Chickenhawk

6. The Holidays

December 1965

When we got back from Ia Drang, the rats had torn up our packages of food and left in their stead little piles of rat turds artfully lined up along every surface in the mildewed tent. The smell was tangible, but it was home. And no pilots in our company had been killed, an occasion for thanksgiving.

Our first week back, we installed the floor and bought chairs, rice mats, and other stuff to shape up the tent. I even hooked up the lights.

A week later, the Colonel called the battalion officers to a muddy spot between us and the Snakes. He stood, bony arms folded against his chest, looking first at the unruly formation, then at the ground, as if there should be a box or something for him to stand on.

“I’m wet,” said Connors in the drizzle.

“Gentlemen, I have a few things to talk to you about today. Number one, we’ve been back for just a week and already we’re getting complaints from the MPs about of ficers crashing the gate at night to get to the village, officers drinking and driving recklessly, officers involved in unnatural sex acts in local bars.” The Colonel shook his head, disappointed. “The medics say the VD rate has quadrupled. This behavior is against the code of the American officer, immoral and disgusting. I’ve decided to do something about it.” The Colonel unfolded his arms to step forward for emphasis, but the mud stopped him. “Starting today, no officer is allowed to drive any vehicle: no Jeeps, no trucks, not even a mule. Any officer wishing to go somewhere by ground vehicle must request a driver first. There will be no exceptions. Second, the VD problem. Gentlemen, I know what you’re going through. I’m human, too. But what kind of example do you think we’re setting for the enlisted men? Those girls downtown are all disease-ridden, a very tenacious version of VD.” The Colonel paused, his face a map of concern. “So for the time being, I’m holding every man here duty-bound to exercise discretion and stay totally away from those women.”

Murmurs and laughter drifted through the crowd. Did he really think that abstention by the officers would influence the enlisted men? At that very moment, An Khe was filled with hundreds of enlisted men understandably jumping every female in sight. “Men, severe situations require unusual solutions. I know you may think of it as self-abuse, but I, and the commanders above me, think that m-masturbation is now justifiable.”

“Is that an order?”

“Who said that!” No one answered. The Colonel glared expectantly at the damp mob, trying to pinpoint the bad apple. The offender did not come forward and throw himself into the mud at the Colonel’s feet, begging forgiveness. Disgusted, the Colonel continued. “No, it is not an order; it is a suggestion. And if there are any more cases of the clap among you men, I’m closing the village to all of you. No passes to town for anything.”

“Did he just order us to jerk off?” Connors’s low voice came from the back of the crowd. Laughter engulfed the formation. The Colonel had not heard the remark.

“I’ve got a plan that will keep everybody occupied and healthy while we aren’t flying. On this very spot, we will build an officers’ club.”

The brass applauded from the front of the formation.

“Face it, men. We’ll be here a long time. Now, having a real club to come back to, a drink after a long day, a refreshing conversation with some nurses, comfortable plush chairs to sit back into, and music—all these things are possible if we start right now.”

“Nurses?” Connors again.

“Yes, nurses. There are nurses at the division level. And they will come down here to see us, if we have some place for them to come to. You wouldn’t want them to visit us in these moldy tents, would you?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Who is that?” The Colonel peered from side to side trying to locate the heckler. We all turned around, looking at each other, to show that we were innocent. Captain Williams glared toward our group, in the direction of Connors.

“Gentlemen, it’s attitudes like that will keep us living like beasts.” He shook his head sadly. “So, starting right now, this minute, we will collect the first month’s club dues. That money will be used to start buying the necessary materials. Captain Florence will be in charge of the job because he was a contractor in civilian life.” Florence beamed and nodded. “Labor will be supplied voluntarily by you men. And each man will be expected to work his share each month until the job is finished.”

A few days later, a Japanese newspaper reporter interviewed me. Some guys watched while the photographer snapped pictures. Among them was a tall, lanky captain from Indiana, whom I still think of as the New Guy. He had a healthy, confident aura about him, qualities that had faded from the veterans.

“If they want a new mess hall, let’s build it!” he’d said when Williams announced that we’d volunteered to do that, too, along with the club. “I’ve built a lot of stuff in my day,” he said. “I could probably do it myself. And, hell, anything’s better than this crummy tent.”

Riker had stared at him and growled, “Shit.” Connors nodded. “Uh-huh, un-huh.” Banjo snickered. That very day, the New Guy started laying out the new mess hall.

“Uh, Bob,” said the New Guy. The Japanese photographer was hunched in front of me, dodging for an angle.

“Yeah?”

“Maybe you’d better take down that picture behind you.”

I turned around to the pinup I had tacked to the wall of Riker’s partition.

“You leave Cathy right where she is,” said Connors. “Let the folks back in good old Japan know what we’re fighting for.”

“But what if his wife sees it?” said the New Guy.

“It?” Connors said. “It? Please, that is Cathy Rotten-crotch, queen beaver of this tent. She is not an it, as you can see.”

The reporter laughed, and the photographer moved to include Cathy in the shot.

“What is it like to fly into the bullets?” asked the reporter.

Someone wanted my opinion? I had thought about the bullets a lot during Ia Drang. I was always afraid. That was the answer: I was always afraid, every time. I sit before you, a chicken in soldier’s clothing, Mr. Reporter. “Well, it’s kinda scary at first, but when you get involved in the landings, you get used to it.” Shit, yeah, you get used to it. Like to be out there right now doing it again.

“Have you had any close calls?”

Yes, very close. So close it makes me shiver. I could’ve been in that pile of bodies. “Well, no closer than any of the other guys. A few rounds through the cockpit. Stuff like that.”

“Is that what you wear during the assaults?” I was dressed in fatigues, wearing my flak vest and pistol, at the photographer’s request.

“Yes.”

“Does that—” He pointed.

“Flak vest.”

“Does that flak vest stop bullets?”

“No. As a matter of fact, it won’t even slow them down.”

Everyone laughed.

We flew support for a convoy going to Pleiku and had to laager for two hours at the Turkey Farm.

Foot-tall grass bent over as the wind gusted along the row of twenty or so helicopters. Near noon, as we sorted through the C-ration boxes, somebody at the front of the row knocked over his jet-fuel stove.

“Fire!” someone yelled. Smoke swirled out of the grass next to the first few Hueys. I ran with the rest of the men toward the fire. Orange flames burrowed through the grass. People slapped the rushing flames with their shirts, but it did no good. The breeze carried the flames toward the rear ships. My ship and the two behind it would be right in the path. I ran back.

Reacher stood behind my seat. “Hurry, sir!” I fumbled for my seat belts, but the smoke surrounding us made me realize that there was no time. I cursed myself for not having the ship preset for start up. Too lax.‘ I flipped switches and hit the starter trigger. “Hurry, sir. The fire is almost here!” The blades turned more slowly than ever before. The flames were less than a hundred feet away, moving very fast. The exhaust-gas-temperature gauge read hot. A hot start now? No, it dropped back to green. The rotors blinked, close to operating rpm. When the flames were orange under the chin bubble, I pulled pitch before the turbine was completely up, and the machine groaned into the air. When I pedal-turned the tail away from the flames, my door flew open. Damn. Didn’t even have the door latched. The noise of the ship seemed very loud. I could feel the hot breeze, and I realized that I was wearing no helmet. Jerk! I backed away in a hover and set the ship down. The two ships behind me moved out of the fire, too.

Connors hovered to intercept the line of burning grass. He approached from downwind, forcing the flames to pause against the blast from his rotors. I pulled back up to a hover and joined him and another ship in the corraling operation. The fire died against the wall of wind.

While we were at Ia Drang, Christmas packages had been pouring in. Gifts, canned hams, cookies, cards, and loving pictures. We even had a large cardboard box filled with letters from schoolchildren all over America delivered to our mess hall. “Dear American soldier,” said one of them. “I am very proud of you. I know you will win. Becky, Grade 5, Mrs. Lake’s class.” I got a pound cake from Patience mailed in September. After three months en route it was not edible.

Two weeks before Christmas, we launched more assaults into Happy Valley, landing troops on pinnacles instead of down in the valley.

Resler and I began flying together. We were the two most junior warrant officers in the company. It was an honor that we were trusted with our own ship. I usually logged aircraft-commander time.

“Why? We’re both equals, you know,” Resler said.

“Not quite. I graduated a month ahead of you.”

“So?”

“So, I’ve got seniority on you, Resler. You’re the pilot and I’m the aircraft commander.”

“We get to trade!”

“Maybe.”

We’d both practiced pinnacle landings with the more experienced pilots in the company. It was like approaching a floating island in the sky. Some of the hilltops were easily eight hundred feet above the valleys. The trick was to keep the landing spot below the horizon. If it climbed above it, you were too low, and that put you at the mercy of the buffeting winds on the lee side of the hill. With the heavy loads we carried, the chopper could mush into the hill if we approached through this burble of down-rushing wind. It was difficult to recover because there was no place to dive to get more airspeed. A captain in our other platoon had done it wrong a few days before with the result that he flopped and rolled down the side of the hill, strewing men and matériel out the doors of the Huey all the way down. He climbed out and landed on his hands and knees in a bed of punji stakes. Given that two other people on board had been killed, it wasn’t bad. He got to go to Japan to get the shit dug out of the punji holes in his knees.

Resler and I made a good team. We talked ourselves away from trouble.

Resler was on the stick, flaring toward the top of a grassy hill. Our sink rate was high because of the eight grunts we carried. We both knew the landing was going to be hard.

“Power,” I said.

“I’ve got all the power she has.”

“Then flare more. You’ll hit too hard.”

“Look, Mason, I’m flying. I can handle it.”

Luckily, it was windy. It was lucky because the wind blew the grass around and I saw part of a large boulder just where we were going to land. Hitting that would trip us, sending us crashing down the other side of the hill.

“Rocks!”

“Huh?” Gary couldn’t see them, because he was flying from the right side and had no chin bubble to look through. We were going to hit.

“Rocks!” I grabbed the collective and pulled hard. I hadn’t put my feet on the pedals, so the ship yawed to the right. We hesitated crookedly above the boulders, and the rotor wash blew the grass down, and Gary saw them, too. The ship mushed lazily over the boulders. As we cleared the hilltop, Gary dove down the other side to recover the waning rotor speed.

“I have just saved your miserable life,” I said.

“Oh, yeah? From what?”

“Those rocks, you blind fuck.”

“What rocks?” Gary fumed. “Why did you grab the collective like that? You could’ve killed us.” He shook his head seriously as he started his climb out of the valley. “Lucky for you I was able to save it,” he said.

Even though we flew every day, they always found time to give us our shots—plague shots, yellow-fever shots, hepatitis shots—on a regular basis. Naturally, we all hated shot day.

While I waited inside the tent, I watched a soldier having his thumb tended. I watched intently as the surgeon pried up the man’s thumbnail. It was smashed and almost black. As the surgeon pulled the nail up, black juice ran out. When the nail finally pulled free, I sank to my knees. I couldn’t believe it. This simple little operation brought me to my knees. I almost fainted.

“Shouldn’t watch stuff like that,” said the medic.

“You’re right.” I nodded weakly from the floor. “Maybe if it had been regular blood…”

Connors was chosen to fly a CBS News film crew around as it followed Gary and me in our ship.

“Hey, you guys, make it look good.” Connors stood outside my window at a laager.

“Like how?”

“Like steeper-than-normal turns and lower than low level and flaring steeper than steep. Like that. You know: Make it look good.”

So while we swooped all around the valley, dropping off troops—the valley had no war that day—we were being filmed. In a low-level turn, I pulled in close enough to a tree to brush the leaves with the rotors. I flared so steeply at an LZ that the grunts screamed.

“Looking good,” said Connors.

Patience said she saw the film clip on television. She knew it was me because there was a square on the door, which she knew marked my company, and “That pilot flew just like you drive.”

Nate and Resler and I went to town one morning. There was nothing up that day, so we hung around in the bars and watched the girls. Nate claimed he was immune to Viet clap, so he had most of the fun.

Something did come up, but since we weren’t there, the company left without us. We got back early in the afternoon to a ghost camp. Everyone except the Bobbsey Creeps were gone.

“Big battle going on just north of Lima,” said Owens. “Where were you guys? The major is pissed. Did you have a pass? It’s hot out there. Really, the major is really pissed.”

Nate thought the time was right to open the canned ham he had been saving for Christmas. We had a quiet party. The ham was good.

Just after dawn, Leese busted in through the door flap. “The New Guy was killed.”

“What?” said Gary.

“The New Guy. You know, the replacement. He got shot through the head. Hey, you guys, get ready to get out there.”

I wondered if I would amount to that much of an utterance someday. “Mason got shot through the head. Hey, you guys, get ready to go out there.”

“What’s going on?” I said.

“It’s hot,” said Leese. “Lotta automatic fire. All in the same area where we’ve been farting around for the last two weeks. Yesterday Charlie decided to fight. It’s already hot again this morning. You guys are supposed to crew the next two ships coming back. Mine is fucked. Nate, you and I take the next ship, and Bob and Gary the one after that. Okay?”

There was an hour between Leese and Nate’s departure and the arrival of our ship. Resler and I were alone in our corner of the tent. I smoked. Resler cracked his knuckles.

“There’s some islands out about twenty miles from Qui Nhon,” said Gary.

“I know.”

“Twenty miles away. Completely uninhabited, too.”

“How do you know that?” I said.

“I’ve heard.”

“Terrific.”

“Do you ever think about quitting?” Gary asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Me, too. Sometimes. Guess that makes us chickens.”

“Maybe. But we do go fly, don’t we? That’s got to make up for feeling chicken.”

“Yeah, I guess it does.” He paused. “And when I’m flying the assaults, I start feeling brave, almost comfortable, in the middle of it all. Like a hawk, maybe.”

“I do, too. When I’m in the middle of it. But times like now, I’d quit at the slightest excuse. So what am I? A chicken or a hawk?”

“You’re a chickenhawk.” Gary smiled.

“Yeah.” There was silence. Yes, I thought. We’re both scared out of our minds. It felt like we were near the end of our wait on death row.

“How long do you think we could live on a Huey-load of C rations?” asked Gary.

“Shit, probably a couple of years. Two thousand pounds of food.”

“Maybe we should take less food and steal a couple of girls to go with us instead.”

“Go where?”

“The island.”

“You know, you’re right. We could do it.”

“I know we could do it.” Resler smiled proudly.

I liked the idea very much. Yes, by God, we could do it! “That’s it! You’ve got the answer. We just keep flying when we go out. We’ll have a big load of C’s. We can stop in Qui Nhon and get a couple of women, fly out to the island, land, and dump the food and the girls. Then one of us has to take the chopper out away from the island and dump it.”

“Why dump it? We can camouflage it, you know.” Gary leaned forward eagerly, caught up in the plan.

“Well, we’ll see when we get there. Maybe there’ll be enough trees and shit to hide a Huey. But if there isn‘t, we ditch it.”

“Okay. If there isn’t enough.”

“Some booze, too. Can you see it? You and me and two luscious girls lying back under the palm trees. We have to have a radio,with us, too, so we can keep track of the war. You know, so we know what we’re missing.”

Gary looked concerned. “Maybe we could fly to Pleiku first.”

“Why?”

“Well, I don’t know if I want to live out there with just any girl. Remember that girl, Mary, in Pleiku where I spent the whole night?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, she loved me.”

“Ah Gary, she…” Didn’t love you, she wanted your money. She wanted a ticket out of this bullshit country. “She was nice, wasn’t she?”

“She loved me.” Suddenly we were both quiet. We looked away, into our thoughts. My strength drained away. What a stupid idea. Just hopeful dumb fucking wishing. Face facts. Face facts. FACE FACTS!

“Gary, I think we can’t go to Pleiku first. I think we could only do it if we flew out of here just like normal and then disappeared. We could probably get away with landing at Qui Nhon. There’s a lot of transient traffic there.”

“Not without Mary.”

“Gary, be reasonable.”

“Hey, guys, it’s your turn.” Wendall ducked into the tent. The palm-tree isle, the bronze nubiles, popped out of existence. “The crew chief is patching some holes, but the ship will be flyable in just a minute.” Wendall looked kind of pale. “The old man wants you to join the gaggle at Lima. They’ve got some more missions to fly today. I hope it’s better for you guys.”

The crew chief, along with the maintenance officer, had inspected the ship. The holes in the tail boom were a concern because the bullets could have gone through the tail-rotor drive tube or the control cables. They had not. The crew chief covered the holes with green tape that almost matched the olive-drab skin. It was now our ship.

The sky, as if on cue, was overcast. At the An Khe pass Gary had to drop to within fifty feet of the road to maintain visibility. We landed at Lima.

“What’s that all about on the road?” I asked Connors. As we circled Lima on our approach, we had noticed a crowd of men around a big pile of something covered with canvas next to an overturned mule.

“A grunt mule driver lost control and flipped over.”

“Was he hurt?”

“No. Killed.”

“You and Resler are Red Four,” said Leese. He hurried back toward the front of the gaggle. Lima was crawling with activity. Troopers moved around in small groups, looking for their assigned ships. A few Hueys were out over sling loads, hitching up. A Chinook made an approach slinging in a fat black fuel bladder from the Golf Course.

“Shall I put my men on board, sir?” a Cav sergeant asked me.

“Yeah, Sergeant. Let them get on.” I looked forward at the other squads moving toward their ships. “We’re leaving pretty soon.”

He turned. “Move it!” They were in place in about fifteen seconds, I think.

It was a monster gaggle—forty or more ships—the kind I hated the most. And we were flying the four position again. We would have to fly hard to keep up with an outside turn, and flare like hell when the gaggle turned our way. Plus, the ship was a dog. When we took off, she hung down in the turbulence of the choppers in front of us, straining her poor guts out. We caught up to the gaggle at mission altitude and watched the prep going on. Smoke trailed in long streamers drifting off to the west. Air-force jockeys streaked away back to their base, their job done. Our gunships worked the area with their rockets and flex guns. Gary flew, so I just watched the show and smoked a cigarette. Kinda like being at a movie. The grunts behind me were screaming at each other over the cacophony of the ship, smiling, laughing, smoking cigarettes, scared out of their brains. The ships in the gaggle rose and fell on the sea of air. Formations always looked sloppy when you were in them because no two ships were ever at the same altitude. From the ground you got a flat view of the V, and it looked better. One of the noises on the radio was the Colonel.

“Yellow Four. Pull in closer. You call that a formation ?” The Colonel was flying above us, being a colonel. There’s a reason why they do that, we said. It’s from the word itself: colon(el), or asshole. They do exactly what you would expect them to.

“Guns ready?” Gary asked. We were now dropping fast, having crossed the initial point, a meager hut near a tall hedgerow that marked the beginning of the final leg of the assault. The LZ was two miles away.

“Ready.”

“Ready.”

“Fire at my order only, unless you see something obvious. Don’t shoot into the huts.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.”

Can’t fire into the huts. If you fired into the huts, you might kill a VC.

As we swooped toward the ground for the low-level run, I put my hand gently on the cyclic; my feet rode the pedals; my left hand touched the collective.

“Flare.”

Fifty feet off the ground, Gary was doing well. He flipped the tail past a few trees just when I thought he’d hit them. The gaggle mushed and bounded into the LZ. The troopers leapt out firing.

“Yellow One, it’s too hot ahead of you. Recommend you pedal-turn and go back out the way you came.” That was one of the Dukes, the gunships making runs at something at the far end of the LZ. The guys up front were yelling that there was a lot of shooting going on, but I couldn’t see any back our way.

“Roger. Flight, we’re going out the way we came. Wait your turn.” The flight leader lifted to a high hover and turned to fly back over us. Each ship in its turn leapt up and flew back over us. By the time it was our turn, the first ships were already calling in hit reports. As we joined up, the ship ahead of us was hit, showering bits of Plexiglas back on us. Next I heard tick-tick-tick, and new bullet holes appeared in the Plexiglas over our heads. Gary pulled full power trying to get higher, but the ship was a dog even when empty, so we lagged behind the others. Tick. Somewhere in the air frame.

