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Reflections on Vietnam: Learning through the eyes of veterans

Joseph Barkoff, Sports & Photo Editor February 24, 2015

Private First Class Bruce Thompson, 10 Cavalry Buffalo Soldiers, proudly received a letter around Thanksgiv- ing 1967 from President Lyndon B. Johnson. The letter said “greetings” and informed Thompson to report for induction into the Army Dec. 7.

After completing basic training and jump school, Thompson went home for Christmas and broke his jaw. With his injury he could no longer make the jump out of an airplane, so he was re-assigned to tank school.

In the Navy Hospital in New York with a broken jaw. Thompson was surrounded by 800 broken Marines, home from Vietnam. He remembers telling his girlfriend he would never be like them. He was in the Army; it was different.

Thompson, like a lot of young men and women, was drafted into service for the ongoing Vietnam con ict, with no idea of the personal repercussions of war, or the unwelcome response he and other vets would receive upon their homecoming.

“Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.” That is the motto worn on t-shirts, bumper stickers and in the hearts of all who had the unfortunate experience of witnessing the Vietnam War.

That motto is perpetuated in Jill Kelly-Moore’s humanities course on American culture in which she immerses students in a debate that has raged on campus for 10 years now. The debate has been going on for longer, but Kelly-Moore brings a unique experience for every student brave, lucky and caring enough to engage in it.

“I do it for them [the veterans],” Kelly-Moore said. “It is the vets’ show, and the students must participate.”

Kelly-Moore split the class in half. One side is pro-war, one is anti-war and, for the purposes of the class, the student’s actual feelings don’t matter. Like any debate or critical thinking process, students must research their assigned tasks with the goal to present the delegated side of the argument.

It’s a unique educational experience because, unlike any other part of the curriculum, real Vietnam veterans judge the debate.

In the weeks before the debate, the veterans spend a class period sharing their experiences about the war and their trip back home after their own one-year tour.

Kelly-Moore’s exercise helps both parties involved. The vets bene t by being able to speak about their plight and the students learn from the vets’ rst-hand experiences the truth of war. Both bene t because the injustice is shared, like a burden, but a burden of knowledge granting those involved the wisdom to not careen down the same path and repeat history.

For the vets, every new branch of memories and experiences they share with students is a release that lightens the load they carry.

“In basic training, we used to march to the beer hall. In Airborne AIT we would jog to the beer hall, and in tank training we used to take the beer with us,” Thompson said, offering a brief moment of levity before reading from the Field Manual the de nition of his new home.

A “free re zone” is a little place in hell. The manual states a free re zone ”is an American military term used to designate and de ne a geographical area in which all life is considered the enemy. Any humans or animals in this zone are fair game for all of the organic weapons of the U.S. Armed Forces, and are destroyed immediately upon detection. Plant and marine life are also considered hostile and subject to repeated defoliation by Agent Orange and other toxic chemicals.”

Early in his tour, sitting atop his APC, Thompson saw a Vietnamese man get up and run from cover. He took aim, followed the target and did what he was trained to do. “Bam! You could almost see the bullet go. Hit the guy in the back as he’s running and his arms go out and his head goes back and he plops down on the ground. He bounced once,” Thompson said.

If the man was Viet Cong, Thompson’s platoon would nd his AK-47 ri e laying where he ran from. If he was a farmer just trying to sneak back into his ancestral homeland, the platoon would nd nothing. The 10th Caval- ry would still place an AK ri e next to the dead Vietnamese man and take a Polaroid. They were to document every kill they made. The war was about body count, Thompson explained.

To make camp in the free re zone, the squad would all re their weapons facing out in a circle for a minute, ceasing at the same moment to see if anyone was ring back. If not, they would send out two men in each direc- tion with a walkie-talkie and instructions to signal on the radio every hour, on the hour.

One night, an hour came and went without so much as a chirp from one of the sentries. The squad mustered and headed off to nd its comrade. What they found was a bloody foot barely attached to a boot, and a blood trail heading into the jungle. The trail was speci cally left for the GIs to follow. They knew this, Thompson said, because every few feet there was a new body part and more of the blood trail.

