Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

Fifty years – half a century since the last helicopters lifted off from Saigon. To us now, it seems as far away in time and nearly as pointless as the Western Front, as I noted in another reminiscence some years ago.

Platoon seems as much of a relic as Journey’s End, the image of a helicopter hovering over jungle with All Along the Watchtower on the soundtrack an image as archaic as doughboys with puttees and soup-plate helmets, marching along and singing Mademoiselle from Armentieres.

In that summer, I was a college student, volunteering with a small volunteer refugee resettlement in the far distant Los Angeles suburb where I lived with my family then. Our Lutheran church banded together with a couple of other local churches, the Lions’ Club and a handful of volunteers to sponsor Vietnamese refugees. We thought, by pulling in all our resources that we could manage an extended family of up to 25 members, adults and children, as we had been given to understand that was where the need was greatest: sponsors for large families. In their infinite wisdom, Lutheran Social Services at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas (which location was one of the holding camps for Vietnamese refugees in that year) sent us three small family groups and four single young men. We had just enough in our collected funds to rent a small house and two apartments – the single young men were farmed out to families. One of the young men, named Kiet, who turned out to be just barely 18, went to our family and lived with us for more than a year. (His maternal uncle was resettled in Houston with his family, and Kiet eventually went to live with them.)

All of our sponsored families and the young single boys had stories of how they escaped. The youngest of the four was a younger son from a prosperous family; they scraped together the funds and documents to send him out of the collapsing country by commercial air, wanting one of their family to be safe and out of what was expected to be a bloodbath by the victorious North Vietnamese. Another was an enlisted tech in the Viet Air Force; he and others from his unit were all evacuated out on a Viet Air Force transport to Thailand, and then to the Philippines and on to the United States.

Kiet had the most hairbreadth escape. He was also a Viet Air Force enlisted man; a security policeman, on duty at Tan Son Nhut, assigned with his fellows to work crowd control – on the very last day that fixed wing aircraft could operate as the North Vietnamese had begun shelling the runway. Only helicopters could take off from Tan Son Nhut then – and in the rush of the panicked crowd, Kiet was carried off his feet and shoved up against the door of one of those helicopters. On an impulse – as he always insisted that he hadn’t planned to escape – he threw away his weapon and got in. The helicopter staggered into the air, hideously overloaded with frantic people – and barely made it to the USS Hancock. One of the first humorous remarks that I ever heard from Kiet was when all of us were watching a Jacques Cousteau special on underwater archeology. With a grin, Kiet said that he knew exactly where there were a great many helicopters on the bottom of the sea.

There were so many helicopters coming out to the Hancock and trying to land that the American crew could only throw them overboard, as soon as they were emptied of people. Clear the flight deck, and there were five more overburdened helicopters running on fumes, desperate to land on the Hancock’s flight deck.

The family that I knew best because the husband and wife spoke English well were the Tran family: Xuan-An and Hai. They brought pictures of where they lived in the highlands in a town called Dalat; snaps of cool, misty green pines and gardens of rhododendrons, and a horizon of mountains. Eventually, they had to flee Dalat for Saigon, where their youngest daughter was born, and Xuan-An’s mother came to live with them. Hai had left Hanoi as a teenager when the Communists took over there, his family being well to do, part Chinese, and immensely scholarly. He worked as a librarian for the USIS, and Xuan-An as a teacher of English and sciences. They were on the Embassy list of Vietnamese citizens to be evacuated in the spring of 1975, with their four children, aged 12 to 2 years old. They were still waiting at their home, for someone to come fetch them. Perhaps someone from the Embassy might have come for them eventually, but Xuan-An’s brother who was the captain of a Vietnamese coastal patrol vessel came to their house after dark, instead.

