Nam-A-Rama

by Phillip Jennings

  Gearheardt and I took the pages and began reading. They were the orders that we had been expecting.

  “You know it’s a court-martial offense to open some one else’s orders.” I was calm only because I had somehow suspected this would happen.

  “No it isn’t. I’m the squadron mail officer, the squadron admin officer, the squadron assignments officer, and the squadron bully. Any questions? Good. Now here’s what you don’t know.” He leaned forward even closer, and Gearheardt and I leaned our heads toward him.

  “I knew Flager didn’t have a thing to do with it. First of all, I just enjoyed knocking the snot out of him because he shot up my stereo last month. But most of all it was just so the other dipshits in the squadron who suspect your mission now have something to think about. Gents, I’m on your side.”

  Gearheardt put out his hand and Buzz took it. I wasn’t so sure and hung back. Buzz noticed and frowned, his eyes piercing.

  “Look, dickhead,” he said, meaning me, “I got my own theories about this two-bit war. Strike or hike, is my fucking plan. We either nuke the north or get our asses home to mama. We put big fans on the DMZ and blow the radiation into China. They got more people than you can shake your dick at anyway. And not enough Uncle Ben’s to feed half of ‘em. Stop ’em before they come over and get two million deep at the Dairy Queen lines, if you get my drift.”

  “Gee, Buzz, you’re a humanitarian.”

  Buzz glared at me. “You know why nobody likes you, Armstrong?”

  “I was hoping you’d tell me, Buzz.”

  “Cause you’re a wise-ass.” He paused and drew on his cigar. He leaned back away from me as if he had made his point.

  “Somebody needs to tell ’em we’re not as stupid as we look. Old Ho Chi already said that we couldn’t win a war of attrition because he was willing to sacrifice ten of his men for every one of ours. Is there a swinging dick stupid enough not to believe him? What does he give a shit? Afraid he’ll lose the next election in Hanoi? Somebody better get real in this damned war, or there’ll be people hurt.”

  “Tell who?” I said. When Buzz wrinkled his brow, I went on. “You said ‘somebody needs to tell ’em.’ Tell who?”

  Buzz’s smile was to cynical as stink is to shit, as the President would say. “Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Who in the hell in the chain of command has the balls to say ‘Fuck this shit, we’re invading North Vietnam or we’re going home.’”

  “Eloquently put, Buzz. I particularly like the fan on the DMZ idea.”

  Buzz looked skeptical.

  Gearheardt was taking all of this in with what would be called a bemused look. He didn’t dabble much in the philosophy of combat or politics. He tried to keep his life simple, except for when he was pulling the chain of the Assistant God. Then he pretended to be interested in religion.

  Buzz looked a little embarrassed after his last outburst. “Not that I give a shit about them, but I got little brothers need to go home to Mama. My army brother even has a wife and kiddy and he’s humping around the Delta. The rest of those Army dicks can—”

  “So you’re going to help us get to Hanoi?” Gearheardt said suddenly, reminding me of how this all started.

  “I don’t know about that, but I’m going to try to keep that bastard Wilson from killing one or both of you. This barbed wire trip he has Armstrong on is a crock of shit. You think the squadron is going to frag two choppers to fly to Danang to bring back a roll or two of barbed wire? Get serious. Check the tail number on the bird they got you scheduled to fly. Yankee Romeo Three Four. Guess where that came from? I’ll tell you. It’s the bird we stole from that South Vietnamese squadron that was up here last week. And the coordinates where you’re to drop the load? Nowhere, man. Out in the damned boonies. They got lots of call for barbed wire out there. Like I said, get serious.”

  I wasn’t sure what to make of all of it. Buzz seemed sincere. Gearheardt had the same half-smile on his face and was humming very softly. It was hotter than hell in the tent, and outside I heard the squadron drifting down to the chow tent. A hooch maid in black pants and white ao dai, a straw “wok” on her head, looked in, saw Buzz, and hurried away.

  “My crew? The other chopper?”

  “My guess is they don’t know shit. Winston is probably just expendable. No one likes him anyway, and it’s only a matter of time before he augers in. Fucker can’t fly. The rest of them are the squadron dregs and shitbirds anyway. Don’t ask me who knows and who doesn’t. The best I can tell, you pissed off some chief in Yokosuka and you’re screwed.”

