by Robert Mason
“Every morning the truck comes. I have to open the back door; I know what’s out there, but I still go to the door,” I said. “It’s always the same. The driver backs the truck to the door and says, ‘How many do you want?’ He points to a truck of babies. Dead babies. I always gag at the sight. They all look dead, but then I see an eyelid blink in the pile, then another.” I stopped.
“Then what happens?” Doc Ryan flicked an ash on his desk.
“Then I always answer, ‘Two hundred pounds, Jake.’ I laugh when I say it. Jake picks up a pitchfork and stabs it into the pile and drops a couple of corpses on a big scale. ‘Nearly ten pounds a head,’ he says. Inside my head, I’m yelling for him to stop, that the babies aren’t dead, but Jake just keeps loading the scale. Each time he stabs a kid, it squirms on the fork, but Jake doesn’t notice a thing.”
“Then what?”
“Then it ends.”
“What do you think it means?”
“I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“I’m more interested in what you think it means.”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, time’s up, anyway. Think about it. Same time next week?”
“Okay.”
Dr. Ryan, Captain Ryan, led me to the door.
“The tranqs helping?”
“They help me sleep, but I can’t fly with them.”
“A little more time,” he said. “You’ll be back up.”
I was grounded. Seeing Doc Ryan each week was part of my new schedule. This was the second time I had been grounded at Wolters.
The first time, I was with one of my best students, landing at the main heliport. At the end of the training sessions, the heliport was normally crowded with hundreds of returning trainers. Usually the instructor flew the ship in this congestion, especially on the flight line, where the competing rotor wash made hovering tricky. As I hovered toward the parking slot, I felt the ship rear back. I pushed the cyclic forward, then realized that the ship wasn’t falling backward. I was. I squeezed the intercom trigger. “You got it.” The student grabbed the controls instantly, thinking I was just giving him one more surprise test. He maneuvered into the slot, landed, and shut down. While he did that, I fought the dizzy feeling. Back at the debriefing, I complimented him on his landing and gave him a double-A grade for the ride. Then I went directly to the flight surgeon. He could find nothing physically wrong, but he grounded me for a month.
Being a grounded pilot in the midst of flying pilots is torture. I worked in the tower, kept records, and drove trucks out to the stage fields. I was performing a job normally held by a pfc.
During the month, the nightmares continued and my wake-ups became worse. I lived long nights alone in my own home. After Patience and Jack were asleep, I paced, read, built model airplanes, anything to become sleepy. Generally I would get to bed at four or five in the morning.
I reasoned that things would only get worse if I didn’t fly. The trauma of being grounded was inflaming the problem. When I saw the flight surgeon again, I told him everything was just fine. I felt great. Sleeping like a log. When can I fly? He said that if I went another week doing as well, he would put me back up. And he did.
I taught flying again. I showed students how to get into and out of confined areas, how to take off when you couldn’t hover, how to fly formations, and I even demonstrated night autorotations. Leese would’ve been proud.
At the end of the cycle, the students, whom we had put through hell, were so happy that they usually gave their instructors gifts. The traditional gift was a bottle of whiskey. I did not drink at the time, so my gifts accumulated in a cupboard at home.
My days were good; my nights were hell. I had been back from Vietnam for over a year. The dreams still oppressed me, and the unseen fear kept me bouncing out of bed. On one of my late-night wanderings around the house, I decided to have a drink. Three drinks later, I climbed into bed and fell asleep. I tried it again the next night. It worked, though I had to drink a bit more to do the job.
After I’d taught two more cycles, the dizziness returned. I was flying cross-country with a student when I felt the ship rear back.
I was grounded again. This time it would be permanent. That was when I started seeing Doc Ryan.
While the school was trying to find a job for a nonfly ing pilot, I spent two weeks taking psychological tests. For one set of tests I had to go to Fort Sam Houston for a consultation.
In the parking lot at Fort Sam, I met Niven, the Prospector who had caught the wire in the minefield. He was now a major.
“Well, how do you feel about your DFC?” asked Niven.
“What DFC?”
“For the night we dropped that ammo, remember? You tried it once, started to fall through, and went around and did it again.”
“Yeah, I remember that.”
“Well, the grunt commander on the ground that night put us in for DFCs. I’ve got mine.”
“I never heard a thing about it.”
“I can’t understand.” Niven frowned. “It couldn’t have been because I was logged as the aircraft commander?”
“That sounds typical.”
“Well, you should check it out, anyway. It can help your career.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m leaving the army.”
“Why?”
“I’m grounded. Without flying, the army gets old quick.”
“Why’d they ground you?”
“I’m nuts.”
I walked through a hallway at the Hospital. Fort Sam Houston is the burn center for the military. I saw eighteen-year-old boys with their faces burned away, bright-pink skin grafts stretched over strange, stunted noses. Had someone photographed the men there, twisted and deformed with featureless faces, by the hundreds, the war might have ended sooner. But probably not.
With the results from my various tests, the army gave me a new medical profile. A sentence in the profile reads, “Aviator may not be assigned to duty in a combat zone.” At a time when the army was shipping pilots back to Vietnam after only a few months in the States, this no-combat restriction was known as the million-dollar ticket.
