monkeyplus1

one reason I loves GTA:SA. aircraft.

In San Andreas, if you pimp shit right, you can buy an airfield that has 2 hangars, 2 helipads, and a mega-hangar (not quite big enough to stuff an airliner in, though).

I made this video (and accompanying monkeyplus1 track) for the joy of air to air combat.

here, I went for style points. the vertical take off, air-to-air kills.

notice the flaps and gear down for slow-speed turns to get the target sighted, teetering on the edge of a stall.

the best shot came from teasing the surface-to-air missiles (SAMs) from the Area-51 inspired military base.

Pulling up into a loop at the last second, seeing them arc harmlessly skyward under my belly.

Dodging billboards on low-altitude fly-by through the casino city.

Let me remind the viewer, if they don’t already know, death comes easily and suddenly at such high speeds.

btw, this is a really OLD video.

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In other news, I registered

www.purebrown.com

to release my music output that doesn’t fall in with the monkey plus one sound. I’ve got most of my tracks up there, including the Automatic cover.

My wife gave me some flak for naming it “pure brown” saying that it was too self-deprecating, since one makes the association BROWN = SHIT.

I immediately disputed that. 14 years ago, “Pure Brown” was a hypothetical name a friend of mine suggested for a mix-tape his roommate made, which I’d thought would make a good name for a noisy band, and the “Brown” was only partially a reference to dookie.

But in it’s original context, Brown had significantly different (non-anal) connotations.

Maybe I’ll change it later, but for now, I need SOMETHING to call it. If people think it’s PooPoo Brown, so be it.

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I was practicing on my bass guitar, trying miserably to play along with various songs, when my wife asked to raid my music library as she was making a compilation CD of popular 80s music for a friend.

I ran across “Automatic” by the Pointer Sisters, that I used to bump while driving around Vice City. Of course I’d remembered hearing on the radio when I was a little kid, too.

While she was listening to it, I picked out the notes on my bass, and later had a Gritty Moment.

Gritty says things that just pop into his mind, “YOU KNOW WHAT WOULD BE COOL?!!” he says, about to assplode from enthusiasm. What he usually says after that pronouncement is usually something so random that nobody even ventures to guess what he’s thinking. Not all of his ideas are bad, but they’re rarely ever something he can, or will, follow up on.

While dozing off, I thought it would be cool to do a slow, shoegazing cover of “Automatic”.

I still had the idea in my head the next morning, figured doing something (even if it’s so-so) is better than just talking about doing something. And so…

Automatic (covered by mp1) MP3

I should also note that after scouring the internets, I’m fairly sure this the only rock cover of Automatic.

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another video from the depths of my computer, this is the Sprockettes, an all-girl minibike dance group, performing at the Multnomah County Bike Fair in Southeast Portland.

I’d originally met some of these girls zoobombing, but like anything, their line up has changed over the years.

Sadly, the video quality sucks big time on this, it’s very over-exposed so much of the color got washed out.

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I was getting dressed at the gym, after an easy workout and soak in the spa, and a man sitting on the bench next to me noticed my pants.

“Those Army pants?” he asked.

He’s in his mid 60s, bald on top, seeming to take his time getting dressed.

“Yeah, BDUs. I love them.” This particular pair is the Army’s current desert digital camouflage, and judging from his stare, he’s never seen the pattern up close.

He shakes his head, “We just had plain old fatigues when I was in the Army, even though some units were just starting to wear camo”.

“What’d you do in the Army?”

“I flew helicopters.”

“Vietnam?” I ask. I mean, he’s the right age, hopefully it’s a good guess.

“Yup.”

“No kidding! What kind of mission did you fly?”

“Medevac.” (These days called casevac, casualty evacuation).

“Where in country?”

“II Corps.” He looks at me, aware I wasn’t even born when he flew there. But I nod knowingly, and ask “Pleiku?”