  He stood up and stretched. “Trying to stop this war is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, but it’s a shitpot better than what we’re doing now. Personally, I just want to go back to Bangkok and screw my brains out for the rest of my life. But I promised Mama I would help my litle brothers, so I’ll help you.” He went to the tent door and looked out.

  “You’re going to have to get your ass in gear before they come looking for you. Gearheardt, you should take Winston’s place. Charlie and I will fly the backup bird on your wing. When we get to Danang, have your crew chief and gunner refuel you before you go to pick up the load. Then when both of them are out of the aircraft, get the hell out. Charlie and I will cover for you as long as possible, but you’re basically on your own. You may not have enough fuel to get to Hanoi, but that’s something you’ll have to figure out. In your orders, it looks like there are a couple of ships off the coast that maybe you can get fuel from. I don’t even want to know.”

  Buzz started outside. I looked at Gearheardt, who shrugged and grabbed his helmet and a parachute bag full of gear already packed. My heart was racing, and I thought of a million things I wanted to do before I left, none of them possible. I did stop by my tent and throw a few items into my parachute bag. Fatass saw me and waddled over.

  “Good luck,” he said. He stuck out his hand.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. What did he know?

  “What does good luck mean? I thought it meant that I was wishing that something bad didn’t happen to you. No one ever talks to me. Are we supposed to be wishing bad luck instead? Like that break a leg thing for actors? Why doesn’t anybody ever talk to me? Is it because I’m fat?”

  “Yep.” I didn’t have time for Fatass.

  15 • Vietnam at Escape Speed in My Rearview Mirror (in G)

  We made it to Danang without a problem. Captain Wilson tried to stop us, but Gearheardt decided that he couldn’t possibly get into any more trouble than we were heading into and punched him out. As most of the squadron had been wanting to punch out Captain Wilson because he had been a grunt before he transferred to the air wing, it caused no real stir, and he was lying peacefully on the tarmac when Gearheardt jumped into the pilot’s seat, making me co-pilot even though I was senior. Winston was glad not to have to fly with me, and Buzz, true to his word, flew on our wing.

  Ten minutes out of Chu Lai, a flight of Army Cobras attacked us, but they didn’t really press and we evaded them easily. Buzz had warned us that there were a few die-hard units that the chief had probably gotten to. We knew that not only had Gearheardt insulted one too many chiefs in Yokosuka, but that they had a number of long-term construction contracts that were going to be in default if the war was over sooner than planned.

  “You can’t blame the chiefs,” Gearheardt said as we pulled into a tight diving turn to allow the Cobra rocket to miss us. “They got inventory up the ying-yang and were in the middle of shifting from LIFO to FIFO. No wonder they’re pissed that we’re heading out to stop the—Whoa.” We were at treetop level, and he narrowly missed an antenna. We were nearly to Marble Mountain, south of the Danang airbase.

  “Does everybody in the whole country know about this, Gearheardt?” I asked. “What happened to our secret mission?”

  “Hold on, Jack. We’re there.” He flared and touched down. Buzz flew low over us, waggled his rotors in salute, and turned back south.

  “Gunny, you and Wi
nger hop out and get the concertina wire ready to pick up.”

  I heard two clicks on the intercom and the chopper moved slightly as the crew jumped out.

  Gearheardt pulled in power and lifted off almost immediately.

  “We’re on our way, Jack. Onward to immorality.”

  “Immortality, Gearheardt. What’s that clicking sound on the radio?”

  “The squadron channel is off. I don’t want to listen to a lot of threats and bullshit.”

  “Well, something is clicking on the intercom then.”

  Gearheardt looked down and behind him out his window.

  “Oh shit, the crew chief is hanging on to the damn step.”

  In the belly of the chopper I saw the crew chief’s head pop up beneath the cargo door. I unstrapped and lunged for him, nearly falling out myself, caught his shoulder holster and dragged him inside. He lay gasping for breath on the floor, his face red and twisted. His radio cord had kept him attached to the chopper when we had lifted off, and when it didn’t automatically unplug, he had grabbed the step-bar to keep from being strangled.

  I plugged my headset into the outlet on the bulkhead.

  “We got company, Gearheardt. Gunny Buckles seems to have come along for the ride.”

