Chickenhawk

10. Grounded

April 1966

When a First of the Ninth platoon landed near Chu Pong, they captured NVAs who said that there were at least a thousand more men in the area. Moments later the platoon was under fire and trapped. While trying to get them out, two slick ships were shot down, and fifteen men were killed.

This was bad news to many of us. The strategy of attrition was an endless cycle of our taking and retaking the same areas.

“Why the fuck don’t they keep some troops out there?” said Connors. “This is like trying to plug fifty leaks with one finger!”

Week after week, the magazines reported kill scores that we knew were inflated with villagers. There were quotes from generals who reported we had them on the run, and quotes from the leader of the posse, LBJ, that victory was just around the corner.

The perimeter of the Golf Course was now mined, searchlighted, patrolled, and guarded. In seven months the VC had been able to get only a few mortars over it and a handful of men through it.

When the Eastern mind encounters such a hard obstacle, it is inclined to use a kind of mental judo to bridge it. The VC asked themselves how they could get the Americans to give them rides in their helicopters so that they could inspect our defenses.

“Mason, you and Resler go over to the bridge and bring back some prisoners,” said Farris.

Gary and I lifted from row three and flew to a small field near the southeast corner of the perimeter. Here a second lieutenant ran over with his M-16 held by the sights.

“Got two suspects for you,” he said. He pointed behind him to two kids, maybe twelve years old. They were smiling as the grunts gave them chocolates. One of them smoked a cigarette awkwardly.

“Those two?” I asked.

“Right. We caught them wandering too close to the perimeter.”

“Maybe they don’t know they’re not supposed to be here.”

“No, they know all right. Our orders are to arrest anyone who gets too close. You’re to take them to the cage.”

“Where’s that?” I asked.

“You know where finance is?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, there’s a barbed-wire pen in a field near there. You’ll be able to find it easy.”

“Okay.”

The lieutenant motioned the prisoners toward our ship. The two boys grinned with childish expectation and ran over.

“Do they get blindfolded or something?” Gary asked.

“Naw,” said the lieutenant. “They’re just kids.”

One of the boys sat in the web seat and the other sat on the floor with his legs dangling out—like the grunts did—and Gary and I strapped back in.

Coming back into the Golf Course, we went out of the pattern and circled around the division to reenter traffic on the downwind leg. The boys were all eyes. The one on the floor punched the other and pointed at something. They both laughed.

Gary told the tower we were going to the pen, and they cleared us to fly down row three and beyond. We crossed the northern perimeter, the troopers’ garrison, the tube emplacements, the antimortar radar installation, the sky-crane pad, and the long rows of Hueys. Beyond the heliport we flew over the tent cities to a field.

Two clerks on guard duty came over to corral the prisoners. The boys jumped off smiling and went where they were pointed. Five or six prisoners crab-walked around under the three-foot-high barbed-wire ceiling of the cage. One of them waved to the boys. They called a greeting. It did not look like a good place to spend time, but as we were told, no one stayed there very long anyway.

“After we question them, we either send them back home or turn them over to the ARVNs. These two little fucks will probably be sent back home,” said the sergeant in charge.

Back in the air, I had the feeling that we had just been tricked. They had just done an aerial survey of the entire First Cav compound, and they didn’t even have an airplane.

The perimeter of tangled concertina, land mines, antiper sonnel mines, trip wires, and observation towers was constantly infiltrated by the haphazard return of nature; that is, weeds. With the mines in place, no one could go out to trim the weeds. Weeds were not only messy; they could conceal the approach of the enemy. The solution was to have men spray defoliant chemicals out the doors of a hovering Huey. There was no way to get out of the minefield if the engine failed. To someone as nervous around explosives as myself, the chance that just the air pressure under our hovering ship might trigger a mine seemed possible. And what about the sticks and stuff that blew around in our rotor wash? The imagined dangers were endless. I never thought for one moment about the defoliant itself.

For two or three days, Resler and I drew the job. As with most noncombat chores with the Huey, it became a game.

“Whatever you do, don’t catch the concertina with the skids,” said Resler.

“What do you think? I bought my license at Sears?”

We flew slowly along the rows of concertina just missing the short iron posts that anchored it. A man used a long nozzle to spray a mist of chemicals that swirled into the wire and around the ship. At the end of a three-hundred-yard pass, we rose slightly, turned, and went back, paralleling the same route ten feet farther over. One of the men in the back of the chopper waved to the man in the observation tower. He waved back, and with his finger traced a circular path beside his head for good measure. Guard duty is shit, but at least I’m not stupid.

For three hours Gary and I painstakingly covered every square inch of our assigned section of the perimeter with weed killer. The stuff swirled into the cockpit, but was odorless and tasteless. The men of the spray crew were protected only by buttoned-up collars and pulled-down baseball caps in their never-ending job.

One morning we drew the assignment of flying to la Drang as a courier ship. We carried the courier, who carried a pouch containing important messages being sent to various field commanders. It was the kind of job I loved best. No formations, no hot LZs, no screaming grunts, and no red tracers.

After crossing the Mang Yang pass, we flew to a small LZ somewhere south of Pleiku. The courier hopped out and asked us to shut down. We did, then wandered over to a group of brass who were interrogating an NVA. The man’s arms were bound behind him. He shook his head quickly when the interpreter shouted sharp questions. A heavy-set colonel reacted angrily and asked again. A major stood behind the prisoner with a .45 drawn but held by his side.

“Tell him to talk or we will kill him,” the colonel said. The ARVN translator grinned. “Tell him!” The interpreter switched his face to stern severity and wheeled around and yelled piercing Vietnamese accented with gestures. The prisoner flinched at the words but resolutely shook his head.

“Did you tell him we’d kill him?”

“Yes. I say you talk now. If no talk now we kill now. Boom.” He smashed his fist into his hand.

“Good. Tell him again.”

He did, but the prisoner stubbornly refused to talk.

“Goddamn it!” the colonel shouted. “Major, put your automatic to the back of his head,” he said quietly, so as to not tip his hand. “When Nguyen here asks him again, push the barrel against his head.”

“Yes, sir.” The major raised the weapon.

The interpreter pounced upon the man, unleashing a torrent of threats, and the major prodded the back of his skull with the muzzle of the gun. The man flinched at the gun stabs and closed his eyes, waiting for the explosion. When the interpreter stopped screaming, he shook his head. No.

The colonel brushed the interpreter aside and put his face in front of the prisoner’s. “Listen, you slimy little gook. You talk. Now.” He glared. “I’ll blow your slimy brains all over this goddamn jungle.” He moved his face closer to the prisoner’s. “Cock that gun, Major!”

“Huh?”

“Cock the goddamn gun and let him hear it. I don’t think he believes we’ll kill his ass.”

“But we can‘t, sir.”

The colonel wheeled to the major. “I know that and you know that, but he doesn’t. Cock it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The major sheepishly pulled the slide back and let it snap. The loud click-clack made the prisoner flinch. He seemed to brace himself for death. He lowered his head. The major kept the gun at the base of his skull. Before the interpreter even asked the question, he began to shake his head slowly. No.

“Okay, okay. Let’s take a break,” said the colonel. “God damn gooks!” He looked around to see the courier and Gary and me. “What do you want?”

“Dispatches from division, sir.” The courier handed the colonel a fat envelope and saluted.

“Right.” The colonel nodded. “The fucking paperwork can find you no matter where you are.”

“Yes, sir,” said the courier.

The colonel looked up from the papers. “Well?”

“I have to get a signature on the cover sheet, sir.”

“You’ll get it. You’ll get it.” While he patted his fatigues for a pen, he noticed the prisoner staring at him.

“Major, I want you to blindfold that slope. And I want you to tell him that I’ve decided to execute him.”

“Sir?”

“That’s right. Tell him. Tell him.” The colonel shook his head wearily. “Jesus, Major, this is basic stuff. I’m going away for a while, and I want the interpreter to talk nice and friendly to the gook and tell him that maybe he can save his miserable skin. Like if he decides to talk. Get it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here’s your cover sheet.” The colonel handed the paper to the courier. “Nice day for flying.” The colonel looked at me.

“Yes, sir, it is,” I said.

He nodded over and over as if agreeing to several things, then stopped suddenly and looked at me sternly.

“Well?”

“Yes, sir,” I said quickly, “we’re going.”

I spit out blood. I had quit smoking and was taking it out on the inside of my cheeks. I sat behind a table in the mess tent trying to figure out how to make sense of a tall pile of papers that made up an accident report. My job, since I had caught a bad cold, was to be the scribe on the accident board. The company was out working the local area, but the word was in that we were going to go to the Turkey Farm in a few days.

I had mixed feelings. The job kept me behind in the safety of the camp, but being left behind for any reason was hard to bear. What a stupid emotion! I’d rather do a mountain of paperwork than be out flying. So why did I feel so rotten? What am I? A lemming? Relax and take it easy while you’ve got the chance.

“Aircraft commander says he did not realize that the LZ was filled with hidden stumps,” the report read. “Aircraft was pinned to a large sharpened stump, causing the aircraft to be abandoned.” Who cares? Why do we have to document every accident in this goddamn war? How can a pilot be expected to know everything? What do they expect, X-ray vision?

“Can I sit here, sir?” Sergeant Riles sauntered to my table.

“Sure.”

He pushed a file folder aside and put his canteen cup on the spot. “Got to take a break from the fuckin’ supply tent,” announced Riles.

“Yeah. Gets tough in there.” I hated myself for being cynical with one of the stay-behinds. And this one was the company’s genuine loser. Riles kept himself drunk by stealing whiskey from the crews’ stashes while they were out. He had been a master sergeant once, but because of his drinking he was now a pfc. We called him “Sergeant” because he grew very depressed with the word “Private.”

“Well, not that tough.” He laughed.

If Riles is a stay-behind and a loser, what does that make me? A feeling of revulsion came over me.

“Like to talk, Sergeant, but I got all this shit to do.”

“Right. Don’t mind me. Gotta get back anyway. Got this order today that we got to get ready for an IG inspection.”

“Uh-huh.” I barely glanced over a form.

“Hate that shit. Ever do an IG?”

“Never. Never will, either.”

Riles stood up and waited for me to say something. The silence spoke and he finally slumped off. I wanted to call him back and apologize for my thoughts. But I didn’t.

While the convoy crawled along Route 19, I thought about the British marching resolutely into American ambushes. The cook had lent me his M-16, which now lay across my lap as I sat in the Jeep. I thought of my rank insignia as the equivalent to the British Redcoat, and turned my collar under. By virtue of my being grounded, I was the officer in charge of our first road convoy to Pleiku.

“Group Mobile 100 ran from An Khe to Pleiku once,” said Wendall.

“Who’s that?” I asked.

“They were French equivalent to the First Cav,” said Wendall. “They ran around these same roads in long caravans trying to beat the Vietminh. Group 100 was wiped out near the Mang Yang pass.”

“Thanks, Wendall. Great news.”

“Well, it’s history. You can learn from history, you know.”

“How’s that supposed to help me now?”

“Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t go to sleep on the trip. Have fun.”

The big difference, of course, was that we had patrols along the entire route. Knowing this did not suppress my fears. I had become very skeptical of secure LZs, roads, bridges, and camps. During the entire fifty-mile drive I watched the elephant grass along the road, braced for explosions at every narrow pass, and sat lightly on the seat when we crossed each bridge. When we drove into the Turkey Farm, I immediately found the flight surgeon and asked to get back on flight status.

“Sorry, you’re totally blocked up. If I let you fly, it’ll only get worse. Check back in a couple of days.”

In a damp mist a hundred men pulled the bulky GPs from the trucks and began setting them up while the ships were out on a mission. In less than an hour, the flat, grassy field outside Camp Holloway was transformed into a tent city. Water bags, called “lister bags,” were set up on tripods; the mess tent was put together; and while the men stacked C-ration boxes around the sides, the cooks started the evening meal.

While all this was going on, I wandered around and made sure that the baggage for our company got put in the appropriate tents. Then I had nothing to do but deal with my thoughts. I sat on my cot alone in the dank GP and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. I was tortured by conflicting feelings. The Bobbsey Creeps were the only other pilots on the ground, reinforcing my misery.

At the first sound of the returning ships, I went outside and watched. The Hueys snaked out of the mist and with increasing noise gathered on the field west of the camp. Huey after Huey hovered to a landing. The field became a complicated, dance of whirling rotor blades, swinging fuselages, and swirling mist. The roaring rush of the turbines died, and the rotors swung lazily as the ships shut down. The crew wandered up to the camp. They all had come back.

I felt like an abandoned child seeing his family again. Soon the tent was filled with the usual sounds.

“Hey, Nate, the next time you cut me out like that, I‘ll—”

“Fuck you, Connors. If you’d been watching what you were doing, you’d have kept your distance.

“Jesus Christ! I don’t know who’s worse, you or the Cong.”

It was nice to hear.

My ten days on the ground seemed interminable. Our battalion spent two more days at the Turkey Farm before packing up to go north to Kontum. Again I rode in the convoy.

We found an old French barracks that the Vietnamese had been using as stables and chicken coops. After a lot of cleaning up, this became our Kontum camp. I saw the flight surgeon each morning, and each morning he continued my treatment of drugs and no flying.

Finally, after two days at Kontum, I was put back on flight status. Riker and I were assigned to fly together. As I walked out to the flight line, I felt weightless with joy. My work had become my home, and I was glad to be back.

The ships were shadows in the early-morning mist. We took off singly to join up out of the fog. Climbing over vague trees, we saw the earth disappear. Riker, who knew where we were going, told me to turn left. Just as I did we saw the phantom of a Huey cross immediately in front of us. I lurched back on the controls, but that was not what saved us from a midair collision. Luck had been with us.

The mission was to resupply the searching patrols. We followed three other ships thirty miles up to Dak To, separated, and flew west to one of our patrols.

We shut down while the grunts dragged out insulated cases of hot food. A sergeant came over and invited us to join them for breakfast. We did. Hot reconstituted scrambled eggs, bacon, white toast, and coffee. We sat on the Huey’s deck and ate silently. The mist was beginning to burn off, and the dark shadows around us grew taller, revealing themselves as mountains.

The platoon leader, a skinny second lieutenant, came over and shot the shit for a while.

“Find anything?” Riker asked.

“Just some old campsites.” The lieutenant patted his blouse for cigarettes. I offered him a Pall Mall. “Thanks.”

“We hear that the VC don’t want to fight the Cav.”

“Can’t blame them, can you?” said the lieutenant. “Every time they do, we clobber the shit out of them.”

Yeah, as long as we have helicopters, Phantoms, and B-52 bombers, I thought. I said, “Maybe the war is almost over.”

“Maybe. They keep talking about peace negotiations all the time. Johnson’s got ‘em in a bind up north, and we’re putting the squeeze on ’em down here. They might just see that it’s impossible to win.”

“Yeah,” said Riker. “I don’t see how the little fucks can go on much longer. McNamara says we’re due out of here in less than a year. Some people say that we might not even serve a complete tour, could end that quick.”

“Might be,” said the lieutenant. “At least we know we own Dak To.”

“We have a guy in our company, named Wendall, says that that’s what they did with the French,” I said.

“Did what?” said the lieutenant.

“Made them think they’re winning, let them set up camps and stuff, and then bam!”

“Totally different war now.” The lieutenant flipped his cigarette out to the dew-covered ground. “The French couldn’t get around like we can.” He patted the Huey’s deck. “Machines like this make all the difference. How’d you like to be a guerrilla trying to fight an army that can be anywhere, anytime?”

“You got a point there, all right,” I said. “Wendall’s a flake anyway.”

“Sounds like it,” the lieutenant said.

“Yep,” said Riker, “I can see it now. Get home early, get laid, and then put the baggage down.”

“Well, I’m back to work. Take it easy.” The lieutenant smiled and walked back over to his men. “Phillips. Get some men to load those food boxes on the Huey.”

“What’s next?” I asked Riker.

“We’re supposed to go back and drop this shit off and then we fly some refugees somewhere.”

Black pajamas, conical hats, pigs trussed in baskets, chickens that watched with upright heads on upside-down bodies, wide-eyed kids, crying babies, rolled-up rice mats, staffs, bundled firewood, and warped metal-clad boxes that stayed together by faith alone were packed into the Huey.

“What a menagerie,” grumbled Riker. A pig squealed as the turbine whined. I turned around and saw a young mother with a baby’s face pressed to her breast as she watched us with saucer eyes. I nodded to her and smiled. She nodded quickly and smiled back. God, they are scared, I thought. How would I feel if foreigners made me and my family get on a strange contraption to fly me from my home to who knows where?

“Winning their hearts and minds,” I said.

“Ain’t that a crock,” said Riker.

We flew north, past Dak To and the border junction of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The mountains were the tallest I had ever seen. Misty clouds blanketed this wet, green world.

We were in our slot, one of ten ships, as the flight followed valleys to stay out of the clouds. Past a dark peak that lost its top in the whiteness, a red, freshly cut airstrip appeared in the valley below. New huts with tin roofs were clustered defensively within a sandbagged, wire-topped compound wall. Welcome home, I thought. Eyes in the back watched intently as the flight drifted out of the misty sky to land on the red earth.

Little ARVN soldiers with slung rifles urged them out of the ship. A frightened mother looked back inside to two small kids. A soldier grabbed a pig and tossed it to a pile of rope-trussed belongings. It screamed noiselessly in our hissing, and squirmed like a living sausage. One of the kids screamed tearfully. His frantic mom snatched him quickly off the deck to sit on her hip. He grabbed her blouse tightly as she ducked our rotors and stumbled to her things.

I watched her as we left. She grew smaller as we climbed. Soon she was only a memory, confused and frightened, alone and far away from her family’s ancient home. At that moment I hated Communists and was ashamed to be an American. But then I had often been accused of being too sensitive.

We continued relocating refugees all the next day. We were supposed to finish our sweep at this end of the Ia Drang valley and then go home to the Golf Course. By dusk, though, we were landing the last load of people at one of the new villages. The old man decided to stay out and head back in the morning.

Twenty ships landed on a grassy ridge in the gathering dark. The ridge was the site of a temporary ARVN camp. Two large tents were set up for us.

Riker and I carried our sleeping gear over to the tents. We blew up air mattresses in the light of army flashlights.

Dinner was C’s eaten down by the ships. Riker and Resler sat on the deck eating from cans while I twisted the opener around a tin of chicken. I was pulling the ragged lid away from the chicken meat when the silence was shattered. Whomp! and then ringing. The ringing came from my ears. Nobody announced the obvious: mortars. Cans clanked on the deck and shadows scattered. I dropped my can and ran toward a shallow hole I had seen when we landed. It was only twenty feet away. Whoomm! I saw the bright flash of the round as it exploded a hundred yards away. Dropping to the grass, I low-crawled the rest of the way to the hole. Whoomml It was occupied by two crew members from the ship in front of us. Whoom-whoom! Goddamn! Where am I supposed to go? Whoom! Damn! Real close! I got up and ran back to the ship. The ship was my security. It always got me out of trouble. Whoommm! My shadow flashed against the black u.s. ARMY on the tail boom. I dropped and rolled under the deck. My shoulder caught on the fuel drain spigot and I tore it loose. My mind had long since left, and I was blindly scrambling toward the front of the ship away from the fuel bladder. Whoom! I reached the cross tube up front and stopped. “Goddamn it!” I screamed “Mother fuckers!” Then I realized that the Huey was just thin aluminum and magnesium and Plexiglas and jet fuel, and that if a round hit, I would go up in smoke with it. “Get away from the ship, you stupid shit!” I yelled to myself. I crawled in the foot-deep grass, pressing my nose in the dampness, my nose the runner, my head the sled. Ten feet away I stopped. Whoom! Off to the right. No hard hat. No weapon. I cursed my stupidity and swallowed sobs. Silence! A bug crawled on my cheek. I heard a muffled whoompf and a pop. A flare dazzled and swung in the sky. Whoompf, pop, whoompf, pop. Huey shadows intersected and swayed wildly across the grass. A flare dimmed, then disappeared as it dropped below the ridge. Gray smoke made lazy trails in the light of the flares above. Silence. They stopped? After ten more minutes of lying in the grass, I heard voices. “All over.”