He had sent his crewmen all to fetch their families, they were going to make a run for safety out to sea, and he came to get his and Xuan-An’s mother, who would later be known to us as Grandmother. He was horrified to find his sister and brother-in-law and the children still there. He urged them to come with him straight away, and not wait any longer for rescue. They came away with only what the adults could carry, in small packs the size of student’s books. The youngest daughter was a toddler and had to be carried herself. The motor launch was a hundred feet long, and there were a hundred people crammed onto it, carrying them out to an American cargo ship, the Pioneer Contender, which waited with other American rescuers, just beyond the horizon.

Always take the family pictures, Xuan-An said, when she showed me the album, Anything else in the world you can get back again or something like it, but not family pictures. And jewelry. You can always sell jewelry.

It was an article of faith among the South Vietnamese fleeing Saigon in 1975 that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong would treat anyone with the barest connection to the Americans and the Saigon government as brutally as they had treated civilians in Hue, when they overran that city during the 1968 Tet offensive. Those on the losing side of a vicious civil war were not inclined to trust in the magnanimity of the victors, since none had ever been demonstrated heretofore. They took their chances and whatever they could carry and fled, by boat, and by aircraft.

Grandmother had made a vow, that if all of her family escaped, and were safe, she would shave her head, and so she did: when I first met her, her hair was coming back, an inch or so long. One of Xuan-An’s pictures was of Grandmother in her youth; she was gorgeous and looked like the Dragon Lady of Terry and the Pirates fame.

In the vast mess-tent one day, a young Vietnamese man began complaining loudly about the spaghetti and meatballs being served, and a little, elderly Vietnamese woman in line behind him asked him what his name was. The young man turned out to be the son a of a high-ranking South Vietnamese officer, whereupon the elderly woman dumped her bowl of spaghetti and meatballs on his head and told them that if his father had only done his job better, then none of them would have had to be eating food like that. Xuan-an still giggled when she told me that story. I wonder if Grandmother might have been the dumper of spaghetti.

Xuan-An and Hai, with their children and Grandmother were the first of the families to be sent to us. We had spent a weekend cleaning out the tiny rental house we had found for them, and fitting it up with donated furniture, linens and kitchenware. As we were raking up and bagging desiccated dog-poop from the dusty little side yard, the owner of the house across the road came over and asked what we were doing. When we explained that we were setting up the house for Vietnamese refugees, he asked if we needed a refrigerator, and brought it across the road on a dolly when we said yes. The town was quietly, undemonstratively supportive: like the little elderly Vietnamese woman in the camp, I think a lot of local people felt that we had not done a good job, we had left a lot of good people in the lurch, and now we owed them. (Sunland-Tujunga at this time was a working-class to no-class and blue-collar sort of town – the kind of town where young men accepted the draft, rather than resisting it.)

Xuan-An and Grandmother practically cried when they first walked in, as plain and minimal as the house was. Grandmother immediately took over the housekeeping, while her son and daughter took two jobs apiece. The youngest daughter, Tao, at the age of three became Grandmother’s translator when school began in the fall for her sister and brothers. They made an interesting pair, in the local Ralph’s grocery, a tiny elderly Vietnamese woman in black loose trousers and white blouse, earnestly picking over the fresh fruits and vegetables, and Tao, barely up to Grandmother’s elbow, translating from English to Vietnamese and back again. I am not sure that Grandmother really needed a translator, after a while: she had the most elegantly expressive face and hands, and the gift of communication without language. We always knew what she was on about, and she instantly divined whatever it was we were trying to get across. Without ever learning any other English other than the word “Hello”, Grandmother also become quite fond of the soap opera General Hospital. She did all the cooking, putting the cutting board on the floor of the kitchen and dismembering a whole chicken with a cleaver the size of a machete. Occasionally, Grandmother gifted us with a jar of homemade pickled vegetables, beautifully carved slices of carrot and daikon radish, and whole tiny onions, in a brine slightly spiked with fish sauce.

Xuan-An and Hai meanwhile worked two jobs each, for a while. Like many of the 1975 Vietnamese refugees, they spoke English well, although the children did not at first. All summer, we gave them lessons, and they started in the fall at grade level. The oldest daughter would eventually go on to college, while Xuan-An and Hai bought first a car, then a house of their own, in the neighborhood where they had lived as refugees. Later, their two sons would serve in the US Army.

