by Robert Roth
Chalice’s aptitude with the blooker surprised even himself. He continued firing it with excitement as Tony explained the characteristics of the different types of rounds. The blooker was capable of firing a standard grenade round, a shotgun round, white phosphorus, and signal flares. When Chalice had emptied the sack of ammunition, he asked Tony if they could get some additional rounds. Tony told him that he didn’t need any more practice. Chalice would have been flattered by any favorable reaction from Tony, but this compliment stripped him of any qualms about exchanging his M-16 for the blooker.
Tony mentioned Chalice’s prowess with the blooker to Forsythe, and it wasn’t long before the whole platoon was making complimentary remarks to him. A few of the men mentioned something about the Phantom Blooker, as if it were Chalice’s sole responsibility to kill him. Chalice had heard references to him before, and he’d always assumed this Phantom Blooker was merely a mythical Viet Cong representing a number of Viet Cong soldiers who prowled the Arizona with captured American grenade launchers. It wasn’t until they were standing bunker watch that night, that Forsythe realized Chalice had no real knowledge of exactly who the Phantom Blooker was. Chalice listened incredulously to Forsythe’s explanation, unable to decide how much of it was reality, and with the claustrophobic feeling that he had somehow been trapped.
At first Forsythe’s story seemed to focus upon Kovacs. He had joined Second Platoon as they were finishing the third month of what had been planned as a ninety day, battalion-size operation in the Arizona. The conversations and thoughts of the men were centered upon that approaching but uncertain time when they would be able to cross the river and leave the Arizona behind. Each day brought with it the prospect that it might be the last; but then something happened, and no longer did the operation’s end depend upon days.
Each of the battalion’s four rifle companies was camped in a different section of the Arizona. The helicopter that had brought Kovacs to Hotel Company had also brought in a load of supplies. The men were busy dividing them when this same helicopter radioed back that it had spotted five Viet Cong escorting an American prisoner. The CP and one platoon were left behind to guard the supplies, while Hotel Company’s other three platoons immediately headed in the direction of the hovering chopper. Moving at an exhausting pace through the rice paddies, the men took quick glances at the circling copter to see how much farther they had to go. Only a dense tree line and three hundred yards remained between the column’s point and the helicopter when the men were startled by a burst of rifle fire from the other side of the high ground. They watched as the helicopter hung motionless for a few seconds, then plummeted behind the tree line.
The column had seemed to be moving as fast as possible, but the pace quickened to a frantic run. The men could hardly keep their balance by the time they burst from the opposite side of the tree line and saw the scattered and half-burned wreckage of the helicopter. It took more than an hour to recover all the bodies. Besides the crew, there had also been five members of Hotel Company on board. Two were headed for R and R’s, and the other three had just finished their thirteen month tours. It was now too late to get another helicopter in to pick up the dead, so the men carried them to the tree line and set-in for what was to be the most terrifying and longest night many of them had ever spent. At roughly fifteen-minute intervals, they would hear the faint pop of a grenade launcher discharging its round, and a few seconds later the explosion of this round within their perimeter. The next morning two more bodies and six wounded had to be loaded on the incoming chopper, and it was then that the men of Hotel Company started making references to the Phantom Blooker.
During the next few days there was very little speculation about when the battalion would leave the Arizona. Instead, all talk centered upon the rescue of their fellow Marine which everyone knew would have to come first. Surprisingly, the morale of the men improved to a point far better than at any other time during the operation. They no longer saw themselves as searching out a ubiquitous yet impalpable enemy. Every march through rice paddies and every sweep through tree lines had a single cogent purpose — the rescue of one of their own. Each man was able to sympathize with this lone captive who waited helplessly for them to free him. They imagined themselves in his place, and required nothing more to drive them on. Each man’s actions were defined by what he himself would expect from those around him if he were the captive.