“Jesus H. Christ! How lucky can you get!” I got up. My shoulder hurt where I had hit the drain valve. I believe in God. Really. I walked back to my ship, dropped to my knees, and searched the grass for an already opened can of boned chicken.

The mist was so thick I could barely see the Huey from the tent. The distant mountains from the day before had disappeared. Resler had got up before me, and I could see a friendly orange flicker from his tin-can stove next to our ship. I shivered. It had been a cold and sleepless night.

Nobody had been hurt during the attack. No one could understand why the VC or the NVA or whoever they were had stopped when they did. Certainly it had not been because of any counterattack on our part. They probably just ran out of ammunition. Thank God for VC shortages. We had been sitting ducks.

“Wanna use the stove?” Resler smiled from his hunker. He stirred in sugar from a paper packet. The coffee smelled like life.

“Yeah, thanks.” I leaned in against the edge of the deck and dragged the C-ration case over.

“Let me guess. Scrambled eggs and bacon?”

“Of course. It’s breakfast time, isn’t it?”

“I think you’re the only one in the company who eats that shit.”

“All the more for me.” I got a can from the box and a coffee packet. I poured some water into Resler’s cookie can and set it on his stove. While the flame seared the wetness on the outside of the can, I opened the eggs. Inside was the familiar yellow-green egg loaf with small bits of brownish bacon. I spooned it out cold. Resler made an expression of revulsion as I munched. I spooned another chunk out and held it toward him. “Want some?”

“I don’t eat puke.” He grimaced.

We went through this routine often. It was our morning ritual.

“I’ve never seen fog this thick before.”

“I know.” He checked his watch. “It’s already seven and it looks like five.”

I nodded. The Huey in front of us was a pale shadow, and the one I knew existed in front of it was totally obscured.

“ITO?”

“Probably. When was the last time you did an instrument takeoff?”

“Flight school.”

“Me, too.”

Farris came swirling out of the fog carrying a steaming cup of coffee. “Just talked to an air-force pilot. Says our valley is filled up with this fog, but it’s clear at the peaks.” We nodded. “We’ll wait an hour to see if it burns off.” He continued walking and disappeared behind us.

“Where’d you go last night?” I asked.

“Over there.” Resler pointed toward the GP.

“The tent?”

“No. See that kind of ditch up there?”

“Oh, yeah. Man, if they had kept it up—”

“I know. One of these days, they won’t stop.”

An hour later Farris told us to put our gear inside the ships. He and Riker were going to take off with some other ships, and he wanted us to listen in on the radio. He’d tell us how high up the fog went.

As I followed Resler down the slope, carrying my flight bag, I veered off to the left—nothing very unusual, except that I was trying to walk straight. When I leaned to the right to change course, I kept going to the left. I didn’t feel dizzy, just strange. I stopped for a minute and tried it again. I felt myself being tugged off track again but was able to ignore it. When I reached the ship, the feeling had gone. I shook my head. I’m coming apart.

I strapped in while Resler tuned the channel Farris would be on. We listened while Farris called the ships going with him. He asked if we were on the net.

“Roger,” Gary answered. Six more ships waiting with us rogered in turn.

“There’s no hurry,” Farris radioed. “We’re going back to Kontum to pick up some troops. You guys can meet us anywhere along that valley we followed yesterday. We should be back through in an hour.” We rogered down the line.

While Farris talked, I noticed something in the corner of my eye. Ten feet to the right of our ship, a gray mortar round stuck out of the grass. I punched Gary. He followed my finger and nodded. His eyes rose in surprise.

“I’ll be damned!”

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” said Farris. “The fog ends about five or six hundred feet up. Just make sure you take off due west when you leave. Remember, there’s mountains on both sides of you.”

“Roger,” Gary answered. “Yellow One, there’s a mortar round stuck in the ground next to us.”

“Huh?”

“There’s a mortar round from last night stuck in the ground right next to us.”

“Roger. Call the ARVNs. They might have a demolition squad here.”

I lit a cigarette and stared at the round. It was just about where I had been lying last night.

Gary raised the liaison officer, an American who stayed with the ARVNs. “Roger, we’ll take care of it. Don’t try to move it yourself.”

We both burst out laughing. “Lucky he told us,” I said. “I was almost out the door to defuse it.”

As courage gathered in each of the seven ships, one would announce he was leaving, and we’d hear him flutter up into the mist. Gary and I decided that the round wasn’t going to explode, since it hadn‘t, so we waited. Neither of us felt entirely confident about the ITO. If we had the time, why not wait to see if the fog burned off? The last ship left. They radioed back that the fog was still about five or six hundred feet deep.

“Guess it’s not going to burn off for a while.”

“Guess not,” I said.

“Wanna go for it?”

“Yeah.” I looked at the mortar round. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

I stared at the round as Gary cranked up. Would it be sensitive to the rotors when they started to thud? I guessed I’d never know if it was. “Top-notch demolition crew them ARVNs have….”

“You see ‘em coming?”

“No.”

“Oh. Yeah. Top-notch.”

Gary set the artificial horizon low for the takeoff. “Okay, Bob, you double-check me on the way out.”

“Right.”

“Everybody on board?”

“Roger,” answered the crew chief. “Sir, you sure we shouldn’t wait a little longer?”

“Relax, Sergeant. We got this thing under control.”

“Roger.” He didn’t sound convinced. Gary looked over at me and smiled. I nodded.

When he pulled in the power, I glanced at the round. The grass around it was pressing down in the rotor wash. Did it just move? The ship drifted off the ground. The round disappeared along with everything else.

There was no sensation of movement. The artificial horizon was right where it was supposed to be, and the airspeed was picking up. Gary let it accelerate to about 40 knots and held it there. Turn and bank was fine. “Needle, ball, airspeed” was the slogan we learned in flight school. I checked the instruments in that order. Gary was right on the money. White nothingness extended in all directions. The ship hummed, the instruments said we were moving, but the senses said we were parked in some strange void.

“So far, you’ve got a double-A ride,” I said, referring to the grading on the check-ride sheets our instructors used to carry with them. “Don’t fuck it up.”

“No sweat,” said Gary.

The whiteness grew brighter. It blazed. But still you could see nothing. Without reference to the inside of the cockpit, you would swear you were blind. The bright white grew bluish, and we saw a dark-green peak off to our right. “Yea,” I said, cheering.

“Great flying, sir!” The crew chief was now a believer.

I looked back. The misty sea beneath us hid the valley where midnight mortars lurked. The mountaintops were bright islands at the surface. I felt a shudder of relief and smiled to myself. It had been a bad night, but the sky was bright ahead.

11. Transfer

May 1966

Riker and I sat together in the sling seat of the C-123 as it droned to Saigon. My feet rested on the flight bag that contained everything I owned. I was not coming back. Riker was on his way to an R&R flight to Hong Kong. Since I volunteered to transfer out, I wondered why I already felt homesick for the Cav.

“You see Resler break Eight-eighty-one?” Riker said.

“He didn’t break it; the new guy did.”

“Yeah, but it was Resler’s ship.”

I’d said good-bye to Gary as he walked out to the flight line with the new guy, Swain, in tow. Gary was checking him out, to see how well he flew.

“Probably won’t see you again,” said Gary.

“Probably not. At least not if I see you first.”

He laughed. “Yeah. Well, it was fun, even if we did argue a lot.”

“No problem. I always won anyway.”

He grinned and extended his hand. “Gotta go check this new guy out. I’ve got your home address. I’ll write you after our tours are up.” We shook hands.

“Yeah, do that. Let’s keep in touch.” I nodded and let go of his hand.

“See you.” He smiled and turned toward the ships.

“See you.” I watched him walk away.

I decided to watch him take off, so I sat on some sandbags in front of the operations tent.

“Where they sending you, Mason?” Captain Owens came out and pushed his cap back.

“A place called Phan Rang, Forty-ninth Aviation Company.”

Owens nodded. “Never heard of ‘em.”

“Neither have I, but they’re not the Cav.” Gary and Swain climbed into their ship, 881, the oldest Huey in the company.

“Ha. ‘Not the Cav’ is right.” Owens grinned. “Nobody’s the Cav.”

Gary’s ship was running now, so I got up to leave.

“Well, good luck in your new company,” said Owens.

“Thanks.”

They were in a hover, backing out of the slot, when everything came unglued. The ship vaulted backward over its own tail. The rotors hit the ground, and the transmission and drive shaft came off. The fuselage slammed into the ground. Pieces flew everywhere.

“Jesus!” I yelled and ran down the path. The fuselage was crumpled, lying on its back. I saw the crew chief scrambling out of the wreckage, pale and wide-eyed. I humped to get there, visualizing Resler as crumpled as his ship. Then I saw him squirming out through some twisted metal. He was scared but smiling.

“You all right?” I yelled.

Gary brushed himself off and began laughing. Swain was out walking around in circles. The crew chief was on his knees, trying to pull the gunner out of the pocket. Jet fuel dripped in puddles near him. “Come on!” the crew chief yelled, pulling.

Freed, the gunner, was bleeding from a gash on his temple. Gary was wandering dumbly toward the operations tent. Then he stopped and came back to the wreckage.

“You okay?” I ran over to him.

“Sure.” He laughed. “Sure, I’m okay. Why’d you ask?”

“Why’d I ask? Look at the ship!”

He laughed again, a giggle from a pale and confused face. “Bad landing!”

Some people walked the gunner up to the med tent. He was the only injury. I relaxed. “It’s only a bad landing if you don’t walk away from it.”

“What happened?” Gary’s question was broken by spasms of laughter.

“You don’t know?”

“Shit, the last thing I knew I was locking my belts, then wham!”

“Swain was flying?”

“Yeah. I didn’t think he could fuck it up getting out of the slot, you know.”

“Hey, Mason, the Jeep’s waiting to take us to the airfield,” Riker yelled from the tent.

“Shit. Hey, I gotta go. Again. You’re okay?”

“Sure. Why’d you ask?”

Riker dug around in his bag looking for something. The vibrations from the cargo ship were putting my ass to sleep.

“You know, Riker, every time I go to Saigon, you’re with me.”

“That’s right, you lucky fuck. I’ve got to get a room tonight ‘cause my R&R plane’s not leaving until tomorrow. Want to share a room?”

“Why not? I’ve got two days to get to my new assignment,” I said. Riker nodded in the loud droning. I looked across the deck, through a window, and saw the plane was banking. Probably getting close. Then we hit some bumpy air. It reminded me of the fly-by for the general.

We had practiced for two days, and the weather couldn’t have been smoother. A line of Hueys, Chinooks, Caribous, and Mohawks, even some little H-13s stretched for two miles, looped to the An Khe pass and back toward the Golf Course. “Keep ‘em tight,” said the Colonel. We did. Resler sat copilot and I flew because our position put my side closest to the ship we were flying on.

“You don’t have to go that close, you know,” Resler said.

“These guys know what they’re doing,” I said, referring to Connors and Banjo in the ship we followed. “I’d feel okay overlapping blades with them.”

“Fucking daredevil.”

I grinned, liking the label, and moved closer. “I knew I should’ve kept my mouth shut,” said Gary.

I moved the rotor tips so that there was no more than three feet between us and the other ship. I held a vertical clearance of three feet to allow for any rough air and the surges it would cause.

“Ever overlapped blades before?”

“Never. Never will, either.”

I kept the three-foot vertical space and moved gently in. My left hand on the collective jerked up and down, keeping our blades above Connors and Banjo’s. Banjo was watching. He grinned from only a few feet away and raised his fist, thumbs up. Then he waved me closer. The smirk on his face said it was a dare.

“Okay, flight, looking good. Remember to keep the turns very, very wide. I don’t want to see any bunching up,” said the Colonel.

“Not in the turn, Mason.”

I nodded. I saw only the vertical space between our rotors. The rest of the world did not exist. When their ship bounced up in an air pocket, my hand flicked us up at the same time. I saw I could hold the space, so overlapping would be easy. I moved slowly in as we began the turn.

“Okay. Okay. You did it. Now get back,” said Gary.

Connors knew what I was doing and flew as smooth as silk. We made the whole turn with our rotors overlapped by two or three feet. As we came out of the bank, I slid away, and breathed again. “I can’t believe you like to do shit like that,” Gary said, disgusted.

“What’s so funny?” Riker said, inside the C-123.

“Nothing. Just thinking about the fly-by.”

“Fucking waste of time, that was.”

“Yeah,” I said. But I was already thinking about the assault we did in Bong Son. When we got back from our sweep around Dak To, our company was sent over to Bong Son to help the 227th. The VC were retaking the valley we had won two months before. During the briefing at the Rifle Range, the officer in charge said, “So make sure your gas masks are working okay. We’ll be using CS and tear gas on this assault.”

There were murmurs in our crowd. Gas masks? What gas masks?

Outside, the CO had a quick inventory done and found that we had enough masks for exactly half the men. One pilot in each ship and one of the gunners would have to go without.

“Why don’t we just go back and get some more?” somebody asked.

“Not enough time,” said the CO.

Resler and I and our two crew members stood next to the ship looking at the two masks. Resler produced a coin. The crew chief and gunner flipped. The crew chief won.

“Heads or tails?” Resler grinned confidently. He never lost.

“Heads.”

He flipped.

“Heads.”

As it turned out, the gas was diffuse where we landed, and we took only one round as we left. But I remember Resler sitting on his side of the cockpit grimacing, tears flowing, yelling on the intercom, “Shit! Goddamn!”

The plane banked hard. Out the window I could see the outskirts of the big city. “About time,” said Riker. “You really enjoyed this flight. You’ve been grinning the whole way down.”

“Yeah. I guess I have. It’s just that I’m so happy to be leaving the Cav.”

“Yeah. Course, you don’t know what kind of unit your new one is yet.”

The hotel we got to was a place Riker had heard of. I don’t remember its name or where it was. That’s partly because we had had a good meal and several drinks that night and got to the hotel after dark.

The hallway was narrow, and the ceilings were twelve feet high. The place was dark and dingy and the clerk uninterested when we checked in. The Vietnamese were getting used to us, it seemed, and they didn’t like what they saw. The clerk gave us a key and pointed down the dark hallway.

“Some joint, Riker.”

“Guy I know says it’s a great place. Big rooms, low prices.”

The windowless room had two beds and a dresser and a small wooden table. The tall doorway, which occupied one corner, had a glass transom above it. I flopped on my bed with a copy of Time. Riker stripped to his shorts and wrote at the table.

An article mentioned the transfer of General Kinnard, for whom we had the fly-by.

“Hey,” I announced, “they’ve written up Kinnard’s transfer in Time and there’s not one word about mine.”

After the fly-by, I had had to take a ship over to the river to wash it out. Long sat with me on the sandbar as usual and talked.

“I am sorry to see you go,” she said. Her English was improving every time I saw her. She was a self-taught genius.

“I’ll miss you, too.”

“Will you give your wife a present from me?”

“Sure, but you don’t have to give me any presents.”

“Not for you!” She giggled. “For your wife.” She removed her gold-wire earrings and held them out to me.

“No.” I shook my head. “You can’t afford to be giving me gold earrings, Long. I’m the rich guy here; I’ll pay you for them.” I reached into my pocket. She suddenly looked hurt, genuinely hurt. She was really just being nice.

“Okay, okay. No money. I’ll give them to Patience.”

She smiled brightly and handed them to me. I wrapped them in a piece of paper from my notepad and put them in my shirt pocket. “Thank you for the present. I’m sure Patience will love them.”

She grinned.

I patted my shirt pocket. Still there. Better mail them as soon as I get to the new unit. I wasn’t reading the words I looked at, so I put the magazine down. In the meantime, Riker had got in bed. My grandfather’s Hamilton said it was eleven o‘clock. Someone knocked at the door.

“Yeah?” I called out.

No answer. Then another knock.

“Who the fuck could that be?” I sat up.

“Probably the maid.”

I walked over to the door. “Probably.” If it was the maid, why was I afraid to open the door? I’m really coming apart, I thought.

When I turned the knob, the door shot inward, slammed into my boot, and stopped. I reflexively pushed back, and as I did, I came face to face with a frowning Oriental only a few inches shorter than I.

“Hey!” I pushed hard, trying to close the door. My boot slipped back as the door opened wider. I struggled harder. Altogether I could see four or five men pushing. Silently. Grimly determined.

“Hey, Riker! Get over here. There’s a bunch of gooks trying to bust in here!”

Riker paused for a second until he saw I wasn’t kidding.

“What the—?” He got up and ran over.

My boot slid back farther. The opening was almost wide enough to squeeze through. “C‘mon, goddamn it! Push this fucking door shut!” I yelled. My boot jammed under the door was the only thing that was keeping them out of the room. Riker pushed, stretching his long legs to the foot of my bed and his back to the door. When the door closed a fraction, I moved my boot ahead to lock it there. Then they pushed with a surge and the pressure on my toes grew until I thought they would crack. Hands came around the edge of the door and grasped air, trying to reach us. The only sounds were grunts and heavy breathing. Riker and I dripped sweat. As the heavy door groaned and thudded, the space was slowly getting smaller. Unbelievably, we were gaining on them. A hand grabbed the edge of the door as it got close to shutting. I smashed it with my fist. It held. I smashed it over and over until it let go and struggled back through the narrow crack of the door. As the fingers slipped out, the door slammed shut. Fumbling, shaking, wet fingers latched the lock and the extra safety bolt. Riker and I looked at each other in amazement. We were sharing a nightmare. Then we heard the thud of a body slamming against the door, and the door seemed to bend inward. The thudding repeated itself rhythmically, like a heavy heartbeat.

“Call the fucking desk!” said Riker.

I ran over to the night table and picked up the phone. Riker dragged the dresser across the room. It made a splintering sound as the veneer split against the tile floor. The desk phone rang.

“Are you calling them?!” Riker yelled as he struggled to get the dresser against the thudding door.

“Yeah. No answer.” I wiped sweat from my eyes. “They don’t fucking answer!”

After fifty rings I knew they would never answer. We sat across from each other on the two beds and watched the door moving with each animal thud. “Your derringer! Get out your derringer.” Riker brightened at the prospect.

“I sold it to Hall.”

“You sold it to Hall! I thought that was your fucking last-ditch weapon. Don’t you think this looks like an emergency?”

I nodded and shrugged. The gun was still sold to John Hall for twenty-five bucks.

“If that ain’t the dumbest thing I ever heard of…”

I nodded sorrowfully.

Crack!We both jumped at the new sound. They were throwing something metallic against the glass transom. Crack! Then chips of glass fell inside. The transom window had wire mesh embedded in it. At the center of the window a section the size of a fist was now bare of glass.

“Try the phone again,” said Riker.

I listened to a mechanical switch click and cycle a burst of ringing noise, then click, recycle, then noise. Riker took his bed apart. Under the mattress were hardwood bed slats. He smashed one down on my bed. It made a formidable club. I shook my head when he looked at the phone. Then I hung up. “Bastards!” Riker yelled.

