Loading the Dice in the Delta

114^th Assault Helicopter Company 

      Going to Vinh Long on a story wasn’t anything like going to Pleiku or Dalat. In the first place, it was hot and dusty like all the Delta cities south of Saigon. Secondly, and most significantly for me, I was going to a unit that was actively engaged with the enemy on a daily basis and I was going as a combat correspondent.

    This assignment began with what would become my pattern for the next year. Cecil and I hitched a ride on a helicopter going to Vung Tau. He, under the pretense of checking our battalion’s medical records, and me because I could get away with it.  After a day or so at the beach and some time at the Grand Hotel, he returned to HHC Long Binh and I set off to get my story.

I arrived at the 114^th Assault Helicopter Company (AHC), checked in with the commander, and was told I’d be flying the next few days with SP5 Mantanoma—“Montana” to his crewmates. The first thing I learned was that a crew chief’s job is two-fold. The many hours spent in the air as a gunner was only half the job and was usually followed with another three or four hours on the ground in the evening doing general maintenance and plugging bullet holes.

On my first day, we flew Command and Control (C&C), meaning we’d be actively involved in every phase of the mission. I don’t think in the two or three months I’d been in-country that I had ever really given much thought to just what the helicopter war was all about. The day began with a fueling stop at the Phi Troung Vi Thanh Airfield, where the crew picked up fresh supplies of ammo and mounted their M-60s.

There are no words to describe the helicopter war other than to say it is anything and everything. We were in the air from dawn to dusk, moving both troops—sometimes a lone lieutenant or captain and sometimes three or four soldiers, and supplies—anything from ammunition to food and even mail. We also performed occasional medivacs and provided air cover when requested, which was all day long.

We’d set down in little villages that were really nothing more than a few shacks, a dozen people and a couple of cows with a road running down the middle and other times we’d visit a large base or town.

In the course of performing all these details, what I learned was that there was always someone waiting to take pot shots at the ship when we were on the ground or close to it. For this reason, we didn’t stay on the ground long and we didn’t waste time getting some elevation when we left a place. A helicopter is the epitome of easy on/easy off travel.

When there was nothing else to do, we’d hover around at cloud level above a LOH to see if anyone was stupid enough to take a shot at it. If they did, our ship would drop down and zero in on their little patch of cover and blow them to kingdom come.

By the end of my first day, I realized that there wasn’t a notepad big enough to log all the varied activities the crew of this huey gunship had performed that single day. Before I even began putting my notes in order, I did have the working title for my story.

Watching the crew react to countless attempts to shoot it out of the sky, as it flew above the flat green countryside, and performed one task after another with the cool precision of a Las Vegas gambler, I decided to call my story, Rolling the Dice in the Delta. Later, I reconsidered. With the great advantage in firepower that these ships possessed, a more appropriate title for the story was, Loading the Dice, so that is what it became.

At their day jobs as pilots, crew chiefs and gunners they were almost robot-like, every action seemingly performed in accordance to an internal checklist continually running through their minds. They put great effort into demonstrating how qualified they were at their work and took great pride in their performance. During this flight time, I got the pictures and quotes that would comprise the bulk of my story.  

At night they could and would relax and become themselves again—the persons that they were back home before they learned how to fight a war. Here, I got the anecdotes that turned them into real people and not just warriors.

Every night that I stayed with the boys of the 114^th and they were boys—most were younger than me and I was only 23—I kept busy making sense out of my notes until they returned from the airfield. This was when I really got to know them, which was a good thing because no one’s first impression of someone should be when they’re manning an M-60 machine gun.

There were poker games; home cooked meals cooked a thousand miles from home, and a lot of ribbing going on every night, once these guys could finally call it a day. Frank Akana, Montana’s roommate was fixing a dish from his native Hawaii, while Montana complained that he was too short to be on the receiving end of so much enemy fire.

In the choppers, they were simply gunners and crew chiefs, but listening to the music playing in the background—whether it be country, rock, or western—enabled them to regain their true identities as Texans or Samoans or New Yorkers, city slickers or country boys, book worms or jokers.

The small reward I could give them in return for the hospitality they showed me was to get a few names into the magazine and accurately tell their story, the whole story. About the fighting men with the weight of the war riding on their shoulders during the day and the good time boys, trying to shed some of that burden, if only for a few hours, at night. I wanted to give them something to send home to their friends and family that was different from everything else they were hearing on the news.

