Once Upon a Mulberry Field

by C. L. Hoang

  Bobby. Bobby. You and your Shakespeare. I couldn’t help smiling, even through the tears. It was just like him to not leave things hanging. Set them right whenever you can, ’cause you never know, he’d always maintained. How tragically prophetic.

  We never had our chance for a proper send-off as you’d wished. So whatever unknown road you’re traveling on now, here’s to you, big guy. Now and always. My buddy. My brother.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The next week unwound like a bad dream that wouldn’t quit, shrouded in thick mental fog.

  I was going through the motions, not seeing or hearing much of what went on around me. My days were colored by a pervasive sense of numbness and detachment as I tried my damnedest to tend to business as usual. My nights, on the other hand, seemed hopelessly engulfed in grief, the relentless kind that fed on itself and kept sleep at bay.

  Since day one in country, my schedule had been structured with Bob figuring prominently in it, in some way or another. Aside from us sharing the same hooch and office, he’d also played the roles of superior, mentor, and best pal to me. We’d spend the bulk of the day by each other’s side: from the moment we awoke to the rousing “Gooood Morning, Việt-Nam” from the Dawn Busters gang on AFVN Radio; through the busy workday at the dispensary, punctuated with occasional emergencies on the flight line; to the wind-down evening hours at the club, when we joined the rowdy crowd around the TV set to watch Bobbie Keith, the weather girl, perform her nightly gags in miniskirt or bikini and to raise a glass to her at the end of the show as she bid us good-night, “weatherwise and otherwise.”

  Now, with my sidekick suddenly vanished, I found myself cast adrift without bearings. A hollow, unsettled feeling—as if a part of me had gone AWOL—would dog me for the remainder of my tour.

  In the aftermath of the tragedy, I remember going out of my way to avoid any conversations that might bring up Nancy and baby Ricky. Having seen their pictures proudly displayed atop his footlocker and listened to the dreams Bob had built for all of them for when he returned home, I felt I’d known them on some personal level. It broke my heart to think how lonely and deprived their lives would now be without him. All those plans for their future—up in smoke on one single afternoon. And there wasn’t a damned thing anyone could have said or done to stay the heavy hand of fate. This sense of powerlessness drove me out of my mind, so I turned away and ran to hide. Never once did I seek to confirm that somebody here had managed to reach Nancy on that fateful day before she’d left for Hawaii. The alternative scenario, too horrendous to even contemplate, was best left unknown.

  The sole token I wished to hang on to, as a reminder of my hooch mate in Việt-Nam, was Puff the toy dragon. Even then, the little stuffed animal was promptly stowed away at the bottom of my suitcase as I struggled to move past the pain and to regain some semblance of normalcy in my daily life. This would prove a tougher and longer process than I’d suspected, with no letup in sight, especially in the days leading up to the memorial service.

  The service was planned for Friday afternoon. Quite a number of base personnel, both Air Force and Army, had indicated their intentions to attend. Since the makeshift chapel might be too cramped for the turnout, it was decided to hold the service on the large empty lot behind the Bird Cage. Dean Hunter made a point of swinging by the dispensary that afternoon so he and I could go together. He had already stopped in earlier in the week, as soon as he’d heard the news upon returning from the Plain of Reeds. I’d had the miserable task of filling in the details for him, as Tweety had done for me on Sunday night. When I was through, we’d sat in my office and shared our grief in silence. For Dean also, Bob’s untimely death had been too great a loss for words.

  I don’t have clear recollection of the entire service, only mental snapshots here and there. A lot of people showed up. Some had just come off their work shifts, others on their return from the day’s sorties. All the ranking officers, including the base commander, were present. Even a small contingent of South Vietnamese pilots recently assigned to Biên-Hoà to take over the old A-1 Skyraiders, or “Spad,” came to pay their respect.

  Lined up side by side on the red dirt were the fallen soldiers’ boots and helmets, recovered from the crash site. Directly in front of those, in a straight row, stood the nine M-16s turned upside down with bayonets stuck in the ground. It was a simple sight, like white crosses in a cemetery, yet overwhelming in its stark symbolism.

