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Hong Kong
    In a lifetime spent in airports, this is definitely the most spectacular. The ultimate in huge, modern, efficient, high tech and with more fancy shops, restaurants, etc. than any mall I have seen.
   The 16 hour flight from Newark on a 777 was comfortable enough. My seat turned into a flat bed. Flight attendants steadily plied me with offers of food and drink. I will meet up with Rick after the last leg to Saigon - oops! Ho Chi Minh City.
   Almost forty-three years ago, things were quite different. My mood then was one of great sadness, knowing that I would not see home and loved ones for the next year. Intellectually I knew that a lot could happen in a year in the combat zone, but fear was not one of the emotions. Bad things would no doubt befall many of the 200 or so GI’s with whom I was packed tightly into the smoke-filled bright yellow Braniff 707. In the first of the letters that I would send home every day for a year, I wrote, “It seems strange to be going to war in something that looks like a banana.” At twenty-two I was invincible.   TR