Who Shot the Water Buffalo?

by Ken Babbs

  “All right, all right. I give ya yer warning.” He retreats into the rain, muttering, “Yah wanna stay, no hair offa my goddamned scrotum. Dumb farts wanna die, let ’em …”

  I look at Cochran. His goofy grin curls toward his ear.

  “Shay, Admiral,” he slurs. “Has Mister Huckelbee seen your giant conch yet?”

  “By God! I’m glad you mentioned that. I don’t believe he has. Come along, my boy.”

  I follow him dutifully, as a good junior officer would, duty before dishonor and all that.

  “Oh, Mister Cochran,” Matilde trills. “Could you give me a teensy weensy hand for just a teeny weeny bit?”

  We cross and recross the wardroom, cabin to cabin, drink to drink. The Admiral opens the outside doors, lets the wind through, by God. The curtains stand out straight, sheets to the wind. The tablecloth flaps, a sail gone to luff. Mrs. Jenkins tips the lid off the silver serving platter. It flies across the room. The Admiral serves us up. One pork chop each. Speared to the plates. Twelve peas per plate, squashed down. Tiny wedge of lettuce, slithering. Smidgen of roquefort. Mrs. Jenkins waves matches at the drenched candles. We wipe our faces with sopping napkins.

  “I declare, gentlemen. I’m having the worst time. Won’t one of you all assist me in finding some dry linen?”

  Cochran wavers after her toward the bedroom.

  “By damn, Huckelbee,” Admiral Jenkins fumes. “You haven’t had a chance to look at my Samurai sword.”

  We pour cognacs and sweet liqueurs. Smoke cigars and drink mocha java. The electricity goes out. A storm lantern dips and sways from the ceiling. Pensacola Bay pours into the house. We pile the crystal, china and silver on the table and wrap the tablecloth around everything. Mrs. Jenkins huddles over the pile, cooing: “There there, my babies, I won’t let anything happen to you.”

  The Admiral paces, his chest braced against the gale. “’43, or was it ’44? The bridge was shot away and water coming over the gunn’lls, but we kept going.”

  Cochran and I sit numbly. Our watersoaked cigars are losing their leaves. We cup our chins in our hands.

  “Wake up!” the Admiral orders. “No sleeping on watch.”

  “Yessir.” We blink away the salt spray.

  “Now say you’re flying off a carrier in a single-seat attack jet armed with a 500- pound bomb.”

  The house shakes with a tremendous blast of wind.

  “You have searched for an enemy ship without success. Now, low on fuel, you’re headed back to the carrier when you spot a white ship marked plainly with red crosses. Obviously a hospital ship. Got that?”

  We nod and grin.

  “Suddenly your commander calls on the radio and tells you to drop your bombs on the hospital ship.”

  “Believe tha’s against the rules of war, sir,” Cochran mumbles.

  “He has secret information that it’s a disguised enemy missile ship with its weapons zeroed in on your carrier. He gives you a direct order: Drop your five hundred pounder down the smokestack. What do you do?”

  “Ah, that’s a tough one,” I say. “Can I take some time to think it over.”

  “No time! You’re almost out of fuel. You have to decide now or you won’t make it back to the ship.”

  Cochran smashes his fist on the table.

  “Y’God, I’d drop the bomb!” he bellows.

  “You would?” I’m surprised to hear that.

  The Admiral beams. “That’s my boy.”

  Mrs. Jenkins sobs over her family treasures. “My precious crystal. I won’t let them hurt you.”

  The house shakes. Flying spray lashes the Admiral’s face. He wipes it off with his sleeve.

  “But,” says Cochran, biting down on the cigar. “I’d miss.” The cigar shreds to pieces. Bits cling in brown patches to his white jacket. He spits the cigar out.

  The Admiral glares. “All right, smartass,” he roars. “See if you can get out of this one. What if you’re ordered to drop a nuclear weapon on a town?”

  “I’d never have that problem, sir.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I’m going into helicopters.”

  “You are?” the Admiral and I cry in unison.

  “They don’t drop bombs,” Cochran mumbles.

  What a shocking admission. Aspiring pilots are supposed to want to fly jets, the hotter the better. Studliness is at stake. Only lowgrade, lousy-aptitude pilots fly choppers. But looky here, blustering and sopping though he may be, my man Cochran is telling a by-God Admiral he’s volunteering for the slow, plodding, wacky-dacky eggbeaters.

