, attempting to conceal our anxieties. Extending his hand to retrieve the Salem, he responded, “Fuck you very much, Bee.” I laughed and took another gut-burning swig from the fifth of Smirnoff vodka I held wedged between my legs. I passed the bottle to Bill. He gulped such a hit it made me wonder if he would be able to keep it down. I withdrew a Salem from my shirt pocket, lit it, and took a deep draw. During a pause in the otherwise incessant rain shower, I stared through the color prisms of water drops dotting the bus window and fixed downward upon the brownish black-feathered hens and roosters strutting around the trash littered yards of the shanty homes that lined our route. I felt, remote and detached, like I was viewing my existence rather than actually being a part of it. My mind revisited the shock and dismay I felt about the impoverished humans I had observed existing on a thread of life in the refuse at the outskirts of cities in Mexico like Nuevo Laredo and Tijuana, the people to which Franz Fanon had labeled “the wretched of the earth” in his book of the same title. They eked out meager subsistence, cloaked in spiritual hopefulness, holed up in cardboard homes living off daily food scrounging.
My mind seemed to have a mind of its own, running its own picture shows outside of my control. It fastforwarded to the future. I saw my copilot self sitting in the F-4 Phantom, whizzing earthward in a five hundred mile an hour dive, dropping napalm on the thatched hooches of Vietnamese peasant farmers. I could see them in my mind, taking their breakfast rice while the same scrawny-looking hens and roosters scurried wildly for their lives in the front yards of their jungle abodes. I grimaced and snapped back into the reality of the bouncing Air Force bus, my temporary refuge from what laid ahead of me. CHAPTER 8 China Fantasy It was like a slice of ephemeral heaven spinning and twirling to the music inches from Donna as she moved and swayed rhythmically like a single pink rose suspended in a soft breeze, close enough to me that the fragrance of her cologne intoxicated my overflowing senses. Music was always wine to my soul. Being able to experience the music with her elevated the magnificence of the vocals and transformed the encounter into fantasia. Donna and I became lost in our communion with the swirling reverie of the music. Like musical paradise, James Brown’s funky cut “Popcorn” came over the speakers without a break from the previous number. We both noticed Donna’s date finally return to the table with a sheepish grin cast our way. I had hoped he would have gotten mugged and dragged into the alley or something or perhaps noticed what a great time Donna and I were having and decided to go home. Thoughts of “bogarting” the guy’s date swept across my thoughts until I saw Donna issue a furtive wave his way acknowledging his return. I loved James Brown songs, especially “Popcorn” and “Cold Sweat.” Donna seemed to have a little soul herself. She hung right with me, not that that was such a feat of talent. Then, the deejay, as if answering prayers from paradise, shifted the mood to Aretha’s mega hit “Do Right Man.”
An infusion of guilt penetrated my conscious mind. By my actions and intentions, I had disqualified myself as a candidate for Celeste’s “do-right man”. I switched to another channel. The bizarreness of the scene was intensifying. I was convinced some supernatural power had taken over our experience. With the smooth grace of Don Quixote extending the hand of chivalry for his Dulcinea, I slowly pulled Donna to me for a third dance; this one was slow and called us into embrace. The dance gyrations of the up-tempo tunes had turned us both damp and steamy. Our bodies shared their wetness. I leaned my head close to Donna’s and lost total sense of self as the delusion I could croon captured my reason. I sang in a vibrating softness into Donna’s ear, permitting my lips and cheeks to guide her into a romantic trance with me. I held her tightly, too soon entertaining the agony of the dance being over and having to do the right thing and surrender her back to her date who waited in incomprehensible patience at the table sipping another Budweiser.
Tasting Donna’s perspiration while holding her was more than I could endure. I felt once again weak and vulnerable, helpless in the amazing unpredictable flow of life’s unannounced, mystifying excursions into adventure. Chivalry called. I had to be a gentleman. I furtively kissed her beckoning cheek, still caressing her gently, neither of us realizing the music had stopped. Shaken back into the reality of silence as the deejay paused between cuts to permit the crowd to dissipate from the dance floor, I thanked Donna from the depths of an unknown place for so unselfishly sharing her time to dance with me. I escorted her to the table and she introduced me to her date, John. I apologized to him for briefly monopolizing Donna’s time and acknowledged him for being so accommodating and patient. Hah! Before there was time for further interaction, I escaped the club and whisked myself off into the Hong Kong night, as quickly as I had appeared.
Bouncing and swaying in the blue Air Force bus, we felt like two alien travelers in a foreign land. We wondered whether either of us would ever return to Clark Air Force Base again, alive.
Bill interrupted the quiet. “Let me bum one of your Salems, Dumbshit.” I deliberately hesitated in reaching two fingers into my shirt pocket to withdraw a cigarette. Rolling my eyes, I complained, “Jesus Christ, man, I buy ’em and you smoke ’em.”
