by Robert Mason
“Roger,” Gary answered. “Yellow One, there’s a mortar round stuck in the ground next to us.”
“Huh?”
“There’s a mortar round from last night stuck in the ground right next to us.”
“Roger. Call the ARVNs. They might have a demolition squad here.”
I lit a cigarette and stared at the round. It was just about where I had been lying last night.
Gary raised the liaison officer, an American who stayed with the ARVNs. “Roger, we’ll take care of it. Don’t try to move it yourself.”
We both burst out laughing. “Lucky he told us,” I said. “I was almost out the door to defuse it.”
As courage gathered in each of the seven ships, one would announce he was leaving, and we’d hear him flutter up into the mist. Gary and I decided that the round wasn’t going to explode, since it hadn‘t, so we waited. Neither of us felt entirely confident about the ITO. If we had the time, why not wait to see if the fog burned off? The last ship left. They radioed back that the fog was still about five or six hundred feet deep.
“Guess it’s not going to burn off for a while.”
“Guess not,” I said.
“Wanna go for it?”
“Yeah.” I looked at the mortar round. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
I stared at the round as Gary cranked up. Would it be sensitive to the rotors when they started to thud? I guessed I’d never know if it was. “Top-notch demolition crew them ARVNs have….”
“You see ‘em coming?”
“No.”
“Oh. Yeah. Top-notch.”
Gary set the artificial horizon low for the takeoff. “Okay, Bob, you double-check me on the way out.”
“Right.”
“Everybody on board?”
“Roger,” answered the crew chief. “Sir, you sure we shouldn’t wait a little longer?”
“Relax, Sergeant. We got this thing under control.”
“Roger.” He didn’t sound convinced. Gary looked over at me and smiled. I nodded.
When he pulled in the power, I glanced at the round. The grass around it was pressing down in the rotor wash. Did it just move? The ship drifted off the ground. The round disappeared along with everything else.
There was no sensation of movement. The artificial horizon was right where it was supposed to be, and the airspeed was picking up. Gary let it accelerate to about 40 knots and held it there. Turn and bank was fine. “Needle, ball, airspeed” was the slogan we learned in flight school. I checked the instruments in that order. Gary was right on the money. White nothingness extended in all directions. The ship hummed, the instruments said we were moving, but the senses said we were parked in some strange void.
“So far, you’ve got a double-A ride,” I said, referring to the grading on the check-ride sheets our instructors used to carry with them. “Don’t fuck it up.”
“No sweat,” said Gary.
The whiteness grew brighter. It blazed. But still you could see nothing. Without reference to the inside of the cockpit, you would swear you were blind. The bright white grew bluish, and we saw a dark-green peak off to our right. “Yea,” I said, cheering.
“Great flying, sir!” The crew chief was now a believer.
I looked back. The misty sea beneath us hid the valley where midnight mortars lurked. The mountaintops were bright islands at the surface. I felt a shudder of relief and smiled to myself. It had been a bad night, but the sky was bright ahead.
11. Transfer
I don’t think the elections will result in a Communist or neutralist government, but if they do, we will fight. I don’t care if they are elected or not, we’ll fight.
—Nguyen Cao Ky, in Time, May 13, 1966
May 1966
Riker and I sat together in the sling seat of the C-123 as it droned to Saigon. My feet rested on the flight bag that contained everything I owned. I was not coming back. Riker was on his way to an R&R flight to Hong Kong. Since I volunteered to transfer out, I wondered why I already felt homesick for the Cav.
“You see Resler break Eight-eighty-one?” Riker said.
“He didn’t break it; the new guy did.”
“Yeah, but it was Resler’s ship.”
I’d said good-bye to Gary as he walked out to the flight line with the new guy, Swain, in tow. Gary was checking him out, to see how well he flew.
“Probably won’t see you again,” said Gary.
“Probably not. At least not if I see you first.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Well, it was fun, even if we did argue a lot.”
“No problem. I always won anyway.”
