by Robert Mason
Decker was sitting on the end of his cot, elbows on his knees, hands on his cheeks, staring at the dirt.
I was glad to see him back. “Hey, Deck—” Someone stopped me with a shake of the head. I nodded. Instead of walking by him, I went outside and came in through the back flap and sat on my stretcher.
Nate, facing me on his cot, was pouring some Old Grandad into his canteen cup. “Want some?”
“Yeah, I think I will.” I poured about two inches in my cup and stirred in some water with my finger. We sat there silently. Nate reread one of his letters, and I watched Decker. Everyone else in the tent talked quietly, keeping a space around the mourning man.
He was pale. He looked up once, and his face showed that sad child within. He shook his head and made a weak smile. “He autorotated.”
We all looked at him, expecting more. But he was silent.
Sherman broke the silence. “Morris?”
“Yeah. As he died, he bottomed the pitch for an autorotation. But we were too close to the ground, and the ship nosed in and sank up to the canopy.” Decker squinted in pain and stopped talking.
I was thinking, “Nosed in”? There was nothing wrong with the ship. They’d hit harder than normal, but the ship was just sitting there running when Decker jumped out.
Decker continued solemnly. “The bullet came in through the triangle window and went through his flak vest like it wasn’t there and through his heart. The flak vest stopped it on the other side. He pushed the collective down like he was making an autorotation and we crashed before I could stop it.” He stopped for a moment. “If I had been a little faster, I could’ve kept us from crashing.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” said Sherman.
“That’s what you think. How would you feel if your best friend had just gotten killed and you couldn’t even keep the fucking ship from crashing? See, he did the right thing even while he was dying. He set us up for the autorotation, but I just wasn’t fast enough to save it.”
“But, Decker, Morris was already dead. It doesn’t matter about the landing,” Sherman said.
Decker stood up suddenly. “He’s dead and it’s my fault!” He grabbed his shotgun and walked outside.
“Jesus,” said Nate.
“I don’t see why he’s blaming himself,” said Sherman. “Morris was already dead. And besides that, the ship didn’t crash.”
We all looked at Sherman. Of course, he was right. But nobody wanted to be rational. It was so… out of place.
The old man said nothing about Morris except that we ought to get some money together for flowers for his wife, but Sherman took it upon himself to give a little speech that night.
“Well, we’ve been pretty lucky up to now. It was only a matter of time. The other companies have taken a lot more kills than we have, so it’s our turn now. It looks like the overall ratio is one in five. One pilot out of five will get killed. We’ve only lost two guys, which puts us five away from the average. We’ve just been lucky.”
I hated Sherman. Now we were delinquent in our deaths. Running behind in our proper death ratio were we? Well we’ll just see about that. C‘mon you guys, let’s get out there and die!
At dawn the next morning, a Chinook landed, dwarfing our Hueys. A deuce-and-a-half backed up to the door ramp, and men began loading chest protectors onto the truck. Hundreds of chest protectors.
8. Bong Son Valley
This country cannot escape its destiny as the champion of the free world—there is no running away from it.
—Gen. Maxwell Taylor, in U.S. News & World Report, February 14, 1966
February 1966
The beach was slippery red clay. Connors claimed that it was better than the Caribbean. “In the Caribbean you can’t slide into the water because of the sand.”
True. If you sat on this beach without holding on to a bush, you slipped into the warm red water. Stepping toward the center of the pond, your feet accumulated layers of adhesive clay that made it seem like you were touching bottom when you weren’t. When I was chin deep, I stopped to watch the others.
Banjo ducked under and disappeared completely, an act of great courage in this slime, to reappear several feet away.
“Man, how can you stick your head under that shit?” said Kaiser. Kaiser, like me, wouldn’t go under for anything, but stood chin deep, soaking in the relative coolness.
