War For the Hell of It: A Fighter Pilot's View of Vietnam

by Ed Cobleigh

  Only bus passengers in Bangkok never seem to smile. Beat-up bus after beat-up bus crammed full of Thais going to and from work passes me by on the crowded street. The dimly seen faces in the dusty bus windows have the same weary, exhausted expressions as they do in any large city in the world. Does taking a bus to work beat you down or does the ride free you to express your exhaustion? Is your true self on display when surrounded by other commuters who will forever remain strangers? In any case, bus riders everywhere have the same hangdog expression; it is both universal and sad. Yet in Bangkok these same forlorn riders will step down from their crummy bus and greet you with a radiant smile.

  There are various ways to get around in Bangkok, but none of them seem to work very well. The city is stacked to overflowing with people, beyond even normal Asian crowding. The jammed streets seem to generate pervasive, but polite, chaos, which then spreads outward into the rest of the city. Just as the monsoon rains overfill the many canals and then flood the streets; the street traffic floods the city with its liquid chaos.

  I have been sightseeing, alone alas, as my mythical, lonely airline stewardess failed to materialize. To see the sights, and there are many worth seeing, I have to choose my preferred mode of dysfunctional transportation.

  I can take a taxi, which will invariably be a compact Japanese sedan with more dents in it than the outfield wall in Yankee Stadium. However, the interior will be spotlessly clean and tidy. All taxis have a pungent air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror; often the freshener is aided by a lei of fresh flowers. Perhaps to promote survival in the cut-and-thrust traffic, each cab has good luck incantations finger-painted in Thai on the headliner just aft of the windshield. In a Bangkok taxi, I have plenty of time to enjoy the attention the ever-smiling driver lavishes on the interior of his cab. Most daytime rides take quite a time to complete in the choking traffic. I like to measure our progress by watching individual people walking on the sidewalk to see if we are logging blocks faster than they are. Usually the pedestrians win the unannounced race, but bicyclists blow us away with superior speed.

  Another, more sporting, transportation alternative is the "tuk­tuk." These are motorized samlors named after the coughing sound their smoky two-stroke engines make. Holding tight to the handle­bars, the driver sits in front of the underpowered tricycle. The passengers sit between the rear wheels and over the putting engine. Tuk-tuks are scarcely faster than taxis and more exposed to the smoke and exhaust of the street. Alas, I never, ever, have had a desire to ride a tricycle in Bangkok traffic.

  Rickety buses are everywhere, dirty and crowded. They are cheap, but their route schedules are unfathomable, as the Thais insist on labeling everything in their own Thai language. Who knows where any given bus is headed? Besides, I am in too good a mood to join the sourpusses on the buses.

  For the seriously suicidal, there are motorcycle taxis beyond counting. These dart and swim in the river of street traffic, avoiding immobilized buses like shoals of fish swimming through rocky rapids. For a few baht, you tell the driver where you want to go. Then you hop on the back of his tiny Japanese motorbike and hang on for dear life. You can actually get around town fairly quickly on the back of a motorcycle taxi, if you live through the ride. However, these bikes work better if the terrified passenger is a 100-pound Thai than they do with a 175-pound American embarked. I see Thai girls in their traditional ankle-length, tight silk skirts perched crosswise like colorful oriental mermaids on the backs of fifty-cc motorbikes as they head to their jobs as waitresses or hostesses. I wonder how on earth they survive the commute.

  Talking the crowded sidewalks of busy Pat Pong district, I spot a particularly curvy hostess in a shimmering silk dress and spike heels sliding off the back of a motorbike taxi. She is obviously reporting to work the lunch hour in a small Thai restaurant where the bike has let her off. That reminds me how hungry sightseeing has made me. Hungry for food, that is.

