Chickenhawk Page 10

  “It’s my dick, and I can wash it as often and as fast as I want,” somebody yelled.

  “Well, I never!” Banjo minced. “Don’t you know that’s bad for you?”

  “Well, what the hell, I’ve been shaving my palms since I was fourteen.”

  There was the usual horseplay: cover-your-asshole-when-you-bend-over jokes, soap-bar wars, falling in the mud and rinsing off. It was the first good time we’d had in a month. And we got clean.

  We found some more of our missing Conex containers. Most of our tents turned up. The warrant tent was divided: nine warrant officers in one GP. Luxury at last. Five of us—Leese, Kaiser, Riker, Resler, and I—each got an eight-foot section along one side. Nate, Gotler, Connors, and Banjo each got a ten-foot space along the other side. This was to be our permanent tent.

  We decided to install a wooden floor and electric lights. Four of us went to town to buy the wood for the floor and the stuff for the lights. I was in charge of getting the wire and fluorescent fixtures because I lied about knowing how to wire the place. I wanted to go to town.

  As our truck passed through the division’s southern perimeter, the guard pointed to a man hanging dead from the flagpole. We’d heard about this the day before.

  “The local authorities caught him with some American supplies. The Cav had them hang him up there as a lesson,” he said.

  The man’s head was bent over to one side as the noose cinched into the skin of his neck. As we drove by, the angle changed, and I watched him turn slowly and then grow smaller as we continued on.

  “Some lesson, huh, Gary?” I said to Resler, who sat across from me in the back of the deuce-and-a-half.

  “Yep,” he said. “Guess he’ll never steal again.”

  We rolled into town. Resler and I jumped out while Leese and Nate went to park the truck. They were supposed to shop for wood while Gary and I looked for the electrical supplies. First, we decided to have a look around. We hadn’t been here for a couple of weeks, and the place sure had changed.

  Dusty old An Khe was now a jumping army town. New bars were packed to overflowing with hundreds of GIs. The streets were crowded with busy vendors from miles around.

  We walked by a girl with a baby on her back, papoose style. I had seen her approaching some GIs from a distance, but I didn’t realize what she was doing until we passed her. She was asking for money, then pushing the baby toward the shopper, making it clear that she wanted to sell the kid. My head twisted around to watch her as I walked. I finally figured it out and turned to follow her. Gary said, “What’s wrong?”

  “I can’t believe it. She’s trying to sell that baby!”

  “Who?” Gary hadn’t noticed, but when he saw where I was going, he said, “Oh,” and followed me.

  The girl was all of twelve or thirteen years old. I had started to tell her that it was wrong to do what she was doing when I noticed something peculiar about the baby. Gnats were crawling all over the slits of its eyes. It wasn’t blinking. I reached out to touch its pale cheek. When my fingers touched cold skin, I knew I had discovered something I didn’t want to know.

  “Why does she want to sell a dead baby?” asked Gary.

  “I don’t know.” My voice was calm, but inside I cringed away from her. She saw the fear in my eyes. I stared at her for a moment while I thought, How could you do this? Her weary eyes flicked away from mine to find another customer.

  We walked across the street, which was strewn with gum wrappers and cigarette butts. I stopped to look for a hardware store.

  Gary went on ahead. There weren’t any stores around here, just bars. I saw Gary duck into one of the doorways. I followed him.

  I stepped through the beaded curtain. The bar was crowded with GIs and bar girls. It seemed to me there were more bar girls there than there had been people in town two weeks before.

  “Buy me a drink?” a girl said as I walked farther into the mob. She pushed me to a seat at a little table. Three more bar girls argued with my captor about who was to be my girl friend. As flies and gnats swirled around us and played in the beer puddles on the table, one of the girls got out of her lawn chair to sit in my lap.

  “You numma-one jai,” she chopped out in a monotone as she wriggled her buttocks against me. “You numma-one jai,” she repeated and moved her face closer to mine, nervous eyes darting in a smiling mask.

  I think she was just as embarrassed as I was. She was new at her job. So was I. I sat there wide-eyed but trying to look nonchalant, like a warrior out to get laid.

