The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking Read Online Free PDF Page A

see fit to crush his family’s modest dreams. He channeled his melancholy into a solitary pursuit: building intricate models of trains, planes, and helicopters. The geeky hobby reminded him of the happy moments he had spent with his dad in Virginia, watching naval shipbuilders weld together the beams of aircraft carriers.
    On the rare occasions he ventured outside, Holder faced relentless teasing by his peers. While waiting for the Navy to complete a new housing complex in Alameda, his family lived in a predominantly black section of neighboring Oakland. The boys there ridiculed Roger for a cruelly ironic reason: they considered his behavior too white.They mocked him for his models, his elocution, his skateboard—anything that smacked of habits favored by residents of the Bay Area’s paler precincts. Confused and stung by this rejection, Holder retreated even deeper into a world of his own.
    But when he entered Encinal High School in 1964, Holder discovered that girls of all races were actually charmed by his quirks. Adept at exuding a pensive cool, the long-limbed teenager attracted the sorts of female admirers who were just beginning to hang Beatles posters on their bedroom walls. Holder capitalized on their curiosity by mastering the art of the pickup. He started riding his skateboard to the coffeehouses frequented by students from Mills College, an all-girls school in Oakland’s foothills. He convinced more than a few pretty English majors to accompany him to Leona Heights Park, where he would pretend to dig their sappy poetry before moving onto lewder diversions.
    Holder was a careless lover, a foible that led to predictable results: in the summer of 1966 he learned that one of his girlfriends, a sixteen-year-old Encinal sophomore named Betty Bullock, was pregnant by him—with twins, no less. That November, to earn money for his children’s care, he dropped out of the eleventh grade and joined the family business by enlisting in the U.S. Army; he had to lie to the recruiter about his age, since he wasstill just seventeen. Holder was at basic training the following February when Bullock gave birth to his daughters,Teresa and Torrita.
    Though he lacked a high school diploma, Holder was extremely intelligent and scored well on his Armed Forces Qualification Test, the exam the Army used to determine its recruits’ assignments. In March 1967 Holder was sent to Bad Hersfeld, West Germany, home of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, to take a course in tank warfare. That October he received the inevitable order to join the 11thACR’s contingent in Vietnam. On his way to Southeast Asia, Holder made a quick stop in California to marry Bullock and bid farewellto his infant daughters.
    When Holder arrived in Vietnam, the 11th ACR was in the midstof an extended operation to pacify Long Khanh, a province northwest of Saigon that teemed with Vietcong fighters. The guerrillas launched daily ambushes on vehicles traveling the region’s muddy roads, battering their prey with rockets before melting back into the jungle. The primary mission of the 11th ACR, better known as the Blackhorse Regiment, was to plow its armored vehicles through Long Khanh’s dense wilderness in search ofthe elusive enemy.
    The Blackhorse Regiment’s mainstay was the M113 armored personnel carrier, a trapezoidal twelve-ton beast with the power to obliterate all foliage in its path. Holder manned one such vehicle’s M60 machine gun, shielded by a steel plate stenciled with the regiment’s unofficial motto: FIND THE BASTARDS THEN PILE ON . In the thick of the jungle, Holder and his crewmates would try to detect signs of Vietcong activity—the camouflaged hatches of underground lairs, the suspiciously neat piles of leaves that concealed grenades. But with visibility often limited to ten feet or less, their first inkling of the enemy’s presence was typically ahail of AK-47 fire.
    Holder grew enamored of this perilous search-and-destroy work. He relished