Fleet Lentz - A Backseat View from the Phantom

This book is my memoir of one calendar year, September 1972 to September 1973, when I served a tour in the Southeast Asia campaign as a young Marine aircrewman, new to war. Based at the Royal Thai Air Force Base in Nam Phong, Thailand, we called it The Rose Garden. My year coincided with the official end of the war in Vietnam in January 1973 but also included combat flying in Laos and Cambodia after that official end in Vietnam. By late September 1973, it was all finally over. I returned to the world.

No one, to my knowledge, has written of the Marine aviation effort during those final months. I wanted to record my experience, our experience, so that what we did there under the orders of our government and out of whatever sense we had of patriotism or duty would not fall through the cracks of history.

In the fine recent documentary The Vietnam War: A Film by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, which touched briefly on the wars end, the Marines at The Rose Garden were not mentioned. The Marine aviation effort in those months was not mentioned at all. It became clear to me that my part of the war was unknown, almost forgotten. But good men flew there, some died there, and their contributions deserve acknowledgment.

The book is personal. It is not about politics or really even about big-picture history. We had neither time nor resources to keep up with what was going on politically. As the year unfolded, our news source was the Stars and Stripes newspaper, which was a week old when we got it, if we got it. But we knew our missions and executed them, living hop to hop.It is not an academic work. I do not include notes or a bibliography. I have read widely about military history and Marine history, though, and have included (Appendix G) a short list of some of the books that have been interesting or important to me and have no doubt influenced my perspective.

I write as a Marine with a 31-year tenure, which I ended with the rank of colonel. The book is about Marines, my job as a radar intercept officer (RIO), and our daily lives, including what we did to stay human. The book roughly follows this order: Entry into my new world, breaking in, notable combat hops and times, comments on secondary jobs we all held, my transfer to a higher echelon while still stationed in The Rose Garden, the retrograde or pullout, and noteworthy people and timessome outlandish, some somber. In the final chapter and epilogue, I reflect on lessons that I learned from my combat experience and on two trips back to Vietnam long after my war year was finished. Perhaps those trips were when my processing of my war year really began.

I wrote primarily from memory, which has served me particularly well. I have always had a decent ability to remember detail. While I was in Thailand in 19721973, my only writing was letters home to family and friends. There were no journals to draw from. In writing this book my best resource material included consultations with my own Aviators Flight Logs, the VMFA-115 19721973 Silver Eagles Cruise Book (much like a high school yearbook), queries to the U.S. Marine Corps Historical Division, and numerous conversations with other men who were also stationed at The Rose Garden during my year. Many of them I am still in touch with today.

Of course, my memory has occasional glitches. I have done my best to be accurate. I regret any mistakes or omissions. They are my own and unintentional.

My memoir is definitely a work of nonfiction but I have chosen to write it using, in some instances, the style of the story-teller , including dialogue, indicated by quotation marks. The situations, though certainly based on my own impressions, are as accurate as I can make them and the dialogue is probably pretty accurate as well. Though I cant guarantee it is 100 percent accurate, I can guarantee that it conveys the gist, tone and spirit as much as almost 50 years distance allows. Ive used italics liberally not only for emphasis but also to denote military slang and written and thought remembrances, as opposed to the spoken dialogue.

I have referred to the people in this memoir not by name but by title, callsign or nickname. Some of the callsigns are real; some, I made up. The people mentioned will know who they are but their identities are protected, whether they really need to be or not.

I have several audiences. Of course, my fellow Marines and other Vietnam-era combatants. Their friends and families who may want to know more than they currently do about what happened over there . Readers interested in this often-troubling era in our countrys history. And the broader audience who simply may like good stories, tinged with both darkness and humor. Ive tried to define and explain with the non-military audiences in mind without being condescending to my military audience. The appendices are included in that spirit.

The people stationed at The Rose Garden were young Marines living and flying together in high stress situations. Without being gratuitous, I sometimes use the language, including the profanity and what I see now as sexist language, that we used then. Not to do so seemed to me to be inauthentic. I hope the language is not too offensive to the reader.

That year was a long time ago but it lives on. Seems like last week.

Semper Fidelis.