Chickenhawk: Back in the World - Life After Vietnam

EPILOGUE

I’d given quite a few talks at universities, been included in a BBC television program on helicopters; but I’d never given a talk to my peers, the pilots who flew in Vietnam, the ones I wrote about.

I am a member of the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association, the VHPA, which now has over six thousand members. I went to my first reunion at their annual meeting in Washington, D.C., in 1987.

Almost no one in the association mentioned my felonious past except one former captain who said he hoped I’d learned my lesson. I said that I had: get a faster boat. He didn’t like that. There were, in fact, several members who thought that, though my book was good, I was still a drug smuggler. I was really surprised when Dave Owens, the president of the VHPA, invited me to be a speaker at the next reunion, in Texas.

On Friday, July 1, 1988, Patience and I flew to Fort Worth and met Jerry Towler and his wife, Martie, at the hotel where the reunion was being held. The next day five hundred of us were going to be bused to Mineral Wells, where we’d all gone to flight school. They said the whole town was going to throw us a party.

That night, Jay Elliott, a member of the board of directors, told me that my speech was scheduled for the big luncheon Sunday. He also said, “There might be an incident, Bob.”

“Incident? Like what?”

“Some of the guys gave us a bunch of flak about having you give a speech. You know, your smuggling thing. They said they’ll get up and leave as a group when you’re speaking.”

“So why the hell did you and Owens invite me?” I asked.

“Because I think you did a hell of a job with Chickenhawk. You made a mistake, I’m sure you know that. I just wanted you to know not everybody agrees with us so it wouldn’t take you by surprise.”

Saturday morning we loaded up in twelve buses and drove the fifty miles to Mineral Wells. The buses drove through the main gate of the former flight school. The two helicopters were gone; only their pedestals remained. Fort Wolters, former home of the U.S. Army Primary Helicopter School, was now an industrial park.

The buses parked in the drill field where we used to practice marching for endless hours. The barracks, long two-story brick buildings, were empty, abandoned on a weedy field. We got out and wandered around the buildings, remembering. You could almost hear the shouts that used to echo in the yards, “Give me twenty, candidate.” “You call that a clean belt buckle, candidate?”

Jerry and I went into a barracks, walked down a hallway, trying to find our old rooms. The building was dusty, spooky, quiet. It had once bustled with eager young men determined to become pilots. We used to spit-shine our floors and wax the sinks. We used to sit up nights in the latrines, studying for the next written test. We braced to attention and slammed against the walls when an upperclassman or, God forbid, an actual TAC officer met us in the hallways. The place never rested. Now our footsteps echoed in the emptiness.

Outside, tumbleweed drifted between the barracks.

As promised, the town gave us a party. They’d reopened the old mess hall. They served barbecue and beer, all the beer we could drink.

After lunch, we sat through a couple of hours of speeches given by former flight school instructors and the mayor, and saw a movie describing the opportunities of starting a business in the industrial park.

When a speaker asked someone to stand up at the back of the audience, the man in front of me turned around. It was Woody Woodruff. I called him Decker in Chickenhawk. He and Captain Phillips (Morris in the book) were shot down when Phillips, Woody’s best friend, was shot through the heart during an assault landing in Happy Valley. I’d gotten caught in the same ambush, gotten shot down, but didn’t get a scratch.

“Mason!” Woody said, beaming.

“Woody!”

Jerry, sitting beside me, said the same thing. We hadn’t seen each other since Vietnam. After the meeting, we traded addresses with Woody and got back on the buses for a tour of Mineral Wells before heading back to Fort Worth.

The buses looped around this small Texas town and our guide, a local volunteer, pointed out the new library and showed us that the old hotel was closed. In the country outside of town he pointed at some buffalo grazing in a field, said ranching buffalo was a burgeoning industry in this part of Texas. The truth was, when the flight school closed, Mineral Wells shriveled up and became the small central Texas town it had been before the Army arrived in the fifties.

