It
was 1968 and there was a war on. You
knew it because you could watch it on TV at night. You could watch the big B52 bombers dropping
thousands of pounds of bombs on Vietnam every evening. Theoretically, you knew
they were killing people, a lot of people, but you didn’t really see them die so it
wasn’t really happening in real life to real people.
I was stationed at
Utapao in Thailand on the Gulf of Siam “where the flying fishes play.” I never did see a flying fish, but it was the
Gulf of Siam and it was the largest B52 base in Southeast Asia outside of
Vietnam. The runway ended on a beautiful
white sand beach. We were just a few
kilometers from Sattahip; the largest American military sea port in Southeast
Asia outside of Vietnam.
It
was a wonderful way to fight a war. The B52s went out
from our base and flew for hours to get over Vietnam and “deliver their
ordinance.” At the time I didn’t much
care. I was 22 and I was a sergeant in medical supply. That’s a supply sergeant who only handles
items for medical facilities. I didn't even have to see any patients. And I definitely didn’t
have to deal with the war in any real way, I had a job that gave me more
responsibility than any I would have for a decade afterwards. Life was pretty good. If I didn’t care what my job was contributing
to, and I didn’t.
We
could go off base any night we chose with no fear. They were all Friendlies
here. Within a few kilometers of the
main gate there were 25,000 prostitutes both freelance and in 500 bar/whore
house combinations. At least according
to the military police, although I never got around to counting them all. Alcohol was cheap and easily available and there
were drugs, mainly Thai stick at $15.00 a key, less than an ounce cost back in
the states.
On
the base we had running water and all the other comforts of home and then
some. We lived in hooches, which were small
wooden buildings and all the sides could be opened to let the air blow through. There were about twelve to fifteen guys in
each hooch and each hooch had a hooch girl.
She washed and cleaned our clothing and the hooch we lived in and we
each paid her 20 baht a month which at that time was about a dollar. We did no manual labor except what we had to do
at work. It was a great step up from
wherever we’d been stationed before.
There was a Base Exchange and three movie theaters. One doubled as a synagogue on Saturdays and a
church on Sundays. One was at the USO
club which was run by young women who had come over from the United States to
support the troops.
And one was an
outdoor theater. Where we set on wooden
benches and watched the movie projected on an outside screen. The screen had a slopping roof that went out
about ten feet and angled down to the screen and on both sides there were walls
that angled out away from the screen for the same distance. If it rained we’d get wet, but the screen
would stay dry.
We would sit with
our backs to the runway while the screen faced it. Often at night when we would watch a movie
there would come a sound, a roar like the freight trains that used to run a
block from my childhood home. The roar
would drown out the sound coming from the screen, but the movie would never
stop. It was the B52s going out on their
missions. The sound would roll over us
and then hit the screen get caught in the overhang and roll back. The sound would come in threes; the giant
planes flew in three plane formations, but there could be as many as twenty or
more of these formations. One, two,
three…………one, two, three…………one, two three……………….one, two, three…………...
And the next day
you could watch it all on TV.