Banjo only laughed and ducked under again. An old Vietnamese lady laughed at him while she weeded the fields around the pond. Four or five women and two men watched us skinny-dip in the buffalo watering pond. The women grinned self-consciously. These naked foreigners were clearly making fools of themselves. We interpreted their smiles as friendly approval.
An ROK road patrol guarding a bridge a hundred feet away laughed, too. I found out later that the Koreans were forbidden to undress around the Vietnamese because it was a sign of vulnerability to be thus exposed in front of your enemy.
Nate was sitting on his clothes on the beach, sunning himself, when a Cola girl materialized. When he noticed her, he modestly crossed his legs.
Cola girls were ubiquitous. They arrived at our laagers carrying Cokes in plastic netting.
“Fifty cents, GI. Buy Croakacrola?” They were inevitably young and cute, so I never bought a Coke. I was convinced the soda was poisoned.
“Hey, Nate, I can see your pecker,” yelled Connors. Nate glanced at him while he declined the coke and tightened his legs.
“I’m trolling, wise-ass.”
“Hey. So that’s how it’s done. But the bait is so small.”
Everyone laughed.
“I don’t know where you get off, Connors. You could play a record with your cock.”
“So, you’re going to do it?” I said.
“Yeah. You oughta think about it, too,” said Kaiser.
“Air America. Who are they?”
“Well, they’re supposed to be a civilian helicopter service, but it’s a CIA front.”
“How much do they pay?” I asked.
“That’s the good part. They guarantee twenty thousand and the average is thirty-five. Plus you get PX privileges, an airline discount, and ten days of R&R every month.”
“Twenty thousand?” I was paid seven.
“Yeah. And you can join them right now, before you get out of the army.”
“You doing that?”
“Well, I’ve only got two months left in service, so I’m going to finish up and move to Saigon as a civilian.” Kaiser slapped an envelope against his hand. “Got the letter today. It’s all fixed. What do you think, Mason? You want me to give you the address?”
“Naw. I think I’d rather fly crop dusters in Florida than sneak around with the CIA in Vietnam.”
“You’re going to be a CIA agent?” Nate said to Kaiser.
“Not an agent, a pilot. You know, Air America.”
“So, you like this line of work, do you?”
“Shit, they never fly assaults. They mostly do courier work and fly radio teams into Cambodia. Or pick up downed pilots where the army isn’t supposed to go. We take a lot more chances than they do, and we do it for peanuts.”
“So why do you think they’d let somebody as stupid as you even get close to their operation?”
“Not all of us are morons, Nate. You’ll see. In two months I’ll be pulling in twenty thou for doing a lot less work and for taking a lot less chances than you.”
Nate set a record on top of a box. In one corner of the box there was a fold-out tone arm.
“That’s a record player?” I said.
“Yeah. Neat, huh? My wife sent it for Christmas, but it just got here.”
Music played. “You’re kidding me!” said Kaiser. “ ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’? I’m sick!” He got up and left.
“Eat your heart out, Kaiser!” Nate hummed along with the song.
Barber, Wendall’s buddy, ducked in through the flap. “Mason, you seen Wendall?”
“No.”
&
nbsp; “I have. He’s over toward the mess tent digging a hole,” said Nate.
“Thanks.” Barber left.
“What’s he digging a hole for?” I asked.
“He keeps saying we’re going to get hit. I think he’s beginning to take Hanoi Hanna seriously,” said Nate.
“Puff the Magic Dragon” was making me uncomfortable. It was the saccharine song that had inspired the naming of the murderous gatling-gun-armed C-47s. I couldn’t listen. “I’m going to check out Wendall.”
It was twilight, and I could see a small pile of dirt next to the other platoon tent. When I got closer, I saw what looked like a cap sitting on the ground. The cap moved, and Wendall’s smile brightened under the brim. “Hi, Mason.”
“Hi, Wendall. Nice hole you got there.”
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No. Really.”
