The Big Buddha Bicycle Race by Terence A. Harkin

Author:Terence A. Harkin [Harkin, Terence A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2017-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

5 November 1971 (evening)

Tora! Tora! Tora! (OR: The Element of Surprise…)

Having an extra stripe didn’t help me feel any better flying over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The NVA didn’t seem to be impressed. The trucks kept coming. We kept killing them by the hundreds. The NVA kept shooting back. On a clear night we could still see blurry shadows of drivers climbing out and trying to escape the carnage. Pigpen Sachs started wearing a T-shirt that read: “You can run, but you can’t hide.” Danielle’s letters started piling up. I was having trouble writing back when I wasn’t allowed to say a word about Spectre or Operation Pave Pronto. Compared to nighttime combat seventy-five hundred feet over Steel Tiger East, the usual chatter about sports and weather, college protests and college apathy, drugs and booze, getting strung out and going into rehab, getting a one-stripe promotion and even a fifty-mile bicycle race all seemed trivial.

And the trucks kept coming. Triple-A gun emplacements kept inching south, not stopping at Sepone but ever deeper into Laotian territory and ever closer to the end points of the Trail in South Vietnam and Cambodia. They weren’t immobile German-style pillboxes or nuclear-age American missile silos. They were maddeningly mobile and always seemed to be hiding in caves or some unknown spot under the triple-canopy jungle just enough farther down the Trail that flights of F-4s could never seem to find them in the daytime when they went back to take them out for us. SAM missiles, Russia’s finest, which weren’t supposed to exist outside Hanoi, started turning up, following in an eerie progression after the 57-mm radar-guided guns that followed the 37s that followed the 23s that slowly but surely followed the dual-mounted 12.7s down the Trail. The days of potshots from small arms fire were long over. In-tell tried to convince us otherwise, but we knew a flying telephone pole when we saw one, especially when they had pointy noses and little shark fins for tails. Apparently Command Post decided flight crews didn’t have a “need-to-know” regarding what was being shot at them. The flight crews deeply appreciated the way Command Post looked after their morale.

Cooper was still stateside, Harwell and Spitzer were on TDY over at Danang, and Spinelli and Nevers were still dead, which meant Jamal Washington and I had to fly five nights straight. I used my day off to bring every decent album I could find at the BX down to Woodstock Music for a little of what I called spiritual black marketeering—spreading international peace and goodwill like Satchmo Armstrong did when he toured for the State Department. While I was there, Sommit showed me an article in a Chinese-language newspaper from Bangkok. “It say the national police raid a warehouse in Mukdahan. Find much Communi’t propaganda. Some show pictures of Thai bar girls dancing with American GIs, ask ‘Does this bring democracy?’ Others say ‘No American bases in Thailand! Americans go home!’ Except Thai people like American, say they sanuk, have good heart—jai dii—which mean they fun and spend money.

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