30,000 hr plot,sailor, writer.
DEATH, TERROR, FEAR, COURAGE, WASTE! Non-Fiction, Personal History, In 1966, I climbed out of the big jet into a steamy colonial oriental town built by the French using thousands of Vietnamese workers. The air, putrid, rotten cabbage mixed with dead fish. You could taste the disintegrating organic material. Nothing seemed real. I was with a group of young, and not so young, trainees the company called FNG's ('fucking new guys'). We were all competent pilots with considerable experience. For the past few weeks, we had been in training for something completely different from anything any of us had ever done. We were hired by a mysterious Government contractor, the Central Intelligence Agency, to fly in Vietnam where most of the population wanted us dead. The company was called Air America. Back then, I guarantee, none of us ever heard of it. Maybe, had we known, many of us might still be alive!
