by Robert Mason
“Right.” Wolfe gave me a salute.
Sky King smiled. “Hey, this is my lucky day. I get to fly with a veteran. I feel so… secure.”
“Yeah, yeah. Spare me, please.”
“No, really. Just being in the same ship with you makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay.” We walked toward our ship, one pair of pilots in a long, straggling line of helicopter crews walking over the red dirt to their ships.
“You know, you can be a pain in the ass, sir.”
“Haw!” Sky King yelped. “Got you.” We walked up to our ship. “You know, Mason, I like you. And to prove it, I’m going to let you in on a little business deal. I’ll tell you all about it when we get back.”
“Thanks.”
“No, really. You’ll love it. You’ll see.”
One thing different about the Prospectors, aside from such informal relations between officers and warrants, was that they had chest protectors up to their eyeballs. They had so many, in fact, that they kept the extras up in the chin bubbles. Seeing one of them at my feet made me feel guilty. For the lack of one of these, Morris had died. Maybe there was another pilot somewhere in Vietnam, right now, who was wondering why the fuck he didn’t have one. Maybe one was dying right now.
“How did you get so many of these things?” I pointed to the armor.
“We’ve always had them,” said Sky King. He looked at me like I had asked a dumb question. “Why?”
“Just wondered.”
The weather was great, puffy white clouds in a brilliant blue sky, a nice day for flying. Since I had been here once before, I knew that there were no VC around. I felt that I had retired from heavy action after leaving the Cav. My only concern was the ARVNs. I kept hearing such bad stories about them. A Prospector told me that an ARVN had turned and fired at his ship when he dropped them at an LZ. I’d heard that before.
We picked up eight ARVN Rangers wearing tight-tailored camouflage uniforms. They stared nervously, smoked cigarettes, and got aboard reluctantly. They did not bolster my sagging opinion of our ally.
The twelve slicks in the mission were to fly the ARVNs a few miles up the valley from Dak To. There we would cut across the eastern ridge and land two at a time on an eight-foot-wide ridge running to a small concrete fortress. While the flight stretched to get the necessary spacing, we heard on the radio that the VC were there, too. From a couple miles away I could see a daisy chain of Phantoms hitting the hill directly across the small valley from the fortress. Sky King and I were to be one of the second pair of ships to land. As the first two ships landed, they called hits.
From several VC machine-gun emplacements on the facing hill, tracers flicked out at the Phantoms. The fighters swooped, releasing monstrous bursts of cannon during their blindingly swift passes. The tracers converged on them.
I had the controls on the right side of the ship. Our buddy ship was taking a spot just in front of the fortress, leaving us the stark ridge nearest to VC guns. I set up the approach. The two ships in front of us took off after what seemed to be an awfully long time on the ground. With a hundred yards to go, our right-door gunner opened up on some muzzle flashes. At the same time, a Phantom began billowing black smoke in the middle of his strike. He climbed up sharply in an almost vertical climb—and we saw one man eject. As we landed, I saw grazing rounds kick through the dirt on the ridge in front of us. The emplacement was just a little higher than we were. The right door gunner blazed away, and I waited for the ARVNs to get the fuck out. When the crew chief hadn’t called that they were off for what seemed to be an hour, I looked back and saw him trying to force an ARVN off the ship from his awkward position in the pocket. The other ARVNs kept ducking their heads in the gunfire, waiting with wide-eyed anticipation for me to leave. I shook my head and started screaming, “Get off! Get off!” and pointed at the door. They sat there. I heard a round go through the air frame. The old, familiar tick. The crew chief pulled his .45 and pointed it at the soldiers, waving it toward the door with murder in his eyes. When they saw I wasn’t going to go anywhere and that the crew chief might indeed kill them, they began to get off. I looked at the fortress to see if we were getting any cover fire. No one in sight. No guns were in action; everyone was on the dirt behind the walls. The black, billowing trail of the Phantom disappeared in the jungle. A pearl-white chute blossomed in the blue sky.