  I leave the hot, sunny street and enter the cool restaurant, my eyes wide open in the dim light. This place must be an upscale eatery; it is air-conditioned and all the chairs match each other. Another tip-off is the large, gilt-framed portrait of the King of Thailand hung with reverence on the back wall. The luscious hostess I followed in flashes a radiant smile and greets me with well-spoken English. She shows me to a table with a vinyl tablecloth and softly hands me a leather-bound menu. As her high heels click-clack her away, I peruse the fare. They must get a lot of farangs in here as the dishes are listed in both Thai and English. The heat outside has wilted my appetite somewhat. I just want a simple lunch.

  Ah, there's the ticket, something light. The dish called "Thai pepper beef salad" sounds refreshing and healthy. A smiling waitress arrives and seems surprised when I order the salad with iced tea. Maybe she was expecting me to include a beer.

  In what seems like no time at all the salad arrives on an oblong platter. The white china platter holds a bed of lettuce hosting a sprinkling of onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, and strips of thin-sliced, rare roast beef. The salad is moistened with a clear dressing and garnished with bits of red, yellow, and green peppers. I can't wait to dig in.

  The pretty teenaged waitress sets the salad and tea down, then asks in broken English,

  "You like?"

  I reply that it looks very good, but she doesn't walk away as I expect. She remains standing beside my table, wearing a dark blue waitress uniform that she must have borrowed from her little sister or from her Barbie doll. Her dress is so short and so tight, I don't see how she got into it and if she ever has to bend over very far, she'll be out of it. I smile my best lecher's smile, but still she remains. I think she wants to watch me eat this salad. Oh well, while she is observing me, I'll enjoy watching her stretch her mini-dress to the breaking point. A little provocative floor show during lunch won't be too hard to take.

  The first forkful of salad tells me I have made a serious, perhaps fatal, mistake. What did they use for dressing on this salad, napalm? This stuff is like eating a green veggie welding torch. The tender parts of my mouth are being cauterized, my tongue is melting, I am dying of chili overload. I have never eaten anything this hot in my entire life. I choke down the first bite and grab a gulp of cold ice tea. The tea affects the flame in my mouth like pissing on an oil well fire. In my agony, I steal a look at the waitress still hovering nearby.

  She smiles and repeats, "You like?"

  I managed to gasp, "Yes, it's very good."

  What this salad is good at is an incendiary assault on my taste buds. I take another bite and things only get worse. My vision is going blurry. I am breaking out in a fever, my upper lip is dripping with sweat and curling with pain. I can feel my heart pounding in protest to the abuse I'm shoving down my throat. Passing out is not out of the question. Another swig of tea helps a wee bit, enough for me to notice that the slinky hostess has joined my pert waitress to enjoy the show of a farang dying a fiery death by Thai salad.

  Discretion dictates that I give up this spicy torture and order something else, perhaps a quart of green tea ice cream and yes, there is such a dish. But I am not going to give up that easily with the flowers of Bangkok womanhood watching. I force an anguished smile and press on eating as another dark-haired girl joins the gallery.

  At last, with the help of four glasses of ice tea, I finish every bit of the 400-degree salad. By now, all five mini-skirted waitress and the hostess in her long silk sheath are watching from close by as I push away my now empty platter.

  My waitress reaches for the implements of torture and asks once again, "You like?"

  All I can do is nod affirmatively. It is a bold-faced, or rather a red-faced lie.

  She smiles and goes on, "I never see American man eat this before."

  That is really comforting. If I could talk, I'd thank her.

  She finds one lone bit of red chili left on the empty platter and points to it.

  "Not even Thai eat that."

  Evidently I was supposed to push th
e offending chilies aside and chow down on the salad itself.

  I don't know whether to swagger or to slink out of the restaurant. Did I show them how tough us farangs are or how stupid? In any case, my original plan was to use a hoary line on the beautiful hostesses, "Hostess honey, what time do you get off?" has gone up in oral flames. I open the door and reenter the shoals of sweltering people on the sidewalk, sadder but probably no smarter.

  After the cool and quiet restaurant, the street seems even more chaotic than it was thirty minutes ago.

  The streets of Bangkok are like great, dusty rivers of traffic. Dirty buses, smoking tuk-tuks, darting motorcycles, and battered taxis jostle in the flow as the traffic stream sluggishly makes its way between its curbed banks.

