'When We Walked Above the Clouds'

When We Walked Above the Clouds by H. Lee Barnes available here.


H. Lee Barnes on far left with 57mm Recoilless Rifle and the Australians


Barnes firing recoilless rifle

Barnes in flip flops


Barnes (in Tiger Stripe fatigues) shakes hands with Charlton Heston. Heston was considering a film role that went to John Wayne.

H. Lee Barnes 2002

In 1963, H. Lee Barnes was an Army Brat living in El Paso and struggling through college. A disinterested and alcoholic mother wasn't helped by a radio announcer step father whose constant job searches would later be subsidized by Barnes himself. There comes a time in some men's lives when they discover they don't belong anywhere. This is usually followed with the recognition that they're pretty much alone. It's a ripe moment for an Army Recruiter.

Barnes enlisted in the Army and volunteered for Special Forces. "You know that song?" Barnes tells me. "One hundred men they'll test today --Only three win the green beret? I was the only one of 50 who made it." I tell Barnes only three in my class of 88 made it and I wasn't one of 'em. I'm looking for a laugh. I don't get one.

Memories of Ft Bragg in 1965 and '66 are seared into my brain despite being eight years old. The green beret itself was something holy to me. I revered the men who wore it. My father, his team members, the next door neighbor and all the men who inhabited Smoke Bomb Hill. This small corner of Bragg was home to Special Forces and was littered with white frame buildings from WWII stuck in the pines. I revered the place when I came back ten years later looking for my own beret.

Assigned to the 7th Special Forces Group at Ft Bragg, Barnes is sent to the small but promising hot spot of the Dominican Republic where Communists are trying to push over a domino. Barnes quotes a lifer's observation in the book, "Wherever Americans go, they turn the women into whores." It's easy duty, guilty even, so Barnes volunteers for Vietnam and winds up at SF Camp A - 107 in Tra Bong some 60 miles south of Da Nang.

Barnes specialty was Demo and secured the Spec 5 ($194 a month) two hazardous stipends of $55 each. One for jump pay and one for blowing things up or the more challenging job of keeping things from blowing up. This all sounds pretty sexy but life at Tra Bong is a thumping bore. As junior man on the team, Barnes gets the shit details...to include burning it.

Jame's Jones took tedium in the army to an art form in A Thin Red Line. A man's thoughts and memories of home in the book became film director Terrance Malick's flashbacks in the film version . A Walk Above the Clouds (author's blog here) takes us on patrols of surrounding mountains with a ruck and a weapon. But there's higher altitude.

Barnes mines his deeply personal reflections. Not only on his good luck, and the guilt that comes with it, but the value of a man's specialty over his value as a human being. Two senior noncoms whose alcoholism reflect a sad army tradition but whose honor and duty spoke to a responsibility the army instills. What Barnes calls, "An honorable action" and "Doing the right thing."

I ask Barnes if he can think of any traits unique to Special Forces members back then. He quickly ticks off a list: "A broken home. Poor. Rootless. Driven to be recognized. Bright and unstable." Tra Bong is one of three places in the world where Cinnamon grows naturally. It is also a place where Lee's captain was beheaded and three team members were killed. Barnes writes of the obsessive card playing with fellow team members, "Cards, like war, reduced to luck no matter a man's skills. No one wanted to be alone with his thoughts to think about that."

Barnes tells me he is done with writing about Vietnam and claims it's the hardest thing he's written. Not only because he was bound to the truth of it but because his team mates names were on it. These events occurred 45 years ago but they should be fresh on everyone's mind. War in a far off place and in a culture not understood. Where the object of "Hearts and Minds" becomes confusion over who the enemy really is. The surprising ending of this book is a reminder...sometimes our biggest enemy can be on our own team.

Odd Books + Wine = Broadbent

Why do I buy books like this?


I guess because they're cheap...


and loaded with images like this. The Chairman, Directors and Staff.


This was Christie's first full year of wine sales. Click on image to read and ponder 1966 prices for 18th century wines.

Director of wine sales, Michael Broadbent, holds up one of the 200 year old bottles from the cellar of the Marquess of Linlithgow.


I mentioned Chateau Musar Hochar here earlier. A unique red that has recently become an obsession due to it's soft but bold character. Like a not very attractive woman with huge personality who dresses in St John. Warm, open, funny. A little bawdy, she likes to say 'fuck' a lot.


Hochar, when you can find it, runs $26 a bottle. That's not cheap but it's still an amazing value. And while white and rose have filled this Summer's record breaking temperatures -- Hochar is soft enough to pair perfectly with grilled steaks, lamb or a spread of smoked meats and cheese.


Go to Broadbent.com for a distributor in your state, and have that warm, funny and bawdy woman over for dinner. What the fuck have you got to lose?

Princeton - 1966

(click on image to enlarge)

"If your picture is fuzzy and your name is spelled backwards, we apologize, but we did our best."

So said the editor of the Princeton yearbook in 1966. The 'Bric-A-Brac' had some great years in the '60s and a couple not so great. '66 was exceptional and like any good year book it captured a time not just for the students but, it turns out, for those of us who didn't have the SAT or the net worth.

Who knew we'd be admiring the insouciant ease of high water khakis and white socks 45years later. What really strikes me is the reality of it all. This is not a carefully staged Polo ad shot by Bruce Weber but simply the day to day of a school year shot by a freshman.

It would have made more sense to post images from the '64 -'65 yearbook - the year Take Ivy was shot on campus - but the '66 yearbook is so good I couldn't wait. I promise to post '65 tomorrow. Until then, enjoy a look at Princeton and 1966 from the student perspective. Different from Take Ivy but no less artful.

Ft Bragg, NC 1966

Smoke Bomb Hill, Ft Bragg, NC 1966

My father's A Team just before deployment to 5th Group in Vietnam. A story in every man. An odd A Team in that there were 13 men and not the usual 12. Two NCO's and a Lieutenant did not come back.

I remember a party at our quarters on post just before they left. Everyone of these men were crammed into our tiny living room. Wearing starched fatigues, drinking beer and smoking Marlboro's--I wandered among the spit shined Corcoran jump boots while the theme from, "The Magnificent Seven" boomed over a stereo. I looked at our dining room table and saw a pile of forest green berets with the red 7th Group flash sewn on the front. Some worn and some brand new. I'll never forget the smoke and laughter in that living room. Or that I was around something that was very real and they were going somewhere very dangerous. I'll never forget.

Many years later my mother recalled the same party. Late that night a young sergeant cornered her on the stairs to the only bathroom in the house. "Uh oh," she thought. "Here we go..." He leaned into her and said, "Don't worry about your husband, ma'am. Nothing's gonna happen to him. We're gonna make sure." And with that he turned around and walked away and was true to his word.