Dressed in everything from jeans and T-shirts to fatigue pants mix-matched with brightly colored Hawaiian shirts they would spend the last few hours of the day telling stories, laughing and guzzling beer as they tried to put the first fourteen hours out of their minds.

     They were more a family than a unit in that they didn’t really have to explain themselves to each other. They knew everything there was to know about each other or at least everything that mattered. They rarely discussed the war. They knew enough about the war to not waste time discussing it the way we did back in Long Binh.

     Back at Headquarters Company, we knew nothing about the war, but that didn’t stop us from obsessing over it and analyzing it to death. In reality, we had the time to talk about the war because we weren’t busy fighting it. We found each other interesting the way you found a classmate back in college interesting; but we didn’t really know each other.

     After four or five days with the 114^th AHC, I returned to Long Binh to finish writing Loading the Dice, with a much greater understanding of what the helicopter war was all about; and for that matter what the Vietnam War was all about. It wasn’t so much about capturing a hill or clearing a rice paddy as it was doing anything and everything that might need to be done.

I was back but a few weeks, getting ready for Thanksgiving and working on my Forging Across the Muddy River story, when our information officer approached my desk and told me Frank Akana had died.

“How,” I asked.

“I dunno. His name just turned up on a report.”

And ain’t that a gambler’s life in a nutshell—especially a gambler rolling the dice in the Delta? If you’re lucky, your name turns up in a magazine and if you’re unlucky, it turns up in a report.

 

Postscript: This is a story about a story. I didn’t know Frank Akana as well as I knew his roommate. I didn’t even know his roommate that well. Our job as journalists was to bring a little recognition to the units and get as many names in so they could tell their families back home. He was mentioned in only one paragraph of the magazine article. To get a better picture of who he was, go to the Vietnam War Virtual Wall at, http://www.vvmf.org/Wall-of-Faces/433/FRANKLIN-R-AKANA?page=1#remembrances.

I Want It All

Anytime you can get all of something you’d be a fool not to go after it. Like the Hunt brothers in the 70’s when they tried to corner the world supply of silver. At the time they were possibly the richest family in America and it would have been easy for them to say, “Yeah, sure, we’ve got it made.” but they didn’t get rich resting on their laurels. They wanted more, which is pretty much how the rich eventually become the filthy rich. You have to want it all but even more importantly you have to go out and get it all.

Wanting more is what made this country great. Getting more is what made things complicated. The Hunt brothers certainly proved that. They succeeded in acquiring half the world’s supply of silver but in what could actually be the definition for complicated, they eventually had to declare bankruptcy declaring assets of $1.5 billion and liabilities of $2.5 billion. That’s complicated with a capital C, considering the average bankruptcy involves assets of $30,000 and debts of $47,000.

But this isn’t a story about bankruptcy or even the Hunt brothers. This is a story about cornering the market—any market but in this case the Carlings Black Label market.

One day Sam, the manager of the 1^st Aviation Brigade Headquarters Company Club affectionately named the Yellow Submarine, mentioned to Cecil and me that he had 50 cases of Carlings Black Label and he was willing to let them go at a good price if we were interested.

Were we! I dunno ‘bout Cecil, but it had been a lifelong dream of mine to have all of something, regardless of what that something was, so long as no one else had it. I was captivated with the idea of living large even if living large meant nothing more than having my own personal stock of beer in rusty old tin cans left over from the Korean War.

I’m just kidding. This was never a lifelong dream of mine but once the offer was made I did find the idea of having my own stock of beer in the fridge, all bought and paid for in advance, very appealing. As the newest writer on the HAWK magazine staff, it just seemed like something Kerouac might do, or Hemingway.

 “If you promise to always have some on ice, I’m in,” I said, smiling like a kid coming down the stairs on Christmas morning.

“Oh don’t worry. I’ll take good care of you guys,” he responded, smiling like that kid’s parent who knew something the kid did not.

For a while, everything was working pretty well. I had a cold beer with my name on it waiting for me whenever I walked into the Yellow Submarine. Between us we actually had 1200 cans with Mabel’s picture and our names on it—enough to take us almost all the way to the end of our tour if we played our cards right.

But playing cards and drinking is always an iffy proposition and it wasn’t long before things started to get a little crazy. I started to drink more, which I had allowed for but some other stuff caught me completely off guard.

