On, then, to part two.
While in Newfoundland I developed a pretty nasty drinking habit. I’d struck up a friendship with a guy named Larry Clyde Jones. He was a southerner, with a pronounced southern accent. In the course of our early conversations I deduced that he was grifter. He’d developed a reputation around the barracks of being a go-to guy for anyone who needed a short term loan. If someone wanted five dollars till payday, he would give it to them with a requirement to pay back seven dollars. As the amounts increased, so did the payback – ten for fourteen, fifteen for twenty, and so forth. It was a high demand, high reward sideline. I was fortunate that I didn’t have to avail myself of his services. He noticed this and asked me why I was never broke. I told him I just didn’t spend much money and left it at that. Then, a while after that he asked me if I’d be interested in a business proposition. “I need someone to watch out for me. I’ve got a few people who don’t like me and I need to be seen as someone who has a friend who will protect him.” I went over my head at first. “I don’t know what you want,” I responded. “Protection,” he said emphatically. “I’ll share my proceeds with you if you look after me.” It didn’t take me long to agree to his offer. I honestly thought it was a joke. I’d have been the last person someone would have wanted to protect him, but if Larry Clyde Jones was willing to share his ill-gotten gains, it seemed good to me. So began the “business relationship” that was to be the doorway for God’s grace to enter my life.
For the next several months, Larry’s business boomed, which meant I could afford to buy expensive clothing, consume booze at the airman’s club every night, and roam around Ernest Harmon and Stephenville, the small off-base town, living under the delusion that I was important and powerful.
I was drunk so often here were times I couldn’t tell whether or not I was drunk or sober. Life became a daily routine of work, followed by hours of prodigious drinking. It seemed that everything blurred together. The alcohol had an effect on my work performance. I developed a well deserved reputation for being a marginal soldier. But, I didn’t mind. The alcohol and the profits from Larry’s business were insulators. And so it was. The important thing in life became going from one alcohol induced interlude to another.
It was on one of these alcohol induced interludes that I had my first adult encounter with grace. It was during Newfoundland’s very brief summer. A group of us had a few days leave from Ernest Harmon, so we decided to take the time in Corner Brook, which was a few hours north of the base. Most of the guys had girlfriends they visited there. I went just for amusement. On our first night we found a spot near the water, unloaded the beer and whiskey, and set up a bonfire. The spirits were flowing freely for a couple of hours until we ran out. By this time most of us were too drunk to do the sensible thing, which would have been to stop. I don’t know who made the decision to get more and how Larry Clyde Jones and I got nominated to go to Corner Brook to get more. But we got nominated and agreed to go.
Larry owned a little MG Midget, something like the one pictured in the link. Larry adored it because, as he often said, “It’ll go like a bat out of hell.” We got ready to go and were interrupted by one of the girls with us whose name was Eloise. She’d made the decision to go with us because she was concerned for our safety and wanted to pray for us wherever we went. Lrry didn’t seem to mind and I thought the idea of someone praying while a couple of drunks were driving around looking for more booze was hilarious. She was, as I later found out, a “Salvation Army Girl.”
“I wonder how fast this thing will go with three people in it?” Larry said, as we took off. I was sitting in the passenger seat and Eloise sat between Larry and me, which made us one very compact pile of humanity cramped into a very small place. I couldn’t see how fast Larry was going, but as I looked out the window I saw the water get more distant as we climbed the steep hill that overlooked our bonfire. Larry laughed and whooped it up as we careened around the winding road, going higher and higher. Suddenly, on a sharp turn, Larry lost control of the car and we flew off the road. We started plummeting end over end down the cliff that overlooked the water. As we did I could see the car crumbling around me. I then felt a strange sense of peace. I don’t think it was a sense that everything was going to be alright; it was a peaceful sense of resignation. We were going to die and that was it. I’m not sure how many times the tiny car turned end over end, but we finally landed on the shore about 200 feet below the cliff that we had launched from. My first thought was curious. I was sure I was dead. But I felt alive. “Well, ain’t this about a hoot,” I said to myself. “You’re dead. You’re alive. It’s all the same thing.” I then felt the warmth of blood running down my nose. It was then I realized that I was still alive. I looked to my left and saw Eloise. She was unhurt. I heard Larry moaning. “I’m all busted up. Oh, God I’m gonna’ die.” I found a hunting knife that Larry kept in the car and cut what was left of the convertible top so that we could extricate ourselves from the car I now feared was going to explode. I got Eloise out and found that she was not hurt at all. Not even a scratch! We then tried to move Larry. But it was impossible. The clutch had somehow come down on his right foot and jammed it into the floor. We couldn’t move him at all. Our only hope was to get help. With our fellow revelers still drunk on the beach any hope of having them even think of us was remote at best. Eloise and I decided that our best hope lay in climbing up the cliff to see if we could find help close to us. We left Larry knowing there was a chance that the car could explode, but we figured that there was nothing we could do for him without help. As we climbed the cliff I could hear Eloise praying, “Dear, dear Jesus, help us. Dear, dear Jesus help us. Dear, dear Jesus, help us.”