Wendall tried to hold his chin up at the edge of the five-foot shaft while his shoulders strained low to reach something on the bottom. A large tin can full of sand squeezed up between his chest and the tight walls. He dumped it on the pile around him.
“The VC love mortars, and we have no protection,” he said.
“They say we can’t dig holes. We’re supposed to use that big gully over there.”
“That gully’s too wide. If a mortar round went off in it, you’d have hamburger. That’s why I built this like I did. I’m below ground level and I present the minimum target.”
“Pretty smart.”
“Not really. It just looks smart compared to what the morons told us to do.” He was referring to the Cav’s no-digging policy, which was still in effect to keep us from disfiguring the landscape. “Sometimes I think this war is being run by a gardener,” he added.
I walked over to the maintenance area and took a time-exposure shot of Reacher and some other guys working on a Huey in the glare of floodlights. Thousands of moths flitted around the lights while Reacher and Rubenski, armed with wrenches and screwdrivers, worked to get the ship flyable for the morning. They did it every night. Our ships were parked in a long row, nose to tail, along with eight or so other Hueys, at the Rifle Range. The rest were invisible in the moonless night.
The music was off when I returned, and Nate was asleep. I stripped to my underwear and crawled under my poncho liner.
I could not sleep. Why couldn’t I be more like Kaiser? Get a job with Air America and get out of all this? Imagine twenty thousand dollars a year. Patience had been complaining in her letters about our money problems. We were paying for the new Volvo, a much too expensive bed-and-dresser set, life insurance, and high rent at Cape Coral. Twenty thousand would sure be a whole new world. But it would have to be in this stinking country. Anything was better than that.
A mosquito pierced my arm, but I didn’t flinch. A guy I knew in another company was still in Japan living in a hotel while they treated him for malaria.
I was jumpy, worried. My nights were getting harder to bear. I thought of jerking off, but it seemed like too much trouble. You had to be very careful because the slightest noise or creak of the bed might cause some wise-ass to yell, “Hey. I hear somebody fucking his fist!” That would cause a few moments of catcalls, which masturbating men use to cover their last, quick strokes. So far I hadn’t been discovered. I knew it was only a matter of time.
Invariably my thoughts turned to a problem I had devised when I first arrived. I was mentally designing a clock to be made of bamboo. I had now determined how many gears I would need, how I would slice the bamboo to make the gears, how I could rig an escapement—almost everything I needed. I reviewed the plan, looking for errors. That put me to sleep.
Whoom! Whump whump wham! I awoke sitting upright but not understanding. Very heavy, ground-shaking explosions came from the direction of the Rifle Range gully.
“Mortars!” someone yelled.
Mortars? Shit! I grabbed my pistol belt and stuffed my feet into my boots. People ran by.
Rounds were exploding beyond the sand berm next to the gully. Men were packed into the bottom of the trench. I didn’t go in. Wendall was right: If a mortar went off in there, it would be mass murder. I decided to hide somewhere else.
I had my pistol out in front of me as I ran. The unlaced boots kept sliding off my feet; my cock kept swinging out of my underwear. Our mortar batteries began shooting back. I heard frantic calls for the pilots assigned to evacuate the ships to get going. I wasn’t part of that, so I kept looking for a place to hide. Finally, I rolled under a truck and watched the explosions. They were terrifyingly powerful, and random. So far no rounds had hit inside our compound. I was under the truck for a few minutes before I realized that if a mortar did hit it, the truck would explode, shredding me. I rolled out from under and lay in a shallow depression in the sand. Flares cast swinging shadows around the compound. Fifty-caliber tracers seemed to cruise slowly overhead, coming our way, so it must be the VC. I heard the Hueys running for a long time, but they didn’t take off. As the flares went off over the ROK positions, I noticed Wendall’s helmet moving around in the middle of his pile of sand. Why was he always right?
I heard the sounds of machine guns blasting out of the darkness overhead. Our gunships were on station, shooting streams of tracers into the foothills beyond the ROKs. Still, no mortars had come past the berm next to the gully. Our ships still idled, not taking off.
