by Robert Mason
“He moved. He was trying to get away.”
The next prisoner said a few hurried words in Vietnamese as the sergeant stood over him. When the sergeant kicked his feet, the prisoner closed his eyes. A bullet shook his head.
“It’s murder!” I hissed to the man at my side.
“They cut off Sergeant Rocci’s cock and stuck it in his mouth. And five of his men,” said the voice. “After they spent the night slowly shoving knives into their guts. If you had been here to hear the screams…. They screamed all night. This morning they were all dead, all gagged with their cocks. This isn’t murder; it’s justice.”
Another head bounced off the ground. The shock wave hit my body.
“They sent us to pick up twenty-one prisoners,” I pleaded.
“You’ll get ‘em; you’ll get ’em. They’ll just be dead, is all.”
The sergeant moved down the line stopping prisoners who tried to escape. The line of men grew longer than it had been, and the sergeant grew distant. His face glowed red and the heads bounced. And then he looked up at me.
Forgotten events dogged my sleep.
A wounded VC lay on a stretcher, one end rested on my ship’s deck, the other end held by a medic.
“I don’t think he appreciates this. I think he’d rather die,” said the medic.
The VC stared at me. His black eyes accused me. He lay in a black pajama top—the bottoms were gone. He had a swollen, stinking thigh wound from days before. He’d been hiding in the jungle.
“He’s going to lose that leg,” said the medic.
The man stared at me. The stretcher grated against the deck as the medic shoved. The crew chief reached across from the other side and pulled. They slid the stretcher up against the cockpit seats. While they shoved and jostled the stretcher, he kept his eyes on mine.
“That fucker either has the clap or he’s turned on by us.” The crew chief grinned. He pointed to the man’s groin. What looked like semen dripped from his penis and glistened on his thigh. I looked away, feeling his hate. I felt his exposure. I looked back to his eyes and they stared, black and hot. The scene stopped. I thought I was waking up. But then it was the human shield I’d seen during LZ Dog.
The eyes blinked and wrinkles formed at their edges. The old woman with black teeth said something to me, then screamed. There was no sound. Her wrinkled hand held a child’s smooth arm. The child hung lifeless and dragged the old woman down. She moved slowly, like she was falling through water. The crowd around her gasped silently and flinched and fell. The machine gun stuttered from a distant place. The woman fell slowly to the ground, bounced, dying and dead. The old woman had been saying something. When I saw her lips moving, I knew that she had been saying “It’s okay….”
The scene changed again. I sat in my Huey waiting for the grunts to finish inspecting a napalmed village.
“It’s okay.” A man looked in my cockpit window.
“She’s dead!”
“They’re all dead. It’s okay.”
The crowd was gone. I sat in my cockpit while the man talked to me from outside. The place had been a village. The wet ground smoked. Scorched poles and mud-daubed walls and thatch smoldered. Charred people lay twenty feet away. The smell of burnt hair and smoldering charcoal sank into my lungs and brain.
Why was there barbed wire in the village? Was it a pen? A defense perimeter? I couldn’t see the scene beyond where the child stuck to the wire.
“This is wrong,” I said to the man.
“It’s okay. It’s the way it is. They had their warning. Everybody else left the village. They’re VC.”
“She’s VC?”
The man looked down. “No. She’s unfortunate.”
She was burned to the barbed wire. The wire was growing from the charred flesh of her tiny chest. She was bent over the wire, a toddler who had run away from the hell from the sky. The lower half of her two-year-old body was pink from intense heat; her tiny vulva looked almost alive.
“This is not war. It‘s—”
“It’s okay. There’s always going to be some innocent victims.”
The man talked on, but his voice became silent. The little girl’s stark body, half charred death, half pink life, leaned against the wire, almost free. Suddenly I heard ringing.
I awoke hearing my voice echoing off the far wall. The phone was ringing on the night table.
“Hel—” I gulped. “Hello?”
