Stephen Davy was twenty years old, working the toy gun counter at a Toys R Us outside Washington D.C., when his draft notice arrived in the spring of 1967. By November he was at Lackland Air Force Base for basic training, and by the following summer he was in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam, assigned to the munitions team at Pleiku Air Base. His job was to fuse rockets, assemble and fill napalm canisters, and truck two-thousand-pound bombs from the bomb dump to the flight line, where A-1E Skyraiders flew them out on close air support runs. Twelve-hour shifts, seven days a week, in a job where a dropped chock could send a load of live bombs rolling through the perimeter fence.
What makes Stephen’s story different from most Vietnam memoirs is what happened on the off-hours. Within a month of arriving, he and his best friend Tom Glenn — a fellow musician he’d met recovering from emergency surgery at the Air Force hospital in Denver — formed a band. A sympathetic supply sergeant flew their guitars, amps, drums, and PA system in from Hong Kong, and the New Generations Band started playing weekend gigs at Camp Holloway, Engineer Hill, Fifth Special Forces, and any Army outpost that could rig a generator. They were chronically AWOL, occasionally hauled back to base in helicopters whose pilots wanted to attempt loops with the band gear bouncing around the cargo hold, and once mid-set during an attack they ended up behind the bar of an Army club, taking phone calls from the bomb dump asking when they’d be back for the midnight shift.
For all the surreal humor — a pet macaque named Colonel Spiker who got drunk in the Airmen’s Club, a leopard discovered on the other side of a rehearsal-room door, a cigarette that landed standing upright on stage — Stephen doesn’t sand down the harder parts. He talks about the racial tension on base, the close calls he barely survived, the VC sapper team that tunneled directly under a truck full of artillery shells, and the orphanage outside Pleiku he and Tom visited with clothes their parents mailed from home. Kids missing arms and legs, hundreds of them. Fifty-seven years later, he still tears up describing it.
The story doesn’t end in Vietnam. Stephen came home to Andrews Air Force Base, pulled security details on the President, was robbed multiple times working nights at a 7-Eleven, and eventually answered a Washington Post want ad that read “knowledge of music helpful but not necessary.” It led him to a master violin maker named Tom Nerado, then to the legendary connoisseur Albert Mollier at the Library of Congress, and ultimately to a fifty-year career as a luthier in Laguna Beach, where he still works today.
Listen to the full conversation on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.