Our buddy ship took off. “They’re out!” yelled the chief. I glanced across the deck through the door to the ARVNs hiding on the low side of the ridge. I took off. As we crossed in front of the fortress, we saw the defenders lying low. Not one gun was in position.
A half mile away, it was over for us. That was it—one load to the ridge. I cruised the five miles back to the camp, steaming.
“I’ve never seen anything like that. How the fuck are they going to win this stupid war if they fight like that!”
Sky King nodded gravely and said nothing. He’d worked with ARVNs before.
When we landed, I thanked the crew chief, Blakely, for using his brains and getting the ARVNs off.
“Any time, sir. Next time I’ll do it sooner.” He grinned. We all went around the ship to count hits. There was one. It was hard to believe that they had shot down a Phantom and missed us as we parked on the ridge, but that was the way it was.
“Lucky, lucky, lucky,” said Sky King.
“Astounding,” I said.
We walked back to the Ops tent and waited for the rest of the gaggle to return.
“Wolfe just got hit,” said Maj. Richard Ramon, the operations officer, as we walked inside. “Friend of yours, isn’t he?” He looked at me.
“Yes, sir. A classmate.”
“Well, he got his arm messed up. He’ll be here in a minute.” He shook his head. “Hell of a way to start the day.”
I kept seeing ARVN asses glued to the deck of my ship.
“Daring’s boys are out there now trying to get that gun position,” said Ramon. “And we had a slick and a gun out looking for the air-force pilot.”
“One?” I asked.
“Yeah, your friend Resler picked him up, the other guy never got out. Poor bastard.”
Two more Hueys cruised in fast, low level, down the airstrip. When they landed, Wolfe staggered out, helped by the crew chief. He held his arm across his chest, dripping blood down his pants. Doc DaVinci met them half way and walked them to the tent. Wolfe was pale, as if all his blood had drained out of his arm. He smiled blankly at me as Doc used scissors to cut his sleeve away.
“Fuckers shot my smokes!” exclaimed Wolfe. With his arm down, we could see that his chest-protector pocket was blown away, revealing the ceramic strata beneath the green cloth. The round had torn through his right forearm and blasted into his chest protector.
“Do you see that? The fuckers blew away my smokes!”
I nodded and handed him a lit cigarette.
“Can you move your fingers?” asked Doc.
“Sure.” Wolfe puffed the smoke.
“Well, move them.”
“I am.”
Doc looked at Wolfe. “I think you’re going to get home on this one.”
“I told you, Mason! A bone wound will do it every time.”
I raised a weak smile. “You got it right.”
Doc wrapped Wolfe’s arm in a bunch of bandages while Sky King and I went back out to the flight line to get the ship ready. We were going to fly him to Pleiku.
During the flight, Wolfe chain-smoked cigarettes handed him by the crew chief. When I dropped him at the hospital at Pleiku, his color was better and he was smiling like a man who just won a lottery. He had landed right after me in the same spot on the ridge. I almost wished it had been the other way around.
Later that day, Sky King and I flew out to lift a load of grunts from the 101st—to rescue the ARVNs—and back. We had experienced fairly heavy fire the second time out, but no hits. Meanwhile, Daring’s gun platoon was swooping all around the hill, trying to get at the emplacement.
It seemed impossible that the gooks could last through the Phantom strike and a whole gunship platoon, but they had. When the sun dropped behind the ridge, the guns came back one by one. They had taken many hits. Two pilots had been wounded and were taken immediately to Pleiku.
“Where the fuck is Seven-oh-two?” Major Ramon asked no one in particular. A group of us sat around in the operations tent listening to the radios: 702 was the last of the gunships out there. He had called five minutes before that he had been hit, but then there was silence.
“Let’s get somebody back out there.” Ringknocker spoke from the tent door. “Maybe he forgot how to get back here.” He frowned at his own joke.
Then we all heard the familiar whopping of rotors, and in the dusky light we saw the ship skid across the dirt fast and slide to a stop on the strip.
“Fancy landing,” somebody said.
