lifestyle themselves once they were off base and out of uniform. Two in particular stood out—Lieutenant Lisa Sherry and Lieutenant Rick Liscomb. She was statuesque with olive skin and deep, piercing eyes. He was a light-skinned black man, built like a linebacker, with a warm smile and a bone-crushing handshake. It was hard to tell at first if they were an interracial couple keeping it low-key or just good friends. It turned out that they had been both. She was the daughter of a French farm girl and an American fighter pilot who abandoned them soon after they got to the States, leaving her mother distraught and leaving Lisa to eventually scrape her way through the University of Maryland on scholarship. Liscomb had grown up in a comfortable middle-class section of Washington, DC, the son of the principal of a private school for children of diplomats. He had been one of the first black graduates of the Air Force Academy, where we found it easy to believe he had once been the light-heavyweight boxing champion.
Norton Air Force Base turned out to be my first assignment where they actually had airplanes. The flying part of the base was run by the Military Airlift Command (MAC) and was busy seven days a week operating a steady stream of flights full of troops and supplies headed for Vietnam. Every C-141 long-range transport in the MAC inventory was flying, and they still needed to bring in charters from Braniff, Continental, TWA and Seaboard World. Our third of the base was converted from what had recently been a Strategic Air Command operation assembling and storing intercontinental ballistic missiles. When the Pentagon assigned AAVS primary responsibility for documenting the war in Southeast Asia, the 1361st quickly became a major source of television news footage seen by the American public and the main source of briefing films shown to the Congressional Armed Services Committees responsible for funding the war. They also did plenty of in-house Air Force training films, Air Force Now! (the movie newsmagazine shown at monthly commanders’ calls worldwide), and a vast amount of still photography. Now that AAVS had consolidated its operations from Orlando, Florida; Wright-Patterson, Ohio; and Lookout Mountain in the Hollywood Hills, its labs were processing more feet of film a day than any movie studio in the world.
I was assigned to the editorial department, with a wisecracking young film editor named Larry Zelinsky as my immediate supervisor. Once he showed me how to thread up a Moviola, I was on my own. The 16mm synchronizer, viewer and splicer were pretty much the same as the 8mm equipment I had used at the Rhode Island School of Design. I felt lucky then that an English major from Brown was able to take film classes next door at RISD. I felt even luckier now to find myself in a spanking-new editing room as spacious and comfortable as anything in Hollywood.
Shahbazian talked me and Tom Wheeler, one of the unit clerk-typists, into going in with him on a mountain chalet in a pine forest high above San Berdoo. First Sergeant Link—“Missing Link,” Zelinsky used to call him—was the Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge of all enlisted men in the 1361st. He split a gut when he found out we weren’t stuck in the drafty barracks on base with the rest of the guys, but Shahbazian was a retired colonel’s son and knew Link couldn’t make us move back. Link blamed me, figuring as a college graduate I had to have been the brains behind the operation, but in those days I laughed it off, foolishly assuming his glowers were harmless. No one else seemed to mind, however, and soon hipster enlisted men and hipster officers were dropping by regularly, especially on the weekends. Liscomb was learning to play the guitar and was into Peter, Paul and Mary at the time. Woody wasn’t a whole lot better on his acoustic guitar, but we enjoyed the change of pace singing folk songs after the din of the blues and Southern rock we were churning out at Sarge’s. Somehow the lovely Lieutenant Sherry—Lisa when we were alone—began fraternizing with me after hours, volunteering to help me pack up my drums at Sarge’s at the end of the evening and get them home safely. Woody, a firm believer in fraternizing with female officers, gave me his seal of approval, breaking into his Hank Williams imitation and singing, “If you’ve got the money, honey, I’ve got the time,” whenever he saw me around the cabin.
