Rolling Thunder

by Mark Berent

CHAPTER FIVE

  2215 Hours Local, 18 December 1965

  Bien Hoa Air Base

  Republic of Vietnam

  That night, in the squadron hooch, Bannister sat on one of the four rickety wooden stools in front of the bar the squadron pilots had built from scrounged sheets of plywood. They had built it at one end of their open bay, wood-and-screen Bien Hoa Hut barracks to have a private drink without going to the O’ Club. They called it the Ram Inn.

  First Lieutenants Fairchild and Freeman, green bag zippers down to their navels (the temperature was 92, the humidity at 86 percent), sat next to Bannister. Behind them, in the dark, was an aisle between the rows of a dozen or so mosquito net-covered steel G.I. cots. Fairchild had turned Ramrod loose to investigate the hooch's rat population. Major Conrad Russell, MD, USAF, was acting bartender. The small refrigerator behind the bar had cost ten K-Bar survival knives traded to an Army warrant officer over at the Army supply depot in Long Binh. A broken foot-high green plastic Christmas tree was propped on top of the refrigerator. The pilot's wife who mailed it to her husband had unwarranted faith in the APO (Army Post Office) system.

  The three pilots were drinking Budweiser beer. Doctor Major Russell had a Scotch and soda. The Squadron's Akai tape recorder, bought with money kicked in by the twelve hooch mates, was reeling off at 3 and 3/4 inches per second a tape of what the Reader's Digest said were the best songs of Christmas. Bing Crosby had just finished crooning his dreams of a white Christmas. Perry Como was now relating the tale of chestnuts roasting by an open fire. The pilots hadn't spoken much. Just some banal talk about how the day had gone--no hot missions, how the weather was--lousy, how the Bud tasted--cool, like in a real bar back in the world. The 3rd Tac Fighter Wing, they knew with relief, wasn't losing many pilots, maybe two or three a month. Nothing like the Thud (F-105) and Phantom (F-4) drivers that had to go North from Da Nang and bases in Thailand. Their losses over Hanoi, code named Route Pack 6, were becoming staggeringly high, about five a week. The Hun drivers from Bien Hoa had a reasonably safe way of life going for themselves and they knew it. The term Hun came from the ‘hundred’ in F-100.

  "Whooee, that's good beer," said First Lieutenant Doug Fairchild, holding up his beer can so all could see this marvel of American know-how.

  "But is it Christmas?" asked First Lieutenant Dan Freeman, not quite in the bag but getting weepy. He missed his wife and three-year old daughter something fierce. This was their first Christmas apart.

  "What the hell do you care whether it's Christmas or not, you're Jewish," Fairchild demanded, lowering the can.

  "It’s the season, you goy fink, to be jolly and I'm not jolly. I want to be home."

  Freeman sighed and took another pull at his beer. "So what's a nice Jewish boy like me doing here anyhow killing Buddhists to make the world safe for Christianity?"

  "Now that's profound, Freeman, really profound. The only problem, is, it's what you always say after you've had two beers," Lieutenant Fairchild said, trying not to laugh.

  Though they'd heard it before, both Bannister and Doc Russell, aka Baby Huey, chuckled.

  Fairchild and Freeman looked at each other, then at Bannister. "Too bad about Major Austin," Freeman said. "Yeah," Fairchild chimed in, "was he really stitched or did he auger in on his own?"

  Bannister took a long swallow of his beer, then fixed Fairchild with a sharp look, the humorous atmosphere rapidly dissipating."Why do you ask that?"

  "Oh, I dunno. Some of the guys might have heard something," Fairchild replied uneasily.

  Bannister kept staring at the lieutenant.

  "Unh, nothing big, Court. It's just that my crew chief said some Tech from Wing might have heard something. You know how those wing weinies gossip, huh?" Fairchild began nervously scratching his left forearm with his right hand. Bannister kept staring at him.

  "Come on, Crapola," Freeman said, suddenly grabbing Fairchild's arm, "let’s hie off to yon Officer's Mess and quaff a few for the jolly old king. What say, eh?"

  "Yeah," Lieutenant Crapola said, climbing down from his stool and following Freeman's lead to the door of the hooch, "Unh, see you later, Court, Doc."