A week passed with no sign of the prisoner. Then one night their perimeter was again besieged by a blooker attack. At dawn they received word that less than a kilometer away a helicopter had spotted five Viet Cong with a prisoner disappear into a nearby tree line. It was obvious to the men that an air strike would endanger his life, and that this man’s only chance was to be rescued by a rifle company. All four of Second Battalion’s rifle companies became involved in the search. The captured Marine was sighted numerous times, usually at intervals of five or six days, and always by the helicopters. Almost every one of these sightings was preceded or followed by a blooker attack upon the nearest company. In the first three weeks of the search, twelve Marines were killed and almost forty wounded. It became obvious that the prisoner and the Phantom Blooker always traveled together. The men’s obsession to rescue their fellow Marine now took on another and often more dominant aspect — the destruction of the Phantom Blooker. No rifleman had ever seen the elusive captive, but there were very few who had not endured at least one blooker attack and seen its results. In their imaginations, it was the Phantom Blooker who prevented the intended rescue, and by doing so prevented their leaving the Arizona. His ability to continually outwit them caused the men to begin equating him with death itself; and the American prisoner who had never been seen by any of them began to fade farther into the background. It was obvious that the Phantom Blooker was using him not only as bait, but also as insurance against indiscriminate fire. Seldom was the prisoner spoken of except in connection with derisive comments about his intelligence or bravery. Perhaps this wouldn’t have happened if they had been able to see him themselves, to be sure of his existence. Unquestioningly, they continued the search, now without distinguishing the Phantom Blooker from the prisoner. They crossed and recrossed the same ground, occasionally coming upon the footprints of a single pair of boots, and once finding two live blooker rounds. Still, they weren’t sure that these tracks or rounds were not their own. The night barrages continued, but less frequently and of shorter duration. For almost a month, not even the helicopters had been able to spot the American, but numerous terrifying nights attested to the continued presence of the Phantom Blooker.
The men no longer thought of the operation as something that would come to an end. Instead, they looked with anticipation towards the terminations of their tours or their upcoming R and R’s. For this reason, many of them were actually dumbfounded when the entire battalion was suddenly reunited and choppered back to Hill 65. They searched for reasons to explain why the operation had been so unexpectedly terminated. At first the general conclusion was that because the prisoner hadn’t been spotted for over a month, the colonel had decided he’d probably been either executed or evacuated. But soon another explanation spread among them. Usually it was received with doubts, but even the skeptics served to relay it to others. Few men admitted to accepting it as fact, but fewer challenged the possibility that it was true. Each new man that joined the battalion soon heard about that one additional time the American and five Viet Cong had been spotted, supposedly two days before the battalion pulled out of the Arizona, and about the helicopter pilot who swore it was the American who carried the blooker.
For two months the rumor hovered over the battalion — seldom argued about but often mentioned. It wasn’t until the men received word that in a few days they would again enter the Arizona that the arguments started, often loud and sometimes ending in fights. In the last few minutes before the operation began, all speculation was stopped, and what had been rumor was finally accepted as fact. When the men formed
up to board the helicopters, the platoon commanders said their standard few words, but in addition they added the instructions that if any American prisoners were sighted in the company of the Viet Cong, shoot first and ask questions later.
Second Battalion returned to the Arizona expecting the same conditions they had experienced the last time. With each day they anticipated contact; either booby traps, sniper fire, or ambushes. Previously there had never been five days in a row without some sort of action, but the first two weeks of the operation passed without any sign of the enemy. Instead of causing the men to become lax, this tended to make them nervous, and it was repeated many times that, “When the shit hits the fan, it’ll really hit.” These predictions proved correct, and for the following three weeks they were constantly harassed by booby traps and sniper fire. It was only then that the men began to comfort themselves by saying, “Things can’t get worse.” This time they were wrong, and each of the four rifle companies walked into at least one daylight ambush. However, at no time did they come under fire from a grenade launcher, and therefore all talk of the Phantom Blooker ended.