The train of buses stopped at the Holiday Inn on the way out of town. Here, two rotor blades were set up as an arch at the entrance to the pool. In the days after Jerry and I graduated, the new pilots were thrown into this pool when they first soloed, not in the cattle ponds like we’d been. More beer was available, as much as you could drink. Soon people were throwing one another into the pool. After a couple hours of play, the pilots, many dripping wet, boarded the buses for the trip back to the city.

When one of the other buses passed us on the highway, everybody in our bus booed and demanded the driver catch them. Who knows why? The driver ignored us. Finally one of the pilots walked up to the front of the bus and held out fifty dollars saying, “You beat these other assholes back to town and you get this.”

The driver sped up and the race was on.

One bus passed us on a downhill run, and we saw two forty-year-old men with their naked butts pressed up against the windows. Everybody was laughing. Patience and Martie were giggling. One guy yelled “Pressed ham!” Martie yelled “I’m in love!” It was crazy, it was juvenile, it was fun.

The pilots raced and mooned each other all the way to Fort Worth, prompting calls to the police from offended motorists. The police called the hotel and were informed by the manager, “That’s impossible. These men are all over forty!”

When we got back to the hotel, the drivers were all given their prizes, for being good sports and for giving it their best.

I woke up early Sunday morning wondering what I was going to say in the speech. I’d given talks at universities, but those were usually about Vietnam and helicopters in combat. What could I tell these guys about that? Also, I knew there was going to be some kind of demonstration.

I decided to write a short story about our trip to Mineral Wells. I spent a couple of hours at it and it seemed like it would probably work, though I suspect you would have had to have been there to appreciate it. I still didn’t know how I was going to handle the protesters.

Jerry and Martie Towler and Patience and I sat at a table near the dais. Dave Owens, who was sitting with us, leaned over and said, “You know what you’re going to say?”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

“Bob, I want you to do me a favor and not get mad.”

“What’s that, Dave?”

“Show me your notes when you come up to the dais, just a glance.”

“What for?”

“Because that was one of the conditions for you speaking here. They said I had to see your notes before you speak.”

“That’s bullshit, Dave.”

“I know. I won’t read them. Hold them up when you walk by me. That’s looking at them, isn’t it?”

I laughed. “Sure, okay.”

Dave went to the podium, made a few brief announcements, and then introduced me.

As we passed each other on the steps, I held my notes out to Dave, who looked at them and then out at the audience. He nodded and said, “Thanks, Bob. Give’m hell.”

I turned on my pocket tape recorder, put my notes, my story, on the podium. There were over a thousand people in the room. The applause was thunderous. I waited.

I said:

“I thank you for inviting me to be your speaker today. I feel kind of odd about that. I’m a member of the organization; I’m not from outside.

“I’m here because I wrote a book about what I, and many of us, did in Vietnam, and subsequently gained some celebrity because of it.

“I feel odd about that, too, because almost anybody here could have written Chickenhawk. Many of you certainly experienced more harrowing adventures than I did. But I’m the one who wrote the book.” I paused. “I’m the one that’s getting the recognition,” I said quietly. I looked across the audience.

“I’m the one who gets the letters.”

“I get letters from grunts thanking me for having been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam.

“They thank me for the pilot who pulled them out of a hot LZ and saved their lives.

“They thank me for the pilot who got the Huey in, at night, without lights, under fire, bringing in ammunition and supplies that saved their unit.

“They thank me for the things we all did in Vietnam.

“Being, I suppose, the more well-known of the Vietnam pilots here, the one who gets the mail, the one who gets the attention we all deserve, I hereby pass that thanks on to you.” I stood back, held up my arms, and said, “You deserve it. Give yourself a hand.”

There was much applause. I scanned the room. I saw smiles. I saw tears. Nobody got up to walk out.

I then read them the story I’d written, “The Race,” which, as I had hoped, met with success. Racing buses filled with mooning forty-year-olds is just naturally funny, especially to the participants. I brought the house down.

I talked about some early experiences I’d had as an adolescent pilot trying to teach myself to fly and got a lot of laughs.

Then I faced the issue of my controversy.

“A situation that irks some of my fellows here, and is an issue of curiosity for others, is, what did happen at the end of the book?