Because I didn’t need to bring money with me, I stopped wearing pants, showing up at the Club in just my army boxers. In fact, I was walking around in my underwear so much that Lin, the barmaid, said I was looking more and more like a Vietnamese peasant every day.

I also began giving away more beer—often to guys I didn’t know and sometimes to guys not even assigned to our company, who’d heard rumors of the great Vietnam War Beer Giveaway. The consensus around the barracks was that it was nice to have a writer in the house.

I eventually arrived at the conclusion that something Kerouac or Hemingway might do, really wasn’t something I should be doing.

As it turned out our personal stock of beer didn’t even last until the end of the month. The good news was that with all the freeloaders gone you could now get a seat at the Yellow Submarine. That and I started wearing pants again.

 

 

 

 

Vietnam Rag

    Within minutes of walking into the club that was the other half of the transient barracks I once called home, I heard a song I had never heard before. I listened to the lyrics and instantly thought, my God, they must have read my mind, much like a teenage girl might have felt listening to “Baby Love” by the Supremes for the first time,

 

                    Come on all you big strong men,
                    Uncle Sam needs your help again.
                    He’s got himself in a terrible jam,
                    Way down yonder in Vietnam.
                    So put down your books and pick up a gun
                    We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun.

 

    Was there ever a song, I wondered, that more perfectly described my situation? It wasn’t even a year since I had turned in my books and unable to find a job joined the Army.

    There were other songs that I liked, even liked a lot, but this was my song even though I had never heard it before entering the club and ordering a beer from Lin, our Vietnamese barmaid.

    The music was always playing in the club just like it was always playing in Vietnam. There was never a time when the music stopped just as there was never a time when you couldn’t hear a helicopter’s rotor blades turning somewhere if you listened hard enough—or a frog croaking somewhere during the rainy season.

    I flew in Huey gun ships at 2000 feet listening to Simon and Garfunkle sing the lines, Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, as gunners emptied rounds from their M-60’s into peaceful tree lines bordering quiet rice fields. And I have to say, the song never sounded out of place—both mystical and mystifying as our airborne tank glided through the sky while I reached out to grab the clouds.

    Other wars had their songs but Vietnam was the first war with a score. The radio played round the clock and no GI in a support role got past his first two months in-country without purchasing a reel-to-reel tape recorder or at least a stereo system of some type. Still the song I remember most was this Vietnam Rag by Country Joe MacDonald and the Fish that they had sung the previous summer at Woodstock.

Sometimes, if the crowd were big enough and drunk enough, everyone would join in, the way we used to do at the frat house when someone played Shout on the jukebox. And other times, I would be alone in the bar except for Lin and her niece Rang and they would smile shyly and pretend to be embarrassed when the music stopped and the band admonished the crowd for not singing along loud enough. “How you gonna stop the war,” they asked the stoned crowd at Woodstock, “if you can’t raise your voices in protest?” It was an interesting question that I had never really considered and I’m sure none of the generals had either. 

 

              Come on generals, let’s move fast;

                   Your big chance has come at last.
                   Gotta go out and get those reds—
                   The only good commie is the one that’s dead
                   You know that peace can only be won
                   When we’ve blown ’em all to kingdom come.

 

I remember asking Lin early on where the song came from but she just shook her head and said she didn’t know. As many times as she had heard it she more than likely didn’t care where it came from and only wished that it would go away.

The Vietnam War wasn’t like World War II where war songs were a dime a dozen, listened to by both young and old, and were always positive and inspiring—and only played stateside because not every soldier carried a radio or tape deck around with him in the Big War.  Only the young listened to Vietnam War songs for the simple reason that they weren’t meant for adult consumption.

 

              Come on mothers throughout the land,

                   Pack your boys off to Vietnam       
                   Come on fathers, don’t hesitate,
                   Send your sons off before it’s too late.
                   You can be the first one on your block
                   To have your boy come home in a box.

                   And it’s one, two, three, what are we fighting for?
                   Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam.
                   And it’s five, six, seven, open up the pearly gates.
                   Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why,
                   Whoopee! We’re all gonna die.

 

I could have easily attended Woodstock had I not chose to remain in Lowell after graduation and continue working at the Peerless Wine Store. It was only a three hour drive but apparently delivering beer, wine and whiskey to shut-ins who couldn’t make it to their local bar, even though a bar in Lowell was never more than a block away was more important to me than attending the biggest cultural event of my generation.

