CHAPTER 1

No Ticket Home

MIDDAY, JANUARY 1968 —This looks as if it could be the beginning of a fantastic tropical vacation, I thought. The magnificent scenery below certainly made the thought a plausible one.

With an index finger, I eased my sunglasses up above my eyes in order to have an untinted view of the spectacle passing beneath me. The landscape was even more beautiful with its natural colors revealed.

We were flying low over sparkling blue-green water that flashed and glittered as it rolled and danced gently onto a long, narrow, light-brown beach. A natural piping of lush green palm trees swayed slowly in warm tropical breezes. Coral heads blossomed from beneath the crystal-clear water, and bright green mangroves grew thick along waterways that led to winding inland rivers. Occasionally, the beach dissolved into massive rock outcroppings, which rose up to meet us. Off in the distance, inland mountains were visible against a bright blue sky, which played host to a few randomly scattered, fluffy white clouds.

The panorama before me, a true masterpiece of nature, was surely meant for the cover of an exotic travel brochure. It was exactly the way I imagined Tahiti would look.

As any other healthy young male might, I had daydreams of some day traveling to a faraway tropical island, which I would share with at least one stunningly beautiful woman. Now, barely a few hundred feet below me, was at least part of the dream: the tropical island. The view was so hypnotically captivating that I thought I could even hear the rhythmic beating of island drums. I began to wonder,Will the rest of the dream come true?

Still peering beneath my sunglasses as we crossed over the shoreline, I could see what appeared to be a native village in the distance. Here and there, over and through the thick growth of tropical vegetation, I caught an occasional glimpse of shapes that perhaps were island huts. As we neared them, and then swooped almost directly over them, I saw that the hutlike shapes weren’t really huts at all. Rather, they were large military tents that had absolutely nothing to do with a romantic island village, Tahitian or otherwise. We were arriving in Nha Trang, and the tents were part of a military base camp position for a U.S. Army artillery battery.

The imagined sound of island drums faded quickly from my mind as I once again became conscious of the synchronizedwhop, whop, whop sound of the churning helicopter blades above me. I let my sunglasses fall back to the bridge of my nose and settled back into my seat.

In reality, this scene wasn’t the start of a fantastic vacation at all, and no beautiful woman waited on the beac