  Well, if that’s the way the winds blow, I’ll sail the course too. I stand up and draw my sword. “I’m going into choppers myself.” I swing my sword grandly.

  The Admiral slashes with his Samurai, sparks flying. Mine clangs to the floor.

  “Pansy ants!” the Admiral yells. “I shoulda known.” He flails with his sword.

  Cochran and I dive under the table.

  “Hiram!” his wife shrieks. “Don’t injure the china.”

  She leaps on the pile to keep it from sliding off.

  “Guess that’s the last of our trips to the private staterooms,” Cochran says morosely.

  “And just what was going on in there?” the Admiral yells at Matilde. “It wasn’t drinking?”

  “Oh, no sir,” we all scream in unison.

  He stalks onto the porch.

  “Frzzk … eye of hurricane expected at …”

  “Eye my ass!” He gives the radio a swipe with the sword, sends it crashing, sparks flying. “Bring your worst. We weathered thirteen in a row, each one stronger than the last.”

  The radio dies in a gurgle of sea water. Mrs. Jenkins moans over the table. The wind stills and the rain stops. Cochran and I slink outside into the calm of Hurricane Ed’s eye. We wade through knee-deep water to our little house and fall over one another piling up furniture and nailing blankets across the broken windows. Hurricane Ed heads West to give Mobile a good licking. A red sun rims the horizon. I give Cochran a baleful look.

  “Helicopters, huh?”

  His eyes are as red as the sun. They flash sudden fire.

  “You better believe it, numbnuts. Helly chopters don’ carry no Fat Man.”

  “Lo entiendo. Que risa, pendejo, I get it … Funnier’n shit, dumb ass.”

  We never sample the Admiral’s sideboard again, but it doesn’t matter to us. Flight school takes up all our time. I’m lousy enough a pilot the chopper-flying decision probably saves my life. Not that it’s all that easy to fly. Too confusing.

  Work the stick with your right hand, the collective with your left hand. The collective is a device that sits alongside your leg. It’s got a twist throttle on the end like the motor scooter so that’s one thing I’m used to. Up the collective, down the collective—sounds like a corny commie capitalist argument, but when you pull the collective up, up you go, when you push it down—not so fast there—down you go.

  Never let go of the stick! The chopper flops crazily, gyrates wildly, spiraling toward its doom, until, pouncing jackrabbit fast, the instructor grabs the stick and straightens things out. He’s dealt with this student fuck-up before. Rudder pedals keep the bird flying straight ahead and are used to turn the helicopter in circles when you’re hovering. Hovering, another helicopter peculiarity.

  Left hand on the collective, twisting, lifting and lowering, right hand on the stick, forward, right, left, backward, feet pushing on the rudder pedals, left foot, right foot—is it any wonder I’m confused?

  The saving grace of the chopper is its slow speed. Goof, you’ve got time to correct. For Cochran it’s not a problem. He not only loves to fly the chopper, he’s good at it, too.

  To him, the man plus the machine equals the bird. Soar like a gull. Hover like a hummingbird. Plummet like a hawk. Brake like a duck. Roost like a grouse landing on her nest of eggs. He graduates number one in the class. I bring up the rear. He’s not so great with the scooter. I get it ba
ck the next time it won’t start and take the beast to the shop for an easy fix. A bolt holding the carburetor to the intake manifold is loose.

  Our orders are the same: report to Medium Helicopter Squadron 188 at The Marine Corps Air Facility in Santa Ana, California. I sell the Lambretta to an incoming flight school student. Cochran checks the base bulletin board and finds a 1952 Pontiac Chieftain, a green two-door Hydramatic with a flathead six, fender skirts, windshield visor, wide whitewall tires, one major scrape along the side, a steal at two hundred and fifty bucks. We load our gear in the back seat and head out for the Coast, rear-end sagging, tailpipe dragging, sparks flying.

