Peters There Was No Music

1. Auflage 2020
ISBN: 978-1-0983-0451-5
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 354 Seiten

'There Was No Music' is a recollection of a naval aviator and founding member of a unique combat aviation unit, the HA(L)-3 'Seawolves', the most decorated navy squadron of the Vietnam conflict. The unit is currently the subject of a Smithsonian sponsored historical novel and a nationally televised PBS documentary. The author is cited in the novel and appears in the documentary. In a parallel narrative, the author reflects on the aftermath of the combat experience, a quixotic journey, dogged by post-traumatic stress related to the combat experience. Though the subject matter is often grim, the author's perception is cast in a darkly humorous context. This work evolves in two concurrent parts, one detailing my Vietnam combat experience where, as a decorated naval aviator the author logged in excess of 800 hours of combat flight time and was: twice wounded; twice shot down; and continually engaged in combat actions culminating in a top-secret rescue operation. The parallel story considers the authors reentry into civilian life, a unique odyssey inter-twined with significant socio-political events of the post-World War II era: the Southern California beach scene; Watergate and President Nixon's resignation; Aspen, Colorado evolving as a haven for refugees of the 60's cultural revolution and a celebrity mecca; Gary Hart's disastrous presidential campaigns; and the launch of the International Space Station.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Peters, Michael

