On our own farm I found only enemy bullets. We plowed up so much Federal ordnance in our fields that Old Ma used Yankee Minie balls for sinkers when she went fishing for catfish.
I sit, staring out over the black water of the river and as I listen to the flowing of the water the night goes on and on without end and I think about catfish and about how catfish have whiskers and look like Fu Manchu.
Noon at the Luu Dan factory. After a sleepless night on the riverbank I still feel stiff, I've got a cough, and my nose is running.
The day is quiet and peaceful. The air is clean and the sun is a gold coin. I smell a fire and rice cooking. I can hear children playing nearby, running in a ragged troop along the paddy dike, laughing, flying a long blue kite shaped like a dragon.
Battle Mouth is playing with the village children. For months after the victorious battle at the Nung combat fortress Battle Mouth was a catatonic zombie. When he finally did snap out of it, his personality had improved and he was no longer an asshole. He no longer wants to slaughter the jackals of imperialism for the glory of socialism. All he wants to do now is be a little kid again. And the little kids of Hoa Binh don't mind. The kids love Battle Mouth because he likes to laugh and have fun and is big enough to give them piggyback rides.
Most of the villagers are out working in the paddies. The harvest is almost over.
Under an open-air canopy of glossy green palm fronds and bamboo poles we sit, cross-legged on reed mats, our faces tiger-striped by wedges of sunlight. We sing as we work, constructing military equipment out of American trash, making Luu Dan weapons for the People's Army.
We sit in a row. In front of each worker is a pile of components. As each Luu Dan is passed from hand to hand along the human assembly line each person attaches a component from his pile.
The boy to my right has a harelip and likes to smile. He has the same cheerful, spaced-out expression on his face all the time, every day, like he's either retarded or eats opium with a spoon. In front of the boy is a pile of red metal Coca-Cola cans gathered from American trash dumps by the children of the village.
With a cold chisel the boy rakes a can from the pile. He flips the can upright with the chisel, an impressive trick. He presses the chisel hard onto the center of the bottom of the can and gives the chisel a precise tap with a square-headed hammer, punching a hole into the can.
Using the cold chisel like a big finger, he flips the punctured Coke can into my pile, claws another can from his pile, upends it with a practice motion, and his hammer falls again.
The rhythm of the work is steady. As we work we sing:
On we go to liberate the South
Smash the jails, sweep out the aggressors
For independence and freedom
Taking back our food and shelter
Taking back the glory of spring. . . .
I pick up a punctured Coke can. I insert a bamboo handle that is about four inches long into the hole in the bottom of the can. I toss the can to an impatient Johnny Be Cool, who is always one beat ahead of me in the rhythm of the production line.
Johnny Be Cool's nimble fingers insert a coiled string into the hollow bamboo handle. The string is attached to a pull ring of braided comm wire. Before he hands the Luu Dan to the Broom-Maker, Johnny Be Cool slips a cap of hammered tin over the bottom of the bamboo handle.
The Broom-Maker inserts a pair of wire cutters into the small drinking hole on the top of the can and cuts across the top, folding back two flaps of thin metal.
Song takes the can from the Broom-Maker and inserts a short metal cylinder hacksawed from a length of plumbing pipe. Inside the short piece of pipe is a simple spark-producing friction firing mechanism. Song carefully ties the end of the string inside the bamboo handle to the firing mechanism.
Behind Song is a scrawnv little old man with no teeth. He is sitting on a defused American howitzer shell with a hacksaw in his hand. He holds on to the shell with his legs while he hacksaws through it like a metal log. After a minute or so he stops sawing and pours water from a plastic Pepsi bottle onto the shell. When he starts sawing avain the wet shell slips free and the little old man grunts, wrestling with the shell until he loses his grip and falls to the ground like a rodeo rider.
The assembly line laughs.
Song says, "The bomb is alive!" and everybody laughs again.
The bony little shell rider stalks his prey. He hops back into the saddle. In the high-pitched rasp and grind of his hacksaw metal dust flies. The tip of the shell falls off and the old man has laid a big copper-jacketed egg. Only the egg has hatched and there are no bronze baby birds inside. Instead, the shell is full of old cheese, light tan on the outside, off-white on the inside. The old man with no teeth quickly plunders the inside of the shell, digging out the TNT with a fish knife.