  The real river in Bangkok, the Chao Phraya, flows much faster than the streets do. The river is the lifeblood of the city, bringing its commerce, transporting its citizens, housing some of its people, and carrying away its waste. The river is brown-green with mud and decaying vegetation, its waves churned to dirty froth by squadrons of boats. It is so polluted you could develop film in it, yet little naked Thai kids swim in it like miniature brown dolphins with no apparent ill effects.

  Even the boats in Bangkok are exotic and strange. Long and slender, the typical wooden boats range in size from a dug-out canoe, full of fresh fruit for sale, to "long-tailed boats" thirty and forty feet in length. The long-tailed boats are maybe four feet wide and are powered by converted car engines mounted on swivels on the sterns. A slanting propeller shaft extends ten or fifteen feet behind each boat like a watery stinger. These long-tailed boats skim across the turbulent river like snarling dragonflies.

  Bangkok boats are long and narrow to navigate the hundreds of canals or "klongs" that earned the city the title of "The Venice of the Orient." Even given the Italian propensity for exuberant living, the chaos of Bangkok must make Venice, Italy look as tame as Sunday morning in St. Mark's Square.

  The street-born chaos extends to the sidewalks awash in people. Polite and friendly people, but people in their millions. Pushcarts are everywhere, selling food I mostly recognize, but with some I don't. The streets of Bangkok are lined with mom-and-pop stores, each fifteen or twenty feet wide and twice as deep. The owner's families live on the second floors and business is done from breakfast until late at night. Bangkok has never heard of zoning; that would be way too organized. So, a welding shop is next to a restaurant, which is next to a dress shop, which adjoins a spice shop, which abuts a shop selling furniture. Somehow it all works and people find what they need and keep their good humor in doing so.

  ***

  After a hot, tiring day of sightseeing, I'm waiting in the bar of the Bangkok USAF Officers' Club for some guys I just met. We have dinner reservations tonight at the best Hungarian restaurant in Bangkok.

  I'm reading the Bangkok Post, Bangkok's daily newspaper for English-speaking expatriates. The front page tells me unbridled chaos isn't limited to Bangkok, Thailand. The antiwar movement back in the States is gathering size like a ball of wet manure rolling down a barn aisle. There have been violent riots and angry street demonstrations in most cities on the West Coast, in Chicago, and in the northeastern parts of the United States. Civil disobedience is spreading, arrests are numerous, and bonfires are being lit with draft cards. College ROTC offices are being firebombed. What the hell is going on back there? Shocked, I read on.

  The paper tells me the latest tactic of antiwar movement is the protest march. The objective seems to be to gather everyone with a beard and a bitch about the war. Then the assembled mob attempts to disrupt as many public functions as they can while marching. The thought of a protest march on paved city streets reminds me that my feet hurt.

  I have been jogging barefooted again. The intelligence troops tell us the first thing the Bad Guys do to a captured American is to take away his boots. They know all Americans have been shod since infancy and thus have tender feet. If a downed airman attempts to escape his captors, a mile or so of running on jungle rocks and underbrush will cut his soft feet to ribbons. Further flight is then impossible. As all wounds suffered in the jungle are septic, his cut feet will become masses of infection in a day or two, making even normal walking too painful to endure. Gangrene isn't unknown. So, I'm jogging barefooted to toughen up the soles of my feet in case I have to make a run for it. Meanwhile, some misguided folks back home are marching in sandals to protest my dedicated efforts.

  From the paper, it seems the protestors have just discovered that the Vietnam War is unjust and an outrage. That's funny, just a couple of years ago, the very same war was righteous and good. Recently, the war was popular. Col. Robbie Risner, a famous F-105 Thunderchief fighter pilot, was on the cover of Time magazine. "Ballad of the Green Berets" was a hit song. The press was full of praise for our military efforts and for the guys doing the fighting. What happened? The aims of the war didn't change. Our so-called allies in South Vietnam didn't get any less lovable (that would be impossible). The war is no more unwinnable now than it was back then. So why the sudden interest in massive, out-of-control antiwar protests?