The squad made it halfway to their comrade, “Blondie” as they called him, and they radioed in another platoon to take over the search because this was their man. The second platoon found an arm, a leg, an arm and a leg.

“The last thing they found was Blondie’s head sitting in a crook of a tree with his manhood hanging out of his mouth, his eyes open as big as a human being could open his eyes because they had castrated him and done this

to him while he was alive,” Thompson said.

The rst time Thompson was wounded in Vietnam was May 31, 1968. His tank hit a mine, and the four crew- members were bleeding from every ori ce that could leak blood. With concussions, the crew limped their tank with the hatches open back to a friendly Landing Zone [LZ] that the intel said was safe. Thompson and his tankmates were left alone while the working platoon went off on a pressing matter. What they didn’t know was the Viet Cong watched Thompson and his other three tankmates from the bush.

Assuming it was safe because their captain said so, the crew cracked a beer and sat on their tank. Suddenly, from the bush came a Rocket Propelled Grenade [RPG]. It ew over their heads.

The second RPG landed between Thompson’s best friend’s legs and blew up. It blew all four men into the
air, and one guy they never saw again. Though peppered with shrapnel, Thompson was hit at so the shrap-
nel burned his leg instead of taking it off. He looked over at his friend Mack. Mack’s right arm was gone at
the elbow, his left leg gone below the knee. His jaw was gone too, and Thompson could see white things and tendons going a mile a minute, because Mack was trying to talk to him. Thompson looked up and saw another RPG being aimed at them, when all of a sudden, he heard “Whoop whoop whoop,” the unmistakable sound of a Huey chopper and the gunner working his M-60 to take out the VC next to Thompson’s tank, while kicking out C-rations (the predecessors of MREs, “meals-ready-to-eat”).

Everyone who made it onto the chopper lived, including Mack. Thompson didn’t get on the chopper. He stayed on the ground and moved with a squad to the closest rebase, where he was designated to be sent back to the States to recover from his injuries.

Thompson said he gave away his M-16, ammo and rations, but held onto his .45 pistol, in preparation to leave. Suddenly the Viet Cong overran the base. A woman VC armed with an AK-47 charged and red at Thompson in his machine gun nest. She had it set to automatic re, instead of single shot. The shots rode up and only hit Thompson once in the leg, a through-and-through, and he unloaded four rounds into her, killing her. He tried to crawl over her to get out of the bunker but, through her blood and his, there was nowhere to go. He lay still next to her in a pool of blood, facedown with his pistol held cocked under his own chin, just in case he was discov- ered.

The VC overran the base and went to search for survivors. Thompson recalls hearing the VC nd a GI. “I never imagined a human able to make those sounds, but I never imagined listening to someone be skinned alive,” he said.

A 2012 report from the of ce of Veterans Affairs estimates that an average of 22 vets commit suicide a day. More than 8,000 veteran suicides a year are con rmed and it is nearly impossible to track all of the deaths. Overdoses, accidents, single occupant vehicle collisions are all examples of deaths that are dif cult to determine intent.

In 1967, Specialist Anthony Tate, originally from Chicago, found himself in court at age 17. The judge offered him a choice, jail or the army. For Tate, it was an easy choice to make.

“Do you want me to sugarcoat this, or drop is like it’s hot?” Tate began his presentation to Kelly-Moore’s class. A warning, given with a smile, readily accepted by the class to “drop it like it’s hot.”

Tate continued, divulging a brief jump ahead in time with his grocery list of degrees. One AA in early child- hood development, two bachelors’ in sociology and psychology and a master’s degree in rehabilitation counsel- ing. He knows how to make a point.

“Did I hide? Yeah, 40 years. I didn’t tell a soul I was a Vietnam Vet,” Tate admitted.

A product of the projects, Tate was no stranger to survival. He fought his way to school past three gangs in three different projects, to ght during recess against alley kids. Seeing someone fall from a 14-story project or shot on the street was not alien to him.

Yet Chicago did not prepare him to ght 5-year-olds strapped with explosives on their chests or shooting from between their mother’s legs in the rice paddy. Every Vietnamese person was a potential enemy, from 5-year-olds to mothers, fathers, and all the way to the oldest person in the family tree.