At 2 A.M. the thudding stopped. Riker was asleep, proving that you can get used to anything. I sat up against my pillow with one of his bed slats on my lap. When the thudding stopped, I tried the phone again.

There was another small window near the ceiling at the other end of the room. While the phone rang, I looked up to see glass spraying in from it. Riker jumped up at the new sound.

“What the hell is going on here?” Riker pleaded.

I didn’t know. I’d been sitting on my bed for two hours, listening to the door being smashed, asking myself the same question. They are trying to kill us, aren’t they? Why didn’t they just blow up the fucking door? Or use an ax? Or fire? Or some fucking thing besides bodies? Maybe we should let them in and smash their brains in with our clubs. A quick no sounded in my head. I felt pretty brave at the controls of a helicopter while people tried to kill me, but trying to smash five darting Orientals with bed slats was just not me. I waited to see what developed. Soon the fuck-up at the desk would return from someplace and hear the ruckus and call the police There were police in Saigon, weren’t there? Or the people next door. They would get somebody. But the thudding went on and on. I wanted to scream at the utter unreality of the situation. But I could not scream, because I was a soldier. That thought made me laugh out loud. “GI Joe would’ve never let a bunch of dirty Nips get away with this,” I said. Then I visualized the myriad ways in which GI Joe would murder this mob. Of course, they were all centered around the fact that he always had a weapon stashed somewhere. I clutched my bed slat and waited. What I needed was a flamethrower.

The windowless room showed no light at dawn. My watch said it was six. The thudding had stopped. I woke Riker. We pulled the glass-covered dresser away and cautiously opened the door. There was some debris outside, but no people. Quickly we grabbed our gear and entered the hallway. All clear. As we walked toward the desk, we almost had cardiac seizures when we saw the clerk staring at us.

“Where the fuck were you last night?” we both yelled.

“Sir, I do not work at night. A man named Thieu does.”

“Well, where was he?” I said.

“He was here all night, sir. He certainly was this morning when I came to work.”

“Bullshit!” I yelled.

The clerk flinched a little but said, “Was there something wrong with your room?”

“Some people tried to break into our room all night long, you fuck!” said Riker.

“Really? That’s strange,” said the clerk. “Did you call the desk?”

“Yes. Over and over,” I said.

“Well, possibly the phone is broken.”

“Even if the phone is broken,” I explained, “our room is at the most fifty feet from here. Nobody could have not heard that commotion last night.”

“I will inform the manager of this,” said the clerk. He looked at us quietly. His eyes told us he knew exactly what had happened last night and we could yell and scream and complain until doomsday. He was never going to admit it. We hoisted our bags and left.

Phan Rang is near the coast, about 160 miles south of Qui Nhon and 160 miles northeast of Saigon, but that’s not where I went first. First I signed in at the 12th Aviation Battalion’s camp near Nha Trang. Then I waited in a bar in a sweltering sea-level village and talked to a depressing, sallow, and lumpy engineer who worked for one of the many American companies in Vietnam.

“I hate it over here,” he said.

“Why don’t you go home?”

“Money’s just too damn good.” He swilled the last of his beer. “Besides, there’s no poontang at home like the stuff that lives over here. I got a bitch waiting for me back home.”

It all fit. Anyone who lived with Mr. Darkness had to be a bitch, and the only place in the world he’d get the poontang he wanted was where he was transformed into the Rich American Engineer. I nodded, but said nothing. He told me more about his job, his hooch, his lady, his stereo, his growing bank account. I almost fainted from boredom. At a lull in the drone I announced, “Gotta go.” The engineer nodded hazily and turned his snout back toward the barkeep. He tapped the mug on the bar and pointed sternly to it. “More,” he said.

The Huey landed on the sandy patch where I waited. The crew chief ran past me carrying a sack of mail to battalion HQ. I threw my gear on board and fished out my flight helmet.

“You’re Mason?” said the pilot. I nodded.

“Good. We’ll be leaving as soon as he gets back.” He pointed to the retreating crew chief.

I climbed into the idling Huey and smoked. It felt good to be back in a helicopter after wallowing around in air-force transports.

The crew chief returned, and the pilot lifted off through the swirling sand. As we moved forward, the wind felt cool against my skin.

Cam Ranh bay was the halfway point on the flight to the company. As we flew by, I saw scores of navy PBYs (seaplanes) anchored in the harbor. For the rest of the flight I had daydreams about owning a PBY and flying cargo in the Bahamas, or running a cross-Canada, lake-to-lake touring business.

When I saw the concrete buildings at the Phan Rang air-force base, I felt a moment of happiness. I was finally going to get to live like a human. But the Huey flew by the barracks and landed on a grassy field, a mile across the runway. I saw a familiar collection of dirt-covered, sagging GPs that I immediately realized was my new home.

The sun was red in the west and the ground was soggy. We squished across the field and left our chest protectors in a tent. The two pilots, named Deacon and Red, escorted me to the club.

“Well, well!” The major grinned endearingly. “Our second Cav pilot in two days.” Tall, dark-haired, and smooth-faced, he came over to me and shook my hand. “Welcome to the Prospectors. I’m the CO, and as you’ll find out, when I’m not around the boys call me Ringknocker.” The boys, about fifteen of them, sat around some tables in the bamboo-paneled, tin-roofed bar, their company’s club, and laughed. I nodded nervously, never having met a CO who was friendly.

“Pleased to meet you,” I said.

“You looked me right in the eye when you said that.” He grinned. “That’s good. Shows you’re not afraid.” He turned around to the boys. “That’s good,” he said. They nodded. I wasn’t afraid, but I was suspicious. What did he want from me?

“First things first,” said Ringknocker. “Hey, Red, take Mason over to your tent. He gets the empty bunk there.” I started out the door with Red. “When you get your gear organized, come on back. Chow’ll be served in about a half hour, and then we can talk.”

“Yes, sir.”

He beamed.

The tent floor was rolling red dust, but there was a plywood platform next to my cot. I sat on the cot, which was already made, and looked around. Red was smiling at me from his cot. God, they don’t even have a floor, I thought. “Why do they call him Ringknocker?” I said.

“He’s a West Pointer, wears a class ring.”

“Ah.” I had never met one before. Now his aggressive, cordial manner seemed appropriate. “Seems like a nice guy.”

“Yeah, he is. Lot better than our last CO. Nobody liked that prick. That’s why he woke up one night with a knife sticking out of his chest.” Red announced this as though that was the typical way in which incompetent commanders were dealt with.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. He was black and an asshole. We still don’t know who stuck him.”

“He was killed?”

“No. We got him to Cam Ranh just in time.” Red grinned. “It all turned out to the good, though. The replacement CO was Ringknocker, and he’s a natural leader. You know what I mean?”

Though I had never met one, I thought I knew what he meant.

The club I had been in was one half of the tin-roofed building. The other side was their mess hall. Dinner was served by Vietnamese waitresses to groups of four sitting at cloth-topped tables set with clean napkins and bronzeware. During the meal, Red told me that everything was paid for out of club dues and the meal tickets. “But don’t get used to it; we’re never here anyway.”

Before we finished, I heard guitar music coming from the club on the other side of the bamboo partition. The building shook as a Phantom F-4C hit its afterburner on takeoff. This was an air-force base. The runway was a quarter mile from the Prospectors’ camp. The Prospectors were a little band of gypsies camped in a vacant corner of the walled city.

A voice wailed from the club as Red and I walked in.

“Man, that’s horrible,” said Ringknocker.

“We can change it, but it’s a start,” said the singer, a captain named Daring.

“Haw, you can take that ditty and flush it, Daring, you asshole!” a pink-faced cherub of a man yelled from the bar. He was Captain King, otherwise known as Sky King.

“Okay, okay, goddamnit.” Daring glared at Sky King. “Let’s hear what you got.”

“What I got goes squish, squish between Nancy’s legs. Right, Nancy?” Nancy, a Vietnamese girl of twenty, had special permission to work at the bar until eight o‘clock. All other Vietnamese workers had to leave at dusk.

“Nooo! You bad man!” She blushed. To my knowledge Nancy never cooperated with any of Sky King’s vulgar requests, or anyone else‘s, either. She was beautiful, neat, efficient, and an excellent barmaid. To all advances she announced that she was married.

“Hey, Mason.” Ringknocker leaned back from his table when he saw me. “Do you recognize your comrade, here?” He pointed to a heavy-set man sitting beside him.

“No, sir, I don‘t,” I said. Ringknocker waved me over.

“This is Mr. Cannon, from…” He looked at Cannon.

“Delta Company, 227th,” announced Cannon.

“From right around the corner,” I said. “Nice meeting you.”

Cannon just nodded, looking worried.

“Yep. Cannon flew guns in the Cav,” said Ringknocker. “But in our company, we assign pilots to the guns by their weight. You now how weak those B models are, especially loaded up with ammo. So all our gunship pilots are skinny fucks, like you.”

A shock hit my body. That’s why Cannon looked so worried. Ringknocker was making him fly slicks. And he was going to make me fly guns.

“What’s the matter?” Ringknocker said, reading my face.

“I fly slicks.”

“Yeah, and I fly guns,” Cannon interjected.

Ringknocker lowered his eyebrows to a more official level. “Well, my policy is skinny guys in the guns, fat guys in the slicks. Besides, I don’t know what you’re worried about, Mason. Guns are a lot safer than slicks. Most of our hits are taken by the slicks. In the guns you at least have something to shoot back with.”

A Phantom roared on takeoff.

Daring changed a line: “Sky troopers sailing through the air…”

“I’ve flown six hundred hours of combat time as a slick pilot. All my experience is in slicks. And I’m still alive. I don’t want to change anything I’m doing at this stage of the game.”

“That goes for me, too,” said Cannon. “I’m still alive, and I don’t want to change nothing.”

“Six hundred hours?” Ringknocker looked impressed.

“That’s right.”

“Shit,” he said, “the most anybody, even Deacon, has in our company is three hundred.” Ringknocker tapped his ring on the table. “Flew your ass off, hey?”

“Yeah, and I understand slick flying.”

“And I understand guns,” said Cannon.

“Shit!” Ringknocker looked dismayed. “I have my policies, you know.” Cannon sat back in his chair, looking pissed off. I was thinking, Another fucking book man.

“Okay, okay, all right, fuck it,” said Ringknocker. “Fuck my policy. Cannon, you fly guns. Mason, you fly slicks.” Ringknocker grinned. “And that’s an order.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“It’s a deal,” said Cannon.

“Settin’ our traps to catch them bears…” droned Daring.

“No, no, no.” Ringknocker suddenly leaned into the circle of songwriters. “Horrible, horrible, horrible.”

Sky King dropped to his knees, holding his hands on his ears. “I’m sick!” he yelled. He humped over and retched loudly.

“Look. We get a decent song, we get invited to Saigon for two days in the sing-off,” Ringknocker announced. “You wanna have two days to fuck off in Saigon, don ‘cha?”

I sat there dumbfounded as Ringknocker explained. A sing-off? Song contest? Cannon, arms folded across his chest, looked at me and shook his head. These guys are strange.

The songwriters argued; then Daring strummed once more. This time three other guys, out of the twenty in the club, sang along. While they sang I noticed something moving on the wall. A human skull mounted above the bar moved its jaw, clacking along with the song. Sky King was pulling the string that led from the skull to the end of the bar. “Sing it, Charlie!” he yelled.

“Charlie?” I said to Red.

“Yeah, Doc made him from a VC head we brought in.”

I nodded. What else would you call a VC head?

The song ended.

“Puke,” said Deacon.

“You really think so?” Ringknocker asked with a worried look. Deacon was one of the two platoon leaders in the Prospectors. He was also the company’s IP and part-time sage. He wore a graying flattop over a smooth and sincere face. Ringknocker trusted him implicitly.

“Yes,” said Deacon.

“Well,” Ringknocker shook his head, “we’ll just have to keep trying.”

The Prospectors left at dawn. I stayed behind with another warrant named Staglioni. We were to bring out a slick that was being repaired.

Staglioni told me that four or five ships in the company were already out in the field at Nhon Co. “That’s what we usually do. We have some guys go ahead and set up camp while the rest of us come back here to take a break.” Staglioni was tall and soft and dark. His accent was New York to me.

“Flatbush. That’s in Brooklyn,” he said.

“So, we just wait until the ship is ready and then fly out?”

“That’s it. Maintenance told me it should be ready tomorrow morning.”

We watched a flight of four Phantoms take off. When they hit their afterburners on the climb-out, it was like thunder. “Looks like fun.” I said.

“It is,” said Staglioni. “I tried it once.”

“You flew a Phantom?”

“Yeah. You could, too, if you wanted. They come over here all the time. They like to trade flight time.”

“They want to fly Hueys?”

“Yeah. They’re all the time betting that they can hover a chopper first time up.”

“I bet they can’t.”

“You’re right. None of them have so far. One of their pilots even flew a mission with us one day. He hated it. He felt like we were too close to everything, you know, right down in it. They really don’t see much on their strikes. They aim at puffs of smoke in the jungle, drop their shit, and bam, they’re back home. Their total time in the air from takeoff to landing is one hour and twenty minutes. It’s a quickie. Then they hop in an air-conditioned van and cruise back to the club. And that’s it for the day. A hundred missions and they go home.” He paused for a minute while a Phantom came in for a landing. “Can you imagine? A hundred missions? Shit, I’d be back home twice already.”

“You guys log missions?”

“No, not officially. I keep my own log. The last time I told one of the air-force guys how many missions I’d flown, he said, ‘What do you expect? The smart pilots are in the air force.’ That fucker.”

I watched another Phantom take off. If I had stayed in college, I lamented, I would be flying those and living on the other side of the runway.

“It’s true,” I said.

“What is?”

“The smart pilots are in the air force.”

The camp was a dirty-fabric ghost town. The trail that led from the club past the row of ten GPs was completely deserted. Staglioni went to his tent and I went to mine.

I wrote Patience a letter to bring her up to date and give her my new address.

A Vietnamese woman dressed in black pajamas ducked in through the tent flaps. She nodded as she walked by. She walked to the other end of the tent and began to sweep the dirt floor with a bamboo whisk broom, drawing neat parallel lines in the dust. When she got to me she bowed slightly and then waited expectantly for me to raise my feet off the plywood platform. I raised my feet and she swept under them. Then she began making up the beds. There were four in the GP. When she got to me again, she bowed. Her smile was black from betel nut, and she waited for me to get up. I jumped up.

“Oh,” I said.

“Ah,” she said. She stripped the whole cot, remade it, and carefully rearranged my gear. Folded flak vest here, .45 and its holster on top there, just so. She stood back and shared with me her artistic arrangement and nodded that I could place my ass back on the blanket.

“Thank you,” I said.

She grinned betel black and ducked outside.

So, even if the army had drawn the dreary side of the field and the dreary domiciles, Ringknocker had gone to some lengths, allowing some luxuries to brighten the dreariness. I hadn’t seen anything yet.

I walked back and forth in the tent for a while. I ducked outside to watch a Phantom take off and nodded to a passing hooch maid. I wanted to go talk to Staglioni, but he had said he was in the middle of a good book. I remembered mine. I was in the middle of the second volume of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Gollum was slithering down cliffs head first as he followed Bilbo. I identified with Gollum and loved his voice. “Yesss,” he said. I tried talking that way back in the Cav: “Yesss, we likes to go on missionssss.” But people thought I was developing a lisp. No one knew who Gollum was. The most popular books were James Bond adventures.

While I read, something went wrong with my brain. Something had to be wrong, because instead of lying back with the book on my lap, the book was on the dirt floor and I was reaching for my .45 and saying, “What?”

“What?” I roamed the tent, looking in corners. I looked outside.

“What?” Something was very wrong. I was tense. I was ready. I waited.

A dark head pushed through the flaps. That? As I drew my pistol, I saw it was Staglioni. “Chow,” he said, and ducked back outside. He had not seen my gun. Abruptly the feeling of impending doom passed. A danger was past. What the danger had been I didn’t know, but it was gone. I holstered the .45 and walked to the mess hall.

I sat at a table with Staglioni and two air-force pilots from across the base. All during the meal I kept worrying about what I had just done. There wasn’t anything wrong. It’s me. I’m going crazy.

“Wanna try it?” The air-force lieutenant asked.

“Try what?”

“Fly a Phantom.”

“I fly slicks.”

“I know. You wanna trade a ride?” He looked at me quizzically.

“No.”

The Huey was not ready the next day. Or the next. Each day I waited, the routine was much the same. Breakfast, read, lunch, read, dinner, read, sleep. The routine was punctuated by moments of nonspecific terror. I spent my nights hopping up out of bed looking for the source of my fears. One afternoon, while I read at a table in the club, I blacked out. One moment I was reading normally; the next thing I knew my face was resting on the pages. That scared me into taking my tortured soul over to the flight surgeon on the air-force side of the base.

“I have these dizzy spells, I keep waking up at night thinking that I’m dying, and yesterday my face fell into my book,” I shamefully admitted.

“Take off your clothes,” said the doctor, with sympathetic fascination.

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“I’m going to give you a neurological examination.”

And he did. He poked me with pins, scraped my soles, tapped my elbows and knees. He had me follow fingers and lights with my eyes, stand on one foot, and touch my fingertips with my eyes closed. And when he finally looked into my eyes with his ophthalmoscope, he said,

“Hmmm.”

“Find something?” I asked.

“Nope. Nothing at all. All your circuits check out fine.”

“So why am I having these blank spells and dizziness?”

“I don’t know.”

I sagged with dissappointment.

“It could be a couple of things,” he added hastily. “You might have a rare form of epilepsy, which I doubt. Or you’re suffering from stress. I would think that with the kind of job you have, it’s stress. But I suggest you check with your own flight surgeon when you get to see him. If you keep having the symptoms, they’ll probably ground you.”

Four days after I had arrived, a week after leaving the Cav, I joined my new unit in the field at Nhon Co.

The Prospectors’ ships were parked in a narrow airstrip cut into the jungle by the French. The camp was up on a hill next to the strip. I carried my gear up and found Deacon, and he showed me to one of the twenty six-sided tents scattered around the sandy, weedy dunes at the top of the hill. My tentmates were two warrants, Monk and Stoopy Stoddard.

“Hey, a new guy,” said Monk. He looked up from filing magazine clippings in a shoebox. He had square jaws and a compact, sturdy body. “But”—he squinted in the glare of the light behind me—“I’d say you’re not new to Nam.” He was looking at my belt buckle. The green tape that covered it was filthy and almost black, the mark of the veteran.

“That’s right. I’m a transfer from the Cav.”

“Really?” said Stoddard. “The Cav? That’s a tough outfit.” Stoopy was an overweight child of a man who said irritating things like “Gosh” and “Wow!” and even

“Neat.”

I nodded and said, “Can I put my gear over here?” I pointed to the back of the tent.

“Sure,” said Stoddard. I threw my bag against the cloth wall and sat on it. Monk resumed filing his clippings. Ragged copies of Stars and Stripes, Newsweek, Time, and other magazines lay strewn in the dirt around his bedroll. He carefully cut each item with a Swiss army scissors, then flipped through alphabetized index cards to find its proper place.

“Are you a writer?” I asked.

“Monk, a writer?” Stoopy giggled. His belly and fat cheeks shook. I noticed chocolate stains on his lips and then saw the chocolate bar grasped in a grubby hand. “He thinks you’re a writer, Monk.” He laughed brightly. Monk shot him a glance that killed the laughter immediately. Stoopy blinked hard and sat quietly and respectfully.

“No, not yet,” said Monk. “I’m just collecting my material. Someday…” he trailed off, apparently avoiding a touchy subject.