In the early days, Xuan-An sometimes talked of going back to Vietnam, that it would be important for the children to remember their original language, in that case. I would look at Tao and know that Tao would not remember anything but growing up in America.

Since my daughter and Wee Jamie, the Wonder Grandson have moved themselves and a large part of their belongings from my own little suburban house, I have been occupying part of my days in packing up their stuff and rearranging my own furniture and various bits and bobs. There is more room in my place now – and consequently less of it in hers – but I really am enjoying being able to do this. I am way overdue for repainting the living-room and kitchen, and resorting/rearranging the bookshelves and decorative elements … but anyway, when I was moving stuff around today, I was reminded by a book on my shelves, of how I managed to efficiently conduct a tour of Mather Air Force Base when the tour group did not come all neatly compact in a school bus…

That was a year of my time in the military which I thoroughly enjoyed – that year in the Public Affairs shop. The commander of it was a wonderful, competent and engaging officer, one of the two best as commander and leader/manager of people that I ever worked for.

An explanation: during the time when I was assigned to the Public Affairs office there, Mather boasted a tiny planetarium, and a small historical museum. The planetarium’s reason for existence on the base was to teach celestial navigation to masses of brand-new second lieutenants taking a very lengthy course which would qualify them as official Air Force navigators. It was also about the only planetarium anywhere within an easy travel distance of Sacramento. The museum was there just because. The planetarium and the museum featured on the lists of officially approved venues for student field trips by local school districts. Essentially, this meant I would be heading down to the main front gate two and three times a week to meet a school bus. I’d swing up the steps of the bus, introduce myself, give a cordial but firm little talk to the kids, explaining that the base was a serious place, and reckless shenanigans on their part would not be tolerated. If such shenanigans did occur – wandering away from the group or carelessly messing around with any interesting yet potentially dangerous bits of equipment within reach – I would speak to their teacher. Once. And if such shenanigans happened twice – then the tour would be concluded right then and there. I would see them all back to the bus and out the main gate. Some of my assisting helpers on these tours did comment that it was a very savage little talk, but I never did have to cut a tour short, and I never lost a member of a group, so … hey, results count.

There usually was a block of time to be filled between arriving at the gate, and when we were scheduled at the planetarium. To fill it,  I would conduct a brief tour of the base, standing up at the front of the bus and using whatever public address system they had, pointing out the various facilities and explaining that the base was just like a little self-contained town, with a general store/BX, a grocery/Commissary, a school, a town hall/AKA the Head Shed, a church, a park, apartment houses/dorms, a suburb/AKA the housing area. Then to the planetarium, where the officer instructors who ran it had a nice little hour-long canned presentation suitable for students of all ages. Then – a walk down the street and around the corner to the building which housed the museum for another hour. The sidewalk passed close by a place where a certain species of California ground-burrowing owl had set up housekeeping at the edge of an empty lot where probably a WWII-era temporary building had once been. Since the owl and mate were individuals from a rare, endangered and protected species, they were protected and were consequently rather cherished as a kind of mascot. The guys from the local CE shop had provided Owl and Mrs. Owl with a miniature picnic table with an umbrella adjacent to the burrow mound.  Usually, only the first three or four kids in line after me would catch sight of Owl or Mrs. Owl, perched on their burrow mound – the owls would dive into the safety of the burrow as soon as we came close. Still, in a lot of the pictures drawn by the kids and sent to the Public Affairs office with a thank-you note from the teacher, the owls and their burrow figured highly, almost as much as the airplanes.