“Your call to the United States will be coming through in fifteen minutes,” said the voice.
The call! Of course. The call to Patience. “Thank you.”
“We wanted to make sure you would be here for the call, Mr. Mason.”
“Yes. Yes, thank you. I’m here.”
The phone clicked off and I held the buzzing receiver in my hand for a minute before setting it back on its cradle. I shivered as an air-conditioned breeze chilled me. The sheets were wet and twisted.
I lit a cigarette with shaking hands and sat up to wait for the call. I was having these dreams almost every night. I began to feel better. I was awake, after all, away from the dreams.
After four miserable nights, I decided to cut my leave short and return to Vietnam. The leave had been a disaster. Gary had come to Hong Kong with me, but he left the second day for Taipei. I had bragged about the women there too convincingly, and the call girls in Hong Kong were too experienced, too professional, and too expensive. Resler packed up and left. I was going to follow, but when I tried to get a ticket to Taipei, I was refused because I was a serviceman on leave to Hong Kong, and that’s where I’d have to stay. I don’t know how Gary slipped through the red tape, but I was alone.
I had not the slightest desire to hire a call girl; I really just wanted to talk.
“I love you. Over,” I said.
“I love you too. Are you okay? Over,” said Patience. Her voice struggled weakly through the hiss and whistles of the radiophone connection.
“I’m fine. They say I won’t have to fly any more combat assaults when I get back. Over.”
“No?”
“That’s what—”
“The party has not said ‘over,’ sir.”
“Oh,” said Patience. “Over.”
“That’s what the doc said when I left. He said that the Prospectors were going to put their last-month short-timers on ass-and-trash missions. Over.”
“Oh, I hope they keep their word. Over.”
“They will. These guys are not the Cav. Over.”
I listened to the howl and echoes of interfering electronics, sorting out the words. Patience, my son, Jack, and my family had become phantoms. They were dreams, too. When we finally stopped talking, when her voice melted into the static, the tenuous link to my home fantasies broke. “Over,” I said.
And there I sat, on the edge of the bed, just like after every other dream.
It was very similar to my hometown, Delray Beach. There was a beach; it ran north and south. There were palm trees, sandy roads, salt smells, girls playing in bikinis, and quietly rolling surf. It was late afternoon, almost dusk, and the sun glinted off parts of the heavy wire screen that surrounded the terrace. My table stood near the front of the terrace, allowing me the best view.
Voices chattered quietly behind me. Vietnamese sounds lovely even if you can’t understand it.
It did feel like home.
Golden dolls, wearing bikinis so brief they were ribbons of modesty, strolled with pale GIs. As it got darker, the beach crowd broke up, drifting into the town.
“Manh gioi khoung? How are you?” said the smiling waitress. I noticed her Vietnamese glance of nerves and felt comforted by familiar behavior. “What would you like?” she asked.
I would like to jump you like a rabbit. “I’ll have another beer, please,” I said. The girl prompted immediate lust. Perhaps I could find solace in solace. My conscience immediately began to pummel me with shots of raw guilt, delivered at high voltage. “Monster!” it railed. “Married. Short-ti
mer. And not only that, but you’re just getting over the clap!” It was mercilessly rational. I succumbed to its barbs.
The waitress bowed and left to get the beer. I smiled as I watched my phantom flit naked from me to the girl, to hump her happily while she leaned over the bar.
She returned, beaming, friendlier, and served my beer. Her arm brushed mine and I felt warm electricity flicker between us. My mind savored salty-sweet smells and orgasmic contractions, hearing her voice as an echo. “Would you like…”
Her voice was obliterated by the sudden ripping, zipping howl of a stylus skidding across a record. She dropped to the floor and rolled under a table.
At the sound of crashing chairs and breaking glassware, I turned and saw the Vietnamese taking cover. Five men crouched low behind the bar. I sat alone on the porch and took a sip of beer. The girl knocked over a chair as she crawled toward the back of the porch.