First Lt. Kate O’Hare-Palmer, an army nurse who trained in L.A. county hospitals during the Watts riots in 1965, had seen gunshot wounds and plenty of traumas before arriving in Vietnam.

O’Hare-Palmer told the class between 7,000 to 10,000 women served in Vietnam.

Freshly 22, she arrived in Vietnam and, after being awake for 24 hours, a helicopter took her to her post. Along the way, the chopper was called to an emergency and needed to drop her off before they headed to their new task. The chopper left her at the top of a desolate mountain LZ. O’Hare-Palmer hadn’t even been issued her .45 pistol yet. She hid in the trees with her duffel bag until sometime later another helicopter crew came to nish her transfer.

Having landed at her destination base in Chu Lai, O’Hare-Palmer hit the rack for some shut-eye. Two hours later she was awoken and ushered into an Operating Room [OR], not even able to be completely gowned and gloved. Soldiers yelled at her to just get ready. The patient was in a pressurized bag and had a nicked aorta. When the bag was opened O’Hare-Palmer had to act quickly before he bled out.

O’Hare-Palmer recalled gory conditions in the medical unit. “We were covered in blood. We would slip in blood,” she said.

One night, three weeks into her tour as the junior nurse on staff, O’Hare-Palmer was assigned the night shift. Her training in the ER back home helped her respond to incoming traumas. That evening eight GI’s came in with their legs macheted off below the knee. Fifteen minutes later soldiers brought in two of the VC that did it, whom American soldiers had kept alive with hopes of interrogating them later. All were placed in the same ward.

“This is very moral issue here all of us will face, all of you will face,” O’Hare-Palmer explained. “How will you handle working with someone you do not want to be with, or you think they have done something really wrong? How are you going to handle that? We faced that every day.”

It wasn’t until later in the war the military set up different bedding units in the eld hospitals for the enemy to receive medical assistance.

When she came home at 23-and-a-half, O’Hare-Palmer said she felt 105. “I only felt comfortable with other vets,” she said. But she wouldn’t talk about it at the time, not even with her own brother, who spent tours in Vietnam as well. She didn’t want anyone to know she was a vet for a very long time.

When they came home, Vietnam veterans were spit on, yelled at and called “baby killers.” There were no PTSD-specializing doctors, because PTSD hadn’t been discovered as a real disorder. Vets were publicly pun- ished for reporting for duty. They were treated as though they had enlisted to an all volunteer military to go and kill people in another country. This was not the case, as many were drafted to report for duty, regardless of their own views on the war.

Kelley-Moore’s ensuing class debate took place two weeks after the students caught what was dropped, hot, in their laps. In the rst session, one judge voted for the anti-war argument, the next day, he voted pro-war. For the vets, it wasn’t about whom they wanted to win; that much was obvious.

“We know the story,” Thompson said.

Kelley-Moore designed the event to expand the students’ minds, and Specialist Tate let them know when he felt they did not perform up to muster in the open debate discussion portion.

After the debate, student Billy Ambrose said, “It’s hard to be pro-war, but I understand why it’s needed and there are two sides to every story. There is no downside to understanding both sides of everything.”

Student Aja Harris didn’t know much about Vietnam, other than she has close relatives like uncles and her grandpa who fought there, but still don’t discuss it. “They aren’t open about it like these gentleman are, so this really helped me understand what they went through and just what everyone went through on both sides,” Har- ris said. “Having a 2-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old son, I feel like I have this information, this knowledge that I can pass off onto them.”

Student Frank Moran argued for the pro-war side, despite his anti-war sentiment. “It was a hard decision this country had to make. You can’t really make a conclusion on it,” Moran said. “It’s just one of those things you have to accept; that there are many different points on it and you can’t just stamp it and say ‘there it is.’ It’s not so much about what we believe, it’s about you have to think about it from every standpoint.”

Thompson said what’s going on in the world to day is similar to what his generation experienced in the ‘60s. “Some stuff doesn’t change. What we hope is that your generation will do maybe a better job than we did,” he said. “Because we kind of, I feel we kind of let humanity down a little bit, and maybe we could have done a better job. So we are going to leave it up to you to do a better job.”

