There is a book - a very good book - called ''The Quiet American.'' Written in the 1950s, the book says plenty about the Far East and the small circle of misery and beauty that is Southeast Asia: Vietnam, Laos, Thailand. It is a delicious book, its pages rich with the scents of dark-eyed Asian women and other exotic intrigues; afternoon whiskeys on the top floors of Saigon hotels, among them.
It is a book, finally, about a man, a government agent, a "quiet" America, and about America. Our strengths, our conceits. Our triumphs, our tragedies. America believed it would work its will in Vietnam. All would be saved in the name of the Free World and on behalf of Democracy and the Future.
The Communist, our enemies and godless men, would fail.
Or so we believed. In our hearts.
Long ago Jerry Fink was a government man, and there is still something of the government man about him. It's more cerebral than physical - an attitude, a disposition toward belief - though, truth be told, Fink's looks remain standard government-issue from those earlier times: well-scrubbed with short-cropped hair and an intensity around the eyes.
We are sitting in his downstairs den. In one corner a blue-screened computer, in the other a TV, books all around, and lining one wall framed certificates telling of a life. Shady Side Academy. Kenyon College. Harvard Law School. And more. It has been a long day, starting in the early morning. After eating lunch at a Route 30 restaurant, Teddy's (a restaurant, incidentally, which belongs to his brother's son-in-law), we have returned to Fink's home in a neighborhood above the Norwin Hills Shopping Center.
Jerry Fink, nearing 70 and the proud father of an exuberant grade school dance-student, is in a determined mood. A complex man, bright, sophisticated and worldly, he has one goal in mind: to persuade a panel calling itself the Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee to recommend to the Postal Service that a postage stamp be issued in the name and to the honor of Air America.
"If the post office can honor Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, why not us?" Fink says. "My god, those boys deserve it. They've been overlooked for so long now. They were real patriots."
Air America. Owned by the CIA, the airline ferried supplies and men throughout Southeast Asia before and during the war in Vietnam. At one time it was the world's largest air carrier, with its own commercial wing, an elaborate cover devised by "the customer", the CIA. Disbanded in 1975, it has sunk out of sight except for a movie, the Mel Gibson version of Air America, which is nothing like the real thing, Fink assures. Jerry Fink, who served as Air America legal counsel from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, scoffs when speaking of the movie. "We tried to stop it," he says. "Tried to talk to everyone."
The movie made of Air America a sort of rogue organization, an undisciplined assemblage of hell-raisers, mavericks, malcontents, swashbuckling, mercenary types. Foreign Legionnaires without consciousness, without scruples. Drug-runners, too. Fink says the drug-running never happened. Never, ever. Fink is angry; it's a controlled, nearly subterranean anger, disguised as silence. "You try to keep each and every bag of opium bopping around the Far East in those days of war off each and every Air America flight," he says finally. "It would be a miracle."
But never did an Air America pilot, all CIA boys, ferry drugs for money, for profit, for the war effort. No way. That damn movie told a lie, Fink says. A big lie. And look what we have now. San Jose Mercury story about the CIA and the sale of drugs in inner Los Angeles, to support the Contra war in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Fink tells how he read the stories on the Internet. There it was. Vietnam. CIA. Air America . Drugs. Lies, all lies. Fink eases up. A lawyer, he knows the score. Can't beat Hollywood. "Can't keep people from making their movies," he says, "lies and all."
Naturally the airline, first known as Civil Air Transport and later as Air America, was a secret. The CIA was not exactly an open book. Not when you were flying covert missions over Dien Bien Phu, during the fatal communist siege of the French there in 1954. Or when you were dropping supplies to guerrilla fighters on mainland China and in Indonesia. Air America flew over Burma, during the communist insurgency, and over the Bay of Pigs, during the failed CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba in 1961. The world was in ferment, a titanic struggle was under way pitting democracy against communism, America against the Soviet Union. And in all of this, Air America was the CIA's wings.
Fink joined the organization in 1957, exactly when the CIA was hitting its stride. He remained with Air America until 1973, until just about the very end, living for the most part on Taiwan but also traveling throughout the Far East. It was a long, wild ride, although what Fink actually did was tame enough. Air America's contracts were a mess. He straightened these out, sometimes giving his bosses fits in the process.
"Jerry, don't worry about that," they'd say insistently. And Jerry would answer, just as insistently, "Got to do it right."
The fact is the CIA leadership - the very top leadership, in the person of director Allen Dulles - didn't care much about how Air America ran. Peter Grose, who wrote a Dulles biography, said the director was a fixer, a doer, not a legal taskmaster.
In ''Gentleman Spy,'' Grose described Air America, in a single paragraph, as a "gun-and-agent running facility," started by Gen. Claire Chennault, an old China hand, after the war, to support the Nationalists' fight against the mainland Chinese Communists. From then on it was patched together. "Allen just loved the idea of owning an airline," Grose quotes one CIA operative as saying, "but he never knew a damned thing about how it was run."
As for the CIA's legal problems, Dulles chose to ignore these. Enter Jerry Fink. Over lunch at Teddy's he explained the myriad details he handled. There were offices to rent, and fuel and rice contracts to look after, and workmen compensation cases to spirit through the bureaucracy. Fink put in countless hours arranging survivors' benefits. He tells the story of Herb Strauss, an Air America pilot killed during the so-called "secret" war for Laos in the early '60s. Nearly 20 years after Strauss was lost, Fink went back to the case in an effort to right what he felt was a wrong. "It was the only (case) I felt badly about," he said. "The only one in which I thought we hadn't done right by." The government agreed, and the Strauss family received a goodly sum. It was the kind of routine work Fink did. There was never any cloak and dagger stuff; Fink was no James Bond. Just Jerry, son of Scott Fink, a longtime Greensburg attorney, doing a lawyer's job for his country.
