by Robert Mason
“Doesn’t it bother you that it takes so much equipment and men to beat the NVA? If we were equally equipped, we’d lose.”
“Yeah, but we aren’t equally equipped, and they lose. Besides that, I have a month to go and I don’t give a shit.”
“Unless they make you fly assaults during your last month.”
“If they do that, then I’ll give a shit.”
While the First Cav slipped unceremoniously back to An Khe, the 101st decided to end the operation with a parade. There would be no spectators except for the news reporters—unless you want to count the men in the parade as spectators, and of course they were.
Hundreds of bone-weary soldiers gathered at the artillery emplacements and began the five-mile march back to the airstrip. They marched, in parade step, along the dusty road. Insects buzzed in the saturated air. No virgins threw flowers. No old ladies cried. No strong men wept. They marched to their own muffled footsteps.
“I bet they’re pissed off,” said Gary, leaning against his door window, staring down at the column. “Especially when they look up and see all these empty helicopters flying around.”
We flew up and down the column in four V’s at 500 feet during the entire march. Supposedly we were generating excitement, or underscoring a memorable event. But according to a grunt, “We wanted to know why you fuckers wouldn’t come down and give us a fucking ride.”
When the head of the column finally reached the 101st section of the airstrip, the band played, the Hueys whooshed overhead, and the general beamed.
With all the troopers back in camp, noses were counted. Nearly twenty people were unaccounted for. It was presumed that these men were all dead. There would be a search operation to find their bodies in a few days.
The next day, while the missing moldered, the 101st had a party for the survivors. Their camp was within walking distance, but our aviator egos demanded that we fly. Af ter seeing too much death and injury, the survivors celebrated life. We had a boisterously good time to emphasize that we were still alive.
Business was so slow during the next few days that Gary and I decided to follow up a rumor. Other than the daily ice flight, and an occasional ass-and-trash, air operations in support of the 101st had stopped while loose ends were tied up.
The rumor was that our old First Cav company, the Preachers, was camped at Cheo Reo, a hundred miles south of us. So we went to Ringknocker and said, “Major, can we use a Huey to go visit some old friends of ours?” The question sounded stupid as I asked it. I wouldn’t have even thought about asking Farris or Shaker for a ship in the Cav. Helicopters were never, never used for personal business, unless maybe you were bringing in a load of ivory and you outranked everybody else.
“Visit friends?” Ringknocker stood in front of his tent dressed in shorts, on the way to the shower we had built. “What kind of friends do you have in Vietnam?”
“Our old company is camped down by Cheo Reo,” said Gary.
“Oh, those old friends.” Ringknocker seemed relieved. “Sure. Go ahead. But”—he smiled warmly—“be home before dark.”
And that was that. I didn’t even have to get the ice. Sky King agreed to take the trip for me. We had at our disposal a half-a-million-dollar helicopter, two hundred gallons of fuel, a full crew, and nothing to do but drive south to visit some friends. It was like getting the family car.
After lunch, we climbed up into the cumulus sky. Crossing Pleiku at 3000 feet, we changed course to 140 degrees for the flight to Cheo Reo.
“We’ll get some storms outta those clouds this afternoon,” said Gary.
I nodded. I was flying at the base of the clouds, changing course now and then to thread between the gaps. Below, the clouds cast dark shadows on the jungle. The river beneath us changed from gleaming sparkle to dull black, in patches.
“There she is.” I jutted my chin forward. After nearly an hour of flying, we saw our objective.
“Ah, good old Cheo Reo…. I remember it well.” Gary smiled. We’d camped here once with the Prospectors.
I let down and circled a field where I saw a bunch of Hueys parked.
“That’s them.” Gary keyed the mike to broadcast. “Preacher Control, this is Prospector Oh-four-two.”
No answer. Gary repeated the transmission. “Of course they don’t answer,” he said. “They wouldn’t be using the old frequency anymore.”
Meanwhile, I saw a group of men shielding their eyes with their hands, staring up at us. “It’s them all right. I can see Connors,” I said.