Their luck finally began to change, and soon they were springing the ambushes on the Viet Cong. A week before the operation was to end, battalion headquarters estimated that that they had inflicted ten Viet Cong casualties for every one inflicted upon them. The men had no knowledge of this, and their estimates approximated five to one. A more realistic ratio would have been two Viet Cong casualties for every American casualty.
The Viet Cong saw no reason to worry about relative casualties yet. They had intelligence information saying that Second Battalion would pull out within a few days. To them, this meant that the Americans might get careless, and therefore the opportunity for revenge. They took advantage of this opportunity with a late-afternoon ambush and an all-night attack. Golf Company was the victim, and it was necessary for Hotel Company to help recover some of the bodies. At first it seemed as if the Viet Cong hadn’t had time to loot these bodies, and this was partially true. It was Tony 5 who first noticed that something was wrong. The dead Marines still had their watches and rings. Their new M-16’s lay beside them, some jammed and half taken apart. Two of the bodies were those of blooker men, and although both of their grenade launchers lay in plain view, no rounds were to be seen. Even if they had used all of them, they would still be wearing the empty pouches in which these rounds were carried. Tony was quick to mention this to Lieutenant S, and it was received with interest. A day later the entire battalion pulled out of the Arizona, still without coming across any sign of the Phantom Blooker.
Two months later, when Second Battalion returned to the Arizona, there was little talk of the Phantom Blooker. On the third night of the operation, Echo Company came under a four-hour barrage from a grenade launcher. It was then that old memories were repeated and exaggerated until again few words were spoken without reference to the Phantom Blooker. During the next month, only Fox Company escaped contact with him. The other three rifle companies in the battalion and also Headquarters and Supply Company all took casualties from these encounters. At no time during this period had there been any sightings of a lone American prisoner.
Late one afternoon when Hotel Company was returning from a patrol, Kovacs suddenly stopped walking and began pointing his rifle towards a tree line three hundred yards away, yelling, “Look! There they are, over there!” He raised the rifle to his eye and began shooting. All along the column, men squinted while trying to make out what he was aiming at. After a dozen quick shots, he lowered the rifle and said, “Four VC disappeared into that tree line,” and then after a pause, he added, “one of them had on a Marine bush jacket.” There wasn’t a man in the company that didn’t know what this could mean, yet Kovacs’s later claim that this one man had been the Phantom Blooker was met with skepticism. It seemed much more likely that he was merely a Viet Cong soldier wearing an American bush jacket. Kovacs refused to push his contention, but when asked why he was so sure, he replied, “The sonofabitch didn’t walk like a Gook.” Even though Kovacs was only a fire team leader at the time, no one in the platoon, including Lieutenant S, would dare laugh in his face. Yet this is exactly what many of the men felt like doing. It seemed impossible that anyone could somehow distinguish the walk of an American from that of a Vietnamese at three hundred yards, and it also seemed strange that Kovacs had been the only one to spot anything.
Regardless of his own beliefs and those of his men, the company commander decided not to take any chances. He immediately directed the column towards the tree line. The brush was much denser than they had expected, and dusk came on before they were able to sweep through half of it, thus making it necessary for them to set-in for the night. As the men dug their foxholes, there was a lot of kidding about digging them deep enough for protection against the Phantom Blooker; but this is exactly what most of them did. Shortly before midnight, they were awakened by a quick series of exploding blooker rounds, seemingly proving Kovacs’s claims. The men scurried and dived into their foxholes, some of which were the deepest they had ever dug. Although these holes seemed all too inadequate at the time, they were the sole reason every man in Hotel Company survived the night. Three men were wounded badly enough to be medivacked. One of these men was Alpha’s squad leader, and before Second Platoon moved out that day, Lieutenant S told Kovacs to take over his squad.
