Bye, Al A fonier Vietnam. POW, he lived and sailed in Pensacola
Norman, Geoffrey
Bye, Al A former Vietnam POW, he lived and sailed in Pensacola. BY GEOFFREY NORMAN E CONTACTED ME-BY E-MAIL¡ªAfter he'd received my daughter's wedding invitation. "Damn right I'll be there,"...
...Well, I remember when I was at Miramar, back in the real early '60s, one of the other guys in the squadron and I decided to take a couple of F-8s out for a little cross-country hop...
...Everything else was right here...
...It isn't the solitude so much," he said, when I made the point...
...I'd like to help but, you see, I only remember the funny parts...
...Bad," Sheryl said...
...Jones" would be Robert F. Jones, a novelist and magazine writer¡ªmost prominently with Sports Illustrated¡ªand a neighbor and hunting companion of mine...
...Either way, it was a prime spot and seemed like a reasonable perq...
...M OST OF AL'S VISITS came in the fall when he would bring an old shotgun he'd used to hunt ducks on the Eastern shore...
...On his many visits to Vermont, Al had gotten to know Jones and they'd become friends...
...Motion was still his mantra, it seemed, and maybe it gave him some relief...
...He was now a hospice patient...
...Couple of months...
...And written on the visor, in red lipstick, along with the shape of a valentine, were the words, "Bye Bob...
...Could not, in fact, make it at all...
...BY GEOFFREY NORMAN E CONTACTED ME-BY E-MAIL¡ªAfter he'd received my daughter's wedding invitation...
...Even though they had heard it before, they would listen intently...
...Bob's stuff was still hanging there, next to mine...
...Since I've come home, motion is my mantra...
...I figured he was just running late so I changed into my flight suit and put my g-suit on over it...
...Then he would turn the helm over to one of the girls, give her a course to steer and explain how to read the telltales to make sure we were on the correct point-of-sail...
...It's the sailing...
...Before I left that day, Al said, "When will you be back...
...She said it with affection, though she could find Al exasperating...
...Totally passed out...
...And it seemed he had gotten separated from his clothes since I last saw him...
...the guns andwhat made one superior to another...
...Al would immediately start working the lines and giving the girls jobs¡ªholding this one, coiling that one¡ªin a manner that made it clear these were important, even vital, tasks...
...GEOFFREY NORMAN Bob, it seemed, had more ambitious plans...
...He's been looking forward to this...
...But, then, you could forgive this as understandable since his plane had taken a direct hit from a surface-to-air missile that cooked off his entire bomb load, blowing him out of the sky in a dirty orange explosion that ignited the propellant in his ejector seat...
...And before I got a chance to talk to him about his last book...
...Al looked wasted and talking made him tired...
...Sure," my neighbor said...
...Then I went into flight - ops, thinking he might have been there waiting for me...
...Al planned to play a little blackjack, eat a good dinner, and then catch the show...
...Al admired Jones for his talent, his erudition, and his bluster...
...Wrong," she said, "Al patronizes everybody...
...Before I even opened the card with the Pensacola postmark, I thought of the line from some old song¡ª "Another good man gone...
...Are you busy...
...His greeting was always efficient¡ªalmost brusque¡ªand it had taken the girls a while to get used to it...
...O NCE WE HAD cast off, Al would handle the boat until we had cleared the channel and were in the deep water of Pensacola Bay...
...I wondered about those trips...
...You must have flown out of Nellis," Al said at one point...
...Like Al, she never tried to sugar-coat it...
...So once they were in Vegas, they split up and agreed to meet back at the flight line at "oh-dawn-thirty...
...But when he got back out to Nellis, there was no sign of Bob...
...One of them had taught him how to take apart a V-8 engine and rebuild it, and when he got home, Al bought the right model pickup so he could test himself...
...But he made the effort it took to brief me...
...14 Geoffrey Norman is a writer in Dorset, Vermont...
...Let's take a ride...
...We would hand over the chicken, the cooler, and whatever else we had brought with us and then come aboard...
...I won't stay long...
...Stay until he tells you to leave...
...He enjoyed listening to them and he especially liked telling them...
...Late in the war, when the heat was off and Al was not in solitary but sharing a cell with one or more of the other POWs, there was nothing to do but talk¡ªtell stories and ask questions...