  2. What’s In A Name

  Sheee-eeet fire, Doc, you ain’t doing me any more good than a rattler running fangs up and down my shoulder blade … rat-tat-tatting machine gun banging chopper blades thumping and flashing lights going off like a pinball machine … whose fault is it, Doc? … I know … the San Andreas Fault … Teutonic plates shifting, or something like that … no, wrong continent … but any place you cut it, it’s a mess … been that way for centuries … lowland tribes fighting mountain tribes … then it’s French Indochina until the Japanese take over … here come the Frogs again, hippity hop hippity hop they get in deep, knee deep … hey, there’s rubber plantations to drool over … not on our patch, says Ho Chi Minh … he’s a dirty commie, Doc, a member in good standing of the Red Horde and a sneaky bastard, too, the young Ho … Marines are Gung Ho, does that mean we’re related? … no no … what do you get when you combine a penis and a potato, Doc? … that’s right, a dictator, and that’s Ho … he forces the Frogs into making a stand, winner take all, and even with surreptitious help from the U. S. of A., the French surrender … Vietnam gets partitioned … reds in the north, republic in the south … Ho is a unification guy, he’s rattling his saber … the democratic regime in the south is shaky, Doc … how do I know? … it’s like the thermos, Doc, you know how a thermos keeps something cold, cold? … and something hot, hot? … how do it know? … by absorption … ha ha … but we’re dealing with reality here, Doc … there was a buildup going on … new meat fed into the hopper … more pilots to fly the chopper … what better training ground than California … open up your golden thighs, Californy here we come …

  Unending sunshine. Hot days, balmy nights. A half hour drive from the helicopter base to Laguna Beach, much better happy hour bars than our club on the base. Luscious single women come from miles around to meet handsome virile blowtorch drivers while egg beater pilots hide in the corners and gawk and drool. Or tell a lie. There I was, honey, doing a reverse Immelman at the bottom of an inverted loop, you know, where your only recourse is to swap ends, and the G suit is pumping massive gobs of blood into my thighs, gave me an erection you can’t believe, it’s lasted a week. She arches her eyebrows, “Inverted loop my ass,” and flounces over to squeeze a jet jock’s bicep, “Oh, it’s so big.” Crash and burn, scorned and reviled, retreat the better form of valor, we slink chagrined and shamefeaced back to the base.

  Which is a former blimp base from World War Two, just off the I-5 on a sprawling flat hunk of land surrounded by orange groves. Two cavernous hangars dominate the skyline. Plenty of room inside for the squadron’s twenty-four choppers. Maintenance bays. Wooden offices and a ready room where the pilots gather for briefings and, after training flights, kill time reading paperbacks, playing board games, and conducting spelling bees.

  The all new HMM-188 is a mixture of experienced pilots from the group pool and new blood from the training commnand. We newbies have to be assimilated and brought up to snuff. Our teachers are the older lieutenants with thousands of flying hours under their belts. Having snuck through flight school by the thin skin of my wet-with-sweat pants—“Ya kin teach a monkey to fly, Huckelbee, but it takes a man to fly the plane and not have the plane fly him—now out in the fleet, I have to get acquainted with a bigger, meaner bird: the UH-34D, the Dawg. Pilots perched high in front, and below them, an open belly capable of holding twelve fully equipped Marines, me wondering if this nine cylinder, clattering assemblage of engine, transmission and hydraulic systems driving a twenty-foot, four-bladed rotor will fall to pieces under my anxious hands. Scary at first. Just saying Dawg gives me the willies, but what’s in a name? A helicopter by any other name would clatter as loud.

  The presence of another pilot in the cockpit preserves life and sanity. It takes a while but I pass the checkpoints in sequence, and thanks to mastering the coordinated movements of hand, feet, eye and brain that it takes to do a full autorotation—where you back off throttle and bottom the collective, the engine and tranny disengage, the blades provide enough lift to glide to the ground, you pull up on the collective and settle gently onto terra firma—I’m qualified to be an HAC, a Helicopter Aircraft Commander.

  I’m paired with Cochran a lot. Due no doubt to the influence of Lieutenant Carl Emmett, the schedules officer. Emmett is square-jawed, burr-headed, son of Germanic stock, bred and born in Milwaukee, and he brooks no shit, for not only is he a superb pilot, he has the self-assurance of never having been proved wrong, no matter what the subject.