With a collective sigh of relief, the crowd began to break up. I stopped outside with some others because something odd was happening with 702. Nobody was getting out. The ship just stood there hissing. Its rotors swung lazily. Somebody ran over to the ship and started waving frantically, calling for Doc. All four people on board were unconscious from wounds.
While they loaded the crew of 702 on a slick going to Pleiku, I walked back to the tent. Stoddard was showing Resler a six-foot section of a Huey tail-rotor drive-shaft tube. As I got closer, I could see a bullet hole in the tube.
“My first hit,” said Stoddard proudly.
Resler nodded agreeably but cautiously. Stoopy had taken the hit early in the day and had had the crew chief give him the ungainly trophy.
“Going to take this thing back home,” said Stoopy.
I was feeling kind of guilty for thinking that Stoopy was a jerk. He was… just a little too exuberant, or something.
“You’re a moron,” said Resler. I laughed for a long while.
“So, this is the deal.” Sky King talked as we sat in the mess tent. “Ice.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ice, man.” Sky King’s eyes gleamed in the light of the mess tent’s bare bulb. Our generator grumbled and popped in a hole fifty feet away.
“This is the business deal you were talking about?”
“That’s it, kimo sabe. Ringknocker’s agreed. We start taking a ship down to Kontum every day and load it up with ice. You know, big blocks of ice. We bring it back here and sell it to our own mess, the company’s beer tent, and the rest we unload to the grunts at the 101st. We’ll charge the grunts enough to pay for our ice. Nice deal, eh? The Prospectors get free ice.”
“We have an ice machine.”
“We do, but it only makes chipped ice. And just barely enough for drinks. We’re talking about big twenty-five-kilo blocks of ice to cool the beer. Besides, there’ll be a profit, and we can use the money for the club. What do you think?”
“What do you want me to do?” I said.
“Just volunteer to fly down with me every day.”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Exactly. Partner.”
We couldn’t land a Huey in downtown Kontum to get ice. Sky King had arranged for a truck from a nearby Special Forces camp. The deal was that we could use their truck and driver if we let them use our Huey and a pilot.
On the first day of the ice business, Sky King took the truck into town while I flew the Special Forces CO—a lieutenant named Bricklin—on his jungle patrol. We covered his normal route through the scrub and jungle at low level in twenty minutes. The same trip via ankle express took him and his Chinese mercenaries a full day to complete. Naturally, he couldn’t see much from a speeding helicopter, nothing like what he could’ve seen had he walked, but he could honestly report that he had covered the entire route. This made him and his men very happy.
Only fifteen or twenty of the two hundred men at this camp were Americans. The rest were Chinese mercenaries from Saigon. When we landed back at the compound, Bricklin pointed out the arrangement, indicating that that side was for the Chinese, this for the Americans.
Bricklin was a tall and lean Montanan. He—like most of the Special Forces—was of the old school concerning the proper way to handle the war. Charlie was treated somewhat like a band of mischievous outlaws whose chances of actually taking over the country were nonexis tent. Bricklin believed that with the Americans dominating the Kontum area, the people would eventually come to trust the Americans and their ways, especially if the Americans educated their children and supplied medical care and other material goodies that even backward peasants come to crave when they are exposed to them.
Bricklin had begun to point out the advantages of the patient method of converting the Vietnamese versus the so-called war of attrition when he saw the Cav’s horse patch on my right shoulder.
“The only trouble with those guys,” said Bricklin, “is they kill a lotta people that just happened to get in the way. Every time a villager or his water buffalo gets killed, the VC boys talk it up real big. ‘See how much the Americans love you?’ they say. ‘Killed old Mrs. Koa yesterday and she was seventy-five and never hurt a bug.’ Course, old Charlie had come through the same village and executed the honchos, but who trusts politicians anyway? These wide-screen raids the Cav and other units are doing are wrecking everything these people have. Sure, they beat the NVA units and the VC units, but they’re ignoring the stomping they’re doing to the people we’re trying to help. And this relocation thing is about equal to dying as far as the villagers are concerned. These people are born, grow up, and die all in the same village—the village of their ancestors. That village is everything to them. So what do we do? We come marching through, burn it down—to keep the VC from occupying it—and move the people out to God knows where and turn them overnight into refugees and welfare cases and honest-to-God American-haters. The VC are winning because we’re losing.” Bricklin had said all that before he popped a beer inside the small metal building they called their club. “Just show ‘em by example. Show the VC how good the American way is, and they’ll come around. These people’ ll go the way that works.”