  “You numma-one jai,” she said again and pushed her little, flat nose against mine and breathed fish breath into my face. That breath and her limited vocabulary were snapping me out of grinning aw-shucks-ness. I wanted to leave.

  She saw my expression change, and realizing that I was getting ready to make a break for it, she pulled out the reserves.

  “You numma-one jai!” At last, some emotional inflection. Her eyes flirted. Her free hand reached down through her lap to grab a sincere handful of my crotch.

  I jumped with surprise. I was embarrassed, also a little titillated, but I stood up and put the little masher back in her chair. Once I was standing, I used the opportunity to make it obvious I was looking for Resler. So I stood there for a minute searching through the mob, slapping little, sneaky hands away, but I couldn’t find him.

  “Shouldn’t even think about it,” I muttered as I walked outside to resume my search for a hardware store. I liked that girl; at least, my hormones liked that girl. Warnings about the dreaded Vietnamese cock-rot came to mind. “Sometimes amputation is the only cure” was one description of its severity. Another was “There are guys who have been quarantined in ‘Nam since ’61 trying to be cured.” Or “I heard of a guy who woke up one morning and found his pecker had fallen off. Son of a bitch has to squat to piss. Damn.”

  “Hey, Bob, where you going?” I turned and saw Resler coming up the street toward me.

  “To find some light fixtures, remember? Where were you?”

  “Me? I was looking for you. Did you get any?” We both walked down the dusty street. If there had been horses instead of Jeeps, it would have looked like an Old West town. Most of the doors we passed were entrances to small bars. Small boys ran up to every soldier, yelling, “Hey, numma one, you. Want boom-boom? You come with me. Two dollar.”

  “ ‘Get any’? Not me, Resler. I don’t need the clap,” I said smugly. We turned off the main street into a narrow, shaded alley. There were shops here with everyday goods behind glass windows.

  “You can’t get the clap, Mason. You’re immune.” We stopped in front of a store window featuring cheap tools, wire, small electric motors, and light fixtures. This was the place.

  “What do you mean, ‘immune’?”

  “It’s one of the advantages of being an officer. We get ‘nonspecific urethritis.’ Enlisted men get the clap.”

  The shopkeeper spoke no English, but with the objects we wanted in plain sight, we had only to point. I bought nine fluorescent light fixtures—bulbs, ballast, and wire. Now if I only knew what to do with them.

  The old salts had been through the development of air-assault techniques in the 11th Air Assault, plus the full-scale test of Air Assault II in the Carolinas; but the bullets had been fake, the enemy was really on the same side, and judges told you when you were dead. Now that we were flying in the real world, the old salts were unhappy about how their commanders forgot their training.

  “I cannot fucking believe it,” said Connors. “You’d think that we never even heard of air assaults, much less done it.” We sat around a picnic table in the new mess tent after our first big assault in Happy Valley.

  “Captain Farris, who decided to fly low level across the rice paddies like that?” Connors pleaded as he leaned toward Farris.

  “Wasn’t right, was it?” Farris answered.

  “How the hell can they ignore all that fucking time we spent trying out every conceivable way there is to approac
h hot areas. Rice paddies don’t offer any cover. You only fly low level when there’s cover—trees, riverbeds, valleys—something.” Connors looked deflated; Farris didn’t answer. There was no answer.

  I was depressed. I was supposed to be learning how to be an aircraft commander in an air-assault company. I wondered if I would live through the training program.

  The day before, at six o‘clock in the afternoon, sixty-four ships forming an entire air-assault battalion gathered on the Golf Course, loaded troopers, and flew to Lima, the laager area just on the other side of the An Khe pass.

  At that point the old salts were already pissed off. We were to spend the night at Lima, only ten miles (seven minutes) closer to our objective, Happy Valley, than if we had stayed at the secure Golf Course.

  After we landed, some of our ships went back to the division to fetch hot chow for us and for the five hundred grunts. Wendall, Connors, Nate—all the old salts—complained about being there. Wendall kept pointing out that the VC were famous for their surprise ambushes against the French right around where we were camped. It was not a good night. We slept in the Hueys. Everyone was jumpy, and the mosquitoes were intense. At 0400 hours we were awake, and at 0545 we cranked up and flew the troops to an already secured LZ north of Lima to group with another Cav unit for the big push.

