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From Jay Ball

............it's fall quarter 1965, I'm coming back to campus haloed with anticipation at the fact that I, me, Jay Ball, God's gift to women, aviation and all things cool, will not be going back to that stupid 2nd floor roommate with the coca cola glasses named Tommy whatever, who never said anything, who lived inside books, living vicariously, given to a level of "neatness" that I did not yet know the term for, who probably was shot in Viet Nam (probably by someone in his own unit) with his obnoxious behavior..........no more, no.  I was coming back to school in a corvette, pulling a Harley Davidson and my roommates were going to be my roomies and WERE we GOING TO GIT SOME! ...........Jackson courts Apartments had just opened, Heaven would have been just as good a name, Up stairs, balcony view of the back side of campus, we were ready,.......pockets full of that good green Bible Selling money and off to the Leggers to get some beer..........later that Sunday night, my fingers are bleeding from playing Money and What I Say, and the girls and the beer flowed like molasses down while the moon said come and get me and life was good, God was in his Heaven and we were in Jackson Courts and my first call was to Suzanne, a sure thing but more like a buddy Love, not in the guy buddy, but just a real "buddy" that didn't give you no shit, she just walked through the bead strung "curtain" that led to my room with two glasses of red wine and two lit Winstons in her mouth and kicked the door closed with her foot and grinned through the smoke.............oh what a night...............the form God gave her silhouetted against the black light and almost bounced off the Beatles poster on the otherwise naked wall, the anticipation in my blood rose with her every step as she moved, no glided towards my already naked self, propped up on the pillow that my grandmother had hand sewn the shams for.......and life was good...

 

.............in another world Capt. John Smith was auto rotating his disabled Huey towards the hot LZ, flying without power in auto rotate to flare mode to whatever awaited him.  Soon he would know as the gooks came crawling over the ridge near the small beach on the Mekong, seconds before the F105s pulled a balls out napalm drop on the ridge.  Crispy commie, the best kind.  He would live to fly another day and the golden bb that had caught the hydraulic feed line that cut the cable to his hydraulic oil feed on the fully articulated rotor head. 
    "Nice piece of flyin," came over the Clark headset as the 105 did a victory roll and full pn1 straight up climb to avoid the remaining gooks ak ak fire, leveled off at 4,000 to look at the heads up display long enough to detect a sam launch, deploy the aluminum chaff that would hopefully fool the sam and dove straight for the Mekong river, leveling off 50 feet above the water, where the worst problem might be a bird strike. 
 
Two different worlds, two worlds that would later collide in a renewed friendship at West Georgia College.  Hey, we all got our scars. And I, Jay Ball, have mine.
 
Jay Ball
 

                               

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