At 1000 feet or so I lit a cigarette and contemplated the new holes. Bad place for ‘em. It’ll leak if it rains.

We didn’t make it back to Lima. We were pulled out with the other three ships in the Red flight for a couple of emergency extractions. Gary and I followed Farris and Kaiser in Red Three to get some wounded out of a hot LZ. The other two ships went somewhere else.

Farris orbited a couple of times to make sure there was no firing going on. We were supposed to wait until the grunts secured the LZ.

“All clear, Red Three.” I heard gunshots in the background as the trooper talked on the radio to Farris. Farris did, too.

“You’re sure?”

“Affirmative, Red Three. You’re clear to land.” Of course, he was lying. I would’ve lied, too, in the same position.

As we made our approach, Farris took the spot I was headed for, so I had to fly a hundred feet past him. I landed in a grassy spot in front of a hedgerow. I saw troopers low-crawling all over the place.

“Secure, my ass,” said Gary.

Two bent-over men ran toward us carrying a stretcher. Sand sprayed out of the grass near them, and they went down. The body in the litter shifted like a doll.

“Fire from the front,” I radioed to Farris.

The stretcher bearers got back up and made it to the side door, where the crew chief quickly jumped out and grabbed one end of the litter and shoved it across the deck. Another few rounds hit the dirt in front of us. I looked at the radio antenna of the grunt leader swinging around behind the hedgerow. “Fucking liar.”

Another litter had been hauled to our other door, and the gunner was out helping. We were locked to the ground. Farris called that he was leaving. “Come on! Come on!” I yelled back between the seats. Two walking wounded rolled on board. The grunt leader stood up for a second and then hit the dirt. All I heard was the whine of our turbine. No shots. Just little puffs of sand in the short grass. At the hedgerow, a man held a thumbs-up. He pointed to a man at his knees and shook his head. For the first time, I noticed the body. Of course it was a body. Strands of intestines had followed the bullets out of his guts and were lying across his abdomen. He could wait a little longer.

I was up. Pedal-turn. Nose down. Tick. Go. Tick. Climb.

The four wounded lived.

We spent a rainy night back at good old Lima. The new bullet holes leaked.

There was a Christmas truce, but we flew anyway, taking patrols out to check on reported VC violations in our territory. I couldn’t get over how bizarre it was. We could decide to stop killing each other for a few days and then start again. I was still young then.

Actually, the reason I was out on Christmas was that I had fucked up a few days before on a flight with Captain Gillette, our supply officer. He and I were the lead ship in a gaggle of forty-plus ships operating in the hills. On the flight back, I became very aware that there were all these helicopters following me. I had never led a big gaggle before.

All I had to do was bring the gaggle back to the refueling area where the Vietnamese worker had died of snakebite. The lead ship had to fly smoothly—no quick turns, gradual descents. But as I started to slow down for the approach, I was too careful. I kept thinking that they would all ram me. I slowed too late, with the result that I overflew the approach. I missed the whole fucking field! Gillette turned to me in awe. There were rumors around that I was a pretty good pilot, and look—Mason missed the entire field, in a helicopter! I had visions of the whole gaggle laughing behind me as I flew past and set up to return. But it was worse. When I made the turn, I saw that all the others had gone ahead and landed while their leader flew off to La-La Land. I flew back to the field flushed with embarrassment. How would I ever live this down?

So on Christmas Day I found myself flying with Farris. He didn’t say as much, but he was checking me out to see why I had fucked up. I was the lead-ship pilot again, but I had spent so much time worrying and thinking about my mistake that I made perfect approaches. I picked the right spots. I allowed enough room for the gaggle to land. My landings, takeoffs, everything, went just fine.

“Gillette said you were having a little trouble with your approaches,” Farris said tactfully.

“That one time, I did.”

“I can see that. You did just fine today.”

“Thanks.”

“Merry Christmas.”

That evening, after we delivered Christmas dinners to all the patrols, we had our own turkey meal. Later we sang a couple of carols, ate some of the goodies sent by the wives and families, and I, for one, shed a few tears when I went to bed.

“I don’t believe it,” Gary Resler said, crouching by his bunk. Heavy gunfire sounded outside our GP. “Why?”

I shook my head in the darkness. “Madness.” A machine gun blasted just outside the tent. I forced my ass farther under the cot, up against the cross braces. I closed my eyes, trying to make the chaos outside a dream. The blast of the machine gun lost itself in the roll of hundreds of other exploding weapons. I was hiding from the madness.

A shadow ran down the aisle, thumping a loose board under my head. Pistol shots rang out inside the tent; then the shadow was gone.

The firing continued. Riker was inside with Gary and me. The others were outside in the trench—safer, maybe. The cot wasn’t going to stop bullets, but I felt safer lying on the floor in the darkness.

“Maybe we should go outside,” Gary called from the corner of his area.

“We tried that, remember?” A staccato blast sounded from just beyond the canvas wall. “They won’t stop!” I shouted. The madness roared like a storm. I guess I won’t forget New Year’s Eve, 1965, I thought.

In a lull, Gary said, “I think it’s dying down. I’m going outside.”

“You’ll be back.” He didn’t hear me. I felt the boards creak as he got up and left. He was back in five minutes.

I felt someone thudding along our aisle again. “Mason, Resler. You guys here?” It was Captain Farris.

“Yeah,” I said from down on the floor.

“Well, get out there and stop them. Stop them.”

“We tried.”

“Well, try again. Let’s go.” He ducked out through the flap.

“I don’t believe this shit,” I heard myself say.

“C‘mon, let’s go,” said Gary.

Under the tracer-streaked sky a spec-five held an M-60 machine gun at his hip, blasting away. The light was dim, but that demonic face was clear.

“Stop that!” I shouted. “Put that gun away!”

The spec-five shook his head and smiled ominously. He watched his tracers stream into the sky toward Hong Kong Hill. God, I thought, there are people on top of that hill, lots of them.

It had started with people shooting into the sky for New Year’s Eve. Now it was totally out of control, and bullets were going toward the radio-relay team on top of the hill. Suddenly tracers came back from the top. The relay team was firing back down into the division.

The Colonel was a spider scurrying and dodging from sandbag pile to ditch to tent, encountering his men gone mad. Fifty feet away from us, he stopped and screamed at a man firing a machine gun. “Stop! I order you to stop!” The man paused, with an irritated look on his face. His battalion commander was becoming a nuisance. He smiled menacingly and swung the hip-held M-60 toward the Colonel, aiming it carefully at his chest. The Colonel shrank back. He turned momentarily to look at Gary and me.

“Do something,” he said, glaring at us.

“What?” We shrugged. He bent over and dodged back toward his tent.

It was quiet at last. At twelve-thirty or so, the battle of Hong Kong Hill stopped. Planes that had had to orbit since the beginning of the melee could now land. The shooting had stopped, and the men had put the guns away. It was still New Year‘s, but it was now very quiet.

“Some people were killed at the maintenance depot,” said Connors.

We all sat quietly on our cots, lights on, as if nothing had happened.

“How many?” somebody asked.

“Seven, I think. There’s some wounded, too.” He spoke without emphasis and stared at the floor. “Hell of a party, huh?”

They shouldn’t allow holidays in a war.

7. The Rifle Range

January 1966

Not long after Resler and I talked of disappearing with a Huey, a ship from the Snakes, tail number 808, took off on a foggy morning to go out to Lima with C rations and supplies, and never arrived.

The pilots called once before crossing the pass to say that the visibility was almost zero, but they could make it. By 0900 I was involved in the search. By dusk they had not been found, not even a clue.

“Do you think they did it?” Resler asked.

“Nah. It was a stupid idea.”

The next day, half a dozen ships from the battalion combed the jungles for miles around the pass looking for signs. Nothing.

The First Cav—the helicopter division—lost one of their own Hueys in their own back yard. It was bad for pilot morale.

Meanwhile, supply sergeants throughout the battalion were keeping their fingers crossed. This was a rare opportunity to balance the property books—once and for all.

Let me explain. In the army, specific amounts of military equipment were allocated to the company supply sections. Once or twice a year, the inspectors general, agents from the brass, came through to check that all property was in the supply depot or properly accounted for. If it wasn‘t, mountains of paperwork had to be done, including explanations by the commander and the supply officer. Searches were made. That was the formal army system.

The informal army supply system worked around such rules. The supply officers simply traded excesses back and forth to cover their asses, and the IGs never knew. Unless, of course, they had once been supply officers. The informal system made the books look good and protected the supply people, but we still had no jungle boots or chest protectors. Certain things you had to get for yourself. I was able to trade a grunt supply sergeant some whiskey for a pair of jungle boots. The chest protectors, though, were still not available. There were only a handful of them in the battalion.

All supply people dreamed of a way to balance the books—once and for all—without all that trading and shuffling. Flight 808 looked like the answer.

After two more days of searching, a Huey was found. It was the wreckage of a courier ship that had disappeared on its way to Pleiku a year before. The search was abandoned, and flight 808 was declared lost.

Declaring the ship missing started paper gears working all over the battalion. One of the questions the supply people loved to hear was “Did you have anything aboard the missing helicopter?”

“Well, now that you mention it, I did have six entrenching tools on that ship. Plus some web belts—seven web belts, to be exact—three insulated food containers, four first-aid kits, twenty-four flashlights,” and so on.

When all the reports were tallied, I was told by Captain Gillette, it came to a total of five tons of assorted army gear—about five times what we normally carried.

“One hell of a helicopter, don‘cha think?” said Gillette.

“Maybe that’s why it went down,” Gary said. “Slightly overloaded. By eight thousand pounds, I’d say.”

“Yep. We’ll never see another like that one.”

The action in Happy Valley slowed to nothing again. The brass took this to mean that we had won. Won what? A higher body count score, for one thing. And we did dominate the skies. Wendall believed that the Communists had decided to stop fighting temporarily, like they’d often done with the French. Instead of picking up a gun that morning, Charlie went out into the rice paddies and worked. We didn’t believe this. We thought the murderous hordes were beaten and whimpering out in the jungles, licking their wounds. But Wendall said they were with the villagers. Because they were the villagers.

Back around Christmas, a group of Montagnard mercenaries had revolted and killed more than twenty ARVN officers at the Mang Yang pass. After that the Cav guarded Mang Yang pass and the bridges on Route 19 going to Pleiku. The American patrols had their HQs next to the road. We delivered hot food, clothing, mail, and ammunition to them every day. Four or five ships from our company did the resupplying. Resler and I flew one of those ships, logging six and eight hours daily.

It was difficult to adjust to peaceful times. The deaths, the close calls, and the generally hectic pace of the past few weeks had established a combative mind-set and an expectation of continued action. Just going out to resupply some patrols on a secure road was so bland that we played games to make it interesting. Resler and I took turns flying low level down the road, seeing who could hold the ship in the turns. We also buzzed a convoy. MPs in the convoy thought we were maniacs and radioed our battalion. Farris was waiting for us when we got back that night. He said we had really scared the MPs.

“If I hear of any more cowboy stuff by you guys, I‘ll—” He had to stop and think for a minute. What could he do? Ground us? Send us home? What could he do that we wouldn’t like? “Tomorrow is your day off. You two have just volunteered to work on the club.”

Perfect.

Rumor came first, then the news. The 229th was scheduled to go to Bong Son valley. Every recon ship sent to this coastal valley fifty miles north of Qui Nhon had been hit by ground fire. The VC called it their own. A huge joint operation was planned involving the Cav, the marines, the navy, and the ARVNs. The navy would bombard the LZs with heavy guns. The marines would land on the beach north of the valley. The Cav would go into the middle of it and take the place. The ARVNs would mill around somewhere.

One of the recon-ship pilots, a warrant officer from another platoon, walked into the company’s HQ tent and turned in his wings, silver wings he had earned before the Second World War. He put them on the table and said, “Enough.”

“God! What will they do to him?” said Resler.

“I don’t know. Is it legal to just quit?” I asked Connors.

“Got me,” said Connors. “Probably they’ll shoot him or cut off his balls or maybe even make him work on the club.”

The quitter was whisked away. Several weeks later we learned that he was operating an in-country R&R center in Saigon.

It had never occurred to us that we could quit. Technically, we were all volunteers, and if anyone couldn’t take it, he could resign from flight status. But actually to do it… just quit. It was definitely an intelligent thing to do, but so dumb. How would he live with himself?

A few days later we flew farewell assaults in good old Ia Drang again, following up reports from the ARVNs that the NVA was gathering strength near the Cambodian border. About twenty-four ships from our battalion, including one with Nate and me, were sent to poke around.

Sherman rarely led a flight. The aging captain—he was in his early forties—needed some combat-command time before he could make major. He was nervous and cocky at our briefing, the dashing leader of a combat mission to the dreaded Ia Drang. His plan had us flying to Plei Djereng Special Forces camp, near the Cambodian border, then breaking up in groups of four to land grunts at strategic points.

Nate flew on the way out and I played with the maps. It wasn’t necessary to navigate during a formation flight, but I was always curious about just where the fuck I really was. We crossed the Turkey Farm at 2000 feet, heading west-southwest. A half hour later I saw what I thought was the camp five miles off to our left, but Sherman continued straight ahead.

“Getting close to the border,” I said.

“How far?” asked Nate.

“Well, it looks to me like we’re almost on top of it right now.”

“Really?”

“Yellow One, Yellow Two.” Yellow One was Sherman; Yellow Two, Morris and Decker.

“Roger, Yellow Two. Go ahead.”

“Yellow One, I think we’d better turn. Real soon,” Morris drawled.

There was a moment of silence. I could imagine Sherman unfolding and folding and crumpling maps, trying to figure out just what part of this miserable jungle he was over.

“Yellow Two, we’re right on course.”

“Ah, that’s a negative, Yellow One. I’ve got us past our target.”

That was Morris’s way of saying that we were over Cambodia.

Another moment of silence.

“Negative, Yellow Two. I’ve got us on course.”

You could hear the static of Morris’s mike as he hesitated. “Roger.”

Poor Sherman had fucked up and still didn’t know it. His very first authentic combat mission as commander. Kiss major good-bye.

Five miles into the jungle marked “Cambodia” on the map, Sherman’s ship lurched. He veered left, then right, before he actually made the turn. He made no announcement, simply turned back.

“Man, it’s hard to navigate around this fucking jungle, the dumb shit,” Nate said.

The radio was silent until our expeditionary gaggle returned to the proper country. From that day on, poor Sherman would get no command more adventurous or prestigious than being put in charge of digging the company’s well.

As we crossed the border, the chatter began once again. Sherman called Connors and told him he wanted our flight to stay on the ground as a reserve when we landed. Then he told us all to stretch out in trail formation.

The gaggle strung itself out in single file for the landing at Plei Djereng. As the first ships flared, red dust billowed up and swallowed them completely. The Special Forces people had bulldozed a landing strip, and the dry season had turned it to dust.

“Don’t try to hover. Put ‘em straight on the ground,” Sherman radioed. We couldn’t even see the ships that had already landed in the red clouds.

I trailed in behind Connors. When he got within fifty feet of the ground, the dust from the ship in front swallowed him up. He called, “Go around.” He pulled up and headed off to the right. I followed. Ships three and four behind us went on in and landed, and then the rest. By circling around, Connors and I put ourselves on the tail of the line. As we set up for the second try, I drifted back farther from Connors to stay away from his dust. Ten feet off the ground, Connors disappeared. Now it was my turn, the last ship in.

Roots and leafless bushes stuck up wildly at the extreme end of the strip. When I flared, the rotor wash stirred up the dust and everything vanished. I felt the ship hit something. I thought it sounded like a stump coming up through the belly, which happened pretty of ten on the assaults, so I elected to land a few feet farther ahead. Which way was ahead? Which way was up? There were only seconds to figure it out. The compass showed that we were turning to the right. I pushed the left pedal to stop the spin. It didn’t work.

This was a tail-rotor failure. The solution was to chop the power quickly to stop the ship from rotating under the main rotors, and then do a hovering autorotation. We had practiced this routine in flight school. Hundreds of times.

I tried to roll off the throttle to stop the spin, but it was locked. Nate, flying right seat, had locked the throttle for cruising. There was no way to release it from my side. There was no time to discuss the problem with Nate. This whole spinning machine was going to go over and beat itself to death, real soon. So I decided to put it down before it spun too fast. The ship hit and twisted on the skids, rocked over toward the left, hesitated precariously, and flopped back level.

We were out long before the dust settled. It didn’t look too bad. The ship sat crooked on its skids. The tail-rotor gear box was hanging by mechanical tendons. The tail rotor itself was twisted and bent.

Connors came back looking genuinely concerned. “What happened?”

“I’m not sure, but I hit something with my tail rotor.”

Nate and I, Connors and Banjo, and the grief-stricken Reacher poked around the ship looking for a stump or a rock or something big that could have done such damage, but there was nothing obvious. Nate finally called us over to where he squatted.

“A root?” I exclaimed.

“Looks that way,” said Nate. “See, you chopped it off right here.” He pointed to a fresh cut on a scrawny root sticking up through the dust. The cutoff point was two feet off the ground.

“Damn,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it, Mason. You couldn’t have seen it, not in this dust,” said Nate. “I didn’t see it.”

“Yeah, but you weren’t flying.”

“Couldn’t be helped.”

I bitched some more about my rotten luck, but Nate and Connors kept saying it wasn’t my fault.

Reacher came over and said, “It’s okay, Mr. Mason. She’ll be flying again in no time.” I felt better. Reacher was the one to know. It was his ship, the most powerful ship in the company, the ship Leese had used to haul that impossible load. If Reacher thought it wasn’t too bad, then it wasn’t too bad.

Nate and I walked to the Special Forces HQ hooch to wait for a ride back. Reacher decided to stay with the Huey until a Chinook was sent out to sling-load it home for repairs.

“You guys want a beer?” asked one of the advisers. He wore a camouflage uniform like the Vietnamese Rangers‘, covered with red dust. Red dust collected on everybody’s skin.

“Sure,” said Nate. We weren’t going to be flying any more today, so having a beer was okay.

We sat on a cot under a canvas canopy and sipped our beers while the rest of the gaggle gathered their load of grunts, cranked up, and left. A half hour later, the dust finally settled.

“Well, how do you like it?” asked the adviser.

“The beer?”

“No, this place. Plei Djereng. The asshole of the world.”

“Dusty.”

“Yeah, we keep it that way on purpose. Keeps the shit from stinking.”

A lone Huey courier landed at the camp. Nate and I hitched a ride to Pleiku. We had the pilot call our gaggle en route to tell them where we’d be. Sherman said he’d come fetch us near the end of the day. Camp Holloway at Pleiku was familiar territory. We immediately went to their officers’ club, drank some more beer, and played their slot machines. I still felt bad about breaking the ship. I couldn’t enjoy myself at all. While the rest of the gaggle was out getting shot at, I was acting like a typical adviser, drinking beer, playing slots—jerking off. The whole thing was due to my incompetence; nobody else had hit a root. So I drank more beer than I should have. So did Nate. He suggested that if we had to wait till sunset, we might as well do it downtown. I agreed. We decided that the best way to get there was to walk, and that’s what we started to do. We got a mile down the road when the daylight began to fade.

“Hey, Nate, something’s wrong with my eyes. Everything’s getting dim.” I stopped.

“Yeah. Mine, too.” The sky turned a pale orange, yet the sun was still high.

“Man, every time I drink too early in the day, I get fucked up. Not like this, though,” said Nate.

While we blinked at our dimming world, we saw our gaggle approaching Camp Holloway. The sun got brighter.

“Aha!” I exclaimed. “It’s not the booze; that was an eclipse.”

“Hey, yeah.” Nate grinned. We weren’t going to continue to dim out and fade to nothingness after all.

The sun got bright again, and the gaggle thundered and whopped and hissed to a landing. We ran back to Holloway to rejoin our comrades.

