A Bad Omen is Simply a Good Omen Turned Upside Down

The plane had just barely left the runway when the sound of the wheels being raised reinforced the idea that yes this was it. As we made ourselves comfortable in our seats, I was certainly aware of the risks involved in this journey, but I really wasn’t assessing the odds or worrying about them.

Only a few years earlier I had sat in Cumnock Hall as a Lowell Tech freshman and listened as the dean told us to, “Look to your left, look to your right. Two of you won’t be here next year.” I’ve always been a glass half full guy, so I felt sorry for those two other guys.

I wasn’t totally naïve but I certainly knew my odds of returning home would be better than one out of three. On the other hand, I also knew that the stakes would be higher.  

Unless this plane was different from every other plane that had been bringing troops to Vietnam for almost a decade, the one undeniable truth was that some of us would not be on the return flight in a year’s time. You could count on that like you could count on an in-flight meal back when you could count on an in-flight meal.

We were flying above the clouds when the stewardess addressed us for the first time. She welcomed us to Continental Airlines and told us how honored the crew was to be flying us to our destination today. Usually when you fly somewhere you hear stuff like, “Welcome to sunny Miami Beach” or “Welcome to the Big Easy, home of Mardi Gras” or “Hope you enjoy our flight to San Antonio, home of the Alamo.”  But our stewardess stuck with destination the whole flight. There was simply no good way to say, “Welcome to our flight to stinking hot Vietnam, where things are really jumping.” She didn’t want to spoil a perfectly good plane ride with a nasty word like Vietnam, and that was okay because none of us wanted to hear it. What she said next was not okay.

“The crew has some unfortunate news for you today,” she said.

Unfortunate news? What could it be? More unfortunate than the fact that the war was showing no signs of ending any time soon.  What could this unfortunate news be and could anything be done about it?

“We’ve checked through the whole galley and we’re sorry to have to announce that much of the food that was supposed to be on board somehow didn’t get loaded. We’re going to have to ration the food so that you all get some. Again, the crew would like to apologize for this error.”

There was some grumbling by a few of the soldiers but even that stopped quickly. While thoughts of dying may have been lingering in the air, I was pretty sure none of us were going to die of starvation on the flight over. At the worst, it might be a sign.

If this was a sign of something—and no one was saying it was—but more than a few of the passengers on that flight must have been thinking to himself that it could very likely be a sign of something and if it was, it would most certainly be a sign that this was a bad sign—a bad omen of something bad happening.

The sergeant sitting next to me was certainly going that route. He put a cigarette in his mouth, lit up and stared at the stewardess. He had already told me this was his third tour and he wasn’t expecting to come back—and that had been back on the runway when we were still taxiing and now he was listening to her tell him that there would be no last meal.

My thinking didn’t go past the thought that no food was just a crummy way to start things off. To my way of thinking, if no food was a sign of anything, it was a sign that I was going to be damn hungry when we landed in ten hours.

I was going over on my first tour as an information specialist, didn’t have a clue what I would be doing but was pretty sure it wouldn’t involve fighting. I hadn’t even held a rifle in my hands since boot camp. I didn’t have the experience or the common sense to know that this plane and everyone on it was just a big roll of the dice and no one knew whose number would come up.

I don’t remember anything else about the flight except that we got a little bit of food like the stewardess promised. An interesting point of fact is that what the stewardess and all of us considered to be a little bit of food was far more than the airlines would be offering just a few years down the road. It goes without saying that the guy sitting next to me chain-smoked one cigarette after another for the whole trip, something else you won’t find on an airline anymore.

We stopped in Anchorage but didn’t get out. In Tokyo we did get out—but for some reason couldn’t go inside the terminal. We all just sat against a wall on the tarmac in the dead of night, waiting to switch to another plane. As a sergeant major would tell me years later, “Nothing is too good for the American fighting man, and nothing is what they get.”

The next day—or was it the same day—or was it yesterday—crossing the dateline was a new experience for most of us and we didn’t really know how it worked. Not that it mattered. The only important day now would be the day we board our flight returning home. All the days in between were just that—days in between.

But at some point, after a very long flight, we landed at Cam Ranh Bay, Vietnam—hungry as dogs.