A Berkeley Confrontation over Vietnam
In 1966 I drove from
San Francisco to Berkeley for softball with Jerry, a high school friend and
third year law student in Berkeley, a city with radical politics, The Free
Speech Movement, and anti-Vietnam War protests. After the game, he invited us
to his apartment where I noticed bookshelves of literature, history, politics,
philosophy, law, and more. His friends were graduate students in Law, English,
Comparative Lit., and History. I tried not to feel intimidated by the academic
achievement surrounding me.
I needed to inform
Jerry of a crucial decision I had made and blurted out, "I turned in my wings
and transferred from flying in jets a few months before the Navy assigned me navigator
of my ship. So did my pilot."
"Why did you do
that?"
"I heard pilots say at the officer club, "Here
comes the pilots and there are the bombardiers. The ones that fly are men, and
the others are queers.'"
"What else?"
"Our ready room
instructor referred to navigators as "dipshits' even though some navigators
died in the RA5C nicknamed, "The Flying Coffin.'"
"Nice."
"The heaviest jet to
land on carriers, it had the most losses in Vietnam, and the worst safety
record with maintenance problems."
"Those are damn good reasons."
"I cheated death by
transferring. The North Vietnamese shot down the crew who replaced me. They
didn't recover the navigator. His pilot remains a prisoner in Hanoi."
"Sounds like the
smartest thing you ever did."
When I said I was
about to navigate 300 Marines to Vietnam, the mellow mood shifted. "Why the
fuck are we in Vietnam?" Jerry spat out.
"To stop communist
aggression into a country that needs us," I offered. Unexpected laughter
greeted this simplistic explanation.
"Where did you learn that?" A tall bearded law
student asked.
"Naval Academy classes
in Far East History and counter-insurgency, the Coronado Naval Base courses,
and Defense Department articles."