The original damage estimate was $10,000, later raised to $100,000. The accident board decided that the cause was extreme, dusty conditions. They had let me off the hook. The usual verdict was pilot error. I mean, if the rotor blades came off in flight, the pilot was posthumously charged with failure to preflight the ship properly. One time, I saw the rotors of a Huey slash through‘the cockpit and decapitate the two pilots while the ship was on the ground. The pilots were guilty of not checking the ship’s log. The ship had been “red, X’d” by the crew chief while he worked on the control rods. Pilot error. If you skewered a Huey on a sharp stump during an assault, it was pilot error. If you tumbled down the side of a mountain while trying to land on a pinnacle under fire, it was pilot error. There was usually no other conclusion. So the board was generous indeed when it decided that the accident was due to extreme, dusty conditions. But guess what I thought… the pilot was in error.

We’d already taken Happy Valley, but we had to go back out to patch up a few holes in the victory. Somebody forgot to tell Charlie he lost, so he was still out there shooting down helicopters, the dumb fuck.

The news about our victory against the North Vietnamese Regulars at Ia Drang had been so well reported that the Cav was taking on some of the mythical qualities usually afforded the marines. We were the pros.

I knew that the press was doing a selling job when we supported a newly arrived unit from Hawaii. When we landed to pick up the men, they rushed us like kids when they saw we were air crews from the famous Cav. We were celebrities, the vanguard of more units like ours that would squeeze the Communists back up north like so much shit.

In two days we flew twelve assaults into the same areas we had taken several times before. To add insult to injury, the VC fought even harder.

One LZ lay near the thin jungle at the base of the hills. I was flying number-three slot on the left side of the formation. Our squad was the second one to go in. Gunships made their chattering runs beside us, and door gunners killed bushes. Smoke from the prep was billowing skyward, and as we got to within five hundred feet of the ground, red tracers were streaking among us. By now I had learned to concentrate on my job and to suppress my fear. I felt almost brave. This was Happy Valley. I’d been here scores of times before, and it was never as bad as Ia Drang. Besides, I was one of the pros.

The return fire from the invisible Charlies was more intense as we got closer. We continued straight in.

Near the bottom of the approach, maybe a hundred feet off the deck, I saw a steady stream of tracers off to my left. Aiming at somebody else? Who’s behind me? Then the stream began to move in toward my ship. He’s singled us out as his target. He’s got us. Goddamnit, he’s got us.

I could not move from my slot, or even dodge around. I was flying tight on number two, and somebody was flying tight on me. Just keep going. I felt Gary get on the controls. The tracers were close, only a second away from raking the cockpit.

I tightened my stomach, like the bullets might bounce off. My arms tightened; my jaw tightened; my hands tightened. The rounds must not go through me. Of all things, my wristwatch stood vividly before me. How could I see my watch? I wasn’t even looking at it. It was a gold, square-faced Hamilton that my grandfather had left me. The second hand had its own dial at the bottom of the face. And the hand was not moving. At that moment, I could have unbuckled, opened the door, walked around outside, had a smoke, and watched the flight frozen in the midst of the assault. I would be able to walk between the tracers and use one to light my cigarette. I saw the flight frozen there in midair. I saw myself braced for the impact of that shredding fire. It was almost funny.

An explosive whoosh beside the cockpit caused the clock to run again. Smoking rockets followed the tracers to their source. They stopped, just like that. A Duke gunship had nailed that fucker with a rocket right down the stream of fire. I was saved.

There was a lot more fire on the ground when we landed, but it was impotent. It didn’t matter: I was saved.

Back at the Golf Course, they told us that our first assault into Bong Son was set for the next morning.

The first assault would be to LZ Dog, to secure a base of operations for the grunts. The navy had blasted Dog, the army had artilleried Dog, the marines were landing on the beach ten miles away, and the Cav was sending a hundred slicks in to take the place.

A flight of a hundred helicopters becomes a train of unconnected parts that bunches up and stretches out like the flow of commuter traffic. One minute you’re trying to close a gap between yourself and the flight ahead, and the next second you’re practically hovering to keep away.

The villages we saw before we got to LZ Dog were islands in the sea of rice paddies. This was one of the most valuable of all Vietnamese valleys because of its bountiful rice crop. The people who lived here were sympathetic to Uncle Ho, as was 80 percent of the rest of Vietnam. The other 20 percent, in the American-controlled cities, was engaged in maintaining the colonialist system installed by the French and now run by the Americans. I knew this because Wendall had told me. He said, “Just read Street WithoutJoy and you’ll see.” But there weren’t any copies of that book around here, and it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, because I just didn’t believe it. I didn’t believe it, because Kennedy and McNamara and Johnson and all the rest certainly knew about Street Without Joy, and they sent us here anyway. It was obvious to me that Bernard Fall was just another flake, the father of the dreaded Vietniks who were attacking our country like so much cancer. And of course the proof of all this was that Wendall himself was still here doing everything I was doing. And even Wendall wasn’t that dumb.

“Yellow One, you are off course.”

No answer.

“Yellow One, turn left twenty degrees.”

Yellow One, the lead ship of this monstrous gaggle, still didn’t answer. Instead he slowed down even more and turned farther away from our course. Nate and I (Resler was away on R&R) were way back in the flight, the fortieth ship or so. We were showing an airspeed of 20 knots. The whole gaggle was staggering and bunching up over some villages at an altitude of 100 feet.

“Yellow One, do you read?”

No answer.

“Yellow Two, take the lead. Come left forty degrees.”

“Roger.”

We had a leader again. Yellow One’s radios were shot out, and he had been trying to hand-signal Yellow Two to take over, but Yellow Two just followed him as he tried to break away.

Below us, the villagers were having a picnic, shooting at a lot of helicopters flying low and slow. At one village I saw fifty people just standing around, their hands shielding their eyes from the sun, watching the show. Somebody down there was shooting, because the ships were calling in hits. I couldn’t see any guns, just women and children and men watching the helicopter parade.

As the gaggle crossed the next village on our flight path, many ships called in hits. Connors got his fuel bladder raked and had to break away from the flight. Another ship called in that a pilot was killed, and it turned back. Someone in that village was doing a real job, but so far he was invisible. Meanwhile, we still wallowed around, flying low and slow.

One of the ships just ahead of us called in hit. At the same moment, I saw where the gun was. Among all the people, water buffalo, thatched huts, and coconut trees, an innocent-looking group of people stood bunched in a crowd. From the center of the crowd I saw smoke and then the gunner. He had a machine gun.

Before I got into the army, they had asked me a question they asked all prospective grunts: What would you do if you were the driver of a truck loaded with soldiers, traveling very fast down a muddy road, flanked on both sides with steep drop-offs, and a small child suddenly walked into your path? Would you try to avoid her and drive off to certain death, or would you keep going and kill her? Well, everybody knew the right answer: You kill the kid. And it didn’t much matter, because the kid and the situation weren’t real anyway. So I had said, “I’d stop the truck.”

“No, no. You can’t stop the truck. It’s going too fast.”

“Well, then, I wouldn’t be going so fast down a very bad road in the first place.”

“You don’t seem to understand. It’s assumed that you have no choice but to kill either the little kid or you and your comrades.”

“Since I have no choice, I’ll go ahead and kill the kid.”

“That’s what we like to hear.”

Now the question was, How do you kill that gunner, who has just killed some pilots, without killing the screen of innocent people around him?

“I see the gun, sir!” said Rubenski, the door gunner.

“Shoot at the ground first. Scare those people away,” I said.

“Yes, sir.” Rubenski, one of our most accurate gunners, opened up as we drew closer to the gun position. The spectators were at the edge of their village, directly off our right side, a hundred yards away.

The bullets sent up muddy geysers from the paddy water as they raged toward the group. The VC gunner was concentrating on another ship and didn’t see Rubenski’s bullets yet. I really expected to see the black pajamas, conical hats, and the small children scatter and expose the gunner. Were they chained in place? When the bullets were smashing fifty feet in front of them, I knew they weren’t going to move. They threw up their arms as they were hit, and whirled to the ground. After what seemed a very long time, the gunner, still firing, was exposed. Rubenski kept firing. The VC’s gun barrel flopped down on its mount and he slid to the ground. A dozen people lay like tenpins around him. The truck had smashed the kid.

Twenty ships were damaged and five were shot down, killing two pilots and two gunners, while we floundered over the villages on the way to Dog. Dog itself was an ancient Vietnamese graveyard, and we took it without too much trouble. The ships landed in groups, dropped off the grunts, and returned for more. By that night, Dog was an outpost of Americans in a Vietcong wilderness. Nate and I and three other ships were selected to spend the night there with the grunts as emergency ships for the grunt commander. It drizzled all night.

“Why didn’t they duck?” I sat in my seat staring into the night.

“The VC forced them to stand there.”

“How can you make people stand up to machine-gun bullets?”

“He would have shot them if they had run.”

“But if they had all run, he couldn’t have shot them, not with us right there shooting at him.”

“Obviously they were more afraid of him than they were of us.”

“That was it? They were so afraid that they would get killed that they stood there and got killed?”

“Orientals don’t think like we do.”

Firefights chattered all night, but I didn’t lie awake because of that. I kept replaying the scene. The faces were clear. One old woman chewed betel nut and nodded weakly as the bullets boiled in. One child turned to run, chewed up even while he turned. A woman shrieked at the child; then she was hit, too. The gunner kept firing. I saw it over and over, until I knew everybody in that group. And they all knew me and nodded and smiled and turned and whirled and died.

At three in the morning the firefight got suddenly louder at the edge of the graveyard. A grunt ran up and told us to crank. Fifteen minutes later the firing slowed, and the grunt came by and told us to shut down.

The next morning, Nate and I flew fifty miles south to a place called the Rifle Range, where the rest of our battalion and part of the 227th had set up camp. We moved into a GP with Morris, Decker, Shaker, Daisy, Sherman, and Farris. Resler was still gone. My cot was missing, so I built a stretcher out of two poles and a blanket set across two ammo crates.

We were camped on an old ARVN rifle range near the village of Phu Cat, next to Route 1. About a thousand ROKs from the Korean Tiger Division surrounded us as our security. That was nice, because the ROKs (from Republic of Korea) were devout killers. They spent their dawns beating each other up just for fun.

After a quick lunch Nate and I were back in the air in a flight of two squads going back to Dog. At Dog we loaded up with grunts and set out on the mission.

Farris led the flight. A command ship was to meet us en route and show him the LZ.

“Preacher Six, do you have me in sight?”

“Roger,” said Farris.

“Just watch me. I’m going in now.”

The ship dropped from 1000 feet and set up an approach to one of the clearings below. I thought he was just going to fly over it, but he flared and hovered into the LZ. Rice plants rippled in a circle around him.

“Right here, Preacher flight. It’s all clear.”

That was the only time I ever saw this technique. It looked pretty good. Here was an LZ that really was quiet. The ship nosed over and took off to the north over a stand of trees.

Farris called, “Man your guns,” and we pulled up nice and tight and followed him in.

“Pick your spots,” radioed Farris. The LZ was narrow, so I dropped back a little to land behind the number-two ship.

As we flared, spray from the rice paddy swirled around us. I decided not to land completely but to hover with the skids lightly touching the paddy. The grunts jumped out before we touched, not because of the excitement of the assault but out of habit. A routine landing to a cold LZ.

We waited for thirty seconds while Farris made sure everybody had unloaded. Machine guns opened up from three points. They had us pinned with fire from the front, the left flank, and the rear. I could see the muzzle flashes in the tree line fifty yards away, which blocked our take off path. I pushed pedals furiously and wiggled the ship as we hovered, waiting for Farris. The only gun position I could watch was the one up front, and he was raking us at will. Our door guns couldn’t swing that far forward, so the gunners concentrated on the flank attacks. As I oscillated left and right, I heard one tick, then Farris took off just to the right of the forward VC gun with the rest of us hot on his tail rotor. As we crossed the trees, another VC gun opened up, showering tracers through our flight. I pulled up higher than the rest of the flight and made small, quick turns left and right. As we climbed out, all the guns below us converged on our eight ships. I just kept floundering around, believing firmly that Leese was right: Anything you can do to make yourself a bad target is to your benefit. Moments later we were out of range. Six of the eight helicopters were damaged, and two gunners had been killed. Our ship had taken the one round that had hit us on the ground.

Later, checking the angle at which the round had hit the ship, I found that it had hit while I was pedal-turning in the low hover. The bullet had come up just beside me, at chest level, and lodged in the base of the tail boom, behind me. I was convinced that my evasive tactics had saved my life.

“If you had not moved at all, the bullet would probably have missed you altogether,” said Nate, back at the Rifle Range.

“That particular bullet hit me while I turned right. That means if I hadn’t turned, it would have come into the cockpit.”

“But you couldn’t know that. It was just luck.”

“Yeah. Good luck.”

“But just luck. What if you had turned into a bullet? The same technique could just as easily kill you.”

He was right of course, but I was convinced that I had actually dodged the bullet.

“But what about the takeoff? Everybody else got torn to ribbons,” I countered.

“Look, Mason, if it’s your turn to die, that’s it. You can’t control the odds. It just wasn’t your day to get zapped.”

“So you’re saying I should just sit there and fly smooth and neat with the rest of the flight? I can’t do that. I can imagine myself on the ground trying to shoot down a Huey. If one ship in the flight is going nuts like I do, I wouldn’t even try to hit it. I’d go for the others.

Nate nodded and sipped some coffee. “I guess if it makes you feel better, you should do it. But I think you’re just pissing into the wind.”

We learned that one gunner had taken a direct hit in the chest armor he was lucky enough to be wearing, and it had stopped the bullet cold. It reminded me of my near hit—which would have got me in the chest—so I got pissed off about the lack of chest protectors in our company. After all the fire we’d taken in the last five months, we still had only a few. We just hadn’t lost enough pilots yet.

The VC fire in this valley was intense. This was their home, and they were thoroughly dug in. No matter where we flew, we were shot at. In two days we had had forty-five ships seriously damaged in our slick battalions. The Chinooks in the 228th had been hit—which had not happened much at Ia Drang—and had lost ten pilots. We thought the C-130 that crashed and burned at the An Khe pass the day before, killing eighty, had been forced down by ground fire.

That night, Nate and I and Morris and Decker rode to the village down the road. I took some pictures of a group of smiling children. We all bought some candles and soap from the little store. On the way back, in the rear of the truck, we complained about our lack of chest armor. Morris sat with his arms folded as we bumped along.

“I talked to a friend of mine at battalion,” he said. “He says we should get a load of chest protectors any day now.”

The truck pulled up beside our mess tent, and as we got out, Decker said, “Yeah, any day now. I wonder how fast he’d get them here if he was flying in this shit.”

The next day, January 31, we launched another mission. This LZ was named Quebec. It was about five miles past Dog.

Dog was now a very large staging area where the bulk of our troopers stayed. If any place was secure in this valley, it was Dog. As the twelve ships on this mission crossed the river for the approach, somebody on the right side of the formation took a hit from the “friendly” village.

We hung around on the ground for about an hour, watching the air-force Phantoms as they hit Quebec with tons of bombs and napalm. I sat on the roof of my Huey and watched the show. At the bottom of their passes, the Phantoms would mush and they’d kick in their afterburners to power out. It was a pretty good show. I could’ve sat there and watched it all day.

While all this was going on, I idly watched two grunts walk out to/set up a claymore mine a hundred yards in front of us. I had gone through a demolition course in Advanced Infantry Training, so I felt a critical interest. The claymore mine is shaped like a crescent. The convex side is pointed toward the enemy. It’s detonated remotely, blasting millions of small wire pieces that shred its victims. As I watched them anchor it in position, it exploded. Both men, one on either side of the mine, were thrown back—torn, lifeless heaps.

What’s next in this carnival? I thought.

The Phantoms finished prepping Quebec, and the air show stopped.

“We’re up. Let’s go,” yelled Williams.

Eight grunts jumped on each ship. We cranked, checked in on the radios, and took off. Nate and I followed the number-two ship, Morris and Decker.

The smoke from the air-force bombing drifted lazily at Quebec as we flew past to set up an approach to the south.

“Preacher Six, Antenna Six. Head south now. VC automatic weapons on your route.” Antenna Six, the Colonel, flew overhead.

“Preacher Six, roger wilco.” Williams started his turn back to the LZ.

“Preacher Six, artillery is still preparing the LZ. Be careful.”

“Roger. Preacher Six now on short final.” The LZ was a narrow strip of brushy, dry sand next to the foothills on the west side of the valley. Following previous instructions, we moved into a staggered trail formation.

“Preacher Six, receiving small-arms fire from the west!” That was Connors.

“Yellow flight, this is Preacher Six. Pick your spots. The LZ is rough.” Williams was just off the ground in his landing flare. Morris and Decker were fifty feet off, and I was behind them maybe a hundred feet.

“Preacher Six, this is Yellow Two. Captain Morris is hit. Captain Morris is hit bad!” Morris’s ship suddenly dropped fast from twenty feet and landed hard.

“Yellow Four is receiving fire from the right.” There was nothing to see on our right except a long row of dead brush.

“Captain Morris is dead! Captain Morris is dead!”

“Roger, Yellow Two.”

“This ship is destroyed. I’m getting out!”

I saw Decker jump out of his Huey as we landed behind him. He leapt to the ground beside the ship, his sawed-off shotgun at the ready. He was faced away from the VC.

Nate called, “Preacher Six, Yellow Three. We’ll pick up Decker and his crew.”

“Negative, Yellow Three. Clear the LZ for the next flight.”

The grunts were off. Some of them scrambled toward Decker, under fire, and pointed him the right way. The troopers stayed low. Sand kicked up under the VC fire.

“Let’s go, Yellow flight.” Williams took off.

As I made the takeoff run beside Decker’s still-running ship, I glanced into the cockpit and saw Morris sitting in the right seat with his head slumped forward on his chest. He seemed to be taking a nap.

Tick. “We’re hit.” Tick-tick-tick.

The gunner that had got Morris was getting us. I pulled in a lot of power and climbed for the sky. I climbed much higher than Williams, and at about 1000 feet, the engine quit. Silence. I bottomed the pitch.

It was my first authentic forced landing, and I was extremely lucky. The spot I was aiming for was the spot I was supposed to land in anyway. It was secure. I skidded ten feet when I hit, and the rotors quietly slowed and stopped.

The crew chief was already inspecting the damage before I got out of the ship. “Four rounds through the fuel lines, sir.” We wouldn’t be flying that ship anymore today. Nate and I stood around while the flight returned to Quebec. I don’t know about him, but I felt cold and clammy while we stood in the blistering heat.

Battalion always had at least one maintenance ship on call for situations like ours. It landed in secure areas to determine whether or not a ship could be fixed on the spot.

I heard the loud whopping of the Huey as it crossed Dog, two miles away. How could anyone be taken by surprise by a flight of Hueys? The thudding slap of the main rotors grew quieter when the ship was a quarter of a mile away, replaced by the buzz of the tail rotor and the hissing whine of the turbine. It landed a hundred feet behind us, starting a brief sandstorm before the pitch was bottomed. The turbine shut off and the rotors spun down. Two specialists, mechanics, ran toward our ship. The crew chief showed them the damage under the engine cowling. They all stuck their noses into the Huey’s innards. Leaving them to their work, I walked back to the maintenance Huey to see who was flying.

It was Riker.

“Somebody hurt?” said Riker. He did not know about Morris.

I stood next to the skid and tried to word what I was going to say while Riker finished freeing himself from the straps. As I began to speak, a painful grin possessed my face. “Morris was shot and killed.”

Riker’s face showed a second of shock and despair, before he too was possessed by the same animal grin. “Really? Morris?”

“Yes. Just a few minutes ago. At Quebec.” I spoke jerkily as I fought with the expression on my face. How could I be grinning?

Riker was having the same problem. His mouth curved into a smile, but his face showed pain. He tried to break the spell by speaking of other things.

“How bad is your ship?”

“Not bad. Fuel lines were hit.”

“Your ship is okay?” he said vacantly.

“Yep. Okay.”