  We’re walking along the flight line, heading toward the choppers, a clear morning with the sun’s rays bouncing off the orange trees, Emmett giving us the straight skinny: “The underboost will tear up the engine as much as an overboost.” I look at Cochran, mouth, what? but before he can hip me to lugging the engine, six burly Marines in combat gear grab Cochran and Emmett and me by the arms and hustle us into the back of a 6-by-6 truck where we’re thrown to the floor with our hands tied behind our backs.

  We’ve been warned about this—escape and evasion training. Get dropped off in the boonies, live off the land, make it to a designated pickup point and get choppered back to base or—and this is the hairy part—get captured and thrown into a rat-infested prison to undergo intensive brainwashing and interrogation.

  After a long drive they sit us up, relieve us of our wallets, cut the plastic cuffs and kick us out.

  “The rescue chopper will be at the pickup point at 0600 in five days,” a tough-looking grunt yells. “See you there. If you make it.”

  He kicks out a box of supplies. His raucous laugh is the last thing we hear. Then we’re alone in the midst of scrubby bushes sticking out of the sandy ground. Clear sky and hot sun overhead. Cochran checks the map, shades his eyes and looks around the horizon.

  “We’ll go this way,” he says, and strides off.

  “Hold it,” Emmett yells. “The pickup point’s the other direction.”

  “That’s the whole idea,” Cochran calls back. “They’ll have that area blanketed. They’ll never look for us up there.” He points to a ridge. “I don’t know about you but I’m not up for that brainwashing interrogation resistance training.”

  We’ve heard all about it. No one in the squadron has ever made it to the pickup point. They’ve all been captured and come back full of horror stories of being locked in a tiny windowless hut with a bare dirt floor, hole in the corner for bodily evacuation, sleep deprivation with ceaseless Chinese music clanging and a bright light that never goes out, interrupted by screaming interrogations: “you talk or we rip out one eye, then—”

  I follow Cochran and, after a short wait, Emmett comes grumbling along.

  “This isn’t going to work,” he says, “but we’ve got to stick together.”

  It’s not much different for me than being out on the range with the cattle. The grunts gave us two canteens of water each, and survival knives and matches and a bag of rock-hard C-ration crackers and dried soup, so we know if we ration everything we’ll be okay foodwise.

  “Just like boy scouts,” Cochran says, ambling along, top half of his flight suit tied around his waist, T-shirt wrapped around his head, body soaking up the sun.

  “How do you expect to cook the soup?” Emmett wants to know. “They’ll spot the smoke.”

  Cochran scratches his chest. “Good question. Where’s that boy sc
out manual?”

  “Oh God, put your shirt back on,” Emmett says. “You look like a half-assed gorilla doesn’t even know that half from a hole in the ground.”

  “I can cook the soup,” I say, deflecting an oncoming fray. “We’ll use dry twigs and make a small, smokeless fire, early in the morning when the fog will cover it.”

  “Where’d you come up with that?” Emmett growls.

  “Old cowboy and Indian trick I read in a Clarence Mulford novel,” I tell him, and, never having heard of Mulford, the Hopalong Cassidy creator, Emmett shuts up.

  We mosey along the ridge and follow it for a couple of days, then circle around to get behind the pickup spot, the theory being they won’t expect us coming from that direction. We pick our way between big boulders that are scattered around the hill. Cochran stops short and holds out his hand, no farther. I peek around him. Emmett crowds alongside. A big rattlesnake is sunning itself on top of a flat rock.

  “Whoa. Fresh meat,” Cochran says.

  “No way. Stay away from that thing,” Emmett says.

  I start cutting a branch off a tree with my survival knife.

  “Go over there and get him to strike,” I tell Cochran. His eyes get big. “Use a stick or something. Don’t get near him.”

  “No!” Emmett bellows. “It’s not worth it.”

  Too late. The blood is up. Cochran waves a stick, the snake lets out a loud crackling rattle and lunges. I jam the fork of branch down on his neck and hold him, fat body thrashing, tail whipping.

  “Don’t just stand there,” I yell. “Slice off his head.”

  The fat is in the fire and the shit has hit the fan and Emmett rises to the mark. One fast cut with his survival knife and the snake is ours. The thrashing and our hearts slow at the same time. Cochran picks the rattler up by its tail. It’s as long as he is tall.

  When morning comes I have a small fire going that doesn’t make any smoke. Cochran has skinned and gutted the snake. The rattle is tied to his belt with a piece of vine.