by Robert Mason
While I read, something went wrong with my brain. Something had to be wrong, because instead of lying back with the book on my lap, the book was on the dirt floor and I was reaching for my .45 and saying, “What?”
“What?” I roamed the tent, looking in corners. I looked outside.
“What?” Something was very wrong. I was tense. I was ready. I waited.
A dark head pushed through the flaps. That? As I drew my pistol, I saw it was Staglioni. “Chow,” he said, and ducked back outside. He had not seen my gun. Abruptly the feeling of impending doom passed. A danger was past. What the danger had been I didn’t know, but it was gone. I holstered the .45 and walked to the mess hall.
I sat at a table with Staglioni and two air-force pilots from across the base. All during the meal I kept worrying about what I had just done. There wasn’t anything wrong. It’s me. I’m going crazy.
“Wanna try it?” The air-force lieutenant asked.
“Try what?”
“Fly a Phantom.”
“I fly slicks.”
“I know. You wanna trade a ride?” He looked at me quizzically.
“No.”
The Huey was not ready the next day. Or the next. Each day I waited, the routine was much the same. Breakfast, read, lunch, read, dinner, read, sleep. The routine was punctuated by moments of nonspecific terror. I spent my nights hopping up out of bed looking for the source of my fears. One afternoon, while I read at a table in the club, I blacked out. One moment I was reading normally; the next thing I knew my face was resting on the pages. That scared me into taking my tortured soul over to the flight surgeon on the air-force side of the base.
“I have these dizzy spells, I keep waking up at night thinking that I’m dying, and yesterday my face fell into my book,” I shamefully admitted.
“Take off your clothes,” said the doctor, with sympathetic fascination.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“I’m going to give you a neurological examination.”
And he did. He poked me with pins, scraped my soles, tapped my elbows and knees. He had me follow fingers and lights with my eyes, stand on one foot, and touch my fingertips with my eyes closed. And when he finally looked into my eyes with his ophthalmoscope, he said,
“Hmmm.”
“Find something?” I asked.
“Nope. Nothing at all. All your circuits check out fine.”
“So why am I having these blank spells and dizziness?”
“I don’t know.”
I sagged with dissappointment.
“It could be a couple of things,” he added hastily. “You might have a rare form of epilepsy, which I doubt. Or you’re suffering from stress. I would think that with the kind of job you have, it’s stress. But I suggest you check with your own flight surgeon when you get to see him. If you keep having the symptoms, they’ll probably ground you.”
Four days after I had arrived, a week after leaving the Cav, I joined my new unit in the field at Nhon Co.
The Prospectors’ ships were parked in a narrow airstrip cut into the jungle by the French. The camp was up on a hill next to the strip. I carried my gear up and found Deacon, and he showed me to one of the twenty six-sided tents scattered around the sandy, weedy dunes at the top of the hill. My tentmates were two warrants, Monk and Stoopy Stoddard.
“Hey, a new guy,” said Monk. He looked up from filing magazine clippings in a shoebox. He had square jaws and a compact, sturdy body. “But”—he squinted in the glare of the light behind me—“I’d say you’re not new to Nam.” He was looking at my belt buckle. The green tape that covered it was filthy and almost black, the mark of the veteran.
“That’s right. I’m a transfer from the Cav.”
“Really?” said Stoddard. “The Cav? That’s a tough outfit.” Stoopy was an overweight child of a man who said irritating things like “Gosh” and “Wow!” and even
“Neat.”
I nodded and said, “Can I put my gear over here?” I pointed to the back of the tent.
“Sure,” said Stoddard. I threw my bag against the cloth wall and sat on it. Monk resumed filing his clippings. Ragged copies of Stars and Stripes, Newsweek, Time, and other magazines lay strewn in the dirt around his bedroll. He carefully cut each item with a Swiss army scissors, then flipped through alphabetized index cards to find its proper place.
“Are you a writer?” I asked.