“For those of you who haven’t read Chickenhawk, I say, at the end of the epilogue, that I had been arrested for smuggling marijuana and I was appealing the conviction. That sounds pretty serious. It was. In fact, I lost the appeal. I went to jail.”

It was quiet in the auditorium. Someone coughed.

I launched into a quick-paced summation of selling the book and going to jail. I told them what it was like being sent to Eglin. I told them about the white lines that marked the boundaries, that it was a prison for wimps, that if you had to go to prison, Eglin was the place to go. I made Eglin seem like a lark. I made them laugh.

I paused.

“But it was still prison. I couldn’t leave.

“When my book became a best-seller, it didn’t seem real. Because, while I was experiencing the highest moment of life, I was also experiencing the lowest moment of my life. I was not proud of what I’d done or for going to prison. I was humiliated and embarrassed. Yet, at the same time, I was experiencing this wonderful success. It was a tough mixture of emotions for me.

“But it’s over now, or nearly so. For those of you who think I haven’t paid enough for what I did, I’m still on parole. As a matter of fact, I’m here courtesy of the U.S. Parole Commission. It’s been seven years since I committed my crime. I’ll be off parole this December. I’m looking forward to that.”

I made Jerry Towler stand up, introduced him as my flying partner and the Resler in the book.

When I finished, the applause was astounding.

I wasn’t able to walk anywhere for the rest of the reunion without someone coming up and telling me I was okay. I needed that.

In August 1989, David Hunt and Kevin Bowen of the William Joiner Center at the University of Massachusetts (which is trying to get decent medical care to the Vietnamese) invited me to come to Boston to meet a group of Vietnamese writers—former Viet Cong and North Vietnamese regulars, VC and NVA, as they were known to me. Philip Caputo, Tim O’Brien, and other American writers of the Vietnam War were also coming. They wanted to know if I’d give a reading with Tim O’Brien. I agreed.

Patience and I flew to Boston. During the drive from the airport, David Hunt told us that their public meeting with the Vietnamese the day before had ended in disaster. South Vietnamese refugees broke up the meeting, injured some of the guests. Now, he explained, they were holding the rest of the conference at Kevin Bowen’s home in the Dorchester section of Boston.

We climbed the stairs up to the attic of the three-story house where the meeting of American and Vietnamese writers had already started. Three Vietnamese sat together on a couch at the front of the room: Le Luu, who wrote a Vietnamese best-seller, The Humorless Colonel; Nguyen Khai, a writer and the deputy general secretary of Vietnam’s Writers Union; and Nguyen Quang Sang, who’d written a novel, four short-story collections, and produced several films about the war. About ten people sat facing them in folding chairs, five of them writers: novelists Philip Caputo, Wayne Karlin, Tim O’Brien, and two poets, Larry Rottman and Bruce Weigl. They stopped talking for a second when Patience and I walked in, and then continued after we sat down.

In this first meeting, the discussion was about the war as seen by the different sides. It was an opportunity to ask questions of your former enemies. An American asked, “What did you think of the American troops’ fighting ability?”

Le Luu, the most popular novelist in Vietnam, shook his head and smiled. “Generally,” he said through an interpreter, “they weren’t very good fighters.”

I felt myself getting excited; I had wondered how I’d react. I had been against us being in Vietnam, but then, these guys had killed some of my friends. I had never seen a living North Vietnamese regular, and very few living Viet Cong. One of them might have been the guy who shot me down. It was an eerie feeling to face former enemies.

Philip Caputo, a former Marine lieutenant, replied, “You’re saying we were bad fighters?” Caputo looked pissed off.

The interpreter, a young man who wasn’t born until after the war, shrugged, translated. Nguyen Khai, the leader and diplomat among the Vietnamese contingent, smiled nervously. There was great pressure in Vietnam to regain normal relations with the United States. I think he sensed the tenseness in the air.

“Not bad in the sense that you were cowardly or unprofessional,” Khai answered. “You were simply not as well motivated as were we. We, after all, were defending our country—”

Sang broke in, his voice deep, his smile wide. “When you did not have your fighters and helicopters and B-52s to support you, you were easy to beat.”

