Taxes

Here's an example of your taxes hard at work during the late sixties:

From a USAF helicopter pilot.

"We were getting ready to start our afternoon poker game, and I said, "you know, maybe I can get a bunch of girls down here for a party." And one of them, there was two colonels, they were sort of the Godfathers of the base. One of them was the senior officer of the group that was training the Vietnamese in A1-Es and helicopters. The other colonel was just a supply guy, that got tapped to come to Vietnam. Don’t care what your rank is, you’re in the captains job. So we were sittin there and they were saying bull, with some other words. And I said, no really, I can, I just need a couple of helicopters. Maybe three. And the colonel said, who wants a bunch of Vietnamese girls? And I said, no no, these are American girls, secretaries, from Saigon. And he says, yeah, I got those helicopters, I’ll just get those from the Vietnamese General; you can’t really do this! And I says, can you? And he says, I’ll let you know at noon tomorrow! So I got on the telephone, I got ahold of this bureau where these girls were at, and says,
"would y’all like to come down to Ban Touei?"
"Oh yeah! We never been to an Air Force base!"
"How many girls? I gotta line up the helicopters."
"A helicopter flight! Oh boy! That’s really great!"
"How many girls? And they said, we can probably get thirty."

Ok. We laid the date on, the Colonel got permission from the General to get three of the Vietnamese helicopters, but no Vietnamese pilots, we had to fly them ourselves. So I got a couple extra pilots who pretended to be crew chiefs, for each one of the helicopters, put em in a white jacket from the officers club; we had four bottles of champagne for each helicopter, flew up to Saigon. We had worked with the Navy, because the Navy river patrol boat headquarters was just outside of Ban Touei, on the Rok chia river. So we had LST, they had a full Admiral. We invited them to come to the club to partake in the fun! And they in turn had arranged the bus from Saigon to pick up the girls from the headquarters in Saigon when they got off work on Saturday at noon, brought em directly to the Vietnamese operations center, at Ton Sanut, and the helicopters were sitting there waiting. The bus pulls up, the girls pile out and jump into the choppers, the champagne popped, and off we went for Ban Touei. In H-34 helicopters, Sikorskys. Short flight. Got down there, big party on Saturday night, Sunday about noon, some of the girls got rides in A-1E Skyraiders, others got river patrol boat rides… The A-1E Skyraider was loaded with 100lb bombs that had been in the club all night, with people writing messages on them. It was just called a demo, but there happened to be a free-fire island right there; anything you saw there was fair target. They were loaded. The girls on the boats, out on the river, the Navy had packed some beautiful picnic lunches for each boat, and there was no enlisted men on board that day, not one. A buncha air force pilots, a buncha girls and a picnic lunch. And we just cruising up and down the river, opposite this island, letting the girls take turns with the .50-cal machine guns. They A-1Es come in, drop bombs, with both of us on the river, had our picnic lunch, then come back to Saigon that afternoon.

It does sound like fun, but completely screwed up. Existing in the odd ethical vacuum of a war.

Do you have any idea how much fuel helicopters consume? Or A-1E Skyraiders? Or how much .50 cal ammo costs? Hmmm.

Jim was a great guy, great stories, but there are some moral gray areas about using a huge amount of taxpayer money to have a party with some girls. Hey, if someone else's paying, I'll show up to the party.