Lieutenant Sherry might have been a little out of her mind dating an enlisted man, but I was sure my brain was firing on all cylinders when she let me take the wheel of her dazzling white MG convertible and we crossed the border into Mexico for the first time. Maybe we couldn’t get to Woodstock, but we could enjoy this little caesura of pleasure and apparent sanity by camping out on a deserted beach on the Gulf of California. It was March, the end of the California rainy season. The rains had been kind that year, and the dusty chaparral and mesquite that covered the hills running south from San Bernardino and Escondido into Baja California had transformed into an emerald veil dotted with poppies, lupine and larkspur in full bloom. We sought out a simple fishing village she had heard of on the mainland side of the Gulf called Puerto Peñasco where we could sleep on the beach under the stars and where the food and drink in the nearby cantinas was plentiful and cheap. I was completely new to sleeping under the stars—the Boy Scouts had always used tents—but after quenching our thirst with cold, dark Mexican beer it seemed to work out fine.
Drinking some more of that cold, dark beer with dinner the following night, the kind WAF lieutenant expounded for me on her theories of free love and open marriage. After a few beers of my own, her logic seemed incontrovertible—in the Age of Aquarius, two people could care about each other deeply without chaining each other down. It didn’t bother me at all that an old captain friend from Tan Son Nhut would be coming in TDY in the next few days. Our relationship was going to be chain-free.
Shahbazian had been worried that I had run off to get married that weekend, but any thoughts I might have had of marriage, open or otherwise, vaporized in the hot San Bernardino sun. I didn’t hear a word from Lisa the entire week her captain was in town. The cabin seemed empty when I got home from work, and sitting alone out on the deck, I polished off two bottles of bootleg Tequila, one shot at a time, licking the salt off the back of my hand and biting down hard on the lemon chaser. And then the icing on the cake: I was diagnosed with non-specific urethritis. The doctors were concerned it might be one of the nasty new strains coming out of Vietnam, so they shot me full of antibiotics and ordered me to stay off sex and booze for a month. I spent much of my convalescence in a melancholy mood, nursing a broken heart while deprived of alcohol, a substance more precious to the Leary bloodline than oxygen. For four weekends at Sarge’s I flailed dutifully at my drums, the only person in the joint who was sober. I swore off women for life and then drove myself crazy watching a parade of tanned San Bernardino townies in tank tops undulating before me on the dance floor. Liscomb sat down next to me at the bar one night while I was on break and noticed that I was sipping a ginger ale. “What’s this, Brendan? You aren’t in training, are you?”
“I’m afraid I’ve been burned by our friend, Lieutenant Sherry.”
“Lieutenant Sherry,” he smiled. “She’s great as a friend, even better as a drinking buddy, but when we tried to get serious once upon a time I just couldn’t get used to her ideas about free love. Sounded good on paper, but the first time her old captain friend came in TDY from Tan Son Nhut, she had me crawling the walls. Our apartments at the Bachelor Officer Quarters are right across the hall from each other.”
“Ah yes, her captain from Tan Son Nhut. I live up in the mountains and she still had me crawling the walls.”
Before I went back on stage we clinked our glasses nostalgically to Lisa and free love.
Doing on-the-job training as a film editor in the AAVS postproduction department meant Zelinsky had pretty much left me alone to teach myself. I had a hunch work was going to get a lot more interesting when Lieutenant Liscomb asked for me on one of his projects, and, sure enough, he quickly became my favorite production officer, continually coming up with new and crazy ways to make an Air Force documentary while encouraging me to experiment with flashy editing techniques and cut to the beat of the heaviest-metal rock and funkiest funk we could dig up. We drove the civil-service types nuts over in the animation department, throwing new projects at them daily, depriving them of the down time they usually spent counting the hours until they could start collecting their pensions. He brought in a couple of experimental films he did when the Air Force sent him to the University of Rochester, and they turned out to be the only flicks I had ever seen weirder than the stuff my classmates at Rhode Island School of Design used to dream up. The weirdest of all was about a sculptress who had not created anything except genitalia of various shapes and sizes for over two years.