People who knew me knew that I wrote stories. The head of the faculty-development branch found out and interviewed me. He asked if I’d like to try writing lessons for ground school and be a platform instructor. And that is what I did during my last six months in the army.
As a platform instructor I taught incoming pilots from Vietnam how to train students effectively, I stood on the stage, a has-been, and gave expert advice on how to do it. If you can’t do it, teach it. I was witty. I was popular. I was a closet basket case.
I was drinking half a bottle a night to get to sleep. Even though I could never go back to combat, the war enraged me. I watched television. The war was going stronger than ever before. The scores were always ten to one, proving that we were winning. Only a few people seemed to realize that the war was wrong. To the rest of the people, the war news droned on every newscast and had become an annoyance. People didn’t want to stop it; they wanted it to go away.
———
Meanwhile, pilots were being sent back for their second tours.
At the officers’ club one night, a pilot I knew came through to say hello. He was visiting his wife on a leave from Nam. A week after that, we read his obituary in the Army Times. The pilots read the obits and calculated their odds of surviving the second time around. The joke about going on the second tour was “If they try to send me back, they’ll have to have a door on that plane big enough for me and my telephone pole.” That was so much bravado, for almost all went. It was either that or end your career.
For a year and a half, Patience and I had been going to the mandatory monthly cocktail party at the club. Patience hated army etiquette. We went through a receiving line each time, shaking hands with the post VIPs. One night she told a colonel that his sunglasses made him look cool. He took them off, glaring. Luckily I was leaving the army anyway.
“Mason, I’ll be damned.”
I thought I recognized the voice.
“It’s me. Hawkins,” he said.
“Lady Killer Hawkins?”
“That’s it.”
Some people moved behind me, allowing more light to shine on Hawkins. Something was wrong. That was definitely his voice, but his face…
“Just got here,” said Hawkins.
“How come? I’ve been here a year and a half.” The first thing I noticed was that Hawkins had no eyebrows. Or ears. His hair was patchy from implantations. His nose was shiny and deformed. Hawkins? The handsomest guy in our class?
“I’ve been in a hospital. For a long while.”
“Jesus. It is you. What the hell happened?”
“Crashed and burned,” said Hawkins. “I got knocked out in the crash. I was unconscious in the fire for quite a while.”
“You’re lucky to be alive.”
“That’s what they tell me….” Then his voice trailed off. “I don’t feel so lucky.”
“They’ll get you back in shape. Don’t worry about that. The army has the best—”
“They’ve already done their best.”
Patience and I went to New Orleans for the weekend with another couple. It should have been fun. Instead, I collapsed while touring a catacomb. I sank to my knees, feeling death. I felt like I was going to roll over and die on the grass. The tombs seemed to beckon me.
Later, when we got to a bar, I anesthetized myself. That helped. If I stayed drunk, I could cope. When I was sober, life was unending anxiety with no focus.
I did so well as a platform instructor that when I told the head of the department I was leaving the army, he offered to get me a direct commission as a captain if I would stay. But I would be a captain who walked. I could wear my wings and walk to the flight line and watch the ships fly away. So, when I left the army in 1968, it was as an ex-pilot and, in my mind, a failure.
A lot has happened since then. I have followed a pattern of behavior that is typical of many Vietnam veterans. The funny thing is, I wasn’t aware of the pattern until I wrote it down. It has taken a very long time for me to see it.
I returned to the University of Florida to complete the education I had begun in 1960. I saw student demonstrations that accused veterans of being fools for going to Vietnam. I felt like a double loser; some internal flaw had caused me to lose my flight status, and now I learned how dumb I had been for having gone to Vietnam.
I studied art, mostly photography. I tried to learn a new career and rejoin society. I could not sleep without having nightmares. I arrived at my eight o‘clock morning classes only after at least two stiff drinks. If I drank all day, I could sleep at night. I could not face a campus filled with young, smiling faces while guys still leapt screaming out of helicopters, killing and dying for a cause unworthy of their bravery. They deserved to be heroes, but they were fools.
I kept jumping out of my skin at night, so I asked the Veterans Administration for help. They declared me a 50 percent disabled veteran by reason of nervousness, now called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Chronic (DSM III, 309.81), and issued me tranquilizers. I still drank, but now with the tranquilizers, and also smoked pot (introduced to me by students—I never saw the stuff in Vietnam). After nine months of school I dropped out and moved my family to a small village in Spain. While we were there, America put the first man on the moon. After seven months, there was no improvement in my outlook or attitude, so we returned to the States.
I worked as a technician in an electronics company. To the drinking, tranquilizers, and pot, I added a new vice: a girlfriend. When Patience said she was going back to school, with me or without me, I also returned.
During the two years it took to finish my degree in fine arts, Patience and I broke up for a month. I was up to almost a bottle of whiskey a day, and four or five Vali ums, yet I was still as tense as a snake. I was seeing shrinks weekly at the VA, but the nightly wake-ups continued.