  Instead of flying at 1500 feet, this flight leader flew low level all the way. There were no shots fired, but it was a curious move. The gaggle landed and dropped the troops only to find out it was the wrong LZ. We reloaded the grunts, and on the second attempt we made it to the correct LZ. There we waited.

  During the half-hour wait, the old salts really went wild.

  “Why the fuck did we come up here low level?” Connors shouted, cornering Shaker. Shaker just shrugged and looked unhappy. Apparently someone new was leading this assault, but Shaker was a platoon leader and wouldn’t comment about what his brethren in the braid were up to.

  I was flying with Leese, but he didn’t say anything either, just looked pissed off. The second stage of the assault was ready to commence. The word came back that we should expect to receive opposition on the flight route.

  “I sure wish we had chest protectors,” said Resler. “You know, if they know we’re going to get shot at and they still fly low level, they ought to give us some armor, don’t you think?” I nodded, distracted. Seeing the regulars bitch like this wasn’t good for my morale.

  The other unit stayed behind to form a second wave. Our gaggle loaded up.

  From there to the real LZ were ten miles of rice paddies, spotted with villages ringed with trees and an occasional lonely coconut palm or clump of bushes—the kind of place you’re supposed to stay away from, especially if you know it is controlled by the VC.

  If it was going to be low level, then Leese was going to make it low level. He actually tried to fly the contours of the paddy dikes at 100 knots. I sat in the right seat with my hands and feet near the controls, waiting, tense, scared. We were Orange Three. On our right front, Nate and Farris flew Orange One; on our left rear, Sherman and Captain Daisy flew Orange Four. Across the V, Resler and Connors flew Orange Two. The distance between us varied as each ship dodged occasional coconut trees and tall bushes. Over the radios I could hear the prestrike commentary going on in my earphones. From 5000 feet above us I heard our battalion commander, the Colonel, telling us to maintain a neater formation as we spread out over the flat plain.

  Up ahead, from the trees around a village, I could actually see muzzle flashes. Then I heard ships in the Yellow flight calling, taking hits. Then from small brush clusters I hadn’t noticed before came more bullets. Soon the radios were jammed with hit reports. Above the din I heard “Do not fire into the villages; do not fire into the villages,” from the Colonel. On our left, Sherman and Daisy kept lagging back and then lurching forward, sometimes beside and sometimes behind us. I heard them call “Orange Four, we’re hit!” Then they dropped back out of sight. They had taken a burst through the cockpit, and the debris from the shot had temporarily blinded Sherman. Leese tried to stay away from the villages, but there was no way to do that; they were on the flight path. Tricky flying was to no avail here. I could stare at muzzle flashes for long moments as we flew straight at them, and the VC had the same amount of time to fire at us. Low-level flying was supposed to minimize exposure time, but it wasn’t working here.

  The flight up the valley was lower, faster, and much hotter than anything I had yet seen. By the time we got to the LZ, my brain was numb. I don’t know what I would have done if Leese had got hit.

  The LZ was no different from the rest of the valley except that there were more bushes. Despite an artillery prep and rockets from our gunships, it was hot. Bullets came from the bushes, from behind paddy dikes, from hidden trenches. The grunts leapt out as soon as we touched down, increasing the confusion. Up ahead a VC jumped out of a hidden hole and charged Connors’s ship. Nobody on Connors’s ship saw him, but his wing man’s door gunner did. He shot him in the back.

  The flight leader, noticing that we had indeed “received opposition,” led us back to the first LZ at 2000 feet, proving that the concept that helicopters can fly higher than four feet was known to him.

  Although most of the ships had been hit, only two pilots were seriously wounded and had to be evacuated. Ten more, including Wendall, Barber, and Sherman, got minor face cuts from flying Plexiglas. Leese and I were untouched.