Caputo answered grimly, “I saw plenty of firefights where we took you one on one, no outside support, and we won.”

Sang shrugged. “Certainly there were exceptions. I was speaking in general. You did win some battles; some, like the Tet Offensive of 1968, were devastating for us. But you must admit, we did win the war.”

I said, “I don’t see it that way. You didn’t win the war; we stopped fighting it. There’s a difference.”

“Not if you realize that it was our sustained effort against an overwhelming force that convinced you to stop fighting,” Sang replied. “Of course, you could have blown us back…” the interpreter paused, getting an idiom right, “back to the Stone Age, I think you say; but your hearts weren’t in it.” Sang smiled and added, “For which I am eternally grateful.”

The whole group laughed. Kevin Bowen took the opportunity of the break in mood to suggest we stop for a while.

We went downstairs for coffee and beer on Bowen’s back porch. Hunt told Sang I was a former helicopter pilot, and he came over to me with the interpreter, who introduced himself as Ha Huy Thong. Sang spoke. Thong said, “You flew the Huey?”

“Yes. First Cav Division.”

Sang smiled warmly. “Yes. The famous First Cavalry. I used to shoot you down.”

“Yes,” I said. “You were pretty good at it. But we still got the job done.”

Sang nodded. “Yes. Many brave young pilots died, I am afraid.”

The interpreter, Thong, said that Nguyen Sang had made a movie about the American helicopter pilots and wanted to do another. He said that Sang had gotten a lot of the details of his first film wrong. He wanted to know if I’d be willing to be interviewed by Sang the following day. I agreed.

Sang wanted to know if he could have his picture taken with me. We stood side by side on the porch, grinning at the camera. I was at least a foot taller than this wiry, wily Viet Cong. While one of the Vietnamese fiddled with his camera, Sang said something. Thong said, “Sang wants to show his friends back home the kind of people he was shooting down.”

I turned to Sang and shook my head. This sturdy little man, my former enemy, in the middle of his former enemy’s country, on the other side of the planet, was bragging about killing us. You had to respect this guy.

During the break, I met the other American writers. I told Philip Caputo that A Rumor of War was partly responsible for me writing my book. He said he liked Chickenhawk. I told Tim O’Brien how much his first book, If I Die in a Combat Zone, influenced me, made me realize I, too, had something to say. I also told him I really enjoyed Going After Cacciatio. He was used to that, having won the National Book Award for it.

After the break, we went back to the attic and talked about the writing business. The Vietnamese were fascinated by the fact that American writers seemed to make so much money. They wanted to know how much money we made on our books. Caputo and O’Brien weren’t at this meeting, so I volunteered that I had made nearly a half million dollars so far on my book. They had the interpreter repeat this several times to make sure they were hearing right. I understood what the problem was when Le Luu, the author of the number-one bestselling novel in Vietnam, said that he had made enough money on his book to buy a new German bicycle. I felt embarrassed.

As we were leaving, Sang reminded me about our interview the next day. He was starving for authentic details from the other side. I shrugged. “I’ll be here.”

When I got to Kevin Bowen’s house the next morning, the Vietnamese were having a kind of soup they called pho for breakfast. While they slurped bowls of noodles and fish, I sat and drank coffee with the interpreter, Thong, whom I found fascinating. He was not a former enemy; he was not a threat to me. He was twenty-three, educated entirely in Vietnam. His English was beautiful. I asked him how he liked America. He said he wasn’t allowed to leave New York City (this trip was a special exception), where the Vietnamese mission was located, but he liked the city, had American friends there.

Bowen said that he had to go to the university, and left. In a few minutes I realized that there was no one in the house except me and two Vietnamese: Ha Huy Thong, the interpreter from Hanoi, and Nguyen Quang Sang, the tunnel-rat Viet Cong who’d shot down a lot of helicopters.

We sat at Bowen’s kitchen table. The table was wood, old, pleasantly worn. Sang sat across from me and switched on his Sony tape recorder, flipped open a notebook. Thong sat between us.

Thong told me that Sang had gotten a lot of criticism of his movie when some Americans had seen it. For one thing, Thong said, Sang showed the American pilots returning home to their base and partying with whiskey drunk from champagne glasses. I laughed.