  I couldn’t hear most of the eulogy delivered by the nervous chaplain, who seemed unaccustomed to a crowd this size, except his closing statement, a quote from some unknown source. “To most people, the sky is the limit. To those who love aviation, the sky is home.” That’s Bob through and through, I said to myself.

  Then Captain Silverman stepped forward, picked up the helmets, and placed them over the rifle stocks, one by one. Behind us, the bugler played Taps. We saluted our departed comrades for the last time. No gun salvo. No waving flag. Just the haunting lullaby at sunset, with red dirt swirling in the wind—and silent tears of farewell.

  My memory flashed back to something Bob had pointed out to us on a recent MEDCAP trip. It was the memorial statue at the entrance to the Nghĩa-trang Quân-đội (National Military Cemetery), situated off of National Highway One on the south side of Biên-Hoà. Bob, who’d visited there before, had suggested we stop off at the site for a break and a close-up peek at the statue. The stone sculpture depicted a South Vietnamese soldier sitting on a rock, his backpack still strapped on his shoulders and his M-1 carbine laid across his lap. His helmet was untied and pushed up above the forehead, and he was staring off into the distance, eternally lost in thought.

  “The statue is called Thương Tiếc, pardon my pronunciation,” Bob had explained at the time. “It means remembrance, or mourning. Something to that effect. The subject is said to be commemorating his fallen comrades. When unveiled a year ago, it created quite a sensation. It’s only grown more famous since.”

  Indeed, the unknown soldier’s face and countenance conveyed an impression of weariness and deep melancholy so realistic that we had all felt touched by it. Little had anyone suspected that the impromptu side trip had been a presage of things to come.

  As the assembly dispersed after the service, Dean and I wandered out onto the open field, away from the Cage’s wooden structures. The sun slipped over the horizon, a shimmering disk veiled in tails of amber clouds. A breeze lingered on my face, warm and dry. Monsoon season was still a couple of months away, thank goodness.

  Suddenly I felt drained, weighed down by immense sadness and regret, like the pensive statue at the National Cemetery. I flopped down on the bare red soil, leaning back on my arms. Dean sat down beside me. Almost in unison, we exhaled.

  Squinting into the sunset, I broke the silence. “Should’ve been me on that chopper. But all I could think that morning was to get to Sài-Gòn as early as possible—”

  “Don’t even go there,” Dean interrupted. “It changes nothing. Only drives you straight over the edge, is all. There’s no rhyme or reason in who lives or dies, and nobody gets to pick his time to go. One thing we know for sure—Bob was a good, decent man. True to his heart till the bitter end, doing what he wanted. Let’s leave it at that.”

  It was the most we had exchanged all week.

  A single pair of wild ducks crossed the twilight sky without a sound. It occurred to me we’d rarely seen or heard any feathered creatures in this area. Where had all the songbirds gone?

  Darkness was rising fast all around us. Just like that, it was nighttime. The inscrutable night of the tropics. Dean pushed himself up off the ground, and I followed. We were about to turn and head back when I felt his arm around my shoulders.

  “I miss him, too, kiddo,” he said quietly, his eyes gleaming in the twinkling light of flares.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Startled awake from deep sleep, I sprang up in bed.
>
  For one foggy moment, I forgot where I was, even as the siren continued to shatter the night. Then my bleary eyes caught sight of the dim alarm clock atop the footlocker. 0300 hours. Biên-Hoà time. My brain engaged. Incomings! The survival instinct kicked in. Seven seconds. I had seven seconds to get to the nearest bunker. Barely time to grab my clothes and boots, throw on my flak jacket, and cover my head with a steel pot—all of which had been laid out within reach in case of an attack like this—then un-ass the hooch.

  Outside reigned the usual chaos. Floodlights flashed on and off; klaxon horns blared, lifting sleepers from their beds; PA speakers shouted emergency instructions; and groggy airmen scrambled to their assigned posts or the closest shelters as fast as they could. A scene that had become part of our nocturnal landscape. On this night, however, Eleven-o-clock Charlie had thrown in a new twist by postponing his regular rocket launch until 3:00 a.m.—in the middle of the Tết cease-fire, no less.