His eyes brighten, “Yup” and rattles off the names of a dozen or so camps in the II Corps region. Military jurisdiction in the war separated the small country of South Vietnam into 4 zones, called Corps. I Corps (pronounced “eye core”) bordered the Northern DMZ, the no-man’s zone between North and South.

“Huey?” I ask, though it’s a dumb question. At the time, it was the only helicopter that could realistically do medevac.

“Yup.”

“Charlie model?”

“No, H-model.”

“Ah, lots more horsepower.”

“Yeah, but we still had a lot of Charlie models being used as gunships, and they had a hard time getting off the ground fully loaded with their ammo cans.”

We got to talking in this vein, on the subject of horsepower, said that there were times where even the H models had a hard time getting airborne. He’d had to hover into a hole in the trees to get down to some LRRPs (pronounced “Lurps”, long range recon patrols), pulled pitch and the rotor RPM started dipping into the red zone, forcing him to set it back down before the whole ship fell. He made one of the men get off the helicopter until the last second, which the man was not too happy about, and then clawed his way out of the hole.

I mention having read that helicopters don’t get transitional lift (when they bite into undisturbed air) unless they’re moving in one direction. Every little detail like this I mention just lights up his face.

I ask if he still flies. He said after getting shot down 20 times, and living through it, he quit the Army after his tour, and flew for an Alaskan airline. In the mid 70s, he made an emergency landing at 200 knots, and somehow didn’t have a single broken bone in his body. He was sent to the hospital, where he had a stroke five hours later, paralyzing his left arm.

“That ended my flying career.”

I notice his left arm is positioned uselessly, swollen, and realize that’s why it was taking him so long. But he was all grins, saying he was a lucky son of a bitch to be alive after all that.

I ask if he’d ever thought of going back to visit Vietnam now. He says he’s been back 8 times, and that they love Americans, it’s a beautiful country and very cheap. Flying there is the expensive part.

He said he’d just fallen in love with Vietnamese culture, the food, the people, the country, and in his travels there has made a lot of friends from Hanoi to Saigon. Mentally, I thought it was interesting he still called it Saigon, since after the fall of South Vietnam, it was renamed Ho Chi Minh city. Perhaps calling it Saigon was a way to avoid thinking about the sad way that war ended.

He said he travels with a good friend he met there that speaks both English and Vietnamese, and who is somewhat of a celebrity in Vietnam for being a lounge singer. He mentioned the only thing that he didn’t like was that when they stayed in a town where the man’s family lived, they would come around every day for money. To them, we Americans are exceedingly wealthy, and should be willing to hand them money. He said it was all fine and good, but never once did they say thank you. It was just something they expected.

Now, I’m sure there are people out there who say, “oh yeah, I was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam”, who are completely full of shit. But this guy seemed genuine, and certainly had all the details right.

In the end, I figure he was wondering how I knew all this stuff, and I mentioned that I’ve read every memoir I can find written by aviators of any kind in the Vietnam war, including helicopter pilots and crew. I just even happened to have a book in my bag I pulled out, “Vietnam from the Treetops: A Forward Air Controller Reports” by John F. Flanagan.  “I just love reading about this stuff,” I say.

He asks if I’ve read “Chickenhawk”.

“Robert Mason, yup, that’s a good one.”  Probably the most well-known book written by a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. At least, that’s the one I see everywhere. It’s a good one, but certainly not my favorite.

He says he met Mason and his wife, who now go around the country to veteran’s hospitals, counseling soldiers with PTSD.

“Post-traumatic stress disorder,” I say, just to reaffirm I still know what he’s talking about.

“You in the Guard?” he asks.

I laugh. “No, these are my gardening pants. Tough as hell, rarely tear, I love them.”

I leave it at that, don’t want to tell a guy who is probably a true fucking hero, risked his life many times to pull wounded men out of hot LZs, why I didn’t join. Growing up under a hard-assed veteran, the military life was no place for me.

Hopefully, I’ll run across him later, maybe get him to tell me some of his stories.

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