Leseproben

Chapter 1 I met Stacey in a saloon. It was a Sunday afternoon in early June 2006. I was killing time. I had spent the weekend in Reno at a reunion of my Vietnam combat squadron, the Seawolves. Fun event, three days of reminiscing about the rollicking times we had laying down death and destruction on “Charlie,” the shorthand tag for our adversaries, the Viet Cong guerillas. Officially, the Seawolves were Helicopter Attack (Light) Squadron Three or “HA(L)-3.” I spent most of my time with the guys from my detachment, fondly known as “Rowell’s Rats” or just the “Rats.” They were not necessarily lovable guys, but they truly merited the cliché “friends I would die for,” and I almost did. The Rats had gained near legendary status and we were treated like rock stars at the reunion. You put a drink in front of a Navy pilot, and it is a reason to tell a story. If you are a rock star, a lot of drinks get put in front of you. Come Sunday morning, I had had enough drinks and had heard enough stories. It was time to get off the stage. One of the Rats, A J (Dirty Al) Banford had a place up on Lake Tahoe. He was headed back East for two weeks and said his Tahoe retreat was mine if I wanted it. It was an offer I could not refuse. I planned to meet him up there in the early evening. It was noon and I had time to kill. I’m not a big fan of Reno. I don’t gamble, at least not in the betting sense. If you don’t gamble, there is just Reno, which Stacey aptly described as “900 shades of brown.” Virginia City, Nevada, only thirty minutes west of Reno, is a different story. It is a historic mining town that has done a fair job of retaining the character of its rowdy and raucous past. It sits at 1700 feet above Reno in the Virginia Range of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Silver and gold, mined from its legendary Comstock Lode, would become the area’s economic engine and would put immense amounts of money in the coffers of the San Francisco founding fathers. It was here in 1863 that Samuel Clemens, a reporter for city’s local newspaper began bylining his articles under the pen name of Mark Twain. In its heyday, it had a lot of saloons and it still does. I made it up there in the early afternoon, parked the car and wandered around. I noted that the Bucket of Blood Saloon had a band, “The Comstock Cowboys,” cranking up at three o’clock. Perfect! Just enough time to grab some lunch. I settled on barbeque. I live in the State of Virginia where barbeque is a staple. I like to eat local fare wherever I am, but all the choices looked quite dismal, so I chose back home. I headed to the Bucket. The Cowboys were cooking, and the gentlemen were swinging their ladies. The locals were in costume: Civil War, miner, cowboy, but no Indians. It was a bit on the hokey side, somewhat like a Hollywood set. The bar was on the right as one walked in and went the entire length of the building. Something caught my eye as I entered. I kept moving toward the other end of the bar. I settled in and glanced back at the crowd lining the bar and managed my first good look at Stacey. I have always enjoyed a lightly regarded but delightfully quirky movie called “Cold Feet,” based on a screenplay co-authored by Tom McGuane. It stars Tom Waites, Sally Kirkland and Keith Carradine. The plot revolves around the misadventures of a well-intentioned but benignly mendacious cowboy (Carradine) and his cohorts, an inept homicidal maniac (Waites) and his always hungry, nymphomaniac fiancé (Kirkland). Through most of the movie, Kirkland and Waites pursue Carradine, who absconded with property they had jointly stolen. Kirkland vacillates between getting revenge and reestablishing a relationship with her wayward fiancé. At one point, she tries to explain her attraction for Carradine to the perplexed Waites: “All I ever wanted was a dishonest cowboy who would feed me.” The line has always resonated with me. I had come to see myself as a cowboy. It was in my DNA; my mother descended from caballero stock of central New Mexico. I was perpetually restless, wandering, seeking that peaceful valley in some forgotten corner of the world. And I had been dishonest on occasion. The first thing that came to mind when I saw Stacey was that here was a woman who could probably appreciate a dishonest cowboy. She had her back to the bar and was leaning on her elbows, totally at home. A hat, more fedora than cowboy, sat tipped down over her forehead, but not in a cocky or affected way; it belonged right where it sat. It covered a mop of red hair, not her natural color I would later learn. Still, it was a perfect frame for a face full of freckles with high cheek bones, and a pair of brown eyes that didn’t miss a thing and seemed to delight in everything they fell upon. She was tall. There is a portrait by Modigliani that hangs in the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, “Nude on a Blue Cushion.” That would be Stacey. Voluptuous comes to mind; the cowboys would say bodacious. When I showed her the portrait, she suggested her breasts were more attractive. She did not lack for self-assurance. She wore a tight-fitting western shirt, tight jeans and hand-made cowboy boots. She was surrounded by an all-male cast of costumed characters who appeared straight out of a Wild West reenactment. She clearly was the queen, and she was completely comfortable with the role. Unlike the rest of the crowd, she wasn’t in costume, but didn’t need one; she was the real thing. Damn, she was gorgeous ---- worth becoming a dishonest cowboy for. Never happened, of course, but then it really didn’t matter. She wandered through the room effortlessly. I suspected she could do the same in any setting. I was right. In the Bucket she was every guy’s sweetheart and, in another era, possibly the hooker with a heart of gold. I would later learn she had run a bar in Virginia City and had brought in strippers from Reno as barmaids. A friend from Vegas couldn’t pay off a debt, so Stacey settled it by taking over the debtor’s business, a phone-for-sex operation. She ran it for a year. She wanted to put a bar in the old Virginia City Morgue, which she was going to call “Stiffy’s.” Stacey was a team roper on the national rodeo circuit, and had a huge belt buckle to prove it. She had lived in an old miner’s cabin in the hills above Virginia City, and in a cottage in Windsor, England where she loved to attend the races at Ascot, she and the Queen. She was at home at black-tie events and wore ball gowns with elegance. Smiling, ever smiling, she exuded a stunning self-confidence that masked an insatiable need for security. I am not very good at bar talk; I need to be motivated. As she walked by me, she commented on the emblem on my polo shirt. She thought it might be a Scottish crest. It was my Navy Squadron logo. We chatted. She excused herself for a moment, came back and effortlessly resumed the conversation. She took me down to meet her friends. As it turned out, the costumes weren’t costumes. That crowd also was the real deal, people who had decided to stay put and not move on with time. Stacey and I danced, slow cowboy stuff. I never could or ever would get a handle on the Texas Two-step, but I would try for her. I was meeting Al for dinner that evening. I think if I would have asked, Stacey would have joined us. We did make plans to meet at Al’s place the following evening and then go to dinner at the Lone Eagle on the Lake. I drove down the Geiger Grade and headed back up the Mt. Rose Highway. I was thinking about Stacey. That would become the norm. From that time on, I would be with her, or be thinking about her, from the time I woke up, through the day and on into my dreams. But for the moment, I was headed to another saloon to see Dirty Al. We would talk about things present, Stacey, and things past, Vietnam. *** Dirty Al screamed, “That one got an ammo dump.” The huge ball of fire lit up the nighttime sky. We watched the mortars descend into Saigon’s Ton Son Nhut Air Force Base. The Huey gunships had already scrambled and were returning fire. It was indeed surreal. I keep coming back to that word because so much of this story seems more the recounting of a dream, or more appropriately, a nightmare, than just a recitation of memories. But although the events were real, in the context of the pre-war life I had come to know and to which I would eventually return too, I tend to recall them as surreal. Consider this scene: we were sitting beside the swimming pool adjacent to the bar on the roof of the Rex Hotel in downtown Saigon, casually sipping drinks while watching a mortar attack on the city’s major airbase. Is this experience not the essence of surreal? And so it would continue. Our detachment of pilots and support personnel reached Vietnam that afternoon. Finally! It was December 2, 1966, the day after my twenty-fifth birthday. Originally, we were scheduled to arrive in May, but there weren’t enough aircraft to go around, so we were delayed six months. The waiting over, we were in-country at last, ready to do our duty, and raring to take on the enemy. We were Rowell’s Rats, Detachment 21 out of Helicopter Combat Support Squadron One (HC-1), Naval Air Station Imperial Beach, California. We were the Seawolves. The Seawolf concept originated with the U.S. Army and the South Vietnamese riverine forces. The Vietnamese rivercraft patrolled the...