  The previous night, January 29–30,1968, the local New Year’s Eve or Giao-Thừa had turned out uneventful, with the exception of sporadic bursts of firecrackers around the city of Biên-Hoà. It was almost impossible to distinguish them from the staccato of machine guns fired off in celebration at nearby ARVN III Corps Headquarters. I had thought of Lee Anne and wondered if her husband had made it home on their most sacred night of the year. Despite an official thirty-six-hour truce, the Army of the Republic of Việt-Nam had kept on full alert a minimum strength of fifty percent in all its units. Meanwhile, to our relief, Charlie hadn’t bothered us since the start of the ceasefire at 1800 hours on Monday the 29th. But then, all through January 30th, the First Day of Tết, reports had trickled in that confirmed bloody infractions up country as well as enemy movement in our own neck of the woods.

  And now this.

  Inside the jammed bunker near the hooches, we fell flat on the ground and buried our heads under our arms for protection. God save us all should our simple refuge (sand bags over pierced-steel planks) suffer a direct hit. Those Soviet or ChiCom-produced 122-mm rockets were horrific weapons capable of blasting most on-base structures to smithereens. Like Death pouncing from the night sky, the fin-stabilized six-foot missiles zoomed toward their doomed targets with a ghastly whistle that rose to a full-throated roar before all hell let loose in a deafening explosion at impact.

  We lay squirming in the dark, listening to the rockets being “walked” across the base and praying they’d march past our shelter and never find us. On any regular night, Charlie would lob from five to ten rockets into the base then quickly vanish into the jungle before our choppers had time to get airborne and retaliate. As conditioned as we’d grown to these nocturnal visits, we still had little control over the feeling of dread and suspense that gripped us each time the blasted siren went off. It was precisely VC’s intention, with their deadly game of cat-and-mouse, to wear our nerves ragged and test our resolve and patience to the limit.

  On this early morning of January 31st, however, something was terribly amiss. For ten minutes mortars and rockets slammed down on us with unrelenting ferocity, shaking the ground nonstop as if we were being carpet-bombed. Under the most intense heavy-artillery blitz we had experienced to date—close to two hundred hits total, with one third by rockets—ten minutes seemed like an eternity of hell.

  And then, it suddenly stopped. My ears still buzzing and my body aching from all the concussions, I strained for any signal in the eerie silence. In the smoky darkness, I could almost hear the question on everybody’s mind. Had the furor blown over, or were we simply stuck in the eye of the storm? Finally, the all-clear signal rang out to a collective groan of relief. Our stupefied bodies stirred back to life. We’d made it through yet another rocket attack—this one, by far, the most vicious in recent memory.

  Men crawled up on their hands and knees, gathered their personal effects and stumbled out of the bunker, too weary to talk. Stuck in a corner, I was waiting to exit when I heard someone moaning. It had been so dark inside the bunker that one couldn’t even tell who had dropped on the floor next to one.

  “Somebody here? You okay?” I called in the direction of the noise.

  The moaning grew louder, then degenerated into a whimper.

  I felt my way toward it, inching closer until my hand touched a human form lying in the dirt. The man was curled up in a tight ball, his knees to his chest.

  “Are you hurt?” I inquired, getting no answer. There hadn’t been any big explosions in our proximity, but with so much shrapnel flying around during the attack, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had sustained some injury before reaching the shelter.

  “I’m a doctor,” I said. “I’m going to roll you over and check you out, okay?”

  I gently turned him on his back and untangled his twisted limbs. He shook like a leaf, whining meekly as I ran my hands over his body to feel for signs of trauma. Down his upper legs, I detected dampness. A quick smell test revealed it wasn’t blood, but urine. Apparently, the poor fellow had been scared out of his mind and lost control of his bladder. A greenhorn, most likely. For some men, their first taste of war—or, in military parlance, the first time they “saw the elephant”—might prove too nerve-wracking, an experience for which no training could have prepared them sufficiently. As I helped him sit up, the man clung to me and began sobbing like a child, still unable to speak.