He grinned and extended his hand. “Gotta go check this new guy out. I’ve got your home address. I’ll write you after our tours are up.” We shook hands.
“Yeah, do that. Let’s keep in touch.” I nodded and let go of his hand.
“See you.” He smiled and turned toward the ships.
“See you.” I watched him walk away.
I decided to watch him take off, so I sat on some sandbags in front of the operations tent.
“Where they sending you, Mason?” Captain Owens came out and pushed his cap back.
“A place called Phan Rang, Forty-ninth Aviation Company.”
Owens nodded. “Never heard of ‘em.”
“Neither have I, but they’re not the Cav.” Gary and Swain climbed into their ship, 881, the oldest Huey in the company.
“Ha. ‘Not the Cav’ is right.” Owens grinned. “Nobody’s the Cav.”
Gary’s ship was running now, so I got up to leave.
“Well, good luck in your new company,” said Owens.
“Thanks.”
They were in a hover, backing out of the slot, when everything came unglued. The ship vaulted backward over its own tail. The rotors hit the ground, and the transmission and drive shaft came off. The fuselage slammed into the ground. Pieces flew everywhere.
“Jesus!” I yelled and ran down the path. The fuselage was crumpled, lying on its back. I saw the crew chief scrambling out of the wreckage, pale and wide-eyed. I humped to get there, visualizing Resler as crumpled as his ship. Then I saw him squirming out through some twisted metal. He was scared but smiling.
“You all right?” I yelled.
Gary brushed himself off and began laughing. Swain was out walking around in circles. The crew chief was on his knees, trying to pull the gunner out of the pocket. Jet fuel dripped in puddles near him. “Come on!” the crew chief yelled, pulling.
Freed, the gunner, was bleeding from a gash on his temple. Gary was wandering dumbly toward the operations tent. Then he stopped and came back to the wreckage.
“You okay?” I ran over to him.
“Sure.” He laughed. “Sure, I’m okay. Why’d you ask?”
“Why’d I ask? Look at the ship!”
He laughed again, a giggle from a pale and confused face. “Bad landing!”
Some people walked the gunner up to the med tent. He was the only injury. I relaxed. “It’s only a bad landing if you don’t walk away from it.”
“What happened?” Gary’s question was broken by spasms of laughter.
“You don’t know?”
“Shit, the last thing I knew I was locking my belts, then wham!”
“Swain was flying?”
“Yeah. I didn’t think he could fuck it up getting out of the slot, you know.”
“Hey, Mason, the Jeep’s waiting to take us to the airfield,” Riker yelled from the tent.
“Shit. Hey, I gotta go. Again. You’re okay?”
“Sure. Why’d you ask?”
Riker dug around in his bag looking for something. The vibrations from the cargo ship were putting my ass to sleep.
“You know, Riker, every time I go to Saigon, you’re with me.”
“That’s right, you lucky fuck. I’ve got to get a room tonight ‘cause my R&R plane’s not leaving until tomorrow. Want to share a room?”
“Why not? I’ve got two
days to get to my new assignment,” I said. Riker nodded in the loud droning. I looked across the deck, through a window, and saw the plane was banking. Probably getting close. Then we hit some bumpy air. It reminded me of the fly-by for the general.
We had practiced for two days, and the weather couldn’t have been smoother. A line of Hueys, Chinooks, Caribous, and Mohawks, even some little H-13s stretched for two miles, looped to the An Khe pass and back toward the Golf Course. “Keep ‘em tight,” said the Colonel. We did. Resler sat copilot and I flew because our position put my side closest to the ship we were flying on.
“You don’t have to go that close, you know,” Resler said.
“These guys know what they’re doing,” I said, referring to Connors and Banjo in the ship we followed. “I’d feel okay overlapping blades with them.”
“Fucking daredevil.”
I grinned, liking the label, and moved closer. “I knew I should’ve kept my mouth shut,” said Gary.
I moved the rotor tips so that there was no more than three feet between us and the other ship. I held a vertical clearance of three feet to allow for any rough air and the surges it would cause.