“That’s an impressive amount of stuff you got there.” I nodded at the shoebox.

“Thanks, I’ve got more.” He pointed to four more rubber-banded boxes resting against the tent wall. “Someday… You’d be surprised to know what they’re saying about this war.” He nodded slowly and knowingly. I signaled agreement.

“Well, well, well. Look who’s here,” said a voice from the flap.

“Wolfe!”

“Wow, Mason, what a memory!” We both laughed. Wolfe was a former classmate.

“I didn’t know you were with the Prospectors,” I said.

“I was one of the shmucks that set up this camp. I was out here when you arrived.”

“Well, you picked a nice place.”

“Thanks.”

Monk seemed irritated by Wolfe’s intrusion. He rolled a rubber band off his wrist around the shoebox and stashed it carefully with the others. Then he stood up and squeezed past Wolfe without saying a word. Wolfe ignored him as he left. Apparently they were not friendly.

Wolfe and I talked awhile. He had arrived in-country a month before. He was very impressed that I was a short-timer with only two months to go in my tour. I told him I had been in the Cav and that I had recently talked to some classmates of ours up near Kontum. We shared rumors concerning the whereabouts of the rest of the class and agreed that probably most of them were somewhere in Nam. Somebody called that it was chow time, and Stoopy, whom we had completely ignored, leapt outside. As we emerged from the tent, we saw Monk balanced on his hands, walking up a small sand dune.

“That’s pretty good,” I said as we walked away.

“The guy’s a jerk,” said Wolfe sourly.

That evening I delivered a letter from the air-force doctor to Doc Da Vinci, our flight surgeon. He agreed that it was probably just a stress reaction and gave me some tranquilizers to take. He warned me to use them only at night. I couldn’t fly with them. I slept well that night.

The next morning I was back in the saddle in a Huey. The aircraft commander was my platoon leader, Deacon. We flew three missions of local ass-and-trash, single-ship stuff. Deacon let me do all the flying. In four hours that morning, I landed in a clearing so small I had to hover vertically down, also landed on a tight pinnacle, carried two loads that were so heavy I had to make running takeoffs, and finally joined up with three other ships in a formation flight back to the airstrip. I had been thoroughly checked out.

“Damn good flying,” Deacon said from the left seat as I landed behind another Huey back at the airstrip.

“Thanks,” I replied. Coming from an IP, that was a real compliment.

“If you fly that good again tomorrow, I’ll sign you off as an aircraft commander.”

The next day was also the Prospectors’ last day at Nhon Co. So at the end of another day of local ass-and-trash, we flew directly back to Phan Rang. Other ships brought the tents and gear back. I did fly well, and, true to his word, Deacon signed me off as a qualified aircraft commander. On the walk to the company area, Deacon told me that Ringknocker was arranging another big party.

“We seldom get a break like this; we’ll be here four days. Ringknocker likes to see the men enjoy themselves. I’d roll my bedroll up if I were you,” Deacon said.

“Roll up my bedroll?”

“Yeah. Just roll your mattress up and tie it.”

“Why?”

“You’ll see.”

It was nine o‘clock and the party was in full swing. Doc DaVinci sat next to me at the bar and explained how he had prepared the skull that now sang on the wall. He was drunk. The members of the songwriting team sat facing each other in a circle of chairs in a far corner, producing sounds that clashed with a Joan Baez tape. They were drunk. Sky King and Red Blakely Indian-wrestled in the middle of the floor. Sky King held a brimming mug of beer, claiming that he would not spill a drop while he dispatched Red.

“I boiled it,” said DaVinci.

“In the kitchen?” I asked, interested.

“No, no. They wouldn’t let me do it in the kitchen. I built a fire out back and boiled it there. Boiled it a whole day.”

I glanced at the skull, clacking with Baez’s words, admiring the clean gleaming white of it. “It’s so… white.”

“Not naturally. I bleached it after I pulled off the meat.”

I drank some bourbon and nodded. “Of course.” I put my drink down. “Bleach.”

“It’s a fact,” DaVinci said. “Clorox will give your skull a whiter, brighter look.”

“They’re coming!” Sky King yelled. Everyone stopped talking. I could hear a siren wailing in the distance.

“You rolled your bed up?” Deacon had walked up to me.

“Yeah…”

“Smart boy,” he said.

“Who’s coming?” I asked Doc.

“The ladies, of course.”

The siren got louder, then stopped. Somebody outside said, “Back ‘er up.” In the light that shone through the windows I could see the rear end of an army ambulance moving toward the open door. It stopped and someone opened the back. Packed inside were at least a dozen smiling Vietnamese women. All the Prospectors were standing, applauding, whistling, while the ladies were helped out of the ambulance.

It’s hard to say what happened next except that once the women were all inside the club, they began to disappear. Men grabbed giggling girls and ran out the doors into the night. It all happened in minutes. I sat there on the bar stool, open-mouthed. I had just seen an ambulance back up, unload a bunch of whores, and they were carried away?

“There must be some kind of rule against that,” I said.

“Hey, it’s our ambulance,” Doc said.

“If that happened in the Cav, everyone here would be up for a court-martial.” I shook my head in disbelief.

“It works great,” said Doc.“The security guards never stop an ambulance. Best damn thing we ever traded for.”

“You traded for an ambulance?”

“Yeah. Ringknocker got an ambulance, a deuce-and-a-half, and a Jeep for one Huey.”

“A Huey?” I shook my head.

“Yeah, a Huey. It was one of ours that got shot to shit. It was declared a total loss, and its number was taken off the registers. It was just wreckage when Ringknocker made the trade. Part of the deal was that our maintenance guys would piece it back together. It looks like shit, but it flies.”

“That’s incredible.”

“I know. Ringknocker has got a creative mind.”

It had been only fifteen minutes since the girls were carried off when one of them walked back into the club escorted by her partner. “Next,” he called out.

Doc slapped my shoulder and nodded toward the girl. “It’ll change your luck.” He grinned.

“No thanks. I’m still fighting a case of clap,” I said. Inside, I was awed by their style—these Prospectors were out of a dream. “You go ahead.”

“Not me. Every time I try to examine them, they get pissed off.” He blew a kiss to the girl.

“No you!” she said, shaking her finger. Doc laughed loudly.

She left with someone and two more came inside.

I had forgotten about the songwriters. They were still in their corner rehearsing their latest lyrics, apparently undisturbed by the intrusion of the lovelies.

I left the party at one o‘clock. The girls had been sent back out through the gates in the blaring ambulance, but the Prospectors partied on.

“Okay. We’re taking two ships. Deacon, you pick a crew. I’ll fly the other with Daring.” Ringknocker held a briefing at a table in the mess hall the next morning. Deacon and Daring nodded. I watched from the next table while I ate fresh scrambled eggs. “The target is the Repair and Utility compound, here.” Ringknocker pointed to his frayed map. The R&U compound was a fenced-in field at another air-force base, heavily guarded, surrounded by all sorts of security, where the civilian contractors stored their mountains of building supplies. Such things as tin roofing, lumber, air conditioners, refrigerators, sinks, toilets—everything needed to build a truly American base. “Now I’m trying for an ice maker, but anything will do,” Ringknocker explained. “Deacon, I want you to fly cover while I go down. Keep me posted when the guards start moving our way.” Deacon nodded. “Okay, let’s go.” The group of men got up and left, dressed for a mission.

Ringknocker’s Huey came back an hour later carrying a huge wooden crate on a sling. He landed it on the back of his deuce-and-a-half, which drove it immediately to the maintenance area. When they opened the crate, they discovered that it contained another refrigerator, just like the one they already had. Ringknocker was happy anyway, and by late the next day he had arranged to trade the refrigerator to an air-force unit on the other side of the base for a brand-new ice-making machine. For the next two months, wherever we went in the field, someone got the job of moving the five-hundred-pound ice machine as part of our field gear.

On the afternoon of the fourth day of the break, Deacon told me to take a ship up to our headquarters and pick up two new pilots.

I flew with Sky King, who chattered during the entire thirty-minute flight. He was a happy man and very lik able. His total disregard for army formalities made me forget that he was a captain.

We landed at the sandy pad at headquarters, shut down, and walked to the tent with the mail courier. From a hundred yards away I thought I recognized one of two men carrying flight bags on their shoulders.

“Those must be the two pilots,” said Sky King.

I nodded, staring at the distant, frail figure who sagged under the weight of a giant flight bag. I knew that walk.

“Shit!” I said with a wide grin on my face. “How far do I have to go to get away from you?” The two men were twenty feet away.

“Damn! They told me there wasn’t a chance you’d be in this unit,” Resler replied. I helped him carry his bag back to the ship.

12. La Guerrilla Bonita

June 1966

It struck me as ironic that the Prospectors, located two hundred miles south of the Cav, were assigned to Dak To, the Cav’s last hunting ground. Within a month of my transfer, I found myself once again scouring for VC in an area in which the Cav had drawn a blank. This time, I flew with a different unit in support of the famous 101st Airborne in Operation Hawthorne. The VC had chosen not to fight the Cav, but apparently they thought they’d try their luck against the 101st.

Our camp was west of the village of Dak To, in a grassy plain south of some low foothills. Our tents were set up in three straight lines, paralleling the red-dirt airstrip. A mile from our camp, the 101st bivouacked and maintained security for themselves and for the Prospectors.

We spent a day filling sandbags to build low walls around our tents. On the morning of the second day, it was announced that we would fly a little mission for some ARVNs before we started direct support of the 101st.

“The best thing that could happen to you is to get a minor bone wound,” said Wolfe. He stood in the awning of the tent I shared with Resler and Stoddard.

“A bone wound? I feel weak just thinking about it,” I said.

“I’m saying that if you had to get wounded, that’s the one to get. A bone wound will get you out of this fucking country.”

Deacon walked down the row between the tents. “Let’s go,” he yelled.

“How about no wounds?” I said. “Maybe they’ll just call the whole thing off.” I reached for my helmet. My .45 was already strapped on over my flak vest. I was ready.

“Fat fucking chance,” said Wolfe.

“Good luck.” Gary ducked out of the tent to go to his ship. He and I couldn’t fly together in the Prospectors, because they didn’t let junior warrants do that. We felt safer together. Especially since the pilot who replaced me back in the Cav, Ron Fox, had been killed sitting in the cockpit with Gary. He had taken a round up through his chin. Gary said that his brains poured out when they removed his helmet. Fox’s death was one of the reasons they had sent Gary on a R&R on the way to the Prospectors. We’d both been working on Deacon to let us fly together—told him what a great team we’d made in the Cav—but so far, no dice.

“Good luck,” I said. I left the tent walking a little way with Wolfe. “What do you get for a scratch?” I said.

“A free cup of coffee. What do you think? You got to get something that takes time to heal but won’t be a permanent handicap.”

“Yeah, I see. I’ll work on it.” I saw Sky King waiting for me by the Operations tent. “See you after the mission. Good luck.”

“Right.” Wolfe gave me a salute.

Sky King smiled. “Hey, this is my lucky day. I get to fly with a veteran. I feel so… secure.”

“Yeah, yeah. Spare me, please.”

“No, really. Just being in the same ship with you makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay.” We walked toward our ship, one pair of pilots in a long, straggling line of helicopter crews walking over the red dirt to their ships.

“You know, you can be a pain in the ass, sir.”

“Haw!” Sky King yelped. “Got you.” We walked up to our ship. “You know, Mason, I like you. And to prove it, I’m going to let you in on a little business deal. I’ll tell you all about it when we get back.”

“Thanks.”

“No, really. You’ll love it. You’ll see.”

One thing different about the Prospectors, aside from such informal relations between officers and warrants, was that they had chest protectors up to their eyeballs. They had so many, in fact, that they kept the extras up in the chin bubbles. Seeing one of them at my feet made me feel guilty. For the lack of one of these, Morris had died. Maybe there was another pilot somewhere in Vietnam, right now, who was wondering why the fuck he didn’t have one. Maybe one was dying right now.

“How did you get so many of these things?” I pointed to the armor.

“We’ve always had them,” said Sky King. He looked at me like I had asked a dumb question. “Why?”

“Just wondered.”

The weather was great, puffy white clouds in a brilliant blue sky, a nice day for flying. Since I had been here once before, I knew that there were no VC around. I felt that I had retired from heavy action after leaving the Cav. My only concern was the ARVNs. I kept hearing such bad stories about them. A Prospector told me that an ARVN had turned and fired at his ship when he dropped them at an LZ. I’d heard that before.

We picked up eight ARVN Rangers wearing tight-tailored camouflage uniforms. They stared nervously, smoked cigarettes, and got aboard reluctantly. They did not bolster my sagging opinion of our ally.

The twelve slicks in the mission were to fly the ARVNs a few miles up the valley from Dak To. There we would cut across the eastern ridge and land two at a time on an eight-foot-wide ridge running to a small concrete fortress. While the flight stretched to get the necessary spacing, we heard on the radio that the VC were there, too. From a couple miles away I could see a daisy chain of Phantoms hitting the hill directly across the small valley from the fortress. Sky King and I were to be one of the second pair of ships to land. As the first two ships landed, they called hits.

From several VC machine-gun emplacements on the facing hill, tracers flicked out at the Phantoms. The fighters swooped, releasing monstrous bursts of cannon during their blindingly swift passes. The tracers converged on them.

I had the controls on the right side of the ship. Our buddy ship was taking a spot just in front of the fortress, leaving us the stark ridge nearest to VC guns. I set up the approach. The two ships in front of us took off after what seemed to be an awfully long time on the ground. With a hundred yards to go, our right-door gunner opened up on some muzzle flashes. At the same time, a Phantom began billowing black smoke in the middle of his strike. He climbed up sharply in an almost vertical climb—and we saw one man eject. As we landed, I saw grazing rounds kick through the dirt on the ridge in front of us. The emplacement was just a little higher than we were. The right door gunner blazed away, and I waited for the ARVNs to get the fuck out. When the crew chief hadn’t called that they were off for what seemed to be an hour, I looked back and saw him trying to force an ARVN off the ship from his awkward position in the pocket. The other ARVNs kept ducking their heads in the gunfire, waiting with wide-eyed anticipation for me to leave. I shook my head and started screaming, “Get off! Get off!” and pointed at the door. They sat there. I heard a round go through the air frame. The old, familiar tick. The crew chief pulled his .45 and pointed it at the soldiers, waving it toward the door with murder in his eyes. When they saw I wasn’t going to go anywhere and that the crew chief might indeed kill them, they began to get off. I looked at the fortress to see if we were getting any cover fire. No one in sight. No guns were in action; everyone was on the dirt behind the walls. The black, billowing trail of the Phantom disappeared in the jungle. A pearl-white chute blossomed in the blue sky.

Our buddy ship took off. “They’re out!” yelled the chief. I glanced across the deck through the door to the ARVNs hiding on the low side of the ridge. I took off. As we crossed in front of the fortress, we saw the defenders lying low. Not one gun was in position.

A half mile away, it was over for us. That was it—one load to the ridge. I cruised the five miles back to the camp, steaming.

“I’ve never seen anything like that. How the fuck are they going to win this stupid war if they fight like that!”

Sky King nodded gravely and said nothing. He’d worked with ARVNs before.

When we landed, I thanked the crew chief, Blakely, for using his brains and getting the ARVNs off.

“Any time, sir. Next time I’ll do it sooner.” He grinned. We all went around the ship to count hits. There was one. It was hard to believe that they had shot down a Phantom and missed us as we parked on the ridge, but that was the way it was.

“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” said Sky King.

“Astounding,” I said.

We walked back to the Ops tent and waited for the rest of the gaggle to return.

“Wolfe just got hit,” said Maj. Richard Ramon, the operations officer, as we walked inside. “Friend of yours, isn’t he?” He looked at me.

“Yes, sir. A classmate.”

“Well, he got his arm messed up. He’ll be here in a minute.” He shook his head. “Hell of a way to start the day.”

I kept seeing ARVN asses glued to the deck of my ship.

“Daring’s boys are out there now trying to get that gun position,” said Ramon. “And we had a slick and a gun out looking for the air-force pilot.”

“One?” I asked.

“Yeah, your friend Resler picked him up, the other guy never got out. Poor bastard.”

Two more Hueys cruised in fast, low level, down the airstrip. When they landed, Wolfe staggered out, helped by the crew chief. He held his arm across his chest, dripping blood down his pants. Doc DaVinci met them half way and walked them to the tent. Wolfe was pale, as if all his blood had drained out of his arm. He smiled blankly at me as Doc used scissors to cut his sleeve away.

“Fuckers shot my smokes!” exclaimed Wolfe. With his arm down, we could see that his chest-protector pocket was blown away, revealing the ceramic strata beneath the green cloth. The round had torn through his right forearm and blasted into his chest protector.

“Do you see that? The fuckers blew away my smokes!”

I nodded and handed him a lit cigarette.

“Can you move your fingers?” asked Doc.

“Sure.” Wolfe puffed the smoke.

“Well, move them.”

“I am.”

Doc looked at Wolfe. “I think you’re going to get home on this one.”

“I told you, Mason! A bone wound will do it every time.”

I raised a weak smile. “You got it right.”

Doc wrapped Wolfe’s arm in a bunch of bandages while Sky King and I went back out to the flight line to get the ship ready. We were going to fly him to Pleiku.

During the flight, Wolfe chain-smoked cigarettes handed him by the crew chief. When I dropped him at the hospital at Pleiku, his color was better and he was smiling like a man who just won a lottery. He had landed right after me in the same spot on the ridge. I almost wished it had been the other way around.

Later that day, Sky King and I flew out to lift a load of grunts from the 101st—to rescue the ARVNs—and back. We had experienced fairly heavy fire the second time out, but no hits. Meanwhile, Daring’s gun platoon was swooping all around the hill, trying to get at the emplacement. It seemed impossible that the gooks could last through the Phantom strike and a whole gunship platoon, but they had. When the sun dropped behind the ridge, the guns came back one by one. They had taken many hits. Two pilots had been wounded and were taken immediately to Pleiku.

“Where the fuck is Seven-oh-two?” Major Ramon asked no one in particular. A group of us sat around in the operations tent listening to the radios: 702 was the last of the gunships out there. He had called five minutes before that he had been hit, but then there was silence.

“Let’s get somebody back out there.” Ringknocker spoke from the tent door. “Maybe he forgot how to get back here.” He frowned at his own joke.

Then we all heard the familiar whopping of rotors, and in the dusky light we saw the ship skid across the dirt fast and slide to a stop on the strip.

“Fancy landing,” somebody said.

With a collective sigh of relief, the crowd began to break up. I stopped outside with some others because something odd was happening with 702. Nobody was getting out. The ship just stood there hissing. Its rotors swung lazily. Somebody ran over to the ship and started waving frantically, calling for Doc. All four people on board were unconscious from wounds.

While they loaded the crew of 702 on a slick going to Pleiku, I walked back to the tent. Stoddard was showing Resler a six-foot section of a Huey tail-rotor drive-shaft tube. As I got closer, I could see a bullet hole in the tube.

“My first hit,” said Stoddard proudly.

Resler nodded agreeably but cautiously. Stoopy had taken the hit early in the day and had had the crew chief give him the ungainly trophy.

“Going to take this thing back home,” said Stoopy.

I was feeling kind of guilty for thinking that Stoopy was a jerk. He was… just a little too exuberant, or something.

“You’re a moron,” said Resler. I laughed for a long while.

“So, this is the deal.” Sky King talked as we sat in the mess tent. “Ice.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Ice, man.” Sky King’s eyes gleamed in the light of the mess tent’s bare bulb. Our generator grumbled and popped in a hole fifty feet away.

