In my early days of the Vietnam War, my crew and I slept on Guam, an island from which our B52s flew west day and night. Sometimes, our flying schedule left us some room to head to the airbase's beach, where the sand was creamy white, the San Miguel beer 15 cents a can, and where storm-battered speakers sent Hawaiian Steel guitar music, from high in the palms. 'Seems obscene, now.
A loner even then, I spread my tatami mat under a palm tree off the main beach, and savored silence. But along came six young women, not very tan. The lack of tan meant not stationed on the island. Visitors. As they walked the beach, they collected the expected young men from the base, enjoying their day off now even more. One woman, a bit older, broke off the parade, and walked over. She asked, with a small smile, if all the shade was taken. She put down her beach towel.
She was a stewardess on a Boeing 707 Flying Tiger flight, on a layover in Guam. Yes, stewardess was still the term, in the late 1960s. She was from Chicago, and had been hired on at Flying Tiger a year before. She liked to fly, she said, with a sense of sadness I did not pursue. Tomorrow she and her crew would fly to Tan Son Nhut, and then back to the states. Flying Tiger was a contract carrier, transporting troops to Viet Nam, and then back home after their combat tours.
I asked her about her work, as we watched her sisters-in-flight laugh and flirt with their new beach buddies. “It's like two different worlds,” she said slowly. From the states, “Our passengers are so young, fresh-faced, friendly and eager to prove themselves in combat..
“On the way back out of country, a different kind of person comes aboard,” she continued. “They are tired, so much older, the light in their eyes so much dimmer than before. Some seem frantic, fastening and refastening their seat belts, as if to assure themselves that they are safe, in a stateside-bound aircraft. Others are completely silent, like zombies.”
“We try very hard to not let these seated passengers see our other passengers come aboard....the ones who go in the cargo hold, in their GI caskets. It takes a long time to load them all. But sometimes they do see them.” Her face again registered sadness, a sadness I had not yet felt, certainly not under postcard palm trees, with Hawaiian Steel Guitars murmuring background to the surf.
It was not long afterward that friends of mine began boarding Flying Tiger flights back to the states, in the cargo hold. I would later see their names on the Viet Nam Wall in DC, and remember them in their green flight suits, at mission briefings, on the crew buses that dropped us off at our loaded B52s.
I will think of them and their chiseled names tomorrow. And I will also think of the sadness on the lady's face. On this Memorial Day, I wish her and all her passengers, well.