by CDR Jack D. Woodul, USNR(Ret), artwork by Carl Snow
Cities were burning all over America that summer. And the President assured the country that, way over yonder in Veet Nam, he had Ho Chi Minh by the scrotes, and surely his heart and mind would follow. College kids had discovered that the only thing better than the love-in was the war protest, particularly since their generation held the franchise on values and morality. Certainly nobody over 30 could be trusted, since they had probably invented napalm and had heavily invested in plastics. So they scornfully accepted their college trust funds, competed for the best costumes, expanded their minds, protested and picketed, and got laid a lot. It was a magic time of peace and love, if you could afford it.
On the other side of the President’s guns and butter coin, po’ folk who couldn’t buy their way into college, draft deferments or trips to Canada, got drafted or joined the warmongers for employment. Other simple-tool running-dog, imperialist-lackeys of the military/industrial complex still trotted off to NAS Pensacola and learned to fly great screaming war eagles. They went off to war, spurred by love of flying and the patriotic examples of their daddies and uncles in the Big War. And, at least initially, they held the notion that they were participating in something big and fundamentally righteous for their country.
Grabbing the Goodies
Since everybody with short hair was an automatic baby-burner, it was no wonder that, in the Reserve Big Red Fighter Squadron, the sailors bought wigs so they could boogie on liberty, and the gypsy pilots, most of whom were veterans of that crazy Asian war, grew sideburns and hair as long as possible. What were they going to do? Put you on a 27-Charlie and send you to Viet Nam?
Puresome was no different. Having sported a crew cut for the first 27 years of his life, he had finally given in, grown and mastered a donut-roll pompadour and inched his sideburns down to skipper-flinching maximum. It wasn’t up to the glory that the intriguingly nasty hippie girls in “Hair” sang about, but it had to do for sharing life in the civilian world and flying in the Raggedy-Ast Reserves.
So the attitude du jour around the Big Red Fighter Squadron that hot summer seemed to be both “circle the wagons” and grab some of the goodies before the revolutionaries found them out. It was the best of times for libertines and the worst of times if you still had pals getting their asses busted in WestPac while the rest of the country partied, supported Uncle Ho against the home boys, or just tried to ignore all those body-bag shots on Huntley-Brinkley every night. It wasn’t that simple, but it seemed so.
Puresome watched as the quest for the Holy Grail turned to guano and figgered “if they can’t take a joke, frabb ’em.” It helped some, but it never quite covered the quease of being safe while others weren’t, and it barely subdued the primal-scream anger about a war that the country was half-assing into not winning.
But all this simmered on the back burner of life its ownself. Puresome did his civilian thing and flew as much with the pre-ResFoRon flying club as their limited funding allowed. It permitted him to keep on bending airplanes and swapping war stories with his pals. The stomping and saluting was incidental.
One of the stalwarts around the ready room was a gentle giant, H.L. “Tiny” Mice, the Biggest Man in the World. At least, that’s what Puresome called him at least 12 times a drill weekend. Puresome was a medium size chunk, but standing in front of Tiny, Puresome swore the only way the huge pilot was able to fit in the cockpit of an F-8 was to get slathered up with KY Jelly.
The Care and Feeding of Tiny Mice
The complete ritual had Puresome staring him in the eye from about a foot and a half lower altitude and chanting, “H.L. ‘Tiny’ Mice, the Biggest Man in the World, I look up to you!” Puresome knew he was working the edge of the envelope, but the Biggest Man in the World never said “I thought I heard a bug fart,” or thumped him off-handedly into the promised land, as he richly deserved. Unfortunately, Puresome took this as encouragement. But he was as the buzzing of flies.
But today, it was just Puresome and Cousin Weakeyes who had been scheduled to do battle in the skies over central Texas, but both their moth-eaten Crusaders with “NAVY/ MARINE” on the fuselages had gone Tango Uniform, and they were drinking coffee in the ready room, waiting for their aircraft to be glued back together.
“Hey! Did you hear what happened to Tiny Mice?” Weakeyes asked.
“Did he just get himself designated a national monument?”
Cousin Weakeyes expected no less, and kept on trucking. “You know he drives a Corvette with a bumper sticker that has a peace symbol on it and says ‘Footprint of the Great American Chicken?’ Well, he was driving home last week, and a bunch of hippies drove by, saw the bumper sticker, got all pissed and crowded him off the road.”
This is looking up, Puresome thought expectantly.
“Well, Tiny pulled over and stopped, and these hippies came boiling out of their van, ready to kick his hiney. It took about three minutes for Tiny to unfold himself out of his Corvette, and by the time he finally did, the hippies thought better of trying to whip somebody the size of the state of Rhode Island, and they jumped back in their van and buggered off at the speed of heat!”
“Right arm! Farm out!” Puresome eagerly shouted in his very best John Denver imitation.
Because, in a bad season, the good guys had won one. Because, just like a parable from Robert, the Strange, McNamara, the bad guys had clearly seen that trying to frabb with the Biggest Man in the World was not a good idea, and had just gone away.
When Puresome finally got to ask the gentle giant about the incident, he didn’t say squat. But in that otherwise overcast moment in time, the smile on the face of H.L. “Tiny” Mice, the Biggest Man in the World, was like the shiny sun bursting through the clouds onto Mount Fuji.