It was a great job, but it was weird. No one told Fink about the Air America -CIA connection. Not at first anyway. Then, it seemed a good idea to let the attorney in on the secret. Yet there were thousands - the vast majority of Air America employees - who had no idea. The pilots knew but not the mechanics or the flight attendants or most of the office staff.
Those that did know never talked. That's what made it so strange, so different, Fink was saying. "We all lived in our little compartments. We never spoke to one another about what we did." He smiled. "We used to make things up to talk about." Once, seeing live ammo being loaded onto a airplane he was flying on in Laos, Fink didn't say a word. Didn't even think about saying a word. That was the rule, unspoken of course.
One of Allen Dulles' successors, William Colby, said the Air America boys knew their game, knew their profession, loved their country, and so all of them kept silent. Remarkable. All those pilots, all those packets of rice kicked off planes, all those refugees picked up and ferried cross country, all those perilous landings on and off mountain ridges, 3,000 feet high.
And all the dead. 242 pilots and others. Lost and missing or otherwise gone. And not a word. Not one peep. Colby called them, living and dead, "the secret soldiers of the Cold War. ... They did a superb job. But the cost was high."
After leaving Air America in '73, Fink returned, for a while, to the family farm house above Route 30. "I never thought I'd stay in the Far East," he explained. "Some guys fall in love with the place. I loved it, but I knew I'd never live there forever. I always knew I'd come home."
Sixteen years in the Far East taught him plenty, or so he thought. But what was this⢠The war which had defined his life was discredited at home. The old assumptions, the time-worn Cold War truths, were under attack. Yet Fink remained unshaken. He was dead-on convinced the United States had fought the good fight in Vietnam. The war, despite what everyone was saying, had not been one big, god-awful mistake. On the contrary, it had been necessary. The dominoes were real enough; the idea that if Vietnam fell all of Southeast Asia would be easy pickings for the communists - that was true.
Fink blamed Richard Nixon and his "Kraut" secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, for the coming debacle. He ruminated a lot during this period. Just think of the good that had been done, the rice delivered to half-starved villagers . Air America had teamed with AID, the U.S. Agency for International Development. Hadn't AID done a wonderful job⢠Bastard communists killed, pillaged. Not AID. No Vietnamese farmer ever wanted because of AID. So Fink was puzzled. Truly puzzled. But like a good soldier, he never doubted and was never confused.
Even today Fink harbors no doubts about the appropriateness of the American role in Southeast Asia. You feel it in his eyes and his tone of voice, in his physical bearing when he talks about the subject. Fink feels deeply that freedom was under attack in Vietnam and it was America to the rescue. "Freedom and democracy, that's what it's all about," he said.
Uundoubtedly there's something fraternal about Fink's Air America allegiance. Once, addressing comrades at the dedication of an Air America memorial in McDermott Library at the University of Texas-Dallas, he eulogized the dead and missing, saying that "many misguided people speak out against, and will continue to speak out against, the type of activity for which our fellow employees gave their lives. (But) our actions will ensure that each name (on the memorial) serves as an inspiration to future generations, (for) each name stands as a tribute to freedom."
All of this brings us to the point Jerry Fink was trying to make at the start of the day. Heroism. Patriotism. The Air America postage stamp.
Picture a chopper. With its blades spinning, it sits atop a building in downtown Saigon. The time is April 1975. And the game is up. The war lost. Ascending a ladder, like ants, a procession of Vietnamese. The camera is too far away to pick out faces. There is one recognizable figure, however. On the small rooftop a bent figure of a man, his right arm outstretched. An Air America man.
Elsewhere in Saigon on this day there is pandemonium, Marines poking rifle butts into ribs to ward off those who can not be fitted aboard the choppers taking off from the U.S. Embassy grounds. It is a terrible reminder of all that has gone wrong: America's helpers being left behind. Within hours all will come under the yoke of the Viet Cong, the communists, the enemy. But not these people advancing up a flimsy, slightly sagging stairway to the Air America helicopter. When others were cutting and running, Air America was doing its job. The one it was sent to do. So the Air America boys are heroes. That's the message Jerry Fink delivers in his slightly husky voice. "They were all volunteers, they all loved what they were doing, and they were professionals," Jerry says.
In the '70s and '80s, this idea of a postage stamp would have been a pipe dream. But times change. A newer perspective. The Cold War was won. Who could have imagined that in April 1975⢠"Victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan."
An Air America Association press release says: "This picture could have been taken hundreds of times from 1947 to 1975, all over Southeast Asia, as thousands of refugees, downed U.S. military pilots, and countless others were saved by civilian pilots who performed these acts voluntarily. They neither received, nor requested, any recognition.
"... An Air America stamp ... would commemorate the effort performed by civilians pilots in Southeast Asia, and serve as a symbol of the continued vigilance necessary to preserve our freedom."
Things come full circle, don't they⢠Only now, the fly boys are out in the open. Fly, Air America , fly.
The Air America Association suggests letters of support be sent to: Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee, c/o Stamp Management, U.S. Postal Service, 475 L'Enfant Plaza SW, Room 4474E, Washington, D.C. 20260-2437. Air America Association, Inc. is located at P.O. Box 1522, Castorville, Texas 78009.
Richard Robbins writes for the Tribune-Review.
