exit, stage east

I’ll get back to getting me back from Vietnam forthwith, but I can’t let two rounds of the Canada/U.S. trade dust-up go unreported: (1) the troll that Trump posted showing an eagle holding down a Canadian goose is from a video that ends with the goose chasing off the eagle; and (2) some Canuck comic has proposed that we change the name of the St. Lawrence Seaway to the Strait of Our Moose.

The day I left the Princeton to go back to the world finally rolled up. I was primed to go, having just read Catch-22. The day started ominously. I was on the flight deck at sunrise, waiting to board a helicopter to Da Nang. As the crew rolled the bird out, one of the sailors caught his leg under a wheel. His scream shattered the pristine dawn air, somehow appropriate as my last memory of the ship.

In Da Nang I was taken to an area of quonset huts next to the air strip, the busiest in the world. I was to fly out the next day. All I had to do was survive a bunch of drunk Marines, many of whom still had their weapons and ammo. It was fairly calm during the day. Nonetheless, I stayed outside. At night, I watched the firefights outside the base, the tracer rounds from the choppers pointing them out.

Someone set up a screen between two huts and showed The Sound of Music. I’ll never forget the mash-up of the Hollywood version of war with a real one: “The hills are alive, with the sound of SKRLEEWURLWHOOSHZOOM!!!” Or should I say M*A*S*H-up?

The movie ended about 10 p.m. I wanted to get some sleep, but the Marines were even drunker and still with their weapons. The quonset hut I was assigned to was covered with sandbags to catch gunfire, shrapnel and whatnot. I moved my cot to the top of my hut, reasoning that I was more likely to be shot at by my fellow jarheads than the Viet Cong.

Morning, then a commercial airplane (Pan-Am, I think) came. I slept most of the flight back. In what I still consider the oddest conjunction of my life, when I arrived back in the world in California, I landed the day before I left Da Nang, having crossed the international dateline. In a way, I went back in time.

We landed at Travis Air Force Base in the Bay Area. The Airman checking me in said “Why don’t you wait a few minutes until after midnight? That way you’ll get an extra day’s leave.” My first break back in civilization.

I took buses from Travis to the San Francisco Airport, where I would take a red-eye to Los Angeles. That gave me a few hours to wander the concourse. One of the news kiosks had prominently-displayed porn magazines, with graphic covers. Clearly, the world had changed in my absence.