The museum featured a scale model of a WWI biplane, which was big enough for kids to climb into, and a WWII wire recorder, which still worked – and recorded brief messages; there were some other interesting exhibits, although not interesting enough for me to recall any specifics. It was run by a very cool major, who would sometimes amuse the visiting kids by riding his unicycle through the museum. (Majors are usually very tense, humorless officers; nervous because if they are ambitious in any degree they are facing retirement at 20 years in that grade, when they really would like to retire as lieutenant colonels. It’s more dignified, that way, plus a fatter retirement pension. There are some who purely don’t care; the unicycle-riding major was one of them.)

To conclude the tour, most frequently the class and I repaired to the base picnic grounds for the kids to eat their brown-bag lunch. Occasionally, a tour extended to a visit to the working dogs, and the training aircraft on the flightline, but mostly it was just the planetarium, the museum, and my introductory briefing about the base-as-small-town.

Oh – and my work around for when the school tour arrived in half a dozen car-pooled automobiles driven by parent volunteers? Well, I still did the base brief; leading a convoy of cars from one spot to another where they could all park, and the kids gather around me for the relevant part of my talk – but how to get everyone back into their seats and moving on to the next stop without wasting time? That’s the bit I was reminded of, when I dusted the bookshelf with this book ( Scramble, by Norman Gelb) on it. I thought to tell the kids when we gathered at the front gate to begin the tour – a brief outline about the Battle of Britain; how in the summer of 1940 the RAF fighter pilots were on alert status, ready at the command to ‘scramble’, to get into their airplanes and take off on a moment’s notice to fly and fight. I would tell them that they had to be just as fast, to run and jump into their places in the cars, fasten their seat belts and be ready to move on – just as speedily as those long ago pilots, who were in the main not very much older than some of the schoolchildren I related this story to. Yep – blow the whistle (which I have routinely kept on my keychain since I could drive a car myself), yell “Squadron! Scramble!” and the students would hightail it to the cars with all speed. Very efficient – but I would venture a guess that certain adults who toured Mather AFB in that year came away from the experience with a very odd notion about the Battle of Britain.

And then there was the occasion that I had the base MPs point loaded weapons at me, and my tour group on the flightline, but that is for another time…

I wrote a couple of months ago about the odd and (usually rightfully) obscure movies that we got in the AFRTS shipments of programming back in the day that I was a lowly airman, working the night shift in the TV control room at FEN-Misawa. Indeed, we received many an odd selection of movies in the weekly package of TV programming.

In the first year or so of my service, the weekly TV program package came on half-hour long film reels, and then on Umatic ¾ videotape cassettes, which were a lot less messy to deal with – but still had their own challenges, mostly because the cassettes were held together with about thirty teeny metal screws, which had the dismaying tendency to come loose in transit – and then drop into the innards of the playback machine, necessitating much swearing by our engineering staff and possibly damage to the delicate machinery itself. As our experience developed with that format, a small Phillips-head screwdriver was routinely chained to the rack where the daily programs were pulled from their metal traveling cases and lined up the night before by the on-duty operator. Yes, part of that duty was to tighten ALL the screws holding each and every tape case together, the rollers, and the little metal flange that was supposed to protect the tape itself. In some cases, we went to the extent of opening and carefully rethreading the tape through the various rollers and take-up reels. Yes, we probably weren’t supposed to be doing this, but … whatever. The program had to air, especially if it were a very popular one. We all got very good at administering first aid to ailing Umatic cassette tapes.

Anyway – the movies. Many of the movies in the package were … grade C. The bottom of a double feature in a dollar theater in the bad part of town. Or so old and/or low rent that they were aired late at night back at home, interspersed with commercials for shady used car lots. It was a bafflement for years – why did AFRTS generally seemed to get the absolute dregs when it came to movies? We kind of got it that the military post-Vietnam was about as popular as a case of herpes with the Hollywood set, and perhaps that was the reason. We shrugged and moved on.

In the fullness of time, I finished the tour in Japan, whiled away a pleasant year in the Public Affairs office at (now closed) Mather AFB. After that, I did a tour at Sondrestrom AB, Greenland, of which it was often said, “Not the end of the world – but you can see it from there!” Sondrestrom was thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle and saved from complete and total isolation by also being the main international airport for all of Greenland.

