Cycles

I was twenty-one years old when this picture was taken in January 1971. I’m standing next to my Huey–#16252–on the landing strip at Khe Sanh. Three feet to my left, inside the cockpit, my office, is the collective, my up and down stick. Hidden from view is the cyclic, the control stick that determines which direction the aircraft goes. For a year in Vietnam I held the cyclic in my right hand, steering the Huey in and out of harms way. The Sky Behind Me, a Memoir of Flying and Life. As I look at the kid in this picture I see a lot of things: youthful insouciance, a sheen of invulnerability (back then enemy troops owned Khe Sanh for Pete’s sake) and a look of cleverly disguised bravado, like the glare a kid gives a neighborhood bully just before getting clobbered. But the most interesting thing about this shot is its followup. In 1992 I traveled back to Vietnam, the returning vet going over old haunts, touching a part of my past. It was a trip dripping with remembrance. With my little car and an interpreter I drove highway 9 from Quang Tri out to Khe Sanh, ending up […]