My Great Adventure - Part 2

(Author’s note: This continues my autobiography of my experience as a Christian and how my time in Vietnam has played an integral part of who I am today. Part 1 of this saga was published on this blog on October 9, 2010.)

Part 2 – Southeast Asia

I spent maybe three or four days at Oakland Army Terminal, during which the normal drudgery of hurry up and wait was made a little bit more fun for me and a bus load of other GIs who had volunteered to give blood at the San Francisco blood bank. You see, if we gave our pint of blood, then we would be on light duty for then next 24 hours! What better incentive was there? So, we assembled to board our OD green bus and headed off across the Bay Bridge towards downtown San Francisco. We arrived a little while later, donated our blood and then loaded up again on the Army bus, driven by a civilian Army employee, to head back across the bay to Oakland. However, the driver, before even starting up again, asked us if we would like to see Haight-Ashbury Street. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haight-Ashbury) To a man we all said yes! And off we went, in our khakis, and in our OD green Army bus, to the center of the known world for the Flower Children, the Love Generation, the Summer of Love (but this was February). What a trip! We didn’t want to go to Vietnam, and the Love Children didn’t want us to go either! Amazingly, looking back on this mind-blowing scene, we were on each other’s side, GIs and Flower Power as one!

Well, we finally got back to Oakland, and the next day, after a couple of miscues and more hurry up and wait at Travis AFB, I was on an Eastern Airlines stretch DC-8 charter headed for SE Asia. I distinctly remember that as soon as we were off the ground, and the no smoking light went off, this long tube we were sitting in almost instantly acquired a blue haze atmosphere from all the cigarettes that were lit! We refueled in Honolulu at Hickham AFB, again at Wake Island (I remember thinking to myself as we came closer and closer to the whitecaps under the aircraft on our final approach that “There’s gotta be a runway down there somewhere!”) and again at Clark in the Philippines. As we reached the coast of South Vietnam the pilot announced to us in the cabin that if we looked out the right side of the aircraft we would see Vietnam for the first time. As we all moved to that side of the cabin, the DC-8 made a significant attitude shift banking right! (Too much weight on that side I think.)

On February 15, 1968, I was celebrating Tet with most of the other Americans in Vietnam by ducking mortars and rockets that had been thrown at all allied forces by Charlie and Papa Ho since the end of January. If the Army had told us that this was happening, I would have tried to catch a later flight!

This is what I wrote on this blog in November 2007 about those first few days in Vietnam: “On 18 February I was assigned to pull sentry duty (without any kind of a weapon, however!) at the 93rd Evac Hospital at Long Binh. My job was to stand by a door and just monitor who came and went. I don’t remember what the entrance was, but there were a lot of people coming and going. I had not been on duty very long when, all of a sudden, there was a terrific whoomph! and the air was transformed into a fog of dust!

“Turns out it was Tet. And the enemy had just hit the hospital with a rocket attack. I don’t remember if there was more than one explosion, but I imagine there were multiple rockets and mortars; these lasted pretty much all night. As I was laying flat on the ground (must have been a basic training learned reaction) my thoughts were “Oh shit!” and “Welcome to Vietnam!”

“Later on, after my shift, I went back to the barracks to try to get some sleep. That was a little difficult, what with the VC attacking, the gunships that were in the air all around and the huge amount of adrenaline that was being pumped through the bodies of all us new guys. At about 3:00 in the morning there was a HUGE explosion when the VC blew up the 12th Combat Aviation Group’s ammo dump where 8 pads detonated with a total ammo value of $2,774,348 (in 1968 dollars).

“I have had a picture in my mind of the massive explosions that night, but I had never seen a photo of it. Last week, at http://www.nonags.org/members/raffia/, I found a photograph, which is published here and is remarkably very close to what I remember.

“Later that day, my name was finally called and I was on a C-130 on my way to Nha Trang, and the 17th Group HQ. They told me I was assigned to the 225th at Phu Hiep (I responded “Phu What?) and not long after that I became a member of the Blackhawks .” (http://225observer.blogspot.com/2007/11/welcome-to-vietnam-or-how-i-celebrated.html)

I ended up serving twenty-eight months with the 225^th (several of our company spent much more than the one year there, Rob Jensen and Dennis Wert come to mind), during which time I became friends with many guys who have remained my friends over these past four decades, having reconnected with them beginning in mid-1998 because of the marvel of the Internet. Some of you are reading this now! We all had a shared experience that was unique and has bonded a lot of us together for the rest of our lives. Stay tuned for the next installment in my story.

To Be Continued...