Song cautiously stuffs the piece of plumbing pipe with the white waxy scrapings, then passes the can to a chubby twelve-year-old girl in a red T-shirt. From a mound of materials scrounged by the smaller children of the village, the girl fills the Coke can with bits of glass, nails, scrap metal, truck engine parts, rusty shrapnel, paperclips, thumbtacks, and other sharp and deadly things.
At the end of the assembly line a black cast-iron cooking pot full of hot pitch boils over a wood fire. It smells like a hot road. Bubbles pop on the surface as it is stirred. With a gourd dipper full of hot pitch, an old woman in a patched UCLA Bruins sweatshirt seals the top of the Coke can, then holds the can upside down and seals any open spaces in the hole around the bamboo handle. She looks like a chamber of commerce volunteer dipping candy apples at the country fair. She lays the finished homemade hand grenade on its side to cool.
Just before lunch the hand grenades are picked up by children who carry them in small rattan baskets on a bed of straw, like Easter eggs. The children hurry to distribute the Luu Dan weapons to Chien Si fighters in camouflaged defensive positions around the village.
At noon, when the sun is without mercy, our lunch arrives on the back of a snorting black water buffalo led by an eight-year-old girl. The girl guides the bulky monster, tugs him along, her fingers hooked over the heavy brass ring in the water bo's nose. When the water bo hesitates or deviates, the midget buffalo handler gives the animal a sharp slap across the nose with the palm of her hand.
As we distribute lunch bundles from two giant earthenware jugs slung on either side of the water buffalo, Battle Mouth comes up and greets me and smiles at me. He likes me now, maybe because I'm the only other adult in the village who has time to play games with him and the kids.
We pass out small wooden bowls and wait our turns as hot rice is ladled out with a tin cup.
A shell hits the deck a mile from the village. We ignore it. Just another short round. Just some gungy cannon cockers playing that silly game they play.
Dark gray puffs of smoke appear in a treeline two hundred yards to the east, followed by muffled explosions. H&I fire--harassment and interdiction. The Americans and their puppet armymen shoot shells at random into areas where troop movements have been reported by recon. Another Long Nose crazy thing, of no consequence to anyone except as a source of dud shells with which to construct Luu Dan weapons and as an annoyance for Comrade Lizard.
Shells fall. Then more shells.
The Woodcutter appears in a nearby vegetable field. He squints, shields his eyes from the sun with a callused hand. He gives an order and immediately the men and women in the field drop their farm implements and lift bundles of black plastic sheeting from beneath the paddy water. Inside the bundles of black plastic sheeting are weapons.
In the village, somebody is banging a shell casing with a bayonet.
At the grenade factory the women collect our uneaten bowls of rice and dump the rice back into the earthenware jugs.
Commander Be Dan and Bo Doi Bac Si dee-dee down the paddy dike. The Woodcutter and Commander Be Dan have a muted but animated conference that, this time, does not end in an angry confrontation.
As we watch
the gray puffs of smoke whump-crumping into the treeline we think about how sometimes the Arvin puppet soldiers like to crank off a few rounds of artillery for no particular reason except that they get nervous and the noise boosts their morale.
But these shells are obviously not intended to hit anything, not even ghost battalions of Viet Cong, and are not marking rounds. All of the shells are striking the same spot, in a tight group, not in a pattern. A pattern kills, a tight group minimizes the danger of hitting innocent bystanders.
General Fang Cat may be a corrupt public official, but he is an honest businessman. General Fang Cat is firing his rusty old guns to fulfill his contract with the Woodcutter. The incoming shells are a warning.
Commander Be Dan, the Woodcutter, and Bo Doi Bac Si are all running down paddy dikes in different directions, and Song has disappeared.
"Truc Thang!" yells the old man without teeth who hacksaws artillery shells. "Truc Thang!
Truc Thang!"