The story was originally done in print, and here is a link to the web version.
Bruce Thompson describes being on high alert while in a free fire zone during his deployment in the Vietnam War to a SRJC humanities class.
Wiley, like Calvin

By Joseph Barkoff

Flying with wasps, part 1

One last trick, showing off the skills that partially enabled his world travels. Climbing up, up, up, pushing the little-two-seat pearl sky blue 1947 Cessna 140 Taildragger to the point where most small, single engine planes would stall, around 45 mph or 39 knots, and then over, down, down, down, executing a negative-g maneuver.

Anyone who has flown before, ridden an elevator, or been at the apex of a roller coaster ride that plummets from the top to where your stomach lags behind you a few feet, knows the feeling of a negative g-maneuver.

Contorting and twisting out of the pilot seat, silently waving and flailing, 800 feet in the air and going around 75 mph, in a two-seat cockpit 39 inches wide and 40 inches tall, the pilot looks like he is having a seizure.

“Are you OK?”

“Wasp,” blurts out 2008 Western Kentucky University graduate Calvin Wiley, in a quick exhale as he desperately tries to avoid the angry stowaway’s bite.

Wasps do not like negative g-maneuvers.

Humble beginnings, brick and mortar, foundations

Everyone dreams of one day traveling the world, perhaps even by motorcycle or a single prop turbine airplane — everyone but Calvin, he admits.

“I liked being around home,” Calvin said.

That’s because he’s done all those things. By age 32, he has flown single engine airplanes from the US to Buenos Aires, Argentina; driven a motorcycle down one side of South America and up the other; driven a motorcycle across Russia, Mongolia and the majority of Europe; been to at least 50 countries and even survived being bitten by a poisonous viper.

Today, Calvin is a little bit more grounded and now shares his passion for world travel close to home. Six months ago he opened Roam Sandwich Company in a quaint nook just off Bowling Green’s downtown square.

Though tethered, Roam reflects Calvin’s worldly wanderlust in the décor.

There are two wall-sized world maps on two walls. One of world maps on the walls has colored pins all over it. Calvin pointed out where Deep Roy, actor and comedian, placed a pin in Kenya one night after a sandwich and some beers.

“It’s where he is from,” Calvin said. “Some of the pins are where people are from. Some are where I have been.”

Bookshelves lined with National Geographic magazines, travel guides and books are the first thing a person sees walking into Roam. Most of the copies are Calvin’s, but some have been donated by his former WKU professors.

“He’s done a lot,” said Dr. Ron Ramsing, an associate professor of kinesiology, recreation and sport, says about Calvin. “He loves his independence and autonomy, and has enough wanderlust to take the world by storm. He has done in the past few years more than most people will ever do in their lifetimes.”

Calvin grew up just outside the small town of Glasgow in Barren County, Kentucky, in a little hollow called Nobob, population of maybe 80 folks, if including the Mennonite settlement and everyone at home visiting. His life was a farm life.

The folklore is that Nobob is named after a man named Bob, a settler in the area the story goes, who was swept away in a flash flood through the lowland section following the small river as it winds through a couple of Kentucky’s beautiful lush green hills covered now with oaks and corn.

He grew up working on his family’s dairy farm with 110 dairy cows — small by industry standards, but the couple hundred head of cattle to milk, steers to feed and acres of mostly corn to tend to took up most of his time and kept him close to home.

“I was always doing local things outdoors,” Calvin said. “Maybe canoeing, riding dirt bikes, got into Motocross for a little bit, but never traveled much out of the state.”

Calvin graduated from Barren River High School in 2003 and took what he thought at first was the next logical step. He majored in Agriculture at WKU. He figured it would be easy and the thing to do, since it was what he had known all his life.

He took an environmental science class designed to round a student’s education out or, perhaps as in Calvin’s case, introduce him to something he didn’t yet know he would love.

He fell in love, more than he already had for the outside, but now it was the world that peaked his curiosity.

As a senior at WKU, in 2008, Calvin enrolled to do a three-week service learning trip with WKU’s Study Abroad program in Costa Rica. The trip included carrying in gravel to worksites and working to restore trails in a national forest in Costa Rica.

Calvin always felt comfortable catching snakes back home in the hollow and enjoyed watching television naturalist Steve Irwin do it with poisonous snakes all the time on television.