During WWII the US Army Air Corps, after careful consideration, sited a transit airfield on that exact spot, because of usually favorable local weather conditions, as opposed to the generally unwelcoming weather conditions practically everywhere else on that continent. For an isolated military base, Sondrestrom AB hosted a constant trickle of international travelers on the Danish side of the base where the international airport terminal and hotel complex was situated –  separated from the American military side by nothing more than a narrow road around the top end of the landing strip.

(The runway had been built half on hard ground and half on fill blasted out from the hills and dumped into the end of a 40-mile-long fjord. It bent downhill in the middle. Only very experienced pilots of large aircraft were permitted to land and take off from Sondrestrom, situated as it was at the end of a 40-long, straight-as-a-die fjord with tall mountains lining either side.)

Anyway, there had long been an Air Force broadcasting squadron detachment at Sondrestrom. For exactly how long, I didn’t know; the very oldest discs in the library of AFRTS-Radio releases in the record library there (specifically in limited issue to AFRTS-Radio outlets only, beginning with #1 sometime in the early 40’s) were on enormous 16-inch records, and numbered in the 600s.

There was also – because this was an Air Force establishment, a range of recreational venues, all catering to the Air Force personnel, the Danish and American contract employees, Danish staff of the Royal Greenlandic Trading Co., and the airport. This included NCO and officer clubs, a small indoor swimming pool (said to be the only such in Greenland) and the BX movie theater, which usually showed first-run movies about six months after said movies opened Stateside. The co-location of the BX theater, and the international airport and hotel in such a remote site had a strange and incidental bearing on the lack of good movies in the AFRTS weekly packages, for a reason that I didn’t hear about until a decade later.

I did a year-long tour in Greenland and departed for a follow-on to Greece – my choice as a reward for a year in a place that couldn’t possibly be any more remote unless it was the Antarctic. Eventually I finished out my overseas assignments in Korea, at AIG-Yongsan, in the heart of downtown Seoul. In a conversation with an older NCO, who had knocked around military broadcasting for some years longer than I had and had a wider repertoire of stories about that specialty and some of the very odd characters in it. When I mentioned that I had done a tour in Greenland, he told me how our broadcast detachment there was the direct cause of movies in AFRTS-TV weekly packages being routinely so third- or fourth-rate for decades.

I honestly do not know if the story he told me was true or not. I am certain that it was technologically and in practice possible. Being in such isolated location, with only the semi-weekly transport aircraft from the States, and international flights taking a northerly route as a lifeline to the larger world – military personnel stationed there get very, very bored. It’s always dangerous when intelligent people in an isolated situation get bored. Because they do creative things to alleviate that boredom, especially when there is no one around to advise against the most … er, creative diversions.

What is supposed to have happened is that whoever was in charge of the BX movie theater got together with someone at the broadcast station.

(It may have been the same person, actually. It was a small base, and a lot of personnel doubled up on extra jobs. The year I was at Sondrestrom, the NCOIC of the Security Police unit was also the senior enlisted advisor, and manager of the BX theater.)

That person, or persons enabled the almost-new movie releases intended to be shown at the base theater to be taken to the station – and broadcast. This spectacularly violated a pair of iron-clad rules, the first being that only TV and radio programs provided by the AFRTS programming center can be aired by stations worldwide. The other larger rule violated – and the one with major outside-the-military implications – was that the movies to be shown in the base theater had not been released for broadcast in any form. That those movies were being illegally broadcast at a dinky military TV station with a total reach of maybe five miles in any direction, thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle made no difference. It violated the rights of the various movie copyright holders – yet it might have passed unnoticed.

But it didn’t. Apparently, according to my acquaintance, a fairly prominent studio executive happened to be passing through the international airport. Stuck in the airport hotel for a night or two, he turned on the TV in his room … and saw one of his studio’s new releases being broadcast. Illegally. When that executive got back to the States, the word went out from him, and just about every other movie production house that AFRTS was henceforward on the bad books; from then on, only used-up movie dregs were released to the AFRTS TV programming center.