And he's right. The sky is full of helicopters. The killer locusts are coming, armed to the teeth, gunships and troop carriers, buzzing high in the sky, holding off, waiting for the artillery barrage to lift. No doubt company commanders are screaming obscenities into radio handsets, asking what stupid son of a bitch opened fire ten minutes early and what stupid son of a bitch is continuing to fire ten minutes late.
Everyone is running somewhere. The village gong bongs with heavy resonance, announcing the attack.
I don't move. Johnny Be Cool waves goodbye, then charges off to take care of his water buffalo. My leg is still stiff from the wound I got on the combat mission. I can hump, but I'm awkward, slow, and clumsy when I run. There's no cover crossing the paddies. I don't want to be caught out in the open by the gunships.
When General Fang Cat has decided that he has jumped the gun on his orders as much as he can safely explain away as merely the fortunes of war, the artillery lifts, and the sky is open for the gunships.
Under the canopy of the Luu Dan factory I watch as American airplanes fill the sky. There is the knifing of green wings and four Phantom fighter-bombers roll in for a bomb run across the village.
Five-hundred-pound bombs drift down at an angle, black blobs with Xs on top. Energy bells blossom and hang in the air for an instant, faintly visible, like heat coming up off a hot road.
Hooches, trees, and disassembled people float up into the sky. Then, as though unrelated, a muffled thud, followed closely by a tremor in the ground.
I pull up a reed sleeping mat in one corner of the Luu Dan factory and lift the trapdoor of a tunnel. I climb down into the tunnel and the trapdoor drops back into place.
I learned the locations of every tunnel in the village by playing an educational game with Johnny Be Cool, Battle Mouth, and the kids. We walk through the village and I say "Boom"
and the last kid into a tunnel loses the game.
The first thing I learned about life in a Viet Cong tunnel was that Viet Cong tunnels were not constructed for tall people. I crawl a few yards, then squat and push my back hard against the earth wall. I can't see my hand in front of my face. I can't breathe. Mud has sucked my rubber sandals off and now is closing in cold and wet over my toes. A spiderweb catches me in the face. I spit. Furry lumps splash in water. I hear rats clawing for high ground.
The wall against my back reverberates. Moist soil falls down all over me. I spit again. I cough. There is dirt in my eyes. I press my ear against the cold tunnel wall and I can hear the battle, big thumps, rhythmic strings of impacting raindrops, and, as clear as any field radio, the rumble of tanks.
And I think: They are going to blow the tunnel, they are going to blow the tunnel, I just know that they are going to blow it. Some dumb grunt is standing up there popping a Willy Peter grenade. The Willy Peter grenade is a light green canister with a yellow stripe. I hear it.
There, that's the spoon flying off. The grunt is going to drop the Willy Peter grenade into the tunnel and fry me like Spam. Then the tunnel rats will come down and be scared and amazed when they find me.
I panic. I hear more rats. I think I hear boots topside. I feel something slimy trying to crawl up my leg. My test drive of a grave has inspired me with a sudden will to live. I push, pull, heave, climb, and claw my way up out of the tunnel.
Back out in the light, I rest on my stomach, pumping air, cold and wet, plastered with mud, dead leaves, and sweat.
Somewhere a water buffalo bellows horrible death agonies.
When I stand up, I see a world of shit coming down.
In the rice paddy water the reflection of a prehistoric flying monster grows larger and larger at a fantastic rate until it turns into a Cobra gunship and roars in at one hundred miles per hour, shaking the canopy over the Luu Dan factory with a hot blast of wind and sand. Miniguns are chopping away chug-chug-chug and the Cobra fires hissing rockets with long tails of smoke.
The rockets look like white snakes with heads of fire.
The Broom-Maker runs past the Luu Dan factory, her clothes charred and smoking. She runs steadily and with intense concentration, ignores me, ignores and is perhaps unaware of the fact that both of her hands have been blown off and blood is pumping out of the shredded flesh of her wrists.
The Cobras swing around and roar in for another gun-run. Bullets blast the hooches to pieces. There is red fire on the thatched roofs and black smoke beyond the fire.
I turn to face the tanks.