“Where was he hit?” Riker said abruptly. The task of maintaining his composure was beyond him, and his face jerked involuntarily into that horrible grin.

“I don’t really know, but I think he got hit in the chest.”

“Yeah?”

“I think so.”

We were embarrassing each other, so we stopped talking and sat on the sandy grass and smoked a cigarette. The mechanics fiddled with my ship. Nate, who had been watching them curiously, walked over to join us.

“Bob tell you about Morris?” Nate seemed brave and businesslike.

“Yeah. By the way, is Decker all right?” Riker said.

“He’s still in the LZ,” said Nate.

“Really? Why didn’t somebody pick him up?”

“There was too much fire, and Decker jumped out and took cover on the ground. Besides, Williams wouldn’t let us wait to get him.”

“Why not?”

“Well, he was right. The next flight was right behind us, and we probably would’ve just got someone else hurt trying to get Decker to the ship.”

“It doesn’t seem right, just to leave him there.”

“He’ll be okay,” Nate said. “He’s got his trusty old shotgun with him.”

“Sir, the ship’s not flyable,” the mechanic called to Riker.

“Okay.” We all stood up. “You guys interested in a ride back to the Rifle Range for a new ship?”

“You bet,” I said. “Can’t wait to get back into the fight.”

Nate and Riker smiled at my false bravado. Then Riker said, “You guys remember that model he made of the Croatan?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I wonder where it is now?”

An hour later, Nate and I were back in the air. We joined a flight taking more grunts into Quebec. Decker had got out on the next flight. Late that afternoon, after we had replaced two second lieutenants who had been killed and hauled reinforcements in and wounded out, the grunts finally took Quebec, both sandy acres of it. Two machine guns and ten rifles had been hidden in a long trench under that innocent-looking pile of brush. At twilight we landed back at the Rifle Range.

Decker was sitting on the end of his cot, elbows on his knees, hands on his cheeks, staring at the dirt.

I was glad to see him back. “Hey, Deck—” Someone stopped me with a shake of the head. I nodded. Instead of walking by him, I went outside and came in through the back flap and sat on my stretcher.

Nate, facing me on his cot, was pouring some Old Grandad into his canteen cup. “Want some?”

“Yeah, I think I will.” I poured about two inches in my cup and stirred in some water with my finger. We sat there silently. Nate reread one of his letters, and I watched Decker. Everyone else in the tent talked quietly, keeping a space around the mourning man.

He was pale. He looked up once, and his face showed that sad child within. He shook his head and made a weak smile. “He autorotated.”

We all looked at him, expecting more. But he was silent.

Sherman broke the silence. “Morris?”

“Yeah. As he died, he bottomed the pitch for an autorotation. But we were too close to the ground, and the ship nosed in and sank up to the canopy.” Decker squinted in pain and stopped talking.

I was thinking, “Nosed in”? There was nothing wrong with the ship. They’d hit harder than normal, but the ship was just sitting there running when Decker jumped out.

Decker continued solemnly. “The bullet came in through the triangle window and went through his flak vest like it wasn’t there and through his heart. The flak vest stopped it on the other side. He pushed the collective down like he was making an autorotation and we crashed before I could stop it.” He stopped for a moment. “If I had been a little faster, I could’ve kept us from crashing.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Sherman.

“That’s what you think. How would you feel if your best friend had just gotten killed and you couldn’t even keep the fucking ship from crashing? See, he did the right thing even while he was dying. He set us up for the autorotation, but I just wasn’t fast enough to save it.”

“But, Decker, Morris was already dead. It doesn’t matter about the landing,” Sherman said.

Decker stood up suddenly. “He’s dead and it’s my fault!” He grabbed his shotgun and walked outside.

“Jesus,” said Nate.

“I don’t see why he’s blaming himself,” said Sherman. “Morris was already dead. And besides that, the ship didn’t crash.”

We all looked at Sherman. Of course, he was right. But nobody wanted to be rational. It was so… out of place.

The old man said nothing about Morris except that we ought to get some money together for flowers for his wife, but Sherman took it upon himself to give a little speech that night.

“Well, we’ve been pretty lucky up to now. It was only a matter of time. The other companies have taken a lot more kills than we have, so it’s our turn now. It looks like the overall ratio is one in five. One pilot out of five will get killed. We’ve only lost two guys, which puts us five away from the average. We’ve just been lucky.”

I hated Sherman. Now we were delinquent in our deaths. Running behind in our proper death ratio were we? Well we’ll just see about that. C‘mon you guys, let’s get out there and die!

At dawn the next morning, a Chinook landed, dwarfing our Hueys. A deuce-and-a-half backed up to the door ramp, and men began loading chest protectors onto the truck. Hundreds of chest protectors.

8. Bong Son Valley

February 1966

The beach was slippery red clay. Connors claimed that it was better than the Caribbean. “In the Caribbean you can’t slide into the water because of the sand.”

True. If you sat on this beach without holding on to a bush, you slipped into the warm red water. Stepping toward the center of the pond, your feet accumulated layers of adhesive clay that made it seem like you were touching bottom when you weren’t. When I was chin deep, I stopped to watch the others.

Banjo ducked under and disappeared completely, an act of great courage in this slime, to reappear several feet away.

“Man, how can you stick your head under that shit?” said Kaiser. Kaiser, like me, wouldn’t go under for anything, but stood chin deep, soaking in the relative coolness.

Banjo only laughed and ducked under again. An old Vietnamese lady laughed at him while she weeded the fields around the pond. Four or five women and two men watched us skinny-dip in the buffalo watering pond. The women grinned self-consciously. These naked foreigners were clearly making fools of themselves. We interpreted their smiles as friendly approval.

An ROK road patrol guarding a bridge a hundred feet away laughed, too. I found out later that the Koreans were forbidden to undress around the Vietnamese because it was a sign of vulnerability to be thus exposed in front of your enemy.

Nate was sitting on his clothes on the beach, sunning himself, when a Cola girl materialized. When he noticed her, he modestly crossed his legs.

Cola girls were ubiquitous. They arrived at our laagers carrying Cokes in plastic netting.

“Fifty cents, GI. Buy Croakacrola?” They were inevitably young and cute, so I never bought a Coke. I was convinced the soda was poisoned.

“Hey, Nate, I can see your pecker,” yelled Connors. Nate glanced at him while he declined the coke and tightened his legs.

“I’m trolling, wise-ass.”

“Hey. So that’s how it’s done. But the bait is so small.”

Everyone laughed.

“I don’t know where you get off, Connors. You could play a record with your cock.”

“So, you’re going to do it?” I said.

“Yeah. You oughta think about it, too,” said Kaiser.

“Air America. Who are they?”

“Well, they’re supposed to be a civilian helicopter service, but it’s a CIA front.”

“How much do they pay?” I asked.

“That’s the good part. They guarantee twenty thousand and the average is thirty-five. Plus you get PX privileges, an airline discount, and ten days of R&R every month.”

“Twenty thousand?” I was paid seven.

“Yeah. And you can join them right now, before you get out of the army.”

“You doing that?”

“Well, I’ve only got two months left in service, so I’m going to finish up and move to Saigon as a civilian.” Kaiser slapped an envelope against his hand. “Got the letter today. It’s all fixed. What do you think, Mason? You want me to give you the address?”

“Naw. I think I’d rather fly crop dusters in Florida than sneak around with the CIA in Vietnam.”

“You’re going to be a CIA agent?” Nate said to Kaiser.

“Not an agent, a pilot. You know, Air America.”

“So, you like this line of work, do you?”

“Shit, they never fly assaults. They mostly do courier work and fly radio teams into Cambodia. Or pick up downed pilots where the army isn’t supposed to go. We take a lot more chances than they do, and we do it for peanuts.”

“So why do you think they’d let somebody as stupid as you even get close to their operation?”

“Not all of us are morons, Nate. You’ll see. In two months I’ll be pulling in twenty thou for doing a lot less work and for taking a lot less chances than you.”

Nate set a record on top of a box. In one corner of the box there was a fold-out tone arm.

“That’s a record player?” I said.

“Yeah. Neat, huh? My wife sent it for Christmas, but it just got here.”

Music played. “You’re kidding me!” said Kaiser. “ ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’? I’m sick!” He got up and left.

“Eat your heart out, Kaiser!” Nate hummed along with the song.

Barber, Wendall’s buddy, ducked in through the flap. “Mason, you seen Wendall?”

“No.”

“I have. He’s over toward the mess tent digging a hole,” said Nate.

“Thanks.” Barber left.

“What’s he digging a hole for?” I asked.

“He keeps saying we’re going to get hit. I think he’s beginning to take Hanoi Hanna seriously,” said Nate.

“Puff the Magic Dragon” was making me uncomfortable. It was the saccharine song that had inspired the naming of the murderous gatling-gun-armed C-47s. I couldn’t listen. “I’m going to check out Wendall.”

It was twilight, and I could see a small pile of dirt next to the other platoon tent. When I got closer, I saw what looked like a cap sitting on the ground. The cap moved, and Wendall’s smile brightened under the brim. “Hi, Mason.”

“Hi, Wendall. Nice hole you got there.”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“No. Really.”

Wendall tried to hold his chin up at the edge of the five-foot shaft while his shoulders strained low to reach something on the bottom. A large tin can full of sand squeezed up between his chest and the tight walls. He dumped it on the pile around him.

“The VC love mortars, and we have no protection,” he said.

“They say we can’t dig holes. We’re supposed to use that big gully over there.”

“That gully’s too wide. If a mortar round went off in it, you’d have hamburger. That’s why I built this like I did. I’m below ground level and I present the minimum target.”

“Pretty smart.”

“Not really. It just looks smart compared to what the morons told us to do.” He was referring to the Cav’s no-digging policy, which was still in effect to keep us from disfiguring the landscape. “Sometimes I think this war is being run by a gardener,” he added.

I walked over to the maintenance area and took a time-exposure shot of Reacher and some other guys working on a Huey in the glare of floodlights. Thousands of moths flitted around the lights while Reacher and Rubenski, armed with wrenches and screwdrivers, worked to get the ship flyable for the morning. They did it every night. Our ships were parked in a long row, nose to tail, along with eight or so other Hueys, at the Rifle Range. The rest were invisible in the moonless night.

The music was off when I returned, and Nate was asleep. I stripped to my underwear and crawled under my poncho liner.

I could not sleep. Why couldn’t I be more like Kaiser? Get a job with Air America and get out of all this? Imagine twenty thousand dollars a year. Patience had been complaining in her letters about our money problems. We were paying for the new Volvo, a much too expensive bed-and-dresser set, life insurance, and high rent at Cape Coral. Twenty thousand would sure be a whole new world. But it would have to be in this stinking country. Anything was better than that.

A mosquito pierced my arm, but I didn’t flinch. A guy I knew in another company was still in Japan living in a hotel while they treated him for malaria.

I was jumpy, worried. My nights were getting harder to bear. I thought of jerking off, but it seemed like too much trouble. You had to be very careful because the slightest noise or creak of the bed might cause some wise-ass to yell, “Hey. I hear somebody fucking his fist!” That would cause a few moments of catcalls, which masturbating men use to cover their last, quick strokes. So far I hadn’t been discovered. I knew it was only a matter of time.

Invariably my thoughts turned to a problem I had devised when I first arrived. I was mentally designing a clock to be made of bamboo. I had now determined how many gears I would need, how I would slice the bamboo to make the gears, how I could rig an escapement—almost everything I needed. I reviewed the plan, looking for errors. That put me to sleep.

Whoom! Whump whump wham! I awoke sitting upright but not understanding. Very heavy, ground-shaking explosions came from the direction of the Rifle Range gully.

“Mortars!” someone yelled.

Mortars? Shit! I grabbed my pistol belt and stuffed my feet into my boots. People ran by.

Rounds were exploding beyond the sand berm next to the gully. Men were packed into the bottom of the trench. I didn’t go in. Wendall was right: If a mortar went off in there, it would be mass murder. I decided to hide somewhere else.

I had my pistol out in front of me as I ran. The unlaced boots kept sliding off my feet; my cock kept swinging out of my underwear. Our mortar batteries began shooting back. I heard frantic calls for the pilots assigned to evacuate the ships to get going. I wasn’t part of that, so I kept looking for a place to hide. Finally, I rolled under a truck and watched the explosions. They were terrifyingly powerful, and random. So far no rounds had hit inside our compound. I was under the truck for a few minutes before I realized that if a mortar did hit it, the truck would explode, shredding me. I rolled out from under and lay in a shallow depression in the sand. Flares cast swinging shadows around the compound. Fifty-caliber tracers seemed to cruise slowly overhead, coming our way, so it must be the VC. I heard the Hueys running for a long time, but they didn’t take off. As the flares went off over the ROK positions, I noticed Wendall’s helmet moving around in the middle of his pile of sand. Why was he always right?

I heard the sounds of machine guns blasting out of the darkness overhead. Our gunships were on station, shooting streams of tracers into the foothills beyond the ROKs. Still, no mortars had come past the berm next to the gully. Our ships still idled, not taking off.

After fifteen minutes the mortars stopped. Only the familiar sound of outgoing rounds was left. I stood up and tried to dust the sand from my sweating body. My hands shook, and I cursed the Vietcong, the mortars, and the army.

The evacuation pilots were returning from the flight line.

“Listen, asshole, I was assigned Two-two-seven. What the fuck were you doing in my seat?” I heard someone say.

“The major told me I was supposed to fly it, numb nuts!”

The ships hadn’t got off the ground, because too many men tried to squeeze on board. The weight of the pilots and crew chiefs stuffed inside the machines kept them grounded while they argued about who was supposed to be flying.

The Koreans had sent out their Tiger teams. They came back with mortar tubes, base plates, and severed VC heads. The Koreans also complained that our gunships had killed some of their men.

We came off as a bunch of amateurs compared to the ROKs.

For the rest of the night I kept snapping awake as though something were happening. But nothing was.

“Preacher Six, there’s a machine-gun position on your takeoff path.”

The guns swooped back and forth in front of us, chattering.

Williams was up against the tree line in front of us, so he had to pull the guts out of his Huey to make it over. The gunships were in front of us, circling like sharks, firing down into the jungle.

“Preacher Six, turn left. You’re heading for the machine gun.”

No answer.

“Turn left. Turn left!” The gunship pilot was losing his cool as he watched us take off right over the position he’d warned us about.

It was a single gun. As we crossed above it, it raked us in the belly.

“Sir, one of the grunts just got hit!” said Miller, the crew chief.

The grunt, a black guy, had taken a round in the ass. I heard our gunner, Simmons, yelling incoherently over the noise of the ship.

“Sir, it’s Simmons’s brother,” Miller said.

“Preacher Six,” I called, “we have a wounded on board. We’re going to the aid station first.”

“Roger.”

We landed next to a MASH hospital pod that sky-cranes had lifted in from the Golf Course. The medics ran out and loaded the man onto a stretcher. Simmons ran around from the other side of the ship, crying, and hurried alongside the stretcher into the pod. We waited. He came back a few minutes later, his cheeks wet, but he was smiling.

“The doctors say he’ll be okay. He’ll be going home,” he said to the crew chief.

Ah, the proverbial million-dollar wound. Then I remembered that Simmons had discovered another brother at the bottom of a pile of bodies at Pleiku.

Neither brothers nor fathers and sons were supposed to be in the same combat theater at the same time. I knew of two people in Vietnam who didn’t have to be there.

I talked to Simmons after we got back to the Rifle Range.

“Yes, sir, I know,” he said.

“So why don’t you tell the CO. He’ll get you out of here. You’ve lost one brother, and another was just wounded. Your family has done enough.”

He smiled and said, “No. I’m staying.”

“Why?”

“Someone has to do it.” He really said that. I thought I was in a movie. Maybe he did, too.

The fighting had progressed from the valley floor near the village of Bong Son north to the narrow An Lao valley, surrounded by steep mountains. We landed on the valley floor in the rice paddies.

The grunts jumping out of the Hueys found themselves slogging slowly for cover next to the paddy dikes. The paddies were tricky. If we landed and laagered for a while, the ships sank up to their bellies in the quagmire, anchoring them. Leese had demonstrated the proper technique for takeoff from such places months before in Happy Valley.

“You can’t just pull up hard and race out of here,” he had said. “First you bring the nose up to start releasing the skids, then level the ship and pull up slowly, very slowly, until the skids slide free. If you don‘t, one skid will leave first, leaving the other still stuck. Then you’ll flip over and go crash.”

Resler, having just returned from his R&R, was with me. We landed in a paddy in An Lao to await grunts on their way to our position to be extracted.

Once on the ground, each Huey became a kind of island in the rice-paddy lake. The heat was sweltering. The humidity was as thick as the mud under us.

Helicopter pilots, like cats, were finicky about getting their feet wet. That was one of the reasons they were pilots. Grunts got dirty; pilots didn‘t—so the story went. Anyway, Resler and I crawled over the seats, sat in the shade on the cargo deck, and picked and pawed at the C-ration boxes for snacks.

When the pace of the action was broken by periods like this, we sometimes compensated by indulging in what the army called “grab-ass.” That is, we tried to make each other laugh.

“Hey, how’re we gonna heat the water for the coffee?” asked Resler.

“Here, gimme that can. I’ll make a stove.”

“Oh, yeah? How ya gonna get to the fuel drain?”

“You’re right. Let’s make Miller get the fuel.”

“No,” said Miller.

“Aw, come on. You want us to be alert, don’t you? What if we fall asleep and crash?” Resler coaxed.

“You ain’t gonna fall asleep, and I ain’t gonna go slog in that shit for the fuel.”

I looked at Rubenski in the pocket next to his gun. “Rubenski, grunts are supposed to love mud. Will you go get some JP-4 for me?”

“No. And I ain’t a grunt. I was a grunt; now I’m a gunner.”

“What’s the difference?”

“The difference is that a grunt would go get the fuel for you and I won’t.”

“Good point.” I glanced up and saw a tin-can stove burning on the dike next to the Huey beside us.

“Hey, you guys,” I yelled. “Give us some coffee, huh?”

“Get bent,” yelled Nate, grinning.

“Hey, have a heart. I’m nothing without my morning coffee.”

“You’re nothing anyway, Mason.”

“Shit, I can’t take this whining. I’ll go get some fucking fuel.” Rubenski jumped out and sank to his knees in the leech-infested bog.

“Now, that’s what I like to see—the true determination of an American grunt,” I yelled.

“Gunner!” Rubenski yelled back as he slogged heavily toward Nate’s ship.

When he was just about there, we heard “Crank ‘em!” from up front.

“Goddamnit!” Rubenski turned and slogged back through the morass. “Fuck!”

We cranked and checked in on the radios. The grunts were coming across the paddy, laboring at each step. They were tired and torn, unshaven and grim. Ammo cases clunked wearily on the deck. So did rifles and canteens and helmets. With eight of them in the back, the surface of the deck disappeared under mud and pieces of rice plants.

The flight leader gave us the word to go. One by one the ships wriggled loose from the slime. I rocked the ship back and forth and from side to side as I pulled the pitch. It was especially sticky stuff.

The ship in front of us, an attached ship from the Snakes, had a new pilot, or an old pilot in a hurry. He jerked up through the mud and promptly flipped over. The rotors hit the paddy, exploding into pieces. The mast came off. Parts flew everywhere. When the Huey stopped kicking, men started climbing out the cargo door, now the top of the bent and muddy fuselage. The command ship overhead told us to leave. He would get the men. While we circled back toward the valley ridge, I saw the command ship and a light gunship land and evacuate the men. I grinned while I imagined what the pilot who had crashed was thinking.

We chased Charlie around his valley for more than two weeks, flying too many hours every day. Observed or reported movements of the enemy were immediately countered with air assaults to the spot. The Cav’s Third Brigade fought tirelessly and well in this hectic hopscotch war and was chalking up an impressive kill score. The marines were being misused on the beaches northeast of the war. So far they had not made contact, but a marine had hurt his foot on a beach assault. Things were getting better for pilots because we were shot at less and less in the secured areas. The big question was whether they stopped shooting because they had been defeated or because they just stopped shooting and became civilians.