Back home, Neil Young’s “Ohio” about the killings at Kent State had become sort of an unofficial anthem for those protesting the war but in Vietnam, the “Vietnam Rag” was becoming the unofficial theme song for those fighting the war. It wasn’t a protest song for the GI’s in Vietnam like some tried to make it into stateside and it certainly wasn’t a patriotic song.

It was just a song that told our story, a story we were all stuck in and couldn’t get out of—much the way a catchy tune about Alice in Wonderland would have told Alice’s story back when she was stuck in Wonderland.

Vietnam Rag became the theme song for the war that nobody wanted to have anything to do with but nobody seemed able to avoid. I think we accepted our fate with a clear understanding of the terrible jam we were in and how little control we had—and that was all anyone was really asking of us.

Of course, even in the middle of a war there will be songs that have nothing to do with war so out of curiosity I asked Lin one day what most Vietnamese songs were about.

“Rain,” she said. “All Vietnamese songs about rain.” 

Rain—of course—I should have known—the one thing they had even more of than war.

 

 

 

 

 

Going the mail route

Unless, as a young boy, someone wanted to be in the military when he grew up you can almost assume that if he finds himself in the military he probably screwed up somewhere along the way. So if you didn’t want to be there and you are there, it’s safe to say you have nobody to blame but yourself.

Of course, there are a lot of ways an individual can screw up. My way seemed to be never thinking far enough ahead. I now possessed, having completed basic and AIT, a new set of skills. Some, like shooting a rifle or hand-to-hand combat, I hoped I would never have to use and others, like writing a story or taking a poignant picture, I couldn’t wait to put to use.

But on many levels I was still the same screw-up who had switched majors three times and been unable to find a job back in the days when everyone coming out of college was finding a job. If there was one maxim that would have done me a world of good back then it would have been: Think man. Just think.

But I was having none of that—especially not in my social life.

There was a girl back in Boston* who I had pinned two years earlier who just wasn’t doing it for me any more—and I know she felt the same way—and her family even more so.

There was also a girl back in Rochester who I had known for about ten years but just began seeing again in the few weeks before I shipped over to Vietnam. She had to know I liked her because I was going over to her house every night to drink coffee with her and her mother. She knew about the girl in Boston but didn’t know I intended to break up with her. To make matters even more confusing the Carpenter’s hit song, Close to you, was getting a lot of airtime on the radio and as I prepared myself for my upcoming tour in Vietnam it seemed I wanted nothing more than to be close to her.

But I was keeping this desire to be close to her close to the vest because I had a plan—one I would later conclude was just one more in a long line of not-well-thought-out-plans but of course I didn’t see it at the time. I figured the safest way to deal with the situation this delicate would be to deal with it from afar—put everything down on paper to ensure there be no confusion—say what you mean and mean what you say but don’t take a chance of saying the wrong thing.  In other words, don’t say anything. Write it down.

* No names have been used to protect the innocent.

Getting My Feet Wet

     My first official assignment with the 1^st Aviation Brigade had me flying the central highland city of Pleiku. There wasn’t much going on at the 52^nd Combat Assault Battalion, home to the Flying Dragons, but they hadn’t been featured in the magazine for a while and they were due. My orders were to find a story if there was one but most importantly to come back with some quotes and do not, under any circumstances, come back with standard helicopter pictures.

I understood getting the quotes part of my assignment but didn’t exactly know what they meant by, "no standard helicopter pictures." To no one’s surprise I came back with only standard helicopter pictures. In my defense, they weren’t standard to me. This was only  my second helicopter ride—and this time I flying only a few hundred feet above treetops, to boot. I hadn't been in Vietnam that long but certainly long enough to know what those occasional flashes coming out of those trees were. Nevertheless, my rather ordinary fifty or so different shades of green  didn't  impress anyone.

Two rolls of film was the standard issue for these excursions and I had pretty much shot my wad on treetops. Coincidently, shot my wad is an old wartime expression, which pretty accurately describes what I had done.

Still, I was able to get my feet wet in the journalism business, which was probably the main reason I was sent to a place where there really wasn’t any story to begin with. For the few days I was with the 52^nd Combat Assault Battalion, I stayed off post in a house with four or five guys assigned to the Security Detachment. I was able to rise each day and walk through morning-dewed streets not unlike what I would have found in a rural town in Oregon or Oceanside village in New England.