  The two lieutenants' boots clumped as they crossed the planked floor to the wooden screen door. Fairchild scooped up Ramrod and expertly fitted him to his torso. As Freeman opened the door for his friends, he hollered back up the dark path between the bunks to Bannister and Doc Russell, whose outlines wavered under the swinging overhead lamp, "God rest ye merry, gentlemen, Merry Christmas, and to all a cheery, beery good night." The squeaking screen door swung shut and they were gone, leaving the faint tune of Lieutenant Crapola's humming "God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen."

  Doc Russell took a sip of his Scotch. "Court, I paged through your medical records. You've got a hell of a middle name. I read Courtland Esclaremonde de Montségur Bannister. Do you mind my asking how you got that long middle name? Is it a person, place, or thing?"

  Courtland Esclaremonde de Montségur Bannister, grinning, nodded. "I wondered when you would ask." It was a long story that he told few people. He figured maybe the Doc would appreciate it. He took a pull at his beer. "My Dad's first wife, my Mother, was from Toulouse in southern France. About seven hundred years ago part of her family along with some 200 others were burned at the stake for heresy. They had held out at Montségur Castle for about a year. The ruins still exist. I've been there. They are about 4,000 feet up on a plateau south of Toulouse and slightly north of the Pyrenees. Mother is proud of the stubbornness of her family in the Montségur Castle. I was her first child so she named me after the castle and an ancestor, a brave woman who was killed there named Esclaremonde de Perella." He waited for Doc Russell to make some comment. The expression on the Doc's face was merely that of absorbed interest, with not even a grin about the female portion of Bannister's middle name.

  Both men took a swallow of their drinks. Russell remembered old Hollywood screen magazine stories about Court's mother, the beautiful Monique D'Avignon of France's elite haut société, who had fallen in love as a teenager before WWII with Sam Bannister, at 23, already a world idol of the silver screen. Bannister's face became more thoughtful as he continued. "She died when I was two. I never knew her. She and Dad had only been married a couple of years. Dad was running around a lot so the de Montségurs helped raise me. I went to the Lycée in Paris, as a matter of fact."

  He looked at Baby Huey, this time a wry expression on his face. "I guess you know my Dad remarried. Several times." Silk Screen Sam Bannister had indeed married several times as every Hollywood gossip columnist had screamed. Not since Errol Flynn had they had such a field day. Doc Russell remembered the rhyme all the young American men and half the population of Europe repeated.

  Silk Screen Sam, the ladies' man:

  If he can't get in, no one can.

  "Yeah, I remember," Russell said, reluctant to ask further questions for fear of Bannister's thinking he was probing. He'd always liked what he had heard about Sam Bannister, though. During WWII he had been a gunner on B-17s of the Eighth Air Force. He, Jimmy Stewart, Glenn Ford and Clark Gable were some of the best known Hollywood actors who had volunteered for combat right after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th 1941. David Niven had long before rejoined his Regiment.

  Afterwards Bannister had resumed his acting career, made several highly successful adventure movies, and, with an old high school chum, invested this money in movies for TV and Nevada desert real estate. Together they eventually bought up most of North Las Vegas. Playing only cameo roles now in selected films, Silk Screen Sam Bannister lived in the penthouse of his Las Vegas hotel, the Silver Screen, freshly divorced from his fourth wife. Sam was an accomplished world traveler who avoided the jet set.

  "I have a half-brother," Court went on., "His mother was Mary McDougal, Dad's second wife. His name is Shawn. Shawn Bannister. He's here in Vietnam someplace."

  Doc Russell's eyebrows shot up. "As a G.I.?"

  "Hell,
no. He's a reporter for California Sun, a magazine published near Berkeley."

  "I've heard of it," Russell said, "sort of a left-wing scandal sheet, isn't it?"

  "I guess so. Though Shawn claims it's a coupling of idealism and existentialism. He's hooked on Sartre and de Beauvoir."

  "Sounds like a crock to me," Doc Russell said.

  "Yeah, it's a crock." Bannister folded his beer can and tossed it into the trash. He stood up and stretched.

  "Doc, I just don't feel like it's Christmas," Courtland said. "How about you.?"

  "Well, I'll tell you," Baby Huey began, shifting his bulk to pour another three fingers of Vat 69, "I don't feel so bad, but then I didn't ding on the runway either. All things considered, Court, you should feel pretty good about merely being alive."

