Today's Featured Biography

 
Mark Richardson

After EHS, I went to DePauw University for 3 semesters with John Forney and Don Jones. During Hell week we went to Mr. T’s in Chicago and were 6 feet from the Kingston Trio “live” for the price of a drink. Threw out my knee doing the twist at another bar, fell down, and got slapped in the face because my “friends” thought I was drunk. Transferred to U of M and graduated in ’65 with major in Psych (ha) and minor in (ROTC) (ha, ha). Drove a cab again that summer during the tornados to save money for a trip to Europe. Started in Paris with unlabeled wine for 5 francs per bottle wondering if we’d go blind. Bought a Bella Zundap (like an old Navy motor scooter), went to Ile d’Orleron to visit an AFS student and then up through Holland (met another EHS student, Butch, in the red light district who excelled at communicating with hand signals through the windows), Belgium, Germany (youth hostels all the way) and ran out of money in Copenhagen. One morning I was having breakfast with a young Dane about 6'5" and told him my pecuniary plight. He said his parents, a couple of elderly Danish opera singers, needed a maid and butler, so I immediately said that I could clean and probably “buttel.” Put on my only suit for the interview and was asked when I could start. Moved into a room off the kitchen and kept my beer cold by running water in the sink: “Mister Richardson, the water is running again in your bathroom.” Spent some off hours at the Tvioli dance hall, among other venues, and got a Danish girl friend: “You have a very hairy body.” Battery on the scooter died, had to run the thing down the street and pop the clutch to get it started; Danes would come out of their shops to watch, thought it was a stitch. Every time I went to buy a box of Wheaties (my employers survived on a plain roll and yogurt for breakfast), the shop owner would search for me for a box with a beautiful Danish starlet on the back (the Danes have an elevated sense of humor). My employers entertained by hiring the cook from the Mexican embassy and I served filet mignons in mushroom sauce in my one suit with a towel over my arm. It was very sophisticated. The cook would tell me about her sojourn working in Greenland where the ratio of men to women was about 1200:1 and she was treated very well (as her eyes would almost glass over in the remembering). I learned how to peel tomatoes for the evening meal. If I forgot to set the table correctly, the husband would threaten to put a step ladder over the table with me on the top looking down until I remembered what was missing.

I had told the Air Force that I wanted to come on active duty on November 15th and I got my orders with that exact date, for a pilot training base in the middle of West Texas (where New Mexico would blow by every so often). Gave my Bella Zundap, my girlfriend, and my job to a friend from Indiana. He lasted about two weeks; evidently wasn’t as discreet as his benefactor. Took off for Texas where I was made Chief, Personal Services (triple ha) in charge of the base theater, hobby shops, golf course, etc. We trained pilots for Vietnam. The higher you ranked academically and in flying training, the better your chances of getting an assignment for single seat fighters. I took the eye test three different times, three different ways, but the old depth perception just wasn’t what it should be. That cargo/transport embassy flight around the world every two weeks looked really appealing to me. That was before they really needed more pilots and were washing guys out for things like sitting height and a crooked little finger. When the push for pilots picked up, you could get through and still not be able to haul your big butt over the officer’s club fence. Got to fly in the T-37 (tweety bird), the T-38, one helicopter, and a T-6 Texan (Reese AFB had a great Aero Club). The stan-eval pilot who took me for the ride in the T-38 climbed to 50K feet, heard a sucking noise in the cockpit (leaking canopy), and tried to shake it off but didn’t bother to inform me in advance of that particular maneuver. If he had, I’d brought another pair of pants. Then he asked if I could see that swimming pool down below. I couldn’t, but he didn't wait for an answer and pushed the nose over into a dive that required an 8G pull out with G-suits inflating. If that wasn’t enough, the pilot had a cold and drained his sinuses into his oxygen mask on the pull out. He had to go home and recover; I, however, went back to work in the same, crisp, uniform pants. Sometime later the Air Force assigned me to the Personnel Division and sent me to personnel school. That qualified me to be the low man on the Division totem pole and we were shuffling paper and running an old IBM card sorter.