Sang looked at me seriously. I could see he was studying me, sizing me up. I suppose he was struck by our polarities as much as I. He spoke. Though what he said was incomprehensible to me, his voice was deep, authoritative. This was a warrior who, with others like him, had fought the mightiest country on earth and survived. Thong said, “How many helicopters were in your unit?”

I looked at Sang. He waited for the answer, pencil poised over a notepad. I looked up at the kitchen window and back at Sang. Morning light filtered across the old table. The ridges showing on the rustic, worn wood, the smell of Vietnamese food, the confident look on Sang’s face made me feel suddenly queer. It was like I’d been shot down, captured.

Name, rank, and serial number. That’s what came to mind. That’s crazy, I thought. It’s all public information now. I said, “Our battalion had four companies of about twenty ships each.”

Sang nodded, made a note.

“You called them ‘ships’?”

“Yes. It’s a general word for a craft, air or sea.”

Sang nodded. “And how many aviation battalions were in the First Cavalry?”

“We had two assault helicopter battalions of Hueys, a battalion of heavy-lift Chinook helicopters, and an independent group, the Ninth Air Cav. Altogether, the Cav had about four hundred helicopters.”

Sang nodded, scribbled. “What kind of food did you eat?”

“C-rations, mostly,” I said.

“The pilots did not eat better at their home bases?”

“Some did. We didn’t. The First Cavalry lived in the field. At our base at An Khe we were served canned food called B-rations.”

Sang nodded, spoke. Thong said, “He said he was lucky to get a fish head with his rice.”

Sang’s confidence, and now his professed Spartanism, irked me. “How many villagers did he kill to get the rice?”

Thong looked at me intently, shrugged, turned to Sang, and spoke. Sang’s face darkened. He shook his head and spoke, his voice angry.

Thong shrugged. “He says he never killed his own people. Only you.”

“Oh. The other Viet Cong killed the villagers,” I said.

Thong answered without translating. “Yes. It was unfortunate.”

That night, I shared billing with Wayne Karlin and Tim O’Brien at the Boston Public Library. Karlin read from Lost Armies; I read a few passages from Chickenhawk, all having to do with the Vietnamese. O’Brien read outtakes from his forthcoming book, The Things They Carried.

It didn’t occur to me until later that night, in bed, that people must consider me to be an important writer, to have invited me to that reading. Imagine that.

The next day, David Hunt asked me if I’d return to Vietnam with the other writers, a reciprocal meeting with the Vietnamese writers. I said I would.

My mother was in the hospital while I wrote most of this book.

On August 29, 1990, Patience and Jack and I, along with my sister, Susan; her husband, Bruce; my nephew, Sean; and my niece, Bevan, took a boat out into the Gulf of Mexico and sprinkled her ashes on the waves. My father refused to come. None of her brothers or sisters attended or even came to see her in the hospital. There was no love in her family, a sad thing to see.

We drank a toast of dry martinis, a drink she asked for as she lay dying, unable to drink anything. I tossed a full glass, with olive, into the water for her.

My mother, despite having a heart condition most of her life, was an energetic woman. She grew up believing the woman’s place was in the home, but had worked as a grocery checkout clerk when we first moved to Florida in 1945. Once, when my parents were struggling to make ends meet, she suggested that she go to school and become a nurse, but my father refused to allow it. He believed he should be able to provide for us himself. From 1951 to 1958, my mother did physical work on the chicken farm my dad started west of Delray Beach. We had a hundred thousand chickens on this farm, and we—my mother and father, my sister and I—did most of the work. After my dad sold the farm in 1958, moved us to Delray Beach, and became a real-estate broker, they were sufficiently well off that she could become the ideal of her culture—the wife of a successful businessman. She fulfilled her role by keeping our house as neat as a museum display and giving a cocktail party almost every Friday night.

At the age of sixty-four, a disease called lupus, and the drugs used to treat it, destroyed one of her hip joints. After spending nearly a year in a wheelchair, she decided to have the operation for an artificial hip joint. She was frail; the operation nearly killed her.