“This is the business deal you were talking about?”

“That’s it, kimo sabe. Ringknocker’s agreed. We start taking a ship down to Kontum every day and load it up with ice. You know, big blocks of ice. We bring it back here and sell it to our own mess, the company’s beer tent, and the rest we unload to the grunts at the 101st. We’ll charge the grunts enough to pay for our ice. Nice deal, eh? The Prospectors get free ice.”

“We have an ice machine.”

“We do, but it only makes chipped ice. And just barely enough for drinks. We’re talking about big twenty-five-kilo blocks of ice to cool the beer. Besides, there’ll be a profit, and we can use the money for the club. What do you think?”

“What do you want me to do?” I said.

“Just volunteer to fly down with me every day.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Exactly. Partner.”

We couldn’t land a Huey in downtown Kontum to get ice. Sky King had arranged for a truck from a nearby Special Forces camp. The deal was that we could use their truck and driver if we let them use our Huey and a pilot.

On the first day of the ice business, Sky King took the truck into town while I flew the Special Forces CO—a lieutenant named Bricklin—on his jungle patrol. We covered his normal route through the scrub and jungle at low level in twenty minutes. The same trip via ankle express took him and his Chinese mercenaries a full day to complete. Naturally, he couldn’t see much from a speeding helicopter, nothing like what he could’ve seen had he walked, but he could honestly report that he had covered the entire route. This made him and his men very happy.

Only fifteen or twenty of the two hundred men at this camp were Americans. The rest were Chinese mercenaries from Saigon. When we landed back at the compound, Bricklin pointed out the arrangement, indicating that that side was for the Chinese, this for the Americans.

Bricklin was a tall and lean Montanan. He—like most of the Special Forces—was of the old school concerning the proper way to handle the war. Charlie was treated somewhat like a band of mischievous outlaws whose chances of actually taking over the country were nonexis tent. Bricklin believed that with the Americans dominating the Kontum area, the people would eventually come to trust the Americans and their ways, especially if the Americans educated their children and supplied medical care and other material goodies that even backward peasants come to crave when they are exposed to them.

Bricklin had begun to point out the advantages of the patient method of converting the Vietnamese versus the so-called war of attrition when he saw the Cav’s horse patch on my right shoulder.

“The only trouble with those guys,” said Bricklin, “is they kill a lotta people that just happened to get in the way. Every time a villager or his water buffalo gets killed, the VC boys talk it up real big. ‘See how much the Americans love you?’ they say. ‘Killed old Mrs. Koa yesterday and she was seventy-five and never hurt a bug.’ Course, old Charlie had come through the same village and executed the honchos, but who trusts politicians anyway? These wide-screen raids the Cav and other units are doing are wrecking everything these people have. Sure, they beat the NVA units and the VC units, but they’re ignoring the stomping they’re doing to the people we’re trying to help. And this relocation thing is about equal to dying as far as the villagers are concerned. These people are born, grow up, and die all in the same village—the village of their ancestors. That village is everything to them. So what do we do? We come marching through, burn it down—to keep the VC from occupying it—and move the people out to God knows where and turn them overnight into refugees and welfare cases and honest-to-God American-haters. The VC are winning because we’re losing.” Bricklin had said all that before he popped a beer inside the small metal building they called their club. “Just show ‘em by example. Show the VC how good the American way is, and they’ll come around. These people’ ll go the way that works.”

Bricklin and I sat at a folding table in the small bar. I drank a cup of coffee while he drank beer. I had to fly.

Everything about the place was easygoing. Even the slot machine was easy. The machine’s covers were off; you could see the gears and wheels and the money box. You could reclaim your losses by reaching into the back. Bricklin’s philosophy got me into a political mood.

“Do you think we ought to be here in the first place?” I asked.

“Well, that’s another question altogether, isn’t it? Fact is, we are here.”

“To me it’s the question.”

“You may be right, but things like this are real hard to stop once they get going. I think we’re going to be here a real long time.”

“Do you think we’ll win?”

“Not if we keep bustin’ up the villages and killing the people we’re trying to save, we won’t.”

“A lot of people say that if we had allowed the Vietnamese to have their elections, they would’ve voted for Ho Chi Minh and there wouldn’t be any war.”

Bricklin nodded. “Yeah, I’ve read that, too. And it’s probably true. But like I say, we’re here now.”

“So why can’t we just pull out?”

“Do you think LBJ would ever walk out on this gunfight?”

“No.”

“You’re right,” Bricklin said, and smiled.

The ice truck rolled through the gate and stopped by the bar. Sky King got out and pushed through the screen door. “Man, the prices around here.” He sat down beside me. “Fuckers charge two-fifty for a fifty-pound block. The same thing costs seventy-five cents at Phan Rang.”

“Well, we had the Cav come through here a month ago,” said Bricklin. “Those guys paid whatever the people asked for—ruined them for bargaining. They just don’t understand the locals.” He winked at me.

Sky King had a beer and talked to Bricklin. He told him that the deal was working fine, and if it was okay by him, we’d be coming down every day.

“Just make yourselves at home,” said Bricklin, “and bring your Huey.”

We walked out to the ship as the last of the blocks were put on board. There was a total of twenty blocks—a thousand pounds of ice—packed wetly on the deck. I cranked up. Because of the extra weight, I couldn’t hover up over the flagpole, so I turned the ship around and took off the way we came in.

As we headed up the valley on the thirty-mile flight back to Dak To, Sky King smoked cigarettes, chattered about the business, and nervously watched the cargo melting in the warm, hundred-mile-an-hour wind.

“Shit, we’ll be lucky to get back with half the ice we bought,” he said. “How ‘bout we close the doors?” he asked the crew chief.

“If we do that, sir, we can’t get to our guns,” said the chief.

“Oh, yeah.” He turned to me. “Next trip we got to bring a tarp to put over that stuff.”

He turned around, watching the cargo. “Shit, look at it go! Each one of those drops is a fucking dime!”

“We’re almost there,” I said.

“Thank God. Can you imagine getting back to the company with a fifty-dollar puddle? Ringknocker’d kill me.” He laughed.

I landed on the strip at a spot near the mess hall. A truck pulled out, and the crew began unloading the ice as I shut down. From there it was trucked to one of our

tents, where it entered a complicated distribution system that delivered ice to our company, the nearby engineers, and the 101st before dark.

Being in the ice business gave me the trading material I needed to build a bunker. Both Gary and I were nervous about being mortared. The Prospectors thought we were overreacting. They had never been mortared. We enlisted Stoddard’s help. He was an energetic excavator. Within a day, with Stoopy doing most of the digging, we had a four-by-four hole, six feet deep. While Gary and Stoopy filled sandbags to wall the bunker, I took a Jeep over to the engineers and struck a deal with a captain there. He gave me three sheets of PSP for one block of ice. I took the steel planks, on account, and brought them back. We layered three levels of sandbags on top of them. It was a snug little bunker. And though we knew it probably could not withstand a direct hit, it might, and that gave us great comfort.

Meanwhile, the Prospectors laughed. But Gary and I knew better.

That evening Gary and I sat on our bunker, quietly talking about going home. We were now short-timers with less than seventy days to go.

“They say they’re going to use short-timers only on noncombat missions during their last month.” Gary sipped his daily Budweiser.

“I heard. I think a great plan would be to take a leave ten days before that; when you come back, you’re finished fighting. Just fly rice and stuff around back at Phan Rang.”

“You going to?”

“Yeah, why not? We could both get a leave together. I found some great places in Taipei.”

“I heard it’s better in Hong Kong.”

“It is, eh? Okay, Hong Kong. I’ve never been there. You wanna take a leave there?”

“Yeah.”

By the end of the first week, we had lifted companies of grunts from the 101st into positions at the north end of the valley. They were getting into firefights, but nothing big. We also established an artillery position in the foothills, placed so that it controlled the semicircle in which the 101st fanned out. Intelligence had reported that there was at least a battalion-sized NVA unit out there, and the 101st was eager to make contact.

My schedule was always blank in the afternoons, and I continued flying the ice runs. After a few days, Sky King and I had worked out a procedure in which the one of us who stayed with Bricklin could drink, while the one who went for the ice stayed dry—so that there would be at least one sober pilot to fly back. This made the daily flights more enjoyable. I was beginning to like being a Prospector. They might be eccentric, but they got the job done, and had a good time doing it. And except for the six casualties we experienced on that first day, no one had been hurt. It was, almost, pleasant.

Things seemed to be going well with the Prospectors. Joviality reigned among them while the action lulled. But something was different about us when compared to the outside world, as we demonstrated the next day.

Most people were in camp when a Chinook landed from Saigon. Ringknocker went out to greet four Red Cross girls as they stepped out of the back of the ship. Deacon joined Ringknocker, and the two of them escorted the girls back toward the camp. I was sitting on my cot, watching the party coming our way. Looking down the tent row, I noticed that everybody had disappeared. The place had suddenly become a ghost town. Gary peered out at the women and announced, “Doughnut Dollies,” but stayed inside. As Ringknocker walked the girls down the company street, obviously looking for someone to introduce them to, he could find no one. The girls began to look nervous as they peered into the dark tents, occasionally seeing a shadowed face peering silently back. They walked down the line of tents and back. Ringknocker and Deacon escorted them back to the Chinook. Meanwhile, the crew of the Chinook had deposited a pile of cardboard boxes on the airstrip. We watched Ringknocker nodding as someone explained them. The worried girls shook Ringknocker’s hand, looked quizzically around the deserted camp, and boarded their ship. Minutes later they were gone. When the ship was safely away, the Prospectors reappeared as if nothing had happened.

“Why did they do that?” I asked Gary.

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know. I just couldn’t go out and meet them. We all must be nuttier than we think. I mean, round-eyes. Everybody talks about seeing round-eyes again, and here they were five minutes ago, and we all hid?”

“Gratuitous issue.” Deacon pointed to the boxes.

“What’s that?” asked Gary.

“Free stuff from the Red Cross.”

We walked over and drew gifts of soap, combs, toothpaste, and cartons of cigarettes. And everyone looked guilty. They came bearing gifts and we shunned them. Sky King ran out to the airstrip and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Come back!” he yelled. “Come back!”

I watched the sagging top of my mosquito bar from inside. Resler kept a light on and wrote letters. Lying on my back, I noticed that I would have to find another place to put my electric shaver and assorted junk that I kept on top of the mosquito netting. It sagged too much.

Stoopy was buried under his blankets, asleep. One nice thing about the highlands, it was cool at night. Gary turned off his flashlight and for a while I heard him wrestling with his cot and blankets as he tucked in the mosquito netting. Then it was quiet. From far away, I could hear the occasional noises of battle. The 101st was getting more action every day.

I could not sleep. I stared into the darkness and thought about how it would feel to be out of the combat assaults. Gary and I had requested leave to start in two weeks. If all went as planned, we would both be into our last thirty days when we got back. A barrage of artillery sounded in the distance. I felt tense. After nearly a year of unconscious listening I could instantly tell incoming rounds from outgoing, even if I was sleeping next to the artillery or mortar positions. There was something ominous about the noise from the north end of the valley.

The electric razor above me sparked. My throat tightened in fear. The booby trap? The sparks grew to a white blaze. From the intensity of a Fourth of July sparkler, it suddenly blazed to a blinding white flame. I rolled out of the cot onto the ground and stood up. Flickering shadows were cast by the intense blaze. The inside of the tent was brighter than daylight. “Gary! Fire!” I shouted as I backed into a tent rope. The dazzling light flickered green through the canvas of the tent. When Gary said, “What’s the matter?” the light flicked off. I stood out in the cool night, in my underwear, sweating and shivering. Gary was beside me.

“What’s the matter?” His voice was calm.

“You didn’t see a fire?”

“What fire?”

“In the tent. My razor blew up. You didn’t see it?”

“I didn’t see anything.”

“Come on, I’ll show you.” I walked cautiously back into the tent. Stoddard was still asleep. I used Gary’s flashlight and shined it on the top of the mosquito bar. My razor gleamed in the light—intact. I touched it cautiously, then picked it up. It was cold.

“How can that be? It was burning, as bright as a magnesium flare. I saw it!”

“Bob, nothing burned.”

“Look, I’ve got spots from looking at it in my eyes right now.”

“No one can see another person’s spots.”

“They’re the proof. That razor burned.” I stopped when I understood the words that I spoke. I had never seen anything more clearly in my life, but here I stood with Gary, in the tent, holding the razor. The razor had not burned and blazed and blinded me, at least not so that anybody else could see.

I walked over to DaVinci, who stood by our bunker. I told him exactly what I had seen, in detail. He nodded as I explained.

“Here.” He handed me a small pill.

“What’s this?”

“It’ll help you sleep. I’ll give you another one tomorrow night, too. Try to relax.”

“I am relaxed—or I was.”

“Try harder.”

The next night we watched the sky over the north end of the valley fill with tracer tongues of fire from Puff. The NVA were overrunning the artillery position. Four ships from Daring’s gun platoon were in the middle of it, flying back and forth in front of the artillery piece under attack. Of the four cannon there, that one was now separated from the others as the NVA concentrated on it. Puff, the DC-3 with the Gattlings, blasted unbroken tongues of fire from the black sky. Flares popped white, dazzling and swinging over the battle. The NVA kept closing in. The tube was depressed for point-blank fire. One of the gunship pilots told us that when the NVA swarmed into the gun position the men were so mixed that they had to stop firing. The gun was taken.

We were on alert all night. By three in the morning, when we still hadn’t been called to do a night assault, I went to bed. Another little magic pill and I slept.

By dawn the next morning, the tube had been recaptured by the 101st, with the considerable help of our gunships.

Capt. John Niven came by early and said that he and I were going out. We were going to try to get some ammo to a trapped company.

Niven said in a friendly way that I was a better pilot than he. As the aircraft commander, he chose to handle the radios and let me do the flying. Our first stop was the trapped company’s HQ area at the 101st’s camp. We landed there to get the exact coordinates and to wait. The company was under fire, too heavy for us to get in. We shut down next to a small rifle range, inside the wire-strewn, mined perimeter, and waited.

At noon, we were still waiting. We could hear the company commander, Delta Six, calling on the radio in a nearby tent. He had seven fighting men left; thirty-eight more were either dead or wounded. He sounded bad, kept telling his HQ the names of the people he knew were dead, and also kept saying, “It’s still too hot for that ship. We may have to wait till dark.”

As I listened to this and waited, I wandered into the tent and got a case of .45-caliber ammunition from a sergeant. I took the five hundred rounds back out to the rifle range and proceeded to kill the rest of the afternoon by firing hundreds of rounds at beer cans. By three o‘clock, even I was impressed by my accuracy. I was regularly hitting beer cans at a hundred yards. By four o’clock, some grunts had joined me, and I borrowed an M-16 and shot a few clips with it. Another grunt let me try my luck with an M-79 grenade launcher. As I shot, I became calmer. I realized how much I needed to shoot. Shoot something, anything.

Niven came out of the tent as I blasted a beer can again. “We’re going to try for it,” he said. I slid the hot .45 into my shoulder holster and went to the ship.

“I think I’ll make a takeoff,” said Niven. “I could use the practice.”

“Sure, help yourself.”

Two grunts climbed inside with us after loading the ship full of ammo cases.

Niven cranked up, did a power check at a hover, which revealed that we were just able to hover. He nosed over, a little too much, and took off over the concertina wire. Unfortunately, the ship was too heavy for the amount of angle he had set for the takeoff, so the ship stayed low. We felt something tugging as we crossed the minefield. I looked out my window and saw barbed wire caught on the skid, trailing back, dragging in the other wire.

“We’re caught in some wire!” I yelled. He realized what was up as soon as I yelled, and reared back to level. What he did next caught me completely by surprise. Instead of staying at a hover over the minefield and backing out, he set the ship down. I lifted myself off the seat, against the straps, bracing myself for the explosion.

Niven forgot the mined perimeter. He remembered as soon as we were down. I looked at him as the ship idled. The sun shone through the Plexiglas. Sweat dripped over his face. He looked as scared as I felt. There was no explosion.

The grunts told us to stay put. Men who knew the layout of the mines came daintily stepping out to us with wire cutters and cut us free.

Niven was so shaken he had me fly.

As we drew near the trapped company, we saw gunships working the facing hill. Their efforts were frustrated by the exceedingly deep and dense foliage. In fact, the company itself was under a seventy-five-foot canopy of trees.

“Too hot, Prospector. Wait till dark,” said Delta Six.

“Roger,” replied Niven.

We turned back, frustrated. The tension was building to a high peak. I had looked the spot over, and I could not see a safe approach. The company was trapped on a low, tree-covered knoll surrounded by higher ground. If the NVA were still there when we came back, we’d be sitting ducks.

I landed back at the company’s HQ and shut down. It was two hours till dark. We had chow and waited.

There was no moon when we took off, and the sky was very dark. After a ten-minute flight up the valley, I switched off the position lights and began to descend. As we sank, the tops of the mountains, blacker than the sky, rose above us. I used the contours of the valley and the hills that I had come to know in two weeks of flying over and around them. It’s possible to see ground contour from low level even on the darkest night. Even if there’s no moon. Even if there is an overcast. There are always enough clues to construct an image. I had learned not to stare at what I wanted to see, but to see it with my peripheral vision.

So, as I moved slowly toward the knoll, I knew its treetops were lighter than the back hill behind them. Delta Six radioed that we sounded like we were on course. I had picked the right shadow.

“You’re close,” said Delta Six. “Keep coming, slowly.”

As the ship dropped out of flight and into hover, the load became evident. The dim instrument lights showed that I was using maximum power in the hover. We drifted forward, six feet above the trees, at Delta Six’s beckoning.

Delta Six said, “We hear some shooting.” I saw muzzle flashes from the hill facing us.

“I think that’s about right… wait… I can hear you right over us, but I can’t see you. We have wounded lying all around here, and I don’t want them hit by the ammo crates.”

I hovered, not looking at anything in particular, just noticing the different shades of black. Muzzle flashes began to twinkle from the hillside.

The low-rpm warning siren blared. I glanced at the dial and saw the needle dropping fast. The ship was sinking into the trees. If we didn’t drop that ammo we’d go down.

“We’ve got to drop that ammo,” said Niven.

“No! You’re right over the wounded.” Delta Six’s broadcast was filled with the crackling noise of rifle fire.

Were we or weren’t we going to drop the fucking ammo? I moved a little farther to the right. The crew chief and the grunts had the boxes poised at the edge of the deck, but it was still wrong. A treetop rose up, brushing the nose. That was it. If we didn’t go now, we’d be joining the men below us as pieces.

The shuddering Huey resisted as I tried to move forward. The warning siren blared. It was on the verge of quitting; moving forward was real effort. I heard a loud slap as the rotor hit a treetop. I couldn’t climb. If anything, I had to descend, to get the rotor speed back to normal. I turned to the right, getting a little power bonus that way, and dragged the skids across the treetops. Within a few feet I was able to drop down the side of the knoll into a black ravine. ,

“Now what?” asked Niven.

“I’m going down to the end of the ravine, circle back, and try it again.” .

“We’re too heavily loaded.”

“Yeah, but I think I know where he wants it now.”

Niven called Delta Six.

“Thank you,” said the grateful voice.

As I cruised slowly toward the knoll, the muzzle flashes began. Then a tongue of tracers flitted off to our left. Apparently we were hard to see, because we hadn’t been hit yet. From the conversation during the first attempt, I had a feeling where Delta Six was and where he wanted us to drop the ammo.

“That’s it!” he yelled. “Hold it right there.”