  A few days later Farris assigned me to fly a mission with Captain Daisy—another troop lift into Happy Valley. Half the ships were from the Snakes, half from the Preachers. The LZs were getting hotter by the day. No one ever figured how the VC always knew which clearing we would use for an LZ. There were thousands of possibilities, but Charlie would almost always be waiting for us in the one we picked.

  Daisy thought of himself as a war historian. He was always the most vocal in the late-night discussions about how the war should be fought. As a matter of fact, I agreed with his premise that we should be taking real estate instead of bouncing all over the place in hit-and-run exercises. But except for the bullshit of our late-night strategy sessions, we had little in common.

  I was in the right seat, first pilot’s position, a courtesy extended by Daisy. Later I almost always flew from the left seat, even when I was the first pilot, because the left side of the Huey’s instrument panel was chopped and I could see straight down to the ground between my feet.

  We flew east to Happy Valley at 3000 feet. I was always happy to be flying high. Even higher would have been fine with me. Very few pilots were killed by staying away from the ground. We had eight grunts in the back. A crew chief and gunner in the pockets behind them manned the two machine guns on the new pylon mounts. About five miles from our intended LZ, the flight leader, Major Williams, radioed the sixteen ships to descend to treetop level for the final run. As we began our dive, smoke drifted up from the jungle ahead of us. There had been a thorough prestrike by the air force and by our own gunships.

  Up to this point in the mission, Daisy had been flying. As we leveled out for the low-level run, Daisy said over the intercom, “You got it.” I took the controls. I remember feeling complimented that he would let me take control at the most critical part of the flight.

  The flight was really moving. Using the speed gained in the dive, the whole gaggle flashed through the treetops at more than 110 knots. I concentrated on the reference points and on keeping one or two rotor diameters away from the other ship. At the same time, I let us down into the trees as close as possible for cover. I had to read the ship to my right constantly to avoid it when it swerved left and right to miss the smaller trees.

  We were about a minute away from touchdown when the gunships started firing. Some of the guys were now reporting taking rounds. The rule was that on the actual approach into the LZ, and in any circumstances where the crew was under fire, both pilots were supposed to be on the controls. This procedure was to ensure control of the aircraft if the
one who was flying got zapped. Daisy didn’t do this. As we got within thirty seconds of our landing and the lead ships were reporting taking hits, Daisy started to hunch down in the armored seat.

  I had my hands full, but other than hitting one frond on a coconut tree, I was doing okay. From the corner of my eye, I saw Daisy moving. I risked a quick glance. He gave me a weak smile and hiked his chest protector up to his nose. He had one of the few pieces of chest armor in the company. He had worked his body down in the seat so that his ass rested on the front edge. This brought his head down almost low enough for his chest armor to hide his face. He could not fly from this position. Seeing my aircraft commander ducking for cover brought me to a new level of fear.

  “Preacher flight, flare!” crackled in my phones. I pulled back on the cyclic and reduced collective to flare, and looked frantically ahead, trying to see over the nose of the Huey to get my first glimpse of the still-unseen LZ. My tail rotor spun just a few feet from the ground. I saw some bushes ahead, and I pushed the right pedal to swing the rotor away. Steeply, noses high, the whole flight rapidly decelerated for the landing.

  Luckily for us, the fire at the back of the LZ was lighter. A couple of pilots up front had already been wounded. The grunts jumped out even before the skids touched the ground. I looked over, and Daisy was still under cover. I was going nuts. The LZ was riddled with sniper fire. Sand kicked up in front of me. Daisy stayed low even while I cleared the last trees on the way out. As I climbed higher, hit reports decreased, and by the time we had climbed to about 1500 feet, they stopped.

  As the flight leveled off, Daisy said, “I got it,” and took control of the helicopter, just as though nothing had happened. I felt like punching my head to make sure I was still there.

  I sat limply in my sweat-drenched fatigues and tried to figure out what to do. Call Williams and tell him I have a chickenshit on board? I leaned forward a little and turned to look at Daisy. Actually, I stared. He glanced over for a second, calmly. Who was crazy here? He outranked me; he was the aircraft commander, with years of experience. He had been flying daily with the other guys, and now he looked as calm as a clam. Yet I knew he had done what he had done.