Second Battalion remained in the Arizona for three more weeks, but only once more did it come into contact with the Phantom Blooker. It was during Kovacs’s third day as a squad leader. He was on a platoon-size patrol with his squad, Alpha, at the point. They were following the edge of an overgrown path through some very heavy brush. Kovacs was the fifth man in the column, with Tony 5 directly in front of him. The squad radioman was right back of Kovacs. He in turn was followed by Forsythe, Childs, and Hamilton. The dense brush prevented anyone from seeing past the back of the man in front of him.
Within a span of five frightening seconds, it happened; and no one there was sure about all of it. First there was the staccato burst from the point man’s rifle, then the silencing of this rifle by the explosion of a blooker round which ripped away half of the point man’s face. A few pieces of shrapnel from the same round entered the skull of the second man, killing him instantly. Next there was a burst of two rounds from an SKS. The first of these rounds grazed the third man’s shoulder, while the second pierced his neck, at the same time knocking him backwards into Tony 5, and both of them to the ground. In that instant the reeling body flew towards him, Tony 5 saw the profile of a man wearing Viet Cong slacks and a Marine bush jacket, a man he would later swear was an American.
Kovacs had seen nothing. He scrambled up the trail a mere fifteen yards before it widened into a small clearing. Within this clearing, the corpse of a Viet Cong soldier lay sprawled face down on the ground, one leg drawn up under him — caught in the same frantic position it had been in when the bullet found him. Across from this corpse was the body of another Viet Cong, sitting in the same position in which he had been surprised, and with the tin of food he had been eating still clutched in his hand. On the ground lay an SKS and four live blooker rounds. Kovacs returned to his squad to find two of his men dead and another critically wounded.
Chalice had the third watch that night. At nine o’clock, he laid his poncho liner on the ground in back of the bunker, realizing then that he would not be able to sleep. No longer was he thinking about what had happened under the canopy. This was part of the past, and Forsythe’s story had purged these thoughts of their immediacy. However disturbing they were, Chalice now imagined himself faced with something far more threatening. In less than forty-eight hours the battalion would enter the Arizona. He now understood the meaning behind the remarks made to him that day, the belief among many of the men that the Phantom Blooker would have to be destroyed by his own weapon, a weapon that Chalice was to carry. Their comments had almost made it seem as if they would be mere observers, and that Chalice would be rep
resenting them in a macabre duel upon which their fates depended. He felt it absurd that this superstition should bother him, and yet it did more than that. When Forsythe came to wake him for his watch, Chalice was lying motionless with his eyes open, no closer to sleep than he had been at any time during the previous four hours. Only after he was inside the bunker, silently looking over the valley and seeing nothing but darkness, only then did he become tired. The two hours and fifteen minutes of his watch seemed to stretch on insufferably. When it was over, he almost staggered back to his poncho liner before lying down and falling into a deep sleep.
Chalice awoke with the sense that something was different, yet everything seemed the same. There was no unusual activity on the hill, and the men straggled to the mess hall in the same manner as always. The food was as bland and tasteless as usual. It did seem to stick in his throat slightly more often as he forced himself to eat it. By taste alone, he would have had a difficult time distinguishing exactly what he was eating. Only after he finished and sat scanning the room was Chalice able to detect small differences in the men. Some were more animated than usual, others less; and the mess hall was a little quieter than normal. It was then he realized that no one was talking about the Arizona. The word that had been so often spoken during the past few days seemed now to be forgotten.
The next hour was spent in the same manner as during previous days on the hill. It was only as he stood in the working party formation in front of the S-2 hootch that Chalice began to really question this. It seemed incomprehensible that tomorrow he would be in the Arizona Territory, yet today should be a monotonous, grinding replica of past days on the hill. As the men were divided into different details, they moved with even more lethargy than usual, seemingly having built up some unfeeling inertia within themselves. Though Chalice didn’t notice it, none of the men complained about the different working parties they were assigned, accepting them and their meaninglessness with indurate resignation.