I rolled out of the orbit and let down. We landed next to one of the Preacher ships, killed the turbine, and stepped out.
“In-fucking-credible!” said Connors. “Don’t tell me. You were on your way to Saigon and you got lost, right?”
“Wrong. We’re on our way to Paris and we stopped for fuel,” I said. I saw some more men walking our way. One of them was Farris.
“Mason and Resler!” Farris said. “I don’t believe it. What the heck are you two doing down here all by yourselves?”
“Just visiting, Captain,” said Gary.
“Really? Just visiting?” Farris was trying to figure just how such frivolity was possible. His First Cav logic could not fathom it. “They let you… just visit people?‘
“That’s the way they do it on the outside, Captain,” I said.
Farris shook his head in wonderment. “Well, come on over and join us. The cook just made up a new batch of brew.”
All the way to the mess tent, Gary and I had our backs patted and hands shaken by friends we hadn’t seen for two months. At the mess tent, we also saw a whole bunch of new faces. As a matter of fact, almost all the faces we saw were new people. They were breaking up that old gang of mine. I saw Major Astor walking out to the flight line. His nemesis, John Hall, was no longer in the company. Banjo was still there. And so was Riker. Kaiser had gone to work for Air America. And that was it. A few old faces, some rumors, were all that was left of the original Preachers. The second shift was taking over. They were moving into An Khe, never realizing all the work that the original guys had done to make it the way it was. It was funny how the hardships that I hated the most became the core around which I built memories of camaraderie.
We sat around drinking coffee and telling war stories.
The Preachers had been overrun on an overnight laager. Four new pilots had been wounded. And a month before, a new pilot was killed in an assault.
We told them about the gunship that had landed with everybody unconscious (it had become the Phantom Gunship), about hauling the reluctant ARVNs to the fort, and how the NVA overran the 101st artillery position. But most of all we bragged about how much better we lived under the reasonable leadership of Ringknocker. Ice runs, beer parties, Vietnamese labor to build bunkers, and ambulances loaded with party girls: just a way of life with us, all right. As we listed these things, calculated to shock their Spartan sensibilities, Farris began to look uncomfortable.
“That guy would be hung in the Cav,” he said with a knowing nod.
“He gets the job done,” I said.
Farris nodded, but I could tell he didn’t believe me. If the Cav wasn’t doing it, it wasn’t getting done.
We had chow and stayed longer than we should have. The sun was low in the sky, leaving us an hour or so to get back. We said good-bye for the last time.
“Hang in there, short-timers,” said Connors.
“Yeah, it’s not long now,” I said.
“Don’t forget, we’ll have a party when all this is over,” Connors called as we walked away.
I called back, “Call us when you get to town.”
The last missions we flew at Dak To were to recover bodies. We dropped teams at various spots around the bombing zone, and waited for them literally to sniff out the bodies, which had become very ripe during the few days we had been packing up the camp.
We just had a party not too long ago, I said silently to a lumpy body bag. Someone tried to push down a knee that jutted
awkwardly. The knee moved down but sprang back up when let go. The smell grew so strong that I gagged. You should have been there, I thought.
On July 17 we were back at our permanent camp at Phan Rang for a four-day rest. Next stop would be Tuy Hoa.
Gary and I had passed our thirty-day-to-go mark on the twelfth. Four replacement pilots had come to the company. We really believed that we would be staying back at the camp to fly admin flights for the battalion or the ARVNs.
“I’m sorry, but it just didn’t work out that way,” said Deacon. “Ringknocker had been to some pre-mission briefings and says we’re going to be very busy at Tuy Hoa. We have to support two units, one being Korean. We’re just going to need every pilot we have.”
I looked at Gary. Gary looked at me. We both looked at Deacon.
“So why has everybody been saying we’d be doing admin flights during our last month?” I said.