“It was all great except for when I found a snake in the bush there where we were workin,’” Calvin said. “I caught ‘im and I was showin ‘im to people. It was a Hognosed Pit Viper.”

“I got him behind the neck, but I wasn’t careful enough. He just nipped me right here on the finger,” Calvin described while holding up the assaulted appendage. “I think they still use that [story] with every [WKU] group that goes to Costa Rica.”

It took two ambulance rides and what Ramsing called “the executive tour of the west coast of Costa Rica” later for Calvin to get help. At the first hospital, only one doctor spoke English and there was no antivenom. The second hospital, more than an hour drive by ambulance, did have antivenom, but only one nurse there could read and write in English, but not speak it.

After waiting another 11 hours for a specialist, Calvin received doses of Polyvalent Antivenom, the antivenom designed specifically for the Costa Rican species of viper.

“Wasn’t bad. It swelled up black and blue,” Calvin drawled.

Calvin felt bad for the professor who had to accompany him. He doesn’t mess with snakes anymore.

Ramsing thinks that Calvin was not bit by the travel bug in Costa Rica, but already had the desire inside of him to travel the world. Costa Rica simply opened the door to more knowledge and a wider view of the world.

Ramsing remembers seeing photos on social media of Calvin, after the snake incident, hugging a “pseudo domesticated boar” named Charlie. Charlie would follow guests around, but no one thought to attempt to approach a boar, let alone hug one.

Calvin doesn’t quite fly off looking for adventure, despite earning his small plane pilot license in 2003. Sure, he read up about seeing the world in a few travel magazines, blogs and forums dedicated to how to get around the world on a budget.

Earthquakes and Orphanages

Calvin does not necessarily just crave adventure and excitement; rather the bug that bit him compels him to do good.

After two weeks of reading about the carnage and aftermath from the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, Calvin set off to help.

With no connections, organizations or groups to connect him to people in need, except for his own research, Calvin believed he could do more than just donate goods; he would go to Haiti and donate his time.

Upon his arrival, he found an orphanage to help. It was far enough away from the epicenter to not have been crushed, but with bodies strewn throughout the rubble in the streets, the children still needed help.

In the earthquake’s aftermath, the children, some whom had been going through the adoption process for almost six years, were suddenly expedited through the system. As if the earthquake broke the dam holding them back.

Calvin spent time chaperoning and co-piloting, by plane, the children to the capital for their impending adoptions.

More recently, Calvin hopped a flight to the east coast of Africa’s Tanzania for what he calls a “typical tourist trip.” He worked with the Make a Difference Foundation at an orphanage helping restore structures and reading with the children.

Though he was only at the orphanage for a brief time, he made an impression on some of the children, and they wrote to him to tell him about it.

“Dear Calvin,” Exuper wrote above his drawing of a giraffe in the foreground and Kilimanjaro in the background. “Thank you so much for come here to help us and I say thank you to you. I wish you to climb a mountain without get any accident God bless you forever. From Exuper”

Another note is a signed work drawn in crayon of the orphanage, rabbits and balls. “To: Calvin,” it says in the top left. “From Giet.”

“Dear Calvin,” an unsigned letter begins. “I hope you are fine because I see you every day. Thank you for read with me and you. I love you Calvin.”

Work at an orphanage for a couple weeks and then enjoy a guided hiking trip 19,341 feet up Africa’s tallest peak, Mount Kilimanjaro — “people do that,” Calvin said assuredly. At least he did.

Adventurer without borders

With no safety net, a 5,000-mile trek planned and surmounted alone for the first time, in April 2011, Calvin flew into Buenos Aires, Argentina, to meet a Canadian with a used Kawasaki KLR 650 Dual Sport se vende on buenosaires.craigslist.org for under $1000.

They met in the hotel lobby and Calvin was now the proud owner of a “budget crafty, cargo box, dual sport ‘thumper.’” The KLR’s design had not changed from 1987 to 2008, so finding parts in the case of emergency, even in foreign countries, would be much easier than riding on a less often called upon make and model.

Calvin rode through Argentina’s Patagonia, into Bolivia, across the salt flats of Solar del Uyuni up to Lake Titicaca, with a map showing two different options to choose for entering Peru.