  Just then a vehicle, its brights full on, screeched to a halt at the entrance to the bunker, now mostly vacated. In the reflected light, I looked down at my distraught patient and stared into wide-open eyes filled with tears and the utmost terror—the eyes of First Lieutenant Paul Nilsen.

  We’d met when Bob had taken him around the dispensary and introduced him to the rest of us, soon after his arrival on the day after New Year’s. A young general medical officer about my age, with hair the color of corn silk, bright blue eyes, and the fresh complexion of a Sunday choirboy, hence his instant nickname “The Kid.” Lieutenant Nilsen, like my former hooch mate, hailed from the American heartland. Decorah, Iowa, in his case. Like many of us, he had volunteered for a reserve commission in the Air Force in exchange for a deferment until completion of his two-year residency in pediatrics. Or so he’d thought.

  It must have been a blow when, halfway through the first year, he’d received his orders to report for active duty. Due to a shortage of doctors, the USAF had found it necessary to assign him immediately to fill an urgent requirement from Biên-Hoà for a new GMO. Unlike most of us, who just went with the flow, he’d hired a lawyer and appealed the decision, but to no avail. He arrived in Việt-Nam a very unhappy camper. The cause for his great reluctance soon became obvious. Being of a gentle and sensitive disposition, and from a religious background, he was appalled as well as terrified by the whole war scene and felt utterly out of place at Biên-Hoà. In a sad way, he reminded me of Vivienne. How many like them, I wondered, hopelessly trapped yet vulnerable and ill-equipped for survival in this crucible of war?

  “It’s all right. It’s over now,” I assured him. “It appears you’re not hurt, but we’ll get you to the dispensary to make sure.” I threw my arm around his sweat-drenched back and leaned in to support his trembling body.

  “Anyone in here? You all okay?” a familiar voice shouted from the entryway as a flashlight beam painted a bright circle around the bunker.

  “Tweety, over here,” I yelled toward the looming shadow, motioning the young medic over. As was their routine, he and his fellow medics had jumped into their cracker boxes at the first all-clear to start their search-and-rescue throughout the base.

  After they assisted the badly shaken officer into the ambulance, I pulled Tweety aside. “He’s in shock. I want him kept overnight for observation.” I grasped his forearm. “He’ll need a change of clothes. In the meantime throw a blanket over him, you hear?”

  “Aye aye, sir. You’re not riding back with us?”

  “Just
need to gather my stuff. You guys go on ahead. I’ll walk.”

  “You sure, sir?” Tweety directed my gaze toward Runway 27. Only then did I notice the commotion out there. A “Hun” jet had caught on fire in the middle of the runway and had started to cook off ammo, shooting bright sparks and tongues of flames in all directions. Not far from it, the burned carcass of an AC-47 gunship, better known as Puff the Magic Dragon, smoldered, apparently struck down by mortars during an aborted takeoff. The eastern sky lit up with yellow flares and streams of red and green tracers. All around us, the night air crackled with the rapid firing of automatic weapons and the urgent thwacks of assault helicopters in action.

  Bewildered, I turned to the young medic.

  “Enemy sappers have snuck on base, sir,” he explained. “Sons-of-bitches managed to shut down the runway, as you see. The east perimeter was breached during the rocket attack. Now they’re taking it directly to us, on the ground. We’re in danger of getting overrun, sir.”

  Thus, without much preamble, we found ourselves plunged headlong into the fire maelstrom known in the annals of the Việt-Nam War as the 1968 Tết Offensive.

  For all of us at Biên-Hoà AFB, it was an unforgettable night. A night of terror and death, of dauntless fighting and dogged survival, like none other we had lived through. It was a night of bravery for many, heroism for a few. In more ways than one, it was our night of truth.

  The sprawling airbase, inside its ten-mile perimeter, was home to twenty-five hundred unarmed Air Force personnel. The responsibility for their protection rested entirely with the 3rd Security Police Squadron, the so-called Sky Cops. In the wee morning hours on that final day of January 1968, the three hundred men of the 3rd SPS along with one hundred augmentees of various job skills were suddenly thrust, without crew-serviced weapons or armored vehicles, in a deadly struggle for their lives—as well as all ours.