I volunteered for Vietnam but the application never got out of office because it had to be approved by your superiors. So, being a personnel specialist, I found in the manual a job and career field, “Human Intelligence,” that didn’t need any approvals and sent it off. Had to go to Denver to be interviewed by an undercover AF Major who placed his hands on a large pot belly and said that AF Intelligence had been very good to him. He asked me if I had any qualms about killing people, among other things, and, of course, I told him “Not if they needed it.” Must have worked because I was selected for 19 weeks at the Fort Holabird, MD, Army intelligence school. In our class was an Army Special Forces Major who referred to the school as a “three week course crammed into 19 weeks.” During the part of the course on available light photography, we all had a fancy Nikon and roll of film and were told to shoot it without any artificial light. One of my fellow students took 36 pictures of his wife nursing his first born and we all dutifully approved both his technique and his chutzpah. The school asked us all how far we could swim. Being naive but not stupid, I told them “about 50 feet.” Needless-to-say, I was not selected for the submarine ride from Miami to Puerto Rico to infiltrate the beaches in a 16-man raft. The Colonel who ran the school, an old “brown shoe,” selected himself to lead his “men” storming the beaches. While the submarine practiced dives on the way to Puerto Rico with the inevitable stomach churning heaves, the Colonel needed to use the head. After he finished, he glanced at the operating instructions on a metal plaque above the stool, turned a few values, and blew his deposit all over himself. Then he lurched, so the story goes, into the gangway where a crewman offered to help clean him up. But, being a Colonel and the Head of the Army Intelligence School, he quickly reasoned that he didn’t need any assistance. After gruffly dismissing the offer to help, he returned to the head, slammed the door, turned a couple of values, and did it all over again. When they got to the beaches of Puerto Rico, so the SF Major tells it, the Colonel got into the raft, in the middle like Washington crossing the Delaware, with the Major in the stern as tillerman. Unfortunately, as they went through the surf toward the beach the SF Major was supposed to somehow turn the 16 man raft around but didn't quite manage it. They got caught broadside by a wave and it dumped both raft and men upside down on the beach. The Colonel got up, moved his hand to his mouth and saw there was some blood. The SF Major thought his career was over and his knees were a little shaky. The Colonel touched his mouth again, again with the blood, stuck out his hand to the Major and said, “Damn fine landing, Major!”

There were six of us AF lieutenants in the class. We were to be interrogators in Vietnam. Toward the end of the course someone came into class and told us, no questions asked, that three of us were still going to Vietnam (12 month tour) and the other three were going to Thailand. Then they asked the three bound for Thailand whether they wanted an 18 month tour “unaccompanied” or a 3 year tour “accompanied.” I’d just gotten married (in Texas) and so I opted for the 3 year tour. Eventually, to make a long story shorter, the three year tour was cut to two years because someone figured out that we weren’t producing much “human intelligence.” We did have apartments, tennis courts, and a live-in maid but no language skills and precious little intelligence. Bangkok, however, had bath houses, a somewhat euphemistic term. After that it was a year in Japan at the “Reconnaissance Operations Center” set up after the Pueblo incident. Our job was to scramble the F-4’s at Atsugi and Misawa if the Navy got itself in trouble again. But, by the time I got there, the funding for the F-4’s had dried up and the red scramble phone was dead and gathering dust. We did, however, plot North Korean radar of the SR-71 flights over the peninsula but we weren’t supposed to know what it was we were plotting.

P.S. Ran into Mike Lushine and my cousin in Bangkok. Mike was Army Intelligence with ear phones and wouldn’t tell me anything. My cousin was a point man on Army patrols with an M-80 grenade launcher, got two purple hearts, and was medevaced to the US after the second wound. Also saw Ann Margaret at the hospital in Bangkok (just a single ha).

And the rest, as they say, is history. Buy me a few drinks and it goes on forever. Ask me about the time we were going to infiltrate the beaches of Fort McHeny from Chesapeake Bay. We had the rafts stacked four high on the deck of a really old wooden WWII PT boat, headed out in thick fog (because we had radar) and right into the side of a freighter tied up at the wharf.

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