“Monk, a writer?” Stoopy giggled. His belly and fat cheeks shook. I noticed chocolate stains on his lips and then saw the chocolate bar grasped in a grubby hand. “He thinks you’re a writer, Monk.” He laughed brightly. Monk shot him a glance that killed the laughter immediately. Stoopy blinked hard and sat quietly and respectfully.
“No, not yet,” said Monk. “I’m just collecting my material. Someday…” he trailed off, apparently avoiding a touchy subject.
“That’s an impressive amount of stuff you got there.” I nodded at the shoebox.
“Thanks, I’ve got more.” He pointed to four more rubber-banded boxes resting against the tent wall. “Someday… You’d be surprised to know what they’re saying about this war.” He nodded slowly and knowingly. I signaled agreement.
“Well, well, well. Look who’s here,” said a voice from the flap.
“Wolfe!”
“Wow, Mason, what a memory!” We both laughed. Wolfe was a former classmate.
“I didn’t know you were with the Prospectors,” I said.
“I was one of the shmucks that set up this camp. I was out here when you arrived.”
“Well, you picked a nice place.”
“Thanks.”
Monk seemed irritated by Wolfe’s intrusion. He rolled a rubber band off his wrist around the shoebox and stashed it carefully with the others. Then he stood up and squeezed past Wolfe without saying a word. Wolfe ignored him as he left. Apparently they were not friendly.
Wolfe and I talked awhile. He had arrived in-country a month before. He was very impressed that I was a short-timer with only two months to go in my tour. I told him I had been in the Cav and that I had recently talked to some classmates of ours up near Kontum. We shared rumors concerning the whereabouts of the rest of the class and agreed that probably most of them were somewhere in Nam. Somebody called that it was chow time, and Stoopy, whom we had completely ignored, leapt outside. As we emerged from the tent, we saw Monk balanced on his hands, walking up a small sand dune.
“That’s pretty good,” I said as we walked away.
“The guy’s a jerk,” said Wolfe sourly.
That evening I delivered a letter from the air-force doctor to Doc Da Vinci, our flight surgeon. He agreed that it was probably just a stress reaction and gave me some tranquilizers to take. He warned me to use them only at night. I couldn’t fly with them. I slept well that night.
The next morning I was back in the saddle in a Huey. The aircraft commander was my platoon leader, Deacon. We flew three missions of local ass-and-trash, single-ship stuff. Deacon let me do all the flying. In four hours that morning, I landed in a clearing so small I had to hover vertically down, also landed on a tight pinnacle, carried two loads that were so heavy I had to make running takeoffs, and finally joined up with three other ships in a formation flight back to the airstrip. I had been thoroughly checked out.
“Damn good flying,” Deacon said from the left seat as I landed behind another Huey back at the airstrip.
“Thanks,” I replied. Coming from an IP, that was a real compliment.
“If you fly that good again tomorrow, I’ll sign you off as an aircraft commander.”
The next day was also the Prospectors’ last day at Nhon Co. So at the end of another day of local ass-and-trash, we flew directly back to Phan Rang. Other ships brought the tents and gear back. I did fly well, and, true to his word, Deacon signed me off as a qualified aircraft commander. On the walk to the company area, Deacon told me that Ringknocker was arranging another big party.
“We se
ldom get a break like this; we’ll be here four days. Ringknocker likes to see the men enjoy themselves. I’d roll my bedroll up if I were you,” Deacon said.
“Roll up my bedroll?”
“Yeah. Just roll your mattress up and tie it.”
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
It was nine o‘clock and the party was in full swing. Doc DaVinci sat next to me at the bar and explained how he had prepared the skull that now sang on the wall. He was drunk. The members of the songwriting team sat facing each other in a circle of chairs in a far corner, producing sounds that clashed with a Joan Baez tape. They were drunk. Sky King and Red Blakely Indian-wrestled in the middle of the floor. Sky King held a brimming mug of beer, claiming that he would not spill a drop while he dispatched Red.
“I boiled it,” said DaVinci.