When I graduated, in December 1971, I started a commercial photography business. In less than a year it failed. I tried to get a job with the government as an aircraft dispatcher, deciding what ships were flyable and what ships needed maintenance. I wanted to be around helicopters. I was turned down because of my disability. Even Congressman Don Fuqua could not get the government to hire this disabled vet, though he tried hard. The turn-down notice sent me was in an envelope stamped with the slogan “Don’t forget, hire the vet.”
The war was still going on in Vietnam, and inside my head.
My father risked some money to start an import company with me. I wanted to buy pocketknives in Spain and market them through the mail. I had a car wreck in Portugal, broke my hip, and we ended up selling thirty knives. So much for importing.
Finally, through an intricate series of business deals over a three-year period, I became vice-president of a mirror-manufacturing company in Brooklyn. There I had the money I wanted, I had fifty employees under me, and I quit using alcohol and tranquilizers. Still, I was painfully dissatisfied. And I continued to jump awake at night.
By now I had been back from Vietnam for ten years. I would not allow myself to believe that my unhappiness could be a reaction to my experience there. Instead I drew the conclusion that I was somehow basically inferior or mentally disturbed.
Two and a half years after I started at the mirror company, I resigned my position. We moved back to Florida, to ten acres of land next to the Santa Fe River. I built a cabin. Encouraged by my wife and friends, I decided to write about Vietnam.
Things went badly. I had arranged a separation settlement from the mirror company that allowed us to survive while I built the cabin and wrote. When the money ran out, Patience got a paper route to make ends meet. I looked for work too, and finally decided also to run a paper route because of the free time it would give me for writing.
The car broke down and the bills began to pile up. For the time I had spent writing, I got four rejections.
What did the desperate man do? I can tell you that I was arrested in January 1981, charged with smuggling marijuana into the country. In August 1981, I was found guilty of possession and sentenced to five years at a minimum security prison. I am currently free as of February 1983, appealing the conviction.
No one is more shocked than I.
Afterword
I recently visited the Night Stalkers, the 160th Special Operation Aviation Regiment (Airborne). These army aviators perform rescues, medical evacuations, and combat assaults wherever in the world they are needed. (Their mottos: “Night Stalkers Never Quit.” When they want to be more specific, they use: “Death Lurks in the Dark.”) They lost two Blackhawk helicopters and several pilots and crewmembers in Somalia which was depicted in the book and film Black Hawk Down.
The Night Stalkers had invited me and Bill Reeder (Col. USA Ret) to talk about jungle flying. Bill tells people that if they want to know what it was like to fly helicopters in combat in Vietnam, read Chickenhawk. Which is a stretch considering that I was a WO-1 Slick pilot, a landing-craft-of-the-air driver who got out of the army the moment his commitment was up. Reeder is a two-tour combat pilot, shot down on both tours in Vietnam. He was shot down first in a Mohawk surveillance airplane in 1969. He and his copilot were recovered by the air force after a firefight with the encroaching enemy. In 1972, he was shot down in a Cobra gunship while defending the Special Forces camp at Ben Het, which was being overrun by the NVA. Bill, his ankle wounded, his back broken in the crash (his front-seater died soon after impact), was able to evade the enemy in the jungle for three days before being captured. He spent almost a year as a POW, first in a cage in the jungle and then, after a 400-mile walk, at the Hanoi Hilton, from which he was released in 1973.
Colonel Andy Miliani, Reg
imental Commander of the 160th, told us that because the Night Stalkers were flying in the deserts and mountains of Afghanistan and Iraq, they were not as knowledgable about jungle operations as he thought they ought to be. Considering the present state of the world, Colonel Miliani thought it would be good for his men to hear from us what it was like to fly helicopters in jungle missions.
More than a hundred Night Stalker pilots showed up for the presentation, which consisted of Bill and me talking about our experiences thirty years ago and taking questions. Almost all of them were younger than my own son, Jack. And almost all of them were veterans of Afghanistan or Iraq, or both. They flew CH-47 Chinooks, UH-60 Blackhawks, and OH-6 Little Birds, which, except for the Blackhawk, were flown when I was in the army; at least there were aircraft then with those same names. They looked about the same to me, until they showed us one of the Chinooks that the Night Stalkers use in Afghanistan. While they had suffered mechanical problems and were grounded several times early in the war, the new Chinook is reliable and amazingly powerful, able to lift more cargo than our heavy lifting Sky Crane could in 1965. All their helicopters are now highly advanced fighting machines. Computers, electronic cockpit instrumentation, night vision goggles, contact radar, and incredibly tough training allowed the Night Stalkers to do things with helicopters that Bill and I had never dreamed possible. Using contact radar, these guys routinely fly Chinooks at zero visibility, low level in mountain ravines, at night, in fog or rain or snow, following the moving needles on the dials of their instrument panels. Sweat pours off aviators focused this intensely. The slightest deviation could kill everyone on board. These pilots were the best ever. What the hell could they learn from us?
Well, some things never change. They still have to land and take-off from tight LZs, overloaded with troops. They still have to dodge bullets. They still get shot down.