I AM APPROACHING THE AGE at which we begin to lose our faculties. I no longer run; I creak when I walk. Hair grows in all the wrong places. My eyesight, once as sharp as an eagle’s, is hopelessly blurred without bifocals, and I am useless for almost all things after 9 p.m. I am probably also boring (except to my grandchildren when I do magic tricks) and perhaps at the point of becoming a legend in my own mind. If all that is so, I’ll deal with it. But indulge me one memory—a memory in my life that persists in vivid detail as clearly as on the day it happened. It is the “The Great Risinger raid of 1968”—the absolute dumbest damned thing I have ever been involved with in my life, and this is how it happened: We were the fourth generation of Misty—misfits all: brave beyond all rights and yet incredibly serious and professional. We were also frustrated, frustrated by a war we were clearly losing. We had been sent to North Vietnam in obsolete equipment to do an impossible job: stop the flow of men and materiel from North to South Vietnam through Route Pack 1, but we couldn’t bomb where we should—Hanoi and Haiphong.
The year 1967 was a “buildup” year for us, for the VC (Viet
