Cycles are what we ride, like it or not.

I was twenty-one years old when this picture was taken in January 1971. I’m standing next to my Huey–#16252–on the landing strip at Khe Sanh. Three feet to my left, inside the cockpit, my office, is the collective, my up and down stick. Hidden from view is the cyclic, the control stick that determines which direction the aircraft goes. For a year in Vietnam I held the cyclic in my right hand, steering the Huey in and out of harms way.
As I look at the kid in this picture I see a lot of things: youthful insouciance, a sheen of invulnerability (back then enemy troops owned Khe Sanh for Pete’s sake) and a look of cleverly disguised bravado, like the glare a kid gives a neighborhood bully just before getting clobbered. But the most interesting thing about this shot is its followup. In 1992 I traveled back to Vietnam, the returning vet going over old haunts, touching a part of my past. It was a trip dripping with remembrance. With my little car and an interpreter I drove highway 9 from Quang Tri out to Khe Sanh, ending up very near the spot pictured here. The old airstrip was weed-infested, barely recognizable. The surrounding hills were a picture of serenity, the ‘enemy’ nowhere to be seen. The property is now owned by a company that grows coffee beans.
This morning, as I look at the picture of that kid again, I’m no longer young, much less naive than he was while perhaps even more vulnerable to the vicissitudes and dangers of life. Still, the cycles are no longer hidden. I’m sipping a cup of coffee in the (relative) safety of my home office, reminiscing about a place that played a monumental part in my early life. That once dangerous place is now a peaceful field, a farmer’s source of income. The cycle, one hopes, is complete.