“In the kitchen?” I asked, interested.
“No, no. They wouldn’t let me do it in the kitchen. I built a fire out back and boiled it there. Boiled it a whole day.”
I glanced at the skull, clacking with Baez’s words, admiring the clean gleaming white of it. “It’s so… white.”
“Not naturally. I bleached it after I pulled off the meat.”
I drank some bourbon and nodded. “Of course.” I put my drink down. “Bleach.”
“It’s a fact,” DaVinci said. “Clorox will give your skull a whiter, brighter look.”
“They’re coming!” Sky King yelled. Everyone stopped talking. I could hear a siren wailing in the distance.
“You rolled your bed up?” Deacon had walked up to me.
“Yeah…”
“Smart boy,” he said.
“Who’s coming?” I asked Doc.
“The ladies, of course.”
The siren got louder, then stopped. Somebody outside said, “Back ‘er up.” In the light that shone through the windows I could see the rear end of an army ambulance moving toward the open door. It stopped and someone opened the back. Packed inside were at least a dozen smiling Vietnamese women. All the Prospectors were standing, applauding, whistling, while the ladies were helped out of the ambulance.
It’s hard to say what happened next except that once the women were all inside the club, they began to disappear. Men grabbed giggling girls and ran out the doors into the night. It all happened in minutes. I sat there on the bar stool, open-mouthed. I had just seen an ambulance back up, unload a bunch of whores, and they were carried away?
“There must be some kind of rule against that,” I said.
“Hey, it’s our ambulance,” Doc said.
“If that happened in the Cav, everyone here would be up for a court-martial.” I shook my head in disbelief.
“It works great,” said Doc.“The security guards never stop an ambulance. Best damn thing we ever traded for.”
“You traded for an ambulance?”
“Yeah. Ringknocker got an ambulance, a deuce-and-a-half, and a Jeep for one Huey.”
“A Huey?” I shook my head.
“Yeah, a Huey. It was one of ours that got shot to shit. It was declared a total loss, and its number was taken off the registers. It was just wreckage when Ringknocker made the trade. Part of the deal was that our maintenance guys would piece it back together. It looks like shit, but it flies.”
“That’s incredible.”
“I know. Ringknocker has got a creative mind.”
It had been only fifteen minutes since the girls were carried off when one of them walked back into the club escorted by her partner. “Next,” he called out.
Doc slapped my shoulder and nodded toward the girl. “It’ll change your luck.” He grinned.
“No thanks. I’m still fighting a case of clap,” I said. Inside, I was awed by their style—these Prospectors were out of a dream. “You go ahead.”
“Not me. Every time I try to examine them, they get pissed off.” He blew a kiss to the girl.
“No you!” she said, shaking her finger. Doc laughed loudly.
She left with someone and two more came inside.
Silver wings upon their chests,
Flying above America’s best.
We will stop the Vietcong,
And you can bet it won’t take long.
I had forgotten about the songwriters. They were still in their corner rehearsing their latest lyrics, apparently undisturbed by the intrusion of the lovelies.
I left the party at one o‘clock. The girls had been sent back out through the gates in the blaring ambulance, but the Prospectors partied on.
“Okay. We’re taking two ships. Deacon, you pick a crew. I’ll fly the other with Daring.” Ringknocker held a briefing at a table in the mess hall the next morning. Deacon and Daring nodded. I watched from the next table while I ate fresh scrambled eggs. “The target is the Repair and Utility compound, here.” Ringknocker pointed to his frayed map. The R&U compound was a fenced-in field at another air-force base, heavily guarded, surrounded by all sorts of security, where the civilian contractors stored their mountains of building supplies. Such things as tin roofing, lumber, air conditioners, refrigerators, sinks, toilets—everything needed to build a truly American base. “Now I’m trying for an ice maker, but anything will do,” Ringknocker explained. “Deacon, I want you to fly cover while I go down. Keep me posted when the guards start moving our way.” Deacon nodded. “Okay, let’s go.” The group of men got up and left, dressed for a mission.