...Then Al explained that while he had enjoyed hell-raising as much as the next fighter pilot, his intentions on this trip were relatively pure...
...When Jones had died of pancreatic cancer six months earlier, Al sent me an e-mail...
...The F-8s were parked at the end of the flight line and Al had walked a long way before he came to them...
...Bob was the guy's name...
...He wanted to get back into it so he would go out with me and my dog when we hunted birds¡ªgrouse and woodcock¡ªin the aspen and gone-by apple orchards...
...Al barely knew them...
...It took me a while to realize that his was not so much a personality quirk as learned behavior...
...Last I saw Bob," Al said, "he was heading down the strip with this gleam in his eye...
...He wasn't much of a shot¡ªmaybe because his gun was too big and clunky for the kind of quick work we were doing¡ªbut he was enthusiastic and he wanted to know everything...
...His next e-mail said, "I'm afraid I won't be there for the wedding...
...Hard to believe old Jones has gone west," he said...
...I couldn't think of anything to say so I merely nodded...
...He'd been a POW in Vietnam for five and a half years...
...38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2004 GEOFFREY NORMAN We'd meet him at the Naval Air Station dock, on Bayou Texar off Pensacola Bay...
...On one of those evenings, he got into a conversation with someone who wanted to know about his time in captivity...
...He'd designed routes to beat the tolls and take advantage of the best gasoline prices, to take him by the homes of a couple of his old POW buddies and, also, to visit Oxford and the Choptank where he would pick up some seafood for us...
...Hadn't he experienced enough solitude...
...But no sign of Bob and no message from him...
...The worst part of his entire captivity, he once told me, had been when he was locked in a little metal crib, alone, for 13 months...
...Merely detailed and intense, with a focus on the physical suffering...
...She remembered going out with her sister on Al's sailboat when they were not quite school age, back when we were spending time on the Gulf Coast...
...Turned out, it wasn't some Air Force tech guy...
...Al did his best to deflect them¡ªtreating them like gnats¡ªbut he couldn't make them go away...
...We were in Vermont most of the time so Al began coming up to visit...
...Only had to check the manual a couple of times...
...The tears were part bridal sentimentality, of course...
...That was the pattern...
...AL L DESCRIBED just what the F-8 could do, in a lot f technical detail that my neighbor under ¡¡¡¡¡¡tood and appreciated...
...At the dock, he would tell them that they were a great crew and that he wanted them to come back so he could teach them about oiling teak and polishing brightwork...
...Then it's getting hot inside all those clothes, so I decided to take a walk out to the flight line just to get some air and look at the airplanes while I'm waiting...
...Al had a very sure sense of just how badly wrong things could go...
...They found this damned cancer and it looks like I'm going to be joining old Jones pretty soon...
...He wasn't wearing a single stitch except for his flight helmet...
...So I went up the ladder all ready to wake the guy up and tell him to get the hell out of our airplane...
...A lot of what he knew, Al told me once, he'd learned from his fellow POWs...
...He treated the drive like a cross-country hop and the passenger seat of his little truck would be piled with charts on which he had marked his route¡ªand his alternates¡ªin yellow highlight ink...
...You have to be anywhere in the next couple of hours...
...They like him because he doesn't patronize them," I told my wife once...
...I was ready to fly...
...Neither of us had ever been to Vegas so we filed a flight plan for Nellis and took off one Saturday afternoon...
...Once or twice a year, he would singlehand it from Pensacola across the Gulf, and then around to the Bahamas where he would spend a couple of months anchoring in the shelter of little, uninhabited Cays, spearing fish and lobsters for food, then sailing on to some small harbor town when he needed ice or water or, even, a little human contact...
...It would not have been Al if he'd tried to run some transcendent insight on me...
...Then, while the girls sailed the boat, he would get busy with the rituals of stowing gear, coiling lines, and generally making things shipshape...
...While my wife and I listened, my neighbor and Al talked about their fighter pilot days...
...But there was something else...
...He didn't make it...
...Then I'll see you in a couple of months...
...A friend of his was building a boat, he explained when we got in my car, and he wanted me to see it...