“I could go one road,” Calvin holds out one hand. “Or, I could go this other road that looked a little cooler, a little more windy. I like to get a little off road,” he said with a little glint in his eye.

Heading up the windy road turned into snaking up the Andes Mountains on a 4×4 dirt trail that eventually crossed over the pass, but without finding the border checkpoint noted on Calvin’s map.

Downhill the dirt became a gravel road that turned into a paved road and Calvin finally saw people in some trucks headed up the way he had just come. When the asphalt opened up and he could read a couple of street signs he noticed he was in Peru.

“I thought, well OK, and just kept going up to Cuzco,” Calvin explained. He planned to talk to immigration officials at the big mountain town people fly into to start their Machu Picchu trips.

“I came in on this one road on the map,” Calvin showed the immigration official in the city office. “There was no border.”

“Oh yeah,” the officer said. “That could be a problem. I could try to help you out. For a price.”

There is no customs in Cuzco because it is a mountain city and the only points of entry and exit, covered by customs agents, is at the airport, but the officer explained they do not have the correct stamps any ways. He would take Calvin’s passport to the airport and have it stamped for $40.

Forty dollars and two hours later, Calvin, but not his motorcycle, were legally in Peru.

As he was trying to leave Peru and enter Colombia, Calvin found a remote border crossing with one small hut occupied by one old, lone, customs and immigration agent. Despite having the paperwork to prove he bought the motorcycle almost 5,000 miles ago, without the stamp from the point of entry for the motorcycle, the officer told Calvin he would have to call the police. His bike, the man said through thick Spanish, “is contraband, like drugs.”

In his wallet, Calvin had a couple of smaller American dollars and local currency. A US $5 bill and a couple of tens. He tried to offer those bills and the officer told him with an almost sinister laugh, “No, I do not take bribes,” as the tension seemed to rise.

Tucked deep in the back of his wallet Calvin had one lone $100, for emergencies.

With no other options, he reluctantly pulled the bill from its hiding spot and gave it to the officer.

The officer stared at it intently for a minute and responded asking Calvin, “Tiene mas (Do you have more)?”

Now Calvin was angry and exclaimed, “That’s a hundred dollars dude!”

“All right,” the officer said, and stamped everything necessary.

Calvin sold the bike for around what he paid for it to an Australian in Cartagena, Colombia, before flying home to Kentucky.

Cannonball runs, Irishmen and Alaska

In 2013, Calvin road a KLR 650 to Alaska from Kentucky. He left it there in Anchorage for the winter. The following spring, he returned to ride it south to Everett, Washington.

He loaded the KLR 650 onto a cargo freighter bound for Vladivostok, Russia, a port town on the Sea of Japan, where you couldn’t go much further south in Russia before running into North Korea or China.

Russia offers two visas. One is a 30-day visa, the other is a three-year visa, but Russia requires at least two extra pages in the passport to qualify. Calvin applied for the three-year, but was denied without the requisite passport space.

Russia granted him a 30-day visa, and the clock was ticking for his planned trip as his motorcycle arrived 11 days late in Vladivostok.

The plan was to ride through Russia and Mongolia, around China and Kazakhstan, but now there was only 17 days to ride 6,000 miles. At the KLR’s comfortable cruising speed of around 50 mph, that makes for a 400-mile, 8-hour ride each day, to make it out of Russia before his visa expired.

Skirting the edge of China, to connect onto the Tran Siberian Highway, he dropped into Mongolia to what Calvin describes as no roads across the open plains.

“It was beautiful and amazing,” he said looking off toward the map marked by pins from his travels, and guests origins, above the dining room’s two–top tables inside Roam.

With time a finite mistress, two separate mechanical break downs and a crash resulting in a broken bone in his hand, Calvin would have to ride an hour to a clinic to have a makeshift cast put on his hand and wrist before resuming his sprint across Eurasia.

Calvin explained to the clinic he still needed to operate his motorcycle, so they bandaged him with a half cast and two fingers frozen in a cast pointing out, and three still usable on a motorcycle, Calvin headed back across Mongolia into Russia.

