PHIL'S POSTER

I moved my duffle into our living quarters at FOB2, just outside of Kontum. Doug Krout, Phil Phillips and I shared a space that had an air conditioner which didn’t work, a wall-mounted fan, and a refrigerator used only to store beer. Phil and Doug occupied the lower bunks and I got the top bunk above Phil. Some lockers for clothes and a single chair completed the décor, except for a poster-sized photo of Phil’s now former wife Sandy. Naked. Which made it impossible to ignore. A very beautiful young woman with a very amazing figure, fueling any one of a number of my X-rated fantasies. That image alone was enough to strengthen my will to survive this war. The photo posed Sandy lying on her stomach with her chin in her hand, smiling out at whoever came into the room, and it was thumb-tacked to the wall right by my upper bunk. Every morning when I left to go flying I kissed my hand and patted that poster right on Sandy’s fanny. When I finished my tour I went to Rucker as an O-1 instructor pilot. Phil and Sandy came through Rucker just before Phil left the Army. When I was introduced to her, I laughed and told Sandy that I was having a tough time looking her in the eye. She giggled and said “I guess you liked the poster too”. “Liked it”? No. As Randy Newman said in “You Can Leave Your Hat On”, “you give me reason to live, you give me reason to live, you give me reason to live…”

The Bird-dogs were parked in revetments at Kontum Airfield, and to get there we had to drive through the city. The trip wasn’t too bad except in the pre-dawn early morning. That was VC time, so we drove like maniacs to get to the flight line. I never did figure out which had the greater potential for catastrophe, getting fired on by the local cadre or crashing into a tree.

Kontum’s airfield was guarded by Regional Forces troops. I am convinced that ARVN assigned the smallest guys they had to the RFs. I don’t think I ever saw a guy over 5’3”. The airfield was protected by guard towers every hundred yards or so, and at night the guys in the towers would sound a gong at specified times, kind of like “twelve o’clock and all’s well”. Except that it was so black out at night that anybody could have been banging that gong. But what was really going on was that the RFs were running an all-night gas station, selling Av-gas from our bladders to the locals. Honda scooters ran great on our Av-gas.

One morning while taxiing for take-off I did the obligatory engine run-up and mag-check, and noticed that the mag-check was not right. Over the course of a week it got worse. We had contaminated fuel. So we started gassing up at Plei Djerang before heading out into the AO. About a week after we stopped using our av-gas I was driving from FOB2 to the airfield and noticed that there was almost no traffic on the roads. Usually there were people out and about, but Kontum was at a standstill. As we drove by one of the local bars three of the girls came out and flipped us the bird. I realized that the whole town must have gotten their gas from our bladders and that all the scooters were out of action. It cracked me up. Like we deliberately put bladders of bad av-gas at the airfield just so we could screw up local commerce. It was our fault that the gas they were stealing was rotten.

Ben Brown was one of our crew chiefs. And just like “Cherry Boy”, Ben looked to be about 16. But you couldn’t ask for a nicer guy. He lives in Kentucky now, and runs a farm equipment repair shop. He and I were in the process of refueling my airplane (the bladders full of contaminated fuel had been replaced, commerce had returned to normal, and the bar girls resumed their “I love you long time” usual greeting) while an Air Force C130 occupied a better part of the ramp space at Kontum Airfield. We all hated when that damn thing showed up because there was a guy outside of town who stashed a rocket launcher on this ridge overlooking the airfield. He always took a shot at the C130. Never hit it, but that round coming in sounded like a freight train. Ben was on one strut filling the right tank and I was waiting for him to hand me the hose so that I could fill the left tank when our pal decided to launch. We heard it coming; Ben tossed the hose on the ground, yelled “you got it Dai Wi”, and took off running for the bunker. I should have followed him, but I jumped into the airplane instead, fired it up and headed for the runway. The guys in the tower were practically rappelling down the ladder as I took off, sort of wing-low-sideways with one full and one empty tank. Of course I didn’t have any rockets loaded and I didn’t have my helmet, which prevented me from talking to anybody. So I flew a quick pass over the ridge and then came back and landed, sort of wing-low-sideways, which for me was almost normal. From then on I greeted Ben with a “you got it, Ben” hello every time I saw him.