“Ever overlapped blades before?”
“Never. Never will, either.”
I kept the three-foot vertical space and moved gently in. My left hand on the collective jerked up and down, keeping our blades above Connors and Banjo’s. Banjo was watching. He grinned from only a few feet away and raised his fist, thumbs up. Then he waved me closer. The smirk on his face said it was a dare.
“Okay, flight, looking good. Remember to keep the turns very, very wide. I don’t want to see any bunching up,” said the Colonel.
“Not in the turn, Mason.”
I nodded. I saw only the vertical space between our rotors. The rest of the world did not exist. When their ship bounced up in an air pocket, my hand flicked us up at the same time. I saw I could hold the space, so overlapping would be easy. I moved slowly in as we began the turn.
“Okay. Okay. You did it. Now get back,” said Gary.
Connors knew what I was doing and flew as smooth as silk. We made the whole turn with our rotors overlapped by two or three feet. As we came out of the bank, I slid away, and breathed again. “I can’t believe you like to do shit like that,” Gary said, disgusted.
“What’s so funny?” Riker said, inside the C-123.
“Nothing. Just thinking about the fly-by.”
“Fucking waste of time, that was.”
“Yeah,” I said. But I was already thinking about the assault we did in Bong Son. When we got back from our sweep around Dak To, our company was sent over to Bong Son to help the 227th. The VC were retaking the valley we had won two months before. During the briefing at the Rifle Range, the officer in charge said, “So make sure your gas masks are working okay. We’ll be using CS and tear gas on this assault.”
There were murmurs in our crowd. Gas masks? What gas masks?
Outside, the CO had a quick inventory done and found that we had enough masks for exactly half the men. One pilot in each ship and one of the gunners would have to go without.
“Why don’t we just go back and get some more?” somebody asked.
“Not enough time,” said the CO.
Resler and I and our two crew members stood next to the ship looking at the two masks. Resler produced a coin. The crew chief and gunner flipped. The crew chief won.
“Heads or tails?” Resler grinned confidently. He never lost.
“Heads.”
He flipped.
“Heads.”
As it turned out, the gas was diffuse where we landed, and we took only one round as we left. But I remember Resler sitting on his side of the cockpit grimacing, tears flowing, yelling on the intercom, “Shit! Goddamn!”
The plane banked hard. Out the window I could see the outskirts of the big city. “About time,” said Riker. “You really enjoyed this flight. You’ve been grinning the whole way down.”
“Yeah. I guess I have. It’s just that I’m so happy to be leaving the Cav.”
“Yeah. Course, you don’t know what kind of unit your new one is yet.”
The hotel we got to was a place Riker had heard of. I don’t remember its name or where it was. That’s partly because we had had a good meal and several drinks that night and got to the hotel after dark.
The hallway was narrow, and the ceilings were twelve feet high. The place was dark and dingy and the clerk uninterested when we checked in. The Vietnamese were getting used to us, it seemed, and they didn’t like what they saw. The clerk gave us a key and pointed down the dark hallway.
“Some joint, Riker.”
“Guy I know says it’s a great place. Big rooms, low prices.”
The windowless room had two beds and a dresser and a small wooden table. The tall doorway, which occupied one corner, had a glass transom above it. I flopped on my bed with a copy of Time. Riker stripped to his shorts and wrote at the table.
An article mentioned the transfer of General Kinnard, for whom we had the fly-by.
“Hey,” I announced, “they’ve written up Kinnard’s transfer in Time and there’s not one word about mine.”
After the fly-by, I had had to take a ship over to the river to wash it out. Long sat with me on the sandbar as usual and talked.
“I am sorry to see you go,” she said. Her English was improving every time I saw her. She was a self-taught genius.
“I’ll miss you, too.”
“Will you give your wife a present from me?”
“Sure, but you don’t have to give me any presents.”
“Not for you!” She giggled. “For your wife.” She removed her gold-wire earrings and held them out to me.
