Anchor Struck

After the aforementioned USS Princeton returned to the Gulf of Tonkin and I returned to the ship, I had about two months left before I rotated back to the states, or “the world” as we called it. I had several mini-adventures in that time. I loved to ride in helicopters. They are the motorcycles of the air. So whenever I had a chance to go aloft, like to get mail or an errant corpse, I jumped at the chance. On one of those trips the chopper’s crew chief yelled to me “When we go down, stay with the bird!” I gave him a shaky thumbs up. About ten meters up, the chopper’s motor conked out and we hit the ground hard, but it could have been worse because the blades were still rotating.

We landed on the beach of a pristine cove, and, while the crew worked on the engine, I stayed by the bird as suggested. It wasn’t like I was going to wander off and look for mangoes like Chef did in Apocalypse Now. After two hours we were airborne again.

I almost always rode in the single blade choppers, which had a door on each side to get troops in and out really fast. But one day I was riding in a Chinook, a tandem blade bird with a drop down door in the tail. There were three grunts (infantry) on it as well. I wanted to show them that I was with them in spirit, so when the door dropped, I jumped up and charged out. I hit my head on the top of the door frame and fell back on my ass. The grunts walked by laughing and shaking their heads.

On another trip in-country, I hitched a ride with a young officer in a jeep. He had some business in a refugee camp, so I waited in the jeep. A Vietnamese girl about 12 or so came up to me and let me know in broken English and hand signals that she was available for a cigarette. Even in a war zone, I had never been more morally repulsed.

The Princeton did one more trip to the Philippines before I left. My buddy Tom and I took a tour of Manila, including the Manila American Cemetery and Memorial. It is the largest American military cemetery outside the U.S., with more than 17,000 graves from World War II. It also has limestone piers that list 36,286 names of service personnel missing from the war. To stand in the middle of the memorial and look at all the tombstones was mind-blowing.

Speaking of mind-blowing, I had my first psychedelic experience on that trip. The ship also stopped in Singapore, where Tom and I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was in the most elegant theatre I’ve ever been in, with a screen so big that we had to swivel our heads to watch characters interact. We were in the middle of the front row in the balcony, which also had a bar. So when Dave Bowman hurtled through Kubrick-knows-what, we were with him all the way.

On the way back to Vietnam, the Princeton passed over the equator. The Navy has a tradition called “Crossing the Line” where sailors who have done so initiate those who haven’t. I’m not sure what all it entails, but we Marines were having none of it. We drew our rifles from the armory and waited it out in our office. The office was just below the flight deck, so I was able to poke my head up to catch some of it. The initiates were greased up and had to crawl through big flexible tubing while the initiators beat on the tubing. When they came out they had to kiss the belly button (or, more accurately in this case, navel) of a very fat sailor.

We got back to our A.O. shortly thereafter, where I could count the days left on my tour on my hands.