Toward the end of my Air Force career I was in a holding tank in a sub basement of Headquarters Strategic Air Command in Omaha.
For a "let's go out into the forest and find a little creek with cutthroat trout that we can fish for with dry flies" sort of human being, which was me, Omaha was at best, a penance.
At worst it was a strong argument for suicide.
So when the word came out that somebody was looking for volunteers to go to Japan in support of whatever it was that we thought we might be going to do about the Pueblo Crisis, I volunteered.
I figured I had no chance: some senior officer - I was a First Lieutenant - was going to get that job.
I was wrong; sometime in April 1968 I was on a plane to Tokyo.
By that time MLK had been assassinated.
And on the plane I was reading On the Beach.
With the Omaha Pall still upon me - out there over the Pacific - and with uncertainty in my heart about what it might mean that great black men kept being assassinated, Malcom had preceded MLK by then - there were no positive vibes for my then current state of affairs.
******************************************************
The huge advantage of not having to commit suicide because I had to live in Omaha aside, what turned out to be the real advantage of this little Japanese adventure was that I got to become an intimate and important part of what the Air Force did: fly combat missions.
After four years I was suddenly part of a squadron of air craft: RF4s.
The "R" meant that they were reconnaissance aircraft; they took pictures.
They were taking pictures of North Korea.
"Combat Fox" was what it was called.
F4s were two seat - pilot and navigator - supersonic capable (I once watched one, while sitting in the mezzanine bar of the officer's club at Ton Son Nhut take off apparently vertically to avoid the snipers at the end of the runway) aircraft.
So I got to Itazuke and met one of my staff, a Second Lieutenant named Joe.
Joe was from Erie,
Pennsylvania.
We hit it off immediately.
That meant that we spent a lot of off duty time in the bar at the officer's club.
One of my favorite memories of those times is an episode in Screen Saver.
**********************************************
"Joe introduced me to the pilots. Actually some of them were pilots and some were navigators. The RF4s that the Cotton Pickers flew were two-seaters. The front seat was for the pilot and the back seat was for the navigator. Among the men I met were Paul, a pilot and Rocco his navigator. I remember their names because they both became bar room friends of mine. In my time at Itazuke I was to spend quite a bit of time listening to their life stories and sharing with them mine. Inevitably dreams and aspirations entered the conversation also, as did politics, religion and favorite drinks. Of course we had to sample in depth all of each other’s favorite drinks. They were perfect friends.
"The rest of those that I met in that first encounter were equally hospitable. Unfortunately their names were lost in translation.
"So Joe and I addressed the needs of the moment. Two double scotch rocks apiece and I felt I was pretty well versed in the intelligence support requirements of the Cotton Pickers. By then it was later in the afternoon and more of the air crews were drifting in. I was introduced to all of them, and uniformly welcomed by them. They bought me drinks; I bought them drinks; Joe bought me drinks; I bought Joe drinks; they bought Joe and me drinks; Joe and I bought them drinks. And then they started to pour beer on the bar. It was a long bar and it took quite a lot of beer to wet it down. “What are they doing?” I asked Joe. “Wetting down the bar,” he said.
"Then they got some of the potted candles that were on all the little cocktail tables that were in the vicinity and put them at one end of the bar. It was the far end of the bar, toward the entrance. At the opposite end of the bar in an adjoining space there was a large anteroom where there were some dining tables and quite a bit of vacant space. “What are they doing?” I asked Joe. “Putting out candles,” he said. “Why are they wetting down the bar and putting out candles?” I said. “So they can make night landings,” he said. “What are night landings?” I said. “Watch” he said. They turned out the lights in the bar.
"So I watched.
"One of the guys, it was Rocco, went fairly deep into the dining table room end and turned around. This put him some distance from his end of the beer dripping bar. By this time everybody else had moved the bar stools into the middle of the fairly narrow bar area so they could stand flush with the bar. They all had lighted potted candles in their hands. Archie had moved back into the bartender’s area as far as he could get, leaning against the shelf that displayed the various liquors on offer. The lights of the line of men with candles connected with the lights of the line of candles at the end of the bar. This line of bar bordering lights was the only source of illumination in the darkened room. Rocco was making preparatory sorts of movements in the anteroom. “Preparatory to what?” I wondered. I found out quickly. Rocco took a sort of runners stance and rushed at his end of the wetted bar, jumping airborne at the last minute so that his chest would hit the bar. The combination of his forward motion and the slippery wetness allowed him to slide down quite a distance. A cheer went up. Archie measured the distance from the end of the bar to the tip of Rocco’s head. Rocco got off the bar and was replaced in the anteroom by another carrier lander. This went on for quite a time with occasional breaks for wetting down the “carrier deck” or getting refills of drinks. Naturally I had to try it. I came close to crashing in the ocean.
"Later I must have had dinner because there was a dining room at the club – not the carrier landing staging area, but a real dining room with creditable food; I never denied myself creditable food. Sometime after that later assumed act of eating I departed for the BOQ."
******************************************************
A couple of months later I was coming back to our quarters from - somewhere - and I was passing Joe who was sitting on the steps of his lodging.
I said "hi" or some equally vapid acknowledgment of his existence and was in the process of passing by when he spoke.
"They killed Kennedy".
Since I already knew that I was stunned.
Joe was a pretty smart, rational, ironic-tuned sort of human.
Why would he tell me what I already knew?
"Bobby".
I didn't know what to do.
And I never will.
******************************************************
After I returned to Omaha after four glorious months in Japan one day I got the news that Rocco and Paul had been killed in a crash on takeoff back at Kadena.
Somehow the plane inverted as it started its rise and Paul pulled the stick the wrong way.
They crashed back to earth and two important people were removed from my life forever.