We drove into town each day to visit what appeared to be nothing more than a private residence converted into a bar. It wasn’t like the Saigon bars where the object was to separate the GI from his money as quickly as possible while offering him as little in return as they could get away with. There was a lot of kidding around going on and what seemed to be normal conversation and joking between the GI’s and the tea girls. Looking back, this was the closest feeling to being back home  that I remember from Vietnam.

I knew this wasn’t representative of what was going on everywhere else in Vietnam, but it was comforting to know something like this was going on somewhere.  

I managed to string some unmemorable quotes into a story about the Battalion’s medical detachment and threw in a few tidbits about the Montagnards Gift Shop set up on the base to channel a little money to the locals. And that was that.

Perhaps the most exciting part of the trip was the ride back. A Warrant Officer from our office picked me up and we flew back in a Small Observation Helicopter (LOH). The primary mission of the LOH is to fly low and draw enemy fire. They work in tandem with Huey gunships poised to respond to anyone stupid enough to shoot at a helicopter.

But on this day we didn’t have a Huey accompanying us. My pilot decided the safest route back would be to fly as low and as fast as we could and stick as close to QL 14, (Quac Lo 14 or National Road 14). We flew the 150 or so miles back right down the middle of the highway at an elevation of about 100 feet. My kids kid me because I don’t like roller coasters but after that ride there was never a real need to ride a roller coaster.

My most satisfying memory about my first story was that I was able to salvage a magazine story with no usable photos by getting the brigade historian to paint a picture of a two-headed dragon. The story entitled Two Faces of the Dragon and accompanied by his painting told the story of a unit actively engaged in fighting the war but equally involved in serving the community.

I was back at Headquarters only a week or so before being sent on my next assignment to Dalat, a university town set in a peaceful valley and one of the few cities in Vietnam left untouched by the war.

I did some interviews at the university and took a lot of pictures in the local market place—one of a young boy and girl who reminded me of the countless pictures my sister and I were in back when we were the first of what would eventually grow to over two dozen grandchildren. That picture actually made it to the back cover of the magazine and is still one of my favorites.

    From there I visited the Command Airplane Company—a unit consisting of 21 fixed wing aircraft, whose mission was to carry visiting VIP’s around. I commented that they were like a little TWA, which was a reasonable analogy back when there was a big TWA and the commander agreed. Teeny Weeny Airline became the title for an otherwise uninspiring story that nevertheless led to a valuable journalistic lesson.

 

It was only after the issue containing the story was published that my First Sergeant pointed out that in a relatively short space of seven paragraphs I had used the word professionalism eleven times—including the last sentence, which read, “That is the mark of professionalism.” It was a most unprofessional sin for a budding journalist to commit but I learned my lesson and never again allowed the people I was interviewing to dictate the direction the story took.

    

     With these several stories behind me I was beginning at last to feel like the journalist I had spent eleven weeks at the DoD School of Journalism training to be. What I wasn’t feeling like was the Combat Correspondent that the patch on my arm indicated I was supposed to be. 

     But that was soon to change.

Babysan

     I wasn’t in the transient barracks more than a few days before I was assigned my permanent room and bunkmate. The lodgings I had been anxiously anticipating, for the last week, dare I say the last three or four weeks was a six by nine, two-bed, two-footlocker room with no windows and all the shelves you could use providing you could use 2x4 cross-studs for shelves.

My bunkmate was a kid from Oklahoma nicknamed Babysan by the mama sans because he looked like he was about fifteen years old. He was a crew chief who spent his days flying in a gunship and nights repairing bullet holes, all the time looking like a kid who should be goofing off in a middle school.

As hard as Tom Reardon had to work to separate himself from the likes of a hundred other men who were almost totally identical in every way—from drinking in the club every night, the backgrounds they shared, the jobs they performed and the uniforms they all wore; for Babysan, being one of a kind came easy.

Tom was smart and calculating and maybe just a bit conniving, in a good way but Babysan had something even better going for him. He was crazy.