  The Gunny was now looking alert. Alert and puzzled. I leaned over to where I could yell in his ear.

  “We’re on our way to Hanoi to stop the war.” I decided the truth was the best. Anything I said was going to sound crazy.

  God bless gunny sergeants. He looked up at me and gave me a thumbs up. Then closed his eyes and continued rubbing the red welt around his neck.

  I climbed back into the co-pilot’s seat and plugged in my headset. “What about those fighters that were scrambled to chase us?” I craned my head around in the cockpit expecting to see tracers or the flash of a Sidewinder just before it hit us.

  Gearheardt laughed. “Turn up your UHF so you can hear the broadcasts on the Guard channel. You’ll love it. So far the Air Force has scrambled two flights of Phantoms with orders to shoot us down. Then the Marine Corps diverted a flight of F-8s and two flights of A-4s out of Chu Lai to shoot down any Air Force aircraft that fired on us. Now the Navy is trying to get into the act. They’ve given kind of a goofy order, first sending some F-4s off the Oriskany to fly cover for the Marine F-8s, but that was evidently before they were attacked by the Marine A-4s. Now they’re busy defending themselves.”

  I was silent as I tried to digest the enormity of what we had caused and what we were attempting. Below us the water became greener as we got farther from the shore. Our fuel tank was full. Four-plus hours of flight time. Gearheardt had produced a map, with all French notations, showing North Vietnam. Hanoi was circled. My stomach felt like it was full of dry ice. The noise in the cockpit of the H-34 was its normal ear-splitting roar, but I could tell that Gearheardt was humming as he made calculations on his kneeboard after measurements on the map. He looked happy as a pig.

  I lowered the sun visor on my helmet, thinking no one could recognize me. Gearheardt and I now both looked like grasshoppers in the cockpit. He had folded the map away after offering it to me, then smiled and began humming again. I recognized it as a song that I had taught him. “Wings over Mexico.” Each verse and refrain were the same, “Wings over Mexico,” sung to the tune of “Here Comes Santa Claus.” My career was behind me. In fact probably 99.9 percent of my life was behind me. My best friend and I were at fifteen hundred feet over the South China Sea, within sight of the Vietnamese coast, shimmering in the haze to our left. We were going the “secret way” to Hanoi.

  I began singing out loud and Gearheardt joined in.

  Wings over Mexico, Wings over Mexico. Wings over Mex-i-co.

  Wings over Mexico, Wings over Mexico, Wings over Mex-i-co.

  Wings over Mexico, Wings over Mexico, Wings over Me-hex-i-co.

  Wings over Mexico, Wings over Mexico, Wings over Me-hex-i-cooooo!

  16 • Feet Wet—North Vietnam

  “How exactly is this supposed to work, Gearheardt?“I asked.

  We were down to less than a thousand feet above the water. The sky had grown overcast, and the water looked cold and menacing, unlike the friendly blues and greens of the water off the coast of South Vietnam. We reasoned that a low-level flight, while not fuel efficient, would give the North Vietnamese less warning of our approach. But then, that was my question, what was our plan of approach?

  Gearheardt studied the water below us. Whitecaps appeared farther out to sea on our right. Through a light mist on our left, I could intermittently see the coast of North Vietnam, sinister and foreboding, although it was exactly the same coastline as that of recent sunbathing expeditions in Danang. The engine noise had numbed my eardrums, and it was almost peaceful in the cockpit. Gearheardt spotted something on the water and began to grin. He took off power and shoved the nose of the chopper over into a shallow dive, coming over the top of a fishing boat at less than one hundred feet.

  “Flip it on,” he said.

  “Grow up,” I answered. “This is serious, Gearheardt.”

  “Come on, this is the last time.”

  I flipped on the outside speakers, rigged on the Vietnamese helicopter to use in their psy-ops, as Gearheardt keyed his mike.

  “NO FISHING. REPEAT. NO FUCKING FISHING. RETURN TO SHORE AND TURN YOURSELF IN TO THE AUTHORITIES. SHAME ON YOU. THESE FISH AREN’T YOURS. THEY BELONG TO THE GOVERNMENT OF FRANCE.”

  “They don’t even speak English, Gearheardt.”

  As we passed over the boat I could see five or six small figures looking up at us. One was shaking his fist. Gearheardt grinned and pulled his head back into the cockpit.

