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  Finally I said, “What happens if I get hit while you’re in that position?”

  “I’ll have time.” When I turned to look at him, he wouldn’t look back.

  I flew two more sorties with Daisy, back to the same area. Each time, he went through the same routine of passing the ship to me and ducking for cover behind his chest protector.

  “How can that jerk be an aircraft commander?” I glared at Farris.

  “Hey, Bob, jerk is a strong word.” Farris looked uncomfortable as we talked in his tent after the mission.

  “He endangered everybody in our ship and in the rest of the formation. Even I can tell a coward when I see one.” Farris could see I was agitated. Maybe I was so angry because I had been just as afraid as Daisy.

  “Yes, well, he’s better than no pilot at all,” said Farris.

  After a long discussion with Farris, it became clear that Daisy was just one of the circumstances of war that I would have to accept. As a new warrant, though, I ended the discussion pretty firmly.

  “I will never fly with him again,” I said.

  “Okay,” said Farris, “you never will.”

  And that was that. No action was taken against Daisy.

  “What did you expect, a firing squad?” Connors remarked as we stood in the chow line that night.

  “No,” I said. “But maybe they could ground him and put it on his record.”

  “Look Bob, everybody in the company knows he’s a coward. Even he knows he’s a coward. The only people who will fly with him are the new guys like you, who don’t know any better,” said Connors.

  “Well, I’m not flying with him anymore.”

  “Now, that,” another voice interrupted, “is going to shake him up, Mason.” It was John Hall. He had been standing behind Connors, listening to our conversation. “What you have to do,” he continued, “is teach him a lesson.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ll have to kill him,” said Hall.

  “Why are you making fun of me?” I looked at him seriously. “I really think something should be done, like grounding him, or putting him in the operations tent with his own kind.”

  John looked at me quizzically. “My, my,” he said. “Are you accusing the operation twins of being,” he paused to look around and continued in a whisper, “of being chickenshit cowards, too?”

  Connors started laughing. Owens and White, from the operations tent, never flew in the assaults. The rumor was that they were logging combat time, though, for medals.

  Hall continued, “If that’s the case, Mason, it’s going to be messy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, how do you expect to eliminate all three of them without making a mess?” Hall grinned madly for a second and took a giant swig from his canteen full of Scotch—his trademark.

  We laagered at Lima in the drizzling rain. Most of the crews in the twenty-four ships sat in their seats, though Nate had left his, beside mine, to visit around. The village looked distorted through the raindrops on the Plexiglas. The air was hot and still and humid. The rain brought no relief. Behind me the crew chief cleaned his weapon and the gunner slept. The ship beside me was the lead ship, and the Colonel had walked up beside it to talk to our CO, Williams. We had been here two hours. Waiting.

  “Sir, I bet you never saw a .45 like this before.” The crew chief, Sergeant LaRoe, leaned up between the seats and thrust his gun toward me.

  “Looks pretty much like a .45 to me,” I said. LaRoe was not a regular crew chief; he was a maintenance supervisor getting some flying time.

  “That’s what it looks like, sir, but it’s my private weapon, not an army issue. I’ve made some modifications to it.”

  Great. A gun hobbyist. “Really?”

  “Yep. For one thing, I’ve filed the trigger sear so that it only takes a feather to release the trigger.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, if you have to squeeze too hard to pull the trigger, it throws off your aim.”

  “Oh. Great.” LaRoe had the gun wavering a foot from my face, waiting, I suppose, for me to take it to admire. I didn’t. He moved back suddenly and I heard a click-clack. I turned and saw him pulling the magazine out of the handle.

  “Try it, sir. You won’t believe how light it is. I filed away a lot of the metal.”

  “That’s okay, LaRoe, I believe you. I’m sure it’s a great little weapon, all right.”

  “C‘mon, sir. Just dry-shoot it once.” LaRoe pushed the gun my way, holding up the magazine as he did. “Here, I just cleared it.”

  I was thinking about how much LaRoe probably liked it here with all the real guns and bullets around. I should’ve thought more about how he had given me the gun.

  It was cocked, so I held it gingerly, though I knew it was empty. I pointed it up and looked for a target. I had never been good with pistols, rifles being my forte. The sights wavered. A Huey lined up, fragmented by the water drops. I moved the aim away from the ship, an automatic precaution. The Colonel’s back filled my sights. It was really crowded out there. So I continued to sight, holding the gun now with two hands, moving it around to find a clear, though dry, shot. I settled on one of the gauges on the instrument panel in front of me. I thought about pulling the trigger, and the gun exploded, slapping back against my hand. The gauge shattered and disappeared. I went deaf and into shock at the same time. Holding the gun in front of me, watching the smoke curl lazily out of the barrel, I considered turning around and killing LaRoe. However, the gun really was empty now.

  I calmly passed the gun back to him. His face was white. “Nice trigger pull, Sergeant. No doubt about it.”

  A small crowd had gathered around the front of my Huey to examine the exit wound in the ship and the small crater in the mud where it finally stopped. The Colonel watched with his arms folded as I climbed out. The thought balloon next to his head read, “Dumb shit.” Williams just sat in his seat behind him, glaring.

