Col Olds' addressed this in his farewell speech, warning us. He knew.
It is impossible to relate how we were affected, what changed in us. We jumped back into the quietude of life as we knew it. We paved over the tensions and anxieties that we unknowingly carried inside us. We got on with our lives as civilians or in continued military service elsewhere.
The latent anxiety of the possibility the base would be attacked visiting us as we drifted off to sleep in our barracks. The driving focus of getting aircraft repaired and on flight status that kept us going often 12 hrs a day or more. A heightened awareness of being in a strange culture. For those of us assigned to guard duty in addition to our regular duties the daily reminders of helmet, flack jacket, canteen, and in my case and no doubt others, extra loaded M-16 magazines that had been given to me by the guy I replaced( These were not sanction issue. But they were mine.) ; took up space in our lockers and reminded us what we would be doing sooner or later. It all retreated in the relief and joy of leaving Ubon RTAFB (Royal Thai Air Force Base). Ubon and our experiences there have never left us though, as many of us have discovered in surprising and often terrifying ways. (see NIGHT VISITOR, in side bar).
The experience changed my perception of the experience. It was not just fixing airplanes in one way or another. It was an experience of our selves being fundamentally changed by what we experienced, whether we were aware of it or not. This is what Col. Olds spoke of. We could not see the change but it was there in one degree or another in all of us and we took it with us.
Robt. Wheatly captures it so succinctly in 'Night Visitors'. Sapper attack meant anything and every thing! It meant terror in the night.! It meant uncertainty, danger, death and destruction. Not theoretically but immediate ! NOW! NOW! NOW! The base is being attacked, Sirens, Aircraft launching, Gun Ships Droning overhead! Flares Illuminating the SKY! EXPLOSIONS! RiFle FiRe.
And for the Security Police and the augmentees, we were going out there in the night .... and waiting for contact with the enemy.
I wish I had talked to any one of the others about how they felt. It seems strange now but it was just what we did. Morning came they picked you up in a truck or you walked back to the armory and checked in your weapon and went to the chow hall, the beer garden and the to bed. No big deal!
Not then anyway. Give it ten or twenty, or thirty , or forty years..... And then see what happens when you go out at night alone, Or when the dreams startle you awake and you have to get up and escape into the television or a stiff drink. When you have to have all the lights on when your trying to sleep if your alone at home. When alcohol, or drugs or exhaustion are merely palliatives against the anxiety of closing your eyes and struggling against where sleep takes you. When unexplainable terror seizes your and all you can do is curl up on the ground and sob uncontrollably. Because that is what you fought against doing in the middle of the night in a far off place so long ago but instead steeled yourselves and did your duty.
I only know my experience. The guys back in the barracks went back to bed once they cleared the alert and let them leave the bunkers. I never talked to any of them either about what went on and they slept in the next bunk ! Go figure. This was life for us. We fixed airplanes, every so often the VC would mess up our night with an attack, then we'd all get up and do it again the next day. Just a normal day in our war.
Robt. was in radio interception of the enemy communication. Locked in a concrete bldg that was encircled with fences. The guards were on the inside. The weapons for Robt. and the technicians were locked away. His assessment is that they knew to much to be allowed to be captured. The armed guards were there to protect the information, not them. If the perimeter was seriously breached he believes they would have been killed. I don't think that was on the duty roster. Do you?
So sapper attack meant something else to Robt Wheatly. Possibly death at the hands of his own countrymen to preserve the knowledge he held. A grim reality to harbor in the back of you mind. Not death in combat but executed if the situation seem untenable. That could give you a delayed wake up call a few decades later!
So when you re-read 'Night Visitor' keep that in mind.
You don't have to even have been in combat to carry this terror with you. After you mind quietly works on these things for long enough you get to have dreams like these!
He also wrote a very poignant poem about the death of a Sgt Yorkie, who was preparing to go on a rescue mission of a downed pilot when a sapper breached the perimeter and tossed a satchel charge of explosives into the open back door of his aircraft, killing him.
This nursery rhyme just started going through my head this evening, actually only the 'Home again, Home again, jiggity jig' and became the title of this post. Then I googled it up. It's funny how these distant things surface. I remember this from my childhood, mother reading it or reciting it. And now it has percolated up through my consciousness to this page carrying with it things that she never imagined and things she thankfully never knew.
Mother Goose nursery rhyme:
- To market, to market, to buy a fat pig,
- Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.
- To market, to market, to buy a fat hog,
- Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.
- To market, to market, to buy a plum bun,
- Home again, home again, market is done.
To war, to war, all my young men,
Off to kill Charlie until he's all gone
Came we home again, such as we were,
Home again... Home again..war is all done...
Hooray.....Hooray......we all said,
Until it visits us in these strange ways.....
And Mother's not here to make it go away,
With the soothing words of Jiggety Jig.
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