BOND, JAMES BOND

A few days after the new senior advisor arrived, it became obvious that he was having a hard time making the splash he wanted. Except for the incident at the Combat in Villages demonstration, he couldn’t seem to make anything else happen. Failing to impact the day-to-day work, he started looking for new areas to showcase his leadership. Life in the team compound was a logical choice.

Life in the compound was pretty simple -— eat, sleep, play a little pool, drink, write letters home, and watch movies. Every night, as soon as it got dark, a movie was shown, and the senior advisor turned out to be a big movie buff. He was generally unhappy with movie quality, the condition of the projector, the skill of the team members in operating the projector, and the behavior of the audience. A couple of events incited him to take action.

Several movies arrived that had been badly spliced somewhere up the line and the projectionists were confused by them. They showed them forward and backward, attempting to find the beginning, attempting to find sound that matched the pictures, and so on, well into the evening. This led to a lot of hooting and jeering from the rowdy audience. This was not the demeanor which the senior advisor desired in his team.

Then the movies stopped coming.

Movies were supplied, along with the mail, by a circuit-riding airplane. The schedule called for five new movies to arrive every Thursday, and for five old movies to depart on that same flight. No movies arrived for several weeks, and then the next week just two crummy, beaten up films and a couple of old NFL games showed up. The senior advisor was highly perturbed.

He wanted two problems solved, and wanted them solved fast. He wanted no more confusion by the "operators", sergeants whose real jobs involved other things and who were showing the movies out of the goodness of their hearts, so to speak. His solution was to have every movie previewed before show time and set up properly, just as you would expect in a theater. He called me into his office and told me this. Perplexed, I asked why he was telling me this. The senior advisor's reply was that he had noted that I was involved in all the sports and games and assumed I was the "Special Services" officer. If I wasn’t already, I was now.

I explained that I had not had any responsibility for the movies or any other recreation before this, but I saw several problems with the boss’s solution. For one, the sergeants had advising duties which they would have to neglect in order to do the afternoon previewing. Secondly, it wouldn’t be dark, unless the senior advisor wanted to delay starting the movie nearly two hours to allow the operators to see the film well enough to correct any problems. "Do what I told you," was the response.

Then, there was the problem of no movies. "Get them, now!" he told me.

I had no idea how the movies got there or how to fix it, but I knew the only acceptible answer was "Yes, sir."

"And I want James Bond movies," was the rest of the instruction.

In all, only about four or five James Bond movies had been made at that time. No matter, if I got movies, decent movies, I wouldn’t have to worry about the James Bond stuff.

A little research turned up the fact that the stop ahead of us on the airplane’s circuit was the place that was supposed to be forwarding movies. Special Services in Saigon said they had been sending out five movies a week without fail. Calls to the stop ahead, a District Advisory team at "Sa Ten", went unanswered. After a week or so the senior advisor was getting madder and wanted the problem solved yesterday.

An artillery forward observor flew a little Piper Cub airplane, called a Bird Dog by the Army, from the airstrip. After I pleaded, reasoned and threatened, the pilot, Ben, agreed to fly me to Sa Ten to find out what was going on.

The trip was an easy 50 minutes or so and Ben made a fairly smooth landing on a little dirt strip. He taxied to a parking area near the road and turned off the engine. Neither of us knew what to do next, as we didn’t know where the American compound was and had no other transportation. Just then, however, a truck driven by an American sergeant pulled up.

"Going to the District House?" he asked.

It turned out that he met every plane that landed and took whoever or whatever came in to the District House, home of the advisory team. We piled into the truck and headed down the road. On the way, I engaged the sergeant in conversation about life in Sa Ten. I managed to work in a question about night life.

"It’s great," bragged the sergeant. "We’ve got a first class bar, good chow, and movies every night.

"C’mon," I chided, "the movies are lousy and aren’t enough of them to show one every night."

"Not here," the sergeant boasted, "we’ve got a closet full of first rate movies. We have double and triple features on weekends."

When the truck arrived at the team house it turned out that none of the officer advisors was present. While waiting for one to return, I asked to see the movie closet. Suddenly the sergeant became leery. It was too late, though. We knew of the existence of the movie closet and I ordered him to open it. He tried claiming that only the colonel had the key, but, when pushed, it turned out he had it and he opened it for us.

Ben and I could hardly believe our eyes. The closet was full of floor-to-ceiling stacks of movie cans. We started pulling them off the top to see what they were. One of them was a James Bond. That was a good reason to look at all the rest. In the next 10 minutes we found four James Bonds.

I started taking movies out to the truck, but Ben had to stop me. There was no extra lift avaiable in that climate, and Ben was afraid that even three movies might be too many. In the end, we decided to try to take off with three Bonds. I wrote a note to the District Senior Advisor telling him that I had found the movie cache, had taken three movies, and expected five more on the next flight, including the remaining Bond.

The sergeant reluctantly drove us back to the airfield. He predicted dire consequences when the colonel returned to find some of his movies gone. I didn’t care. Ben was worried about takeoff.
At the airport I learned more about the problem of transporting the films. There really wasn’t any room in the little airplane for any of the cans. Eventually Ben managed to pack them around his passenger -- under my feet, on both sides, in my lap, and one behind my head.