  Up to that point I was just beginning to feel accepted by the old salts. Shit.

  Williams did not say a word until we got back to the company after the mission. Before evening chow he sent Owens, the operations officer, to fetch me.

  “Major Williams wants to see you in his tent.” Hee, hee.

  “That was the dumbest, stupidest, most moronic move I have ever seen in my life,” Williams said. But he did not

  say I was an asshole.

  “But—”

  “There is absolutely no excuse for a supposedly intelligent pilot to play with a gun like you did.”

  “But—” I was trying to blame it on LaRoe.

  “If you ever shoot up one of my helicopters again, I’ll have your hide. You got that, mister?” He was a little tense, so I decided to go along with him.

  “Yes, sir.” I saluted on the way out.

  Just to rub it in, they hung the remains of the omni-gauge—a radio-navigation instrument—in the operations tent. A little note was attached to one of the uncoiled springs explaining that it was the victim of the first shot fired at the Cav from inside one of its own helicopters.

  The airfield south of the Cav was built by the French, and the Cav considered it part of their property. We occupied the airfield and the land around it, including an area on the nearby riverbank that was the site for our new shower station. The Cav engineers had set up a group of special water-processing trucks next to the river. They pumped the water through self-contained devices that chemically treated, filtered, and heated the water before pumping it inside adjoining GP tents equipped with wooden-slat floors and a dozen shower heads. About six of these trucks and tents made up the bathing area.

  The first time I heard somebody yell “Shower call” I thought I was hearing things. Showers were something the advisers took in their established compounds and Special Forces camps. Sure, people in Saigon, Qui Nhon, Nha Trang, and Pleiku took showers, but weren’t they tourists? Until now, the Cav’s brass seemed to feel that the dirtier we got, the
more depressed we became, which made us madder, which made us chop stumps harder, or something like that. Anyway, we were generally filthy, so the words themselves were a touch of comfort.

  The day after I shot out the omni-gauge, twenty-five of us were packed into the back of a deuce-and-a-half, smelling ripe, on the way to the shower station.

  Connors had actually taken a liking to me after the incident with the gun. For him, liking someone meant including that someone in a cynical observation.

  “So, Bob, did the omni-gauge make a move toward you first, or did you just ambush it?” I was on the floor with my back to the cab. Connors and Banjo sat jammed together on the bench beside me. Resler sat next to me. He started to laugh at Connors’s remark.

  “Yeah, Bob,” said my supposed friend Gary, “did it give you any warning before it attacked? Like moving its pointer or something?”

  “Look, Gary,” Connors inexplicably jumped to my defense, “anyone can make a mistake.” I smiled at his generosity. “I mean,” he continued warmly, “how was Mason to know that the gauge was going to come after him like that!”

  The truck pulled up. We jumped out, carrying towels and fresh clothes, and ran to the shower tents.

  It was luxurious. Hot water filled the tent with steam. I stayed in as long as I could, rinsing away the accumulated grime and rejuvenating my spirits.

  “We have got to build one of these back at tent city!” said Marston.

  “Can we do that?” I asked.

  “Sure. All we have to do is figure out how to get the water,” said Marston. “And the only way I figure we can get to it now is to dig a well by hand. And we’re on high ground, so the well would have to be deep, maybe a hundred feet.”

  It sounded impossible to me at the time. We did it a few months later.

  After washing, we wandered around outside the tents drying in the sun and getting dressed. I sat in the sun for a few minutes, naked. The hot water had soothed my muscles. The sun seemed to radiate energy into my body. I was completely relaxed.

  I was idly watching two guys from another company as they walked near a shower tent about a hundred feet from me when they disappeared in a shattering explosion.

  With the noise, I reflexively looked out to the perimeter. Who? What? Are we being attacked? My throat tightened with fear.

  Not VC. Not a stray mortar round. Nothing we were prepared for. The two cleanly scrubbed grunts had made a final discovery: land mines last and last. At least eleven years, anyway. The French had heavily mined the airfield before they were driven from An Khe, in 1954.

  They put the showers off limits for a few days while men from demolition burned the weeds and grass away with flame throwers and swept the area with mine detectors. Mines were found and blown up, and the spot was declared safe again.

  Flying out to Happy Valley became a daily routine. It didn’t seem to make much difference, unless you happened to be one of the Americans killed during these few weeks. Or one of the supposedly three hundred VC. Then it made a lot of difference. To the rest of us, the ones alive, the result of our daily grind was fatigue and irritability.

  Wendall said that the VC were bending with the force to learn more about how the Cav operated. He may have been right. They seemed to control the situation. We wanted them to stand and fight and they wouldn‘t—very frustrating for the “First Team.”

  To prove they controlled the valley, they not only would know which LZ we were going to use and greet us there but would also wait until we were in the middle of an extraction to shoot again. In between it was snipers from shadows.

  I was getting plenty of practice. I got very good at low-level and formation flying. I learned how to function, even though I was scared shitless, by doing it over and over again. I had become efficient, numb, or stupid. I learned that everyone adapts and becomes concerned with the details of the job at hand, no matter how bizarre.