  From my remote location, actually at said war, the answer seems to lie in the military draft. The key to my admittedly self-serving analysis is the fact that the burgeoning antiwar movement is based on college campuses. When only professionals like Robbie Risner and me were fighting the war, it was OK, even heroic.

  That's rich, placing Colonel Risner and me in the same category. That's like saying that Mickey Mantle and I both played baseball.

  Anyway, the war was publicly supported when only three demographic groups were fighting in it; professional soldiers like fighter pilots and the U.S. Army's Green Berets, white southerners, and urban blacks. Membership in the U.S. armed services has traditionally been heavily weighted toward these three distinct sub-cultures.

  The stateside trouble started with the rapid buildup of U.S. forces in South Vietnam. The services' usual three manpower pools could not provide the sheer number of troops required. For the first time since the Korean War, white, middle-class guys were being drafted off college campuses. Sons from California, Massachusetts, and Chicago started coming home in body bags.

  College freshman everywhere suddenly had to contemplate the awful possibility of giving up their guitars for M-16 rifles. Night jungle patrols aren't nearly as much fun as rock concerts. What's more, protesting the war is way more fun than actually fighting in it. An ambitious student leader could become an instant campus hero by leading a protest march for a few hours and let others less fortunate (and braver) lead the bayonet charges. Of course, saving the world is much more satisfying than more mundane activities, like studying or taking exams.

  Suddenly the war became inherently wrong when the wrong guys were called to participate. Does the political justification for a war change with a rise in the social class of those called to fight in it?

  As I read about the street chaos back home, I wonder why the Thais passing by outside the Officers' Club in Bangkok aren't protesting. The Communists have taken over all of North Vietnam, half of the south, a third of Laos, and a quarter of Cambodia. For Thailand, the war is a few hundred miles away, not on the other side of the earth. Perhaps because of this proximity the Thais don't protest the war; they support it with troops in Vietnam and bases in Thailand to stage our air attacks.

  The protestors and I agree on one thing; the war is unwinnable as it is being fought. Could we win it if we tried? I don't know. I don't know if South Vietnam is worth winning. What I do know is that we could, if we wanted, convince the North that they lost. All that would take would be firepower finally unleashed.

  Meanwhile, the political chaos continues back home and the garden variety of chaos reigns delightfully in Bangkok. I guess I shouldn't read the Bangkok Post while drinking.

  After joining up with the three guys I met last night, we hop in a taxi to the restaurant. These guys are F-105 pilots, based at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base in cen
tral Thailand. There is a definite pecking order among USAF fighter pilots. At the top of the pyramid are pilots who fly single-engine, single-seat jets like the F-105 "Thud." Those airmen who fly two-seat fighters, like my F-4 Phantom, occupy one small step down. Just this once, the F-105 jocks have condescended to dine with the likes of me. Maybe they wanted to fill up a table of four.

  I would have preferred to go another round with Thai food, but these guys are intent on visiting a joint called "Nick's Number One."

  The taxi deposits us outside a run-down, colonial-style building with a red tile roof and a covered entranceway. A small, unlit sign is the only indication that this is the famous place. The restaurant looks ready to fall down, with jungle weeds growing against the peeling, plastered wall. A tarnished brass plaque outside announces that a past King of Thailand built this decrepit relic in the late 1800s for one of his mistresses. Given the vast number of pretty girls in Thailand serving at the pleasure of the King, it is a wonder he didn't construct his own subdivision.

  We enter the darkened entranceway and we are greeted by a courtly older gentleman sitting at a dimly lit wooden desk just inside. His upper class, faintly European accent marks our elderly host as Nick himself. The restaurant is dark with circles of cream-colored light cast by hanging lanterns. Still, we can see that the walls are covered with zillions of business cards, stuck up in substitution for wallpaper or paint. Curious, I strike up a conversation with Nick and he is only too willing to tell me the tale of the best Hungarian joint in Bangkok.