...He realized, when he got closer, that there was someone in the cockpit of one of the planes...
...the birds and how you knew where to look for them...
...He was good at it, too...
...It was partly his nature and the other part his love of the boat, a 32-foot sloop that he'd bought with some of the money that had accumulated while he was a POW...
...Finally, he said, "I'm really sorry...
...Toward BYE, AL dusk, we would sail back to the marina, generally upwind, with Al explaining to the girls about how you tacked...
...Al's night went pretty much the way he planned...
...Now," Al said, as though that were all housekeeping stuff and he was relieved to be done with it...
...We talked about small things...
...It was as though he worried that if he didn't make sure of every detail, there would be a misunderstanding and things would go suddenly, disastrously wrong...
...No...
...Al had retired from the Navy by then but he still had privileges or, maybe it was just a courtesy...
...I'll hang on that long...
...The boat wasn't really important, though...
...The oxygen mask was pulled off to one side and the visor was down, covering his eyes...
...I MADE IT TO PENSACOLA not long after my daughter's wedding...
...That wife had been his second...
...Then I said, out loud so he could hear it, "Bye,Al...
...A neighbor who had flown fighters with the Air Force had come by and stayed for a beer...
...The questions weren't particularly hostile, inquisitory or, even, political...
...They like him because he treats them like they're adults...
...Real bad...
...Let's sail out to the pass," Al might say, "and see what the Gulf looks like...
...The night of his arrival, we'd always have friends over to help us eat the oysters that Al and I would shuck...
...He asked questions about the dog and how you trained one...
...He'd always liked show tunes and there was a singer¡ªI don't remember which one¡ªat one of the casinos that night...
...When he'd drive up from Pensacola, Florida, to see us in Vermont, Al would always detour through Oxford, near the mouth of the Choptank River where he'd spent the best years of his youth and, maybe, his entire life...
...Al's wife¡ª"the one I should have married the first time"¡ªmet me in the driveway...
...Turned out, he couldn't stay a single night...
...It was Bob...
...the doctors had given up on chemo and other treatments that morning...
...the drive was the point...
...And it was true that Al had a way of explaining things so carefully and in such elementary language that you could believe he thought you were a little slow...
...I'm an old fighter pilot," Al said, shaking his head...
...Jones's was fascinated by Al's story...
...The first marriage had been worse and had also included children...
...He came to hanging in his parachute four or five thousand feet over North Vietnam...
...that they weren't passengers or guests on his vessel¡ªthey were crew...
...Al would call and say, "Why don't you pick up a bucket of fried chicken somewhere and bring your girls over for a sunset cruise...
...When I told my daughter that Al wouldn't be coming¡ªand why¡ªshe cried...
...You want me to pick up some crabs and a bushel of oysters when I come through Maryland...
...The rest of the money had been spent by a wife he'd divorced not long after he came home...
...At T THE MOUTH OF PENSACOLA BAY, Al would luff he sails and we'd eat our fried chicken and rink our sodas while we watched a school of bottle-nosed dolphins and listened to the mournful sound they made through their blowholes...
...The essential piece was...
...How long can you stay...
...But there were fewer and fewer of those sailing trips once my daughters started school...
...He and I were sitting at the table in my kitchen one evening, after an afternoon of hunting...
...Absolutely," I replied...
...Like, I suppose, a lot of women...
...Damn right I'll be there," Al said...
...Department of Auto Mechanics, Hanoi U." I suppose the POW experience could also explain Al's fondness for long stories...
...He tapped his head with his finger...
...The way I look at it, the blue sky behind you is just wasted air space...
...When the wake-up call came, I didn't even have to go into the bathroom to throw up...
...I drank a cup of coffee and I talked the duty officer for a while...
...In one of those conversations he would get into with my friends in Vermont, someone had once asked him if he had any regrets about those five and a half years, "what with the way the war turned out, you know...
...And he was thinking, as he walked, that there was something wrong, something out of place, but he couldn't quite figure out what...
...These days, he had the boat...
...How is he...
...That had been in the '50s and he hadn't done any hunting since then...
...And, of course, they loved it...
...He guessed that one of the enlisted men from the service crew had climbed up there and gone to sleep...
Vol. 37 • July 2004 • No. 6
