Area 51: An Uncensored History of America's Top Secret Military Base

by Annie Jacobsen

The drive into the countryside was beautiful and relaxing, with its tropical bamboo forests and small ponds. Camellias and Japanese apricot trees were in bloom. There were beautiful sunsets to watch over the East China Sea. “We had a different rapport, Jack and I, than the other pilots, I think. We did more than just get along. Jack Weeks and I became friends,” Collins says. When the two pilots weren’t at the beach, Collins and Weeks would take the 1129th Special Activities Squadron staff car, “an old clunker of a station wagon,” and head into Koza, a sprawling little city of cement-block high-rises and crooked telephone poles. “Jack and I had kids who were about the same age. We’d head into Koza and buy these little plastic airplanes and remote-control tank models which we intended to bring home to our kids. But sometimes we’d get bored back in Morgan Manor and open up the toy packages and end up making the little tank models for ourselves,” Collins recalls. “We had a lot of fun doing that.” Life’s simple pleasures during the Vietnam War.

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