The company had a stray dog that became attached to it like all companies and stray dogs eventually do. And like all crazy people, Babysan attached himself to the dog. The two of them were never out of sight of each other. The dog even flew with him, which means that his pilot who I didn’t know because he didn’t live in our enlisted men’s barracks, was probably just as crazy as Babysan—only at a higher pay scale and with a better club to come home to at the end of each day.

Snow—the name Babysan had given to the mutt on account of its white hair suggesting that not all crazy people are necessarily creative people—slept in our room at the foot of Babysan’s bed. To my knowledge the dog never spent a day in the transient barracks.

These things, in of themselves, wouldn’t have classified Babysan as being crazy. But his attachment to this mutt coupled with the fact that he slept with a knife stuck into the frame of his bed, preparing him to meet any challenge that might present itself in the middle of the night, would have certainly gone a long way to proving the point. But even that might not have been enough if there wasn’t just one more thing.

Babysan had an electric fan mounted to his bed—a fan that was mysteriously missing the safety guard on the front. Every night became a Punxsutawney Phil moment as I’d lie awake watching him sleep and waiting for when he would roll over and his arm would flop near the fan and he’d suddenly awake to the sound of chipchipchip of his fingers rubbing against the fan blades.

If it was me and I was awaken in this manner I would immediately go for the knife and start swinging but Babysan seemed to take to the startling interruption—the countless startling interruptions each night—the way one would react to a simple stiff neck or muscle cramp. His arm would fling back as if catapulted and he would turn over to a new position and go back to sleep.         

He never become agitated or grabbed for the knife in fear, although being suddenly awakened in the middle of the night had to be the only reason for the knife being there. To this day I don’t know why he never put the fan in a different location or found a guard for it or got a new fan.  But this was the world he lived in and he couldn’t be happier and because he was so content in this world he himself created, I decided he must be crazy. But being crazy, in and of itself, wouldn’t have made him a bad bunkmate.

What made him a bad bunkmate, and one I began looking to replace almost from the first day I moved in, was that each night before patting Snow good night and tucking himself in alongside his fan and knife, he would pop himself some popcorn, which he ate in bed.

In the middle of the night, when I wasn’t contending with the chipchipchip of his fingers falling into the fan I had one more problem to contend with. Against the soft humming of the fan motor I could hear the rustling of the rats above my head, as they would work their way into the room for their nightly snack of leftover popcorn pieces.

 

The funny thing is they didn’t bother me. Oh, they may have bothered me at first but once I knew their routine and realized they were not interested in me but only in Babysan’s popcorn, the rats and me got along fine.

I would hear them rustling and chirping the way rats like to do when they’re getting ready to feast on a salty snack, then they would jump on my chest to get to Babysan’s bunk, much like a gymnast might use a springboard to get to the vaulting horse or uneven bars.

Between the fan and the knife and the popcorn and the rats I knew I had to find another room and another bunkmate. But first I had something else to do. I had to fly to Pleiku on my first story. 

 

 

 

Lady Trades Drapes for Control Tower

     It began when Sgt. Fox called me to his desk and said he wanted to send me on an assignment. I had only been in-country for a few weeks and was anxious to go on a story, visit some of those cities our helicopters were flying to every day.  More importantly I wanted to know if I could write a real magazine story.

“Where am I going, Sarge?”

“You’re not really going anywhere for this one, Phil. There’s a female air traffic controller working at the Bien Hóa Airfield Air Field, the only one in Vietnam we think. There’s probably not that much to it but we thought it might make a good story that we can put in a press release.”

“A press release?”

“Yeah, a press release. You know what those are, don’t you?”

Well of course I knew what a press release was and we had covered the subject a little bit at Journalism school but for the past few weeks I had kind of grown attached to the idea of being a storywriter for a magazine—not a common run-of-the-mill news reporter.

But as every soldier in every war eventually learns, it’s almost always not about you.

“We’ve got an interview set up for tomorrow—shouldn’t take more than an hour. Someone will drive you over.”

Suddenly I remembered the kid in the recruiter’s office when I signed up to be an Information Specialist—the one that couldn’t become a truck driver because he didn’t have a license. I also didn’t have a military driving license. I was approved for shooting a rifle should the need ever arise and before my tour ended I would have interviewed everyone from privates to generals but I couldn’t drive myself five miles to the airfield.

“It will probably only be picked up in her hometown paper,” he reminded me, “so make sure you get her hometown.”

“Yeah sure.”

“No really. I mean it. Make sure you get her hometown.”