“No.” I shook my head. “You can’t afford to be giving me gold earrings, Long. I’m the rich guy here; I’ll pay you for them.” I reached into my pocket. She suddenly looked hurt, genuinely hurt. She was really just being nice.
“Okay, okay. No money. I’ll give them to Patience.”
She smiled brightly and handed them to me. I wrapped them in a piece of paper from my notepad and put them in my shirt pocket. “Thank you for the present. I’m sure Patience will love them.”
She grinned.
I patted my shirt pocket. Still there. Better mail them as soon as I get to the new unit. I wasn’t reading the words I looked at, so I put the magazine down. In the meantime, Riker had got in bed. My grandfather’s Hamilton said it was eleven o‘clock. Someone knocked at the door.
“Yeah?” I called out.
No answer. Then another knock.
“Who the fuck could that be?” I sat up.
“Probably the maid.”
I walked over to the door. “Probably.” If it was the maid, why was I afraid to open the door? I’m really coming apart, I thought.
When I turned the knob, the door shot inward, slammed into my boot, and stopped. I reflexively pushed back, and as I did, I came face to face with a frowning Oriental only a few inches shorter than I.
“Hey!” I pushed hard, trying to close the door. My boot slipped back as the door opened wider. I struggled harder. Altogether I could see four or five men pushing. Silently. Grimly determined.
“Hey, Riker! Get over here. There’s a bunch of gooks trying to bust in here!”
Riker paused for a second until he saw I wasn’t kidding.
“What the—?” He got up and ran over.
My boot slid back farther. The opening was almost wide enough to squeeze through. “C‘mon, goddamn it! Push this fucking door shut!” I yelled. My boot jammed under the door was the only thing that was keeping them out of the room. Riker pushed, stretching his long legs to the foot of my bed and his back to the door. When the door closed a fraction, I moved my boot ahead to lock it there. Then they pushed with a surge and the pressure on my toes grew until I thought they would crack. Hands came around the edge of the door and grasped air, trying to reach us. The only sounds were grunts and heavy
breathing. Riker and I dripped sweat. As the heavy door groaned and thudded, the space was slowly getting smaller. Unbelievably, we were gaining on them. A hand grabbed the edge of the door as it got close to shutting. I smashed it with my fist. It held. I smashed it over and over until it let go and struggled back through the narrow crack of the door. As the fingers slipped out, the door slammed shut. Fumbling, shaking, wet fingers latched the lock and the extra safety bolt. Riker and I looked at each other in amazement. We were sharing a nightmare. Then we heard the thud of a body slamming against the door, and the door seemed to bend inward. The thudding repeated itself rhythmically, like a heavy heartbeat.
“Call the fucking desk!” said Riker.
I ran over to the night table and picked up the phone. Riker dragged the dresser across the room. It made a splintering sound as the veneer split against the tile floor. The desk phone rang.
“Are you calling them?!” Riker yelled as he struggled to get the dresser against the thudding door.
“Yeah. No answer.” I wiped sweat from my eyes. “They don’t fucking answer!”
After fifty rings I knew they would never answer. We sat across from each other on the two beds and watched the door moving with each animal thud. “Your derringer! Get out your derringer.” Riker brightened at the prospect.
“I sold it to Hall.”
“You sold it to Hall! I thought that was your fucking last-ditch weapon. Don’t you think this looks like an emergency?”
I nodded and shrugged. The gun was still sold to John Hall for twenty-five bucks.
“If that ain’t the dumbest thing I ever heard of…”
I nodded sorrowfully.
Crack!We both jumped at the new sound. They were throwing something metallic against the glass transom. Crack! Then chips of glass fell inside. The transom window had wire mesh embedded in it. At the center of the window a section the size of a fist was now bare of glass.
“Try the phone again,” said Riker.
I listened to a mechanical switch click and cycle a burst of ringing noise, then click, recycle, then noise. Riker took his bed apart. Under the mattress were hardwood bed slats. He smashed one down on my bed. It made a formidable club. I shook my head when he looked at the phone. Then I hung up. “Bastards!” Riker yelled.