I stopped the ship. As she sank toward the trees, Delta Six called, “Okay, dump ‘em.”

With much scraping and bumping, the boxes were shoved from the ship. They dropped seventy-five feet through the branches and leaves. The ship gained power as it lightened.

“Great job!” yelled Delta Six. “Nobody was hit. Great job. Thank you, Prospector.”

I hit one more treetop on the way out, bounced toward the ravine, and accelerated. Ten minutes later we were back at HQ being credited with saving their lives. Delta Six and his men had fired the last of their ammo to cover us.

The next morning, Delta Six had managed to push back the NVA—or the latter pulled back—and a Chinook hovered over the spot and hoisted out the wounded. Another Chinook pulled out the last of the living along with the dead.

The 101st was getting the action they had craved. Unfortunately, the territory was the enemy’s home field. In some of the LZs the grunts had cut on hilltops, the stumps were so close together that it was difficult to get the skids to fit between them. The American patrols hacked through the brush, struggling toward objectives, only to become hopelessly lost. Commanders constantly reported men missing in action who were in fact lost—you couldn’t see a man ten feet away. While they fought the jungle, the NVA harrassed them, attacked them, and sometimes overran them. When platoons and companies came under heavy attack, rescue units sent out to help them became lost, scattered, and surrounded. For days, the 101st had lost units looking for lost units looking for lost units. It was total confusion. In that confusion, many men died.

In these conditions our helicopters were the least effective in helping the grunts. We were constantly out trying to find men who cried for help on the radio but who were totally hidden in the jungle. One company we tried to save was completely wiped out as we flew above the canopy trying to find them. Their radio went dead, and they were gone.

Another company—led by a West Point football player, Bud Carpenter—became famous because Carpenter called in an airstrike on his position as he was being overrun.

Sky King and I were in the air, orbiting Carpenter’s position. Carpenter was trying to get to an old LZ to be extracted. We listened on the radio and watched the LZ, waiting for him to show up.

“We can’t make it to the LZ,” radioed Carpenter. “They’re all around us.”

“What’s your position?” implored Gunfighter Six, Carpenter’s CO.

“I’m one hundred meters east of the LZ,” said Carpenter calmly. Gunfire crackled with his voice. “I see only six men around me,” he lamented. “They’re moving closer. I want an airstrike here, now.”

“On your own position?” asked Gunfighter Six.

“Yes. Hurry.”

Two A1-E’s were already on station. They got their instructions in seconds and began to hit the coordinates. They dropped napalm, bombs, and then strafed. Carpenter’s position was covered in smoke. A long silence followed.

“That did it,” said Carpenter’s tired voice. “They stopped.”

Gunfighter Six said, “If things don’t work out to the good, I want you to know that I’m putting you in for the Medal of Honor.”

No reply.

“Also, I’m sure that when we get to you, we’ll find a lot of dead VC.”

“All I can see are my own people…” said the quiet voice.

“We’re sending help,” said Gunfighter Six.

Moments later, Gunfighter Six called us. He wanted us to land at his position, near the artillery emplacement.

“I can’t understand it,” he said. He sat on the deck of our Huey holding a plastic-covered map board. He looked gaunt and sad. He pointed to a circled spot on the green paper. “I don’t understand it. They’ve got to be here.” He was talking about a platoon he was trying to send to Carpenter’s position. But the platoon wasn’t there, because when the men fought in the direction he directed, they found nothing and became pinned down. Gunfighter Six was depressed. He had it all worked out on his game board, and the labels were all in the right place, but the men weren’t.

“I want you to fly out and find this unit.” He pointed to the map. “Find them and give them an azimuth to here.” He moved his finger across the board to Carpenter’s position.

A major and a captain got in the back of our ship with a big radio. We took off.

I flew slowly across the treetops, listening to the grunts’ radio instructions. They could hear our ship. Using our sound, they directed us right over them. During the crisscross search pattern, the enemy did not shoot. But when I found and circled a unit, they opened up from the high ground around us. I heard one tick. I flew past the unit, turned, and came back over them in the exact direction they were to go. “Go this way,” radioed the major from behind us.

The unit rogered its orders. The major had us look for another lost patrol. Again, while we cruised back and forth over the jungle, right in front of the enemy’s hillside, they did not shoot. But as soon as I circled, they opened up. The hillside was peppered with muzzle flashes. We were so close to one NVA barrage we could hear the crackling rifle fire. I felt a thump in the air frame and turned around and saw the major hitting the deck—not shot, but following his instinct to hit the deck under fire. It was kind of funny that he thought the deck was any protection—bullets went through it like tinfoil—but I didn’t laugh.

I turned and came back over the invisible men on the heading they were to follow. As we crossed them, Sky King radioed, “Two-six-zero degrees.” The lieutenant below rogered.

And we did it again. And again. In a couple of hours, we had redirected all the lost units. The ones who still talked, anyway. They were converging on one spot to join up. Gunfighter Six was not only going to secure Carpenter’s position; he was also getting his men together to pull out. He had had enough of this shit. It was time to call in the Cavalry.

We landed back at Gunfighter Six’s position and watched while he told his aides what he had in mind. The plan amounted to this: He was going to have the First Cav send out a battalion or so of troopers and position them north of the fighting, to wait on some ridge tops. He believed that if the air force bombed this area, and then the 101st went back in, they would beat the NVA up to the Cav. The crazy thing was that he believed that the NVA would travel along the ridge tops, not in the valleys. Looking at the map, I could see a thousand ways the NVA could get away, but then I wasn’t an infantry commander. I’m glad I wasn’t.

The briefing was interesting, but we were called out in the middle of it to rescue wounded men.

Sky King told me later that he didn’t believe we were going to make it. The clearing was a tight circle cut out of a stand of saplings, and the grunts had put too many wounded on board for us to hover. To top it off, we were under continuous fire.

What I did was considered reckless. The solution was automatic. The ship lost rpm at a one-foot hover, I could not leave anyone behind—because men were dying—and we were surrounded by fifteen-foot bushes and saplings. But we were on a hill. My instincts told me that if I could get through the barrier, the ship could dive down the side of the hill and we could fly. So, while Sky King advised me that we would have to drop at least one man, I shook my head and headed for the thinnest section of the vegetable wall. Luckily, the rotors are so high above the ground that they had to cut only the thinner tops of the saplings. Our nose forced through the branches and leaves, the skids tugged on clinging things, and the rotors exploded into the stuff. It sounded like we were crashing. Men screamed in the back of the ship. But even as we struggled through the trees and leaves and bushes, the ground dropped beneath us. The rotors cleared the tops, and we dragged the fuselage through the last of the foliage. We burst out of the thicket in a swirl of debris—a turbine-powered brush cutter. I sailed down the side of the hill, picked up some airspeed, and then climbed out. Sky King said, “I don’t fucking believe it!”

I laughed. I was surprised myself.

By that evening, the scattered patrols, platoons, and companies consolidated themselves. It turned out that Carpenter had lost fewer men than he had thought. Only half his company were among the dead or wounded. The others had been separated in the tight brush. The jungle was the enemy’s ally, and as long as he forced us to fight in its strangling hold, we would lose. Carpenter’s heroic, suicidal solution left him miraculously unscathed—and had stopped the rout. But we lost the battle.

The grunts were pulled back past the artillery position to wait for the Cav and the air force. The air force was sending B-52-loads of one-thousand-pound bombs from Guam.

The bombs were supposed to kill a lot of NVA; the survivors were to race up the ridges, pursued by the 101st; and the Cav—way up north—would smash them. The scope was too big. The delay caused by waiting for the air force was too long.

Early the next day, Gary and I and the rest of the Prospectors stopped in our tracks in the company area. A monstrous storm thundered up the valley from the south. The noise grew so loud you couldn’t hear the voices around you. The storm was the monster gaggle sent by the Cav.

The Cav raced up the valley, at least eighty ships, at low level, and fast. The gaggle flew over us and continued north to their assigned objective. Minutes later, the last of their formation disappeared, and the roar silenced.

“Damn! I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many Hueys flying all at once,” someone said. I admit that I felt a sense of pride on seeing my old unit. They were—in this part of the world—the big time.

The Cav’s image lost some of its gloss that same afternoon.

The 101st fought scattered firefights among a hundred branching valleys. A Cav gunship company was borrowed to help out. It was to support a ground commander who had radioed that he wanted the Cav to pulverize a spot where he would throw smoke. Yellow smoke.

Near where the 101st wanted the Cav to strike, a radio operator walked along with his patrol. He carried several smoke grenades on his belt. One of them, of course, was yellow.

At the moment the grunt commander, a mile away from the radio operater, announced that he had thrown yellow smoke, a branch pulled the yellow-smoke grenade from the radio operator’s belt, popping the pin. The radio operator and his platoon were immediately swallowed up in the chalky yellow smoke. The Cav gunships happened to be only a few hundred meters away, looking for the yellow smoke that marked their target.

The gunship rogered that they saw the smoke, and attacked. They even saw people running around under the smoke and thought they were getting old Charlie.

When the commander noticed that his yellow smoke was not being hit—that someone else’s yellow smoke was being attacked—he screamed at the gunships to stop.

It was lucky he did. In just a few seconds they had already killed the radio operator’s platoon leader and wounded twenty-one others, including the radio operator himself.

It was a freak accident, but the Cav was labeled clumsy. And after such a dramatic entrance, too. It ruined their image. The Prospectors and the 101st felt safer, knowing that the Cav would be way up north, somewhere, as the anvil. We were the hammer.

The following day, all the 101st units were pulled back in preparation for the bombing.

The NVA were not dummies. They knew that something was up. They faded into the jungle. According to the hundreds of grease-pencil marks on the maps, the NVA were surrounded, about to be driven along the ridge, north, into the hands of the clumsy but mighty Cav. The next morning, the air force was due for its part of the squeeze.

Sky King and I were assigned to carry a television film crew up and down a dirt road that marked the western boundary of the bombing zone. Pictures of bombs, especially gigantic bombs, going off have great PR value, everyone knows.

The clouds sank into the valley, hiding the mountaintops. Sky King and I cruised nervously, at 500 feet above the road. We had been assured that the air force did not miss, that it was practically impossible to be hit by a stray bomb. Our feeling was, “Bullshit.” The air force misses, a lot.

At the exact moment the bombs were supposed to hit, they did. I had just turned back, heading up the road, when we saw the hillsides a quarter mile away begin to erupt. Intersecting concussion spheres, visible in the close air, suddenly expanded away from the ground. Circles in the heavily wooded hills became instantly nude. The thousand-pound bombs fell in rapid succession, systematically and devastatingly, traveling along the ridges, in the ravines, against the hillsides, a visual staccato of overlapping blasts, tearing the earth asunder. We heard oohs and aahs from the film crew. The pattern of destruction had started across the valley from us and moved closer. Somewhere, 30,000 feet above the cloud cover, some very good bomber crews were keeping the bombs within the designated area. Charlie must be turning into hamburger.

After a half hour of this, the bombs had reached the road. The concussion rings were not only visible; they were tangible. The ship rocked in the explosions. They were going off right on the road, so I moved off the track. One bomb exploded in front of us, past the road, and for a minute I thought we might be seeing just how well a Huey holds up to thousand-pound bombs, when the bombing stopped.

Silence. The valley swirled in stringy smoke. Leafless trees stood at bizarre angles. The ground was gray and charred between monstrous craters. No one could have survived that apocalypse.

The end of the bomb run was the cue, and scores of Hueys flew in, dropping grunts all over the torn valley floor. It was the end of our mission, so I lingered only a little while before turning back to the airstrip.

I was impressed. The film crew was impressed. The grunts were impressed. But the gooks were not impressed. They were gone. They did leave behind a few men, and these were captured, dazed but intact—something like twenty NVA.

So now it was up to the Cav.

The Cav searched the ridges and the valleys for two days. And then they closed back to the bombed valley. When the net was closed, no fish were found. The dumb little barbarians had got away, showing not the least respect for superior technology. They had used judo, and bent with the force.

But a bombing was a bombing, and fighting is fighting, and many men had been heroic indeed. The battle, though lost, had been impressive.

General Westmoreland himself flew up from Saigon to pin on medals. Captain Carpenter was given a silver star and was put on Westmoreland’s staff.

Near the end of June, I got very twitchy. Being a short-timer made life difficult. It would almost be better not to know when you were due to return. As the day drew closer—only fifty days to go—the possibility of dying seemed more imminent, like I had already used up my breaks and would be getting it any day now. Somewhere between now and the day I left was the mission, probably a typical little mission-light fire—and just one little stray bullet would go through my forehead.

Nights were hell. Even with the tranquilizers Doc DaVinci gave me, I kept snapping awake at unseen dangers. Daytime was fine when I flew. The ice business also kept me busy. But when I wasn’t flying—a few hours between missions, or a day off—I grew morose. Nothing that I saw convinced me that we were doing the right thing in Vietnam. I even harbored a sympathy for the enemy, which made me feel guilty.

The local war, the one I was in, went on every day. I was part of it. In the air, I did my job the best I knew how. I flew, as did all the pilots, into hot LZs, because in the middle of the confusion the hazy principles over which the war was fought disappeared. Everything else was excluded. Even I was excluded.

When Deacon finally let Gary and me fly together, our first mission was to resupply a small patrol in the jungle. We used off-course navigation to find them, a method that wasn’t taught in flight school. Monk had told me about it.

In standard dead-reckoning you corrected a plotted course for wind drift, but you never knew which way to look when you’d flown long enough to be at your target. The wind-drift correction was a calculation. The actual track you’d made was off to one side or the other. But which side?

In off-course navigation you don’t correct for wind drift. You fly the magnetic course you plotted on the map for the length of time you calculated, and then you know where to look—upwind.

We found our resupply target without incident.

After lunch a firefight broke out close to the airstrip, near where we had left the ARVNs that first day. There were casualties, and the men needed ammo. Gary and I made it into a tiny clearing cut on a ledge. There was just enough room to squeeze the rotors in, leaving the tail hanging over space. The grunts threw some of their wounded on board, gunfire began crackling, and the grunts waved vigorously for us to leave. Takeoff from such a nook is backwards. As the nose and the rotors clear the obstruction, you push the right pedal and the whole machine pivots as it’s flying so that the nose and tail trade places, putting you back to the normal posture. That’s what we did.

At the hospital pod, the medics had the wounded off in seconds. Gary and I took off to go back for a second load.

“Damn. They said this whole damn area was secure weeks ago,” Gary complained.

“They must not have told Charlie,” I said.

“That’s the truth.”

The unit told us to wait. There was a small firefight going on.

I circled high over the valley, out of small-arms range. From the orbit, we could see some smoke up in the north where we had worked that morning. To the west was more smoke from some 101st units who were moving in that direction. The Americans were working a very large section of territory, but from up high it seemed very small. The sea of jungle stretched for hundreds of miles in every direction. And you could go anywhere you wanted under that canopy.

“Okay, Prospector, we’re secure.”

“Roger, we’re on our way,” called Gary.

From the orbit, I dropped toward the peak of the hill, dropped below it, and settled into a descent along a ravine that led to the nook. We had picked up a load of ammo on the way and could barely hover at this altitude. I had to time the approach so that I lost translational lift as the ship moved onto the ledge. When we were moving at maybe 30 miles an hour, with 100 yards to go, our right-door gun exploded. The gunner saw muzzle flashes. With 50 feet to go, the most critical part of the approach, the ground guide started waving me away.

This was no place to stop.

I kept coming. Then two more men jumped up and waved me away. At the same time, a voice on the radio yelled, “Don’t land. We’re under heavy fire!”

This was a new one for me. Normally, I could just fly over the LZ if we had to abort. But this one was on the side of a hill. Enclosed on both sides by the ravine, T couldn’t turn away either. But there was space behind and below us. I flared the ship to stop the approach Since it couldn’t hover, it began to sink. Nose high, the ship slid tail-down into the ravine. As we fell, I used the right pedal to bring the nose around, but I let it continue to fall, to get airspeed. I accelerated into the ravine. The airspeed came up to about 70. Then we were a flying machine again, and I swooped up between some trees on the ridge beside the ravine. The grunts had seen us tumbling into the ravine. We disappeared as the ravine turned, and they thought we crashed. But lo! the Huey jumped out of the jungle, to their amazement.

We finally got back to the nook, dropped the ammo, and picked up the rest of the wounded. As usual with the last trip, some dead men also rode back with us.

That afternoon, I took Gary with me to pick up the ice.

13. Tell Me You’re Afraid

July—August 1966

Sleep no longer gave me peace. I had escaped Vietnam with an R&R to Hong Kong, but I had not escaped my memories.

Twenty-one men lay trussed in a row, ropes at their ankles, hands bound under their backs—North Vietnamese prisoners. A sergeant stood at the first prisoner’s feet, his face twisted with anger. The North Vietnamese prisoner stared back, unblinking. The sergeant pointed a .45 at the man. He kicked the prisoner’s feet suddenly. The shock of the impact jostled the prisoner inches across the earth. The sergeant fired the .45 into the prisoner’s face. The prisoner’s head bounced off the ground like a ball slapped from above, then flopped back into the gore that had been his brains. The sergeant turned to the next prisoner in the line.

“He tried to get away,” said a voice at my side.

“He can’t get away; he’s tied!”

“He moved. He was trying to get away.”

The next prisoner said a few hurried words in Vietnamese as the sergeant stood over him. When the sergeant kicked his feet, the prisoner closed his eyes. A bullet shook his head.

“It’s murder!” I hissed to the man at my side.

“They cut off Sergeant Rocci’s cock and stuck it in his mouth. And five of his men,” said the voice. “After they spent the night slowly shoving knives into their guts. If you had been here to hear the screams…. They screamed all night. This morning they were all dead, all gagged with their cocks. This isn’t murder; it’s justice.”

Another head bounced off the ground. The shock wave hit my body.

“They sent us to pick up twenty-one prisoners,” I pleaded.

“You’ll get ‘em; you’ll get ’em. They’ll just be dead, is all.”

The sergeant moved down the line stopping prisoners who tried to escape. The line of men grew longer than it had been, and the sergeant grew distant. His face glowed red and the heads bounced. And then he looked up at me.

Forgotten events dogged my sleep.

A wounded VC lay on a stretcher, one end rested on my ship’s deck, the other end held by a medic.

“I don’t think he appreciates this. I think he’d rather die,” said the medic.

The VC stared at me. His black eyes accused me. He lay in a black pajama top—the bottoms were gone. He had a swollen, stinking thigh wound from days before. He’d been hiding in the jungle.

“He’s going to lose that leg,” said the medic.

The man stared at me. The stretcher grated against the deck as the medic shoved. The crew chief reached across from the other side and pulled. They slid the stretcher up against the cockpit seats. While they shoved and jostled the stretcher, he kept his eyes on mine.

“That fucker either has the clap or he’s turned on by us.” The crew chief grinned. He pointed to the man’s groin. What looked like semen dripped from his penis and glistened on his thigh. I looked away, feeling his hate. I felt his exposure. I looked back to his eyes and they stared, black and hot. The scene stopped. I thought I was waking up. But then it was the human shield I’d seen during LZ Dog.

The eyes blinked and wrinkles formed at their edges. The old woman with black teeth said something to me, then screamed. There was no sound. Her wrinkled hand held a child’s smooth arm. The child hung lifeless and dragged the old woman down. She moved slowly, like she was falling through water. The crowd around her gasped silently and flinched and fell. The machine gun stuttered from a distant place. The woman fell slowly to the ground, bounced, dying and dead. The old woman had been saying something. When I saw her lips moving, I knew that she had been saying “It’s okay….”