Ringknocker’s Huey came back an hour later carrying a huge wooden crate on a sling. He landed it on the back of his deuce-and-a-half, which drove it immediately to the maintenance area. When they opened the crate, they discovered that it contained another refrigerator, just like the one they already had. Ringknocker was happy anyway, and by late the next day he had arranged to trade the refrigerator to an air-force unit on the other side of the base for a brand-new ice-making machine. For the next two months, wherever we went in the field, someone got the job of moving the five-hundred-pound ice machine as part of our field gear.
On the afternoon of the fourth day of the break, Deacon told me to take a ship up to our headquarters and pick up two new pilots.
I flew with Sky King, who chattered during the entire thirty-minute flight. He was a happy man and very lik able. His total disregard for army formalities made me forget that he was a captain.
We landed at the sandy pad at headquarters, shut down, and walked to the tent with the mail courier. From a hundred yards away I thought I recognized one of two men carrying flight bags on their shoulders.
“Those must be the two pilots,” said Sky King.
I nodded, staring at the distant, frail figure who sagged under the weight of a giant flight bag. I knew that walk.
“Shit!” I said with a wide grin on my face. “How far do I have to go to get away from you?” The two men were twenty feet away.
“Damn! They told me there wasn’t a chance you’d be in this unit,” Resler replied. I helped him carry his bag back to the ship.
12. La Guerrilla Bonita
Neither conscience nor sanity suggests that the United States is, should or could be a global gendarme. The U.S. has no mandate from on high to police the world and no inclination to do so.
—Robert S. McNamara, in Time, May 27, 1966
June 1966
It struck me as ironic that the Prospectors, located two hundred miles south of the Cav, were assigned to Dak To, the Cav’s last hunting ground. Within a month of my transfer, I found myself once again scouring for VC in an area in which the Cav had drawn a blank. This time, I flew with a different unit in support of the famous 101st Airborne in Operation Hawthorne. The VC had chosen not to fight the Cav, but apparently they thought they’d try their luck against the 101st.
Our camp was west of the village of Dak To, in a grassy plain south of some low foothills. Our tents were set up in three straight lines, paralleling the red-dirt airstrip. A mile from our camp, the 101st bivouacked and maintained security for themselves and for the Prospect
ors.
We spent a day filling sandbags to build low walls around our tents. On the morning of the second day, it was announced that we would fly a little mission for some ARVNs before we started direct support of the 101st.
“The best thing that could happen to you is to get a minor bone wound,” said Wolfe. He stood in the awning of the tent I shared with Resler and Stoddard.
“A bone wound? I feel weak just thinking about it,” I said.
“I’m saying that if you had to get wounded, that’s the one to get. A bone wound will get you out of this fucking country.”
Deacon walked down the row between the tents. “Let’s go,” he yelled.
“How about no wounds?” I said. “Maybe they’ll just call the whole thing off.” I reached for my helmet. My .45 was already strapped on over my flak vest. I was ready.
“Fat fucking chance,” said Wolfe.
“Good luck.” Gary ducked out of the tent to go to his ship. He and I couldn’t fly together in the Prospectors, because they didn’t let junior warrants do that. We felt safer together. Especially since the pilot who replaced me back in the Cav, Ron Fox, had been killed sitting in the cockpit with Gary. He had taken a round up through his chin. Gary said that his brains poured out when they removed his helmet. Fox’s death was one of the reasons they had sent Gary on a R&R on the way to the Prospectors. We’d both been working on Deacon to let us fly together—told him what a great team we’d made in the Cav—but so far, no dice.
“Good luck,” I said. I left the tent walking a little way with Wolfe. “What do you get for a scratch?” I said.
“A free cup of coffee. What do you think? You got to get something that takes time to heal but won’t be a permanent handicap.”
“Yeah, I see. I’ll work on it.” I saw Sky King waiting for me by the Operations tent. “See you after the mission. Good luck.”