  Although I flew with several different pilots as I trained for aircraft commander, I flew the bulk of my time with Leese. He taught me things that saved my life several times.

  We were on an extraction mission up Happy Valley to pull out some troops we’d dropped off the day before. We heard the ships ahead calling in hits on the way into the supposedly secure LZ. Leese put the gunners on alert.

  “Tell me if you see a target,” he said to me. Putting my hands and feet lightly on the controls was a completely automatic response by this time.

  Our company of sixteen ships was the last flight on this extraction, so all the troopers pulled away from the tree lines and jumped on ships in groups of eight. Eight was the load for today. (How much the ship could carry depended on the density altitude, which varied with the temperature and humidity and altitude. The hotter or higher—and therefore thinner—the air was, the less we could carry. The limit was calculated daily.) But there was a fuck-up. After everybody had eight grunts on board, there were four men left over, running around being turned away. Leese saw this and immediately called for them to run back to us. Confused, they ran to the ships that were trying to tell them to come back to us. Everybody was nervous. The four grunts didn’t want to be left behind. Reacher jumped out the back and waved. They finally got the message and came back. I didn’t understand Leese’s decision. We already had eight troopers on board. I’d been in a ship that had dragged the trees trying to get out of an LZ with eight on a day like today. Twelve was impossible. Finesse, luck, experience—none of that would get twelve grunts off the ground today.

  As soon as they squeezed inside, Leese brought in the power. I could feel the air pressure build up under the rotors as they struggled, pulling the overloaded ship slowly off the ground. Then he radioed Williams that he could make it. Leese stayed in a hover as the company took off. I glanced at the power gauge. It must have been broken. It indicated that we were using 105 percent of available power. As the company lumbered over the tree line, I heard them firing down into the jungle, then a few calls of hits, then we were alone. Leese nosed the stuffed Huey gently over, letting it accelerate across the ground to gain lift. He kept it just over the grass even as the trees approached. The gauges showed he was pulling maximum power, and we were running out of room. Then, somehow, he pulled in power beyond maximum. The ship groaned up and over the trees. I felt a tug when the skids hit treetops. The company had flown to the left at take off, but Leese turned right. I scanned the clearings and bushes below, looking for muzzle flashes or smoke, but I saw nothing. The ship climbed much slower than normal. It took us a long while to get up to the safety of altitude, but we got there.

  “How did you know this ship would be able to do that?” I asked.

  “Simple. This is Reacher’s ship,” Leese answered.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “This is the only ship in our company that can haul a load this big. Right, Reacher?”

  “That’s right, sir, and more.” Reacher’s voice hissed in my earphones.

  Reacher had made certain fine, illegal adjustments of the turbine. I had never flown the ship before—Leese kept it to himself—so it was news to me. An army training film I saw would prove that it shouldn’t have worked, but it did. The ship muscled through an important career for the next two months, saving a lot of lives, until I destroyed it.

  The ship may have been stronger than usual, but it still took a lot of experience to know just what the limit was, and how to milk it all out. Leese was good at knowing the absolute limits of aircraft. He made that a part of his bag of survival tricks. It was Leese who taught me that our fixed position in the assault formation was really fixed only as far as our horizontal movement was concerned. You could—as he demonstrated on several occasions—move the ship up and down relative to the formation without throwing the flight off. He would do this rapidly while the flight was being shot at. On final approaches to hot LZs he kicked the tail back and forth, making us waggle into the clearings. His theory was that any movement of the target made it more difficult to hit by confusing
the enemy gunners. I adopted this style of flying. Whether it really made a difference didn’t matter; I thought it did. It kept me occupied in otherwise hopeless situations.

  We joined our company after the long climb up with the twelve grunts. Miles ahead of us the lead company in the battalion was reporting machine-gun fire near the pass at 3000 feet. Fifty caliber. We had never encountered these heavyweight calibers before. Our company veered off to avoid the fire. We could hear the commotion on the radios as voices in the static told us what was happening.

  “Big as baseballs!” A reaction to the fifty-caliber tracers.

  “Jesus, Yellow Two is going down!”

  “Yellow flight, break formation!” They were spreading out.

  I could see those tracers, in their lazy-looking flight upward, from five miles away. In between each tracer were four more bullets. A fifty-caliber machine gun spits out bullets a half inch in diameter and an inch long. When you held one of those slugs in your hand, it had a hefty throwing weight. When blasted out of a gun at 3000 feet per second, it had incredible power and range.

  The battalion veered away from the ambush, leaving the gunships behind to harass the VC. I also heard the Colonel call for artillery. Five ships got shot out of the sky; two pilots were killed; the other crews were saved. A gunship was hit sixty-six times and still flew, a record one might boast about except that the pilot was killed. The copilot flew the sieve back to the Golf Course.

  Our company flew back to division, dropped off the grunts who had been out for two days, and picked up a fresh batch. We took these to Lima, and for the rest of the day we flew more troops and equipment out to this bivouac. By late afternoon we had logged eight hours of flying time. I was tired and looking forward to getting back to division. Home, these days, was where the hot food was.