All because of a stylus skidding across a record? Damn, they were even jumpier than I was. I looked around the bar. Nothing was happening. There was no fight. People peered from behind the bar and tables, looking up front. It had just been the sound that spooked them. They had absolutely no confidence that their city was secure. They knew the facts. The VC were everywhere.
Cowards, I thought. Anger flushed through me. I felt betrayed, revolted. They’re really afraid.
For five minutes I had complete quiet as I watched the surf foam glow in the gathering dusk. At the end of that time, the bar, the customers, the porch, came back to life.
I paid my tab and walked to the room I had rented.
I sat against the wall on the bed, thinking about the panic at the bar. The old question “Why don’t the Vietnamese fight the VC like the VC fight the Vietnamese?” seemed very valid. Without the support of the people, we were going to lose. And if they didn’t care, why were we continuing to fight? Surely the people who were running this fiasco could see this, too. The signs were obvious. Plans leaked to the VC, reluctant combatants, mutinies in the ARVN, political corruption, Vietnamese marines fighting Vietnamese marines at Da Nang, and the ubiquitous Vietnamese idea that Ho would eventually win.
I stabbed a cigarette into an ashtray. Without American financial support and military support, the South Vietnamese government would have failed long ago, as a natural result of its lack of popular support.
The whole problem settled on my shoulders. In a few hours, I was going to voluntarily go back into battle and risk my scrawny neck for people who didn’t care.
I stayed up and smoked cigarettes all night. I tried to sleep, only to jerk awake, sitting in bed, listening.
I was back at Dak To, home, the next day. Here, the war was simple. We did our job well, beat the VC almost every time, and kept them on the run. Here, I was a member of the honorable side. The reluctant, cowardly Vietnamese were not visible to remind me that they didn’t care. I could go on believing that simply by killing more and more Communists we would win. When I crawled into my cot my first night back, I fell instantly asleep.
The next day, Gary and I sat on the deck of our Huey waiting for the grunts to finish eating. Their platoon was one of several that were pushing toward the west, scouting for the VC. We joked in familiar surroundings.
“You shoulda come, you know,” said Gary.
“I tried, asshole. They wouldn’t let me. How did you get a ticket?”
“I just went to the ticket counter and bought it.”
“Well, you must have looked like a civilian, because they wouldn’t sell me anything.”
“It’s really a shame. You missed Grass Mountain.”
“What’s that?”
“Grass Mountain is packed with geisha houses. Wanna know what it’s like to go to a geisha house?”
“No.”
“They start off with a bath. Just you and two naked girls. They wash you first, then soak you, then massage you.”
“Didn’t you hear me?”
“I heard you,” Gary said. “The two of them massage you so well you think you’re going to crack. Then, at the perfect moment, one of the girls sits on you and puts you out of your misery.”
I nodded my head with closed eyes, kicking myself for not getting laid when I had the chance.
“And that’s just the beginning.”
“Just the beginning!”
“That’s right. It takes hours to get out of this place. They give you more baths, and tea and food and massages, to keep you going, and then they pass you down the line to teams of two or three girls who work you over in different ways.” Gary’s face brightened at his memories.
“I never even heard of Grass Mountain when I was there,” I lamented.
“Never heard of it? Where the hell were you?”
The next day I was flying with Sky King. In the middle of a laager, a grunt lieutenant came to our ship. “We just had a newsman wounded. Will you guys pick him up?”
“Sure,” I said.
“The squad leader with the guy said it was a sniper. They say they’ve got the place secured.”
“No problem. Where are they?”
The lieutenant showed me on his map. They were only a mile away. When I turned to get into the ship, Sky King and the crew chief were all ready to go. I strapped in as Sky King cranked up.
Sky King flew at fifty knots heading for the place.
“Over there,” I pointed to four or five soldiers standing around a prone man in a thicket of leafless trees. “You see them?”
“Got ‘em.”
As we flew by, the men hit the dirt, leaving one man standing. He was aiming a movie camera at us.
