Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

In October 1969, Patience got a letter saying her father had died. The news came when we both wanted to go home. I phoned my dad and borrowed traveling money. We drove to Lisbon to catch a Yugoslavian freighter home. The Roach, which I’d figured would be dead by now, was still running great. Selling it in Spain meant a lot of paperwork and import taxes. The shipping company said it would cost two hundred dollars to bring it with us. We loaded it on the ship.

The Yugoslavian freighter took two weeks to sail from Lisbon to New York because of bad weather. We were three of the twelve passengers on board. We sailed through storms that sank other freighters, tankers, and seagoing tugs. Waves bashed into the superstructure, crashing against the passengers’ portholes. Jack got thrown across the main stateroom, sitting in a giant wooden chair, looking very surprised. Patience weathered the storm in her bunk, sick. I took photographs, making time exposures of the waves crashing against the portholes. I was sober for the entire trip because the ship only had two kinds of booze: scotch, which I couldn’t stand, and some ungodly swill called Slivovitska, a plum brandy that tasted worse than it sounded.

When we were a day out, we all crowded around a portable radio and cheered hearing an American commercial jingle: “Chock Full o’ Nuts is the hea-ven-ly coffee …” Home.

CHAPTER 4

November 1969—We stayed with my parents in North Palm Beach, Florida. I looked for work while we lived off the modest insurance benefit Patience got from her father.

We were feeling so well off (the insurance money came to three thousand dollars) that we decided to fly to Tampa to visit friends. I rented a Cessna at Palm Beach International Airport, loaded up Patience and Jack, and took off. Hadn’t flown in three years. Felt good. Patience was more impressed that I was able to understand the tower gibberish than that I could fly. Flying made her sick, too. Jack sat on my lap and yanked the control yoke around like he was on a twenty-five-cent sidewalk ride. He couldn’t see over the top of the console, but he was a natural pilot. Whoop! Zoom! Wow! Patience got sick, nixing Jack’s flying lessons for the rest of the trip.

We spent the night in Tampa and went back to the plane early in the morning. I’d parked at a grass-strip airport and the plane was covered in dew. While I wiped the windshield and did the preflight, I had the feeling I was over there. I used to do this every morning, getting my Huey ready for the assaults. I felt myself getting tense.

Got in the plane, cranked up. Did a warm-up where I was parked and then pushed in full throttle. We roared down the grass strip and I lifted off, keeping the plane low. I thought I was in a Huey and that Patience and Jack weren’t there. I was taking off at An Khe, heading east toward the pass. I skimmed over the trees at the end of the strip and stayed low among the treetops—hard to hit you when you’re in the trees. Patience asked if we weren’t a little low and I remembered where I was. I stayed low and flew directly toward a tall tree. She said, “Bob?” I pulled up over the tree, just missing the branches, caught a glimpse of the morning sun, felt myself relax. I climbed to cruising altitude. “Are you okay?” Patience said. I nodded.

I was accepted for a job at Pratt & Whitney to make high-speed movies of jet engines in action—I knew enough about photography to bullshit the head of the project. I also had an opportunity to work for Radiation, an electronics manufacturer, in Palm Bay because a friend of mine who worked there, Bill Willis, knew they needed a photo-technician. Willis, a big blond man, and I grew up together west of Delray Beach, Florida. We shared a common interest in science and technology, and I was in the mood for that. Also, the pay at Radiation was better. I took that job.

I’d never worked in an electronics factory before. They put me on the night shift photographing circuit diagrams with a room-sized process camera and developing the twenty-by-thirty-inch film sheets. The job required some skill, but not so much that I was kept occupied. I soon became bored and started taking two-hour lunch breaks. I would wander around the whole place, seeing how they built integrated circuit chips. I saw the whole process, from actually growing the silicon crystal, slicing it to wafers, sensitizing the wafers with photoresists, doping, photomask exposures, etching, testing, and final cutting. Interesting stuff, but my niche in the process—photomask technician—wasn’t very exciting. I think the most interesting project I ever worked on was making microphotographs of a competitor’s chip. Electronics companies do this regularly—they buy another company’s hot new chip and grind it down, layer by layer, and photograph each layer. With the photos, the engineers can see how the thing works and rip off the design.