The scene changed again. I sat in my Huey waiting for the grunts to finish inspecting a napalmed village.

“It’s okay.” A man looked in my cockpit window.

“She’s dead!”

“They’re all dead. It’s okay.”

The crowd was gone. I sat in my cockpit while the man talked to me from outside. The place had been a village. The wet ground smoked. Scorched poles and mud-daubed walls and thatch smoldered. Charred people lay twenty feet away. The smell of burnt hair and smoldering charcoal sank into my lungs and brain.

Why was there barbed wire in the village? Was it a pen? A defense perimeter? I couldn’t see the scene beyond where the child stuck to the wire.

“This is wrong,” I said to the man.

“It’s okay. It’s the way it is. They had their warning. Everybody else left the village. They’re VC.”

“She’s VC?”

The man looked down. “No. She’s unfortunate.”

She was burned to the barbed wire. The wire was growing from the charred flesh of her tiny chest. She was bent over the wire, a toddler who had run away from the hell from the sky. The lower half of her two-year-old body was pink from intense heat; her tiny vulva looked almost alive.

“This is not war. It‘s—”

“It’s okay. There’s always going to be some innocent victims.”

The man talked on, but his voice became silent. The little girl’s stark body, half charred death, half pink life, leaned against the wire, almost free. Suddenly I heard ringing.

I awoke hearing my voice echoing off the far wall. The phone was ringing on the night table.

“Hel—” I gulped. “Hello?”

“Your call to the United States will be coming through in fifteen minutes,” said the voice.

The call! Of course. The call to Patience. “Thank you.”

“We wanted to make sure you would be here for the call, Mr. Mason.”

“Yes. Yes, thank you. I’m here.”

The phone clicked off and I held the buzzing receiver in my hand for a minute before setting it back on its cradle. I shivered as an air-conditioned breeze chilled me. The sheets were wet and twisted.

I lit a cigarette with shaking hands and sat up to wait for the call. I was having these dreams almost every night. I began to feel better. I was awake, after all, away from the dreams.

After four miserable nights, I decided to cut my leave short and return to Vietnam. The leave had been a disaster. Gary had come to Hong Kong with me, but he left the second day for Taipei. I had bragged about the women there too convincingly, and the call girls in Hong Kong were too experienced, too professional, and too expensive. Resler packed up and left. I was going to follow, but when I tried to get a ticket to Taipei, I was refused because I was a serviceman on leave to Hong Kong, and that’s where I’d have to stay. I don’t know how Gary slipped through the red tape, but I was alone.

I had not the slightest desire to hire a call girl; I really just wanted to talk.

“I love you. Over,” I said.

“I love you too. Are you okay? Over,” said Patience. Her voice struggled weakly through the hiss and whistles of the radiophone connection.

“I’m fine. They say I won’t have to fly any more combat assaults when I get back. Over.”

“No?”

“That’s what—”

“The party has not said ‘over,’ sir.”

“Oh,” said Patience. “Over.”

“That’s what the doc said when I left. He said that the Prospectors were going to put their last-month short-timers on ass-and-trash missions. Over.”

“Oh, I hope they keep their word. Over.”

“They will. These guys are not the Cav. Over.”

I listened to the howl and echoes of interfering electronics, sorting out the words. Patience, my son, Jack, and my family had become phantoms. They were dreams, too. When we finally stopped talking, when her voice melted into the static, the tenuous link to my home fantasies broke. “Over,” I said.

And there I sat, on the edge of the bed, just like after every other dream.

It was very similar to my hometown, Delray Beach. There was a beach; it ran north and south. There were palm trees, sandy roads, salt smells, girls playing in bikinis, and quietly rolling surf. It was late afternoon, almost dusk, and the sun glinted off parts of the heavy wire screen that surrounded the terrace. My table stood near the front of the terrace, allowing me the best view.

Voices chattered quietly behind me. Vietnamese sounds lovely even if you can’t understand it.

It did feel like home.

Golden dolls, wearing bikinis so brief they were ribbons of modesty, strolled with pale GIs. As it got darker, the beach crowd broke up, drifting into the town.

“Manh gioi khoung? How are you?” said the smiling waitress. I noticed her Vietnamese glance of nerves and felt comforted by familiar behavior. “What would you like?” she asked.

I would like to jump you like a rabbit. “I’ll have another beer, please,” I said. The girl prompted immediate lust. Perhaps I could find solace in solace. My conscience immediately began to pummel me with shots of raw guilt, delivered at high voltage. “Monster!” it railed. “Married. Short-timer. And not only that, but you’re just getting over the clap!” It was mercilessly rational. I succumbed to its barbs.

The waitress bowed and left to get the beer. I smiled as I watched my phantom flit naked from me to the girl, to hump her happily while she leaned over the bar.

She returned, beaming, friendlier, and served my beer. Her arm brushed mine and I felt warm electricity flicker between us. My mind savored salty-sweet smells and orgasmic contractions, hearing her voice as an echo. “Would you like…”

Her voice was obliterated by the sudden ripping, zipping howl of a stylus skidding across a record. She dropped to the floor and rolled under a table.

At the sound of crashing chairs and breaking glassware, I turned and saw the Vietnamese taking cover. Five men crouched low behind the bar. I sat alone on the porch and took a sip of beer. The girl knocked over a chair as she crawled toward the back of the porch.

All because of a stylus skidding across a record? Damn, they were even jumpier than I was. I looked around the bar. Nothing was happening. There was no fight. People peered from behind the bar and tables, looking up front. It had just been the sound that spooked them. They had absolutely no confidence that their city was secure. They knew the facts. The VC were everywhere.

Cowards, I thought. Anger flushed through me. I felt betrayed, revolted. They’re really afraid.

For five minutes I had complete quiet as I watched the surf foam glow in the gathering dusk. At the end of that time, the bar, the customers, the porch, came back to life.

I paid my tab and walked to the room I had rented.

I sat against the wall on the bed, thinking about the panic at the bar. The old question “Why don’t the Vietnamese fight the VC like the VC fight the Vietnamese?” seemed very valid. Without the support of the people, we were going to lose. And if they didn’t care, why were we continuing to fight? Surely the people who were running this fiasco could see this, too. The signs were obvious. Plans leaked to the VC, reluctant combatants, mutinies in the ARVN, political corruption, Vietnamese marines fighting Vietnamese marines at Da Nang, and the ubiquitous Vietnamese idea that Ho would eventually win.

I stabbed a cigarette into an ashtray. Without American financial support and military support, the South Vietnamese government would have failed long ago, as a natural result of its lack of popular support.

The whole problem settled on my shoulders. In a few hours, I was going to voluntarily go back into battle and risk my scrawny neck for people who didn’t care.

I stayed up and smoked cigarettes all night. I tried to sleep, only to jerk awake, sitting in bed, listening.

I was back at Dak To, home, the next day. Here, the war was simple. We did our job well, beat the VC almost every time, and kept them on the run. Here, I was a member of the honorable side. The reluctant, cowardly Vietnamese were not visible to remind me that they didn’t care. I could go on believing that simply by killing more and more Communists we would win. When I crawled into my cot my first night back, I fell instantly asleep.

The next day, Gary and I sat on the deck of our Huey waiting for the grunts to finish eating. Their platoon was one of several that were pushing toward the west, scouting for the VC. We joked in familiar surroundings.

“You shoulda come, you know,” said Gary.

“I tried, asshole. They wouldn’t let me. How did you get a ticket?”

“I just went to the ticket counter and bought it.”

“Well, you must have looked like a civilian, because they wouldn’t sell me anything.”

“It’s really a shame. You missed Grass Mountain.”

“What’s that?”

“Grass Mountain is packed with geisha houses. Wanna know what it’s like to go to a geisha house?”

“No.”

“They start off with a bath. Just you and two naked girls. They wash you first, then soak you, then massage you.”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“I heard you,” Gary said. “The two of them massage you so well you think you’re going to crack. Then, at the perfect moment, one of the girls sits on you and puts you out of your misery.”

I nodded my head with closed eyes, kicking myself for not getting laid when I had the chance.

“And that’s just the beginning.”

“Just the beginning!”

“That’s right. It takes hours to get out of this place. They give you more baths, and tea and food and massages, to keep you going, and then they pass you down the line to teams of two or three girls who work you over in different ways.” Gary’s face brightened at his memories.

“I never even heard of Grass Mountain when I was there,” I lamented.

“Never heard of it? Where the hell were you?”

The next day I was flying with Sky King. In the middle of a laager, a grunt lieutenant came to our ship. “We just had a newsman wounded. Will you guys pick him up?”

“Sure,” I said.

“The squad leader with the guy said it was a sniper. They say they’ve got the place secured.”

“No problem. Where are they?”

The lieutenant showed me on his map. They were only a mile away. When I turned to get into the ship, Sky King and the crew chief were all ready to go. I strapped in as Sky King cranked up.

Sky King flew at fifty knots heading for the place.

“Over there,” I pointed to four or five soldiers standing around a prone man in a thicket of leafless trees. “You see them?”

“Got ‘em.”

As we flew by, the men hit the dirt, leaving one man standing. He was aiming a movie camera at us.

“Great place for a landing,” said Sky King.

The base of the clearing was wide enough for our ship, but the scrawny branches twenty feet off the ground crowded over the circle, making it too tight to get in.

“Axle One-Six,” I radioed. “Can you move to a better clearing?” Sky King circled, looking for a way to get through the trees.

“Negative, Prospector. We’re still getting sniper fire, and this guy is wounded pretty bad.”

Sky King set up an approach and closed in. As he got to the treetops, it became obvious that he was going to hit branches with the main rotor, so he aborted.

When the squad saw us heading across the LZ, they radioed, “Can you make it, Prospector?”

Sky King shook his head. “I can’t get in there. You want to try it?”

I nodded and took the controls. While Sky King had approached, I thought I saw a way. “We’ll get in, Axle One-Six. Just hang on.”

The plan was simple. I would come in ninety degrees to Sky King’s last try and then turn sharp. I thought that in a bank the rotors could slip through the narrow slot that Sky King had shot for. I lined up on a tangent to the clearing and let down.

I hit the turn fast, banked hard over, and as we slipped toward the ground, I saw that I was going to hit some stuff anyway. The main rotor smashed some dead branches, sounding like machine-gun fire. I flared for the landing and we were down.

“Great. Now how are you going to get out?” said Sky King.

I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know how I was going to get out. The grunts grabbed the wounded man. He was unconscious, his fatigue blouse sopping with his blood. At that point I noticed the cameraman standing back filming the whole thing. The grunts were prone beside him, laying out cover fire toward the jungle. When I saw him aim the camera toward the cockpit, I sat a little straighter, and thought cool thoughts, in case those, too, might somehow be recorded. The crew chief called that we were ready, and the cameraman jumped on board.

In fact, there was no acceptable way to get out. There was not enough room to accelerate and bank back out through the slot. Some of the high branches hung over our rotor disk. By the book, we were trapped.

But I had seen rotor blades stand up to incredible stress before, so I decided to take the brute-force option. I picked up to the hover, turned the tail until it matched a slot in the overhanging branches, and then pulled the pitch. We climbed straight up twenty feet before the rotors smashed into cane-thick branches at nearly every point of their circle. It sounded like the rotors were being smashed to pieces. Seconds later we cleared the treetops and I nosed over, accelerating toward the airstrip five miles away.

“Someday you’re going to hit a branch that’s just a little too big,” Sky King said after a long quiet.

“What then?” I asked.

“Then your ship’s going to come apart, and you’re going to kill yourself and everybody around you.”

“Now that’s frightening,” I said. “I think maybe I oughta quit this job and go home.”

“This guy’s still alive, sir.” The crew chief’s voice buzzed in my headphones. “The cameraman says he’s the president of CBS News. Imagine that.”

“Ain’t that a kick,” Sky King said. “I guess he got bored with his nice safe desk job, the dumb shit.”

When we landed at the hospital tent at the 101st, the cameraman jumped out and filmed his boss being unloaded. He filmed Gary and me in the cockpit, then put the camera down and gave us a salute.

I nodded, brought the rotors up to operating, and leapt off the pad. As I flew back to retrieve the empty thermos containers we left with the grunts, I recalled the cameraman’s salute and felt slightly heroic.

When we shut down that night, Sky King showed me the creases and nicks in the rotors and scolded me. “Look at this. You’ve ruined them.”

“Naw. They’re fine. Just creased is all. No holes. Look at the bright side. The guy’s alive.”

“Yeah, but look at those rotors.”

During the second week of July, Operation Hawthorne began winding up. The patrols and reconnaissance companies were getting very little opposition in the battle zone. The NVA had slipped away.

“If they’re gone, and we killed two thousand of them, we won,” said Gary.

“What did we win? We don’t have any more real estate, no new villages are under American control, and it took everything we had to stop them,” I said.

“We won the battle. More of them got killed than us. It’s that simple.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that it takes so much equipment and men to beat the NVA? If we were equally equipped, we’d lose.”

“Yeah, but we aren’t equally equipped, and they lose. Besides that, I have a month to go and I don’t give a shit.”

“Unless they make you fly assaults during your last month.”

“If they do that, then I’ll give a shit.”

While the First Cav slipped unceremoniously back to An Khe, the 101st decided to end the operation with a parade. There would be no spectators except for the news reporters—unless you want to count the men in the parade as spectators, and of course they were.

Hundreds of bone-weary soldiers gathered at the artillery emplacements and began the five-mile march back to the airstrip. They marched, in parade step, along the dusty road. Insects buzzed in the saturated air. No virgins threw flowers. No old ladies cried. No strong men wept. They marched to their own muffled footsteps.

“I bet they’re pissed off,” said Gary, leaning against his door window, staring down at the column. “Especially when they look up and see all these empty helicopters flying around.”

We flew up and down the column in four V’s at 500 feet during the entire march. Supposedly we were generating excitement, or underscoring a memorable event. But according to a grunt, “We wanted to know why you fuckers wouldn’t come down and give us a fucking ride.”

When the head of the column finally reached the 101st section of the airstrip, the band played, the Hueys whooshed overhead, and the general beamed.

With all the troopers back in camp, noses were counted. Nearly twenty people were unaccounted for. It was presumed that these men were all dead. There would be a search operation to find their bodies in a few days.

The next day, while the missing moldered, the 101st had a party for the survivors. Their camp was within walking distance, but our aviator egos demanded that we fly. Af ter seeing too much death and injury, the survivors celebrated life. We had a boisterously good time to emphasize that we were still alive.

Business was so slow during the next few days that Gary and I decided to follow up a rumor. Other than the daily ice flight, and an occasional ass-and-trash, air operations in support of the 101st had stopped while loose ends were tied up.

The rumor was that our old First Cav company, the Preachers, was camped at Cheo Reo, a hundred miles south of us. So we went to Ringknocker and said, “Major, can we use a Huey to go visit some old friends of ours?” The question sounded stupid as I asked it. I wouldn’t have even thought about asking Farris or Shaker for a ship in the Cav. Helicopters were never, never used for personal business, unless maybe you were bringing in a load of ivory and you outranked everybody else.

“Visit friends?” Ringknocker stood in front of his tent dressed in shorts, on the way to the shower we had built. “What kind of friends do you have in Vietnam?”

“Our old company is camped down by Cheo Reo,” said Gary.

“Oh, those old friends.” Ringknocker seemed relieved. “Sure. Go ahead. But”—he smiled warmly—“be home before dark.”

And that was that. I didn’t even have to get the ice. Sky King agreed to take the trip for me. We had at our disposal a half-a-million-dollar helicopter, two hundred gallons of fuel, a full crew, and nothing to do but drive south to visit some friends. It was like getting the family car.

After lunch, we climbed up into the cumulus sky. Crossing Pleiku at 3000 feet, we changed course to 140 degrees for the flight to Cheo Reo.

“We’ll get some storms outta those clouds this afternoon,” said Gary.

I nodded. I was flying at the base of the clouds, changing course now and then to thread between the gaps. Below, the clouds cast dark shadows on the jungle. The river beneath us changed from gleaming sparkle to dull black, in patches.

“There she is.” I jutted my chin forward. After nearly an hour of flying, we saw our objective.

“Ah, good old Cheo Reo…. I remember it well.” Gary smiled. We’d camped here once with the Prospectors.

I let down and circled a field where I saw a bunch of Hueys parked.

“That’s them.” Gary keyed the mike to broadcast. “Preacher Control, this is Prospector Oh-four-two.”

No answer. Gary repeated the transmission. “Of course they don’t answer,” he said. “They wouldn’t be using the old frequency anymore.”

Meanwhile, I saw a group of men shielding their eyes with their hands, staring up at us. “It’s them all right. I can see Connors,” I said.

I rolled out of the orbit and let down. We landed next to one of the Preacher ships, killed the turbine, and stepped out.

“In-fucking-credible!” said Connors. “Don’t tell me. You were on your way to Saigon and you got lost, right?”

“Wrong. We’re on our way to Paris and we stopped for fuel,” I said. I saw some more men walking our way. One of them was Farris.

“Mason and Resler!” Farris said. “I don’t believe it. What the heck are you two doing down here all by yourselves?”

“Just visiting, Captain,” said Gary.

“Really? Just visiting?” Farris was trying to figure just how such frivolity was possible. His First Cav logic could not fathom it. “They let you… just visit people?‘

“That’s the way they do it on the outside, Captain,” I said.

Farris shook his head in wonderment. “Well, come on over and join us. The cook just made up a new batch of brew.”

All the way to the mess tent, Gary and I had our backs patted and hands shaken by friends we hadn’t seen for two months. At the mess tent, we also saw a whole bunch of new faces. As a matter of fact, almost all the faces we saw were new people. They were breaking up that old gang of mine. I saw Major Astor walking out to the flight line. His nemesis, John Hall, was no longer in the company. Banjo was still there. And so was Riker. Kaiser had gone to work for Air America. And that was it. A few old faces, some rumors, were all that was left of the original Preachers. The second shift was taking over. They were moving into An Khe, never realizing all the work that the original guys had done to make it the way it was. It was funny how the hardships that I hated the most became the core around which I built memories of camaraderie.

We sat around drinking coffee and telling war stories.

The Preachers had been overrun on an overnight laager. Four new pilots had been wounded. And a month before, a new pilot was killed in an assault.

We told them about the gunship that had landed with everybody unconscious (it had become the Phantom Gunship), about hauling the reluctant ARVNs to the fort, and how the NVA overran the 101st artillery position. But most of all we bragged about how much better we lived under the reasonable leadership of Ringknocker. Ice runs, beer parties, Vietnamese labor to build bunkers, and ambulances loaded with party girls: just a way of life with us, all right. As we listed these things, calculated to shock their Spartan sensibilities, Farris began to look uncomfortable.

“That guy would be hung in the Cav,” he said with a knowing nod.

“He gets the job done,” I said.

Farris nodded, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. If the Cav wasn’t doing it, it wasn’t getting done.

We had chow and stayed longer than we should have. The sun was low in the sky, leaving us an hour or so to get back. We said good-bye for the last time.

“Hang in there, short-timers,” said Connors.

“Yeah, it’s not long now,” I said.

“Don’t forget, we’ll have a party when all this is over,” Connors called as we walked away.

I called back, “Call us when you get to town.”

The last missions we flew at Dak To were to recover bodies. We dropped teams at various spots around the bombing zone, and waited for them literally to sniff out the bodies, which had become very ripe during the few days we had been packing up the camp.

We just had a party not too long ago, I said silently to a lumpy body bag. Someone tried to push down a knee that jutted awkwardly. The knee moved down but sprang back up when let go. The smell grew so strong that I gagged. You should have been there, I thought.