Colonel Lester, of the Third Brigade, probably wondered about this, too. He decided to find out by putting the VC in a position where they would have no choice but to fight, because there would be no escape. The VC always knew our exact positions by watching the Hueys.

The first stage of his plan was to airlift nearly three battalions of infantry to a crow‘s-foot of seven intersecting valleys, twelve miles south of Bong Son. Nothing unusual about that, except that once the troops were dropped off, we would not return to support them. Instead, they carried several days’ rations themselves and operated independently. For three days they deployed themselves throughout the crow’s-foot silently and without any helicopters flying near them, placing themselves in ambush position for the VC who would be coming their way.

Part two called for convincing Charlie that we were landing huge forces on top of the ridges along the long valley that led to the crow‘s-foot. We did this by flying empty ships for two days to normally prepared LZs along the ridge tops. We went in with all the hoopla of a standard air assault on every one of the fake LZs. On short final, the door gunners blasted the bushes. We landed and stayed on the ground for thirty seconds or so and then left. Later we’d fly out to “resupply” these units at regular intervals. We were in on the plan. And the fact that there was a plan was a novelty. So, for two days, the VC watched the buildup and decided that things were getting too hot in the valley and began to drift south toward the trap.

After the imaginary forces were placed on the ridges, real troops were landed on the valley floor to act as beaters. The beaters ran into occasional Charlie delay teams that sacrificed their lives so that their comrades could make it to safety. During the next few days we supported these beater troops with hot food and new clothes and the phantoms with counterfeit visits.

Life for the grunts in the valley was grim. In a few days they were reduced to sodden, weary, leech-encrusted men. One company took a break at a particularly scenic spot on the river. A hundred and fifty men stripped themselves of their rotten clothes to bathe in the sandy shoals of the river, leaving a handful of men as security. Charlie was well ahead of them. No one felt the slightest threat of ambush at this delicate moment.

Without warning, Charlie opened up. Naked men scattered in all directions as the bullets churned the water. The sentries couldn’t see where the shots were coming from. For long minutes the men were completely exposed. They got to their weapons. The tide of the battle changed abruptly and Charlie was driven off.

I landed next to the riverbank soon after the firefight, and the naked men were still laughing about it. Nobody had been seriously hurt. That was unbelievable, and therefore funny.

We dropped off food and sat on the ground for a while, waiting for the men to eat. I’d spent the night with these guys several times. As usual, several grunts gathered around the machine. Some guys asked all sorts of technical questions. How fast can it fly? How long can you stay up on one fueling? Why don’t you make all your takeoffs vertically? Do you get scared? Others would stand back and grin knowingly, as people do around race-car drivers.

Around us, the men were breaking open the boxes of clothes we’d brought. Their old sets, two days old, were literally rotting off their backs.

One man pointed at a bullet hole in my door. “Where’d that round go?” I slid the side armor forward and showed him the crater where the bullet had hit. “Damned if that wasn’t lucky.”

“Yeah, I’d probably be dead if it hadn’t been there,” I said.

Somebody poked his head inside and exclaimed, “Do you really use all those dials and switches and stuff?”

“Yeah, but not all at once. We check each one in a pattern.”

“What’s that one do?”

“That’s the artificial horizon, which shows you where the horizon is when you can’t see it, like in bad weather.”

The soldier nodded and said, “I’d sure like to fly one of these.”

“What? You crazy, Daniels?” his friend responded. “You want to be a fucking target?”

“It’s better than being a grunt, asshole. You stay clean.”

“Man, what does that have to do with anything? We get dirty, but we can at least hit the dirt when we’re shot at. I mean, haven’t you been on enough lifts to get the piss scared out of you yet? Coming into the LZs is the worst part of this fucking war, because you got no cover. If it weren’t for the shit, I’d kiss the ground every time I got off one of these birds.”

“Yeah, but I bet when you guys get back to base those nurses really go nuts for you, don’t they?” said Daniels.

“Our base?” I started to tell them that our base was just a pile of sand at Phu Cat and that I hadn’t seen one Caucasian female since I’d been here. “Yeah, it is good back at base. I mean, we’re just regular guys like you. But, it’s true, the nurses do get out of control.”

“See, asshole. This is class, in case you can’t see it. I mean, this takes brains. While we’re out here eating mud and fucking fists, these guys are sleeping in soft beds and scoring all the nooky they can handle.”

His friend wasn’t impressed. “They can have the nooky. Look at them bullet holes. They got ‘em up there in the roof, through the doors and the windshields—this thing is a fucking sieve. I’m staying here on the ground and nurse my poor aching cock back home to my waiting mama.”

“Ah-fucking-men, brother,” someone agreed.

To Daniels I said, “If you’d like to get on one of these ships, they are always looking for gunners. You can volunteer.”

“Yeah, I guess I could.” Daniels looked unhappy. “But I made it this far like I’m doing. Six months and I’m gone.”

“Well, if you change your mind…”

“Yeah, if I change my mind.”

Rubenski walked up beside the cockpit.

“Just found my friend, Mr. Mason.”

“He’s in this unit?”

“Yeah, this is my old company. I’m trying to get him to transfer to the 229th as a door gunner.”

“What’d he say?”

“He said yeah. Man, can you see the two of us on the same ship? We would mow—I mean mow—VC!”

One of the gunners had to be a crew chief, like Miller. I told him this.

“Aw, it don’t matter. Just having him in the same company would be enough. Him and me went through a lot together in Chicago. And we have plans for when we get back. You know, sir, with the stuff we’re learning here, my friend and I could knock off even a bank.”

“Knock off a bank? You’re gonna rob a bank?”

“I guess that is kinda wimpy. Maybe even a bigger job than a bank. That’s why it’s so important to have him with me. We can plan the right job. He’s the brains and I’m the muscle.”

I was really surprised that Rubenski was considering a life of crime when he got home. More likely it was a day-dream that kept him going. I laughed.

“You think I’m kidding?”

I laughed again.

“Wait, Mr. Mason. You’ll see. Rubenski and McElroy. That’s the names to look for, sir. The best.”

“I’ll be watching the papers, Rubenski.”

“Great. That’s all I ask. Watch the papers. Give us a chance.” Rubenski turned around and noticed that the grunts were getting organized. “Be right back.” He ran toward a group of soldiers.

The grunts were dressed in their new uniforms, back in business. They loaded the empty food containers on board along with two guys with minor wounds. When they moved away from our ship, I saw Rubenski hugging one of the grunts in farewell. He ran back to our ship as I cranked up.

As the VC were driven southward, they moved toward the crow‘s-foot in Kim Son valley. In that valley one of the serpentine turns of the river looped back almost upon itself. The piece of land within the loop was the site of a large village.

“This is LZ Bird.” Major Williams pointed at the map at our operations tent at the Rifle Range. “North Vietnamese and Vietcong units are holed up here, and in the jungles north of it. Our assault will be to the village itself. The approach path is across this high ground south of Bird, and there doesn’t seem to be any ground fire along that route. Antiaircraft emplacements are reported at Bird, but the LZ will be thoroughly prepped before we land. After the initial wave is on the ground, some of you will return to the staging area to pick up more troops and take them to the LZ. Good luck. Let’s go.”

As we left to walk to the aircraft, Resler said, “Jesus, sometimes I get the feeling I’m in the middle of a war!”

“What did you think? The war’d be over when you got back?”

“I was hoping. God, you should have seen Bangkok. Absolutely precious women, great food, strange sights, and, best of all, no shooting.” We approached our ship and threw our chest protectors and helmets up front on the seats. Gary did the preflight walk-around, and I climbed up top to check the rotor hub and mast. “Those girls look so cute and so shy, it’s really a shock to find out that they love to fuck,” he added.

“Give me a break,” I said. The rotors were clean, showing no delaminations.

“Really. They practically fell all over me.” Then I heard him tell the crew chief, “Missing a rivet here. Course, I don’t see how it matters, with that bullet hole next to it.”

The dampers were free and there were no cracks forming in the hub, the Jesus-nut safeties were in place, and there were no fractures visible. I climbed back down. “Did you get any sapphires?” I said.

“No. I can’t tell a good one when I see it. Got laid, though.”

“Gary, I will kill you if you don’t stop—”

“They’ve got the biggest eyes you’ve ever seen. Small, delicate features; small, firm breasts; and tight little pussies.”

“Tight?” I sighed.

“And juicy.” Gary cackled and began to walk around to get in.

“God, I need to go to Bangkok,” I muttered. “How much?” I called to Gary as he strapped in.

“Free.”

“Free?”

“Yep. And all you can handle. If you can walk when you leave, you weren’t trying.”

“Crank ‘em!” someone yelled.

I climbed into my seat and strapped in. “Tonight, Resler, I will strangle you.” He laughed so hard he cried.

The fifty-ship gaggle cruised in the cool air on the way to Bird. Gary and I were twentieth or so. We did little talking on the way. It wasn’t exactly fear that caused that tickling, queer feeling in my stomach at the beginning of the assaults. At least I wasn’t conscious of being afraid. Instead I concentrated on the radio chatter to see how it was going, shrugged now and then to relieve the stiffness in my neck and shoulders that always seemed to be there, and patted my pistol.

As we crossed the ridge, the LZ was visible at the bottom of the bowl. Streams of smoke from the prestrike drifted up to the top of the valley and blew away. The twenty ships in front of us formed a line descending steeply toward Bird, going down a staircase. Up through that line of Hueys, huge tracers from the anticraft guns streaked silently by. The only sounds of battle came through my earphones as pilots talked. I could hear the chatter of their own machine guns.

“Crew chief hit bad! I’m going back,” someone ahead of us radioed. Pfc. Miller had taken a direct hit in his chest protector, but the shrapnel from the bullet had ripped off his left arm. He would have bled to death if the pilot hadn’t aborted.

“Roger. Get him to the hospital pod.” A wounded air crewman or great structural damage were the only reasons you could abort. If a grunt was wounded, you kept going.

Gary flew. I chanced a few clicks on the camera around my neck while I lightly followed his movements on the controls. I didn’t look through the viewfinder; I just hit the shutter a couple of times, shooting blind.

I could never understand how tracers appeared to move so slowly. I knew they were going really fast, but they always seemed to be on a lazy flight. Unerringly straight, but lazy.

The guys up front did all the work, took the chances, and lost two ships. By the time we got closer, the heavy guns were knocked out by the grunts, leaving only one still blasting away.

We landed in somebody’s sandy vegetable patch, and the grunts were off, bounding toward the tree line. Gary nosed over and we were off. Gone. Away unscathed. Back to the beautiful sky where small clouds played in the cool air.

“You got it,” said Gary.

“I got it.”

We had to pick up some more troops and return. Gary flipped on the RDF (radio direction finder) and tuned in the station at Qui Nhon. Nancy Sinatra sang “These Boots Were Made for Walking.”

“Pretty good reception, high like this,” said Gary.

“FuckyouGIfuckyouGIfuckyouGI!” came over the radio.

“Hey, Charlie’s got our frequency,” I said.

“Say again, Charlie,” Gary broadcast back on the same channel.

“FuckyouGIfuckyouGI…”

“Who’s calling Charlie?” yelled the command ship.

“FuckyouGIfuckyouGI,” said the Oriental voice.

I spun the dial on the FM homer, and when the needle nulled, I had the general direction to the transmitter. “Coming from the south.”

Gary called the command ship. “We’re monitoring a Charlie broadcast from the south.”

“Roger.”

“FuckyouGI…” The high-pitched voice persisted, and then stopped as a Huey turned off in his direction.

“Little gook’s got some balls, don’t he?” said Gary.

“Yeah. I bet they’re bigger than he is.” If all the gooks were killed, I hoped that at least this guy survived. Every time I heard his emphatic staccato rendition of “Fuck you GI” I laughed my ass off. Somebody else pissing into the wind.

While the command ships tried to track down the VC radio broadcast, Gary and I flew back to the staging area and loaded more troops.

The second landing to the LZ was uneventful. We set down off to the right of the village compound in some gardens. We were told to shut down and wait to carry trophies captured in the battle.

Chinooks were slinging in artillery as we walked over to the newly captured/destroyed village. Once-swaying palm trees were now obscene sticks standing awkwardly above the pall that covered the craters and burnt hooches. I saw no living Vietnamese.

VC bodies were piled near a bunker. Some were missing limbs and heads. Others were burnt, facial skin drawn back into fierce, grotesque screams. A VC gunner was lying below his antiaircraft gun with one arm raised, chained to his weapon. American soldiers were policing the dead for weapons and piling what they found in a growing heap. Most were smiling with victory. Wood-smoke from the hooches mixed with the stench of burnt hair and flesh. The sun was hot and the air was muggy.

At the river’s edge, some grunts were playing with basket boats: woven boats six feet in diameter. The men kicked and splashed like kids. The villagers had used the boats for fishing. Now, of course, there were no villagers.

Across the river a giant waterwheel still turned. It was about twenty-five feet in diameter, five feet wide, and built entirely of bamboo. Around the edge of the wheel, arranged so that they were always horizontal, long tubes of bamboo, closed at one end, filled with water at the bottom of the wheel and emptied at the top into a trough that carried the water to the fields. The total rise of the water was over twenty feet, and it splashed steadily into the trough, oblivious of the fate of its builders. A grunt in the river grabbed it, trying to stop it. It pulled him out of the water. He let go ten feet up. Immediately, another grunt grabbed the wheel and hung on tight. He was carried slowly up and over the top and back to the river. Two grunts tried it simultaneously, and the wheel slowed, almost stopped, but carried them up and over. When three guys tried it, the wheel pulled them all out of the water before it stopped. They cheered. Victory!

I examined one of the basket boats. The weave was so tight and precise that it stopped water. There was no calking between the flat strands, yet the boat did not leak. Both basket and wheel were built from material found growing around the village. I wondered how our technology was going to help the Vietnamese. Maybe after we had killed off the people—like these villagers, who knew how to live so elegantly in this country—the survivors would have to have our technology. That waterwheel was as efficient as any device our engineers could produce. The knowledge that built it was being systematically destroyed.

We stayed at Bird for an hour. I stared at the wheel and the men playing with it, wondering who the barbarians were.

When we left, I could see where the water was being pumped. No humans walked the field that it irrigated. No crops grew. The water was filling bomb craters.

Instead of going out on the assaults the next day, Gary and I were assigned to fly a special team of radio-intelligence people to track down the VC who were still broadcasting over our frequencies. Intelligence had determined that an NVA general was radioing messages to his men, uninhibited by our presence. The brass was determined to get this general. Special teams of troopers were on standby.

The four men in the team got in the back with their huge tracking antenna. We flew courses up and down the valleys at their direction. One of the men slapped another on the shoulder and called me on the intercom. “Okay, turn to course one-eight-zero. We’ve got the little fucker.”

Troopers were launched, encircling the triangulated location. They found burning campfires, some miscellaneous equipment and food, but no radio, no VC, and no general.

“Okay, come back to course two-seven-zero,” said the head of the radio-tracking team. Gary was flying, so I turned back around to watch them.

They looked pissed. “What’s up?” I asked.

“That gook general is broadcasting again, and he’s laughing.”

They swung the cross-shaped antenna back and forth. We changed course a number of times before they once again had the general’s location. While we went back for fuel, another team of troopers was sent in.

Back in the air, we learned that once again the site was found empty except for evidence of a hasty departure. The men in the back were shaking their heads. One of them said to me, “That’s fucking amazing. That gook is a fox.”

After another two hours of crisscrossing the valleys, the general allowed himself to be discovered again. What in hell was he doing it for? Again a team was sent in. Again it discovered a hastily abandoned campsite. The mission was canceled at dusk and rescheduled for the next morning.

The general played this game for two more days until it no longer mattered. A Cav infantry company captured an NVA colonel. He talked, revealing the location of the headquarters the general had been trying to save. The spot, called the Iron Triangle, was in the opposite direction. The general had been leading us away from the nest. He was never heard again. The Iron Triangle was taken after two days of fierce battles. Everyone thought that was it for Charlie in Bong Son valley. But the fighting continued.

Soon afterward, Gary and I heard the familiar sing-song message from our old friend: “FuckyouGIfuckyouGI…” It was like trying to eradicate crabgrass.

Kaiser stared ahead, his shoulders sagging. He could’ve been a player on a losing football team, but he was a tired pilot flying a helicopter.

I smoked a Pall Mall and leaned against the door to rest my aching back. We had been flying assaults for more than eight hours, no breaks, and were headed back to the Rifle Range.

“Yellow Two, Preacher Six.”

“Roger, Preacher Six. Go ahead.”

“Roger. Come up on two-six-niner and do whatever you can for the man.”

“Roger,” I replied. Kaiser shook his head while I tuned in the grunts.

“Yellow Two, Wolverine One-Six. We’re under heavy mortar attack and we’ve got some serious wounded to get out.”

“Roger, we’ll be there soon. What’re the coordinates?” The lieutenant read off six digits, and I plotted him on my map. He was only two miles away. I pointed to the map, and Kaiser changed course without saying a word. I leaned against the door and flipped my cigarette out the window. Maybe it would clear the jungle.

It was easy to find the guy for all the smoke that filled his clearing. Other than the smoke, I couldn’t see any action.

“Yellow Two, we are clear. I repeat, we are clear. The mortars have stopped.”

“Roger, we’re coming in.”

Just like that. Neither of us thought about the fact that the unit was trapped, encircled. The mortars could start again any time. Neither of us cared.

We approached the clearing in the shadows and pall, with the setting sun ahead of us. Even while Kaiser brought us over the tall trees, I felt no adrenaline. I sat up and squared my shoulders, put my hands on the controls, but I felt no anxiety.

Rubenski fired suddenly into the trees to our right.

“Get him?” I asked.

“I don’t know for sure.”

“That’s nice.”

Kaiser brought us to the ground with scarcely a bounce. The clearing was a miniature meadow surrounded by tall trees. The grass was short—like it had been mowed. I stared out the canopy. Across the lawn, ten men lay dead in a neat line. One man’s abdominal cavity was emptied around him, his remaining arm buried under his own guts. Another man seemed to be sleeping unscathed in the shady meadow. I stared at him while the grunts scurried toward us carrying five men. Ah, I thought, as I noticed the pale gore behind his head. Not sleeping. Brains blown out.

Two torn men were loaded on the back before the mortars returned. As the mortars struck, the grunts hit the dirt, carrying their wounded with them. Aw shit, I thought, another delay.

I noticed that there was a lot of orange light inside the explosions, silhouetting clumps of black dirt at the bottom of the funnel of expanding gases and shrapnel as mortars exploded a hundred feet away.

The grunts must have been as tired as we were. After the first few rounds, they got up and loaded the three other wounded while the mortars continued bursting ahead of us.

I looked back as the last man was lifted onto the deck. He was missing a leg below his knee. A tourniquet kept the blood mostly stanched. Rubenski blasted the tree line on our right flank. How long had he been doing that?

“That’s it, Yellow Two. Watch out for a machine gun ahead of you.”

Kaiser lifted the collective. I radioed, “Roger.”

A mortar exploded at two o‘clock, fifty feet away.

Kaiser pulled the ship’s guts so hard that the rpm warning siren screamed in our ears. He let off enough pressure to silence the alarm and turned left to avoid a machine gun the grunts had warned us about.

As we crossed the edge of the meadow, I heard Rubenski’s gun blasting away, and then tick-tick-tick. Ah, must be another machine gun. I nodded to myself. Three rounds passed harmlessly through the sheet aluminum and lodged in the hell hole.

It was peaceful again. I lit another cigarette and watched the sunset.

“You guys really impressed that grunt commander,” said Nate, back at the Rifle Range. “I heard he’s putting you in for a DFC.”

“Wrong medal,” said Kaiser, already drunk. “It should be the ‘I Don’t Give a Crap’ medal with a V device for valor.”

