Chickenhawk: Back in the World

Almost no one in the association mentioned my felonious past except one former captain who said he hoped I’d learned my lesson. I said that I had: get a faster boat. He didn’t like that. There were, in fact, several members who thought that, though my book was good, I was still a drug smuggler. I was really surprised when Dave Owens, the president of the VHPA, invited me to be a speaker at the next reunion, in Texas.

On Friday, July 1, 1988, Patience and I flew to Fort Worth and met Jerry Towler and his wife, Martie, at the hotel where the reunion was being held. The next day five hundred of us were going to be bused to Mineral Wells, where we’d all gone to flight school. They said the whole town was going to throw us a party.

That night, Jay Elliott, a member of the board of directors, told me that my speech was scheduled for the big luncheon Sunday. He also said, “There might be an incident, Bob.”

“Incident? Like what?”

“Some of the guys gave us a bunch of flak about having you give a speech. You know, your smuggling thing. They said they’ll get up and leave as a group when you’re speaking.”

“So why the hell did you and Owens invite me?” I asked.

“Because I think you did a hell of a job with Chickenhawk. You made a mistake, I’m sure you know that. I just wanted you to know not everybody agrees with us so it wouldn’t take you by surprise.”

Saturday morning we loaded up in twelve buses and drove the fifty miles to Mineral Wells. The buses drove through the main gate of the former flight school. The two helicopters were gone; only their pedestals remained. Fort Wolters, former home of the U.S. Army Primary Helicopter School, was now an industrial park.

The buses parked in the drill field where we used to practice marching for endless hours. The barracks, long two-story brick buildings, were empty, abandoned on a weedy field. We got out and wandered around the buildings, remembering. You could almost hear the shouts that used to echo in the yards, “Give me twenty, candidate.” “You call that a clean belt buckle, candidate?”

Jerry and I went into a barracks, walked down a hallway, trying to find our old rooms. The building was dusty, spooky, quiet. It had once bustled with eager young men determined to become pilots. We used to spit-shine our floors and wax the sinks. We used to sit up nights in the latrines, studying for the next written test. We braced to attention and slammed against the walls when an upperclassman or, God forbid, an actual TAC officer met us in the hallways. The place never rested. Now our footsteps echoed in the emptiness.

Outside, tumbleweed drifted between the barracks.

As promised, the town gave us a party. They’d reopened the old mess hall. They served barbecue and beer, all the beer we could drink.

After lunch, we sat through a couple of hours of speeches given by former flight school instructors and the mayor, and saw a movie describing the opportunities of starting a business in the industrial park.

When a speaker asked someone to stand up at the back of the audience, the man in front of me turned around. It was Woody Woodruff. I called him Decker in Chickenhawk. He and Captain Phillips (Morris in the book) were shot down when Phillips, Woody’s best friend, was shot through the heart during an assault landing in Happy Valley. I’d gotten caught in the same ambush, gotten shot down, but didn’t get a scratch.

“Mason!” Woody said, beaming.

“Woody!”

Jerry, sitting beside me, said the same thing. We hadn’t seen each other since Vietnam. After the meeting, we traded addresses with Woody and got back on the buses for a tour of Mineral Wells before heading back to Fort Worth.

The buses looped around this small Texas town and our guide, a local volunteer, pointed out the new library and showed us that the old hotel was closed. In the country outside of town he pointed at some buffalo grazing in a field, said ranching buffalo was a burgeoning industry in this part of Texas. The truth was, when the flight school closed, Mineral Wells shriveled up and became the small central Texas town it had been before the Army arrived in the fifties.

The train of buses stopped at the Holiday Inn on the way out of town. Here, two rotor blades were set up as an arch at the entrance to the pool. In the days after Jerry and I graduated, the new pilots were thrown into this pool when they first soloed, not in the cattle ponds like we’d been. More beer was available, as much as you could drink. Soon people were throwing one another into the pool. After a couple hours of play, the pilots, many dripping wet, boarded the buses for the trip back to the city.

When one of the other buses passed us on the highway, everybody in our bus booed and demanded the driver catch them. Who knows why? The driver ignored us. Finally one of the pilots walked up to the front of the bus and held out fifty dollars saying, “You beat these other assholes back to town and you get this.”

The driver sped up and the race was on.