  "Alive? What do you mean, alive? Sure, I'm alive. I'm well and happy. Believe me, I'm well and happy," Bannister said, swinging his head from side to side to emphasize his words. He was starting to feel the beer. Only with conscious effort was he able to suppress a replay of the dead Austin crushed in his ejection seat and the sight and sounds of his own crash on the runway.

  Russell looked at Bannister. "Why are you really here in combat, Court? I saw on your records yesterday that you volunteered for this. In fact, you broke an assignment to the Test Pilot School at Edwards to get recurrent in Huns and come to Vietnam. Why did you do a dumb thing like that? You had it wired. You probably could have gone on to the astronaut corps or something. Anything instead of this God-awful place," Russell said, somewhat belligerently.

  "Doc, I plan on doing just that. Going to astronauts I mean. I only put off going to Edwards for a year. I'll go there to the School after this tour and then, sure, on to astronaut training," Bannister said.

  "You still haven't answered my question," Russell pressed. "Not how did you do it, but why did you do it? Wife troubles, finances, glory, country at war, boredom, all of the above?"

  "What is this, Doc, the friendly Flight Surgeon's psychiatric evaluation?"

  "Hell, no, Court, just a friend inquiring. Take me, for example. I'm here because I love flying, and fighters, and, yes, you guys who fly them. I want to see how you all fit together in a war." Doc Russell paused. "You don't have to answer if you don't want to."

  Bannister liked Russell and agreed privately he looked like the rotund Baby Huey of the cartoon series. He knew Russell was competent, hardworking, and, unlike many military doctors, not in the service merely to pay off his medical school tab paid by the USAF, or for the varied experience that would take a civilian ten years of general practice to acquire. Those kind of MDs usually snickered at the servicemen they treated and could hardly wait until they could get out and earn eighty grand a year and tell funny stories about the nincompoops in uniform.

  Doc Russell was content with his $19,565 per annum as a major on flying status (he was required to log four flying hours a month) with three dependents and MD bonus pay. (Court, as a captain on flying status drawing combat pay, grossed $10,236 per year.) Doc Russell might not be a warrior in appearance, Bannister thought to himself, but he sure is one inside. He was known to do anything, to buck any rank or regulation that prevented him from taking care of his boys. It was common knowledge that Baby Huey had earnestly requested an officious hospital commander more concerned with advancement than Aesculapius to go stuff his stethoscope where the sun don't shine, while he, Doctor Conrad D. Russell, went outside channels to fulfill an immediate need to replace a broken autoclave.

  Bannister decided to tell Russell a bit of his story. Just enough to satisfy his curiosity. What the hell, he thought, I haven't really gotten to know anybody here. A few months in the squadron that's been together for years and I'm still the FNG, the frigging new guy. And, he admitted to himself, I have been off running around with the Army Special Forces guys quite a bit. And there was the aura of his father, because of whom most guys were afraid to appear sycophantic. Bannister was used to this understandable quirk in squadron life. It hadn't been like that at grade school in Hollywood and at the Lycée in Paris where everybody's father or mother, sometimes both, was a known personage. But in the Air Force, until his squadron mates accepted him as a good pilot, serious about his profession, and fought their self-induced intimidation, they usually remained aloof. Bannister also admitted to himself that he felt a bit tipsy and acknowledged to himself that a minor case of the lonesome Christmas blues was starting to set in. This conversation might be the needed catharsis. He took another pull at his beer.

  "My wife and I were divorced about two years ago when I was in the Air Force Institute of Technology program at Arizona State. I was carrying up to 21 hours of engineering each semester and flying T-33s out of Luke on the weekends. So I, ah, was gone a lot. My wife became more and more unhappy and finally said her mother didn't raise her to participate in a one-person marriage."

  "No kids?" Doc Russell inquired.

  "No." Bannister took a pull on his beer, “We had only been married one year. We had agreed no kids until we were ready, but we were growing apart. We never became ready. She wanted to go back to her career.

  "Which was?"

  "Acting, dancing, singing..."

  "Oh my God," Russell said, "I just remembered. You were married to Charmaine, weren't you?"

  Bannister nodded.

  "Hey, she's here in Vietnam with the Bob Hope Show. I heard about it on AFVN." (AFVN was an American radio station for the G.I.s; Armed Forces, Vietnam.)

  "Yup."

  "Are you going to see her,?"

  "Nope," Bannister said, crushing another beer can, "not planning on it."

  "Does she know you're here?"