“We thought that that’s the way it would be.” Deacon looked unhappy. It was ruining his expectations, too. The “last month” program was fading to the dream that it probably had been all along. “I know that both of you are getting pretty jittery. Just keep doing what you’ve been doing and hang on. You’ll be home before you know it. If it helps, just remember the rest of us have more than six months to go.”
“Well, Deacon, I hope that when you get short, they give you some kind of a break. I’m telling you now that you’ll need one. I do,” I said.
“I know. I’m sorry.” Deacon left the tent.
Now I had to reset my clock. Every sunset had put me one day closer to getting out of here. My mental calendar had ticked off the moments until it believed that it had reached zero. Adding twenty-five more sunsets to the calendar was a real strain.
“Look,” I said to Doc DaVinci, “I’m tired. I can’t sleep at night. I have to take tranquilizers to function. I need a break. Can’t you do something?”
“I’d like to help you, Bob. But physically you’re fine.”
I glared at him. “Look at me. I weigh less than a hundred and twenty pounds. I look like shit!”
“Another three weeks of being skinny won’t hurt you.”
“It’s not that I’m skinny; it’s why I am skinny. I’m worn out. I’m frayed. I want to fly admin flights like hundreds of other pilots do every day.”
“Well, if you tell me you’re afraid to fly, I can ground you.”
“If I tell you I’m afraid to fly, you’ll ground me?”
“Yes.”
Why is he setting me up like this? I thought. Why does he want me to say that I’m afraid? Why can’t he just use his professional authority and put a medical restriction on me?
“I can’t say that. I’m not afraid to fly, I just don’t think I or Gary or any short-timer should have to fly combat assaults anymore. We have each flown more than a thousand missions already. Isn’t that enough? Why couldn’t they bring up a couple of Saigon warriors to take our place? They could use the experience, and Gary and I could finish off our tours flying VIPs around or something.”
“I told you what I have to do.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Well, just don’t take the tranquilizers during the day,” said Da Vinci. That was the end of the conversation.
Gary and I sat at a table watching the Prospectors whoop it up at the party that night. Neither of us could join in. The laughing skull was no longer funny.
We had camped on the beach at Tuy Hoa for one day when a storm struck. Seventy-mile-an-hour winds blew clouds of sand in horizontal sheets. Tents began to collapse. Hueys approaching along the beach had to fly sideways. The only direction their noses could point in was into the wind.
Gary, Stoopy, and I had pitched our tent a quarter of a mile nearer the ocean than the headquarters tent. We got back from a mission in time to see Stoopy wrestling with the flapping canvas. Blankets, mosquito netting, and clothes were rolling across the dunes like tumbleweed.
“Jesus Christ, Stoopy. Why did you let the tent collapse?” yelled Gary.
“This is just like a desert storm you see in the movies.” Stoopy grinned, shoveling sand into what he believed would be a protective berm.
“Shit,” I said, “let’s get this fucker nailed down.”
“The wind keeps pulling the tent pegs out,” said Stoopy.
“So we make dead men,” I shouted in the wind.
“What the hell are you talking about?” yelled Gary. He had wrapped a towel around his neck and head to keep the sand out.
“A dead man is something you tie a rope to and bury,”
I said, blinking. “We can tie the ropes to sandbags and then bury them.”
“All right, let’s do it.” Stoopy’s shout barely rose above the wind.
Stoopy filled sandbags while Gary and I went around the tent tying them to the ropes and burying them. When we finished, the tent was concave on the windward side; it shook, but it held. We ducked inside to try to get the sand off our gear. The salty sand stuck to everything. My carbine gritted when I worked the bolt. I watched Gary slapping his cot with a towel, trying to dust about ten pounds of sand away. Stoopy lay on his cot, on a mixed pile of clothes, blankets, and sand, eating another candy bar.
“Stoopy, why don’t you get that fucking sand off your stuff?” I said.
“It’ll just get sandy again.”
I shook my head in disgust.
“It will. I’ll clean it up before I go to sleep tonight.”
“You’re a slob, Stoopy,” said Gary.
“So?” said Stoopy. “Somebody has to do it.”