Two days left, over 2000 miles to go Calvin was a little worried and called the US Embassy in Russia and asked for advice.

The officer told him that if he wasn’t too far past the date of exit, he might have to pay a small fine. If he should be in Russia too long though, he would have to go to Moscow and apply for an exit visa.

Four days, thousands of miles and a $20 dollar fine later, Calvin was out of Russia and on his way to a youth hostel in Kiev, Ukraine.

“Calvin had come into the room after a long drive and was talking to himself unaware anyone else was in the room,” said Ian Sullivan, 33 from Sligo on the west coast of Ireland. “As he was muttering away, I began talking to him.”

Sullivan said that Calvin started apologizing and explaining that he wasn’t arguing with him, just with himself.

“We then agreed that the only way to usually get intelligent conversation is talk to oneself,” Sullivan said.

They both agreed to go get a beer later in the evening. The Ukraine bouncers did not want to let Calvin in “on account of his hand,” Sullivan said trying to mimic Calvin’s drawl.

The bouncers thought Calvin had been fighting from the cast on his hand and his dusty motorcycle attire. Despite Sullivan trying to quietly endorse his new friend, the bouncers whispered out of earshot of the biker, “We think that guy is crazy.”

Sullivan said he thought that was hilarious because he thinks that Calvin is such a genuine gentleman.

Calvin hoped to eventually find a place in Europe to store his battle-tested motorcycle through the winter and come back to finish his tour the following spring.

Sullivan offered his parents’ farm in Sligo, to which Calvin agreed. Before meeting back up with Sullivan at Sullivan’s family farm in Ireland, Calvin headed through Moldova into Romania for a two-week archeological field school, where he learned to do field archeology working on medieval burial site consisting of how to identify different bones and catalogue them.

The experience in Romania would come in handy when Calvin finally made it through Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Montenegro, Bosnia, Croatia, Italy and Austria across the English Channel and the Celtic Sea to Sligo, Ireland.

“Sly go,” Calvin said in his well-articulated slight Kentucky drawl — a drawl light enough to tell he is not a city slicker, but without the heavy twang that would make it difficult to follow. “It’s how they pronounce it. It’s really a pretty little town.”

In Sligo, Sullivan took Calvin to see an old Irish Republican Army Bunker located in a tunnel under ground.

“Usually people just look at it,” Sullivan said. “But Calvin went straight down with his ever-present trusty torch, and I reluctantly went after him. I’m glad I did, because it turned out to be a very important archeological find.”

The bunker was 1,500 years old and used by ancient Irish people to hide form attackers and store food during the winter, Sullivan said. Archeologists came and surveyed the bunker, ultimately writing an article for an archeological journal, Archeology Ireland, where they thanked Calvin for his adventurous nature.

“He is a modern-day Indiana Jones,” Sullivan said.

Europe Part Duex

Calvin didn’t make enough money to make it back to Ireland to finish his European trip for two springs, but was welcomed by Sullivan at his family’s farm when he finally did.

Sullivan said his parents really liked Calvin. They are farmers, too, and “they thought he was such a genuine polite country boy.”

Calvin finished his ride through the European Union hopping from Ireland to England, shooting through France, across Andorra and finally to Spain.

Island Hopping, the Amazon and the Brazilian Air Force

“Yeah,” Calvin said. “I can do that.”

Without the proper experience Calvin admits now, he might have “bullshitted a little bit,” the first time he flew a plane down to Buenos Aires, Argentina in January, 2012.

“I was really nervous the first time I did it.”

From Kentucky to Florida and island hop the Caribbean to Guyana before following the river system south above the Amazon Forest.

“I was nervous as hell when I got over open water,” Calvin said. “You are flying low and slow.”

Calvin planned his trip refuel to refuel point down across the Amazon.

“If something goes wrong in the Amazon, you are dead basically,” Calvin explained.

After the Amazon, it is mostly open farm land east of Paraguay.

“Actually, this last time I was doing it I got scared to death,” Calvin said, pointing to the spot on the wall-sized world map in the dining area. “I was flyin’ though here in this country side, and evidently this is a big drug corridor.”

Calvin hadn’t been talking on his radio for some time and when he came out of the clouds he noticed there was a Brazilian A-29 Super Tucano, which looks like a modern upgraded P-51 Mustang from WW II, off each of his wings.