Bricklin and I sat at a folding table in the small bar. I drank a cup of coffee while he drank beer. I had to fly.
Everything about the place was easygoing. Even the slot machine was easy. The machine’s covers were off; you could see the gears and wheels and the money box. You could reclaim your losses by reaching into the back. Bricklin’s philosophy got me into a political mood.
“Do you think we ought to be here in the first place?” I asked.
“Well, that’s another question altogether, isn’t it? Fact is, we are here.”
“To me it’s the question.”
“You may be right, but things like this are real hard to stop once they get going. I think we’re going to be here a real long time.”
“Do you think we’ll win?”
“Not if we keep bustin’ up the villages and killing the people we’re trying to save, we won’t.”
“A lot of people say that if we had allowed the Vietnamese to have their elections, they would’ve voted for Ho Chi Minh and there wouldn’t be any war.”
Bricklin nodded. “Yeah, I’ve read that, too. And it’s probably true. But like I say, we’re here now.”
“So why can’t we just pull out?”
“Do you think LBJ would ever walk out on this gunfight?”
“No.”
“You’re right,” Bricklin said, and smiled.
The ice truck rolled through the gate and stopped by the bar. Sky King got out and pushed through the screen door. “Man, the prices around here.” He sat down beside me. “Fuckers charge two-fifty for a fifty-pound block. The same thing costs seventy-five cents at Phan Rang.”
“Well, we had the Cav come through here a month ago,” said Bricklin. “Those guys paid whatever the people asked for—ruined them for bargaining. They just don’t understand the locals.” He winked at me.
Sky King had a beer and talked to Bricklin. He
told him that the deal was working fine, and if it was okay by him, we’d be coming down every day.
“Just make yourselves at home,” said Bricklin, “and bring your Huey.”
We walked out to the ship as the last of the blocks were put on board. There was a total of twenty blocks—a thousand pounds of ice—packed wetly on the deck. I cranked up. Because of the extra weight, I couldn’t hover up over the flagpole, so I turned the ship around and took off the way we came in.
As we headed up the valley on the thirty-mile flight back to Dak To, Sky King smoked cigarettes, chattered about the business, and nervously watched the cargo melting in the warm, hundred-mile-an-hour wind.
“Shit, we’ll be lucky to get back with half the ice we bought,” he said. “How ‘bout we close the doors?” he asked the crew chief.
“If we do that, sir, we can’t get to our guns,” said the chief.
“Oh, yeah.” He turned to me. “Next trip we got to bring a tarp to put over that stuff.”
He turned around, watching the cargo. “Shit, look at it go! Each one of those drops is a fucking dime!”
“We’re almost there,” I said.
“Thank God. Can you imagine getting back to the company with a fifty-dollar puddle? Ringknocker’d kill me.” He laughed.
I landed on the strip at a spot near the mess hall. A truck pulled out, and the crew began unloading the ice as I shut down. From there it was trucked to one of our
tents, where it entered a complicated distribution system that delivered ice to our company, the nearby engineers, and the 101st before dark.
Being in the ice business gave me the trading material I needed to build a bunker. Both Gary and I were nervous about being mortared. The Prospectors thought we were overreacting. They had never been mortared. We enlisted Stoddard’s help. He was an energetic excavator. Within a day, with Stoopy doing most of the digging, we had a four-by-four hole, six feet deep. While Gary and Stoopy filled sandbags to wall the bunker, I took a Jeep over to the engineers and struck a deal with a captain there. He gave me three sheets of PSP for one block of ice. I took the steel planks, on account, and brought them back. We layered three levels of sandbags on top of them. It was a snug little bunker. And though we knew it probably could not withstand a direct hit, it might, and that gave us great comfort.