Gary and I laughed. Stoopy’s grin showed the chocolate stains on his teeth.
With two weeks to go, I had very little tolerance for a person like Stoopy. But I realized that his intentions were good. He was friendly; he really wanted to be a good pilot; he wanted the Americans to win the war; and he flew into the assaults without showing fear.
The problem was that he was a terrible pilot (“professional copilot,” we called them); he was overweight; he was a slob; he was juvenile; and he was downright dangerous.
At Dak To, he had unloaded a parked flare ship by throwing the flares out the door. Unfortunately, the flare canisters were still attached by lines from their fuses to the deck. Normally this allowed them to ignite automatically as they were pushed out at 2000 or 3000 feet. But since Stoopy was unloading the ship on the ground, he was soon surrounded by a giant cloud of white smoke and blinding magnesium flames. Strangely, he was not hurt. He was also famous among us for not being able to keep himself in his formation slot. In just the few months he’d been with the Prospectors, he’d become known as the “smiling menace.”
Naturally, when battalion requested that Ringknocker send his best pilot to Saigon to work for the VIPs, Ringknocker sent Stoopy. All the pilots had to vote for the best pilot, and he would be sent to Saigon. At the meeting Ringknocker told us the rules: Vote for Stoopy. “We have a terrible shortage of pilots already, so battalion gets what I can afford,” said Ringknocker. “Stoopy Stoddard is what I can afford. You gentlemen will vote for Stoopy and then we can get back to work.”
When I had first dealt with the Koreans at Bong Son valley, I was impressed by their zeal. When we drove by the Korean bridge guards, they jumped to attention with a shout. When we were mortared, the Koreans were the ones who came back to the camp carrying VC heads and the mortar tube. From the first time I saw them, I thought we’d be better off just giving the Koreans the country, if they could take it. They probably would’ve.
At Tuy Hoa, we flew missions for the Koreans. At the pickup point, Gary and I watched five or six Korean rangers load our ship with food and ammo in less than a minute. Very few Koreans spoke English, so when the ship was loaded, a young soldier ran out to us and gave us a slip of paper with a list of coordinates written on it. The soldier saluted and left. We were to fly to these places, and they would know what to do.
At the first stop, the ship was barely on the ground whe
n a whole team of Koreans unloaded their portion of the load in seconds. No words were spoken. At the next stop, the same thing happened. And the next. By eleven o‘clock in the morning, we had finished a resupply mission that would have taken us all day had we been resupplying Americans.
All the Korean ROKs were hand-picked, highly trained volunteers. They were dedicated professionals who took the job seriously, and because they were performing under the watchful eyes of their original teachers, they were out to prove their abilities. They did.
We flew almost every day. The missions were numerous, but I don’t recall them very well. I was preoccupied. Gary had received his orders to leave Vietnam, but I hadn’t. I sent letters to Patience to contact the Pentagon. I checked daily with our admin section. I believed that it was possible for the army to forget that I was even there.
On a rare day off, I dragged a parachute canopy (that Gary and I had scrounged from a treetop) to the shore. I spread it out so that it made a circle of soft nylon fifty feet across. Carrying a towel, I walked to the center of the chute and lay down to sunbathe. I wanted to look tropical for Patience. I was trying to be healthy. I had even stopped smoking again, on the chance that God would be moved to spare me.
I heard someone clumping along the boards that led back up to the tent areas. My eyes were closed while the sun baked me.
“Hey, Mason, what are you doing?”
I looked up. “Sunbathing, sir.”
Ringknocker grinned and began to step on my giant beach blanket. “I had something—”
“Don’t walk on this,” I quickly interrupted as Ringknocker put his foot on the parachute.
“What?” Ringknocker stopped and stepped back.
“Don’t walk on this. This is my beach blanket. People don’t walk on other people’s beach blankets,” I said seriously.
Ringknocker first showed a smile. But that faded to concern as he saw that I wasn’t kidding.
“You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
Ringknocker nodded sadly and walked back up the board path.