The first sight I remember when we got close to the top of the cliff was a small house. The lights were on. We scrambled to the top and ran across the road and pounded on the door. “We need help real bad,” I pleaded as an old man who looked somewhat like my uncle Fi answered the door. In about a half an hour the RCMP arrived. We took them across the road to show them where the car, and Larry had been. I’m not sure how long it took to get Larry out of the car, but fortunately the Mounties did. Larry had suffered two broken legs, a broken foot, collarbone, pelvis, and two ribs. I had a bloody nose and Eloise was unhurt. The Mounties were amazed. The only theory they had was that having Eloise in the car with us had compacted us to the point where we couldn’t get buffeted around as the car made its plunge. Their other theory was that “Someone was looking out for you tonight. You should be dead.”
In order to maintain my philosophical stance I claimed the option of chance. “It was just pure luck that things happened the way they did,” I later thought. “It was just pure chance and nothing more.” As far as I was concerned there was no God and in the end we all just die and rot. It’s all like turning on a television show and turning it off when it’s no longer amusing.
After the accident near Corner Brook I decided to maintain a low profile. My worldview and my ego were battered and needed a rest. I did maintain my love of the stout, though, and it was that love that was to really get me in trouble.
Alcohol can do amazing things. It can lower inhibitions. It can turn a normal human body into a poor imitation of a flopping fish. And it can cause a normally sensible person to let down their guard.
That was my problem. About a month or so after the accident I struck up another friendship with a guy from my unit who I’ll just refer to by his first name, Steve. Steve had been assigned to Ernest Harmon about a year after me, which meant that he was going to be there, I assumed, a year after I was gone. I met him at the airman’s club one night and we struck up a conversation over a couple of beers. One thing led to another over the next couple of weeks until Steve decided to “open up.” It was on one of our almost nightly tours of duty at the airman’s club he confided in me that he wanted to get his wife up to Newfoundland but didn’t have enough money for a down payment on a trailer house he had looked at and decided would be good for him and his wife. I didn’t pay much attention at first, but after three or four drinks I let my guard down. “How much money do you need? I asked. He looked pleadingly as he answered, “About two thousand.”
“That’s some serious money and I don’t have that kind of cash. Have you tried to get a loan?”
He slumped down in his chair. “Yeah, I tried, but they told me I would need a co-signer.”
“Well,” I slurred, “Why dontcha’ just go get one. It couldn’t be that hard.”
Steve grinned back. “How about you? You’d do that for a friend, wouldn’t you?”
“I can’t man.”
“Come on, man, you know I’m good for it. I’d never leave you high and dry.”
“I really can’t.”
“Please, Phil, please. I’m really desperate to see the old woman.”
If I’d been sober that night my life would have been so different. But I wasn’t. I foolishly agreed to co-sign a loan and a couple of weeks later Steve had the cash he needed.
Something didn’t seem right. Have you ever had that internal railroad crossing go off inside you?” That’s what was happening to me. Any time I’d get around Steve after co-signing the loan that signal would go off. “Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. Train coming. Don’t cross the tracks.”
I found out shortly after these brief encounters that I was in the middle of the tracks and a train was bearing down on me.
I got to my duty station one night and went to look for Steve to let him know I had some misgivings about having co-signed the loan. When I couldn’t find him I checked with one of the duty section’s NCOs. Where’s Steve?” I asked
“He got an emergency reassignment stateside.”
“You can’t be serious. What about his wife?”
“He ain’t married.”
“Yeah he is. He got me to co-sign a loan so that he could get her up here.”
“Well, if you ain’t the stupidest airman at Ernest Harmon. You’ve been conned.”
“I’m tellin’ you sarge, he’s married. He got the money to get her up here.”
“If you really believe that you’re even stupider than the stupidest airman at Ernest Harmon.”
It wasn’t long till the train hit me broadside. I got a letter, then a call from the finance company. They wanted their money. I told them to get it from Steve, but they told me that they were going to get it from me. I pleaded poverty. “I don’t have two thousand dollars.” That didn’t work either. The relationship with the finance company spiraled downward. They decided the loan was in default and they wanted all their money, immediately. Worse yet, they threatened to get the Air Force involved if I didn’t pay in full.
Now two thousand dollars may not seem like much these days, but back in 1964 it was a lot. I didn’t have the money. My mother didn’t have the money. No one I knew had the money other than Larry and there was no way I would ever ask him, knowing I’d be in hock to him for the rest of my life if he did give me the money. In desperation I checked my options within the military. There was one. I had to take what was called a short discharge, then re-enlist, which I hadn’t planned on doing. But I was so desperate that I was willing to do anything. I signed over another four years of my life and got the two thousand dollars I needed in the form of the reenlistment bonus.
Toward the end of my eighteen month tour someone showed me a picture he had found in a magazine of a Montagnard tribesman. It looked to me like the pictures I had seen in geography classes when I was in school or like something out of National Geographic. “Where’s this guy live?” I asked out of curiosity.
“You mean Indo-China?”
“No, Vietnam.”
“We’ve got advisors over there, don’t we.”
“More than advisors. They’re lookin’ for volunteers.”
I didn’t know then what possessed me to do it. I just felt the need to get away from Ernest Harmon and Larry. As soon as I was finished with that conversation I went over to the orderly room and volunteered to go to Vietnam. Within a week I had shipping orders to report to the 1964th Communications Squadron at Tan son Nhut AFB, Vietnam.
Stay tuned. Part three will follow in a few days.