On July 17 we were back at our permanent camp at Phan Rang for a four-day rest. Next stop would be Tuy Hoa.

Gary and I had passed our thirty-day-to-go mark on the twelfth. Four replacement pilots had come to the company. We really believed that we would be staying back at the camp to fly admin flights for the battalion or the ARVNs.

“I’m sorry, but it just didn’t work out that way,” said Deacon. “Ringknocker had been to some pre-mission briefings and says we’re going to be very busy at Tuy Hoa. We have to support two units, one being Korean. We’re just going to need every pilot we have.”

I looked at Gary. Gary looked at me. We both looked at Deacon.

“So why has everybody been saying we’d be doing admin flights during our last month?” I said.

“We thought that that’s the way it would be.” Deacon looked unhappy. It was ruining his expectations, too. The “last month” program was fading to the dream that it probably had been all along. “I know that both of you are getting pretty jittery. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing and hang on. You’ll be home before you know it. If it helps, just remember the rest of us have more than six months to go.”

“Well, Deacon, I hope that when you get short, they give you some kind of a break. I’m telling you now that you’ll need one. I do,” I said.

“I know. I’m sorry.” Deacon left the tent.

Now I had to reset my clock. Every sunset had put me one day closer to getting out of here. My mental calendar had ticked off the moments until it believed that it had reached zero. Adding twenty-five more sunsets to the calendar was a real strain.

“Look,” I said to Doc DaVinci, “I’m tired. I can’t sleep at night. I have to take tranquilizers to function. I need a break. Can’t you do something?”

“I’d like to help you, Bob. But physically you’re fine.”

I glared at him. “Look at me. I weigh less than a hundred and twenty pounds. I look like shit!”

“Another three weeks of being skinny won’t hurt you.”

“It’s not that I’m skinny; it’s why I am skinny. I’m worn out. I’m frayed. I want to fly admin flights like hundreds of other pilots do every day.”

“Well, if you tell me you’re afraid to fly, I can ground you.”

“If I tell you I’m afraid to fly, you’ll ground me?”

“Yes.”

Why is he setting me up like this? I thought. Why does he want me to say that I’m afraid? Why can’t he just use his professional authority and put a medical restriction on me?

“I can’t say that. I’m not afraid to fly, I just don’t think I or Gary or any short-timer should have to fly combat assaults anymore. We have each flown more than a thousand missions already. Isn’t that enough? Why couldn’t they bring up a couple of Saigon warriors to take our place? They could use the experience, and Gary and I could finish off our tours flying VIPs around or something.”

“I told you what I have to do.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Well, just don’t take the tranquilizers during the day,” said Da Vinci. That was the end of the conversation.

Gary and I sat at a table watching the Prospectors whoop it up at the party that night. Neither of us could join in. The laughing skull was no longer funny.

We had camped on the beach at Tuy Hoa for one day when a storm struck. Seventy-mile-an-hour winds blew clouds of sand in horizontal sheets. Tents began to collapse. Hueys approaching along the beach had to fly sideways. The only direction their noses could point in was into the wind.

Gary, Stoopy, and I had pitched our tent a quarter of a mile nearer the ocean than the headquarters tent. We got back from a mission in time to see Stoopy wrestling with the flapping canvas. Blankets, mosquito netting, and clothes were rolling across the dunes like tumbleweed.

“Jesus Christ, Stoopy. Why did you let the tent collapse?” yelled Gary.

“This is just like a desert storm you see in the movies.” Stoopy grinned, shoveling sand into what he believed would be a protective berm.

“Shit,” I said, “let’s get this fucker nailed down.”

“The wind keeps pulling the tent pegs out,” said Stoopy.

“So we make dead men,” I shouted in the wind.

“What the hell are you talking about?” yelled Gary. He had wrapped a towel around his neck and head to keep the sand out.

“A dead man is something you tie a rope to and bury,”

I said, blinking. “We can tie the ropes to sandbags and then bury them.”

“All right, let’s do it.” Stoopy’s shout barely rose above the wind.

Stoopy filled sandbags while Gary and I went around the tent tying them to the ropes and burying them. When we finished, the tent was concave on the windward side; it shook, but it held. We ducked inside to try to get the sand off our gear. The salty sand stuck to everything. My carbine gritted when I worked the bolt. I watched Gary slapping his cot with a towel, trying to dust about ten pounds of sand away. Stoopy lay on his cot, on a mixed pile of clothes, blankets, and sand, eating another candy bar.

“Stoopy, why don’t you get that fucking sand off your stuff?” I said.

“It’ll just get sandy again.”

I shook my head in disgust.

“It will. I’ll clean it up before I go to sleep tonight.”

“You’re a slob, Stoopy,” said Gary.

“So?” said Stoopy. “Somebody has to do it.”

Gary and I laughed. Stoopy’s grin showed the chocolate stains on his teeth.

With two weeks to go, I had very little tolerance for a person like Stoopy. But I realized that his intentions were good. He was friendly; he really wanted to be a good pilot; he wanted the Americans to win the war; and he flew into the assaults without showing fear.

The problem was that he was a terrible pilot (“professional copilot,” we called them); he was overweight; he was a slob; he was juvenile; and he was downright dangerous.

At Dak To, he had unloaded a parked flare ship by throwing the flares out the door. Unfortunately, the flare canisters were still attached by lines from their fuses to the deck. Normally this allowed them to ignite automatically as they were pushed out at 2000 or 3000 feet. But since Stoopy was unloading the ship on the ground, he was soon surrounded by a giant cloud of white smoke and blinding magnesium flames. Strangely, he was not hurt. He was also famous among us for not being able to keep himself in his formation slot. In just the few months he’d been with the Prospectors, he’d become known as the “smiling menace.”

Naturally, when battalion requested that Ringknocker send his best pilot to Saigon to work for the VIPs, Ringknocker sent Stoopy. All the pilots had to vote for the best pilot, and he would be sent to Saigon. At the meeting Ringknocker told us the rules: Vote for Stoopy. “We have a terrible shortage of pilots already, so battalion gets what I can afford,” said Ringknocker. “Stoopy Stoddard is what I can afford. You gentlemen will vote for Stoopy and then we can get back to work.”

When I had first dealt with the Koreans at Bong Son valley, I was impressed by their zeal. When we drove by the Korean bridge guards, they jumped to attention with a shout. When we were mortared, the Koreans were the ones who came back to the camp carrying VC heads and the mortar tube. From the first time I saw them, I thought we’d be better off just giving the Koreans the country, if they could take it. They probably would’ve.

At Tu^y Hoa, we flew missions for the Koreans. At the pickup point, Gary and I watched five or six Korean rangers load our ship with food and ammo in less than a minute. Very few Koreans spoke English, so when the ship was loaded, a young soldier ran out to us and gave us a slip of paper with a list of coordinates written on it. The soldier saluted and left. We were to fly to these places, and they would know what to do.

At the first stop, the ship was barely on the ground when a whole team of Koreans unloaded their portion of the load in seconds. No words were spoken. At the next stop, the same thing happened. And the next. By eleven o‘clock in the morning, we had finished a resupply mission that would have taken us all day had we been resupplying Americans.

All the Korean ROKs were hand-picked, highly trained volunteers. They were dedicated professionals who took the job seriously, and because they were performing under the watchful eyes of their original teachers, they were out to prove their abilities. They did.

We flew almost every day. The missions were numerous, but I don’t recall them very well. I was preoccupied. Gary had received his orders to leave Vietnam, but I hadn’t. I sent letters to Patience to contact the Pentagon. I checked daily with our admin section. I believed that it was possible for the army to forget that I was even there.

On a rare day off, I dragged a parachute canopy (that Gary and I had scrounged from a treetop) to the shore. I spread it out so that it made a circle of soft nylon fifty feet across. Carrying a towel, I walked to the center of the chute and lay down to sunbathe. I wanted to look tropical for Patience. I was trying to be healthy. I had even stopped smoking again, on the chance that God would be moved to spare me.

I heard someone clumping along the boards that led back up to the tent areas. My eyes were closed while the sun baked me.

“Hey, Mason, what are you doing?”

I looked up. “Sunbathing, sir.”

Ringknocker grinned and began to step on my giant beach blanket. “I had something—”

“Don’t walk on this,” I quickly interrupted as Ringknocker put his foot on the parachute.

“What?” Ringknocker stopped and stepped back.

“Don’t walk on this. This is my beach blanket. People don’t walk on other people’s beach blankets,” I said seriously.

Ringknocker first showed a smile. But that faded to concern as he saw that I wasn’t kidding.

“You’re serious?”

“Yes.”

Ringknocker nodded sadly and walked back up the board path.

Behind him I saw the maintenance ship take off carrying a damaged rotor blade attached to the sling hook. Maj. Steve Richards, the maintenance officer, had been hitching the rotor blade to his ship’s cargo hook to carry it out to sea and drop it. He did nothing more dangerous in this war than to check out freshly repaired helicopters. When the blade had been attached to the hook, Richards asked if anyone wanted to go for a little ride. Five men, mostly mechanics, jumped on board.

As the ship took off, it became obvious to the men on the ground that carrying a rotor blade dangling vertically beneath the ship was not going to work. It swung wildly under the ship as Richards gained speed. The maintenance sergeant ran after the ship, yelling, “Major Richards! Stop! Stop! The blade is swinging!”

I saw the blade whipping around under the ship at 300 feet. Apparently Richards could not tell that the blade was gyrating under him. Before he reached the water, the blade slashed up behind the ship, knocking off a section of the tail rotors. Richards flared back, trying to slow the ship, but it was no use. As he flared, the blade knifed forward under the ship and swept up and hit his main rotor. The damaged main rotor flew off. Time seemed to stop, and I saw the ship nose down, invert, and then disappear behind some tents and smash onto the beach. It fell like an anvil. There was a brief moment of quiet after the crash and then a whoosh. The flattened Huey burst into flames. Orange flames first, as the fuel burned, then bright-white flames as the metal ignited. Helicopters contain a lot of magnesium.

People ran toward the ship, only to be driven back by the fire.

Major Richards, his crew chief, his gunner, and three mechanics were incinerated. I was still alone on my precious beach blanket. I cried.

That evening, on the beach, six flight helmets were placed on stakes in a line. The chaplain conducted the service.

My one comfort in the hell of waiting was that I had a companion. Gary and I flew together always. Then, with five days to go on our tours, Gary left for Phan Rang.

“Don’t worry, Bob. They’ll get your orders.”

“I know.”

“Really, it’s just a minor fuck-up. Ringknocker’s going to tell you tomorrow or the next day that you can leave. Really.”

“I know. I’m okay.”

“So, I’ll see you back in Phan Rang in a day or two. Okay?”

“Of course. A day or two. See you soon.”

“Good-bye.”

“ ‘Bye.”

Gary ran out to the ship going back to our main base. After a few days of out-processing, he’d be in Saigon, getting on a big bird for the States.

Ops assigned me to fly with a new pilot, Lieutenant Fisher, the next oay.

Fisher and I flew to a place in the jungles west of Tuy Hoa to pick up a reconnaissance squad. When we flew to the coordinates given us, it was an almost circular funnel of a valley. The squad was at the bottom of the giant funnel. They told us on the radio that they were getting occasional sniper fire and that we should be careful in the approach. I took the opportunity to show Fisher how to get down to the bottom of this place without getting shot.

I flew toward the funnel at 80 or 90 knots, heading on a tangent to the rim of the funnel.

“I’m gonna keep us low level all the way to the bottom,” I said.

Fisher nodded from the right side of the cockpit. This was his first mission in-country. For a second I saw myself there, wide-eyed, riding with Leese on that low-level run in Happy Valley. I had been overwhelmed by the speed at which things happened, and I’m sure that Fisher was experiencing the same feeling.

As I crossed the rim, I banked hard, putting the ship level with the incline. “If we stay close to the treetops and keep moving fast, they won’t get us.”

We spiraled down the funnel. The squad called and said that they heard many shots. “Don’t worry,” I said to Fisher. “They’re shooting blind.”

There was a stand of trees at the bottom that would force me either to pull away from the tree cover or to go through the trees. Since the whole point of this approach was to maintain cover, I chose to go through the trees. Near the end of the spiraling ride, I leveled the ship and rushed for the stand of trees. The squad was behind them. As I leveled, I had also dropped below the trees out of sight of the squad. Because we didn’t come over the top or to the side, the squad assumed that we had crashed. When they called us, I was busting through the trees. I had swerved off to one side of the stand and then swung back in fast. This allowed me to bank very sharply so that the Huey and its big rotor disk squeezed between two tall trees thirty feet apart. After hurdling through the trees, I flared the ship quickly to make the landing. The radio operator who had been asking where we were said, “Oh.” We landed right in front of the squad.

As the team quickly loaded, I noticed muzzle flashes ahead of us. The team leader pointed all around, at places he had seen shots fired. We were right on time. The squad was surrounded, and the VC were moving down the funnel to get them. Altogether there were eight grunts, not a giant load at sea level but enough that climbing out of this place was going to be slow. “I’m going to accelerate across this field as fast as I can, and then we’ll do a cyclic climb up the side of that hill.” I hovered for a second, then nosed over hard, lumbering off across the field. I kept the ship at 4 or 5 feet until we reached 90 knots. Then I pulled the cyclic back and the ship swooped up. The climb was very fast at first because we were using the accumulated energy from the acceleration run. As we neared the top of the funnel, however, we slowed to a grinding crawl. I knew that this was when they would be shooting in front of us, taking a lead, as a hunter does with a duck. So when the ship was straining hard, with very little forward velocity, I did an abrupt pedal turn at the top of the climb and headed back in the opposite direction. That took everybody by surprise, and I heard shouts from the back. Fisher involuntarily reached for the controls, but stopped himself. A few seconds later we were beyond the ridge, heading back to the beach.

“Beautiful!” said Fisher. He was grinning.

“Just remember, keep yourself low when there are trees, keep moving as fast as you can, and never use the same route twice.” I grinned as I said that Leese had told me the same thing a year ago.

When I was flying, my life was in my own hands. When I was back at the camp, the army was in control of my destiny. And the army still hadn’t found my orders

“This is a hot one,” said the operations officer, Major Ramon. Every pilot in the Prospectors was at the briefing. The major droned on with battle plans, frequencies, ship numbers, crew assignments, and suspected enemy locations. It was so much noise to me. My hand was writing information down on my pad, but my mind was in shock. Two days to go, said my mind. Two fucking days to go and I’m going on a hot one. “We will make a total of three lifts this morning,” said the major. Three chances. Step right up. Three, count them, three Huey rides in a combat assault absolutely free. Win yourself a body bag. Become a hometown hero. Become a memory early in your life. “Okay, you’ve got everything you’ll need. Let’s go.”

I walked across the quarter mile of sand with Fisher. I kept checking my gear, like a novice. Pistol, flak vest, maps, chest protector. Oh, yeah, the chest protector is in the ship. Helmet. Courage. Where is my courage? Oh, yeah, my courage is in the ship.

“Lose something?” asked Fisher. He had been watching me check myself, patting my pockets and gear.

“No, I’ve got everything.”

“This is really exciting,” said Fisher.

“Yes. It’s very exciting.” You dumb shit. I hated Fisher when he said that. Exciting? Is that like excitement at the old football game? It’s exciting to get killed? Fool. Wait a few months and then tell me it’s exciting.

Fisher climbed up to the rotor head, and I checked the air frame. As I opened the radio hatch at the nose, an orderly ran up to me and said, “They want you back at ops, sir.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know, sir. Major Ramon told me to tell you they have something for you at ops.”

“Right.” I looked up at Fisher. “I’ll be right back.” Fisher nodded.

I pushed the flap aside and walked into the ops tent. Ramon wasn’t there. “Where’s Major Ramon?” I asked the sergeant.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Well, what did they want me for?”

“Who wanted you, sir?”

“Ramon, I thought. I was just told that somebody had something for me here, and I’m here. Is this some kind of joke?”

“I don’t know, sir. I don’t know anything about it.”

I heard the turbines winding up to shrills behind me. The Prospectors were cranking up. I turned and left. If I didn’t hurry, I’d hold up the mission. I ran across the sand. A hundred yards away the lead ship took off. What the fuck. I waved. “Hey, wait. There’s only one pilot in my ship!” I ran faster. Then the whole flight took off. I stood in the sand, watching the flight cruise west, completely confused. A Jeep I hadn’t noticed before drove back from the flight line. The driver stopped next to me. “Want a ride, sir?” The driver was the orderly that had come with the message. All my flight gear was in the Jeep. I got in.

“What the fuck is going on? Where’s Major Ramon?”

“Major Ramon is flying your ship, sir.”

I wasn’t the only one who thought I needed a break.

The next day, August 10, I was called into the operations tent and handed orders. I was to proceed to Saigon to catch an eleven o‘clock morning flight on the fourteenth. I was exhilarated.

That afternoon, I was flying a Huey back to Phan Rang. The ship was due for a major overhaul, and so was I. I flew along the coast and went through a notch in a tall hill next to the ocean. As we crossed the ridge, the crew chief, a new guy, called me. “Sir, we’re being shot at from that hill. Shall we engage?”

Shall we engage? I couldn’t believe what I heard. Shall we engage?

“Not today, Sergeant.” I turned to Staglioni, the copilot, and grinned. “Not today.” I laughed so hard that I cried.

Sitting in the soft airline seat, I savored the air-conditioned crispness of the air and breathed in the scents of the passing stewardesses. I had a grin on my face that wouldn’t quit. I was the Cheshire cat. The man who sat next to me was Ken Klayman, a guy I had met on the Croatan. We were both aboard a chartered Pan American 707 going to the land of the big PX. We were no longer in-country.

“I suppose now we could say we’re out-country?”

“Yes. Definitely out-country,” said Klayman.

“It seems like a dream.”

“Yeah: It is nice to wake up from a bad one. And just when you thought they had you.”

Since I had left Phan Rang, every time I checked the time I remembered that the maid had stolen my watch. The maid who neatly arranged my gear for me, who’d never steal a thing—until the day you left. I had considered the watch a charm.

It had been lifted once before—the first night I tried out the new shower we’d built in the Preachers. I hung it on a nail, took the shower, and it was gone.

“I’ll get it for you,” Rubenski had said.

“You know who took it?”

“Not yet. But don’t worry. I’ll find the fuck. Stole your grandfather’s watch. What slime.”

An hour later Rubenski walked into my tent carrying the watch. “Here ya go, sir. And don’t worry; it won’t happen again,” Rubenski said.

“Hey. Thanks a lot. You’re amazing.”

“It was nothing,” he said. “Just remember, Lake Tahoe…”

Klayman and I reverted to early adolescence during the flight back. Neither of us could sleep during the twenty-hour trip. Instead we cracked jokes and pretended we were flying the plane. The pilots we played didn’t know much. “Compass? What’s that?” “Holding pattern? Are you crazy?” “I can’t put the gear down. We’re too close to the rooftops.”

We landed at the Philippines and then headed for Hawaii. At Honolulu, we were invited to get off the plane to stretch our legs, buy gifts, and such. Klayman told me to pick up a small chess set so we could play on the long nonstop flight to Fort Dix, New Jersey.

I found a small traveling set at one of the airport gift shops. I also grabbed a Newsweek and went to the counter to pay. The clerk, a young woman, took my money and asked if I was returning from Vietnam. I said yes, proudly. She suddenly glared at me and said, “Murderer.” I stared at her for a long minute, feeling confused. Then I smiled. I realized that she was talking about someone else.