The office of the Camden and Spearfish Lake Railroad was in the old passenger and freight terminal on the south side of town. The railroad mostly used just the offices in one end of the building; the other half, the old passenger waiting room, was basically not used at all. It was little changed since the last passenger train had left Spearfish Lake thirty years before, and still had old D&O railroad posters, and long, hard wooden benches dating from a century before.
In recent years, George Lindquist from the Spearfish Lake Historical Society had worked on Bud to allow the society to set up a display on the history of railroading in the area, mostly as something of a tourist attraction, and Bud didn’t mind. Some volunteers from the society had cleaned out the dust of decades, and started preparations for the display to be installed in the spring, but activities were moribund for the winter. It made a good place to accumulate and organize the gear for the expedition.
It was in the old rail terminal that the members of the expedition met just after Thanksgiving. “Anybody see the news the last couple of days?” Gil asked needlessly.
“Yep, January 15 deadline,” Ryan said. “Anybody think Big George will put it off much after that?”
“Till about 2 AM Baghdad time,” Gil snorted. “He won’t have anything to gain by waiting, and lots to gain if he tells them he’s coming, and when, and they can’t do anything about it.”
“Might make it a little hot for the guys flying downtown,” Bud observed.
“Yeah, for the guys, but it won’t bother the cruise missiles much,” Mark said. “The one thing I see pretty clear is that he won’t go before the fifteenth. I take that to mean we’re probably still good to go on schedule.”
“That’s how I read it,” Bud agreed. “I know we talked about maybe Gil and Steve and me and possibly Mike staying on past the twelfth if we don’t find anything. I think unless we’ve got a real hot lead, we’d better be out of there on schedule, all of us.”
“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “If we’ve got that hot a lead, we’ll still have some time left on the visas for a few of us to go back a third time. If not later in the spring, then some other time, even if it takes years again. But, I’ll bet if things quiet down, in a year two or three of us could walk into Bangkok and get thirty day visas for the asking.”
“If that’s the case, why not put it off, just to be safe?” Mike asked.
“Mostly because we’ve put it off for so long already,” Gil told him. “Any delay now probably means a year, and there’s no guarantee Steve is right that we can get visas in the future. It’s not as good a hole as we’d hoped for, but it looks like the best we’re going to get. But, just to be sure, does anybody have any objections to going now, and all of us leaving the country on or before the planned departure date?”
No one spoke up. After a few seconds, he said, “Well, all right. It’s a go like we planned, I guess. Any outstanding issues?”
“I’m not sure if it’s an outstanding issue,” Ryan said, “But the EMT test is the 15th, and I’m obviously not going to be able to take the test. Wouldn’t have the card for a week or so after that, anyway.”
“So long as you have the knowledge, the card is secondary,” Gil said. “The Viets aren’t going to ask you for it. Is the medical gear ready?”
“About as ready as I can make it,” Ryan said. “Broad spectrum, but slanted toward major trauma, intestinal problems, and heat injury. I brought the last of it tonight, including some prescription stuff my doctor came up with for us. But, it’s really just emergency supplies. We don’t have the stuff and I don’t have the knowledge to do an all-out MEDCAP, but I could do some minor stuff if it became absolutely necessary.”
“Well, we weren’t planning on offering it,” Gil agreed. “But you never know. Bud, what’s the food situation?”
“Still waiting on a shipment from Mountain House,” Bud reported. “If it doesn’t show up by the middle of the week, Mark and I are going to make a fast trip to Camden and Decatur if we have to, and clean out the backpacking shops looking for substitutes.”
“Nothing we can do locally?”
“No,” Bud said, “Unless we want to pay a big weight and volume penalty.”
“Well, it’s your call,” Gil said. “Mark, where are we on gear?”
“Good shape, Gil,” Mark reported. “There’s a couple items outstanding, but they’re not priority items, and we could go without if we had to. We’ve still got a few days. Everything else has been taken out of the packages and checked to make sure it’s all there, and it works. I’m still figuring on a packing bee a week from Saturday. Bud and I are going to sort food into daily rations on Friday, but we don’t want a lot of people here for that. It could get confusing.”
“It’ll probably be bad enough on Saturday,” Gil snorted. “Anything else?”