After we dropped off four wounded men at LZ Dog, Banjo and I, Daisy, and Gillette found ourselves returning to the Rifle Range at night. Daisy led the flight and decided to climb to about 2500 feet and have the radar at Dog vector us back to the Rifle Range.

I had used radar vectoring only once or twice during the instrument-training phase of flight school. I wasn’t familiar enough with it to want to use it. It wouldn’t even have occurred to me to do anything but fly a compass course back. Daisy was nervous about flying into a mountain, but if we stayed away from the ridge to the west, we were well clear of the mountains.

So Banjo flew in formation with Daisy as he climbed up in a spiral above Dog.

“Preacher flight, take up a heading of one-seven-zero degrees,” said the radar station. This station was a four-by-four-foot box on the back of a trailer. It was olive drab.

Daisy turned to the heading, and Banjo skillfully turned with him. We found it easier to fly very close, so close that we could see the red cockpit lights of the other ship. At this distance you can hear the buzz of the tail rotor beside you.

“Preacher flight,” called the radar guy, “I have lost you.”

Lost us? We had been on course for all of two minutes.

At the same moment, we lost sight of Daisy’s ship as we flew into the clouds. It really was dark—no up, no down. Which way was Daisy flying? Left? Right? Up?

“Yellow Two, I’m breaking off to the left,” called Daisy.

“Roger,” Banjo said. He turned to the right. I watched the compass. We were turning right on around to the north, then to the west. West was where the mountains were.

“Hey, Banjo, we don’t want to go west,” I said.

“I know.”

“Okay.” I waited for him to change course, but he didn’t. Instead he was diving. The airspeed indicator was up past 120 knots. The vertical-speed indicator (VSI) showed we were going down at over 1000 feet a minute.

“Banjo, we’re diving.”

“I feel fine.”

“Look at the airspeed.” He did, and the ship slowed back to 90 knots, normal cruise. The VSI was showing a slight climb.

Where was Daisy?

“Yellow Two, Yellow One. We are descending to get out of the clouds. Recommend you do the same.”

I could just see it, Daisy wallowing around in the muck, trying to find the bottom of the cloud bank that ends right where a mountain begins. I could see the two of us trying to do this together and colliding before we hit the mountain.

“Banjo, don’t do it. Keep climbing. We’ll pop out at the top and shoot for Qui Nhon.”

“Daisy says to descend.”

“Daisy doesn’t know shit. Descend into what? Where exactly are we right now? Over the valley? Or are we over the mountains?”

“Okay, we’ll climb.”

“Do you want me to fly?”

“No, I’m okay.”

“Then could you come back to a south heading?”

Banjo began a turn in our featureless world. You can feel changes while flying in the blind, as when Banjo started his turn, but after the bank is established, you can’t tell it from straight and level flying. Banjo was staring straight ahead into nothingness, and the ship was diving again.

“Banjo, the VSI.”

He said nothing, but he stopped the dive and began a climb again.

I watched my set of instruments, monitoring Banjo. I wished that Gary was flying, or that I was. Banjo had gone through flight school years earlier, when helicopter instrument flying was not taught. Gary and I had completed instrument training at Fort Rucker, in the Huey. Banjo was an old salt with lots of time. In his mind I was still the rookie.

We were diving again.

“Banjo, if you keep diving like this, we’ll get into a world of shit.” The ship rocked back as he stopped the dive, but he was now turning to the west. “Compass,” I said, sounding like my old instrument instructor. “Compass.” He stopped the turn but started to dive again. “Airspeed.” The airspeed indicator will tell you immediately if you’re climbing or diving: If the airspeed increases, you are diving. Obviously Banjo was too proud to say he didn’t know what the fuck he was doing, especially to me. I had to talk him through this.

“Ninety knots,” I said. That airspeed would keep us in a climb.

Now he was turning again! “Compass.” He corrected. It’s true, I thought. The FAA had tested experienced pilots in flight simulators to see if they could somehow fly seat of the pants, with no visibility. A hundred percent of them crashed.

God, I would love to see something. What if the cloud goes to twenty thousand feet? Can’t go higher than ten or twelve thousand without oxygen. Probably it’s clear over the ocean. Yeah, go over the ocean and come back under the stuff. “Banjo, head farther east.”

The altimeter read 4000 feet. Jesus, it’s got to end soon.

“Mason, what if this shit doesn’t end?” said Banjo. “I think we should drop back down like Daisy.”

“No.”

“What do you mean, no? I’m the aircraft commander.”

“No, don’t let down; you don’t know where you are. Just a few hundred feet to go. I’m sure of it. Airspeed!” We had lost 500 feet while we talked.

Banjo wrestled with the Huey for a minute while I coached. Soon we were back in the climb, passing 4000 feet for the second time.

“I’ll take it to five thousand. If it’s not clear by then, I’m heading back down.”

I said nothing. The idea of letting down blind over mountainous terrain put me into a panic. It is correct to climb, I told myself.

“Airspeed!” I shrieked, letting some of the panic come through. “Damnit, Banjo, watch the airspeed. Keep us climbing.” Then I calmed myself and said, “Banjo, you sure you don’t want me to fly this last little bit?”

“No, I’ll fly. You just watch the instruments.”

“Okay. I’ll watch the instruments.”

Five thousand feet and more nothing.

“I’m going back down,” he said.

“Wait!” I yelled. “Keep climbing. We’re almost there. Besides, we’re heading for the sea, and the clouds end there, so we can’t lose by climbing, but we can lose by descending. You understand?”

“Goddamnit!” said Banjo. He maintained the climb.

I blinked. Spots before my eyes? Stars? Yes, stars! At nearly 6000 feet, we broke through. The crew chief and gunner cheered. We all cheered, even Banjo. The universe was back, warm and twinkling. We could make out the jewels of light from Qui Nhon.

By the time we landed, we were very angry at Daisy. He was the one who’d got us into that shit. Had we just flown a normal contact path back to the Rifle Range, we would never have been put into instrument flight. Banjo would not have been found lacking. I wouldn’t have had to talk him through the weather.

We saw Daisy as we walked in from the flight line. He had a sandwich from the mess tent. Banjo walked up to him.

“You dumb shit!” he yelled. Daisy jumped back. “You almost got us killed.”

Captain attacked by chief warrant officer. He backed away.

“Look, Banjo, all you had to do was descend to the valley like I did.”

“Brilliant, Daisy. No one ever descends over mountains in weather. You dumb shit.”

“I knew where the valley was all the time,” said Daisy.

“You liar.”

I walked past them into the tent. Farris wanted to know what all the excitement was about.

“Daisy decided to have the radar at Dog vector us back and led us into a cloud bank.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“The radar lost us in the clouds and Daisy told us to descend.”

“So?”

“So, neither of us knew where we were—over a valley or a mountain.”

“So what did you do?” asked Farris.

“Banjo and I climbed until we broke through at six thousand.”

“So why are you mad?”

“I’m mad because if we had followed Daisy’s orders, we could’ve bought it. It pisses me off to have leaders like him running loose.”

“So, you found out that even leaders make mistakes.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s it—if you classify Daisy as a leader. I’m more inclined to call him a moron that happens to be a captain.”

Farris nodded and gave me an understanding smile. “Well, I’m going to finish this letter. See you in the morning.”

As I tried to sleep, I kept wondering why I felt so miserable. I kept jerking suddenly awake for no apparent reason. It seemed like I did that all night.

I kept hearing ricochets and ducked every time I did. Farris saw this and smiled. Farris did not duck.

“What the fuck is that?” I said.

“It’s nothing. Don’t worry.”

Nothing doesn’t ricochet. I wasn’t exactly worried. I was mostly irritated. We were in the middle of another long laager in another ruined garden. Twenty bored helicopter crews sprawled, hunkered, or wandered around the machines, sweating their brains out. When the whining bullets sounded overhead, faces tracked them across the sky.

Adjacent to our laager was a village. From where we were parked you could not see the huts for the trees, over a hundred feet tall. A trail led into the dark-green lush-ness. I decided to follow it.

In just a few steps I was in another world. Dark and cool under the canopy of green, the well-worn, clean path led to a kind of courtyard and stopped.

A hundred feet above me a small circle of light broke through the trees. I turned to look behind me for the inevitable bunch of people, the “Hey-GI-you” crowd. No one anywhere. I stepped up on a kind of sidewalk that connected the hooches. I looked in the door of the first hooch. Nobody was home. I leaned in cautiously—some—where in my brain a voice warned me to watch for booby traps—and saw that the cooking fire at the back of the hooch was glowing. I looked around outside again—nobody.

I walked to the next door, leaned inside, and met a face that had been hiding against the wall next to the door. The face was a woman’s. She was smiling, her forehead wrinkled in worry. From behind her black pajama pants peered a small boy.

She bowed slightly and said something to me and then called out to someone. I stepped back outside nervously, wondering why the fuck I was here alone. The woman and boy followed me out, smiling and bowing nervously. Behind me I heard another voice. I turned quickly and saw an ancient lady in black limping across the courtyard.

She smiled, showing black teeth. I didn’t remember any words in Vietnamese except numbers. I didn’t know what to say except “You Vietcong?”

Suddenly the three of them pointed outside the village. “Vietcong.” I wanted to ask them where their men were, but I didn’t know the words. Finally, I did the American thing and took their photograph.

I began to feel self-conscious with the three of them huddled fearfully on their sidewalk. I explained to them that I was just looking around and that I was going on along the trail. I waved good-bye.

The trail led to another, identical courtyard. No one was home here, either. I found some cooking fires still hot, but everybody had obviously beat a hasty retreat. Alone in one of the hooches, I touched the wattle walls and sat in a net hammock. Above me, the exposed bamboo rafters and beams looked well made. The floor was clean, even if it was made of dirt. Not a bad place, actually. Certainly it was a lot better than the tent I slept in. It was not the average American home, but I doubt that the inhabitants paid much of a mortgage.

I walked farther into the village under the trees, passing a suspicious pile of rice stalks that probably hid the entrance to underground bunkers and tunnels. I could’ve gone over and checked. I could’ve grabbed my pistol and committed suicide, too. They both would’ve amounted to the same thing.

The last hooch I examined was the home of a master carpenter. I discovered his box of tools. Inside the box—about the size of a small suitcase—scores of tools rested in neat compartments. Yellow brass gleamed; shiny steel edges glinted. Knurled hardwood knobs held planing blades tight in their handles. All manner of carving tools reposed in their own boxes. The wide selection and the quality of their tools told me that these people, or at least this person, were definitely not savages.

I had never heard of a gook or a slope-head or a slant-eye or a dink who did anything but eat rice and shit and fight unending wars. These tools and that waterwheel convinced me that there was a successful way of life going on around us, but all we saw were savages, backward savages fighting against the Communist hordes from the North. Why were all the men of this beautiful village gone just when the Americans were right outside? Wouldn’t people under attack by the Communists welcome the men who were there to save them? Or was I seeing the wrong way? Maybe the only people who wanted us around were the Saigon politicians who were getting rich by having the Americans here. This village was a long way from Saigon. And the people weren’t rich; they were just people.

The carpenter had made a bench whose parts fit so well that it didn’t need any nails to hold it together. It was so precisely made, and so in tune with the materials that made it, that it held itself together without aid. I saw this as an enlightening symbol of the true nature of the Vietnamese people, so I stole the bench. I carried it on my shoulder back up the trail, past the rice-stalk pile, past the two courtyards, past the still-smiling women, and back out into the sunshine of the sandy garden. I walked over to my helicopter and put the bench in the shade of the rotor, sat down, and said, “Look, no nails.” I shifted back and forth to put strain on the bench to show that it did not move. Kaiser came over to see. “See, they put this together so well it doesn’t need nails,” I said.

“That’s because they have to. Dumb gooks don’t know how to make nails,” said Kaiser.

We had been away from the Golf Course for more than a month when it was hit in a mortar attack. Several people were killed, fifty or so were wounded, and several Hueys were shredded, but that didn’t interfere with the scheduled appearance of Ambassador Lodge, who showed up the next day to dedicate our division compound officially as Camp Radcliff. It was too late. The name had become the Golf Course, and we were stuck with it.

“Don’t worry about McElroy; he can take care of himself,” said Rubenski. McElroy’s platoon had been encircled, and we could not get to them. Charlie had set up antiaircraft guns on the hillsides around the platoon, and somebody had already died trying to fly past them. We waited in the dark at Dog for the air force to bomb the emplacements.

“Of course,” I said. “But what does being able to take care of yourself have to do with surviving a Vietcong ambush?”

“If you knew McElroy, you’d know he’ll do just fine.” Rubenski’s scarred face brightened in a crooked smile. He once told me that he almost did not get into the army because of all the old fractures in his skull, part of the growing-up process in Chicago. “Listen to this plan,” he said. “McElroy’s plan.”

“Not the bank-job idea.”

“No. No measly bank job. That’s the point. McElroy has a mind.”

“So what’s the plan?”

“Lake Tahoe.”

“Jesus.”

“Wait a minute, sir. Give me a chance.”

“You want to rob Lake Tahoe?”

“Just listen. Then tell me if you see any bad spots, okay?”

“Go ahead. I’m not going anywhere for a while.”

“The target is a casino at Tahoe. Now, McElroy has seen this, but he doesn’t know yet exactly how often each week they do it—collect the take from the machines and tables. We’d have to case the place for a while to get the times straight. Anyway, they collect all the loot in garden carts and haul it outside to an armored car. They got guards all around, but for a minute or so millions of dollars is just sittin’ there waiting to be scarfed up.”

“So all you have to do is walk past a bunch of guards—”

“Wait, sir, let me tell you,” Rubenski said eagerly. “We use gas, like we do here. Three of us wait in ambush and pop the gas when the loot is outside. Then, as we go into the gas to get the carts, you come in with a Huey and land on the road, in the smoke.”

“Me? How did I get into this plan?”

“It’s gotta be you, Mr. Mason. I’ve seen you do stuff like this a hundred times. See, that’s the genius of McElroy’s plan. We take the stuff we learn here and put it to good use back home. You see?”

“Yeah, I see you flying all over the place trying to figure out where to park a Huey-load of money without raising suspicion.”

“That’s the best part,” he continued. “When we drop the CS”—a vomit-inducing agent—“nobody is going to stick around who doesn’t have a mask. We also pop a bunch of smoke to cover the loading and the takeoff. We get off with everybody on board and head away low level. We fly for a hundred miles to a lake McElroy knows about. There’s a cabin there where we can stash the money and where we can stay for six months while things cool off.”

“Nobody’s going to notice a Huey parked out on the dock?”

“Oh, yeah. We take the Huey—stolen from the National Guard—out over the lake and ditch it. Then we hang around for six months thinking about how to spend over a million dollars each. Can you imagine?”

“It’s a classic plan all right.”

“I knew you’d like it.”

“I didn’t say I liked it; I said it was classic.”

The stars were bright enough to see a man running from ship to ship, a shadow. At the next ship we could hear him asking for Rubenski. Rubenski called that he was here, and jumped out to meet the shadow halfway.

Some people had died in the ambush. McElroy was one. Rubenski came back and sat in the pocket by his gun and cried. Choking sobs filled the Huey.

I stared out into the black night and shed tears for McElroy, too, and I didn’t even know him.

“I can’t believe anybody’d be dumb enough to walk into a tail rotor.”

“I know. And a grunt who’d been on a bunch of assaults, too.” We laughed.

It was funny now, on the back of the truck heading toward Qui Nhon. But last night, when we returned from Dog, a grunt had walked right into the spinning tail rotor of the ship in front of me. I almost resigned. It was too much. I could not stand the idea that somebody could get killed by a Huey after the same Huey just saved his life. I was pulling off my helmet as the ship whined down when I saw the guy rush around from the side door of the ship. Before I could even think of saying “Stop,” he was driven to the ground. The tail rotor had hit him on the head. Thud. Down.

I didn’t resign. There was a trick ending: The guy wasn’t dead. His helmet saved his life, leaving him with only a bad concussion and some cuts.

“The dumb fuck is probably on his way home right now,” said Kaiser.

“He deserves it,” said Connors. “Anybody that is still alive after that should get a medal and a plane ticket home.”

This truck ride was the first break in a month for the six of us. Other groups of pilots had got into Qui Nhon, and now it was our turn.

Whether by accident or plan, I was with the usual bunch, Connors, Banjo, Kaiser, Nate, and Resler. Farris was also with us—to make sure we came back.

The twenty-mile drive from the Rifle Range at Phu Cat to Qui Nhon took nearly two hours on a bumpy causeway through unending rice paddies. Every so often an island village punctuated the causeway.

“You’d think the fucking army could squeeze one fucking ride in a Huey for a bunch of its ace pilots,” said Connors.

“No ships available. Too many down for maintenance,” replied Farris, the army spokesman.

We parked the truck where the traffic got thick and hired a kid to watch it for us. Then we wandered down the street, looking to be entertained.

Connors was stopped by an MP. “Sorry, sir. You have to have your sleeves rolled above the elbow,” said the MP.

“What?” Connors said.

“Your sleeves, sir. You have to have them rolled up above the elbow.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“No, sir.”

Connors glared at the MP. We all did. None of us had our sleeves rolled up high enough.

“What if I like my sleeves just like they are?”

“Then I’ll be forced to arrest you, sir.”

“You would arrest me for not having my sleeves rolled up^?”

“Yes, sir. Those are my orders.”

“Tell me,” Connors said quietly. “Do you know that there’s a war going on?”

“Yes, sir. Of course I know there’s a war going on.”

“Then why the fuck do you care how high my sleeves are!”

The MP flinched. “I don’t care, sir. But if I don’t enforce the dress codes, I get my ass in a sling.”

“Ah. You get your ass in a sling if my sleeves aren’t rolled up above my elbow. Now you’re making sense.” Connors started rolling his sleeves. “See, gentlemen, it’s not this specialist’s personal perversion that makes him look for sleeve abuse during wartime; it’s the personal perversion of his rear-echelon boss.” Connors nodded grimly. “Right, Specialist?”

“That’s right, sir.”

Everybody looked pissed off, but we rolled our sleeves up.

“Damn. I keep forgetting that the army goes on like normal while we’re away,” Gary said, voicing our thoughts as we strolled down the bustling street.

While we were still in sight of the truck, Farris told us to meet him back there at 1600 hours, to which we reverently agreed.

Kaiser had been here before. “What we need to do first, gang, is to go get a steam bath so we won’t repel the lovelies.”

“Ah, the lovelies!” Connors swooned.

“You’ll need more than a steam bath, Connors,” said Banjo.

“I love the lovelies.”

“Like, plastic surgery,” Banjo continued.

I had always liked the idea of a steam bath, but it wasn’t what I expected. It was hot, way too hot to enjoy. I was forced to the floor, to breathe the mythical cooler air there, two minutes after I had closed the door to the steam room. This is fun? After two more minutes, when I was sure I was passing out, I practically crawled outside to the massage table.

A middle-aged Vietnamese man positioned me carefully on the table and began to wreak Oriental vengeance upon my Occidental body.

“Good, no?” he said as he slammed on my back. “You will like… this.” I winced as he pulled my elbows beyond my head. He continued for some minutes. He leaned over quietly and said, “You want blow job?”

“No,” I said quickly, embarrassed.

“I can have girl come here give number-one blow job.”

I was relieved to know that it was a girl he was talking about, but I wasn’t interested. “No. Thanks anyway.”

“Yes, you do, Mason.” I heard Kaiser’s voice beyond the partition. “You owe it to yourself to enjoy the best each place has to offer. The best this place has to offer is Nancy and her magic lips.”

The Vietnamese masseur nodded expectantly, but I said no. He shrugged and started beating me up again.

We wandered around, shopping and drinking, more or less as a group, for a couple of hours. I began to lose track of my position. I was somewhere in the heart of Qui Nhon on a sunny street, off a sunny street. Four of us were sitting around a table at a wonderful little bar on the lovely, sunny street talking to beautiful little girls who wanted to fuck us blind. Kaiser belted back more booze while he tried to get a laughing girl to pay him for his services. Gary blushed and talked to an image of a sweet-heart. Nate became a sober intellectual as he discussed world affairs with a nodding woman. I drank and watched everything that happened in this sunny, wonderful bar. I never knew just how good bourbon could be.