She called one day, a few weeks after the operation, said to come over, she had a surprise. When we got there, I saw her standing in the living room wearing a brand-new dress, beaming. After a year in a wheelchair, it was a miracle.

Two days later, she suffered a blood clot in her arm and had to have another operation.

She came home for a week, then went back in for other complications. She never left. I see her standing in the living room, smiling, happy just to stand up. I see her in the hospital, withered, in pain, dying. I see a cardboard box of granular ashes and dust.

My father, who had had another stroke, was now an invalid. With his caretaker gone—my mother had actually cooked for him as a cripple—he made conflicting demands of me and my sister. Depending on the whims of his depression, he wanted a new apartment, he wanted to go to a nursing home, he wanted a companion to live with him, he wanted to move in with us.

I had already started drinking scotch, drank more while my mother suffered, but I noticed with alarm that I was now drinking at least a bottle a week and increasing. I’d thought that drinking was a habit of the past, something I’d grown through.

As the date to leave for Vietnam drew near, I began to have more and more symptoms of distress. I refused to acknowledge them. I had made a commitment and I would stick by it. I called Larry Heinemann, told him I was having problems. He told me to try to hang in there.

The symptoms got worse. I began to have chest pains, dizziness, irregular heartbeats. I couldn’t sleep. I really believed that I had overcome all this bullshit, yet here it was, a monster from the past, revisiting. I drank more. If I drank enough, I slept, but I also remembered where that had once led. I was retreating down an unfortunate path. This could not be.

Two weeks before our scheduled departure, I called David Hunt. I told him I wasn’t going with them.

“What? Why?”

“I’m having real problems,” I said. “Stuff is happening to me that hasn’t happened for years. I’m a mess. I don’t want to go over there and be a drag to the others.”

“You know, Bob, this might be an opportunity to face your fears, overcome them.”

“Yeah. Maybe. Or go completely nuts. You don’t know how bad I feel right now, David, and I’m not there yet. I don’t think I harbor any resentment toward the Vietnamese. I might, but I think the idea of just seeing that country—remembering the waste—I think I’m not ready yet. I will go, when I’m ready. Not now.”

“A lot of people are going to be disappointed, Bob. Your book is being translated into Vietnamese. You know who’s going. Everyone’s a respected writer. This is a historical trip. Even Larry Heinemann is coming; he’s your friend, right?”

I nodded. “I’m sorry, David. Please tell everyone that I’m sorry. I’ve got to go with my gut feelings now. I’ve ignored them in the past, and I was wrong.”

I slept that night through.

The next day I felt better. In a week—though I felt badly about missing the trip—I felt the tension subside, I became calmer, more comfortable. While the writers made their tour, I stayed home and wrote.

Someday I will return to Vietnam, find Nguyen Quang Sang—the man who shot down Hueys—and take him for a ride.

I drink, not as heavily. I don’t smoke cigarettes except when I forget at a party or during the holidays. When things are going well in my life, I feel pretty good. Stress brings on the symptoms I’ve lived with since Vietnam.

I have come to realize that Vietnam did affect me, that I’m not crazy.

The effects are losses, mostly.

I lost my career as a pilot.

I lost the children Patience and I wanted when we were first married, brothers and sisters for Jack. Jack lost a normal childhood and adolescence.

I lost a feeling of fellowship. I am different from people who have not seen combat, especially combat in which people died for a politician’s ego.

I lost the belief that I could trust my government.

I very nearly lost Patience. And by staying with me, Patience has become a veteran of another kind of war.

Finally, I have come to realize that the most significant thing I lost in that war was peace.

When Polynesian sailors sail their canoes for weeks at a time on boundless seas without charts or compasses, they believe that they are sitting still, on a vacant earth, and that by moving their paddles correctly, by setting their sails properly, an island, their destination, will arrive on the horizon and come to them.

I move my body carefully and watch the ground pass beneath me and hedges and fences move by me until the steps of my house come to me and touch my feet. I experience the sensation that I am at the center of the universe, focused on what I’m doing, now.

I am looking for peace to arrive.