Jerry and Martie Towler and Patience and I sat at a table near the dais. Dave Owens, who was sitting with us, leaned over and said, “You know what you’re going to say?”
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“Bob, I want you to do me a favor and not get mad.”
“What’s that, Dave?”
“Show me your notes when you come up to the dais, just a glance.”
“What for?”
“Because that was one of the conditions for you speaking here. They said I had to see your notes before you speak.”
“That’s bullshit, Dave.”
“I know. I won’t read them. Hold them up when you walk by me. That’s looking at them, isn’t it?”
I laughed. “Sure, okay.”
Dave went to the podium, made a few brief announcements, and then introduced me.
As we passed each other on the steps, I held my notes out to Dave, who looked at them and then out at the audience. He nodded and said, “Thanks, Bob. Give’m hell.”
I turned on my pocket tape recorder, put my notes, my story, on the podium. There were over a thousand people in the room. The applause was thunderous. I waited.
I said:
“I thank you for inviting me to be your speaker today. I feel kind of odd about that. I’m a member of the organization; I’m not from outside.
“I’m here because I wrote a book about what I, and many of us, did in Vietnam, and subsequently gained some celebrity because of it.
“I feel odd about that, too, because almost anybody here could have written Chickenhawk. Many of you certainly experienced more harrowing adventures than I did. But I’m the one who wrote the book.” I paused. “I’m the one that’s getting the recognition,” I said quietly. I looked across the audience.
“I’m the one who gets the letters.”
“I get letters from grunts thanking me for having been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.
“They thank me for the pilot who pulled them out of a hot LZ and saved their lives.
“They thank me for the pilot who got the Huey in, at night, without lights, under fire, bringing in ammunition and supplies that saved their unit.
“They thank me for the things we all did in Vietnam.
“Being, I suppose, the more well-known of the Vietnam pilots here, the one who gets the mail, the one who gets the attention we all deserve, I hereby pass that thanks on to you.” I stood back, held up my arms, and said, “You deserve it. Give yourself a hand.”
There was much applause. I scanned the room. I saw smiles. I saw tears. Nobody got up to walk out.
I then read them the story I’d written, “The Race,” which, as I had hoped, met with success. Racing buses filled with mooning forty-year-olds is just naturally funny, especially to the participants. I brought the house down.
I talked about some early experiences I’d had as an adolescent pilot trying to teach myself to fly and got a lot of laughs.
Then I faced the issue of my controversy.
“A situation that irks some of my fellows here, and is an issue of curiosity for others, is, what did happen at the end of the book?
“For those of you who haven’t read Chickenhawk, I say, at the end of the epilogue, that I had been arrested for smuggling marijuana and I was appealing the conviction. That sounds pretty serious. It was. In fact, I lost the appeal. I went to jail.”
It was quiet in the auditorium. Someone coughed.
I launched into a quick-paced summation of selling the book and going to jail. I told them what it was like being sent to Eglin. I told them about the white lines that marked the boundaries, that it was a prison for wimps, that if you had to go to prison, Eglin was the place to go. I made Eglin seem like a lark. I made them laugh.
I paused.
“But it was still prison. I couldn’t leave.
“When my book became a best-seller, it didn’t seem real. Because, while I was experiencing the highest moment of life, I was also experiencing the lowest moment of my life. I was not proud of what I’d done or for going to prison. I was humiliated and embarrassed. Yet, at the same time, I was experiencing this wonderful success. It was a tough mixture of emotions for me.
“But it’s over now, or nearly so. For those of you who think I haven’t paid enough for what I did, I’m still on parole. As a matter of fact, I’m here courtesy of the U.S. Parole Commission. It’s been seven years since I committed my crime. I’ll be off parole this December. I’m looking forward to that.”
I made Jerry Towler stand up, introduced him as my flying partner and the Resler in the book.
When I finished, the applause was astounding.
I wasn’t able to walk anywhere for the rest of the reunion without someone coming up and telling me I was okay. I needed that.
In August 1989, David Hunt and Kevin Bowen of the William Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts (which is trying to get decent medical care to the Vietnamese) invited me to come to Boston to meet a group of Vietnamese writers—former Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars, VC and NVA, as they were known to me. Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, and other American writers of the Vietnam War were also coming. They wanted to know if I’d give a reading with Tim O’Brien. I agreed.
Patience and I flew to Boston. During the drive from the airport, David Hunt told us that their public meeting with the Vietnamese the day before had ended in disaster. South Vietnamese refugees broke up the meeting, injured some of the guests. Now, he explained, they were holding the rest of the conference at Kevin Bowen’s home in the Dorchester section of Boston.
We climbed the stairs up to the attic of the three-story house where the meeting of American and Vietnamese writers had already started. Three Vietnamese sat together on a couch at the front of the room: Le Luu, who wrote a Vietnamese best-seller, The Humorless Colonel; Nguyen Khai, a writer and the deputy general secretary of Vietnam’s Writers Union; and Nguyen Quang Sang, who’d written a novel, four short-story collections, and produced several films about the war. About ten people sat facing them in folding chairs, five of them writers: novelists Philip Caputo, Wayne Karlin, Tim O’Brien, and two poets, Larry Rottman and Bruce Weigl. They stopped talking for a second when Patience and I walked in, and then continued after we sat down.
In this first meeting, the discussion was about the war as seen by the different sides. It was an opportunity to ask questions of your former enemies. An American asked, “What did you think of the American troops’ fighting ability?”
Le Luu, the most popular novelist in Vietnam, shook his head and smiled. “Generally,” he said through an interpreter, “they weren’t very good fighters.”
I felt myself getting excited; I had wondered how I’d react. I had been against us being in Vietnam, but then, these guys had killed some of my friends. I had never seen a living North Vietnamese regular, and very few living Viet Cong. One of them might have been the guy who shot me down. It was an eerie feeling to face former enemies.
Philip Caputo, a former Marine lieutenant, replied, “You’re saying we were bad fighters?” Caputo looked pissed off.
The interpreter, a young man who wasn’t born until after the war, shrugged, translated. Nguyen Khai, the leader and diplomat among the Vietnamese contingent, smiled nervously. There was great pressure in Vietnam to regain normal relations with the United States. I think he sensed the tenseness in the air.
“Not bad in the sense that you were cowardly or unprofessional,” Khai answered. “You were simply not as well motivated as were we. We, after all, were defending our country—”
Sang broke in, his voice deep, his smile wide. “When you did not have your fighters and helicopters and B-52s to support you, you were easy to beat.”