I really don’t know if this occurred as my informant told me, as it was a story passed along like a game of telephone. But I – and anyone who ever tuned into AFRTS during the last quarter of last century can truthfully testify that, yeah – the movies broadcast on military TV stations were a very odd and generally low-rent collection.

Another story from the wacky world of military broadcasting – I thought I had written this one out before – maybe I have, but that must have been so long ago, that it’s lost in the archives.

This really happened; the whole story was verified by the then-news director, who I worked for as a station manager some years later, around the time that I decided that I didn’t want to go into broadcast management with AFRTS. It came to me around 1989 or so that every AFRTS station manager I had ever worked for had cracked up in some interesting manner, either mentally, physically or personally. (It was a stressful job, with a great deal of responsibility and very little actual control over anything much – a certain guarantee of killing levels of stress.) I wanted to retire in good health at 20 years with all my original issue of marbles, and eventually did a sideways slide into a related video production field.

Anyway – there was an incident in the late 1970s involving a Russian fighter jet flying a little too low and slow over an American carrier, in a manner presumably meant to be intimidating by buzzing the carrier, and which resulted in some panicky news stories, along the lines of “OMG the Russkies are trying to provoke something!” At this time the Far East Network was headquartered in Tokyo, and at Misawa we rebroadcast their radio feed, with a five-minute long newscast at the top of the hour for most of the day save for when we broke away for our local morning and afternoon shows.  FEN-Tokyo’s radio section boasted a full set of golden-throated trained DINFOS announcers, one of whom was a guy with a deep, resonant speaking voice, and possibly the emptiest skull ever recorded as being possessed by one of that ilk. He would become known far and wide as the Ted Baxter of the Far East Network; an absolute legend in military broadcasting at that time, and not for good reasons.

It came to be that Our Hero was the duty announcer the day that the story of the Russian fighter buzzing the American carrier came over the wires. At that time, we had teletype machines printing out the various stories sourced from AP and UPI. It was a matter of pulling copy off the teletype, arranging the various stories in order – most important first, counting up the lines of text (14 per minute was normal reading speed for us) writing out something to bridge between stories, editing or adding as necessary. Our Hero popped his head around the news directors’ office door, and asked casually, for the correct spelling of “strafed”. The news director, with his mind on other matters, spelled it for him and went back to work. Our Hero went into the on-air studio and waited as the hour-long music program came to an end. The minutes ticked by – top of the hour; time hack, station ID, opened the mike and launched into the first story. The On-Air warning light outside the studio door was red; alerting anyone that the mike was hot, and not to open that door until it went out.

Some minutes into the newscast, the news director was struck by an awful premonition – a feeling of absolute certainty so powerful and urgent that he dashed into the studio – disregarding the On Air light and ripped the news copy out of Our Heros’ very hands. When the news director verified the story to me, some years later, he claimed that he broke into a cold sweat and nearly had a heart attack on the spot. Our Hero had come about two lines from announcing to everyone within radio-hearing that a Russian jet had strafed an American aircraft carrier. Our audience didn’t just include American military personnel and dependents, but a substantial shadow audience … to include diplomatic personnel of all nations who listened to FEN. This would have had serious international repercussions for everyone, up and down the chain of command – and all of this escaped by a whisker by the news directors’ sudden premonition.

Our Hero, though – was completely oblivious. In the aftermath, as he was being yelled at by the news director, the program director, and for all I know, the det commander, he looked at them all in bafflement and asked. “Strafed? Buzzed? What’s the difference?”

Believe it or not, he was around for years in AFRTS, and became a legend, rather like Bigfoot, bouncing back from near-disaster after near disaster, as if he was glazed with Teflon. Nothing every stuck to him, and no one could figure out how he managed to make the rank that he eventually did. The best anyone could come up with was he was the nephew of someone high up in the Pentagon. Very high up. That, or incriminating pictures.