“Great place for a landing,” said Sky King.
The base of the clearing was wide enough for our ship, but the scrawny branches twenty feet off the ground crowded over the circle, making it too tight to get in.
“Axle One-Six,” I radioed. “Can you move to a better clearing?” Sky King circled, looking for a way to get through the trees.
“Negative, Prospector. We’re still getting sniper fire, and this guy is wounded pretty bad.”
Sky King set up an approach and closed in. As he got to the treetops, it became obvious that he was going to hit branches with the main rotor, so he aborted.
When the squad saw us heading across the LZ, they radioed, “Can you make it, Prospector?”
Sky King shook his head. “I can’t get in there. You want to try it?”
I nodded and took the controls. While Sky King had approached, I thought I saw a way. “We’ll get in, Axle One-Six. Just hang on.”
The plan was simple. I would come in ninety degrees to Sky King’s last try and then turn sharp. I thought that in a bank the rotors could slip through the narrow slot that Sky King had shot for. I lined up on a tangent to the clearing and let down.
I hit the turn fast, banked hard over, and as we slipped toward the ground, I saw that I was going to hit some stuff anyway. The main rotor smashed some dead branches, sounding like machine-gun fire. I flared for the landing and we were down.
“Great. Now how are you going to get out?” said Sky King.
I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know how I was going to get out. The grunts grabbed the wounded man. He was unconscious, his fatigue blouse sopping with his blood. At that point I noticed the cameraman standing back filming the whole thing. The grunts were prone beside him, laying out cover fire toward the jungle. When I saw him aim the camera toward the cockpit, I sat a little straighter, and thought cool thoughts, in case those, too, might somehow be recorded. The crew chief called that we were ready, and the cameraman jumped on board.
In fact, there was no acceptable way to get out. There was not enough room to accelerate and bank back out through the slot. Some of the high branches hung over our rotor disk. By the book, we were trapped.
But I had seen rotor blades stand up to incredible stress before, so I decided to take the brute-force option. I picked up to the hover, turned the tail until it matched a slot in the over
hanging branches, and then pulled the pitch. We climbed straight up twenty feet before the rotors smashed into cane-thick branches at nearly every point of their circle. It sounded like the rotors were being smashed to pieces. Seconds later we cleared the treetops and I nosed over, accelerating toward the airstrip five miles away.
“Someday you’re going to hit a branch that’s just a little too big,” Sky King said after a long quiet.
“What then?” I asked.
“Then your ship’s going to come apart, and you’re going to kill yourself and everybody around you.”
“Now that’s frightening,” I said. “I think maybe I oughta quit this job and go home.”
“This guy’s still alive, sir.” The crew chief’s voice buzzed in my headphones. “The cameraman says he’s the president of CBS News. Imagine that.”
“Ain’t that a kick,” Sky King said. “I guess he got bored with his nice safe desk job, the dumb shit.”
When we landed at the hospital tent at the 101st, the cameraman jumped out and filmed his boss being unloaded. He filmed Gary and me in the cockpit, then put the camera down and gave us a salute.
I nodded, brought the rotors up to operating, and leapt off the pad. As I flew back to retrieve the empty thermos containers we left with the grunts, I recalled the cameraman’s salute and felt slightly heroic.
When we shut down that night, Sky King showed me the creases and nicks in the rotors and scolded me. “Look at this. You’ve ruined them.”
“Naw. They’re fine. Just creased is all. No holes. Look at the bright side. The guy’s alive.”
“Yeah, but look at those rotors.”
During the second week of July, Operation Hawthorne began winding up. The patrols and reconnaissance companies were getting very little opposition in the battle zone. The NVA had slipped away.
“If they’re gone, and we killed two thousand of them, we won,” said Gary.
“What did we win? We don’t have any more real estate, no new villages are under American control, and it took everything we had to stop them,” I said.
“We won the battle. More of them got killed than us. It’s that simple.”