was identified and the signal strength excellent. The needle centered up and remarkably, we were only a few miles off course. We begin letting down, following the directions of the HKK approach controllers and lining up for the CC (Charlie, Charlie) approach into Kai Tek. Hundreds of pilots from all over the world know this approach and have a great deal of respect for it. The pilot has to be on precisely on altitude as the apartment buildings just across the street from the airport with their TV antennas are passing only feet below the main gear. The final decent to land , after clearing the buildings, seems and is steep because the airport was built on a narrow artificial island extending from the shore out into the waters surrounding the island. All that’s aviation history now. There’s a new airport across the bay that’s a lot easier to land on.
On the ground, the passengers crawled down the stinking slippery cabin deck and departed for their R&R and other business. We, true to form, “paid off” the mechanic, he broke the plane, we had two days off, flew back to Nam and did it all again the following week.
CHAPTER 8
HONG KONG
“And if you screw up just this much, you'll be flying a cargo plane full of rubber dog shit out of Hong Kong.”
— Air Boss Johnson in the 1986 movie, 'Top Gun.'
I met up with some interesting characters in Hong Kong, one night I wandered into a little bar called the “Ship Inn” it was run by a three hundred pound white Russian woman and her equally fat son. There was a bunch or British Soldiers in the place and one of them said, “sit down yank and I’ll buy yr a pint!” Never one to walk away from a free beer, I accepted. He gestured to the fat lady by pulling down an imaginary handle. She drew the draft and set it in front of me. “Hope yr’ likes warm beer mate” said the Soldier. I’d had it before, so nothing new. I noticed that anyone who wanted anything was making these queer hand signals. I saw that one that looked like drawing a pint and then, holding the imaginary glass, wiping his hand over the top. The fat proprietor filled the glass and then dumped a slug of green lime juice in it. The Brits, called this horrible concoction “Tops” and love it. I tried it and didn’t. Another hand signal was to wipe the foam off an imaginary beer and then make a quick dumping signal into the brew, this it turned out was asking for a shot of whiskey in the beer, a boilermaker. It took me a while to figure all this out, but after the second pint, I got it. Both the fat lady and her son were deaf and dumb. If you wanted a drink you had to use hand signals. Good grief!
Next Door was the “Hasty-Tasty” a hole in the wall selling fried Hong Kong Harbor fish wrapped in yesterdays newspaper- perfectly horrible sober but passable when knee-walking drunk which was the condition of 90% of the Ship Inn’s clientele after a few hours.
Across the street, in this dingy section of Kawloon was the “Waltzin Matilda” Inn, and as, the name implied, it was a place frequented by Aussie soldiers and sailors.
Around midnight it was common for both the Brits and Aussies to call each other horrible names and wind up in a battle royal in the middle of the street. The coppers sirens would sound in the distance and magically, a large British Army Lorry would pull up and the less drunk guys would help their more drunken pals into the back and head out to Sekong where the army base for REME, the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, was located.
One night, I met one of the British Officers in another, more civilized place, this was in the basement of a small out of the way hotel, the Palace, where Frank Poonching had worked for years as the piano player. Frank was a Filipino musician who had been working in Hong Kong since emigrating in the early thirties. He had played for the Japanese soldiers during WW-II and was still there in 1966, twenty years later. Frank could play every imaginable song but these days he was playing things like the “Scottish Soldier” and other military ditties that were requested by the mostly British military crowd.
The officer and I met several evenings talking about everything under the sun. He was stationed in Sekong with his wife and kids and he and a few pals had just bought a thirty foot Chinese Junk but didn’t know how to sail it. Of course, like an idiot, I volunteered and one Saturday afternoon we set sail with both families and the kids. The Junk was a miserably unwieldy craft, with far too much windage and not enough keel or sail. The ancient Lanteen rig was difficult to trim and lost more wind that it held. It was great to leeward but couldn’t even hold a parallel course. After barely missing a few smaller islands and a few larger and smaller craft- I got the hang of it and thus began one of my more enjoyable pastimes whenever I had a couple of weeks out of Vietnam. Thank God the beastly thing had an engine or we might have wound up getting shot up by a Chinese gun boat.
I had to go to school to get a Hong Kong harbor pilots license. The class was taught by a retired British master mariner and consisted of him placing red, green and white dots all over a huge table covered with black felt. He would move them all over and then quiz the student on what ship’s lights they represented and who had the right of way. I passed- anyone who could fly a fade parallel range Adcock approach in a snow storm could definitely be a Hong Kong harbor pilot.
One day I was invited to help the Brits design a fitting to be welded to the turrets of their tanks to mount a light machine gun. I had mentioned that I thought I could draw up some sketches that a machinist could follow and they took me up on it. I was examining the tank for measurements in the afternoon and spent a few nights in the barracks.
Every morning there was a formation which of course I slept through. Sergeant Major Parks, who ran the troops, had been wounded in the head in Cyprus and had a great dent in his bald pate. He would look at me funny every time he saw me walking around out of uniform and not standing in formation. I had been introduced to him several times by the boys but every morning he had completely forgotten and the introductions had to be made all over again- turns out that his head wound had caused him to have memory lapses. His old memories were spot on but any new ones were day to day.
One morning, I was sleeping in when he busted into my room kicking the bed with his great boots and yelling in his loudest drill sergeants cockney voice- ”Ere, Ere, whatcherdooen in the kip yr’ lazy-lout, up yr’ goes er-I’ll have yr’ stripes.” “Yes Sir “S’nt- Major” I said and jumped to attention- what else could I say. I knew that he had forgotten completely that I was a visiting engineer and not one of his boys. The British Army has or had a remarkable loyalty for the men and anyway, the Brits just love artifacts and Parks was certainly that- they kept him on until his retirement - much kinder than his fate would have been in the American military.
I used to get over to Hong Kong every month and stay as long as I could. It made Vietnam bearable and kept me sane. In the beginning, we would stay at the President hotel, just north from the Peninsula near the docks for the Star ferry, which you could ride in those days for ten cents between Kaloon and Hong Kong island. There were signs on the Ferry admonishing the Chinese not to spit. I used to wonder about this. Turns out that spitting is a way to ward off evil spirits and, for the superstitious Chinese, the evil spirits were everywhere.
Years before, when some of the old-timers at Air America were building airports in China helping the Nationalist’s under Chan Kai Chek to escape from Mao’s army. The Chinese workers would line up on the sides of the runway and just as an aircraft was taking off or landing dashing out trying to cross at close as they possibly could in front of the propellers and landing gear. The idea was that the evil spirits chasing them would be smacked by the blades or flattened by the giant tires. Of course, a lot of workers wound up as chop-suey- their evil spirits must have laughed like hell over that.
After the first year I rented a small apartment in Hong Kong which saved a lot of hotel expense. I rented it to other pilots and friends who were visiting the island and we all got a lot of mileage out of that place.
Many of the American pilots would head over to Bangkok when they got some time off and I flew over there a few times as well. I didn’t like the place as much as Hong Kong, probably because the British colonial government ran a tight ship and the place was far cleaner and more civilized than Bangkok- or so it