“Secret?” I said, alerted by the words and face of a girl who had become my confidante. “Where?”

She pulled me to her to whisper the secret. Laughter broke out when Kaiser’s girl compromised and announced she would fuck him for free, just like he had said she would. Ah, it’s so wonderful here with all these lovely people.

“But if it’s a secret, why are you taking off your clothes?” Aha, be witty and she’ll love you. The girl grimaced as her pants caught her foot. Haste clouded her face with worry. Magically, my clothes were gone, too. She flinched once when I entered her, but maintained an admirable state of concentration while she waited for me to finish floundering out my months of pent-up lust. She didn’t have to wait long. Soon I was being led back to the bar, where I raved about how wonderful it was to get laid by these wonderful, sunny people.

“Ain’t it the truth?” slurred Kaiser. “Ain’t these little honeys the best little honeys there are? Huh?”

“It’s the truth!” said Nate, hitting his forehead on the table for emphasis.

From this point, the events grow faint. We spent the rest of the afternoon wandering the streets and drinking. By the time we remembered Farris and found our way back to the Jeep, we were an hour late.

“We got lost,” Kaiser explained.

“Right. Let’s go,” Farris said brusquely.

Unfortunately, after the two-hour drive back to the Rifle Range, I was stone sober. We bounced along the causeway watching village after village go by until, finally, a sandy, greenish tent city appeared. Ah, I thought, home at last.

9. Tension

March 1966

I stood with thirty enlisted men on an apron at the airport at An Khe. Sweat dripped down my sides, staining my khakis.

We watched airplanes move around the airport, trying to determine which one was going to take us to Saigon. A silver C-123 transport had taxied out to the center of the field and then shut its engines off. An army Caribou taxiing toward us locked one brake and swung around, bathing us in a hot breeze that evaporated the sweat. This was our plane.

The rear end of the silver C-123 opened. Four men got out and walked toward us. The rear end of the Caribou opened. The crew chief walked down the ramp eyeing us, the eager groundlings, suspiciously. Up through the fuselage I could see the pilots in the cockpit. One of them noticed my wings and nodded hello.

The men from the silver plane got close enough for us to see they were brass—one army, three navy. The crew chief started to tell us to get on board. The pilot waved to him. He carried his clipboard up front to confer.

The brass were closing fast. The one up front was very tall, very big, wore stars, and had his arm in a sling. I racked my brain. Who is very big, wears stars, rides around in silver airplanes, and has his arm in a sling?

“Isn’t that Westmoreland?” a private behind me asked.

Right! Westmoreland, the ruler of Vietnam, was only a hundred feet away, heading for us. I turned around, looking for a lieutenant or a captain to take charge of this mob and call attention and all the stuff you’re supposed to do when the fucking general shows up. My search revealed that I was the ranking person there. “A-tent hut!” I yelled. AWOL (overnight) bags and laundry sacks hit the dirt as the mob dropped everything to come to attention for the general.

He liked that. When I turned around, Westmoreland was nearly on top of us, still marching, smiling, probing for eye contact with the skinny warrant officer who just then flipped a perfect salute. I held the salute until he stopped and returned it. The general and his admiral friends stood facing me and thirty grunts.

“At ease, Mr. Mason,” the voice boomed. He stood close enough to read my name tag, so close that he seemed much taller than he already was. What other rank could they make a guy like this? He had to be a general.

“Mr. Mason,” he began in a conversational tone, “my friends and I are on important business, and my airplane just broke down.”

His airplane? All the airplanes were his airplanes. Also all the helicopters. And all the ships. Westmoreland owned everything, even the cannon fodder he was talking to. “I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”

“Thank you. Well, Mr. Mason, if it’s okay with you, I’d like to take this airplane of yours so I can get these important gentlemen back to their ships on time.” The admirals smiled at the joke—“if it’s okay with you”—as he said it.

“Yes, sir.” Of course, absolutely, my plane is your plane….

“Thank you, Mr. Mason.” He smiled a straight smile in a square jaw while a knowing glint flashed in his eyes. “Now, if you could move these men out of the way, we really have to get going.”

“Yes, sir.” I turned around and gave the command. “Move out of the way!” There was some confusion as the men grabbed their stuff and backed away.

The admirals walked up inside the plane and sat in three of the thirty-five seats. Westmoreland turned back to say, “Thanks again, Mr. Mason. And I hope this doesn’t make you too late for… where was it you were going?”

“R&R, sir.”

“Ah, R&R. There’ll be another plane very soon.”

Time’s recent Man of the Year walked inside to join the admirals. The four men sat in the cavernous interior of the Caribou. The crew chief, looking like he had just been given a couple of grades of rank, pushed the button that raised the ramp and sealed the ship. The prop wash hit us, and the airplane moved away, got smaller, and leapt into the sky. Behind me the dusty mob spoke.

“Gee, I hope they ain’t crowded in there.”

“You can’t mix enlisted and brass too close, you know.”

“Why the fuck not?”

“The vapors from the enlisted men make ‘em tarnish.”

I considered myself very fortunate indeed to be on an airliner cruising smoothly toward Taiwan. My sweat had dried in the air-conditioned plane, and I nursed a drink served by a stewardess. As I stared out the window at the sea, I knew that Resler and the rest of the gang were at this very moment trying to get rid of the rat turds and mildew in our GP. I had to smile.

We had returned from Bong Son just two days before. The VC had suddenly given up or disappeared. After forty-one consecutive days in Bong Son valley, high body counts were announced. Victory was ours. Let’s go home.

We couldn’t just fly back casually after forty-one days away; we had to do something dramatic. We were, after all, the First Team.

The hundred Hueys moved into trail formation at the An Khe pass and snaked around the sky, trying to spiral to a landing at the Golf Course. The guys on the ground said we looked really impressive. They couldn’t hear the chatter, everybody yelling about how fucked up the formation was, how we were bunched up—fussily worrying about how we looked to the rest of the Cav. The hundred ships landed, causing a storm at the Golf Course. The crews walked to their tents.

Once again the rats had prevailed. Their turds were lined up in comfortable disarray, which bespoke rats truly at home. Mildew coated everything. Black shapes with shining eyes darted for cover as we reoccupied the tent.

“We’ve got to kill these fucking rats!” yelled Connors.

I was smiling stupidly when the stewardess asked, “Care for another drink, sir?”

“Huh? Oh. Yeah.”

Connors’s exasperation always delighted me. Once, when he came back from a night out, he drunkenly explained that the tent flaps should be down, not up. He sat in the dark on his cot and loudly enumerated the faults in leaving the flaps up. Then he pulled the rope near him that released the flap. It had filled with water. When it unrolled, gallons of water poured over Connors and drenched his bed. He launched into a series of curses, filled with rage and fury. He also lent me a hundred dollars for my R&R. Just before our assault the day before, Connors said, “Mason, be real, real careful, okay?”

“I always am.”

“Yeah, but you’ve never been worth a hundred dollars to me before.”

By the time we landed in Taipei, I was feeling very good. Uncle Sam, in his great wisdom, provided all necessities for his warriors—just follow the line. In Saigon we had lined up for various cities: Taipei, Bangkok, Sydney, others. The attraction of each city was the same—drinking and fucking. Or fucking and drinking, depending on your morals.

As we deplaned, a smiling government employee directed us to a bus. The bus cruised the streets while a man gave us a rundown of various hotels, indicating prices and location. I elected to stay at the King’s.

When the government dropped us off at the hotel, the Chinese-civilian half of the team swung into action. A kindly, knowledgeable Chinese man-about-town latched on to us as we stepped off the bus.

“Okay, boys. You have come to the right place.” He smiled warmly. “Come right this way, I’ll help you get your rooms, but we must hurry. There is so much to do in Taipei.”

I tossed my bag into the room. A man named Chuck had the room across from mine. Chuck was in his mid-forties and was a captain back at work. In the hallway he wore a tourist costume much like mine—chinos, checked shirt, and loafers. We had just introduced ourselves when Danny, the guide, came rushing toward us.

“Come, come, gentlemen, we must hurry. There is much to do in Taipei.”

Danny hurried us down the hall to the elevator. “Remember, gentlemen, you are here to enjoy yourselves, and I am here to help you. First, we must go across the street to a fine, high-class bar and have a drink to discuss our plans. You must tell me what you want to do and I will be your guide.” Danny walked a little ahead of us, almost walking backward as he talked to us. He was so excited that you might have assumed that he, too, just got in from Vietnam.

Danny showed us through the door of the bar. I noticed thirty or forty women sitting along one wall, side by side. He herded Chuck and me toward the beginning of the line.

“Martha! So good to see you tonight,” he said to the first girl. She nodded warmly to Danny and then to us.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Bob Mason.” Martha looked very pleased to meet me.

We moved up the long line of girls, saying hello to almost everyone. At the end of the line we went up to the second floor and settled around a table where drinks were already being served by some of Danny’s friends.

“So, gentlemen, which one do you want?”

“You mean, which one of those girls?” I asked.

“Of course. Tell me which one you prefer and she will be with you like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“Well, I did see one girl I kinda liked, but I didn’t get her name,” I said.

“Where was she sitting?”

“I think she was about the tenth girl. She’s wearing a violet dress.”

“Ah, Sharon. You have very high-class taste, Bob.”

“Thanks.”

Chuck described the girl he remembered, and Danny got up and excused himself. “I will be right back, soon. Drink up!”

Immediately after Danny disappeared down the stairs, the girl in violet, Sharon, appeared and was escorted to a table at the other end of the room. She sat down across from her escort, facing me. How could I feel deceived by someone I didn’t know? Of all the girls I had met in the lineup, she was the one whose eyes had locked on mine. As I sat there watching her, I realized that I absolutely loved her. There was something familiar about her. She was smiling gently as she met her escort, but her expression changed slightly when she looked up. She did not look away, and I knew she loved me, too.

Danny came back up behind two women. They were both dressed very nicely and carried evening bags. They sat down across from Chuck and me while Danny introduced them. “Linda, this is Bob. Vicki, this is Chuck.” He stood back for a moment, grinning at the happy couples. “I must go see about your drinks.” Before he left, though, he leaned over to me and whispered, “Sharon was already—” I nodded quickly.

Linda leaned across the table and whispered, “It is so sad that you could not get the one you loved. Do you wish me to leave?”

Yes, I did. That girl, Sharon, seemed to be an Oriental version of Patience. Patience looked at me the same way when we first met. But there wasn’t enough whiskey in me to cause me to become callous. The fact that Linda was willing to leave, to be rejected, stirred what remained of my sensibilities, and I said, “No, of course not.”

“She is more beautiful than I am,” said Linda, fishing for compliments. In fact, Sharon was more beautiful than Linda, but I reminded myself that neither of them would be near me if I wasn’t going to pay. In four days it would be over.

“Don’t be foolish; you are more beautiful.”

“Thank you for saying so.” She smiled.

Sharon still looked at me occasionally. I wondered why.

I have dim memories of the insides of many different clubs, singing in the streets, and bright lights and taxis. I even woke up in a different hotel. My companion, for ten dollars a day, was Linda. She showed me the sights on the island in between servicing my desperate horniness. We ate at different clubs and restaurants every night, never visiting the same place twice. Occasionally, as we toured, I would see Sharon watching me familiarly.

In moments, the four days were spent.

Surprisingly, girls crowded outside the bus as we arrived at the airport. As we got off, reunions were formed by the departing soldiers and their Chinese girlfriends. The girls were actually crying. Why in the world? Perfect strangers five days ago were now sobbing tearful farewells. I climbed down out of the bus, but there was no Linda. I moved past the hugging couples, to follow a roped path to the terminal. Five steps away from the door, I heard my name called. I looked up and saw Sharon. She was smiling broadly, but tears flowed on her cheeks. She held her arms out and I instinctively hugged her. I could not understand why she was doing this.

“Please be careful,” she said.

A nearly hysterical feeling of fear hit me as I stepped off the plane at An Khe. The fear welled within me, changing to a prickly, cold terror in the moist heat. I shivered slightly and forced the demons to the background while I looked for a field phone. I shivered in the dark tent while I waited to be connected to my company.

“Welcome back, Mr. Mason,” said Sergeant Bailey. I calmed immediately at Bailey’s voice. “We’ll send a Jeep over right away.”

It was gray outside, overcast, humid, incredibly hot. I fired up another Pall Mall and waited.

In a few days I succeeded in almost totally suppressing my fear. We were not taking many hits out in the mountains where the Cav was currently fishing. The closest thing to real action was when one of our gunships shot down a slick.

Major Astor, the replacement for Captain Morris, was a tall, sturdily built man with short blond hair, more like the stereotypical marine than an army pilot. He joined us right after Bong Son valley. He saw only our pleasantly boring missions in the local boonies, which led him to erroneous conclusions.

“They let us go pretty much where we want to go,” Major Astor said to John Hall. “How much longer can the VC last if we’ve got control of the air like we do?”

“We don’t have control; they do,” said John.

“Yéah. I’ve seen how tough they are. Actually, though, what could you expect them to do against our helicopters?” Astor grinned.

“You’ve got it wrong, Major. The little people have just decided to take a small break for a while.” John was drinking whiskey; the major beer; and I was listening. We were at the bar of our soon-to-be-opened-built-by-our-own-hands officers’ club. There was no bartender yet; people just brought their own bottles.

“You call them ‘little people’?”

“Sometimes.”

“Makes them sound like elves.”

“Well, sometimes you’d think the little bastards were carrying around some fairy dust or something, the way they can be exactly where you don’t want them to be.”

Connors and Banjo walked in. Connors’s shirt was stuck to his sweaty body, and sweat ran down his face. Banjo looked dry in comparison.

“Bartender!” Connors yelled. “Beer! Give me beer!”

“There is no bartender,” Banjo said.

“I know that; I’m just practicing.” Connors looked

around and nodded to the new major. “Good evening, sir.”

“Good evening, Mr. Connors. I just found out that you’re the company’s IP.”

“Yes, that is true. I am an ace with a helicopter.”

“Just don’t get near him when he tries to tie one down,” said Banjo.

“Fuck off, Banjo.”

“Ever teach at flight school?” Astor said to Connors.

“Not yet. That’s probably where they’ll send me after this bullshit, though. Why? Are you an IP?”

“No,” said Astor. “I just graduated. I was impressed by the training program at Rucker.”

“Army helicopter training is the best there is. When you leave, you’re almost safe.”

“Almost safe?” Astor laughed.

“That’s right. Any new pilot is still dangerous. They know just enough to get themselves in trouble. After another five hundred hours of practical flying, learning how to use the aircraft, I’d say they were pretty safe. If you’re still alive at a thousand hours, you must have it down pretty good. That’s stateside time. Over here you pick things up quicker ‘cause of the pressure of being shot at.” Connors grabbed the beer that Banjo put in front of him.

“Well, I thought it was a damn good program,” said Astor. “And after flying over here awhile, I’m even more impressed at how good the training is.”

“Yeah, it is good. But don’t judge the action here by what you’ve been seeing since you’ve been here. When you start making your approaches to that tight LZ, in formation, with the VC shooting at your ass, then it starts to get tough.”

“Even so, if you fly like they taught you, and don’t panic, you ought to do okay,” said Astor.

“What can I tell you? You got the big picture for sure.” Connors turned to me and Hall and rolled his eyes.

“Here’s to army aviation.” Astor raised his beer.

“Huh?” said Connors..

I left the club to write my daily letter home, mentally totaling my flight time. By Connors’s definition I was a little better than pretty safe, with seven hundred hours. Connors himself had nearly three thousand hours, almost all in Hueys. All of this proved to me that I was becoming a professional—a helicopter pilot. When I got back home, I could start my own helicopter company. All I had to do was get back home.

Later that night, I heard the shrill screaming of a man gone crazy. I ran outside, goose flesh rising on my skin.

“God damn them! God damn them!” the voice shrieked.

Near the club, I saw four men carrying one of our pilots, a screaming, twisting, fighting Captain Fontaine. Fontaine hated Owens and White.

“I’ll kill them! I’ll kill them!”

“Calm down…”

“I will kill themmmm!” Fontaine’s voice trailed into a high-pitched scream. He was a struggling pig going to slaughter, but the four men, one of whom was Connors, held him tightly and carried the writhing man up the short stairs to his hooch. And Fontaine was such a calm guy, too.

“He went fucking nuts,” said Connors.

“I can see. But why?” I asked back in our tent, watching Banjo heat some coffee water next to his cot.

“Fucking Owens and White.” Connors sat on his cot. “Fontaine says he found out that those two have been faking their flight records. They’ve been logging a lot of combat time when everybody knows they don’t fly at all. Anyway, he got into it with Owens. Owens told him he was just jealous! That cocksucker! He thinks everybody is as much an asshole as he is.”

“Why do they want the time?”

“Well, you figure a guy like Owens, coming up soon for major. He needs the combat time on his records. He might even try to get some medals with it.”

“Coffee time. Sorry guys, there’s only enough for me.” Banjo laughed.

“So why say anything?”

“I’m not sure. I think it makes me feel better when I think I’m living better than you.” Banjo laughed. “How ‘bout a cookie?”

“You’re so generous, Mr. Bates.”

“Not at all, Mr. Connors.” Banjo bowed, smiling. “Mason?”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m going to bed.”

When you put your mosquito netting down around you, you felt isolated, even in the crowded tent. You were still in plain view of everyone, but the feeling was that you now were private, separated. I settled into my poncho liner to sleep.

Blackness surrounded me and something formless pursued me. A presence dove into my mind and flooded my heart with overwhelming fear. I snapped awake, raised on my elbows. Through the gauze of the netting, I saw Connors looking over from the other side of the tent. I tried to remember what scared me, but I could not. Nothing was happening in the camp. I eased myself back down, feeling tired, and watched the top of my mosquito netting.

The next day, Gary and I flew attached to Major Astor’s platoon on his first mission as leader. Most of the day was spent flying C rations out to resupply the various patrols beating the bushes for Charlie. So far, no Charlie. Occasional sniper hits were reported. Old campsites. New campsites. Even a few captives. But for all practical purposes, the jungle and bush we scoured was uninhabited.

Astor did pretty well at the beginning of the mission. He had the eight ships assigned to him split up, each one resupplying an area of its own. This made the work go faster. Resupply was considered tedious by most pilots, but Gary and I took these delightfully boring occasions to play with the machine while we did the job. Nothing malicious, like buzzing MPs, but the kind of play that challenged our skills.

It could be something like ticking a tree limb with the rotor in an LZ just to see if you could pull it that close. That would be considered foolish back in the States. Here, that kind of judgment could save your life.

I experimented with the Huey tuck that day. If the Huey was nosed over too far on takeoff, the wind resistance on top of the flat roof would force the nose even lower. The ship would then try to dive into the ground as it accelerated. If this happened over level ground, you were trapped in a vicious circle. Pulling the cyclic back would not overcome the wind pressure on the roof. Pulling up on the collective to stay away from the ground only added power to the system, causing you to crash at a higher speed. If you didn’t do anything but curse, you hit the ground at a lower speed. Either way, you lost.

I almost got caught in a Huey tuck once, and I wanted to know just how far over was too far. I found out by simulating a level takeoff from a pinnacle.

I nosed over very hard and pulled enough pitch to keep the ship flying horizontal to the ground. I tested the cyclic, and the ship would not respond. I could feel it happening. Adding power only made it worse. When I could feel the trap and feel how I got into it, I knew I could never get into it by accident. I was experimenting with this over a valley, so all I had to do to recover was dive.

Near the end of the day, Charlie decided to try to wipe out a platoon or two before dark.

We were at a field command post where our ships were being loaded when the grunt commander called Astor over to his command tent.

There were six Hueys in the laager. When Astor came out minutes later, he signaled for a crank-up, then walked over to Gary and me.