  “Yeah, it would be a lot funnier if they could understand us. But I like doing it anyway.”

  “Look, we’re heading for Hanoi. Do you even know how to get there?”

  “Haiphong. Turn left. Follow the river. Satisfied? Surely they’ve got a water tower that says ‘Hanoi’ on it. We land there.”

  “And how do we plan to get our asses in to see Ho Chi Minh? Did you have your secretary call ahead?” I thought maybe the sarcastic humor routine might work for me, too. I looked at the map of North Vietnam I was holding, and the shaking told me it wasn’t working quite like I hoped. At least Gearheardt was right about the river from Haiphong up to Hanoi. Of course that wasn’t exactly what I meant by my original question.

  “Did you forget about our package of orders?” Gearheardt’s voice was irritating, but the message was welcome. I had forgotten it. Shuffling through the map case beside my seat, I found and opened it.

  “Great, here’s a map. Like we didn’t have any maps.” I imagined the President or one of his numbnut aides assembling the package back in D.C. “Fantastic, a list of hotels in the area. Okay, here’s a list of contacts. Holy moly, we have this many agents running around Hanoi? There must be fifty people on this list. Here’s a great one, Gearheardt, ‘Gon Norea.’” I was babbling, and I took a breath to calm down.

  “Keep up the running commentary and sarcasm about the contents, Jack. It helps me to concentrate.”

  “Don’t get snotty with me, you bastard. This is one of a long line of screwed-up situations that you got us into, without giving a thought to my life or limb.”

  “So we have a list of contacts. What else? I had to go through the package in a bit of a hurry when Buzz gave it to me.”

  “Contacts, addresses. Here we go, an envelope marked Top Secret, Eyes Only.”

  I took it out of the package and noticed that the seal on the back of the eight-by-eleven manila envelope was broken. The name on the front of the envelope was “Gerard Finnigan Gearheardt (Narwsorthy) Special Agent & Almost Captain USMC 087863.” I put the rest of the packet away and started to open the envelope.

  “Gerard Finnigan?” I said.

  “Give me that, you aren’t the Eyes Only the President had in mind.” Gearheardt was smiling, but he grabbed at the envelope and yanked it from my hand, back ov
er to his side of the cockpit, where it continued out the side window, quickly disappearing in the airstream.

  “Oh, shit,” Gearheardt said.

  “Very nice. In fact, that might be the nicest move that you have made in our too-long friendship. Was that cute? Ripping our orders out of my hand? Did you get a kick out of that?”

  “Knock it off, Jack. Sarcasm won’t really help here.”

  “And what would help, Gerard Finnigan Gearheardt?”

  Gearheardt actually growled. “Only my mother calls me that. And she only did it once.”

  “Is that when they took you to the orphanage?”

  Gearheardt was silent for a moment. He didn’t like to talk about his folks dropping him off at the orphanage. Before I could apologize, another voice was heard.

  “If you don’t mind me saying so, sirs, you’re not giving me a lot of confidence that you know what the hell you’re doing on this socalled mission.”

  It was Gunnery Sergeant Buckles. I had forgotten that he was in the belly of the chopper. Now he had awakened and obviously was plugged into the intercom.

  “Hello, Gunny. How are you feeling?” Gearheardt asked.

  “Not bad, Almost Captain Gearheardt. At least I thought—”

  “You can drop the ‘almost’ Gunny. Just call us ‘Captain.’ We’ll be dead or captains when we finish this mission.”

  “Thanks, Captain. Anyway I thought I was doing pretty good until I heard you and Captain Armstrong discussing what we were doing. Now I’m—”

  “Don’t sweat it Gunny. Captain Armstrong is just upset that our instructions flew out of the window, that we barely have enough fuel to get to Hanoi, and that there’s a strong possibility that they’re going to chop our nuts off when they catch us.”

  “When who catches us, Captain?”

  I could answer that one. “Whoever catches us, Gunny. We’ve pretty well managed to alienate everyone. We’re on our way to Hanoi with a vague notion of meeting with Ho Chi Minh and making a deal with him to stop the war, or perhaps killing him. I was foolishly hoping that the orders that Captain Gearheardt threw out the window might fine-tune our options a bit. To say nothing of perhaps providing a kernel of a clue as to how we hope to accomplish all of this.”