Uncle Bill
A short story by Chalmers Benedict “Chip” Wood II
It was June, 1958, I was ten, and I had just spent four days in ancient propeller driven aircraft flying from Boston to Saigon, Vietnam. Out my window, cumulonimbus clouds stretched below to an unseen eternity, a blinding white sea of angry cotton inside a cerulean blue and white bubble. The endless drum of the plane’s four huge super-charged radial engines had long since sapped any
sensation from my exhausted body. The endless blur of the propellers outside my window drained all thoughts from my mind. Suddenly, the pilot announced our descent. This was it! In a manner forbidden in American passenger aircraft, the Air France pilot dropped the Super Constellation’s flaps and dove down through the rainy season thunderheads. We bumped and jiggled, and then roared out through a white ceiling like a B-17G in trouble and breaking cover over the Ruhr in 1944. Below us was a weirdly beautiful landscape. Blindingly bright sun-reflected green and silver rice paddies circled and wove their way across Arcadian terrain to the horizon. In places they radiated out from some terrain feature in a mysteriously mathematical pattern. Ancient religious structures dotted the countryside. Water buffalo and Asian kids in black pajamas and conical hats took little notice of us as we descended overhead on final approach.
Finally, the pilot flubbed his flare and we ricocheted down Ton Son Nhut Number One until he groaned the Connie to stop with her brakes. I giggled. He was a good Frog. He had actually let me
fly the Connie for ten seconds over the South China Sea, auto pilot actually turned off. Then he given me a really cool official plastic Air France badge which I immediately pinned on my jacket. Saigon would be our seventh home town, and third overseas hometown. The door opened and sweltering heat flooded the aircraft. My parents, who had been in Saigon for nine months, stood out on the tarmac along with our Vietnamese chauffeur, Sinh. They were dressed in tropic whites like characters in an Victorian English empire novel.
We had been separated for nine long months, and our reunion was wonderful! Sinh disappeared, and we walked through customs with a nod and a tip to the officer. Outside, a great surprise awaited. Sinh drove up in a cream-white 1957 Chevrolet Bel Aire sedan. It had a huge V-8 engine, carburetors that sounded like the typhoonic inhalations of Doom, and a special, extra-heavy-duty air conditioner. We called it “The Great White Shark.” It was, my father quietly let slip, the fastest car in Saigon. But he absolutely refused to speculate as to whether it would “lay rubber”. But I knew it could. Easily.
Outside my window, schools of bicyclists drifted past. A peasant mother held her child at arm’s length while it urinated carefully in the gutter. The streets of Saigon were flooded with Asian humanity and every form of transportation from ox carts to the British ambassador’s Rolls Royce. Apparently all the police knew our car, for they waved their slender arms and blew their golden whistles with real enthusiasm so we could motor by. Many Vietnamese smiled at us. They knew well of my Dad. Their warmth was genuine. Dad said that for the first time in many generations, thanks to the help of representatives from our farming universities, the Vietnamese were growing enough rice to feed themselves, and sell more on the global market to developing foreign exchange. I was immensely proud of him! We hastened on to my new home. The whole city seemed in a hurry. Dad said that the afternoon monsoon was due in a few minutes, and everyone was trying to get their shopping done before it hit. Apparently, so much moisture was sucked up into the atmosphere in the heat of the day that the moment the temperature
dropped even a smidgen, it all fell back down at once. This happened every day a little past three in the afternoon. At 3:16 p.m., as I stood on my new roofed porch, the heavens suddenly poured millions of gallons a second on Saigon in an infinite melody of rain. A billion tiny suns flickered through the falling droplets. Then, in a breath, it all just stopped. Steaming puddles covered the ground. The plants crackled as they visibly swelled absorbing the water. The air was amazingly refreshing, and my nose tickled with the smell of vegetation so fat, bold, and healthy that it seemed Vietnam its great kingdom, and we humans just tiny visitors. Dad had been sent to Vietnam by Eisenhower and both Dulles Brothers. His mission was to try and avoid the looming war there through Ho Chi Minh’s “people� via the King of Cambodia, and maybe even start the wheels turning towards normalizing our relations with China.
That summer I got my first job: flying model airplanes for the government VNAF as part of an aviation education program.
Every weekend hundreds of Vietnamese families came to our site to gawk at let their children learn about the mysteries of flying.
We even visited Ankor Watt in Cambodia.
That first evening of my arrival in ‘58, Dad invited his personal CIA friend to dinner so he could give an informal briefing about Vietnam, what to expect, and what to do & not do. He was very neat with a real bow tie, a calm and very clear voice, penetrating
eyes, and the manners of a past master and international diplomat. He was a good man. I called him “Uncle Bill”, and our liaison became a fact of my like.
We last met in his law Office in April, 1995. During the war in Vietnam, his programs had been my private diplomatic cover for my missions. We were subdued. Dad had been murdered in 1991. I asked him if it was possible for him to help obtain anything of the $1,000,000.00 in royalties owed me by Robert Hall Weir and the ‘Grateful Dead’ band. I had created those properties in 1963, and entrusted into Weir’s care that June as a cold war psychological operation. The Dead’s mission was to defeat Stalin’s Soviet dream with our dream and prevent nuclear war. It had succeeded at that while evolved from music to drugs. In 1976 its leader Jerome John Garcia had offered me unlimited drug money to launder by running for congress. He refused to give me a penny in the cash owned me, even though he later confirmed that I had created their artistic, business, and investment properties through Weir. Uncle Bill was not surprised. I told Uncle Bill I wanted to start some schools in Vietnam and China. A year later Uncle Bill was murdered.
I remember him
William Egan Colby, 1944, Operation Jedburgh WWII, OSS, Europe. 1920 ~ 1996
RIP And Dad.
Chalmers Benedict “Ben” Wood Sr. 1918 ~ 1991
RIP