“There’s a platoon coming under attack just a few klicks from here. We only need five ships to get them out.” Astor zipped up his flak vest. “I want you to stay here and monitor our frequency in case we need you.” He trotted to his ship, which was already running.

“Pretty tough assignment,” said Gary. We both climbed into the cockpit. Gary started up so that we could monitor the radios without draining the battery. Having to get a jump start in the middle of nowhere was something neither of us wanted to experiment with.

I tuned the radios.

“Charlie One-Six, Preacher Yellow One,” Astor called.

No answer.

“Roger, Charlie One-Six. We are inbound. Throw smoke.”

No answer. On the ground we could hear only Astor’s side of the radio conversation. He sounded just like he knew what he was doing.

“Yellow One, they are on the other side of the tree line.” That was John Hall’s voice.

“Negative, Yellow Four. I see the smoke,” said Astor.

I started to fasten my straps. If they were that close to pickup, we would be in the air in minutes.

“Negative, Yellow One. The target is upwind of that smoke,” said Hall.

“Yellow Four, I am in charge here,” said Astor.

“Roger.”

“Do you think we should get into the air?” asked Gary.

“Naw, not yet. Wait for Astor to give us the word.”

“Yellow Four is taking heavy fire from the tree line!” yelled Hall.

Astor, possibly already on the ground, did not answer.

“Yellow One, we are aborting. My crew chief has been hit.” We could hear the machine guns on Hall’s ship chatter while he talked.

“We’d better go,” I said.

“Right.” Gary brought the Huey up to rpm and made a quick takeoff.

“Yellow One, Charlie One-Six. I have you in sight. You’re about five hundred meters downwind of us.”

It was clear to Gary and me that Astor had really blown it. He had landed downwind of the grunts’ secure position, following the drifting smoke, even though Hall had seen the correct position. I saw the flight and called Astor to say we were joining up. He radioed a curt “Roger.” We joined up and made the landing to the grunts’ clearing without incident.

As the crews mingled after the mission, back at the Golf Course, Astor separated himself and walked away quickly.

“That guy is an accident looking for a place to happen,” I said.

“Yeah, he’s a disaster all right…. Hey. Major Disaster!” said Gary. Everybody laughed. He was christened.

Hall met us at the tent. His crew chief, Collins, was dead. The ship had taken more than twenty rounds. Hall was shaking with anger. He had been right. Disaster had ignored his warnings.

“I’m going to kill him,” said Hall.

“I know how you feel,” I said.

“No, I mean that I will actually kill him. You know, dead.” Hall unsnapped his revolver holster and walked off toward Disaster’s hooch. I thought he was just acting tough, but when I got to the mess line fifteen minutes later, I heard Disaster calling for help from inside his hooch.

Hall stood tall and silent, his pistol at the ready, a can of beer in his left hand. He had taken a position midway between Disaster’s hooch and the mess tent. About thirty men, getting their evening chow, looked on with interest.

“Hall, if you don’t put that gun away immediately, I’ll have you court-martialed.” The voice came from behind the hooch door.

“You’ll have to come out sometime, Major.”

“You’re crazy! You can’t pull a gun on a superior officer and hold him captive in his own quarters. You’re going to be in serious trouble if you don’t put that gun away. Right now!”

“You killed Collins, Major. Now it’s your turn.” Hall raised his pistol to aim.

“Help!” Disaster screamed when he saw Williams come near the mess tent. Williams looked up and saw Hall in the darkening twilight. Disaster peered hopefully out, then yelled again, “Help! Major Williams, get this madman away from me!” Williams nodded and rinsed his mess kit before he walked into the mess tent.

Nobody came to Disaster’s aid. Once in a while we heard him yell. No one paid the slightest attention. Later that night Hall gave up the vigil. I heard him singing drunkenly on the path outside my tent. The next morning he was still so drunk that he could not be allowed to fly.

That incident seemed to precipitate a series of conflicts among us as tension took its toll. Hall beat up Daisy one night, splitting his lip. He continued to harass Disaster by throwing Montagnard spears at him as he walked around the camp. Soon after Captain Fontaine was carried screaming back to his hooch; Riker told Shaker, very plainly, to shove it, when Shaker told him to go work on the club. Connors and Nate pushed each other around over where the laundry should be hung. Nate and Kaiser scuffled over a territorial dispute.

The farewell party for Williams was very quiet. The major, an excellent air leader, was being transferred to brigade staff in Saigon—a move up. The party was restrained because Williams had never been close to us, like Fields had been.

The next day, after an award ceremony to pass out air medals among us, our new CO, Major Crane, made his introduction speech.

“I think that everything around here is just fine except for personal neatness,” said Crane. “This company has an impressive list of accomplishments in the Cav. I’m sure you’ve been so busy that you just let things slide.” He wore crisp fatigues and spit-shined boots. Even Williams, Mr. Hardass himself, didn’t worry about that kind of bullshit. Williams concentrated on our missions. Crane was already talking about the busywork.

“You may not think that wearing a shirt in the company area is very important—and, by the way, the shirt must be tucked in—but I do. Sure, it’s tough here. This is combat. But if we let just one aspect of our professional demeanor fall to the wayside, our overall performance will suffer.” He paused, smiled. Just a regular guy doing his job. “So from now on, we will conform to standard army dress codes at all times. That means tucked-in shirts outside the tents, bloused boots, and clean uniforms.”

It’s our own fault, I thought. We spent so much time making this place look civilized that this guy thinks he’s back at Fort Benning.

“While I’m talking about keeping yourselves clean, I may as well announce a bit of good news.” He smiled. “Starting tomorrow, we will be digging our own company well so we can have our own showers.” He waited. I think he expected some cheers here. We were silent. “Captain Sherman will be the project leader, and I want you all to give him your fullest cooperation. Dismissed.”

“My aching fucking back,” said Connors back at the tent. “I was kind of getting used to cleaning up the way I do.”

“Shit. How do you think you clean up?” asked Banjo.

“Well, just like everybody else. I keep my uniform on until it becomes a second skin. Then, when I peel it off, it takes all the crud with it.”

“I would like to have a shower around here,” said Gary.

“Yeah, I would, too. I wonder how deep we have to dig?” I said.

“Maybe all the way to Cincinnati!” Gary said.

Farris walked in. “I have another announcement for you guys.” He waited until we gathered around him.

“We need volunteers to transfer to other aviation units to make room for the replacements.”

“Transfer out of the Cav?” Gary asked.

“That’s right.”

“When?” somebody asked.

“Sometime between now and the end of next month.”

This was my chance. Maybe I could get a cushy job at Qui Nhon, flying advisers or something. I raised my hand.

For the next few days I flew local routine missions or dug the new well. While I filled buckets and watched them being hauled up on a rope, I daydreamed about my new assignment. A friend of mine from flight school had written saying that he was assigned to a navy carrier with his own Huey. I knew there were better jobs than the Cav. Maybe a 9-to-5 courier pilot in Saigon. Imagine, no more mud, tents, or boonies.

At twenty-five feet we struck rock. Sherman called in some guys from the engineers who said we’d have to blast.

Gary and I flew over the Bob Hope show on our way to Happy Valley. While we flew ass-and-trash that afternoon, we listened to the most bizarre radio conversation I had ever heard.

“Raven Six, Delta One. We have a target in sight.” Delta One was a gunship.

“Roger, Delta One. Do you see anything on their backs?”

“Negative.”

“Well, there’s just no way to be sure. Go ahead and get them.”

“Roger.”

“What the heck are they talking about?” asked Gary. We had just picked up some empty food containers and were sailing down the side of a mountain.

“Got me,” I said.

“Raven Six, our guns just won’t stop them.”

“You tried to get them in the head?”

“Roger.”

“Use the rockets.”

“Roger.” Silence. Gary was setting up for an approach to the road patrol on our resupply route.

“Raven Six, Delta One. That did it. We got both of ‘em.”

“Glad to hear it, Delta One. I was beginning to wonder if anything we had could stop an elephant.” Elephant? We’re killing fucking elephants?

“Roger. Anything else?”

“Of course, Delta One. Go down and get the tusks.”

“I’m sick,” said Gary. “Killing elephants is like blasting your grandmother.”

Back at the company, there was general outrage at the news that the ivory was delivered to division HQ. It was okay to kill people in a war, but don’t touch innocent by standers like elephants.

“Any man who’d do that would come into your house and shoot your dog,” Decker said.

“Get your camera, Mason!” Sherman yelled.

“What’s up?”

“We’re going to blast the well. Get your camera.”

I stood back along the trail to the well and pointed my camera.

“Everybody clear?” Sherman yelled.

“Clear.”

Bonk. A small cloud of dust rose five feet above the site. I snapped the picture.

“Shit. I thought it woulda made more noise than that,” yelled Sherman.

“Yeah. Did it go off?”

“Is there water?” Everybody went over to the well.

“Hoo-fucking-ray,” said Connors. “We got more dirt under them rocks.”

“We’ll just keep digging,” announced Sherman.

Somebody had painted a five-by-ten-foot mural of LZ X-Ray on the wall of our new club. I had a bourbon and water in my hand as I walked around. The furniture, shipped in from the States, looked foreign. The chairs were stained bamboo with tropical-print cushions. The tables had bamboo legs and Formica tops.

The place was packed for the official opening. We all knew that the Colonel was going to bring nurses to the affair. The Colonel wasn’t around yet. The hundred or so guys passed the time drinking twenty-five-cent‘drinks in rapid succession.

Nearly everybody from our company was there. Nate and Kaiser talked seriously at the bar while Nate’s hand kept time with a song played on the new stereo system. Connors and Banjo laughed from a table nearby. Farris nursed a Seven-Up but smiled anyway. Hall sat in a corner staring at the mural. Disaster shadowed Crane and talked business. Wendall and Barber watched the tape recorder work. Resler grinned like a child on his second beer. Riker’s red face was bright as he drank more than he usually did. I stood by the bar wondering whether I got the clap in Vietnam or in Taipei.

“You’re not… sick,” I had said, pointing to her groin, “are you?”

“Me?” Her face showed pain. “Me? Don’t be silly. I no sick.”

“If there’s one thing I can’t do, that’s catch the clap,” I said.

“Well,” she huffed, “I’m almost a virgin.”

Just as I noticed the silence, Resler shoved me. “Bob,” he whispered, “the nurses are here.”

The Colonel had come unannounced, through the club’s back door, escorting his promised nurses. They, I’m sure, did not know that they were the inspiration that had built this club. They did have a look of extreme self-consciousness about them. The entire club stared intently and silently as four elderly, high-ranking females from the medical corps took seats at the Colonel’s table, cause enough for their nervousness.

The music played on. Two very plump lieutenants followed. I kept looking at the door to see the rest. That was it. After a long minute, that was clear to everyone. Talk began again.

“There must be some real nurses in this fucking division,” snarled Connors. Banjo was laughing so hard that he was in tears.

“Those are nurses,” said Resler.

“You know what I mean,” said Connors. “You know, nurses. Like with tits that come up here”—he gestured—“not down here. Shit, my grandmother is more appealing.”

The Colonel kept looking around while his aides talked to the nurses.

“Ladies.” A drunken warrant officer walked over and bowed politely to the nurses. ‘Gen’lmen…“ He nodded to the aides. ”Sir…“ He bowed again.

The Colonel glared at him. The nurses laughed. When he turned to leave, the Colonel relaxed. At a moment when the club was silent, and while every eye was glued to the scene, the drunk released a fart that stopped hearts.

The Colonel, his men, and the nurses flinched at the report. The Colonel grew red in the face and started to get out of his chair, perhaps to kill the drunk. Noise returned abruptly to the club and he hesitated. Everyone was laughing. It was as though everyone had delivered that fart, and the Colonel knew it. He sagged back in his chair helplessly. The nurses explained that they had to get back, right away.

Farris said, “I think you men should stop drinking and go home. We have a big mission tomorrow.”

It wasn’t a very big mission, just lengthy. Since I’d been back from R&R, the daily missions were in the mountains forty and fifty miles north of An Khe. We started each day at 0500, picked up grunts at the Golf Course or the refueling area, flew them out to the mountains, placed them at various LZs, and picked up wounded and dead from the patrols already out there.

This area wasn’t too bad for the pilots. We weren’t getting killed. The grunts, though not beaten, were suffering losses from constant sniper fire and devious booby traps.

After a week of our carrying wounded and dead people, the deck and bulkheads of the cargo area got very rank. Dried blood caked under the seats, and miscellaneous pieces of flesh stuck to the metal. When it became absolutely necessary to wash out the gore and smell, the pilot would make an approach toward the bridge going to An Khe and land in the river.

Washing out the Hueys spawned a new support industry among the Vietnamese around An Khe. As we came across the bridge, boys would scramble toward the shallow area near the sandbars where we usually landed, ready to work.

The only thing we had to worry about was not getting the electronics wet. Everything else, up to deck level, was unaffected by water. I hovered around in the shallows with the skids underwater until I found a spot that was the right depth. It was safe as long as you kept an eye on the tail rotor. As soon as the engine shut down, the boys would grab buckets and brushes and begin scrubbing the ship. The crew chief usually took out the seats for the scrub-down.

I took off my boots and socks, stashed them on top of the console, rolled up my pants, and made it to the shore. While I stood on a sandbar and watched, the crew chief supervised the project and the boys did most of the work. They even climbed up on the roof and poured water down the hell hole, which was industrious of them but completely unnecessary.

Other forms of business prospered on the sandbars. One was the Coca-Cola business. The other was mermaids. The Cola girls had exclusive territories. The girl in the area I usually landed was named Long. Because I flew to the sandbars a lot, she knew me pretty well.

Long was about ten years old, with waist-length black hair. Her eyes were black, and her skin was darker than that of most Vietnamese. She was a gorgeous and radiant little girl.

“Do you have a wife?” she asked when we first met. I said yes.

“Is she tall like you?”

“No, she comes up to my chin.”

“Ah, very tall. Does she have hair on her arms like you?”

“Not like me, like you.” I brushed the peach fuzz on her arm.

“Oh, that is good.” She laughed. She had never seen Caucasian women.

We became friends over a period of months. Long usually sat beside me on the sandbar while the Huey was washed and talked about how nice it would be when the war was over. She believed that it would be over very soon. There was talk of peace overtures going around. She could not imagine how the VC could beat soldiers that marched through the sky.

When a ship was rinsed out, the crew chief would normally want to let it dry a little. Then he would get undressed to go for a “short swim.” The inspiration for this healthy and athletic act came from the older girls, who pretended to be mermaids and beckoned sweetly from downstream islands.

The mermaids showed up at the river the day after the general placed An Khe off limits as a result of the high rate of social disease. For months, while an American-regulated village of ill repute was being constructed just outside town, the mermaid business flourished. I never drifted down the river myself, but from what I could see, it looked very sweet indeed.

Eventually the ship would dry and the crew chief would come back smiling. Long would get up to say good-bye. Standing, she was only a ccuple of inches taller than I was sitting.

“Good-bye, Bob. Be well.” She smiled and wandered off to sell her wares as other Hueys landed among the sandbars.

When I flew a ship to the sandbars, I usually tried to teach the crew chief some basic flying so that he could take the ship in case a pilot got hit, and get it to the ground in one piece. The results of this training were disappointing, because there was never enough time to pursue it. Consequently I never saw a crew chief who was able to fly even a rudimentary approach.

What seemed to me the most basic of human skills—hovering a helicopter—somehow eluded even the most intelligent crew chief. But among the men I tried to train, Reacher was notable. I had flown with him so much that he was almost able to hover, and I believe that in an emergency he might have got a ship down on the ground in one or two pieces.

Rumor was it was getting hot again in the Ia Drang. While the First of the Ninth was over there snooping around, we continued our ass-and-trash missions around the home base. The pilots were tired of this kind of flying, and the ships suffered the mechanical equivalent of lassitude and dishevelment. The flyable rate was less than 50 percent. On the same day that a Chinook was shot down, our company broke four Hueys from just sloppy flying. At the news of the four accidents, the general reaction was “four less Hueys to fly.” Malaise had set in.

A brand-new replacement, Captain Hertz, was assigned to fly with me one afternoon. Nate flew with another replacement, and the two of us were going to fly to Qui Nhon and back to check these new guys out.

When the sky was a dull orange behind us, we crossed the An Khe pass heading east. Hertz had been flying since we left the ground. He was doing okay, flying on Nate. We talked a little in the air. He told me he had a lot of flight time in the States.

A formation accident in the Cav had killed ten people. We heard reports about other wrecks around the country. Night-formation skills were critical. One guy, fucking up just a little bit, could wipe out a bunch of people if those rotors connected.

As it got dark, Hertz began to drop behind Nate. I encouraged him to close up, because dropping back too far caused you to lose perspective relative to the lead ship.

“Move it right up close, just like a daylight formation.”

Hertz moved to about two rotor disks’ distance of Nate. Unfortunately, he also started to oscillate, swinging too far away, then too close. As he tried to adjust for the swing, he overcorrected. I said nothing. On one swing toward Nate, he scared himself and dropped farther back.

“You gotta keep it closer,” I said. “If we were in a regular formation, we’d be screwing up everybody. If Nate decided to make a left turn right now, we wouldn’t know it until we were right on top of him.”

“I was just dropping back for safety.”

“I know. But, believe me, it’s safer closer.”

“Okay.”

As he pulled back up into the slot, he once again began the oscillations. He was on a pendulum that swung out away from Nate and then back toward him. He either knew a real slick trick, or we were going to blend rotor blades with Nate. At the last possible moment, when I realized he had no slick trick in mind, I grabbed the controls.

“I got it.” I Hared back abruptly and pulled back into position.

“Why?”

“Because you were going to hit Nate.”

“I wasn’t even close,” said Hertz.

“You were close enough that I had to get on the controls.”

“Well, I don’t think so.”

“Well, we’re up here tonight for your benefit, not mine. Try it again.”

He set up again, and again began to swing in and out. His trouble, I believe, was his fear of collision, which was rational but which wrongly affected his judgment. He overcorrected, compounding the error until it grew out of control. On a wild swing away, I asked, “Are you okay?”

“Roger,” said Hertz. Then he swung in toward Nate, and once again I took the controls. “I got it.”

This pissed him off. “No one has ever taken the controls away from me, especially not a warrant officer.” Ah, what we had here was a dyed-in-the-wool snob who hated warrants.

“Well, as far as I’m concerned, Captain, you should be thanking me for saving your life. I need night training like I need an extra asshole.”

“When we get back, I’m reporting you for insubordination.”

“Right. Well, it’s turnaround time. Nate is going to fly on us on the flight back. You take the controls and just aim this thing back to the west. You got it.”

Hertz took the controls. We said nothing more on the flight back to the Golf Course. I did consider the possibility of a steep bank, flip off his belts, open the door, and assholes away. But that was impossible.

Hertz made the approach to our area nicely. In fact, the only thing he had done wrong was the oscillating in the formation. I could’ve helped him on that if he had just relaxed. On the ground, he opened the door and stomped off. I logged the book, entering myself as the aircraft commander, Hertz as pilot.

“How’d it go?” Gary asked as I dumped my gear on my, bunk.

“Shitty. That new guy Hertz tried to kill me and Nate, and when I had to grab the controls, he got pissed off.”

“Yeah. I heard him yelling at Farris a little while ago.”

“What’d he say?”

“I couldn’t tell, but I heard your name a couple of times.”

Nate walked in grinning. “Mason, you really pissed off that new captain.”

“I know. He said he was going to turn me in for insubordination. Maybe they’ll send me home early.”

“No such luck.” Nate sat down on my bench. “Farris ended up chewing his ass.”

“Really? What’d he say?”

“He said that regardless of rank, you were the aircraft commander. And he said, ‘If Mason said you were too close, then you were too close.’”

“Really?”

“Yep.” Nate fiddled with a plastic chess piece on the board I’d left set up. “Hertz has to apologize to you, too.” Now I felt very good.

“Wanna play a short game?” Nate held up two pawns.

“Anytime,” I said.