  "Can't say," Bannister said. "We don't write each other. I guess she knows I'm in 'Nam. Dad threw a bit of a wingding for me at the Screen in Vegas before I left." Bannister smiled. "Do you know what one of the movie fan magazines titled their coverage? Combat for Cowboy Court."

  "Cowboy Court?"

  "Yup," Bannister said, "When I was 19, right before I became an Aviation Cadet, I was in a few cheap westerns. Did a lot of riding but no acting. It was a lot of fun."

  "What a life," Doc Russell said, shaking his head, "what a life. Why bust your buns so hard for the engineering degree?" he asked, resis­ting saying `You certainly don't need the money.' This courtesy did not go unnoticed by Bannister who then really decided to open up. He took another long pull on his beer.

  "The moon, Doc. Because of the moon," Bannister said more intently than Doc Russell thought called for. "After the Lycée, I had barely two years of college, general `beer and broads' college at that. You need an engineering degree to get into Edwards. It used to be two years of math or engin­eering got you in but the new AFR 53-12 reg changed all that. I had to go complete my ME degree, in a bloody short time I might add, gutting my way through George Beakley's College of Engineering at ASU to be eligible for Edwards. Then, after I graduated from Edwards, I planned on going to Houston, to be selected for Houston that is, for astronaut training. Then off to the moon. I planned on being the first man to walk on the moon."

  "You're a tad late now, aren't you," Russell said. "Aren't all the moon guys chosen?"

  "Yes, they are," Bannister answered. "I'll try the next round. I'm going to Edwards when this tour is over. By late '69 I'll be in astronaut training for a shot in the early '70s. That's how it will be."

  The Doc placed his now empty Scotch glass down on the stained plywood bar. "Court," he said, "you still haven't told me why you chucked a sure slot at Edwards to come to Vietnam."

  "I'm getting to it. I called my old Squadron Officer School boss, General Herb Bench. He was Director, Personnel at TAC HQ. He agreed experienced fighter jocks were needed here and suggested I could give up my Edwards assignment then re-apply for the next class and hope I can pass the board again. He said he heard the Board would look favorably on my re-application." Bannister shrugged his broad shoulders. "That's about it."

  Doc Russe
ll, an intent look on his Baby Huey face, said "No, Courtland Esclaremonde de Montségur Bannister, that's not `about it.' You keep giving me the `how.' I want the `why.'"

  "Why should I give you the why? What the hell do you care?"

  "Why shouldn't you? Besides," Russell said, "I do care."

  Bannister stared at Russell for a long moment, took a deep breath, and started to talk in a voice so low Doc Russell had to lean forward.

  "My country is at war--" The Doc started to say something but Bannister held up his hand to stop him. "I have a lot of reasons, but that's the main one. It all started for me when two Thuds were shot down by MiGs in August '65. I didn't know the pilots personally but that didn't make any difference. They were our guys. They were at war and I was about to fat-cat it on the beach, while they were getting their butts shot off. What I'm trying to say without getting all tangled up, it's my duty to be here. This is exactly where I want to be." Bannister's voice had become louder as he spoke.

  "There's more," said Russell, "isn't there?"

  Bannister glanced at the Doc, then fixed his eyes on the beer can he held in his hands.

  "Yes, there's more. Isn't there always?" Bannister tossed his empty beer can into a trash barrel in back of the bar, reached across the narrow plywood strip and dug another from the reefer. He punched it open, took a long pull, put both hands flat on the bar and looked Russell in the eye.

  "Doc, I'm a fighter pilot. I'm a single seat, single engine jock, up from the F-86 Sabrejet, who has been training for this for nearly ten years. I'm telling you, it's my duty to be here. I'm a soldier, a warrior, an airman, a fighter pilot. Call it what you will, they all mean the same. It's what I get paid to do. It's why I've been drawing flight pay all these years. Maybe I'm like a boxer who trains and trains for the big fight that never seems to come off. He can get stale or he can quit. Up to now, for me, just the thrill of flying fighters and knowing I'm good keeps me from going airlines or, God forbid, back to Hollywood. You understand what I'm trying to say, Doc?"

  "Yeah, I understand. Is that all?" The Doc knew full well there was one last bit. He was checking to see how honest with himself Bannister really was.

  Bannister slapped his hand on the bar. "No, dammit, that's not all." He hesitated, then began again, his mouth twisting into a wry grin as he spoke. "Down deep I wanted to see if I could hack it when someone started shooting at me."