Ben cranked up the plane and taxied down to the end of the short runway.

"I sure wish we had a 20 knot wind," he groaned.

His first two attempts to take off ended with a screeching of brakes and stops just feet away from crashing into the village at the end of the air strip. On the third try, following a long engine runup with the brakes applied and adding a few feet of grassy land at the far end of the field, the little plane wallowed into the air, cleared the rooftops by a couple of feet, and climbed ever so slowly to an altitude out of small arms range.

We both thought we had made it at that point, but it was now late afternoon in the Delta and that meant thunderstorms. Sure enough, the sky suddenly turned black and lightning bolts appeared in every direction.

"I can’t get up high enough to go over it, we’ll have to go down to the deck," Ben shouted over the thunder.

He took it down to what seemed like rice paddy dike level. Tree lines became major obstacles. The plane was so overloaded that it flew like a bathtub, so when a treeline appeared out of the darkness Ben would gun the engine and pull up as hard as he could. A few times the wheels dragged through the leaves of the highest trees.

In those days the Delta was considered to be under VC control, so we were very vulnerable to anyone we encountered on the ground except that the rain was pouring down and drowning out the noise of the engine and it was almost totally dark.

After about 15 minutes Ben shouted, "Do you know where we are?" Neither of us had the slightest idea anymore where we were. "I’m heading west," Ben said, "Keep a look out for anything you can recognize."

"Oh great," I thought, "we’re going to fly into Cambodia." We couldn’t go up, down or anyplace else but straight ahead, hoping to find the end of the storm before we entered Cambodia as international film smugglers. In fact, Ben wanted to throw the movies out to gain more altitude, but I couldn’t move either hand so I couldn’t comply. We were sure we were going to die for three lousy movies, but there was nothing we could do now but fly on.

As suddenly as the storm appeared it cleared. The plane had gotten lighter from all the fuel it had burned up skimming over the rice and the trees. In fact it was pretty low on fuel. Ben pulled up to about a thousand feet and almost immediately we could identify a village not far from "home", and still a good two miles inside Viet Nam We landed with the fuel indicator on empty..

Slogging in from the airstrip with three James Bonds and more on the way, I expected to be greeted like a conquering hero. The senior advisor, after questioning why we had endangered an Army plane in the storm, declared that he wanted one film previewed and set up before movie time that night, and it had better be shown right! Nothing had changed.

Now that I was the Special Services Officer or whatever that job was, I got to know the new senior advisor much better than I wanted. Every night there was a volleyball game or basketball game after supper. It turned out that the boss was not well coordinated for either of these sports and he quickly tired of either being a klutz or sitting and watching the others play. He called his new Special Services Officer in and told me that he wanted the sports court modified to include a badminton court and he wanted badminton equipment available. I guessed that he thought of himself as an accomplished badminton player.

On my next trip to Saigon, I went to the Special Services office there and got some rackets and shuttlecocks. Unfortunately there were no rule books available and I had to make a court. It didn’t matter much, I figured, whether it was exactly regulation since no one would really know, but I had no idea of even the approximate dimensions. I wrote to my wife and asked her to find a set of rules and send them. During the two-week mail turnaround I was queried at least five times about the progress of the badminton court. The senior advisor was obviously anxious to show his stuff.

My wife is brilliant and can find anything. In due time the rules arrived, appropriate paint was purchased, and I waited for a chance to paint the lines on the concrete court. Unfortunately it was the hot season (there is no other season in the Mekong Delta, but this time of the year was even hotter than usual.) Everyday the high was over 100 degrees and the sun beat down mercilessly on the concrete. After a few more days the boss was unwilling to wait any longer. He ordered the court painted immediately.

I wanted to wait until a cooler part of the day but his instructions were that it would be ready for playing that night. I had no idea how long it would take the paint to dry so out I went right after lunch while the Vietnamese I advised were on their daily siesta. I measured the lines, sweat pouring off me like a fire hydrant, and opened the paint can. I started painting and immediately discovered that the paint dried instantly on the 120 degree concrete. There was no chance for repairing any mistakes.

This unusual activity attracted the attention of the deputy senior advisor, a filippino major who was small, but an amazing athlete. Deputy Dog stood around in the sun watching until the court was finished, questioning the sanity of the painter. I then put the volleyball net at the correct height for badminton, and the deputy suggested a game to try it out. Now it was my turn to question sanity. It was one thing to be out there painting, but I had no choice about that. This was pure folly.

Deputy Dog questioned my manhood, something that works particularly well with pre-teen boys and infantry officers. A badminton game was underway.

I was surprised at how well the deputy played. I had never seen badminton played like that, with low hard shots skimming the top of the net and landing just inside the lines. Lob one over and the deputy would slam it down your throat. After a few minutes I picked it up and learned how to play the same way. Now I was amazed at my own ability to play at that level. I was getting beaten soundly but I was playing at a level I had never dreamed of. It was great fun!

During the second game I noticed the senior advisor watching from his office window. Several more times I looked over and saw him still watching, then he disappeared.

Badminton was never mentioned again. In a few days the net went back up to vollyball height and the rackets went into the closet. They’re probably still there.