“Yeah, personal items for the bags. Keep it to thirty pounds, no more. If you have something small and heavy or something you absolutely don’t want to lose, put it in your carry-on. That’s only limited by what you can jam in it, but you can only have one. I did some rethinking on the packing. What I want to do is to split up everything as much as possible between several bags. No more than one day’s food per bag, for example. No more than one tent to a bag. Personal stuff, split between at least two bags, and so on. That way, if one of the airlines loses a bag, we only lose a day’s food, and someone doesn’t get to change underwear as often as they might like. That’s going to make the packing very confusing. I thought about just limiting it to Bud and me, but we are just going to need more hands to do everything.”
“You and Bud are just going to have to be in charge and keep the rest of us from goofing up,” Gil said.
“We’re going to have to do a fairly careful inventory,” Mark said. “Or we’re going to waste a hell of a lot of time looking in bag seventeen for something that’s in bag eleven. Once we get base camp set up, it’ll simplify things a lot, and we can do some reorganizing, but I figure time spent here is time we won’t waste there.”
The packing session went better than expected, since Mark and Bud had taken a lot of time during the week to get things organized before the mob descended. All of the gear was packed into a collection of twenty old Army duffel bags, some from a surplus store catalog, but a few of which had been to Vietnam many years before and were now donated to the cause. Each of the twenty bags was painted with a huge number in pink spray paint, just to make them more noticeable and keep them straight.
With Mark overseeing things, and Binky and Bud marking checklists, they were done by mid-afternoon with less confusion than they’d feared. Finally, the last bag was packed and stacked with a pile of others in the middle of the old railroad depot.
“Looks like quite a pile,” Harold commented. “But, it really isn’t that much.”
“It better be about all we need,” Gil said. “It’s going to have to hold us. I just hope we haven’t forgotten anything we need.”
“If we have, it won’t be for the lack of trying,” Ryan said. “Think about how many times we’ve been over those gear lists.”
“It better be enough,” Mark said. “I can think of other stuff we could have taken, but it starts getting into weight. On the other hand, we’re going to be more comfortable than the last time most of us were in the field there.”
“Yeah,” Steve agreed. “At least we don’t have to carry M-16s and ammo this trip.”
Heikki and Heidi Toivo came to wish them well as they gathered at the railroad station early on the morning of December 15. Heidi wasn’t looking well, more frail than ever, but the Toivos wished everyone luck and asked them to be careful.
Shortly afterward, a small convoy of cars and minivans left Spearfish Lake for the Camden airport. George Webb drove the Record-Herald’s circulation van, which was pressed into service to carry the gear. The people were packed into four cars, carrying the eight leaving from Spearfish Lake, all the wives and a number of kids, including Mike and Kirsten’s three, and Steve and Binky’s two, Tabitha and Hunter, who would be staying with Kirsten while their parents were gone.
It didn’t take long at the Camden airport. There were some tearful good-byes, more wishes of luck, and then the eight went down the boarding ramp, and were off to Vietnam.
They met Rod in Chicago, after he’d flown in from Denver. They hadn’t seen him since Labor Day, when they’d had one last archaeological session and a lot of trip preparation. Rod added two more bags, one of personal gear, and one of excavating equipment and other useful tools.
The flight over the Atlantic made for a short night into the oncoming sunrise, but most of them knew to sleep as much as they could. They didn’t see much of Frankfurt – the first time in Europe for several of them – and soon were on another Lufthansa jet, heading much farther to the east.
About the only notable thing on the flight to Bangkok came not quite half-way through, when it was announced they were detouring over what had not long before been the southern part of the Soviet Union to avoid the war zone in the Persian Gulf. “That’s really weird,” Gil pointed out. “Here we are, on a German jet, flying over Russia, on the way to Vietnam, avoiding yet another war.”
“Things have changed,” Harold said.
“Yeah,” Gil mused, glancing out the window in the general direction of the south. “I got a letter from Dennis not long before we left. I’d written to tell him we were heading back for one last look, and you know, he told me Bob Marley is down south there somewhere.”
“Our Bob? The one who went through Target One?”
“Yeah,” Gil said. “He’s Command Sergeant Major of some battalion in the 504th, God bless ‘em. Still jumping out of airplanes, after all these years.”
“Are they going to fight?” Mike asked from the row behind.
“Unless Saddam backs down,” Gil said. “Mark my words, be watching TV about 2 AM Iraq time on the fifteenth, and watch all hell break loose.”
“Jeez, another war,” Steve said. “And, here we are, on the way to clean up loose ends from the last one.”
“Yeah,” Bud said. “I hope no one has to do something like we’re doing after this one.”