  "Well, can you?

  "Damn, Doc, you don't give up, do you?"

  "Well?"

  "The guns are small around here, and I've only got 38 missions so far. But yeah, I suppose I can hack it. Sure. The guys going North out of Da Nang and Yankee Station and Thailand, they've got it rough. Not us. Overall, though, at least we're winning the war. The guys are doing some real good stuff."

  "What do you mean, `not having it rough?' You just had an airplane shot from under you and your flight lead shot down and killed, and you say we're winning the war. What makes you so sure?"

  "I just am, that's all. I'm sure, Doc. Those shootdowns were a one-time thing. Let me tell you, here in III Corps or south in IV Corps, if a squad sized unit draws one, merely one, round of sniper fire--they've got three Huns overhead in twenty minutes with a full load of 20 mike-mike, nape, and CBU. Same thing in Eye Corps and II Corps. We've got the VC on the run." Vietnam was divided into four areas called Corps. 20 mike-mike stands for the four 20mm cannons, nape is napalm, and CBU is Cluster Bomb Unit, a huge canister carried under each wing that lets out baseball-sized bomblets that explode on impact.

  "That's in the air. How about on the ground?"

  "Remember the headlines in the Stars and Stripes a few months back?" Bannister asked. "The SecDef said there was no reason we couldn't win if such was our will. COMUSMACV, General Westmoreland, said his search-and-destroy strategy would clean out the Cong one year from now by the end of '66. McNamara says he sees the light at the end of the tunnel. And, it's our will to win, so we'll win."

  "How about up North then," Russell said, "You said yourself the losses over Hanoi are rough."

  "Yeah, they are that," Bannister responded, "the guys are badly cramped by the Rules of Engagement. But if the whole communist drive falls apart down here, then we won't have to go North any more. God, Doc, we got nearly a quarter million G.I.s in-country now. And the USAF is building up to twenty wings and 50-some squadrons of fighters and recce and transports here. Not to mention the Marines and the Navy. We're creaming the bad guys. You watch. They'll come around. Maybe even during this bombing halt President Johnson is starting."

  "Court, look," Doc Russell said as he set his nearly empty glass down, "do you really mean all that? That we are winning?"

  "Of course I do."

  "What about the Loc Ninh build-up?

  "I said we're winning, not that the war is over. Yeah, the bad guys are up to something around Loc Ninh and Intel doesn't believe it. They say the area shows no past or on-going activity of any kind. I told them there was enough activity to shoot me down with guns of a caliber not normally seen this far south."

  "Shoot you down? Why the singular? Didn't they shoot Paul Austin down also?"

  Bannister looked straight at Doctor Conrad Russell for a minute. "No, Doc, they didn't." he said in a low voice, "He rolled in low and slow. Paul didn't leave himself enough room to pull out. I saw him, an instant before impact. He must of had the nose of that bird up thirty degrees, burner blowing and throwing dirt up like a rooster tail. In fact, he might have made it if he hadn't lit off his afterburner."

  Doc Russell looked up, "What do you mean?"

  "You know, you've been in the back seat of our F-model. When you bang the throttle outboard to engage the burner, eyelids on the aft section of the tailpipe open up about two or three seconds before the burner ignites and kicks you in the butt with the extra thrust. That extra open space in the tailpipe costs you about two thousand pounds of thrust when you need it most. But, the main reason I know he wasn't hit was what he said just before impact."

  "I didn't know he transmitted. I signed off as Wing Flight Surgeon on the report you made to Keith Jones and I didn't read where Paul transmitted anything. What did he say that makes you so sure he wasn't hit?"

  "When a pilot is hit, the first thing he does, if the plane hasn't exploded under him, is say "Lead's hit' or "Two's hit.' You let somebody know who you are and what happened. But when a jock screws up like Paul did and knows he can't pull out enough to avoid hitting the ground, he almost always says "Ah shit" in a long, drawn out, low key way. It's never a scream. Listen to some of the tapes the various Air Forces have of crashes from aerobatics or on the gunnery range when a guy screws up. You hear the same phrase in Japanese or German or French. kon kusho, Scheisse, eh merde. It's a hell of a thing to hear. There's everything you've ever wanted and lost in life packed into that one phrase"

  "And that's how you know," Russell said, "Paul said shit."

  "That's how I know. Paul said `Ah shit.’”