Calvin found the nearest airport on his charts, 20 minutes away, and adjusted his course to go there. After he landed on the short country runway, common in South America, but too small for supersonic jets, the F-5’s circled over the airport a few times before retreating into the horizon.

Calvin was sure the military would show up any minute, but after waiting for almost an hour and refueling, he was about to begin his pre-flight checklist when a convoy of military jeeps rolled onto the airport.

They inspected his vehicle from nose to tail, but satisfied Calvin was not a drug runner, they left him alone to continue his flight.

Bowling Green, Kentucky

In the third-largest city in Kentucky, one past fall afternoon downtown off the square, searching for Pokémon in the alley with his cousin, Calvin noticed a small entry way in the unit behind the Comcast store.

He thought it looked cool and looked in all the windows while walking around the old brick building’s perimeter.

Calvin peered into the window at the front and noticed a for lease sign laying on the floor.

“It hadn’t even been put up yet,” Calvin said. “So, I called the number.”

The landlord explained she was putting the storefront up for lease the following day.

“It was kinda spur of the moment thing,” Calvin started. “Actually, I had no idea and planned on traveling all this winter, hopefully. It was what I had been gearing up for.”

Calvin had been thinking he would like to open a store or business. He thought with his experience he would like to open a hostel in Bowling Green, but was unsure if Bowling Green would attract enough traffic. Then he thought, maybe a restaurant.

Calvin bounced the idea off some of his friends and ended up being introduced as mutual friends to co-owner and chef, Krista Delaney.

Delaney is originally from Barren County, like Calvin, but unlike Calvin has experience cooking and managing restaurants professionally.

Calvin never worked in a restaurant before and rarely cooked at home growing up, but like every good business owner he does everything he can. He has run the front of the house, while expediting food, taking out the trash, or doing dishes.

“I am learning the sandwiches,” Calvin said.

Delaney recently bought a house in Bowling Green.

“Here I am living in Bowling Green, working on this house and doing this restaurant shtick. It’s a great place to be,” Delaney said. “God, I really blow my own mind when I don’t want to be anywhere else.”

Calvin envisioned people who want to travel abroad, coming into Roam, grabbing a book about the country they want to visit, having a sandwich, a cold beer and plan their trips using the thoughtful assortment of travel publications on hand.

Nobob 2017

Back home in Nobob, Calvin’s dad loaded 2×4’s onto a pallet for pouring cement forms and explained that he and his son aren’t much alike.

“I’ve never been outside Kentucky,” Steve Wiley said. “It’s not for me. I prefer to stay right here.”

Calvin still works a couple days a week on the farm that has been in his family now for three generations.

It is where his hangar and three planes reside next to his custom-made bush runway in the middle of a cornfield.

It is where his grandfather, Harley, the oldest person in the hollow, still rides a tractor to deliver the hay rolls for the steers in their corral, while working the family dairy farm almost every day.

“I get winded easy nowadays,” Harley said. As he waits for the ranch hand, Joseph, a local Mennonite to come operate the corral’s locks.

“Calvin,” Harley said. “Yeah, he likes to go off and do things.”

Flying with Wasps, the conclusion

Do things, indeed.

Before take-off, Calvin didn’t think to check the Cessna’s air vents. A wasp must have found a way to make a small nest in vents which are located in the top corners of the cockpit, resembling pneumatic delivery tubes. Pulled, they release air, and now wasps, to flow through the cramped cockpit.

With the surprise over, the wasp was corralled with a flight manual in the corner of the windshield, knocked senseless and summarily squished in the copilot’s seat, and the excitement ended, almost as quickly as it began.

Minutes later, the little blue taildragger came in for a landing. A low throttle issue ended up cutting off the engine, and it glided without power to a stop 200 meters short of the hangar.

Any landing you can walk away from, is a good landing.
Calvin Wiley looks over the nose of his 1947 Cesna 140 Taildragger flying over Nobob, a hollow in Barren County April 17, 2017 outside Glasgow, Kentucky.
Calvin Wiley flies over Nobob, a hollow in Barren County April 17, 2017 outside Glasgow, Kentucky.