After fifteen minutes the mortars stopped. Only the familiar sound of outgoing rounds was left. I stood up and tried to dust the sand from my sweating body. My hands shook, and I cursed the Vietcong, the mortars, and the army.
The evacuation pilots were returning from the flight line.
“Listen, asshole, I was assigned Two-two-seven. What the fuck were you doing in my seat?” I heard someone say.
“The major told me I was supposed to fly it, numb nuts!”
The ships hadn’t got off the ground, because too many men tried to squeeze on board. The weight of the pilots and crew chiefs stuffed inside the machines kept them grounded while they argued about who was supposed to be flying.
The Koreans had sent out their Tiger teams. They came back with mortar tubes, base plates, and severed VC heads. The Koreans also complained that our gunships had killed some of their men.
We came off as a bunch of amateurs compared to the ROKs.
For the rest of the night I kept snapping awake as though something were happening. But nothing was.
“Preacher Six, there’s a machine-gun position on your takeoff path.”
The guns swooped back and forth in front of us, chattering.
Williams was up against the tree line in front of us, so he had to pull the guts out of his Huey to make it over. The gunships were in front of us, circling like sharks, firing down into the jungle.
“Preacher Six, turn left. You’re heading for the machine gun.”
No answer.
“Turn left. Turn left!” The gunship pilot was losing his cool as he watched us take off right over the position he’d warned us about.
It was a single gun. As we crossed above it, it raked us in the belly.
“Sir, one of the grunts just got hit!” said Miller, the crew chief.
The grunt, a black guy, had taken a round in the ass. I heard our gunner, Simmons, yelling incoherently over the noise of the ship.
“Sir, it’s Simmons’s brother,” Miller said.
“Preacher Six,” I called, “we have a wounded on board. We’re going to the aid station first.”
“Roger.”
We landed next to a MASH hospital pod that sky-cranes had lifted in from the Golf Course. The medics ran out and loaded the man onto a stretcher. Simmons ran around from the other side of the ship, crying, and hurried alongside the stretcher into the pod. We waited. He came back a few minutes later, his cheeks wet, but he was smiling.
“The doctors say he’ll be okay. He’ll be going home,” he said to the crew chief.
Ah, the proverbial million-dollar wound.
Then I remembered that Simmons had discovered another brother at the bottom of a pile of bodies at Pleiku.
Neither brothers nor fathers and sons were supposed to be in the same combat theater at the same time. I knew of two people in Vietnam who didn’t have to be there.
I talked to Simmons after we got back to the Rifle Range.
“Yes, sir, I know,” he said.
“So why don’t you tell the CO. He’ll get you out of here. You’ve lost one brother, and another was just wounded. Your family has done enough.”
He smiled and said, “No. I’m staying.”
“Why?”
“Someone has to do it.” He really said that. I thought I was in a movie. Maybe he did, too.
The fighting had progressed from the valley floor near the village of Bong Son north to the narrow An Lao valley, surrounded by steep mountains. We landed on the valley floor in the rice paddies.
The grunts jumping out of the Hueys found themselves slogging slowly for cover next to the paddy dikes. The paddies were tricky. If we landed and laagered for a while, the ships sank up to their bellies in the quagmire, anchoring them. Leese had demonstrated the proper technique for takeoff from such places months before in Happy Valley.
“You can’t just pull up hard and race out of here,” he had said. “First you bring the nose up to start releasing the skids, then level the ship and pull up slowly, very slowly, until the skids slide free. If you don‘t, one skid will leave first, leaving the other still stuck. Then you’ll flip over and go crash.”
Resler, having just returned from his R&R, was with me. We landed in a paddy in An Lao to await grunts on their way to our position to be extracted.
Once on the ground, each Huey became a kind of island in the rice-paddy lake. The heat was sweltering. The humidity was as thick as the mud under us.