The tanks are bulky mud-splattered monsters, attacking on line through the rice fields, crushing through the paddy dikes with no effort at all, grinding the rice into heavy crunching treads and destroying the crop, plowing deep into the paddies like bloated iron hogs grunting in the mud.
Small-arms fire cranks up to full volume on the far side of the village, recon by fire, right on cue, and I know it's a ground attack. The popping of AKs begins to mingle with the whack-whack of M-16s.
Johnny Be Cool reappears, picks up an Easter basket full of red metal eggs from the end of the Luu Dan factory assembly line.
A tank with CONG AU-GO-GO painted in big Day-Glo letters on the turret growls up and stops twenty yards away. Painted on the tank hull is a squad of little yellow men in conical hats, neatly X'd out.
Behind the tank, enemy infantry is coming in on line and in force.
The grunts are wearing new jungle utilities, new canvas jungle boots, new web gear, new everything. They are legs, line doggies, Army pukes. It's as easy to tell Army grunts from field Marines as it is to tell a bag lady from a Paris model.
From behind a burning waterwheel a squad of Army grunts charges my position at high port.
The squad sets up a perimeter protecting the tank while the Tank Commander gives them covering fire with the .50-caliber machine gun on top of the tank.
"BAN! BAN!" yells Commander Be Dan, and suddenly I am no longer alone in my heroic one-man unarmed defense of the Luu Dan factory.
Commander Be Dan yells in English: "Airborne armymen, airborne armymen, fuck you."
As the Army grunts exchange fire with the village Self-Defense Militia I crawl out of the way of some bullets and take cover behind a dead water bo.
The firefight gets hotter. Johnny Be Cool takes a grenade from the Easter basket, pulls the tin cap from the end of the bamboo handle, hooks his thumb into the comm wire pull ring, and throws, as hard as he can.
The grenade arcs out, string unraveling until it is taut and jerks a sparking pin from the grenade. Friction ignites the firing mechanism. After a couple of more seconds in flight the grenade explodes.
Johnny Be Cool throws homemade hand grenades, one after the other, by the numbers.
About half of the grenades are duds.
The noise level gets scary and black powder smoke floats across the battlefield like ground fog. The stubby barrels of black M-16s spit sparks of gold fire as Johnny Be Cool throws hand grenades at the tank.
I peek over the warm carcass of the dead water bo. The tank looks undamaged.
> I see a grunt. The grunt is trying to pull himself up by clawing at the steel treads of the tank, but he can't stand up. He looks down, then screams at the sight of his thigh bones jammed into the earth like white stakes.
Johnny Be Cool cocks his arm to throw his last grenade.
Bullets tattooing the air over my head and rocking the water bo carcass tell me it's time to change my position. As I stand up something hits me a glancing blow on the side of the head.
I fall backward. The sky above me is filled with the black tumble of grenades. I watch the lazy flight of the smooth green ovals. Somebody is sowing hard noisy seeds of kiss-your-ass-goodbye.
Concussion sucks all the blood out of my face while a stone elephant sits down onto my head and black noise embeds hundreds of fragments of steel wire into my living flesh.
People are yelling at one another all around me. I don't know what's going on.
Somebody screams, "GUNS UP!" Then: "MEDIC UP!" Then: "PONCHO UP!"
Two brown balloons are having an argument right above my face. The argument is about some guy who is maybe dead or maybe not dead. I think maybe it's me.
They roll me onto a poncho and lift me up. They carry me into the village while I bounce around like a rag doll and wonder if I'm alive.
By the time we reach the village common, which is being used as a landing zone for the medevac choppers, I'm feeling better. That is, I'm feeling alive enough to be in pain. My face is throbbing like it has been string by yellow jacket wasps and I've got blood coming out of my nose and ears.
The brown balloons drop me onto the deck next to a platoon of wounded grunts.
Ten yards away, a big Sergeant, a white giant with a steel-gray crew cut and a bomb-shaped head, drags Johnny Be Cool kicking and screaming out of a drainage ditch by his ankles, and drops him on the deck. Somebody gives Johnny Be Cool a vertical butt-stroke to the head with a shotgun. Thirty yards away I can hear the crack of Johnny Be Cool's neck.
The Phantom Blooper Page 18