My Great Adventure

(Author's note: This is my story. As Steve Bogner pointed out to me in an e-mail today, I totally forgot to say who wrote this. It was me, Gordy. Thanks Steve!)

Part 1 – The Adventure Begins

My aviation career consisted of on-the-job-training as a Flight Follow Observer (a special 225^th SAC MOS) in Vietnam in fall of 1969. I was never a “Mohawk driver” or a pilot of any kind. The closest I ever got to becoming a pilot was when Joe Beckham, Dugan Lawrence or one of our other incredibly talented and able pilots let me handle the controls at twenty thousand feet in Double Zero somewhere over II Corps. I well remember a flight with Mr. Beck where we did very close passes around big, high, beautiful cumulus clouds in an otherwise bright blue sky over the South China Sea. Tight banking to the left and then to the right and then up and over the top, complete with a pencil floating in right in front of my nose! What an exhilarating experience for a 22 year old!

But I do know that whenever you go on a flight, you’re supposed to file a flight plan. Of course, in Vietnam forty years ago my part of the flight plan consisted of the target runs I had been assigned and our estimated time of return (plus lots of other information). For us Flight Follow guys, we plotted the target runs for all the missions we were following.

This was a really an amazing time in my life, those days some forty years ago. Now that I have reached the six-decade mark of my life (actually I am 63 now) I have realized God has had a plan for me all along, even when I was in that map room at Phu Hiep plotting targets in the wee small hours of the morning so long ago.

For a long time I have wanted to write my story to tell what Jesus Christ means to me and what he has done in my life, and put it on this blog to share in order to maybe help someone who may be looking for something more, some additional meaning to life. It kind of reminds me of that old cartoon of the guy climbing the mountain, finally reaching the summit just to encounter the old guy at the top just to discover the sage doesn’t know the meaning of life any more than he does. Well, just as I have seen with my 20-20 hindsight how Jesus has been involved in my life these past forty-plus years, I thought it would be better to not keep it all to myself.

I have been in a quandary, however, on how to present this without sounding preachy or judgmental or holier-than-thou. When I started the 225^th Observer blog in July 2007 my purpose was connect those of us who had had the shared experience of serving with each other as Blackhawks or Phantomhawks at Phu Hiep AAF and Tuy Hoa AFB. I didn’t want to alienate anyone by presenting old, worn out clichés that we all have heard since our parents made us go to Sunday school when we were little, but may have rejected “religion” as irrelevant later on. Suffice it to say that this short essay has been a long-time incubating.

When I was a high school junior a friend invited me to a local church youth group called Lamplighters that was sponsored by a local Presbyterian church. You see, I had never gone to church, except occasionally with the neighbor kid when I was in elementary school, and my parents didn’t go either. My dad was sort of a Christian Scientist and my mom, well, I don’t know what she was because religion was never talked about in our family. The impression I had growing up, and it was only an impression, was that religion or church was not a thing to be involved with. Curiously, however, I can remember dad watching a Billy Graham crusade on TV and even asking me if I wanted to send away for the free literature.

Anyway, to make a long story longer, after three weeks of building up courage (why that was necessary, I don’t know) to go to Lamplighters, I went. Well, at the youth group I “accepted” Jesus as my Lord and Savior, I asked him into my heart. But no bolts of lightening came down, no life-changing events happened immediately, life just continued on.

In 1965 I graduated from high school, went one year to the University of Washington (and did miserably grade-wise), got a job in a television station and then attended community college. Sometime in the early spring in 1967 Uncle Sam (or was it Uncle Lynden?) sent me a notice to appear for my pre-induction physical. The dreaded draft notice was sure to follow, and the one thing since I was a little kid that I never wanted to do, to be a soldier, was now looming just over the horizon. To avoid the draft, I decided that I would enlist to at least get a job in the Army that wouldn’t necessarily guarantee I would die in combat. The staff sergeant recruiter signed me up to be a photo lab tech (MOS 84G20); I was to report to begin active duty to the Army Entry Station of the Seattle waterfront on June 20^th, 1967, my 20^th birthday!

So, almost exactly two years out of high school, I was off to North Fort Lewis, Washington, for eight weeks of Basic Combat Training, and then on to Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, the Army’s Signal Center and School for four or five months of photo lab training. In February 1968 we took a day trip to Fort Dix for Vietnam orientation (in a snow storm!), and I received orders for Vietnam, along with the rest of my photo lab class. I took a couple of weeks leave to come home to the Northwest and then I was off on a flight to Oakland Army Terminal for shipment to Vietnam.

All the while, I had no clue that Jesus Christ was watching over me, putting people in place ahead of me who would have a profound effect on my life. He was setting the stage for my great adventure in life.

To be continued....