The Great Muckrock and Rosie

The next day, she was doing a Saigon turn, flying from Taiwan to Saigon and returning to Hong Kong, for a two night layover. How in the hell would I get to Hong Kong? The answer to that was simple, swim if I had to. I caught a Cathey Pacific Flight, no orders, no passport, no nothing, but horny determination and a verbal ok to be away from the base for a few days.
I was waiting at the Kowloon Sheraton Hotel when she checked in and just sat there and watched her read the note I had left for her. She smiled. I went up to the room and waited, giving her time to check in.
We spent two of the most romantic nights in my early life alone Hong Kong. The first night, when we got back to her room, she sat down on the bed. When a woman sat, in the short short skirts they wore at that time, the skirt generally pulled up high enough that there wasn’t much left to the imagination. I was virtually hypnotized. Remember, there were no women at Phu Cat and I’d been there for almost four months since returning from R&R.
I sat down next to her, leaned over to kiss her. She moaned quietly and leaned into me. I quickly got around to touching her on one of those beautiful legs. I just slowly slid my hand up that beautiful appendage. I thought my head would explode.
All of a sudden she stood up and said, “let’s not do this.”
“Oh. Let’s not do what?”
“Let’s not wrestle for fifteen minutes getting our clothes off. Let’s just take them off and get in bed.”
God bless Sweden.
We dined one night in the Hong Kong Hilton, which had a restaurant on the top floor called the Eagles Nest or something like that. We ate there, with about twenty violins playing and I thought I was in heaven. Two days later she and her crew left.
We continued the romance as soon as I got back stateside, spending more time in a little burg known as Larkspur, just north of San Francisco, each time “leaving on a jet plane” after about two or three days together. I went on to my next assignment in Selma, Alabama. When she came down there to visit, she was a big hit with all the student pilots.
Eventually the charm of our meeting location and the initial response to San Francisco wore off. Besides there were a couple of other nice gals that I knew, one from Texas and the other from upstate New York and the whole deal got pretty jammed up. As is the case when a man tries to have it all, I wound up with nothing from the three of them but pleasant memories.
We broke up on mutual agreement, but what a week-end that was in Hong Kong.
As I sat in that seat at 23000 feet, convinced I’d never see her again, my only thought was, “What a waste.”
So there I was, no lap belt or shoulder harness buckled around me anymore, just sitting in the seat still. I remember thinking that the seat kicker wasn’t working either. The kicker is a strap that is connected to an inertial reel behind the pilots head and then runs down the back of the seat, under the pilot’s rear end and connects to the front of the seat between his legs. When that inertial reel is fired, it winds up the strap and separates the pilot from the seat.
Figuring that the seat kicker wasn’t working I thought about pushing away from the seat and started to do so when I felt the seat peel off my butt and fly away. It didn’t kick me out. It peeled the seat off me.
The air charge that fires that kicker is the same one that opened the lap belt and shoulder harness. It had continued through the tubing and fired the kicker ½ second after the belt opens. It happened a half second later or it wouldn’t have happened at all. Every thought that I described about my romance in Hong Kong and all the thoughts from when I looked down and saw that puff of smoke as the lap belt opened, happened in a half a second.
Falling down over Laos now, shoulders low, with only the parachute on my back, I remembered a story Dave Jenning had told us about how he jumped out over the ocean on another Misty Flight. As he described it, he had been hit while working in North Vietnam and decided to head for DaNang as an emergency divert . He mentioned to the man in the rear seat that he may want to think about bailing out and “bam” Dave was alone in the airplane. That man in the rear seat seriously outranked Dave.
Dave punched out. But he had been a sky diver and he regaled us with his story of the 16000 foot sky dive he accomplished.
Why not try sky diving, I thought.
I tried to roll over on my stomach and do the normal picture of sky diving and all hell broke loose. I tumbled so violently that I remember seeing red. I said “dear God get me out of this and I promise I won’t fuck with it again.” I immediately found myself in the same position as before, falling with my head low and feet high, on my back.
I didn’t fuck with it.